Right before I began my M.F.A. program, a cartographer friend of mine—Jake Coolidge—gave me a piece of sage advice: at some point in the experimenting and making process I will enter into conversation with a medium; the medium will begin to inform what ideas I bring to it. This post is a formalization of that advice as it pertains to printmaking. It builds from two readings I’ve encountered thanks to Corinne Teed at the University of Minnesota: Bill Fick and Beth Grabowski’s 2015 essay “Print + Make,” and Richard Field’s 1994 “Sentences on Printed Art.”
The core of Fick & Grabowski’s essay is a defense, or rationale even, for the continued thriving of printmaking as a fine art medium. It is an elegant response to the common and gnarly question of why one might engage with early modern tools and techniques to produce imagery in the digital age. For aspiring printmakers, there are a number of key points to keep in one’s back pocket. One of the most striking was an unexpected phrasing that seemed to sum things up: in discussing ink varieties and alternatives, they write that “matricies can be interpreted with a variety of alternatives that can make contributions to the understanding of the work” (229). They’re specifically writing here about the possibility of using things like body fluids—blood, let’s say—to communicate life or death in an image. The printmaking process, including all the decisions therein, become part of communicating the concept itself. Fick & Grabowski draw on the art critic Thomas McEvilley to make this point, that “materials and processes are themselves coded and contribute to the content of the work” (224).
While perhaps relatively basic for those engaged in making art in the 21st century, the part that gave me pause was the turn of phrase, that is, interpreting a matrix is very different to me than making a print. The notion of “interpreting a matrix” (the object that holds ink and transfers it to a support) opens up printmaking to the world around us. It implies a lifting of the head, a self-awareness that expands beyond a performance of technique. As the authors say, “if idea and process are presented as integrally linked components of creative problem-solving, we can be liberated from a ‘right or wrong’ duality as far as process is concerned” (225). What lies before us in the print studio are tools, and as “tool-beings” (Heidegger by way of Harman) we are in conversation with those tools; we co-constitute one another. As geographical beings, interpreting a matrix means we look clearly at what’s going on around us to inform how we prepare, move, press, change, erase, bend, and reveal the transfer of information.
It was rewarding to follow up this reading with Richard Field’s “Sentences on Printed Art,” a manifesto of sorts about the benefits and character of printmaking. A few of his 30 theses that caught my attention were:
#7 – “Prints are highly individualized statements within the confines of rigidly defined technical means; they embody a condition of modernism—the conflict between man [sic] and machine, the handmade and the replicated, the original and the copy.”
Here I think immediately to Walter Benjamin, but also to later texts such as Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 “Simulacra and Simulation.” For an entire artistic enterprise (printmaking) to grapple with these themes as its raison d’etre is definitely profound.
#17 – “Prints draw upon the nature and resistance of materials, signifying the opaqueness of language.”
Something I learned in a recent poetry workshop is that many times, good poems are defined by the fact that all their words can mean at least two things. The opacity of language, in this case, is the strength of poetry. I aspire to create the conditions of multiple meanings and mystery with my prints, too!
#26 – “Prints mediate art and craft, often locating meaning in process.”
I think this is true for any fine art medium, though the way it unfolds in printmaking is certainly its own. Fink & Grabowski outline this in-betweenness in detail in their chapter, citing the matrix, reproducibility, the support, the ink, layering, and community.