Print Research Network
I speak from my experience as a further education teacher of printmaking. This is a vital part of the cycle that feeds students into the system and often provides facilities post certificated-study.
I teach printmaking and am a member of a 30-strong group of Richmond Printmakers. We were started by a Richmond Adult College print tutor and have always looked, primarily, to the college for use of faculties. There are two good etching presses, an excellent Colombian press and, as a more recent tutor, I redesigned the facility for nitric acid etching and relief print.
The college is currently actively discouraging printmaking. Shame on them. There is no technical assistance. Printmakers have no facilities for computing or digital print. Aquatint was removed with no substitute facility. Part-time tutors provide absolutely everything organisational in their unpaid time. There is total management resistance to flexible use of the facilities, which are used for half of the week only. I have tried and failed to get funding to develop printmaking into the use of new materials.
I enjoy the stimulation of teaching and in desperation have left the college. I have developed a peripatetic printmaking kit. I now teach printmaking using two slightly less wonderful presses in two odd corners of the locality. I have developed copper-sulphate-based etching for this and am sad that print, which fascinates me, has been shoved into a corner.
Nicky Browne
020 8979 0548
07879852263
12 November 2007
Tuesday 13 November 2007
Wednesday 7 November 2007
Lithography Future
Print Research Network
Wisconsin print program was at the center of the print explosion in the 60s and 70s but things have changed as your topic demonstrates.
I'm particularly interested in the the decline of lithography in the US. At the moment The interest in the process at UW is nothing like a decade ago. This comes at a time when I continue to introduce more contemporary support processes like digital imaging, photographic plates, transfers, etc. The love I have for the process just does not seem to capture the current student that comes here. The drop off is drastic! In addition I have to confront my own colleagues who feel the print processes are outdated although the issue of multiples, duplication and dissemination of information is certainly a PostModern paradigm.
Best wishes,
Jack Damer
Professor of Art
04 November 2007
Wisconsin print program was at the center of the print explosion in the 60s and 70s but things have changed as your topic demonstrates.
I'm particularly interested in the the decline of lithography in the US. At the moment The interest in the process at UW is nothing like a decade ago. This comes at a time when I continue to introduce more contemporary support processes like digital imaging, photographic plates, transfers, etc. The love I have for the process just does not seem to capture the current student that comes here. The drop off is drastic! In addition I have to confront my own colleagues who feel the print processes are outdated although the issue of multiples, duplication and dissemination of information is certainly a PostModern paradigm.
Best wishes,
Jack Damer
Professor of Art
04 November 2007
Wednesday 17 October 2007
DOES PRINTMAKING HAVE A FUTURE IN ART ACADEMY EDUCATION?
Print Research Network
CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS
Does Printmaking have a future in Art Academy Education?
What is the current status of printmaking and how is it perceived?
What strategies have been employed by colleagues to ensure the future of printmaking within art academy curriculum?
The PRINT RESEARCH NETWORK will explore these issues in a round table discussion at the Impact 5 International Printmaking Conference on Friday 19th October 2007.
The discussion will provide a rare opportunity for international colleagues to locate issues of common concern and to suggest strategies for the successful integration and promotion of print media into Art Academy education and research. The aim of this exchange is to gain an understanding of the status and practise of printmaking on an international level and to forge links and supportive partnerships between colleagues and institutions.
Join us at
Impact 5 International Printmaking Conference Panel Session 10
Chaired by Nick Devison (UK), Printmaking Partners and Print Research Network Estonian Academy of Arts (Tartu Mnt 1), Auditorium 119 B
at 14.00–15.45pm
You may wish to develop views expressed in this forum into an abstract and send it to us following the RE: PRINT link at http://www.printresearchnetwork.org.uk/ All abstracts submitted will be published on the PRN website. The PRN will shortlist a number of these abstracts and successful contributors will be invited to develop their abstracts into a 1,200 – 1,500 word essay. These will be included in a PRN publication RE: PRINT that will record the reflections of international colleagues on the current condition and future of printmaking in art education.
Post your thoughts now on the PRN website: www.printresearchnetwork.org.uk
CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS
Does Printmaking have a future in Art Academy Education?
What is the current status of printmaking and how is it perceived?
What strategies have been employed by colleagues to ensure the future of printmaking within art academy curriculum?
The PRINT RESEARCH NETWORK will explore these issues in a round table discussion at the Impact 5 International Printmaking Conference on Friday 19th October 2007.
The discussion will provide a rare opportunity for international colleagues to locate issues of common concern and to suggest strategies for the successful integration and promotion of print media into Art Academy education and research. The aim of this exchange is to gain an understanding of the status and practise of printmaking on an international level and to forge links and supportive partnerships between colleagues and institutions.
Join us at
Impact 5 International Printmaking Conference Panel Session 10
Chaired by Nick Devison (UK), Printmaking Partners and Print Research Network Estonian Academy of Arts (Tartu Mnt 1), Auditorium 119 B
at 14.00–15.45pm
You may wish to develop views expressed in this forum into an abstract and send it to us following the RE: PRINT link at http://www.printresearchnetwork.org.uk/ All abstracts submitted will be published on the PRN website. The PRN will shortlist a number of these abstracts and successful contributors will be invited to develop their abstracts into a 1,200 – 1,500 word essay. These will be included in a PRN publication RE: PRINT that will record the reflections of international colleagues on the current condition and future of printmaking in art education.
Post your thoughts now on the PRN website: www.printresearchnetwork.org.uk
ALCHEMY
Print Research Network
It is the nature of revolution to engender change - and a digital revolution is no different - but nothing is as sure in life as change and we should embrace it and utilise it in our involvement with creativity.
Just as previous revolutions in history have involved humanity in discord and loss there has also been gain and progress: so should we be viewing what is happening now to printmaking. When Sean Rorke suggests that “of course (printmaking) has a future” there are many, I know who would support that statement, and I am certainly one of them.
Unfortunately it has been within my first hand experience as a lifelong student of printmaking to witness and feel the “resultant disenfranchisement of print from the core curriculum … …under the guise of financial ‘efficiencies’” which Nicholas Devison talks about.
I first studied during the sixties at Edinburgh College of Art when printmaking was a moving force and Inverlieth printmaking department was in existence. Sadly, it has now gone. However, I have continued to study and explore new facets of printmaking and I am energized by the possibilities open to us, in combining traditional media with digital output [George Whale and Naren Barfield discuss this in their book Digital Printmaking].
Open Access Printmaking Studios can serve to spread this awareness to artists and keep the life force going during the difficult times ahead.
I welcome the opportunity that the PRN will open discussion and debate, not only among Art Academy Academics but with students, artists, and printmakers who wish to share ideas and knowledge. Let us form that network and seize the chance to disseminate!
Anna Johnson
Artist/Illustrator/Printmaker, Creative Director of Green Door Open Access Printmaking Studio CIC. C.I.C.382976, Derby, and MA student.
It is the nature of revolution to engender change - and a digital revolution is no different - but nothing is as sure in life as change and we should embrace it and utilise it in our involvement with creativity.
Just as previous revolutions in history have involved humanity in discord and loss there has also been gain and progress: so should we be viewing what is happening now to printmaking. When Sean Rorke suggests that “of course (printmaking) has a future” there are many, I know who would support that statement, and I am certainly one of them.
Unfortunately it has been within my first hand experience as a lifelong student of printmaking to witness and feel the “resultant disenfranchisement of print from the core curriculum … …under the guise of financial ‘efficiencies’” which Nicholas Devison talks about.
I first studied during the sixties at Edinburgh College of Art when printmaking was a moving force and Inverlieth printmaking department was in existence. Sadly, it has now gone. However, I have continued to study and explore new facets of printmaking and I am energized by the possibilities open to us, in combining traditional media with digital output [George Whale and Naren Barfield discuss this in their book Digital Printmaking].
Open Access Printmaking Studios can serve to spread this awareness to artists and keep the life force going during the difficult times ahead.
I welcome the opportunity that the PRN will open discussion and debate, not only among Art Academy Academics but with students, artists, and printmakers who wish to share ideas and knowledge. Let us form that network and seize the chance to disseminate!
Anna Johnson
Artist/Illustrator/Printmaker, Creative Director of Green Door Open Access Printmaking Studio CIC. C.I.C.382976, Derby, and MA student.
Friday 12 October 2007
Print Research Network
Print Research Network
The paradox of the multi-disaplinary, pluristic curriculum in Fine Art education has been the narrowing of many students' experience and understanding of how art can be made. For made, created, realised or performed is eventually has to be.The realisation of an idea through artistic means with any sensitivity and understanding in relation to the materials and processes used can only occur with some knowledge and experience gained from specialisation (time) taken to explore the intrinsic and unique nature of materials and processes. Specialisation, however, has become an anathema within Fine Art education implying 'craft' and work lacking in intellectual content. Printmaking has fallen foul of this notion.Compounded by the academic withdrawl from the making environments (workshops and studios), students enter printrooms to find only technical support implying and underlining the idea that 'technique' is all there is to printmaking and leading to the printroom being used mostly as a rerprographic facility.This disjunction of theory and practice gives a particular message to students, that theory and intellectual reasoning does not occur during the act of making and consequently the act of making is undervalued. As a result printmaking studios and other workshop facilities are in danger of becoming token resource areas.Printmaking survives as a healthy authentic means of artistic expression if we address the underlying and fundamental oversight by those in education who think that making is only a mechanical and technical process devoid of intellectual value.Perhaps we should at least ensure that the difference between printing and printmaking is known and undertood. We know but do they?
Gillian Golding
07 Oct 2007
The paradox of the multi-disaplinary, pluristic curriculum in Fine Art education has been the narrowing of many students' experience and understanding of how art can be made. For made, created, realised or performed is eventually has to be.The realisation of an idea through artistic means with any sensitivity and understanding in relation to the materials and processes used can only occur with some knowledge and experience gained from specialisation (time) taken to explore the intrinsic and unique nature of materials and processes. Specialisation, however, has become an anathema within Fine Art education implying 'craft' and work lacking in intellectual content. Printmaking has fallen foul of this notion.Compounded by the academic withdrawl from the making environments (workshops and studios), students enter printrooms to find only technical support implying and underlining the idea that 'technique' is all there is to printmaking and leading to the printroom being used mostly as a rerprographic facility.This disjunction of theory and practice gives a particular message to students, that theory and intellectual reasoning does not occur during the act of making and consequently the act of making is undervalued. As a result printmaking studios and other workshop facilities are in danger of becoming token resource areas.Printmaking survives as a healthy authentic means of artistic expression if we address the underlying and fundamental oversight by those in education who think that making is only a mechanical and technical process devoid of intellectual value.Perhaps we should at least ensure that the difference between printing and printmaking is known and undertood. We know but do they?
Gillian Golding
07 Oct 2007
Tuesday 9 October 2007
Not another crossroads!
Print Research Network
Printmaking it seems is at another crossroads, and the signposts are confusing. Whilst there are murmurings of a resurgence in printmaking we are also being asked ‘is printmaking dead?’
The question surely should be; ‘Has printmaking got a future?’ The answer just as surely must be ‘Of course it has!’… and that answer should be shouted loud and clear. However, with some universities in England closing print departments in favour of digital and video suites, and others marginalizing the print departments to be no more than service areas for all students to dip into, printmaking is facing a crisis, at least in higher education.
If there are fewer printmaking degrees to be studied, are there fewer printmakers, and are there less teachers capable of teaching printmaking to the next generation?
It has to be said that there are many fine art degrees and masters courses which have good print departments in the UK, and let’s face it some students will get a better and broader experience at art college than possibly 20 years ago. But the drain of printmaking resources and expertise at higher education must stop, or in 10 to 20 years we will be discussing where we went wrong and going about the business of blame.
Universities such as UWE; Bristol, Anglia Ruskin; Cambridge, Brighton and Bradford are all standing tall, but there are too few places to do a printmaking degree or masters.
Those interested in printmaking are turning to sources outside of universities to learn printmaking and open access print workshops in the UK are going from strength to strength, with more and more people seeing them as an alternative or an add-on to their art education. However the experience of art college, of being in a vibrant educational environment that offers thought and challenges ideas, cannot be experienced just anywhere. The university art department is the true breeding ground of the next generation of printmakers.
We all have a responsibility for the future of printmaking. For printmaking to have a good future those in charge of printmaking departments must put their heads above the parapet and make things happen…(and when have you met a printmaker that cannot talk into the early hours about issues surrounding printmaking?)
The Print Research Network has the potential to bring university lecturers and heads of departments together in a common goal, to take printmaking forward, and to not let the accountants or the short sighted middle management of universities, (intent on advertising to the outside world, at least on the surface, that they are contemporary and modern), erode the foundations of printmaking, take away the core of print activity, and actively allow printmaking to be taken out of the equation to the next generation of artists as a truly modern medium.
I am not talking about rhetoric or research points here, I am talking about action to get printmaking at the top of the agenda again. I am talking about the need for a network of printmaking departments that are outward looking, aiming to work together to get to all those who find it hard to know where to go to learn about screenprinting, etching, relief printing and digital image-making, to show all those choosing fine art that print is modern and part of the armoury of the contemporary artist. I hope that the PRN catalyses printmaking lecturers to have a good look at their department and ask are they pushing the boundaries and offering students the full print experience. Can they do more?
The time is now to act and build a positive philosophy towards printmaking to strengthen our position and extend our knowledge.
‘Philosophically speaking we are right in the centre of fine art where the physical nature of the subject can expand. We are also in a period where anything is possible…where a love of rudimentary materials and basic methods runs alongside a fascination with the computer….’ Tim Mara
Sean Rorke
8 Oct 2007
Lecturer in printmaking, (De Montfort University, Leicester), Development Manager for Hot Bed Press, Salford, printmaking consultant and artists printmaker.
Printmaking it seems is at another crossroads, and the signposts are confusing. Whilst there are murmurings of a resurgence in printmaking we are also being asked ‘is printmaking dead?’
The question surely should be; ‘Has printmaking got a future?’ The answer just as surely must be ‘Of course it has!’… and that answer should be shouted loud and clear. However, with some universities in England closing print departments in favour of digital and video suites, and others marginalizing the print departments to be no more than service areas for all students to dip into, printmaking is facing a crisis, at least in higher education.
If there are fewer printmaking degrees to be studied, are there fewer printmakers, and are there less teachers capable of teaching printmaking to the next generation?
It has to be said that there are many fine art degrees and masters courses which have good print departments in the UK, and let’s face it some students will get a better and broader experience at art college than possibly 20 years ago. But the drain of printmaking resources and expertise at higher education must stop, or in 10 to 20 years we will be discussing where we went wrong and going about the business of blame.
Universities such as UWE; Bristol, Anglia Ruskin; Cambridge, Brighton and Bradford are all standing tall, but there are too few places to do a printmaking degree or masters.
Those interested in printmaking are turning to sources outside of universities to learn printmaking and open access print workshops in the UK are going from strength to strength, with more and more people seeing them as an alternative or an add-on to their art education. However the experience of art college, of being in a vibrant educational environment that offers thought and challenges ideas, cannot be experienced just anywhere. The university art department is the true breeding ground of the next generation of printmakers.
We all have a responsibility for the future of printmaking. For printmaking to have a good future those in charge of printmaking departments must put their heads above the parapet and make things happen…(and when have you met a printmaker that cannot talk into the early hours about issues surrounding printmaking?)
The Print Research Network has the potential to bring university lecturers and heads of departments together in a common goal, to take printmaking forward, and to not let the accountants or the short sighted middle management of universities, (intent on advertising to the outside world, at least on the surface, that they are contemporary and modern), erode the foundations of printmaking, take away the core of print activity, and actively allow printmaking to be taken out of the equation to the next generation of artists as a truly modern medium.
I am not talking about rhetoric or research points here, I am talking about action to get printmaking at the top of the agenda again. I am talking about the need for a network of printmaking departments that are outward looking, aiming to work together to get to all those who find it hard to know where to go to learn about screenprinting, etching, relief printing and digital image-making, to show all those choosing fine art that print is modern and part of the armoury of the contemporary artist. I hope that the PRN catalyses printmaking lecturers to have a good look at their department and ask are they pushing the boundaries and offering students the full print experience. Can they do more?
The time is now to act and build a positive philosophy towards printmaking to strengthen our position and extend our knowledge.
‘Philosophically speaking we are right in the centre of fine art where the physical nature of the subject can expand. We are also in a period where anything is possible…where a love of rudimentary materials and basic methods runs alongside a fascination with the computer….’ Tim Mara
Sean Rorke
8 Oct 2007
Lecturer in printmaking, (De Montfort University, Leicester), Development Manager for Hot Bed Press, Salford, printmaking consultant and artists printmaker.
Thursday 4 October 2007
Printmaking and the Rhetoric of the ‘Open Curriculum’
Print Research Network
Colleagues have already discussed printmaking within the context of an established muti-disciplinary art school culture through which the student determines a choice of medium appropriate to the direction of their individual practice (1).
This open curriculum (2) ethos has served as the cornerstone of Academy pedagogy within fine art since the recommendations of Coldstream Committee in the 1960’s and 70’s. Perhaps now however, it is vulnerable to hijack by an ideology within Academy culture, that is largely antipathetic towards print media, and indeed any media involving process or craft. The resultant disenfranchisement of print from the core curriculum provides an expedient for the demolition of resources under the guise of financial ‘efficiencies’.
It is essential, if we are to maintain the practise and spirit of the open curriculum, that the student is empowered with a choice of media from a range of disciplines, in order to make genuinely informed work. As a quid pro quo, we as print practitioners and academics must aim to possess the ground of new developments and to explore the practical and theoretical implications of such research. Solipsism does print no favours in what is already an unforgiving environment.
A well-resourced print workshop provides an enormous range of image making possibilities that may be applied to a range of contexts. Print media, far from being anachronistic or outmoded is well placed to make a vital contribution to a pluralistic curriculum. Wise management within art education must ensure the continuance of this spectrum of provision if the rhetoric of open curriculum is to be manifested in real student experience.
Nicholas Devison
October 2, 2007
(1) See Timo Lehtonen’s Printmaking, who said anything about Printmaking, posted 25 September on this site.
(2) Jeremy Mulvey has discussed this ethos in detail in his article Art of Freedom http://www.hero.ac.uk/uk/inside_he/archives/2006/art_of_freedom.cfm
An extract of this piece will also posted on this site.
Colleagues have already discussed printmaking within the context of an established muti-disciplinary art school culture through which the student determines a choice of medium appropriate to the direction of their individual practice (1).
This open curriculum (2) ethos has served as the cornerstone of Academy pedagogy within fine art since the recommendations of Coldstream Committee in the 1960’s and 70’s. Perhaps now however, it is vulnerable to hijack by an ideology within Academy culture, that is largely antipathetic towards print media, and indeed any media involving process or craft. The resultant disenfranchisement of print from the core curriculum provides an expedient for the demolition of resources under the guise of financial ‘efficiencies’.
It is essential, if we are to maintain the practise and spirit of the open curriculum, that the student is empowered with a choice of media from a range of disciplines, in order to make genuinely informed work. As a quid pro quo, we as print practitioners and academics must aim to possess the ground of new developments and to explore the practical and theoretical implications of such research. Solipsism does print no favours in what is already an unforgiving environment.
A well-resourced print workshop provides an enormous range of image making possibilities that may be applied to a range of contexts. Print media, far from being anachronistic or outmoded is well placed to make a vital contribution to a pluralistic curriculum. Wise management within art education must ensure the continuance of this spectrum of provision if the rhetoric of open curriculum is to be manifested in real student experience.
Nicholas Devison
October 2, 2007
(1) See Timo Lehtonen’s Printmaking, who said anything about Printmaking, posted 25 September on this site.
(2) Jeremy Mulvey has discussed this ethos in detail in his article Art of Freedom http://www.hero.ac.uk/uk/inside_he/archives/2006/art_of_freedom.cfm
An extract of this piece will also posted on this site.
Tuesday 2 October 2007
Printmaking the art that dare not speak its name!
Print Research Network
The distance from a studio practice for many Fine Art students grows
greater each year as pressures of reduced economic resources and the cost of building space price different studio practices out to the margins of higher education and increasingly towards out sourcing organizations. Combined with a conceptual fashion that describes the creation of art work to be isolated in terms of pure ideas--the fabrication left to another agent more like the process of designer to industrial maker, many fine art students leave colleges with little or no experience of making their own work. Printmaking becomes merely a reproductive exercise, other basic fine art activities designed models for fabricators to follow or enlarge to specified sizes. It is almost an act of pride to distance ones self as far as possible from the making and overseeing the making of work, to avoid the general trail and error of progressing a work towards both knowledge of a practice and within the reactive form of expression chosen from the experience of making.
Printmaking by its nature demands a basic understanding of the possibilities of the materials and processes used--that is not to say that when possible that work can be made by others for you under very careful supervision but how many people have the resources to do that. Even more particularly why is it even being suggested to fine art students that their direct post college experience will allow their resources to be applied that way? Is it not a cruel pretence to allow the notion that work has to be made for one and that the exercise of full control over an art work is a thing of the past. We are too easily taken in by the virtues of a virtual practice being enough to encompass the whole need of human expression.
Stephen Mumuberson
September 25, 2007
The distance from a studio practice for many Fine Art students grows
greater each year as pressures of reduced economic resources and the cost of building space price different studio practices out to the margins of higher education and increasingly towards out sourcing organizations. Combined with a conceptual fashion that describes the creation of art work to be isolated in terms of pure ideas--the fabrication left to another agent more like the process of designer to industrial maker, many fine art students leave colleges with little or no experience of making their own work. Printmaking becomes merely a reproductive exercise, other basic fine art activities designed models for fabricators to follow or enlarge to specified sizes. It is almost an act of pride to distance ones self as far as possible from the making and overseeing the making of work, to avoid the general trail and error of progressing a work towards both knowledge of a practice and within the reactive form of expression chosen from the experience of making.
Printmaking by its nature demands a basic understanding of the possibilities of the materials and processes used--that is not to say that when possible that work can be made by others for you under very careful supervision but how many people have the resources to do that. Even more particularly why is it even being suggested to fine art students that their direct post college experience will allow their resources to be applied that way? Is it not a cruel pretence to allow the notion that work has to be made for one and that the exercise of full control over an art work is a thing of the past. We are too easily taken in by the virtues of a virtual practice being enough to encompass the whole need of human expression.
Stephen Mumuberson
September 25, 2007
Friday 28 September 2007
Here with my thoughts about Printmaking education.
Print Research Network
` The graphic image houses a true human virtue, in as much as it demands inspection and contemplation ( thought ), it gives us information, it tells us what to do what we need to do . In the same way the education of the graphic image (which has the deepest roots of all the plastic arts) is embodied in the practise and process of Printmaking. Long gone are the dark `days of nonsense` belonging to the digital/traditional image debate.
Without the intellectual means and a working knowledge of reproduction any process is dysfunctional anyway.
The essential spark and excitement from process experiment gives Printmaking a lead the field. Such an ultimate irony then, that many a middle institutional manager has seen fit to discard the traditional in favour of the digital in relation to the order of the Printmaking studio or workshop. This is the real dark age, where true dysfunction is printed on the fiscal variants of the spread sheet. `
David Ferry.
September 27, 2007
` The graphic image houses a true human virtue, in as much as it demands inspection and contemplation ( thought ), it gives us information, it tells us what to do what we need to do . In the same way the education of the graphic image (which has the deepest roots of all the plastic arts) is embodied in the practise and process of Printmaking. Long gone are the dark `days of nonsense` belonging to the digital/traditional image debate.
Without the intellectual means and a working knowledge of reproduction any process is dysfunctional anyway.
The essential spark and excitement from process experiment gives Printmaking a lead the field. Such an ultimate irony then, that many a middle institutional manager has seen fit to discard the traditional in favour of the digital in relation to the order of the Printmaking studio or workshop. This is the real dark age, where true dysfunction is printed on the fiscal variants of the spread sheet. `
David Ferry.
September 27, 2007
Monday 24 September 2007
Printmaking? Who said anything about Printmaking?
Print Research Network
The conventionally recognised household of Fine Art disciplines in England may be said to have played together and stayed together with a minimum of bickering or squabbling until at least 1970. But the publication of the 2nd Coldstream Report in that year delivered, for eminently defensible reasons, the ambitious proposal that academic provision in Fine Art could no longer be satisfactorily described ‘in terms of chief studies related to media’ - thus signalling the beginning of a domestic estrangement that (nearly forty years on) can still be heard rattling uneasily in the family cupboard.
It has to be acknowledged, of course, that during this period much work of immense value flowed from the doctrine that Fine Art practise be perceived as ‘ an attitude that may be expressed in many ways’. Yet where it exists, the doctrine of unmitigated pluralism in contemporary art education still cannot unequivocally recommend itself, in my view - and for quite straightforward reasons. The common denominator of pluralist ‘discourses’ is that they tend to privilege ideas over seasoned engagement with technical and formal understanding (and to that extent, let it be said, unintentionally define themselves as what they presumably most abhor - a ‘specialism’).
Academics in the Fine Art sector must therefore reflect carefully on whether or not all emerging artists can be effectively persuaded to proceed by an overtly conceptual route alone. I believe that it remains, at best, a moot point. For some students an idea may simply represent a strategic point of departure, one that accumulates conviction only, and precisely because, it is imaginatively extended and formally complicated through the practised - rather than provisional - manipulation of methods and materials. In any event, it is surely the responsibility of the academy to offer its students a plurality of strategic (not just tactical) opportunities for the development of a convincing personal language?
Timo Lehtonen
September 23, 2007
The conventionally recognised household of Fine Art disciplines in England may be said to have played together and stayed together with a minimum of bickering or squabbling until at least 1970. But the publication of the 2nd Coldstream Report in that year delivered, for eminently defensible reasons, the ambitious proposal that academic provision in Fine Art could no longer be satisfactorily described ‘in terms of chief studies related to media’ - thus signalling the beginning of a domestic estrangement that (nearly forty years on) can still be heard rattling uneasily in the family cupboard.
It has to be acknowledged, of course, that during this period much work of immense value flowed from the doctrine that Fine Art practise be perceived as ‘ an attitude that may be expressed in many ways’. Yet where it exists, the doctrine of unmitigated pluralism in contemporary art education still cannot unequivocally recommend itself, in my view - and for quite straightforward reasons. The common denominator of pluralist ‘discourses’ is that they tend to privilege ideas over seasoned engagement with technical and formal understanding (and to that extent, let it be said, unintentionally define themselves as what they presumably most abhor - a ‘specialism’).
Academics in the Fine Art sector must therefore reflect carefully on whether or not all emerging artists can be effectively persuaded to proceed by an overtly conceptual route alone. I believe that it remains, at best, a moot point. For some students an idea may simply represent a strategic point of departure, one that accumulates conviction only, and precisely because, it is imaginatively extended and formally complicated through the practised - rather than provisional - manipulation of methods and materials. In any event, it is surely the responsibility of the academy to offer its students a plurality of strategic (not just tactical) opportunities for the development of a convincing personal language?
Timo Lehtonen
September 23, 2007
Tuesday 18 September 2007
Print Research Network
The Print Research Network seeks to interrogate the status and nature of printmaking as a taught research discipline. The network was initiated in March 2006 and funded through RAE Funding. The PRN Steering Group is made up of leading practitioners working within the sphere of printmaking. Print Research Network Aims:
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