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
Friday 28 September 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:
| ||
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
