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