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.
Thursday, 4 October 2007
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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