A few days ago I attended a lecture at Edinburgh Printmakers
advertised thus: At the heart of contemporary printmaking sits a glaring
contradiction. Twisting common ubiquity into elitist rarity, practitioners who
create limited editions almost universally celebrate print’s democratic
availability. John Phillips, director of London Print Studio, will explore how
and why this dilemma arose, and ask if, given the changes to production and
distribution wrought by new media, it is likely to remain in the future.
The wording of the second sentence of that blurb made me a
bit apprehensive. In fact, the presentation by Phillips was excellent. He spoke
spontaneously to a wealth of on screen illustration building towards his thesis
with a history of printmaking crammed with fascinating detail. In Dr Johnston’s
words There is no item of information however insignificant, which I would
rather not know, than know, so I was pleased to learn that there is a term,
bracelet shading, for the encircling lines used to describe form that derives
from Durer and which became the universal technique in engraving. The huge
effect of warfare on art was outlined. Transparent watercolour was developed in
England to colour maps over engraved line and the first ordnance survey map of
Scotland, i.e. military map, was made after the defeat of the ’45 Rebellion.
Army and naval officers were taught to draw to familiarise themselves with
landscape and coastal features for tactical advantage and they passed these
skills to their wives. The explosion of popular prints was linked to the ending
of royal collecting with the execution of Charles I and the release from
Cromwellian Puritanism. Gillray was mentioned but not the effect that the
development of etching, which was so much quicker than engraving, had on the
political cartoon. More intriguing information was revealed about the rise of
amateur printmaking when traditional presses became commercially redundant and
available. Queen Victoria and Van Gogh’s friend Dr Gachet were two of the
well-known names that dabbled.
The etching revival at the end of
the beginning of the 20th Century and limited edition prints by
Whistler, DY Cameron and the like were blamed for the de-democratisation of
printmaking. Gone were the popular print shops of Hogarth’s day. A finite
number of images served to make them exclusive and expensive.
Phillips suggests that limited edition prints might become a
thing of the past. Work can be put out on the net, Facebook, YouTube. He showed
a work he has just produced with a Chinese artist. It is not a limited edition,
is on aluminium and can be bought for £300. He gave a little explanation of the
work just like these explanatory cards that are de rigeur in modern art
galleries. It would be interesting to know how this print will do. I do not
believe the case was made for the demise of numbered prints.
What supports the limited edition system is what we might
call signature-buying. The Dali scandal where he signed lots of blank sheets of
paper that went on sale duly furnished with images made by others, illustrates
the point. Dealers and, understandably, printmaking workshops, have always been
keen to produce editions, often substantial, of celebrity artists at the peak
of their marketable careers. The American composer, Ned Rorem, writes of how he
saw Picasso at a bullfight, draw on a baby’s bottom which he signed,
leaving the parents with a dilemma. Do they skin the child or never wash it
again? For reasons of conceived investment prospects, judgemental
insecurity or just to achieve some sort of vicarious attachment to celebrity,
for buyers, not excluding public galleries, the signature has become more
important than the image.
The situation is different with artists producing prints in
open access workshops up and down the country and abroad. Prices are unlikely
to be such that democratic availability is likely to be impaired. They will sell mainly to private buyers
although occasional sales to public collections will help trade. Their edition
sizes will be based most probably on a realistic estimate of how many prints
they will be likely to clear, with the price of quality paper being a
consideration. Of course, it depends to some extent on the print medium used.
Etchers, for instance, can mark a few prints with a relatively high edition
number and pull more if needed, but I do know of one etcher who changed to the
type of relief printing that I do, where the edition has to be decided at the
outset as the blocks are destroyed in the printing process. He was tired of
going back to images he had hoped to be finished with. I sympathise. If you
sell out an edition you can sometimes wish you had made more, but it is
creation that is the enjoyable part. Repetitive printing is a chore.
Perhaps there is a parallel with the open workshop users,
who may be primarily painters or sculptors and not necessarily unambitious, and
the Dutch Little Masters. The latter produced for a domestic market while the
celebrity figures did their separate thing. A few of them became great painters
in their own right.
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