Art Lies, Volume 46, Spring 2005 Page: 14
120 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 28 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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A New State Reassessing Prints
Kathleen V. Jameson
The process of editing this issue on prints and printmaking presented a number of
challenges, especially in terms of rethinking and redefining my own thoughts on the
subject. This undertaking, along with extended conversations with colleagues, sug-
gests the need for a cumulative critique of the print field. While my assessment here
is brief-even cursory-I hope it precipitates new dialogue and engagement with
prints and printmaking.
While there are writers and scholars who address prints, they are rarely the sub-
ject of theoretically oriented scholarship and criticism. Aside from a few journals
devoted to works on paper-as well as sporadic articles and reviews in more gener-
alized periodicals, too-infrequent books and the occasional exhibition catalogue-
few outlets exist for writing and thinking about prints on a serious, critical level.
Indeed, and quite sadly, it appears that Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction, published nearly seventy years ago, remains the
fallback critical foundation. Prints simply have not demanded the critical assess-
ment and analysis with which other media have been treated and studied.
Print scholarship may be the last bastion of connoisseurship; while this is not
necessarily negative, an emphasis on the mechanics of printmaking and the "qual-
ity" of an impression seems to have rendered prints boring, misunderstood and
somehow "other." In putting together this issue, a number of critics and writers
I contacted seemed reticent to contribute, some implying their reluctance is rooted,
in part, in the tradition of print analysis centered on process and technique, often
at the expense of questions of style, subject or conceptual basis. Indeed, prints are
frequently segregated from other modes of aesthetic production. In institutional
practice, prints-along with drawings and photographs-are usually considered
separate areas in collections. Departments are defined by process, echoing the
emphasis on technique in print scholarship.
Such categories and hierarchies have informed and reinforced prints' status
as somehow secondary to painting and sculpture. Even within collections of both
prints and drawings, the former are often viewed as somehow "less than" the latter.
This is perhaps because drawings appear to hold some kind of cache--an immedi-
acy and intimacy that prints seem to lack. Many artists argue that prints are in fact
a less immediate means of expression than painting or drawing-an "analytical way
of working." ' This can be both true and false, for making a print can be as complex
as a multi-plate, multi-process project or as exquisitely simple as the swift stroke of
a lithographic crayon on stone. Process, the mark of the analytical and connoisseur-
ship have all contributed to a sense that prints are somewhat tedious.14 ARTL!ES Spring 2005
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Bryant, John & Gupta, Anjali. Art Lies, Volume 46, Spring 2005, periodical, 2005; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth228011/m1/16/: accessed April 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .