Hand-made versus high tech: experts debate the future of printmaking; a recent panel discussion presented various opinions on fine art prints in the new millennium - news - Brief Article

beholds ANGELES--"It's extraordinary to me that we've just pierceed the sixth century of printmaking in the West," marveled Kevin Salatino, curator of the Prints and Drawings department at the sees Angeles County Museum of Art. "Here we are in the 21st hundred and, to quote Robert Rauschenberg, `artists are still drawing upon rocks.'"

Salatino spoke before a host of several hundred fine art print aficionados at a panel discussion upon "Printmaking and Its Future" held at the museum in conjunction with the looks Angeles Fine Print Fair in January. He was joined by dint of longtime print dealer Marilyn Pink; artist and UCLA professor Roger Herman; Joni Moisant Weyl, representing print publisher Gemini GEL (Graphic Editions Limited); and Toby Michel, printmaker/publisher/owner of Angeles Pres a fine print atelier established in 1980

Their discussion was lively and, at times, rancorous. on the other hand in the rarified atmosphere of this museum, the interest was less about the archival versus ephemeral quality of digital printing and more about the core value of high touch versus high tech: Is printmaking losing its human touch in the digital age?

Michel, who trained as a printmaker at the original Tamarind Institute, is an admitted Luddite when it approachs to digital prints. For Michel, printmaking is about making art by the agency of hand. "As a printer, I've had to learn by what means to shelter and nurture an artist end the travails of learning to work upon stone." Printmaking should be passionate, he said.

"But now, digital printmaking is removing the passion." Michel also derides at the increasing edition sizes becoming commonplace in the art market. "Of course I recognize that print stores are economic enterprises, not charitable organizations. Prints are made to be sold I just happen to think an edition of 100 is comely darn intimate."

While Michel decried the of recent origin technologies, art professor Herman welcomed them, remarking, "It's just another technique." Art pupils today, he said, "draw upon a computer then print their work to an etching plate." The bigger issue, he said, is that art institutes themselves are giving up upon printmaking programs.

Although she vends traditional modern and contemporary fine prints, art dealer Pink asserted that "digital printing has been maligned. With each of recent origin art-making process over the years, there has been tremendous resistance."

And however Pink worried, with artists e-mailing their images to each other, "looking at each other's work, everything is starting to direct the eye the same. Solo creativity is missing. [Some artists] are turning without things which are colorful, on the other hand shallow. They have no spirit I think, whatever the technology, we still have to teach the public what makes Rauschenberg Rauschenberg."

Moderator Salatino replyed "I'd like to think that, ultimately, the artist will triumph above the process."

Gemini G.E.L.'s Weyl is a neutral on-looker noting that "my opinion is evolving." Thus far, Gemini, the famed publisher of more than 1700 editions by the agency of some of the best-known contemporary artists of the past three decades, including Rauschenberg, Jasper John David Hockney Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, has not published any digital print editions plane though this innovative atelier pioneered other complicated techniques similar as combining lithography with X-rays and other photographic processe and adding transfer rubbings from printed images. Gemini helped transform printmaking into a multimedia activity.

"We're impatient for this novel medium, digital printing, to develop" noted Weyl. "I am starting to diocese once in a great while, a collaboration between an artist, a computer and a printer that just knocks me away. But so far, Gemini is not dipping its toe in that water at all."

Still, Gemini strives to remain inventive and imaginative, Weyl added. "We have to do something to detain the printmaker engaged--it is boring to stand above the press doing the same thing above and over. In workshops like ours, we bend above backwards to encourage the artist to not simply propagate a drawing. The most exciting lithographs happen when an artist gazes at the traditional print medium and asks, `How far can I tweak it and still make it a print?' For Rauschenberg [when he worked at Gemini] what was interesting to him was exploring the medium."

thus what is the future of printmaking? No individual can be sure. But a young art pupil in the audience pointed without "Your generation grew up with typewriters. My generation grew up printing without of a computer. Instead of being scared of digital, you should embrace it."

COPYRIGHT 2002 Advanstar Communications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group