Title

Here / Now. Re Place.

Author

Payne, Patsy.

Publication date

1997

Type

Conference paper

Language

English

Country of context

Australia

Full text

Here/ Now. Re Place
By Patsy Payne

The subheading Here /Now, reminded me of that game I used to play when addressing an envelope, trying to place myself in a position relative to an ungraspable infinity of time and space. I suppose that everything is relative though, here/now can be interpreted within a personal or a professional or a more broadly human framework. My identity is integrally connected with the teaching that I have done in Lismore, Sydney and Canberra over the past ten years.

I want to consider the process of questioning and replacement of old orthodoxies, which has to be one of the most vigorous components in printmaking courses, as in any educational arena.

I'm illustrating this talk with work by some of the artists who have graduated from the Printmaking Studio at Sydney College of the Arts since 1993. I have a strong attachment to the College. I learnt there and I taught there over a period of years. Here now, for me as a teacher, is the work that these artists dare to make and their future production in an arena where hopefully the sorts of barricades behind which printmaking has been sequestered no longer apply.

Here is their engagement with the technologies newly available to them, their capacity and enthusiasm to negotiate the contemporary art morass despite their enthusiasm for works on paper and a reproductive medium such as print.

Part of my role as a teacher is to instill the confidence in my students that their endeavor is worthwhile. This becomes increasingly difficult, the longer I attempt it. It is like trying to make sense of something that is as screwed up as a David Lynch film.

The paranoia of the printmaker is often founded not only on the deep seated psychic wounds of childhood, but the constant reiteration of beliefs that printmaking is a second rate activity, at best a domain for reproducing the first rate works of painters and sculptors. The best prints are made by painters, and printmaking is just a craft, let's set up an editioning workshop! Key players in the contemporary art world are rarely individuals whose concentrated focus is printmaking.

When the going gets tough, printmaking is one of the first areas in art schools to be chopped. As a self contained, viable and experimental medium it is placed under siege, under the spotlight and forced to justify its existence in more than one institution around Australia right now!

In general, the climate in art schools at the moment is one of panic, based on a serious decline in the value placed on art in the wider community and exacerbated by the progressive acceptance of economic rationalism, the drive for full fee paying students and the squeezing of more and more out of ill equipped individuals and poorly equipped workshops. There is a helter skelter rush towards design and technology and an associated rhetoric which on the bare face of it means nothing when funding is being cut at such a rate of knots.

So, there is an atmospheric depression. For Printmaking this is associated with an ongoing ideological debate based on the relationship between craft and concept and the need to insert a level of intellectual debate into the activity of printmaking as a means of counteracting the sorts of prejudices exposed in Robert Nelson's paper at the last symposium.

It is now a difficult time to be teaching in art schools, especially printmaking. Somehow my disillusion and discomfort have to be dealt with and a strategy for survival has to be offered to the generation of artist/printmakers that replace the older generation of which I am forced to admit I am a part. Or perhaps I hover some where in between, growing up in the era of television without having one in the housel Having a father who sold massive computers way before the era of a pc in every home.

These graduates have started to make sense of their position in the contemporary art world and also make sense of their use of print amongst other media as the best possible way of communicating some sense of an existence at the end of this millennium and the beginning of another. What indeed does print represent? - text, image, power, control, knowledge, beauty, ephemera, reproduction, communication, replacement As long ago as 1990, Ruth Weisberg asked whether it was possible to acknowledge a subjective and inward studio practice and at the same time to locate printmaking praxis, teaching and analysis in a wider critical framework. I believe it is, although it seems that private endeavour and quiet contemplation are not greatly valued. I perceive that reticence and modesty only have a small place right here, right now.

There is a diffusion of printmaking concerns throughout numerous contemporary practises and objects. The relationship of the copy to the original, the issue of translation, and questions of multiples, templates and self-degenerating images carried through many reproductions.

Print logic and matrix strategy can be adapted to other materials and formats. Perhaps instead of staying sequestered in craft, printmaking can be rethought as a model for investigating the modern and post modern. (ideas that have replenished the bankrupt fields of painting and sculpture such as transcription, repetition, modes of representation)

Prints are highly individualised statements within the confines of rigidly defined technical means; they embody a condition of modernism the conflict of man and machine, the handmade and the replicated, the original and the copy. Prints are demonstrations of the process of representation, that all pictures of the world are codified and conventionalised, never merely reflections.

On the cusp of the millennium, printmaking is more thoroughly integrated into artistic practise than would have been imaginable 20 years ago. Print production will remain a critical part of contemporary art, exploited for its seductive formal properties; for its historical associations with literature science and art, for its mirroring of the commercial world; and for its singular ability to suggest both the commonality of a shared culture and the singularity of individual experience.

The following work demonstrates the struggle to come to terms with the range of ideas that I have skimmed.

Anthony Sullivan (Honours 1995)
Alienation and advertising. One can consider the framework for Ant Sullivan's work as based on the idea of Benjamin that the circulated image is a consensually consumed ideological artefact. Aesthetic values are subordinated to a social role defined by reproducibility, accessibility and political purpose. The limited edition just isn't relevant in this context. For both Ant and Michael there is a presupposition that it is a mass society that is being critiqued, the poster is appropriate the billboard, the mass production of images to be pasted around the city to be casually observed by as many people as possible.

The history of prints relates to broadside, text and to popular culture in ways that have always signified the insertion of art into a social formation.

Michael Florrimell ( MA 1995)
Michael Florrimell has incorporated traditional, commercial and public uses of print mediums in his work. In the presentation and installation of the work he has attempted to reverse the roles and spaces associated with different forms of the medium. He investigates changes in the connotation of selected forms of print, placed in unfamiliar contexts. There is an attempt to recode. He is dealing with the broadest field of printed material.

Crossing between traditional and commercial materials i.e. using lithography, intaglio, silkscreen, wood, lino, monoprint, xerox, offset, photography.

The history of print. He refers to both its commercial and mechanical aspects, its graphic employment by artists from 16th C on, and its use within the public arena, both as graphic art and commercial imagery.

Jan Idle (PG Diploma 1996, current MA) Rhyparos Memory Objects.
Filth, leftovers, the painting of mean and sordid objects. In her catalogue statement at the end of last year Jan Idle wrote "Walking the long corridor through each room, collecting the debris of the day, sorting, wiping, and puffing away. Each object collected resists being discarded by evoking some memory or emotion. It is this clutter that binds the present to the past.

Jan has connected her activity as a printmaker with a research into the nature of collecting, the archiving of material from contemporaneous and alien culture, the positioning of artefacts in a relation to or with each other in order to communicate some form of truth which is an inevitable narrative.

The truth is constructed as much as any fiction and we are forced to look at the potential connection and disconnection, to as k what is the difference between fiction and non fiction. There is a process of accumulation in an everyday domestic life which allows for the creation of a cultural narrative in the way that a collection of museum objects creates a public narrative of the culture.

Sutee Kunavichayanont ( MA 1994)
The theme that Sutee was investigating in his work was the contrast and harmony of opposite aspects and the parallel of reality and illusion. He spoke of the perspective achieved in looking back to Thailand from outside. Sutee's work is an ongoing meditation on change , with the thesis that within life is death, and change. These works define the organic flow of mood, sense and intention confronting the artist in front of the blank page. Chance and change, passing time are mapped in these works.

He takes the print medium away from the idea of framed images and multiples serving the market place, re examining printmaking in terms of process and sequence of events and making sense of the medium in relation to his ideas.

The emphasis is on process, time and space. Sutee tempers Western aesthetics with an identity with fundamental Thai rituals and belief structures. There is a challenge of the east west divide. A contrast between tradition and modernism

The installation of these works allowed a level of meditative contemplation of pieces which reflect upon the nature of void, being and the ephemerality of felt experience. The processes chosen, the use of discarded printed material for drawing, the use of newspapers refuse of a mass daily printed output of Sydney Morning Herald, refer to the reality of impermanence.

Erica Seccombe (PG 1995)
Lured by both the natural and the artificial. Erica's work treads a strange path in attempting to define the relationship between art, nature and technology, to understand her place as an artist in a technological world where the present issue of nature is our own survival. Erica's proposition is that the scientist represents technology, and the fool equals nature. The systematic knowledge, technology, scientific authority, power of production and commodity quietly displaces the thoughtful, the intuitive, the natural and the maker of mistakes.

The artist the astronaut has the opportunity to see and reveal the world as it really is, reliant on both technology and intuition / imagination. The artist can make sense of human folly and portray the truth.

In these next works we are presented with an amalgamation of imaginative depictions of tales told in a naive way in a world defined and constructed through technology. The colours and screen dots force us to blend text with its background or deny a finite meaning through the merging of image and text. We must then consider the nature of storytelling, illustration and the relationship of an oral tradition to computer technology. The block like form of the text and the shadow images or spidery forms battle each other and set up questions about the relationship of the individual as storyteller to the information technology of the machine.

Justin Trendall (MA 1994)
A simple description of these works is that they are wall tapestries pieced together from cards printed with fine, colour and text. The size and shape of the tapestries is dependent on their exhibiting space. There are obvious accidental components which become important keys for interpreting the regularity and modularity of this work.

Most of these accidents stem from the very process of their manufacture, misregistration, overinking, flooding, colour discrepancies and other printing flaws.

These works are a tapestry of associated ideas, ornament and histories. The sense is gained from enjoyment and participation in the sequence set up in the various formats. There is a seemingly infinite variety of pattern which can be derived from these components. It is possible to weave together the elements of history, names, colour, pattern and reveal potential influences and contaminations.

Perhaps what I am saying is that despite everything prints are uniquely situated to negotiate the space between public and private experience. Simultaneously populist and elitist, the print is enmeshed in the idea of private ownership and the idea of a broad audience.

John Baldessari said, ‘Everybody knows a different world, and only part of it, We communicate only by chance, as nobody knows the whole, only where overlapping takes place'.

© Patsy Payne, 1997.
Paper presented at The Third Australian Print Symposium, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1997.

Last Updated

02 Dec 2024