When I refer to colony, I mean it quite literally: as a territory take - PDF document

When I refer to colony, I mean it quite literally: as a territory taken over by another power, where identity is maimed and slowly forgotten, values are shifted and increasingly empty and hopeless vow.When I arrived in New York in 1964 I shared a studio second-rate form of art-making. Although we were close considered myself a printmaker and I didn’t believe fties, I saw art as a seamless eld. For me, ne myself and this was conceptually wrong. Somehow I had forgotten that I was supposed nition to and within printmaking. I lived the slogan: I make prints, therefore I am. And meanwhile, nd. Printmaking: A Colony of the Arts by Luis Camnitzerwww.philagra ka.org ka.org were—suddenly and unexpectedly—able to afford the use of underwear. Consequently, a sizeable stock of rags industry, spurring larger quantities of prints, which led to higher printing speeds. Paradoxically and amazingly, to “paper-less” printing, a world informed by compact disks and the Web. Even the notion of ownership has as he did in the case of Ansel Adams. Meanwhile, we printmakers use Rembrandt’s hardground and quibble about the percentage of rag content in hand-made paper. evolution in the seventeenth century.posed by the circulation of information. It was, nearly, a technical accident. Printmakers, however, seduced artistic merit will automatically follow. Making prints is the task. Art seems to be a miraculous byproduct.few good printmakers’ prints. By good, I don’t mean mean prints that seriously affect the way we see things or the way we think about them. While in painting we nding heroes. Most of the ne the history of printmaking—I imagery, or their approach to imaging, was generated going for sex tourism to Southeast Asia or for gambling to a Native American reservation, some revenues and maybe prestige are brought to the locals. The activities, however, don’t leave the visitors any more Asian or Native American than they were before leaving their Among what we can call the “strong natives” we nd people like Seghers, Piranesi or Posada, and maybe some with dual citizenship like Dürer or Goya. Or we have odd characters like Rauschenberg, who did his best work while focusing on printmaking problems—I am thinking of his reduction of a wood block and of the imprint of a tire of John Cage’s car—and later ruined it by using printmaking as a nd in printmaking has as much of a household name as do If, to use a metaphor, we were to think globally instead this issue would be completely irrelevant. The primary mission of artists is to help organize signi cation with ght visual fatigue. Nobody well. But most of us do not think globally. When asked do it. I am a painter, I am a sculptor, I am a printmaker, detail: “I am an etcher, I am a lithographer,” etc. In Argentina the question, posed with a possible future rst visit to New York, back in 1962, I went to the then famous Pratt Graphic Arts Center. The ed. By then I hadn’t found out what those artists did. According to the introduction (and maybe that was is strange in a world that doesn’t even remember who However, at the same time, the institution was proud of having artists like Archipenko and Richard Lindner rmation of identity through Or there was the hope that their prestige would rub off, exemplifying another form of painting-envy. Whichever technical excellence. The aesthetic quality-control was symptomatic of a colonial mentality. I rather saw it as a as a reference and standard for technology, in a manner www.philagra ka.org ka.org uent and developed economy. for anything else. They wanted to absorb industrial nish in their aesthetic. Deep down, however, cially create heavy industries. It reminds me of Mao’s China, when each village tried to technical problems. Working in Uruguay I faced the task without felts. It didn’t mean either that technique would not affect the process of my creative work. Pondering about Picasso’s multi-color linoleum prints made from one ever-diminishing plate, I became interested constancy to belong to a one and only sausage. And the matrix. This thinking followed the visit to Pratt Graphics Today I am persuaded that the scene I encountered colonial thinking of printmakers. The truly colonized doesn’t dare to think independently and, simultaneously, works only timidly within the master’s thought. In this case there were two master’s thoughts: the painter’s having some of his artists sign and number offset prints ve and ten dollars. It was not clear if that was a challenge to traditional printmaking or, ne printmaking” in quotes. Today, of course, the prices of those pseudo-proletarian collector items, signed by Warhol and shy beginning. In the U.S. with Gemini, and Tyler as studios, and Alecto and Multiples as distributors, by the rampant and, temporarily, quite fertile. A vague feeling of independence was in the air. There was a eeting ned. With the increase in size and spectacularity making Thus, thirdly, the “multiple” was born, extending the ed as originals, to tens or With hindsight it is clear that this was not a technical industrial production to art. It wasn’t that the craft ed its own output. Now, one of the big questions arising from constituted a form of democratization of art. Or, in the used effectively to achieve a form of globalization of the values of the empire? Well, the answer is yes in the it accessible to more people. Or more appropriately, shareholders. They are lead to think that they co-own the is kept rather slim. Clearly, the means of production those means. And, of course, the control of the image ne art accessible technology— after Daumier’s Carivari lithographs and Posada’s lead-cuts—both in rich and poor To my mind come the Colombian Alvaro Barrios who of the pages of Artforum in 1969. Unlike Daumier www.philagra ka.org ka.org process of making the print. The focus was on in nite distribution, not on craftsmanship. That quest for nity, rather than the lack of craftsmanship, probably However, that quest for in nity came closer to some essential, maybe Kantian idea of the print. We thus are plagued in printmaking jargon: while print refers opposing those who focus on the craft. There is a true craft correctly. Too much hate for the craft kills the work of art and too much love kills the artist. These mixed up and not the one I live in. The former being on the neo-colonial periphery, the latter making sure it remains there. The solutions for my own life should be simple: painter. But I think there is more to my ambivalence, something like a fear to betray, even if the solidarity one imsy foundations.Printmakers’ fundamentalism gives us a somewhat ill-placed sense of identity, one solely based on the ed with the fact that posed by the painter, sculptor, installationist or multi-media artist next door. We allow, however, the solutions The printmaker’s fundamentalism puts us in a different technical innovations. Primarily, a good painter is invented for “that” particular image. When there is a Tapies stretching walls on canvas, it is not the deviation sense of unique inevitability. It is that feeling that makes one of Morandi’s dumb cross-hatching applied to his of Hayter’s viscosity prints put together. Morandi created Art history, as we study it, is characterized by products nding by the way things are done. We are, today, about to it. With the onset of digital imaging; the arts, as we have ning them, may become reduced to no more access to technology, hobby-crafts among those having with new technology, brings not so much of a technical uent computer plasma screens of any conceivable size. With imagery unmediated and totally accurate, the margins granted. The focus of the artist will have to be set on the density of pixels per inch. Art will be the representation clumsiness of material crafts. The notion of originals and all, will be taught in courses like Home-making II. Art art will become obsolete and inappropriate. We will have to study it differently, maybe in the context of a of art is being started for us. We don’t notice because we keep our heads in the acid tray. Acknowledgments rst appeared in the Text Archive of the reproduced with permission from the author. www.philagra ka.org ka.org