Educating the Next Generation of Printmakers

     In discussing the education of artist in relationship to instruction in printmaking the first necessity is to determine the boundaries of the territory to be covered. Second, to develop a programmatic philosophy to articulate the territory. Third, to establish the classroom attitudes for daily instruction.

     Print is not an object, a technique, or a category, but it is a theoretical language of evolving ideas. The territory printmaking occupies is broad ranging and diverse. Majoring in this area leads the student to a high degree of professionalism, to multiple career opportunities, and gives the individual the widest possible means for self expression. These possibilities include print functioning as fluxus, new genre, and altered photographic communication. It offers dialogue through offset and copier booklets, posters, pamphlets and underground newspapers. It reaches out to discover a new audience by using mail art devices. It functions on a collaborative level, giving a political voice to artist co-ops. Images produced in the creative collaboration between master printer and the artist have become some of the most effective work in contemporary art. Print is the intense introspection of the individual etcher, lithographer, silkscreen or relief print artist. These efforts have developed into a unique aesthetic approach to the issues which make up contemporary visual thought. Print is the images of popular culture, signage, commercial reproduction, and computer imaging. It is both two and three dimensional. Print includes forms devised as multiples, installations and performance. It is drawing, cartoons and illustration. It is private, spiritual and public representation. It is both unique impression, monotypes, as well as limited editions. Print is text, books, information and documentation. Each method of expression cited functions in a unique and vital way involving a series of evolving ideas as well as lineage which is rooted in history. The overall understanding of prints multiple functions, skills and technologies places the student in a unique and advantageous position to succeed in a career in the arts, either in its commercial venues or as one of contemporary societies visual poets.

     Printmaking has educationally taken a categorical approach, building its educational curriculum around technical information. To articulate the broad concern represented by the expansive territory which defines the print means breaking down the technically based curriculum. Education structures based on learning individual technologies are by their craft-oriented nature too narrow to articulate and explore print as a broader language. Overemphasis on technical exploration and achievement cuts the cord binding issues of content with the activity of making. The curriculum structure is replaced with a programmatic philosophy in which thinking, feeling and making are brought together as inseparable components in the educational and creative process. It is through the evolution and development of the individual artist/students, studio narrative that determines the technical exploration needed, choice of medium, and the degree of virtuosity achieved. A successful print can be a simple drawn gesture or a complex combination of photographic and technical manipulations. The technical possibilities inherent in the mediums are communicated not only through class projects but successfully represented by the natural cross-pollination of ideas and images the individual produces. The images become the territory of a dialogue which is indifferent to a hierarchy of values based on the means of production. An educational structure which allows students to flow through the variety of technologies and allowing the degree of craft to be determined by the inclination of the individual and the logic of their work keeps the critical dialogue focused on issues of content. This is not an attack on technology or craft, the programmatic philosophy seeks to keep the creative elements involved in making prints proportional. Within my own institution students have developed the interest and skills to move into collaborative printing. Our graduates have printed for Landfall, Universal, Graphic Studios and others. These students are not held up as the apex of creative possibility, nor are they criticized for their technical understanding. They fulfill one of prints many creative possibilities. The student who focuses on Producing copier books, using stamps, drawing, and altering commercially printed images and in general has a conceptual or post modern orientation is judged as working in an equally valid print area. Each offers the other broader possibilities through cross-pollination.

     In the classroom the print is established as a fluid and vital means of expression rather than a secondary act of representation based of forms previously discovered in other mediums. The goal is to have the students achieve an original and authentic action through the processes of printmaking. To make those processes the mechanism for recording the journey of the students studio narrative. It is important for the student to develop the fluidity to encounter the material in a physical way, to achieve the sensitivity that the physical gesture is a means of thinking. It is the physical act of making that integrates thinking, feeling and making. The student can not progress beyond drawing or representation until they learn to manipulate the delay. Delay is often misunderstood as process or craft in a negative sense. In reality the delay is the transition from the drawing gesture to the mechanical process of the print. Collaborative printing is based around the delay. It is the moment where the printer takes over, moving the artist’s gesture into print. For the print artist and student the delay is accepted and manipulated. The delay becomes a continuation of the creative process, rich in possibility. Here lies the critical separation of attitudes between "painter" and print artist. The same issues are available to both, as is the act of drawing. The delay, the act of printing is for one interference of mechanical craft, and for the other the continuation of creative possibilities. To establish a productive and creative classroom attitude is to achieve a sense of fluidity and creative manipulation of the delay inherent in all print processes.

     Education and instruction are two different forms. Instruction is training, learning how, a development of skills. Education is a process of thinking which leads to discovery. It is not an imposed structure but varies with the individual. The end product is a self-critical, exploratory, interested intellect. Education is a reduction of individual prejudice; it is not goal-oriented, seeking an academic payoff. Dietmar Winkler says "education is for the unknown. Training is for the known." The two forms are complements, threaded together to complete the object. Teaching is a continual swing between the two forms, ideas are expressed through objects, the means by which an object is produced goes far in determining its meaning. It is never a matter of separating the conceptual from the physical but learning to allow both to have their place in the creative process. This is especially true at the undergraduate level. Here the student is at a formative stage and highly impressionable to the stencils imposed by the instructors. A combining of the two forms allows the student to question the information given while learning the physical process, without becoming a parrot.

     April 1991