Perspectives on Contemporary Printmaking

Ruth Pelzer-Montada is an artist and Lecturer in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at Edinburgh College of Art, The University of Edinburgh

‘This will be a significant and important contribution to the field and practice of printmaking and print media. The volume will be vital in MFA professional practice classes, and on theory and art historical courses.’Mary Hood, Artist‘Dr Ruth Pelzer-Montadas publication is an excellent compilation of selected text spanning 3 decades. This topographical discourse points to essential aspects concerning the critical discussions and the debates on contemporary print and printmaking and the tectonic shift of it.’Jan Pettersson, Professor, Head of Print & Drawing, Department for Art & Craft, Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway‘Combining the methodology of a practicing printmaker with the perception of a theorist, Pelzer-Montada assembles key texts on printmaking and print cultures into a comprehensive anthology of writings that reveals the depth and range of thinking and debate on this subject. A long overdue critical framing of print art, this book fulfills the need for a re-evaluation of the importance and ubiquity of print, mapping out its potential in a “post-print” society. […] These writings establish a genealogy of print grounded in society’s desire to maintain, record and disseminate its reflective thinking processes – that have ultimately shaped and evolved our need to communicate.’Andrew Folan, Head of Print, National College of Art and Design, Dublin‘Perspectives on contemporary printmaking is a brilliant book! A manual like this has been longed for both in the academic world and in the studios and printshops; most thoughtful theoretical analysis of printmaking art, assembled into a single anthology. It is informative, well-organized, and knowledgeable. I particularly enjoyed the carefully formulated division into four separate parts, accompanied with Ruth Pelzer-Montadas insightful introductions. It’s already a classic, the only of its kind. Highly and cordially recommended!’Annu Vertanen, artist, professor in printmaking, University of Arts, Helsinki'Perspectives on contemporary printmaking, edited by Ruth Pelzer-Montada, is an excellent, lively collection of 32 essays focusing on the status, ontology and philosophy of print in the contemporary arena […] The varying voices are all engaging, some challenging, some beautifully articulated, provoking rumination and providing ammunition for making print the centre of our conversation.'Wuon-Gean Ho, Printmaking Today (Winter 2018)‘In this compact impressive tome, the editor has grouped together relevant themes and writings, which form a kind of activist’s bible or tool of resistance to not only make sense of what has occurred these last thirty years, but to assert why it matters and why printmaking is still an active participant of change and a vital force of ideas. In many ways, this astute editor enables a better understanding of how knowledge is inextricably linked to the print form as she traces an unbroken seam of print production from its origins through to today.’Imprint

• IntroductionPart I: GenealogyBeat Wyss – Fragments for an art history of media: electr(on)ic thinking (1997)Ernst Rebel – The technical gaze: the parallel world of photography (2003)Frances Robertson – Post-print culture? (2013)Part II: Debates Ruth Weisberg – The syntax of the print: in search of an aesthetic context (1986)Richard S. Field – Sentences on printed art (1994)Kathryn Reeves – The re-vision of printmaking (1999)Andrzrej Bednarczyk – The shape of graphic art (2010)José Roca – The graphic unconscious or the how and why of a print triennial (2011)Richard Harding – Print as other: the future is queer (2013)Barbara Balfour – The what and the why of print (2016)Part III: KeywordsErnst Rebel – Coordinates of a history of the technical image (2003)Susan Lambert – The status of the reproduction (1988)Clare Humphries – Benjamin’s blindspot: aura and reproduction in the post-print age (2015)K. E. Gover – Are all multiples the same? The problematic nature of the limited edition (2015)Frieder Nake – Printing plates and pixel matrix: the mechanisation of memory (2010)Georges Didi-Huberman – Opening up an anachronistic point of view (1997)Deirdre Brollo – Untying the knot: memory and forgetting in contemporary print work (2013)Yara Flores – Spirit duplication (2010)Catherine Brooks – Three ways to use yellow (2014)Amze Emmons, R.L. Tillman and Jason Urban – On the manual (In the manual) (2014)Nicky Coutts – Animal print suicide (2014)Part IV: The fieldDaniel F. Herrmann – Edinburgh Printmakers and the notion of the workshop (2007)Jeremy Lewison – Projects and portfolios: narrative and structure (1995)Gill Saunders – Lasting impressions? A museum perspective on digital fine art printmaking (2009)Sheryl Conkelton – Print and the public sphere (2011)Johanna Drucker – The work event: art in the distributed field and systems of production (2013)Eric Triantafillou – All the instruments agree (2010)Mari Carmen Ramírez – Stamping (molding) marks: the San Juan Triennial tracking the new century (2004)Shang Hui – Chinese printmaking in the twenty-first century: new horizons and energies (2011)Matthew Perkins – What is ’studio’ in the post-disciplinary age? (2011)Amanda Thomson – Making a place: art and a multi-modal, multi-disciplinary approach (2014)R. L. Tillman – Failures, irritations and grief in printing: in search of Manly Banister, an excerpt from an unpublishable memoir (2014)Index