"Twenty years of the Shell Fremantle Print Award" Published in Imprint Vol 31 No 4 Summer 1996
The Shell Fremantle Print Award was first offered in 1976. In celebration of the partnership of the Fremantle Arts Centre, the City of Fremantle and the long-term sponsors, Shell Australia, an exhibition of all the winning prints, entitled From Silkscreen to Computer Screen: 20 Years of the Fremantle Print Award, is touring nationally.
When Shell first sponsored the Award it might have seemed improbable that such an alliance of the public and private sectors would endure for so long. Now we are hearing the long withdrawing roar of retreating public funding, this partnership seems a fine thing. Without doubt, the Fremantle prize has had a great impact on the direction of print culture in Australia. This inevitably follows on the authority that the Award wields and the prestige and money that it confers. Many of these prints belong nowhere else but here; they are too flimsy for the boardroom and too big for the lounge room.
As the excellent catalogue essay by Ted Snell makes clear, the Award has attracted some criticism through the years. Critics have pointed to the introverted and conservative nature of the printmakers' aesthetic, driven by technical perfectionism and demonstrating a 'failure to innovate'. Why does printmaking have a special charter to be technically innovative, I wonder? Is it a defensive reflex arising from our perpetual anxiety that we are second class citizens? Painting, for all that its usefulness as a way of making images has been repeatedly questioned, hasn't renewed itself through technical innovation; most new painting technologies have turned out to be time-bombs, anyway. For printmakers 'technology' handily occupies one of the spaces created by the aesthetic vacuums of Modernism, and we have been grateful for even this much territory to claim as our own. The Fremantle prize has been active in defining this territory, particularly in recent years. The perfect prizewinning print should be all things at once: ambitious yet resolved, innovative yet historicist. It hasn't been done often.
So what sort of tastes and styles have forty-four different judges over twenty years institutionalised? Firstly, I hope I never see another posterised colour silkscreen. This medium of choice of the early eighties is represented by the work of David Rose (1978), Paul King (1981), Tony Pankow (1982), Keith Cowlam (1983), amongst others, and all are equally dull. Ray Arnold's Maria Island Proving Ground— Atlantic Theatre (1982), sparkling and engaging, is the exception. The numbing flatness of silkscreen reaches its nadir in Stewart Merrett's triptych From Kirribilli (1984), and, after the textured play of Alun Leach-Jones' Capricornia (1985), sinks almost without trace.
Just as silkscreen defaults to posterisation, so intaglio and relief prints default to the random graphic mark. At one end of the spectrum of 'graphicness' this mark is delicate and sensitive as in the untitled collagraph of Monica Schmid (1984) or the etching of Jodi Heffernan Shadows, fragments (1991). At the other end of the graphic spectrum the mark is black, tough, virile as in Mike Parr's drypoint Untitled Self Portrait (1990), Bevan Honey's drypoint Memory of Location (1993), or Michelle Hyland's carborundum print Statement of Identity (1990).
This graphicness is offered as an aesthetic end in itself. It is rarely tied to visual curiosity or driven by the exploration of form. Prints such as Megan Russell's woodcut Smith and Liz (1989), deliver in place of an apprehended, investigated face the graphic cipher 'face', over-familiar from a hundred student crits. Encouraged by the separatism of prizes such as Fremantle, and in pursuit of a Modernist ideal of autonomy, printmakers have played down drawing as a mode of enquiry that can shelter both analytic and synthetic impulses. Some exceptions are the etchings of John Spooner (The End, 1986), Ruth Johnstone (Cypress II, 1986), and Danny Moynihan (161 West 22nd Street N.Y., 1988), brooding and moody images all and, not coincidentally, amongst the most memorable.
Of recent years the Fremantle award, renewing its brief to encourage innovation, and seeking to capture some of the energy of contemporary print practice, has floated some new categories: Unique State Print, Best Print Using Innovative Technologies, Artist's Book, and Prints by Indigenous Artists. A curious by-product has been bifurcation into bigness and littleness. On the one hand, the books of Dianne Longley, Night Sea Crossing (1994), and Jan Davis, Solomon (1995), are all miniaturist perfection and intimacy; on the other hand the work of Hyland and Honey, Heather Hesterman's mixed media print I. Cut on Dashed Line (1992) and Dean Bowen's etching The Car Park (1994), are all monuments to graphic grandiosity. Australian prints go big with brute force and bombast rather than with American labour-intensive slickness. Those seeking proof that empty ambition is rewarded in the prize-giving stakes need look no further than Hyland's print, 5.6 square metres of vacuity.
It's very easy in Australia for printmaking to be grown artificially in the award hothouse. The Fremantle prize, as its prestige continues to increase, intervenes ever more actively to nurture the culture of printmaking. The crop, on the evidence of From Silkscreen to Computer Screen, is not always healthy.