"The economy of printmaking: culture and commodity Part Two: Workshops and publishing, art education, developments in technology"
Published in Imprint Vol 29 No 2 Winter 1994
"...In those early days (the 1960s) of encouraging young painters to make prints, the publishers had not yet totally endorsed the principles of competitive business. Their interest was primarily in the art, and their merchandising of the product emphasised personal faith in the artist over material and financial gain. Eventually, the market for artists' unique works grew...It was not unusual to find some artists prints, because they were multiples, rising sharply in price in a vigorous, competitive market. Some sectors of the American economy determined that artists' prints might be the means of doing big business...The idea of investing in prints for financial gain...became the goal of more than a few investment consultants...who counselled their clients to buy prints as a shelter against higher income taxes. Artists who wanted an opportunity to make prints were enlisted in these tax-shelter projects, which provided complete editions of prints and reproduction rights to investors participating in a complex financial arrangement that assured them sufficient losses on paper to reduce their taxes. The scheme was finally determined to be illegal, and the completed tax-shelter prints were determined to have no monetary value. One artist, whose prints are very highly rated, finds it amusing to have some of his stamped by the government, No Value."1 Moral...don't try to make your fortune with printmaking; they've already tried that in America.
The culture of printmaking is embedded in support systems that operate to make skills available, to make hardware accessible, to generate contact between print producers and consumers. This essay seeks to investigate further these mechanisms which institutionalise the cultural economy of printmaking.
Sites of the culture— workshops and publishers Artists' enjoyment of the partnerships of the workshop, away from the solo studio, is part of the particular appeal of printmaking. Talking about these aspects of the print scene arouses strong feelings and partisan support—perhaps in reflection of the difficult times facing the visual arts.2 An oft repeated truism is that, driven by the needs of their imagery, artists will "naturally" turn to print when its materials meet their expressive needs. "The best prints are made by artists ...the best prints have no original image", etc. The charming narrative of the (d)alliance of artist and material, with the sympathetic printer in attendance as midwife, is one of the romances of art. This arcadian image is counter-balanced by stories of money-spinning painters being shunted up to a litho stone by a wheeling-dealer and encouraged to draw, plied with liquid refreshment. (Or, more scandalously, signing blank paper which was then used for photo-reproduction.) This was a more common scenario in the greedy 80s, and now these self-same dealers may be seen with their bottom drawers open, their (less than inspired) prints in view and overflowing. The troubled status of the Melbourne scene, in particular, has even been touched on in the daily press.3
The Australian Print Workshop was structured on the late Neil Leveson's energetic and forceful ideas, embracing both a low-cost access workshop, open to all competent printmakers for a modest (and subsidised) fee, and a custom workshop, where artists are invited, or pay to work with printers Kim Westcott and Martin King for a fee reflecting the true costs involved. A Victorian government grant of $340,000 in 1989 gave the Custom workshop spacious premises and imported presses that other printers can only dream about. Profits from this enterprise were planned to flow on to the Access area. The APW is carrying the burden of the days of hope of the late eighties, when the market was buoyant and an economic model now unworkable seemed feasible, leaving the recently appointed director, Anne Virgo, with an unenviable marketing challenge. Ongoing funding to the whole APW is around $90,000 per annum through Arts Vic. Emmanuel Hirsh, member of the APW board of directors, insists that when the audit is complete "the APW should break even on self-generated income in 1993", including private sponsorship from the Collie Trust, Mobil Print Award and Mitchelton. Hirsh points out that artists and printers, and indirectly, galleries, can use the Access workshop, at rates subsidised by public funding and Custom profits, to generate private profit. He agrees that the Custom presses are currently under-used, and that there is room for greater flexibility in artist/printer collaborations.
Other artists' printers, resenting that there was no form of peer assessment for State Government funding, were "up in arms" about funding to APW, but "in retrospect no harm was done to any private printer", says Hirsh. "If the APW can promote printmaking, private printers will benefit, because the work will flow on. The APW can only service a small portion of the market". Hirsh believes that the APW is not in competition with publishers like Port Jackson Press Australia or Chrysalis Publishing whose artists and markets are distinct, or with printers like John Loane, Bill Young or Larry Rawlings, etc. "APW costing is dearer than that of private printers who can undercut the APW quote—the APW has never tried to undercut any private quote", asserts Hirsh. "In 92/93 the APW worked with artists such as Jan Senbergs, Bill Robinson, Alan Mitelman and Dale Hickey. These artists wanted specifically to work with our printers and would not otherwise have gone into a printing venture."
The APW found that it was necessary as a result of the recession to arrange co-publishing between artists and the workshop and to take on a publishing and marketing role itself. Commissions from dealer galleries as joint venture partners, which have included Ray Hughes, Australian Galleries, Tolarno and William Mora, are important, though not strong enough in the long term to really sustain the business plan on which the APW was structured. Hirsh says there is only an archival collection, not the rumoured back-log of unsold prints on hand.
Where to make prints after graduation? Print publishers and artists' printers in state capitals, artist co-operatives and communal workshops, access to the studios of tertiary institutions are some solutions. The Access workshop is the untroubled face of the APW, widely considered a successful and useful service. Artists such as Neil Emmerson, Dean Bowen, Jennifer Marshall, Angle Komives, Helen Kennedy, Debbie Klein edition there. Manager Marian Crawford describes Access as "a value-neutral place, with open-ended potential". Between 200 and 400 people come through the door each month (not all to print), so it serves an educational function, too. Charges to use the workshop are "modest but real", says Crawford. "Meet the Press", a recent project bringing together printmakers with non-printmakers to work in collaboration (not as printer and artist) was very successful in helping printmakers to "see their work in a broader context."
Studio One in Canberra, directed by Basil Hall, offers a balance of editioning and membership services, with a particular vocation to cater to a wide geographic area, having built up special relationships in working with Aboriginal printmakers from far-flung communities. Studio One receives one quarter of its funding, around $52,000 per annum, from an ACT government grant, and the balance from membership, access charges, editioning fees, print sales and classes. Studio One is under pressure to amalgamate with other ACT publicly funded art organisations including Megalo Access Arts, Leichhardt Street Studios and Photo Access to form a "critical mass", an idea of the economy of scale that seems strangely inappropriate to the idiosyncratic energies involved. The main money-spinner for the studio has been 7000 (!) editions in its twelve-year history, with Studio One "providing the impetus" by generally approaching the artists directly. Work is shared among five printers whose clients have included Mandy Martin, Jannene Eaton, David Preston and George Gittoes.
The intimate type of workshop (in the European tradition) may be the most workable model for Australian practice, with printers who subtly match the sensibilities of different artists. It may be an economically viable style too. Roger Butler believes that the American "master" print-maker workshop does not translate well into Australia, and notes that an Australian artist like George Baldessin was very comfortable working in Paris alongside printers who identify as artisans/craftspeople, in a noble, respected tradition, to be followed by others such as Daniel Moynihan, Raymond Arnold and Dean Bowen. Garner Tullis, American master printer, is bitterly critical of print workshops in America, where "the master printer is the warder or jailer, swamping the artist's inspiration, saying what could not be done."
The loyalty of artists to their partnership with their printer— John Loane and Mike Parr, Larry Rawlings and Juan Davila— is a hallmark of Australian practice. Bill Young is one such charismatic printer. He specialises in etching, editioning for artists such as Michael Leunig, John Spooner, Geoffrey Ricardo, Louis Kahan and Graham Peebles at his workshop in South Melbourne and at Chrysalis Publishing. Both he and Peter Lancaster, who offers lithographic editioning in the same studio, provide fine facilities cobbled together without any form of public funding. They demonstrate clearly that an improvised, capital poor enterprise is no barrier to high quality print production. Young is very happy to work alongside artists enabling them to do what they could not otherwise achieve. Young describes himself as a "de facto" publisher— he has an equity interest in the prints he editions but doesn't do retailing himself.
How are ambitious new print editions generated in Australia? Such undertakings can be expensive, and involve complex constellations of interests: the dealer gallery, the buyer or commissioner, the printer, the artist, the publisher. In the experience of the director of Curwen Chilford Prints, in Britain, "for a significant development to occur, either a printer/ publisher or a publisher/patron is required. In the case of the printer, it is possible for the cost of experimentation to be absorbed by the studio, as part of its general overhead. However this leaves a weakness on the marketing side. With the publisher, the vulnerable area is that of technical understanding. Rarely does an artist open new doors; when they do, the results tend to be extraordinary, enthusing the printer and confusing the publisher."4
Delwyn Schauble, who has long experience in the field, is the director of Chrysalis Publishing, a new print publisher in Melbourne which only publishes Australian work. Schauble says that publishing profitably is "really hard work" but can't be done successfully through only one gallery or by a small group of artists. "I have to sell a high enough percentage of the edition to cover fixed costs and recompense the parties involved, or else run out of the wherewithal, which includes enthusiasm and heart." She sees publishing as a "system for getting images into the market, a form of specialisation like a specialised book publisher. It's difficult but hopeful." Schauble is not concerned with a specific house signature style, even if she felt that the market was big enough to support such specialisation. She works with a large range of images. The artist's return on an edition is calculated as being, in total, approximately equal to a unique work on paper; a gouache, for example. She sees herself as being a pragmatic matchmaker of images to buyers and businesses, and is confident that print sales will blossom with improvements in the economy. She faces the commercial dilemma of "how to allow for serendipity and also keep within reach of the market". Prices should be kept low even in inflationary times, she says. "Multiples can't be devalued after being over-priced as everyone's investment loses value." She points out that the realities of the publishing business push images to a certain scale, since overheads are the same for small images but profit margin is less.
Port Jackson Press Australia, in Melbourne, has recently acquired the assets of Port Jackson Press, a business initiated in the late sixties by David Rankin and solely concerned with publishing and marketing original prints. As such, it has had a great influence on print production, pricing and market acceptance in this country. Under current managers Brian Seidel and Jeffrey Makin, Port Jackson Press Australia commissions print editions from artists. Their marketing strategy involves large editions of each of several images, low returns per print, and a large network of retail outlets. This provides a steady income to the artist and publisher on their investment. Low retail prices, Seidel says, are necessary to overcome buyer resistance to prints. The retail price is twice the wholesale price of which the artist gets one third. Seidel finds that there is very little crossover of buyers of prints and paintings—print buyers are special connoisseurs. Consequently, it is possible for PJP Australia to concentrate on developing the print aspect of an artist's output as a marketable proposition, without conflicting with their regular dealer in paintings. PJP Australia is moving into print importing and broking. May we ask whether existing networks for artist printmakers in this country are resilient enough to absorb such incursions?
In Australia the emphasis in recent decades has been on an unmediated artist/gallery relationship. Ambitious projects in printmaking may be generated by the creative intervention of a publisher. Such an agent brings together artist, printer, dealer, client in an unforeseen geometry. A little of this potential has been demonstrated by dealers willing to float their artists to do saleable editions, or by the curators of charity and special event portfolios, or by the dealers and workshops discussed above. It remains an open question whether Australian printmaking can support independent publishers able to specialise in eccentric, difficult or outrageous projects— truly collaborators who bring into existence works of art that could not otherwise have been.
Education in the culture of printmaking In tertiary art schools, printmaking students encounter authoritative ideas about the uses of the materials of their discipline. If institutional structures can sometimes function to marginalise printmaking activity, does this introduction leave students inhibited and confused when dealing with the wider art scene? Alison Carroll5 and Kate Reeves6 have argued that specialist support systems for the promotion of printmaking repulse critical enquiry while practitioners within the institutions are buffered from outrageous fortune. Is the capital-intensive artmaking, and the labour-intensive art education, of the tertiary print studio driven by a self-perpetuating investment in hardware that has outlived its relevance?
Euan Heng, senior lecturer in printmaking at Gippsland School of Art, Monash University, feels printmaking departments function best as satellites or auxiliaries to other study areas, available as a working place across disciplines, areas for exchange. "If too self-referential and enclosed, print education invents an artificial, cosy aesthetic called 'print-making', a type of self-conscious, mannered mark making, a matrix that we can hang these arty cliches on. The medium has to be allied to whatever communicative strategies are appropriate. Printmaking education needs to mirror the ways printmaking is perceived in current art practice, to concern itself with issues of iconography and theory. The graphic sensibility is easily acquired in collaboration." Regional art schools may be the only places regional students are exposed to printmaking. Staff have to "market" the discipline in order to maintain viable departments, and in the current tertiary education climate, generate the income that justifies their continued existence.
Lecturer in printmaking at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Ruth Johnstone encourages her students to question the printmaking tradition, while still appreciating its historical basis. Indeed, Johnstone's own practice has moved from limited edition print to large-scale installation with some printed components. Students at RMIT are allowed the flexibility to be print specialists or multi-media artists. Johnstone believes that print offers far more options than painting to explore current practice. In first year students are offered access to computer imaging as "complementary practice", made possible by the Faculty of Art and Design investing in the hardware essential for design education, but still unavailable to most fine art students.
Milan Milojevic, lecturer in charge of printmaking at the Tasmanian School of Art, Hobart, reckons traditional print media "will always have a place because of their vocabulary of unique marks", but is excited about computer manipulation of images, to which his students have some access. He mentions the Graphic Investigation Workshop of the Canberra School of Art as a good model of the integration of different studio areas. He anticipates increasing interplay between photo-printmaking, computer, collage and hand-made marks, but is aware that computer imaging can be as introverted as the minutiae of fine lithographic washes if used solely as a technical game. Archival integrity is still an issue of some concern with new technologies, so the final version of these cross-fertilisations tends to be on a traditional support.
I wonder about these rhetorical pieties. After propitiating the god of inter-disciplinary co-operation, institutions go back to the same old hierarchies. It is more likely that the pragmatism of survival perpetuates a siege mentality in tertiary print studios both regional and metropolitan, with amalgamation-exhausted staff in thrall to a roomful of cast iron.
From pixel to panorama—the play of possibilities "No-one has made his or her fortune with computer-generated art," a dealer told me, "but new technology will pull up the print rather than lower its status". On the other hand Anne Kirker writes that "in order to allow their work to be accepted in the existing arenas of art, (makers of hi-tech art) may feel compelled to clothe it in the guise of an existing category, such as printmaking."7 Which seems a bizarre scenario: those who have access to the glamour of "the latest thing" don't hang the millstone of daggy old printmaking around their necks. Printmaking claims a special affinity with computer imaging due to their shared propensity for episodic sequencing, but we must ask how it enhances our communicative project, if it truly "ruptures the symbolic from within", in our desire to embrace the fecund play of influences and to be receptive to overwriting. The seductions of the digital image rely on its capability to evade teleological compulsion ever more slickly. In effect it offers a new expressionism able to create a swirl of arbitrary signs that are literally illegible.
As Neil Emmerson (claiming status as a rebel and outsider) says, there is nothing illegal about any manner of presentation. This may horrify those who have an investment in traditional print connoisseurship, but I don't see anyone else going to the barricades to defend the inviolate territories of traditional media. Artists using digitised media, such as Pat Hoffie, Dianne Mantzaris, Lynne Roberts-Goodwin are happy at play with the myths of authenticity and originality. Contemporary theory unconditionally loves the hybrid, the mongrel, the boundary riders.
The claims of printmaking to the status of major medium over the last few decades rely in part on the monumental images pioneered by American workshops such as ULAE, Tyler Graphics Ltd, Gemini GEL and Graphicstudio, workshops which often had a dual role as publisher. They generated extravaganzas of the sort shown in the touring exhibition Seven Master Printmakers, prints produced by teams of technicians, up to fourteen per image. I visualise a sort of ballet mécanique in inky aprons. Garner Tullis, in this tradition of build-'em-bigger, is set up literally to flatten the delicate autograph tradition. A gigantic press at his New York workshop, converted from a machine-parts press, can exert six million pounds pressure. He has met a lot of resistance in the American print world to his new and experimental techniques. Tullis aims to make prints more public, to "destroy their intimacy." His main question "does it have impact?" True, some prints in the heartfelt, personal, craftsmanlike tradition can sometimes be so introverted that they barely communicate at all, but I'm not sure how communication is enhanced by such juggernauts. Great big prints are happiest placed as "non-intimate" artworks in corporate and public collections.
What Australian workshop can match this scale, and who could afford their products if they did? Big commissions resource the studio or workshop to invest amounts that individual self-funded artists can't afford. Bill Young now has an etching press that can print up to 1500 x 2400 mm, and the recent show at the National Gallery of Australia, My Head is a Map, featured some big works by Ken Orchard, Raymond Arnold, Mike Parr, and others, works which were scaled up by using multi sheets, and all championing the noble autograph mark rather than technological gloss. The industrial-strength graphic package, the opulent print as an ersatz painting has not been part of local practice. The realities of a modest market means Australian printmakers cling to the home-made look.
Acknowledgments Except where footnoted, all quotes have come from personal communication. My sincere thanks to all those who generously shared their time and information to make this project possible.
Notes 1 Riva Castleman, Seven Master Printmakers: Innovations in the '80s, MoMA, New York 1991, p 9 2 To quote the recent Australia Council report (Corporate Support for the Arts 1993, Australia Council, 1993), "the decline in (total) corporate support (for the arts since 1989) can be attributed entirely to a collapse in spending on art works, with a 50 per cent reduction in the number of companies investing in acquisitions since 1989...In 1986, 24 per cent of companies supporting the arts (equal to 3 per cent of all companies in Australia) acquired art works worth $7.6 million. The Bicentenary, coupled with a more buoyant economy, lifted these figures to 40 per cent and $12.8 million in the last survey (1989)...In 1993, the incidence of acquisitions fell marginally below the 1986 level (22 per cent), but the value of acquisitions dropped dramatically— from $12.8 million to about $3 million. In real terms, the cuts were even more severe—investment in art works has fallen by 78 per cent in four years." (p 12) "Three years ago 78 per cent of all art purchased was new work by Australian artists. In fact 99 per cent of all purchases were Australian. The marked preference for Australian art continues (96 per cent) but the proportion of new art works purchased has fallen to 69 per cent... the corporate market for new Australian art works has almost dried up: four years ago it was worth close to $11 million; today, $2 million." (p 31) 3 Greg Burchall, "The Struggle for Money to Print", The Age, 16 June 1993, p 19 4 Kip Gresham, in Turner (ed), British Printmaking Studios, London 1992, p 19 5 Alison Carroll, "The Devil's Advocate and Dorothy Dix", Art and Australia, Vol 27 No 3 pp 400-401 6 Kate Reeves, "The Politics of Printmaking: Behind the Institutional Screens", Imprint, Vol 25 No 3, pp 14-15 7 Anne Kirker, "Prints in the Age of Hi-Tech", Art and Australia Vol 30 No 2 Summer 92 p 247 .