Maryland Printmakers This Article Is Archived From March, 2000 To See The Current Issue, Click Here

REFLECTIONS ON NATIONAL JURIED PRINT SHOWS By Beauvais Lyons, Ellen McClung Berry Professor of Art, University of Tennessee, Knoxville Note: This essay is a shorter version of a juror’s statement Beauvais Lyons wrote for the 13th Parkside National Small Print Competition, January 16 - February 24, 2000. To receive a free catalogue from this show, write to Doug DeVinny, Department of Art, 900 Wood Road, Box 2000, University of Wisconsin-Parkside, Kenosha, WI, 53141-2000. I have always felt ambivalence about national juried print competitions, in part because they can embody the conservative tendencies of the academic salons of the 19th century, which suppressed innovation and controversy. However, in addition to organizing traveling exhibitions of my work, I have consistently participated in juried print shows because they are a meaningful aspect of the discourse of our profession. Juried print shows offer a useful measuring stick by which to gauge the field of self-published printmakers. The juried show system presents significant problems for our profession to the extent they create exhibition programming and purchase awards funded by entry fees paid by artists. The up-side is that many juried shows cultivate an interest in looking at and collecting prints in their local communities. In the long run, this is one way that printmaking can be seen and supported. Up until the 1960’s, many major museums in this country, including the Art Institute of Chicago, held juried competitions. In an ideal art world, jurors would avoid the tautological, seeking instead to represent a diversity of art practice in the shows they select. In this ideal world, the juried show functions like a collection of short essays, a smorgasbord, an eclectic kunstkammer, a visual buffet table, and a Whitman’s sampler pack, all rolled into one. The best juried shows reflect this pluralism. In comparison with the juror, the curator plays a prescriptive rather than a descriptive role in exhibition programming. Prescriptive curatorial practice allows the curator to make visual, cultural statements of their own, free of the limits of impartiality. As the trend setting, interior decorator of the museum, the contemporary curator becomes the primary agent of culture, superseding even the artist. However like the artist, the curator is often expected to cross disciplinary boundaries. As they are creating museum experiences which compete with other forms of popular entertainment, most contemporary curators would exclude prints from their exhibition surveys, viewing prints as too steeped in a discipline-based tradition. Given this bias in curatorial practice, printmakers are justified in asking, “When was the last time prints were included in the Whitney Biennial?” In his recent book Art Subjects, which is about the making of artists in the American university, Howard Singerman asserts that “Certain individually practiced and historically bound media - printmaking, for example, - or ceramics - have functioned less well as disciplines as art in general or as criticism in the place painting once was. There is, perhaps, too much to teach, too specific and material a body of knowledge to learn to produce an image and, it seems, the more teacherly the medium, the less readily its technical practices transform into theoretical questions, and the less historical difference is written in them.” While Singerman’s critique of the technical focus of printmaking has a place in the discussion of this medium, there are many prints being done today which resonate on deeper levels, transcending technique. Singerman assumes that working in a craft-based or historically predicated discipline disqualifies the artist from being engaged with theory. One need only look to the feminist revival of domestic crafts in the 1970’s, or Marcel Duchamp’s use of 19th century printing processes for his Boite-Valises, elaborately constructed miniature museums of his work, to realize that the history of a medium informs its use by artists. Contemporary authors do not seem to have this problem with historical intertextuality. Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, to name a few, all encoded their stories with historical allusions. Likewise, Eastern European printmakers often use historical processes to redress contemporary political issues and ideas. Included in every national juried print show are works which provide ample evidence that the contemporary American print artist is also enriched by print history at the same time they are extending this history in meaningful ways. The task for printmakers is to be accountable to our history and our craft; making works which put theory into practice.