SESSION: Print in the Expanded Field
This panel explores the materials, techniques, and embodied practices of printmaking with the goal of engendering a more capacious understanding of the medium and its ongoing potential as a field of art-historical inquiry.
While Marshall McLuhan famously proclaimed in Understanding Media (1964) that “the medium is the message”, here we ask whether reconceptualizing how we think and write about the medium of print might transform how we interpret its messages. We therefore take up Jennifer Roberts’ call in Contact: The Art and Pull of the Print (2024) to move away from conceptions of “medium specificity” towards “medium generativity”, and to explore more inclusive and expansive approaches to “print”.
We seek to give a field that is rich in talent – but dispersed across temporal and geographic expertise – the opportunity to reassess its parameters. We wish to draw together scholars working across different time periods, disciplinary fields (including art history, material culture, media studies) and geographic focuses, and to encourage papers on traditional print techniques as well as other kinds of printed materials (photographs, films, textiles, wallpaper), and print-adjacent objects (armour, intaglio gems, seal matrices, etc.).
Comprising 10 minute papers our panel aims to explore themes such as: the labour and gestures of printing (dabbing, cutting, digging, cleaning, drying), printmaking as embodied practice (with attention to race, gender, sexuality and disability), print materiality (varnishes, pigments, chemicals, matrices), the spaces of print (studio, darkroom, factory, office, film laboratory), and the intersections between printing and other media (sculpture, painting, photography, film).
Session Convenor:
Esther Chadwick, The Courtauld Institute of Art
Kirsty Sinclair Dootson, University College London
Marika Takanishi Knowles, University of St Andrews
Session Speakers:
Esther Chadwick, The Courtauld Institute of Art
Print in the Expanded Field: Introduction
In this paper, Esther will explore the rationale behind the panel and introduce some key questions for discussion, connecting ideas of the print in the expanded field to her own work on the “radical” print.
Marika Takanishi Knowles, St Andrews University
Print in the Expanded Field: Intervention
In this paper, Marika will consider how scholarship on materials, techniques, and labour in Early Modern printmaking might offer interventions for the panel to consider, linked to her ongoing research into seventeenth-century French etcher, Jacques Callot.
Melissa Percival, University of Exeter
French Printed Textiles 1780-1830: New Perspectives
This paper brings French printed textiles of the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions into wider dialogue with European and global print cultures. Its focus is the new visual medium of copper-engraved monochrome textile prints known as toiles à personnages, or camaïeux, a process invented in Ireland in 1753 and brought to prominence by the Jouy manufactory of Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf from the late 1770s. Iconic toile de Jouy designs are considered alongside less famous outputs from Nantes, Rouen, Bolbec and Alsace.
Expanded markets, new viewpoints. Affordable and rapidly executed, camaïeux brought fiction, theatre, history and politics to walls, bed-hangings, fire-screens and chair-covers. They ushered the imagery and discourse of the public sphere into private spaces. Eclectic subjects and surprising viewpoints mirrored the formats of contemporary journalism and borrowed freely from prints on paper and other visual sources.
Expanded geographies. Composed of cotton, indigo and Senegal gum, some joyous camaïeux can be seen as denials or perversions of the slave economy they arose from. Others engaged more overtly with colonial affairs, bringing far-off politics to the intimacy of European bedrooms. Sea battles in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean expressed enmity with the British and the pangs of territorial loss.
Expanded temporalities. Between actuality and commemoration. Pictorial printed textiles were finely poised between keeping up with the times and serving a more lasting function. The volatility of Revolution meant a consciousness of history being made in the moment, with visual depictions rapidly becoming commemorative.
Tom Young, The Courtauld Institute of Art
‘Joseph Pennell’s Pictures of the Panama Canal’: Modern Infrastructure; Lithographic Pasts
My paper examines a series of lithographic illustrations depicting the construction of the Panama Canal. Made in 1912 by the artist Joseph Pennell (1857–1926), these prints were commissioned by Century Magazine and the Illustrated London News, then released in albums entitled ‘Joseph Pennell’s Pictures of the Panama Canal’. They combine a modern aesthetic of the industrial sublime with older, picturesque conventions used to represent colonial landscapes. Similarly, a narrative published to accompany the prints developed a laudatory account of the United States’ emerging commercial power using Victorian literary tropes associated with colonial travel. Pennell’s choice of medium was equally shaped by the force and presence of the past: inspired by James Whistler’s (1834–1903) forays in lithography, Pennell promoted a lithographic revival, contending that‘there was no such thing as originality … only tradition’. My paper would unravel this knot of artistic, technological, and imperial inheritances by situating Pennell’s sketches of modern infrastructure within a longer, ‘infrastructural’ history of lithographic printing –focusing particularly on the technology’s intimate ties to nineteenth-century travel and Victorian histories of colonial extractivism. Doing so affords an interesting means of interrogating the temporal rhetoric of Modernism, while also bringing to the fore one ofits neglected genealogies: a history of how dramatic technological and infrastructural projects have ‘staged’ modernity across the world, as well as the ways long-established artistic practices of imperial travel and the production of ‘foreign views’ shaped modern habits of visual consumption and modes of conceptualising the global.
Jennifer Chuong, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Dox Thrash and the Labour of Carborundum Mezzotint
When do the means matter more than the ends? In 1937, the African-American artist Dox Thrash, along with two other artists, invented a new intaglio print technique while working for the Philadelphia Fine Print Workshop, a Federal Art Project subsidiary. Commonly known today as carborundum mezzotint, the technique’s smooth halftones lent themselves to Thrash’s moody, evocative portraits and genre scenes. Yet the appearance of Thrash’s invention also raises a question, for carborundum mezzotints are virtually indistinguishable from the prints produced by mezzotint engraving, a technique that had existed since the seventeenth century and which was almost certainly known to Thrash. In this 10-minute talk I argue that Thrash’s invention highlights the importance of writing an art history of actions, as much as appearances. Carborundum mezzotint and traditional mezzotint may produce virtually identical grounds, but using an industrial abrasive to roughen the plate is significantly quicker and less laborious than traditional plate-rocking—a change that had important implications for an African-American artist who had grown up in a cabin formerly inhabited by enslaved people. Furthermore, in emphasizing his use of a flatiron to perform this work and in proposing that his invention be called the Opheliagraph, after his mother, Thrash drew a connection between his artistic labour and domestic labour—a form of labour that is historically marked by invisibility. Taking a cue from Thrash, I argue that artistic processes—even if rendered invisible by the final artwork—are nevertheless a key site of artistic invention, agency, and resistance.
Kirsty Sinclair Dootson, University College London
Print in the Expanded Field: Futures
In this paper Kirsty will consider where we might take our discussions of print in the expanded field, exploring the implications of these ideas for scholars of film and media studies, through a case study of Christopher Nolan’s 2020 film Tenet.