141104 Afterwords to “Putting my stamps on
the Seattle Printmakers Center”
Appended to a 24-page photobook on the properties on Bill Ritchie's concept of the Seattle Printmakers Center
While I worked on this book, I thought about money for the Seattle
Printmakers Center. Mainly it was because I had the idea of putting my
artistamp collection in the book, since I have no pictures of the Seattle
Printmakers Center yet.
I thought about how you go around a place like the Pike Place Market and
you see, at your feet, four-inch square tiles with peoples’ names on them.
These testify as to the fact that these people and organizations gave money to
see to the preservation of the Pike Place Market, this city’s treasure.
What is the equal to a tile in the digital age? When a real-time and
real-space experience exists with a counterpart in virtual time and space,
worldwide, what is the equivalent of a physical thing, such as a tile with your
name or your child’s artwork, or the name of your organization upon it?
In this case, the reward for giving your support and your money to a project
is in this physical thing, a tile or bronze cast. This has been the way of
recognizing contributions. In the digital age, with the internet, video games,
apps and not yet invented experiences that may defy time and space, what is the
equivalent to a bronze plaque or floor tile?
The artistamp (stamp collectors call these by another name--Cinderella) is a
creative way individuals mimic true, government-issue postage stamps produced
by national financing for mail systems. It is a tradition that stamps indicate
authenticity, such as on passports or they represent taxes paid, collectors’
provenance, etcetera.
While I worked on this book, I wondered: “How can a photobook such as this
one, with its 54 stamp images placed among the text, lead toward funding or
other kinds of support? Are the collectible? Is the book collectible?”
We know that collectability is important in the arts as collectors are
concerned, and it will require wealth from many contributions—both in cash and
effort—to build the Seattle Printmakers Center. It seems to me that, in
Seattle’s art history, printmaking has not been a favorite (with the exception
of Virginia Wright who, in the ‘60s, was a strong advocate of prints,
printmakers and printmaking).
This sad truth (for me and many printmakers in the Seattle area) may be
because printmaking is a peoples’ art, a social art, and a performance art and
for long has been a middle-class art. Also it is because mainstream technology
of which printing is a part brings difficulties in appreciating prints, encumbered
as some prints are by special look and the feel of industrial sources.
The visual and tactile qualities confuse as much as they please the viewer
who may be accustomed to separating the two worlds of fine art and popular, peoples’
art.
My aim is to stamp the Seattle Printmakers Center with the uniqueness of
Seattle Printmaking since the 1950s.
This “stamp” is the transformation of printmaking from its being taught and
promoted as a visual art form, like painting, to the realization that
printmaking is the artifact of performances, social networks and technologies.
Printmaking is the ancestor of all technologies, and, hence, of the modern
world.
Over the days that I have been working on my first photobook for the
Seattle Printmakers Center I wondered about the Pike Place Market and how its
history might be analogous to the Seattle Printmakers Center yet to be.
The challenge for me is figuring out if having my artistamps—and perhaps
the artistamps of other Seattle artists—can move the project forward.
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