SeattlePrintmakersCenter

141115 A lesson from technology  

I read the following in the book by Christensen, “The Innovator’s Dilemma”: “The popular slogan ‘Stay close to your customers’ appears not always to be robust advice. One instead might expect customers to lead their suppliers toward sustaining innovations and provide no leadership—or explicitly mislead—in instances of disruptive technology change.”

This is after reading about the example of disc drives, their history and the changes from huge-size to small size and then to flash memory. I am tempted to make a comparison between this and my experience with art and teaching over the past fifty years, and I can do this because I happened, in 1966, to get myself into the Pacific Northwest where leading technological innovation was abundant.

Invention and creative problem solving were abundant throughout the ‘sixties all through the ‘eighties, and I saw some of it firsthand even though I was in the School Of Art at the University of Washington—not technology. The students in my art classes were affected by the atmosphere of discovery and innovation, too, and bolstered by the history of modern art—with its own kind of innovation history.

As an insider faculty member, I also saw the resistance to innovation that students met coming from the established faculty; but as I was closer to the age, in years, to the students, I was inspired to take their innovations seriously and I followed, encouraged, and in turn was inspired by their experimental ways. Consequently, I became a closet outsider and consequently I lost my job.

As I read Christensen’s book, trying to understand what happened and how things might have been different if I had known how to effect innovation in teaching, I think there is a parallel between the history of the disc drive history and my domain-of-expertise. Teaching printmaking can be seen as different from other art courses because painting and drawing, for example, are visual by nature. Printmaking is not only more technical than the simpler visual arts but also is a time-based art more so than, say, drawing.

Not only does it take longer to make a lithograph or a screen print, once the master is ready, then the printing takes additional time because it has to be repeated in order to make the edition which, traditionally, is the whole point of publishing.

There is another element besides the temporal distinction, time; which is the interdependence, community, or social aspect of printmaking. Due to the complexity and costs associated with many of the printmaking studios, it is necessary to share the costs with other people. Dialog ensues and social networks develop around production, yet individuals can maintain their expertise.

This pool of social interchange goes beyond the fact that an artist makes multiples and thus works of art are available to a larger part of society; the artist becomes, as it were, involved in a technology where innovation, similar to engineering feats, may happen.

Printmaking thus becomes subject to analysis in the same way that Christensen analyzed the disc drive industry to make his point about the innovator’s dilemma. If I learn, for example, that soy sauce can be used to degrease my metal plates, I have been given a “disruptive technology” to the old, established way, which was to use whiting and vinegar or cleansers as taught by established and encouraged by institutionalized art school printmakers.

Taking this a step further, I make a videotape of the process, disrupting, again, the old, established way that master printmakers imparted their expertise. It is another disruptive technology—such as I invested in when I began using videotapes to teach printmaking in the ‘seventies.

Coming back, now, to the comment, “Stay close to your customers,” can be interpreted in my story to fallacious in the same sense that Christensen outlined the failures of established disc drive makers to adopt disruptive technologies which, in the end, meant the end of their dominance in their markets.

If I “stay close to my customers” for my art, the etching presses I designed, and so forth, they would, in turn, prevent me from adopting new, disruptive ideas. Like the frustrated engineers of the past who left the established disc drive makers so that they could develop their new ideas—the disruptive technologies—I left the UW to try my new ideas about art and teaching printmaking.

Christensen said these startups had to find new customers who were not enamored and married to the sustaining, old technologies. Again, my experience was similar; I found among the art school students those who were outsiders to the normal art students’ aims. It was a time of protest, the ‘seventies, so it was not hard to find students who wanted to take a different route instead of staying in the line of the mainstream.

Outsiders, who happened to teach briefly at the UW, encouraged them more than I could. Jan Van Der Marck, for example, instantly approved the students wildest notions coming as he did with a global, contemporary and disruptive point of view. This was when I was making a case for “video art” and Jan and his wife’s encouragement sustained my work with the students.

Where does this bring me now? I want to spend the next decade developing the Seattle Printmakers Center, which is to be a showcase of the disruptive technologies related to printmaking. Do I listen to the established market I enjoyed for fifty years, or must I seek new markets? If so, who comprises this new market? That is the question.