03.06.25
In her ground-breaking presentations for the prestigious Andrew Mellon Lectures 2021, titled Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, Harvard art historian Jennifer L Roberts took her fellow art historians and the art world at large to task about their indifference to, even disdain of print.
Against this obliviousness, she argued that the ‘seemingly provincial, esoteric operations of printmaking are, in fact, working at the very heart of some of the most prominent modern and contemporary art across mediums’ (Roberts, 2024, p3). In her approach to proving print’s relevance she highlighted the ‘making’ part of printmaking and its technical aspects. The latter, so often figured as printmaking’s be-all and end-all, are elucidated in their ‘deep imbrication … in the conceptual, the philosophical, the theoretical, and the political’ (ibid).
Despite printmaking’s high status in Norway, the lecture will briefly look at reasons for the broader marginalisation of print and then move to provide examples of the expanded field of printmaking that is not just embracing, but also advancing multi- and interdisciplinary modes of practice, characterised by heterogeneity and relationality while rooted in or retaining a specific ‘printerliness’.
Last but not least, the lecture will delve deeper into some of print’s material and making operations, its strange, even ‘bizarre’ qualities, and their connotational properties that lend it the potency and unacknowledged currency Roberts attributes to it.
Ruth Pelzer-Montada, PhD, is an artist and lecturer in contemporary art and theory in the School of Art at Edinburgh College of Art, The University of Edinburgh. She has published numerous articles and catalogue essays on print and contemporary art and is the editor of Perspectives on contemporary printmaking. Critical writing since 1986, published by Manchester University Press, 2018.
Ruth’s research profile: https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/persons/ruth-pelzer-montada