Printing or Printmaking: Fine Prints, Digital Art, Photography, Xerox, and on Til Morning

By BARBARA ROSENTHAL, April 2023

Hot on the heels of last fall's buzz about the Museum of Modern Art's parting with works in their collection to make way for new acquisitions of Digital Art, an email landed in my press box with an invitation to the International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) Print Fair October 27-30 at the Javits Center in NY, and I thought I'd like to go. What motivated me was the prospect of viewing digital prints in the context of Printmaking, as had been possible in the context of Art and Photography presented at similar fairs by the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA ) and the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) earlier in the year. I couldn't wait to see some exciting work, and it's always fun sporting those official lanyards designating PRESS, which are being ecologically phased out; alas, my archives will miss the addition. 

Author's tangle of press passes in the Barbara Rosenthal Archives in the City University of New York, Pine Tree Foundation Archive Wing, Szilvia Tanenbaum Special Collections Library, CUNY/Queens College, Flushing, NY.

Because of MoMA's decision, based on the popularity of computer work and archival digital print editions among serious fine artists, I was eager to see what the gallery members of IFPDA would display. I intended to seek out my own particular interest, Archival Photo-based Digital Art Prints, and see how such works look among traditional printmaking media: Intaglio (engraving, etching, drypoint, aquatint, and mezzotint), Serigraph (silk screen), Relief (wood and linoleum cuts), and Lithography. 

I also thought there might be some special Artists Books there (yes), or other types of editions besides prints on paper (yes). In the back of my mind, in pleasant reminiscence, were artist-friendly media of yesteryear: Electrostatic/photocopies/xerographic/Xerox/large engineering copies (no), Fax (no) and Photostat (no). But even so, digital prints are art's most plentiful editioned media of our age, and fine artists who work in it observe the careful protocols of traditional printmaking. To list them would be: test strips, proofs, artist's proofs (APs), editions, suites, numbering, the chop or signature, source cancellation or retirement, paper wafting, stacking, preserving, interleaving, cataloging and storage.  

If affordable or gallery supported, such are printed as giclée. Tribeca Printworks (not at the fair) posts that "giclée" and "iris prints" are interchangeable terms for "archival pigment prints... made from a digital file directly to paper... using an inkjet printer." They are not the same as inkjet prints, which utilize eight cartridges of ink in good printers like the Canon Pro-100, whereas giclée uses twelve cartridges of archival pigment. There is much debate, however, about the degree of detail, particularly within shadows, with inkjet actually said to be a bit ahead, though archival pigment prints are more valuable and stable. No doubt there would be wonderful examples.

Besides digital work, I was also on the lookout for anything "beyond prints prints." Paulson Fontaine Press, Berkeley, displayed color aquatint, spitbite aquatint and chine collé with printed acrylic box pieces by Charles Gaines. Screen print and relief, and collage with gold and silver leaf and thread pieces by Lesley Dill were at Tandem Press, WI. I also looked for photo- or lens-based prints in any technique, of which there were a fair number, such as photogravures with aquatint by John Baldessari at the Brooke Alexander, NYC, booth, and his photo-based litho and screen prints at Peter Blum, NYC and Frederick Mulder, London. Jim Kempner, NYC, offered photo-based collage lithographs by Jasper Johns and intaglios by Robert Rauschenberg. Gemini G.E.L at Joni Moisant Weyl, NYC, displayed five gorgeous photo-based lithos of birds by Ann Hamilton, besides editioned objects by Claes Oldenburg and other mixed media examples by Tacita Dean, Toba Khedoori, Analia Saban and Ed Ruscha.

But digital work? I found only two vastly different digital usages. One was a fascinating self-funded booth by Judith Solodkin (Solo Impressions, Bronx) with her digital sewing machine, which she demonstrated. The other was an archival pigment print in an edition of 50 by Allan McCollum (Cirrus Editions, Los Angeles), which I was very pleased to find!

Allan McCollum; For The Millions / Just For You; 2020; Archival Pigment Print; 37 5/8 x 25 5/16", Edition of 50. Image courtesy of Cirrus Gallery.

Cirrus Editions quotes McCollum on their website.

"I'm presently using my home computer to construct Adobe Illustrator 'vector' files that allow the shapes to be produced in many possible ways. The shapes can be printed graphically as silhouettes or outlines, in any size, color or texture, using all varieties of graphics software..."

McCollum's shapes themselves are not photographic, AI or computer-generated; he painstakingly creates them by cut-and-pastes in Illustrator, keeping track of each silhouette to avoid repetition, and besides as prints,

the files can be used by ... machines ... such as routers, laser and waterjet cutters ... to build, carve, or cut the shapes from wood, plastic, metal, stone, and other materials...." 

But why only just that one?! At 3pm Sunday, an hour before the fair closed, was a panel discussion entitled No Plan at All: How the Danish Printshop of Niels Borch Jensen Redefined Artists' Prints, which sounded promising for someone to throw light on such scarcity. At the microphones were Susan Tallman and Niels Borch Jensen, who co-authored book of same title, speaking about Jensen's artist-printer collaborative litho/serigraph/intaglio print shop in Copenhagen since 1979. Susan is an art historian noted for her essays on contemporary art and printed images. Her Q&A reply to me was that print collectors consider digital prints a less-serious medium connoting mass reproduction and therefore not financially viable. She referred to the economics of these media, and what she believes to be print collectors' impression that such are "reproductions," even though all printmaking, except for monoprint, is an art of the reproducible. 

The panel was moderated by Matt Saunders, Harvard Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies, who has collaborated with Jensen on large-scale and experimental photogravures and copper plate etchings, but is also known for his explorations in photography and film animation installations. He emailed me later about the fair, praising the quality of the works, but saying, 

"I guess Susan’s right — that it’s about emphasizing scarcity and the market.... "This year’s felt particularly conservative,… leaning into things like fine paper and limited, exquisite production...." The fair feels like ... retrenchment to me this year.... [S]ome years ... it makes a lot of space for technology and innovation — and you see a lot more digital work." 

Don't get me wrong: I also marvel at the impeccable care and craftsmanship of every luscious lithograph, etching and silk screen. Printmaking has always been dear to my heart and mind. I nearly married a boy in my printmaking class at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1967, and art and literature have been forever fused since 1968, when Roger Anliker, printmaking professor at Tyler School of Art in Rome, read aloud from Vladimir Nabokov's poetic novel, Pnin.  

So, to be fair, is there maybe some valid inherent difference between digital prints and fine prints such that digital can be practically excluded from the genre? Perhaps there is a conceptual division between – what? – "printmaking and printing?" And might Digital Art (of so many different kinds) be its own category, even though prints conform to very different esthetics and techniques from, say, videos? Digital art faces a categorizing dilemma. Photo-based digital art, even moreso. I decided to ask a few people involved, for their thoughts.

John Baldessari; Heaven and Hell (diptych), 1988; 2 color etchings, aquatint, scraping, roulette and photo-etching; 47 1/4 x 31 1/2 inches (120 x 80 cm), each; Printed on Rives BFK paper. Published by Peter Blum Edition. Printed by Peter Kneubühler, Zurich; Edition of 45 + 10 Roman numerals. Image courtesy of Peter Blum Edition.

I got in touch with several, and four replied: panelist Matt Saunders; Jean Milant, owner/founder of Cirrus Gallery and Cirrus Editions, LA; Director of Prints and Editions at David Zwirner, in Chelsea, Elleree Erdos; and Peter Blum, owner/founder of Peter Blum Gallery and Peter Blum Edition, downtown. For each, I crafted specific questions, but asked them to consider the themes broadly, and I welcomed any thoughts, even digression. My plan was to stay open-ended to see how they might think about defining parameters among these overlapping media designations/differentiations/classifications/divisions/categories. How do they determine which of multiple media dominates the production? This quandary arises for artists continually in submissions and applications of every kind. 

Elleree Erdos, at David Zwirner, points out what ultimately is the underlying reality,

"Printmaking and photography seem to be two holdouts to medium-specific categories that have largely been dissolved in both artistic practices and museum departments. I don’t think the borders ultimately matter so much. The starting point for us is always, what does the artist want to achieve? And then determine how best to achieve that end." 

Raymond Pettibon, No Title (He doesn't really...), 2022. © Raymond Pettibon. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

Elleree oversees the gallery's fine print publisher, Utopia Editions, and she organized their IFPDA presentation to include several bold, multi-colored, freehand image-text lithographs by provocative contemporary artists, Katherine Bernhardt and Raymond Pettibon (Utopia), and Tunji Adeniyi-Jones (Jungle Press).

"Prints made by hand through more traditional printmaking techniques usually require a greater commitment and patience on the part of everyone involved – artist, printer, publisher. In comparing hand-printed to digital,.... they are often created from the outset with different goals in mind, that digital prints, including giclée.... [digitals] are often created from a source image provided by the artist [such as] part of a benefit edition in collaboration with a museum, for example, and will be affordable and available to a broad public, whereas that same artist could also work with a master printmaker to create a more limited edition." This gives us good insight about why there were practically no digital works at the 2022 iteration of the International Fine Print Dealers Association Print Fair. 

But she also added that the artist-printmaker collaboration during the editioning of fine prints 

"... can lead to new discoveries and inquiries, and that digital ... and photographic ... processes are not only used for reproductive prints – they can also be applied and manipulated in creative ways within a given project. [M]any artists choose to play around with or manipulate ... conventions in their own ways, once they know the rules." 

This speaks to the point where Matt Saunders and I later engaged: digital and electrostatic editions processed by artists within classical printmaking conventions.

Otherwise would be disheartening to diligent digital artists, and were it not for MoMA's major — one could even say sacrificial — commitment to this contemporary, artist-friendly medium, and commitments by a few galleries and art spaces. Two examples are the (temporarily closed) Los Angeles Center for Digital Art (LACDA), which hung four of my 20" x 24" ink jet prints in 2019, and VellumLA, "LA’s Premier Digital Art Gallery," currently (March16 - April 2) hosting Lifelike, curated by Katie Peyton Hofstadter, whose early 2000s NY Gallery, Undercurrent Projects, mounted several of my solo digital shows and events. McCollum's work, For The Millions / Just For You, the only digital print example I found at the IFPDA fair, was brought by Jean Milant of Cirrus Gallery and Cirrus Editions, also from LA. The costal race is on!: as we "go to press," New York's Whitney Museum is hosting a current show of Digital Art March 7 - July 3, and the New Museum has mounted some new digital adventures with Rhizome, "the leading art organization dedicated to born-digital art and culture since 1996, affiliated with the New Museum since 2003. Are museums ahead of the galleries on the curve, even though they mix techniques like prints and videos? 

Charlemagne Palestine; 356 CcUuoOrphanosS one, 2018; archival pigment print; 44" x 55.25"; Edition of 20. Image Courtesy of Cirrus Gallery and Cirrus Editions.

Jean Milant founded Cirrus in 1970. She emailed to say, 

"I believe the question of whether an inkjet print is a photo reproduction or not lies in the intent of the artist, whether it is a photo reproduction of an existing work, or a digital work created specifically for a printed edition. Cirrus uses inkjet printing in many ways, from files created by the artist, from scans of the artist's body or objects, then digitally manipulated, or not, and in combination with lithography, or silkscreen printing using plates or screens which the artist drew directly to be printed in combination with the photo images."

Peter Blum Gallery and Peter Blum Edition is a conceptually-minded presenter of striking contemporary art in several media, and Peter has represented editions since 1980. It has been said that prints are the foundation of the gallery. They have been positioned within both Art and Printmaking markets since 1993 when he founded the gallery itself, and they had a booth at the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) fair in NY as well as at IFPDA. Peter focused on the interrelationship of the gallery's artworks with their editions of prints and books. 

"I had produced portfolios with James Turrell, Eric Fischl, Alex Katz, John Baldessari, and Louise Bourgeois, all of whom were on view at our IFPDA booth in 2022.... I had arrived at the concept to have a gallery by way of collaborations with the artists, to make an exhibition with the same concept, but “outside the portfolio box”.... The concept was to have a group of prints with texts or poems or even an object, ... like a small exhibition ... [boxed, like a Duchampian suitcase].... The gallery became like the box of the portfolio – a container to exhibit unique work."  

Louise Bourgeois: Sainte Sebastienne Drypoint Printed on Somerset Satin paper; 47" x 37" Edition of 50, with an additional 10 Roman numerals. Printed by Harlan & Weaver Intaglio, New York; Published by and image courtesy of Peter Blum Edition.

I began following the Peter Blum Gallery when it first opened on Wooster Street in SoHo in 1993 while I was showing electrostatic engineering copy editions, such as Art and Artist / Put it in Writing, at Dooley LeCappellaine on Crosby Street nearby. My first serious show of prints had been in 1987, when Homo Futurus Wall Work, comprising 43 box-framed xerographic panels of images from my 1986 artist's book Homo Futurus (Visual Studies Workshop Press, Rochester). It was in the Messages exhibition at Carlo Lamagna Gallery on 57th Street. This was an eight-person multi-media conceptual show with Dottie Attie, Nancy Dwyer, Valerie Hammond, Cynthia Kuebel, Nancy Shaver, Jeanne Silverthorne and Nancy Spiro. And the artists book store, Printed Matter, had begun selling boxed projects by me and others, once they dropped their early boundary of only bound leaves, and only editions of at least one hundred. Those decades, the 1980s and '90s, were explosive times for conceptual image-text multiples. 

Peter Blum tells of his "particular passion for illustrated books," reflecting on the inter-related fields of fine art, text, fine print editions and boxed materials. 

"I took my cue from the collaborations of early-to-mid-20th-Century [artists such as] Picasso, Miro [and] Giacometti. Poetry was often the complement to the imagery, and I decided to apply a similar approach with young and contemporary artists. Encouraged by the late Jean-Christophe Ammann – then Director of the Kunsthalle Basel – I travelled to Italy in 1978 and discovered the work of the “transavanguardia.” This included the still relatively unknown artists Enzo Cucchi, Francesco Clemente, and Sandro Chia..." with whom he produced the gallery's first editions. 

In 1984, Peter Blum also co-founded PARKETT magazine. 

"It was Bice Curiger’s idea to make a magazine that would mainly focus on one particular artist at a time. The idea to produce issues with artists as a collaboration in the form of a limited-edition print or object was my idea. It closely resembled the way I published the portfolios.... I organized [most] gallery exhibitions with artists ... with whom I had produced editions [and] ... limited edition books... [as well as] with artists independent of – but linked to – the [gallery] exhibitions [such as]... Louise Bourgeois, Tacita Dean, Yukinori Yanagi, Robert Zandvliet, David Rabinowitch, Francesco Clemente, Helmut Federle and Alex Katz."

Barbara Rosenthal: Art and Artist / Put it in Writing; 1989; Triptych Engineering Electrostatic Photocopies from collages of Direct Image Electrostatic Photocopies; 60" x 90" triptych'  Edition off 3 + 1AP; Exhibitions: Dooley LeCappellaine Gallery, NYC 1991, 450 Broadway Gallery 1994; eMediaLoft.org NYC, currently. Image courtesy of HomoFuturus® Prints, Books and Photographs; eMediaLoft.org NYC.

Matt Saunders, moderator of the 3PM panel, emailed about electrostatic prints. He fondly recalled having worked in Xerox, though only casually, as a student in the 1990s, and not with the usual printmaking care and protocols, which he said he would have employed, if he had editioned them. He says that his own, later, student-generation in the 1990s 

"had associations [of xerography] with qualities that I group with what came to be known as the “poor image” in Hito Steyerl’s writing."  Matt says that he himself "played with both color and black and white Xerox (never really seeking out any particular machine… using what was at hand) more as a form of drawing or experimentation, so I personally never thought of them as finished works, let alone editions. (But I’m sure if I had, I would have likely adopted some of those conventions from printmaking to give the edition form.)" 

Many artists did consider electrostatic prints as seriously as classical in the 1980s and 90s, and on tight budgets sought out all over the city individual machines by Xerox, Canon, Fuji, Kodak, IBM, etc., and the large Engineering Copiers (which could copy onto vellum!) with the particular, nuanced, push-button contrast and screen control best suited for each varied face-down original, including "direct image copies," which are made from objects placed on the machine's glass panel. And, of course, those who worked in this medium often relaxed, stretched, broke the rules of form (particularly regarding papers) to maximize content, and even bridge a jump between what is art and what is not.

"My main thoughts about Xerox are that it feels really closely connected to the legacy of conceptual art. I think that in that context it obviously had clear and intentional thinking around its multiplicity, reproducibility, and humble materials. That certainly still made it seem cool when I was a young art student in the 1990’s and later, for instance, when I studied with Mel Bochner at Yale. I was well aware of, and quite interested in works like Bochner's early Xeroxed 'Working Drawings And Other Visible Things On Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed As Art,' 1966. 

Mel Bochner: Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art, 1966, 4 identical looseleaf notebooks, each with 100 xerox copies of studio notes, working drawings, and diagrams collected and xeroxed by the artist, displayed on 4 sculpture stands, Dimensions Variable. Collection Museum of Modern Art, New York. Installation view: School of Visual Arts Gallery, 1966. Image courtesy of Peter Freeman, Inc.

Now in the MoMA collection, Bochner's piece is a series of 100 photocopies of studio notes, working drawings and diagrams by artists including Sol Lewitt, Donald Judd, Eva Hess and Bochner, which he bound in four loose-leaf binders, and displayed on four sculpture stands. As it happens, Mel Bochner and I both attended printmaking classes at CMU a few years apart in the1960s. Robert Gardner was master printer / printmaking professor there.  

I'm still grappling with the boundaries of the printing/printmaking/photography flat artworks, and expect to keep watching as more museums, galleries, professional societies and art fairs evolve to consider, even welcome, digital art, in the way, perhaps, that moving image has amalgamated film and video. But as of now, is the fine print "printmaking" whereas digital and xerographic/electrostatic/photocopier art prints are "printing?" And if so, just what is the difference there? Both classical printmaking and direct-image xerography always yield original images as the final print, from a source prepared physically by the printmaker; whereas in usual xerography and digital printing, the process yields a copy. In classical printmaking, the maker also controls the inking, whereas in xerography and digital printing, their ink is measured and placed on the landing surface by machine.

These are Process vs Product differentials. Hung side by side, the final works produced share much the same esthetics. This is the factor that speaks for inclusion: that finished printed works are akin in look and sensibility. Only in their procedures is there even this modicum of difference. So, since prints are processed with increasing frequency by contemporary artists producing serious editions, I think we can probably foresee more digital works at print galleries and fairs.

Barbara Rosenthal: Surreal to Conceptual: Distortion Color Walls with Napoleon Shadow, Montreal, 2023, 35mm full-frame negative digitally scanned and manipulated, with color segments; 40" x 32" archival pigment print  and NFT editions of 6; digital projection and NFT edition of 12, proportions fixed, dimensions Variable. 2023. Image courtesy of eMediaLoft.org, NYC.

But maybe we don't necessarily have to hasten the future? (A line from one of my old text-art pieces springs to mind: Let the Future Ring its Own Self In.) Certainly, artworks created in luscious media (remember silverpoint!) are becoming more rare, and our continually advancing technology creates new categories anyway (remember holograms?). I can see why from different outlets – and as Matt Saunders noted, even the from the same on different years – the IFPDA fair has displayed works that draw the parameters of Printmaking within both wide and narrow lines of inclusion.

Meanwhile, I'll be keeping my eye on just how MoMA and other museums integrate their Digital Art department into the rest of the museum and how it might exhibit works of all the various digital sub-media, techniques and subject matter they cross-reference with. Beyond that, I'll also continue to think about the "fine print" designation of lithographic, intaglio and relief prints created by a reversed image directly marking the surface that contacts the paper, at least as long as lithographic stones and etching presses remain available and functional, workshops like Niels Borch Jensen's carry on their collaborations, and galleries like those in the IFPDA continue to offer them as the future presses on. WM