Please join me at the 2013 College Art Association (CAA) Conference for the Southern Graphics Council International panel:
Saturday February 16, 2013
Hilton NYC, Sutton Parlor Center, 2nd Floor
12:30 – 2:00pm
***FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC***
Chair: Jason Urban, Printeresting.org
Truth and Reproducibility
Beauvais Lyons, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Studio, Museum, Screen: Print & the Virtual, Authentic Image
Julia V. Hendrickson, Courtauld Institute of Art
“… originality doesn’t exist anyway, only authenticity”
Lauren van Haaften-Schick, independent curator
Craving the Mark
Lisa Bulawsky, Washington University in St. Louis
————————–
Session Abstract:
Have pervasive digital technologies recast the language of print, historically a reproductive or imitative practice, as a signifier of handmade authenticity? From the bottom-up explosion of the silkscreen music poster scene, to Starbucks’ top-down embrace of the print haptic, rebranding itself with distressed, faux-printed logos, the aesthetic cues of print have become a new kind of commodity. The human hand, once considered detached from the indirect process of printing, is now strongly associated with processes once considered mechanical, like screenprinting and letterpress. Is the heroic image of craftsmen working in a printshop alluring to an audience entrenched in a world of touch screens? Images of lead type, inky squeegees, and stacks of prints on drying racks flood Youtube, Tumblr and other social media. Is it a sign of the times that the very same digital media from which we seek relief is used to celebrate analog printed matter? How has the mundane, daily digital experience reaffirmed our cultural awareness of physical printed matter and raised the status of the print from commonplace to notable (even in situations where the “printedness” is merely simulated)? This panel focuses on the language of print as a signifier of authenticity and the complex relationship of real printed matter to its life in the virtual world.
