Print/Out: 20 Years in Print

Description

Over the past two decades, the art world has broadened its geographic reach and opened itself to new continents, allowing for a significant crosspollination of post-conceptual strategies and vernacular modes. Printed materials, both in innovative and traditional forms, have played a key role in this exchange of ideas and sources. This catalogue, published in conjunction with an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, examines the evolution of artistic practices related to prints, from the resurgence of ancient printmaking techniques - often used alongside digital technologies - to the worldwide proliferation of self-published artists' books and ephemera. Print/Out features focused sections on ten artists and publishers, including Ai Weiwei, Ellen Gallagher, Martin Kippenberger, Lucy McKenzie, Museum in Progress, Superflex and Rirkrit Tiravanija, as well as rich illustrations of additional printed projects from the last twenty years by major artists such as Trisha Donnelly, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Thomas Schu tte, and Kelley Walker. An introductory essay by Christophe Cherix, Chief Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books at MoMA, offers an overview of this period with particular attention to new directions and strategies within an expanded field of printmaking.

Cherix (Museum of Modern Art) provides an insightful analysis of contemporary printmaking in Print/Out. He describes how artists, artist groups, printers, and publishers-working within roughly the last 20 years-have employed digital technology and exploited essential qualities of printmaking (such as multiplicity and collaboration) in a myriad of ways to produce conceptually rich and technically complex works of art. Specifically, Cherix succintly argues that current forays into printmaking allow artists (Rirkrit Tiravanija and Ai Weiwei, among others) to think through issues pertaining to censorship, copyright, and relational art... Extensively illustrated and inventively laid out, this book provides an excellent summation of the current state of printmaking and will prove invaluable to print scholars and scholars of contemporary art...Highly recommended.--J. H. Noonan "Choice"