[Laura Shore] As I meandered through Control:Print, the intriguing new exhibit at Parsons School of Design, curator and designer Lucille Tenazas reminded me with a laugh that she had predicted the end of print back in 1992, when she was a member of Mohawk’s design council. She had feared that new technologies would render our paper-based practices obsolete, with only business cards {engraved, of course} serving as a tactile reminder of our former creative selves.
Twenty-seven years later, here we were, celebrating print as the centerpiece of a unique collaborative exhibit between artists and designers at Parsons in New York and the Royal College of Art in London. Many of the works on display reveal dynamic tensions between precise digital automation, handmade intervention, and the unique beauty of imperfection. A highlight of the exhibit is a plotter printer “performance” that allows designers in Italy, Iran, France, and Switzerland, to contribute remotely through the magic of the internet. According to Lucille, “We often think of digital technology as alienating, yet in this exhibit, Parsons is exploring the notion that technology can re-engage the tactile tradition of craft in the digital age.”
The performative dimension was extended into the Control:Print Lab, where students signed up for 24 hour stints to develop and document projects exploring the future of ink on paper through questions of time, memory, language, narrative, sounds, and space. The group I visited {64 letters, a comma, and a period} used Mohawk paper, digital printers, lots of caffeine, a really tall ladder and a really big wall. Behind the huge windows giving onto street-level Fifth Avenue, students gave a whole new meaning to the notion of print performance. {See their work and their workspace here.}
Control:Print is on display until December 14 at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons The New School for Design at 66 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY.
Photography: Image 2: Mark Wilson, e8419; Chris Bigg of V23, Crystal Visions Series © Martin Seck, Image 3: Sara Carneholm and Leah Harrison Bailey, Break, Broke Broken © Martin Seck, Image 4: Student project from Control Print Lab © Martin Seck
Print will never die, but change it has. Having spent my 27 year career dedicated to it and the graphic arts, I simply wonder if it is in fact returnIng to it’s place as a craft; one relegated to museums and the avant garde set who have the appreciation for it as an art, while recognizing it’s diminishing role as a primary communication medium.
I’ll get through it; this mid-life melancholy and the realization that perhaps print will never die, but perhaps is changed forever in terms of it’s future as a decent way to make a living. It’s been brutal out here in the commercial end of things. As an art? Yes, it will always live on, and I for one love my letterpress. It’s a way of life.