Mutual Registration: Printmaking and/as Conceptual Art, 1964-1980

Abstract

This dissertation argues that printmaking—a medium long marginalized in major histories of avant-garde art— was in fact a key site for conceptual artists of the 1960s and 70s to reimagine the art object, its production, and its distribution. While printmaking’s traditional techniques might seem at odds with conceptualism’s ambitions to “dematerialize” the art object, this project reveals not only the pervasiveness of conceptual artists’ engagement with print, but also the ways in which the medium was innately entangled with issues of originality, authorship, and authenticity—precisely the terms that conceptual artists were presently taking up. I refer to this as conceptual art and printmaking’s mutual registration, borrowing the term for the all-important alignment of plate and paper for each run through the press. My introduction draws on examples across the career of Sol LeWitt, who was both a leading figure of conceptual art and a prolific printmaker, to establish the terms of this mutual registration and demonstrate how print offered artists a unique set of conceptual tools. Chapter 1 explores how the New York Graphic Workshop (Luis Camnitzer, José Guillermo Castillo, and Liliana Porter) sought to redefine printmaking, focusing first and foremost on the medium’s reproductive capacities rather than the image the artist produces on the plate or stone. Their theory of “editionality”—which they developed through their manifestoes, participatory installations, and mail art exhibitions—challenged artistic discourses of “originality,” and especially those currently shaping the market for fine art prints. Chapter 2 argues that printmaking offered Vito Acconci new models of artistic identity and authorship that dialectically balanced absence and presence, providing an index of the artist’s gesture, but distanced through the mediation of the printing press. In his work across media—poetry, performance, video art, and printmaking itself—Acconci borrowed from print’s metaphors and vocabulary, often as a means of exploring and critiquing modernist notions of the artist. But, at the same time, Acconci’s experience in the print workshop also tested the limits of his own willingness to relegate his authorial control. Chapter 3 focuses on how Douglas Huebler stretched the idea of the limited-edition print to transform the relationship between artists and collectors. The structure of the limited edition both prompted Huebler to conceive of art collecting as a collective endeavor, with each owner of the edition a node in an interconnected network, and established a precedent that endowed the artist with the ability to authorize impressions as authentic and inauthentic. His experiments with the form presented authenticity and value as radically contingent—ideas that no doubt took on greater weight as the global economy was shifting off of the gold standard—and envisioned new models for ownership. Drawing on primary archival sources, interviews with key figures, and analysis of prints in private and public collections, this dissertation reveals how printmaking served as a critical medium in which artists worked out the terms, limits, and contradictions of conceptual art practice, reframing understandings of movement and medium alike.