as an Expanding Field in Contemporary Practice:

A Case Study of Japan, and

Marjorie Anne Kirker Dip.F.A. (Hons), University of Auckland; M.A. Art History, Courtauld Institute of Art,

Doctor of Philosophy Submission for Final Examination Creative Industries Faculty Department of Visual Queensland University of Technology 2009

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Statement of original authorship

The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference is made.

Marjorie Anne Kirker

Signature:

Date:

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ...... 6 Abstract ...... 7 Chapter 1 THE PROBLEM AND ITS CONTEXT ...... 10 1.1 The Research Problem and Its Significance ...... 10 1.2 Key Research Questions to Be Addressed ...... 15 1.3 Objectives of the Research ...... 16

Chapter 2 LITERATURE INFORMING RESEARCH PROBLEM ...... 18 2.1 The Print and Its Historical Location ...... 18 2.2 Relevant Histories of the Three Case Study Contexts...... 24 2.2a Japan ...... 24 2.2b Australia ...... 28 2.2c Thailand ...... 32 2.3 Broader Visual Arts Contexts ...... 34 2.4 The Postmodern Condition and Non-Western Epistemologies ...... 37

Chapter 3 METHODOLOGY...... 41 3.1 The Nature of the Research Problem ...... 41 3.2 Case Study Methodology ...... 44 3.3 The Cases and Criteria for Selection ...... 48 3.4 Data Collection and Analysis ...... 49 3.5 Issues of Reliability and Validity ...... 52 3.6 Synthesis ...... 53 3.7 Research Design ...... 54

Chapter 4 CASE STUDY 1 JAPAN ...... 56 ‘Photographic Interventions’: The Prints of Noda Tetsuya and Shimada Yoshiko ...... 56 4.1 Introduction ...... 56 4.2 Historical Premises for the Print in Japan ...... 64 4.3 Sōsaku Hanga and the career context of Noda Tetsuya and Shimada ...... 71 Yoshiko ...... 71 4.4 Prints and Aesthetics in Japan ...... 79 4.5 Noda Tetsuya and Shimada Yoshiko, Paradoxically In Tune ...... 82 4.6. Photographic Interventions...... 84

3 4.7 Historical Premises for Photography in Printmaking ...... 91 4.8 Tetsuya Noda: Prints Examined in Context ...... 97 4.9 Shimada Yoshiko: Prints Examined in Context ...... 102 4.10 Chapter Summary ...... 112 Chapter 5 CASE STUDY 2 AUSTRALIA ...... 115 ‘Crafting Identities’: The Work of , Raymond Arnold and 115 5.1 Introduction ...... 115 5.2 Historical Premises for the Print in Australia ...... 118 5.3 The Print Council of Australia and Imprint ...... 122 5.4 Bea Maddock: Prints Examined in Context ...... 129 5.5 Raymond Arnold: Prints Examined in Context ...... 145 5.5 Judy Watson: Prints Examined in Context ...... 158 5.7 Chapter Summary ...... 172

Chapter 6 CASE STUDY 3 THAILAND ...... 175 ‘Print as Installation’: The Work of Prawat Laucharoen and Phatyos Buddhacharoen and Their Allies ...... 175 6.1 Introduction ...... 175 6.2 Historical Premises for the Contemporary Print in Thailand ...... 178 6.3 Silpakorn University and ‘Gate-keepers’ for the Print in Thailand ...... 187 6.4 The National Exhibition of Art (NEA) ...... 201 6.5 Breaking from Tradition ...... 206 6.6 Print as Installation ...... 207 6.7 Prawat Laucharoen: Specific Projects Examined in Context ...... 210 6.8 Phatyos Buddhacharoen: Specific Projects Examined in Context ...... 223 6.9 Chapter Summary ...... 236

Chapter 7 CONCLUSION AND PROPOSITIONS ...... 239 7.1 Theoretical Considerations ...... 242 7.1a The Postmodern Milieu and Printmaking ...... 243 7.1b Conditions of Contingency When Cultural Borders Are Crossed...... 245 7.1c Radical Revisionism When the ‘Old’ is Rephrased as the ‘New’ ...... 248 7. 2 Impact of History and Cultural Imperatives ...... 250 7.2a Nationness ...... 250 7.2b Institutional Gate-keepers ...... 254 7.2c Jettisoning Authority to Enable Change to Emerge ...... 261 7.3 How Has Printmaking Been Transformed by Postmodernism and Globalisation? . 265 7.3a Access to Theoretical Discourse and Global Practice ...... 266

4 7.3b Photography and Installation art as an agent for change in printmaking ...... 272 7.4 Significance of chosen case study artists for contemporary printmaking ...... 276

Bibliography: Primary Sources ...... 279 Unpublished Material and Interviews ...... 279 Japan ...... 280 Australia ...... 281 Thailand ...... 282

Bibliography: Secondary Sources ...... 284 Japan ...... 290 Australia ...... 297 Thailand ...... 304

Appendix 1: Plates ...... 310 Appendix 2: Glossary of Printmaking Terms ...... 315

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Acknowledgments

The journey of this thesis began in 2003 when I was accepted into the postgraduate program at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney. Although based in Brisbane, I approached this institution to undertake research primarily because Dr Charles Green was located there and had agreed to be my principal supervisor. His essay in Art Monthly Australia (1993) on `Art as Printmaking: The Deterritorialised Print’ offered a compelling challenge to conventional assessments of the print and resonated with my own concerns, so that I could see him as an ideal mentor. After Green’s relocation to the University of , it was no longer possible for him to maintain his formal supervisory role, although he continued to offer me valuable advice

In 2005, I enrolled at the Queensland University of Technology and was supervised by Dr Mark Pennings, with Professor John Clark at the University of Sydney as my external supervisor. This was an ideal combination, with Pennings ensuring I shaped the thesis arguments with as much rigour as possible and Clark imparting his wealth of knowledge on Japan and Thailand. There are many others who have contributed to this research by their example and professional expertise, including Prof. Brad Haseman. Jill Barker read an early draft and gave insightful feedback, while Dr Jennifer Burton lent her valuable editing skills and encouraged me towards completion. The artists upon whom I focus in the case studies are, of course, seminal informants. Most importantly, without their courageous approach to printmaking and its potential as an agent for displacing antiquated notions of art practice, there would be no thesis. I am grateful to them all. Finally, I thank my husband Prof. Bob Elliott for his boundless patience.

6 Anne Kirker

Abstract

This thesis proposes that contemporary printmaking, at its most significant, marks the present through reconstructing pasts and anticipating futures. It argues this through examples in the field, occurring in contexts beyond the Euramerican (Europe and North America). The arguments revolve around how the practice of a number of significant artists in Japan, Australia and Thailand has generated conceptual and formal innovations in printmaking that transcend local histories and conventions, whilst paradoxically, also building upon them and creating new meanings. The arguments do not portray the relations between contemporary and traditional art as necessarily antagonistic but rather, as productively dialectical.

Furthermore, the case studies demonstrate that, in the 1980s and 1990s particularly, the studio practice of these printmakers was informed by other visual arts disciplines and reflected postmodern concerns. Departures from convention witnessed in these countries within the Asia-Pacific region shifted the field of the print into a heterogeneous and hybrid realm. The practitioners concerned (especially in Thailand) produced work that was more readily equated with performance and installation art than with printmaking per se. In Japan, the incursion of photography interrupted the decorative cast of printmaking and delivered it from a straightforward, craft-based aesthetic. In Australia, fixed notions of national identity were challenged by print practitioners through deliberate cultural rapprochements and technical contradictions (speaking across old and new languages).However time-honoured print methods were not jettisoned by any case study artists. Their re-alignment of the fundamental attributes of printmaking, in line with materialist formalism, is a core consideration of my arguments.

7 The artists selected for in-depth analysis from these three countries are all innovators whose geographical circumstances and creative praxis drew on local traditions whilst absorbing international trends. In their radical revisionism, they acknowledged the specificity of history and place, conditions of contingency and forces of globalisation. The transformational nature of their work during the late twentieth century connects it to the postmodern ethos and to a broader artistic and cultural nexus than has hitherto been recognised in literature on the print. Emerging from former guild-based practices, they ambitiously conceived their work to be part of a continually evolving visual arts vocabulary.

I argue in this thesis that artists from the Asia-Pacific region have historically broken with the hermetic and Euramerican focus that has generally characterised the field. Inadequate documentation and access to print activity outside the dominant centres of critical discourse imply that readings of postmodernism have been too limited in their scope of inquiry. Other locations offer complexities of artistic practice where re- alignments of customary boundaries are often the norm. By addressing innovative activity in Japan, Australia and Thailand, this thesis exposes the need for a more inclusive theoretical framework and wider global reach than currently exists for ‘printmaking’.

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Chapter 1 THE PROBLEM AND ITS CONTEXT

1.1 The Research Problem and Its Significance

Printmaking has been in existence as a recognisable field of visual art since the fifteenth century. The approach to most print studies in the twentieth century was led by curator Arthur M. Hind (based at the ), who wrote a comprehensive on engraving and etching (1923).1 It contained artists’ biographies as well as a narrative history and extensive glossaries. Hind's approach and his conclusions still form the basis for scholarship in print research and his text was the touchstone during my own tenure as an art museum curator in New Zealand and Australia. Only in the early 1990s, when I became strongly involved with the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art project at the Queensland Art Gallery did I decisively shift my focus away from the hegemony of Western canons of appreciation and geographical coverage.2

My choice of thesis topic, while dependent upon the Hind model as a catalyst, revolves around its inadequacies. The linear progression of history it conveyed, its certainty in empirical judgement, the confinement of case studies to Europe (including Britain) and the implicit assumption that printmaking occurring elsewhere was irrelevant, could no longer be sustained as the century in which it was published unfolded. In the past three decades, Hind has been consulted chiefly for verification of facts. This current research, therefore, contributes to rectifying an incomplete account of print activity, especially that of the contemporary realm, by focusing attention on the Asia-Pacific region.

It builds upon the critiques of printmaking that commenced with Walter Benjamin (1936)3 and William M. Ivins Jr (1953)4 and those they influenced among subsequent

1 Arthur M. Hind 1923, A History of Engraving & Etching from the 15th century to the year 1914, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. Hind’s book has been kept in print by Dover Publications, New York, since 1963, the edition consulted for this thesis. Hind similarly published a dual-volume text on the history of European woodblock prints: Arthur M. Hind 1963, An Introduction to a History of , Vols. 1, 2, New York: Dover Publications. The volumes were first published by Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1935. The text was subsequently published by Dover and reprinted up to the 1970s.

2 Led by Caroline Turner, The Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art commenced in 1993 and continues to the present.

3 Walter Benjamin 1968, `The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ Illuminations, New York: Harcourt Brace and World. This essay was first published in German in the journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, V1,

10 Euramerican print experts and visual arts scholars. Revisionist and exploratory, this thesis would have been impossible to write without the available assessments on printmaking within the three countries examined and the growth, generally, in non-Western epistemologies.

It was evident that all primary case study printmakers I researched (by having direct access to their practice, through interviews and by examining primarily and secondary textural sources) eschewed the expectations of modernist authority. Each had challenged the limitations of obvious solutions and modes of image-making to address unique aspects of print traditions in a transformational way. As a consequence, they reinvigorated the field of printmaking and in doing so, have raised questions about the previous formulations of and postmodernism.

This thesis argues that printmaking is responsive to mainstream developments and in turn, contributes to such developments. The practitioners informing my arguments have transformed printmaking into a quintessential postmodern practice, and led the way in demonstrating how artistic endeavour now often eschews the fixed, coherent and stable. In analysing these innovations, my research has been influenced by statements such as that by Lucy Lippard (1990): ‘I’m inclined to welcome any approach that destabilises, sometimes dismantles, and looks to the reconstruction or invention of an identity that is both new and ancient, that elbows its way into the future while remaining conscious and caring of its past.’5

Central to their respective strategies in re-articulating the contemporary print has been the case study artists’ acknowledgment of, and negotiation with, history and place. Their work prompts questions such as ‘In what ways did the print emanating from “Asia” enter into a dialogue with the “West” in formalist and conceptual terms without losing cultural and historical specificity prior to the 1960s’?6 and ‘How important was this legacy for the

1936, and given greater currency with its translation into English some thirty years later for publication in Illuminations.

4 William M. Ivins Jr 1953, Prints and Visual Communication, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

5 Lucy Lippard 1990, Mixed Blessings: new art in multicultural America, New York: Pantheon , p. 14.

6 The 1960s is generally given as a critical marker for commencing the history of the contemporary print, yet for the purposes of this thesis, historical factors pertinent to the print in the Asia-Pacific location demand attention to be given

11 1980s and 1990s?’ Hence the research problem includes questions to do with cultural difference, identity and the impact of geographical location. For while it is important to consider the extent to which printmaking in the Asia-Pacific region has been shaped by Western models, this cannot be done so without an unbiased understanding of the histories and local traditions of Japan, Australia and Thailand.

The case study artists chosen for this thesis all respect fundamental tenets of printmaking. However, they have also re-interpreted its traditions to move the print into more demanding conceptual and aesthetic frameworks that embrace wider understandings of not only printmaking, but also of other disciplines. Their distinctly innovative practice during the period under review also coincides with the need to move away from notions of the ‘Centre’ and the hegemony of the West towards those that accommodate difference and elasticity in definitions and readings of the visual arts. This thesis identifies and demonstrates how these printmakers developed bodies of work that embraced a broader realm of studio practice than that usually pertaining to the print. By moving into these broader realms, the artists under consideration require not only re-interpretation as printmakers but also an acknowledgment as being participants in asserting new aesthetic codes. Their print practice moves beyond the margins of the visual arts to become fully integrated into a ‘deterritorialised’ field that, as a consequence, is open to more critical scrutiny.7

By focusing on three countries in the Asia-Pacific, where printmaking has a distinctive presence, this study is unique. It demonstrates alertness to a region that provides examples of art practice which has the capacity to destabilise, or at least prompt re- evaluation of assumptions of the print held in Euramerican countries. It casts the net of research across wider geographical areas than those usually accommodated in contemporary print studies and provides a more complete picture of printmaking as it has evolved since the 1970s. It highlights the significant work produced by the case study artists that has not been adequately recognised; work that has obvious value for postmodern discourses in the way it defies, or at least mediates, ‘out-of-date’ hegemonic to earlier eras as well. Hence the West’s insistence on stressing ‘1968’ as the pivotal year of onslaught against modern culture and the birth of postmodernism has to be tempered by the specific cultural conditions in the countries I address.

7 A term used by Charles Green in his 1993 essay, `Art as Printmaking: The Deterritorialised Print, Art Monthly Australia, No. 58, April, pp.10-13.

12 theories. Cross-cultural and intermediation perspectives are an integral part of this investigation, as the domains of difference and their overlapping tendency in postmodern subjects are crucial.

The case studies in chapters four, five and six (Japan, Australia and Thailand) draw attention to the themes that have constituted their transformative printmaking. For the Japanese printmakers, photographic themes predominate, while with the Australians, it is the malleability of cultural identity that is translated through the adherence to autographic (handmade) print techniques that rub up against new technologies. In Thailand and New York, Prawat Laucharoen has generated an inventive practice that highlights the performative aspects of printmaking, which results in idiosyncratic and ambitious installations. His is the single most radical development the field of the print has witnessed, and hence Prawat and other Thai artists who follow his example have been selected for these case studies.

Since the 1970s, postmodernism has been a convenient term used to describe those who have explored personal and cultural identity in ways that challenge dominant discourses, have avoided or challenged essentialist assumptions, and have freely appropriated other art fields and incorporated them into their work to broaden the scope of their print concepts. As Green (1993) points out, ‘The conjunction of printmaking and the postmodern is important because changing definitions of truth and identity are central to the postmodern period.’8 All three case study sites show the way in which postmodernism inspired these printmakers to explore their field iconoclastically, without dispensing with technical fundamentals. In these sites, these printmakers demonstrate concepts of identity where binary oppositions, once fixed, now coalesce or are set in critical coordination. In autographic printmaking, they demonstrate how handmade practice may be combined in a single work with electronically manufactured print imagery.

This thesis recognises the aesthetic density, cognitive complexity and ambition in the artists’ print work. Hal Foster writes in his preface to The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ‘Postmodernism is concerned with a critical deconstruction of tradition, with a critique of origins, not a return to them. In short, it seeks to question

8 ibid., p.10

13 rather than exploit cultural codes.’9 This sentence is germane to the artists I principally use as case studies; although in some cases they do consciously return to ‘origins’, for they employ recognisable canons of the print, but in ways that disrupt and provocatively extend the vocabularies of the medium. They may consciously exploit notions of craftsmanship and process, yet they do so in a revisionist mode, in order to draw attention to the hybridised nature of the visual arts under the postmodern ethos and to express shifting perspectives.more accurately

Thus, the central research issue in my dissertation is to discover, reveal and explain how these artists from the Asia-Pacific region interrogated their own printmaking traditions, created a robust interdisciplinary art practice based on the print and reflected theories and practices of postmodernism to ameliorate the conventional Euramerican model. In addition, their practices were and are influenced by socio-political and psychological contexts, for the aesthetic and geographical domain under postmodernism cannot, I believe, be adequately assessed without taking these considerations into account.

Location has specific implications for the practitioners concerned. This is because they communicate as transcultural subjects. In several cases, their practice is conducted in both the Asia-Pacific region and Europe and North America. Furthermore, one individual is of mixed race. The artists therefore are subject to cultural and global flows and they recognise the importance of this in formulating their practice, avoiding simplistic dualistic readings of intention. In a sense this study, with its choice of case studies from the Asia-Pacific, is also an instance of intra-regionalism (in many ways a more accurate term than `globalisation’) as the dialogue occurs within and beyond the region.

The practice of these artists therefore prompts a re-evaluation of dominant (Euramerican) discourses on printmaking, which have been hitherto limited in their coverage. This thesis makes it clear that former restrictions in the way printmaking has been regarded are unsustainable. Limiting it to fixed media categorisations, to schools of activity and chronological ordering is inadequate when the contemporary realm of visual arts answers to rules of contingency, interdisciplinary engagement and situations of flux. I would go so far as to say that only in the arena of market and collection demand (where purist rules

9 Hal Foster (ed.) 1983, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Washington: Bay Press, p.xii.

14 of connoisseurship play a continuing role) can the viability of restricted readings be assured.

Until the 1990s, texts on printmaking predominantly dwelt on its history and technical premises (focused upon key media categories of relief, , planographic, screenprint and electrostatic image-making). Writers provided biographies of relevant artists and addressed common themes arising from their work. In many situations, this standard formula of print analysis continues up to the present. In general texts on art that brought in the print, it was invariably considered a marginal or inferior practice in comparison with what was considered ‘’ - and sculpture. In these publications, printmaking was perceived as being a usually modest adjunct to an artist’s primary practice. This model may have been led by Europe and North American writers but it also influenced those texts published in Japan and in other countries, such as the , on local print activity.

For most of the twentieth century the print was rarely valued sufficiently to attract critical analysis. Such analysis would see printmaking as an ambitious field. It would reflect tensions between traditions and the new, and also explore and provide valuable insights into inter-cultural relationships. Importantly, the analysis would acknowledge issues of indeterminacy or distributed aesthetics (through interdisciplinary practice) in contemporary print imagery.

This thesis seeks to redress this paucity of critique through the case studies and thereby demonstrate the validity and significance of the printmaking tradition to cultural debate. In identifying under-acknowledged practices based on the print outside the Euramerican context, the contemporary visual arts realm is enriched in conceptual scope and global reach. It is the recognition of what has not been explored and recognised that is the contribution of this research to new knowledge.

1.2 Key Research Questions to Be Addressed

The following questions are addressed within these broad research issues:

15  What theoretical considerations underlay the expansion of fundamental principles of printmaking as it evolved from the artists concerned in Japan, Australia and Thailand?

 What were the historical and cultural imperatives that encouraged print artists from these countries to embrace a wider sphere of art activity?

 Using postmodernism and the influences of global culture as a guide, how has printmaking been transformed, as demonstrated in the three case study sites?

 What is the significance of the practice of the selected artists for contemporary printmaking and the visual arts?

1.3 Objectives of the Research

This research seeks to make a significant contribution to contemporary print scholarship. I identify the Asia-Pacific as a previously underestimated area, which has proved to be the fulcrum by which influential artists expanded and transformed printmaking criteria. I also demonstrate how their interdisciplinary and transgressive images emerge from a specific postmodern context by calling existing classification systems into question.

This thesis also takes the point of view that an analysis of the print cannot be confined to technical considerations (even though material and indexical features of the field are importantly retained). Factors relating to history, cultural specificity and symbolic models forcefully invite a reconsideration of their artistic impact and demand the development of new theoretical criteria through which to reassess their value. The artists’ print-based work has considerable relevance for understanding the forces of postmodernism, but also of postcolonialism and globalisation, for they have consistently dealt with displacement and shifting identities and issues of transcultural dialogue.

The case studies derive from Japan, Australia and Thailand. Japan and Thailand demonstrate instructive instances of print activity in the Asian region. They are also exemplified by the strong print activity in other Asian countries (including the

16 Philippines, , South Korea and China). Australia is incorporated in the study because it shares concerns expressed by the Japanese and Thai printmakers. It is not included to provide a qualitative evaluation for the other two case studies.

In all three countries, the printed image is engaged with re-conceptualism. It is reliant on traditional and new print media as a basis to evolve critical practices that accord with the broad influence of postmodernism and the specificities of the cultures concerned. In Japan, for instance, the venerable legacy of hanga (printmaking) has meant that innovation is confined to photographic incursions, which are nonetheless consequential. In Australia, where printmaking has been practised since early colonial times, traditional techniques have been re-articulated and increasingly counterpoised with the digital. In Thailand, where there is little historical density to the printmaking field, the most adventurous practice is that of print installation.10 This thesis, nevertheless, does not attempt to create a single standard for aesthetic and formal appraisal, for that would be to return to a homogenous and ultimately authoritarian system of conclusions. Each context has been researched according to its own particular histories and perceptions of printmaking and the degrees of transformation revealed are aligned with external interpretations to arrive at an objective analysis.

The case study approach enables the researcher to identify and explain the wide variety of adoption and adaptation processes undertaken by these practitioners. Underlying this approach is the assumption that a general framework (with its inherent complexities) of understanding can be developed through investigations of unique cases. The previous Euramerican hegemonic frameworks of the visual arts cannot be dismissed, but need to be re-evaluated in light of the new empirical evidence emerging from this research.

10 For links with print performance and installation art, see Anne Kirker 1999,`The Performance of Printmaking: Prawat Laucharoen, Phatyos Buddhacharoen and Bundith Phunsombatlert’, ART Asia Pacific, Issue 24, pp.60-66, and Anne Kirker 2005, ‘The Extended Matrix: New Dimensions in Thai Printmaking’, in Caroline Turner (ed.), Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific, : Pandanus Books, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, pp. 297-310; for links with electronic technologies, see Anne Kirker 1994, `Bashir Baraki and Pat Hoffie: Extending the Vernacular of Prints’, Continuum, Vol.8, No.1, pp.240-47.

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Chapter 2 LITERATURE INFORMING RESEARCH PROBLEM

2.1 The Print and Its Historical Location

As mentioned in the introduction to this thesis, Arthur M. Hind (1923) set the benchmark for print scholarship in the first half of the twentieth century and the model established by his A History of Engraving & Etching book persists today. Despite reprinting, the text does not acknowledge the etching movement in Japan in the nineteenth century, the example of the Philippines, or other Asian print initiatives.11 Although later, fellow curator A. Hyatt Mayer ‘s more lively Prints & People, published in 1971, included the invention of paper in China and the early Chinese and Japanese woodblock prints tradition, it did not take its reach beyond East Asia.12

In recent decades a number of influential journal articles and books have broached new criteria for evaluating contemporary printmaking, including its repositioning as part of an expanded field of the visual arts. However, these innovations are mostly expressed by scholars based or trained in a Euramerican context.13 They have not been generated in regions regarded as ‘lying in the margins’, and thus conform with Stuart Hall’s recognition that Western capital, stories and imagery (expressed in the dominant language English) remain the driving powerhouse of information dispersal in this domain.14

11 Hind, widely regarded as one of the world’s most distinguished print curators and historians, served as Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum in the early part of the twentieth century. At the time his influential book, A History of Engraving & Etching from the 15th century to the year 1914, was republished in paperback during the international print ‘renaissance’ in 1963, the cover text read, ‘This book, formerly out of print for many years, contains references to every etcher or engraver worthy of mention from the early 15th century to 1914, and gives a fair account of influences, artistic repercussions, and accomplishments of each individual.’ Nowhere is there an acknowledgment of the Filipino example, nor indeed of the etching movement in nineteenth century Japan, or other documented Asian print initiatives.

12 A. Hyatt Mayer 1971, Prints & People: a social history of printed pictures, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Mayer joined the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Prints in 1932 and at the time of writing his book held the position of Curator Emeritus there.

13 A good example is: Clare Williamson, `Forms of ID: Printmaking and issues of cultural identity’, paper presented at The Second Australian Print Symposium, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, October 1992, edited and posted on NGA Prints and Printmaking: Australia Asia Pacific website in 2007.

14 Stuart Hall 1991, The Local and the Global’ in A. King (ed.), Culture, Globalisation and the World System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, New York: State University of New York, p.28.

18

In the last century photography was well served by critical writers such as Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Douglas Crimp, Susan Sontag, David Sekula and John Tagg, but in printmaking literature the discourse has been dominated by general histories and technical issues. In the first half of the twentieth century only Walter Benjamin (1936; 1968) and William M. Ivins Jr (1953) attempted some theoretical analysis of print (as a device for mass reproduction not a fine-art ‘original print’ – I am solely concerned with the latter in my thesis). 15 Later, this theoretical challenge was taken further by American academics such as Ruth Weisberg (1986; 1990; 1993) and Hugh Merrill (1993).

This thesis, via the case studies examined, does not necessarily treat the print as a two- dimensional paper-based entity that can be reproduced. Nevertheless, the imagery concerned would not occur without an active knowledge of these traditional attributes of printmaking. The ‘indexicality’ of a particular print medium, whether it be etching, , screenprint or digital , remains. Furthermore, the tension between the autographic (handmade) and the machine is a constant fact of production.

In 1978, English-born print scholar Pat Gilmour published an influential catalogue essay that pointed this fact out. While she did not set out to ‘theorise’ printmaking, Gilmour recognised such symbioses/paradoxes and paved the way for postmodern investigations. For instance, in the opening paragraph Gilmour states:

Making a print is essentially a way of mechanising an image, but because we have retained, against the odds, what Walter Benjamin called a ‘fetishistic fundamentally anti-technological notion of art’, the story of artists’ prints, particularly during the last hundred years, reflects a fascinating ideological struggle. On the one hand there has been the technological production with its so-called ‘impersonal’ qualities – the regularity and precision of conscious design and division of labour in the making – and that climax and apotheosis of the individually hand-crafted, the allegedly ‘more human’ original print.16

15 Benjamin 1968, op.cit; Ivins Jr. 1953, op.cit.

16 Pat Gilmour 1978, The Mechanised Image: An Historical Perspective on 20th Century Prints, London: Arts Council of Great Britain, p.8.

19 While Gilmour had done this, Weisberg (1986), a print artist and academic, addressed aesthetic theory and the print by adapting critical models developed by cultural and art theorists such as Frederic Jameson and Norman Bryson to explore the relationship between postmodern theory and printmaking.17 Another printmaking commentator, Hugh Merrill (1993), also valued the contribution of postmodern theories, believing they provided useful paradigms and new conceptual possibilities that could be applied to the critical investigation of printmaking. He argued that the modernist print was firmly grounded in painting-based aesthetics, whereas under postmodernism, it was free to encompass a much broader territory. This led to a situation in which the print’s `original and reproductive roles become complementary possibilities rather than opposing categories.’ 18 Merrill also postulated that `print is not a technique, a category, or even an object; it is a theoretical language of evolving ideas’.19 Merrill was particularly influenced by Marxist ideas and considered the print primarily for its function as a ‘communication’ tool, one that acknowledged its `history of activism and social commentary’. He, in fact, refused to use the term ‘printmaking’, as though it would undermine his emphasis on didactic intentions. This interpretation, however, was offered at the expense of acknowledging the print’s formal and aesthetic values.20

As the case study artists in my thesis take time-honoured principles of the print into an expanded field of visual arts practice, I was interested in literature on the contemporary print (irrespective of origin) that could assist in establishing the extent of tradition relied upon, as opposed to radical innovation, in their work. The issue of ‘seriality’ (through editioning), for example, as much as the transfer of an image from the matrix (whether it be a block, stone, plate, stencil, collage on a photocopy platen or printout from a computer) to another surface; chiefly paper, is generally accepted as a fundamental tenet of printmaking. To what degree do the printmakers I discuss depart from such norms? What new forms have these artists used for the print?

17 See Ruth Weisberg 1986,‘The Syntax of the Print: In Search of an Aesthetic Context', The Tamarind Papers, A Journal of the Fine Print, Vol. 9, No. 2, Fall; Ruth Weisberg 1990,‘The Absent Discourse: Critical Theories and Printmaking', The Tamarind Papers, A Journal of the Fine Print, Vol. 13, pp.8-10; and Ruth Weisberg 1993, ‘Critical Theory and the Print’, Contemporary Impressions: The Journal of the American Print Alliance, Vol. 1, No.1, Spring.

18 Hugh Merrill 1993, `Post-Print: Staking Claim to the Territory’, Contemporary Impressions: The Journal of the American Print Alliance, Vol.1, No.1, p.8.

19 ibid.

20 ibid.

20

My thesis intentionally does not linger over questions to do with the technical aspects of printmaking unless there is a conceptual reason for doing so; the most salient reason is when an artist employs a particular print process because he or she believes it to embody a creative and intellectual challenge. As the period chiefly under investigation correlates with postmodernism, postcolonialism and globalisation, technical aspects are generally described only when they elaborate upon or are filtered through such theoretical frameworks.

In 1996 Susan Tallman produced an influential resource on the history and development of printmaking. In part, it addressed questions that problematised the field.21 Well- researched and copiously illustrated, it is chiefly an authoritative survey of prominent artists employing the print in their practice. Nevertheless, chapters in the book such as ‘The ethos of the edition’ indicate Tallman’s recognition of the complementary possibilities that ‘originality’ and ‘reproduction’ have in relation to the practice of editioning. She also acknowledges the potential of the digital print while recognising that, ‘as with photography…, inkjet or laser-printed images are not properly prints: there is no fixed matrix, no physical press of paper against a template.’22 Despite its comprehensiveness and periodic innovations, her text is not without bias and largely conforms to established survey methods as well as displaying an uncritical championship of printmaking.

In 2006, the and Albert Museum, London, built on its venerable record of print scholarship by publishing the book Prints Now. This addressed matters such as ‘New Media’, ‘Old Media Made New’, ‘Print in 3-D’ and ‘New Narratives’. These are all germane to the case studies in this thesis.23 This book possesses an enterprising freshness of ideas and design layout that emphasises innovation and the adaptability of the print. Artists treated in one chapter are cross-referenced with other chapters, as though to emphasise the migration of ideas and approaches to printmaking. However, the artists

21 Susan Tallman’s book The Contemporary Print: From Pre-Pop to Postmodern was published by Thames & Hudson, New York in 1996.

22 ibid. p. 214. There are echoes in this statement of the suspicion directed towards screenprints in the early 1960s, when curators rejected them on the grounds of not being original as they lacked ‘gestural’ or ‘autographic’ imagery.

23 Gill Saunders and Rosie Miles 2006, Prints Now: Directions and Definitions, London: V & A Publications.

21 exemplifying these topics chiefly came from the immediate purview of the curators compiling the text and only one artist, David Bosun from the Torres Strait Islands, definitively represents the Asia-Pacific region.

The texts by Weisberg (1986; 1990; 1993), Merrill (1993), Gilmour (1978) and Tallman (1996) are useful additions to print scholarship, but most follow the perspective that the contemporary print is grounded in postwar Europe and the United States. Writing from within their own cultural context, they tend to ignore other histories.24 There is a propensity to overlook activity occurring elsewhere in the world, or the work of artists with a different geographical and cultural base.

The audiences and potential markets in the Euramerican situation are often markedly different from those for the casestudies that I have selected from the Asia-Pacific region. The dynamics of art school training, the ‘gate-keepers’ (teachers, curators, art administrators) are inflected by historical determinations and social mores in Japan, Australia and Thailand, which vary one from the other. In some cases, the lure of international art exhibitions prompts transformations in art practice. This separation between local concerns and traditions as shapers of practice, and global interactions that may more readily encourage innovation, has considerable bearing on the artists I investigate. Stuart Hall (1991) is apposite in his essays on ‘The Local and the Global’.25

The deficiencies in the above accounts on the print have been somewhat rectified in studies produced by institutions such as the department of printmaking at the University of Alberta, Canada. Since the 1970s, this has been recognised internationally as a centre for printmaking. In 1997, the University of Alberta Press published a collection of essays and images in a book titled Sightlines: Printmaking and Image Culture edited by Walter Jule, which accompanied an International Symposium on Printmaking and Image Culture at the University. In his introduction, Jule makes the point that regional distinctions are

24 This is less the case with Pat Gilmour as she became Co-ordinating Curator of International Prints and Illustrated Books at the National Gallery of Australia in the early 1980s and grew interested in, and knowledgeable about, Australian prints during the course of her tenure there. Furthermore, Gilmour is very familiar with contemporary Japanese printmaking, having served on judging panels in this regard.

25 Hall 1991, op. cit.

22 important factors in the production of certain strains of print imagery.26 He singles out Thailand and Japan for comment in his text, stating:

On the other side of the world, in Thailand, printmakers have sought to preserve their culture’s values and, to a lesser degree, to comment on their society. Although the tradition of printmaking in Thailand is a young one, its disciples have attained international recognition for their combination of craftsmanship and artistic expression. Japan, the economic powerhouse of Asia, represents the extreme of image culture …why Japan, of all countries, has stressed image over word is in order. Understanding that culture’s obsession with graphic art may help us better understand the role of image, or lack of it, in our own.27

Jule’s challenge is taken up by Donald Richie (an inhabitant of ) in his essay ‘Japan & the Image Industry’. He explains that ukiyo-e, and in turn sōsaku hanga (creative print); belong to a culture where image is stressed over word. Arguably this is because of Japan’s writing system. Calligraphy (originating in China) could be said to fuse drawing and writing as the individual ideograph in a simple picture that represents a tangible object or abstract concept, emotion, or action.28

The University of Alberta’s printmaking division has also extended the examination of printmaking beyond a Euramerican perspective by curating exhibitions that connect countries with strong contemporary printmaking traditions (notably Poland, Korea and Japan). Desmond Rochfort, Chair of the Department of Art and Design at this University, for instance, co-curated the exhibition Lines of Site: Ideas, Forms and Materialities with Ryoji Ikeda, a practitioner and Professor of Printmaking at Musashino Art University in Japan. Rochfort (1999) writes in his essay ‘Printmaking, Technologies and the Culture of the Reproducible Image’ about the tumultuous shifts in context for the visual arts caused by the:

26 Walter Jule (ed.) 1997, ‘Introduction’, Sightlines: Printmaking and Image Culture, University of Alberta Press. At the time of publication, Jule was coordinator of the University of Alberta’s printmaking division in the Department of Art and Design. In terms of ‘regional practice’, Jule cited how Poland, beset by social and political upheaval, had developed a strong print tradition through posters that took ‘fine art’ into public spaces.

27 ibid. ’Introduction’, p.V1

28 Donald Richie 1997, ‘Japan & The Image Industry’ in Walter Jule (ed.), ibid. Richie points out how ‘Each kanji character symbolizes a single idea’, p.65.

23 Increasingly global, multi-reproducible ‘Image Cultures’ of the late twentieth century. In this moment the ubiquitous flood of mass-produced digitized pictures that now dominate our urban landscapes conspires to blur the distinction between our understanding of a work of art and its reproduction… In no other art form is the tension between the hand-crafted and the alluring creative possibilities of digital imaging so intensely highlighted as in the print.29

2.2 Relevant Histories of the Three Case Study Contexts

2.2a Japan

In Japan, the considerable impact of new media technologies on printmaking has been in evidence since the 1970s, yet by the 2000s, a more conservative approach to the domain was evident. This has been discussed, for instance, in the print journal Hanga Geijutsu.30 In 2004, Motoe Kunio, a professor at Tama Art University, critiqued the current situation for printmaking in his essay ‘Postwar Prints – With Focus on the 1970s’.31 Here, he wrote of the 8th Tokyo International Print Biennale in 1972, which broke the rules of selection established over many years through the award of the grand prize to Takamatsu Jirō’s The Story, in which ‘Xerox copies of typed permutations and combinations of the alphabet were presented in the form of a book’.32 This Bienniale was a breakthrough event as it offered a new and more encompassing view of printmaking capacities. Kunio concluded that 1970s conceptualism, through its major concern with reproducibility, was ‘intellectually seductive’; through it ‘printmaking turned into contemporary art’.33 However, writing some three decades later, he concluded with a more cautionary note:

29 Desmond Rochfort 1999, ‘Printmaking, Technologies and the Culture of the Reproducible Image’ in Desmond Rochfort and Ryoji Ikeda, Lines of Site: Ideas, Forms and Materialities, The University of Alberta Press, p.9.

30 Refer, for instance, to ‘Zadankai: Geidai Hanga no Kyozo to Jitsuzo’ [A Discussion on the Virtual and Real Images of Contemporary Prints], Hanga Geijutsu, No.84, 1994, p.120. Hanga Geijutsu is the chief contemporary print journal in Japan. A quarterly, it has been published since 1977.

31 Motoe Kunio 2004, ‘Postwar Prints − With Focus on the 1970s’ in HANGA: Waves of East-West Cultural Interchange, Exhibition Catalogue, Tokyo: Hagi Uragami Museum in association with Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. This exhibition was held at The University Museum Chinretsukan Gallery, Geidai, to coincide with the ISPA (International Symposium of Print Art) at that university, 30 Nov. - 5 Dec. 2004. ISPA was devised to address themes relevant to the contemporary print such as ‘Printmaking and Technology’ and ‘The Nature of Printmaking – its Verification and Reconstruction’. The Symposium (with its associated HANGA exhibition) was the main concluding event of a year-long series of print exhibitions and forums throughout Japan.

32 Jirō was included by her 1994 book Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky, New York: Harry N. Abrams. . 33 Motoe Kunio, op. cit.p.29

24 We also remember that this print biennial abandoned several conditions considered the lifeline of ‘printmaking’ such as pluralism and handwork. … ‘anything’ was acceptable as a ‘print’ be it two- dimensional or three-dimensional as long as there was a ‘plate’ [print] or traces of a ‘plate’ somewhere in the work. Such a broad interpretation dug its own grave, so to speak [as] nowadays as we are confronted with an unprecedented situation in which society is being cyberized by modern information technology … 34

Hence, during the 1970s, the persuasiveness of conceptual art and its influence on the Japanese print moved it beyond a self-contained field and made it readily adaptable to postmodern ideas. There was, however, a counter tendency, one devoted to the medium’s purism, as opposed to a pluralistic and heterogeneous disposition. A strong resistance in Japan to continue the momentum of this integration into the mainstream avant-garde rests with entrenched national pride in the country’s history of printmaking. As Kunio chauvinistically states, ‘…compared to Europe, where prints tend to get mixed among other fields, in Japan, there is hardly need to mention ukiyo-e and sosaku hanga to prove that printmaking has traditionally formed a significant field of its own.’35

Of the three case studies, Euramerican scholars and art commentators have only paid close attention to the printed image in Japan – particularly the ukiyo-e woodblock tradition. This trend has continued with the importance placed on sōsaku hanga and its development in that country during the twentieth century. These writers have taken this approach because the traits they appreciate in prints characteristic of these movements display unique aesthetic qualities and faultless craftsmanship. Hence Japanese printmaking’s more adventurous and transgressive practitioners have been sidelined.

Typical examples of such writing can be found in the literature, associated with exhibitions or serving as independent publications, sponsored by The College Women’s Association of Japan (CWAJ), a multinational organisation founded in Tokyo in 1949.36

34 ibid.p.29

35 ibid. p.28. This comment, by an esteemed academic and museum director (Kunio also holds the position of Director of Fuchu Art Museum), demonstrates a lack of understanding, or acknowledgment, of the guild-based print establishments that continue to operate in England and continental Europe.

36 Annual exhibitions of contemporary Japanese prints have been held by the CWAJ to fund its community projects since 1956. In 1985, CWAJ organised its first travelling exhibition, Contemporary Japanese Prints – Symbols of a Society in Transition, which toured five American cities, the Canadian Exposition in Vancouver, and the British

25 In addition, the popular handbook, Japanese Prints Today: Tradition with Innovation, was written by two American printmakers and art historians, Margaret K. Johnson and Dale K. Hilton, from their base in Tokyo and was first published there in 1980.37 The book was weighted towards instructing readers in the techniques of printmaking. It introduces Japanese printmakers (and others) to the basics of traditional Japanese aesthetics as well as acknowledging a debt to Euramerican influences through selected practitioners. It is also a collector’s handbook (giving Tokyo galleries specialising in the print) and advocates an appreciation for the hand-editioned Japanese print.

New approaches to technique and imagery in printmaking during the 1980s and 1990s (in fact from the 1960s), have generally been superficial, which may be a consequence of marketing forces. Technical cleverness, such as the over-lapping of several traditional print methods in a single image to produce an edition, is most often the extent to which sōsaku hanga has been transformed. Few of these prints achieve an impact beyond decorative cleverness, which obscures any wish by the artist to attract serious critical appreciation of his or her work. In Japan, far-reaching innovation in replicated images based on paper has been more readily identified with photography, the ubiquitous manga (popular cartoons) and the 1960s legacy of screenprinted posters.

Traditionally, Japanese printers have been reluctant to shift dramatically from time- honoured values accruing to the print. Yet the comprehensive and venerable printmaking tradition has incorporated photography into its field of practice, and this has functioned as a lever to dismantle the status quo. Indeed, photography in the hands of practitioners like Noda Tetsuya and Shimada Yoshiko possesses an iconoclastic power for its documentary capacity and ‘reality’ bearing attributes. The prints of these two case study artists have unsettled cultural mores and have acted as a revisionist agent in Japanese printmaking.

Museum, London, in 1986, where the exhibits became part of the print collection. CWAJ created a second travelling exhibition, The Urban Bonsai – Contemporary Japanese Prints, for exhibition in Australia and New Zealand in 1992- 93. Organised with the Art Gallery of New South Wales, The Urban Bonsai exhibits were gifted to that institution at the end of the tour. All exhibitions were accompanied by catalogues in English. For the purposes of this thesis the most relevant is Jacqueline Menzies 1992, The Urban Bonsai: Contemporary Japanese Prints, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales.

37 Margaret K. Johnson & Dale K. Hilton 1980. Japanese Prints Today: Tradition with Innovation, Shufunotomo Co.

26 English scholar Lawrence Smith has noted in his books38 on the Japanese print the need to suspend judgment of hierarchies that are still implicit in the visual arts (painting, sculpture with related fields, at the apex) in the West and to be circumspect when distinguishing between art and craft. In Japan, there are specific cultural views on what represents art, as opposed to craft, which are different from those in the Euramerican context. Smith explains this in his essay ‘Printmaking in Three Continents: A Question of 39 Horizons’ (1999). In Britain, he points out, there was a deeply rooted view that prints were not art, (even in the 1970s, while this was not the case in Japan. A traditional Japanese view of cultural production does not distinguish between artistic domains, as skill and distinction in craftsmanship are the primary requirements in that country, irrespective of medium.

So admired was printmaking in Japan that even when Western influences (during the Meiji era) impacted upon the country, and artists began travelling to Europe, where artist- designed, artist-produced etchings and lithographs were the norm, there was a realisation amongst some that woodblock printing should be maintained. Partly this was a response to European admiration of ukiyo-e prints, yet a reciprocation (based on technique) occurred. Smith explains, ‘The Japanese instinct to admire craftsmanship has increasingly led the [local] public to encourage intaglio techniques (etching for instance) with their necessity for exactness and detail. Both of these processes [woodblock printing and etching] may be seen as ways that distinct cultural attitudes have shaped the printmaker’s response.’40

Yet when the etchings of Shimada are evaluated through the lens of contemporary art curators and theorists who are not necessarily print advocates, they are seen as conforming to Japanese avant-garde activity. This artist is a Japanese iconoclast in the way she makes prints and the content she selects, yet what is generally not noted is that she is also a product of a Japanese political consciousness and corresponding print legacy

38 Lawrence Smith’s books include Contemporary Japanese Prints: Symbols of Society in Transition, New York: Harper, 1985. It was published in association with one of the CWAJ’s annual exhibitions

39 Lawrence Smith 1999, ‘Printmaking in Three Continents: A Question of Horizons’ in Rochford and Ikeda, Lines of Site: Ideas, Forms and Materialities, The University of Alberta Press, op.cit.

40 Ibid., p.13.

27 reaching back to World War II.41 Similarly, the Mono-ha movement originating in 1968 has an oblique bearing on the work of Noda. His practice of establishing ‘relationality’ between the woodblock print and the photographic image may be seen as a parallel ‘encounter’ of disparate elements, a mutual interdependence. Furthermore, ‘Mono-ha works of art operated in an “expanded system” that emphasised the “depth and expanse of objects beyond their contours” and intended to provoke a direct, interactive contact with the world itself.’42

2.2b Australia

The dialogue set up between photography and traditional print media, which underpins Noda’s and Shimada’s work, is also applicable to Australian case study artist Bea Maddock’s 1970s photo-etchings. The most directly relevant text devoted to this interdisciplinary engagement is Charles Newton’s book Photography in Printmaking (1979).43

Imprint, the Print Council of Australia’s quarterly journal, has been a constant champion for printmaking in this country. Importantly, it has also reflected the field’s historical and stylistic shifts as they have unfolded. From its beginnings in 1966, when the print was perceived in ‘purist’ terms (at the expense of demonstrated awareness of broader cultural interests), Imprint now embraces a wide spectrum of paper-based imagery that is print related, contextualises it, and does not confine its comments to Australia. An analysis of the contents of Imprint over the years demonstrates a range of editorial responses to this flagship publication and also reveals preferences and prejudices in the practice and concerns of artists who regard printmaking as their major field. At times (although not often), the journal has included essays that contextualise the print outside the discourse of printmaking.

41 Take, for instance, the Zen’ei Bijutsu-kai (Avant-Garde Art Association) of the 1940s, which addressed the atrocities of the war and led to an opposition to the Emperor system (tennō-sei) with its mandates of patriarchy and social conformity, political harmony and personal sacrifice.

42 Lee U Fan, one of Mono-ha’s leading artists, cited in Munroe, op. cit. p.265.

43 Published by the Victoria & Albert Museum in conjunction with Compton/Pitman, 1979.

28 A low point in printmaking interest during the early 1980s in Australia was indicated by the technical emphasis and retrospective nature of articles such as that by Craig Douglas and David Seifert, ‘Collagraphy with Clare Romano’ (Imprint, No. 4, December 1982) and Mary Alice Lee’s ‘The Etched Work of Jessie Traill, 1881-1967’ (Imprint, No.2, June 1983). In the December issue of 1984, there was a special focus on ‘Photography as a Tool’, a subject that was long overdue44, and for Imprint Vol. 24, No. 4, December 1989, Roger Butler contributed ‘Printmaking and Photography in Australia: A Shared History’.

The journal made a more concerted effort to keep abreast of printmaking as a continually transforming field and opened discourse on electronic print media during the following decade. For instance, Peter Charuk wrote on `Computers and printmaking’ for Imprint, Vol. 27, No. 4, Summer 1992. The journal also endeavoured to explore a broader terrain of text on the print outside technique, such as the article by Anne Kirker, ‘Curating prints; a field of expanding interpretation’ (Imprint Vol.26, No.2, Winter 1991). Such references have relevance to this thesis as they demonstrate the background to innovations in the print work of case study artists, particularly Maddock and Arnold, as much as they chart changing attitudes.

Attempts to bring a fresh perspective to Imprint were made at the start of the 1990s, when guest editorships were introduced. For instance, Ashley Crawford, Ray Edgar and Charles Green edited Imprint Vol. 25, No. 2, March 1990. None of these art professionals are regarded as print specialists, which is an important departure from the guild-based status of printmaking. By employing scholars outside a specific discipline, fresh readings may be forthcoming. This particular issue brought a ‘postmodern’ slant to the commissioned essays: Lindy Lee wrote on ‘Redefining History’, for instance. To date, the most ‘uncharacteristic’ of all issues of Imprint was that edited by curator Juliana Engberg and Brenda Ludeman (Vol.25, No.4, Summer 1990). However, in hindsight it departs so significantly from the parameters of print scholarship that this issue stands now as merely a polemical ‘alternative art’ magazine. Since then, the print per se has returned as the central platform of the Print Council of Australia’s journal; albeit with

44 Among the authors of this issue were Bea Maddock and Raymond Arnold

29 extensions into closely associated fields. As evidence of this, the Spring 2008 issue of Imprint states on its cover ‘artist’s books + digital art + paper art + printmaking’.

Charles Green’s (1993) audacious essay ‘The Deterritorialised Print’ in the mainstream journal Art Monthly Australia proposed printmaking as an area worthy of substantial theoretical speculation. Here, under separate headings, he addressed the topics of ‘Printmaking, Photography and the Postmodern’, ‘Performance Artists and Printmaking’, and ‘The Print as Body: A New Technological Paradigm’, using Australian artists as examples. Green’s contribution took printmaking into an intellectually lively and speculative domain.45

Influenced by Green, I also wrote several articles in the 1990s that critically positioned the print within a broader frame of artistic and cultural reference. I argued for the term ‘printmaking’ to encompass the products of new technology; namely computer-generated and photocopied imagery.46 With ‘Bashir Baraki and Pat Hoffie: Extending the Vernacular of Prints’ (1994), I noted printmaking’s new media directions in an anthology about the electronic arts in Australia. This aligned the discourse on the print with mainstream avant-garde discourse and meant it was no longer perceived as the sole province of specialist print journals (more particularly Imprint).

While Baraki (from Melbourne) commenced his career as a photographer, it was his sustained investigations into photocopy imaging that were recognised as his chief contribution to art in this country. A multidisciplinary artist practising in Brisbane, Pat Hoffie consciously moves in postmodern fashion to avoid ‘type-casting’ and employs styles and materials that best respond to socio-political concerns she holds at the time. Her work with the Canon colour laser copier from the late 1980s into the 1990s produced some of the earliest instances of such imagery in printmaking in Australia. Both Hoffie and Baraki embraced so-called ‘new technology’ and the postmodern ‘field of enquiry,

45 Charles Green 1993, op. cit.

46 See for instance, Anne Kirker 1991, op. cit. and Anne Kirker 1992, ‘Print Forum: Prints in the age of hi-tech’, Art and Australia, Vol. 30, No. 2, Summer.

30 which concerns appropriation and an examination of where meaning can lie in the convergence of ‘borrowed’ images.’47

I later elaborated upon the print in Australia as a diverse (and at times contested) field in my essay for the exhibition No Muttering (2001). Here I drew attention to the heterogeneity of the nature of the contemporary print but also pointed out how it often oscillated ‘between the ‘hand-crafted’ and the ‘machine-made’. 48

The two most comprehensive books about Australian modern and contemporary prints have been written by Sasha Grishin (1994; 1997). The first, Contemporary Australian Printmaking: An Interpretative History (1994), provided a meticulously researched ‘directory’ of artists with valuable assesments.49 It followed and updated Franz Kempf’s earlier survey, Contemporary Australian Printmakers (1976).50 In his second volume, Australian Printmaking in the 1990s: Artist Printmakers 1990-1995 (1997), Grishin adopted the broadest definition of printmaking, which apart from the traditional categories, included photocopies and computer generated images. However, Grishin tackles 157 print practitioners during five years of activity, so the profiles on the selected artists are necessarily brief and do not provide Grishin with the opportunity to analyse or critique in depth. It can be argued that these are books that were written for and successfully distributed to a broad readership and therefore are not the forum for theoretical inquiry.

Roger Butler’s triennial National Print Symposiums, held at the National Gallery of Australia since 1987 (with the most recent in 2007), have allowed Australian print experts to present current research about print artists’ work. Some of these presentations have been adapted for publication in Imprint, or they have served thematic exhibitions at Australian regional and State galleries. Since 2007, they have also been posted on a

47Anne Kirker 1994, op. cit., p.240. This particular issue of Continuum was edited by Nicholas Zurbrugg and was based on the theme of `Electronic Arts in Australia’.

48 Anne Kirker 2001, ‘Printmaking Shifts’, in No Muttering, exh. cat., Sydney: Ivan Dougherty Gallery, College of Fine Arts, The University of New South Wales, unpaginated.

49 Sasha Grishin 1994, Contemporary Australian Printmaking: An Interpretative History, Sydney: Craftsman House; Sasha Grishin 1997, Australian Printmaking in the 1990s: Artist Printmakers 1990-1995, Sydney: Craftsman House.

50 Franz Kempf 1976, Contemporary Australian Printmakers, Melbourne: Lansdowne Press in association with the Print Council of Australia. This was essentially a ‘directory’ of artists.

31 website linked to the National Gallery of Australia’s program and collections.51 Furthermore, two of a set of three comprehensive volumes titled Printed were published by the National Gallery of Australia (2007), with Butler as author (with the third expected in 2009). They track colonial prints in Australia (Vol. 1), and modernism and printmaking up to 1955 (Vol.2). The third book will cover contemporary developments in printmaking. Collectively, they (with the Prints and Printmaking: Australia Asia Pacific NGA website link) are a milestone in the art historical appreciation of Australian printmaking. Importantly, their presence underscores how comparatively little attention is paid in the Euramerican context to the rich history of the print in Australia and how modernism and postmodernism in particular could potentially be revised, if this was acknowledged and rectified.

2.2c Thailand

The only historical overview of the print in Thailand is Ithipol Thangchalok’s A Decade of Printmaking: Tendency and Change 1982-1992 (1992). It was published by CON- tempus: The Bangkok Fine Art Center in conjunction with an exhibition there. This seminal (albeit slim) volume traces the relatively short history of artists’ prints in that country and weights examples towards Silpakorn University staff (including Ithipol, himself an accomplished etcher) and alumni. Unfortunately, the book does not mention the print installations of Prawat (those that precede those of Phatyos, the other main Thai case study artist this thesis addresses).52 For this reason I felt compelled to publish `The Performance of Printmaking: Prawat Laucharoen, Phatyos Buddhacharoen and Bundith Phunsombatlert’, in the journal ART Asia Pacific (Issue 24 1999) [see bibliography]. This opportunity to write on an aspect of Thai printmaking helped me gain experience about how to engage with cultural difference, as much as drawing attention to bold and contentious art practice occurring within a South-East Asian country.

Ithipol’s survey was elaborated upon in 2003 by fellow Thai printmaker Pishnu Supanimit, in his essay ‘Modern Thai Printmaking’, for The International Print and

51 Prints and Printmaking: Australia Asia Pacific, accessed at http://www.printsandprintmaking.gov.au

52 On the understanding that it is an acceptable and proper form of address, the full name of Thai nationals is given and then abbreviated through the text, hence ‘Ithipol’, ‘Prawat’, ‘Phatyos’ and others who will be brought into the argument of this thesis.

32 Drawing Exhibition catalogue. Pishnu introduced new names and supported the tenor of Ithipol’s championship of Silpakorn graduates in printmaking (and avoided controversial work). Postmodern explorations (such as those evidenced in the installations of Prawat and Phatyos) were not acknowledged; yet both artists named in parenthesis were successful alumni. Silpakorn is the oldest and most esteemed art school in Thailand and a probable explanation lies in the relative conservatism of its ‘high profile’ publications.

In relation to Asian printmaking, John Clark’s (1998) book Modern Asian Art is an erudite study that questions the meaning of ‘modernism’ for Asian art cultures, including Thailand.53 However, in-depth critiques of printmaking, and explanations of how it is being re-articulated to embrace postmodernism, are scarce. In the case of Thailand, virtually nothing is known about the international significance of its print activity and the boldness of its deviations from tradition.54

Apinan Poshyananda (1992), in his widely distributed book Modern Art in Thailand, integrated commentaries on artists specialising in print imagery with those of painters and sculptors. He also included a section on the development of abstraction and printmaking in that country. Largely, however, his text acts as an historical overview and does not critique the position of the print in that society; nor does it cover developments since 1991.55 Apinan did, however, produce a small catalogue to accompany the 1991 exhibition Print Installation (National Gallery in Bangkok), which went a considerable way towards redressing this anomaly. Importantly, it revealed the existence of a distinctive strand of performance and installation-based print expression that emerged in Thailand.

In conclusion, the critical analysis of the contemporary print in Thailand has been limited in scope and depth. The same can be said of discourses addressing Japanese and Australian printmaking in my field of interest, although a comparatively large quantity of literature pertaining to printmaking has been produced. These texts also have limited

53John Clark 1998, Modern Asian Art, Craftsman House, 1998

54 In 1992, printmaker Ithipol Thangchalok published in Thai and English A Decade of Printmaking: Tendency and Change 1982-1992, which accompanied an exhibition at CON-tempus:The Bangkok Fine Art Center. This slim volume was the first study on contemporary printmaking in Thailand, produced in that country.

55 Apinan Poshyananda 1992. Modern Art in Thailand: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Oxford University Press

33 circulation and impact beyond the Asia-Pacific region. Locally-produced literature especially usually only gains wider circulation as a research and validation tool when, for instance, an artist is chosen for international exposure through the burgeoning art biennale and triennial movement.

2.3 Broader Visual Arts Contexts

The identity of printmaking is challenged in offering a new interpretation of the work of print artists from Japan, Australia and Thailand.. This thesis not only supplements and extends Euramerican perspectives but it also opens the field to transcultural and polycentral discourse. By collating and synthesising literature emanating from the three case study sites with that from Euramerica, this thesis augments existing print analysis. It articulates cultural differences as much as commonalities, which in turn are negotiated in the realm of printmaking.

The title of the 2004 exhibition (HANGA: Waves of East-West Cultural Interchange) for which Motoe Kunio wrote represents the transcultural perspective that has helped shape my focus on the print artists in this thesis.56 Their mature practice coincides with the late twentieth century and as such has benefited from direct contact with the artists’ counterparts in Europe and the United States (through postgraduate training, regular travel, temporary and long-term residencies, exhibition opportunities). Yet their practice has not been subjugated, or unduly influenced, by Western pedagogy. Rather, globalisation has both confirmed idiosyncratic actions as well as opened the way for these artists to approach the print in directions that depart from a narrow reading of the discipline. In doing so, it has opened up the possibilities of a ‘polycentral discourse’.57

I have applied postmodern and global paradigms to the case studies because these provide the scope needed to understand why and how the printmakers concerned have transcended strict discipline-specific parameters. National studies, while essential to the

56 HANGA: Waves of East-West Cultural Interchange, 2004. 57 A term used by John Clark in his essay ‘Asian Modernisms’, in Asia and Modernity issue of Humanities Research 2, Australian National University, Canberra, 1999. A variant on the term ‘Euro-American’, ‘Euramerican’ was employed widely by Clark at the conference he convened on ‘Modernism and Post-Modernism in Contemporary Asian Art’, Australian National University, March 1991.

34 research for this thesis, are less helpful here than texts that address other fields of the visual arts. Importantly, there are theoretical texts published in the 1970s (when the international print movement had gained wide currency) that are relevant. This was the era when the tropes of high modernism were being undermined and a radical re- evaluation of what constituted artistic production occurred.

Rosalind Krauss’ observation on sculpture as an ‘expanded field’ (from which the title of my thesis is borrowed) is a milestone in this regard. This is because it straddles the epochal ideological shifts from conventional readings of the visual arts occurring at this time and can be extrapolated to include more than one field within this domain. At the time she described sculpture as being in a state of ‘homelessness’; and this is the very situation I propose for the printmakers under review. In turn, the heterogeneous nature of their output indicates broader artistic phenomena that concerned postmodern theorists and referred to the pluralistic nature of cultural production by the late 1970s. The boundaries between discrete practices like printmaking and painting, or printmaking and photography, began to blur. Both fields (i.e. sculpture and printmaking) still exist, at least through nomenclature, but they have become categorically indeterminate and liberated from modernist strictures.

Krauss’ essay was included in Foster’s (1983) anthology of texts on postmodern culture, as were articles by Douglas Crimp, Craig Owens, and Edward Said; all theorists of significance to this thesis. 58 Crimp, for instance, draws attention to Leo Steinberg’s application of the term ‘postmodernism’ in his assessment of Robert Rauschenberg’s collage .59 Steinberg called Rauschenberg’s picture surface a ‘flatbed’, a term of especial significance for print analysis, as it refers to a printing press. Edward Said addresses political and historical agendas and the positioning of the ‘Other’.60 The concept of the ‘Other’ has implicit bearing on visual arts production, including printmaking in the Asia-Pacific region and its reception. This is because it is

58 Rosalind Krauss 1983, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, op. cit. The essay was originally published on October 8, Spring 1979. In The Anti-Aesthetic, Douglas Crimp published ‘On the Museum’s Ruins’; Craig Owens, ‘The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism’; Edward W. Said, ‘Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community’.

59 Leo Steinberg 1972, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth Century Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

60 For instance, Edward Said 1994, Culture and Imperialism, London: Verso.

35 geographically remote from Euramerica and, historically at least, it has been subject to colonialist prejudices.

In relation to the issue of transculturalism, a number of scholars involved with the exhibition and conference of the Queensland Art Gallery’s Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) project, during the period 1993 -99, are also seminal to this thesis. They include Caroline Turner (1993), who led the project and edited a book of essays, Tradition and Change, which coincided with the first Triennial.61 However, to avoid only citing interpreters and translators decoding cultures outside their direct sphere of experience, intellectuals are cited who have (through their nationality) a direct knowledge of the previously considered ‘subaltern history of the margins’.62 This is crucial, because the voice of the previously suppressed ‘Other’ has been at the core of postcolonial theory and practice.

Among the essayists contributing to the APT project were Geeta Kapur, and Apinan Poshyananda, whose overview of art in the Asia-Pacific included an assessment of the significant impact of American style capitalism on the region.63 A later essay, by Kapur (1997), on ‘Globalisation and Culture’ in the journal Third Text, takes the issue further.64 Here Kapur reminds readers that, ‘What is being globalised is therefore American style capitalism and its implicit worldview.’65 This thesis raises the impact of dominant Euramerican values as early as the 1950s and 1960s on the printmaking of the case studies under review. It also accords with what Kapur states as being a ‘postcolonial/postmodern entanglement’, where non-Euramerican artists face strategic

61 Caroline Turner (ed.) 1993, Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Kirker was involved as a curator in the Triennial 1993 - 99.

62 A term used by Homi K. Bhabha in his classic text, The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 1994 and 2007. The 2007 edition is used for this thesis.

63 See Caroline Turner (ed.) 1993, op. cit.

64 Papers presented in the ‘Globalisation + Art + Cultural Difference’ conference, organised by Artspace, Sydney, 27- 29 July 2001, included international and local speakers who are regular contributors to Third Text. Particularly noteworthy papers at this conference were delivered by Gerardo Mosquera (from Cuba and New York) and Nikos Papastergiadis (from Melbourne). Mosquera analysed the interaction of opposite tendencies toward homogenisation and difference in contemporary art and culture as a result of globalisation; Papastergiadis addressed how societies interpret the meaning of human diversity. These papers were later published as essays in Nikos Papastergiadis (ed.) 2003, Complex Entanglements: Art, Globalisation and Cultural Difference, Sydney: Rivers Oram Press in association with Artspace.

65 Geeta Kapur 1997, `Globalisation and Culture’, Third Text, No. 39, Summer p. 21.

36 choices in how to express the shifts between the centre and the periphery, the local and the global. ‘The postcolonial artist may be seen navigating the void between these seductively posed polarities, sustaining a romance by turning exoticised otherness into social re-alignments.’66

Issues to do with expatriatism and/or dual citizenship (the heterogeneous process of identity that it can bring; the tensions between one culture and another, displacement, nostalgia and memory) are important parts of this thesis. This is because three of the artists (Prawat, Shimada and Arnold) divide their time between their places of birth and their adopted home bases in a Euramerican context. They are in a sense, ‘bi-cultural’ or transcultural. These terms apply also to Judy Watson, whose work straddles urban and traditional Aboriginal cultural mores and belief systems. Hence writers who have matured intellectually beyond the borders of a single nation have great relevance here. They include not only Kapur but also the postcolonial literary writer Homi Bhabha, whose seminal text, The Location of Culture (1994) was made a Routledge classic in 2004.

2.4 The Postmodern Condition and Non-Western Epistemologies

Engagements of cultural difference may be consensual and also conflictual (as Arnold’s and Maddock’s print works attest). In his book Bhabha writes on the interstices or ‘in- between’ spaces that allow ‘the overlap and displacement of domains of difference’, including cultural values to be productively negotiated.67 ‘They may confound our definitions of tradition and modernity’, he states, and ‘realign the customary boundaries between private and the public, high and low; and challenge normative expectations of development and progress’.68 Other writers I have drawn inspiration from include the academic Madan Sarup, who problematises any simplistic reading of ‘identity’ within the postmodern milieu,69 and Trinh T. Minh-Ha. Trinh is the author of When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics (1991), and her perceptions of the

66, ibid., p.25.

67 Bhabha 2007, op. cit., p.2

68 ibid. p.3

69 Madan Sarup 1996, Identity, Culture and the Postmodern World, Edinburgh University Press.

37 ‘positioning’ of commentators (whether they reside inside or outside the subject context) has informed my understanding of arguments proposed in this thesis.70

A core question about the case study artists relates to the fact that they all, by choice, trained as printmakers. In his 1996 book The Return of the Real: the avant-garde at the end of the century, Hal Foster, well-known for his earlier writings on postmodernism, re- evaluates his position.71 In this publication he writes, ‘Crucial … is the relation between turns in critical models and returns of historical practices…. how does a reconnection with a past practice support a disconnection from a present practice and/or a development of a new one?”72 While acknowledging the clichéd models of postmodernism, Foster has become less interested in ruptures and breaks and more interested in turns and shifts. For this reason, The Return of the Real is a key reference text for my dissertation.

An interview with Foster by Miwon Kwon (1996) at the time of the release of his book further asserts a guiding principle I adopt. For with respect to the subject of ‘interdisciplinarity’, Foster, as I do, underscores the importance of knowing the modes of artistic practice; what actually makes up the basics of a discipline. He is quoted as saying that, in order to transform a field in a substantive way, it is necessary to be grounded in it first; ‘there are particular knowledges inscribed in artistic practices and academic disciplines that are not dead letters – meanings and values there can be resignified and revalued.’73 While the print works described in this thesis may not be readily recognisable as the traditional editioned image on paper (made via etching, for example), they could not occur without the artists’ practical knowledge of such a mode of print production. In the realm of painting, Yves-Alain Bois (1990) had already taken Clement Greenberg and his followers to task by reinforcing the importance of what Bois defines as

70 Trinh T. Minh-Ha 1991, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics, New York: Routledge. The most relevant section and chapter for this concern are’ No Master Territories: Outside In Inside Out’.

71 Foster’s The Anti-Aesthetic 1983, op. cit, is famous in the literature of postmodernism. In addition, Foster wrote ‘Re- Post’ in Brian Wallis (ed.) 1984, Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, and in his 1996 book (reprinted in 1999, the edition used in this thesis), The Return of the Real: the avant-garde at the end of the century, Foster devoted a chapter to postmodernism, ‘Whatever Happened to Postmodernism’, Boston: MIT Press.

72 ibid. p.x

73 Miwon Kwon 1996, ‘The Return of the Real: an interview with Hal Foster’, Flash Art, March/April, p.62.

38 `materialist formalism’. He claimed that material specificity and physical construction cannot be divorced from interpreting the pictorial image.74

The printmakers examined in this thesis have modes of operation that are eclectic; negotiating both fundamental formal principles and the transgressive. Resistances and alternatives are a condition of postmodernity, as Jean-Francois Lyotard makes clear in his The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984): ‘I define postmodernism as incredulity toward metanarratives,’ he states.75 In the examples taken from Japan, Australia and Thailand, departures from convention are the norm. Yet they have an integrity and confidence for the very reason that they are grounded in tradition. The new forms of the print that the case study artists have created forge the possibility of fresh directions in the field.

This thesis studies the works under review as a means of developing a group of concepts that reveal fundamental printmaking issues, yet articulate them to demonstrate their place in the shifting landscape of contemporary art practice. Furthermore, while questions to do with originality and reproduction, the importance of manual gesture, replication of an image, copying and translation, and deferment of the image from its matrix, are crucial to a thesis on printmaking, they cannot be analysed in isolation from the cultural contexts where such image-making occurs.

While writing this thesis, I have asked, ‘How do our traditional interpretations of these traditional print considerations alter when confronted by the case studies in question’? and ‘To what extent is “process” at the heart of the works’ meaning?’ I have also asked, ‘What criteria of analysis should be applied to the imagery of these artists when they are products of the Asia-Pacific region or are by artists straddling at least two geopolitical zones, in a postmodern and globalised context’?

74 Yves-Alain Bois 1990, Painting as Model, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

75 Jean-Francois Lyotard 1984, ‘The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge’ in Lawrence Cahoone (ed.) 2003, From Modernism to Postmodernism, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, p.260. This is a seminal anthology of key texts by eminent thinkers, chiefly of Western descent, including in Part 111 – ‘Postmodernism and the Re-evaluation of Modernity’, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Lyotard and Luce Irigary.

39 By using the work of theorists and print commentators outlined in this chapter as a basis for my arguments, it has been imperative to evaluate their contributions with empirical evidence (the print productions themselves) and develop ideas that more accurately define printmaking in the 1980s and 1990s. Significant transformations have occurred within the formerly isolated field of printmaking through the work of Noda, Shimada, Maddock, Arnold, Watson, Prawat and Phatyos. Collectively, these highly accomplished artists demonstrate how the visual arts in the postmodern era cannot be confined to Euramerican examples. Postcolonial discourse and transculturalism have proved that the reading of our contemporary moment is incomplete when this pattern is maintained. Through their individually conceived practice, the artists revolutionised the print domain from previously marginalised geographical contexts. They generated imagery that radically revised outmoded expectations of printmaking.

40 Chapter 3 METHODOLOGY

3.1 The Nature of the Research Problem

‘… by focussing in depth and from a holistic perspective, a case study can generate both unique and universal understandings’.76

A case study approach involving the selection of particular nations and artists underpins and guides this thesis. I chose this methodology for my investigation because I wanted to focus my research and avoid superficial generalisations, tokenism and oversimplification. This particular case study was supplemented by observations from other visual arts contexts and references to cultural theory (especially with respect to postmodernism, postcolonialism and globalisation).

Case study methodology research began in the late 1960s as part of the move towards qualitative approaches to research, and is now widely accepted across many academic disciplines.77 It is a means to study the uniqueness of the particular in order to understand an evolving phenomenon (in this case, printmaking). The epistemology of the particular has been considered in depth by theorists such as Helen Simons, quoted above, and Robert E. Stake, and their writings are germane to the research reported in this thesis.

Case studies connect well with qualitative research, which is a field of inquiry that relates to a range of disciplines and subject matters but uses specific examples rather than a random selection for organising and reporting information. However, quantitative research methods are still employed in this thesis, as the ‘what, where and when’ attributes of the quantitative model of investigation are reflected in the historical preambles to each case study area. This is because, in order to investigate the ‘why and how’ of decision making in the print works discussed, a historical perspective is required.

76 Helen Simons, 1996,`The Paradox of Case Study’, Cambridge Journal of Education, Vol. 26, No. 2, p.225.

77 See for instance Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (eds.) 2000, Handbook of Qualitative Research, Second Edition, California: Sage Publications

41 Nevertheless, the qualitative inquiry that I use for case studies of particular artists is intended to draw attention to what can be uniquely learned from their selection. One of my key objectives is to optimise the appreciation of the cases - particularly as they have been subject to the forces of postmodernism (such as the interdisciplinary and intermedia tendencies) and the way the selected artists have selected aspects of it to suit their own agendas as innovative printmakers. These artists from the Asia-Pacific region have utilised and reappraised postmodernism to reinvigorate the discipline of the print.

I do not seek neat conclusions. In fact, the methodology I use refutes resolution and asserts that this thesis is an important staging post in the study of how a discrete discipline (that of the print), through the cases selected for investigation, can reinvigorate debate on that discipline whilst maintaining its open-endedness. Having stated this, the ‘specificity’ and ‘bounded-ness’ of case study methodology, to use Stake’s terms, is important, as it has greater usefulness in providing focused insights and refinements of theory, theory which may well challenge as much as confirm dominant paradigms about printmaking.78

In studying the different cases, it is important to note that the thesis represents an instrumental study that chooses innovative printmakers ‘because it is believed that understanding them will lead to better understanding, perhaps better theorising, about a still larger collection of cases’.79 On this point, the seminal texts of the 1970s written by art theorist Rosalind Krauss, when describing the paradigmatic shifts in the art discipline of sculpture, are significant. In the introduction to Passages of Modern Sculpture, she argues for a case study approach over an historical survey: ‘These case studies are intended to develop a group of concepts that is not only revealing of the sculptural issues involved in the particular works in question but can also be generalised to apply to the wider body of objects that form the history of sculpture in the past century.’ 80

78 Robert E. Stake 1998, ‘Case Studies’, in Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (eds.), Strategies of Qualitative Inquiry, California: Sage Publications, p.87.

79 ibid. p. 89.

80 Rosalind E. Krauss 1981, ‘Introduction’, Passages in Modern Sculpture, Boston: MIT Press, pp. 5, 6. First published in 1977 by The Viking Press

42 Krauss asserted that traditional historical surveys have often been limited in depth of analysis and restricted by ideological biases.81 For the most part, Western authors have followed a chronological format when investigating cultural phenomena and have restricted their analysis to Euramerican models. Inevitably, such surveys were plotted along a vertical axis with little concern for developing a horizontal reading of art’s numerous trajectories. This usually excluded the histories and voices of others and propped up what postmodernism identified as a system of ‘metanarratives’. The survey model also tends to eschew the possibility of a non-rationalist model, even ambivalent articulation of experience and events. Whilst the Krauss ‘case study’ approach does not always ameliorate issues pertaining to gender and ethnicity, it has enabled a circumvention of the methodologies associated with orthodox historical surveys. She was able to infer a broader spectrum of information by employing a limited number of artists and works and reanimating them in a deeply informed and provocative manner.

In light of Krauss’ approach, my study chooses printmakers who most accurately reflect transformative processes in their work. Furthermore, their work reflects cultural and historical contexts of countries in the Asia-Pacific region (Japan, Australia and Thailand). The transformative processes in these artists’ prints reflect regional dynamics and also their identification with other locations and contexts, such as the United States of America. There are also other contexts impacting on the evolution of the print practices covered in these cases, which go beyond the geophysical. These revolve around an individual’s sensibility and belief systems. As Stake advises, ‘ the case is a complex entity operating within a number of contexts, including the physical, economic, ethical, and aesthetic’.82

Each case study site and the artists selected to represent it, are singular. However, the site is influenced by various domains that have direct relevance to the print imagery produced by the artists and that create a complexity that demands disciplined strategies for data collection and analysis. For example, the printmaking produced by the artists I select emerges from the history and status of the print within the countries concerned (as

81 Such as the so-called ‘master syndrome’, whereby female artists have been neglected, as have artists of colour and those whose work could not be easily categorised within the visual arts.

82 Stake, op. cit., p.91.

43 inferred above), the nature and agenda of ‘gate-keepers’ influencing the careers of the artists researched, and the interpretation of the imagery within and beyond the sites of production. Given these factors, it was expected that numerous ambiguities and paradoxes would emerge and needed to be addressed as part of the analysis of each case site.

3.2 Case Study Methodology

The thesis was initiated because of my direct experience as a researcher in this field. I began as a practising printmaker and then undertook a career as a curator and theorist in printmaking, especially as it evolved in the twentieth century. The specific research topics in this dissertation were prompted by ten years of field work in the South Pacific, East Asia and South-East Asia, connected with the Queensland Art Gallery’s Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art project. In 1996, I wrote in the exhibition catalogue that Australians:

… are discovering in their contact with Asia, a liberating alternative to European ideals. The challenge in addressing new orders is not to dismiss the old art histories and professional contacts, but to incorporate them into a broader and ultimately more enriching pool of knowledge. This development does not extend in a linear fashion but traverses an infinite number of paths by which to explore the multidimensional nature of contemporary art practice. It does not dismiss the tradition of art emanating from Europe or North America but places it in perspective with the particularities of societies thriving outside the immediate sphere of influence of these two powers.83

As a curator, I acted in an advocacy role for the printmakers I supported but relinquished this perspective to some degree while writing this academic thesis. While in-depth and accurate scholarship is a requirement for curatorial research, scepticism is kept at bay and art works are treated as instances of excellence in their particular genre or as suitable indicators of a particular movement or school. Criticality is often diminished within the art museum world, in order for artworks to be appreciated by a broad-based audience that anticipates that prints (for instance) acquired for the collection and/or exhibited, are exemplary instances of their genre or informative of a theme or art movement. This thesis

83 Anne Kirker, 1996,`Bridging the East-West Divide: A Challenge for Curators’, in The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art exh. cat., Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, p.32.

44 was written without the pressure to appeal to a wide readership (with or without a specialist appreciation of the print), or to justify acquisitions for a public institution or to suit exhibition criteria.

My dissertation is concerned with exploring and charting new ways of understanding the expanding nature of printmaking within the Asia-Pacific region in the postmodern era. Using a selected range of printmakers, I also allude to their impact on other art practitioners and contemporary sociological contexts. This thesis is not intended to fuel discourse on ‘exoticism’ and the ‘Other’ in contemporary culture, although this may be a byproduct. I cannot converse or read texts in Thai and Japanese, except through translation, yet I have nevertheless measured translations of these artists’ works against my own assessment of their practice and my knowledge of the historical and cultural contexts in which it is produced. I have also endeavoured to discuss readings and drafts with those who have extensive knowledge of the region and its cultural practices, as well as relying upon the expertise of my academic supervisors and other professionals. Thus, I trust that the thesis is representative not only of ‘what we come to know, but to see what we don’t’.84

Simon’s concerns with the ‘paradox’ of case study research ties in well with theories of postmodernism, i.e. the latter’s critical stance towards the certainty and homogeneity of modernist traditions. Lyotard’s meditations on postmodernism in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, summarised that movement’s aim of proposing ‘[an] incredulity towards metanarratives’. 85 This is a crucial observation and lies at the heart of developments of the practices of the artists I examine and my broader arguments pertaining to printmaking.

With this acknowledgment that the old hierarchies and canons accruing to the visual arts are no longer relevant for evaluating contemporary art, new strategies and theoretical modes are proposed. Postmodernism serves this thesis well, yet as the theorist Warren Montag argues, generally `We act within a specific conjecture only to see that conjecture transformed beneath our feet, perhaps by our intervention itself, but always in ways that

84 Simons 1996, op. cit., p.226

85 Lyotard 1984, op. cit. p.260

45 ultimately escape our intention or control, thereby requiring new interventions ad infinitum’.86

One of the purposes of postmodernism (and as a corollary, this thesis) is to search for and generate new sets of rules and categories. However, as fixed orthodoxies are intellectually abhorrent to me, I have implemented the spirit of contingency and change in my inquiry. In the case studies, I have, where possible, resisted prior assumptions evident in traditional theoretical treatments of these printmakers, and the cultures from which they spring. The artists concerned are all `lateral thinkers’ in the way they approach their art practice and therefore my methodology was tailored to suit.

Writing as a Caucasian woman, I am aware that the binary oppositions that have dominated Western thinking, and that work to privilege one subject over another, extend to the positioning of one culture over another. Despite the realisation we now have of the limitations of a fixed concept of identity and the inadequacy of maintaining non-Western cultures as the ‘Other’, prejudices still run deep. Although geographical boundaries have been radically undermined by the spread of new technologies and increased human mobility, people remain determined to accord privileges within power accentuated value systems.

In my early research feedback from the artists concerned, I was sometimes subtly called to account for elements of racial prejudice that I needed to address. These exchanges with the case study artists illuminated aspects of the research; without them my thesis would be inaccurate and incomplete. In the research I therefore endeavoured to be sensitive to my own conditioning and also to that of a ‘new internationalism’ where there are epistemological and demographic limits to ethnocentric ideas.87

This situation can override the simplistic assumption that people of a certain race, class and gender are subject to the same value systems and experience. There are commonalities between peoples, but there are differences also that can come to light

86 Warren Montag 1988, ‘What is at Stake in the Debate on Postmodernism?’ in ed. E. Ann Kaplan, Postmodernism and Its Discontents, London: Verso, p.102.

87 Bhabha 2007, op. cit., p. 6.

46 with, for instance, the learning of other languages, which assist in seeing the world in other ways than Euramerican. Language itself can blend codes that come from universal etymological English and an Asian-originating one, even in a single dialogue. An example where this happens in Australia is Darwin, where according to the Australia- based artist Dadang Christanto, Bahasa Indonesia is spoken as a second language to English.88 There are numerous processes that work against the assumption that, because a person is from a certain country, they hold essentialist values and practices believed to accrue to it and that every facet of an artist’s life and work follows accordingly.

Furthermore, the geographical context of where an artist chooses to live and work, and where he or she exhibits, are not always the same. Clark (1999) makes the point (when differentiating between two Indian sculptors with international reputations - Anish Kapoor residing in London, and N.N. Rimzon, who exhibits from his base in New Delhi), that the ‘differentiation is between a vertical, unicentral model of art assimilation to Euramerican canons, and a horizontal, polycentral discourse between differently constituted centres, none of which claim to assimilate, nor indeed reconstitute, a canon.’ 89

It is Clark’s delineation of such territories that informs my assessment of printmaking practice in the Asia-Pacific region. This is despite the fact that artists produce work within and outside it, use their indigenous languages for communication and also adopt foreign languages, such as English (sometimes with altered codes). Whilst the comparison between the cooption by Britain of Kapoor as one of their own and hence privileged above Rimzon (who resides in ) is persuasive, it does not, however, fit every case. Ever since postmodern discourse challenged the entrenched belief in the mastery of Euramerican ideals and location, it appears that such conceptions have been progressively floundering and identity is now generally acknowledged as a fluid and contingent phenomenon. This is reinforced by Stuart Hall (1990) who said, ‘Every

88 Dadang Christanto (b. 1957, Central Java) settled in Australia in 1999. Based on conversation with Anne Kirker 10 June 2008.

89 John Clark 1999, op. cit., p.5.

47 identity is placed, positioned, in a culture, a language, a history…But it is not tied to fixed, permanent, unalterable conditions. It is not wholly defined by exclusions.’90

There are many paradoxes that occur with respect to the case study artists, and these have been used as opportunities to examine and, on occasions, dispel prior assumptions about cultural identity in relation to geographical location. For example, Prawat Laucharoen has lived for many years in New York, yet his reputation as an artist remains largely linked to Thailand. On the other hand, Shimada Yoshiko spent much of her early career in the United States and because her feminist work was not tolerated in Japan.

3.3 The Cases and Criteria for Selection

The major research sites for this thesis are Japan, Australia and Thailand, and there are tangential references to New York and Berlin. From these three principal cultural contexts, seven printmakers were chosen as research subjects, two each from Japan and Thailand and three from Australia.

Judy Watson, a Murri (Queensland Indigenous) artist, was a significant choice for the Australian case study. A central requirement for the case study artists is that they have evolved imagery through their own experience as trained printmakers. While Watson is not unique among Indigenous artists in this regard, her work shows how postmodernism can assist our understanding of printmaking in Aboriginal Australia, when such imagery is produced and controlled by the artist concerned. I was reluctant to include an Indigenous Australian printmaker from a remote Aboriginal community because such artists are not necessarily trained in printmaking themselves and because their imagery (bold and striking though it is, and successful in communicating custodianship of country and cultural identity) may not have the same far-reaching consequences for the field of printmaking as the work of trained printmakers.91 I was furthermore troubled by the marketing imperative driving the production and promotion of many Indigenous prints

90 Stuart Hall 1990, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’ in Jonathon Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hall drew upon his Caribbean background (in Jamaica) as a point of departure for this essay.

91 For example, artists of the stature of David Malangi, Philip Gudthaykudthay and Paddy Dhatangu produced relief prints and lithographs in the 1990s assisted by master printers, more particularly Theo Tremblay.

48 created collaboratively, even though contractual arrangements are in place and dispersion is often through Aboriginal controlled organisations.

Watson’s prints demonstrate a cross-cultural fluidity, based on both her Aboriginal and Anglo-Saxon ancestry and an assertion of her matrilineal heritage. She communicates her Aboriginal ancestry through a personal symbology and innovative print vocabulary that do not readily equate with the printmaking produced by non-urban based Aboriginal peoples. In stating this, it also must be understood that there is a political dimension to Watson’s nuanced lithographs and etchings that calls attention to past injustices towards Aboriginal peoples, particularly in Queensland.

Thailand is one of the so-called ‘newly industrialised countries’ in South-East Asia and as such demonstrates the tensions between a past rural economy and a rapidly advancing globalised urban-centric one. The adaptation of print artists to this phenomenon in the latter part of the twentieth century is a leitmotif to their highly innovative installation practice. Thailand was juxtaposed with Japan, a sophisticated economic entity that has a much longer, venerable print tradition, and with Australia, where the Euramerican model has provided an initial platform and where there is now an active postcolonial discourse. This study sought to examine innovation in a field of art production (the print) that had a strong presence in these three contexts, not only in the period concentrated upon in this thesis, namely the 1980s and 1990s.

3.4 Data Collection and Analysis

In the course of this investigation, the case study methodology addressed characteristics of printmaking as interpreted in three countries, taking into account:

 The history of the appraisal of printmaking traditions.

 The history of the three countries in the development of contemporary printmaking and the impact of postmodernism.

49  The transcultural dialogue and exchange between these countries and others, in the realm of the print - both pre- and postmodernism with the Euramerican perspective, and at the point of impact of the postmodern.

 The reasons why printmaking has become ‘deterritorialised’ and blended with other disciplines within the visual arts, using the three case study sites from the Asia-Pacific region as examples. .

In the course of the analysis of Japan, Australia and Thailand, extensive use was made of literature published on printmaking and contemporary (post 1960s) visual arts. Literature sources also took the form of books, exhibition catalogues and journals on contemporary Asian art and . Most of those texts published in Thailand and Japan are dual language. If the English translation was problematic, I sought clarification from sources within the country concerned and from my associate supervisor, John Clark. As a matter of course, I sought out publications that addressed issues of postmodernism, for example, those by Miyoshi and Harootunian (1989; 1993).92 This is because they presented a view of postmodernism outside the Euramerican viewpoint. I also took account of papers and presentations at a conference I attended (namely ISPA in Tokyo 2004) that had direct relevance to this thesis.

Where possible, I conducted interviews with the artists and experts in printmaking from the principal case study countries. I have matched (or contested) the results of these statements with empirical observation, that is, first-hand experience of viewing print projects and by image comparison.

For example, in Thailand, I contrasted the productions of Prawat and Phatyos with the ubiquitous ‘consensus art’ print practice that occurs in that country. According to Phatarawadee Phataranawik, ‘The official Thai art world has been geared towards political correctness: art institutions, competitions and exhibitions are all organized to cater to consensus art on the assumption that art must reflect characteristics that are

92 Masao Miyoshi and Harry D. Harootunian (eds.) 1989, Postmodernism and Japan, North Carolina: Duke University Press; Masao Miyoshi and Harry D. Harootunian (eds.) 1993, Japan in the World, North Carolina: Duke University Press

50 uniquely Thai…’93 This statement describes the technically flawless screenprints and etchings that contain sentiment serving interests (such as nationalism) and a middle-class market that prizes the decorative. The symbolic patterns of traditional craft (such as textiles) and the highly ornamental wats with their narrative murals have inspired numerous artists’ prints, which hang, for instance, in Western-style hotel lobbies in Thailand’s major cities. By comparison, the print installations of Prawat and Phatyos are avant-garde and present a radical reappraisal of what the print could mean in that country. Therefore, the officially sanctioned Thai printmaking movement (and the marketing of its products) is an important point of comparison.

I also interviewed artists (other than those studied) who were significant printmakers in Japan and Thailand (including expatriates), and Australia. As a matter of course, I consulted collectors, academics, art school instructors, art museum and commercial gallery personnel regarding the three case study social, cultural and artistic sites.

In the interviews, specific print image works were cited to contextualise ideas. Interview questions relating to pre-reading were developed and they prompted questions to assist in developing and elaborating theoretical issues I raised as the interviewer. Where necessary, interpreters and translators were used. They were chiefly experts in the field of contemporary visual arts. The interview questions were tailored to the print imagery and the specific circumstances of each artist’s practice, such as choice of materials, style, impact of traditions, and impact of postmodernism.

For example, certain questions put to Noda Tetsuya focussed on the pivotal role that photography has played in his printmaking. Not surprisingly, this line of questioning had already been anticipated by the artist, as indicated by a statement published in 1980: ‘About my work: some call it photography; some call it printmaking. I don’t care what people call it. This is my expression.’94 I asked the question because it was an obvious one to open more probing and revealing issues. I also knew (from my prior contacts with

93 Phatarawadee Phataranawik 1998.’‘When Two Become One’, in Jonathan Watkins and Jo Spark (eds.), Every Day: 11th Biennale of Sydney, Exhibition Catalogue, Sydney: Shanghart Gallery, p.36.

94 Noda Tetsuya cited in Margaret K. Johnson and Dale K. Hilton 1980, op. cit., p.164

51 him) that Noda would dismiss a line of questioning that employed theoretical terms such as ‘postmodernism’.

Later on I referred to the blue tents for the homeless erected in Ueno Park near Noda’s place of work, which I had not seen on previous visits to Tokyo. I realised that his interest in the quotidian extended beyond his family and the autobiographical to demonstrate compassion for the less fortunate in Japanese society. Noda produced a series of prints based on the tent imagery in 1998, restraining himself from photographing their occupants.

In the Australian context, Bea Maddock was asked why her editioned panorama Terra Spiritus (1993-98) was not produced as a series of etchings with aquatint, but rather, as an ochre crayon drawing duplicated with the aid of tracing templates. She replied that the depth of colour and its direct link with the earth of made it imperative that she employ ochre crayon and not imported manufactured ink.

3.5 Issues of Reliability and Validity

I was mindful of the pitfalls in drawing conclusions from information derived from interviews. Researchers often seek to eliminate inconclusiveness in the drive for certainty. They also tend to have a preconceived idea of what response they expect and sometimes intentionally (or unwittingly) ‘put words in the interviewee’s mouths’. My own experience has taught me otherwise. I have learnt over the years that it is necessary to be flexible and responsive to the artist, art administrator, collector or curator consulted in each case site. Since I first started travelling to Japan and Thailand in the early 1990s, I have found that by employing an interpreter in Tokyo, Kyoto, Chiang Mai or Bangkok, for example (usually a colleague or friend of the interviewee), any problem of bias is offset by familiarity with the artist and his/her work and the easy rapport that can be established.95

95 For instance, in Bangkok, Professor Somporn Rodboon acted as a facilitator, and at times, interpreter, in my interviews during the 1990s with Thai artists from her base at Silpakorn University. This recurred later when this much admired supporter of Thai avant-garde artists took up an art administration position in Chiang Mai.

52 Nevertheless, there may be an agenda, on the part of the interpreter, to indirectly promote the artist. On this point I was guided by experts in case study research such as Simons (1996).96 In ‘The Paradox of Case Study’ she argues that ‘we may need to search for “new ways of seeing” and new forms of understanding, not only to represent what we come to know, but to see what we don’t’.97 This observation was salient with respect to the case study sites of Japan and Thailand (where the first language is not English). This was despite the increasing usage of English amongst well-educated artists who wished to find new markets for their work, gain training and residencies abroad and attract exhibition opportunities outside their country of birth. This, in turn, raised questions of adaptation to attain personal goals.

On this point, Simons’ observation also pertains to Judy Watson in Australia, whose work straddles both her Aboriginal and her European heritage. As part of the methodology, I made a point wherever possible of showing drafts of sections of the thesis to the artists concerned for feedback. This ensured that there was a direct rapport between myself as researcher and the artist as subject. Given my Caucasian background, it was salutary to be reminded of how deeply ingrained racial prejudices and assumptions are buried within dominant Western discourses and language. For instance, in the Australian case study chapter, Watson asked me ‘Why always “Anglo” or “Euramerican”, why not “non-Aboriginal”?’98

3.6 Synthesis

Data from these transcript interviews, correspondence, notes, and the literature mentioned above, were collated and I added the material I had already accumulated over a decade and a half on the print in the Asia-Pacific region, into files. During that time I had visited Japan and Thailand on several occasions, carrying out contemporary art research. These files of pre-existing observations and more recent findings added to the thesis, as did visual evidence of the practice of the case study artists in particular (slides, photographs, illustrations and later, Web-based printouts).

96 Simons 1996, op. cit.

97ibid, p.226.

98 Written feedback on thesis draft by Judy Watson to Anne Kirker, 21 May 2008.

53

Hence my thesis adopted a case study approach as a way of drawing together a variety of data sources about printmaking practices and relevant contemporary art in different sites. I not only substantiated my pre-existing knowledge of printmaking in the three countries concerned, but also found out new and original insights through this thesis-directed research; insights not influenced by museum curatorship. The rationale for a rigorous academic case study approach (based not only on interviews) was the need to test and ground my findings arising from the research. Each re-engagement with those artists I knew well brought fresh material to evaluate. With the print practitioners I had less contact with (chiefly because of travel constraints), I was able to draw upon questions posed in email correspondence and current literature on their work. To deny the appropriateness of the case study approach for this thesis is to deny the very research questions under scrutiny.

Criteria for the selection of the artists and the case study sites were developed and data gathering conformed to the accepted practices of open interviewing, textual and visual analysis and filed note synthesis.

After examining the various data sources as they related to the case studies, certain conclusions and propositions were formulated and articulated. Further verification was sought (for instance, in the case of Judy Watson).These are noted in the relevant places in the thesis. In doing this, closure was delayed as long as possible to consider the various paradoxes identified in the cases. The results of this means of analysis sought to particularise in a way that was generative, without generalising. This distinction was seen as significant in the methodology as a way of being faithful to the particular and moving beyond it.

3.7 Research Design

The following diagram illustrates the overall design path for the research. It illustrates how the individual cases followed from problem identification through to identifying emerging themes and then ultimately to answering the research questions.

54 The Research Problem and its Context

Case 1: Japan Case 2: Australia Case 3: Thailand

Data includes: Data includes: Data includes:

Literature (print- Literature (print- Literature (print- based visual arts, based visual arts, based visual arts, Theory) Theory) Theory)

Interviews Interviews Interviews

Empirical Empirical Empirical evidence evidence evidence

Analysis by Analysis by Analysis by constant constant constant comparative comparative comparative strategies strategies strategies

Leading to themes Leading to themes Leading to themes emerging from emerging from emerging from analysis of these analysis of these analysis of these

Cross-case analysis to identify the uniqueness of each site and the commonalities resulting in propositions that inform the research outcomes as elaborated in Chapter 7: Conclusion and Propositions

55 Chapter 4 CASE STUDY 1 JAPAN

‘Photographic Interventions’: The Prints of Noda Tetsuya and Shimada Yoshiko

4.1 Introduction

Japan will always be a member of the basic comparative set of variations in understanding modern Asian art because it has the longest and to date by far the most visibly documented series of modern artworks in Asia.99

Within its wealth of documented visual arts imagery, Japan is recognised for having a distinctive and venerable .100 In recent decades, this culture has been subjected to postmodern and global tendencies that have prompted a shift in aesthetic values. However, printmaking from the Edo and Meiji eras has, in terms of Western recognition, eclipsed that of the contemporary visual arts realm. The sōsaku hanga (creative prints) movement of twentieth century Japan has not made an impact externally and internally like that of the ukiyo-e colour woodblock prints two centuries earlier. This chapter will rectify this anomaly by demonstrating how contemporary printmaking, in the hands of two artists in particular, reflects progressive ideas and forms that have value both for the print field in Japan, and international contexts.

Historically, the highly regulated, guild-based practice of printmaking in Japan has tended to isolate the print from mainstream (‘high profile’) exposure. It must be stated at the outset, that few printmakers have successfully moved, or significantly, even tried to move, their print work out of this circumscribed situation.101 Unlike photography, a medium also capable of producing multiple copies (or impressions), the contemporary fine art print from Japan has, with only a few exceptions, ceased to matter in significant exhibitions inside and outside its country of origin.102

99 John Clark 1998, op.cit.p.13

100 The published literature in Japanese, English and other languages on Japanese ukiyo-e, sōsaku hanga and related print fields is extensive, more so than literature on German, English and French printmaking. The number of print associations in twentieth century Japan is unrivalled.

101 Many late twentieth century Japanese printmakers aspire to hold solo exhibitions in Tokyo and set their sights on exhibiting in international print forums, including the Tokyo Print Biennale (1957-79).

102 Arakawa Shūsaku (b.1936) is an example of a Japan-born artist whose reputation has been established chiefly outside that country and who has had a high profile career. Born in Nagoya and trained in Tokyo, he settled in New York in 1961.

56

There was a vigorous appraisal of printmaking in Japan during the early 1970s and in the early 2000s, but the creative print has largely not broken from the tightly affiliated print infrastructures within Japan.103 There remains an insistence in Tokyo, Kyoto and elsewhere that printmaking is a medium with its own unique mission and this inadvertently reinforces its separation from other artistic practices. This situation has resulted in a restricted market and clientele.

As the first case study site, Japan presents the challenges of a paradox. Since 1868, the marked binary tension between new and old, and its slippage, would seem to be the leitmotif of artists’ lives in that country. It is manifested either overtly, or subtly interwoven into printmakers’ and other visual artists’ studio practice. ‘Paradox’ is the first word used by Alexandra Munroe in her book on the avant-garde in Japanese art, Scream Against the Sky (1994).104 She states in the chapter ‘Modernism and Tradition’ that :‘The conflict between preserving tradition and cultivating ”world relevance” has been a subject of cultural, intellectual, and political debate since the Meiji Restoration of 1868’. Yet this matter has not been easily resolved, for as Munroe concludes, ‘despite the innovative theory and practice of avant-garde traditional arts groups in the post-war period, they have ultimately remained excluded from the international modern art canon because they were perceived as being ‘traditional’ and therefore ‘anti-modern’ and ‘anti-Western’.105

Munroe’s book does much to correct this situation, but some scholars who are positioned outside Japan have claimed that the radical art movements revealed by Munroe (including

His paintings and master-printed lithographs with screenprint of the late 1970s are indelibly linked to Western conceptualism. Refer to Arakawa’s Point Blank series of six prints from 1979.

The photography realm referred to includes contemporary photographers Sato Tokihiro, Sugimoto Hiroshi, and especially Morimura Yasumasa, who have all received prominent international recognition.

103 See Motoe Kunio’s 2004 essay, ‘Postwar Prints − With Focus on the 1970s’ in HANGA: Waves of East-West Cultural Interchange, exh. cat., Tokyo: Hagi Uragami Museum in association with Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. This exhibition was held at The University Museum Chinretsukan Gallery, Tokyo Geidai, to coincide with the ISPA (International Symposium of Print Art) at that university, 30 Nov. -5 Dec. 2004. ISPA was devised to address themes relevant to the contemporary print such as ‘Printmaking and Technology’ and ‘The Nature of Printmaking – its Verification and Reconstruction’. The symposium (with its associated HANGA exhibition) was the main concluding event of a year-long series of print exhibitions and forums throughout Japan.

104 Alexandra Munroe 1994, Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky, New York: Harry N. Abrams.

105 ibid., pp.125, 135. In this chapter, Munroe largely focuses upon the Bokujin-kai (calligraphyartists) and United States- based sculptor Isamu Noguchi.

57 the Gutai group of the mid-1950s and the Hi Red Center of the 1960s) were ‘clones’ of Western-driven movements, such as fluxus and conceptualism. Yet as Simons (1996) points out in ‘The Paradox of Case Study’; interpreting any field from the outside necessitates a process of ‘bracketing’ so that prior assumptions are recognised. The interpretation of visual arts imagery (no less than studies in Education, on which Simons is an authority), is always problematic when it is filtered through the eyes of someone situated outside the culture. This situation is compounded when the ‘outside’ commentator has a strong belief that imagery (for example, the print) should reflect a stereotypical notion of national identity.

These same commentators often resist alternative readings of national identity if they do not conform to a nostalgic longing for the past and a reluctance to accept shifting values in a changing world order. The same errors are also committed by observers within the cultures concerned, but such matters are not so easily consigned to monolithic notions of national expression. As Bhabha (2007) states, ‘The native intellectual who identifies the people with the true national culture will be disappointed. The people are now the very principle of “dialectical reorganisation” and they construct their culture from the national text translated into modern Western forms of information technology, language, dress. ‘106 This assessment also applies to modes of art practice.

Nevertheless, there is still an element of crudity associated with assumptions that contemporary Japanese art has relied heavily upon Western models without circumspection. Unfortunately, these misconceptions are insidious and widespread. For instance, Daniel Bell, a North American advocate of printmaker Noda Tetsuya (b.1940) – one of two artists highlighted in this chapter – sought to distinguish his subject from other practitioners in contemporary Japanese printmaking. In writing on Noda, Bell states:

With due respect to the few figures one can single out, a survey of contemporary Japanese prints leaves one with a dispirited feeling. The large Kodansha volume Contemporary Japanese Prints I [1983], the comprehensive presentation of 600 prints by 370 printmakers, demonstrates how derivative most of these are from Western prints – decorative, abstract without form, kitschy, with few references, if

106 Bhabha 2007, op. cit., p. 55.

58 any, to the past, either in style or subject matter.107

The implicit essentialism of Bell’s commentary accords with promotional materials published by dealers and agents for artists they represent. In this case the author was commissioned by Noda’s agent, the global Fuji Television Gallery in Tokyo. However, only those with a restricted, and possibly ill-informed, Eurocentric mindset would endorse Bell’s judgment. The reality is somewhat different, for, looking at the whole range of printmaking in Japan during the late twentieth century, Bell’s assessment is relevant only to a particular group of printmakers whose work has been condoned by key Japanese teaching institutions and powerful printmaking lobby groups.

Bell’s nostalgic championing of Noda demonstrates how interpretative analysis is so often grounded in personal preference. In Bell’s case – despite the fact that his essay on Noda has many compelling insights – the writer ignores the complexities of what comprises the ‘avant-garde’ (a Euramerican concept) in Japan’s history. The work of Onchi Kōshirō in the early twentieth century is a prime example. He unapologetically shifted the aesthetic codes of his printmaking between Euramerican art styles and those of classical ukiyo-e, therefore denying any intention to promote a set ‘style’ for his art. (Onchi will be discussed in more depth later in this chapter.) In the context of Japan, therefore, the ‘avant-garde’ can, after all, involve a process of working through tradition (as Noda does) as much as against it, as is cogently addressed by John Clark.108

One of the main reasons for choosing Noda Tetsuya as a primary case study artist for this thesis is his adroitness in collapsing the divide between ‘old’ and ‘new’ and his ability to generate a seamless dialogue between Japanese cultural traditions and international modern strands when interpreting life in the late twentieth century. Yet even beyond Noda, one can see that the marked binary tension between ‘new and old’ and its slippage has been a leitmotif in Japanese artists’ lives since the Meiji Restoration, and is overtly or subtly manifested. This phenomenon is aptly announced by Bhabha (2007) when he argues for a

107 Daniel Bell 2001, `Tetsuya Noda: An Appreciation’, in Tetsuya Noda: The Works III 1992 – 2000, the third volume of the artist’s catalogue raisonné , published by Noda’s agent Fuji Television Gallery, Tokyo, p.15. Bell is Harvard Professor and Emeritus. He is a print collector.

108 Clark 1998, op. cit. See chapter 9, ‘The Avant-Garde’, pp 217-36.

59 ‘hither and thither, back and forth’ reading of subject positions.109 However, the moment of transit Bhabha describes is, when it comes to Japan, about reciprocity, and it has a long history, as borne out in prints produced there during the eighteenth century.

From the postwar years (when the United States occupied Japan, 1945 52) to the present, Japan has developed into a major player in the global economy. In Western circles, Japan’s ascendance as an economic superpower, the effects of globalisation and the influence of postmodern critiques brought its art and culture into world focus during the early 1980s. One of North America’s longest surviving art journals, ARTnews, devoted a special issue to ‘Japanese Art: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow’ in September 1981. In the same decade, a number of contemporary Japanese art exhibitions were held in museums and galleries in Europe, the United States and Australia. On the political front, Japan was seen as Australia’s ‘most important Asian ally’, while in academic circles it was perceived as an ideal site for the phenomenon known as ‘transculturalism’.110 This latter concept gained currency among postcolonial theorists in the 1990s.

However, the Japanese print had long been subjected to transcultural exchange, despite the period of Japan’s supposed seclusion from outside influences (1600-1853). The prominent Tokyo etcher Nakabayashi Tadayoshi, in his essay ‘HANGA: Waves of East-West Cultural Interchange’ (2004), reminds readers that historically the print ‘mediated a cultural exchange between the East and the West because of its plurality and handiness’.111 In the eighteenth century the port city of Nagasaki, with its Dutch enclave and Chinese inhabitants, provided ample evidence of this cultural exchange. Original prints were both imported and produced there. These depicted a dialogue between differing pictorial and societal codes. It was by way of the Nagasaki ukiyo-e prints and copperplate engraving and etchings that Western aesthetic principles permeated through to Edo (old Tokyo). Nagasaki

109 Bhabha 2007, op. cit, p.2.

110 Mike Mansfield 1981, US Ambassador to Japan, quoted in his essay, ‘A Surge of Enthusiasm for Things Japanese’, ARTnews, Vol. 80, No. 7, September, p.85.

111 Nakabayashi Tadayoshi 2004, in HANGA: Waves of East-West Cultural Interchange, English supplement to exh. cat, op.cit. Aside from his etching practice, Nakabayashi is Professor of the Faculty of Fine Arts Printmaking Department at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.

As conveyers of information, print images were disseminated widely. It is only in the twentieth century that printmaking as a component of the fine arts became limited to artists’ editions.

60 stood for change and enterprise, and although Tokyo was not a port city, it took on similar characteristics, especially after the Meiji Restoration.112

The late Meiji period allowed Japanese artists to travel abroad and expand their knowledge of international art and some printmakers joined intaglio ateliers in France. During the same period, foreign artists skilled in etching came to Japan – among them were the French illustrator Georges Bigot, and the Englishman Bernard Leach. In the popular press, woodblock printing could not keep up with the demand for illustrations, and chromolithographs came into use, with other imported print processes. In short, there was considerable activity in the fields of creative printmaking driven by commercial advertising and mass media illustration. Such developments pressed Japanese printmakers into becoming accomplished in a diverse range of printmaking techniques.113

In his book Modern Asian Art (1998), Clark incorporates chapters that chart the histories of relevant printmaking, including chapters on ‘Models’ and ‘Modalities of Transfer’.114 The situation Clark addresses is determined by the internal growth of a society, marked by modernisation processes. He unapologetically relativises contact with ‘Western-style’ art as one key base for Asian modernism, yet the two-way process with France is the most obvious beneficiary in the late nineteenth century print realm.115

A further issue relates to the socio-political identity of Japan within the Asia-Pacific sphere. This has been candidly articulated by my second case study artist, Shimada Yoshiko (b.1959). In 1997 the artist wrote, ‘The term Japanese use to describe themselves: “we Japanese” is ambiguous. It is a position somewhere between West and East, a phrase that distinguishes Japanese from other Asians and from the West as well. Japan has shifted from militarism to an economic form of colonisation. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that military

112 For a comprehensive account of Nagasaki printmaking, refer to Masanobu Hosono 1978, Nagasaki Prints and Early Copperplates, Japanese Arts Library, Kodansha International Ltd and Shibundo, English edition. At the time of publication, Masanobu (b.1926) was chief curator in the art section of the Tokyo National Museum, where a large proportion of the prints illustrated are held.

113 See Elise K. Tipton and John Clark (eds.) 2000, Being Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp.202-203.

114 Clark 1998, op.cit.

115 It is well known that French Impressionism owed a tremendous debt to ukiyo-e printmaking. For a recent account, see Niizeki Kimiko 2004, ‘The East-West Exchange of Images through Prints: The Birth of Ukiyo-e and its Influence on Impressionism’, in HANGA: Waves of East-West Cultural Interchange, English supplement to exh. cat,.op.cit.

61 threat is non-existent in Japan, but domination over others is wielded more by economic power, and defines the term “others”’116

Cultural misconception is highlighted by Shimada’s comment. To the ‘outsider’, Japan has occasionally suggested an alternative to the West’s spiritual bankruptcy, as a release from dystopia to utopia. The novelist Arthur Koestler, for example, travelled to Japan in the late 1950s to discover whether the East could offer spiritual aid to the West. Yet he was disappointed, and recorded this in his The Lotus and the Robot (1960).

It is Tokyo especially, a city with numerous districts, where Japan presents a particularly contradictory and paradoxical face.117 By the early 1990s, Tokyo was considered by many to be ‘the ultimate Western style metropolis where ideas from around the globe are collected, consumed and spat out again, miniaturised and perfected, where television screens fit in the palm of the hand, where popular culture sits side by side with ancient rituals, where the Buddha presides alongside Gigantor and the transistor radio’.118 One art reviewer described this phenomenon as ‘Zen versus Disneyland’.119 Yet Japanese culture also presents a reverence for symbolic ceremony, natural simplicity and refinement, which rubs against the technologically sophisticated, constantly changing spectacle offered by the nation’s key metropolis ─ Tokyo.

Such spectacles prompted Roland Barthes to meditate on his visit to Japan and Tokyo in the 1950s in his book Empire of Signs (1970).120 Two decades later, Barthes’ ruminations on the eclectic barrage of cultural signifiers inspired an exhibition called A Cabinet of Signs, which addressed postmodern Japan. 121 Barthes’ ‘superficial’ tribute is very famous, but

116 Artist’s Statement in Catherine Osborne (ed.) 1997, Divide and Rule: Yoshiko Shimada, exh. cat., A Space Gallery, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 1 February-15 March, p.22

117 It is in the Kanto district, with Tokyo as its epicentre, where most print artists train, exhibit and live.

118 Ashley Crawford 1991, ntroduction to ‘Made in Japan’ issue of Tension 25 , March-April, p.16

119 Christine France 1992, ‘Eastern cultures, Western colours’ review of Zones of Love: Contemporary Art from Japan at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, curated by photography expert Judy Annear, in The Australian Weekend Review, August 8-9.

120 Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, was translated from the French into Japanese in a deluxe edition in 1974. It was translated into English by Richard Howard, Hill and Wang edition, 1983.

121 Richard Francis and Fumio Nanjo 1991, A Cabinet of Signs: Contemporary Art from Post-Modern Japan, Tate Gallery Liverpool, exh. cat.

62 Mark Morris has provided a valuable critique of Barthes’ Empire of Signs in his 1984 essay ‘Barthes/Japan: The texture of Utopia’. Morris argues that the semiotician ‘mistranslated’ his experience and fell into a habitual Western stereotyping of the ‘Other’.122 David Chess supported Morris’ reservations when reviewing Empire of Signs in 1999, and suggested that this text was mostly about the West’s images of Japan (or self-projection).123

The outsider continues to be intrigued and perplexed by the confluences of East and West and ‘new’ and ‘old’ that articulate the internal dynamics of Japanese society, and in turn its art making. Although the mass-produced prints of cartoonists and graphic illustrators are the obvious examples when citing postmodern dexterity, the printmaking I am concerned with just as powerfully manifests this culture’s heterogenous appropriations.124 Japanese printmakers are not unaffected by hi-tech illustrators and film animation; for after all these fields share an historical link with ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Some printmakers appropriate mass media imagery and re-contextualise it, but many feel anxious about their place in a digital age. This is borne out in recent group exhibitions of prints in Japan: for instance the Sapporo International Print Biennales held in Hokkaido 1991-99, where selected prints included those mediated by digital imaging with those employing traditional techniques.125

This apparent willingness to explore the print beyond conventional medium boundaries was exemplified by presenter Murai Mimi at the ISPA 2004 symposium, who spoke about ‘My style: An encounter between printmaking and the digital’ whilst screening an animation film based on digital photographs of her cartoon-like watercolours. She had been trained in woodblock printing, but her inexperience as a designer of animation did not inhibit her willingness to incorporate it into her printmaking practice.126 Despite such experimental approaches, many established print artists in Japan are resistant to the adoption of novelty

122 Mark Morris in his 1984 essay ‘Barthes/Japan: The texture of Utopia’, in Alan Rix and Ross Mouer (eds.), Japan’s Impact on the World, Victoria: Japanese Studies Association of Australia, University of Melbourne.

123 See David Chess’ comments at http://www.davidchess.com/words/revs/empsigns.html

124 The ubiquitous manga or comic books and the screenprinted poster designs of Yokoo Tadanori (b.1936) and his followers represent this rich field of popular print imagery.

125 The author was External Judge for the 5th Sapporo International Print Biennale in 1999. As with the other Sapporo Biennales, the External Judge was matched by four Japanese Judges.

126 However, the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, as arguably Japan’s leading art school, may well have felt it necessary to include in ISPA 2004 a youthful and innovative presence. Nevertheless, to many delegates, this inclusion appeared inappropriate and mere tokenism.

63 for its own sake.127 Furthermore, in the realm of the print, there is a distinct chasm between commercial design and fine art traditions. This is because Japanese printmakers have struggled to preserve their cultural legacy, a legacy that is not only about the ‘old’ as pure, unadulterated indigenous expression, but also, involves the understanding that ‘synthetic eclecticism’ (to use Munroe’s term) has been an essential component in Japanese art over centuries. This attention to tradition is combined with an ongoing critique (throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first) of Western cultural hegemony in Japan.128

4.2 Historical Premises for the Print in Japan

Of the three countries addressed in this thesis, Japan has the longest history of printmaking. The ukiyo-e hanga, or ‘floating world’ woodblock prints, of the shogun’s capital Edo, produced from the end of the seventeenth century, have sustained the attention of the West, especially since the Meiji Restoration. They were conceived as a populist art form and emerged principally with Edo (now Tokyo), and flourished during the Edo period 1600-1868.129 The imagery of this miniaturist, intricately printed art dealt with a limited and officially sanctioned range of subjects. These included courtesans in the Yoshiwara (‘red light’) quarter, erotic images for shunga albums, actors and scenes from the kabuki theatre, sumō wrestlers, samurai and scenes of combat, manga or sketch albums, and towards the end of its heyday (early to mid-nineteenth century), landscape views.

However, there have been centuries of regional specificity in Japanese printmaking.130 Japan had important regional centres like Nagasaki, Osaka and Yokohama that produced

127 Earlier, in the Nagasaki prints, etchings and engravings had practical and representational functions − to disseminate scientific information, panoramic views, maps and portraits of foreigners − and the ever-popular scenic views. As with other Asian cultures, the print in Japan served the country’s own needs and developmental dynamics and was not simply blind assimilation and transformation of imported styles and subject matter.

128 In Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky, 1994, op. cit., p. 23, Munroe writes of a symposium of distinguished intellectuals, academics and critics held in Kyoto in July 1942. Based on the topic ‘overcoming the modern’ (kindai no chōkoku), the event was the culmination of decades of debate that refuted Westernisation. The general sentiment was that ‘Japan was already modern but dangerously close to becoming a mere replica of the West.’ Western- style nihonga painting (which in turn was reflected in printmaking) was formally established as a course of instruction in the late nineteenth century. In spite of debate, it continued to be practised at Kyoto City Art School, Tokyo School of Fine Arts and at the Imperial Art School until being recognised more fully in the 1940s, paradoxically at the time of the Kyoto 1942 symposium. . 129 Ukiyo-e hanga literally translates as ‘woodblock prints of the floating world’. I use the term ‘populist’ to distinguish these prints from ‘high art’ forms in Japan.

130 Kyoto has through its art schools sustained a reputation for continuing to witness nature ’untainted’, as

64 their own distinctive forms of ukiyo-e.131 In the eighteenth century Nagasaki’s ukiyo-e tradition was technically the same as Edo’s but treated markedly different subjects. The traditional Japanese print in the former focused on the ’strange ways’ of the Dutch foreigners in Japan and on maritime subjects. In the nineteenth century, Osaka and Yokahama also had their own tradition of ukiyo-e prints. These specialised in the portrayal of kabuki actors in the former and scenes of port activity in the latter.

Ukiyo-e print production relied upon a print designer, block-cutter, printer and a publisher. This was the so-called ’ukiyo-e quartet’. The composition was drawn on thin tesuki washi (handmade paper), passed to an engraver who pasted it face down on a block of cherry wood, and then carved on the key-block or daiban. After that, a printer inked the key-block in black to establish the outline of the overall composition, and then proceeded (with assistants) to mix the separate colours for the additional blocks needed to complete the design. The collaboration between artist/designers and artisans was closely governed. This is borne out by the addition of characters and seals that referred not only to the subject depicted, but also disclosed the identity of the artist, engraver, printer, publisher and censor. The censor seals signified a control of publication and enforcement of copyright.

Ukiyo-e demonstrates two important factors. Firstly, it is the only print form originating from Japan that won wide international respect as a fine art form (and is collected accordingly) before its country of origin accepted it as such. Therefore, the industry of ukiyo-e print has come to be perceived as a ‘fine art’ form, purely through Western conceptual imposition. Secondly, in cultural terms, Japan has always been a highly regulated society where conciliation is a national imperative. Hence structures and systems are enforced to ensure harmony, conformity and productivity. Open dissent and departures

a major source of inspiration for printmakers’ work. Here, handmade paper (tesuki washi ) is a significant component of printmaking (and the processes of it are taught). Kurosaki Akira (b.1937) is a key practitioner of contemporary woodblock printing, using traditional ukiyo-e methods on handmade paper. With some prints he has used pigments made from persimmon juice and other natural pigments. Kurosaki is Professor in the Department of Printmaking and Papermaking at Kyoto Seika University. In contrast to Kyoto, printmakers living in Tokyo have simulated and manipulated the centuries-old Japanese response to the environment so that it conforms to the visual reality of modern urban culture.

131 In the late twentieth century, the differences between Tokyo and Kyoto are also marked in the realm of sōsaku hanga, with the latter paying more attention to attributes of nature and to the use of handmade paper for printmaking.

65 from established codes of behaviour have been, and continue to be, perceived as undisciplined actions and are culturally unacceptable.132

This adherence to protocols in Japanese society partially explains the strict rules pertaining to the production of ukiyo-e prints. Even the size of each printed sheet conformed to a set formula, albeit also for practical reasons.133 One cannot discount, however, the fact that the sheer volume of production of ukiyo-e prints for a rapidly changing urban market in Edo, called for disciplined procedures.

Ironically, when these colour woodblock prints found their way to Europe in the nineteenth century, the French Impressionists, James McNeill Whistler and other avant-garde artists were attracted to the radical nature of the print compositions. The engraved tensile lines and colourful, boldly patterned images were compositionally daring and departed from European systems of perspective. From the 1920s, Western collectors and print connoisseurs promoted a specialised field of scholarship outside Japan for ukiyo-e prints, and drew attention to the aesthetic and technical complexity of this art. Numerous publications detailing the history of these mass-produced images, the artists and other personnel involved, subject types, expression and technique were published.134 However, authors of these publications (until comparatively recently) only showed a passing concern with aesthetic innovation. The aesthetic dimension of ukiyo-e was left to commentators on the Japonisme phenomenon at the turn of the century, who traced its effect on European artists and designers.135

132 This is borne out with respect to feminism in Japan, and hence it is relevant to research on Shimada Kitahara Megumi. A section of her 2000 essay, ‘The current state and issues in gender; art history and visual representation studies in Japan’, stated that ‘gender bashing’, which occurred in the mid-1990s, was a backlash reaction amongst the conservative press against the exhibitions organised in Japan by public art museums with ‘gender’ as their theme, and also against the moves by senior officials in that country to eliminate mention in history books of embarrassing aspects of World War II, such as the so-called ‘’. See Binghui Huangfu (ed.), Text & Subtext: Contemporary Art and Asian Women, Singapore: Earl Lu Gallery, Lasalle-Sia College of the Arts, pp. 121-22.

133 Usually ōban size; 38 x 25cm, which represents a page from an album in which many of them were originally located. The elongated sheets, measuring 66 x 13 cm, of ‘pillar’ prints (hashira-e) were designed to be pasted on the narrow supporting pillars of Japanese homes.

134 Two early books that became classics are Laurence Binyon, J.J. O’Brien Sexton and Basil Grey 1923, Japanese colour prints, London: C. Scribner’s Sons, reprinted 1960 by Faber and Faber; and Basil Stewart’s 1922 publication.A guide to Japanese prints and their subject matter, New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, reprinted in 1979 by Dover Publications, New York. In the 1970s and 1980s, Jack Hiller encouraged a new generation of ukiyo-e scholars to investigate neglected areas of the field, such as the Osaka print artists.

135 For instance, Siegfried Wichmann, with his book Japonisme: The Japanese influence on Western art since 1858, Thames & Hudson, 1981.

66

In Japan, cross-cultural contact has been reciprocal, and as has been noted before, this can be seen in printmaking. Japan has repeatedly incorporated the customs and belief systems of others, adapting them to develop a syncretic indigenous expression. 136 For example, the Nagasaki intaglio process prints (engravings and etchings) by Aōdō Denzen, an immediate successor of Shiba Kōkan (1747-1818), employed European Abraham Bosse’s laws of perspective for subjects based on ‘Western Views’. At the same time, Aōdō‘s etchings depict Japanese mythological creatures and nature studies that employed the Chinese- originating ‘recession of height’ formula.137

Later, in the early nineteenth century, the famous Edo ukiyo-e landscape artist, Hokusai Katsushika, experimented ‘with the stylistic language of the copperplate engraver. even while designing for a block print series…A clear sense of Hokusai’s ability to assimilate and apply Western principles is evidenced in …his famous Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji [late 1820s].’138 Also during this time, Yasuda Raishū made a series of etchings about the fifty-three way stations of the Tōkaidō (a subject best known from Hiroshige’s interpretations) and famous places around Edo. The latter’s assimilated style was described by a contemporary commentator: ‘while Raishū depicts the scenery of Edo, he leaves the viewer with the impression that he has journeyed to a foreign land, or that a Dutchman has come to Japan and rendered his impressions of the Japanese landscape’.139

An instance of revived scholarship into the field of ukiyo-e printmaking is the collection of essays edited by Amy Reigle Newland, The Commercial and Cultural Climate of Japanese Printmaking, Hotei Publishing, Amsterdam 2004.Importantly, the contextualisation of the subjects portrayed in ukiyo-e prints has been given greater attention than hitherto. As points out in the foreword to Newland’s book, this has led to looking ‘beyond the arena of printmaking to the wider socio-cultural and artistic place of artist and their work’, p. 4

136 Masanobu Hosono (1978) points out the etchings by Shiba Kōkan that were produced in the eighteenth century employing principles of linear perspective. These principles were based on the engraver Abraham Bosse’s studies, which had been translated into Dutch in 1664 and thus became accessible to the Japanese at Nagasaki. Similarly, woodblock prints in the ukiyo-e manner displayed the same Western compositional device. ‘The ukiyo-e block-print master Okumura Masanobu (1686-1764), who credited himself with being the originator of the Japanese perspective print, produced a large number of these in the 1720s and 1730s, and they had a profound influence on the future development of Japanese prints in general,’ Masanobu states in Nagasaki Prints and Early Copperplates, op. cit., p.126.

137 See John Clark 1994, Japanese Nineteenth-Century Copperplate Prints, British Museum Occasional Paper 84, Department of Japanese Antiquities, British Museum. He uses Shiba Kōkan as an example of the nature and speed of the transmissions of the Dutch manner in etchings through this low ranking samurai’s productions of the late 1700s.

138 Masanobu Hosono 1978, op.cit., p.127. John Clark points out in Japanese Nineteenth-Century Copperplate Prints that 1799 was the year that ‘saw the publication of Hokusai’s woodblock prints in the Dutch manner.’, ibid., p.3,

139 Masanobu Hosono 1978, op.cit., p.123.

67 Despite Western assumptions, Japan was never intellectually or artistically closed, but the process of absorption was based on indigenous enterprise and selection. The Japanese have a way of absorbing and adapting others’ work in such an idiosyncratic way that it looks to be the original itself. Foreign cultural attributes and artistic practices were often put into effect so successfully as to confound viewers. With religion, for example, Zen Buddhism entered the Japanese empire in the thirteenth century but is now widely seen as being as representative of Japanese culture as Shintoism. Zen was carefully and consistently adapted from China. Ukiyo-e printmaking was also dependent on this religion, as the term is commonly translated as ‘pictures of the floating world’, and this refers to the Buddhist notion of transience and flux. Paradoxically, perhaps, a genre of ukiyo-e prints reflected and served to illustrate changing fashions and leisure pursuits in the entertainment quarters of Edo.

To the outside observer, confusion occurs when attempting to unravel the nature of Japanese culture and in turn, its artistic manifestations. ‘The whole of Zen wages against the prevarication of meaning,’ Barthes states in Empire of Signs.140 This European intellectual ’entertains…the idea of an unheard-of symbolic system, one altogether detached from our own’, and concludes that within the overwhelming myriad of signs from many cultures bombarding the visitor to metropolitan Japan, there is a ‘fissure of illumination’ that could be specifically Japanese.141 ‘The most complex part of the equation for us’, English curator Richard Francis writes, ‘is to find, or even recognise, the slender thread of light that Barthes believed was illuminating the essential Japanese path. We can work through the defining words – cultured, refined, distinguished by precision and elegance… without hitting the right spot.’142

It is a pointless exercise to attempt to comprehend completely a given culture and postmodernism has made such essentialist arguments redundant. In any event, there is now more readiness to accept inconsistencies in understanding the workings of cultures. Even reading one’s own culture is inconclusive, let alone reading that of others, and debates must often be left open for further speculation.

140 This is the opening sentence of the chapter `Exemption from Meaning’, Roland Barthes 1983, op. cit., p.73.

141 Roland Barthes quoted in Richard Francis, `Your Bag of Thrills’, in Francis and Nanjo 1991, op. cit., p.9.

142 Ibid., pp.11-12.

68

The conjunction of contradictory cultural impulses seen in today’s Japan was also highly visible in the Meiji era’s (1865–1912) ukiyo-e images. For close on two centuries ukiyo-e prints were rigidly determined by set themes and compositional formulas (using natural pigments), but Meiji woodblock print artists also used artificial aniline dyes and emulated Western life through the depiction of ‘foreign’ dress and adoption of pictorial illusionism. This Japanese take on Western signifiers of culture and visual art was no doubt intended to illustrate the post-feudal cultural situation in Japan as much as encode the prints for European consumption. It is also clear that print production responded to new materials when they became available in Japan and artists utilised them to serve their own artistic expression, achieving distinctively individual prints as a consequence.

I shall now discuss examples that will elaborate on the argument of adoption and eclipse offered in the preceding paragraph. Meiji era (ukiyo-e) woodblock prints eclipsed the colour lithographs (by Oshima Tokusaburo, for instance) that were produced at the same time, paralleling them in subject and composition. So too, the etchings and end-grain woodblock prints produced in the 1880s and 1890s were surpassed by the mastery of the long-grain block-cutters and designers of ukiyo-e and their sheer volume. Whilst the vast majority of Meiji prints were apolitical, and primarily sources of entertainment, current events were often printed as ukiyo-e. Triptychs of scenes from the first Sino-Japanese War (1894) were produced, for instance, by several artists, including Kobayashi Kiyochika in 1895, which fused Western and Japanese styles.

These prints were exported after the arrival of the American fleet under Commander Perry in Edo Bay (1853). The prints demonstrated Japan’s selective appropriation of Western culture to conform with Bunmei Kaika (Civilisation and Enlightenment), the official slogan of the Meiji era. Here the fine arts – as much as science – were expected to ‘catch up’ in the process of modernisation. However, as Munroe points out, ‘The notion that Japanese history is divided at Meiji is most definitive in the field of art history’ and as a consequence, the continuation of aspects of Edo-period schools of painting and ukiyo-e have largely been ignored, in favour of visual art practice that demonstrates modernist Euramerican impulses.143 Paradoxically perhaps, the Meiji ukiyo-e prints have been

143 Munroe 1994, op. cit., p.20.

69 recognised and admired in the West since the 1990s for their distinctive ‘hybridity’ and evident display of transcultural or intercultural tensions and less for their aesthetic values, which the Impressionists in France so admired.

In the early twentieth century, ukiyo-e printmaking became less prevalent; it had spent its course as shifts in the socio-political climate in Japan demanded alternatives for print imagery. In the century of modernism and post-modernism, it survived as a conservative, nostalgic and profitable branch of hanga – with its depiction of flowers, birds, beautiful women and landscapes. This is now known as the shin hanga (‘new prints’) movement. Menzies (1992) pointed out that, ‘Its driving force was the publisher Watanabe Shōzaburō who began publishing in 1915, in a deliberate attempt to emulate the best of ukiyo-e, technically and artistically’.144

There is, however, a marked difference between the production of shin hanga and the 250- year-old history of ukiyo-e. While most shin hanga artists of the period during which it flourished (1920-40) worked in the old way with publishers and craftsmen, there were several notable exceptions. These included Yoshida Hiroshi (1876-1950), Hashiguchi Goyō, and Natori Shunsen, who were art school-trained artists who actively used Western styles in their shin hanga – in some respects these genres cross-fertilised each other. Yoshida Hiroshi pursued shin hanga printmaking from his own workshop and garnered popularity in the United States for his images of, among others, The Grand Canyon (c.1925). Yoshida’s brand of shin hanga ‘developed to express in woodblock some of the effects of the plein air watercolour style he had first fully encountered in the USA as early as 1899’.145 He also adopted the Western convention of pencilling the title and signature in the margins of such prints. Yoshida’s prints are also significant because they represented a radical transformation of ukiyo-e from a publisher-owned enterprise to a fine arts milieu.

144 See Jacqueline Menzies 1992, ‘Introduction’, The Urban Bonsai: Contemporary Japanese Prints, exh. cat., Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, p.11. Menzies is Senior Curator of Asian Art at that institution. See also Ajioka Chiaki and Jacqueline Menzies (eds.) 1998, Modern Boy, Modern Girl: Modernity in Japanese Art 1910 – 1935, exh.cat., Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. For a comprehensive account of shin hanga, refer to Kendall H. Brown and Hollis Goodall-Cristante 1996, Shin-Hanga: New Prints in Modern Japan, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

145 Lawrence Smith 1994, Modern Japanese Prints 1912-1989: Woodblocks and Stencils, British Museum Press, London, p.10. Lawrence Smith, Keeper Emeritus at the British Museum has written several key books on twentieth century Japanese prints.

70 Shin hanga were generally popular until World War II, particularly with Westerners who sought traditional images of Japan. Two exhibitions in the United States at the Toledo Museum of Art (in 1930 and 1936), with English-language catalogues, were highly influential in promoting shin hanga. Yet, this ‘revival’ of ukiyo-e prints lasted only a generation, as sōsaku hanga soon took over the market for original prints. Despite these developments, ukiyo-e continued as a backdrop for both innovative printmakers and graphic designers who either were inspired by them or overtly rejected the tradition. Ukiyo-e remains as an ever-present leitmotif for the print in Japan; not simply for the technique it employs but also for the weight of tradition it implies.

Contact with Dutch imagery in Japan in the eighteenth century had included the adoption of etching. The process was learned from a Dutch manual in 1794 by Kôkan, followed by the more accomplished etcher Denzen. They pursued ‘realistic’, mimetic visual representations. This continued in the following century when etching in Kyoto, and elsewhere in Japan, was not only employed for souvenir prints of famous sights but also served as medical illustrations, calendars and maps.146 However, ukiyo-e hanga was not pushed aside by the demand for more effective reprographic technologies. Clark points out that with the earlier practice of intaglio printing in Japan, ‘…many of the elements of modernity were already present before they were fully constituted after the Meiji Restoration.”147 The intaglio print realm is of particular relevance to this thesis as one of the two case study artists selected from Japan, namely Shimada Yoshiko, adopted etching as her first print medium and one of her chief forms of artistic expression in the 1980s and 1990s.

4.3 Sōsaku Hanga and the career context of Noda Tetsuya and Shimada

Yoshiko

146 See Masanobu Hosono’s excellent book Nagasaki Prints and Early Copperplates, first published in Japanese in 1969 under the title Yōfūhanga by Shibundo, this English edition was published by Kodansha International Ltd and Shibundo in 1978. Etching as an indigenous phenomenon in Japan has been little acknowledged by art scholars and completely ignored in Arthur M Hind’s A History of Engraving & Etching, first published 1913. This book is widely considered to be the classic study in the English language on intaglio printmaking from the fifteenth to early twentieth century.

147 John Clark 1998. op. cit.. p.37.

71 Literally translated as ‘block/plate picture’, hanga is commonly used to describe all artists’ prints in twentieth century Japan. The branch of hanga of interest here is described as sōsaku hanga, which stresses ‘the expression of individual creativity’, states Ajioka Chiaki in her introduction to Hanga: Japanese Creative Prints, 2000.148 The term sōsaku hanga (‘creative prints’) came into general use in the 1920s and is distinguished from shin hanga in that the artist is responsible for designing and making the print matrix, and printing the final image. This formula was influenced by European constructs and was adopted worldwide during the period 1920-1970s. The three fundamental aspects of sōsaku hanga, revolving around authenticity and ‘correct procedure’, form the basis of most printmaking in Japan.

Noda and Shimada, however, sit in an uneasy alliance to the field. Menzies maintains that the movement (where Shimada in particular is absent) held ‘the dominant position in Japanese graphics [prints] until about 1970, when the plethora of art schools and media available to artists expanded the whole scene. However, its basic tenet that an artist should participate in every stage of the production of his prints has indirectly influenced almost every artist in Japan.’149

The relative conservatism of sōsaku hanga is apparent when considering exhibitions organised by the College Women’s Association of Japan (CWAJ). Since 1955, the CWAJ has actively supported the contemporary print in Japan by holding an annual print show, and these events represent the public face of Japanese printmaking.150 A case in point was a touring exhibition organised in 1992 by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in conjunction with the CWAJ titled The Urban Bonsai.151 In this exhibition, highly skilled application of techniques by exhibitors came to the fore.

The Japanese evaluation of the creative print promotes the importance of virtuosity of technique, and the ‘decorative’, at the expense of content. The Urban Bonsai demonstrated

148 Chiaki Ajioka 2000, `Introduction’, Hanga: Japanese Creative Prints, exh.cat., Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, p.9. Until 2004, Dr Ajioka was Curator of Japanese Art at that institution.

149 Menzies 1992, ‘Introduction’, op. cit., p.12.

150 This is in marked contrast to the status of the print in the Euramerican context, where the fifties was considered a fallow period for printmaking.

151 Menzies 1992, op. cit.

72 the deep-rooted belief ‘that the concept follows the mastery of technique (the reverse of Western thinking)’, in Japan.152 Despite its title, this exhibition did not explore the theme of the metropolis in any speculative sense, nor did it expand the representation of artists to embrace more conceptually orientated prints. Neither Noda nor Shimada were included amongst the 75 artists selected.153 This is particularly surprising in Noda’s case, for he is well known for his ‘highway’ imagery. Only five artists employed photographs in their print imagery (as Noda and Shimada do), overlaying the mechanised image with autographic procedures. In short, Noda and Shimada are on the periphery of the conventional Japanese printmaking exhibition arenas, and as independent ‘outsiders’, they have been able to establish more significant profiles.

Founded in 1949, the CWAJ is a non-profit, volunteer-run organisation of Japanese and non-Japanese women (chiefly American) who have grouped together in a spirit of cross- cultural exchange. Oliver Statler, an authority on Japanese prints, was an important advisor for the establishment of their print shows and in 1956 published a book titled Modern Japanese Prints: An Art Reborn.154 Statler’s book included an introduction by James A. Michener, a fellow American Japanese print expert and writer, and some editions included an original print by Onchi Kōshirō as the frontispiece.155 Ostensibly, the CWAJ’s annual exhibitions indicate where contemporary Japanese printmaking is situated at any given time, and travelling exhibitions such as The Urban Bonsai, have summarised trends.156 A further source for evaluating the contemporary print field is through the Japanese Print Association events. Lawrence Smith, a world authority on twentieth-century Japanese printmaking, admitted in 1994 that the field may have ‘run out of energy. Certainly visits to

152 Menzies 1992, op. cit. p.17. This is borne out when catalogues illustrating international print biennales are consulted. Inevitably, the virtuosity of technique is clearly advanced in the work of Japanese and Thai practitioners and often stands in place of an overtly compelling emotional or socio-political representation evident in other cultures.

153 A seeming anomaly in Noda’s case, as the theme of the show was chosen to elicit artists’ response to the urban situation.

154 Oliver Statler 1956, Modern Japanese Prints: An Art Reborn, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle Co.

155 A promotional abstract of the book on the New York publishers Design Books website states, ‘This book was written by a man who after WW II befriended Japanese artists working with prints. He started collecting their work…’ (www.washingtonsquarebooks.com)

156 In 1985, the CWAJ organised the first of such travelling exhibitions of contemporary Japanese prints, entitled Symbols of a Society in Transition. It went to the United States, Canada and England. The Urban Bonsai represented the organisation’s second touring show and it travelled to Australia and New Zealand.

73 the recent annual exhibitions of the Japanese Print Association have given the impression of superlative technique with little new artistic inspiration.’157

Noda, only at the start of his career participated in exhibitions arranged by such bodies, and Shimada not at all. It may be that they are artists who do not need the promotion of the CWAJ (a non-artist run organisation) or the Japanese Print Association. Early in his career, Noda forged an independent national and international following for his prints and in the instance of Shimada, the political caste to her etchings would not have been deemed appropriate by these conservative bodies. Shimada’s career has also not relied upon recognition in print group exhibitions. Nevertheless, sosaku hanga is germane to both artists, as borne out by Menzies’ introduction to The Urban Bonsai catalogue:

A basic tenet of the sosaku hanga movement was that creative printmaking was as valid a form of artistic expression as painting or sculpture. Many of the sosaku hanga artists were trained in Western-style art, and they tended to be influenced by European models. Unlike shin hanga, sosaku hanga became even more influential after the War, and achieved international recognition, partly through the patronage of Americans in Japan for the Occupation.158

Onchi Kōshirō (1891-1955) is arguably the most significant pioneer of modern Japanese prints and was the first artist to adopt abstract expressionism in Japan. His work acts as a transcultural vehicle of expression, so he is an important progenitor for Noda and Shimada and their selective appropriation of Western canons. In the catalogue to her exhibition Hanga: Japanese Creative Prints, Ajioka Chiaki stated that Onchi:

… continued to represent the vanguard of the modern Japanese aesthetic consciousness for over 40 years in prints and other media with his commitment to individuality and his acute sensitivity to new artistic developments in the West…to follow the changes in Onchi’s prints is to follow the tracks through which Japanese art pursued modernity.159

157 Lawrence Smith 1994, op. cit., p.19.

158 Menzies 1992, ‘Introduction’, op. cit., p.12 159 Ajioka Chiaki 2000, op. cit., p.10

74 The predominant trajectory in Onchi’s sōsaku hanga prints was lyrical abstraction, which owed a stylistic debt to Kandinsky. He was part of the ‘anti-naturalists’ movement in Japan during the Taisho era, through which he engaged with Japanese writers and poets.160 Sōsaku hanga were also exhibited alongside the yōga (Western painting) works in high profile government-sponsored exhibitions (Teiten) from the late 1920s and closely paralleled the styles and subject matter of these paintings. Hence a study of twentieth century printmaking in Japan finds many parallels with its painting traditions.

At the start of that century, the art flowing from Europe was mainly academic realism (conversely, the plebeian art form of ukiyo-e was dispersed and exhibited in Europe). Onchi, however, picked up on the more ‘progressive’ strands coming out of Russia (Constructivism), as well as with and Futurism.161 (Plate 2) He then returned to the figure for a period in Utamaro-inspired compositions of women, which were commercially popular in the late 1920s and 1930s. (Plate 1) However, these compositions were not a nostalgic return to shin hanga, but were firmly in the mould of sōsaku hanga.

Kuwahara Noriko explains the artist’s sensitivity and alertness to the considerable changes in Japanese society in the period 1910-39. This led Onchi to move unproblematically between abstraction, with its Westernised formulas, and the more ukiyo-e inspired ‘Study of the Human Body’ series.162 His prints are a strong instance of the hybridised nature of Japanese printmaking emanating from East/West dialogues. Onchi was not self- consciously bent on maintaining the traits of a recognisable individual style in his career, unlike his slightly younger contemporary Munakata Shikō (1903-75). Although he retained an allegiance to the woodblock print, Onchi, unlike Munakata –who became famous in the West for his Mingei (folkart) references and his Buddhist imagery – shifted his style chiefly ,to offer new expressions which reflected the new age. His attitude was thus to view his own art not in a parochial Japanese context but in the wider international

160 Information on art movements, such as Post-Impressionism and German Expressionism, were conveyed to him second hand by Japanese artists who travelled to Europe after the Russo-Japanese war, and through imported art books and magazines.

161 One of Onchi’s most important influences was Yamamoto Kanae (1882-1946), who spent the years 1912-16 in France and Russia.

162 Kuwahara Noriko 2000, ‘Onchi Kōshirō’s Pursuit of Modernity in Prints 1910s-1930s’, in Ajioka Chiaki, 2000, op. cit.. pp. 23-39. See especially Ajioka Chiaki’s essay ‘Hanga – Images on the Plate’, in Jackie Menzies and Ajioka Chiaki 1998 (eds.). op. cit.

75 context.’163 And it is Munakata who is more readily acknowledged and collected in Euramerican circles.

By this stage, travel in Europe and the United States had become de rigeur among young artists pursuing Western styles. In socio-political terms, Japan had entered a period of unassailable self-confidence. Its empire had defeated Russia and annexed Korea, while Taiwan and parts of China were also forced to kowtow to Japan. Until 1937, when the so- called Eight Year’s War commenced, early modern art in Japan witnessed a vibrant individualism in keeping with these socio-political realities. The exhibition and accompanying publication Modern Boy, Modern Girl: modernity in Japanese art 1910- 1935, held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1998, demonstrated this phenomenon particularly well.164 The poster art, paintings, printmaking and other forms of cultural and creative expression in this project vividly demonstrate the hybrid, paradoxical, urban-based imagery of the period.

Onchi died before the ‘creative print’ in Japan was widely recognised through international print biennials (including the Tokyo International Print Biennale, which commenced in 1957). In his country of origin, he helped found the first printmaking association called the Nihon Sōsaku Hanga Kyōkai (the Japan Creative Print Association, 1918-31).Members of this Tokyo-based organisation strove to follow Euramerican principles and be free of reliance upon print publishers and printers. They made a virtue of being responsible for all aspects of print processing and distribution. Three of the four founding members had lived in the West and been privy to these individualistic procedures. They included Yamamoto Kanae, who had studied in France 1912-1917 and was seen by some as the leader of the Association’s founders.165 Like Yamamoto and his other colleagues, Onchi was an artist who put printmaking at the centre of his practice and because of his refusal to defer to local and guild-like rules for this art (unless they served to promote printmaking),he is the most pertinent predecessor of both Noda and Shimada.

As an indication of the diffusion of printmaking and its changing character during Onchi’s career, Teiten, Japan’s premier annual art exhibition, changed its rules in 1927 to allow

163 ibid., p.38. 164 Ajioka Chiaki 1998, op.cit. 165 Yamamoto Kanae (1882-1946), see Ajioka Chiaki 2000, op. cit., p.105

76 prints in Western style or yōga. When the Japan Creative Print Association was disbanded in 1931, its members joined the Western-style Print Association (Yōfū Hanga kai), which up to that time served etching and lithography artists. A new body, carrying greater official recognition, known as the Japan Print Association (Nihon Hanga Kyōkai), was quickly formed (in 1931) to amalgamate this body with independent printmakers. As in Western Europe, urban centres in Japan witnessed the inception of a dynamic social modernity in the 1920s and 1930s.166 Despite the Great Kanto earthquake in 1923 (which practically destroyed Tokyo), the period was marked by individualism and self-expression in printmaking, as was indicated in the already mentioned Modern Boy, Modern Girl project. Obliteration of the last vestiges of Edo in Tokyo decisively closed the past for many artists, as a concerted effort to reconstruct the capital was made.

In 1935, the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Japan’s first official arts academy) set up a temporary printmaking atelier. In was later consolidated as the chief printmaking department in that country. In 1939, Onchi established a print study group (the First Thursday Society) and travelled to China as a war artist, and emerged soon afterwards as the undisputed leader of the Creative Print Movement. Like many print artists at the time, Onchi displayed nationalistic pride by putting his printmaking at the service of the Japanese government and its imperial and military ambitions. At the same time, he came from a privileged and cultured background and fraternised with distinguished poets and writers, and designed over 1,000 books during his career.

Japan suffered a calamitous defeat during World War II (with atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and much of Tokyo destroyed), and was occupied by America and its allies in October 1945. The defeat of a nation that had previously considered itself to be invincible had a significant impact on print artists and the more courageous criticised militarism. Of those postwar artists, Hamada Chimei (b.1917) used etching to communicate his traumatic experiences as a soldier (as Shimada would do). His images of

166 See Ajioka Chiaki and Jackie Menzies (eds.) 1998, Modern Boy, Modern Girl: Modernity in Japanese Art 1910- 1935, op. cit. This substantial publication, with essays by Ajioka Chiaki, John Clark, Jackie Menzies, and Mizusawa Tsutomu, presents a hitherto unfamiliar period of Japanese culture in English. It does not favour one medium over another and includes the work of 13 printmakers, notably Onchi Kōshirō, the most important figure in the Creative Print Movement and appreciated in Japan and internationally. See Chiaki, ‘Hanga- Images on the Plate’ (pp. 115- 18); John Clark and Mizusawa Tsutomu, `The Avant-Garde’ (pp. 81-93); and Jackie Menzies, `Exoticism’ (pp. 131-34) in Modern Boy, Modern Girl.

77 human slaughter and personal despair were supported by his diary entries.167 Under the collective title of Elegy for new recruit (1951-54), Hamada imbued his plates with a surreal and in some instances, an Otto Dix–like expressionism. This technique lent an uncompromising directness to the subject and he won acclaim at the Lugano International Print Biennale of 1956. He was one of the few Japanese artists to express his war experiences candidly and imaginatively.

It is important to acknowledge the ways in which attributes of particular print media have a bearing on how they are used to reinforce artistic concepts. In Hamada’s case, and in due course Shimada’s, etching is seen to allow an artist to incise and attack, and introduce shadows to enhance his or her visual statement. The copperplate print involves touching, manipulating, and wounding a surface with acid. By comparison, a relief print (such as those of Munakata and in turn Noda) leaves traces of its organic form through the grain and is inevitably linked to the natural environment.

The end of World War II saw an initial period of withdrawal, as many print artists retreated into themselves, but they soon turned their attention to accepting Japan’s postwar circumstances actively. In early 1946, a group of artists led by Onchi produced a portfolio of prints, entitled Native Customs in Japan. Introduced in English, it established a culture of printmaking that was specifically directed at the occupiers as consumers.168 At this time, printmaking became the only pictorial art that consistently attracted American collectors. Uncontentious subject matter and the print movement’s stance (based around the First Thursday Society) as the up-to-date, international face, of Japanese art were factors that contributed to its success. Furthermore, Onchi attracted GI friends, more particularly the wood-engraver Ernst Hacker, to the Society.

By 1948, travel restrictions on the Japanese were being lifted and artists started exhibiting abroad again, an activity that expedited cultural exchange. Furthermore, the shift from accommodating the expectations of an occupying force in Japan through their prints gained traction. Printmakers began to attract international awards, as elaborated by Smith (2002)

167 See Ajioka Chiaki 2000, op. cit., pp. 72-75.

168 See Lawrence Smith 2002, Japanese Prints during the Allied Occupation 1945 – 1952, London: The British Museum Press, pp. 25-26.

78

The great breakthrough was the award of the first two prizes in the Japanese section of the Sao Paulo Biennale in October 1951 to the print artists Saitō Kiyoshi and Komai Tetsurō (both younger First Thursday Society members). Symbolically, this followed close on the San Francisco Peace Treaty of September 1951 which formally ended the Occupation. Japanese print artists were now increasingly free to travel and exhibit abroad, and to gain attention at major print shows 169

Meiji era Japan, followed by the United States’ in 1945, brought about continuing links with North America. It is in the United States (including Hawaii) where arguably the most Euramerican research on ukiyo-e and hanga has occurred.

4.4 Prints and Aesthetics in Japan

It is necessary to be cautious when applying Western aesthetic standards to Japanese printmaking. This is because (whatever the national context) such standards are modified over time and shaped according to particularities of place, events, the force of personalities and their principles. This thesis is based on the study of transformational elements, and so makes an attempt to distinguish between indigenous belief systems and those transferred from external sources (chiefly Euramerican). There is, however, a lingering preconception in the West that with contemporary Japanese printmaking, the image concept comes second to the mastery of technique, but this generalisation does not apply to the work of Shimada and Noda.

Seventeenth-century aesthetician Tosa Mitsuoki is a guide to understanding how the Japanese approach to aesthetics fundamentally differs from the West. He stated, ‘If there is a painting which is lifelike and which is good for that reason, that work has followed the laws of life. If there is a painting which is not lifelike and which is good for that reason,

169 ibid., p.39

Komai Tetsurō (1920-76), esteemed for his work in intaglio printing, was a First Thursday Society member. He taught Tetsuya Noda at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and earlier, Nakabayashi Tadayoshi (b.1937). Such is the high opinion within Japan of Nakabayashi’s etchings, which focus on the natural world, that he was selected for the major exhibition Japanese Ways Western Means, Queensland Art Gallery, in 1989.

79 that work has followed the laws of painting.’170 These ground rules for Japanese aestheticism were laid centuries before the Nabis in France declared that, before anything else, a pictorial subject should conform to a system of colours and forms. Indeed, Mitsuoki’s distinction between two kinds of images has continued to be influential in Japanese aesthetics. Donald Richie explains that there are images:

which mirror the object and those which mirror the mechanisms of the means through which the image is made. This latter concern is one which has been one of the richest sources of Japanese aesthetics – respecting the artistic means. This would retain the grain of the wood, the strata of the stone, the limitations of black ink on white paper, the syllable count of haiku and waka. …Images which respect pen and brush, woodblock printing, computer graphics, the laws of virtual reality, are in this respect the same.171

The challenge for the Euramerican mindset is to recognise this emphasis on materiality, and the ritual of mark-making through printmaking, as an integral component of the work. Materiality and its articulation by the artist are not merely the benign means by which to produce an image. The integration of ritual and material is significant for the contemporary Japanese print. It extends the notion of the ‘handmade’ from an artisan-only perspective to one that that has profound implications for materials-based practice, and encompasses the particularities of a technique, corporeal involvement (the direct link between ‘head and hands’, for example) of the artist, and the reflection of history and cultural specificity. For instance, Noda’s ongoing link with the woodblock technique of ukiyo-e as a first step in building up his mixed-media prints can be interpreted as an act that historically grounds his image. Yet the mimeographed photographs that he manipulates through drawing and superimposes by screenprinting onto the relief-inked paper sheet, derive from Western aesthetics.

In Hamada’s case, etching (as mentioned earlier) involved biting and erosion of the metal matrix in order to make the image and has aggressive connotations; connotations best suited to his war-based images. In turn, Shimada would do the same from a feminist

170 Tosa Mitsuoki 1967, Honchō Gahō Taiden (authoritative summary of the `Rules of Japanese Painting’), cited in Ueda Makoto, Literary and Art Theories in Japan, Ohio: Press of Western Reserve University, Cleveland, p.130.

171 Donald Richie 1997, ‘Japan & The Image Industry’, in Walter Jule (ed.), Sightlines: Printmaking and Image Culture, op. cit., p.71.

80 perpective. Only etching, a Euramerican invention, can achieve such results in the field of printmaking.

Clark emphasises that technique is not a medium of production as a tactic in formulating Japanese aesthetics, and states, ‘Possibly the most important consequence of contact with Dutch imagery and to some extent also with Chinese literati painting was in a privileging of technique as technique, as if technique could constitute its own self-critical discourse.’172 Clark refers specifically to late eighteenth-century Japan when the public demanded etchings and woodblock prints that displayed a syncretic play between form and subject. It is no coincidence that this synthetic play from widely different sources lies at the heart of Noda’s prints, albeit for different purposes.

Another important attitude in Japanese aesthetics relates to the cultural reluctance to single out the visual arts from other forms of creative endeavour. Curator Nanjo Fumio, in his essay ‘Afterword: Nature and Culture in Japan’, writes:

When Japan opened its borders to the outside world about 130 years ago, the word ’art’ did not exist in the Japanese language. The translators created a new word, geijutsu which essentially means ‘Techniques to create something cultural, decorative, or entertaining’ such as singing, dancing, playing musical instruments, writing poems, and painting. A term for ‘visual art’ also had to be created, and so bijutsu is used, with its direct translation meaning ‘technique of beauty’. The lack of such terms indicates that originally there was no separation between ’craft’ and ‘art’, as it was conceived and practised in the West.173

This statement is a salient reminder of historical differences in interpreting cultural production. The imposition of terminology from one culture to another may alter the way imagery is interpreted, yet it is also an indication of the importation of values from elsewhere that demands new appraisals and an adjustment to categorisation, not only in printmaking. This thesis argues that attention must be given to the specificity of cultural traditions and their visual art manifestations, even though on a superficial level these

172 Clark 1998, op. cit., p.37

173 Nanjo Fumio 1991, ‘After word: nature and Culture in Japan’, in A Cabinet of Signs: Contemporary Art from Post- Modern Japan, op. cit., p.13.

81 manifestations may be perceived as mere mimicry and selective appropriation from elsewhere.

4.5 Noda Tetsuya and Shimada Yoshiko, Paradoxically In Tune

Noda Tetsuya and Shimada Yoshiko exemplify the complexities and issues that are involved in the interpretation of contemporary Japanese printmaking. To begin with, they are products of different generations, and their respective print works reflect ideologies that are historically specific and subject to collective image consciousness. Noda comes from a classical humanist tradition. His acclaimed ongoing ‘Diary’ project emerged early in his career, and received positive critical attention in the late 1960s. To Western audiences, it appeared to be steeped in Zen and conceptual art. It also touched on the concerns of the 1970s Mono-ha artists through the way Noda gave conceptual substance to materiality derived from the natural world. By comparison, Shimada is a feminist artist whose platform is to raise social awareness. In her etchings (with which I am mainly concerned), she examines and exposes politically sensitive aspects of Japan’s past military operations and the ongoing consequences of Emperor ’s regime.174

In terms of printmaking, these practitioners straddle the closed, rarefied field that sōsaku hanga had become by the end of the twentieth century and the print as a form of widely dispersed narratives. The popular ukiyo-e legacy impacts upon their practice as much as it does on manga (cartoon imagery), graphic design and animation artists. Ukiyo-e, and in turn manga belongs to a culture in which image is stressed over word.175 Some contemporary Japanese printmakers also come out of a culture in which the Zen Buddhist tradition of haiku, and related forms of poetry, encompass observations and philosophies in a spare, economic manner.176

174 Since 1998, Shimada has produced collages, often with a female partner called BuBu, which continue a critique of militarism, but which also humorously debunk notions of European supremacy in the visual arts. In 2002, these collages were made into inkjet prints and exhibited, for instance, in Attitude 2002, the opening exhibition of the Contemporary Art Museum at Kumamoto, of the same year.

175 Arguably this is because of Japan’s writing system. Calligraphy (originating in China) could be said to fuse drawing and writing with the individual ideograph, being a simple picture that represents a tangible object or abstract concept, emotion, or action.

176 Granted, this is best manifested through the sumi ink masters, such as Gibon Sengai (1750-1837), where koans (verse riddles) are integrated with a figurative reference on the sheet.

82

From a print perspective, Noda’s depictions of the quotidian have their legacy in the ukiyo- e genre (for example, Hokusai’s manga printed sketch books with their studies of plants and insects). (Plate 8) His ’highway’ prints, however, show a debt to masters of nineteenth century ukiyo-e landscape prints (especially Hiroshige), and to Western conceptualism and documentary photography. (Plate 5, Plate 6) Technically, traditional ukiyo-e woodblock printing is the material basis of all Noda’s work. This older artist’s commitment to the use of natural materials (including gampi handmade paper as the carrier for his inked image) links him firmly with a Japanese generation that believes in the co-mingling of man with nature. Noda (like most other contemporary printmakers in Japan) bases himself in or near high density urban centres, where the lack of contact with nature as a wilderness experience is compensated for by investments in formal gardens and a passion for bonsai art and ikebana. Here, nature is manipulated, distilled and miniaturised to conform to traditional Japanese aesthetic canons of controlled informality.177

Zen Buddhism, with its reverence for life and nature, is an aspect of Japanese spiritual practice that is relevant for Noda’s printmaking. He has never formally practised Zen (or any other religion), but the artist claims that Buddhist belief systems were instilled in his childhood.178 Growing up in the countryside in Kumamoto Prefecture of Kyushu (the southern island of Japan) he states that he was exposed to ‘Buddhist moral codes and traditions. ‘As a matter of fact my father was born in a temple to a family of priests, so naturally something of the teachings, spirit and traditions must have had an influence on me and my work.’179

177 To underscore the reverence for nature in Japan, Dr Philip Courtenay, specialist in Asian ceramics, formerly of James Cook University, Townsville, notes that despite the county’s large population (127.3 million inhabitants in 2004 according to Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Australia, using latest data from ABS, the IMF and other sources) 74% of Japan’s surface area of 378 thousand sq km is forested.

178 D.T.Suzuki’s 1956 book, Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings, New York: Doubleday & Co., was one of this influential writer’s texts that brought Zen teachings to the West. In the second half of the 1950s, he inspired the Beat poets as much as composer and artist John Cage and those of his students who followed Fluxus. Noda was in New York in 1970 and produced a number of woodcut and screenprint images of hippie crowds, which demonstrated his awareness of the counter-culture in USA at the time. The prints Diary: May 8th’70 in New York and Diary: May 31st’70, are cases in point. Hence, it could be speculated that his appreciation of alternative lifestyles, which to varying degrees incorporated Zen principles, came from both Japan and the United States.

179 Noda Tetsuya in email correspondence with the author, 10 February 2006.

83 Noda’s choice of subjects and compositions are close to the brush and sumi ink drawings of the Zen priest artist, Gibon Sengai. Sengai came to international attention in the early 1960s. The simple compositions and subdued colour and the legacy of zenga, or ‘one- corner-painting’, which includes the untouched, unmarked surface of a sheet to resonate as an important component of the overall image, are obvious factors in Noda’s prints. Noda’s printmaking also shares qualities evident in Sengai’s direct and deceptively simple drawings and matching koans imbued with compassion and humour. The artist has used the term ‘Zen’ to describe an artistic influence, but generally prefers to summarise his practice in non-religious terms: ‘My works are about private matters, about everyday life. It is a Diary or a document related to things that have impressed me, annoyed or touched me. Therefore, naturally it is also about our time, our present world.’180

For Shimada, her political position transcends any orthodox religion. She is a ‘dissident who radically challenges the very orders of sense and meaning that buttress all systems of power according to the dictates of patriarchal dominance. As the balance of forces sways in the continual struggle between social and historical practice, there is a moment for critical analysis that keeps alive thought as a practice of dissidence. In artistic practices and those practices engaged in its social representation we find a particular instance of thought.’181 This statement, written by prominent feminist and English academic Griselda Pollock, is from her 1996 book Generations and Geographies, which seeks to counter ‘the West’s artistic hegemony’ and includes Shimada as one of its case studies.

4.6. Photographic Interventions

Noda’s and Shimada’s prints act as important points of encounter between the mainstream avant-garde and the guild-based specialist realm of Japanese printmaking. While they adhere to the conventions of editioned printmaking, it is their employment of photography (or shashin) as a key pictorial element that takes their respective work beyond conventional modes of sōsaku hanga and encourages its evaluation in a broader visual arts context.

180 ibid. As a formality, Noda converted to Judaism on his marriage in the late 1960s to Israeli-born Dorit Bartur, daughter of the then Israeli ambassador to Japan.

181 Griselda Pollock (ed.) 1996, ‘Preface’, Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, New York: Routledge, p.xiii.

84 In contrast to the hanga tradition (which goes back to the seventeenth century), photography is a comparatively ‘youthful’ art and produces a newer visual regime that is linked to industrial modernity. When it began to be creatively integrated into printmaking (1960s), it had a impact similar to that of digital imaging in the last quarter of the twentieth century. In the 1960s, the radical indexicality that was set up between the autographic (handmade) and the machine (camera) in photo-etching and other print processes was hotly debated by international printmakers. Some feared that the ‘originality’ of their handmade imagery would be undermined by the integration of ‘readymade’ imagery. However, by the late 1970s (especially in the West), photographic processes in printmaking were accepted as part of an enlarged vocabulary of options for the field. In turn, as the new millennium approached, a growing fascination with computer technology and the ability to create images that could be printed using digital programs emerged. Nevertheless, a continuing allegiance to the discipline of craft skills and the tangibility of materials has prompted printmakers to combine the digital with the handmade.

Noda is Professor of Printmaking at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, while Shimada is a lecturer at Art Center, Tokyo. These artists work at the interface of photography and hanga, but engage with this conjunction from markedly different perspectives. Noda uses his own ‘snapshots’ as a visual diary that imbues his work with a prosaic, yet lyrical, immediacy. The prints he produces from photographs are, in appearance, akin to pencil drawing and hence, they have a gestural and tactile sense.

The artist blends the indigenous woodblock technique with Western-derived mediums such as the photographic mimeograph and screenprint. Despite his links with the Tokyo National University, Noda prefers to conduct his own practice as a simple craftsman or artisan, and uses the domestic familiarity of his house for most print production. Living on the outskirts of Tokyo, away from the densely urban context, his imagery unapologetically expresses nostalgia for man’s coexistence with the land. Noda acknowledges this fact as he likes to work at home away from metropolitan Tokyo, but at the centre of family activity. He favours the woodblock process, not only for the ease of access to wood and paper, and for his preference for natural materials, but also because, in Noda’s words, ‘I like to use a

85 press that I can carry in my hip pocket. The baren is my press. I prefer woodcut-silkscreen printing to lithography; I can do the whole process at home.’182

In contrast, Shimada has employed printmaking as a didactic and political tool to raise feminist awareness. She has appropriated historical archival photographs (from newspapers and postcards of the 1930s and 1940s) that were once benign, but are now, in today’s revisionist history mode, politically controversial. The artist has enlarged her source material through the photo-etching process. This generates a confrontational scale to photographic images that were unseen at the time of their original production. This allows the past to be revealed and also for fresh meanings to be applied to it. In Japan, her prints were first collated in a solo exhibition at Keio University in 1996. This was followed by an exhibition of a selection of the same works at A Space Gallery (1997) in Canada. During the same period she began to be included in exhibitions at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (1996), an institution that has senior female curators with feminist leanings. Without this institutional support, Shimada would have been forced to exhibit solely outside Japan.

She is one of the few female Japanese artists employing printmaking who actively engaged the practice with postmodernism (particularly debates on feminism, appropriation and the revision of history) during the 1990s. At the start of the twenty-first century Shimada continued to use the print as an integral part of her practice, although it has been transformed into inkjet prints based on the artist’s collages, derived from performances, photographs and popular illustrations. Furthermore, since the late 1980s, with solo and group exhibitions in , Japan, South Korea and Canada, she is regarded as an installation artist as much as a printmaker. (Plate 13).

To a certain extent, Noda and Shimada received similar printmaking instruction. Noda entered the Tokyo National University as a painting major but turned to printmaking after discovering his preference for photography and printmaking. A mimeograph copying machine at Tokyo Geidai allowed him to integrate photography very directly into his

182 Margaret Johnson and Dale Hilton 1980, op. cit., p.168. Apart from the photo-screenprints and by Noda discussed in this thesis, the artist has produced a much smaller number of photo-lithographs, which are printed by Kinuta Kihachi at Fuji Bijutsu Workshop in Tokyo from aluminium plates.

86 imagery. He graduated with a Masters degree in 1965, taught printmaking at his alma mater from 1978 and received the status of professor in 1991.

Shimada did not engage with printmaking until she graduated from Scripps College in California in 1982. She returned to Tokyo in 1985 expressly to study etching under Yoshida Katsurộ, a teacher of printmaking at the independent art school, Bigakkô, in Kanda, Tokyo.183 In contrast to Tokyo Geidai, Bigakkô has a reputation as a place for mature artists to learn experimental techniques without the pressure of formal examination.184 In any event, both Noda and Shimada are not products of lengthy print training (nor, in Shimada’s case, of government-backed institutions) common in Japanese art schools. Their independent stance as artists is also demonstrated by the fact that they chose to specialise in particular print techniques after previously receiving instruction in other visual arts programs.

To explain the normal training procedure for print artists in Japan, it is useful to note that by 1997, the chief institutions in Japan that offered courses in printmaking at a tertiary level conducted a four-year printmaking program, with another two years required for a Master’s degree. This longer and more focused period of instruction has bearing on the status of printmaking and the standards of production expected from Japanese students. Ikeda Ryoji (b.1947), a highly regarded photo-etcher and teacher in Japan, describes his plan for Tokyo’s Musashino Art University printmaking curriculum:

… to concentrate in the first year on drawing, with printmaking as only an option. In the second year students will be introduced to printmaking theory – how to formally express their ideas – and begin to work in various print media such as woodcut, wood-engraving, linocut. Through this they will discover their special interests. In the third year they will learn other skills, including photography and photomechanical processes. For a fourth year we are developing a curriculum that would be a culmination

183 Bigakkô school of art taught intaglio printing to, among others, Yamano Shingo (b.1950), who specialised in etching during 1970-71, but developed a career in exhibition planning from the late 1980s (he was a curator of the Yokohama Triennale of Contemporary Art in 2005) and Arai Shin-ichi (b.1959) who majored in intaglio printmaking under Yoshida Katsurô during 1981-87. Like Shimada, Arai became a radical performance artist by the 2000s.

184 Conversation between the author and master printer Itazu Satoru of Itazu Litho-Grafik, Tokyo, in Brisbane, 16 Oct. 2006.

87 of the first three. Within the technical and philosophical framework of our printmaking program, computer graphics would not be considered art. Printmaking is one step above and quite removed from computer graphics.185

Drawing has always been the mainstay of art instruction, and is a discipline that merges haptic and cerebral impulses. It is a skill that encourages close attention to the human form, objects and the natural world and is steeped in the mimetic tradition. Ikeda is mentioned here to illuminate a common program of printmaking instruction in Japan. The quote is also revealing in the way it underscores the importance of drawing to Ikeda’s photo-etchings, although this is not obvious. By comparison, the hand as a drawing instrument is overt in the photographic prints of Noda. Here, the photograph is disrupted by Noda’s technique of drawing with graphite over it before the image is fed into a mimeograph machine or similar scanner. In fact, the artist’s photo-screenprints from the 1990s appear, at a cursory glance, to be drawings rather than photographically-derived statements. Representational in form, they are tonally nuanced, with very little colour. In spite of the editioning of his prints, Noda retains the ‘aura’ (through this allusion to one-of-a-kind drawing) that Walter Benjamin predicted would be lost with the electronic age.

In their individual ways, Noda and the younger Shimada are hanga proponents, yet in Japan they remain difficult to categorise within this genre. This is chiefly because of their strong attachment to photography and with the latter’s incorporation of her prints in projects termed ‘installation art’. Their idiosyncratic use of photography within printmaking does not conform to the still ‘hermetic’ guild-based perception of print practice in Japan and the force of decorative solutions. Accordingly, their work has been purchased by institutions as diverse as Tokyo’s Metropolitan Museum of Photography and the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts. Of these two leading discipline-specific institutions in Japan, Noda is collected by both, while Shimada’s feminist, politically sensitive photo-etchings have only been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Photography, a less conservative body.186

When asked why she was not collected by Machida, the artist conjectured that ‘I don’t think they consider me as a “pure” printmaking artist [and] I guess they don’t want to deal

185 Ikeda Ryôji, ‘Drawing: The Essence of Printmaking’, in Walter Jule (ed.), op. cit., pp.207-08.

186 According to Itazu Satoru, master printer in lithography and manager of Itazu Litho-Grafik, Tokyo, `’Machida is a conservative place, only interested in purchasing well-known artists, while the Metropolitan Museum of Photography sees photography as a broader field’. In conversation with the author, Brisbane, 17.Oct.2006.

88 with art that deals with history and politics’.187 Ironically, her predecessor, Shiba Kōkan, who is credited with being the first Japanese artist to experiment with making copperplate etchings, was also an independent spirit who, as a critic of the feudal system in pre-Meiji Japan, ‘set up a pose of madness as a self-protective smoke screen’.188

In the context of Munroe’s 1994 book Scream Against the Sky, writer Amano Tarō elucidates the issues of institutional conservatism that artists in Japan were uniquely forced to negotiate at the end of the twentieth century (even up to the early1990s).The audience for exhibitions of avant-garde and contemporary art was poor and had not been the subject of public debate. Young Japanese artists therefore had to go abroad or seek opportunities to exhibit outside their home country, in order to avoid indifference to their progressive work. This may be regarded as a way of overcoming a form of conservatism in their home country. 189 Shimada is a case in point. Amano states that among the factors causing this conservatism (to a large extent continuing into the 2000s) was ‘a closed practice of personnel affairs; institutional backwardness in the universities, which serve as strongholds of Japanese academicism (as evidenced by the disregard for the principle of competition); and the administrative limitations of public museums. There exists a time-lag of seemingly several decades between what occurs on the contemporary Japanese art scene and what is discussed on the institutional level abroad.”190

This trend to seek other audiences outside their country in order to avoid conservative reactions to their work has meant that Noda and Shimada have actively sought international reputations. Thus, both these artists have been accorded the strongest recognition for their

187 Shimada Yoshiko, email correspondence with the author, 18 November 2004.

188 Masanobu Hosono 1978, op. cit. p.67. It is my conjecture that the intentionally ‘outrageous’ sexual innuendos of much of the work of respected contemporary female artist Kusama Yayoi have been accepted with the wide knowledge that she suffers from psychosis; that Shimada, in work produced with her collaborator, Bubu, is playful and overtly erotic and that young women engaged in Cos-play-zoku at Harajuku in Tokyo eccentrically ‘play-act’ to denote individuality, and as a counterpoint to the elaborate costumes of traditional theatre performers.

189 High profile exhibitions in the second half of the eighties include Against Nature: Japanese Art in the Eighties, San Francisco Museum of Art, 1989. At the time, Shimada was included in international print-specific events, including the 9th British Print Biennale, Birmingham, UK, 1986.

190 Amano Tarō 1994 (translated by Robert Reed), ‘Some Issues of Circumstance: Focusing on the 1990s’, in Munroe. op. cit., p.70. These observations were obvious at the 2004 ISPA (International Symposium of Print Art) congress at Tokyo Geidai, the first major forum of its kind in Japan. Not only was there a predominance of Japanese speakers from art academies at that event, but the anxiety and apparent need to distinguish between computer-mediated imagery and creative printmaking was reminiscent of debates held in Australia during the early 1990s.

89 work outside Japan. Noda was accorded a survey of his prints at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco in 2004, which followed his award-winning participation in numerous print biennales and triennials worldwide. In a Euramerican context, he thus has wide recognition as a leading contemporary Japanese printmaker. In the same context, Shimada is admired for her controversial subject matter and no attempt has been made to describe her practice in terms of a specific discipline.191 She represents an artist, trained as a traditional printmaker, who has broadened her field to engage with social reformists, as much as the contemporary art cognoscenti, outside her country of origin. It is her politically charged imagery (irrespective of medium) and her notoriety in and out of Japan that has earned her credibility in the visual arts profession.

In the process of avoiding the conservatism of Japan towards its fine arts, Noda and Shimada have been characterised as avoiding both decorative and overt technically novel solutions in their print practice. This is particularly the case with Shimada. (Plate 10) The integration of photography in printmaking was paramount for both these artists, in order to override charges of the decorative.

Photography serves as one of the ‘New Narratives’ that emerged as a postmodernist strategy in the 1980s.192 Although no print artist is included in Clark’s examples, two Japanese photographers –Morimura Yasumasa and the less well-known Kon Michiko – are artists considered by Clark (1991). The ‘snap-shot’-like photographs taken by Noda are in the vein of street photography popularised in the United States from the 1960s. These American modernist photographs were available to Japanese artists and remain highly influential among Japanese photographers.193 Thus, artists did not necessarily have to leave the country to find models to assist them in avoiding the country’s inherent traditional

191 In a 1997 article on Shimada by Robert Preece for World Sculpture News (one of several mainstream Western journals covering her work in the 1990s), the artist was introduced controversially with the heading ‘No More “I’m Sorry”, and attention was given to the subject matter of her installations of prints. See World Sculpture News, Vol. 3, No. 1, winter 1997, pp.20-22.

192 Outlined by John Clark in his essay ‘The conditions for post-modernity in Japanese art of the 1980s’, in ed. Sugimoto Yoshio., Proceedings, Seventh Biennial Conference: Japanese Studies Association of Australia, Australian National University, Canberra, 11-13 July, 1991. This essay was subsequently republished in a book on Japanese Postmodernism authored by Sugimoto.

193 Refer to Nakahira Takuma’s 1973 body of writings published by Shobunsha, Tokyo, Why An Illustrated Book of Flora, on the theory of Japanese photography of the late 1960s and 1970s, particularly the essays Naze and Shokubutsu Zukan ka (Why a Pictorial Flora?). In the essay of this title he rejected ‘constructed’ images, promoting ‘objectivity’ in camerawork. Nakahira’s opinion in the essay ‘Why a Pictorial Flora’, tempered the growing search for individuality and experimental approaches to photography emerging in Japan after the 1950s and 1960s concern with verisimilitude.

90 conservatism in its art practice. In the case of Shimada, her reportage images were sourced most often in ad hoc commercial outlets and libraries in Japan. In these respects, the photographs the two artists utilise before adaptation and transformation into printmaking, are solely documentary. They are therefore of a different order to Morimura and Kon, where the photograph itself stands as the sole and final artistic statement.

4.7 Historical Premises for Photography in Printmaking

At this juncture, it is useful briefly to track photography and its interface with printmaking in contemporary art. Photography assumed a major role in contemporary printmaking in the United States and Britain from the mid-1960s, often through the integration of photographic techniques or photographic images. Since its invention, photography has been interwoven with printmaking techniques, chiefly serving the manufacture of ‘original’ reproductive prints (based on paintings) and illustrations in the popular press. Gilmour (1970) states, ’hand-made and mechanical print combinations, whether to meet “originality” half-way, or out of a wish to mix the conventions of industrial process and hand-work, have proliferated.’194

In the case of Noda (except for his occasional lithographs) and Shimada (with the exception of her ink jet prints from the early 2000s), they have been solely responsible for the production and editioning of their photographic prints. Hence they belong in this respect to the sōsaku hanga tradition. While Noda and Shimada retain autonomy over the production of their print images, Gilmour reminds the reader that ‘in the realm of printing the most autographic [hands-on] needs a “tool” and a machine, the press, while the most mechanical process needs a sensitive retouching hand, and colour-correcting eye.’195

Thus, Shimada and Noda see the photograph as malleable material. They intervene in order to reduce or enlarge a photograph’s scale, cut away parts of a negative and enlarge others, while incorporating hand-drawn elements to extend mark-making possibilities. Noda explains that ‘Images taken by the camera are very similar to the eye; there is a nuance, a

194 Pat Gilmour 1970, ‘Photography and the Machine’ in her Modern Prints, London: Studio Vista, p.97.

195 ibid. p.76.

91 difference, so that I have to retouch and erase to get this into my expression.’196 This statement is, in fact, contradictory, for images are ‘framed’ by the camera and do not allow for the simultaneous recording of peripheral vision. It is my understanding that the artist intentionally interrupts the presumed ‘objectivity’ captured on film by infusing his printmaking with a sense of the ‘subjective’ handmade. His work thus negotiates the machine aesthetic by persistently incorporating the autographic trace.

For each of his print editions, Noda selects a black and white snapshot that is manipulated by hand on the plate. It is then passed through a low tech scanner to produce a screen of dots, and printed out by using a screenprint technique on a white ink woodblock base. He uses the traditional hand-held baren (a circular pad made from bamboo fibre) to force the ink from the block and through the screen onto Japanese handmade (washi) paper. This is the method historically used by ukiyo-e printers and hence situates his practice firmly with the traditional attributes of printmaking in his country.

Ostensibly, the photographic source material for both Noda and Shimada belongs to the photo-documentary tradition and not to the `staged tableaux’ of studio-based camera work (by, for instance, Morimura). Neither uses the photograph to critique the mimetic tradition or the camera’s authority as a recorder of ‘the real’. Instead, they heighten the verity of the subject depicted by enlargement and subtle embellishments through the print techniques they use. The subject matter for each of Noda’s prints is episodic. They are taken from aspects of his life, so that the artist’s work resembles a form of visual autobiography. ‘Each print begins with a photograph, but these are not images that call attention to themselves as a “statement” as, say, in the work of a Robert Frank or a Walker Evans.’197 Rather, Noda’s camera is used as a handy, fast form of note-taking; a means to create painterly images of quotidian and familiar subjects in printmaking form. His works could be read as treading a fine line between nostalgia and critical approaches to image production.

There are also marked similarities between Noda’s prints and late nineteenth century Japanese studio photographs (which, during the 1860s to the 1900s, proliferated in that

196 Noda Tetsuya, cited in Johnson and Hilton 1980, op. cit., p.172.

197 Daniel Bell 2001, op. cit.

92 country).198 Despite their artifice and theatrical staging, these softly nuanced hand-tinted photographs also feigned realism. They were photography’s answer to ukiyo-e printmaking and treated similar subjects: geisha groups, samurai, sumo wrestlers, genre scenes, among them. Both Western and Japanese photographers took up this practice. For example, Baron Raimund von Stillfried from , who worked throughout Europe and Asia from 1871 to1910, and Kusakabe Kimbei (1841-1934) were prominent in this genre of image production. Sales to Westerners accounted for the largest proportion of trade for these early photographers (mostly based in the port city of Yokohama) and they specialised in producing travellers’ albums. According to Isabel Crombie, these albums of photographs ‘provided both a personal aide-mémoire and a chance to share with others the “wonders” of this largely unfamiliar land and its people’, once they found their way to London, and elsewhere.199 These shashin were essentially stylised depictions of a traditional lifestyle that, in many cases, was vanishing. From a twenty-first century perspective, the albums were an elaborate and specialised form of tourist keepsake.

Conversely, Shimada prevents nostalgia from entering her use of photography. In her belief that photographs furnish documentary evidence, Shimada borrows photo-journalist work for source material. Yet both she and Noda seek to immortalise memory – Noda addresses temporal and personal moments, and Shimada explores the dark side of the human psyche in times of conflict. Whilst the classic texts on photography by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes are relevant in reading their work, with Shimada, one needs also to mine the later literature on photography and feminism.200

For instance, the catalogue and conference papers connected with the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography’s Gender-Beyond Memory: The Works of Contemporary Women Artists exhibition in 1996, is apposite. Shimada was the sole artist from her country

198 Refer to Isobel Crombie with Luke Gartlan 2004, Shashin: Nineteenth-century Japanese Studio Photography, exh. cat., National Gallery of Victoria. The subject of Gartlan’s PhD thesis at the University of Melbourne was the foreign exponent of shashin, Baron von Stillfried.

199 ibid. p.10.

200 Susan Sontag 1979, On Photography, Penguin Books. This often reprinted text was first published in its current form in the USA and Canada in 1977. Roland Barthes 1981, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, English translation, New York: Hill and Wang. By 1994, Barthes’ influential text had reached its sixteenth printing.

93 included in this event.201 She is considered a trailblazer for Japanese feminism and as such contributed to the English feminist magazine N.Paradoxa in September 2000. Here she stated that Gender-Beyond Memory was the most memorable show she had seen in ten years. Furthermore, ‘I consider it to be the first ‘feminist’ show in Japan. Before that, there were “women artist” shows.’202 One nevertheless needs to be cautious in accepting such bold statements: the 1920s was a liberating period for women in Japan (as it was in the Euramerican context with the `flapper’ era), and it may be that artistic activity by women, whilst not labelled as such, demonstrated gender politics.203

Male artists are also concerned with the notion of memory in Japan and here Noda can be cited. However, his treatment of `memory’ is closer than Shimada to Sontag’s and Barthes’ philosophical meditations on photography. Sontag writes that: ‘Photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art…All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.’204 Accordingly, such a philosophy may be seen as paralleling the way Noda maps time before it is lost through the informal records of familiar places and people close to him. Barthes underscored this dimension of ‘time’ (as adopted by Noda’s use of the camera) by stating in his essay on Authentication: ‘The important thing is that the photograph poses an evidential force, and that its testimony bears not on the object but on time.’205

The systematic adoption of the `Diary’ project at the start of Noda’s career characterised his practice as a charted and open-ended document. In refusing to title his images descriptively according to subject, he lessened the nostalgic dimension. He gives only the date to distinguish one print from another. Arguably, his decision to `name’ each image as a

201 Curated by Michiko Kasahara, this large-scale exhibition concentrated on women practitioners and ran from 5 Sept. to 27 Oct. 1996 with an accompanying conference. Other artists included Carry Mae Weem and Trinh T. Min-ha from the United States.

202 Shimada Yoshiko, answering a question to readers posed by N. Paradoxa, edited by Katy Deepwell, Issue 11, Sept. 2000.

203 See Chiaki and Menzies (eds.) 1998, op.cit., where a new type of personal identity by ‘mogas”’spelt a hitherto unconstricted freedom.

204 Sontag, op. cit., p.15

205 Barthes 1981, op. cit., pp.88,89.

94 ‘Diary’ entry may in part have been a strategic ploy on his to make his prints instantly recognisable in terms of ‘authorship’.

Notwithstanding this conjecture, Noda recognised the enormous expressive potential that such a time-based project allows. .Independently motivated, the artist appears never to have consciously aligned himself with any particular movement, artistic or political. Bell writes:

What has been remarkable is the consistent attention over thirty years to his own experiences: what he sees in the life of his family and friends, of travel and domesticity, of the world of nature, not abstractly but in the fruits of the garden that he tends. His world is one of quotidian involvements. The ukiyo-e printmakers lived for the moment, dramatizing a particular passion or posture. Noda seeks almost prosaically to record what he sees, as souvenirs, in the double sense of the word – as mementos, or as memories of the effort to pin down time before it is lost.206

Hence for Noda, the photograph is both sketchpad image and keepsake. Moreover, in subtly re-working his original photographs, he maintains the role of ‘fine arts’ professional whilst referring to the intimacy of the modernist documentary photograph. Through his printmaking, he subtly embellishes his past so that it is relevant for the present, although rather than being assertive, it is reflective.

As a young female in a patriarchal society, photography enabled Shimada to create a dialogue with women of an earlier generation in Japan and Korea during World War II. Despite her acknowledgment that ‘most art people think that feminist art is ‘passé’”, she understands that in this respect, in Japan, feminism is not so much a gender issue as a political one that can rebuke the concept of nationalism.207 The effect of the trauma of World War II on the Japanese national psyche makes it an ideal site for investigation. As with Noda, Shimada’s revisionist prints are set up for ready engagement, albeit with different audiences in mind.

Noda is widely credited with introducing and legitimising photo-printmaking in Japan. Subsequently his practice was very influential on other artists in that country – including Shimada and Ryoji Ikeda. Shimada, by interpreting the contemporary status of Japanese

206 Bell, op. cit., p.15

207 Shimada Yoshiko 2000, N.Paradoxa, op. cit.

95 women through her use of photographic materials from the past, also has conceptual and technical links with Ikeda’s intaglio prints. Two of this earlier artist’s etchings (from 1979) insert photographic portraits into the overall composition.208 Ikeda’s project at the time was based on his travels through India and South East Asia, where he encountered poverty and flood devastation. This caused him to reflect on cyclical regeneration and reincarnation. His deeply humanistic approach to subject matter belongs to a personal belief system that emerged from 1970s humanist idealism.

This idealism, together with the actual compositions of Shimada’s own photo-etchings, ten years later, encourages such a comparison. Like Ikeda, Shimada had been attracted to documentary photographs not solely because they bear witness to an event, but also because ‘Photography has made it possible to build up very complex images quickly, in a way that is not possible by hand. It enables the artist to juggle with the scale and position of the archival images, before using a traditional printmaking technique to reproduce and unify the final image.’209

Shimada’s prints are not precise or refined like Noda’s crafted examples.210 Instead, they adhere to the tradition of political advocacy, inquiry and dissent that has a long legacy in the twentieth century, including the etchings of Otto Dix and Käthe Kollwitz in Germany and Hamada Chimei in Japan. All relate to social unrest and war. The bite of the etching and denial of colour contribute to the power of their message-oriented art and like them, Shimada limits her palette and capitalises on `foul-biting’ and scratches to the etching plate to add expressive power to the political message.211

Noda establishes an intimate relationship with viewers of his prints. They are less about making his daily life public, than they are about inviting the viewer to enter his private space; rather like reading haiku. In contrast, Shimada’s project is about using art to alert

208 The prints in question are Ikeda’s A/avec Antonio Tapies (Skin) and A/avec Antonio Tapies (Genealogy).

209 Charles Newton 1979, Photography in Printmaking, exh. cat., Victoria and Albert Museum, London, p.29.

210 The registration, for example, of the etching plates in her individual images is not always exactly aligned when printing. In Japan this degree of competency is expected before the print is released for sale. It is my contention that Noda prizes the highly refined, technically faultless attributes of Japanese printmaking, whilst Shimada places her emphasis on subject.

211 “Foul biting” is where the acid unintentionally attacks the copper plate through an unsound ground of wax or varnish.

96 viewers to effect social change. She is therefore less concerned with fulfilling the pleasure of the eye and more with creating work that is a subversive instrument.212 Noda’s print imagery is conceptually more readily acquainted with classical Japanese aesthetics, while Shimada (from a younger generation) carries a didactic and subversive function in her imagery. Her images are unlike traditional hanga and her work has the capacity to embrace a wider sphere of art activity.

4.8 Tetsuya Noda: Prints Examined in Context

Despite being characterised as a representative Japanese printmaker, Noda is anything but conformist. While Jane Bell claimed in 1981 that Noda `was an exemplary contemporary Japanese printmaker’,213 she overlooked the transcultural dimension to his work. The `contemporary form’ she saw was interpreted as being driven by a Euramerican perspective. Noda evasively stated to this interviewer, I never think in terms of being a Japanese artist. In any case, there aren’t any special trends here [in Japan]. But I am very much interested in Zen and in minimal art – which was similar to Zen. So I am trying to find a subtle, simplified expression and composition.214 This statement points to a central theme in this thesis; that is, the empirical evidence of the print must be given a primacy in interpretation. This evidence needs to incorporate multiple readings and comparative methods of image evaluation- not only aesthetic but also contextual, social and political.

Noda’s comments above linking Zen and Western forms of conceptualising need further examination. In 1966, he started to make his hallmark series of prints. They each carried the title `Diary’ plus a date, without describing the image depicted. This series initiated an ongoing corpus of images that are composed of individual parts, thus presenting the possibility of minimalist aesthetics. In the 1960s, conceptual art was current, especially in the United States. It was in New York that his compatriot, Kawara On (b.1936) commenced the thousands of Date Paintings and related projects for which he has earned wide critical

212 See Deborah Wye 1988, Committed to Print: Social and Political Themes in Recent American Printed Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

213 Jane Bell 1981, ‘Eight artists: A common search’, in ARTnews, Vol.80, No.7, September, p.93. By the 1980s, Noda (with his close colleague Nakabayashi) were considered the ‘gatekeepers’ of the printmaking department at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. They were held in high regard throughout Japan and in international print forums.

214 ibid., p.95.

97 recognition. Noda’s ‘Diary’ project parallels not only the paintings, but also the typed sheets and mass-produced postcards with rubber-stamped text that Kawara created early in his career. These ritualistically record the contingencies of daily experience. However, in the strictest sense, 1960s and 1970s conceptual art disavowed self-expression. While Kawara’s project recorded the time he got up each day, where he went and whom he met, unlike Noda, he allowed no psychological nuance to betray the conceptual purity of his imagery.

Of the same generation as Noda, Kawara made his name abroad before being recognised in Japan. He has maintained a policy of not allowing his conceptual work, which tabulates the duration of each passing day, to be included in museum surveys of Japanese art because he considers the work ‘international’ and unrelated to any specific Japanese context. Indeed, Kawara has taken this stance, as a protest against the failure of:

Japanese museums and critics to define post-war Japanese art and to promote artists actively on the international stage… Western scholars and art producers are the ones who are backing them up. Similar to the case of ukiyo-e art, which originated in Japan but which was embraced overseas before the Japanese realized its significance, is the contemporary Japanese art scene today.215

With its figural photographic content and autographic manipulation, Noda’s imagery is of a very different cast to the rigorous, sparse and intellectual work of Kawara On.216 Noda is concerned with lyrical representation in his work and different forms of ‘space’ that he builds into his compositions. The Zen Buddhist notion of satori – the spiritually meaningful void –may be implied as simply as to denote the `in-between’ (which Noda refers to in his interview for ARTnews in 1981). Like Kawara’s Date Paintings, none of Noda’s prints is privileged over another through variation in technique or nomenclature.

Noda took photographs of his family and streetscapes in major cities of Japan before overlaying them through a photographic screenprint process over woodblock printing. The paper he uses, gampi, is a warm-toned Japanese washi stock favoured by Rembrandt in

215 Amano Tarô 1994, op. cit. , pp.70, 71.

216 Noda, by contrast to Kawara On, is a self-effacing individual who would not publicly take issue with the Japanese art context.

98 some of his etchings and drawings.217 Symbolically, his prints stand for the transposition of a Western-originating technique of image making (i.e. photography) onto the indigenous legacy of ukiyo-e woodblock printing. However, my reference to minimalism situates his project in a wider sphere of artistic production than that pertaining to guild-based printmaking and photo-documentary traditions.

Noda was awarded the International Grand Prize at the Tokyo International Print Biennale in 1968 with his companion prints Diary: Aug. 22, 1968 and Diary: Sept.11th ’68. (Plate 3, Plate 4) It has been asserted that Noda’s incorporation of photographs into print imagery caused ‘this mixed-media technique [to] become widely employed in printmaking around the world’. However, Pop artists in Britain and America had been using photo-printmaking produced in tandem with master printers.218 In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton and Andy Warhol, especially, had photographic images transferred to paper and canvas. In the realm of intermedia, the 1960s are widely acknowledged as a period of considerable experimentation. Gilmour cites the work of many artists who used photographic images in the 1960s and she points out that when Noda won the grand prize at the Tokyo Print Biennale, ’all three main prize-winners at the first British Print Biennale in Bradford had made creative use of photographic techniques’.219

In her discussion of the Tokyo Print Biennale, Gilmour used an illustration of Noda’s Diary August 22, 1968. She stated that Noda’s winning entry was ‘…a posed family snapshot enlarged by photo-screen, with its members sitting inscrutably on a sofa exquisitely printed by traditional wood-block’.220 Significantly, this particular print shows Noda’s Japanese relatives (his parents and siblings) with a bonsai tree. The companion print ,Diary: Sept.11th’68, is based on a similar group portrait but depicts the artist’s Israeli family (that of his future wife). When recently questioned about these companion pieces, Noda denied

217 Gampi washi is a crisp, strong paper stock with a warm, pearl-like lustre.

218 Stated by Daniel Bell 2000. op. cit., p.13. This gallery is the artist’s Japanese agent.

Noda’s use of photographic imagery in printmaking was preceded by the work of Maeda Tōshirō, who in 1932 began to experiment with photographic transfers onto prints.

219 Pat Gilmour 1970, op. cit., pp.87-88. The Japanese printmakers that Gilmour describes in this book are Shikō Munakata, Hamaguchi Yōzō, Kuni Sugai, Masuo Ikeda and Tetsuya Noda.

220 Gilmour, ibid. p.87. The most high profile international print biennales at the time were held in Lublijana, Tokyo, Venice and Bradford.

99 that his art was in any way commenting on East-West interconnections.221 However, this remark is contradicted by the comment he made in 1981 for the New York-based ARTnews (mentioned previously), and later in 1996, when he drew attention to his debt to a Zen expression of art:

One of the reasons I chose two families from different cultures – from Japan and Israel – to be shown in exhibitions is that I wanted to show the differences between these families. As to composition, I relied on traditional Japanese techniques of expression. For example, leaving a large amount of blank space is one of these traditions in Japanese painting. ‘Blank space’ means, in other words, the ‘in-between’, doesn’t it? In some way I was strongly aware of this traditional concept of the ‘in-between’, which highlights something that exists through something that is nonexistent. 222

Both Diary August 22, 1968 and Diary: Sept.11th’68 are images that clearly indicate a concept of ‘cultural fluidity’. As part of the printed composition, the name and date of birth of each person is depicted in kanji characters for the earlier subject and in English for the later. The information is given in a label that is situated above each figure. Given that these twin prints are the products of a Japanese artist, this attribution device probably harks back to Edo period ukiyo-e woodblock prints. For instance, ukiyo-e typically acknowledges the name of a famous kabuki actor in the block and gives a brief supporting narrative in a rectangle or cartouche. However, the artist regards these bureaucratic identity tags as ‘more like 1960s conceptual art’; perhaps because of the use of text and drawing attention to referents outside the art object itself. 223

It is this hybrid and syncretic reading of Noda’s imagery that takes the work both historically backwards (in conceptualisation as much as technique) and forward into the second half of the twentieth century. It brings his art into alignment with Kawara On and 1960s conceptualism and back to the popular genre of ukiyo-e prints.

Noda’s companion prints Diary August 22, 1968 and Diary: Sept.11th’68, together with the less well-known print Diary: Oct.25th’73, are strongly reminiscent of work by the

221 Tetsuya Noda interviewed at Tokyo Geidai by Anne Kirker, 2 December 2004.

222 Cited in Robert Flynn Johnson 1996, ‘Seeing through Everyday Life’, an interview with Tetsuya Noda, Journal (Swiss-Japanese Chamber of Commerce), March.

223 Noda interview by Kirker, op.cit.

100 nineteenth century shashin (photography) master Kusakabe Kimbei. This reinforces the aspects of Japanese heritage in Noda’s work. The latter’s photograph of a Wedding ceremony from the 1880s has family figures associated with symbolic accoutrements.224 (Plate 7) This is set against Noda’s 1973 print, in which the artist and his wife are formally seated on cushions and pose for the camera in front of a traditional Japanese landscape painted screen.

Noda has located his practice firmly in the international printmaking realm, exhibiting in situations where his Asian identity is not obscured. He has deftly re-energised the print through his hybrid use of photography and ukiyo-e processes in a cross-cultural synthesis. His reputation has grown through acknowledgment from prestigious teaching, exhibition and collecting institutions in Japan. Noda is chiefly regarded as a printmaker but his photographic prints have also been collected by photography museums. His wide circle of international contacts and exhibiting success through print biennials led to the comprehensive retrospective of 2004 in San Francisco.225

The artist, nevertheless, belongs to an older generation of Japanese printmakers who assert beauty and formal refinement in their practice. They rarely, if at all, allude to the social upheavals in late twentieth century Japan. Noda is not confrontational in his art, yet the subjects he chooses to photograph sometimes obliquely record the harsh realities of daily life. When he photographed tents erected by the homeless in Ueno Park (which he walked by on his way to teach at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music), the personal trauma implied in them was not obvious in the resulting prints.226 Rather, the closeups of plastic sheeting weighted down with rocks in prints such as Diary: November 24th ’98 and Diary: Nov.25th ’98 were carefully composed as softly draped forms with grid- like folds dappled by light from surrounding trees.They hid, rather than exposed the desperation of Tokyo’s marginalised community, or rather brought attention to it through a poeticised aesthetic.

224 Isabel Crombie with Luke Gartlan 2004. op. cit., p.25.

225 As an artist billed in the press release for his 2004 retrospective as ‘perhaps Japan’s greatest living print artist’ following a career of some forty years, Tetsuya Noda’s work is readily accepted. See his retrospective (works dating 1968 -2002) of 60 prints that was held at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, 22 Oct. 2004 – 16 Jan. 2005, op.cit. Refer to ed. Robert Flynn Johnson, Days in a Life: The Art of Tetsuya Noda in 2004, exh. cat.

226 Diary: November 24th ’98 and Diary: Nov.25th are illustrated in Johnson (ed.) ibid.. plates 53 and 54.

101

Kukatsu Reiko (2001), one of Japan’s new breed of art commentators, makes a distinction between artists of Noda’s generation who sought to ‘heal’ through their work and those who directly expressed the unease and anxiety that accompanied the economic downturn of Japan’s economy in the 1990s.227 Noda Tetsuya, through his quietly nuanced art practice, records a world largely devoid of conflict. It is Shimada Yoshiko who is allied to work by artists who take on the difficult issues concerning self identity and one’s relationship with the world at large, however unpalatable the truth may be, and without hesitation.

4.9 Shimada Yoshiko: Prints Examined in Context

Shimada confronts pressing socio-political situations in her country. Her work is in part, a legacy of the ‘postwar school’ (Sengo-ha) of Japanese photography. A case in point is the 1966 11:02 - Nagasaki series of gelatin silver photographs by Tōmatsu Shōmei, which chronicled war casualties, including ruins and physical deformities caused by nuclear radiation. For Shimada in the 1990s, it was the aftermath of Emperor Showa’s death that enabled her to critique political, economic, and social systems found in contemporary Japan.

Shimada’s printmaking demonstrates Susan Sontag’s claim that ‘Photographs furnish evidence… [and pass]… for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened.’228 Shimada is also one of a number of female artists who have used art to challenge the repressive patriarchal order. Her work deals primarily with the role of Japanese women through the prism of history. She investigates Japan’s aggressive role in World War II by utilising old media photographs and postcards. In so doing, she questions whether the social structure of her country has changed since the end of that conflict. In her intaglio printmaking, Shimada suggests Japanese women have only been superficially liberalised by Westernisation because vestiges of imperialism still confine their attitudes and lifestyles.

227 Kukatsu Reiko 2001, ‘Japanese Art in the 1990s at the Borderline Between Inside and Outside’, in Binghui Huangfu (ed.), Text & Subtext: Contemporary Art and Asian Women, exh. cat., Singapore: Earl Lu Gallery, Lasalle-Sia College of the Arts, p.109.

228 Sontag 1979, op. cit., p.5.

102 To underscore the significance of the tendency to regard women as liberalised in Japan, Shimada stated that the Meiji period (1868-1912), ‘is always depicted in very positive terms: Japan’s transformation from a secluded feudal society into an industrial world power. It was the starting point of women’s rights. The period brought certain freedoms – the concept of gender equality and education, for instance – but individual identity was still subsumed by national identity.’229 Tennoism (the Emperor system of Japan) predominated during Japanese modernisation. Shimada’s formative years as an artist were shaped by Japan’s longest serving ruler, Emperor Showa (Hirohito - reigned from 1926 to 1989). He has been credited with overseeing the significant economic and social advances in post- World War II Japan. As with Thailand’s monarch, the head of the Imperial family is perceived as above reproach and Japan’s emperor is spiritually linked with the national religion of Shinto.

After Hirohito’s death, Japanese feminist sociologists were at the vanguard in exposing the deleterious effects of the Emperor system.230 Bearing in mind that a savage critique of the Imperial family was published years before (in 1960) in the popular media (and was successfully quashed) Shimada belongs to what can be conveniently termed a ‘watershed period’231 She and like-minded women were emboldened in 1991 when an ex-comfort woman from Korea spoke publicly of the Japanese armed forces’ involvement in the establishment of military brothels. These had commenced in the 1930s when China was invaded by Japan. Since Korea was already annexed to Japan, its women were deemed suitable for forced recruitment as prostitutes for soldiers.

The death of Hirohito enabled Japan to acknowledge more openly its troubled past and come to terms with it. Open discussions in newspapers of the Imperial family occurred almost immediately and as Smith (1994) states, some artists joined this watershed moment:

229 Shimada Yoshiko, artist’s statement in Osborne (ed.) 1997. op. cit., p.22

230 See Kitahara Megumi 2000, `The current state and issue in gender, art history and visual representation studies in Japan’ . in Huangfu (ed.) Text & Subtext: Contemporary Art and Asian Women, op. cit.

231 I refer to the so-called ‘Furyu Mutan Incident in 1960, where the writer Fukazawa Shichiro published a parody in the newspaper Chuo Koron where leftists take over the Imperial palace and behead Crown Prince Akihito and Princess Michiko in front of an enthusiastic crowd. Asada Akira of Kyoto University states that ‘The Furyu Mutan incident was for many a watershed in postwar Japan with devastating consequences for the freedom of the press’; before it occurred, it was much more common to question the existence of the emperor. See Ohmy News article ‘Does Japan Need Its Imperial Family?’ by David McNeill, published 19 Dec. 2005 at http://english.ohmynews.com/article

103 In the field of conceptual art, then gaining popularity among younger artists in Japan, a move towards direct criticism of society, politics and institutions could be discerned. This was a major change in a society which had for long seen satire as the province of the cartoonist, not the artist, and the possibility of prints at last becoming capable of satire and free critical social comment is at least there.232

Given this point, it is surprising that Smith goes on to state that, as products of their time (1912-89) the works of Japanese twentieth century prints drawn from British Museum have ‘virtually no such content’. He may not have been completely familiar with practitioners and their works – as evidenced by the fact that Shimada is not represented in that collection.

In the 1990s, Shimada’s etchings, installations, performance work and collaborations were included in anthologies on feminism, rather then in publications on printmaking. These anthologies are a product of progressive academic debates arising from historical revisionism, debates rarely attempted in literature on the print.233 In her country of origin, she is particularly admired by young and independent women for her adversarial stance towards public censorship of uncomfortable truths.234 In 2002, Shimada sought to portray Japanese women in complex terms. In doing this, she drew on her own history. For example, she wrote:

I was born in a military town called Tachikawa. Growing up in a US base town, seeing Japanese women selling sexual services to the US soldiers, I became aware of the military, social, and sexual power structure between Japan and the US. But I also became aware that the reality of those women cannot just be summarized as that of ‘victims’.235

232 Lawrence Smith 1994, op. cit., p.18

233 See, for instance, Gender Beyond Memory: The Works of Contemporary Women Artists, exh.cat., Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 5 September-27 October, 1996; Griselda Pollock 1996 (ed.). op. cit.

234 Tsuruta Yoriko, gallery assistant, Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo, in conversation with the author, 2 December 2004, relayed that she liked ‘the political message in her prints and the female content’. She pointed out that her employer was a supporter of female artists who produced imagery that challenged the status quo. Ota Fine Arts was opened in 1994 by Ota Hidenori, taking on the most senior and celebrated Japanese female artist, Kusama Yayoi. At the same time he also enlisted Shimada Yoshiko and commenced staging solo exhibitions of her work in 1995.

235 Artist’s Statement in Minamishima Hiroshi, Attitude 2002, exh. cat., Contemporary Art Museum, Kunamoto, 2002.

104 Shimada has also spoken about her fascination with fascism. She believed it was part of the national character and explained that the members of the Japanese Ladies Patriotic Society operated according to absolute discipline and devotion to Hirohito and his regime during the war. With their white aprons or smocks, they embodied motherhood and domesticity, and attracted considerable membership from the middle and lower classes. This white smock, a metaphor for raising children and housework, could also be converted into a uniform which concealed the evil of fascism behind mellow images of goodness and self- sacrifice,’ Shimada wrote. ‘In those days, as far as the Japanese man was concerned, the woman’s role was either to satisfy sexual desire (prostitutes) or provide maternal love (mothers). This resulted in the loss of their reality as human beings.’236 Victim-hood is a contested notion in the artist’s commentaries. She acknowledges that Japanese women were complicit in the war effort (with the inference that they were caught up in the conflicting determinations of national identity and gender roles).

It is Shimada’s etching practice where the artist first demonstrates a commitment to the dialogue she has with women of her times, and their relationship to the past. She commenced working on the theme of women during World War II in 1988, which coincided with the death of Hirohito. Up to that point, her intaglio prints had mainly dealt with introspective dream-like concerns. As she states, ‘Primarily, I was interested in historic photographs after Shōwa Emperor died. My work deals a lot with history and I use photographs as historic document. I also like the grainy quality of photo-transfer engraving,’ she explained in 2004. 237

In 1994, Shimada had artist’s residencies at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, in Berlin and PS1 artist studio in New York. It was in between Tokyo and Berlin that the artist produced much of her intaglio imagery based on the theme of Japanese women and World War II.238 In the foreword to her solo exhibition at A Space Gallery in Canada in 1997, Ingrid Mayrhöfer made the point that:

Shimada, a Japanese artist who divides her time between Berlin and

236 Shimada Yoshiko, ‘Japanese Women and the War’, in Gender Beyond Memory, op. cit., pp.104-105.

237 Shimada Yoshiko, email correspondence with Anne Kirker, 18 November 2004.

238 Refer to Artist’s Statement in Gender Beyond Memory 1996, op. cit., p.105.

105 Tokyo, brings more than a culturally specific aesthetic to the gallery; her work addresses issues of militarism and imperialist patriarchy from within the framework of Asian politics. In contrast to the Eurocentric art-historical approach to Asia, either for formal inspiration (as in the work of the Impressionists) or for Asian ‘exotic’ themes (as in the continuing cultural and economic exploitation of Asia), Shimada’s work is overtly political in form and content. Coming from a country where the male-dominated artistic community has condemned her work as ‘improper’, she is confronted by a Western audience that expects Asian artists to produce ‘safe’ work.239

This schism of expectation in the 1990s also applies to the kind of dilemmas faced by a feminist artist in Japan.240 It is also an important component in my analysis of transcultural artists in this thesis. By such a term, I refer not only to Shimada, but also to Thai artist Prawat Laucharoen and to Australian Judy Watson. ‘Shimada’s feminism and critical view of her country are unusual’, Osborne wrote in 1997. ‘Possibly it was the four years spent at a woman’s college in California that has enabled her to look at Japan from two vantage points, both as a Japanese woman and an Asian woman, which is how she has described herself in her writing. Her stance as a feminist is not unheard of in Japan, but is still uncommon enough to be considered a position of opposition. ‘.241

Shimada’s etchings are closely intertwined with her early installation work. In both, she chose specific objects as emblematic of Japanese imperialism and of women’s status in a system in which all civilian acts were meant to symbolise devotion to the Emperor. In her essay on Shimada’s etchings, aptly titled ‘Divide and Rule’, Osborne states that ‘Imperial lineage is based in Japan’s Shinto religion, according to which the emperor is a descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu. During the war Hirohito was, in name more than deed, the supreme commander of the armed forces. At the end of the war, he became a symbolic figurehead.’242

In the work ‘Divide and Rule’, Shimada was interested in the way in which the power associated with Hirohito’s long reign continues to shape a nation and, in particular, how

239 Ingrid Mayrhöfer 1997, ‘Foreword’, in Osborne (ed.), op. cit., p.3.

240 Refer to Craig Owens’ 1983 essay ‘The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism’, in Hal Foster (ed.), op. cit., pp.57- 82.

241 Catherine Osborne 1997, op. cit., p. 12. Osborne lived and worked in Tokyo from 1989 to 1994.

242 ibid. p.5

106 Japanese women have responded to the propaganda of that regime, and how they perpetuated it in the 1990s. The artist has discovered discriminatory views towards non- Japanese Asian women, because of the estimated 200,000 Asian women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military, approximately 80% of these so-called ‘comfort’ women were Korean.243 Shimada states:

With Divide and Rule, I want to examine memories from the past, particularly the Meiji and Tasho periods, to examine Japan’s modernised patriarchal system in relation to Japanese women and other Asian women in formerly colonised countries such as Korea. Japanese women stood on the side of the colonialists and profited directly, but their collaboration was through manipulation. They were not direct aggressors, nor were they purely victims…Ultimately, the point I want to make is that through modernisation the distinction between ‘we’ and ‘others’ was made. Divide and rule.244

With rare honesty Shimada implicates herself in the discriminatory activity of her race against other Asian women. Her etchings and associated installations deal with two opposing attributes of womanhood, that of the pure image of motherhood (and the continuation of nationhood), and that of the supposedly wanton prostitute.245Among the recurring symbols she has employed to refer to the former is the white apron. It served as a uniform for members of the Greater Japan Women’s Defence Association, a brigade that zealously served the war effort, including military training. Her etching Shooting Lesson 11 (1993) is derived from a photograph that shows smocked women at a shooting range who are practising their skills with guns, (Plate 12) .Shimada brings this female complicity with Japanese aggression into a dialogue with the ‘Other’ by reproducing the torso of a young Korean comfort woman at each corner of her print. Thus two extreme female experiences are pitted against each other. In this image, by juxtaposing the female brigades with comfort women Shimada presents a pure image of motherhood next to the sexual slave, and the Japanese national with the non-Japanese Asian.

243 The Japan Times, 4 December 2004, reported ‘Chief Cabinet Secretary Hosoda Hiroyuki on Friday apologised to former sex slaves for Japan’s sexual violence against them during World War II…it was the first time a Japanese chief Cabinet secretary has met and listened to former sex slaves…sex slaves euphemistically known in Japan as ‘comfort women’. Historians estimate a majority of about 200,000 women who were forced to provide sex for the were from the Korean Peninsula.’

244 Shimada Yoshiko, quoted in Catherine Osborne 1997, op. cit., p.22

245 This binary distinction of women is not confined to Japan; it has been identified by feminists worldwide since the late 1960s.

107

In a highly controversial gesture, she produced a 1993 etching from a photograph of Emperor Hirohito in full military regalia that she ‘crossed through’ with broad aquatint strokes.246 The artist exhibited this print – titled A Picture to be Burnt – with a companion impression that had been destroyed by fire along two edges (including the face), in a Japanese university.247 (Plate 9) This defacement is the only image that Shimada has produced that is overtly slanderous towards Hirohito and it was one that would have faced censorship if shown at more public venues. In an additional act of national defiance, A Picture to be Burnt was published on the cover of the 1994 September/October issue of Asian Art News, a well-known English journal in Hong Kong. The magazine is widely distributed in Southeast Asia (and Australia) but rarely in Japan. It is inconceivable that any Japanese journal would risk an ultranationalist attack by publishing such an image of the former emperor.

Most of Shimada’s allusions to imperialistic power do not invite harsh censorship from right-wing groups. The chrysanthemum (Japan’s imperial emblem), the apron/uniform, a shadowy underwear-clad torso of a Korean comfort woman, are all motifs repeated through photographic representation or through autographic means in her prints of the first half of the1990s.

In A House of Comfort of 1993, three separate photographs constitute a composite etching of a large building (a military sanctioned brothel), a group of seated women – one of whom is heavily pregnant – and a centrally placed torso of a Korean woman (as mentioned above). (Plate 11) The raw graininess of the image, the deliberate scarring of the etching plate, and the blood-red printed central panel is provocative and disturbing. Tea and Sympathy, also from 1992, ironically plays on the old adage of friendship and compassion by taking the portrait of an elderly person (one of the former comfort women who have publicly come forward) and juxtaposing it with an archival wartime photograph of women serving tea to men. Shimada deliberately introduced aquatint and an

246 The author viewed an impression of this image at Ota Fine Arts in December 2004.

247 A Picture to be Burnt, was exhibited in the exhibition Shimada Yoshiko, Research Center for the Arts and Arts Administration, Keio University, 1996, and illustrated in the accompanying catalogue, fig. 8, p.13. This publication contains illustrations of twenty-two intaglio prints by Shimada, dating 1992-1996. It is dual language (Japanese and English), except for the main essay, which has not been translated.

108 aggressively marked etching plate to convey the historical age of her found photographs and the atrocities against her gender to which they refer. It is commonly accepted that her subject matter does not lend itself to the sōsaku hanga printmaking (through CWAJ exhibitions for example), nor in the international print biennales, where judging is partly governed by expectations of national traits. Rather, it belongs to the legacy of the independently-minded etcher Hamada Chimei.

In 1995 Shimada produced a photo-etching triptych called Tower of Loyal Spirit. A central architectural tower – undeniably phallic in form – gradually transforms into a missile. The central image is supported on either side by small rectangular shaped photographic images of Japanese brigade women and their prostitute counterparts. This photo-etching was reproduced with examples of Shimada and Bubu’s collaborations through collage in the 1998 publication Attack/Damage.248 The collages verge on humorous sado-masochist plays, which Shimada and Bubu (a professional prostitute and performance artist with the well-known Kyoto-based trope DumbType) began in 1996.249 Both Shimada and Bubu were singled out by Kitahara Megumi in her essay for Text & Subtext as key feminist artists in 1990s Japan, and Kitagawa states ‘The art practices which deserve special mention are “Bubu” who, besides her activity in the artist group “Dumb Type” is experimenting [with] expressions concerning sex and sexuality using body, photos, sentences etc. and Yoshiko Shimada who explores the issue of the Emperor system in Joan [Tennoism] or the politics of the gaze on “women” under Japanese colonialism and capitalism.’250

Shimada and her collaborator have also encouraged discussions with female audiences and recall The Woman’s Building projects in Los Angeles during the early 1970s. This represented a phenomenon that was widely known and generated similar ‘consciousness- raising’ enterprises elsewhere. In the 1970s and 1980s, academics such as Fujieda Mioko and the artist and writer Tomiyama Taeko were active champions for Asian women and

248 It is number 10 of a series titled ‘Art in Tokyo’ published by the Itabashi Art Museum.

249 DumbType featured in Judy Annear’s exhibition, Zones of Love: Contemporary Art from Japan, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 1991.

250 Kitahara Megumi 2000, op. cit., p.121

109 human rights issues.251 Although Shimada would have been aware of American feminist history through her years in California and her residency in New York, it should be noted that important early feminist texts were quickly translated into Japanese and distributed from Tokyo. For instance, Linda Nochlin’s essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ of 1971 was translated and published by the major art magazine Bijutsu Techo in 1976.252

The distinction between the American model of first-wave feminism under Judy Chicago and others is evident in the topics of discussion in Japanese academia, which went beyond the universal subjugation of women to men and included issues pertaining specifically to Asia. This indicates an important shift away from the previously dominant discourses evident in Europe and America: for instance, the Japanese perception of other Asians; whether or not the economic power of Japan in contrast to their less prosperous neighbours makes Japanese want to align themselves more closely to the West?’ 253 Such debates took the feminist enterprise beyond that of a Euramerican initiative, to have relevance specifically to the Asia-Pacific region.

The discourse can be described as `intra-cultural’ and in Japan (with respect to feminism) it occurred first in the domain of sociology, rather than art history. Megumi Kitahara (2000) explains that it was not until the beginning of the 1990s that feminism was tackled in the study of art history in that country.254 During this era of so-called ‘second wave’ feminism, the writings of Western feminist art historians, notably Griselda Pollock, were translated into Japanese on average a decade after their first release in English.255

Shimada’s etchings correspond with this revolution in feminism during the 1990s in the Kanto region of Japan. In the densely populated cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, women

251 See, for instance, Taeko Tomiyama 1972, My Emancipation, Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo; Taeko Tomiyama 1979, Aesthetics of Emancipation – What did the artists of the 20th century aim at? Tokyo: Mirai-Sha and Taeko Tomiyama 1976/1990, Women proclaiming the times: The path toward feminism in the 20th century, Tokyo: Takshoku Shobo.

252 Bijutsu Techo 1976, No. 407, May.

253 Osborne 1997, op. cit., p.13

254 Megumi Kitahara 2000, op. cit., p.119.

255 For instance, Rozsika Parker and Pollock’s classic Old Mistresses: Woman, Art, and Ideology (1981, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.) was published by Shinsui-sha (Tokyo) in 1992, while the same publisher brought out a Japanese edition of Pollock’s Vision and Difference (1988, London and New York: Routledge) in 1998.

110 created groups such as Asian Feminist Art (AFA), Asia Women and Art Collective (AWAC) and newsletters such as Women’s Art Network (WAN; 1994-2000). They were short-lived but enabled an intensive exchange of information. The journal Visions International, put out by the AWAC network in Tokyo, published an article on Shimada’s work in 1996 as part of an issue promoting feminist perspectives in Japan.256 Of particular relevance to Shimada were texts by Japanese women that addressed history and gender in their country. The distinguished cultural historian Wakakuwa Midori also wrote the book The Women Images Made by War: The visual propaganda for attracting the participation of Japanese women under World War II (1995), and later produced Woman Image as Symbol: Woman representation in the Paterfamilar Society in the Gender History (2000).

From the start of the 1990s, public art museums in Japan staged gender-specific exhibitions in favour of women with the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography particularly active in this regard. Private galleries, such as Ota Fine Arts (Shimada’s agent), also held solo exhibitions, which were reviewed in the Japanese press.

Both Shimada and Bubu use ‘female drag performance as a tool to re-stage history’, Shimada stating, `I’d like to examine the power structure between Japan/US, male/female, colonizer/colonized without falling into a simple dualistic division. Power could be interchangeable through subversive use of sexuality.’257 The photo-etchings from the first half of the 1990s had an earnest didactic function. In her collaboration with Bubu, the issue of woman as ‘victim’ is usurped through parody and sexual transgression. Hence, Shimada’s ambivalence towards fascism and the schism between stereotypes of women she explored in her printmaking reached a resolution within the performance art domain.

In the early 2000s Shimada continued to critique power as an interchangeable force. This was evidenced in the exhibition `Attitude 2002’, (Contemporary Art Museum in Kumamoto). The collages of 1998 she made with BuBu were reproduced in inkjet print

256 Hagiwara Hiroko 1996, ‘’‘Comfort Women” and Patriotic Mother: Recent Works by Shimada Yoshiko’, Visions International, Tokyo: AWAC Network, March, pp.6-8. The same author wrote on Shimada for Griselda Pollock’s book Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, New York: Routledge, 1996. See Hagiwara Hiroko, ‘Comfort Women: Women of Conformity’, chp.14.

257 Shimada in Minamishima Hiroshi 2002, op. cit.

111 editions dated 2002. A 2002 print using the electronic process referred back directly to her photo-etchings of women and the military during World War II. Titled Sep.4, 2002/SDF No.8 Division Sept.4, 2002, it shows Shimada in contemporary military uniform and BuBu as a stereotypical slut. (Plate 14) In his essay for the ‘Attitude 2002’ catalogue, chief curator Minamishima Hiroshi situated Shimada in the section on ‘Nation, Sex, Memory’, and stated:

Shimada’s work is here not to contribute to feminism. My interest lies in how far the artist’s words and expressions can enlarge upon their subjects and whether or not they are capable of inspiring an exchange or words and expressions in others. Shimada’s current work is a video summary of her and BuBu’s trial entry into the Eighth Division of Japan’s Self-Defence Force and of the straightforward questions she asked of the female officers there.258

The collaboration between Shimada and Bubu may have its most obvious manifestation as performance, installation and collage, yet Shimada still sees herself primarily as a printmaker. When she ‘came back to Japan in 2000 and moved to Chiba near Tokyo to a small coastal town called Wada’ Shimada stated that ‘… We are building a studio with a good sized etching press.’ 259 Thus Shimada has not relinquished this activity as part of the broad creative platform she operates from in her advocacy and analysis of women in the context of Japan. With her collaborator, the artist has extended and refined her objectives in keeping with a post-feminist milieu.

4.10 Chapter Summary

1. Despite popular opinion that pre-Meiji era Japan was closed to ‘modernising’ forces, the country has a history of transcultural engagement, including with the West, which has been instrumental in transforming indigenous printmaking into a hybrid identity. Etching practised in Edo after exemplars were received via the Dutch settlement of Nagasaki during the eighteenth century, is a case in point. Hence the term postmodernism (especially in the case of appropriation) cannot be exclusively confined to the late twentieth century when Japan is the case study.

258 ibid. ,p.279

259 Yoshiko Shimada in correspondence with Anne Kirker 2004, op.cit.

112

2. The seemingly contradictory impulses occurring within contemporary Japanese printmaking, and demonstrated in the work of the two case study artists, Noda Tetsuya and Shimada Yoshiko, are the results of time-honoured traditions entering into dialogue with Western artistic movements and aesthetic values. Their work is a synthetic play between form and subject. With both artists, technique cannot be considered in isolation from issues of representation.

3. After 1945, the United States, largely due to its close historical links with Japan, has had the most significant influence in promoting sōsaku hanga (creative printmaking) outside Japan. It has also informed aspects of its compositional form and techniques. However, outside guild-based societies and print exhibition opportunities, the ‘deterritorialised’ print has engaged with contexts informed by postmodernism. The feminist and post-feminist enterprises of Shimada Yoshiko are a case in point.

4. In Japan, as demonstrated through the work of Noda and Shimada, photography has intervened to take the print into a broader realm of art practice, which allows for a higher level of critical reception and appreciation.

5. The generational and gender differences between Noda and Shimada have markedly influenced their respective approaches to printmaking (image concept, technical processes, market and audience). In the case of Noda, his prints are transitional and cross-cultural works in a society that has had highly entrenched traditional codes of practice in Japanese printmaking history. His direct observance of the ukiyo-e woodblock and tangentially of Zen philosophy indicates his generation’s adherence to traditional Japanese mores. He couples expressions of the quotidian with the ‘internationalist’ freight of photography in printmaking. Furthermore, his ongoing Diary project has links with 1960s conceptual art.

6. In the case of Shimada, the impact of globalisation, the resurgence of feminism in Japan in the 1990s and the deconstruction of history through her printmaking, brings this artist firmly into postmodernism as promoted in the West. Whilst the historical subject matter of this artist links her work readily to Japan, the public exposure of her work has been construed as an attack on national identity. This has placed the artist in the position of a

113 radical social commentator through her art practice. The artist’s collaboration with performance artist Bubu employs parody as an interventionist strategy.

7. Noda works through ‘tradition’ and national identity, while Shimada attacks and seeks to redefine it radically. She is an artist for whom the concept of ‘nationness’ is deeply problematic.

8. The mainstream arena that accommodates Noda is that of the specialised print arena (in Japan and beyond it), while Shimada’s practice (comprising her photo- etching, installation work and inkjet prints) is accorded recognition chiefly outside the closed printmaking realm. Her work is situated in a broader and more controversial visual arts and socio-political context. In the 1980s and early 1990s this was exclusively in the West, while by the end of the 1990s, with changing values in Japan, her printmaking was embraced by Tokyo’s more progressive art museums and universities. As Trinh T. Minh-ha (1991) declares in her chapter ‘Bold Omissions’, ‘Feminism continues to be a political critique of society and what it has contributed is the possibility of a new way of understanding subjectivity, a radically different aesthetic, a rewriting of culture in which women are addressed as social and political subjects.’260 Shimada’s photo-etchings are hence securely located within this feminist enterprise in Japan.

260 Trinh T. Minh-Ha 1991, op.cit., p.163.

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Chapter 5 CASE STUDY 2 AUSTRALIA

‘Crafting Identities’: The Work of Bea Maddock, Raymond Arnold and Judy Watson

5.1 Introduction

The title ‘Crafting Identities’ alludes to postmodernism’s challenging re-definitions of truth, and the malleable, shifting, nature of personal and cultural identity. Conversely, it also refers to the continuing currency of many specialist printmakers to respect autographic craftsmanship, even though this has been indelibly linked to modernism and traditional connoisseurship. I shall concentrate on the artists’ ‘transgressive’ activity as much as on their adherence to tradition here.

Collectively, the prints of Bea Maddock (b.1934), Raymond Arnold (b.1950) and Judy Watson (b.1959) relocate printmaking in Australia as ‘a poetic system of transfusions and hybrids’.261 This accords not only with Merrill and Weisberg’s print-specific analyses but also with Bhabha (2007) and his postcolonial arguments, as expressed in The Location of Culture. 262

When writing on ‘Australian’ artists, there has been the tendency to give them an almost monograph identity, but in reality, any nation-state contains hybrid cultures with multiple origins. Therefore two of my case study printmakers, Maddock and Arnold, are artists who have Caucasian backgrounds with which they identify, while Watson has both Aboriginal and European heritage, although culturally, she privileges the former in her imagery. Watson can be considered as having an intercultural identity, yet Maddock and Arnold also express ‘hybrid’ printmaking forms in ways brought to light in postcolonial discourse. In addition, as with the printmakers explored in the case studies in this thesis on Japan and Thailand, these artists stand for different generations. Each generation has

261 John O’Brien and Ruth Weisberg 1992, ‘Printmaking in the Expanded Field’, The Graphic Arts Council journal, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Winter, p.11.

262 Bhabha 2007, op. cit.

115 identifiable aesthetic, iconographic and historical imperatives that include both the ‘new’ and the ‘old’.

This manoeuvring of past practices within a visual arts realm that favours the overtly novel is apparent through the Australian printmakers principally discussed in this thesis. Maddock, Arnold and Watson have steadfastly insisted on maintaining a haptic (handmade) print practice in the face of the digital revolution that has occurred since the 1990s. (This is despite Arnold’s use of computer-generated imagery as part of his autographic print expression.) In short, the Australian artists under consideration, irrespective of age, continue to adhere to the autographic.

However, it is their conceptualisation of print `hand-making’, and with what and how they usurp elements of the mechanised realm, that marks them apart. Maddock’s employment of photography as a component in her early screenprints and etchings is commensurate with Arnold’s later interfacing of his intaglio prints with digital devices. Maddock’s attraction to the photographic was to bring her printmaking into accord with the public sphere of mass media, while Arnold’s juxtaposition of the electronic with the handmade is concerned with issues of introspective identity. Hence their adoption of mechanised techniques to aid printmaking was seized upon by these artists to support their philosophical concerns at the time they employed them.

Postcolonialism was not widely discussed in the visual arts when Maddock started producing her photo-screenprints and photo-etchings in the early 1970s. For instance, Edward Said’s seminal text on Orientalism was not published until 1978.263 Here, and in the postcolonial literature that followed, attention was drawn to the inequities of power under Imperialist regimes, which importantly included the subjugation of Indigenous peoples. During the early 1970s in Australia, therefore, it was interdisciplinary practice that was more likely to be highlighted than issues of the ‘Other’. Only in the following decade did postcolonial debate gather momentum in this country.

It came to the fore in Maddock’s work during 1993- 98 when she produced her major installation of editioned ‘drawings’, Terra Spiritus…with a darker shade of pale. It was

263 Edward Said 1978, Orientalism, New York: Vintage.

116 also in the early 1990s that the younger artist, Judy Watson, responded to postcolonial issues through her printmaking, directly engaging with Indigenous Australia (through the heritage of her grandmother). While training in printmaking at the University of in the early 1980s, her work showed no acknowledgment of this heritage. It was the establishment of urban-based centres for the display of Indigenous art, specifically Boomalli Urban Aboriginal artists’ collective in Sydney in 1987, which assisted Watson to re-frame the content of her prints.

Hence, symbolic and metaphorical references in the prints of Maddock, Arnold and Watson are a reflection of the specificity of an artist’s sense of identity at a particular time in their careers. It is also commensurate with the nature of their professional training, aesthetic persuasion (and sometimes psychological imperatives). All these factors impact on how the ‘contemporary’ is critically interpreted.

Postmodernism stymies the modernist notion of discrete disciplines and encourages readings that stress fluidity of boundaries. It also prompts the introduction of doubt and uncertainty in evaluating art practice according to strict demarcations of an artist’s media speciality. While printmaking has always been the sole visual arts practice of Arnold, for Maddock and Watson the print became, through time, a central part of their oeuvres, with painting. Through all three artists’ careers, the print has been stretched and redirected to test the limitations of existing categorisations and classifications in other fields of artistic production.

The appropriateness of employing postmodernism as a framework to discuss the artists covered in this thesis is because it allows for problematic questions to be raised for printmaking and its place within the visual arts. For instance, when Maddock editions a series of ‘drawings’, are they part of printmaking’s lexicon or do they defy traditional classification altogether? Does the fact that she is principally perceived to be a printmaker, urge their reading in print terms (such as ‘seriality’)? Is the notion of ‘originality’ in printmaking still applicable, given that Arnold lays laser-jet printed images over handcrafted etchings and that Watson employs a master printer for some of her lithographs and etchings?

117 Hence this chapter’s case study explores the ‘slippage’ between adherence to a print tradition (which has its roots in fifteenth century Europe) and the urge to interface with other fields of visual expression that became a powerful force during the postmodern era. This ‘slippage’ allows for new criteria (or at the very least a broadening of the discourse) to be established for printmaking. Furthermore, these artists recognised this and stand as ideal exemplars (with the print artists discussed in this thesis from Japan and Thailand) for their place in a decisively important moment in the field of printmaking. Its dynamic instrumentality within the postmodern milieu is dependent upon the practice epitomised by these practitioners.

In the present age of ubiquitous digital technology, the ‘hand’ can add meaning to the creative process or be deemed superfluous. This is known as the ‘autographic’ in printmaking method terms. A further reading of the autographic may be that it offers ‘a critical breathing space of random disorder in which life can emerge’. 264 Is the autographic mode a perverse reaction to computerisation or a ploy to maintain lingering connoisseurship for the print? Is the ‘man and machine’ issue (absolutely seminal to printmaking) a seamless symbiosis or a contest intentionally played out? Provocatively then, printmaking in Australia can now be seen as a richly discursive, even disputed, territory. And it is through the work of the Australian printmakers identified in this case study that the field was turned into a ‘disputed territory’; one that belongs within postmodern discourse and also one that has continued to inform the innovative practices of these artists.

5.2 Historical Premises for the Print in Australia

Australia is often placed on the margins in international cultural discussions. While postcolonial discourse challenged the centrist mainstream perceptions during the 1980s and 1990s (the period with which I am chiefly concerned), the history and the marginal status legacy of this country still weigh heavily. In the well-known article for Artforum (1974) called ‘The Provincialism Problem’, Australian scholar Terry Smith underlined

264 Kevin Murray 2005, editorial for special issue on ‘Handmade: the new labour’, Artlink, Vol. 25, No. 1,March, p.11.

118 the subservience Australian art practice felt in relation to the Euramerican context; and is a subservience that has (with the exception of Aboriginal art) continued. 265

Prints made a sporadic appearance in the early years of Australia’s colonisation. The first appeared in 1801 and were produced by English immigrant artist John Lewin, and later in the 1840s by better known artists Conrad Martens, John Skinner Prout and S.T. Gill. The international resurgence of interest in printmaking in the 1890s indirectly influenced printmaking in Australia. A distinctive development at the start of the 1900s was initiated by the Australian Painters-Etchers Society, in Melbourne, which included notable printmaker John Shirlow. Predictably, Shirlow and others were influenced by the intaglio work of London etchers and painters like Charles Meryon and James McNeill Whistler.

A decisive break from this overt reliance upon an English and European tradition came with the relief prints of Margaret Preston, especially her intaglio prints that utilised Indigenous Aboriginal imagery. Other Australian women artists of the 1920s and 1930s produced woodblock and linocut prints, which were compositionally bold, decorative and highly original. After a hiatus, it was only in the latter half of the 1950s that the creative print re-emerged as a distinctive force in this country. Lithography became part of the repertoire, although equipment was scarce. Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd, based in London during the 1950s, took advantage of specialist print facilities unavailable in Australia, at Ganymed Press in particular, to produce editions of lithographs.

Another outstanding postwar printmaker, Fred Williams (1927-82) was best known as a landscape painter. He studied intaglio printmaking methods at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in 1954-56 and came to regard etching as being as creatively satisfying as painting. Some of his small black and white prints from this period (based on the Music Hall theme) are often compared with the work of Walter Sickert. Williams, however, was a far more adventurous printmaker and pushed the intaglio medium much further. (Plate 15) Most mid-twentieth century painters who made prints regarded the activity as a coda to their painting practice.

265 Terry Smith 1974, `The Provincialism Problem’, Artforum, September.

119 Williams’ career commenced according to this mindset, but by the mid 1960s he was exhibiting his etchings almost as much as his oils and watercolours.266 When he returned from abroad (in December 1956), the artist pulled his own etchings (an infrastructure of print workshops and publishers in Australia did not exist at this time), and shifted his subject focus to the depiction of the indigenous landscape.267 As he was no longer in direct contact with England, he was able to concentrate on what was at hand and assiduously avoided cultivating a style that could be read as solely adapted from Euramerican prototypes.

Williams’ high profile in Australian art gave the printmaking field in Australia an ongoing ‘dignity and professionalism’.268 Importantly, he was not attracted to it for its ‘outsider’ status in the traditional hierarchy of art disciplines, but rather for its distinctive mark-making capabilities, serial possibilities, and the dislocating effects (one surface transferred to another) printmaking afforded. Furthermore, Williams was attracted to the serendipitous results of the print, where unique chance effects and variations are enacted. Williams experimented with different proofs that were developed from a single image by reworking the matrix and on occasions, he also employed different paper types to achieve subtle variations in the printed image.

While Williams was expanding his intaglio practice, an international print revival was harnessing the energies of those who based their careers solely on printmaking. In 1963- 64, the Art Gallery of New South Wales staged a state gallery tour of the Australian Print Survey, a pivotal exhibition to announce the revival of the discipline in this country. 269 The project recorded the recent past and the work of a majority of practising printmakers

266 The Print Council’s Directory 1988: Australian artists producing prints, edited by Ann Verbeek and published in 1989, records Williams as having his first solo exhibition of graphic work at Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney, in 1964. During 1966, 1967 and 1968, the artist held four exhibitions dedicated to his etchings. In 1968, James Mollison’s comprehensive book, Fred Williams Etchings, was published by the Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney.

267 Print workshops, independent of tertiary art institutions in Australia, were established from the 1960s onwards, gathering pace by the 1980s to operate in all states. However, a larger proportion centred, by the end of the 1990s, in Melbourne, including The Port Jackson Press, John Loane’s Viridian Press and the Australian Print Workshop.

268 Roger Butler 1985, ‘Prints – a coming of age’, in Australian Prints in the Australian National Gallery, Canberra: Australian National Gallery, p.44. Butler is a senior curator specialising in Australian prints and has done the most extensive institutional collecting of prints from this country.

269 Roger Butler commented that The Australian Print Survey, 1963-64, a large exhibition that toured all states, brought together the work of the significant printmakers working at the time. For both artists and the public, it marked the official acceptance of printmaking in the [mainstream] art world’, ‘Prints – a coming of age’ in Australian Prints in the Australian National Gallery, ibid., p.44.

120 at the time. It was organised by Daniel Thomas, a former curator and director highly regarded for his knowledge of Australian art. As part of its comprehensive brief, he argued that the exhibition:

… identified the presence of a number of European-trained printmakers whose influence was felt nationally: and Karin Schepers in Adelaide, Hertha Kluge-Pott in Melbourne and Vaclovas Ratas, Henry Salkauskas and Eva Kubbos in Sydney. They provided a contrast and a balance which have persisted, to otherwise largely British training and influence.270

Thomas recognised the impact that migrant print-trained artists and curators had on local Australian practices during the 1940s and 1950s. They were the catalyst for the establishment of printmaking departments at the country’s art schools and the new interest in original prints shown by state art galleries. Sellbach (from Cologne) for instance, played a leading role in setting up the printmaking department at the South Australian School of Art, while (also from Germany) was appointed to the prints and drawings department at the National Gallery of Victoria. Hoff actively acquired Australian prints dating from the 1940s onwards. Despite these advances, as Sasha Grishin in his book Contemporary Australian Printmaking points out:

… printmaking as a separate, recognised art form – one where relief printing, intaglio, lithography and screenprinting were all brought together under a single roof – was a phenomenon which scarcely predated the 1960s.271

In the early part of the 1960s, a number of well-attended national touring exhibitions and highly publicised print prizes were undertaken. Significantly (in terms of breaking the Euramerican nexus), printmaking was chosen as one of the art forms included in Four Arts in Australia, an official government touring exhibition of South-east Asia, in 1962.

270 As recorded by Hendrik Kolenberg 1998, in his introduction to Australian Prints from the Gallery’s Collection, Hendrik Kolenberg and Anne Ryan, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, p.12.

271 Sasha Grishin 1994, Contemporary Australian Printmaking: An Interpretative History, Sydney: Craftsman House, p.16. Grishin mentions that this revival in printmaking was occurring simultaneously in Eastern and Western Europe and the United States, thus neglecting to acknowledge the Asia-Pacific region, aside from Australia. His overview was preceded by Franz Kempf’s Contemporary Australian Printmaking, published by Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1976.

121 Those who championed printmaking saw the 1960s as a decade in which there was a greater acceptance of the creative print as ‘an art form that existed in the open arena’ of Australia’s art world.272 Printmaking studios in Australian art schools were consolidated and privately owned printmaking workshops, and specialised print galleries were established. The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) went so far as to instigate a fulltime diploma course in printmaking (in 1965). A year later, Tate Adams (who had trained at the Central School of Art before teaching printmaking at RMIT) established the Crossley Gallery in Melbourne. This was the first commercial gallery dedicated to original prints in Australia. Adams had a close relationship with the contemporary print scene in Japan and showcased examples from that country. In this period, Australian printmakers contributed to the international print biennales and triennials alongside artists from Japan and Thailand.273

In Japan and in Australia, the contemporary print during the 1960s was marketed as an inexpensive original art work. Some artists in Australia had allegiance to a particular dealer, such as Fred Williams with the Rudy Komon Gallery, others, like Normana Wight (b.1936), exhibited at a number of commercial venues. For instance, she exhibited screenprints at Pinacotheca, Melbourne, in 1967 and in the following year showed them at Central Street Gallery, Sydney. The counterculture forces of the time also began a burgeoning movement that produced socio-political posters. These were produced by poster-making collectives, such as The Earthworks Poster Collective in Sydney.274

5.3 The Print Council of Australia and Imprint

The Print Council of Australia (PCA) was pivotal in promoting interest in the print; especially as produced by artists who specialised in this field This organisation was established in 1966 by printmakers Sellbach and Graham King and the curator Hoff, and

272 Grishin 1994, ibid.,p.48.

273 Brian Seidel 1965, The Arts in Australia: Printmaking, Melbourne: Longmans. Seidel observed, ‘Australian printmakers have regularly been invited to participate in important international Print Biennials at Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Tokyo, Ljubliana and Lugarno’, p.6.

274 Refer to Roger Butler, Poster Art in Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1993.

122 was based on The Print Council of America and similar European organisations,275 According to Franz Kempf in Contemporary Australian Printmakers (1976), in the first decade of its operation, the Print Council mounted over a hundred exhibitions throughout Australia and also travelled similar exhibitions in Europe, the United States of America and South East Asia.276 This level of print exposure was extraordinary and testifies to the popularity of the editioned print at the time in Australia and internationally.277 The Council served printmakers and print connoisseurs and as the works were relatively inexpensive, they were widely seen as ideal vehicles for attracting potential art collectors, irrespective of medium. Donald Brook in the Sydney Morning Herald (1968) believed that ‘Many artists…are laying down the basis of a reformed art industry, with perhaps a more active role for the art consumer.’ He saw prints as a crucial lever for implementing this awareness of art for a broad spectrum of consumers and not solely for a wealthy elite.278

The PCA’s quarterly publication, Imprint (still active) was Australia’s version of American journals like The Print Collector’s Newsletter (PCN).279 The first issue made a point of differentiating between an ‘original print’ and a reproduction of a work of art, as confusion often arises about the term ‘print’ itself. With the democratic and reformative tenor of Brook’s statement, above, shared by the editor of Imprint, clarification was deemed necessary. Furthermore, as part of Imprint’s purpose was to attract a market for the contemporary print, this instruction was followed by explanations about various print techniques. However, by the fourth issue (1967), Sellbach’s own

275 The Kestner Gesellschaft in Hanover was a primary example. In the `Brief History’ chapter of his book Contemporary Australian Printmakers, Kempf states `This Council was established by Grahame King and a group of fellow artists and interested laymen, because it was felt that Australia had reached the stage where technical equipment, knowledge and interest among artists and public justified a society of this type. Such societies exist in other countries, notably Germany and America…’, op. cit.,p.9.

276 Kempf 1976, ibid.

277 An instance of Australian initiative was the 1976 Western Pacific Print Biennale, which included printmakers from fourteen countries, including Japan and Thailand. The exhibition was prepared by the Print Council of Australia with assistance from the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council. This Biennale occurred only once.

278 Donald Brook 1968, Sydney Morning Herald, 1 December. He pointed out that `original prints` at the time cost `$30-$100’.

279 Imprint differs from the PCN in that its readership is local and it has never advertised the sale of prints. It largely concentrates on articles and news items to do with contemporary printmaking. Unlike the PCN with its New York base and worldwide readership, Imprint has consistently been published from Melbourne, where the headquarters of the Print Council of Australia is based. As it is membership-driven, the PCA has at times been perilously close to financial insolvency, especially after the 1970s when the print, as produced by specialist printmakers, suffered from intervals of waning popularity.

123 writings on the print in this journal became more ambitious than hitherto. For instance, they included an acknowledgment of expansion by printmakers of their use of the medium, as well as the necessity for a matching theoretical framework that is remarkably prescient to postmodernism:

Traditional distinctions between graphic media (etching, lithography, woodcut and so on) are being increasingly disregarded by some of today’s artists. Exploration of the new attitude it implies may establish an intellectual basis for our understanding of this attitude. The technical possibilities of photo-mechanical reproduction, hitherto taboo in the realm of the artist print, are invading this sanctuary with increasing force … Even if not realised yet in Australian printmaking, conservative and timid as it still largely appears, the international scene shows definite signs of a new and inventive attitude in this field and it will only be a matter of time until we find ourselves confronted by these new prints.280

With this statement, Sellbach, a teacher and etcher, predates the call for a critique of the print by American print scholars, notably Ruth Weisberg, by some twenty years and significantly for this thesis, applies it to the Australian context.281

In his 1967 Imprint article, Sellbach criticised the existing state of the print in Australia as ‘conservative and timid’, and unwittingly assumes the ‘provincial’ attitude prevalent in Australia at the time. It assumed that all new developments must automatically be generated elsewhere. This was forcefully articulated by Terry Smith (1974) when he wrote that ‘Provincialism appears primarily as an attitude of subservience to an externally imposed hierarchy of cultural values’. In this essay, ‘The Provincialism Problem’, published in the mainstream international art journal Artforum, Smith elaborated that ‘… the criteria for standards of “quality”, “originality”, “interest”, “forcefulness,” etc., are determined externally’.282 Although Sellbach was German-born and trained and his etchings reflected these beginnings, his commentary displays the commonly held ‘cringe’ mentality in Australia and its deference to Euramerican art developments.

280 Udo Sellbach 1967, ‘Printing possibilities versus medium possibilities’, Imprint, the Print Council of Australia, Vol. 2, No. 2, unpag.

281 As pointed out earlier in this thesis, Weisberg and other print scholars located in Euramerican contexts used printmaking periodicals also to espouse their critical writing. This was because the field continued to be viewed hermetically and it was hence of little interest to other publication vehicles. Despite the shift, indicated by Sellbach and the American scholars, from interpreting the print solely in technical terms, other forums would have been reluctant at this time to embrace the ‘marginal’ art form of printmaking as inspiring potentially new theory.

282 Terry Smith 1974, op. cit., p.55.

124

It was widely acknowledged that Australian artists, as well as others in art worlds outside New York (the centre of influence implied in Smith’s controversial article) freely adopted Euramerican styles and rules. Once mastered, they were elaborated and subtly changed. Furthermore, up to and during the 1970s, it was acknowledged that the cultural transmission was one-way, from the centre outwards. Print artists, as much as those in other art fields, were caught in the ‘provincialist’ bind; more so as their practice (those who called themselves ‘printmakers’) continued to be seen as peripheral to the mainstream.

By comparison, printmaking in Japan was predicated on a long and enduring national legacy, as detailed in the previous case study. In the 1960s and 1970s print artists working in the sōsaku hanga tradition, derivative though much of it was, did not suffer from cultural insecurity. The advent of the Tokyo Print Biennale (the first such international event of its type) alone testified to the confidence of hanga artists in their stake in the international arena. Thailand was different again, as its printmaking was given equal status to that of painting and sculpture, mainly because of the holistic vision of Italian director and his protégée Chalood Nimaser at Bangkok’s Silpakorn University. Furthermore, unlike in Australia, when a survey assessment of contemporary art practice in Thailand is published, printmaking (at least in its conservative forms) has always been included.

It was only during the 1960s that the print in Australia was acknowledged as an aesthetic and commercially viable art form. Accordingly, it was accepted into the mainstream by practitioners (albeit usually painters) who were intent on diversification. Coincidentally, many artists trained in print techniques started to adopt unorthodox approaches in the 1970s. They were aware of a situation where ‘The elaborate world of modernist practice, theory, criticism and connoisseurship, so recently triumphant, had ossified into an official art culture’.283 Accordingly, there was an endeavour to ward off the perception of the print as an anachronistic mode of expression.

283 Terry Smith 1991, `A Problematic Practice 1970-80’, chapter.14 in Bernard Smith and Terry Smith, Australian Painting 1788-1990, Oxford University Press, p.453.

125 Hence, the 1970s print movement in Australia witnessed restlessness and dissatisfaction with old formulas. Artists could be seen to be implementing the views of Sellbach of the late 1960s. The seventies paved the way for postmodernism and the multiple trajectories innovative printmaking took as a matter of course by the end of the 1990s (a situation that continues up to the present).

The election of the Labor government led by Gough Whitlam (1972 to 1975) set the tone for a revitalised agenda for the arts in Australia. This administration encouraged experimentation, diversity of expression and a democratic arts-for-all policy. Printmaking enthusiastically responded to this ethos of ‘Anything Goes’.284 As already noted, it filled the need for relatively low priced original art works for an affluent and often youthful market, which did not necessarily wish to spend capital on expensive paintings. Ironically, this sales success changed perceptions about the practice, which was no longer considered a ‘minor’ art. In addition, Aboriginal (and Torres Strait Islander) printmaking began to emanate from remote communities and was brokered by ‘white’ Australians. 285 ‘Aboriginal people are the only residents of Australia who have not originally come from elsewhere,’ Clare Williamson states (1992), ‘But we, the dominant Anglo culture, manage to classify them as the “Other”.’286 This observation is precisely the conundrum Simons and other case study analysts point out in their writings.287 Hence, the 1970s stands for an immensely fertile period for encouraging shifting perceptions of printmaking as part of the general revolution occurring within the visual arts and culture in Australia.

284 The title of the 1984 anthology Anything Goes: Art in Australia 1970-1980, edited by Paul Taylor, Melbourne: Art & Text.

285 Only in the late1980s and early 1990s did contemporary prints from Aboriginal Australia attract concerted attention. For instance, in 1987, the Print Council of Australia staged a touring exhibition with accompanying catalogue titled Aboriginal Views in Print and Poster. It was curated by Christine Watson and Koori (urban Aboriginal) artist Jeffrey Samuels. It was followed by a substantial touring exhibition and publication published by the Aboriginal Arts Management Association, Sydney, in association with Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, 1992. The project was called New Tracks, Old Land: Contemporary Prints from Aboriginal Australia. The publication was edited by Chris McGuigan and had written contributions from Lin Onus (Indigenous artist), who authored the introduction, and non- I.ndigenous art administrators. Up to that time, occasional insightful articles were published, including Pat Gilmour’s `The Potential of Australian Aboriginal Printmaking’, Tamarind Papers, Vol. II, 1988, pp.43-54.

286 Williamson 1992, `Forms of ID: Printmaking and issues of cultural identity’, paper presented at The Second Australian Print Symposium, Canberra: National Gallery of Australia.

287 See chapter 3. of this thesis, more particularly the reference to Helen Simons, `The Paradox of Case Study’, 1996, op. cit..

126 The period witnessed a number of artists (those of Caucasian origin) systematically overhauling conventional premises for the print in Australia.288 For these artists, the overhauling of tradition in printmaking had, on occasions demonstrated a shift in content that reflected the impact of postmodernist discourses (such as feminism and gay rights), but equally it was to do with the actual form of the print. Artists could therefore focus on technique and interdisciplinary exploration, such as experimenting with the interface between printmaking and photography. By the 1980s and 1990s, such explorations evolved in tandem with performance, installation and an engagement with electronic media.289

By 1970, the term ‘mixed media’ was commonplace in art practice. This was a sign of an immensely interesting development in the visual arts and testified to the sweeping overhaul of antiquated notions that coincided with the ‘counter culture’ push for radical social change. In print practice, it was manifested by a break with the hierarchy of print mediums within the discipline itself. Therefore, traditional connoisseurship was confounded. No longer, for example, could etching reliably represent the apex of the print hierarchy of methods. Furthermore, connoisseurship in printmaking was severely tested, as it was based on the notion of ‘originality’ and limited editions.

The term ‘mixed media’ in printing referred to the combination of two or more of the four standard groups of processes – relief, intaglio (which included etching), planographic, or screenprint – to make a single print. It also referred to the infiltration of photographic technology. With the impact of such technology on printmaking possibilities and attitudes, the autographic emphasis was irrecoverably challenged. It was as though the very foundation of traditional art school training – that of mastery in the life class – was threatened by the introduction of readily accessible technology. Although avant-garde artists had responded to the introduction of photography in image-making in

288 Adrian Newstead states in his essay,`New Tracks, New Trade Routes’, that during the 1970s, Koori artists were painting and producing prints at `art schools, while others were the product of Aboriginal community programs such as the EORA centre in Sydney’s Redfern’, in Chris McGuigan (ed.), op. cit., p.11.

289 At a Contemporary Print Symposium held at the UNSW College of Fine Arts in conjunction with the Ivan Dougherty Gallery exhibition No Muttering, 5 Oct. 2001, a range of speakers commented on the current situation of printmaking. Print artist Rose Vickers, who makes wall-based three-dimensional prints, stated that she found commercial dealers reluctant to sell them. Ruth Johnstone, who arguably had a higher profile as an Australian specialist printmaker, stated that `she has not sold through art dealers for ten years’. As with Bea Maddock, she sells directly to interested parties.

127 the early twentieth century (such as John Heartfield with his photo-montages), it is somewhat surprising that printmakers took so long to make the change en masse.

Arguably it was because of the tight guild-based premises surrounding the print. This meant that during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the interface between the camera and the autographic mark was a significant and hotly contested situation for the creative print. Pat Gilmour states, of this period,‘what is relatively new in the development of the print, is that photography, once barred, has been received into the canon … something that both Ivins and Benjamin took on. What was additionally refreshing about Ivins, was his lack of preciousness in an otherwise very precious field.’290

Hence Sellbach’s 1967 essay, with its visionary prediction (with passages italicised by him), was put into action in Australia during the 1970s. However, while many artists successfully pushed the territory of printmaking further, what had not yet been fully absorbed was the prospect that the generic qualities of the print (such as ‘seriality’) could be isolated as a critical concern for art making and explored accordingly. Sellbach put it this way:

The greatest prospect for printmaking in the future, however, will lie in the acceptance of printing possibilities as a formative element in art. This goes beyond the use of printing techniques for the purpose of making a print. It suggests that serial composition, permutation in form and colour, interchange of images and the moulding of disparate elements of reality through photography and printing are viable.291

Nevertheless, as an indication that electrostatic imaging was well and truly accepted in the lexicon of printmaking methods, Geoff La Gerche (1980) formally declared that the Print Council of Australia would now recognise work incorporating the photocopy form of ‘Xerox’, moulded paper as well as monotypes.292 A decade later, in the early 1990s, computer manipulation became accepted as a part of the repertoire of printmaking in

290 Pat Gilmour, letter to Anne Kirker, 15 September 2002.The texts Gilmour refers to are discussed in chapter 1 , namely, William M.Ivins, Prints and Visual Communication (1953) and Walter Benjamin, `The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations (1968).

291 Sellbach 1967, op. cit.

292 Geoff La Gerche 1981,’President’s Message’, Imprint, Special edition 1980 annual report, March, p.2.

128 Australia. However, it needs to be pointed out here that this thesis addresses the dispersal of printmaking into the electronic realm only when it is consciously counterpoised with the autographic. This ‘coupling’ of radically different modes of image-making engenders a tension or ‘jolt’ to traditional expectations, and at the same time, can allow a formal and symbolic syncretism to occur. The re-animation and reconsideration of problems old and new, the transformations that follow serious artistic endeavour in the contemporary are not reliant upon, or necessarily in opposition to, computer literacy and concomitant tools. With postmodernism, as this thesis argues, there are no radical breaks or terminal discontinuities, only fresh possibilities to extend discourse and avoid entropy.

5.4 Bea Maddock: Prints Examined in Context

Until the 1960s, the screenprint in Australia (and elsewhere) was perceived as little more than a product of a cheap commercial printing process. 293 Known as either serigraphy or silkscreen, it was an easy way to apply layers of colour for advertisements and related uses. Although Allan Sumner held a screenprint exhibition in Melbourne (1946), the artist’s landscapes largely imitated the painted brushwork and composition of oil paintings. This is because the representational conservativism of his imagery proved acceptable to a middle-class market in Australia, which still relied on England and continental Europe as touchstones. Later, in 1963, a gestural abstract screenprint by migrant artist Henry Salkauskas was awarded first prize in the prestigious Mirror- Warartah art competition in Sydney. His contribution was preferred over paintings and sculpture, clearly indicating that printmaking was considered to be on a par with these stalwarts of art production. In the following decade, artists such as Alun Leach-Jones found the screenprint process ideal for compositions on paper that closely related to his paintings. The screenprint stencils allowed for sharply defined forms, and the inks squeegeed through silk provided intense blocks of colour. An added bonus was that unlike other print techniques, the resulting image did not print ‘in reverse’.

However, unlike the gestural or flat abstract appearance of screenprint productions by the artists mentioned above (which could readily be equated with painting) when the process

293 The screenprint was to receive international prominence through its use by Pop artists in collaboration with master printers in Britain and the United States during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s.

129 was used more imaginatively, controversy arose. For instance, when screenprinting was employed in a postmodern ‘collagist’ manner (with fragments of photographs and found imagery from mass media) and had referents only to Euramerican Pop art, purists of printmaking became alarmed. The depth of tradition in Europe of the print as a ‘haptic’ activity was seen as being bypassed in favour of an aesthetic inspired by Britain and United States, one that was informed by mass-media culture.

To such sceptics (who wished printmaking to maintain a guild-based identity) it was as though Walter Benjamin (1968) and his prophetic essay in English on ‘mechanical reproduction’ had overridden the history of autographic print traditions. ‘That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art,’ he proclaimed.294 Similarly, William Ivins (1953) had defined the original print as ‘an exactly repeatable pictorial statement’ and in fact the very notion of a ‘limited edition’ was antithetical to this theorist’s thinking295. Yet it was these very arguments by Benjamin and Ivins that influenced subsequent postmodern interpretations of the print (such as those by Weisberg and Merrill in the United States) to recognise them as being the necessary irritant for change.296

Outside the context of Australia, it was a different matter. This is borne out by Australians Brett Whiteley and Colin Lanceley, who, while in London during the early 1960s, worked with master printer Chris Prater at Kelpra Studio. There they employed photo-screenprints and Whiteley went so far as to produce a print he titled Drawing about drawing (1965), which used ‘photographic processes to challenge the then accepted idea of what an original print was’.297 Hence some ambitious artists, who were chiefly identified as painters or sculptors, addressed printmaking not as trained print practitioners

294 Walter Benjamin 1968, op. cit., p.221. It is worth noting that the date of this widely distributed collection of essays coincided with the international revival of printmaking as an art form.

295 Ivins 1953, op. cit.

296 It is as well to remember here that the invasion of the arena of printmaking by technology is not new. The beginnings of printmaking were, after all, utilitarian rather than aesthetic. When writing of the ‘expanded field’ of printmaking in the late twentieth century as innovative, it pays to recall that expansion of this kind has characterised the history of the genre, and that each invention of the printing industry has revolutionised printmaking as an art form. In the 1960s, this merely progressed to include the challenge of photographic technology.

297 Quoted in Roger Butler, Australian Prints in the Australian National Gallery, op. cit., p.46.

130 but as collaborators with master printers. Fred Williams, mentioned earlier in this case study, had been an exception to this rule.

This is understandable, as in the mid 1950s, when Williams (like Bea Maddock) trained in painting and printmaking in London, the force of Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton and other early Pop artists working with photo-screenprints had yet to emerge there. It was Maddock who became the pioneer of Australian photo-screenprinting; but only after her return to Australia at the start of the 1970s. The prints she produced a decade after Salkauskas’ prize (1963) were of an entirely different order to his Soulages-like animated abstractions.298 Coincidentally, it was in this year that Editions Alecto in London released Paolozzi’s famous portfolio of photo-screenprints, As is When (1963). These collagist works were characterised by the integration of disparate images from found sources that were inspired by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s later writings (1940s) accorded with postmodernism, where boundaries are transgressed in order to promote new meanings and where paradox and contradiction are necessary components. This widely read philosopher played a part in inspiring Maddock to change course in her printmaking.299

The importance of Bea Maddock in this context is that she, unlike her compatriots Whiteley and Lanceley, developed her collagist ideas for the print in Australia. Furthermore, she taught herself the photomechanical techniques necessary to project her imagery in this vein without recourse to master printers. Furthermore, she regarded her photo-screenprints and subsequent photo-etchings as the seminal aspect of her oeuvre, once she had mastered their techniques.This was despite the fact that Maddock produced compelling prints using the relief process during the mid-1960s - which harked back to the style of the German Expressionists.

298 Close in age to Bea Maddock, also broke the mould of traditional printmaking by using photo- screenprints as a serial form of collage, building up surreal images of a world overrun by mechanisation. Senbergs was a graduate of the Melbourne School of Printing and Graphic Art, so he came not from an art school background, but from a technical college.

299 In several of Bea Maddock’s notebooks she wrote quotes and names of philosophers she was following. Wittgenstein and his book Philosophical Investigations (1953) were among them. The author was given access to the artist’s notebooks in Launceston, May 1990 and August-October 1991 in preparation for the exhibition Being and Nothingness: Bea Maddock: Work from three decades, Queensland Art Gallery and Australian National Gallery, 1992.

131 Maddock’s subsequently gained knowledge of British and American Pop art, together with her philosophical readings around such imagery, made her decisively change direction. She became the kind of printmaker theorist William Ivins had called for in 1953.300 When Maddock commenced screenprinting in 1968, she wrote that this was the time ‘Printmaking was starting to become a major art form rather than a kind of painting. And it’s when I stopped painting.’301

Her new prints were the product of a prevailing socio-political context in Australia and a zeitgeist felt elsewhere. Artists wishing to go beyond the permanent object began to set up alternative artist-run spaces, which became a forum for creating ephemeral and non- marketable works. In the wake of the international student uprisings of 1968 and the Vietnam War, rejection of the establishment and its stultifying values was a reality pursued amongst artists in this country. For many (including Maddock) the late 1960s was a ‘consciousness-raising’ time in accordance with counter cultural mores.

Maddock’s printmaking disclosed an interiority of purpose. Her work as a whole is generally descriptive of an “ inner world of feeling’, which has been couched most often in subject matter that is readily available to her; namely her own features, common objects, fragments of photo-journalism, text, and familiar landscapes.302 There is a kind of distinct propriety about it, a paring back to essential concepts and assertions. By the same token, the intense print activity undertaken by the artist during the 1970s was in response to a perceived need for a ‘democratic’ art form capable of broad dispersion, and in a syntax that was relevant to youth. Not surprisingly, the photo-screenprints she produced at that time employed the same methods as those of street protest posters.

Hence she eschewed ‘old’ world print processes and turned to the photo-mechanical in order to integrate her introspection with the force of a changing world order. Maddock found that photography provided the lever by which to achieve this. Formerly, the artist’s

300 Ivins, according to Susan Tallman, ‘had no patience with the muddy, nostalgic use of antiquated media, and saw photography as the ultimate development of reproductive technologies’, 1996, op. cit., p.201.

301 Grishin, cited in Ursula Hoff’s Foreword to Contemporary Australian Printmaking: An Interpretative History, Grishin 1994. op. cit., p.7.

302 See `Charting Territory’, in Anne Kirker and Roger Butler, Being and Nothingness: Bea Maddock: Work from Three Decades, op. cit., p.13.

132 printmaking had been linked closely in subject to her paintings and had relied upon straightforward relief, intaglio and rudimentary screenprint methods. She found, as other artists had, that creating prints using photographic stencils made it possible to build up very complex images quickly, in a way that was not possible by hand. One commentator observed: ‘The photo-aided print offered the possibility of repetition, superimposition, enlargement, and a limitless variety of imagery. By [using] … mass-produced fragments of everyday life, artists synthesized and homogenized a basically collage conception, inventing a new aesthetic that radically broke with past print history.’303

For Maddock and other case study artists in this thesis, technique and content are always inseparable. This thesis importantly points out that materiality and process are inextricably bound to the concepts behind their printmaking. Therefore the synthesis of hand and machine in Maddock’s 1970 photo-screenprints, together with the more numerous photo-etchings that followed, was a means towards achieving a renewed integration of life and art. This is because the prints helped her explore existential questions she was dealing with at that time. Jean-Paul Sartre (whom she read widely, noted in her notebooks and quoted in an intaglio print) had already pointed out that ‘technique itself frequently implies or embodies a philosophy’.304

While this will become more evident in the work of the artists from Thailand I discuss in the next case study, namely Prawat and Phatyos, it is nevertheless keenly relevant to an assessment of Maddock. This is because she deliberately adopted the photo-mechanised print to reflect topical world issues as conveyed through the press and other literature, and at the same time, applied her own insights to this information. Before the Xerox and digital prints phenomena, no medium other than photo-screenprinting, photo-etching and photo-lithography was able to transfer the photograph into the printmaking field.

In 1970 Maddock commenced teaching printmaking at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, Melbourne. There she first experimented with photographic imagery with the

303 Donna Stein 1983, ‘Photography in printmaking’, Print Review, No. 16, p.4. The Print Review journal was published in New York and ceased operation in 1985.

304 Mentioned in Pat Gilmour 1978, op. cit., p.14.

133 School’s advanced print technology.305 The photographic print enabled her to juggle with the scale and position of images before applying traditional printmaking techniques to reproduce and unify the final composition. This was liberating, as Maddock’s integration of randomly selected clippings from newspapers of topical events into her screenprint and intaglio work brought ‘a new look at the outside world. The other completely petered out [her former artistic practice] I couldn’t deal with it any more. The experience had been used up. I treated photography like drawing; it’s in a way going back to drawing but instead of doing it with the hand I’m using photographs.’306

In the photo-etched self portrait Passing the glass darkly of 1976, she progressively obliterated a photograph of her face (through a sequence of three grids) by manipulating the metal plate with aquatint and engraving. (Plate 18) Conversely, the grids underneath, which counterpoint this process of disintegration, increase in size and clarity. It is as though they elaborated the fact that the closer one examines one’s identity,the more a definitive and clear conclusion is denied.

Other prints from this decade brought an immediate world of tragedy and disquieting incident into play with Maddock’s ongoing interest in themes of solitary introspection. The artist’s sketchbooks and private journals became augmented by folders of newspaper clippings, reproductions and snapshots. They reflected the fact that the more the metropolitan environment was deluged with media information, the more liberating she found the syntax of photography in printmaking to be in expressing it.

Maddock began using the dot-screen rather than the woodcut tool and etching or drypoint needle, because she believed that the adoption of photographic techniques was necessary to establish a rapport with an audience subjected to the complexities of late twentieth- century living. ‘I wanted people to realise that I was dealing with reality. But I had to have a syntax; a language for that. The dot-screen became that language.’307

305 Bea Maddock’s teaching in this area was to become pivotal in promoting the practice of photo-screenprinting and photo-etching in Australian art schools.

306 Bea Maddock in conversation with Roger Butler, in Anne Kirker and Roger Butler 1991, op. cit., p.76.

307 Christa E. Johannes and Sue Backhouse 1990, Australian Printmakers: Ray Arnold, Rod Ewins, Bea Maddock, exh.cat., Hobart: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, p.7.

134 The ‘serial’ nature of Maddock’s work also became increasingly important on a variety of levels. The idea of series in the production of art work promotes the idea of transmission rather than representation as such. It parallels the sequential nature of journals and newspapers that connect to a broad spectrum of experience and events. It also, as was recognised by Benjamin, contributes to a democratic concept, as the multiple print can be distributed to a broad audience.

The essay ‘Printmaking in the Expanded Field’ by O’Brien and Weisberg (1992) described ‘seriality’ as ‘the operative core of printmaking’s critical dimension’.308 Other writers like Umberto Eco have recognised the centrality of seriality in contemporary art practice, as demonstrated in his essay ‘Innovation and Repetition: Between Modern and Post-Modern Aesthetics’ (1985).309 He claimed that repetitive aspects of the series and repetition represented a new aesthetic that has developed out of mass cultural production. Bearing Maddock’s introverted sensibility in mind, Eco can be followed as an example by Hal Foster (1999) who wrote on `Traumatic Realism’ in his book The Return of the Real. Here Foster cites Andy Warhol as an obsessive producer of serial production and one who saw the necessity of repeating the ‘real’ so that the shock of a disaster may penetrate and hold the viewers’ attention. 310

Warhol provided a conceptual and formal example for Maddock’s Cast the shadow of your original figure. Is it possible in flashlight? (1970). (Plate 16) She admired the 1960s work of Warhol and Jasper Johns; Warhol’s Disasters series particularly resonated with the artist. Maddock’s large photo-screenprint named above epitomises innovations in Australian printmaking that owed a debt to Euramerican precedents. Low-keyed in tone, the composition is based on a grid structure with a web of coarse-grain dots that reveal the figure – a masked bank robber captured through the lens of a surveillance camera. This newspaper source image is repeated, serially, within the composition as a flattened, geometrised order. This, and other prints like it, are both ‘anti-real’ and traumatic in implication. This is because the viewer recognises the subject but comprehension is

308 John O’Brien and Ruth Weisberg 1992, op. cit., p.11.

309 Umberto Eco 1985, ‘Innovation and Repetition: Between Modern and Post-Modern Aesthetics’, Daedelus, No. 114, pp. 161-82.

310 Foster 1999, op. cit., pp. 130-36.

135 suspended, especially as the title is intentionally obscure. They therefore induce a sense of considerable unease in the viewer.

The prints that followed were based on global disasters. Maddock’s employment of press photographs with a regimental grid matrix superimposed and printed with black and metallic grey inks heightened the gravity of the original event but also, once again, suggested alienation from it. Like Warhol, her emphasis on ‘repetition’ was not only about technical reproduction, but ‘rather, repetition serves to screen the real understood as traumatic’.311 While the viewer is privy to the disaster portrayed (through the photographic image imbedded in the print), Maddock manipulates her composition to distance it from simple reportage and thereby to emphasise alienation from ‘the real’.

A similar situation is established in her Square 1(1972), which belongs to the large body of photo-etchings Maddock embarked on following her work with photo-screenprint (Plate 17). Here, a hand-drawn grid acted as a closely wrought barrier (or screen) overlaying figures striding in different directions across an urban space. The viewpoint is aerial and distances the viewer from engaging with an affinity for the people caught on camera.

Maddock herself has always shied away from explaining her work in psychological terms.312 Instead she prefers to describe the general premise of her subject matter in a sociological manner and also through the methods by which she articulates it. For instance, the artists wrote of Square 1:

The image of the ‘Square’ was originally planned as a screenprint, however I was dissatisfied with the scale (it was too small as a screenprint) so I decided to expose the transparency of the image onto a pre-sensitized zinc plate (the image was culled from a textbook on the study of the movement of people in cities). The printmaking studio where I was teaching had sun- shielded windows with minute metal louvres set into the glass. My view of the world had been through this grid for some time and it simply became what I wanted to do to extend the image. So I grounded the plate and drew

311 Foster 1999, op. cit., p.132

312 This is demonstrated by a conversation Anne Kirker had with Melbourne-based print specialist Irena Zdanowicz, 12 November 2007.Zdanowicz is assisting with the compilation of a catalogue raisonné of Maddock’s work and the artist explained to her, in words to the effect, that she would not accept a psychoanalytic framework for describing her art production.

136 in the grid excluding it from the central square section, after I had open-bit and aquatinted the main image.313

Square1, as described by Maddock, is a reminder of how unexpected, serendipitous elements add to an artist’s preconceived concept. The louvres dictated the ‘grid’ in this print, as much as the variations on minimalist art practice that she was aware were emanating abroad and filtered through into Australia. It can also be claimed that Maddock’s use of the screen of repetition functions as a defensive or warding off device (in psychoanalytic terms). While this fact has never been admitted by the artist, it is inescapable to early twenty-first century viewers of her prints. At the start of the 2000s, surveillance and repression of civil liberties are commonplace, whether in an openly authoritarian regime or a democracy.

The photo-etching Shadow (1973) is particularly instructive in showing how radically Maddock would at times depart from the original representational image. Keeping the dualities of the autographic and the machine-made in critical coordination (as Raymond Arnold was later to do), she reworked her plate with its negative transparency to create a dense field of hand-worked lines and accents of black. The photographic source is only identifiable when it is compared with its earlier companion sheet, Cast a Shadow (1972) which has used a positive (not negative) transparency.

Both prints were based on a news photograph of President Nasser’s funeral in Egypt. Warhol’s influence again comes to the fore and Hal Foster points out the different kinds of repetition that the American employed for his imagery. He also draws attention to the paradoxical ‘fix on the traumatic real, that screen it; that produce it'.314 It is paradoxical because there appears to be a conflation of normally polarised factors,: namely the documentary photograph as conveyor of ‘the real’, and the artificial manipulation of it through devices such as a grid or dot matrix. Hence, the viewer is simultaneously distanced and touched by Warhol’s Disasters (the assassination of John F. Kennedy, car crash victims, for instance). Similarly, Maddock:

313 From notes made at the artist’s studio at Macedon, dated 2 Aug.1982, in preparation for the artist’s survey exhibition of prints in New Zealand the following year.

314 Hal Foster 1999, op. cit., p.136.

137 … removes a comforting, if delusory, sense of order and replaces it with the (existential) notion that, confronted by an extraordinary range of disparate occurrences, often violent, threatening and foreign, judgments cannot be made, logic cannot be used and systems of interpretation cannot be established.315

Given the discussion above, it is apparent that during 1970-71, when Maddock turned from autographic printmaking to photo-screenprinting, this dramatic shift in her work primarily reflected an interest in the power of the mass media. This had been prompted by her identification with the Pop art movement. As the 1970s progressed and she turned to photo-etching, the artist deepened her engagement with the source material and how it interfaced with her interest in existentialism. She therefore bridged aspects of her `interior life’ with the world at large by using the idea of `trauma’. Hence her disquieting prints of 1972-77 may have been based directly on journalistic photographs, but they intentionally neglected to give sufficient information about the subject to enable ready comprehension. In viewing them, one is always left guessing; a definitive reading is deliberately withheld. Typical is her 1974 photo-etching titled No-Where, based on survivors in a life-raft after the sinking of the Titanic. Paired with the small vessel is a telegraph-like text embedded in the sky above, which is illegible. (Plate 19)

Maddock’s decision to move from the screenprint process to intaglio (photo-etching) was not entirely to do with scale. As with Shimada Yoshiko in Japan, the grainy texture of aquatint in comparison to the fine line work that emerges in etching (rather than an emphasis on colour) was a more effective way to convey ‘branding’ or welding an image from one surface to another (the paper support) under great pressure (the printing press). There is a sense of ‘veiling’ (but not in the sense of implying softness and delicacy). Rather, Maddock prefers to employ grid or dot matrices that are geometrically ordered and have tension. Like Shimada, her photo-etchings are based on reportage that has disquieting implications and hence required a method that would demonstrate this.

While Maddock has always resolutely refused to be identified with feminism, it is impossible not to bring feminist discourse into an analysis of her prints. This is because this aspect of postmodernist discourse was flourishing among women artists in the

315 Janine Burke 1980, `Portrait of the Artist: The Work of Bea Maddock’, in Survey II: Bea Maddock, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria.

138 Australian context in which she was working. Books by Janine Burke and Sandy Kirby are good instances of the attention given to feminism in this country.316 Burke herself wrote on Maddock for the National Gallery of Victoria in1980.317 The difference between Shimada and Maddock is that the older artist tends to ‘repress’, whilst Shimada seeks to ‘reveal’.

The sexuality of both is indeterminate, a fact that, while not overtly framing their art practice, does assist in explaining why Maddock is reluctant to engage with psychological analysis of her imagery and why the younger, more extrovert artist, Shimada, is prepared to flaunt transgression. In Japan, Shimada was born and raised in a culture that could not tolerate anti-establishment (and hence patriarchal) challenges. She therefore felt a compulsion to resist this discrimination through the content of her prints.

At the core of this aspect of Maddock’s work is the question of identity. Kobena Mercer points out, ‘One thing at least is clear - identity only becomes an issue when it is in crisis, when something assumed to be fixed, coherent and stable is displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty.’318 Even comparatively direct autobiographical statements by Maddock can be included in this analysis of identity by Mercer. In her photo-etching Shoes (1974), the artist’s sturdy, lace-up footwear connotes use and individual possession. They are, on the face of it, a tangible link with reality, like similar photo- etchings she depicted using items of her clothing. There is a measure of intimacy to them, of the domestic (which accords with first-wave feminism), rather than the public arena. However, the philosophical jottings embedded in Shoes (1974) take the quotidian into a separate realm. The two handwritten and etched panels of text in this print by Maddock are contrasted with the photographic image of shoes, and the words come from G.W.F. Hegel, the early nineteenth century philosopher:

Through perception we obtain information about objects and events.

316 Janine Burke 1980, Australian Women Artists 1840-1940, Melbourne: Greenhouse Publications; Janine Burke 1990, Field of Vision: A Decade of Change, Women’s Art in the Seventies, Victoria: Viking Penguin books; Sandy Kirby 1992, Sightlines: Women’s Art and Feminist Perspectives in Australia, Sydney: Craftsman House.

317 Janine Burke 1980, ‘Portrait of the Artist: Bea Maddock’, in Survey II: Bea Maddock, op. cit.

318 Kobena Mercer 1990, ‘Welcome to the jungle: identity and diversity in postmodern politics’, in Jonathon Rutherford (ed.), Identity: community, culture, difference, London: Lawrence and Wishart, p.43.

139 Information received through perceiving a design on a wall or a canvas comprises only one feature of a three dimensional object. The aesthetic value of the information acquired from the study of a pattern, a patch of colour or a heap of objects can be appraised only after we are able to include in it an order, a given frame of reference, such as that of degrees of order or disorder. 319

Williamson (1992) states (and this is true of Maddock as much as of Raymond Arnold and Judy Watson) that ‘In many contemporary Australian prints dealing with issues of cultural identity, the artist acts as both creator and subject. Depiction of the self is obviously central to explorations of identity. These images, however, are more than acts of self-portraiture. The artist is subject and protagonist, a participant in a process which questions appearance as much as it records it.’320

Maddock’s interest in moving quickly beyond the lessons of Pop art, and of feminism (loath though she was to admit this), to mine complex philosophical issues, had prompted her to take formal classes in philosophy. These are recorded among her notebook entries. In turn, some of them, as in the photo-etching Philosophy 1 (1972), were recorded in her metal printing plates. They resulted in intaglio works that conflated handwritten text with photographic image. For instance, Philosophy 1 (1972) quoted Edmund Husserl’s writings and presented them as barely legible columns of newsprint. In addition, a small press photograph of an unidentified criminal ran like a repeating filmstrip (negative and positive) through the centre of the print. Maddock’s engagement with photography and its postmodern application in her printmaking demonstrated that, like other postmodern artists, she took philosophy and critical theory more seriously than hitherto. Her photomechanical prints of the 1970s therefore show her recognition that, in order to advance her art practice, it was necessary to learn the discursive breadth as well as the historical depth of artistic representation.

By the time Maddock produced Four finger exercise for two hands, Darwin 1981, a colour photo-lino of 1982, she had played out her engagement with photography-based print techniques. ‘We are going to have to go back. Progress for me is “going back”.’ In

319 This passage is from one of G.W.F. Hegel’s books on the subject of `Phenomenology’, recorded in one of Maddock’s notebooks, sighted by the author, 12 May 1990.

320 Clare Williamson 1992, Forms of ID: Printmaking and issues of cultural identity’, paper posted on www.printsandprintmaking.gov.au/symposium/second1992; accessed 3 December 2007.

140 this she was referring to technique as much as a re-evaluation of her practice as a whole. It could be argued that the artist, in order to take stock, almost perversely held herself in check from continuing her embrace of new technologies in printmaking. However, this did not preclude her ongoing interest in theoretical inquiry. ‘We have to go back to the grass roots and find out more about how to “go back” with knowledge’, she stated a few years later.321

One way was to slow down the process of art making radically and to make it a deliberately meditative, contemplative exercise. It implied ruminating on the haptic quality of handcrafting; the encounter with materials involving an intimate, tactile engagement. This shift in attitude was in keeping with an artist who continued to prize traditional skills. The press photograph or snapshot had increasingly lost its instrumental power of expression for Maddock in her printmaking. The decisive change in her practice came when she decided to leave her teaching post in Melbourne (1981), with its readily available printmaking equipment, and shift to the Victorian countryside, then to Tasmania What followed, after a significant break of nearly twenty years from printmaking as her major art form, was innovation in the field of editioned image- making. This has significance for this thesis, as it offers alternatives viewpoints about interpreting the print in terms of postmodernism.

In printmaking, the haptic is wedded to drawing. It is related to the autographic gesture that prompts the mark, and acts less as ‘print’ the noun and more like a verb – an action reliant upon motor skills. For many late twentieth century artists, drawing was considered to be an anachronism, or at best, a useful note-taking exercise. For them, drawing was an unnecessary labour, or a rearguard action against simulacra easily generated by digital matrices. While large encaustic paintings of philosophical texts and panoramic landscapes took much of Maddock’s artistic energies in the two decades following the 1970s, they allowed her to reformulate her approach to printmaking and its application in an expanded field of the visual arts.

321 Pauline Bindoff 1987 in conversation with Bea Maddock,` The Papermaker[Bea Maddock]’, in Tasmanian Folio, Vol. 1, No. 1, p.1.

141 It could be argued that Maddock’s deliberate shift from reworking photographs to manufacturing her print imagery in toto was a Modernist, almost Romantic move: the hard-won image, the heroic artist. Yet this thesis will argue that Maddock’s change of direction was more in keeping with what Kit Wise (2005) states as a ‘wilful self- erasure”.322 Through the enigmatic masking of her photographic reportage imagery andher re-engagement with drawing as her chief modus operandi, Maddock sought to defy ready classification as a practitioner and to keep the taxonomies of process in flux.

This is strongly evident in the artist’s major project Terra Spiritus ... with a darker shade of pale (1993-98). (Plate 20) It stands as the most comprehensive series of images on paper that Bea Maddock has produced. It was conceived to be viewed as an installation, circumnavigating the walls of a room. The suite of 51 (in an edition of 5) incised drawings took five years of intensive work to complete. Its genesis lies in the trip the artist took to Antarctica in 1987. Scenes she recorded from that experience resulted in the Forty Pages from Antarctica (1988) etchings and Heard Island Trilogy paintings. In the etched images, the sparsely drawn profiles of frozen land masses, accompanied by embossed text, give rise to the notion of an extended panorama. The idea of a book remains an essential part of the work. Its sequential format, the diaristic origins and incorporation of words are hallmarks of this portfolio of forty sheets. Maddock’s quest flows as writing (based on Rilke’s ninth Duino Elegy) throughout the image as a whole:

Are we here just for saying ice iceberg icecap nunatak What are we here for Just for seeing And who has marked out the dimensions and stretched the tightrope of existence here And just for seeing remember

Just as her photo-etchings of the early 1970s had often encompassed philosophical texts (such as Philosophy 1 and Shoes), Maddock similarly parallels handwritten passages as part of her representational imagery. The conception of Forty Pages from Antarctica was also influenced by anthropologist Rhys Jones, who travelled to Antarctica with the artist. He likened Heard Island to Tasmania in the last ice age, when it was peopled by the

322 Kit Wise 2005, `Australian drawing now: labouring lightly’, in the ‘Handmade: The New Labour’ issue of Artlink, Vol. 25, No. 1, March, p.39.

142 Tasmanian Aboriginals. This observation fed into Maddock’s subsequent depictions of Tasmania, when she inscribed Aboriginal and European place names as part of her Terra Spiritus compositions. The project is in part a memorial to the first Tasmanians. The language of past lives and the rich ochre base of the drawings are immediately linked with red earth and the spiritual associations it has for Indigenous peoples.

The work is readily situated as an instance of postcolonialism expressed through the visual arts. In the first stage of producing Terra Spiritus, Maddock treated Tasmania as an early surveyor might. An incised coastline unfolds along the top portion of each sheet, each connecting to the adjacent sheet to arrive at a continuous ‘ribbon’ deployed in a single display space. ‘I see Tasmania as defined by its coastline,’ Maddock states in conversation with Diane Dunbar (1998). ‘It is something that encloses, so you get the idea of circumnavigating, going around, something.’ 323 Only in the last stage does the artist add the local Palawa language to the ochre saturated sheets.

In preparation for this project, the artist made calculations on graph paper from topographical maps and constructed Mylar templates of the landscape forms. Guided by the templates, she scored a landscape profile in line directly into the paper. The ochre (as crayon) was worked over the incisions and letterpress. Finally, the place names in local Aboriginal (Palawa) language were calligraphically drawn across the sheets. This language, specific to Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples, was juxtaposed with European nomenclature (in letterpress), providing a rhythm and cross-cultural counterpoint, or an axis between pre- and postcolonialism. Maddock’s journeyman-like treatment of the coastline in Terra Spiritus evoked the first explorers of Tasmania, yet through her post- colonial approach, she refuted the notion of ‘terra nullius’.

This artist’s approach to sequential imagery is serial, and like writing, conveys a sense of narrative as a theme or story unfolds. The fact that she uses text so often in her work underscores the importance she places upon it. The diarist content of her work; the recurring passages of prose or poetry; the excerpts from philosophical texts; and later her use of the Aboriginals’ and early settlers’ nomenclature for place, act as a leitmotif in her

323 `Bea Maddock: an interview’, conducted with Diane Dunbar, Curator of Fine Art at the Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery, Launceston, 22 Sept.1998, published as a brochure accompanying the exhibition of Terra Spiritus at this venue.

143 creative output. Moreover, the spaces in discourse, blank passages and overlayering of text that appear in Maddock’s prints (as well as paintings, bookworks and in Terra Spiritus) evade a single, logical interpretation. Instead, words are used that:

… make up a translatable and meaningful script to me, but because I wish them to be read in the original, they are to remain untranslated, for ‘when not understood, words appear in their greatest physicality, dense, concrete, singular’, and here they represent more poignantly what has been lost.324

Maddock editioned these drawings as though they were like her Antarctica suite of etchings, charting territory. But in the case of Tasmania, it was territory especially familiar to her (she was born and raised in that state). Hence the use of language in Terra Spiritus, where it is in a binary coordination, has more than one impulse behind it. There is personal significance for the artist as much as a concern to revive the history of Indigenous Tasmania; albeit without denying colonial habitation. Terra Spiritus refuses to privilege one cultural group over another. In another respect, she uses this work to question and re-position printmaking.

This installation, on each account, avoids the posturing of a master narrative. It reflects Lyotard’s definition of postmodernism as demonstrating ‘an incredulity toward metanarratives'.325 To represent this ideological position, the artist was prompted to invent a technique (the editioned drawing) that served it. It is this artist’s particular choice of process (as with all of the case study printmakers in this thesis) that cannot be considered in isolation from that which is represented. In this transformational art practice, concept and technique are inextricably bound. As can be claimed with Noda in Japan, an artist of similar age, Bea Maddock’s editioned image making can also be described as ‘her visual autobiography; a continuum in which the present keeps re- engaging the past through recurring ideas and images’.326

324 Bea Maddock 1990, ‘The Makings of a Trilogy’, Art Bulletin of Victoria, No.31, p.46.

325 Lyotard 1984, in Lawrence Cahoone (ed.) 2003, op. cit., p.260.

326 Johannes and Backhouse 1990, op. cit., p.6.

144 5.5 Raymond Arnold: Prints Examined in Context

Since the early 1990s, Arnold’s printmaking has developed in a complex, even paradoxical manner, as it slips between technical and conceptual zones. This generates a frisson of dualities, or a reciprocation of experience. This is manifested by the way he articulates figure and ground relationships in his prints, the relationships he sets up between the two pivotal touchstones for his work - Tasmania and Paris, and also through the tensions he expresses in his imagery between traditional print methods and electronically-generated print imagery (since 1998). Hence it is apposite to quote Bhabha here, who states in The Location of Culture that:

In the fin de siecle, we find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion.327

In order to apply these preoccupations to Arnold’s printmaking, a point of entry is offered by one of the artist’s typical large-scale screenprinted posters South of no North (1991). This was produced towards the end of a period of his considerable activity as a designer and printer of political posters. Here the artist referenced the plight of Aboriginal people of Tasmania, and in this regard, he is close to Maddock. Keenly responsive to the drive to protect the distinctively rugged and virtually untouched Tasmania wilderness, he also meshed political and aesthetic issues in South of no North. The left-hand sheet of this two-part photo-screenprint featured a spectator figure (resembling the artist himself) with his arm outstretched towards a profile of Tasmania, illustrated on the other sheet with a star chart of the heavens poised above. This poster served to advertise an exhibition of Tasmanian artists at the Dick Bett Gallery during the winter of 1991. It deliberately set out to interpret the particularities of a small centre at the world’s periphery within the cosmos, at a precise time of year. 328

327 Bhabha 2007, op. cit., p.2.

328 Since leaving Melbourne in 1983, Arnold had worked at Hobart’s Chameleon Artists’ Co-operative and was a pivotal force during the ten years of its existence. In the old Blundstone building’s print room downstairs he produced not only his posters but also huge screenprints (for example Florentine Valley - displaced landscape 1983), which also demonstrated an engagement with the social and environmental. The artist had in fact moved to Tasmania to bring his work closer to significant conservation issues, more particularly the Franklin River controversy.

145 His screenprinted posters are relevant to this thesis, as they served as ambitious print productions in their own right and not merely made for promotional or advocational purposes. Nor did they conform to conventional market expectations for printmaking. These prints demonstrate how this artist used his printmaking skills on occasion as a form of ‘public art’, to reflect his concerns with the specificity of place. With their incursions of photographic imagery and multi-layered ink surfaces, they also brought an aesthetic and technical sophistication to art engaged with topical social issues.

At times, during the 1980s and early 1990s, these elaborately worked screenprints gave way to the more private studio process of etching, where a slower, contemplative response to landscape came into play. Several large copper plates, printed as unfolding panoramic sequences, emerged at Arnold’s studio at the Chameleon Artists’ Co-operative in Hobart during this period. Most notably, these were his Imaginary landscape - Eighteen months in Tasmania (1984) and Justify the Line - Iron Blow re–excavation (1992). (Plate 21) The latter was produced with ready access to a local paper mill.

The artist’s ongoing environmental concerns were clearly evident in Justify the Line, as the imagery was based on a large copper mine in Western Tasmania. It coincided with the concerns of postmodern theorists at the time such as Suzi Gablik, who published The Reenchantment of Art (1991) to draw attention to how much of contemporary art had degenerated into a market-driven commodity, devoid of an ethical stance and one that neglected protection of the natural world. Gablik stated in this book how ‘the sub-text of social responsibility is missing in our aesthetic models, and the challenge of the future will be to transcend the disconnectedness and separation of the aesthetic from the social that existed in modernism.’ 329

The four horizontally aligned panels to Justify the Line paralleled the will to forge relationships rather than solely to produce objects, for which Gablik called through the field of art. Arnold’s etching metaphorically registers past histories and private revelations that registered hope through renewed connectedness between man and nature. In conversation with Melbourne printmaker Ruth Johnstone (1994), he explained:

329 Suzi Gablik 1991, The Re-enchantment of Art, New York: Thames and Hudson, p. 5.

146 My artworks, with their emphasis on the environment, develop referential trajectories through colonial histories to the events in my own studio in the present time. Within this curving geometry they exist at once as nostalgic echoes and symbols of loss and wishful reclaiming. 330

Using handmade paper made from discarded proofs of intaglio prints, the Justify the Line etchings underscore Arnold’s ethical stance towards the environment. They also demonstrate particular skills in building up and recycling images and ideas; a quintessential characteristic of postmodern discussions on ‘appropriation’. These etchings are `state – proofs’ of prints, presented as an indivisible set. Each one of them shows a gradually evolving rock face. There is an almost alchemical translation of geology in such works, as the line etching unfolds on a plate that retains old scratches and evidence of false starts. There is no core composition; there is simply abundant irregular tracery that produces floating fields that resemble the rocky terrain.

As has been pointed out, Bea Maddock insisted on retaining the sense of sequential unfolding as a core attribute of her work from the late 1980s onwards. (This is evident not only in her panoramic etchings and Terra Spiritus, but includes the encaustic panoramic landscape paintings she produced.). Likewise, Arnold also stressed this factor. The journey of his Justify the Line etching through different technical and representational states, and the shifts in emphasis when inked and proofed, demonstrate O’Brien and Weisberg’s argument that ‘seriality’ is the ‘operative core of printmaking’s critical dimension’. 331 Seriality, according to these print theorists, referred not only to the process of manufacturing print editions but also the way a matrix is subjected to successive stages of working and manipulation to produce a ‘final’ print image. The latter activity results in print ‘proofs’.

A year after Justify the Line was produced, Arnold consciously pursued a conceptual rapport with a particular etching by the nineteenth century etcher Charles Meryon, which on his death remained ‘unfinished’. Rather than engaging with the sketch-like etchings

330 Ray Arnold interviewed by Ruth Johnstone 1994, New Art Prints, Melbourne: Print Council of Australia, Information Sheet.

331 O’Brien and Weisberg 1992, op. cit., p.11.

147 Meryon produced of his voyages to the Pacific, it was this ‘unfinished’ composition (a proof) of The Apse of Notre Dame, Paris (1854) by the Frenchman that triggered Arnold’s response. For him, the Neo-Gothic masonry drawn with cross-hatched lines became equated with the tracery of rock escarpments, caves and excavations he had been concerned with in Tasmania. In engaging with this project, Arnold took up a residency in Paris where he worked at the Lacourière et Frèlaut print studio (where a close friend Daniel Moynihan from Melbourne had produced his Tasmanian Tiger intaglio prints).

Arnold’s initial project was to set up an equation between present day Tasmania and France, where many of the early artist explorers originated. His initial motif for the intaglio print that followed this particular residency was based on the interior of Remarkable Cave, a blow hole on the south-east coast of Tasmania. Not only did it dictate the way the artist would configure rock faces but from this natural phenomenon, he could ‘...metaphorically gaze into the geographic and historical distance.’332 The cave provided the motif for several etching plates Arnold worked on before reaching Paris and which he then added to at Lacourière’s. These plates were intentionally split into two zones, one configured with the irregular texture of rock, the other left blank, like a tabula rasa.

Arnold saw himself as an explorer of place. An inveterate trekker up to this point, he had identified himself with wilderness terrain and his affinity with it was akin to the Romantics (writers like Byron and Coleridge). His print panoramas were infused with a sense of grandeur. There is also something of `the terrible beauty’ in these landscapes that is inferred in the journals of early explorers of the Tasmanian wilderness, such as the photographer James Watt Beattie. 333

Shifting his living and working context to Paris at this time brought Arnold into a situation that would inspire him to make prints, starting with The Spectacle of Nature (1994), that equate with what Bhabha describes as `liminal’. (Plate 22) He uses the metaphor of the stairwell:

332 Raymond Arnold quoted in Katherine McDonald 1995, `The Paris Factor’, Art Monthly Australia , April, p. 22.

333 J.W. Beattie is quoted by Richard Flanagan 1985, A Terrible Beauty : History of the Gordon River Country, Melbourne: Greenhouse Publications, p.67

148

The hither and thither of the stairwell, the temporal movement and passage that it allows, prevents identities at either end of it from settling into primordial polarities. This interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy.334

This quote indicates how Arnold was now intent on directly critiquing the old modernist notions of polarities and endeavoured to break down fixed identities in a culturally hybrid manner. In this, Maddock’s Terra Spiritus, coincidentally based on Tasmania, is connected to his project. She was engaged with her own revision of place and identity at the time Arnold completed the first of his etchings based on the `Paris-Tasmania’ nexus.

The Spectacle of Nature comprised a four-panel etching that has overlapping planes and a central aperture. Tasmanian rock imagery has been printed in brown ink on half of each plate and bled into the juxtaposed red of a lace motif, sourced in Paris, on the other half. The two different elements have been physically interleaved, through the four sheets they comprise, in a cross formation when finally presented on the wall. There is an oscillation between what ‘interiority’ might mean here. The artist’s rugged cave imagery is juxtaposed with intricate patterning of fabricated lace suggestive of the domestic, of intimacy and the boudoir. Both are symbolic languages for the individual and create a reflexive tension. They are essentialist oppositions and accord with Western metaphysics, where binaries underscore experience: nature/culture, male/female, and animus/anima.

The concept of ‘dualism’, according to Western rhetorical traditions, is where one term derives meaning and existence from the opposite term. As such, it tends to predetermine modes of representation and has severe limitations in describing contingent relationships that are more pluralist and do not confirm to dialectical arrangements. Patriarchal dominance and hierarchies in race are just two examples. However, in Arnold’s case it transforms its meaning.

Dualism for Arnold equates with `mirroring’ and with symbolic interaction. The intaglio print for Arnold at this time was a way of looking into and working a metal surface,

334 Bhabha 2007, op. cit., p.5.

149 creating an exact-but-inverted reflection of perceived reality. This conforms to postmodern ideas such as those emanating from Hegel’s famous `master/slave’ dialectic from his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Simply put, Hegel used a narrative of two `self-conscious’ individuals who were like mirrors of each other. In resorting to a struggle for dominance, the victor discovers that power over the ‘Other’ denies the possibility of cooperation. The philosopher codified how ‘the complicated mechanisms whereby disparate, seemingly antithetical or contradictory ideas can be arranged into dialogue or conversation with each other by means of their “dialectic” juxtaposition.’335

Arnold, like Maddock, is acutely aware of how philosophical discourse can assist in deepening the possibilities of meaning in artistic expression.336 Furthermore, his approach to etching, in particular, reflects the basic methodology of intaglio printmaking where ‘mirroring’ is a central attribute. Here, one surface (the plate carrying the inked image) is transferred to another (usually paper), albeit in reverse. Therefore, the interlocking of panels in his work The Spectacle of Nature confounds the mapping of opposites, not only in a conceptual sense, but also through the indivisible contradictions inherent in the process of printmaking.

In preparation for this print, Arnold read philosophical and art historical tracts on landscape in particular. He quotes from Simon Schama’s book Landscape and Memory, in an essay he wrote in 1996.337 The artist also referred at the time to ‘dualised identity’, when drawing attention to Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993) by eco-feminist writer Val Plumwood.338 Plumwood proposed neither the simple reversing of old hierarchies and dualisms, nor a confirmation of them, but envisaged a‘logic of mutuality’. Arnold was drawn towards such investigations in order to go beyond essentialist gender oppositions. His modes of perception may seem to promote binary oppositions but the

335 Benjamin Graves 1997, ‘The Master-Slave Dialectic: Hegel and Fanon’, available at http://www.usp.nus.edu.sg/post/sa/gordimer/july6.html

336 This is borne out by his 1996 essay ‘Appearance and Reason –Framing Nature (1995/96)’ in Imagine Nature, exh. cat., Hobart: , where he cites Thoreau, Simon Schama and Val Plumwood.

337 Artist’s statement refers to this book by Schama in Arnold, 1996, ibid., in Imagine Nature, a publication accompanying an exhibition by artists investigating concepts of wilderness at the Plimsoll Gallery, Tasmanian School of Art, University of Tasmania, Hobart, pp.64- 65, ibid.

338 Val Plumwood 1993, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, London: Routledge. Chapter 2 dealt specifically with `Dualism: the logic of colonisation’.

150 artist’s intention is nevertheless to reconcile or set them in a critical coordination. Just as nature is related to primal energy and to the feminine subject (for example, ‘mother earth’), it is also linked to the mystical and the sublime. That is not to say that Arnold subscribes to Freudian Sublimation (moving from one duality to a higher duality, such as from the sexual to the spiritual), but rather that he seeks to challenge and critique simplistic dualistic identifications.

In this respect, the concept of the `hyphen’ (which is usually employed in discourse on dual-culture subjects, by Gerardo Mosquera for example), is useful. It applies also to Judy Watson and Prawat Laucharoen.339 This term (similar to `liminality’) has been used to articulate representations in art that originate from within rupture, and simultaneously unites and separates. Furthermore, a `hither and thither’ movement and interstitial passage ‘between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy’, is worth repeating here. 340

The hyphen can be used to explain Arnold’s prints of the early 1990s. They address seemingly contradictory terrains: Paris (the cosmopolitan centre) and the Tasmanian natural wilderness. Paris provided him with a claustrophobic environment that was rich in intellectual history and human activity. It is a metropolitan spectacle where attention is focussed on multiple visual and sensory attractions immediately at hand. In becoming immersed in the Parisian milieu, Arnold retained his Tasmanian identity, where rather than being a flâneur, he often trekked through rugged country. There, his attention would be focused on distant landforms and the process of reaching them. Underfoot, Paris offers not scrub, but pavements with their radial metal gratings for protecting trees. In this compressed, ornate environment, Arnold looked inwards rather than outwards and it provided him with a distinctly sensual, body-orientated experience.

339 Gerardo Mosquera 2003, ‘Alien-own/own-alien: Notes on globalisation and cultural difference’, in Complex Entanglements: Art, Globalisation and Cultural Difference, Nikos Papastergiadis (ed.), Sydney: Rivers Oram Press.

340 Bhabha 2007, op. cit., p.4.

151 Haussman’s boulevards conjured up the nineteenth century Parisian poets Charles Baudelaire and J.K. Huysmans. Baudelaire championed the flâneur and Huysmans a climate of effete decadence and sensory pleasures. Paris gave Arnold the licence to explore the anima in himself, where conversely, Tasmania had reinforced a type of masculine explorer/conquistador impulse. Arnold’s prints emanating from France are intimate and confessional. This European context prompted his printmaking to engage with a feminist strategy of privileging emotion. Feminism attempted to displace fixed notions of gender and allowed artists to slip conceptually between sseemingly dissimilar zones of identity. Thus in Paris, Arnold experienced a context that was far removed from the primarily masculine legacy set by the early Tasmanian explorer-photographer James Beattie.

Likewise, in the case of Arnold’s 1990s prints, the notion of `nationness’ is also intentionally confused and conflated. As with Prawat working out of New York and Shimada for a time in the United States and Berlin, transcultural identity is an important issue. While this thesis presents the case studies according to ‘nation’, it is acknowledged that the word is problematic when researching the postmodern realm and the increased mobility of peoples. This thesis argues that while the artists selected are examined under country headings, ‘nationness’ can evoke absolutism and this is not my intention. Therefore, characteristics attributed to the term in the three case studies are necessarily tempered by intermediation with other cultures.

This is evident in Arnold’s series And for each sense there is an image (1995). (Plate 23) Here he treats two ‘zones’ like a self-reflexive action; like a mirror. The second etching in this series of five is typical in the way the composition comprises two lozenge-shaped forms, in balance with each other. These forms were printed on two sheets, then butted together, implying a mended rupture and hence reinforcing the tension between them. Lace is the basis of one, geometrically patterned aluminium the other. They readily suggest binary divisions - half woman, half man. Yet it would be incorrect to see the work exclusively in essentialist dyads, such as softness versus hardness, or the organic versus the mechanical. Rather, the relationship between the two zones represents an exchange of sensations that prompts reflection on identity as a fluid notion, and also

152 contingent upon place, context and time. Arnold stated in a talk he gave in Sydney (July, 1997):

Collaging the lace on the top image in softground and the bottom image, patterned aluminum that I bought and then drypointed in the oval shape. It was comparing and contrasting moments.

The project started with the idea of investigating the dichotomy between Southern and Northern Hemispheres. It also developed into an examination of gendered situations; yet it could be argued that the most persuasive reading relates to the psyche. The two ovals (the top printed musky pink and green, the bottom in black ink only) have a corporeal presence that suggests human interaction.

A particular work located in Paris was seminal to Arnold’s decision to concentrate on the idea of the ‘senses’ for this series.. This was the Musée de Cluny’s Lady with the Unicorn tapestries, five of which are an allegory of the senses. Not only was Arnold attracted to the concept of these tapestries; he was also fascinated by their intricacy and compositional poise. One commentator described his And for each sense there is an image prints thus:

The two plates function as one, as vertical body: the lady above, the unicorn below. ‘The unicorn becomes equated with quantifiable evidence, the lady with the more nebulous world of the senses’. He is culture to her nature.341

Arnold imagined that the surface articulated by the printed etched line was commensurate with the fine needlework that produced the mille fleurs motif of fifteenth century tapestries. To achieve a similar floral and intricate effect for his etchings, he purchased cheap lace with repeating patterns and stylised forms that he found in Montmartre. This fabric was in turn transferred to the plate through the soft ground process and was subsequently etched and printed. (When he took up laser copying for some of his late 1990s prints, Arnold was aware of the pixels resembling the ‘handcrafting’ of weaving.)

341 Robyn Daw 1995, ‘Unfinished Business’, Imprint , Vol. 30, No. 1, Autumn, p.24. This issue of the Print Council of Australia’s journal Imprint also featured a comprehensive article by Peter Hill on Ray Arnold titled ‘Cheap Lace, Synthetic Hair and Remarkable Cave’.

153 The fundamental facts of processing that accrue to printmaking are valued in this artist’s focus on dualism. He has always respected the basics of this art discipline and manifested them as an integral part of his conceptual concerns. For Arnold, it is crucial to retain the integrity of the means in printmaking practice. As this thesis underscores, recognition of the indexical can support philosophical values of an image and extend its critical potential. Hence Arnold points out:

Being a printmaker you are aware of clear oppositions of materials, the plate = matrix, the paper = impression, `this leads to that’ equation. You end up with a hinging issue which Lacan and French women theorists, such as Cixous and Kristeva have drawn attention to, the interesting space between contrasting moments. The binary moment could be seen as confirming old power structures, but that sense of things between the different conditions is something I’m interested in, and their exchange.342

Therefore, as this quote demonstrates, not only was Arnold interested in breaking with the old notion of oppositions between disparate and seemingly antithetical zones unable to be reconciled, but he saw his prints as demonstrating the opposite. He took this into the arena of gender politics with the work Love Creeper - He was to look at her. She saw herself as a man (1995) placed the two -dimensional print into the dynamics of installation as Arnold also incorporated a three-fold screen, a small mirror and an illuminated standard lamp.

While print installation was not itself an important shift in Arnold’s print practice, it does serve to demonstrate the continuing experimentation that this artist undertook to articulate his ideas. Arnold was also aware that installation was a practice that accorded with innovations of other Australian print artists (such as Ruth Johnstone in Melbourne) in their push to take printmaking into a decidedly postmodern artistic context.

The reflective element within Love Creeper ensured that the viewer became implicated in an intimate, dynamic space. Three large ovals, like mirrors with filigree surrounds, featured on the roughly constructed plywood panels that made up the screen. The motif, based on the botanical love creeper that was stylised as lace, was printed on drafting film. This was pinned to the two outer panels, while a central panel was engraved with

342 Ray Arnold in conversation with Anne Kirker, following his talk at the Sixth International Works on Paper Fair in Sydney, 19 July 1997.

154 pokerwork. The curvaceous lamp (crafted by Linda Fredheim) was placed in front of the middle panel, topped by a circular globe. Several writers, notably Filomena Coppola and Robyn Daw, found this installation fertile ground for generating a sense of sexual tension, seduction and mutual dependence.

Drawn into their self reflexive orbit to view the detailed filigree pokerwork, the fine stencilling, the fragile film on which Love Creeper is printed, the viewer is illuminated and unwittingly becomes part of the piece, only to be caught and mirrored back into our own space.343

The oval and circle (as demonstrated by the etchings based on the ‘senses’ and evidenced in this print installation, were pivotal motifs in Arnold’s work for a long period. The symbol is central to Source - Walking into Courbet’s shadow. (Plate 24) This 1997 installation includes etchings, sculptural and lighting elements. When set up, two circular prints on separate sheets are positioned above each other. They have the same landscape and aperture motif, which appears to reflect back on itself as they are butted on the wall, with one motif reversed. While both etchings are printed an earth brown, the bottom one has an additional veil of green ink. There is a sense of flow and exchange between these separate but interdependent printed sheets. At the juncture where they meet, a hyphen- like passage occurs. This space is partially ameliorated by the play of elliptical shadows across the prints and the wall to which they are pinned. This is facilitated by an elevated reflective dish which has been spotlit.344

While maintaining his base in Tasmania, Arnold continued, during the late 1990s and early 2000s, to travel to Paris to work at Lacouriere’s atelier. As he did with his print installations, the artist also extended his print-based practice to encompass digital inkjet printmaking. The School of Art at the University of Tasmania, in Hobart, was one of the first institutions to promote high-end digital printmaking through its DART facility and as a part-time teacher there, Arnold had ready access to this resource. However, like a

343 Robyn Daw 1997, `Sexual tension & magnetic attraction’, Object, No. 1, p.36. This installation was part of the Réflexion (works by Arnold and Fredheim) exhibition shown at Australian Galleries in both Sydney and Melbourne during 1997.

344 Gustave Courbet’s paintings, which Arnold saw in the Musée d’Orsay, attracted him through their materiality and symbolic complexity. He responded to a subliminal femininity in Courbet’s canvases, such as The Source (1868) where the woman’s body is reflected in the stream.

Arnold trekked across the Franche-Comté to trace the site of this painting, a geological phenomenon, where the river comes out of a cliff at the end of a valley. The resulting 1997 print installation was produced back in Australia.

155 number of Australian artists using the ink-jet print, he ignored the technology available to produce unlimited editions.345 Rather, he retained the traditional practice of using quality paper and limiting the number of impressions.

Arnold’s laser prints are conceptually akin to his etchings. The innovative and most interesting aspect to this practice is the way he sets etched and digital forms of the same image side by side. In his printmaking, the ‘hinging’ and ‘hyphenated’ action between these vastly different techniques can be interpreted (as was the case with the mid-1990s prints) as a process of reconciliation and paradox. Mosquera points out that the space of the hyphen `represents an interaction originating from within the rupture: it unites at the same time [as] it separates’.346 The latter is clearly evident in Arnold’s Body Armour and Memory/History (1999- 2003) series of ‘hand-made’ etchings, where some of these are overlaid with digital versions of the same image in a bonding action, which nevertheless visually retains the peculiarities of each medium.

In a broader sense, ‘paradox’ can be seen to be a fundamental characteristic of all printmaking, as it turns on the opposition of ‘uniqueness/reproducibility’. Furthermore, in autographic printmaking, the ‘indirect’ transposition of an image from one surface pressed against another (as in a sheet of paper against one of metal) invites serendipitous results beyond the conscious realm of its creator. (This has already been observed in Arnold’s four-part etching Justify the Line of 1992).With Body Armour, Arnold appears to have forthrightly addressed the paradoxical nature of printmaking itself at the cusp of the new millennium. He has established a symbiotic relationship between the original and the reproduction; between ‘old’ and ‘new’ print technologies. This is one of the core arguments I make in this thesis, as it encompasses also the work of Noda in Japan (with his amalgamation of ukiyo-e-inspired woodblock print technology and the Euramerican- derived invention of photo-screenprinting.

345 See Anne Kirker 1994, ‘Bashir Baraki and Pat Hoffie – Extending the Vernacular of Prints’, op. cit. This essay points out that as an indication of the acceptance of digital printmaking in Australia, a group exhibition curated by Bashir Baraki, entitled Traditional Mediums – New Technologies: The Challenge of the ‘90s, was staged at the Australian Print Workshop in Melbourne in mid 1991.

346 Mosquera 2003, op.cit., pp.28-29.

156 Printmaking as used by the artists in this thesis concurs with Bhabha’s observation on hybridity in culture. He states that such a situation ‘renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent “in-between” space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present. The “past-present” becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia, of living.’347 The slippage between tradition and contemporaneity, modernism and postmodernism, which opens up new possibilities, is salient to the practice of the selected artists so far discussed. With Noda, Shimada and Maddock, Arnold has transformed the field of printmaking from within the framework it has inherited and created a dialogical field that has critical relevance for its time. These artists were particularly attuned to the dramatic changes to cultural thinking and production that postmodernism brought and have keenly maximised its legacy in works since that time.

For while Bhabha is most often described as a postcolonial theorist, his observations can be extrapolated to include the ‘outsider’ status of printmaking and its radical revisionism, for continued relevancy. For instance, if the print is interpreted to be part of what this philosopher terms ‘the borderline work of culture’, then an encounter is demanded of it that is necessarily complex. This encounter includes the history of the print, as much as autobiographical and psychological investigations through its mechanisms by an artist.

This is borne out in Arnold’s address of the past in terms of military history (between Australia and France) in etchings from 1998 to 2003. Among them, the series Memory/History referred to the death of his great-grand-father at the Somme during World War 1. The artist worked intaglio plates with spectral heads, body armour and lace wreaths. Katherine McDonald (2004) reported how Arnold combined both the history and character of etching with issues of his bodily awareness. She wrote about:

The twin concepts of metal as an enclosure or protection for the soft human body and as a conceptual, reproductive vehicle within the context of the Old Master print tradition and the origins of etching on armour.348

347 Bhabha 2007, op. cit., p.7.

348 Katherine McDonald 2005, `Cropping Henri IV: Armours of Proof (à l’épreuvre) 2001-2004’, in Katherine McDonald (ed.), Nature/Culture: Raymond Arnold Prints 1983-2004, Canberra: Australian Galleries, p.52.

157 Arnold consulted Linda Nochlin’s 1995 text The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity expressly for the Armours of Proof prints,. He borrowed her notion of the partial image to invent a new construct; one the artist calls the ‘compound figure’. 349 Hence, as with his earlier etchings on the ‘senses’, Arnold invested his representations of military armour not only as a protective device but also as a ‘site’ for bodily inscription that questioned the fixity of gender definitions.

Krauss (2000) in her book A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of Post-Medium Condition explains how the modernist desire for ‘pure’ art forms (such as printmaking) still operates, but the very form of such an art has evolved so the tenets that it unquestionably followed, say fifty years ago, are no longer tenable.350 In turn, the concepts for which it is used have become more complex. This is why Arnold’s printmaking is so important for understanding how a benign acceptance of a traditional art practice (namely the print) cannot be sustained as a critical agent within the postmodern milieu. It will instead be sidelined as anachronistic.

While not dispensing entirely with the expectations and ideals of the European-driven printmaking movement in Australia during the 1960s and 1970s, the praxis of artists covered in this chapter moved beyond comfortable conventions. These artists employ print technology not in the interests of the old adherence to connoisseurship but to self- consciously exploit singular aspects of it. For instance, they explore craftsmanship as a paradoxical engagement between hand and the machine-made, seriality and reproducibility. Maddock and Arnold, as with Watson, initially grappled with technical and iconic issues through the prism of postmodernism, which offered appropriation, radical revisionism in history, gender and questions of the body, psychoanalytic discourse, and not least, postcolonial theory.

5.5 Judy Watson: Prints Examined in Context

349 ibid.

350 Rosalind Krauss 2000, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, London: Thames & Hudson.

158 Printmaking by Aboriginal artists tentatively emerged in the late1960s at a time when the relationship between black and white Australia started to shift and citizenship and custodianship of land were officially addressed.351 In contrast to their Caucasian counterparts, Indigenous peoples produced prints produced that were conceptually framed, not through the privilege of being part of the dominant culture, but because of the need to establish their ethnic origins as a point of departure.

The print had not been part of Indigenous customary expression (although stencilled images on the walls of rock shelters and caves could be construed as being associated with this tradition). Printmaking was introduced to Indigenous communities (as distinguished from urban Indigenous art practices) by non-Aboriginal art advisors. It often involved collaboration between the artist, language interpreter and master printer. Generally Aboriginal artists living in these remote areas practised painting in tandem with their relief prints. This close relationship between linocut printmaking and either acrylic on canvas or ochres on bark was fundamentally no different from the painting practice of their counterparts in Western modernism.

The production of Indigenous prints by practitioners based outside metropolitan areas became a distinctive (and profitable) phenomenon in the last quarter of the twentieth century. By the late 1980s, alternative print media to relief printing became available to remote community peoples. Ian Abdullah, for instance, made screenprints with Steve Fox. By 2000, Basil Hall (a seminal figure in facilitating printmaking by Aboriginal peoples) was able to state that some thirty years after the first linocuts were done by Indigenous practitioners:

The making of etchings, lithographs, silkscreen prints and relief prints has become a major new [sic] venture in many Aboriginal communities in Central Australia and across the Top End. From Fitzroy Crossing and Balgo in the West to Lockhart River on Cape York and down to Ernabella and Indulkana in South Australia, artists have been investigating aspects of printmaking with the assistance of their arts advisors and visiting experts from the southern states or from Darwin. Several have purchased presses and have established their own workshops…Aboriginal prints have

351 In 1967, a national referendum gave Aboriginal people citizenship and notionally at least similar rights to those of European occupants of Australia.

159 started to appear in greater numbers in galleries in the southern states.352

This scenario is similar to the famous example of altruistic (and visionary) white Australian teacher, Geoffrey Bardon, introducing painting boards and acrylic pigments to Indigenous peoples in Papunya. Similarly, the early Indigenous linocuts allowed for images of ideograms to express particular clan stories about ‘country’. In both cases, Western art media enabled Aboriginal sacred imagery to be selectively transformed and made relevant for the secular realm. The prints had the additional advantage that they could be easily produced, duplicated and widely marketed.

By the 1980s, printmaking opportunities had diversified and residencies for indigenous artists were organised outside their communities. For instance, screenprinting and lithography were utilised by Aboriginal artists at the Australian Print Workshop and Port Jackson Press in Melbourne, and The Printmaking Workshop at Canberra School of Art, and Basil Hall’s Studio One Printmaking Workshop in the ACT.

Local endeavours included that of the Cairns Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts School (set up in 1984), where Indigenous artists learned how to make and edition prints with teachers on hand to provide technical instruction. Individual artists also started their own print studios for producing and selling imagery. In the late 1980s in Fremantle, for instance, Sally Morgan established Murundoo Prints to print and market her screenprints. Murundoo also produced editions by Sydney Koori artist . In 1990, Utopia Art Sydney organised woodcut workshops in the central desert community. Between 1993 and 1996, Leon Stainer introduced etching and lithography to groups and individuals from Oenpelli, Ernabella, Bathurst Island and the Kimberleys. As a result of this activity, Leon founded a print workshop known as Northern Editions. Basil Hall at the Northern Territory University (now Charles Darwin University) also played a pivotal role in developing Indigenous printmaking. By 2000, the enterprise was producing over 120 editions each year by artists from ten separate communities and testified to the burgeoning demand for such prints in Australia and abroad.353

352 Basil Hall 2000, ‘The Diversity of Practice: Printmaking in Aboriginal Communities’, special issue on `Reconciliation? Indigenous art for the 21st century’, Artlink, Vol. 20, No. 1, p.56.

353 It also caused consternation in some areas. A well-subscribed `Getting into Prints’ symposium at the Northern Territory University in 1993 was held specifically to promote the field of printmaking as an option available to

160

The more commercially-oriented Indigenous work, with motifs intended for wide consumption, included Tiwi designs on Bathurst Island (one of the first) and Desert Designs in Western Australia. Tourism was a major factor in the success of these prints, as they were inevitably considered alternatives to the more costly ‘one off’ paintings by many of the artists concerned. That is not to suggest that the prints simply mimicked traditional painting, but they did satisfy the desire of consumers from other cultures to own Aboriginal art. The fact remains that much Indigenous printmaking by practitioners living on their ancestral lands is still caught at the interface between ethnography and aesthetics.

In the context in which Judy Watson works, metropolitan Australia, the situation is different. In the case of regionally-based Aboriginal artists, the adoption of Western media and codes of art making represented a radical departure from traditional body painting, rock art, low relief sand sculpture, burial poles, weaving and ceremonial regalia. Those artists of cross-racial ancestry, trained in University-based art schools, as in the case of Watson, therefore faced a raft of different issues to do with identity and appropriation. In addition, what is common with much of their printmaking and work in other media is the compulsion to address issues of marginalisation. An artist of the same generation, stated in 1987:

There are two main aspects to my work: one contains the political element and the other a spirituality tied up with Aboriginal heritage and our land. I feel that it is important to take a strong political stand in my work as an affirmation that Aboriginal art and culture has survived two hundred years of white colonisation and is still strong.354

To circumnavigate the stereotypical/ touristic view of Aboriginal art, the 1980s witnessed the growth of artist collectives such as the Boomalli Urban Aboriginal artists’ cooperative, in Sydney (which commenced in 1987). Here, printmaking was included in exhibitions as a matter of course and when the product of art school training, had a markedly different quality to the collaborations between Indigenous artists from rural

Aboriginal artists. Concerns were voiced here by, among others, Steve Fox (then coordinator at Yirrkala) in his paper entitled Outsider coming in. Sometimes not really invited. Basil Hall, ibid., p.57.

354 Fiona Foley 1987, ‘Artist’s Statement’, Aboriginal views in print and poster, exh. cat., Melbourne: Print Council of Australia.

161 situations and master printers. Often, there was an overt political dimension to the work supported by Boomalli. Screenprinted posters (such as those from Tin Sheds at The University of Sydney) became a vehicle to raise the visibility of Aboriginal peoples and the issues they confronted. ‘Rad-Ab’ as opposed to ‘Trad-Ab’ became equated with urban Aboriginal art expression.355

The print practice of urban-based Koori and Murri artists, many of whom have cross- racial ancestry, included Judy Watson (who is Murri).356 In this culturally ‘liminal’ situation, she has faced a raft of issues to do with identity and appropriation. Formerly, colonialism placed social and legal restraints on peoples of mixed ancestry, yet by the 2000s, other constraints have appeared for educated and successful Indigenous artists. For instance, their work is open to charges of inappropriate quotation of pre-contact art forms. 357 For them, the experience of printmaking is distinctly different from that of non- art school trained Aboriginal practitioners. Their adversaries may be Indigenous peoples themselves and their gatekeepers are cosmopolitan peers, not organisations established to protect and market so-called ‘tribal’ art.

The notion of ‘liminality’ and of a ‘space between’, is a recurrent theme in postcolonial discourse. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture has already been mentioned when discussing the Caucasian artists Maddock and Arnold, yet it is particularly salient for Indigenous Australian culture and the print work of Judy Watson. Postcoloniality is about fragmentation of the ‘grand narratives’ of enlightenment rationalism. In the breakdown of colonial authority and its homogenous and authoritarian cultural definitions, a disposition of knowledge and a distribution of practices have occurred that require transcultural negotiation. As Bhabha points out, it is a challenging situation where ‘social contradiction or antagonism… has to be negotiated rather than sublated’.358 In traditional

355 These are terms coined by Indigenous curator Djon Mundine in his article ‘The Smart State / Crazy State’ [referring to Queensland], Machine, issue 2.2, 2006.

356 Among her printmaking colleagues in this respect are Avril Quaill and Karen Casey.

357 They face the complexity of relations within the black community itself where responsibilities, protocols and permissions to use sacred imagery are keenly debated. In another respect, Vivien Johnson argued that ‘White excursions onto the terrain of Aboriginal representations are now highly problematic. But they are equally imperative in order to contradict in practice the dismal doctrine that no rapprochement is possible’,1986, `The Art of Decolonisation’, Imants Tillers exh. cat., Australian Pavilion, Venice Biennale: Arts Council of Australia. Tillers has long taken appropriation as a central tenet of his painting.

358 Bhabha 2007, op. cit., p.162.

162 tribal communities, as much as in the urban context (where Watson is based), art operates as part of contested expectations.359

While the artist has continued to express her Aboriginal identity, her work is not equated with that made by the members of remote communities of Indigenous Australia. There exists a kind of museum culture idea in which work in remote communities is considered to be more ‘authentic’ or ‘real’ than work by so-called urban Indigenous artists. Or, at least there is a schism between the two.

While Watson is highly valued by Aboriginal artists and Indigenous art authorities, as are Hetti Perkins, Brenda Croft, Stephen Gilchrist, Avril Quaill, Destiny Deacon and Andrea Fisher, they are all highly educated and mostly urban-based.360 Some urban-based artists, like Gordon Bennett, comment on their transcultural heritage directly in their work; Bennett seeing himself as having an ‘outsider’ status.

Watson produces print imagery that emboldens difference, and points to the liminal zone between disparate cultural experiences, as well as raising awareness of feminine sensibilities. The context in which Watson exhibits these works may be equated with Western institutions, such as The University of Queensland Art Museum, and therefore at a remove from Indigenous peoples living in remote communities.361

The issue of ‘authenticity’ in Watson’s case arises also within her Indigenous ancestry itself, which is associated with Waanyi territory. She explains:

Our family has not gone on the list of Waanyi families re land rights

359 It pays to mention Albert Namatjira at this juncture. Taught by Rex Batterby, he produced watercolours during the 1950s that emanated from his roots in Arrernte country in the guise of conservative European landscapes. Described as a `wanderer between two worlds’ by Joyce Batty (1963) in her monograph on the artist, the art cognoscenti nevertheless regarded his works as ‘kitsch’ and inauthentic hybrid products. With a measure of commercial success behind him, Namatjira spawned a school of Hermannsburg watercolourists, which continues to the present, and inspired debates about the legitimacy of Aboriginal art that did not use traditional (or customary) materials or symbology connected with the boomerangs, carvings and bark paintings. Arguably those who were most perplexed were from the so-called ‘dominant culture’. The Indigenous artists themselves were open to experimentation, embracing introduced materials, technology and codes of picture-making.

360 Judith Watson in conversation with Anne Kirker, Brisbane, 22 May 2008.

361 For instance, Judy Watson: Selected Works 1990-2005, University of Queensland Art Museum, 26 November 2005- 5 February 2006. Sixty works (many of them prints and drawings) were exhibited on this occasion.

163 [because] My grandmother was born on Riversleigh Station on the O’Shannessy River in Waanyi Country. However, her mother’s family moved around working on various stations and didn’t stay on their land.362

Furthermore, the artist states that this sense of ‘displacement’ is compounded; ‘When I am invited to work with other Aboriginal communities, it is like I am in another country. It is another language, another place, I am a stranger. That is to say, even though I am Aboriginal (and non-Aboriginal) when I go to other places within Australia it is like crossing into other countries in Europe with their language and cultural differences’.363

Watson is in a situation not unlike Shimada in Japan and the United States and Berlin and Prawat Laucharoen in New York and Thailand. Like the transformative print works they produce, their personal identity is fluid and crosses national and cultural boundaries. Accordingly, their imagery challenges normative expectations of Western canons and those that are customary within non-Euramerican contexts. Bhabha (1994) calls attention to ‘the conditions of contingency and contradictoriness that attend upon the lives of those who are “in the minority”…the borderline engagements of cultural difference may as often be consensual as conflictual; they may confound our definitions of tradition and modernity.’364 Re-alignments between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art and between the cultural mainstream and those of remote or peripheral art communities are constantly made in the latter half of the twentieth century.

All of these artists named above exemplified this tendency from the early 1980s, Their use of printmaking, itself a marginal artistic discipline, in combination with marginal or ambiguous cultural identities, not only emerged with the encouragement of postmodern discourse, but each artist has continued to innovate and communicate these fluid shifts of cultural and artistic practices to the present. Watson remarks how her Australian peers can ’infiltrate the system because of who we do and don’t look like”.365 This fluidity suggests the contingent identity of many postmodern artists and the way their practice

362 Watson in conversation with Kirker, op.cit.

363 Judy Watson 2005, extract from an unpublished paper ‘Artist’s Statement’ presented at Craft Queensland Gallery, Brisbane, 10 September in conjunction with Sufferance: Women’s artists’ books exhibition.

364 Bhabha, 2007, op. cit., p.3.

365 Judy Watson 2005, op. cit.

164 can assume different meanings dependant upon context. Urban Indigenous artists are typical cross-cultural subjects who often slip through Euramerican theoretical constructs because they have not been the subject of substantial and empathetic critical evaluation. In not having been fully accepted, they do not easily fit existing taxonomies. They are in a ‘borderlands’ situation, not necessarily speaking the language of the tribal affiliation they belong to but also wishing to acknowledge it; as the artist Gordon Hookey states’I have two languages, I don’t know my first’366

Hookey’s admission suggests an absence, a silence that artists like Watson are filling by communicating their experiences through their art works. In both respects there are cultural and institutional ‘gatekeepers’ with whom urban artists are expected to negotiate. Many, including Watson, navigate past and through these authorities in order to retain the integrity of their concepts and aesthetics. She thus eludes both tribal and urban-based authorities in order to re-define the categories of her paintings and prints; intent on marking out new territory for them. This territory is not captured by binary-centred discourses, but rather, is expressive of post-colonial sensibilities in unique ways.

Watson, as with Gordon Bennett, is a successful transcultural Indigenous artist who has broken through into mainstream Australian art on her own terms. Both have navigated the patronising, neo-colonial situation among some Australian Aboriginal art experts and dealers who refuse to consider the practice of urban Aboriginal peoples as authentic or serious. Mindful of the apparent schism between ‘urban’ and ‘traditional’ Aboriginal art and the range of discourses that attempt to arrive at a definitive understanding of both, Watson has aligned herself with Aboriginal country and her matrilineal ancestry. While Bennett’s modus operandi has been to adopt the `quotational’ in his overtly political works, which highlight past injustices, Watson declines to have her work perceived as `postmodernist’.367 She believes the term implies Euramerican discourse and neglects to, as Simons (1996) points out, allow for what we may come to know as something that lies outside theoretical structures that have originated from the `centre’.

366 Watson ibid., quoting Hookey.

367 For discussion on Bennett and the ‘quotational’. see Tony Fry and Anne-Marie Willis 1996, `Aboriginal Art: Symptom or Success?’ in Rex Butler (ed.), What is Appropriation?, Brisbane and Sydney: Institute of Modern Art & Power Institute of Fine Arts.

165 The rhetoric of postmodernism is contingent. When applied to the printmaking of Arnold, a Caucasian Australian, it readily carries the values of the dominant culture. Contemporary Aboriginal art, when its focus is clearly on Indigenous expression, demands re-evaluation of the term ‘postmodern’, unless, like Bennett’s imagery, it is intentionally about appropriation of art styles and cultural politics. The question of ‘race’ is undeniable, for both Watson and Bennett and their respective work cannot be dismissed from demonstrating an allegiance to the continuation of a specific group of people. This is a people that have survived massacres and dislocation after contact with European settlement. This is why, with her prints of the1990s, Watson gives preference to the matrilineal side of her family (which has Aboriginal ancestry) in contrast to her father’s Scottish and English background. While not denying her father’s European ancestry, the artist adopts a feminist strategy of privileging emotion to evoke a ‘felt, rather than thought, connectedness’ to her Aboriginality and artistic tradition.368

Watson’s print practice would have been unlikely to have received the encouragement it has had without the presence of postmodernism and feminist discourse. Postmodernism (including feminism) encouraged pluralism and the shift of the marginal into the mainstream. This is why, despite the fact that it can be argued that Watson fits more readily into post-colonial discourse, she is included in this thesis. While she has not always produced her prints herself (she nowadays relies upon master printers), Watson was trained initially as a printmaker and editioned works accordingly.

She took up printmaking, because painting seemed ‘such a high art business’369 She was searching for a practice that was socially engaged and practical. Lithography became Watson’s speciality after she learned the process while studying at the University of Tasmania in Hobart (1980-82). The tusche washes she placed on stone were akin to how she would swamp unstretched canvases with diluted pigments for her characteristic paintings from 1989 onwards. While these canvases have ensured her status as a

368 Vivien Johnson 1992, ‘Upon a Painted Emotion: Recent Work by Judy Watson’, Art and Australia No. 30, summer, p.238.

369 Judy Watson interviewed by Hetti Perkins, August 2002. An edited version, ‘Looking Aboriginal: Judy Watson and Hetti Perkins in conversation’, is included in sacred ground beating heart: works by Judy Watson 1989-2003, exh. cat., Perth: Curtin University, 2003. The Asian tour occurred in 2004.

166 successful mid-career artist in Australia, the connection between them and her printmaking is crucial, as Ewington (2003) points out:

Working in the exacting medium of lithography in the mid-1980s, Watson experimented extensively with rolling washes of inks suspended in water across the oily surfaces of her lithographic stones and plates. What is usually a minor aspect of the lithographer’s craft became a principal aspect of her printmaking, allowing chance to play its part in creating the floating diaphanous overlapping fields of her spectral images. 370

The canvases drew upon an alchemical-like mix of acrylics, other pigments, oxides and natural ochres to convey her relationship with ‘country’ (metaphysical as well as actual) and often included an overlay of pastel mark-making in stippled circular motifs. In this regard, they were close to central desert dot painting; although this relationship was veiled under many layers. Making short strokes with lithographic crayon and washes of tusche in her monochromatic prints was equivalent to the pastel strokes Watson added to her paintings. There were also, Watson points out, ‘references to Van Gogh’s swirling marks in his drawings and paintings as well as early Italian tempera paintings’.371

What is clearly apparent in Watson’s practice is her reluctance to privilege one art field over another. In fact, the dominance of painting in the traditional lexicon of art methods is a notion she refuses. This was borne out in the survey exhibition sacred ground beating heart: works by Judy Watson 1989-2003, which (when displayed at The University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane) comprised a large number of so-called ‘works on paper’.

This is because the artist recognises a relational symbiosis (conceptually and through technical process) between her lithographs and etchings (from 1997) and her paintings. (Plate 26) This symbiosis is generally not apparent in the printmaking of other Aboriginal artists who are more commonly regarded as painters.372 Both activities for Watson play on the idea of diffusion and transcendence. The forms in her stained

370 Julie Ewington 2003, `Water’, in sacred ground beating heart, ibid., p.46.

371 Watson in conversation with Kirker, op. cit.

372 Ellen José, for instance, produced black-and-white relief prints in 1988, while her painted canvases were multi- hued; a distinction common to the history of Western printmaking.

167 canvases and tusche-drenched lithographs alike are amorphous, although some attract comparison with shield-like forms and female genitalia.

Mostly it is through titles, such as the guardians (1990), and women be strong (1994), that female Aboriginal traditions are indicated, while the earth-toned inks point to country. (Plate 25) The fact that women be strong in part referred to Indian women, and resulted from a residency Watson had in that country, points to her shared concern with women generally. (Plate 27) As with Shimada and the Japanese artist’s empathy for Korean women during World War II, Watson does not narrow her focus to a particular cultural group.

While Watson’s prints do not extend and transgress printmaking technically, to the same extent as the work of Maddock and Arnold, this is not the case when they are considered in relation to the print expectations of both ‘urban’ and ‘traditional’ Aboriginal culture. Watson’s lithographs, and later her etchings, demonstrate that artistic strategies may be revolutionary within certain contexts, although this might not be immediately apparent. If the lessons of postmodernism are kept in mind, transformation is therefore a relative condition, contingent upon race, class, context (historical, geographical) and dominant belief systems. In the same way that photographic incursions in the printmaking of Noda and Shimada in Japan disrupted the customary decorative caste to the contemporary print in that country, Watson avoided the bias towards ‘story-telling’ in her imagery and the assertion of pre-contact art forms.

Watson’s student prints of 1977-79 referred to Aboriginal culture and feminist theory. The texts of Simone de Beauvoir, for instance, were an importance influence on her. In 1985 an etching Watson made was titled touching my mother’s blood. It is the manner in which Watson is subtly able to imbue a profound disquiet with the injustices of her Indigenous inheritance, the inequalities towards women generally, and also her privileging of structurally unstable moments that mark Watson’s prints up to the 2000s as significant, transformational images within the genre.

Watson’s 1980s prints anticipated her engagement with the Waanyi people of North- West Queensland. However, it was not until 1990 (and again a decade later) ,when

168 Watson accompanied family members to Riversleigh Station and Lawn Hill Gorge, that Aboriginal identity assumed a new centrality in her work:

Being with family, talking to my Grandmother, absorbing her memories, gaining an insight into her life and the way she sees the land, being shown bush foods and sites is some of my major research as an Indigenous visual artist. The strength of these experiences sustains me and is the touchstone for my work. 373

Watson’s small lithographs at the time are exemplified by the guardians (1990). This lithograph was conceived, processed and printed in an edition by the artist herself.374 This is because Watson was trained in printmaking, as she says:

I studied printmaking: etching, relief, silkscreen, collograph, monotypes and later lithography. I got bored with these techniques so I played around with them a lot, pushing the medium. Because I know the possibilities of the techniques, I can work in collaboration with master printers in a more informed way than an artist who is unfamiliar with printmaking. I actually did study photo print techniques but preferred to return to drawing techniques with my prints.375

The guardians conveys five dark, amorphous figures spaced across the surface of paper, framed by a hand-dawn rectangle of dotted lines. A limestone, rather than the more readily available aluminium lithographic plate, was employed to emphasise the stone’s natural materiality and uneven perimeter. Mirage-like, these figures are like sentinels and were clearly intended to represent Watson’s matrilineal ancestors.

Her use of the stone (parallel to Maddock’s choice of abandoning photo-etching for ochre drawings when producing Terra Spiritus) similarly underscores the symbiotic relationship between process and concept for these two artists. Not only is limestone a product of the land but Watson also ensures that its corporeal presence is maintained in the final print. Furthermore, she printed the guardians lithographs on fine chine collé,

373 Judy Watson, 2005, op. cit.

374 Rather than in collaboration with master printer Basil Hall at Northern Editions or with Martin King at the Australian Print Workshop (with whom she often works).

375 Watson in conversation with Kirker, op. cit.

169 which gives a skin-like effect. The use of chine collé became the norm for Watson’s subsequent prints (her lithographs as well as etchings). Sometimes, as in the case of etchings she made in collaboration with Basil Hall in 1997, the Japanese paper was bonded over the actual printed composition. (Plate 28) With titles such as our hair in your collections, she later explained to Indigenous curator Hetti Perkins:

I was looking at collections [during visits to the British Museum in 1995] of Aboriginal objects as close to my country as I could find, but I was reticent about depicting them as exposed as in the original drawings. So I put them under a layer of chine collé, like a skin, just to set them back a bit so they’re not able to be too obviously `feasted’ upon by the viewer.376

The etchings in question were of ancestral objects with some fragments of actual hair. They were produced in part to allude to museums that in the past collected body parts for ethnography collections. Titled our hair in your collections, our bones in your collections, and our skin in your collections, these 1997 prints set up a riposte to the colonialist acquisition of artefacts from peoples whose custodianship was denied (until the return of such materials was made mandatory through legislation).

With this series of etchings, Watson also became an unofficial archivist for her cultural links with North-West Queensland (Gulf of Carpentaria). She drew armbands, pubic belts and pituri bags she came across in London, adapted them for etchings on returning to Australia. In explaining how the subject matter of her prints is expressed through technique, Watson said: ‘I cleaned the surface of the etching plates just a little bit and made it really smeary to leave a skin so that the image comes through slowly.”’377 The thin layer of ink left on the surface of the intaglio plate generated a soft, irregular tonal presence, while the sugar-lift aquatint accorded with Watson’s use of tusche wash tones in her lithographs. It also related to her paintings, with their amorphous stains and nebulous forms.

Watson’s involvement with cultural retrieval was treated in the portfolio of prints she was commissioned by the State Library of Queensland to produce for the Sufferance project

376 Watson, cited in Perkins 2003, op. cit., p. 20.

377 Ibid. p.22.

170 in 2005. Entitled a preponderance of aboriginal blood, it comprised sixteen etchings that duplicated original documents. (Plate 29) Printed first in black ink on chine collé, separate plates with brushed aquatinted passages were printed on the top with red ink and gave the effect of spillage. The documents were selected from the Queensland State Archives relating to Australian electoral enrolment statutes from the 1940s and 1950s. These classified whether a person was a ‘full-blood’ Aborigine (and therefore not entitled to vote) or a so-called ‘half caste’ (entitled to vote). They were directly related to Watson’s own family history. ‘Because the material from the archives already had a latent power, I didn’t want to change the documents very much. Its leakage onto the printed page was enough,` Watson explained.378

Her prints are not novel in terms of their technique (lithography and etching), which accords with familiar Euramerican practice. Rather, through their attempt to appropriate Aboriginal values (from a female-associated aesthetic) and give presence to them through Western means, a reciprocal dialogue is proposed. The margins and the centre are collapsed when such work infiltrates (and is indeed lauded) by the mainstream, postmodern milieu. Because the printmaking is the practice of an artist drawing on her Aboriginal ancestry, it is aligned with post-colonial discourses and is not therefore, simply a case of the ‘thief in the attic’ syndrome (where a mainstream artist appropriates from a peripheral culture to enliven their practice).379

Rather, Judy Watson’s editioned imagery acts as a threshold between two separate sets of cultural values, a subtle political act of rapprochement intended to be dispersed widely. As a testament to her own bi-cultural identity, her prints do not intend to exclude and divide, but rather to make aware and educate. As the case study specialist, Helen Simons (1996) states, it is a process of representing not only ‘what we come to know, but to see what we don`t’, that applies to her printmaking.380

378 Watson 2005, op. cit.

379 See Charles Green 1995, Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970-1994, Sydney: Craftsman House, p.144. Green was specifically calling attention to German painter Anselm Kiefer’s visit to Australia in 1992 and his Eurocentric self-absorption, which led to a misunderstanding of Aboriginal mythology and protocols. . 380 Simons 1996, op. cit., p.226.

171 While her images affirm Aboriginal feminine specificity and the artist’s Sufferance portfolio calls the past to account, it is Watson’s projection of her transcultural identity that is of particular value for current times, when not only postmodernism, but globalisation has altered our perceptions. Not only is identity not fixed but increasingly, individuals claim more than one contextual site and ideologies other than the dominant, for their art practice. Hall (1991) puts it this way: ‘the subjects of the local, of the margin, can only come into representation by, as it were, recovering their own hidden histories’. Feminism did this, black cultures have done it and now transcultural subjects are urging an evaluation of new ethnicities, hitherto excluded (or conveniently overlooked) from the major forms of cultural representation. 381

5.7 Chapter Summary

1. The three artists addressed in this chapter have grown out of and moved beyond colonial premises of art practice in Australia, which privileged the example of Britain (and later Europe and the United States). While benefiting from the gains made for printmaking during its revival as an art form in the 1960s, Bea Maddock, Raymond Arnold and Judy Watson have developed as subjects of postmodernism. For postmodernism, as articulated in Australia during the 1980s and 1990s, privileges heterogeneity and difference, in order to transcend the metanarratives of the past and to open up new avenues of expression.

2. For these artists (as with Noda and Shimada in Japan and Prawat and Phatyos in Thailand), technique and content are always inseparable. With their printmaking, process cannot be considered in isolation from issues of representation.

3. It is through the print and the editioned image that they have found a vehicle that best allows them to perform the tensions between centre and periphery. Their practice accords with postmodern paradigms of identity and place. Arnold challenged ‘nationness’ by working out of both Australia and Paris, conflated gender expectations in his prints and combined both the ‘haptic’ and handmade

381 Hall 1991, op. cit., pp. 34 35.

172 attributes of traditional printmaking with the digital. Hence ‘old’ and ‘new’ print techniques were set in a symbolic relationship with each other.

4. Whilst maintaining attributes of modernist printmaking, these three artists do so with conceptual intention, rather than by treating the medium as a neutral entity. Maddock found that photography in printmaking replaced the need to continue painting, and in time, she stretched the definition of drawing to take on the serial attributes of the print. With Terra Spiritus (1993-98), the artist radically urges a reconsideration of media categories. She in fact invents a new form of art practice by editioning drawings as though they were a form of printmaking.

5. Her practice therefore resists classification according to any one media taxonomy; it defies containment and invites the new. In the 1990s, both Maddock and Arnold conceived their editioned works in terms of art installation, further placing their practice firmly within postmodernism.

6. During this period, Arnold used the print to explore cultural dislocation and binarism in terms of identity and print process, while Watson employed it to acknowledge the matrilineal Aboriginal roots of her bi-cultural heritage, while attempting rapprochement through her praxis. In a parallel manner, Maddock saw her printmaking activity leading up to Terra Spiritus as a ‘visual autobiography; a continuum in which the present keeps re-engaging the past through recurring ideas and images’.382

7. Terra Spritus also charts geography, both literally and metaphorically. In this major installation, Tasmania becomes a contested territory where the sign is dislocated to urge a post-colonial reading. Maddock intentionally disrupts master narratives (metanarratives) of history in this work.

8. Judy Watson’s printmaking allows for an affirmation of a continuing culture (the Australian Aborigine) to be widely dispersed. She demonstrates how artists who are, or have previously been considered, marginal to the dominant culture often

382 Johannes and Backhouse 1990, op. cit., p.6.

173 bring a socio-political dimension to their work. Her successful engagement in mainstream art practice potentially empowers the Aboriginal aspect of her ancestry. A conundrum remains in that in some contexts, her prints are perceived as not Indigenous enough. Instead, they conform to Homi Bhabha’s notions of hybridity and liminality where domains of difference are displaced in favour of the subject being formed in a culturally rich zone of the ‘in-between’.383

9. While the majority of her prints are not transgressive in the sense of taking the field of printmaking further in formal terms (into installation for example), they do avoid reductive and stereotypical readings of Aboriginal art. They cannot be classified neatly as ‘tribal’ or ‘urban’.

383 Bhabha 2007, op.cit.

174

Chapter 6 CASE STUDY 3 THAILAND

‘Print as Installation’: The Work of Prawat Laucharoen and Phatyos Buddhacharoen and Their Allies

6.1 Introduction

In this chapter I will discuss four Thai printmakers who, as radicals, broke with tradition and used installation to create arts practice more in keeping with postmodern practice. The discussion focuses on two of these artists, while the other two practitioners are used to elaborate points made. The chapter will demonstrate how the print in Thailand has been the basis of ambitious art installations reflecting both the specificity of place and personal identity.

Whilst the thrust of the chapter is on a radical, maverick and ultimately more challenging approach to printmaking, it would be remiss to denigrate all exceptions to this trend. The establishment of the Thai Art Department at Silpakorn in 1977-78 boosted the neo- traditional movement and to the general public, the imagery it engenders has come to be known as the authentic ‘Thai art’. Yet not all this imagery can be dismissed as merely ‘decorative’ and nationalistic and of appeal to corporate and banking sponsors of exhibitions.

Silpakorn-trained Prawat Laucharoen (b.1941) and Phatyos Buddhacharoen (b.1965) are the artists selected for the two major case studies. They are well known in Bangkok art circles for their development of ‘print installations’ as a distinctive phenomenon. Installation practice is a marginal activity in that country because it radically takes the print away from conservative tropes and stereotypical expectations and moves this discipline into a larger context of postmodern visual arts practice. This innovative use of printmaking in an installation form has been inflected, but not wholly determined by, Euramerican dialogues. Reinforcing this iconoclastic treatment of the print is the work of other Silpakorn artists Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook and Bundith Phunsombatlert. They

175 conform with what Lyotard (1984) proposes as a culture that no longer needs any form of legitimation beyond expediency or ‘performativity’.384

Historically, modernisation in the kingdom has been synonymous with Westernisation, but as with Japan, national styles and motifs have also been adapted to such influences.385 In turn, the eclectic, free borrowing appropriation qualities of postmodernism arose, and were utilised with a localised flavour. Through the prism of Thai installation (chiefly from the 1980s and 1990s), printmaking in this chapter is taken into an expanded territory that moves beyond a hermetic and craft-based form. This interdisciplinary territory is largely postmodern in that it is ‘more eclectic, hybrid or Free-Style’ and witnesses the dissolution of fixed categories of art.386

Despite the tendency of researchers in the past to use convenient definitions by ‘labelling’ subjects according to a singular and hermetic artistic identity or print discipline, a more informed assessment considers the ways that postmodernism worked against such preconceptions. Thai print installation cannot be classified according to Modernist tropes. There is also the postcolonial dimension to consider in such work (regardless of Thailand’s pride in never having been directly colonised by another power). This is a discourse that advises us that ‘the transnational dimension of cultural transformation – migration, diaspora, displacement, relocation – makes the process of cultural translation a complex form of signification.’387

To survive as a critically relevant practice, it has been necessary for printmaking to be re- articulated as an agent of change. It is through installation that this has occurred in Thailand itself and through Thai subjects who live elsewhere (namely, Prawat in New York). Thus, not only do Thai artists (especially Prawat) break national and traditional

384 Lyotard 1984, `The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge’, in Lawrence Cahoone (ed.), op. cit., p. 259.

385 Herbert P. Phillips 1991, The Integrative Art of Modern Thailand, exh. cat., Lowie Museum of Anthropology, University of California at Berkeley. This comprehensive publication sought to ‘be an ethnoaesthetic exploration of contemporary Thai art, not an attempt to analyse this art in terms of the history or aesthetic values of Euramerican art.’, p.3. Nevertheless, it was deemed ‘exotic and politically correct’ by Apinan Poshyananda in his essay on ‘The Future’, Tradition and Change, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1993, p.7.

386 Charles Jencks 1987, Post-Modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture, London: Academy Editions, p.317. Jencks was the first to define postmodernism – in architecture- which led to its subsequent definition in many of the arts.

387 Bhabha 2007, op. cit., p.247.

176 strictures; they also use postmodern attitudes towards making a major contribution internationally. They innovate in their specialist field and lead the way towards a more encompassing conception of printmaking that shapes contemporary practice in other places in the world. Significant artists from Thailand have felt less fettered than their counterparts in Japan in breaking printmaking rules. This chapter analyses the reasons for this attitude. It also addresses the nature of the radical transformational shift from two- dimensional image-making (i.e. conventional printmaking) to environments where ‘installation literally reconfigures social space’.388

The two major Thai case study artists, and the others I bring into the argument (namely their “allies”) illustrate a number of significant points. For example:

 The major artists chose installation as their preferred means of ‘re-enacting’ printmaking, both in Thailand and elsewhere;  Installation is often seen in terms of a global-oriented culture, where information is easily transportable and the example of the West is compelling;  The lure of opportunities to exhibit in cultures where experimentation and open discourse is condoned, has led to a shift in approach by artists;  Such artists have modified their art practice to satisfy new audiences.

These points are crucial in understanding the ‘exchange’ between one art community and another; between Thailand, the United States, Japan, Australia, Germany and elsewhere at the end of the twentieth century.

In the course of examining the images of particular artists in this chapter, ‘interpretative disjuncture’ is addressed. Works are discussed that merge indigenous and Western characteristics; where an intercultural dialogue occurs. Bhabha (1994) states that ‘cultural hybridities …emerge in moments of historical transformation’, and it is an apt observation not only for this chapter, but also for the thesis as a whole. 389

388 Julie Ewington 1995, ‘Five Elements: An abbreviated account of installation art in South-East Asia’, Art and Asia Pacific, Vol. 2, No. 1, January.

389 Bhabha 2007, op. cit., p.2

177 This condition has also been described as involving a process of `intra-regionalism’, where a regional focus is at play and one that takes into account the geopolitical reality of their immediate context. Notwithstanding the importance of Euramerican values and theoretical constructs, the cultural practices of a country and its near neighbours frame the practices of artists. Artistic engagements between Japan and Thailand, for instance, have affected the appearance (and to a certain extent, the content) of print work in the latter country.390 In a sense, this thesis, with its choice of case studies from the Asia- Pacific region, is an instance of intra-regionalism.

Bangkok’s Silpakorn University is a key focus for printmaking in Thailand and this chapter discusses the influence of the University and artists who have trained there. Although I principally concentrate on Prawat and Phatyos, to a lesser extent Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (b.1957) is included in my argument as an artist who radicalised the content and form of the print according to a nascent feminism in Thailand. The thesis also analyses Bundith Phunsombatlert (b.1972), as representing a younger generation. By the 2000s, he had moved a conventional print process into plastic multiples. All these artists create installations, and in the case of Prawat and Araya, performances that work against the grain of institutional art structures in Thailand, or at least adroitly navigate them. Other artists following their mandate of stretching printmaking’s borders include Kamin Lertchaiprasert (b.1964) and Surasi Kusolwong (b.1965). Similarly, they are products of the printmaking studios at Silpakorn.391Through them, I shall demonstrate how the print has the capacity to operate beyond nationalistic imperatives and established canons of production to enter the global arena in a guise completely at odds with traditional expectations.

6.2 Historical Premises for the Contemporary Print in Thailand

Thai printed imagery can be traced back to the production of Christian prayer books in the seventeenth century. The Catholic priest Arnaud-Antoine Garnault has been credited with printing the first such book in Thailand in 1796, which featured a wood-engraving

390 See Caroline Turner 1993, ‘Internationalism and Regionalism: Paradoxes of Identity’, Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press.

178 (xylograph).392 However, it was missionary doctor Dan Bradley Beach who established presses in the kingdom in 1835 and went on to make a significant contribution to the printing industry, especially educational texts.393 The opening of Siam to unrestricted trade in the 1850s further encouraged product and service promotion through printed illustration. For instance, the Illustrated London News published engravings that recorded scenes of Siam for European consumption. Court artisans and artists trained in religious mural painting (such as Khrua In Khong) therefore had access to images by Western illustrators and assimilated the techniques of linear perspective and naturalism in their art.394 For centuries the nation had political and economic relationships with India and China, and under King Chulalongkorn (Rama V), enthusiastically accommodated Western influences in the modernisation process.395 Sometimes these influences were received in Thailand via printed imagery produced elsewhere in Asia.396

Thailand does not have the indigenous print tradition seen in other South-East Asian cultures, where all aspects of production emanated from within these countries. For instance, Thai production is in stark contrast to the Philippines. The latter country was

392 Refer to Anake Nawigamune 2000, A Century of Thai Graphic Design, Bangkok: River Books.

393 Piyaporn Wongruang, writing for The Nation , 17.10.2002, on the history of Thai fonts http://www.thailandqa.com/forum/

394 Refer to Apinan Poshyananda 1992, Modern Art in Thailand: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Oxford University Press, p.7. As a Ph.D. graduate from Cornell University, in the United States, Apinan submitted his thesis `Modern art in Thailand in the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries’ in 1990. It formed the basis of this standard published text on the subject (namely Modern Art in Thailand). His terminology and style of writing follow the surveys published in English on art practice in Western contexts.

Dr Poshyananda was, until mid 2003, Associate Dean for Research and Foreign Affairs, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, and Director of The Art Center at that institution. He has been widely recognised as the most influential curator of contemporary art in Thailand, during the 1990s especially, and was responsible for the prestigious 1996 exhibition at the Asia Society Galleries, New York, titled Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/Tensions. Apinan holds arguably the most powerful ‘gatekeeper’ function for Thai contemporary art. His expansive and often unconventional approach to art practice serves to elevate practitioners alert to international trends over those talents who pursue more traditionalist modes within Thailand. In the 1990s, there appeared to be voices of disquiet among younger Thai art critics in the attention granted to Apinan as the perceived ‘authority’ on contemporary Thai art.

395 Anake Nawigamune’s book on Thai Graphic Design demonstrates the wealth of chromolithographic illustrations (printed outside Thailand), which served nineteenth and early twentieth century newspapers, funeral books, film posters, labels and magazine advertisements. Published in Thailand, the artwork designs for these were sent offshore for production Anake cites a number of specific examples, such as a book of Flag Regulations illustrating different kinds of Thai flags, which was printed in Leipzig in 1899. See Nawigamune 2000, op. cit., p.26.

396 Demonstrating continuing Chinese influence, poster art of the period 1900-40 printed in Shanghai was a highly popular product of the early advertising graphic studios and was widely disseminated. With the large ethnic Chinese population in Thailand, it is highly likely that these posters were collected there. In addition, posters advertising products, incorporating both Thai and Mandarin, were distributed for the purposes of Thai consumption. Western- influenced, these full-colour images portrayed beautiful women in a highly realistic manner using the chromolithographic technique. See Nawigamune 2000, op. cit., p.147.

179 subjected to direct colonisation, first by the Spanish, and then by the United States and Japan. Accordingly, the Philippines had a record of printmaking that reflects settler identity and values. For example, under the sway of Catholicism, figurative woodcuts of the late 1500s, accompanied by text and wood engravings, were produced for religious purposes. These were mostly printed by anonymous Chinese artisans who were familiar with that technique.397 In the following century, missionaries engaged the services of ‘indios’, including Tomas Pinpin (active 1610-39), to continue the process of producing woodcuts for picture books. The eighteenth century saw the introduction of copperplate engraving. This enabled artists to illustrate subjects with more detail and draughtsmanship than early woodcut practitioners achieved. Coincidentally, the plates were signed (by Francisco Suarez, Phelipe Sevilla and others) testifying to the fact that they were aware of their images as artistic achievements. The history of printmaking in the Philippines (although commencing a century earlier than Thailand) can be paralleled with the European history of printmaking expounded by Arthur M. Hind in his classic text on intaglio work.398

This comprehensive print activity did not occur in Thailand. While Bradley’s typesetting and publishing played a major role in disseminating information in Siam, and ensured that the country remained independent of outside forces, there was not the same amount of illustrated print activity as in another South-East Asia nation, the Philippines, which Santiago Albano Pilar and Imelda Cajipe-Endaya (1993) identified for their book on printmaking in the Philippines, Limbag Kamay. Moreover, there is not the distinctive and readily identifiable indigenous print tradition seen in Japanese ukiyo-e colour woodblock images. Even by the nineteenth century, although Bradley had established the beginnings of industrial print activity, Thai royal gazettes, popular magazines, posters, cards and graphic design ephemera were not designed and printed in that country. The weight of a history based on the print, especially in terms of independent estampes (or picture

397 Under Spanish occupation, prints produced in the Philippines were often made by Chinese craftsmen who employed woodblock printing for illustrating religious tracts serving Catholicism. Santiago Albano Pilar states: ‘As in all aspects of culture during the Spanish colonization, the prevalence of Chinese craftsmen in artistic projects determined the strong Chinese character of the emergent colonial culture.’ Santiago Albano Pilar and Imelda Cajipe- Endaya 1993, Limbag Kamay: 400 Years of Philippine Printmaking, exh. cat., Manila: Cultural Center of the Philippines, p.2. This is the most comprehensive history of Filipino printmaking published thus far.

398 Hind 1923, reprinted 1963, op. cit.

180 albums) by masters, has not been an influencing factor on the techniques or conceptual bases of contemporary printmaking in Thailand.399

Arising from the commercial activity, fine art printmaking began to emerge in Thailand in the 1950s. Thus, printmaking did not have art status in that country until the1950s creative print developed. This occurred within a relatively short time, and was linked to the publishing industry as an adjunct to text or commercial art pursuits, rather than to the fine arts per se. A locally cast Thai typeface was created in the 1840s, which led to the establishment of publishing houses and books that were sometimes accompanied by artist-designed decorative borders printed from wood blocks. During the 1890s, books were printed in Bangkok by Rongphim Khru Smith, Bradley’s Press, and others.400 After World War II, the printing business reflected the boom in artistic and cultural activities in Bangkok (Krung Thep). As the casting of metal typefaces was complicated and expensive, hand-drawn characters were made into moulds that prompted the growth of so-called `block shops’. These designed and made hand-drawn characters. They operated separately from newspaper presses and became gathering places for painters, typeface designers and advertising professionals. Famous block shops of the 1950s included Khana Chang, Khana Hem, Silpakarm and Siam Silp.’401 Given this background, it is interesting that a boom in artistic practice emerged in Bangkok.

In terms of the Kingdom’s cultural growth, King Rama V’s substantial reign (1868-1910) is an historical marker. It established a pattern for adopting European artistic ideals, which were most obviously demonstrated in local architecture, sculpture and murals. Direct influence came from Italy via painters and sculptors who served the Thai royal family and the social elite. Cesare Ferro, for example, was hired to work in the Siamese court and he encouraged Thai artists to adopt academic Western representational styles.

399 That is not to say that artists did not know of the engraved linear designs of Buddha on stone tablets during Thailand’s Sukhotai era (thirteenth century), which contemporary printmaker Pishnu Supanimit (b.1948) links with intaglio prints. However, this is a personal speculation only. See Pishnu’s essay on `Modern Thai Printmaking’ in The International Print and Drawing Exhibition exh. cat., Silpakorn University, 2003, p. 174.

400 Information partly obtained an exhibition the author viewed on the development of the Thai book at the National Museum, Bangkok, during November 2002.

401 Atiya Achak-Ulwisut, text extract from brochure to 10 Faces of Type and Thai Nation exhibition, Chiang Mai University Art Museum, 29 Nov. -22 Dec. 2002.

181 In 1924, under King Rama VI, Corrado Feroci was appointed by the Siamese government to work as a sculptor in Bangkok. He served a nationalistic agenda by producing bronze statues of Thai royalty and other propagandist monuments.402 Feroci was very influential and became the first director of the School of Fine Arts in 1933 (becoming Silpakorn University, in 1943) and on gaining citizenship, assumed the name Silpa Bhirasri. At Silpakorn this ‘shaper’ of early twentieth century Thai art laid the foundations for the study of European art, yet he also established courses on traditional Thai art (mostly painting that derived from Buddhist temple murals, which led in time to the ‘Surr’ art movement). 403 In doing so, he adroitly served a regime that sought to propagate its power, indigenous character and commitment to modernity.

Prior to the change of government from absolute to constitutional monarchy in 1932, the official understanding of art (or silpa in Thai) was couched in terms of artisanship. These characteristics still pertain to ‘consensus’ art in the country today:

The criteria for appreciating a craftsman’s works was the evidence of painstaking labour, for beauty was synonymous with intricacy of detail, the costliness of the materials and the time it took to execute. Above all, it had to be made with skill.404

This stereotypical understanding of Thai art is duplicated in the context of Japanese printmaking, where we have seen how traditional mores revolve around a sense of a refined and high level of craftsmanship.

Bhirasri’s appointment in 1933 coincided with a government that was prepared to incorporate Western art into the culture of modern Thailand. The kingdom produced its own painters, sculptors and printmakers, but they executed Western-style projects. This

402 Bhirasri and his assistants were expected to serve the government and the national interest through public art works; the Victory Monument being the most important example. It was very much in the style of fascist work produced under the reign of Mussolini, which the incumbent Prime Minister Phibunsongkkhram (Phibun) admired. Completed in 1940- 41, the Democracy Monument was a symbol of evolutionary spirit and also demonstrated how Phibun used a politicised art to promote mass nationalism.

403 Training in neo-traditional Thai methods brought about a distinctive form of in Thai art, originating from mural painting. It became known as ‘Surr art’. It inflected easel painting most obviously in the 1960s and 1970s with the work of Thawan Duchanee (arguably the twentieth century Thai artist with the highest profile) and continues to be practised by Prasong Luemuang and Panya Vijinthanasarn. Importantly, ‘Surr’ has also been applied to printmaking. This style is used most often for Buddhist-based pictorial subjects.

404 Piriya Krairiksh 1986, Introduction, Thai Reflections on American Experiences, Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art, Bangkok, exh. cat., 13 November-7 December, p.7.

182 reduced the need to import foreign artists to decorate public buildings, and execute monuments and other edifices associated with nation building. Art students were taught to be skilled craftsmen and were encouraged to adopt the European notion of art as ‘an aesthetic expression touching the emotions’.405 This directive came from the Department of Fine Arts (where Bhirasri was first employed as official sculptor), a department established as a result of a political coup d’état in 1932.

Printmaking commenced at the University in the 1950s and was also developed along European lines.406 This was the country’s first institution to offer a program in printmaking (or graphic arts), and Chalood Nimsamer (b.1929) was the tutor. Printmaking was to be taught as an individualistic fine arts pursuit rather than a form of mass communication with accompanying texts, which had been the case under Bradley’s legacy. The practice was given a status comparable to painting and sculpture, and this was a unique situation - distinctive in world art practice. It also nurtured future staff members of the Printmaking, Painting and Sculpture Faculty of Fine Arts at Chiang Mai University in Northern Thailand and other tertiary institutions in the country.407

Under Bhirasri, Silpakorn, Thailand’s oldest art school quickly became the chief training ground for the nation’s artists in a range of visual arts disciplines. Helen Michaelsen (1991) summed up the situation in Thailand when she wrote:

In the 1930s and 1940s art was mainly a government tool which contributed to state-building. Artistic expression was limited to pursuing European art styles, primarily realism and impressionism. The post-war years to the 1960s were marked by less direct

405 Phochananukrom samrap nakrian (Dictionary for Students), Krasuang Tammakan, Bangkok, 1929, p.281, reprinted in conjunction with the creation rites of Thanphuying Siri Sarasin, 10 July 1982.

406 According to Somporn Rodboon (b.1948), a long-serving staff member at Silpakorn. See Anne Kirker 1993-94, `Confronting Paradox’, Thailand section of the double-issue Artlink, Vol. 12, Nos. 3 & 4, p.30. Somporn originally trained as a print artist at Silpakorn before travelling to the United States to undertake additional training at the University of Illinois in 1974. It was here that she gained an M.A. She has been an important facilitator for Thai artists wishing to exhibit abroad, advising Jackie Menzies (Senior Curator of Asian Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney) for instance, on exhibitions such as Thai-Australian Cultural Space. This event was shown firstly in 1993 at The National Gallery, Bangkok, and the Chiang Inn Plaza, Chiang Mai, followed by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1994. Here, installations by the late Montien Boonma, Kamol Phaosawasdi and Vichoke Mugdamanee were shown with two Australian artists, Joan Grounds and Noelene Lucas – artists who have held regular residencies in Thailand.

407 Note the primacy given to printmaking in the title (subsequently simplified) of the fine arts faculty at Chiang Mai University. By the close of the twentieth century this institution had expanded in recognition, becoming the alternative to Silpakorn for those wishing to escape the pressures of living in Bangkok.

183 government intervention…main developments were the experiments with a wider range of international art styles and a revival of traditional Thai themes and styles, which were to a certain degree interpreted in a modern way.408

The melding of international art styles and the revival of traditional art themes and styles were evidenced in Bhirasri’s initiation of the National Exhibition of Art (NEA). The first took place at Silpakorn in 1949 and became an annual event that continues today. Viewers were encouraged to accept modern art produced by Thai artists. During the 1950s and 1960s, Cubism and Futurism were the international styles shaping innovative Thai painting and printmaking, and by the mid-sixties, pure abstraction had made itself felt.409 By the time Silpa Bhirasri died in 1962, two main streams had arisen: the so- called ‘progressives’ with their adaptations of international art styles, and the ‘conservatives’, who were considered neo-traditionalists, with their images of Thai folk and arcadian scenes. This distinction, however, is misleading. While the early relief prints of Chalood and those by Prayat Pongdam and Prapan Srisouta promoted simple village life and Buddhist subjects with deliberate rustic simplicity, these artists were well aware of Western modernist work such as Gauguin’s Noa Noa woodcuts and of Kiyonaga’s early sinuous line ukiyo-e prints. However, as Apinan (1992) states, stylistic inspiration may also have come from ‘the practice of using flat colours delineated with sharp lines in local mural painting in temples’.410

Any idea that Thailand may have been isolationist shifted decisively in the early 1970s. These were particularly politically turbulent years as twenty-five years of military control was coming to an end after an unprecedented uprising by students at Bangkok’s Thammasat University (near Silpakorn) on 14 October 1973. A period of relative

408 Helen Michaelsen 1991, ‘Thailand in the 1980s’, Art Monthly Australia Asian Special Issue, No. 41, June, p.5. Michaelsen is a Thai-based art historian who has written extensively on modern art in that country.

409 Those artists who appropriated these styles in the 1950s and 1960s had access to illustrated books on art in Thailand, and several studied abroad.

410 Apinan Poshyananda 1992, op .cit., p.86.

The symbolic patterns of traditional craft (such as textiles) as well as the skilful draughtsmanship of murals found in Buddhist temples (wats), inspired a number of images produced as original artists’ prints in the 1970s. These decorative images became evident once commercial galleries became active at this time. The prints appealed through their moderate price, their technical accomplishment and unchallenging imagery, as decoration for hotel lobbies, office blocks and condominiums in Bangkok and Chiang Mai. They also served a growing tourist market. The case study artists in this chapter (chiefly Prawat and Phatyos) stand in direct contrast to the many printmakers continuing to work in this manner.

184 freedom and new-found optimism followed, and progressive ideas were circulated. These challenged military powers and the government-sanctioned program of controlled modernity. However, just as the political sphere appeared to be opening up to a broader range of voices, democratic principles were violently repressed by a political coup engineered by the military on 6 October 1976. This has been enshrined in the memories of Thai people as hok tulaa (the sixth of October). Many of the social reforms that had been implemented in the intervening three years were reversed, but the universities remained a place where students (including those in the visual arts field) could gather to discuss controversial issues, albeit more cautiously.411

A fierce Thai nationalism was asserted following the military crackdown in October 1976, and unsurprisingly, it coincided with the formal establishment at Silpakorn of a department of traditional Thai art soon after. Nationalism in Thailand was metaphorically expressed in the triad ‘nation-religion-monarchy’. This rubric was deemed essential for the country’s independence and sovereignty and few artists have challenged it. Craig Reynolds (1991) points out that, in an endeavour to hold its own against the pressures of Euramerican influences, the government initiated a wide media program promoting these three pillars (chat satsana mahakasat) of nation-state ideology.412 Unlike other South- East Asian nations, Siam was not directly colonised and it continually prides itself in public and private discourse on this immunity from past invasion, yet the military state invested heavily in xenophobic national modes. 413

In the 1980s, Thailand underwent both a major recession and a later economic boom. At this time, local corporate investment and the forces of globalisation began to turn the

411 These events occurred in close geographic proximity to the Vietnam War, which, after fifteen years, witnessed the withdrawal of the United States in April 1975. During the Vietnam War years Thai activists opposed the conflict near the country’s borders just as Bangkok became a handy place for rest and recreation GI visitors (contributing to the sex trade there).

412 See Craig J. Reynolds 1991, National Identity and Its Defenders: Thailand, 1939-1989, Monash papers on Southeast Asia, No.25, p.15.

413 At the same time, it is worth noting that direct learning from other cultures by Thai nationals commenced at an early stage in the history of the country. For instance, Thai monks travelled to Sri Lanka (1430-31) and returning with the Sinhalese sect of Buddhism just as the 1960s and 1970s saw a number of artists travelling to the United States (for instance) to undertake postgraduate training in art; many of whom returned to teach in Thailand. See Piriya Krairiksh, Introduction, Thai Reflections on American Experiences, exh. cat., Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art, Bangkok, 13 Nov. - 1 Dec. 1986. This exhibition of 24 artists was organised by the United States Information Service, Bangkok.

185 country into a `tiger’ economy (a Newly Industrialised Country).414 While this extraordinary change in Thailand created modern/postmodern themes previously rarely addressed by artists in that country, including issues such as environmental degradation and urban alienation, globalisation did provide inspiration and fresh professional opportunities. For those artists less willing to adapt to the changed socio-political landscape, globalisation provoked an active re-assertion of Thai national identity through the production of neo-traditional art, which included printmaking. Ironically, this style (especially in printmaking) was very popular with international tourists who visited the country during the 1990s. These were nostalgic images that evoked lost rural ways, the splendour of Buddhist mural imagery and the intricate weaving of traditional Thai culture.

The prevailing taste for well-made and decorative solutions serves imagery that can be misconstrued by ‘outside’ viewers. However, this is a misreading of the depth in the practice and the art objects of some Thai practitioners. Such is the case of `Surr’ artists. This abbreviated term for surrealism, belongs to a category of neo-traditional Thai art that was popularised by Visual Dhamma Gallery at that time. `Surr’ artists necessarily empower their meticulously painted and printed images with revivalist intention. While adopting the formal aspects of Surrealism (Expressionism and Futurism) they reinterpret traditional myths, Buddhist themes and concepts in ways that engender wide cultural appeal.

In `Surr’ artists’ response to Thailand’s classical tradition (especially when their imagery derives from temple or wat murals), visual metaphors may be present that are readily understood by locals conversant with Buddhism. Iconographic signs – images of Buddha, or decorative ornamentations – are activated by artists to allude to contemporary dilemmas or concerns. The prints have a didactic and transformative dimension within a conservative formal framework. A case in point is the lithographs such as Constraint and Desire (1984) designed by leading `Surr’ art practitioner Panya Vijinthanasarn (b.1956). By using Euramerican styles to depict moral themes and symbols pertaining to Thai myth, Panya balances the tension between the probability of his work being admired for

414 Foreign and domestic investment between 1987 and 1990 was such that Thailand became the world’s fastest growing economy. Agricultural production was sidelined in favour of an economy based on industrialisation and the service sector.

186 its `exotic’ content by foreigners and the understanding it generates within those conversant with the Thai classical tradition.

In 1985-87, Panya led a team with artist Chalermchai Kositpipat (both former students of Chalood at Silpakorn) to decorate Buddha Padipa Temple in Wimbledon, London, with neo-traditional murals. These dealt with well-known Buddhist subjects ‘Three Worlds’, the ‘Birth of Buddha’, ‘Nirvana’ and the ‘Defeat of Mara’. They integrated these traditional religious motifs within modern-day media icons and images. This allowed for disturbing contradictions. Although not as radical as the more overtly progressive case study artists covered in this thesis the productions of `Surr’ artists are a useful body of work that militates against binary definitions of Thai contemporary art. These include dyads such as ‘conservative’ versus ‘avant-garde’, ‘traditional’ versus ‘Euramerican modern styles’ and so on.

This point is also a salutary reminder that aesthetic judgment is contingent upon who is responsible for that judgment and on what grounds. Just as there is no such thing as a single stable Thai identity, prejudice against one form of art practice against another needs to be tempered. Said (1994) uses the term `contrapuntal ensembles’ to describe the array of opposites that a society witnesses, which avoids the trap of essentialisation. 415

6.3 Silpakorn University and ‘Gate-keepers’ for the Print in Thailand

While Thai artists and their practice were distinctive, nevertheless they shared common grounds with those in other countries. Whatever their speciality, art professionals in Thailand were subjected to a situation paralleled in the West, where:

You have to pass through certain rules of accreditation, you must learn the rules, you must speak the language, you must master the idioms and you must accept the authorities of the field – determined in many of the same ways – to which you want to contribute. 416

415 Said 1994, Culture and Imperialism, op.cit., p.60. 416 Edward Said, ‘Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community’, first published in Critical Inquiry 9, September 1982 and reprinted in Hal Foster (ed.) 1983, op. cit., p.141.

187 Initially Bhirasri brought his conservative Novecento background to bear on Silpakorn, as he preferred realism and was disinclined towards abstract art. By the early 1960s, however, his attitude had mellowed and students were allowed to experiment with a variety of styles across various art disciplines. It may well be argued that the forces of counter-culture activities across the world impacted on artists and their work in Thailand. In the realm of the graphic arts, printmaker and Thailand’s sole specialist print historian Ithipol Thangchalok (b.1946) sees printmaking in this country as:

Clearly divided into 2 eras. The first era is about 2496-2509 B.E. [1953 – 1966] and most of the Printmaking is made by wood-cut technique. The second era [after1966]…rapidly achieve[d] the International standard, not only in content but also [in] the four major techniques [used].417

The first prizes for printmaking were awarded at the National Exhibition of Art during its twelth competition of 1961, and indicated the rising status of this art form in Thailand at the time.418 Not surprisingly, in 1966, `graphic arts’ at Silpakorn were formally established in the same faculty as sculpture and painting, and a full repertoire of print techniques taught. Etching and lithography became the main staples and are processes that are historically regarded as being at the apex of print media. Hence it is not surprising that Prawat adopted etching as his principle print media and Phatyos concentrated on lithography.

Chalood left a lasting legacy on Thai printmaking and the ethos of experimentation at Silpakorn. Initially trained as a sculptor in wood and bronze, he was also a printmaker who employed the woodcut process. (After overseas experience and more equipment became available in Thailand, he adopted other techniques.) Chalood also became the key

417 See Ithipol Thangchalok 1992, A Decade of Printmaking: Tendency and Change 1982-1992, CON- tempus:The Bangkok Fine Art Center, p.70

418 An indication of the enduring high status of the print, in an ‘institutionalised’ conservative format is demonstrated by the decision to organise a well-endowed `International Print and Drawing Exhibition’ to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Silpakorn University, in mid 2003. The author was an informal advisor for this project. The jury of selectors included print and drawing experts Chalood Nimsamer (Thailand), Thavorn Ko-udomvit (Thailand), Yasunaga Koichi (Japan) and Walter Jule (Canada).

An introductory text published as part of the exhibition pamphlet acknowledges the importance of the National Exhibition of Art in fostering the print in Thailand:' the print works displayed over the years have received a tremendous amount of interest and attention. It has encouraged artists and professors at Silpakorn University to raise the level of their teaching and their artistic output, and as a result, a number of local printmakers today enjoy a reputation that extends far beyond the borders of Thailand’. [name of writer not given]

188 mentoring figure for adventurous printmakers, as he taught Prawat and others at Silpakorn.419 Furthermore, with other Thai artists trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, Chalood later played a major role ‘in closing the gap between modern Thai art and international art’.420

In this regard, definite parallels exist between Onchi Kōshirō (1891-1955) in Tokyo (see Chapter 4.3) and Chalood in Bangkok. They both practised and taught during periods of major cultural transition in their respective cultures when internationalism made itself strongly felt.Although Onchi’s practice in sōsaku hanga commenced some forty years earlier, he like Chalood were drawn towards Cubism as the most obvious way to modernise representational expression.

Encouraged by Bhirasri (who knew that the Poh-Chang technical school in Bangkok already had woodcutting as part of its art teaching course), Chalood commenced wood block printing at Silpakorn from the mid-1950s.421 At first, he confined his own imagery to black and white and depicted subject matter based on rural folk art and quotidian Bangkok scenes. These folkloric images expressed nostalgia for the agrarian life-style he had known as a child and for Bangkok, which was still a city of yan, with village-like neighbourhoods, floating homes and markets.422

In terms of the social and political context in Thailand at the time, nationalism was evident throughout the whole society. For example, anthropologist Niels Mulder (2000) relays:

As recently as the fifties …Thai society still gave an impression of cultural self-sufficiency, providing its own idiom and content for its national discourse, while only occasionally being disturbed by new

419 As recently as 27 Nov. 2002, printmaker and mixed media installation artist Surasi Kusolwong, in conversation with the author in Bangkok, spoke of his admiration for Chalood’s non-decorative work and continuing quest to expand the horizons of printmaking.

420 Apinan Poshyananda 1992, op. cit., p.77. 421 Chiefly a painter, Prakit Buabusaya was in Japan during World War II and after a return visit there in 1951, introduced relief printing into the curriculum at Poh-Chang, Bangkok . 422 See Marc Askew 2002, ‘The Challenge of Co-existence: The Meaning of Urban Heritage in Contemporary Bangkok’, William S. Logan (ed.), The Disappearing ‘Asian’ City, China: Oxford University Press.

189 ideas voiced by the few who had studied abroad for years.423

This statement glosses over the strident nationalism seen in Thailand under Prime Minister Phibunsongkhram (Phibun), a high ranking military figure.424 Chalood’s 1953- 55 relief prints, such as Water Buffaloes (1954) and Going to the Temple (1955) were romantic and stylised images based on traditional customs that would be have been palatable to that regime.425 Even when Chalood turned to colour relief printing in 1959, his technique continued to be simple and direct, arguably in keeping with his rural ancestry.426 Thus the work of Chalood was not just placating the ideology of the regime.

Moving from traditional decorative patterned formulas, he adopted stylistic modes from Cubism, Fauvism and German Expressionism. Suwannee (1959) is reminiscent of Ernst Kirchner’s Die Brucke woodcuts, and A Seated Woman (1961) echoes ’s paintings. These works demonstrate a shift away from folkloric impulses. The modern styles from Europe that influenced Chalood’s prints were simultaneously adopted at Silpakorn by the painting and sculpture studios. These styles were fuelled by Bhirasri’s personal library of art books from diverse periods and cultures, which he shared with his students.427 Yet it was the natural material of wood that fuelled Chalood’s sculpture and his printmaking.

The woodcut was a convenient medium for printmakers because there was a lack of printing equipment at the art school during the 1950s. Therefore, Chalood’s choice of this printmaking medium was a contingency issue as much as it related to the pictorial individualism of Euroamerican practitioners. It was also related to his penchant for

423 Niels Mulder 2000, Inside Thai Society: Religion, Everyday Life, Change, Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, p.13. Dr Mulder is an independent anthropologist who has actively written on South-East Asian society for some thirty years.

424 Phibun spread the message that the country was supremely self-reliant and belonged to the Thai; during his first term of office (1938-44) Siam changed its name to Thailand in the belief that theformer name had been forced upon the country by foreigners.

425 Prints cited by Chalood are illustrated in Chalood Nimsamer: Prints, Drawings, Mixed Media 1953 – 1999, exh. cat., Bangkok: Graphic Arts Department, Silpakorn University. The exhibition was held to celebrate the presentation of an Honorary Doctorate in Graphic Arts to the artist), Silpakorn University Art Gallery, Bangkok 6-15 July 1999.

426 Chalood did not emerge from the urban middle-class, which would become the norm for aspiring artists in later decades.

427 As borne out by the museum dedicated to Silpa Bhirasri at Silpkorn University, which includes the contents of his studio.

190 natural materials (with the latter also contributing to his environmental art concerns in the 1980s).428

The relief process represents the earliest form of printmaking. Like Japan’s remarkable ukiyo-e tradition, it does not require a press to transfer the ink to paper from the block. Wood is also regarded as ‘an honest, home-grown medium with a natural surface and grain which submits to the knife, gouge, or graver willingly, directly, and without pretence’.429 Chalood’s affinity for wood parallels that of local artisans. By comparison, ukiyo-e woodblock printing in Japan is a cosmopolitan phenomenon and the product of team efforts. These prints, unlike those of Chalood, were aimed to serve a large indigenous audience in Edo and elsewhere.

In Thailand, relief printing used long-grain wood (rather than end-grain, employed by ukiyo-e block cutters), so compositions were less detailed and more rudimentary. During the mid fifties, the Thai relief print was formulaic in its reproduction of traditional motifs and customs, but during the next decade it was re-articulated via the co-option of modern European styles. Because of the influence of Silpakorn under the directorship of Bhirasri (an artist with European roots), these relief prints were valued for evidence of new modes of expression, rather than for commercial purposes.

In 1963, Bhirasri sent Chalood abroad to gain experience with the aim of establishing a fully equipped printmaking department at Silpakorn. Chalood had already learned etching in Rome (during1956) but had been unable to practise it in Bangkok because of the lack of equipment. This time, he trained in lithography at the Pratt Graphic Center in New York and spent further time in the etching workshop at Iowa State University. He also visited Paris, to find printing equipment that could be exported to Thailand. By the time Chalood returned to Silpakorn (in 1964), he had first-hand knowledge of Pratt’s printing practices, and it was the leading teaching institution for the print in the United States. Chalood had encountered graphic artists such as Mauricio Lasansky,430 who headed the

428 Refer to Apinan Poshyananda, 1992, op. cit., p.211.

429 Fritz Eichenberg 1976, The Art of the Print: Masterpieces, History, technique, New York: Harry N. Abrams, p.8.

430 Fritz Eichenberg founded Pratt in 1956 and wrote the influential book The Art of the Print: Masterpieces, History, Technique, op. cit. Promoted on the cover as ‘The liveliest and most comprehensive book on the graphic arts ever published…’, the book, nevertheless, only represents the Asia-Pacific region through chapter. 3 (Early Chinese Prints)

191 printmaking department in Iowa and encouraged Chalood to experiment with new techniques.

For instance, Chalood immersed himself in collagraphy, as it was employed the intaglio way. Using this informal, flexible technique, he glued materials to a board and inked it so that the spaces between the upper surfaces were printed. Earth, Moon (1968) was a typical example of this procedure. While in the United States, Chalood began to submit his work to international competitions and won awards at the 1963 International Biennial Exhibition of Graphic Arts, Ljublijana, and the International Biennial Exhibition of Prints in Tokyo (1964). His success may have prompted other Thai printmakers to follow suit, such as Pishnu Supanimit and Ithipol.431 By this time, Thai printmakers were producing their imagery according to the rules established for ‘original’ prints by The Print Council of America and similar bodies. These rules that protected the market and had wide international currency framed International print exhibitions and endorsed particular artists and print images. A number of Thai artists were popular participants.432

Chalood’s status was elevated on his return to Silpakorn from abroad. This was in recognition not only of his Euramerican experience and his effectiveness as a teacher but also as mediator between indigenous knowledge and internationalism:

Assuming the post of Acting Dean in 1971, he was to greatly influence the direction of many young Thai artists since his lessons in free composition, modern painting, and printmaking allowed students to experiment in non-figurative art. Chalood himself freely experimented in abstract sculpture and printmaking.… [the] University revised its curriculum to accommodate and promote abstract art. Printmaking in particular was encouraged as an art form, and because the printing presses belonged to the University, talented printmakers were naturally fostered there. Most importantly, etching, engraving, woodcut, woodblock, lithography, and silkscreen prints [screenprints] were given equal status with painting and sculpture.433 and chapter 4 (Japanese Prints). In the latter, surprisingly, only thirteenth century Buddhist woodcut prints are described.

431 Ithipol Thangchalok (b.1946) was himself trained in the United States, receiving his B.F.A. in Graphic Arts from Silpakorn University, followed by his M.F.A. in Painting from the University of Washington, Seattle.

432 Ithipol’s A Decade of Printmaking exhibition catalogue, op. cit., includes an appendix that lists international print exhibitions in ten countries in which Thai artists have received awards. Eighteen separate awards won by six artists are listed, dating from 1963 to 1991.

433 Apinan Poshyananda 1992, op. cit., p.119.

192

The curriculum encouraged printmaking at Silpakorn partly through the charismatic presence of Chalood and his wish to develop a leading department to attract students to the print. In this, he more than satisfied Bhirasri’s original intentions for a premier, fully functioning art school in South-East Asia established along Euramerican lines. There may also have been a prudent commercial aspect to Chalood’s ambitions, given that in the late 1960s and 1970s, the original print became a popular alternative to purchasing ‘one off’ paintings. The colour and mark-making of lithographs and screenprints approximated oil or acrylic on canvas, albeit on a smaller scale, and could be had for a fraction of the price.

Exposure to overseas innovative printmaking was the catalyst for Chalood’s adoption of abstraction in his print imagery in the 1960s. Typical are the engravings from 1963 of spare linear black markings on paper titled Tattoo, which employed industrial Masonite as a matrix.434 In Bangkok, his students’ abstracts worked with the formalist problems of line, space, colour, and texture. However, their intention was not solely to imitate the Euramerican model; the works also incorporated signifiers of their culture (just as Chalood’s ‘tattoo’ imagery alluded to shamanist practice in Thailand).

The results were an example of what Bhabha calls `hybridity’; an illustration of the mixing or juxtaposition of traditional and external cultural forms and techniques. As demonstrated in the discussion of other Asia-Pacific printmakers, hybridity has been a key part of modern Asian art, as we have seen in the case of the print in Japan. In Thailand, this fluidity and transgression within the abstract realm had been the same earlier with the adoption of Cubism, Fauvism and German Expressionism. This resulted in a ‘new’ visual vocabulary in Thai art through the intentionally ‘imperfect’ translation of style.

Chalood’s massive contribution to Thai printmaking was demonstrated by his survey exhibition at Silpakorn (in 1999), which covered a career of almost fifty years. His prints, drawings and small sculptures, from between 1953 and 1999, demonstrated continual ‘low key’ experimentation and receptiveness to international shifts in art practice. Exhibits showed reciprocation between indigenous expression and widely recognised

434 They are a clear link with Buddhist skin markings, commonly seen on males in Thailand.

193 international modes of representation, hallmarks of the case study artists in this thesis. Belonging to a generation that was indifferent to specialisation, he moved freely across media boundaries and declined to elevate one discipline over another.435

Chalood also encouraged printmakers to participant in the National Exhibition of Art events, even though these by and large engendered conformity.436 In this regard, Thailand shares much with Japan. At the extreme end of this trend are prints that serve nationalist sentiment and a middle class market that prizes the decorative and technical accomplishment. These prints prioritise finesse of process over liberation of content. This is because they are intended as decoration in a domestic setting, hotel or civic context:

[Thai] printmakers acknowledge that they are working in a decorative medium where formal design elements and technical skill are artistically more significant than matters of cultural meaning, and that their work has to stand on its own – with no intercultural translations to make it more ‘understandable’.437

This statement by Phillips (1991) accords with the sentiments of Daniel Bell (2001) when he sought to distance Noda Tetsuya from the ‘decorative’ bias he perceived in contemporary Japanese printmaking.438 In the case of Thailand, there may also have been an ongoing ‘Bhirasri factor’ in force, as Silpakorn’s founder actively published texts, one of which defines `Art’ as equated with `Beauty and Goodness’.439 Despite Silpakorn being subject to extraordinary growth and change, its founder, Silpa Bhirasri, continues to be honoured into the 2000s through, for instance, publications accompanying exhibitions of staff members held at the University.

435 Chalood made an art installation for his survey exhibition comprising his original prints and reproductions of his sculpture and mixed media works. These ‘prints’ were hung at different heights with rope from a wire strung across one of the Silpakorn University Art Gallery’s display spaces and given the title Documents of Rural Artist, 1953-1998. It inventively merged a curatorial imperative to orientate audiences to Chalood’s career and also one that was ‘up to the minute’ visually, by couching it in the form of an installation.

436 As an NEA exhibitor, the artist Thavorn Ko-Udomvit (b.1956) is the most high-profile in this respect. He has also received numerous international print awards during the period 1982-1991. Thavorn’s prints risk the charge of mannerism, as they rarely depart from a readily identifiable style and content.

437 Herbert P. Phillips 1991, op. cit, p.11.

438 Daniel Bell, ‘Tetsuya Noda: An appreciation’, in Tetsuya Noda: The Works III 1992-2000, 2001, op.cit.

439 Silpa Bhirasri 1963, ‘Culture & Art’, Articles from the Catalogues of the Annual National Art Exhibition, published in conjunction with the cremation rites of his death, Bangkok: Silpakorn University Fine Arts Department, p.8.

194 To understand the issues involved in the main arguments of this thesis and the specificity of Thialand’s print movement, it is important to understand (albeit only briefly explained in this context) the location of Silpakorn. It is situated in close proximity to the Royal Palace and the numerous tourists that flow around the area. It is also near the Victory Monument designed by Bhirarsri, where citizens rally during political demonstrations. Therefore, the University’s teaching and student body has witnessed, from this vantage point, the lure of `old Bangkok’ for the `outsider’ and also radical uprisings in the socio- political sense. Silpakorn has observed considerable shifts in the identity of the capital, especially after World War II when

The city was transformed from a small and comparatively sedate settlement of Thai bureaucrats, elite families of noble birth, lesser civil servants and dependents with its busy trading community of Chinese merchants and entrepreneurs and a sprinkling of European officials and traders – all nestled in a rich network of gardens and paddy fields connected by canals – to a sprawling and bustling, concrete-and –asphalt automobile city whose crowded population represented people from all regions of the country. 440

From the mid-1970s, the tourist trade burgeoned and Bangkok soon became recognised as a political and economic South-East Asian hub. It was also the determining cultural centre of Thailand and its influence spread to the northern centre of Chiang Mai, where innovative art practice (some of it print-based) began to emerge.In Thailand, the capital city’s influence on the field of art spread to the northern centre of Chiang Mai, where innovative practice (some of it print-based) began to emerge. Furthermore, in Bangkok where Euramerican art discourses were the norm, these in turn also became evident in Chiang Mai. Highly effective global telecommunications systems, internet access and increased international travel are just some of the new modalities available to artists since the 1980s and so links between Bangkok and Chang Mai have become closer as a consequence.

Foreign influences in Thailand have transformed art practice and culture but this has resulted in the inevitable loss of local traditions. With a population reaching

440 Marc Askew 1994, ‘Bangkok: Transformation of the Thai City’, in Marc Askew and William S. Logan (eds.), Cultural Identity and Urban Change in Southeast Asia: Interpretative Essays, Melbourne: Deakin University Press, p.89.

195 approximately seven million in 2002, Bangkok is a prime example of a country in the Asia-Pacific region where modernisation and globalisation have taken place at an unprecedented level. It has prompted complex and paradoxical responses by artists who have sought to interpret the global city they inhabit. Some artists comment on problems associated with Bangkok’s race towards supremacy as an Asian city in the Western mould (reflected in Prawat’s installation After We Become New Industrial Country [NIC] of 1998). The rapid pace of development through urban expansion and forces of globalisation has dismantled traditional infrastructures and prompted new social divisions.441 Some Thai observers concede that under the prime ministership of Thaksin (until his overthrow in September 2006) too much stress was placed on ‘Americanisation’ and not enough on shoring up indigenous Thai values.442

The cultural expression of Thai printmakers has been remarkably altered by their confrontation with global cultural forces, yet they have managed this interface in unique ways. In 2001, Gridthiya Gaweewong, curator and director of the non-profit art space Project 304 in Bangkok, highlighted the dilemma such artists faced when negotiating ways to authentically explore the ‘slippery’ nature of modern urban identity. She commented:

Today, we are at a critical position standing in the middle of an intersection between globalization and localism; tradition and contemporary culture: Buddha and Cyberspace. Local intellectuals try to find strategies to resist, facing the unavoidable phenomenon by ‘going back to origin’ – meaning exploring folk wisdom, promoting indigenous knowledge, and working with Buddhist philosophy. 443

441 The ‘First World’ countries have for at least fifteen years been compelled to recognise the growth of new economic powers outside Europe and North America. To regard Thailand now as a ‘Third World’ country requires a radical reappraisal for defining economic and cultural conditions. If one takes the urban situation in Bangkok (where the artists I am discussing mostly reside) as an indicator of the country’s global status, then this term is no longer applicable, and even the status of ‘Newly Industrialised Country’(NIC) seems redundant. However, if one takes into account that there are 76 provinces in Thailand with 50,000 or so villages where farming is the main source of income, then inequities of wealth are apparent and corruption is widespread. Looking at the North East, where peoples are in dire poverty, then the ‘Third World’status may indeed be applicable. This dichotomy is not of course confined to Thailand or even to South-East Asia.

442 As articulated by Numthong Sae Tang in conversation with Anne Kirker, Brisbane, 30 November, 2006.

443 Gridthiya Gaweewong 2001, ‘On Thai artists and an issue of cultural identity’, from paper published on -line 15 August 2001, from ‘Inside Out: Reassessing International Cultural Influence’, Apexart Conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2-9 July. http://www.apexart.org/conference/gaweewong.htm

196 While there will always be reactions against global forces towards the local it appears, from the evidence in the Thai artists’ work under discussion here, that postmodern trends affect leading Asian printmakers in pluralistic ways.With a Master of Arts in Arts Administration from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1996), Gridthiya provides an alternative or new voice containing lessons of postmodern and post-colonial cultural discourses and practices. Such a voice could be seen as a challenge to the usually unassailable power of Silpakorn as a ‘gate-keeper’ of training and opinion. Before this new breed of independent scholar appeared in the mid-1990s, most of Thailand’s progressive artists and thinkers originally graduated from Silpakorn. Although they gained scholarships to further their studies abroad, many returned to teach at the University, including Somporn Rodboon (b.1948).

Michaelsen (1991) has pointed out that during the 1980s, ’prejudices against new artistic ideas and the self-protection of certain groups’ beset contemporary Thai art. She states, ‘it is essential to realise that Thai society is based on a hierarchical structure, with seniority and social status being determinant in group operations. Thai artists are part of this society, which tends to impede certain social possibilities and stylistic innovations taken for granted in Western societies.’444 The continuation of this ‘hierarchical structure’ during the 1990s is reflected in competitive situations, especially the annual National Exhibition of Art, where senior artists are often favoured and where standardisation, in the field of printmaking, is expected. The prints exhibited are those that would fit equally well in international biennial and triennial print competitions with their Western styles.

This system of ‘establishment’ rules (not unlike those at Tokyo Geidai) is reinforced by the teaching and the promotion of artists connected with Silpakorn. As part of this system, Somporn ran an active program of international artist residencies there in the 1990s with exhibition and publication projects that promoted an exchange between local practitioners and Australia (for instance).445 This pattern is similar to that established as far back as King Chulalongkorn’s time, when the kingdom embraced Western examples

444 Helen Michaelsen 1991, op. cit., p.6. A trained art historian, Michaelsen is a long-term resident of Thailand.

445 From her position at Silpakorn, Somporn curated an exhibition of Prints from Thailand for exhibition at the Canberra School of Art Gallery in 1991, accepting a residency there. Under the auspices of Asialink (a Centre of the University of Melbourne), Somporn and Anne Kirker curated 6 x 6: A Selection of Contemporary Australian Prints, which was launched at Silpakorn University Art Gallery in November 1992 and subsequently toured to Khon Kaen and Chiang Mai.

197 for modernisation purposes. However, by the 1990s the purpose of exchange was more to do with fostering multi-national links.

Individual artists are represented by galleries and so their influences need to be considered. Aside from the galleries at the Bangkok campus of Silpakorn University, other venues in the capital provided exhibition opportunities (especially during the 1980s and 1990s) for innovative work. They included university art galleries at Chulalongkorn and Bangkok Universities. Innovative art practice in Thailand’s capital has nevertheless long suffered from lack of public appreciation and government support. Gridthiya has created an international portal for distributing informed opinion on the Thai art situation through forums and curatorial projects, yet Project 304 (established in 1996) has not been able to sustain a long-term exhibition space. In the early 2000s, there is widespread acknowledgment that Thailand is promoted for its artistry in ‘handicrafts’ expressing folkloric subjects, traditional weaving and suchlike, not for the contemporary work produced by its many graduates from art institutions.

This means that the audience base for these innovative print artists is small. It is for this reason that the importance of Silpakorn’s activities cannot be underestimated. The University acts as a nurturer of talent and as a touchstone for graduates. From Silpakorn they have taken up key staff positions at Chiang Mai University’s Printmaking, Painting and Sculpture Faculty of Fine Arts (including printmaker and video installation artist Araya from 1987, and Somporn since the late 1990s).

The case study artists I focus on in this chapter work in a ‘cross-media’ territory that merges printmaking with installation, yet they emerged from a broader tendency in Thai printmaking that commenced during the 1970s. Between 1974 and 1988 the Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art (BIMA) played a crucial role in supporting risky, issue-based or conceptually challenging work. It was regarded as the most vibrant and active centre for art events in Thailand. Based in the built-up Sathorn Road area of Bangkok, it served as the radical alternative to conservative forces, and ran for over a decade with an exhibition, performance and forum program. Unexpectedly, its principal patron and donor was Princess Pantip Chumbhot. In 2002 it was tentatively re-opened.446 So too,

446 Ironically, at the very time Thailand was experiencing a boom in the art market, BIMA folded. Perhaps royal and corporate patronage had decisively shifted by the late 1980s towards art which had a commodity status? BIMA was

198 private collector Petch Osathanugrah, had aspirations to build a Bangkok Museum of Contemporary Art (`B-mu’) for the new millennium. These initiatives (more particularly BIMA) can be interpreted as an attempt to ensure that exhibitions and dynamic discussion occur in Bangkok on a regular basis outside of the University system.

The activities of Silpakorn were supplemented in a low-key manner with a number of artists’ collectives that emerged during the 1990s. Collectives such as Concrete House (c.1992), operated with a social activist edge by Chumpon Apisuk, inspired the later Project 304 (1996) and About Studio/About Café (1999 - ). There were also a number of commercial galleries with philanthropic leanings with interests in contemporary Thai art. Up until around the time of Thailand’s financial meltdown in 1997, these included Visual Dhamma Gallery, Silom Art Space and Dialogue Gallery. Silom and Dialogue are now defunct, while at Visual Dhamma, Alfred Pawlin conducts sporadic private sales.447

By 2006, those commercial outlets not solely concerned with profit-making and determined to survive in an atmosphere of general indifference to contemporary art, were few. Importantly they included Numthong Gallery (run by Numthong Sae-Tang, formerly in charge of Dialogue Gallery), and Tadu Contemporary Art (in operation since late 1996). Both displayed the work of print artists.448 Numthong played a pivotal role in fostering Thai contemporary art during the 1980s and beyond. He had been employed at the Bhirasri Institute in its heyday, as was Chumpon. With the new millennium, a publicly funded yet independent Bangkok Metropolitan Art Centre in a commercial hub of Bangkok is on the horizon.449

tentatively re-opened in 2002 with the appointment of the young Thai curator Ark Fongsmut, a Goldsmiths College (London) graduate in museum studies. However, this non-profit enterprise, funded by contributions from artists, corporations and private citizens has as yet, not been able to achieve the same momentum it had when the Institute first opened.

447 Refer to Virginia Henderson’s Master of Arts in Thai Studies thesis 1998, The Social Production of Art in Thailand: Patronage and Commoditisation, 1980-1998, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, especially chapter 4: ‘Socio- Economic Context of Art in the 1980s and 1990s’.

448 Tadu, nevertheless, became increasingly less engaged with these artists from around 2003 to concentrate on supporting performance artists.

449 Phatarawadee Phataranawik, reported on ’BMOCA’ in The Nation, 5 July 2005. Having been championed by a former governor of Bangkok, Bhichit Rattakul, and agitated for over several years by Chumpon and others, it was ideally planned to open in December 2006 to mark the reigning Monarch’s 80th birthday. Available at http://skyscrapercity.com/archive/index.php/t-149869.html

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The public exhibition of Thai printmaking in Bangkok, and other art practice, has on occasions been facilitated by international cultural foundations in Bangkok, such as the Alliance Française, the Japan Foundation and the Goethe Institut. The United States Information Service has provided grants for artists to train and exhibit abroad. International residencies and opportunities to exhibit outside their country of birth have been the goals of most young artists following graduation from Silpakorn. A case in point is demonstrated by the twenty-four Thai artists included in the exhibition Thai Reflections on American Experiences held at the Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art in 1986.450 For artists residing in Thailand, many prestigious corporate-sponsored prizes and exhibitions, as well as collections such as TISCO, emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. Initially these award exhibitions were tightly controlled by the chaopor (art godfathers) who had absolute power of selection. However, over the years this situation has become more relaxed with juries including ‘external’ judges.

The National Gallery houses and displays a permanent Thai art collection (including prints). It also enables high-profile Thai artists (including Araya and Phatyos) to hold solo exhibitions in one wing of its complex. Yet civic funding is poor and few acquisitions are made. Plans for a civic contemporary art museum in Bangkok went awry in late 2002 with a change of governor. Nevertheless, faith has been placed in the new Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (opened August 2005 with municipal funding).

Given the chequered history of support for innovative art in Thailand’s capital, Silpakorn University has been able to retain its power as the ‘gate-keeper’ institution for the whole country. Silpakorn, widely recognised within Thailand and elsewhere for its leadership in teaching, sets aesthetic standards, and nurtures artists. For printmakers, it is a rare exception that their first, if not their second, degree would not be from this University.451

450 A comprehensive catalogue with essay by Piriya Krairiksh accompanied this event, held 13 Nov. -7 Dec. 1989. Piriya Krairiksh1989, `Thai Reflections on American Experiences’ in Thai Reflections on American Experiences, exh. cat. ,Bangkok: Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art

451 For example, of the twenty-two artists included in Ithipol Thangchalok’s seminal 1992 survey of `A Decade of Printmaking 1982-1992:Tendency and Change’, shown at the now defunct CON-tempus: the Bangkok Fine Art Center, all of them had graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and often a Master of Fine Arts, from Silpakorn. At the time Ithipol compiled this selection of prints and the substantial catalogue, he was on the University’s staff, a senior teacher in the Graphic Arts department, with degrees from both Silpakorn and Seattle. Ithipol’s choice of artists and his written

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6.4 The National Exhibition of Art (NEA)

In his essay on the contemporary Thai art scene for the 11th Biennale of Sydney (1998) exhibition catalogue, a young critic, Phatarawadee Phataranawik, revealed:

The official Thai art world has been geared towards political correctness: art institutions, competitions and exhibitions are all organized to cater to consensus art on the assumption that art must reflect characteristics that are uniquely Thai….As one might expect, this has left little room for political dissent or for issues of gender, class, race or xenophobia [to be evident] in the mainstream of Thai art.452

In the comparative safety of an Australian publication, Phatarawadee has pointed to the seeming intractability of the ‘official Thai art world’, which militates against the viability of a practice outside the status quo. While competitions, especially The National Exhibition of Art, have supported and helped to promote printmaking in Thailand for some fifty years, these events have also ‘blocked’ alternative expression.453 They have engendered an expectation that local prints must conform to a high level of technical finesse and cover all the traditional graphic arts processes (at times combining several of them in a single image). The establishment has also embraced diverse styles and subject matter, but these are often indistinguishable from their counterparts in international print biennials and triennials. In these group exhibitions there appears to be a virtuousness pertaining to accomplishing the difficulties of graphic arts media, with awards flowing in accordance. In other words, the ‘hard-won’ image is rewarded.454 Clearly, conceptualism was not regarded highly.

commentary in the catalogue was therefore determined by his familiarity with the artists and with the understanding that the history of contemporary Thai printmaking is indelibly linked to Silpakorn University. 451 CON-tempus invited him to curate the exhibition, as a senior printmaker, specialising in etching. Although there was hence no official link between the fine art centre and Silpakorn, it would have been virtually impossible to mount such an exhibition with printmakers independent of this University.

452 Phatarawadee Phataranawik, `When Two Become One’, in Jonathan Watkins and Jo Spark (eds.), Every Day: 11th Biennale of Sydney, exh. cat., Sydney, 1998,p.36.

453 Prints awarded with prizes from the NEA have formed the basis of print acquisitions at The National Gallery, Bangkok and they are on permanent display.

454 To take one example of this stress on technique: the characteristically lavish catalogue of the 37th National Exhibition of Art (1991), held at Silpakorn University Gallery followed by Ratchamangkhalaphisek National Library in Chiang Mai, lists exhibited prints and illustrates award winners, including an etching by the young Natee Utarit (b.1970). Exhibition catalogue published by Kurusapha Publishing, Bangkok in association with Silpakorn University.

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The institutionalisation of Thai art has stressed technical accomplishment rather than socio-political or other content. In June 1999, the Art Gallery of Silpakorn University held a retrospective exhibition entitled Five Decades of the National Exhibition of Art, 1949-1998. In his review for Asian Art News in 1999, John Clark reminded readers that this event ‘has been institutionalised into a “professional” fine art exhibition of art school-trained artists’.455 In its first years, the National Exhibition was characterised by traditional Thai folk ceremony motifs or Euramerican modernism.Clark suggests that in both preoccupations ‘decoration suspends concern with truth’, ignoring current socio- political realities in the country:

It is interesting – but unsurprising given the jury composition of largely university art teachers who are civil servants in Thailand – that there was no counter regime art on display, and very few works gave any sense at all of the political instability of the 1970s, let alone the transition to quasi- democracy in the 1990s …Indeed “life” as subject surfaces in The National Art Exhibition works as a lyrical separateness or religious transcendence … the direct confrontation of lived realities does not seem to be a mode greatly deployed.456

In other words, independent voices within the art establishment in Thailand were almost never accorded a lasting public presence. For example, the Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art had achieved an independent voice in the mid-1970s into the 1980s but this was not sustained. Similarly, the collectives of the 1990s have struggled to survive. Visual representation in the community is more often than not occupied by what could be termed ‘modernist’ concerns with regard to aesthetics. Here I concur with Kim Levin’s remark of Modernism’s eventual anti-democratic cast. Levin remarks that under its rubric there is an insistence on ’forms and laws rather than … liberty and freedom’.457 It is for this reason that the ‘discordant’ note struck by the print installations of Prawat, Phatyos and

While his Death Figure/Boy signifies family bereavement, the viewer is mostly captivated by the range of intaglio processes the artist has managed to incorporate in a single plate. 455 John Clark 1999, ‘Fifty Years of National Art Exhibitions’, Asian Art News (special issue on Thailand), Vol. 9, No. 6, p.80.

456 Clark 1999, ibid., p. 81,

457 Kim Levin 1989, ‘Farewell to Modernism’, in Beyond Modernism: Essays on art from the 70s and 80s, New York: Icon Editions Series, Harper & Ro, p.6.

202 their colleagues brings their work squarely into the terrain of postmodernism. This is particularly noteworthy given the conservative art environment there at the time. The more courageous artists, having mastered their ‘craft,’ sought to transform it to discover new modalities and ultimately more challenging visual statements. They did not distinguish between form and content, integrating both polarities through one syncretic action. Content may emerge from form, or conversely, form is determined by content, in ways that command critical attention.

Innovation has often come from artists who have spent a great deal of time outside Silpakorn (living abroad, on international residencies or by exhibiting outside its confines). It is these artists who form the basis of this chapter. They may have been nurtured by Silpkorn but they were also quietly revolting against the strictures of this institution, even if some (such as Phatyos) continued to teach there. This is a very complex situation because he represents the Establishment, but on the other hand is not the Establishmnent. This point is also noted in the Japan case study where Noda Tetsuya is similarly placed.

When prints are exhibited in the NEA, they adhere to a traditional craft-based practice and do not deviate from the two-dimensional picture plane. In such forums, various aspects of creative aspiration are often held in check. Restricted in scale (as a condition of the group exhibition and in turn, to suit the market dealing in such prints for public and private consumption), the print has not developed beyond the parameters originally laid down by The Print Council of America in the 1960s. (These strictures have been discussed in chapter 2.) Experimentation only occurs within the confines of a relatively small, flat surface of paper. A case in point is the 38th NEA, which coincided with the centennial celebration of Bhirarsri in 1992. The cover of the fully illustrated catalogue for the exhibition, held at the Silpakorn University Art Gallery for three weeks, featured a print by Thavorn Ko-Udomvit (b.1956) in ‘mixed media’ (photo-screenprint, woodblock and chine collé on local Thai ‘sa’ paper). At this event, the artist’s Symbols in Ritual 1992, which demonstrated a typical example of his printmaking, won first prize in the Graphic Art Section.

While not a central figure in this case study of Thailand, Thavorn is worthy of note as an intra-cultural subject, operating between Japan and Thailand printmaking communities.

203 He has arguably been the most professionally (and commercially) successful printmaker in Thailand. Heading the Graphic Arts department at Silpakorn in the 2000s, he has consistently produced prints on the theme of rituals for the dead. More particularly, the artist’s ancestral Chinese roots, his interest in Buddhism and animism, and his long association with Japan (where he chiefly exhibits), have strongly informed the symbolism of his work. Thus, he is an instance of an ‘intraregionalism’ perspective articulated within the Asia-Pacific region.

In Thavorn’s prints, such as the series Symbols in Ritual (1991-92) and Fetish (1996), simple forms like stones or twigs are printed using the photo-screenprint process, while thread and gold leaf are bonded with sections of fine handmade paper to complete the mixed-media print. (Plate 35) The distinctiveness of Thavorn’s technique and concept, coupled with his entrepreneurialism, have won him considerable recognition in Thailand and on the international print circuit. Yet ultimately, it may be claimed that his work represents the acceptable face of contemporary printmaking in the era of globalisation. It does this by acknowledging the indigenous (through subject), whilst synthesising formal influences from the United States (where he spent time in the 1980s), and Japan. In his printmaking, Thavorn does not deviate from the core expectations of the print: that it be conveyed by a sheet of paper, be capable of duplication in an edition and be marketable. Overriding these considerations is the ‘pictorial’ nature of the conventional print, where the viewer experiences it either intimately by viewing it on a flat surface, or vertically, fixed to a wall.

The influence of Thavorn is seen in the Silpakorn centenary catalogue of 2003 (an event spearheaded by Thavorn), which contained a table of annual exhibitions from 1964 to 1992. Paintings and prints represented the highest number of all media and this confirmed the fact that in this forum, the print was readily accepted.458 Over half of them were etchings or employed a related intaglio process.459

458 During this time, 1972 ,1974, 1976, 1979, 1984, 1989 and 1991 were particularly strong years for print exposure at The National Exhibition of Art.

459 Refer also to the 38th National Exhibition of Art, exh. cat., Bangkok: Kurusapha Publishing in association with Silpakorn University. The exhibition was held at Silpakorn University Art Gallery, 15 September-5 October 1992, [appendix]. Of the 57 prints accepted for this particular event, 29 used the intaglio process. This testifies to the popularity of this particular medium in the teaching of printmaking at Silpakorn and has direct relevance to the work of Prawat.

204

Following Western models in establishing its faculty of graphic arts, the printed image at Silpakorn has nevertheless formed the basis from which a number of significant contemporary Thai artists have radically transformed their practice. Not content to limit their horizons to National Art Exhibitions and other popular competitions, they have sought more ambitious ways to present their work.460

To return to the major artists under consideration, it is in their resistance to pressures and expectations of ‘consensus’ printmaking in Thailand that the installations of Prawat and Phatyos and their colleagues are of importance. However, it should be noted that there are casualties when artists are prematurely placed in an internationally competitive situation.461 To challenge printmaking traditions in a concerted and ongoing manner requires the demeanour and ambition of frontier individualism. Prawat, from outside of Thailand, denied ‘skill’ as the central premise of his practice and in doing so, demonstrated a profound critique of ‘Thai-ness’.

It is important to note that in the environment of international ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions, some artists prospered while others withered. For example, Prawat was of an artistic maturity to capitalise on his inclusion in The First Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at Queensland Art Gallery in 1993. On the other hand, Yupha Changkoon (b.1969), a younger print artist trained at Silpakorn, was not able to sustain the visibility she received at this mainstream international event. Yupha’s poetic work is generally not site-specific and does not require spectacle for its reading. Rather, her etchings are most suited to a domestic environment where they are readily appreciated, not only for their technical skill but for their idyllic folkloric heritage.

460 This shift has been tolerated by the University, as evidenced by exhibitions of ex-students’ work on campus (for example, Phatyos), or by the projects Somporn initiated with international connections (for example the artist residencies).

461 A case in point is Yupha Changkoon (b.1969). The NEA of 1992 included black and white aquatints by Yupha, which nostalgically drew upon memories of her rural upbringing in Kanchanaburi. The artist combined a decorative folk art approach (reminiscent of Chalood’s early black and white relief prints) with a measure of Thai `Surr’. For The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (1996), Yupha was selected for her assemblages of small etchings on envelopes arranged in a Minimalist grid formation: a new departure for the artist. This was despite the fact that this was not the imagery that had won her several awards in art competitions held in Thailand. She represents the pressure on graduate printmakers from Silpakorn to advance themselves professionally through exhibitions and sales of their work. Whilst acceptance in print award exhibitions within Thailand is a starting point for the majority, the more ambitious seek international exposure and are prepared to modify the nature of their art practice accordingly.

205 Renegade Thai printmakers have freely adapted ideas from the realms of painting, sculpture and installation for works that radically expand traditional definitions and usages of the print. They have done so without denying the material properties of, say, intaglio and planographic printing or the qualities of seriality and replication. Motivated by a need to evade the limitations of the conventional print as a static, museum art object they have stretched printmaking into new dimensions, in line with postmodern ideologies, and have relied upon opportunities outside of Thailand to further their ambitions.462 Accordingly, they have left the constrictions of what is acceptable to The National Exhibition of Art far behind.

6.5 Breaking from Tradition

Not all printmakers adhere to serially editioned conventional two-dimensional objects. In an iconoclastic gesture, characteristics that traditionally underpin the field can be seen to intersect with other forms of art practice. This is an expanded territory lying beyond the solander box with its contents of mounted prints and the discreetly framed image hung in a domestic or public environment. In the context of Thailand, this gesture has socio- political ramifications as a disruptive discourse within an otherwise conservative art regime. Potentially, print installations can intervene as a critical action.

Concerning the print as a discipline, it is noteworthy that traditional processes underpinned the work of Prawat, Araya, the younger Phatyos and Bundith (in the 1990s). Traditional practices were evident in their contemporary installation art. Such artists consciously took printmaking into a much broader field of practice, one that subverted style and on occasions, accepted awkwardness and crudity as well as expanding into the three dimensional space. These artists eschewed the vocabulary of ornament that suggests ‘a grammar of availability’. 463

462 As there is virtually no Thai government support, once artists with a ‘progressive’ edge to their work leave art school, their success is often dependant upon foreign funding and opportunities to exhibit abroad. On one hand, the economic crisis of the late 1990s in South-East Asia spawned a tendency to spurn all things Western. Yet it is the Euramerican context which provides the opportunities for professional advancement for these artists; a fact of which they are keenly aware .

463 Levin 1989, op. cit., p. 3.

206 Whether maintaining a conservative practice or challenging the status quo, artists confronted the challenges represented in ‘dual’ personal and cultural identity. The fracturing and hybridisation of identity that is a byproduct of globalisation is experienced by all NIC communities in South-East Asia. This perspective was articulated by Thanom Chakakdee in an article written by Steven Pettifor for Asian Art News in late 1999. Thanom (like Gridthiya Gaweewong and Phatarawadee) is one of the more outspoken members of a younger generation of art critics living in Bangkok. Thanom feels that Thai artists highlight issues and concerns from within their own country, but are also heavily influenced by the styles, media, and conceptual trends set abroad:

We are still following Western style, material and ideas, but artists are trying to mix in the context of Thai society and culture.…Thai artists live in two worlds, one in Thailand and the real one in the international arena. But they say to me `I hate Western ideals’, I don’t know why. If I ask them what is Thai identity, they cannot answer and just get angry with me for being too Western. They want to separate Thai and Western, but still talk about globalization!464

By the new millennium, Gridthiya Gaweewong (2001) had accepted the global city as being necessarily about internal differentiation and contestation. ‘It is not a new issue because being Thai is all about hybridization. Traditionally influenced mainly by Chinese and India, Thai people are good at blending cultures and adapting them into our own version.’465 This was noted in case studies of Japan and Australia. Unlike her more conservative compatriots who cling to binary distinctions by stressing ‘local versus global’ as an oppositional construct, the artist accepts the complexity of a postmodern world where national identity is fluid and multifaceted and where it may be manifested outside geographical borders.

6.6 Print as Installation

Installation art is a Euramerican concept, yet there are elements in Thai culture in which the idea of installation is familiar. For example, installation art has often been infused with indigenous knowledge, such as Buddhist philosophy, folk wisdom and socio-

464 Steven Pettifor 1999, ‘In Search of Fresh Direction’ [Thailand Feature], Asian Art News, Vol. 9, No. 6, p.73.

465 Gridthiya Gaweewong 2001, op. cit., unpag.

207 political events, which hybridised the work and made it specific to the context in which it was shown. Installation art (a relatively new phenomenon) also belongs to a postmodern ethos. Julie Ewington claims:

From its origins in sculpture, installation has taken on the principles of collage, of juxtaposition and displacement, association and dissociation, using objects and representations together as part of its repertoire of effects. Installation is at once catholic, resistant to definition, consistently surprising, the most open-ended of all contemporary artistic practices, perhaps even threatening to the established order.466

Ewington also draws attention to the ephemeral nature of much installation art. She claims that it is made up of separate elements and is generally site specific. She explains installation art in the South-East Asian context in terms of subversion and opposition to the status quo and employs postmodernist rhetoric, which recalls Krauss’ 1977 seminal text and subsequent writings on sculpture in the expanded field.467 Since the early 1990s, Ewington has regularly undertaken research trips to Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia. In the last three countries especially, she recognises that installation art as a practice that has enabled South-East Asian artists to come to international prominence.468

Unlike earlier adaptations of international art in Thailand, which were in evidence after their appearance in the Euramerican context, contemporary installation art emerged in Thailand (and amongst its neighbours) around the time when it became popular internationally. Indonesia was the first to respond to the installation art movement (during the mid-1970s) and the Philippines and Thailand followed about fifteen years later. In all three countries, installation was considered a minority practice, although it was recognised as a highly significant break from modernist precepts.

466 Julie Ewington 1994, ‘An Art of Here and Now: Thinking about Thai-Australian Cultural Space after Bangkok, before Sydney’, Thai-Australian Cultural Space, exh. cat., Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, p.9.

467 More particularly, Rosalind Krauss 1983, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic, op. cit.

468 See also Julie Ewington 2002, ‘Installation in Southeast Asia in the 1990s: Heritage in Modernity’, TAASA Review, The Journal of the Asian Arts Society of Australia, Vol. 11, No. 1, March, p.7.

208 Ewington has argued that installation art was easily integrated into existing culturally- specific contexts. Artists in South-East Asia saw the practice as more relevant to and expressive of their societies than Western-orientated painting and sculpture. Indeed, installation art has been utilised and incorporated into pre-existing cultural artefacts like shrines, festivals and popular decorations.469 In her 2002 article on the subject, Ewington reinforced this fact by stating that installation was an integral part of the emerging postmodern expression. This occurred even when it mobilised premodern cultural sources. Thus Ewington claimed that, for specific reasons in each country, and in several regional centres within them, installation continued to grow in importance throughout the last two decades.470 This observation takes the emphasis of innovation in the visual arts (in installation work, for example) away from the sole impetus of the Euramerican model. This is a pivotal point in the arguments in this thesis.

Ewington is an informed ‘outsider’ who provides a convincing explanation for the ready adoption of installation art, partly because she accepts the postmodernist enterprise. Postmodernism challenges a fixed reading of aesthetics, and acknowledges that artists who borrow traditional elements of community life and use them as a framework for their installations enter a complex engagement in which indigenous cultural identification colludes with Western globalisation. The process is one of conscious displacement as well as syncretism; a continuously renegotiated meeting of both sides.471 In relation to such intersections Bhabha writes:

The borderline work of culture demands an encounter with ‘newness’ that is not part of the continuum of past and present. It creates a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation. Such art does not merely recall the past as social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent ‘in-between’ space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present. The ‘past-present’ becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia, of living.472

469 Explained by Julie Ewington at her graduate lecture, Installation Art in Southeast Asia, College of Fine Arts, UNSW, Sydney, 12 May 1994.

470 Ewington 2002, op. cit.

471 Filipino artist the late Santiago Bose, is a prime example of a highly educated, widely exhibited artist whose installations were rooted in the material culture and belief systems of the Cordilleras peoples, with Baguio at the centre.

472 Bhabha 2007, op. cit., p.10.

209 In the Thai context, the use of hybrid and multilayered conceptual zones is evident in the print installations of Prawat and Phatyos, .Araya and Bundith.473 It is important, however, to note that at the commencement of the 1980s, when installation art emerged in Thailand, it was not immediately utilised to express political dissention or social unease. In Thailand, as in a number of other South-East Asian countries it is difficult and often impossible to display art publicly that renders the political regime problematic. However, many Indonesian and Filipino artists did risk censorship of their work during that time. When Prawat, for instance, chose to critique the three pillars of Thai national identity (as he increasingly did in the 1990s from his New York vantage point), he did so with subtle provocation rather than overt aggression. More significantly, print itself (intaglio and relief printing and their adaptations) has been the basis of his work.

As witnessed in the highly crafted manipulations of the photographic image in Noda’s photo-screenprints and the slow, meditative accretion of editioned images by Maddock, these Thai artists forcefully demonstrate the reliance of their innovations on their steadfast engagement with print. In 2001, a journalist for the Bangkok Post, in summing up Prawat’s installations, stated that, ‘For the visual art practitioner keen on solving unexpected problems like Prawat, art is a matter of process. The more sophisticated and technically challenging each piece becomes during the creative process, the more he enjoys it. This may be due to his background as a print-maker who is familiar with complex production procedures.’474 Other reasons compelled the younger Phatyos to develop his mature studio work based on the print from traditional craft-based canons to those that interface with innovative contemporary art practice.

6.7 Prawat Laucharoen: Specific Projects Examined in Context

In the last two decades, Prawat Laucharoen has been the outstanding figure in Thailand’s innovative printmaking realm. He was recognised as the most accomplished artist in this

473 See Anne Kirker 1999, op. cit.

474 Pattara Danutra 2001, ‘Bringing it all back home’, exhibition review of Prawat Laucharoen’s installation The Proverbs My Brother Taught Me, at the Art Centre of Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok Post, 12 July, published electronically at http:// www.rama9art.org/artisan/2001/july/proverb/bot.html. See also Anne Kirker 2001, `The Print Installations of Prawat Laucharoen’, in Apinan Poshyananda (ed.), Prawat Laucharoen:`The Proverbs My Brother Taught Me, exh. cat., Bangkok: The Art Center, Center of Academic Resources, Chulalongkorn University, 13 July-10 August 2001.

210 respect in the 1991 exhibition titled Print Installation, which Chulalongkorn University’s Apinan Poshyananda curated for the National Gallery in Bangkok. On no other occasion in that country (if elsewhere) had this term been used, except for Prawat’s other projects in New York. In Australia, ‘print installation’ was only brought to wider public attention in Ruth Johnstone’s exhibition Psycho(geo)graphica: mapping the interior at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne in 1998.475

Apinan’s exhibition was a deliberate and provocative riposte to the capital’s art competitions, where standardisation is the norm, and most prints are marketed as decorative multiples for hotel lobbies and corporate showrooms. It was provocative in that it challenged the official art mores of the time. In the exhibition, Prawat had an attitude similar to that of other Thai artists in the exhibition (such as Montien Boonma, Kamol Phaosavasdi and Vasan Sitthiket) in breaking the established rules. Unlike Prawat, the other artists were not primarily printmakers, but they responded to the curatorial challenge with highly idiosyncratic interpretations of print installation.476 The sculptor Montien incorporated terra cotta handprints with industrial rubber ‘belts’ for his The Fist Activities, and performance artist Santi wrapped trees with newspapers and rope, with himself held captive.

Prawat’s approach was adversarial; attacking the qualities of printmaking that he himself had practised and had witnessed, as no longer providing any substantial meaning, because it was merely concerned with technical prowess. This applied to the context of Thailand as much as to New York .He was represented in Print Installation by the work with a rhetorical question: ‘Black + White + Colour’ or ‘Does Rembrandt Need Colours?’ In the catalogue he is quoted as saying: ‘If there are possibilities of making prints in other ways, perhaps it will be difficult to look at prints which have been done before.’477.

475 At the time of this solo exhibition, Ruth Johnstone had been a practising printmaker for nearly twenty years. Psycho(geo)graphica was based on her Master of Arts research at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, and examined the relationship of art to architecture. She employed soft-toned relief printing on hanging (chamber-like) forms and unfurling scrolls of paper.

476 `Print Installation’, seven interpretations by Thai artists (Prawat Laucharoen, Montien Boonma, Vichoke Mukdamanee, Kamol Phaosavasdi, Suthat Pinruethai, Santi Isrowuthakul and Vasan Sitthiket),The National Gallery, Bangkok, 3-21 July 1991.

477 Artist’s statement in Apinan Poshyananda 1991, Print Installation,exh. cat., Bangkok: The National Gallery.

211 From 1980 onwards, Prawat developed print installations to explore printmaking radically in terms of process and as a sequence of events. He took etching and the intaglio process as his basic approach in the National Gallery show. He alluded to Rembrandt as the first acknowledged master of etching and as a consequence, acknowledged the high status this medium has been accorded in the traditional hierarchy of print media. Prawat’s intaglio-inspired installations are a tribute to European practitioners who continue to have universal currency. It could also be argued that the Thai’s friendship with and admiration for the performance work and sculpture of Dennis Oppenheim in New York played a decisive role in his iconoclastic approach to printmaking at this point. Prawat collaborated with Oppenheim in 1981, the same year his first print performance with installation Launching Station occurred. He described this major shift from the familiarity of editioning prints to, in his words:

Exploring all variables…In the printmaking medium, one is confronted with the raw state of certain materials. To be able to draw upon what is fundamental to those materials and initiate a process…call it art, if you will. The new form that results is not concerned with image; although image may literally be what emerges….The process is continuous, alive and institutes an irrevocable situation of cause and effect. 478

In Launching Station (1981), Prawat placed a series of large-scale copper plates parallel to the wall, which he then assailed with various chemicals and tools. (Plate 30) These plates served as an equivalent to canvas, as the act of etching and engraving resembled that of a highly charged expressionistic painting.479 At the conclusion of this ‘performance’, the plates were cleaned, inked and impressions were taken in the usual manner. This was a dramatic and seminal work that wrenched printmaking out of a passive, contemplative mode. The main purpose of the work was to challenge audience preconceptions about printmaking, as well as offering Prawat an opportunity to use printmaking as a carthartic experience, much in the mould of earlier abstract expressionists and performance artists like Mike Parr in Australia. By doing so, Prawat revolutionised the medium and extended printmaking’s potential, by integrating the pluralistic, expansive postmodern aesthetic into his own practice.

478 Artist’s Statement in Cohen 1986, Prawat Laucharoen, Metamorphosis on the Theme of Morandi, Print Installation, op. cit.

479 Coincidentally, Richard Serra’s earliest work was in response to Abstract Expressionism. From 1968 to 1970 he did a series of Splash pieces, splattering molten lead against studio and gallery walls in New York.

212 Cathartic for the maker, the results were intended to confront and perplex the viewer. The making of Launching Station was captured on film, just like any art performance. The chance effects of the artist’s actions with acid and tools dramatically countered the meticulous craftsmanship that characterises much of modernist Thai printmaking and the nationalist sentiments that are couched in indigenous cultural designs.

As in Japan, there is an ongoing expectation in Thailand that ‘essentialist’ national characteristics will be played out in its art making. Apinan (1992) confirms how printmaking was ‘given equal status with painting and sculpture’ at Silpakorn University from the mid-1960s, and how ‘The brilliant skill and technical virtuosity of many Thai art students found expression in printmaking. Its emphasis on draughtsmanship, precision, two-dimensional surface, and linear and flat colours, all characteristics of Thai art and qualities in “the veins” of Thai artists, particularly appealed to them.’480

Returning to one of the central figures in the Thai case study, Prawat grew to recognise the limitations of such expectations and critiqued this situation by removing his imagery from the wall, .therefore relinquishing its ‘pictorial’ capacity. Furthermore, the idea of impermanence (which may be as much derived from Buddhist philosophy as from process-oriented works) began to underlie his installations.

Prawat moved to New York in 1969 and received his Master of Fine Arts from the Pratt Institute in the early 1970s (where Chalood had trained).481 However, instead of returning to Silpakorn to teach (as would be expected) Prawat established his own workshop in New York and observed:

The 1970s were the best time everywhere for every direction of art. Seventeen years ago in the U.S., Pop and Minimalist Art were already mature. Conceptual Art, Performing Art and many others were blooming …As a foreigner, I began to see real art work, and was surrounded by many serious artists. This was a big charge for me.482

480Apinan Poshyananda 1992, op. cit., p. 119. It is assumed that the author was in large part attributing his ‘characteristics of Thai art’ to the traditional temple mural paintings on mythological themes and on the life of Buddha. Together with folkloric imagery, these are the quintessential modes of indigenous representation in Thailand.

481 Prawat Laucharoen graduated from Silpakorn University in 1967, with Chalood as his teacher.

482 Prawat Laucharoen, cited in Piriya Krairiksh 1986, Thai Reflections on American Experiences, exh. cat., Bangkok: Bhirasri Instituite of Modern Art, 13 November -7 December, unpaginated.

213

Prawat found the expatriate situation liberating, and he developed without the pressures or expectations of the homeland. He could also crystallise ideas about his place of origin at one remove. He was particularly drawn towards the rituals of Joseph Beuys and the conceptualism of Oppenheim (mentioned above) and Vito Acconci.

Prawat is cited by Piriya (1986) as one of ‘the more adventurous artists at Silpakorn University…he realized that art in New York was a serious business…that led him to experiment with different print techniques’.483 His skills in a range of print media enabled Prawat to teach lithography at Pratt in 1971 whilst studying for his Master of Fine Arts, and to be employed over the next few years as a master printer using this notoriously difficult technique (even though his preference was for intaglio printing).

In New York, Prawat became recognised as an outstanding master printer, and he collaborated on lithography projects with painters Alex Katz, Larry Rivers, David Hockney, Jennifer Bartlett and others. He was also employed to work on lithography by the Hollander Workshop and at Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop (the chief New York-based print shop for editioning the work of `minority’ groups). Prawat was also employed as a printmaking instructor, closing his own print shop in 1980 to take up a teaching position at New York’s Hunter College, and five years later he began teaching at the Horace Mann School (a position he continues to hold).

It was partly the seemingly rigid and inflexible nature of the intaglio technique that urged Prawat to transform this particular process of printmaking into a sculptural and time- based experience. In doing so, he somewhat violently divested himself of the characteristics associated with Thai art expression (such as meticulous attention to detail and flawless technique), which have often impeded substantial statements, particularly in printmaking.

Subject to Change without Notice was the title Prawat gave to two print installations of 1984 and 1986. (Plate 31) In the second version, copper plates were arranged as a

483 Piriya Krairiksh 1986, op. cit., p. 9.

214 rectangle on the floor, upon which were placed large, rather eccentric, mechanical forms with burin and roulette characteristics, which could be manually directed. A print recording this performative activity was made from the incised metal surfaces and attached to the wall as part of the assemblage. Printmaking thus acted primarily as a documentary form of his ‘performance’, rather than exclusively containing the expression of the artist. It is a record as well as being his creative statement. This work reflects the idea that art is involved in the ‘process’ as much as it is in the ‘final product’. Therefore, the autonomy of the print (in relation to meaning) is challenged and broadened.

‘Freed by him from the strictures of their traditional formats - and also forms - and removed from the confines of the printing shop, the material and processes of intaglio technique have been transformed into a sculptural ensemble, one that nevertheless retains the customary usages of them,’ the New York prints and drawings expert Ronny Cohen observed.484

In his highly iconoclastic approach to the processes of printmaking, Prawat also re- investigated European print masters of etching; his own preferred method. (Rembrandt has already been mentioned.) With his Metamorphosis on the Theme of Morandi III (1986), an installation from the same period as Subject to Change without Notice, Prawat paid tribute to the small etchings of still-life objects by Georgio Morandi.485 He admired the Italian’s prints because they were systematic, and at the same time, spontaneous. However, it is the Thai’s prioritising of the means of display that give meaning to his appropriation of Morandi in this instance. That is, the framing of the display plays a more important role than the subject matter itself. This expanded notion of what a work of art is, is just as readily applied to printmaking. In this sense, Prawat is an outstanding printmaking figure, who early on applied the lessons of conceptual art and other innovative neo-avant-garde practices to printmaking. He thereby instigated a major reconceptualisation of the print in the second half of the twentieth century.

Metamorphosis on the theme of Morandi III analysed the Italian’s cross-hatch method of registering shifts in tone. (Plate 32) On nine abutting copperplates secured to the wall

484 Ronny Cohen 1986, op. cit.

485 Queensland Art Gallery purchased this print installation in 1994. (acc. no.1994.173 a-ee).

215 within a pegged wooden frame, Prawat drew an enlarged still-life image with acid according to a predetermined grid system or ‘score’. The marked-up plates in this installation had a presence as vital as the multi-part print that was finally pulled from them. Indeed, the print matrix (copperplates) and the frame for scaling were accorded a role as important as the paper bearing the final inked image. The entire process of conventional printmaking was transformed and taken to another plane in this installation. According to Piriya Krairiksh, it was Prawat himself who called this work an `installation’ and a `performance’, terms that he worked within from his New York base.486 In turn, this radical shift in printmaking not only reflects the innovation of practitioners trained in Thailand, and hence within the context of the Asia-Pacific region; it was also acknowledged in his country of birth and spawned projects in print installation by others living there.

Unlike the Modernist stress placed on the art object as the total and complete visual statement, Prawat encourages a reading that makes use of deconstruction, indeterminacy, dispersal, chance and play, even irony. This reassessment of the nature and form of art that emerged in postwar practices like Pop art, minimalism, conceptual art, process art (post-minimalism), and performance art would be crystallised in postmodern cultural practice and theoretical discourse. ‘Work-in-progress’ is a core attribute of Prawat’s performative print installations, as though the masters of intaglio, Rembrandt and Morandi, are open to continual renegotiation and interpretation and that the traditional processes they used are similarly malleable.

Prawat’s postmodern eclectism knew no bounds, as by the late 1980s he was tackling the legacy of ukiyo-e prints. In 1987 he exhibited the installation Japanese Reverse; a self- conscious reference to de-construction. He confidently reversed through a playful self- awareness and keen knowledge of the Japanese print tradition. His solo exhibition, held firstly at Chiang Mai University, then at the Bhirasri Institute in Bangkok, was acknowledged by Apinan as ‘a revelation’ as Laucharoen opened up radically new possibilities for printmaking.487 In fact, Japanese Reverse is believed to be the first print

486 Piriya Krairiksh 1986, op. cit., p. 13.

487 Apinan Poshyananda 2001, ‘A Proverb for Prawat Laucharoen’ in The Proverbs My Brother Taught Me, exh. cat.. op. cit.

216 installation in Thailand.488 According to Somporn (similarly, a highly regarded commentator on the visual arts in that country) and originally trained as a printmaker herself, ‘In this print installation the traditional Japanese woodblock was reversed into a different relief process. Prawat inscribed Japanese characters on the surface of a chunk of timber, hand rubbing it on a piece of paper. Prawat continued this process in his installation at The First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at the Queensland Art Gallery (APT1) in 1993.’489

The work in question was The Four Elements. (Plate 33) The link with Japan is of interest here in the sense that a venerable print tradition was appropriated and disrupted - that of the ukiyo-e woodblock print. It also points to a significant dialogue that has occurred through the visual arts between Thailand and Japan; an intra-regional flow as well as international. This is seminal to postmodernism, as margins begin to borrow from one another as well as negotiating Euramerican ‘centres’ like New York. The 1980s and 1990s were exciting times for printmakers willing to depart from the comfort of guild- based premises of the field. In this era of postmodern flux, Prawat read the times and implemented the lessons offered and thus by doing so, made a major contribution to the conception of printmaking. Somporn states in 1994 that in her country there is ‘no doubt that the influence of installations comes from the West as well as Japan’.490

Somporn also points out that, while installation appeared to be an important movement in Thai contemporary art, it was spearheaded outside of that country, by Los Angeles –

488 Stated by Somporn Rodboon in her article `Thai contemporary installation’, Australian Art Monthly , August 1994, p.20.

489 ibid.

490 ibid. The links between Japanese and Thai artists are well documented. See in particular: Apinan Poshyananda 1992, Modern Art in Thailand: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, op. cit., and Somporn Rodboon, Master Thai Artists in Japan, Silpakorn University Art Gallery, exh.cat., 27 June-15 July 1998.

In terms of printmaking, the artists listed below are among those to have engaged directly with Japan. In terms of their practice, each echoes the main trends emanating from Silpakorn during the 1960s to the 1990s; trends that were to a greater or lesser extent inflected by their Japanese engagements.

Praphan Srisouta visited Japan in 1964, afterwards producing black and white relief prints of Thai rural life in the manner of Hokusai’s manga; Damrong Wong-Uparaj independently studied in Kyoto, 1976-77 producing rural subjects in relief prints and drawings on his return to Thailand; Kanya Chareonsupkul spent a year in Kyoto during 1979-80 and produced tusche-wash lithographs, suggesting an amalgam of traditional Zen ink symbolism and abstract expressionist gestures; Yanawitya Kunchaethong studied screenprinting and lithography at the Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts 1983-88, processes which he put towards abstract compositions that addressed the concept of tradition and change;Thavorn Ko -Udomvit has since 1987 (when he taught at Nagoya Uinversity of Fine Arts) consistently and successfully exhibited his mixed media prints with handmade paper, throughout Japan.

217 based artist Kamol Tassanachalee.491 He is mentioned here for this fact and also to illustrate that Prawat was not the sole practitioner of print installation by Thai nationals before it gained currency in Thailand itself. Kamol included installation work in his survey exhibition Ten Years of Art in the U.S. 1970-1980, held at The National Gallery, Bangkok in 1980. A painter and mixed-media printmaker, he, like Prawat, has spent most of his career in the United States. Perhaps his championship of `Thai culture’ in California and the ‘decorative’ cast of his work explain why Kamol’s imagery is on permanent display at The National Art Gallery in Bangkok (while Prawat’s is not). The former’s mixed media assemblages characteristically comprise etching and vivid watercolour on thick paper pulp. Alluding to American Indian peoples (through added materials such as tepee rods, wool and feathers), they also refer to Buddhism (through a stylised rendition of Buddha’s footprint, for instance).

Kamol’s highly ornate mixed media prints are closely aligned with the experimental print workshops favoured in California in the 1970 and 1980s.492 Like Prawat, he turned in the 1970s to European masters (such as Raphael and Van Gogh) for image content, but parodied rather than paid tribute to them in his mixed-media collages and related prints. Although they connect with his Thai heritage, his physically robust prints and collages of the 1980s using hand-made paper are essentially wall-based statements and do not interrogate process. Furthermore, only in his paintings and prints of 1972, when the artist was a student at Otis, did Kamol make a series of prints called The Troubled World that related directly to social unrest in his homeland and anticipated the political upheaval of October 1973 in Bangkok.493 Therefore, the consequences of his printmaking owe much to the artistic freedom and social enquiry characteristic of the Californian counter-culture era. Unlike Prawat and Phatyos, he did not embark on any substantial critical and speculative investigation of the field.

491 Kamol Tassananchalee studied painting and printmaking in the early 1970s at Otis College of Art and Design, a major art school in Los Angeles. In 1982, he founded the Thai Arts Council in that city. See Poshyananda 1992, op. cit., p. 188.

492 Such as that operated by Garner Tullis and Ann McLaughlin from 1972, in San Francisco. The Experimental Workshop has drawn many Americans and international artists to its studios in their quest to explore papermaking and large-scale printing.

493 Poshyananada 1992, op. cit., p.160.

218 Until the 1990s, Prawat’s printmaking projects conveyed no direct reference to the socio- political situation in Thailand. His projects were iconoclastic enquiries into the nature of process. Only when democratic values were violently undermined with the military crackdown in Bangkok during May 1992 did he openly integrate political comment into his visual language. This was a risky and courageous move. However, as an expatriate, Prawat, like Kamol could avoid censorship in tackling politically sensitive issues outside of his homeland. For the First Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane (1993) he produced The Four Elements, a major installation that would have been impossible to mount in Bangkok. Thailand’s capital city at the time was aggressively adopting Western -style redevelopment but this phenomenon is usually ‘skin-deep’ in centres that have experienced very rapid socio-economic change. The rules of ‘consensus’ art are intractable to the extent that contentious art works are banned from public display in Thailand.494

It is worth pointing out here a statement by Caroline Turner (1993), which comments that at times of socio-political unrest, an artist’s work may noticeably change from its former trajectory and bypass Western hegemonies (for instance) through the demands of specific events and situations:

In the demands of reality, theoretical discourse and complex abstractions of modernism and postmodernism, although understood, are secondary to the issues of cultural concern, and frequently social concern with which artists are engaged within those countries.495

In this thesis, Turner’s observation is true of not only of Prawat but also of the print work of Shimada and Watson.

In Prawat’s case, installation also allowed for the integration of heterogenous methods and materials and was not bound by tight disciplinary canons. In The Four Elements, the artist audaciously overturned acceptable printmaking tropes by incorporating objects,

494 A case in point are two 1992 paintings by Vasan Sitthiket , purchased for the art collection of Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, namely Buddha returns to Bangkok’92 and Resurrection, which were not permitted to be hung at the University on the grounds of their damning portrayals of Lord Buddha and Christ. Instead they were publicly exhibited at the First Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, in 1993.

495 Caroline Turner (ed.) 1993, ‘Internationalism and Regionalism: Paradoxes of Identity’, Tradition and Change, op. cit., p.xiv.

219 found documents and film footage into the work. The documentary components reminded viewers of the previous military coups that had occurred in Thailand and the outspoken monks and dissident citizens who had perished in their belief in democratic rights. He deliberately ‘misused’ the disciplines of printmaking in this installation and also tackled the notion of Thai national identity through representation. It is necessary here to acknowledge the fact that to portray Thailand’s monarch and his family in a ‘non- official’ manner is tantamount to treason. Even though the artist did so within the relative safety of the Australian Queensland Art Gallery, it was a courageous action. Never subsequently exhibited in his homeland, The Four Elements was intentionally an `attack’ on Establishment values and militarist ambitions.

The four interconnected components to this room-size installation related to the guiding pillars of Thai society: namely nationhood, religion, the monarchy and the constitution. Elements such as projected documentary slides and a drawing of Buddha in gold leaf, a mural-scale pastel rubbing of the royal family and hanging copper plates from which it had been taken were integrated into the space. The plates had been etched with aquatint, as though prepared for intaglio printing. However, they were not inked up and run through a press as they would be normally and so these printmaker’s materials and skills were `deterritorialised’ (to use Green’s 1993 term for postmodern printmaking). In completing the installation in Brisbane, the artist `performed the work’ by taking rubbings from engraved trunks of wood. Hence his performance referred to the earliest of printmaking techniques, that of the woodcut, and similarly alluded to its didactic premises. The rubbings he took were of Thai text (political slogans) and in turn he fixed them to a wall of his installation.

After this confrontational work, Prawat developed the installation called After We Become New Industrial Country (1998). (Plate 34) This project addressed the mixed blessing of South-East Asia’s economic boom during the preceding decades. As a “NIC” phenomenon, Prawat believes ‘The rapid growth in Thailand signalled alarm in many people. The transition from an agricultural society to an industrial one happened too quickly, and caused people to lose their culture, their way of life and their values.’496 In

496 Letter from Prawat Laucharoen to Anne Kirker, 17 November 1998. See also Jim Sheehy 1999, ‘Print as performance art’, Printmaking Today, Winter, p. 17. This article by Sheehy is focused upon Prawat Laucharoen and his installation of After We Become New Industrial Country 1998, which was shown at the Limerick City Gallery of Art, Ireland; the first European exhibition of Prawat’s work.

220 this installation, the seductive promise of industrialisation was symbolised by the soft variegated rubbings that were transferred from ornately carved wooden dressing tables pinned on the wall. With the actual upside-down furniture parts hanging above them, twelve simple black boxes were set on the floor and suggested a model for city planning: a stark, modernist grid of uniform elements. Filled with water, they reflected the image from the wall and the viewer who stepped through them when engaging with the piece. This serial use of geometric shapes conveyed a tribute to minimalist form as well as commenting on the homogeneity of some Western-style modernist buildings. However, in contrast to the severely reductive features of 1960s American Minimalism, the urge to convey a potent cultural message of the seeming collision between globalisation and localism transcended any purely formalist reading of it.497

Prawat’s ongoing interrogation of the print process was central to the pieces that were first shown in Limerick City Gallery of Art (1998). The Snapline, for instance, consisted of a wooden box containing a small tray filled with acid (when exhibited, water was substituted, rather than to risk harm to viewers) that was placed next to a large iron plate. By turning a handle connected to the box, a reel of cord passed through the acid and when held taut it was ‘snapped’ on different areas of the plate to induce rugged etch lines. As with his installations from the 1980s, the field of the print became transformed into a hybrid, cross-disciplinary art experience perfectly in keeping with the postmodern ethos. It is a work of speculation and chance, of privileging the viewer as participant in the creative process. Conceived from ‘printmaking,’ this work paradoxically has the presence of an interactive sculpture.

By the early twenty-first century, Prawat was incorporating post-colonial precepts into his practice as he re-examined Thai traditions. The artist’s 2001 exhibition, The Proverbs My Brother Taught Me, demonstrated the survival and revival of indigenous myth and ritual in Thai art. It was curated by Apinan for the Art Centre of Chulalongkorn University. At the time, Gridthiya observed that many Thai artists were exploring traditional proverbs in their installation work, including Jakapan Vilasineekul, Sutee

497 National heritage became a key issue in Thailand during the 1990s. In urban situations (especially Bangkok), multi- national corporate identity and Western consumerism witnessed on a grand scale prompted the development of governmental policies for protecting aspects of Krung Thep as an indigenous city. See Marc Askew 2002, op. cit.

221 Kunavichayanont and Kamol Phaosavasdi. Gridthiya believed that installation was a way to prevent this area of investigation being reduced to an art commodity, but in Prawat’s case, she criticised his didacticism, believing the installation ‘was so straightforward in interpretation that the artist did not leave any room for local audiences to breathe and imagine, and made it inaccessible for international audiences’.498 In short, it could be stated that she placed Prawat’s project in an impossible conundrum.

The printed elements of this installation were a distinct part of interconnecting components that conveyed other visual forms (chiefly found materials but including living creatures). Each component referred to a particular proverb. One comprised roughly carved woodblock prints of crows on a wall near glass display cases with live cobras, another of heads with bone necklaces, printed and nailed to the wall as a huge mural. A hill-like mound of soil in one corner had a large mortar at the base of it, while another corner served wooden stumps in different sizes and heights, with an empty ceramic jar placed nearby. The entire exhibition illustrated an old Thai proverb that urges the use of wise judgment in life. For instance, Prawat explains in the exhibition catalogue that ‘Pushing the mortar up to the mountain. Beating the snake to feed the crow. Watering a stump - Khen Krok Khun Khao. Tee Ngou Hai Ga Gin. Tak Nam Rode Hua Taw. These mistaken actions benefit no one. Each burden is equivalent to hanging bones around one’s neck.’499

The relief printed murals in this project matched the ‘rural’ origins of the work’s concept through Prawat’s use of the woodblock as his print matrix. Additionally, by employing woodcut in The Proverbs work, Prawat once again approached the print’s historical function as a didactic tool that was wielded for political protest.500 In this 2001 exhibition, Prawat moved away from solely regarding his work as ‘print installation’ and was unhesitating in his incorporation of found natural materials to communicate his conceptual agenda. It repays recalling here, Krauss and her ‘Sculpture in the Expanded

498 Gridthiya Gaweewong 2001, op. cit.

499 Prawat Laucharoen 2001, The Proverbs My Brother Taught Me, op. cit.

500 A trajectory that burgeoned in the second half of the twentieth century with the political posters movement. There is, of course, a well documented history behind the print being used as an agent for social and political change, from German woodbock prints of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries based on the Scriptures, through to the British of the eighteenth century and the Euramerican political poster movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

222 Field’ essay, which argues for eclecticism and art that can be defined ‘in relation to the logical operations on a set of cultural terms, for which any medium…might be used’. 501

Therefore, the example of Prawat demonstrates how a printmaker can seize the postmodern ethos to rephrase the print’s former identity dramatically. Without relinquishing traditional methodologies (such as relief and intaglio printing) this Thai artist extends them into the performance and installation realms, thus urging a radical re- reading of what printmaking now comprises. While his print installations never neglect the innate materials and method of the print process he selects, nor the cultural specificity of found objects and materials he chooses to incorporate, they offer a strong challenge to existing print scholarship, especially in the Euramerican sphere.502

6.8 Phatyos Buddhacharoen: Specific Projects Examined in Context

The print installations of Prawat and Phatyos thoroughly discredit the long-standing belief that discourses originating from Euramerica are diluted or placed at a lower or earlier developmental stage when adopted by the ‘Other’. The application of postmodernism to their work takes into consideration their unique expression of printmaking approaches that were driven as much by local discourses as by forces of globalisation. Furthermore, in a postmodern neo-avant-gardism, ‘Asian material does have something to tell those who are other than Asian about the avant-garde.’503. This fact is still blithely overlooked in contemporary print publications. For instance, Prints Now (2006) limits its formal content and discursive position by neglecting to examine printmaking in the Asia-Pacific region.504 Revelatory though the book is in providing examples of case studies where possibilities for interpreting the print are expanded, the narrowness of its ‘catchment’ of artists is problematic. Hence, other directions and the possibility of alternative definitions for printmaking are unacknowledged.

501 Krauss 1985, op.cit., p. 41.

502 Refer also to Anne Kirker 1994, ‘The Print Installations of Prawat Laucharoen’, Imprint (Journal of The Print Council of Australia), Vol. 29, No. 1, Autumn, pp. 1-3. This essay was extended and revised in Poshyananda (ed.) 2001, The Proverbs My Brother Taught Me, exh. cat., op. cit.

503 Clark 1998, op. cit., p.290.

504 Gill Saunders and Rosie Miles 2006, Prints Now: Directions and Definitions, op. cit.

223 For instance, Phatyos would have been an ideal inclusion for Saunder and Miles (2006) in their Victoria and Albert Museum book. Until 2000, Phatyos Buddhacharoen concentrated on lithography and in the course of his investigations,shifted from readily identifiable usages of the medium to concentrate on seriality as a key factor in large-scale installations of heterogeneous materials. Like Prawat, he is a graduate from Silpakorn and is currently teaching in the graphic arts department there.505 At the start of the 2000s, he departed from conventional printmaking with his production of ambitious installations that have only a minimal print component.506 Importantly, the notion of ‘seriality’ (the duplication of units) continues throughout these projects.507 For instance, see the repetition of snake skins in the work…Shed the Shells… of 2003. (The snake in Thai culture represents Naga or ‘god-spirit’.)

Unlike an earlier generation of printmakers such as Prawat, Phatyos did not take his higher degree abroad nor did he aspire to teach outside Thailand. This is in part because the 1980s provided greater access to studio facilities and trained staff, and there were also more opportunities to exhibit in group shows in Bangkok and in international print biennials and triennials. Here both Thai and (as has been noted) Japanese printmakers excel, as they are from cultures that encourage the attainment of high technical standards and conformity to the restrictions of sheet size and related guidelines, as demanded by national and international competitions.508 With access to such international exhibitions and a sound infrastructure for professional development within Bangkok (and Chiang Mai), the generation Phatyos represents has greater confidence in living and working there. Artists are not compelled to seek further training abroad, despite an aspiration to exhibit in ‘contemporary mainstream’ international art events.

505 Phatyos Buddhacharoen graduated in 1992 with a Master of Fine Arts from Silpakorn University and became an art instructor there two years later, in lithography.

506 For instance, printmaking was confined to fields of silkscreened text in Mindfulness (2003). One could speculate that this represents a link with the didactic, educative role of publishing in Thailand’s early history where, paradoxically, print imagery was usually an embellishment for the text.

507 See the comprehensive essay by Phatyos Buddhacharoen 2003 (translated into English by Den Wasiksiri), Mindfulness: Phatyos Buddhacharoen, exh. cat., Bangkok:the National Gallery, February 28th-March 29th

508 In the 10th Norwegian International Print Triennale, Fredrikstad, Norway (1992), Phatyos won a silver medal and he received an Honourable Diploma at the 9th International Print Biennial at Varnia, Bulgaria in 1997.

224 Phatyos’ lithographs shown at these events were grounded in Buddhism and concern for the environment. Later, in his print installations, it became clear that he also strove to set up a friction between the primary religion practised in Thailand and a commodity-driven society that he perceived Bangkok, in particular, to have become. His work therefore contained (by the early 2000s) classic instances of the ‘intersection between globalization and localism; tradition and contemporary culture; Buddha and Cyberspace’509

Religious faith has always been a major part of Thai life, and ninety-five percent of the population purport to follow Theravada Buddhism. This religion stresses three principal aspects of existence: dukkha (stress, unsatisfactoriness, and disease), anicca (impermanence, transience of all things) and anatta (non-substantiality of reality – no permanent ‘soul’). The Buddha’s teachings are centred on an Eightfold Path intended to eliminate dukkha, and have the ultimate goal of achieving nirvana or enlightenment. Most Thais do not aspire to this advanced state. Instead, they observe their religion by regular worship at the local wat, feed monks and give donations to temples. It is common for young males to train as monks for various lengths of time, for it is seen as an important in a family’s capacity to generate social and religious merit-making (tham bun). However, the economic boom of the 1980s brought rapid modernisation to the country (particularly observed in the spectacular growth of its capital, Bangkok) and this dramatic change has threatened traditional values (including Buddhism). Much of the communal and family solidarity that used to characterise rural life has also been fractured by the exodus of people moving to the city.510

Buddhism is still one of the three nationalist pillars of Thai society (along with nationhood and the monarchy), but it is a constantly evolving religion. There has recently been a diminution of doctrinal Buddhism and a rise of animistic ritual, but the latter is an extension or intensification of Buddhism: ‘One of the basic characteristics that Thai animism shares with Theravada Buddhism is the recognition of impermanence, instability, and insecurity, at least in the outside world.’511 Rituals, such as those

509 Gridthiya Gaweewong 2001, op. cit.

510 See, for instance, the of Pira Sudham, which are based on Thailand’s socio-economic and political changes, such as People of Esarn, the Dying Earth (7th edition 1994), published in English by Shire Books, Bangkok. The Esarn plateau is in the north-east of Thailand.

511 Niels Mulder 2000, op. cit., p. 37.

225 involving small spirit houses outside private dwellings, and the employment of talismans, are commonplace for both urban and rural families. From an anthropological perspective, Mulder (2000) observes that ‘[Thai thinking does not attempt to resolve the contradictory, opposed, or complementary experiences of daily existence…there is no cosmic equilibrium of contradictory principles beyond each person’s balance of karma.’512

Phatyos has generally linked physical and spiritual worlds.513 Commencing with his single sheet lithographs, followed by his 1990s print installations, he associates Buddhist philosophy with natural phenomena. In the artist’s 1996 solo exhibition, for instance, monochromatic lithographs showed a central vortex with radiating lines of energy, which were in turn surrounded by fixed stone-like forms. He combined these forms with lines that suggested forces of continuous energy. Sometimes, as in the lithograph Spirit in Space, the stones became part of the spiralling field, like a never-ending circle. (Plate 36) At the time, Kanya Chareonsupkul wrote that Phatyos chose ‘forms, derived from tangible objects such as the ground, stupa and chedi, together with intangible notions (strength, tranquillity, and contentment)’. 514

By 1998, the artist shifted his focus away from editioned lithographs made for museum display, and moved towards elaborate three-dimensional installations. The use of planographic printing on paper was one element in this development, while the image- bearing means (the matrix) was also a key element. This was borne out in Phatyos’ second solo exhibition, aptly titled From Limestone.515 Here, every area of the gallery space was utilised for individual ‘installations’ combining in accord with a common theme. Collectively, they amplified the relationship between nature and the

512 ibid., pp.36-37.

513 In keeping with the custom for young males to spend a period of time living in a temple compound practising Buddhist Dharma, Phatyos stated that he had trained as a monk for a short time (during conversation with the author at Silpakorn, 14 January 1999).

514 Kanya Charoensupkul is a senior instructor in lithography at Silpakorn. This quote is from her 1996 essay ‘Conceptually Creative Work by Pongsak Buddhacharoen during 1988-1996’ (translated into English by Den Wasiksiri). in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Pongsak Buddhacharoen: Self-Spirit of Nature, Bangkok: Gallery of The Faculty of Painting, Sculpture and Graphic Arts, Silpakorn University, 17 June- 8 July, 1996. Pongsak has subsequently changed his name to `Phatyos’.

515 From Limestone: Phatyos Buddhacharoen, Art Gallery, Silpakorn University, Bangkok, 3- 20 November, 1998.

226 transcendental. The floor piece, Range of Mountains, was arranged as a grid of lithographic stones (several drawn on with liquid tusche and inked up, while others were left blank). Some stones supported vertical glass containers, which were lined with prints pulled from the limestones and filled with smaller pieces of rock gathered from nature. (Plate 37)

Another component called Images of the Mind consisted of sheets of paper printed with loose gestural forms that were butted closely together on the wall.(Plate 39) Below them on the floor were the limestones from which the images had been pulled. In a sense, they ‘grounded’ the elusive, abstract compositions above, while also demonstrating the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ technical basis of print production when one surface is transferred onto another. Finally, in Range of Stones, a subtle interplay between illusionism and the actual object occurred as the grid of earth-coloured lithographs on the wall converged at floor level with wrapped `stone` forms made from cut-up strips of these same prints. (Plate 38) For Phatyos, the stone represents the mountain – the microcosm in the macrocosm, just as the circle motif in his lithographs from the Space- Time series of 1996 represented a stone and also the universe.516

Krauss’ final chapter in Passages in Modern Sculpture is particularly relevant to Phatyos. It covers sculptural practice since the late 1960s and proposes a new syntax for sculpture, which opens it out to processes and materials hitherto not regarded as sculpture’s domain. Using examples of minimalism and earthworks, the American scholar’s text therefore has relevance for Phatyos’s print installations.517 Certainly the legacy of Minimalism through the reductive clarity of form, the repetition of units, truth to materials and elements arranged with formal precision in a given space. is apparent in his work.

Aside from familiarity with such movements, Phatyos’s generation is also keenly aware of ecological issues. It is no coincidence that between 1991 and 1995, a series of exhibitions were mounted at the Art Gallery at Silpakorn University and the National Gallery, Bangkok, called Art and Environment. Comprehensive catalogues accompanied these events that were distributed at Silpakorn as well as elsewhere. Nor is it insignificant

516 In conversation with the author, 14 January, 1999.

517 Krauss 1981, Passages in Modern Sculpture op. cit., pp. 243-87.

227 that German artists Rainer Wittenborn and Nikolaus Lang, with Australian Joan Grounds, were acknowledged in the credits for these projects.518 The practice of all these ‘external’ artists is sympathetic to environmental issues, and their respective residencies at Silpakorn University (as well as at Chiang Mai University) coincided with the Art and Environment exhibitions. Grounds wrote the essay to the catalogue of Art and Environment 2, stating ‘The furious pace of contemporary urban development has an irreversible self perpetuating momentum and we are sucked into the vortex of a time and place, a way of life which has its own internal logic….The development we now exist in is of high environmental impact and is non-sustainable.’519

Grounds’sentiments paralleled Phatyos’ own.The practice of Buddhist dharma as an individual responsibility dominates his work, even more so than it does with that of the Australian. By the early 2000s, he took responsibility for writing his own comprehensive texts to accompany his work. For instance, rather than to depend upon a ‘gate keeper’ at Silpakorn to interpret it (such as Kanya), the five-part exhibition Mindfulness (2003) demonstrated that Phatyos himself had become a younger generation ‘gate-keeper’ at this art school.520

Looking back on the works I have created in the past: ‘Self-Spirit of Nature’ (first solo exhibition held in 1996) and ‘From Limestone’ (second solo exhibition held in 1998), it can be seen that these two series contain certain similarities and certain differences. The similarities lie in the concept that links the two, concerning abstract essences in nature. It is the contemplation on meanings derived from inner feelings that demonstrate ‘energy’ in connection with ‘time’ which is the determining factor.This is the phenomenon of truth in an analogy with Buddhist philosophy.521

518 The first of these exhibitions was held at the Art Gallery, Silpakorn University, during February 1991. Participating artists presented projects from their artists’ workshop with German artist Rainer Wittenborn. Before being shown in Bangkok, participating artists exhibited their projects at Chiang Mai University, then with sponsorship from the Goethe Institut it became possible to extend the project to a showing in Bangkok. In April 1993, the Goethe Institut, with Silpakorn University, jointly organised Art and Environment 3, held at the National Gallery, Bangkok, 8-31 March 1995 with 20 participating artists, all Thai nationals. Wittenborn and Nikolaus Lang are credited with shaping the concept of this event.

519 Art and Environment 2 (Ecological Balance) was held at the National Gallery, Bangkok, 8-26 September 1993 with 13 participating artists, all Thai nationals. The respective work originated from a workshop conducted by Wittenborn at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Chiang Mai University, 16-30 November 1992.

520 Kanya Charoensupkul taught Phatyos lithography at Silpakorn and wrote for his first solo exhibition. Later, confident of his artistic direction, he chose to write his own history as a printmaker and has in fact arguably replaced Kanya as the ‘gate-keeper’ for younger artists in the lithography studio there.

521 Buddhacharoen 2003, op. cit. ,p.4.

228 The proselytizing tenor of the text matched the fervency of Prawat’s slightly earlier treatments of Thai proverbs. Phatyos became more engaged with Buddhism after a personal crisis. He states that his 2003 installation Way of the Breath resulted in part from psycho-social problems facing him at the time and hence prompted him to alter the emphasis of his work.522 Feelings of insecurity and loss of personal autonomy may have urged him to create environments that were decidedly more interactive. He described the differences between his first two solo exhibitions:

In the presentation and technique employed. ‘From Limestone’ used lithographic technique with nature as a symbol of spirituality and mentality. This is like ‘setting the mind’ on exploring the inside and outside, based on a balanced interrelationship. The presentation in two dimensions became three dimensional, mixed media, site specific installations, which was intended for the viewers to be mesmerized or move around and think as well as feel about what they see visually and psychologically.523

The interactive capacity of installation art assisted Phatyos in developing projects that were analogous to Buddhist philosophy. During the period 2000-2003, the interrelated yet independent installations (under the encompassing title Mindfulness) were displayed at the National Art Gallery, Bangkok, which demonstrates this ongoing concern of the artist. (Plate 40) At the same time, his seven interrelated installations, under this general title, embraced the contradictions of a postmodern world where multiple identities accrue to the individual. For instance, Phatyos, along with many young Thais connected to the visual arts in Bangkok, is interested in fashion and graphic design, (as demonstrated in style magazines emanating from Europe and Japan).524 The design of his 2003 Mindfulness catalogue is in accord with an internationally recognised `upwardly mobile’ middleclass.525 It matched his bold multi-installation event, and as has been the case in

522 ibid., p.8..

523 ibid. p.4.

524 Mindfulness was directed at the educated youth of Bangkok, the university community and art and fashion aficionados.The exhibition was underwritten by sponsors, including the Government Lottery Office and Toshiba. The latter is a major supporter of contemporary art in Thailand. Thus it had the imprimatur of government and a powerful corporation, which are not mutually exclusive bodies in this country.

525 The design can be traced back to the late 1990s with, for instance the Thai contemporary art magazine Art Record in 1994, edited by printmaker Wijit Apichatkriengkrai. Its cover and internal design layout resembled the American-based journal ArtForum, which has a wide global circulation. Additionally, the catalogues designed by Surasi Kusolwong for the Silpakorn University, such as for the `Print as Print: 1997 Graphic Arts Exhibition’, follow a mainstream design format.

229 Thailand for at least a decade, the text was published in both Thai and English, suggesting the intention for information to reach beyond the country of origin and have broad currency.

Displayed in five rooms at the National Art Gallery, Mindfulness comprised individual installations with separate titles including Evolution and Revolution: Thai European Fashion News (2000), which was supported by a web-based statement by Phatyos: `clothe ourselves modestly and not for the purpose of flaunting’.526 Evolution and Revolution was not intended to be a parody, but the television monitor with Thai catwalk models and neon-lit garments could be interpreted as highlighting inherent contradictions, given his devotion to Buddhist tenets. Only recourse to Phatyos’s electronic statement brought clarification to the readings of this particular work from Mindfulness. It is such contradictions in identity and interpretation of art works that emerge with hybridisation. At the start of the twenty-first century, ‘everyone has a “question mark” on his or her forehead about their next steps’, Gridthiya writes. ‘What kind of direction should we take? Going back to our tradition, or forward? Leaping over the past, and taking the fast lane to join the train of `international’ style? Or is there anything in between?’527

In contrast to the stylish consumerist tenor of Evolution and Revolution, there was an introspective mood in his installation Shed Skin (2001). The sloughed off skins of the snake (representing Naga) related to Outer Shell (2002), which featured a life-size mummy-like figure bound with similar skins. The chapel in Amidst Entertainment (2003) had a sanctuary-like function in keeping with a Thai Buddhist wat, but it did not have the gilded decorative motifs and the rich sensory inclusion of incense sticks and multi- coloured flowers normally associated with such sites. Instead, Phatyos’ contemplative environment resembled a New Age ‘minimalist’ retreat. He collaborated with Supol Lohachitkul to produce another installation, Way of the Breath, which was a large circular structure of screenprints on carborundum paper supported by a metal armature. The prints depicted diagnostic diagrams of heart waves from over a thousand people

526 Phatyos Buddhacharoen 2003, Mindfulness, available at http://www.rama9art.org/artisan/2003/february/mindfulness/left.html

527 Gridthiya Gaweewong 2001, op. cit.

230 (aged between 24 to 99) taken while they were practising transcendental meditation. Floor cushions were placed within the circle to encourage public participation.

The shed snakeskin was a strong motif in several of these installations. It was hung from black painted walls and ceilings with intervals of square-cut mirrors, and these reptilian remnants were geometrically reiterated as a stylised organic feature. The installations drew on contemporary minimalist design principles, yet the use of skins was inspired by the indigenous cultural significances they had in relation to Naga. In one of the National Gallery’s exhibition spaces, Outer Shell’s life-size mummy figure was swaddled with snake skins (in lieu of strips of muslin) to convey the idea of an individual’s transformation through the unravelling of the skeins.

Mindfulness clearly announced that the print was no longer a critical premise in Phatyos Buddhachroen’s practice. Indeed, after the 1990s, printmaking became integrated into installation. The print (now screenprinted text), rather than being central to the work, served as only as a didactic tool in combination with architectural and organic elements. Buddhist premises had comfortably served his print installations in 1996 and 1998, which evoked the natural world. However, in a highly urbanised context, lithography was no longer capable of providing imagery that critiqued the tension between an ancient faith and Western consumerist spectacle. Critical discourse on faith, articulated in a profoundly secularised environment, appears to have overridden the tactile seductiveness of autographic printmaking in his installation work.

Other Thai artists trained in printmaking at Silpakorn have also wrestled with the inability of traditional processes to serve their aspirations - Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, for instance, one of the few Thai women to have gained a comparable professional status to her male counterparts. She incrementally transformed her print practice into installation, and later video, over a period of some fifteen years from the mid-1980s. The link between the body, her gender and intaglio printmaking was clear to Araya when she stated in a letter from 2000 that ‘for me making prints is for women: systematic and delicate’.528 She trained as an intaglio printmaker, firstly as a student at the College of Fine Art, Bangkok, in the mid-1970s and then specialised in printmaking at Silpakorn,

528 Letter from Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook to Anne Kirker, 4 December 2000.

231 graduating with a Master of Fine Arts in 1986. To complete her printmaking training, Araya spent 1988-90 at the Hochschüle Für Bildende Kunste, Braunschweig, Germany. 529

Araya’s career confronts issues of gender, and patriarchal discrimination that are keenly relevant in many parts of contemporary Asia. She is less strident than Shimada in Japan, as her feminist prints and print installations are expressed in poetic, melancholic terms; as laments.530 Despite their different approaches to feminism, these women are transgressive artists in their respective countries. Both raise the question of representing the ‘Other’; whereby the polemics of masculine and feminine are vital considerations. Not only do they question how and what culture signifies but they also express their disquiet with the status quo by departing from conventional, and hence readily acceptable, approaches to printmaking.

As a respected and feisty graduate in printmaking from Silpakorn, Araya was appointed to the Faculty of Fine Arts at Chiang Mai University in 1987 (where she continues to teach). She made it clear that, to her mind, Thai art schools are restricting and conformist, when in 2002 she stated:

Art doesn’t give me much to eat. I earn my sustenance from teaching at a university even though whenever I pronounce ‘art institute’, the uncouth sound would detract from the taste of art – making it poisonous to the ears of those in the real art circle. 531

Given this attitude, it was not surprising that the artist undertook a period of postgraduate study in printmaking during 1988-90 at the school of art in Braunschweig, Germany (an institution where a number of Thai artists have trained). Typical of her etchings at the time, is The Parting of 1990, which conveys two illuminated figures emerging from deep shadow. (Plate 41) These small-scale etchings, which use the soft tonal aquatint process

529 She chose to take a Diploma in Graphic Arts at this art school, as it `is the best printmaking studio in Germany. But why Germany?: In Thailand there are only two countries, which continuously support art activities…and giving grants for post-graduation. They are Japan and Germany’. Quoted in letter from Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook to Anne Kirker, 24 January 1996.

530 See Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook 2002, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: Lament, Thai with English translation by Chamnongsri Ruthnin, Bangkok: Amarin.

531 Letter from Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook to Anne Kirker, 4 December 2000.

232 extensively, are confessional and cathartic. They are tactile and sensuous works that mine the poetics of light and dark.

After being selected for the First Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Araya took the opportunity of a prestigious international forum to move into installation work, being encouraged to do so by Apinan, who was an adviser for the Thai component of that event.532 One of Araya’s contributions to APT 1 was Three Boxes of Men and their Reflections (1993). (Plate 42) Here, three large intaglio prints were bonded to the top inside lid of black metal boxes holding reflective liquid (sump oil). At the time (in the context of Australia) she downplayed the feminist impulse in her work, explaining:

This [installation] was created in the summer of 1993: black metal boxes, open, each consisting of two opposites, divided by a line that separates the box from its cover. It is the line between people in an open space and their shadows…between the fighters and the losers; it’s the line where one decides whether to live or die… or, in a Buddhist way, it’s the dividing line between knowledge and ignorance, between deliverance and attachment …533

After APT 1 (1993) Araya began to discard printmaking altogether. She believed that by itself, etching was an anachronistic mode of communication. The artist concentrated instead on installations that have no reference to the print, yet arguably retain vestiges of reproductive technology, namely photography and camera-based work. They also have direct visual reference back to her early etchings. For instance, the performance she undertook at Chiang Mai Museum called A Walk, in 1999 (which was filmed), shows Araya in pale-toned clothing walking through a series of black muslin rooms. It resonated with her black and white etchings almost a decade earlier, made at Silpakorn, where figures emerge through shadowed spaces.

By moving away from printmaking, opportunities for exhibiting in high profile exhibitions increased. She was represented at the 10th Biennale of Sydney in 1996 with

532 The First Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art was held at the Queensland Art Gallery, 18 Sept.-5 Dec.1993.

533 Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook in Anne Kirker 1993, ‘Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’, The First Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, exh. cat., Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, p.47, 18 September-5 December 1993. In making the selection of artists, the conventional print is not perceived as appropriate ‘blockbuster’ material. By this stage, Araya herself had grown dissatisfied with the editioned print. .

233 an installation titled When an object gets sick II, which incorporated a column of X-rays of the human anatomy, held together by ‘bulldog’ clips. (The death of Araya’s father from cancer prompted such an installation.) Subsequently, the artist has responded to social injustice and corresponding issues of personal responsibility. In Chiang Mai and Braunschweig, she produced site-specific installations, reflecting the abuse of Thai women through prostitution in both those centres. This exploitation of women is a shared issue for both the European and Asian realm, yet Araya’s treatment is subdued, in keeping with her artistic sensibility and possibly as protection (as a female artist) against criticism in her country of origin. She comments:

[an] American woman…taking a course with the beautiful name of Cultural Management… wanted to see the fury of a female Thai artist! She won’t. How shall I ever tell her that that would be harder than searching for a needle at the bottom of an ocean – that’s a Thai saying, by the way. But if she had wanted to experience the fury of a Thai prostitute after servicing a client – then that’s something else! Now, that’s a scene from a film from real-life drama that could be called Thai art!’534

This quote accords with Simons’ work on case study research where the interviewer is alerted to situations where the interviewed subject will proffer a response not only to protect themselves but to satisfy the expectations of the ‘outsider’ interviewee.535 Even though the interviewee was of the same gender as Araya, a distancing occurred, based on the artist’s perception of unequal power relations and experience differentials. Historico- cultural reasons prompted an unwillingness to engage more fully with the interviewer.

Since the late 1990s Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook has used video art and performance to develop her feminist viewpoints in addressing the often taboo subject of ‘death’. I use the word ‘feminist’ in the sense that, like Western artists proclaiming this position in the 1970s, Araya takes the autobiographical, the hidden and personal, and most often the female subject, as central to her work. For instance, Reading for male and female corpses of 1998 and Reading for female corpse of 2001 are performances made to be captured on video film with the artist as chief protagonist. In 2005, with Montien Boonma, Araya represented Thailand at one of the most prestigious international art events, the Venice

534 Letter from Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook to Anne Kirker, 4 December 2000.

535 Simons 1996, `The Paradox of Case Study’, op.cit.

234 Biennale. They shared a pavilion under the title: ‘Those Dying Wishing to Stay, Those Living Preparing to Leave’.

In the late 1990s, the younger Bundith Phunsombatlert produced objects and installations with embossed plastic forms to comment on rampant consumerism in newly industrialised communities.536 In 1996, he had produced a series of four etchings with aquatint called Conditions of Living, which demonstrated the colossal human enterprise involved in erecting monolithic structures for modern city planning. 537 (Plate 43) Labourers constructing Bangkok’s freeways were compared with the elephants traditionally used to support the structure of chedis (Buddhist monuments) in these technically very accomplished prints.

As he refined his project, Bundith’s compositions became less representational and surreal.538 By 1998, the artist was applying the principles of the print to a three- dimensional format and using materials that could be readily identified with a culture transformed by Western consumerism. Inspired by product packaging, he press-moulded plastic plates screenprinted with identikit faces as well as cross-sections of the human brain and other organs. These images had been fixed with bar codes to symbolise that they are for sale – just like a commercial product. A vendor’s trolley (itself able to be replicated with identical precision) acted as display unit for these ‘prints’; the whole assemblage forming part of the artist’s Readymade Human Product project. which continued into 2000. (Plate 44) The chromium trolley with commercially printed embossed plastic units was part of Bundith’s contribution to the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial in 1999 and was unrecognisable in terms of traditional printmaking processes. However, by stressing standardisation of units and seriality and by using the materials of the modern marketplace it can be argued that he has here re-invested printmaking with its original social and political function.539

536 Bundith Phunsombatlert was born in 1972. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in graphic arts from Silpakorn University in 1996 and his Master of Fine Arts in 1999. He was represented at Beyond the Future: The Third Asia- Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in 1999 in Brisbane with ‘Readymade human product and Forms of emptiness’. The publication accompanying the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art featured an illustrated essay, `Bundith Phunsombatlert’, by Khetsirin Knitichan, Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery pp.156-57.

537 These etchings were accepted for the prestigious International Biennial of Graphic Art 1997, Ljubjana, Slovenia.

538 The distinctive tradition of Surrealism in Thai art, which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, known as ‘Surr’ art allowed …’artists to fuse freely subjects from society, religion, and politics’.,Apinan Poshyananda, 1992, op.cit.,p.232.

539 See Anne Kirker 1999, op. cit.

235

6.9 Chapter Summary

1. Printmaking in Thailand does not have the distinctive indigenous tradition of ukiyo-e colour woodblock printing in Japan as an historical reference, nor does it have a consistent print tradition (that charts direct colonial activity), like that occurring in other South-East Asian nations. Rather, in Thailand, the print was historically used as a didactic tool for instructing court mural painters in Western styles, was tangentially connected with printed ephemera, and was a byproduct of the book publishing industry. Hence the weight of a history of printmaking in that country has not been a factor in the evolution of contemporary printmaking.

2. While to Western viewers, the dominant characteristics of printmaking (from the 1970s onwards) in Thailand exploit decorativeness and technical finesse at the expense of conceptual substance, sometimes aspects of indigenous symbolism are embedded and may take the interpretation of these prints further. Arguably, the mixed-media prints of Thavorn Ko-Udomvit are a case in point. Furthermore, the advent of ‘Surr’ expression has transformed Buddhist themes into an amalgam of religion, myth, fantasy and socio-political commentary. In both respects, a transformative dimension in printmaking ‘content’ has occurred. Nevertheless, there appears to be reluctance, in these instances, to question the emphasis on virtuosity of technique as though a moral imperative (merit) is implied in achieving excellent workmanship. Furthermore, there has been no attempt to question or jettison widely recognisable conventions of printmaking such as two- dimensionality, print editions and domestic-scale imagery.

3. Prawat Laucharoen and Phatyos Buddhacharoen are two of a small number of contemporary Thai artists who during the 1980s and 1990s radicalised the print, deriving new meaning from the central precepts of this field (more particularly to do with process), which has implications for print scholarship worldwide. As an expatriate, Prawat commenced his print installations (during the 1980s) as an assault on the ‘merit’ of finesse in printmaking. He moved to direct social commentary in the following decade, when he witnessed the effects of

236 globalisation and violent anti-democracy in his country of birth. Despite the ‘gate- keeping’ role of Silpakorn University in Bangkok and the National Art Exhibition events that set conventional standards for Thai printmaking, Phatyos used lithography as an agent of environmental art and Buddhism as a determining force behind his installations.

4. These artists transformed printmaking from a discipline that has often been regarded as the ‘handmaiden’ or surrogate of painting (though this is less the case in Thailand than elsewhere) to a genre with its own authority. Reaching beyond this status, they have eroded the traditionally strict parameters of printmaking production, market and audience to command new sites of reception locally and internationally.

5. Prawat and Phatyos, together with Thai artists Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook and Bundith Phunsombatlert, through their installation-based practice have ‘deterritorialised’ the print, yet retained the fundamental qualities of printmaking; its ‘function’, ‘process’ and ‘materials’.

6. Prawat (chiefly through intaglio) and Phatyos (chiefly through lithography), demonstrate that by stressing materiality and process in their work, a disintegration between the old binary distinctions of ‘technique’ and ‘content’ occurs. Content is not overwhelmed by process, but is integral to it. In fact, the medium is the message, but in a guise completely at odds with conventional thinking. For despite the stress on technical virtuosity that Silpakorn instructors are known to favour in their teaching, Prawat, in particular, deliberately employs ‘de-skilling’ devices in his print practice. He has a vastly different approach to intaglio printing than, for instance, neo-traditional Surr artists.

7. These artists employ the field of art installation to provide an all-encompassing environment for engaging directly with their audiences and for enforcing ideas rooted in positive social values, those that are generated directly from the context of Thailand.

237 8. Just as Western art movements have been accommodated by Thailand (especially from King Rama V’s time) and through the significant influence of Silpa Bhirasari at Silpakorn University, the print installations of Prawat and Phatyos have been inflected by Minimalism (for instance), yet infused with local meaning. The artists work between and across different discourses, one external and adopted, the other embedded in the issues and traditions of the culture in which they were born. Their respective work with printmaking displays the tensions between Western styles and indigenous content as an inspiring conundrum. By the 2000s, the print component of Phatyos’s installations especially (and those of Araya) became marginalised by these artists as the conceptual demands prompted them to use other means of visual representation. With Bundith, the artist rephrased the materials of serial-based print imagery by employing plastic moulded forms, commercially printed according to his specifications, for his installations.

238 Chapter 7 CONCLUSION AND PROPOSITIONS

This thesis is based on the belief that the conceptual and formal innovations of some Australian, Japanese and Thai printmakers contributed to a deeper understanding of contemporary art as it has developed since the late 1960s, but particularly during the 1980s and 1990s. Therefore, in the countries concerned, it is interpreted through a prism of postmodernism. As Charles Green (1993), a significant Australian art academic (and an artist himself), remarks: ‘The conjunction of printmaking and the postmodern is important because changing definitions of truth and identity are central to the postmodern period.’540 Green not only elevated the field beyond its former peripheral (craft-based) status to declare ‘Art as Printmaking’, but also acknowledged that stimulating and provocative readings could be brought to it.

The seven artists I have focused on in this thesis are specific to the Asia-Pacific region. This gives my arguments an added significance, as it is this region that has been denied exposure in substantial texts on world printmaking.

While the case studies reported in chapters 4, 5 and 6 are specific to the Asia-Pacific region, the artists selected to support my arguments have evolved work that reflects ‘The Local and the Global’, which implies Indigenous and Western modes of experience.541 Therefore issues related to postcolonialism and globalisation are inevitably brought to bear when interpreting the print works of Noda Tetsuya and Shimada Yoshiko from Japan, Bea Maddock, Raymond Arnold and Judy Watson from Australia and Prawat Laucharoen and Phatyos Buddhacharoen from Thailand. Yet it is not a simple binary split of ‘here and there’ that occurs; rather, what is reflected is a process of transcultural engagement with its attendant reciprocity, ruptures and recuperations.

Printmakers have often resisted the alignment of this practice with broader and more challenging arenas of visual arts discussion. However, the data of this thesis leads to the conclusion that this field risks becoming an anachronism unless it is responsive and contributes to wider contemporary discourse and it is the printmakers I discuss who

540 Green 1993, op. cit., p.10.

541 Hall 1997, op. cit., pp. 19-39.

239 demonstrate this as well. Their work is the evidence of this consanguity. Furthermore, questions of cultural identity and representation must also be considered, for they cannot be divorced from considerations of printmaking as an indexical field. It is the exploration of technical and stylistic processes in tandem with broader areas of contemporary theory (namely postmodernism, postcolonialism and globalisation) that marks the innovation of the print field and takes it into uncharted territory.

The term ‘Art and Culture’ is ubiquitously used in describing the phenomenon of art making in a social sphere. Yet it is essential to underscore the symbiotic nexus between production (in this thesis, that of the print) and the historical, cultural and social contexts that frame and inform the image. It is also, as this thesis proves, more than ever important to articulate ‘cultures’ rather than ‘culture’ as the operative term in the late twentieth century. It is also necessary to suspend the judgment of ‘time-lapse’ when attributes of postmodernism are manifested outside a Euramerican location. For instance, feminism became particularly marked amongst progressive thinkers in Japan after Emperor Hirohito’s death in 1989 and Shimada was, as a consequence, compelled to critique the effects of his reign on women (especially during World War II) in her printmaking. Hence, while the comments of Craig Owens on feminism as the quintessential postmodern condition came earlier (in Foster’s The Anti-Aesthetic 1983), with a Western- based readership in mind, his comments are equally prescient in other contexts.

The works created by the thesis’ case study artists, when analysed within the environments in which they are produced and exhibited, are found to adopt and transgress Euramerican norms, even though Western ideologies and modes of imagery remained influential. In terms of formal practice, the innovation shown through their print work acknowledges tradition, while at the same time substantially shifting the field of printmaking towards ‘deterritorialisation’. This ‘deterritorialisation’ is commensurate with the specific location of production and is definitely not homogenous.

In these liminal situations, the print becomes reinvigorated, and can be claimed to constitute an integral part of mainstream art practice. It poses fresh and significant perspectives for contemporary art as a whole. The artists selected demonstrate that the time-honoured processes of printmaking – the materiality and serial attributes, the ‘performance’ of it through particular techniques – do not need to be jettisoned to re-

240 invigorate the medium. Rather, these printmakers require the knowledge of their chosen discipline and its local history to take it further ‘as a continual process of anticipated futures and reconstructed pasts’.542 It is therefore essential to discuss the materialist formalist aspects of the medium and they are a core consideration in my arguments. Moreover, when printmaking is considered as a field capable of re-invention, its relevancy for postmodernism is assured. While not dispensing with tradition, its radical transformation of conventional canons and processes, and its interdisciplinary reach, make it an ideal topic for further critiques of it as a vital sector in contemporary art.

All of the artists selected maintain the autographic (handmade) and haptic elements in their image-making. While several of them employ photographic and digital printmaking (especially the former), they use them in a symbiotic manner. This symbiosis of processes is necessary for both formal and conceptual purposes. Noda is a case in point. His ‘hybrid’ prints (from 1968 to the present) combine photo-screen imagery and woodblock, allowing him to reference the autobiographic (through the artist’s diaristic snapshots), as well as engage with the Japanese print tradition.

Other artists in this thesis extend or alter their technical ‘vocabularies’ to match conceptual purposes. Maddock, for instance, stated at the start of the 1970s that she adopted photo-screenprinting as a means to engage with the world through new technology. Later in her career she produced the panoramic installation work Terra Spiritus…with a darker shade of pale (1993-98), and she editioned drawings that deliberately eschewed photo-mechanical print techniques. She believed that, in order to treat Tasmania as reflecting the axis between pre- and postcolonialism, materials should evolve from natural ochres collected there and processes should emulate the scientific drawings of early surveyors. Furthermore, Maddock had reached the point in her career where ‘Progress for me is “going back”…We have to go back to the grass roots and find out more about how to “go back” with knowledge.’543

The indexical features of traditional printmaking underpin the ambitious print installations of Thai artist Prawat Laucharoen. In choosing installation, a field.that ‘is at

542 Foster 1999, op. cit.. p.207.

543 Bea Maddock in conversation with Pauline Bindoff 1987, op. cit., p.1.

241 once catholic, resistant to definition, consistently surprising, the most open-ended of all contemporary artistic practices, perhaps even threatening to the established order’, the artist was able to rid himself of the moniker of professional master printer and explore his own print activity in a highly iconoclastic manner. In 1981 he collaborated with conceptual artist Dennis Oppenheim whose robust performance practice was one of the inspirations for Prawat to move away from editioning images as such. He stated, ‘I remember Dennis made a work using a tracker [felt-tip pen] to draw a mark, making a line across one corner of a room to another.’ He later added, ‘it looked like an engraving. He also did a performance where he put a book onto his chest and lay down outside letting the sun burn his skin around it... It was like a block placed on something and then taken away…a form of printing.’544

Prawat, and later Phatyos, demonstrate that Thai print artists of their kind have an eye for interdisciplinary, almost post-medium, avenues for their art. They are fundamentally conceptualists and in that sense are not overshadowed or outpaced by Euramerican artists’ use of performance, installation art and conceptualism. In fact, in many ways, based on empirical comparative evidence, they are more adventurous.

7.1 Theoretical Considerations

Given the complexity and shifting parameters of the new order of print work produced by Shimada, Maddock, Prawat and the other artists considered in this thesis, the first question posed was:

 What theoretical considerations underlay the expansion of the fundamental principles of printmaking as it evolved in the work of the artists concerned in Japan, Australia and Thailand?

The first proposition to emerge from the case studies is that there are three categories of theoretical positioning relevant to understanding the expanding nature of the print as it evolved in the hands of selected printmakers from this Asia-Pacific region. These are:

544 Prawat Lauchareon in conversation with Anne Kirker, the artist’s Great Jones Street studio, New York, 20 Feb. 1994.

242

1. The postmodern milieu and shifting strategies of print expression when meta- narratives are rethought.

2. Conditions of contingency when cultural borders are crossed.

3. Transformations in printmaking when the ‘old’ is accommodated and rephrased as the ‘new’.

Each of these categories is explored below:

7.1a The Postmodern Milieu and Printmaking

With exceptions (namely in Imprint and in Charles Green’s contribution to Art Monthly Australia), postmodernism and the print have been addressed mostly through Euramerican literature, by academics and/or practising printmakers. These responses were mainly written from the mid-1980s to the 1990s. The authors of most relevance here are Americans Ruth Weisberg (1986; 1990; 1993) and Hugh Merrill (1993).545 The former addressed aesthetic theory and the print, taking critical models from cultural theorists such as Jameson; while Merrill, through the lens of Marxism, stressed the print as a ‘communication’ didactic tool and hence limited its scope. They published their theoretical investigations in specialist print journals with limited readership.

While useful in departing from the usual commentary on printmaking as a craft with detailed technical analysis and artists’ biographies, these writers have not, however, made an impact beyond a guild-based constituency. Likewise, despite the international print biennales and triennials that have occurred since the 1960s, these events have not been accompanied by commentaries with critical value. Rather, they are opportunities for promoting nationalism and are used to further the careers of participating artists.

In Canada, Walter Jule (1997) in his book Sightlines: Printmaking and Image Culture, made the salient point that regional distinctions are important in determining the

545 Weisberg 1986; 1990; 1993, op. cit; Merrill 1993, op. cit.

243 production of print imagery, and he included Japan and Thailand in his analysis. Biennials strive for informality through restricted selection criteria and can be assessed through superficial regionalist readings (by the way the prints ‘look’ and techniques used). However, such coverage does not embody the depth of meaning and analysis Jule intends.

Therefore, the print field urgently requires an analysis of the impact of complex theoretical discourse about printmaking and its relationship to broader visual arts commentaries, to provide a more testing analysis of the print in the late twentieth century. Krauss’ famous essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, republished in Foster’s 1983 anthology, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, is an important guide in this regard. The American scholar called for epochal ideological shifts in the interpretation of the visual arts, and she intended that the full ramifications of the postmodern era be taken into consideration.

Flowing from these influential texts, I informed my analyses of the case studies with formative texts on postmodernity, such as those by the eminent philosopher Jean- François Lyotard. Lyotard refused to shape his arguments in conformity to metanarratives or to frame them solely within one discipline of human endeavour. His seminal study, ‘The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge’ (1984), embraced art as much as psychoanalysis and politics in his cultural analysis, which reinforced the multidisciplinary terrain in which the term can be applied.546 Similarly, the printmaking I use to exemplify arguments resists easy categorisation.

From non-Western epistemology, Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (2007) and essays in Third Text journal, especially by Geeta Kapur (1997), stressed the ‘postcolonial/postmodern entanglement’. Stuart Hall (1991) reminded scholars that the term ‘globalisation’ is by no means a recent phenomenon. The latter cautioned that globalisation ‘is working on the terrain of post-modern culture as a global formation, which is an extremely contradictory space. Within that, we have entirely new forms which we are only beginning to understand.’547

546 Lyotard 1984, op. cit.

547 Hall 1991, op.cit., p.39.

244

In Australia, John Clark (1998) wrote about ‘modalities of transfer’ and disputed the limitations commentators of Western modernism imposed on Asian art. He underscored differences as much as commonalities between Euramerican–originating specifications of the ‘modern’. In his book Modern Asian Art, Clark interpreted postmodernism as an extension of modernism.548 His book also addressed Japan and Thailand at length.The case studies in this thesis aim to reveal the fluidity of readings that emerge from the term ‘postmodern’.

To accomplish a focused investigation of printmaking in the Asia-Pacific region, the methodology chosen was that of the ‘case study’, paying close attention to empirical evidence (image comparison) and primary source material. While theoretical models may have been generated from ‘outside’ the contexts of Japan, Australia and Thailand, they have been applied with keen attention to the specificity of the artists’ practice. Given the Euramerican comprehension of postmodernism (texts by Lyotard, for instance), slippages inevitably occur when the case studies examined are located beyond its direct influence. Therefore, new modes of interpretation, which offer more accurate assessments of contemporary printmaking, become part of the consideration of postmodernism and visual arts’ place within it.

Helen Simons stressed in her analysis of case study methodology the importance of focusing in depth and avoiding the tendency to homogenise or generalise results. Rather, as her ‘The Paradox of Case Study’ clearly indicates, paradox and contradiction are perfectly acceptable.549 This situation has been revealed in my own assessment of the artists when the print is shown to be part of an expanding field of art, when the contemporary arises from the traditional, or when transculturalism is a leit-motif.

7.1b Conditions of Contingency When Cultural Borders Are Crossed

Historically, printmaking in Japan fits neatly under the term ‘transculturalism’. Despite the popular view that pre-Meiji Japan was closed to ‘modernising’ forces, the country has a long history of ‘inter’ or transcultural engagement, including with the West, which has

548 Clark 1998, op.cit.

549 Simons 1996, op. cit.

245 prompted Indigenous printmaking to be transformed into a hybrid, ‘in-between’ expression of identity. In printmaking, this hybridisation occurred two centuries before Bhabha (1994) first published The Location of Culture, in which he elaborated upon how different power structures (and by extension, aesthetic forms) can merge into `hybrid’ configurations. Etching practised in Edo, after exemplars received via the Dutch settlement at Nagasaki during the eighteenth century, is a case in point. Hence the term ‘postmodernism’ (especially in the case of appropriation) cannot be confined to the late twentieth century when the history of Japanese printmaking is studied.

With Noda Tetsuya, time-honoured traditions (through processes and haiku-like attention to the quotidian in Japanese life) are conveyed through the rhetoric of photography and the Western-style conceptualism he encountered in the United States.550 With Shimada Yoshiko, her feminist beliefs (chiefly modelled on Euramerican examples) urged her to create work outside Japan in the early 1990s and to cultivate new audiences. Due to the grip of Tennoism (or Emperor-worship), her native country disallowed overtly political imagery in art and, for a time, she was obliged to alternate her working base between Tokyo, the United States and Berlin. Only in 2000 did she take up full-time residency in Japan again. As an indication of the former prejudice against her work, Shimada’s major Divide and Rule series of photo-etchings (that critique Hirohito’s long reign and its manipulation of women in World War II) was exhibited in Canada (1997), not in the place of her origin. The aftermath of the Emperor’s death in1989 slowly witnessed the re- emergence of a more open society in Japan; one which accommodated, albeit reluctantly in conventional circles, opposition to patriarchal values.

By the time Shimada collaborated with Japanese performance artist BuBu and made collages of their work (in 1998), which were subsequently editioned as inkjet prints (in 2002), a number of art institutions in Japan were prepared to exhibit her art. Therefore, in the case of Shimada, the cultural climate of her country had initially militated against her atypical Japanese printmaking.. Despite learning the etching technique in Tokyo, the products of this teaching (Shimada’s overtly political critique as well as her intentionally ‘unpolished’ approach to etching) were not culturally acceptable in Japan.

550 His matter-of-fact use of diary dates as titles, given below each image, testifies to a trope of 1960s Conceptualism.

246 In Australia, the printmaking of the three case study artists accords with postmodern paradigms of identity, cultural contexts and place. Maddock’s photo-mechanical prints of the 1970s bear this out as much as her Terra Spiritus: a quintessential postcolonial statement.This installation of editioned drawings is a memorial to the Indigenous peoples of Tasmania. Judy Watson’s bi-cultural ancestry prompted her to draw on the matrilineal side of her family (Aboriginal) in terms of concepts and subject matter, yet her lithographs and intaglio prints were couched in Western techniques. Furthermore, as an urban Indigenous artist, she operates in a liminal mode, not fully accepted by tribal clans, yet recognised by mainstream ‘white’ Australia as an Indigenous artist.

Raymond Arnold’s choice to alternate his working base between Paris and Tasmania brings a different type of transcultural focus to printmaking. His approach accords with Bhabha (1994) and his observation that ‘it is in the emergence of the interstices – the overlap and displacement of domains of difference – that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated’.551 Furthermore, Arnold’s prints demonstrate liminality, as an in-between designation of identity, which stands for the symbolic interactions. In Maddock’s case, `liminality’ stands for radical revisionism in the way she couples Palawa language with nineteenth-century English placenames, surveyor-like renditions of coastline and an ochre base that is equated primarily with country in Aboriginal Australia.

With Watson, it is reciprocation between Aboriginal customary values (as practised outside of urban contexts) and those that are decidedly Western. With Arnold it is to do with his attraction to Paris as a centre of cosmopolitan sophistication, in contrast to his base in Tasmania, a frontier territory of wilderness Australia. He has used the print as a vehicle that most accurately allows him to mirror the tensions between centre and periphery, and equally to propose a relational equivalence between otherwise oppositional categories.

Originally from Thailand, Prawat is also a `transcultural’ subject. He has been based in New York since 1969 and periodically returns to Bangkok. The larger metropolis provided opportunities to engage with avant-garde practitioners and gave him the

551 Bhabha 2007, op. cit., p.2.

247 freedom to experiment once he had decided his employment as a master printer had run its course. He was drawn towards the robust work of his contemporaries there, such as Dennis Oppenheim, and collaborated with the performance artsist and sculptor in 1981.

7.1c Radical Revisionism When the ‘Old’ is Rephrased as the ‘New’

Just as ‘reality’ is a situation that changes constantly as part of human interaction, evolution and enterprise, there is no single way of interpreting printmaking. Print specialist Hyatt Mayer (1971), for instance, remarked that ‘familiar facts regroup into unexpected patterns…especially when you try to see prints as the outcome of old traditions, and old prints as though their ink still smelled.’552 There are givens with printmaking; namely the image made on a matrix, transposed by ink (or an allied substance) to another surface (mostly paper), with the possibility of editioning multiple copies (impressions). Furthermore, there are five key print processes that continue to be mined by artists; namely, relief, intaglio, planographic, screenprint (and more recently, electrostatic).

In rethinking aspects of his postmodern texts from the mid-1980s, Hal Foster (1996) stated, ‘there are particular knowledges inscribed in artistic practices and academic disciplines that are not dead letters – meanings and values can be resignified and revalued.’553 Maddock has already been cited in this chapter for her radical reappraisement of ‘editioning’ and how the field of drawing can be employed as a form of multiple to the extent that it becomes almost indistinguishable from an etching with aquatint. Without Maddock’s in-depth practice as a printmaker, it is inconceivable that she would have produced Terra Spritus, an installation of 51 drawings in an edition of 5. Noda’s commitment to the ukiyo-e print tradition is literally demonstrated by the way this artist begins his editioned images with the printing of ink from a woodblock onto paper. Only after laying this barren-rubbed ‘ground’, does he overlay his photo-screen composition; twinning a Japanese invention with that from Europe. In the case of Phatyos in Thailand, stone lithography is used in his print installations as an integral part of his conceptual framework, which is rooted in Buddhism and the natural environment.

552 Mayer 1971, op. cit.

553 Cited in Kwon 1996, op. cit., p. 62.

248 In terms of postcolonialism and contexts that have hitherto been perceived as in the ‘margins’, Bhabha (1994) again is useful. He sees ‘the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation. Such art does not merely recall the past as social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent “in-between” space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present. The “past-present” becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia, of living.’554 This is obvious in all of the case studies addressed in this thesis. The printmakers concerned re-envisage history and tradition as a means of creating new paradigms for their field. Their respective work demonstrates that without history, there can be no tangible measure of the ‘new’.

Furthermore, these artists work dialogically, in that they both accept and contest the specific print traditions that have evolved in their own countries. In Japan, this approach involves reaching back to the venerable ukiyo-e woodblock images and negotiating the twentieth century ‘creative print’ sōsaku hanga tradition (which still largely conforms to guild-based premises). Noda and Shimada substantially stretch the discipline in Japan to introduce new meanings. In Australia, printmaking emerges from the English colonial legacy and the consequent displacement of . Yet, in Australia, Euramerican canons of print practice have been critiqued and re-worked to extend the boundaries of the tradition. For instance, Meryon was perceived (along with Seymour- Haden and Whistler in England) as the artist-printmaker par excellence and it is no accident that Arnold took an unfinished etching by the Frenchman to join, or ‘hinge’, Northern and Southern Hemispheres in a symbolic action. The ‘South’ has often been perceived as inferior, and in the 2000s is the subject of theoretical discourse in Australia.

In Thailand, printmaking is identified as stemming from the 1950s when Italian-born Corrado Feroci (Bhirasri) became head of Bangkok’s Silpakorn University of Fine Arts. He encouraged modernism whilst also supporting traditional Thai art. Therefore this thesis has heeded the specificity of individual histories in the Asia-Pacific, rather than attempting to homogenise the print practice in the three countries concerned. This discussion leads to a response to the second research question posed in this thesis.

554 Bhabha 2007, op.cit., p.7.

249 7. 2 Impact of History and Cultural Imperatives

The second question considered in this thesis was:

 What were the historical and cultural imperatives that encouraged print artists from these countries to embrace a wider sphere of art activity?

The structure of this thesis revolves around nation-states and it is important to reflect on what this means within a postmodern milieu.

This reflection leads to the second proposition to emerge from my analysis. While the idea of a self-contained geopolitical territory is problematic, it does demonstrate how print activity in Japan, Australia and Thailand both confirms national identity and radically departs from a fixed notion of identity. Innovation requires displacement from the status quo as ideas mutate and take on complex forms of significance. Therefore, just as country of origin and influence are pivotal for the artists concerned, so too is the force of globalisation and identification with other cultures.

There are three issues that emerge from this proposition that required examination.

1. Nationness

2. Institutional Gate-keepers

3. Jettisoning authority to enable change to emerge

Each of these is elaborated below.

7.2a Nationness

The case study artists addressed in the thesis are innovators. While residual modernism can be traced in their work, it is nevertheless more accurately postmodern in its avoidance of strict ‘typecasting’ and openness to experimentation.All the printmakers in

250 the case studies received training and acknowledged the print field as pivotal in their art practice. In Japan, Australia and Thailand, the print has a distinctive presence and therefore is an ideal field through which to explore the impact of history, social forces and cultural imperatives within these contexts. However, nowhere can `nationness’ be sustained as an absolute, and characteristics attributed to it in the three case studies are necessarily tempered by intermediation with other cultures.

Since postmodernism and postcolonialism gained ground in the 1990s as models by which to understand and add meaning to seemingly contradictory impulses, this thesis has been positioned to avoid using the concept of ‘nation’ as a homogenising and unifying force. Rather, the case studies have been chosen from territories in the Asia- Pacific region where print activity is strong. All three ‘nations’ comprise internal cultural differences and values and all have been influenced by Euramerican culture to some extent. In 1999, new generation Thai critic Thanom Chakakdee states `We are still following Western style, material and ideas, but artists are trying to mix in the context of Thai society and culture….They want to separate Thai and Western, but still talk about globalisation!` 555

Munroe (1994) observed that in Japan, tensions between preserving traditions and cultivating ‘world relevance’ had been debated at an intellectual and political level since the Meiji Restoration of 1868.556 Hence the Japanese have long accepted negotiation between the ‘local’ and ‘global’, which to many ‘outsiders’ (especially with Tokyo in mind) was unfathomable557 Co-presences of seemingly different values and technical practices in printmaking are manifested in Noda’s work, where time-honoured customs are mediated through both Japanese and Western aesthetic values. Nevertheless, with his younger colleague Shimada, conflict arises when officialdom discourages departures from designated political and aesthetic conventions.

555 Chakakdee 1999, quoted in Pettifor, op. cit., p.73.

556 Munroe 1994, op. cit.

557 Barthes 1983, op. cit.

251 Shimada was unable to exhibit her profoundly anti-establishment photo-etchings in Japan for some time, while Noda’s printmaking was admired. Arguably, this was partly because Noda has been deliberately evasive when describing his print practice. ‘My works are about private matters, about everyday life.’ he explains. 558 While his colleague from her feminist platform stridently critiqued Tennoism and decisively worked against the phallocentric order, Noda, from an older generation and a revered teacher of printmaking at Tokyo Geidai, worked more cautiously through `tradition’ and accepted notions of national identity with his diaristic prints. For him, this implied reconciling Zen principles, for example, with attributes appropriated from the United States (viz documentary photography, minimalism and conceptual art). In the case of Shimada, the concept of `nationalism’ is deeply problematic. She sought through her practice to revise official readings of it radically. To do this, she initially used the values of other contexts (in the United States and Europe) to assist in this process.

There is no doubt that gender and formative life experience, as much as the generational `divide’ between these two artists, influenced their respective approaches to printmaking. However, they both shared a desire to break with specific histories and traditions. Without letting these go entirely. Noda was exposed to Buddhist moral codes and traditions as a child through his father’s family, and a harmonious resolution to aesthetics is at the core of his work. In contrast, Shimada recalls ‘growing up in a US [military] base town, seeing Japanese women selling sexual services to the US soldiers’, and later trained in the United States, where she was exposed to radical feminism.559

However, despite the vast differences in the premises and motivations to their printmaking, Noda and Shimada employed photographic sources in ways that single- handedly usurped the decorative bias and charge of derivativeness besetting the Japanese contemporary print movement. Noda used it as a record of the quotidian; Shimada as a weapon to effect social change. It is their application of photography (or shashin) as a key pictorial element that takes their respective work beyond conventional modes of sōsaku hanga and moves it into a broader visual arts context.

558 Noda Tetsuya, email correspondence with the author, 10 February 2006.

559 Cited in Hiroshi, 2002, op. cit.

252 Significantly, Noda’s and Shimada’s prints act as a point of encounter between the mainstream ‘avant-garde’ and the guild-based specialist realm of printmaking in Japan. Although Shimada deliberately ‘wounds’ her etching plates in the service of her image, both she and Noda edition and market their prints. They avoid decorative subject matter and overt finesse in technique, yet adhere to the intrinsic property of printmaking as a way of widely distributing art imagery.

Australia privileged Britain by adopting the British painter-etching tradition for prints produced in the early twentieth century. It was not until a wave of post-World War II émigrés from Europe spearheaded a contemporary print revival (in Melbourne especially) that alternative paradigms were adopted. From the 1960s, the United States (with New York as the epicentre) offered a youthful, avant-garde model for the visual arts and became a persuasive yardstick by which to judge aesthetic and conceptual progressiveness. This led Terry Smith (1974) to declare that Australian artists felt subservient to American art practice.560 With the exception of the etchings of Fred Williams, which described the local landscape without obvious resort to British or American exemplars, many of the artists who regarded themselves as printmakers were loath to abandon the ‘print guild’ and associated institutional opportunities.

In Thailand, the print was connected with ephemera as a byproduct of the book publishing industry. Printmaking did not join the lexicon of fine arts until the 1950s. With Silpakorn University as the centre of activity, modernist printmaking was encouraged and blended technical finesse with indigenous subjects (i.e. folklore and village life) or symbolism (drawn from temple murals or intricate textile designs). Projections of nationhood did not invite reflection, except in terms of style and technique. It was this passive acceptance of the status quo that prompted Prawat to break from officially sanctioned traditions of printmaking. In the comparatively neutral context of the Queensland Art Gallery, Prawat’s print installation The Four Elements (1993) critiqued the guiding pillars of Thai nationhood, religion, the monarchy and the constitution. At the time, such a work would have been censored (even in the comparatively liberal context of Bangkok).

560 Smith 1974, op. cit.

253 7.2b Institutional Gate-keepers

In sociological terms, ‘gatekeeping’ is a mechanism that sets the terms by which a nation controls its subjects and represents itself and ideology. As a result, open discourses can be stifled (or driven underground). In the visual arts, gate-keepers include art schools, curators, art dealers as well as opinion-setting academics, art critics and journalists. However, as Clark (1998) observes, ‘artists are an important category of those people who move between cultures and some develop parallel identities between one or more cultures.’561 Prawat, with his dual citizenship (Thai and American), developed symbolic freedoms through being situated in the interstice between Bangkok and New York. It had been the same with Shimada (based for a time in the United States and Berlin) and with Arnold (Australia and Paris).

All seven principal case study artists addressed in this thesis were nevertheless trained in printmaking in their countries of origin. They were subject to the particularities of national art school systems and the indigenous legacies of their particular discipline. In Japan, the 250-year-old tradition of ukiyo-e woodblock prints had strict rules and regulations. Early sōsaku hanga practitioners, on the other hand, were not part of a collaborative enterprise that produced large numbers of images for wide dispersion. These `creative print’ artists were individualists and the product of the Meiji period when Western-style modernism became part of the official slogan of Bunmei Kaika (Civilisation and Enlightenment). With this background, printmakers had autonomy as artists in control of each stage of the production of their work, yet they were as a matter of course trained in Euramerican-style movements.

Onchi Kōshirō was the most significant pioneer of modern Japanese printmaking from the 1910s to the1930s. Paradoxically, his own practice displayed unapologetic contrariness, rephrasing abstract expressionism early on, then later rephrasing Utamaro- style bijin (beautiful women).In 1939 his printmaking was voluntarily placed at the service of nationalism when he became a war artist. Chameleon-like, he responded to the socio-political climate as much as to shifting patterns in international art. Onchi helped found the first printmaking association (the Nihon Sōsaku Hanga Kyōkai, the Japan

561 Clark 1998, Modern Asian Art, op.cit., p.294.

254 Creative Print Association, 1918-31) and similar guild-based bodies continued into the late twentieth century.

Without the innovative verve of that time in Japan and Onchi’s presence as a figurehead, such bodies declined in significance as conveyors of speculative innovation in printmaking. They no longer bore the influence of his ‘commitment to individuality and his acute sensitivity to artistic developments.’562 Instead, the print became merely a commodity and answered to predictable formulaic solutions. By the 1990s such organisations had turned their back on any engagement with the forces of postmodernism. At this time, Japanese print expert Lawrence Smith stated that the field had ‘run out of energy... visits to the recent annual exhibitions of the Japanese Print Association have given the impression of superlative technique with little new artistic inspiration’. 563

While it is necessary to be aware of the differences between Western and Japanese aesthetic standards (the latter traditionally places an emphasis on materiality and technique and does not distinguish between ‘craft’ and ‘art’), Smith’s observations appear to be shared by Noda and Shimada, neither of whom was associated to any large extent with print associations. Instead, they were supported by dealers: Tokyo’s Fuji Television Gallery in Noda’s case, and from 1995, by Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo in Shimada’s case. They also attracted international recognition, as Noda was acknowledged in print biennales and triennials and achieved a solo exhibition at a major museum in San Francisco in 2004, while Shimada held a solo show at A Space Gallery, Toronto (1997). At around the same time, she was also included in major group shows in progressive Tokyo art museums.

Noda is Professor of Printmaking at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music and is now an institutional gate-keeper himself. With other prestigious art schools in Japan, Tokyo Geidai places considerable emphasis on drawing in tandem with the intricacies of print techniques; a factor born out in Noda’s own work. (This is demonstrated by the way he manipulates his photographic imagery with drawing before it is finally screenprinted.) Digital technology is not regarded as part of the visual arts

562 Chiaki 2000, op.cit., p.9.

563 Smith 1994, op. cit., p.19.

255 lexicon, as photo-etcher Ikeda Ryôji explains of Musashino Art University, ‘Within the technical and philosophical framework of our printmaking program, computer graphics would not be considered art. Printmaking is one step above and quite removed from computer graphics.’564

This explanation demonstrates the corralling of the print in high profile art schools in Japan, away from the vibrant and progressive domain of manga and advertising. It is a protective measure, to ensure that the field of ‘hanga’ retains a distinctive presence, especially in Tokyo; the site of extraordinary innovation in graphic design. Not surprisingly, Shimada avoided any coercion into a four-year curriculum for printmakers. She learned etching from an ‘independent’ art school, Bigakkô in Kanda (Tokyo) and later extended it into installation and performance work.

Despite his close links with Tokyo Geidai, Noda prefers to conduct his own print practice in the domestic familiarity of his home and to view it as an intensely private pursuit. The arena that has acknowledged his work is that of the specialised print arena (in Japan and beyond), while Shimada’s practice (comprising her photo-etching, installation work and inkjet prints) has been accorded recognition by independent art venues, feminist-aligned art publications and generally ‘alternative’ visual arts contexts. In the 1980s and early 1990s this was exclusively in the West, while by the end of the 1990s, with changing values in Japan, her printmaking was embraced by Tokyo’s more progressive art museums, such as the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOT) and university-based galleries.

While they are both hanga proponents, the strong photographic nature of their printmaking has placed collecting institutions in a quandary. This is a familiar scenario in general for artists working within postmodernism, where a lack of easy categorisation is anathema for art museums with in-depth collections. Taxonomies are not easily changed and the tolerance for work that is not easily classified according to art discipline depends upon the professional staff concerned. Hence the relationship between Noda and Shimada and the gate-keeping powers of such institutions are complex.

564 Ryôji, in Jule (ed.) 1997, op. cit., pp.207-08.

256

The prints of both these artists have been purchased by institutions as diverse as Tokyo’s Metropolitan Museum of Photography and the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts. Of these two leading discipline-specific institutions in Japan, Noda is collected by both, while Shimada’s feminist, politically sensitive photo-etchings have only been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Photography, a less conservative body.565 When asked why she was not collected by Machida, the artist conjectured that ‘I don’t think they consider me as a “pure”printmaking artist [and] I guess they don’t want to deal with art that deals with history and politics.’566

In Australia, the arrival of print-trained migrant artists and curators during the 1940s and 1950s was the catalyst for the establishment of printmaking departments at art schools and concerted collecting of original prints by art galleries/museums. From Germany, printmaker Udo Sellbach and art historian and curator Ursula Hoff, were pivotal national figures in providing an alternative forum to the otherwise largely British influence. Both figures were intent on elevating the print as an art form in Australia. Nevertheless, as Grishin (1994) points out, ‘printmaking as a separate, recognized art form – one where relief printing, intaglio, lithography and screenprinting were all brought together under a single roof – was a phenomenon which scarcely predated the 1960s.’567 This was when the Print Council of Australia (PCA), which was based on the Print Council of America and organisations such as the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hanover, commenced its quarterly journal Imprint.

The PCA attracted strong membership from printmakers and collectors alike. The Council’s mandate was democratically aligned. Donald Brook (1968) summed this up in a report in the Sydney Morning Herald where he saw printmaking as a way of introducing art to a new and broad-based spectrum of consumers.568

565 Itazu Satoru, master printer in lithography (Itazu Litho-Grafik, Tokyo), in conversation with the author, Brisbane, 17.Oct.2006, stated ‘Machida is a conservative place, only interested in purchasing well known artists while the Metropolitan Museum of Photography sees photography as a broader field.”

566 Shimada Yoshiko, email correspondence with the author, 18 November 2004.

567 Grishin 1994, op. cit., p.16.

568 Brook 1968, op. cit.

257 Within the organisation, the thorny issue of what comprised an ‘original print’ was addressed at the outset. It was perceived that guidelines were needed for the new print organisation. Sellbach (1967) acknowledged in Imprint that, given trends elsewhere, traditional distinctions between ‘graphic media’ were too limiting for the Australian context. While he urged exploration and innovation in the field, it was in order to keep pace with external standards of quality and originality. For Sellbach, Australian printmaking was perceived as ‘conservative and timid [while] the international scene shows definite signs of a new and inventive attitude…it will only be a matter of time until we find ourselves confronted by these new prints.’ 569

The impact of overseas exhibitions, art journals and travel on Australian printmakers caused the 1970s local print movement become restless and dissatisfied with old formulas. Imprint reflected these shifts, whilst continuing to honour traditional printmakers in its articles. In a climate of ‘anything goes’, the yardstick for evaluating innovation was none the less Euramerican in origin.570

The impact of this postmodern largesse and challenge to traditional modes of art reportage was reflected in issues of Imprint from the late 1980s and early1990s. Taking the summer 1992 issue of this quarterly as an example, Michaela Kobor addressed ‘Ideas on technology and the print’, while Peter Charuk contributed an essay on ‘Computers and printmaking’. Furthermore, Judy Watson, Bea Maddock and Raymond Arnold were treated in separate essays in this issue.571 Hence two indications of postmodernism’s heterogeneity and embrace of New Technology within formerly ‘closed’ disciplines, and their impact on the three Australian print artists studied in depth in this thesis, were reflected in Australia’s specialist print journal.

The only shift to a decidedly local perspective was when Aboriginal (and Torres Strait Islander) printmaking emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Located in remote communities, the relief prints by these artists were perceived as a means of preserving

569 Sellbach 1967, op. cit.

570 Refer Paul Taylor (ed.) 1984, op. cit.

571 Imprint, Vol. 27, No. 4, summer, 1992 included: Michaela Kabor, ‘Ideas on technology and change in the print’, pp. 4-5; Peter Charuk, op. cit., p.6; Mirabel Fitzgerald, ‘Dissonance: Aspects of Feminism and the Arts: Judy Watson artist in residency’, pp. 7-8; Katherine McDonald, ‘Artificial Nature: from Queenstown to Springwood’, pp. 14-15; Anne Kirker, ‘Bea Maddock: An introduction, part 2’, pp.20-21.

258 and reviving traditional imagery. Such prints were disseminated by ‘white’ Australians, not only in their country of origin, but through international art world connections. The master printers who worked collaboratively with artists in these communities, such as Basil Hall and Theo Tremblay, did so with altruistic intentions (a fact that was welcomed by Aboriginal authorities). The brokering of non-urban Aboriginal art in general intensified during the 1990s and early 2000s as the gate-keepers (chiefly Caucasian) responded to local and external demand.

However, in the case of so-called ‘urban’ Indigenous artists such as Judy Watson, the prints she produced at the time sought to express selfhood, underpinned by feminism. Although deeply responsive to customary practices, her prints did not have the intent to enhance the well-being of Indigenous communities. Initially, she printed her own lithographs and etchings and then collaborated on printing them with master printers. In turn they were marketed through dealers who did not necessarily specialise in Indigenous art. She has largely avoided categorisation as the ‘Other’ by occupying a transcultural zone and is chiefly given the moniker of ‘contemporary Australian artist’. Only when officialdom deems fit (as a means to acknowledge the first peoples of Australia and their cultural heritage and as a nationalistic promotional opportunity) is Watson categorised as Aboriginal.572

In Thailand, an ‘official’ art world has been often written about, in the postmodern milieu. It is as though by bringing this condition to the fore, it can be critiqued and surpassed by new generation Thai artists such as Bundith Phunsombatlert.This situation was forthrightly explained by art critic Phatarawadee who stated ‘the official Thai art world has been geared towards political correctness: art institutions, competitions and exhibitions are all organized to cater to consensus art on the assumption that art must reflect characteristics that are uniquely Thai.’573 In terms of all three areas of this critic’s concern, Silpakorn University was the focus.

It is the oldest art school in Thailand and has trained and nurtured the country’s most influential artists and curators. Commencing with Chalood Nimsamer, who set up the

572 As evidenced by the Australian Council’s art commission for the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris 2006.

573Phatarawadee Phataranawik 1998, op. cit., p.36.

259 print facility there in the 1950s and continuing with Somporn Rodboon, they ensured printmaking had equal status as painting and sculpture. While Silpakorn is the leading ‘gate-keeping’ art school in Thailand, there have always, nonetheless, been renegade forces within it. This is demonstrated by Chalood’s indifference to specialisation (he practised as a sculptor as well as a printmaker), which left its mark via his mentorship of Prawat. More common were those of conformist persuasion, such as Ithipol Thangchalok, a Silpakorn-trained printmaker who acted as a chronicler of the field in his country. Ithipol in his text A Decade of Printmaking (1992) makes clear that in Thai printmaking there is not the historical weight that is evident in Japan, or even in Australia.

Given the conservative tenor of most Thai printmaking, some artists (as this thesis demonstrates) have consciously rebuked conformity in their work. After all, the visual arts have often witnessed how strictures of State-imposed values, meanings and priorities prompt iconoclastic work by non-conformists. This is clearly the case in Thailand, where the phenomenon of print installation has been partly offered as a riposte to officialdom and the institutionalism of the visual arts.

In that country, the dominant characteristics of printmaking (from the 1970s onwards) exploit decorativeness and technical finesse at the expense of conceptual complexity. The tourist boom of the late 1960s led to a market for ‘Thai’ prints and decorative murals. In the following decade, large-scale corporations, such as TISCO (Thai Investment and Securities) became conspicuous collectors of contemporary art in all media and generally bought conservative prints. They also organised award exhibitions that were tightly controlled by the chaopor (art godfathers) who had absolute power of selection.

Even in ‘Surr’ expression (where Buddhist themes are transformed into an amalgam of religion, myth, fantasy and social commentary) the printmakers continued to emphasise virtuosity of technique. It is as though social custom placed a moral imperative on artists to attain excellence in workmanship, as it had done with traditional Buddhist-inspired narratives in wat wall murals. Neo-traditionalism was introduced in the curriculum of Silpakorn under Bhirasri, and was later championed (from 1981) by Viennese Alfred Pawlin in his Visual Dhamma Gallery, Bangkok. Furthermore, as seen in the officially sanctioned and supported NEA events (which commenced in 1949), the valuing of technical expertise in prints continues to predominate. In that Thai forum, there has never

260 been any attempt to question or jettison widely recognisable conventions of printmaking such as two-dimensionality, print editioning and domestic-scaled imagery.

7.2c Jettisoning Authority to Enable Change to Emerge

In Thailand, print installation is a conscious riposte to officialdom and the capital’s art competitions, as epitomised by the annual NEA and the use of prints as wall decoration for hotel lobbies and corporate showrooms. The hybrid term ‘print installation’ is anathema to NEA, despite the fact that it was used by Apinan Poshyananda. Apinan is considered the outstanding ‘authority’ on Thai art, having published the standard text, Modern Art in Thailand (1992), and acted as advisor for high-profile international exhibitions such as the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, or APT. He was also curator of New York’s Asia Society’s high-profile exhibition, Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/Tensions (1996).

Educated in both Thailand and the United States, Apinan is alert to international trends in art (and with high social standing in his country of origin) and is regarded by many progressive Thai artists as a broker for innovative practice and also as a ‘kingmaker’. Hence, although Michaelson (1991) points out that during the 1980s ‘prejudices against new artistic ideas and the self-protection of certain groups beset contemporary Thai art’, respect for Apinan was such that by the 1990s, he wielded an alternative influence to ‘official’ expectations.574 In short, the situation for contemporary Thai art practitioners involves complex relationships and allegiances.

Furthermore, the idea of contingency applies to the artists themselves, who can be simultaneously conservative and radical, respecting traditions and rejecting them. This is borne out by the ‘hybrid’ print expression of Prawat. While of a younger generation, Apinan’s openness to postmodern discourses (including the intermingling of art forms) and installation art ensured that Prawat’s work was seen in Thailand and not solely in New York and Europe. Print Installation was an example, with only one printmaker

574 Michaelson 1991, op. cit., p.6. In the same article, this long-term resident of Thailand points out `It is essential to realise that Thai society is based on a hierarchical structure, with seniority and social status being determinant in group operations. Thai artists are part of this society, which tends to impede certain social possibilities and stylistic innovations taken for granted in Western societies.’

261 included, namely Prawat. The artist posed a rhetorical question with his English-titled work for the event: Black + White + Colour or Does Rembrandt Need Colours? It was Prawat’s Japanese Reverse (1987), a project based not on etching’s revered Dutch master, but on appropriation and disruption of the ukiyo-e print tradition, that had earlier caused Apinan to state that this print installation was ‘a revelation as Laucharoen opened refreshing possibilities for printmaking’.575

Prawat left Thailand to further his training in the United States and gain experience as a printmaker in the West. Instead of returning to Silpakorn to teach printmaking, Prawat remained in New York after gaining his Master of Fine Arts at the Pratt Institute. In this environment, he avoided the social and cultural strictures of Thailand, despite the fact that he continued to visit and exhibit in Bangkok. By 2001, with Prawat’s print installation The Proverbs My brother Taught Me (curated by Apinan for the Art Center, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok,) the artist had completed his re-enactment of aspects of Western printmaking and the legacy of Japan ukiyo-e to concentrate on reclaiming specifically Thai customs. He chose to address Thai indigenous myth and ritual, as these were rapidly disappearing in Westernised Bangkok and elsewhere in metropolitan Thailand. Hence, he re-appropriated `nationness’ in terms not of touristic framed prints from editions but as a robust installation. The Proverbs comprised a room of large, rough-carved woodblock prints of crows pinned to the wall, juxtaposed with vitrines containing live cobras, a mound of soil and other such symbolic components.

The support of Apinan and of Somporn Rodboon at Silpakorn University (through her international artist-in-residency program) helped younger artists incorporate global tendencies while remaining in Thailand. Silpakorn also had incorporated a Masters program by the time Phatyos Buddhacharoen became a student there. Unlike Prawat, he therefore did not feel compelled to leave Thailand to further his printmaking career. After completing his degree, he became an instructor in the print department at Silpakorn. Alternatives to exhibit in Bangkok had also increased by the 1980s and included the Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art (1974-88), which supported risky, issue-based or conceptually challenging work, and later artists’ collectives such as Concrete House (c.1992-), Project 304 (1996) and About Studio/About Café (1999 -). Furthermore,

575 Poshyananda 2001, op. cit.

262 commercial galleries, particularly Dialogue Gallery and Numthong Gallery, supported innovative printmakers, as a matter of course.

By the 1990s, Chiang Mai in northern Thailand had also become a centre for Silpakorn- trained artists. Printmaker Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, for instance, developed installation work based on the print from her base at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Chiang Mai University.. The catalyst for this radical departure from her former small black and white etchings was the artist’s inclusion in the APT of 1993. In this international ‘blockbuster’ her Three Boxes of Men and Their Reflections comprised a series of metal containers holding sump oil. On the underside of the containers’ lids, large etchings of male torsos were bonded, which in turn were reflected in the liquid below. After this event, Araya ceased to regard herself as a printmaker and turned to other forms of installation, including projected video. It can be argued that it was the topicality of installation art in the postmodern milieu that persuaded this artist to abandon her former allegiance to the print, but it is also true that contemporary art had changed so much that she could readily expand the range of media used in relation to printmaking.

This is also true of Phatyos. In his exhibition at Silpakorn, titled From Limestone (1998), rather than exhibiting lithographs as single entities on the wall, he composed elaborate three-dimensional installations based on the process and its capacity to demonstrate his Buddhist and ecological concerns. One work within this exhibition, Range of Mountains, comprised a grid of lithographic stones, some supporting vertical glass containers lined with prints pulled from them. What was clearly demonstrated was that the artist (not the print instructor) had exhausted the expectations of lithography as a modernist entity and employed it instead as a process for re-deciphering past, present, and future within the institution.

In Japan, more-so than in Thailand, there are no radical breaks, and no terminal discontinuities in printmaking as a single image on paper, capable of multiplication. Noda’s Diary prints, although based on the artists’ quotidian snapshots, nevertheless do not attempt to depart from traditional formats for printmaking. Similarly, with Shimada’s feminist-inspired etchings, it is the collapse of the past division between printmaking and photography, together with the anti-decorative caste of the imagery that liberates it from guild-based protocols.

263

Both artists forged new conventions for the print that simultaneously re-aligned the way in which media interacted. While other Japanese printmakers employed photography in their work from the late 1960s, they did not offer, to the same extent, formulas for the print that re-wrote and re-deciphered past, present and future. While Noda has always been accepted and revered by established art circles in Japan because of his adroit bridging of old and new print technologies and imagery that evokes a Zen-like humanism, his younger female compatriot deliberately challenges the patriarchy. She resists identification with Japan’s hermetic print societies and is more readily linked with alternative art venues abroad and with ‘risk-taking’ institutions in Tokyo. It is their distinctive wielding of photography in printmaking and the way it serves their conceptually strong ideologies that makes them ideal subjects of postmodern printmaking in Japan

In Australia, Maddock has consistently refused membership of the Print Council of Australia and defies being categorised solely as a printmaker (although it is this field more than any other that informs her imagery). When she could no longer ideologically sustain (in the 1970s) an adherence to gestural autographic printmaking, the artist turned to photo-screenprinting and photo-etching. Through these processes, she was able to integrate found images (newspaper clippings) into a collaged formula to reflect on topical events. In moving beyond traditional autographic printmaking, Maddock was one of the first to promote a revised print aesthetic in Australia. In turn, Arnold built on her legacy when he doubled computer-generated imagery, as the new tool, with hand-worked etching, for expressing a hybridised artistic language.

Arnold’s oscillation between technical and conceptual zones in his prints allowed for the articulation of difference without privileging any particular zone. His decision to locate his practice (during the 1990s) equally between Tasmania and Paris –deriving conceptual inspiration from both - ensured that ready identification of personal identity and place was problematised. His work privileged the idea of ‘symbolic interaction’ Furthermore, Arnold’s initial appropriation of an unfinished etching by Charles Meryon for the basis of his four-panel etching The Spectacle of Nature (1994) reversed the usual order of colonial negotiation. It thus demonstrated a confounding of tradition and modernity, which can lead to such richness in debates on postcolonialism.

264

In Watson’s case, ‘cross-cultural’ implies a dialogue within Australia; namely between Indigenous customary beliefs and the operations of urban centres of art production. Watson is a Murri (Queensland urban artist) with strong respect for her Indigenous heritage. She is working outside remote communities (although familiar with them) and workshops established for producing Aboriginal prints.Watson accepts that her identity as being part Caucasian and part Indigenous brings its own challenges to art authorities. Because she resists easy categorisation, she is the classic ‘liminal’ postcolonial hybridised subject. Shet has both negotiated a place as a stakeholder in Waanyi territory (the clan of her maternal grandmother) and with major art museums in Australia. In Euramerican contexts, she, like others with fluid cultural identities, such as Prawat and Shimada can arguably ‘infiltrate the system because of who we do and don’t look like’.576

This leads to a response to the third research question posed in this thesis.

7.3 How Has Printmaking Been Transformed by Postmodernism and Globalisation?

The third question of this thesis was:

 Using postmodernism and the influences of global culture as a guide, how has printmaking been transformed, as demonstrated in the three case study sites?

This question raises issues about information flow, readiness to adapt local printmaking to Euramerican theoretical discourse and to depart from it. Therefore, two issues require examination, emerging from the proposition of external influence that has been transformed..

1.Access to theoretical opinions and visual arts practice from outside the artist’s country of origin.

2.Photography and Installation art as preferred vocabularies for extending the field of printmaking.

576 Watson 2005, op.cit.

265

7.3a Access to Theoretical Discourse and Global Practice

This section addresses aspects of the experience of case study artists outside their countries of origin. It will also summarise the transference of theoretical discourse and visual arts practice (especially printmaking) into broader global contexts. As this research argues, it is an art historical fact that modernity and postmodernity in Japan, Australia and Thailand have evolved out of direct or indirect contact with Euramerican examples and have added to these movements. This thesis is testament to how more critical and in- depth acknowledgment of the print in the Asia-Pacific region (in all its manifestations) is required for an inclusive and accurate assessment of postmodernity.

In terms of influential texts, it is evident that contemporary printmaking has not attracted the same depth of critical analysis as photography. However, some texts (chiefly in English) have taken print analysis further. Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1968) is a case in point.577 Its publication beyond the original German text coincided with the resurgence of interest in printmaking in the West and reached many artists, academics and curators in Australia. Although Benjamin’s essay referred to the print as a mass reproduction device, it did, during the 1990s especially, become a touchstone for re-evaluating printmaking per se.

In Japan during the twentieth century, a considerable body of literature has been written about printmaking, yet the realm of contemporary hanga (without critical evaluation) has been the major focus in recent years. While there has been a specialist print quarterly published in that country since 1977 (Hanga Geijutsu), it was only during the 1990s that articles addressed postmodern concerns. These included Zadankai: Geidai Hanga no Kyozo to Jitsuzo in 1994, which discussed computer generated and autographic contemporary prints.578 More recently, Motoe Kunio (2004) wrote about 1970s prints in

577 Benjamin 1968, op. cit

578 Hanga Geijutsu 1994, No.84, 1994, p.120.

266 Japan and how the persuasiveness of conceptual art’s concern with reproducibility may have obscured the unique position of printmaking as a field unto itself.579

As a progenitor of the many International print biennales and triennials, Tokyo has prided itself as being the epicentre of a strong hanga tradition, yet the catalogue texts to such events do not address issues that challenge the autonomy of modernism. Rather their purpose is to champion the print through the filter of nationhood. The exhibition catalogues put out since the 1950s by the CWAJ in Japan, are also in this category. This uncritical formula was to a certain extent rectified by exhibitions such as Walter Jule’s SIGHTLINES (1997) in Canada where contributors to the comprehensive catalogue included Elizabeth Ingram, Lyndal Osbourne and Charlene Pretnak. There was an emphasis on printmakers in the exhibition from Eastern Europe, Asia and Canada. Therefore, print practitioners were invited from Japan and Thailand as much as from countries where there is a proven commitment to the field (such as Poland) but who do not readily exhibit in major art museums in the United States and Europe. The choice of artists and the catalogue texts were a deliberate ploy on Jule’s part to rectify this anomaly. He wanted SIGHTLINES to move beyond competition-based (with their standardised print criteria) international print exhibitions and be supported by texts that brought a more scholarly analysis to the print.580

In literature on art that is not specific to the field of printmaking, challenging opinions have been expressed that potentially inform new readings of it. In the case of Japan and Thailand, Munroe (1994) with her book Scream Against the Sky: Japanese Art after 1945 and Clark (1998) Modern Asian Art are two important examples.581 Similarly, Taylor (1984) and Smith (1991), in books on aspects of the visual arts in Australia have been germane to this thesis.582 The field of the print was mostly the province of the Print Council of Australia’s quarterly Imprint. While Australia had access through art libraries to postmodern critiques of printmaking, notably by American print specialists Weisberg (1986; 1990; 1993) and Merrill (1993) their observations referenced Euramerican

579 Kunio 2004, op.cit.

580 Jule (ed.) 1997, op. cit.

581 Munroe 1998, op. cit.

582 Taylor (ed.) 1984, op. cit.; Terry Smith 1991, op. cit.

267 printmakers solely from within the limited readership of print-specialist journals.583 The same can be said for Imprint in Australia. Anthologies containing mainstream art scholarship tended to ignore their arguments. In post-colonial discourse, however, significant and comprehensive scholarship has ensured that the ‘marginal’ is brought to the fore and that continuation of this anomaly should therefore not be sustained.

It is clearly evident in Australia, as in Japan and Thailand that a close relationship between postmodern theory and printmaking occurred from the early 1990s. Imprint accommodated a range of articles that applied postmodern precepts (Crawford, Edgar and Green in 1990; Kirker in 1991, Charuk in 1992, for instance), and Green (1993) took the topic of print and postmodernism to the mainstream journal Art Monthly Australia (1993). As with the other writers mentioned, he made the decision to use Australian artists solely as his subjects.584 In addition, Kirker attempted to remedy the absence of printmaking in critical art anthologies by persuading the editor of the journal Continuum, to include an essay on computer-generated prints by Australian practitioners.585

In Thailand, printmaker Ithipol Thangchalok (1992) published the first survey of contemporary Thai prints but did not present an engaged critical analysis of the period covered (1982-1992). Apinan Poshyananda (1992) discussed the print in his book Modern Art in Thailand but this was also not a platform for in-depth theoretical analysis. The same can be said of medium-specific books produced in Australia, including Australian Printmaking in the 1990s: Artist Printmakers 1990-1995 (1997) authored by Sasha Grishin. Nevertheless, such texts established the basis for further reflection and interrogation of the print as a significant field of inquiry.

Debates on innovative print practice and associated disciplines occur most readily in conferences and symposia, such as those conducted by the Australian prints and drawings department from the early 1990s at the National Gallery of Australia. Often the most informative and challenging presentations are by printmakers themselves who generally prefer not to discuss their work in terms of postmodernism (or other such Euramerican

583 Weisberg1986; 1990; 1993 op. cit; Merrill 1993, op. cit.

584 Green 1993, op. cit.

585 Kirker 1994, op. cit. pp 240-247

268 constructs) but rather through issues of deep personal concern to them. Mike Parr is an obvious case here as his on-going self-portrait project is a psycho-analytical one that deals with identity and art as a cathartic agent. Nevertheless, this thesis accepts that the term ‘postmodern’ is highly instructive when describing the seismic formal shifts in the evolution of printmaking in the Asia-Pacific region.

When printmaking was introduced into essays that focussed on other art forms, it opens the possibility of being significantly re-contextualised. This is demonstrated by Somporn Rodboon who wrote about `Thai Contemporary Installation’ for Art Monthly Australia (1994). In the course of her arguments, she brought in Prawat. Likewise, Shamada was included in Griselda Pollock’s anthology Generations and Geographies (1996), which is a standard text for art history, cultural studies and women’s studies. The artist was also a published correspondent in the leading English feminist visual arts journal, N. Paradoxa.586

It is common knowledge that access to journals and books with a broad distribution has been a constant factor for artists to gain familiarity with visual arts generated from a range of contexts. In Japan, Yamamoto Kanae, leader of the Nihon Sōsaku Hanga Kyōkai (the Japan Creative Print Association, 1918 – 31) studied in France during the period 1912-1917 and on his return his experience filtered through to colleagues. Later, Onchi brought to the creative prints movement literature he had collected on art movements such as Post-Impressionism and German Expressionism. In the 1930s, travel in Europe and the United States became de rigeur among young Japanese artists who wished to pursue Western styles. While World War II dispelled this trend, by the 1970s, print artists from Japan again regularly travelled abroad. Importantly, Australian and Thai printmakers also sought further training in Japan.

From Australia, painter and printmaker Fred Williams commenced a highly productive period of etching when he studied the technique in London during the 1950s. At this time, Chalood, under the auspices of Silpakorn University, Bangkok travelled to the United States and Europe. Maddock trained as a painter and printmaker in London yet

586 See Yoshiko Shimada’s answer to the question ‘Defining Experiences: feminist exhibitions in the 1990s’, in Katy Deepwell (ed.), N.Paradoxa, Issue 11, Sept.2000.

269 when she commenced screenprinting in 1968 she decisively turned her back on painting and committed herself to the print; albeit with photomechanical means. She was drawn towards the imagery of Jasper Johns and other Pop artists from the United States and Britain whose collagist screenprints were accessible in Australia as illustrations in art journals such as Studio International.587

In turn, Maddock’s teaching at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne influenced a generation of Australian printmakers in photography and the print. Of a younger generation, the formative years of Arnold and Watson were marked by an increasing number of exhibitions from United States and Europe and international print collections (especially at the National Gallery of Australia) that were regularly used for public display. Therefore, by the 1980s, the reliance upon second-hand sources for experiencing innovative visual arts practice was no longer the issue it had been two decades earlier.

Literature that was not about printmaking but informed the theoretical ideas of case study artists in this thesis (especially mid-career: Shimada, Arnold and Watson) was accessed either in their country of origin or place of residence. Typical was the postmodern critique by Krauss (1983) on sculpture.588 This and other seminal texts were cited as a matter of course by Australian art writers when analysing the postmodern condition. From the mid 1990s, postcolonial discourse reached a wide readership through Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994). The latter was reprinted three times and distributed broadly in and beyond Euramerica. In Japan and Thailand, a trans-lingual process occurred in university contexts where such texts were referenced in part through translation and also through the progressive art magazine Bijutsu Techo.

Shimada, like other Western educated printmakers, is English literate and hence is conversant with the original texts. However, it is likely that she was aware of the Japanese translation of Linda Nochlin’s essay ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’ (1971) published in Bijutsu Techo.589 By the mid-1990s, Shimada was herself an

587 Furthermore, like many Australian artists, she saw exhibitions that brought direct exposure to both the Pop idiom and geometric abstraction (particularly Two Decades of American Painting (1967) which toured to Melbourne and Sydney).

588 Krauss 1983, op. cit. Other influential essays in Hal Foster’s edited collection included Clive Owens 1983, op. cit. and Edward Said 1983, op. cit.

589 Nochlin 1976, op. cit.

270 active contributor to international feminist discourse. This is significant because it brings attention to the second point of this question that assesses the influences of globalisation and transcultural-exchange.

Japan has a legacy of feminist critique with the writing of academics such as Fujieda Mioko of Kyoto Seika University and the artist and writer Tomiyama Taeko (both of whom were active in the 1970s and 1980s). However, Shimada gained first-hand knowledge of feminist art practice during her student years in California in the early 1980s. This experience was consolidated in the following decade when she divided her time between Berlin and Tokyo (with a one-year’s residence in New York). The products of this transcultural life-style are apparent through her inclusion in the feminist-specific exhibition Gender-Beyond- Memory, mounted by the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in 1996 as much as in her solo exhibition at A Space Gallery in Toronto a year later.590

In the course of her active participation with international feminist art practice and debate, Shimada brought a Japanese regional content to her work.591 This is a clear instance in this thesis of an artist from the Asia-Pacific contributing and influencing the feminist art platform beyond that region. Her prints, and increasingly the associated performances and installations based on Japanese women and World War II, therefore had significance for both her female compatriots and women elsewhere.

In the case of Noda, his early Diary photo-screenprint and woodblock prints recorded his sojourns in New York (1970) and through Israel (2001) as much as his trips within Japan. Japanese trained and a teacher at his alma mater, Tokyo Geidai, this artist built an international and national printmaking reputation after winning the grand prize at the 1968 Tokyo Print Biennale. His work from that point became a regular feature in print exhibitions world-wide and he built up strong collegial links with printmaking experts (such as Pat Gilmour) in England, the United States, Europe and Australia. He is held in high esteem amongst international print circles and in acknowledgment of this the Asian

590 Michika Kasahara (curator), Gender-Beyond-Memory, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Sept.1996. Shimada was the only Japanese artist in this exhibition. Other artists included Carry Mae Weems and Trinh T. Minha, artist based in the United States.

591 Shimada’s inclusion in Minamishima Hiroshi’s exhibition Attitude 2002 at the Contemporary Art Museum, Kunamoto, brought the artist’s profile as a fearless social revisionist, back to Japan.

271 Art Museum, San Francisco mounted a comprehensive retrospective of Noda’s prints in 2004.

Hence both Shimada and Noda, through exposure of their work and direct experience in Euramerican contexts, simultaneously drew upon, and contributed to a fresh understanding of Japanese printmaking. Borrowing from photography and transforming it through the agency of printmaking, is the distinguishing individualist feature of these artists’ prints. Noda maintained aesthetic links with traditional hanga while integrating Western tropes of the 1960s, such as conceptual art, while Shimada contributed to feminist debate internationally and more recently in Japan through her photo-etchings, inkjet prints, performance art and installations.

7.3b Photography and Installation art as an agent for change in printmaking

Just as in the case of postmodernism, the history of printmaking has been marked by invention, innovation and technological advance. In the 1960s, photography radicalised traditional autographic approaches to the field. Its infiltration into the lexicon of printmaking techniques was shunned by conservative practitioners and welcomed by those artists wishing to employ means by which to reflect the complexity of the times. It furthermore, greatly expanded artists’ options as photomechanical printmaking allowed for the manipulation of found images that could be enlarged, truncated, overlaid and merged with hand-drawn elements.

As borne out by Noda and Shimada, their respective use of photography as a conceptual necessity is the salient factor that unites them as innovators within the context of contemporary Japanese printmaking.Although photography and its interface with printmaking (hand-made with mechanical image-making) proliferated in Euramerican contexts from the 1960s, less attention has been paid to the manifestation of this dialogue in Japan during the same period. Given its ukiyo-e print legacy and reluctance to jettison later hanga as a specialised domain of artistic endeavour, Japan, more so than Britain and the United States, resisted the disruption to traditional autographic printmaking and principles of connoisseurship.

272 Noda honours Japan’s pride in its print traditions by blending woodblock printing with his appreciation of American ‘street photography’ and conceptual art. He further hybridises his mixed-media prints by modifying the original photographs through drawing. From a younger generation, Shimada appropriated historical documentary photographs to serve her feminist platform and had no intention to harmoniously reconcile the past with the present. Deliberately rough in their manufacture and printing, these intaglio prints read like wounded vestiges of a shameful history. Yet both Shimada and Noda are, paradoxically, concerned with immortalising memory: Noda addressing temporal and personal moments, and Shimada exploring the dark side of the human psyche in times of conflict. For them, photography was the ideal catalyst for these investigations.

In Australia, Maddock spent a decade ((1972-82) extensively working with newspaper- derived photographic imagery in her screenprints, etchings and lithographs. In 1987 she decisively shifted her practice and announced “We are going to have to go back. Progress for me is ‘going back’”.592 Rather than continue with the immediacy of reportage imagery and collagist effects that she gained from her use of photographic printmaking, Maddock craved a reengagement with the haptic. This in turn suggested a deliberately slow, meditative form of working. The major work to evolve from this change in direction was Terra Spiritus (1993-98), a 51 sheet panorama of editioned ochre drawings. Not only did this work concentrate on Australia as a conflicted postcolonial nation, but it was mirrored by the technical processes.the artist used. Rather than etching (which she initially considered), Maddock invented an entirely new form of editioned imagery, which was based on drawing materials sourced from Tasmania (as a natural environment and to honour the first Australians located there). Hence Maddock intentionally disrupted master narratives (metanarratives) of history and the debt to Euramerican canons and, not least of all, confounded the conventional prescriptions of printmaking through this major work.

Arnold also mined an inextricable bond between concept and process in both his print editions and print installations. From The Spectacle of Nature (1994), a four-panel etching pinned to the wall, to the later etchings bonded or butted with computer-

592 Bea Maddock Bindoff 1987, op. cit., p.1.

273 generated prints mirroring the same image, the artist communicated his dynamic: the oscillation between Paris and Tasmania. This situation of geographic flow and exchange across vastly different histories was one of several Arnold addressed in his printmaking. His focus on dualism accords with Bhabha’s reflections on “the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy”.593 It extends to the mediation between France (a world centre for printmaking as much as painting and sculpture in the late nineteenth century) to Australia where far less is acknowledged of its etching traditions.

From this liminal working site, Arnold periodically took the print on paper convention further by integrating it into site-specific situations with three-dimensional elements. Source – Walking into Courbet’s shadow (1997) is a case in point. Although Watson has pursued installation art on occasions it is not with the print in mind. Nor had she engaged with photography until the political dimension of this Indigenous Australian artist’s printmaking became pressing for her in the early 2000s. It was then, in two portfolios of photo-etchings that Watson sought to reveal past injustices in a readily interpretable form.

Installation practice closely accords with postmodernism as, among other factors, it allows for the integration of heterogeneous methods and materials. Art installation is not bound by tight disciplinary canons and potentially invites direct audience participation. It is generally site-specific and ephemeral, and hence can avoid some market expectations. When it is articulated by printmakers, installation art becomes a hybrid phenomenon, and is not readily recognised as stemming from the conventions of the print. No longer adhering to the convention of single sheet images (from an edition) as wall-based statements with reliance upon print guilds and specialist exhibitions for exposure, these print installations emphatically defy tradition. They therefore made classifications like those applied by the Print Council of America in the mid-1960s, redundant.

This thesis proposes that of the three case study sites, Thai artists created the most consequential print installations. The tradition of printmaking as a modernist endeavour in the Asia-Pacific region and elsewhere in the world is radically disrupted through their

593 Bhabha 2007, op.cit. p.5.

274 engagement with installation art. Without the weight of an extensive history of printmaking in Thailand (albeit with the presence of “official Thai culture”), artists Prawat, Phatyos (and to a certain extent Araya and Bundith) have adopted it as their chief modus operandi. For as Ewington (1994) remarks, the framework of installation art is `the most open-ended of all contemporary artistic practices’.594

Undeniably a Euramerican concept, installation art as practised by these artists (especially during the 1990s) is nevertheless infused with indigenous Thai knowledge. This is shown in the way the print installations of Prawat were inflected by performance art and socio-political commentary, and those by Phatyos by minimalism and Buddhist belief. With Araya’s work, it reflected her feminist leanings as much as the encouragement she received from Apinan in Thailand to extend her print practice into more ambitious statements. In turn, the younger Bundith, matured in a climate where Silpakorn acknowledged installation art as a major trend world-wide. Accordingly, he gave up making print editions in the mid-1990s, to apply his printmaking skills to assemblages and wall installations. These employed not paper but press-moulded plastic that was screenprinted with ‘indentikit’ faces and human organs, and drew attention to the body as a commercial commodity in a globalised economy.

Prawat was one of the originators of Thai print installations and initially arrived at them through ‘acting out’ the process of intaglio with hand built tools, acids and metal plates. This was done from his base in New York, and functioned as a riposte to the finesse and decorative bias of contemporary Thai printmaking. Later, in response to the violent crackdown of pro-democracy advocates in Bangkok by the military in May 1992, his installations questioned the official pillars of Thai nationhood. This was witnessed in his 1993 installation The Four Elements at the First Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (1993).

In Phatyos’ case, installation implied taking his lithography into a decidedly postmodern realm. With From Limestone, his print installation at Silpakorn University in 1998, Phatyos amalgamated his interest in this process with environmental art and his adherence to Theravada Buddhism. Prawat, in his print installation The Proverbs My

594 Ewington 1994 (a) op. cit., p.9.

275 Brother Taught Me (2001) continued to mine printmaking’s potential and ensure its currency and relevance to global visual arts practice. Displaying the tensions between Western styles and indigenous content, this work offered viewers at the Art Centre of Chulalongkorn University, an inspiring conundrum: it demonstrated the survival and revival of indigenous myths and rituals while couching them in the internationally familiar tropes of installation art. Yet it may not be the dilemma that Western commentators perceive. For in the words of Gridthiya Gaweewong, from her base in Bangkok, “It is not a new issue because being Thai is all about hybridization. Traditionally influenced mainly by Chinese and India, Thai people are good at blending cultures and adapting them into their own version.”595

This leads to a response to the fourth and final research question posed in this thesis.

7.4 Significance of chosen case study artists for contemporary printmaking

The fourth question of this thesis was:

 What is the significance of the practice of the selected artists for contemporary printmaking and the visual arts?

While the preceding questions in this chapter and the arguments I have mounted to answer them more than cover the significance of the work of this thesis’s case study artists to the field of printmaking, there are certain points that need emphasising here at the conclusion of this thesis.

 The first is the recognition that nationality does have a place in drawing connections between local/global conditions within the visual arts. Therefore it has been necessary to frame this thesis according to three case study sites, namely Japan, Australia and Thailand. Furthermore, these nation states belong to the Asia-Pacific region which, with regard to printmaking, has not been sufficiently (if at all) acknowledged within Euramerican debate, for the innovative and consequential work that has emerged, especially in the 1980s and 1990s.

595 Gaweewong 2001 op. cit.

276

 Secondly, postmodern theory, in particular, would gain from insights provided by the way the artists `deterritorialise’ the field which in turn makes it applicable to mainstream discourse. The artists in this thesis work through tradition as much as against it and do not entirely jettison lessons learned from the past in the realm of the print. These lessons are reflected by the way the artists continue to observe techniques that in some cases are centuries old and cultural traditions that are specific to a particular geographical locality.

 Thirdly, although Euramerican academics (viz Weisberg and Merrill) had in the first instance rectified the paucity of critical debate in the field of contemporary printmaking, the examples of artists they used were invariably limited to those whose prints were familiar to them. By not reaching further than the print practice about which they had in-depth knowledge and understood the embedded cultural coding in it, such author’s arguments are incomplete when postmodernism is considered as a whole. Arguments skewed towards Western practitioners must therefore be read as limited. I believe that these print scholars’ arguments would have been far more convincing and significant in placing the print firmly within postmodernism, if they had known of the practice of Noda, Shimada, Maddock, Arnold, Watson, Prawat and Phatyos.The same can be said of the reluctance of high-profile art commentators to include the print (as produced by artists trained in the field) in their analyses of the contemporary visual arts per se.

 Fourthly. While writing on printmaking has been hampered in the past by an insistent attention to technical explanation at the expense conceptual considerations, the fact still remains that process and materiality are conceptually imperative for the work of many of the most progressive print artists. In this thesis this fact pertains to all key artists discussed. .  Lastly, this thesis has argued that by researching the print practice of contemporary artists situated outside the Euramerican context, it is made abundantly clear that most prior investigations into printmaking have been profoundly parochial enterprises. Without qualification, significance in a field of

277 art practice cannot be bestowed from a relatively narrow perspective. Empirical evidence (through access and substantial understanding of print works from countries other than those of Europe and the United States) has become more than ever imperative (and possible) in this age of globalisation. Through this thesis the emphatic instrumentality of printmaking from the Asia-Pacific region within a postmodern milieu has been canvassed. It has been done in the belief that the time has come to overcome `omissions’ in art history and theory pertaining to the print and to encourage further research in the field.

278

Bibliography: Primary Sources

Unpublished Material and Interviews

Based in Australia, it has been relatively easy to meet directly the case study artists considered in this thesis. I had already conducted intensive interviews with Bea Maddock (and consulted several of her notebooks) for her print retrospective in New Zealand, Bea Maddock Prints 1960-1982 (1982) and her major retrospective Being and Nothingness (1991). I also interviewed Raymond Arnold for an article about him in Art & Australia (Spring 1998) and his 2005 monograph Nature/Culture. In the case of Brisbane-based Judy Watson, conversations and interviews contributed to this thesis and also to an essay on the artist in Eyeline journal (Spring 2005), followed by Artlink (Summer 2006).

I paid field trips to Japan and Thailand during the term of my curatorial involvement with the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, from 1992 until 1999, which in turn provided the impetus for this thesis. Additionally, I spent time in Thailand during 1992 expressly to curate and project-manage the Asialink (Melbourne) exhibition 6 x 6: A Selection of Contemporary Australian Prints with Professor Somporn Rodboon at Silpakorn University, Bangkok. It opened at Silpakorn and toured to Khon Kaen University and Chiang Mai University of Fine Arts. Since embarking on this thesis, I have taken additional research field trips to Japan and Thailand. I kept extensive notebooks during these trips.

As a pivotal tool for the primary research for this thesis, in all case study sites, I viewed bodies of prints by the artists concerned. I located these prints by visiting solo and group exhibitions, the artists’ studios, or the artists’ gallery dealers. Only in a few cases was it impossible to see all print installations first-hand. The trips that facilitated this empirical research and allowed for interviews were:

Tokyo, 20 May -2 June 1991 Bangkok, 24 June-2 July 1992 Bangkok, 26 October-6 November 1992.

279 Bangkok and Chiang Mai, 8–23 November 1995 Tokyo, 19 April-24 April 1996 Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto, 2-14 September 2001 Bangkok and Chiang Mai, 2–12 February 1999 Tokyo and Sapporo, 7–11 November 1999 Bangkok and Chiang Mai, 25 November–7 December 2002 Tokyo, 28 November–10 December 2004.

Interviews conducted of particular relevance to this thesis include those listed:

Japan

Ajioka Chiaki, at Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 12 September 2003

Shimada Yoshiko, email interview 18 November 2004

Jörg Schmeisser, National University of Fine Arts and Music, Tokyo Geidai, on Noda, 30 November 2004

Tetsuya Noda, National University of Fine Arts and Music, Tokyo Geidai, 2 December 2004

Yoriko Tsuruta and Yasuko Kaneko of Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo, on Shimada, 2 December 2004

Nakabayashi Tadayoshi, Tokyo Geidai, 4 December 2004

Hideki Kimura, of Kyoto City University of Arts at the National University of Fine Arts and Music, Tokyo Geidai, 4 December 2004

Kyoji Takizawa, curator at Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, Tokyo, 5 December 2004

Michiko Kasahara, curator at Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, on Shimada Yoshiko, 7 December 2004

280 Emiko Namikawa, art consultant, Tokyo, on contemporary Japanese prints, 8 December 2004 Mamoru Watanabe, Director of Fuji Television Gallery, Tokyo, on Noda, 8 December 2004

Marilyn Gosling, 2004 College Women’s Association of Japan, Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, Tokyo, 9 December 2004

Satoru Itazu, Master printer at Itazu Litho-Grafik, Tokyo, Dell Gallery, Queensland College of Art/Griffith University, 16 and 17 October 2006.

Australia

As the number of artists, curators and other art specialists interviewed on Australian printmaking over the years is large, only the most significant and those pertaining to the case study artists are listed here.

Bea Maddock, at her home in Macedon in preparation for a touring survey exhibition in New Zealand of her prints mounted at the National Art Gallery (now Te Papa Tongarewa/Museum of New Zealand), 2 August 1982

Udo Sellbach, at his home, Brisbane, at the time of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Print Council of Australia, 5 July 1991

Bea Maddock, at her studio at Launceston and through correspondence, in preparation for the touring survey exhibition in Australia of her prints, paintings, drawings and artist’s books, at intervals during May 1990 and August-October 1991 Raymond Arnold, following his talk at the Sixth International Works on Paper Fair, Sydney, 19 July 1997

Bea Maddock, at Queensland Art Gallery when Terra Spiritus was acquired for the Collection, 3 February 1999

281

Pat Gilmour, correspondence from her home in London, 15 September 2002

Charles Green, as previous principal supervisor of this thesis (during my enrolment at College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney) gave generous feedback on this thesis during the period 2003-04

Judy Watson, at her studio, Brisbane and e-mail feedback, 22 May 2008

Thailand

Somporn Rodboon, with specialist knowledge of the print, acted as facilitator and at times, interpreter, for my interviews with Thai printmakers during the 1990s. At the time, she was an Associate Professor at Silpakorn University, Bangkok.

Alfred Pawlin, at Visual Dhamma Gallery, Bangkok, 1 July 1992

Apinan Poshyananda, at Royal Hotel, Bangkok, 25 June 1992

Apinan Poshyananda, at Sasa House, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, 9 November 1995

Apinan Poshyananda, at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, 29 November 2002

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, at Chiang Mai University, 20 November 1995

Araya Rasdjarmreansook, at her home, Chiang Mai, 11 February 1999

Araya Rasdjarmreansook, correspondence from Chiang Mai, 4 December 2000

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, at her exhibition at the National Gallery, Bangkok, 1 December 2002

Bundith Phunsombatlert, at his studio, Bangkok, 30 November 2002

282 Chaiyot Chandratita, in Graphic Arts Department, Chiangmai University, 10 February 1999.

Chalood Nimsamer, in association with Surasi Kusolwong, at Silpakorn University, Bangkok, 27 November, 2002

Ithipol Thangchalok, at Silpakorn University, Bangkok, 29 November 2002

Jennifer Gampell, interviewed in her position as a writer for The Nation, Bangkok, 27 November 2002

Kamin Lertchaiprasert, at the Land Project, Chiang Mai, 3 December 2002

Numthong Sae-Tang, at Royal Hotel, Bangkok, 26 June 1992

Numthong Sae-Tang, at Numthong Gallery, Bangkok, 29 November 2002

Numthong Sae-Tang, at Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 30 November 2006

Panya Vijinthanasarn, at Silpakorn University, Bangkok, 27 November 2002

Phatyos Buddhacharoen, at Silpakorn University, Bangkok, 28 November 2002

Pongdej Chiyakut, at Chiang Mai University, 19 November 1995

Prawat Laucharoen, interviewed in his studio, New York, 20 February 1994

Prawat Laucharoen, correspondence from New York, 17 November 1998

Samjej Yurachai and Kanaid Silsat, at Khon Kaen University, 30 October 1992

Somporn Rodboon, at Silpakorn University, Bangkok, 24 June 1992

Somporn Rodboon, at Silpakorn University, Bangkok, 27 October 1992

Somporn Rodboon, at Chiang Mai University, 3 December 2002

Thavorn Ko-Udomvit, at Silpakorn University, 25 June 1992

Thavorn Ko-Udomvit at his studio, Bangkok, 28 November 2002

Yanawit Kunchaethong, at Silpakorn University, 26 November 2002

283

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Australia

Arnold, Raymond 1996. ‘Appearance and Reason – Framing Nature (1995/96)’ in Imagine Nature, Exhibition Catalogue, Hobart: University of Tasmania

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Thailand

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Rasdjarmrearnsook, Araya 2002. Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: Lament, Bangkok: Amarin

Reynolds, Craig J. 1991. National Identity and Its Defenders: Thailand, 1939-1989, Monash papers on Southeast Asia, No.25

Rodboon, Somporn 1994. ‘Thai contemporary installation’, Australian Art Monthly, August

308 Rodboon, Somporn 1998. Master Thai Artists in Japan, Exhibition Catalogue, Bangkok: Silpakorn University

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Wongchirachai, Albert Paravi 1995. ‘Montien Boonma: Grief, Buddhism and the Cosmos’, Art and Asia Pacific, vol. 2, no. 3, July

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37th National Exhibition of Art, Exhibition Catalogue, Bangkok: Kurusapha Publishing, Bangkok in association with Silpakorn University

309 Appendix 1: Plates

When the print works featured are from editions (and are therefore potentially distributed to more than one owner), no single collection source is given. Image size is given in centimeters, height before width, following the medium.

Plate 1. Onchi Kōshirō (1891-1955), Beauty in front of mirror, 1928, colour woodcut, 30 x 21 cm [p. 74]

Plate 2. Onchi Kōshirō , Morning, 1930, colour woodcut, 21 x 13 cm [p. 74]

Plate 3. Noda Tetsuya (b.1940), Diary: Aug. 22nd ‘68, 1968, photo-screenprint and woodblock print, 82 x 82 cm [p.98]

Plate 4. Noda Tetsuya, Diary: Sept.11th ‘68, 1968, photo-screenprint and woodblock print, 82 x 82 cm [p. 98]

Plate 5. Hiroshige Utagawa (1797-1858), Evening squall at Ohashi (from `100 Views of Edo’ series), c.1859, colour woodblock print (ukiyo-e), 34 x 21.9 cm. [p. 82]

Plate 6. Noda Tetsuya, Diary: April 27th ’80 in Atsugi, 1980, photo-screenprint and woodblock print, 53 x 84 cm [p. 83]

Plate 7. Noda Tetsuya, Diary: May 30th,’87, at 2-12-4 Kikkodai Kashiwashi, 1987, photoscreenprint and woodblock print, 48 x 77 cm Juxtaposed with Kusakabe Kimbei (1841-1934) Wedding Ceremony, 1880s, hand- coloured photograph (shashin) [p. 100]

Plate 8. Noda Tetsuya, Diary: Nov.25th ‘98, 1998, photo-screenprint and woodblock print, 49 x 79.8 cm Juxtaposed with two Hiroshige ukiyo-e ‘pillar prints [p. 82]

Plate 9. Shimada Yoshiko (b.1959), A Picture to be Burnt, 1993, photo-etching, 60 x 45 cm [p. 107]

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Plate 10. Shimada Yoshiko , Balloon Bomb, Rising Sun, 1993, photo-etching, 60 x 45 cm [p. 89]

Plate 11. Shimada Yoshiko , A House of Comfort, 1993, photo-etching, 60 x 45 cm. [p. 107]

Plate 12. Shimada Yoshiko, Shooting Lesson II,1993, photoetching, 45 x 60 cm [p.106]

Plate 13. Shimada Yoshiko, Look at Me/ Look at You 1995, installation with Japanese and Western bridal gowns and a group of photo-etchings. Displayed as part of the Age of Anxiety exhibition at the Power Plant, Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, 1995 [p. 85]

Plate 14.Shimada Yoshiko and BuBu (b.1961) from Dumb Type performance group, Training, 1998, ink-jet print from collage assembled by Shimada [p. 110]

Plate 15. Fred Williams (1927-82), Landscape Quartette, 1962, etching with aquatint, each plate image 25.4 x 17.8 cm [p. 118]

Plate 16. Bea Maddock (b.1934), Cast the shadow of your original figure. Is it possible in flashlight?, 1970, photo-screenprint, 78.4 x 55.9 cm [p.134]

Plate 17. Bea Maddock, Square 1, 1972, photo-etching, 48.8 x 39.3 cm [p. 135]

Plate 18. Bea Maddock, Passing the glass darkly, 1976, photo-etching and engraving, 35.4 x 53.7 cm [p. 133]

Plate 19. Bea Maddock, No-where, 1974, photo-etching, 68 x 50 cm [p. 137]

Plate 20. Bea Maddock, Terra Spiritus…with a darker shade of pale, 1993-98, panel from a series of 51 incised drawings with ochre pastels and blind letterpress, in an edition of 5; each image to this forty-metre panorama is 28.4 x 75.8 cm [p. 141]

311 Plate 21. Raymond Arnold (b.1950), Justify the Line – Iron Blow re-excavation 1992, panels two and three, etchings from recycled prints by the artist, each panel to four panel panorama is 88 x 130 cm. [ p. 145]

Plate 22. Raymond Arnold, The Spectacle of Nature 1994, four panel etching, 200 x 200 cm (installed) [p. 147]

Plate 23. Raymond Arnold, And for each sense there is an image II, 1994, etching diptych, 140 x 70 cm [ p. 151]

Plate 24. Raymond Arnold, Source – Walking into Courbet’s shadow, 1997, print installation comprising two etchings, spotlight and elevated dish [ p. 154]

Plate 25. Judy Watson (b.1959), the guardians 1990, lithograph with chine collé, printed by the artist, 24 x 39 cm [p. 167]

Plate 26. Judy Watson, shield 1991, pigment, charcoal, ink, acrylic and pastel on canvas, 189 x 147 cm, collection of Wollongong City Gallery [p. 166]

Plate 27. Judy Watson, women be strong 1994, lithograph with chine collé, printed by the artist, 33 x 25.5 cm [p. 167]

Plate 28. Judy Watson, our hair in your collections 1997, etching with chine collé, printed by Basil Hall, Northern Editions, 31 x 21 cm [ p. 169]

Plate 29. Judy Watson, a preponderance of aboriginal blood, 2005, photo-etchings printed by Basil Hall Editions, two panels from a portfolio of 20 sheets, 42 x 30.5 cm. Published by Numero Uno Publications, Brisbane [p. 170]

Plate 30. Prawat Laucharoen (b.1941), Launching Station 1981, intaglio print performance with three copper etching plates and mechanical devices, the artist’s studio, New York [p. 211]

312 Plate 31. Prawat Laucharoen, Subject to Change without Notice, 1984, intaglio print installation with six copper etching plates, mechanical devices and etchings on paper. Installed at Orion Editions Gallery, New York, 1986 [p. 213]

Plate 32. Prawat Laucharoen, Metamorphosis on the Theme of Morandi III 1986, print installation comprising nine copper plates, etchings on paper, grid boards and bottles of etching fluid. Collection of Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane [ p. 214]

Plate 33. Prawat Laucharoen,The Four Elements 1993, installation comprising etched copper plates, rubbings on paper, gold leaf drawings, (among other elements). Exhibited at the First Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, 1993 [ p. 216]

Plate 34. Prawat Laucharoen, After we become New Industrial Country 1998, installation comprising traditional Thai dressing tables with rubbings taken from them, and 12 black boxes with water. Exhibited at Limerick City Gallery of Art, Ireland 1998 [ p. 222]

Plate 35. Thavorn Ko-Umdovit (b.1956), Fetish, 1996, woodblock print and photo- screenprint with chine collé on sa paper, 130 x 150 cm [ p. 203]

Plate 36. Phatyos Buddhacharoen (b.1965), Spirit in Space, 1996, lithograph, 70 x 118 cm [p. 225 ]

Plate 37. Phatyos Buddhacharoen, Range of Mountains, 1998, print installation of limestone blocks, glass containers with stones and printed lithographs. Exhibited at Silpakorn University Art Gallery, Bangkok 1998 [ p. 226]

Plate 38. Phatyos Buddhacharoen, Range of Stones 1998, print installation comprising wall assemblage of lithographs with ‘stones made from lithographs at base [ p. 226]

Plate 39. Phatyos Buddhacharoen, Images of the Mind 1998, print installation comprising limestone blocks and related lithographs [ p. 226]

Plate 40. Phatyos Buddhacharoen ,…Chapel Amidst Entertainment…, 2003, screenprinted panels of text and structure of wood with lotus-shape lamp, among other elements.

313 Installation as part of the artist’s Mindfulness exhibition at the National Gallery, Bangkok, 2003 [ p. 228]

Plate 41. Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (b.1957), The Parting 1990, etching and aquatint, 34 x 44 cm [p. 231]

Plate 42. Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Three boxes of men and their reflections, 1993, three black metal containers with motor oil and etchings. Exhibited at the First Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, 1993 [ p. 232]

Plate 43. Bundith Phunsombatlert (b.1972), Conditions of Living 1996, etching, 53 x 48 cm [ p. 234]

Plate 44. Bundith Phunsombatlert, Readymade Human Product, 1998, vendor’s trolley with screenprinted plastic elements. Exhibited at the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, 1999 [ p. 234]

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Appendix 2: Glossary of Printmaking Terms

 Autographic - made by the hand of the artist

 Edition - the total number of prints (or impressions) made.

 Electrostatic - printing from electronic or hard copy matrix which results in a Xerox or an ink jet print.

 Graphic - term used to describe both drawing and printmaking

 Matrix - the original block, plate, stone, stencil form or collage from which an image is printed

 Original print - traditionally defined as a `print made directly from a master image on wood, stone, metal, etc. which is executed by himself’ (Oxford English Dictionary). Included relief printing, lithography, intaglio printing (etching, aquatint, engraving and drypoint) and screenprinting. However, since the late 1960s, artists have used photography in printmaking and computer-generated means, which has made the term difficult to apply. Futhermore, as this thesis testifies, cross-disciplinary use of print tropes means that the term is further compromised.

 Photomechanical- any process in which an image can be photographically translated into one of the print media, i.e. photo-etching, photo-lithography, photo-screenprinting.

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