Rachel Vogel

The 1960s witnessed two simultaneous but seemingly contradictory artistic developments: the rise of conceptual art and the flourishing of the American Print Renaissance. Conceptualism launched a revolutionary attack on the existing art world by proposing that the idea was more important than the finished object. In contrast, the American Print Renaissance marked a return to the traditional techniques and skilled production that conceptual art supposedly eschewed. Given these divergent aims, perhaps it is no wonder that scholars have not yet addressed the fact that throughout the 1960s and 1970s, almost every major North American conceptual artist turned to the medium of print. My dissertation examines the pervasiveness of this phenomenon and argues that printmaking was critically important to how these artists thought about conceptual art.

Conceptual printmaking took on many forms, blurring the boundaries between traditional techniques and photomechanical processes. This project considers conceptual print workshops, collaborations between conceptual artists and master printers, and conceptual print publications, looking to examples from the New York Graphic Workshop, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design Lithography Workshop, Crown Point Press, and publishers such as Printed Matter and Seth Siegelaub. Taken as a whole, these activities reveal the nexus of shared concerns between conceptualism and printmaking: distributed authorship, mediation, seriality, multiplicity, and the dissemination of information. By focusing on issues of collaboration, artistic labor, and process, this project challenges prevailing understandings and assumptions of both conceptual art and printmaking.