Studio Practise: Print and Culture

Print and Culture

Art schools taught painting, sculpture, architecture, music, poetry. During this time only men was allowed to attend school. Industry revolution between 1760-1840. During this time, there was a sense of division between the middle class and working class. The struggle was between identity, and class. Chartism and political movement was introduced through the identity struggle.

John Martin (1820) Belshazzar’s Feast, charge people to see his paintings. Martin then made engravings of work for the secondary market. The school of design started to emerge.

The difference between fine art and design, created conflict of both sides not understanding each other.

Matthew Arnold (1867) ‘Culture and Anarchy’

Culture is the best that has been thought and said in the world. The study of perfection. Attained through the disinterested reading, writing thinking. The pursuit of culture. Seeks ‘to minister the diseased spirit of our time’.

Anarchy

Culture polices ‘the raw and uncultivated masses’

‘The working class… raw and half developed… long lain half hidden amidst it’s poverty and squalor… now issuing from its hiding place to assert an English man’s heaven born privilege to do as he likes, and beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, breaking what it likes (2960, p105)

Leavisism- F.R Leavis and Q.D. Leavis

Still forms a kind of repressed, common sense attitude to popular culture in this country. For Leavis-C20th sees a cultural decline Standardisation and levelling down.

‘Culture has always been in minority keeping’

‘the minority, who had hitherto set the standard of taste without any serious challenge have experienced a ‘collapse of authority’

Collapse of traditional authority comes at the same time as a mass democracy (anarchy). Nostalgia for an era when the masses exhibited an unquestioning deference to (cultural) authority. Popular culture offers addictive forms of distraction and compensation. ‘The form of compensation… is the very reverse of recreation, in that it tends, not to strengthen and refresh the addict for living, but to increase his unfitness by habituating him to weak evasions, to the refusal to face reality at all (Leavis & Thompson, 1977:100) C19th Penny Dreadful.

Walter Benjamin

‘The work of Art in the age of mechanical Reproduction’ 1936

Technological Reproduction of art removes Aura. The Aura includes: creativity, genius, eternal value, tradition, authority, authenticity, autonomy, distance, mystery. Art is a mystery. This is the definition of art. Print technology changing what art is.

Print Capitalism- newspaper would include traditional illustrations.

A great nation does not ‘send its poor little boys to jail for stealing six walnuts; and allow its bankrupts to steal their hundreds of thousands with a bow; and its bankers rich with poor men’s savings, to close their doors ‘under circumstances over which they have no control’, with a ‘by your leave’; and large landed estates to be bought by men who have made their money going armed with streamers up and down the China Seas, selling Opium at the cannon’s mouth, and altering, for the benefit of the foreign nation, the common highwayman’s demand of ‘your money or your life’, into that of your money and your life’. (Ruskin, 1903, ‘Of Kings Treasuries’)

William Morris (1877) The Lesser Art

‘decorative’ arts are sick because of a division of labour. Mechanical vs intellectual. Craft worker reduced to mere labourer. Art is a ‘fruit’ growing from the conditions of society.

‘dull adjuncts to unmeaning pomp, or ingenious toys for a few rich and idle men’.

The use of nature in wallpapers was used commonly as it was perceived as popular art, it was also used for political culture.

Hand blocking studios, freely available, art that everyone can have in their homes. Couldn’t compete with machine work of creating a huge quantity a lot quicker. Letterpress flyers were produced.

Work was bespoke, returning to a DIY small scale progressive method of production. Anthony Burrell- gave back the handmade practise.