The UK originality debate took place only 40 years ago. Then both print workshops and critics thought new photographic processes available to artists would make their work less'original' - Discuss in relation to the Kelpra screenprinting studio.

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The UK originality debate took place only 40 years ago. Then both print workshops and critics thought new photographic processes available to artists would make their work less ‘original’. Discuss in relation to the Kelpra screenprinting studio and after.

 

Since the beginning of the 20th century, many advances have been made in technology, particularly in the fields of print, and design based media. This accelarating curve of knowledge in turn has raised many issues concerning not just the boundaries and limitations of art, but also it’s future and direction. Specifically I will be discussing the originality debate of 1959 and general trends in art and ideas relating to the growing force of the information age. The woodcut invented reproduction  in graphic art and with time, everything on the planet is culminating into a boiling pot of information, commercialism, corporative systems and human greed. ‘Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge, where is the knowledge we have lost in information.’  T.S. Elliot 

                With liphography came turbulant times of development in the reproduced image.  Both liphography and screen printing play on the fundemental principal of the natrual antipathy of grease and water and they way they separate.At the end of the fiftys Chris and Rose Prater founded the Kepra print press, a printmaking studio dedicated to screenprinting, a growing technique used by flourishing commercial artists since the fortys. The Praters had a close knit relashonship with the Tate corporation, and generously offered a copy of every print they produced to the tates print collection. The gift is some 1,400 screenprints in total. Hon. Robert Erskine, who at the end of the fiftys created a publishing proggramme at st. Georges gallery, London, is considered to have been at the front of the print boom  of the post war period. The timing of this ‘renaissance’was in contunction with a general economic boom. He had an aim to make good art be appreciated by ‘ the Mums and Dads of Pinner and Wigan’. There was a definate shortage of established print specialists and workshops in comparison with the rest of the continent.

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In 1959 Kelpra Studio gathered a group of five artists to represent england and produce prints for the  Paris biennale of 1965. The artists, included Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi, Patrick Caufield, and Richard smith. In reaction the growing use of photography generaly and in printing the International Congress of Plastice Arts held a meeting in 1960 in Vienna to define the meaning of an ‘original print. A number of the artists used photographic images as the base of their screenprints and this caused upset when the prints were entered. The ‘commitee’ decided that the prints were unoriginal because of ...

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