Printmaking: A Pre and Post Structuralism Article

Printmaking: A Pre and Post Structuralism Article Review of the process

"It is difficult to return to a pre-Enlightenment way of thinking," according to the author "The Syntax of the Print" Ruth Weisberg, whereby beauty alone was assumed to be the primary function of art. However, the standardization of the process of lithography has also, through the postmodern gaze, enabled such standardized reproductions, once considered merely formulaic and derivative process given the Enlightenment century's fixation upon the original and upon beauty, to be considered with the same intellectual seriousness as high art. (53) Although the function of lithography is often for the consumption of consumers, in the form of broadside advertising, and the materials used in the process are of standardized shapes rather than 'original,' Weisberg suggests that postmodernism's questioning of the pure nature of artistic visual discourse blurs the distinction between high and low art, between lithography and original works.

For instance, although a painting may seem to be 'high art' and contain the appearance of originality, often it is as dependant upon cultural tropes and mores, and is just as enclosed a part of a cultural language of the image as a mass produced piece of lithography. Thus, structuralism's approach to printmaking is valuable when thinking about other art disciplines such as design, sculpture, painting, and photography, because it frees the artist from the need to be original and locates his or her catalogue of images as part of a larger cultural language of images. The standardization of images in lithography, one can see in other arts. One can see such standardization present in the sameness of supposedly original photographs on magazine covers, all of which, although of different women, often depict models and actresses in the same pose. Furthermore, art such as the work of Andy Warhol, shows that replication, when taken to the level of self-parody of the multiple image of advertising, can attain the level of high art.