Hugh Merill on print's possibilities (in a visual arts context)

In a 1991 paper called Educating the Next Generation of Printmakers, Hugh Merrill wrote: "Print is not an object, a technique, or a category, but it is a theoretical language of evolving ideas. The territory printmaking occupies is broad ranging and diverse"..."These possibilities include print functioning as fluxus, new genre, and altered photographic communication. It offers dialogue through offset and copier booklets, posters, pamphlets and underground newspapers. It reaches out to discover a new audience by using mail art devices. It functions on a collaborative level, giving a political voice to artist co-ops. Images produced in the creative collaboration between master printer and the artist have become some of the most effective work in contemporary art. Print is the intense introspection of the individual etcher, lithographer, silkscreen or relief print artist. These efforts have developed into a unique aesthetic approach to the issues which make up contemporary visual thought. Print is the images of popular culture, signage, commercial reproduction, and computer imaging. It is both two and three dimensional. Print includes forms devised as multiples, installations and performance. It is drawing, cartoons and illustration. It is private, spiritual and public representation. It is both unique impression, monotypes, as well as limited editions. Print is text, books, information and documentation. Each method of expression cited functions in a unique and vital way involving a series of evolving ideas as well as lineage which is rooted in history."

Merill concluded his paper with the sentence: "It is never a matter of separating the conceptual from the physical but learning to allow both to have their place in the creative process."

http://www.hughmerrill.com/writing/nextgen.html (accessed 25 February, 2010)

Hugh Merill is an American artist who has devoted his career to printmaking, community arts projects and education. His postgraduate study brought him into contact with John Cage, Alex Katz and Robert Motherwell – among others – who influenced his thinking and work. In the 1970s he worked on etchings he called real-estatescapes, which referred to the dominance of urbanisation over nature. In the 1990s Merill resolved to make work that had a direct social impact, following a period of studying the writings of Lucy Lippard, Suzanne Lacy and Suzi Gablic; and a consequent trip to Krakow and Auschwitz from which he produced a series of photographs and drawings. In 1996 he worked as a visiting artist with the Christian Boltanski exhibition, So Far, at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. This resulted in a collaborative tabloid insert for the Sunday Kansas City Star; and an arts and educational archive called Portrait of Self, which he has used as a prototype for community arts projects around the world. In 2005 Merill produced, through invitation, a community action project called Pools of Belief for the Impact conference in Germany and Poland.

Merill has taught at taught at Wheaton College (in Massachusetts) and Kansas City Arts Institute. He has spoken at numerous conferences; been awarded several grants; and his work is held in major art institutions including the Museum of Modern Art.