Print in contemporary art - print as contemporary art

One of the consequences of the dearth of critical discourse on prints in the context of contemporary art is the insufficient attention that has been paid to the two categories into which contemporary print falls: there are prints that constitute an element of installations or other types of artistic output; hence the notion of ‘print in art’. And there are those prints that appear under the familiar label of the ‘fine art print’, typically in the form of the editioned print, hence the suggested concept of ‘print as art’. Both categories may occur in the oeuvre of an individual artist ─ take Sigmar Polke, for example, or British Turner Prize nominee Ciara Phillips. Yet, these manifestations of print can also be said to occupy different terrains of contemporary art (Suzuki, 2011; Tallman, 2013). British philosopher Peter Osborne has made the observation that a similar situation applies to contemporary photography and he argues that ‘the relationship between these different kinds of practice’ is ‘one of the most important unresolved critical questions’ (Osborne, 2013, pp 126-7). As with photography, a related issue may be the theoretical conception of print as a ‘pictorial medium’ versus print or the ‘printerly’ as a function of the ‘domain of the image’ in general (ibid). The broader issue at stake here is the ‘graphic unconscious’, as posited by Avi Alpert (2010), and its role in contemporary art and culture.
My paper will begin to outline some of the overlapping and/or diverging institutional, socio-economic, educational, material/aesthetic and philosophical-critical issues that arise from this situation.