Who Signs the Print

by bam

A fine art print is made by at least two people: the artist who makes the image, and the master printer who makes the edition. Only one of them signs it. That is not a rule about race, and getting that right is the whole point of this course, because the convention applies to every master printer who has ever worked, which means the medium itself manufactures a category of expertise the public cannot see. The interesting question is who ends up in that category, and what they build once they are there. This course teaches the convention end to end: what a pencil signature actually certifies (approval, not authorship, and it dates only from the second half of the nineteenth century), where the printer's credit really lives (an embossed chop that carries no name, and a documentation sheet the public never reads), and what a printer owns instead of a signature (the bon a tirer, the proof the whole edition must match). Then it follows Robert Blackburn, hired in 1957 as the first master printer at Universal Limited Art Editions, who printed its first seventy-nine editions, all of which carry other artists' signatures, and who answered the convention by building an open workshop rather than by arguing with it. Elizabeth Catlett answered it with a collective, Margaret Taylor-Burroughs with a museum, AfriCOBRA with a cheap and portable medium, Charles White with a classroom, and Emma Amos with a print portfolio that got her into a room she was the only woman in. The shape transfers: session musicians, ghostwriters, film colourists, translators and test kitchens are governed by the same three conditions, and the course ends by teaching you to spot them, and by showing two credit conventions that were actually corrected.