Touch – Feel – Experience – Consider: On being exposed to crisis through performative and interactive practices in contemporary printmaking and graphic arts

Abstract

The last two decades have brought a visible and perceptible change in artistic printmaking practices. Besides traditional forms of presentation, i.e., framed or unframed print on paper or any other surface, we may observe new ways of interacting with viewers, who become more and more involved in transforming themselves into active participants or even co-producers of the artistic project. This paper focuses on such artistic proposals, and if more classical artworks are mentioned, the reason is their non-traditional aspects like provocative visual play with viewers’ perceptions.

Those formal aspects of analysed artistic examples are linked to the ideas expressed by the artists in question, which revolve around different crises and catastrophes that humanity is facing today. The leitmotiv of the general approach represented by Sean Caulfield, Karol Pomykała or Angela Snieder is related to the postulate posed by Jean-Luc Nancy (2015, p. 8), that:

"We are being exposed to a catastrophe of meaning. Let’s not hurry to hide this exposure under pink, blue, red, or black silks. Let us remain exposed, and let us think about what is happening [ce qui nous arrive] to us: Let us think that it is we who are arriving, or who are leaving."