Transverse mappings: print, media and beyond

In 1968 the critic Leo Steinberg (1920-2011), introduced the audience of a lecture at MoMA, New York to the notion of the ‘Flatbed.’ This term, as it suggests, was one borrowed from the flat bed of the printing press. For Steinberg such a conception was necessary in order to register the unwieldy pressure put upon traditional notions of the picture plane by the art of the time (in particular that of Robert Rauschenberg), and a conception that did justice to the possibility of a ground open to receive the technological dynamics of new media together with the mediated image. In this way the work surface “stood for the mind itself—dump, reservoir, switching center, abundant with concrete references freely associated as in an internal monologue—the outward symbol of the mind as a running transformer of the external world, constantly ingesting incoming unprocessed data to be mapped in an overcharged field”. This Panel takes its staring point from Steinberg’s usage of print media as a means for broadening the remit of the art object and its potential role as interface. This conception allows for a rethinking of print media in much broader terms, no longer simply as a technical support but a synthesizing and negotiating a variety of representational, formal and technical tools. While some have been calling for a return to thinking through media-specificity once more, what does this mean for the expanded field of print, a medium that has always traversed media? How do we negotiate practices that both lie in the traditional core of printmaking and those that appear to thrive at its edges and periphery? What, we might ask, is the binding element, the current ‘flatbed’? Veronique Chance (chair), Nicolas Devision, Finlay Taylor and Johanna Love will discuss this in relation to current practice