This is not a fight against 'Flesh and Blood"but one against 'misperception' and 'wrong thinking'.
RandySwearer, was and is, as I consider him, a brilliant and gifted colleague. I watched him, at our university, single-handedly organize a lagging Advertising Art Program into a viable and strong four year Design Program, complete with undergraduate admission portfolio examination process, and as a separate, autonomous educational entity.
This, however, is one of the flaws, as I see it, with the 'separatist' mentality. Undergraduates singled out for a career-driven rather than art-driven curriculum, will, in such a 'closed system' and learning environment, lose touch with the historical, ideological, and cultural foundations which season and inform the aesthetics of our visual perception. Such an educational separation amounts to a deconstructing and reinventing the culture, a completely Post-Modernist trend in contemporary education. I hope that it soon 'self-implodes' by it's own continued omission of addressing the philosophically honest admonition that:
There is wisdom in discovering why our forebears erected certain walls of separation, of organization, of protection, of definition, of distinction) before we opt to "dismantle them".
Timothy High
TIMOTHY GRIFFIN HIGH
In the printmaking area at the University of Texas at Austin, Department of Art and Art History, (the place of your current Dean's former employment), we have a separate Printmaking Tech Media Room which exclusively services the Printmaking Area. We have state of the art Mac G3 and G4 stations, an oversize flat bed scanner, transparency scanner, laser printer, and an H-P Encad Chroma 24" plotter printer, and a NuArc fliptop litho /etching plate exposure unit.
At first, our print grads, especially one, immersed himself for almost a year and a half, learning to translate his copper etching plates from hand-drawn photoshop manipulated transparent positives. After a modicum of success with these prints, he just recently has returned to direct hands-on etching techniques, where his impressions are newly able to capture, so dramatically, far more tonal nuance than any of the halftone computer-based photo-etchings he was producing. I asked him if would continue working with the computer and he seemed less than eager to return to it.
The computer is best seen as a means (or tool) to be used to enhance the organization of the images or the subject matter , but the treatment of tonal passages and articulation of light are best served by the traditional printing disciplines and techniques. Art cannot be best served by assuming that the CMYK and RGB color -processing of Adobe Photoshop images is a viable replacement for the modern printmaking disciplines.
To rely on this alone, as a substitute, is like trying to content yourself with a pallid Swanson's TV Dinner when your heart is set on an authentic French gourmet meal,... on a Babette's Feast!
Keep up the Good Fight.
Please keep me posted.
Tim High,
Associate Professor-Printmaking UT-Austin