Raising the Spectre: Contemporary Art and Print Culture in the Aftermath of Colonialism

In recent decades attention has turned to the role played by print culture in the expansion and expression of imperial power. Print is, in large part, the way in which empire represented itself to itself. With its ability to reproduce and therefore mobilise information, the printing press became an indispensable tool of empire, its operations extending beyond colonial administration into areas such as anthropology, botany, and cartography for the purposes of defining and controlling people, space, and the natural world. Whether in terms of literal boundary demarcations, artistic renderings of landscape, scientific accounts, administrative records, or popular broadsides, the printing press afforded these representations of empire an expansive reach that traced the geographical extent of empire itself. In doing so, it projected constructions of imperial identity, culture, and power to distant locations and populations. At the same time, print imbued such artefacts with an authority that bolstered and fortified efforts to claim, organise, and control these ‘new’ lands and their inhabitants. Such an interrogation of print’s historical role, however, is not well developed within the critical discourse of fine art printmaking. Emerging as they did within an art economy that valued the unique and singular artwork, master printers and publishers found it fruitful to shelter printmaking from the stigma of industrial reproduction. As noted by Gerardo Mosquera, fine art printmaking is a ‘reproductive medium that self-limits its reproductive possibilities’. Such a demarcation has contributed to a critical lens which is less sharply attuned to the overlaps between fine art printmaking and print culture, and therefore to the social, cultural, and political operations and histories they share. While A. Hyatt Mayor’s 1971 work Prints and People: A Social History of Printed Pictures remains a foundational work internationally, in recent years there have been some notable local developments in this area. Exhibitions such as The Story of Australian Printmaking 1801–2005 (National Gallery of Australia, 2007), Colony: Australia 1770–1861 and Colony: Frontier Wars (National Gallery of Victoria, 2018),