It is a little world
- Cubed
In the 1960s, the designer Robert Propst worked with the Herman Miller company to produce “The Action Office”, a stylish system of open-plan office furniture that allowed workers to sit, stand, move around and configure the space as they wished.
Propst then watched in horror as his ideas were corrupted into cheap modular dividers, and then to cubicle farms or, as Propst described them, “barren, rathole places”. Managers had squeezed the style and the space out of the action office, but above all they had squeezed the ability of workers to make choices about the place where they spent much of their waking lives.
...It should be easy for the office to provide a vastly superior working environment to the home, because it is designed and equipped with work in mind. Few people can afford the space for a well-designed, well-specified home office. Many are reduced to perching on a bed or coffee table. And yet at home, nobody will rearrange the posters on your wall, and nobody will sneer about your “dog pictures, or whatever”. That seems trivial, but it is not.
The brick is one of those old technologies, like the wheel or paper, that seem to be basically unimprovable. ‘The shapes and sizes of bricks do not differ greatly wherever they are made,’ writes Edward Dobson in the fourteenth edition of his Rudimentary Treatise on the Manufacture of Bricks and Tiles. There’s a simple reason for the size: it has to fit in a human hand. As for the shape, building is much more straightforward if the width is half the length.
It seems to me that many printmakers are suffering under a delusion. Looking at current trends, it appears that recent prints are simply copying fine art and painting. Some printmakers are working in the nanga style of painting. Others are attempting to reproduce the effects of oil. Some cleverly contrived prints are often difficult to distinguish from paintings done with a brush. The question arises: Why are these printmakers working in the medium of woodblock printing at all?
For prints to follow in the footsteps of painting has very little meaning. The art of the brush and palette should be left to the brush and palette.
It might be said that the carving of a woodblock encompasses the greatest restriction on freedom. Printmakers come under extraordinary natural constraints on their work. Strangely enough, however, it is this restriction that is the fount of beauty. Constraint and restriction themselves become a blessing.
...Many people see a lack of freedom as the death knell of art. That may be true in the case of the fine arts, but in the handicrafts, lack of freedom is the fountainhead of beauty.
Among the best woodblock prints are many that seem not to have adhered strictly to the preliminary sketch. The sketch simply indicated a general direction, and in many cases was not used at all. Or it was even improved upon in the process of carving and brought vividly to life; the woodblock qualities of the print were accentuated and highlighted.