“The Machine That Makes the Art”: Printmaking as Conceptual Practice at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design Lithography Workshop

This paper analyzes prints produced at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design Lithography Workshop by conceptual artists—including Sol LeWitt, N.E. Thing, Co., and Douglas Huebler—during the workshop’s operation between 1969-1976. Key concerns of conceptual art are also issues central to print theory: for example, questions about the transmission of information, ephemerality, seriality, or the delegation of labor. Indeed, over the course of 1970s almost every major North American conceptual artist worked with print in some fashion, many in collaborative workshops such as NSCAD’s. Yet, despite their prevalence, these prints have received little scholarly attention, nor has their contribution to the larger span of conceptual practice been considered. I argue that conceptual artists were drawn to printmaking because of fundamental procedural and thematic resonances between conceptual art and printmaking, and show how conceptual artists further transformed the operations of printmaking to serve conceptual ends. Paralleling the way conceptual art attempted to deemphasize the art object in favor of the “idea,” analyzing conceptual prints requires shifting attention from the printed edition to their matrices and processes of their printing. Complicating the role of “deskilling” in conceptual practice, making itself is shown to be a site of conceptual work and a public space of collaboration. This paper specifically interprets prints that self-reflexively attend to the collaborative process of printmaking; that complicate the idea of the matrix by incorporating non-print operations, such as folding or affixing; and that use printmaking’s reproductive capacity to explore issues of mediation and irreproducibility.