Conceptual Iconoclasm in American Printmaking

Radical print praxis has been at the heart of Chicanx printmaking for the last five decades, but rarely do we stop to ask how these works pivot toward conceptualism. This paper examines this shift when print artists turned to language as a malleable form, questioned the objecthood of the print and its commodity status, and initiated new forms of participation and distribution. Scholars have written on how these conceptual practices came about in a Latin American context, marked by authoritarian regimes that disappeared those who spoke openly against repression. But Chicanx artists were at the forefront of a different kind of war, a coercive system that cast them within a prescribed racial and class hierarchy, one that also required DIY tactics to fracture the veil of the ‘land of the free, and home of the brave.’ I draw on a hemispheric framework to contextualize experimental print practices that subversively exposed the war at home. Often in a turn of phrase, an invocation to perform a speech act, or an unplanned journey, these artists incited a war of images. They attacked and rejected the most cherished symbols of U.S. nationalism and in doing so they engaged in a conceptualist iconoclasm intent on exposing the ideology’s origins and its enduring colonial legacies. Their work exposes not only the colonial thinking that undergirds US nationalism and US interventions in Latin America, but also how the violence of American expansionism structures our contemporary life.