Veronica Belo Contemporary Print Practice Research Paper 4/17/15 Art Against Authority How Printmaking Lends Itself to Political and Social Resistance. A picture is worth a thousand words, quite literally having the ability to communicate on a multitude of levels with a broad audience. There is no doubt that visual mediums, particularly print, have made huge strides in the critique of and protest against political and social injustice. Printmaking’s effectiveness in the realm of political and social resistance or protest can be attributed to three of its most inherent attributes: quality, quantity, and accessibility. Printmaking in the context of a resistance is a qualitatively distinctive endeavor utilizing different tools to interject in the realm of the physical world. These endeavors and tools are employed to manifest new meanings, which initiate new relationships. These relationships are intrinsically different …show more content…
The number of prints produced as well as the potential or intended audience are also paramount aspects of printmaking. Dylan Miner says work printed in smaller runs “created a body of accessible, yet non-elitist images. The tactility and expediency of the print is paramount to its capacity to circulate within wide audiences, without being contained by capitalist social relations” FIG 2 (pp, p130). The circulation and use of a finite body of work fosters connection and community. Jesse Goldstein advocates that ““Making 30 or 40 or even a hundred prints for an event is a nice way of being part of a shared space. This is production at a human scale” (pp, p100). Printmaking’s reliance on the hand process and the analog method speaks to its more human and scaled output but it also implies that the work be more purposeful and democratic. Printing in relatively small quantities is an understood rejection of mass-production, mass communication, and mass