International graphic art circuits as "negotiators of diversity"
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The San Juan Biennial - held in the city of San Juan, Puerto Rico - was a pioneer in "negotiating diversity", projecting and finding a hierarchy for Latin American printmaking within the context of the rest of the world. Its prestige soon made it the artificer of a "tangent" globalization¹³ that united Latin American countries mound the problems of the print media, while its continuity and excellence helped achieve the dissemination of images and artistic languages, provoking an exchange between regional artists themselves. This event also made it possible to grant Latin American graphic arts an identity that was removed from the indigenous-expressionist stereotypes with which central countries identified them, since it prompted the understanding of a multiple concept of identity that is unrelated to folk or ethnocentric elements, and, instead, is concerned with diverse situations and life experiences: personal memories. political and social articulations, or racial and sexual minorities determined by particular historic developments.
As said before, another example of this "negotiation of diversity" was given by the appearance of the Czech magazine Grapheion. This stunning magazine, impeccably edited by Simona Hošková and her staff, made several things very necessary for our field. In the first place it was edited in a non-Central country with a strong European cultural profile, which brings fresh air to the "dry" technical information and lack of content that characterize this kind of magazine generated in the Central countries. In the second place, and for the same reason, it highlighted the field of printmaking through a very deep theoretical reflection on contemporary aesthetic issues related to the graphic arts. And last but not least, it generated many links among artists and events around the world.
Making the best of a historical moment characterized by ruptures and exchanges, in which culture projects homogeneity. while at the same time being forced to assume the idea of differences. graphic arts knew just how to "negotiate diversity". They did so through the consolidation of an international circuit of shows and events dedicated to their own field. generating a counter-current from the periphery to the center (which also involved the hierarchical rupture between major arts and minor arts), whose influence often exceeded the realm of the merely artistic.¹⁴ International shows aligned with the mainstream of globalized art had left graphic arts beyond the scope of their light. or at any rate poorly lit. An empty space thus remained which was comfortably occupied by those "others", in the peripheral areas: Latin America. Eastern Europe, the nations that were born from the rupture of the former Soviet Union: India, and Egypt. In addition. in the past 15 years, there has been an important influx of Asian events and artists into this globalizing circuit of international graphic arts. This is shown by the Triennials in Kanagawa, Osaka, and Sapporo (now inactive), in Japan. the Biennial in Taipei. Taiwan (one of the oldest and most prestigious in the East, founded in 1983) and the graphic mega-events "Reveal-Harmonize" in Macao. "Millennium" in Japan, and "Y2K" in Taipei. which were organized to commemorate the dawn of a new millennium through printmaking.
We should also mention that in the last decade of the 20th Century, at first timidly, then assertively, a series of very well attended international events¹⁵ took place. They brought into focus the profound economic, communicational, cultural, and migratory modifications that we have been analyzing, as well as their consequences for graphic arts. It was concluded that, at the end of the century, printmaking - not altogether conscious of how or why it had happened - was considerably well situated within the globalizing wave. The fact is that many of the changes brought on by globalization, changes that had a destructuring effect in other fields. opened new perspectives for graphic arts, and they came hand in hand with greater freedom to experiment technically and conceptually. While the use of electronic media and interactivity revolutionized all aspects of social communications and information transmission, and modified the notion of representation and artistic practices. graphic arts - which had been working with multiplicity: the connection between sequences of works; the production of a matrix previously conceived. that would later give way to the finished piece - were the first to approach the new media and begin to experiment with them. At the same time, rules and regulations for the participation in international biennials, as well as the curatorship of graphic arts shows, became more receptive to the bending of the frontiers of the traditional print, in order to include new proposals and new media. to the point where a good portion of the first prizes at the Cracow Triennial 2000. organized under the theme of "A Bridge to the Future". were awarded to digital prints.