The first reference monograph on Marie Cool Fabio Balducci, this publication edited by Laurence Schmidlin offers a thorough overview of their singular practice and critical work. For 25 years they have been developing—under a double name voluntarily without conjunction—an unclassifiable body of work between sculpture and live practice based on short, often repetitive actions carried out at first only by Marie Cool, but later also by others in confined spaces (studio, exhibition space) using common objects from standard work environments (sheets of A4 paper, adhesive tape, pencils, office tables) and natural elements such as water or sunlight. Carried out in silence, these actions take the form of simple gestures and short interventions: moving pencils at a regular rhythm, holding two A4 sheets of paper against each other, pouring a bottle of water on a desk, or following the sun reflected by a glass. The themes of ownership, precariousness, and the subjection of the body to the material world underlie their rigorous and modest work. Their practice has recently taken on an installative dimension in relation to the exhibition space, thus offering the audience a space for exchange and reflection in relation to the stakes of today’s society and the experience we make of it.

What ties western art together? This extended essay attempts to distill some of the basic ideas with which artists and observers of their art have grappled, ideas worthy of ongoing consideration and debate. The fostering of visual creativity as it has morphed from ancient Greece to the present day, the political and economic forces underpinning the commissioning and displacement of art, and the ways in which contemporary art relates to past periods of art history (and in particular, the Renaissance), are among the topics broached. Architecture, drawings, prints, films, painting, sculpture, and decorative arts from Europe and the US are considered and examined, often including nonstandard examples, occasionally including ones from the immediate surroundings of the author (who is based in New England). Although this book is primarily geared to those who would like a brief introduction to some basic aspects of a visual tradition spanning thousands of years, students of aesthetics might also discover useful benchmarks in this concise overview. The author places the emphasis on how art has been used and loved (or sometimes despised or ignored) more than on which works should be most famous.

Typically viewed as a curiosity in the artist’s œuvre, the unusual cancellation sheet for Félix Vallotton’s 1898 woodcut series Intimités is here reassessed as an integral part of the series and an artwork in its own right. After situating Vallotton’s sheet among the ethical, commercial and ideological stakes of cancellation as a printmaking practice in nineteenth-century France, this article argues that the sheet functions as a uniquely decorative culmination of the series’ overall resistance to narrative. It concludes by re-examining the status of cancellation as a destructive, final act, proposing that it can instead be interpreted as a creative and generative process.

This article examines caricaturist Paul Gavarni’s lithographic series, Les Lorettes vieillies, and Jules and Edmond de Goncourt’s short text, La Lorette, as two conflicting visions of the lorette, a type of nineteenth-century prostitute celebrated in literary and visual sources. The Goncourts’ text has previously been studied for its explicit aim to break the rules around representing the lorette; however, I propose here that Gavarni’s little-known images were in fact more radical. Exploring the ways in which Les Lorettes vieillies humanizes the experience of the ageing lorette, a taboo topic in other sources, I show how the series challenges society’s norms around age and gender. Finally, I suggest that we should consider Les Lorettes vieillies, published at the same time and in the same newspaper as La Lorette, as an important intertext informing the Goncourts’ own presentation of the lorette as a transgressive figure.

In recent decades attention has turned to the role played by print culture in the expansion and expression of imperial power. Print is, in large part, the way in which empire represented itself to itself. With its ability to reproduce and mobilise information, the printing press afforded these representations of empire an expansive reach that traced the geographical extent of empire itself, projecting constructions of imperial identity, culture, and power to distant locations and populations.

Embedded within the material language of these historical print forms is a set of associations heavily aligned with power and its effects. In an Australian context, print is haunted by colonialism. The languages of these marks, their particular vernaculars, carry a taint that endures today. But these languages are now being spoken by other voices. This article argues for a more strongly developed conceptualisation of ‘print language’ within the critical discourse of fine art printmaking, and applies this approach to a reading of work by Rew Hanks (with reference to Daniel Boyd), Judy Watson, Julie Gough, and Robert Hague. These contemporary artists appropriate print vernaculars in their work as a means of investigating and critiquing the ongoing effects of colonialism in contemporary culture.

Washi is paper made by hand from the bark of native Japanese shrubs. Washi is a common medium used for printmaking and paper crafts. Artists who have studied nagashi-zuki, a sheet-forming method unique to washi, often import Japanese fibers because alternatives with similar properties have not been identified. We propose Dirca L. (leatherwood), a shrub endemic to North America, as a source of fibers with properties similar to those plants traditionally used to make washi. The thinness and strength of the leatherwood paper allows it to withstand repeated bending, folding and creasing better than paper made from species of Wikstroemia (Japanese fiber), suggesting an alternative for use with various printmaking techniques and paper arts and crafts that involve folding, such as origami. We engaged printmakers and origami artists in creating original pieces using our leatherwood paper and evaluated how the paper responds to various printmaking techniques and complex folding. We identified Dirca mexicana as a source of fibers with similar properties to species of Wikstroemia used to make gampi washi. Handmade D. mexicana bark paper was successfully used as a paper medium for intaglio, lithography, relief, digital, and screenprinting printmaking techniques, as well as, complex folding origami sculptures.