Levy process camera, 1932 or 1933, glass negative, Library of Congress
“Oh, it’s just a print,” the homeowner says, waving toward the lithograph’s number and signature.
Just a print? Does she realize humans learned to print art long before Gutenberg printed sentences? That printing a woodcut required an engraver to make more than a thousand cuts just to chip out slivers between the crosshatch and produce two square inches of shadow? That the printing process shaped modern art?
In her new book Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, Jennifer L. Roberts, the Drew Gilpin Faust Professor of the Humanities at Harvard, redeems a process we dismiss too breezily. Just a print. A reproducible image, cut off from its original, cheapened by its quantity. “In the predominant narratives of the development of Western art,” she writes, “printmaking barely registers. It suffers from a weird form of double invisibility. It is somehow both too obscure and too familiar; both beyond and beneath notice.”
Dear friends of ours are split on this issue. The wife buys art—meaning original canvases, not digital tokens or paper copies. The husband groans every time: “You could just get a print.” It would be cheaper is what he means; besides, he can tell no difference.
They need Walter Benjamin to mediate. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin says yes, there is a great loss. Even the most perfect reproduction “is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be….This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition…as well as the various changes in its ownership.” Provenance, darling. The delicate wear that keeps preservationists, curators, and restorers employed. Originals have authenticity—the DNA of the artist, perhaps literally—and are, as originals, unique and irreplaceable.
But, continues Benjamin, a print trades the aura of the original for the ability to touch millions, entering all sorts of situations and contexts. The print democratizes art, freeing it from art-world rituals that might keep it from being seen by more than a handful of people. “And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced.”
Reactivates. Gives it new energy and momentum. Lets it move, and be seen, and touch us.
Technology is often accused of deskilling. Add the efficiencies of the printing process to an artist’s repertoire, and you will make them lazy. Tell that to the Japanese artists who use katagami stencils to resist-dye bolts of cotton or silk. The handmade paper of those stencils is “interpenetrated by a hand-threaded mesh made with single strands of human hair or silk.” The exquisite care required far outweighs a splattering of paint.
By the start of the twentieth century, technical reproduction was so advanced, Benjamin notes, that it “captured a place of its own among the artistic processes.” By mid-century, young artists were refusing to be stuck at an easel holding a palette of oils. Snobbery was boring; new techniques of all kinds were exciting.
Jasper Johns used stencils to grid paintings of numbers and letters, and the result opened an era of “conceptual art, minimalism, and an entire range of systematic painting practices.” Andy Warhol used screenprinting to transfer photographs of movie stars onto huge canvases and gave us pop art. “In each case the artist diverted a printmaking technique into another, higher-status medium,” Roberts points out.
She tells us about artists who used printing presses to smash ironing boards, set fires on press beds, used their own bodies as printing plates, used blackcurrants, chutney, Bolognese sauce, Hershey’s syrup, and caviar as ink.
The playfulness delights me, and while I do not want art that requires refrigeration, I would treasure a signed and numbered lithograph of any canvas I loved. I have no interest in buying a piece of art that lives only in electricity. I know there are ways to frame and exhibit digital art, just as Kindle made itself more like a paper book and magazines do those ridiculous page-by-page presentations online. But it is the physicality of the printing process—the sensuousness, the texture and flow—that intrigues me.
A fine printmaker must know exactly where the paper is, how thick the ink is, how much pressure to apply to make the plate. “A print is an object that has been made by transferring an image between two surfaces in contact,” Roberts writes. To print traditionally, you have to convert your image into something that can be felt. You must give it a pattern of grooves, ridges, or adhesions. And when you begin to print, your ink, paper, and plate must all be in physical contact, with pressure coming from above and resistance from the print bed below. A print “is an object that has been pushed, and pushes back.”
David Hammons was pushing back when he made a series of body prints in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He would cover his Black skin with margarine and lie down, pressing his body, often awkwardly contorted, against a sheet of paper or board on the floor. Rising carefully, he would sift powdered pigment onto the clear, oily shape, “inking” it. The results often suggested, even to the point of reenactment, racial violence.
Yet the prints are tender. “Hammons returns to each impression as he would to another body, laying his head on its chest, laying his cheek on its cheek, wrapping his hand around its waist, bringing eyelash to eyelash in a butterfly kiss,” Roberts writes. “The delicacy and sensitivity of this operation cannot be overemphasized. This is not the record of a blunt impact. These are prints made by the softest, most sensitive parts of the body: prints made by lips, hair, eyelashes, and even the tiny reticulations of the surface of the skin.” The Black body is not immune to sensation, he is saying. The Black body is finely wrought, exquisite, and feels pain with a terrible sensitivity.
Around the time that Hammons was making those prints, Robert Rauschenberg was growing depressed by the violence and social unrest battering all viewers of the nightly news. He flew out to Malibu with “the intention of doing a large, peaceful watercolor.” He did not produce anything remotely peaceful, Roberts notes dryly. Instead, he became fascinated by the moiré effect that was once the bane of anyone trying to print a magazine, because you could not reproduce a photo that was already a reproduction without the overlay of two different screens distorting the image. Instead of avoiding the moiré effect, Rauschenberg sought it. He collaged news articles and ad clippings, transferred them to screens, and printed them, producing a liquid, wavelike structure. He even rotated one of the screens until it was slightly off-register to intensify the distortion. “The entire set of prints is overtaken by moiré,” Roberts writes, and the interference pattern vibrates in your gaze, underscoring the shock. He had found “a way of expressing precisely the sense of anxiety and anticipation caused by these events, especially the sense that one can perceive but not fully understand their meaning.”
She slips many such examples into her book, which is a chronicle of creativity as well as a redemption of printmaking. She treasures “the way it compels us to confront and interpret different forms of orientation, different forms of knowledge, different forms of sensory experience.” The art of printing hinges on relationships, and on touch. “It brings us into contact.”
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
