Deceleration Through the Imprint: Photo/graphic interactions in contemporary art

Abstract

Art historian David Joselit has recently argued that the task of art today is resist “the allure” of information’s “transparency”. This places a specific emphasis on photographic images. The ease of their production and ubiquity of use — as a crucial element in economic, social and cultural acceleration processes tied to information — has increased the implicit transparency that has arguably been one of photography’s most prominent attributes. The article suggests that printmaking can provide valuable procedural, aesthetic and conceptual means in the questioning of the photographic image’s assumed transparency that thereby contribute to the image’s criticality. Drawing on the concept of the “imprint” — as developed by the French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman in a still untranslated study — the article undertakes an analysis of a specific mode of contemporary printmaking, namely the woodcut. It is proposed that the distinctive material methods developed by the two chosen artists, Brook Andrew and Christiane Baumgartner, present a unique manifestation of the imprint that results in a process of slowing down the viewer’s apperception. Concurrently — and closely related to the artists’ thematic concerns — they can generate an enquiry of photography’s transparency and thus enhance its socio-cultural potential of critique.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 One example of the burgeoning literature and exhibition activities on the subject is the excellently contextualised catalogue of the 2012 exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, The Art of Deceleration. Motion and Rest in Art from Caspar David Friedrich to Ai Wei Wei, edited by Markus Brüderlin.

2 Unlike this focus on materiality, other authors, like Sarah James, have argued for a re-examination of photography’s privileged relationship to the “real” in the form of documentary as a critical response to the predominance of digital images’ seemingly straightforward proximity to the real (1–4). The opposite approach is suggested by, amongst others, Philippe Dubois, namely the conception of the photograph as a “fiction-image” (155–66).

3 In examining the interrelationship between photography and printmaking in nineteenth century France, Stephen Bann lays the blame on the disavowal of photography’s enmeshment with printmaking during the nineteenth century on writers such as Gernsheim, who in his 1955 History of Photography clearly strove to “avoid contaminating photography with the vocabulary proper to the engraving arts”, quite unlike the practitioners of the nineteenth century themselves (“Photography, Printmaking” 24). Bann also points out that “Benjamin’s view of visual reproduction in the nineteenth century is vitiated by the need to arrange successive ‘inventions’ diachronically, with the photograph being cast as the ultimate fulfilment of the project of mimesis” (“Photography, Printmaking” 24). In other words, there has been a general tendency in writing on photography — notwithstanding the important work by a number of scholars, such as Bann — to ignore or deny its historical affiliation with printmaking. The reasons for this “blind spot” lie — as indicated in Bann’s comments — in the desire or perceived need to construct a (singular) medium-specific genealogy of photography. See also Bann, “Distinguished Images”; Bann “Parallel Lines”; Rosen “The Printed Photograph”; Rosen “Julia Margaret”.

4 The same can be said of critical discourses assessing these practices. While painting, video, film and installation are frequent reference points in photography criticism, printmaking rarely gets a mention. See, for example, David Campany’s comment: “It’s interesting that historically photography has always emerged as the crucial medium in discussions not just about reproduction and originality, but also about authorship, anonymity, authenticity, agency, the status of the document, quotation, appropriation, value, democracy, dissemination and so forth. It’s the medium that prompted art to rethink what’s at stake in those concepts, but has also proved to be the medium best placed to articulate and express them too” (Campany 83). Interestingly, José Roca, curator of the significant international print exhibition Philagrafika (2009–2010) in Philadelphia, USA, counts similar qualities of contemporary art as a whole, namely “seriality, multiplicity, and dissemination” as typical of print (“The Graphic Unconscious” 23). The fusions of other media with photography that have piqued the interest of theorists, critics and artists themselves have tended to be painting or cinema rather than print/printmaking. For a recent example, see British philosopher Gregory Currie’s lecture “The Visible Surface: Painting, Photography, Cinema”. Scottish Aesthetics Forum, Edinburgh, 11 December 2015.A recent exception, other than historical and/or technical investigations, is philosopher Christy Mag Uidhir’s “Photographic art”.

5 For just one example, see the works from the Impressions from South Africa exhibition at MOMA, New York, 2011. The MOMA exhibition webpages highlight artists using photography.

6 I am not suggesting that such self-reflexivity is novel. See the examples by the earliest photographers such as Bayard, Foucault and Fox Talbot mentioned by Batchen (“Photography” 50–56).

7 On the difficulty of translating the term empreinte into English in the context of Didi-Huberman’s study and the retention of the French term, see translator Miranda Stewart’s note in the first English translation of the initial section of Didi-Huberman’s book, titled “Ouverture”, in my forthcoming anthology of critical writing on print: “The word empreinte, the subject of Didi-Huberman’s book, can mean variously ‘print’, ‘imprint’, ‘impression’, ‘trace’ or ‘mark’. … There is no single English term that encompasses the denotative range of the French word empreinte in terms of the material objects it covers, or its potential metaphorical connotations. Hence the translation retains the original French empreinte” (Perspectives).Quotations from the untranslated sections of the book are my own translation from the German edition (“Ähnlichkeit Und Berührung”).

8 Didi-Huberman’s study was originally published in 1997 under the title L’Empreinte, to accompany his eponymous exhibition. Didi-Huberman stresses that the imprint in the age of mechanical reproducibility is different from earlier manifestations. One can extend this observation to the notion of the imprint in the age of digital reproducibility. This is a subject that would benefit from further investigation. Although written before the widespread advent of the digital in art, Didi-Huberman released an unaltered version of his text in 2008, obviously still deeming his earlier insights relevant.

9 The French word “contact” has been retained in the English translation, as it has fewer, immediately valorising connotations than the word “touch”.

10 Hence the term’s usefulness in querying long-held (art-historical, and often cultural, one may add) binary assumptions associated with art in general. Didi-Huberman is scathing about the reasons for the neglect of the imprint/cast in art history. For a humanist art history (Didi-Huberman cites Jean Clair) it smacks too much of crude materiality; being too “real”, too simplistic, rudimentary, even “primitive” in its execution, lacking in skill and premeditated thought or “idea”. Postmodern authors (Didi-Huberman cites Rosalind Krauss) may be predisposed towards the imprint for its seeming evacuation of presence, authenticity and originality, its “arbitrariness”, but they underestimate its complexity, especially its potential to challenge binary thinking that still structures much art historical discourse (such as colour/drawing; nature/ideal; organic forms/geometry; ornament/structure; image/text (Ähnlichkeit und Berührung” 196‒7) and the index and icon (26). Didi-Huberman’s larger project is to argue for the fundamental role of the imprint within a general theory of the image. The imprint then is seen as the necessary counterpart to imitation, just as the haptic and the optical are necessary counterparts, not oppositions (36).

11 See, for example, Elkins, especially the combative exchange between Rosalind Krauss (125–7 and 339–42) and Joel Snyder (369–400).

12 As, for example, in Sontag’s well-known phrase of the photograph as “something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask” (80–81). Discussions about the index, including the use of the term “imprint”, have contributed to a more complex, even if unresolved, understanding of the photograph’s indexical relationship to its referent. See Elkins, especially 27 and 147.

13 In order not to overcomplicate the argument here I am ignoring further possible transfer or imprinting processes, such as transferring an original drawing onto the plate or stone by means of charcoal, for example.

14 Increasingly artists use laser-cutting for this purpose — see the woodcuts of Korean artist Jimin Lee, for example. See also Catanese and Geary.

15 For information on Japanese woodblock or mokuhanga, see Salter.

16 Andrew was unable to obtain any information on the sources of the images. Email to author, 22 June 2015.

17 See also Andrew and Walter 2–6.

18 The author saw the print series in 2011 in the campus gallery of Monash University in Melbourne.

19 For a detail of Gertsch’s cutting technique see http://www.artnet.com/artists/franz-gertsch/schwarzwasser-i-detail-8-schwarz-a-a80BDbmQD0s7rU3Ia3qb-w2.

20 On the notion of optical versus haptic vision in recent printmaking, see Pelzer-Montada (“The Attraction”, especially 80–88).

21 “I used various types of bokashi. Bokashi is a gradation of color technique. The bokashi techniques I used include atenashi bokashi (shadow portions) and ita bokashi (block gradation) for the rug in Even a Failing Mind feels the Tug of History and in Legions of War Widows Face Dire Need in Iraq around the fireplace stones” (Shoichi Kitamura qtd. in Pelzer-Montada, “Brook Andrew” 416). For further explanations about techniques of block cutting and printing and their respective effects, see Salter 98–110.

22 See also some of the details: The two woodblock images required six to seven blocks which were carved on both sides. 35 to 38 trial impressions were counted by Andrew and Walter. Kitamura reckons he printed each woodblock, which can carry several image elements, three to four times, so the figures given by Andrew and Walter and Kitamura himself roughly correspond. (Email correspondence with Andrew, 19 June 2015; and Kitamura, 22 June 2015, respectively.) It is worth pointing out that these monochrome images required many more impressions than even a complex traditional Japanese colour woodblock, which on average would consist of up to 20 blocks, one for each colour (“Heilbrunn Timeline”).

23 These features of Baumgartner’s work could be linked to the “machine vision” of the camera, as theorised by Vilém Flusser (2006).

24 It is important to remember that, following Marcel Mauss, Didi-Huberman emphasises that any “technical dispositif” (or technical apparatus) quite independently of its technical sophistication — or lack thereof — has to be conceived in terms of a subtle tension between its material and symbolic effects and effectiveness: its physical structure only exists in connection with its linguistic or verbal structure (Ähnlichkeit und Berührung 16).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ruth Pelzer-Montada

Ruth Pelzer-Montada, PhD, is an artist and lecturer in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. She has participated in exhibitions in Scotland and abroad and regularly contributes to national and international academic conferences. Her texts on printmaking and contemporary art have appeared in national and international academic publications. Her anthology of critical writing on contemporary printmaking will be published by Manchester University Press in 2018.

Research profile: http://www.eca.ed.ac.uk/school-of-art/ruth-pelzer-montada