The Attraction of Print: Notes on the Surface of the (Art) Print

Guest Post by Dr. Ruth Pelzer-Montada.

An early version of this essay was originally published in  Art Journal, in the Summer 2008 Issue and is being reprinted here with permission. Footnotes appear after the jump at the end of the article.

The Attraction of Print – Notes on the Surface of the Art Print by Ruth Pelzer-Montada

This essay was prompted by my own experiences and interests as a printmaker.[i] It examines the surface of the contemporary art print as a means to position printmaking in relation to contemporary painting, photography and new media. Terry Smith’s (2001) differentiation between ‘viscerality’ and ‘enervation’, Richard Shiff’s (2001) account of the changing perception of the surface of painting in modernity and the concept of the haptic as developed by Laura U. Marks (2002) with regard to experimental video will serve to trace similarities and differences between print and other contemporary media and to conceptualize aspects of the surface of print. In particular, I shall be asking whether there is a distinct haptic quality or haptics of/to the print.

I am using the word ‘printmaking’ as a shortcut for a practice that encompasses different constituencies and institutions, from printmaking taught and increasingly researched in institutions of higher education; open access workshops; print publishing and gallery art. The latter two seem to bifurcate into the work of well-known, ‘blue chip’ artists on the one hand (usually executed by ‘master’ printers or technicians) and artists working exclusively as printmakers. The former mainly work in other media and printmaking constitutes only one mode of their artistic production. The latter tend to represent a constituency of their own with exhibitions, galleries and publications that may intersect with high-end art. And yet, as one of the educational guides at the Kassel Documenta 12 (2006) put it in a private conversation: ‘I don’t know of one well-known artist who is exclusively a printmaker.’ It is, of course, a moot point whether any artist today can (or should be) categorized by his or her medium alone even if such medium-specific definitions still persist. Rosie Miles and Gillian Saunders point out in their 2006 survey of the contemporary art print, ‘Print is now a central part of many artists’ activity, the equal of their output in other media, conceived as integral or complementary to it.’[ii] Such popularity of printmaking notwithstanding, in critical writing on prints, the printed nature of the work is often taken for granted. As a printmaker, I am therefore concerned with the theorizing of art print from ‘within’ printmaking. I am also interested in locating printmaking and the art print within the current media debate. This essay aims to contribute to raising the critical profile of printmaking in contemporary writing on art.

Printmaking, as an art of the surface, may be closely affiliated to the everyday of printed matter such as posters, advertising, packaging. It both draws on and seeks to differentiate itself from such surfaces. Crucial to this discussion is the flatness of the printed surface, which mobilises a powerful cultural dichotomy, namely that between surface and depth. Put simply, ‘surface’ tends to be conflated with the superficial and the artificial, ‘depth’ with their counterparts, ‘deep’ meaning and ‘the real’. The cultural connotations and hierarchy between these two tropes run at many levels through Western thinking.[iii] Take, for example, the often almost hysterical pronouncements regarding the loss of depth or the ‘real’ in the face of spectacularisation, especially in the context of new media.[iv] Print can be therefore considered as a site in which cultural debates about surface and depth and their associated connotations are played out. Paying attention to the surface of the print will lead, I hope, to a more differentiated assessment of the often merely dystopian views that are typical of such discourses. An examination of this kind is based on the assumption that ‘systems of meaning [are] coded in [these] materials and means of production.’ (Kress & Van Leuuwen, 2006, p. 216)

This article continues after the jump.

Generally, recent writing on the subject of the surface in art and culture does not consider the artistic print. Marks’ work on the surface, as already indicated, concentrates on video art and experimental film, while Joselit (2005) is primarily focused on the trajectory of modernist painting’s purported ‘flatness’ in postmodernism. Within printmaking there is awareness of the importance of surface, especially in light of printmaking’s intersection with digital media.[v] Accompanied by a renewed flaring-up of the question of the ’originality’ of the print (thought buried since the 1960s), the flatness of the inkjet printed surface has been above all a matter of concern. Paul Coldwell, for example, has noted the ‘uniformity of the surface’ of digital prints in comparison to traditional forms of printmaking due to the fact that the technology of such printers is ‘aimed at matching the surface quality of analogue photography’. (Coldwell, 2001, p. 2) He also speaks of the ‘need’ of his own prints to ‘have rich physical qualities’ and ‘to create a physical presence within the print.’ (Coldwell, 2001, p. 4) The latter is achieved by using ‘traditional’ printmaking methods, such as etching or lithography in a practice that encompasses digital methods. His ‘mixed’ approach is characteristic of that of a large group, if not the majority, of printmakers today, including myself. There has also been an argument for a more conceptually driven practice facilitated by digital media.[vi] But, as Kevin Haas has argued: ‘Debates over how an image exists within culture and how it signifies its meaning, have typically taken place outside the discourses of printmaking.’ He also confirms my earlier point about the necessity for a theorisation of print when he notes that, ‘Despite the significant role printmaking has played in art throughout the 20^th century and currently, it has not shared the outpouring of theoretical writing which has been devoted to photography in the last several decades.’(Haas, 2006)

At the same time, Haas expresses concern that the discourse of printmaking must not simply converge into the larger discourse of photography and digital media. My discussion of the surface of the print aims to tease out some of the intricacies of the relationship between these fields from the vantage point of printmaking. As a writer based in the UK, my visual references refer largely to work produced here.

Despite their differences and the changes they have undergone within their own history, ‘traditional’ printmaking processes are characterized by a flat surface. Let us briefly remind ourselves of the ‘fate’ of the printed surface in the art of the 20^th century. As is well known, modernism contrasted printmaking, not least its mechanically produced flat surface (a signifier of its reproductive character), with the ‘full’ flatness of the surface of the modernist painting. Pop art made a virtue of the superficiality of the print’s surface by adopting the flattest of commercial printing techniques at the time, screen printing, thereby aligning itself with the culture of mass production and the commodity. Subsequent practice can be characterized as veering between two main ‘poles.’ One strand foregrounds printmaking’s imitative structure, often rejecting autographic means in favour of reproductive ones. Here, one can detect a strong convergence with the photographic. (Fig. 4) The other strand attempts to suppress flatness by emphasizing the materiality or ‘touch’ of the surface.

A major proportion of the content of printmaking journals and conferences consists of reports and demonstrations of new or altered techniques of the surface. While this is understandable, even necessary, it could be argued that there is an overconcern with, even a fetishisation of techniques of the surface. I am inclined to read this preoccupation with technique/s as an inheritance of and compensation for printmaking’s marginalisation within the larger context of art within modernism. The indicators of the ‘craft’ of printmaking, its enriched surface qualities, signal the superior values of the artist’s touch and, by implication, the authentic and the ‘real’.[vii]

While it is true that, for some printmakers, the concern with the surface and its complexity serves as a route to authenticity, this need not be so. Here, a comparison with the materiality of the modern painted surface is helpful, for both its actual make up as well as its connotations have experienced multiple shifts, especially as a result of the emergence of photography. With reference to the artistic surface in the twentieth century, the art historian Terry Smith (2001) speaks of a trend towards ‘viscerality’ on the one hand, and ‘enervation’ on the other. Viscerality is understood as the emphasis on the materiality of the artistic surface while enervation describes its opposite, represented by the preponderance, especially in the latter half of the twentieth century, of images on screens or screen-like images. (Smith 2001, in Smith, pp. 1 – 39)

How may the artistic print be located between the viscerality and enervation of the surface as suggested by Smith?

An article by the art historian Richard Shiff (2001) about the surface in the work of Georges-Pierre Seurat and Chuck Close proves instructive in this regard. The main gist of Shiff’s argument is that both the construction as well as the perception of the materiality of a surface changes historically. His investigation explains how this change has occurred in modernity in relation to the painted surface of certain realist painters: A painting or drawing by Seurat, for instance, appeared wholly mechanical to his contemporaries. The question was even raised at the time as to whether the work might have been executed ‘automatically’, as with the surfaces of photography or printmaking, namely the then hugely popular lithography. This conflation of printmaking in the form of lithography – a predominantly, if not exclusively commercial process at the time – may appear absurd to a contemporary printmaker working in lithography today, but it indicates the perception of the method at the time as an altogether technical, hence ‘automatic’ mode of image production. Yet today, when screen surfaces abound, Seurat’s painting, in Shiff’s words, ‘becomes subject to an ironic reversal’; it appears ‘organic’ rather than ‘automatic’, imbued with presence or the evidence of the artist’s individual marking. (Shiff, 2001, p. 141) Further, as Shiff argues, the modernist suppression of the hand in painting or ‘the realism of low resolution’ does not necessarily have to result in the ‘dematerialisation’ of the painted surface, as in Seurat’s or in Close’s more recent work, but can equally rest in such ‘noisy’ surfaces as Jasper Johns’ encaustic paintings of, for example, the American flag.[viii] Shiff concludes: ‘The meanings of photography and painting evolve as a result of their interaction.’ And now the ‘interference’ comes from electronic media ‘to which all other media must be compared.’ ‘Video exposes the material thickness of thin photographic emulsion and does the same to any thin, emulsion-like surface of painting. Our response is a changed sense of the materiality of images.’ (Shiff, 2001, p. 156)

The implication of Shiff’s analysis for the construction and perception of the printed surface is that today – unlike in the heyday of modernist painting – the formerly mechanical surface of the print can appear similarly rich in presence. Following Shiff, one can apply his general remarks on the changed perception of the materiality of the painted image through new image technologies to the different modes of printmaking: newer printing technologies, such as the advent of ‘enervated’ screen-printing, made the surfaces achieved by the older techniques look ‘visceral’ in comparison. If we simplify, for the moment, the differences in printmaking techniques and the varying consistencies of printmaking inks, then its multiple, complex layering is what constitutes the particular surface of the print. It is the condensation through different layers that accounts for the materiality, even tactility of the print. Today, older technologies of print (including, ironically, screen printing) yield a tactile, ‘fleshy’ surface in comparison to the mean slimness of the digital print.

In the digitally printed image, the construction of surface through layering that is so familiar to printmakers becomes virtual and assumes a greater dematerialisation than ever before experienced by print. In yet another ironic reversal – especially given the wide-spread popularity of the once ‘enervated’ screen print – when a digitally produced image takes on material form, it is not the materiality of the surface that is subject to contention as in modernism. Now it is the fact that there is not enough materiality, not enough substance compared to conventional printmaking modes – vice the ‘dead’ flatness of certain ink jet prints. The print curator and art historian Stephen Goddard has also raised the question whether the possibilities of a purely digital output as opposed to paper may indicate the potential emergence of a ‘rift’ within the printmaking community. He concluded in 2001 that it seems unlikely such a chasm would arise; a more likely development – for multiple economic, social and cultural reasons – would be the co-existence of both output modes and he predicted: ‘In all probability printmaking’s center will hold … .’[ix] Subsequent developments so far appear to prove him right. Much of the research carried out by the Centre for Fine Print Research (CFPR) in Bristol, United Kingdom, has concerned the adaptation or alteration of commercial technology, such as digital printers, to suit the needs of artists both in the scale and quality of the output. The exhibition Committed to Print in 2007 at the Royal Academy of the West of England in Bristol, curated by Dr Paul Thirkell from the Centre for Fine Print Research (CFPR), demonstrated the ‘tactility’ of digital prints which are now often almost indistinguishable from traditionally printed work. Steve Lovett, printmaking educator from New Zealand, told me that, technical changes notwithstanding, his students overcome the ‘thinness’ of a digitally produced work by using digital printing techniques in a manner similar to traditional modes of printing, i.e. by digitally printing separate layers rather than outputting a digitally created image as a single file and one image.[x] No doubt, many printmaking artists and tutors will come across the same, or similar, creative adaptations in their own or their students’ practice. Despite such wide-spread enhancements as well as improvements in the output capabilities of digital printers and appropriate papers (here too, undoubtedly more will follow), Jo Ganter, printmaking leader at Edinburgh College of Art, has expressed a different kind of reservation: Digitally produced and printed images which appear to adopt the syntax of, say, a wood cut or a lithograph still only look like the real thing and function merely as a quotation of said techniques. More importantly, in such digital prints, she noted the paucity of the more subtle codings and unique syntax that the traditional modes allow.[xi] In contrast, the impact of large-scale woodcuts of printmakers such as Thomas Kilpper and Emma Stibbon is closely affiliated with the exploitation and foregrounding of the technique’s material semiotics. As Shiff comments towards the end of his essay, while new materials ‘unmask[s] the imperfections’ of the previous ones, ‘touch returns.’ (Shiff, 2001, p. 144)

One way to speak about touch in regard to the surface of the print is by considering it in terms of its ‘haptic’ qualities. This expression, originally conceived by the art historian Alois Riegl, has been taken up by the American film and video critic Laura U. Marks (2002). She differentiates between haptic and optical modes of seeing:

Haptic perception is usually defined as the combination of tactile, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive functions, the way we experience touch both on the surface of and inside of our bodies. In haptic visuality, the eyes themselves function like organs of touch. Haptic visuality, a term contrasted to optical visuality, draws from other forms of sense experience, primarily touch and kinesthetics. (Marks, 2002, p. 2)

It is not surprising that in haptic visuality the viewer’s body is ‘more obviously involved in the process of seeing than is the case with optical visuality’. In Marks’ interpretation of Riegl, optical representation is seen in contrast to haptic visuality. Accordingly, it represents

a general shift toward an ideal of abstraction. The long-term consequences of this shift include Renaissance perspective, which reinforced the visual mastery of an individual viewer. … optical representation makes possible a greater distance between beholder and object  … . (Marks, 2002, p. 2)

Marks stresses that the difference between these modes is a ‘matter of degree’. Not only are the haptic and the optical both involved in most processes of seeing, we also need them equally. As she says in her book: ‘It is hard to look at a lover’s skin with optical vision; it is hard to drive a car with haptic vision’. (Marks, 2001, p. 3) More recently, she has added that we can choose between haptic and optical looking. In her example of driving a car, this would be focussing on the windscreen itself (haptic) as opposed to looking through it to focus on the road (optical). (Marks, 2004) This example further demonstrates the need for (and the alternation between) both modes.

Of interest here is the notion that visual images themselves may have haptic qualities. However, as in her general remarks about haptic and optical visuality, Marks says that with regard to film and video there are none which are totally haptic. She also points out that historically, since the Renaissance, optical representation has been the norm. Added to this is the fact that vision has conventionally been considered as disembodied, affiliated with post-enlightenment rationality. It continues to be so – a point to which I will return. According to Marks, optical visuality in the form of a particular photographic look, or ‘the photogenic’, as Smith calls it, pre-dominates: most digital images, even if they are wholly computer-generated rather than derived from camera-based ones, adopt a ‘photographic look’. (Smith, 2001, in Smith) Hence it can be argued that the majority of mainstream computer-generated images tends towards optical visuality. An example might be the photographic realism of a computer-generated animation film such as Toy Story (1995. Directed by John Lasseter. USA, Pixar) or the ever-increasing realism of computer games. As Marks comments, today, optical visuality ‘is refitted as a virtual epistemology for the digital age’. (Marks, 2001, p. XIII)

But she detects an ‘undercurrent of haptic visuality’ in recent art. (Marks, 2001, p. XIII) She cites as evidence of the latter a particular tendency in contemporary experimental video works. Haptic visuality here is manifest in ‘the desire to squeeze touch out of an audio-visual medium, and the more general desire to make images that appeal explicitly to the viewer’s body as a whole’. Mona Hatoum’s seminal Measures of Distance, 1988, is one example she cites. Footage of Hatoum’s mother in the shower are overlaid with her letters to her daughter (Hatoum) who, on visiting London for a brief period, was unable to return to Beirut due to the outbreak of the war in Lebanon in 1975. The beginning of this video shows ‘still images so close as to be unrecognizable, overlaid with a tracery of Arabic handwriting’. (Marks, 2001, p. 16) Marks regards this trend as an indication of ‘a cultural dissatisfaction with the limits of [optical] visuality.’ (Marks, 2001, p. 4) Thus in countering the photogenic or photographic, some film and video makers create a haptic image. Yet, as Marks has to concede in her more recent writing on the haptic, increasingly a tendency towards the haptic image can also be observed in popular cinema, advertising, music videos and video games (see, for example, the rotoscoping effects of films such as Richard Linklater’s 2006 version of Philip K. Dick’s 1977 novel A Scanner Darkly. USA, Warner). In light of this increasing mainstream popularity of the haptic she retreats from her claim of a liberatory force that she affiliated with it in her earlier conception.[xii]

The qualities that attract a haptic look when watching film and video – ignoring for the moment the differences of these mediums – are, according to Marks, achieved through techniques such as the speeding up of footage, enlarging the grain of the film, changes in focal length, over- and underexposure, and so on. (Marks, 2001, pp. 8-9) Their haptic quality is defined by the effect they create, the look they invite: ‘Haptic looking tends to rest on the surface of its object rather than to plunge into depth, not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture. It is a labile, plastic sort of look, more inclined to move than to focus.’ (Marks, 2001, p. 6) She even refers to it as a ‘caressing look’. (Marks, 2001, p. 7)

Following Riegl, Marks connects the historical undercurrent of the haptic to the minor arts – as opposed to the optical in the major arts. Textile art, the ornament, embroidery, weaving etc. invite the haptic look. Ignoring the gendered implications of the haptic that are suggested here, we might productively add printmaking, for it is this kind of ‘labile, plastic’ or ‘caressing’ look that the printed surface, more often than not, also generates. This is readily observed in printmaking exhibitions where viewers press up close to the prints, their eyes pulled towards the surface, scrutinising its concatenations, delighting in its variegated fabric, puzzling as to its sensuous fusion (‘How is it done?’).

If there is a ‘haptics of the print’ of what might it consist? Crudely speaking, an image that is based on a ‘photographic look’ lends itself to an optical mode of reception. But the ‘photographic’ alone is insufficient to define the ‘optical’ in print – even if one ignores the additional complexity of how such so-called ‘optical’ elements are actually employed in the work in question. Although it might be constituted by photographic or enervated images, such a print can be argued to possess haptic elements that distinguish it from a photograph – even if we disregard the additional complexity of the surface of digital or analogue photographs. The multi-layering that is characteristic of the print process, however different it may be in each of the various techniques, and the dragging of (multiple) deposits of inks (of varying density depending on the technique) yield a surface that resembles no other image due to its particular haptic quality. Of crucial importance here is the support, or the material onto which the image is printed. This may deny or enhance the haptics of the image. For example, Perspex or glass as opposed to the specific haptics of different types and qualities of paper necessarily redraw the haptics of the print. UK-based artist Marilène Oliver’s figural recreations of MRI scans of the body are printed on to ‘enervated’ slices of Perspex, only to be returned to a haptics by their three-dimensional weightiness and volume when assembled to form a three-dimensional sculpture.

Yet however miniscule or large the different surface characteristics of print in actual fact are, in contrast to the enervated images that surround us, the condensed composite that is the print induces a ‘micro-haptics’ that we can typify as ‘an excess of surface’ or a ‘surface in excess’. What is conceived as excess varies historically, as we have seen, but the propensity towards greater density in comparison to ‘enervated’ screen images is what gives the print its haptic quality today. Recalling the historical and relational quality of (the perception of) the haptic surface, it is interesting that, as already discussed, the early debates regarding the use of digital printers and subsequent alterations to them or use of them in printmaking have been geared towards a re-creation of this ‘surface in excess’. More paradoxically, the initial flatness of such works (in tandem with other enervated images and commercially printed super-flat surfaces) creates a greater acceptance for the more eviscerated print as art.

Prints based on photographs may exemplify today the surface-in-excess quality of the printed image or its haptics more obviously than its ‘straight’ photographic counterpart, but the changing status of other types of artistic prints is similarly aligned with the changing cultural acceptance of the enervated surfaces of modernity and postmodernity. As already stated, viewers in the early 1960s perceived the screenprint as lacking the visceral depth and reality not only of the dominant form of art – painting – but also of its printed predecessors. Today, in contrast to inkjet prints, the now ‘traditional’ screen print demonstrates a ‘surface in excess’ or the relational quality of haptics although the gap between traditional modes and digital output is constantly closing, as we have seen. The emphasis on the micro-haptics of prints can be seen as an attempt to maintain a competitive edge at both the aesthetic and market levels, while a new print flatness yields the simultaneous acknowledgement of art’s proximity to the surfaces of consumption and the media, of joining the enervated screens of the late 20^th and early 21^st century.

In other respects, printmakers or artists producing prints have opted – as in different fields of visual production such as graphic design – to ‘dramatize’ (Shusterman, 2002) a haptic look or create a ‘macro-haptics’ by introducing 3D elements such as embossing or collaged cut outs – even if this viscerality is achieved by technical rather than ‘hands-on’ means, as in the image by the 2006 Jerwood Drawing Prize winner Charlotte Hodes.

These examples are only the tip of the iceberg of a macro-haptics in print.[xiii] Such procedures aim to counter the loss of touch and of the real brought on by the relentless mediatisation that characterises the contemporary. In the words of Steven Connor,

[We] continue to depend upon an opposition between things which are felt to be immediate, original and “real” on the one hand, and the representation of those things, which we conceive of as secondary, derived and therefore “false” on the other. (Connor, 1997, pp. 173-4)

Yet the shifting history I have outlined indicates that the recuperation of the ‘real’ occurs even within those representations that are considered to be the root of the loss in the first place, for the same trade-off between optical and haptic images modes that Marks observes in video and film occurs in print. Jacques Derrida has commented on the haptic as a ‘smooth space of close vision’ as defined by Deleuze and Guattari:

There is never any pure, immediate experience of the continuous, nor of closeness, nor of absolute proximity  … . The relation between the smooth and the striated, therefore, does not constitute a reliable conceptual opposition, but rather an idealizing polarity, an idealized tendency, the tension of acontradictory desire (for pure smoothness is the end of everything, death itself) from which only a mixed given, a mixture, an impurity comes forth in experience. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1997, quoted in: Derrida, 2005, p. 124)

Derrida’s emphasis on the impossibility and undesirability of a pure haptics notwithstanding, one can perhaps observe a greater tendency towards the haptic look with its close mode of viewing in the now so-called ‘traditional’ modes of print practice with small-scale (or at least ‘smallish’) framed work that are still the criterion for numerous printmaking competitions and exhibitions.[xiv] Yet on examining the variety of print practices today, a much more complex picture emerges.

Whereas painting trades on the tradition of its viscerality in tension with enervation (the now ‘classic’ example being the work of Gerhard Richter), prints flaunt their proximity to optical image modes or enervated surfaces on the one hand and open out into a micro- or macro-haptics on the other, more often than not all in one work, vice Charlotte Hodes’s print which ‘laces’ – literally and metaphorically – photographic and drawn image fragments with laser cut forms that create a giddy shuttling between the enervated and the haptic.

Another case in point is Anne Rook’s The Book of Golden Delicious 4021 and 4020, 2002. This work employs different visual codes and semantic registers and presents a dizzyingly complex meditation on viscerality and enervation. With a nod to the optical, the representation of the subject of the title consists of an ostensibly photographic rendition of an apple. Yet the latter is no ordinary apple (whatever that would be) but a constructed ready-made, just as its eponymous ‘real’ counterpart, its viscerality is fashioned from the multiple, enervated surfaces of a logo. Rook’s intricate processes underline the intertwining of the visceral and the optical: ‘Using a scanner and computer she [Rook] reproduces multiple sheets of labels, which she then cuts out individually by hand. These are pasted over the surface of fruit … and made up into illustrated ‘recipe books’ or wallpaper patterns, where labels substitute for depictions of fruit, flowers and trees.’ (Saunders & Miles, 2006, p. 64) Through their complex sampling of different image modes these works constitute an acknowledgement of print’s irrevocable enmeshing with the surfaces of consumption. Their presentation in form of a box/book recovers the haptics that the image skilfully alludes to and playfully undercuts.[xv]

Although he is not a printmaker, a public work by sculptor-photographer Alex Hartley, Elevation 1:1, on view in Edinburgh in summer 2007, further demonstrates my argument, for Hartley covered the modernised façade of the former fruit market with a commercially printed, one-to-one-scale replica.

The gallery brochure described the work:

The work that exemplifies his practice most comprehensively is Elevation 1:1, in which Hartley writes instructions for climbing The Fruitmarket Gallery on to the building itself. The instructions are listed as eight individual climbs … The base for this image is a smooth surface [print!] covering the building’s front elevation. Ironically, in order to represent this climbing route, Hartley levels the very elements which would be used as footholds for a climb – the building’s cornices and pilasters. The method by which the route is delivered cancels out the possibility of climbing it. Hartley’s decision to produce a full-scale image of the gallery challenges the conventions of architectural plans, drawings and photography, in which images are always reduced in scale. Seen from up close, the photograph’s pixels further emphasize the distance between the architectural image, with its potential for dissolution and the actual building, with its embraceable, solid mass.[xvi]

At first glance, this work dramatises optical viewing: Seen at a distance, the photographic reproduction of the façade that constitutes the ‘image’ allows a gaze of mastery or surveillance. The enervated commercial screen print that ‘imprints’ the building seemingly suppresses the haptic. Yet the haptic is re-covered by the fact that the image becomes the building’s skin just as the building becomes the haptic counterpart of the artist should he decide to actually scale it. The text superimposed on the replica architectural features evokes this proximate encounter between artist and building for the viewer, just as the image/building as a whole restages its optical/haptic unity. Besides, the printed surface seen at close quarters matches Marks’s haptic look in other respects: not only is it not possible to recognize the image, the pixellated surface requires the ‘labile, plastic sort of look’ mentioned earlier.  In gazing up close, the viewer experiences the equivalent of the experience of the climber, a kind of haptic vision whose ‘orientations, landmarks and linkages are in continuous variation’ and which ‘operates step by step [de proche en proche].’ (Deleuze, 1997, quoted in Derrida, 2005, pp. 123-4)

While all looking is currently discussed in terms of embodiment, the haptical-optical model contributes to the debate on visuality a definition of different types of looking which particularly focuses on the spatial dimension of vision.[xvii] It is important to regard the model’s two-fold structure as non-hierarchical, as Derrida and Deleuze have argued. Marks has also stressed that both modes are complementary, and although in her book of 2002 she appears to privilege the haptic with a politically radical force, in a later article, written in 2004, she clearly retracts this earlier position.[xviii] Here it becomes once again evident that no visual forms per se can be politically radical on behalf of (the right kind of) political value system. Critical writing on photography in the 1980s proves a case in point. It had championed the implicit critical potential of certain types of avant-garde practices, such as photomontage, and bemoaned their application for propaganda purposes by such diverse political systems as Stalinist Russia, Fascist Italy, and later the US Government.[xix] The on-going attraction for commercial advertisers of such visual models has further challenged any revolutionary promise of a particular visual form per se. It would therefore be a mistake to credit the haptic with immanent critical ‘talent’. Nor should it be seen, as already discussed, as in any way superior to the optical. As Marks had to realize: ‘Haptic images and haptic visuality, in order to have the kind of radical potential I saw in them, need to be motivated by something radical.’ [original emphasis] And she adds: ‘My purpose in theorizing haptic visuality was not to condemn all vision as bent on mastery, nor indeed to condemn all mastery, but to open visuality along the continua of the distant and the embodied, and the optical and the haptic.’ [original emphasis] (Marks, 2004)

Nevertheless, I believe it is important to consider the haptic visuality that is instantiated by the surface of the print in terms of a ‘volitional, deliberate vision’, as stated by theorist Vivian Sobchack in her exemplary phenomenological study of film. (Sobchak, 1992, p. 93) The viewer ‘has to bring it forth from latency’, explains Marks. ‘Thus the act of viewing, seen in the terms of existential phenomenology, is one in which both I and the object of my vision constitute each other.’ (Marks, 2002, p. 13) While all seeing is embodied, the haptic could be considered as a kind of looking that makes the embodied aspect of vision more obvious. Its ‘volitional’ quality, or its attribute of progressing step by step (Deleuze and Guattari) highlights vision’s performative or constitutive, provisional character.[xx]

Moreover, Marks finds in this ‘mutually constitutive exchange’ ‘the germ of an intersubjective eroticism’. She insists that ‘haptic images have a particular erotic quality’, one that involves ‘giving up visual control’. (Marks, 2002, p. 13) By ‘interacting up close with an image … the viewer gives up her own sense of separateness from the image.’ (ibid.) Haptic images ‘move eroticism from the site of what is represented to the surface of the image. Haptic images are therefore erotic regardless of their content.’[xxi] Here one may be able to locate some of the attraction – in the original sense of the word – of (not only) ‘traditional’ print making techniques (and the particularities with which individual artists employ them). They force the viewer to ‘interact up close’ with the image and – with the exception of the miniature print – ‘give up visual control’. In addition, the variety of current printmaking approaches and their specific take on the haptic bring the complexities of looking, the different operations that are involved and the instability of its performative character, to the surface (in both senses of the word).

Bibliography

Barfield, N., Barfield, R. & Whale, G. 2001, “‘Defying convention: emergent print practices in digital printmaking’”,Point, Art and Design Research Journal, vol. 1, no. 12, pp. 4-14.

Bolt, B. 2004, Art beyond representation : the performative power of the image, I. B. Tauris, London.

Buchloh, B.H.D. 1984, “FROM FAKTURA TO FACTOGRAPHY”, OCTOBER, , no. 30, pp. 82-119.

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Coldwell, P. (2001)’Interrogating the Surface’, Conference Paper for IMPACT II, International Printmaking Conference, Helsinki, Finland, 29.8. – 2.9.2001 Available from:http://www.uiah.fi/conferences/impact/coldwell/Coldwell.pdf [Accessed 28/ 8/2007]

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[i] The paper originated in a presentation for the session Convergent Theories: Printmaking, Photography and Digital Media chaired by Kevin Haas at the Annual College Art Association (CAA) Conference in Boston 2006. An earlier version was published in the Summer Issue of Art Journal, Vol. 67, NO.2, pp 74-91.(Pelzer-Montada, 2008)

[ii] Saunders & Miles, R. (2006), p. 8. On the concept of new media, see Gauntlett, D. and Horsley, R. eds. (2004).

[iii] The best-known, recent formulation of this dichotomy is Frederic Jameson’s differentiation of postmodernity from modernity. He speaks of ‘a new kind of flatness or depthlessnes, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense – perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the postmodernisms.’ (Jameson, 1991, p. 60). Interestingly, the famous example that he uses to demonstrate this point, are a painting by Van Gogh of peasant shoes (no dates are given as to which of Van Gogh’s peasant shoes paintings the work represents) and Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes of 1980. The latter belongs to a series of works made by employing acrylic paint, silkscreen and diamond dust. In contrast to the photographic negative as a source and striking visual attribute of the image, the role of the print as a crucial feature of flatness, is not mentioned by Jameson.

In addition to the sources mentioned already, for a discussion of the topic in relation to art, see also Richard Shusterman (2002) and David Joselit (2005).

[iv] On the notion of ‘spectacularisation’, see the familiar concept of the ‘spectacle’ in Guy Debord’s (1968) eponymousSociety of Spectacle. ‘The spectacle is a society which continually declares: “Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear.”’ (Sadie Plant, 1992, p. 13). ‘Appearance’ here implies the rising to the surface (of visibility).

[v] See, for example, Paul Coldwell’s (2001) ‘Interrogating the Surface’ paper presented at 2^nd IMPACT International Printmaking Conference, Helsinki, Finland, Aug 29 – Sept 2, 2001. See also the exhibition with the same title as the conference paper curated by Coldwell at the Atkinson Gallery, Somerset, UK, in November 2001. Coldwell was also instrumental in the 2003 Digital Surface International Conference at Tate Britain. In the US, see the exhibitionDigital: Printmaking Now at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, curated by Marion Kushner (2001).

[vi] See Coldwell (2001)..In the United Kingdom, the argument for a more conceptually driven digital practice has been made by Naren Barfield and others (2001). Ruth Weisberg, in her influential paper from 1986, has argued that the process of (what is now) ‘conventional’ printmaking lends itself to a conceptual or ‘cerebral’ approach. (Weisberg, 1986, p. 58). While there may be a rationale for this argument, in my view, a conceptual approach does not rely on the medium or the media an artist chooses, technical or otherwise, however crucial to his/her concept they may be. I concede that my concept of the ‘conceptual’ may be narrower than that of the authors mentioned.

[vii] Examples are numerous. One may suffice: At the Fourth IMPACT International Printmaking Conference in Berlin-Posznan, Germany/Poland, Sept 5 -10, 2005, there was a demonstration of a wax silk screen technique which creates beautifully rich and dense surfaces. Not only the technique, but also the name of the workshop, ‘Hand Print Workshop’, are indicative of a yearning for authenticity that is affiliated to the notion of ‘touch’ and is connoted by the involvement of the hand – communicated through the surface of the print. See also my article ‘Technology versus Concept’ (Pelzer-Montada, 2004).

[viii] Shiff, 2001, p.150. This was possible because the imagery was already familiar.

[ix] Goddard, 2001. For further examples of the interrelationship between new and older print technologies in the US, see the exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art mentioned in footnote 5 and also the contribution of Dorothy Simpson Krause to the panel ‘Convergent Theories, Printmaking, Photography and Digital Media’.

[x] Conversation at IMPACT IV, Berlin-Posznan 2005.

[xi] Private conversation at Edinburgh College of Art in Summer 2007.

[xii] In a web article of 2004 Marks says that the ‘radical potential’ which she initially affiliated with the haptic, needs ‘to be motivated by something radical’. One ought to add, the right kind of ‘radical’ at that. She is at pains to distance herself from ‘what seem [to her] proto-fascist, new-age celebrations of feeling, irrationality and primordial ooze’ and ‘beseech[es] those who are newly encountering haptic thinking to keep alive the dialectic with the optical!’ (Marks,2004)

[xiii] For more examples, see Saunders and Miles (2006).

In the US, the Philadelphia Print Center staged an exhibition in 2003 with 3D prints. Rapid Protoyping and Laser Cutting are also technologies with 3D potential which are hotly pursued. In the UK, see research and work done by the Centre for Fine Print Research (CFPR) in Bristol. http://amd.uwe.ac.uk/cfpr/ [Accessed 15 June 2007]

[xiv] The 2007 Summer Exhibition of the Glasgow Print Studio omitted the requirement for framing but coupled this innovatory step with limitations in scale (56 x 76 cm) and therefore restricted the scope of potential prints for submission. Even if one accepts that some guidelines need to be adhered to, especially for such annual survey shows, it is lamentable that similar restrictions still characterize numerous printmaking competitions and exhibitions. See the Glasgow Print Studio Summer Show Entry Form http://www.gpsart.co.uk/mailout/may_ssentryform.pdf [Accessed 5 June 2007]

[xv] Following Kress and Van Leeuwen, works such as those by Paterson and Rooks could be considered as a contribution to ‘a theorizing of a new stage of semiotic practice, namely synthesis, through new practices of construction and production.’ Kress and Van Leuuwen see this ‘new stage of semiotic practice’ or ‘synthesis’ as a result of the increasing abolishment of ‘recording technologies’ (e.g. photography) through ‘synthesizing technologies’(digital means) where previous notions of referentiality ‘give way to “signification”. … This does not mean that representation has ceased. Rather, the formerly … naturalized relation, the identity of representation and reference, has broken down irreparably for the time being.’ (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2006, p. 218)

[xvi] Alex Hartley, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Edinburgh Festival Exhibition, July 26 –  October 21, 2007, Exhibition Leaflet

[xvii] Regarding embodiment or embodied vision, there is an increasing body [sic] of critical writing related to a reconsideration of phenomenology. This extends and, to some extent, rewrites the social-constructivist and semiotic theories of the 1980s and their often perfunctory treatment of the body. It questions the philosophical separation of body and mind which has been so prominent in Western philosophy and culture and examines the implications this has had for an understanding of vision. See the ground breaking phenomenological study of film by Vivian Sobchack (1992); in the European context, see the conference in 1997 and subsequent publication by the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Bonn (1998) Der Sinn der Sinne [The Meaning/Sense of the Senses], especially the contribution by Sybille Krämer, “Sinnlichkeit, Denken, Medien: Von der ‘Sinnlichkeit als Erkentnisform’ zur ‘Sinnlichkeit als Performanz’ [Sensousness, Thinking, Media: From ‘Sensuousness as a Form of Perception’ to ‘Sensuousness as Performativity’].

Marks gives a brief summary of different theoretical positions which challenge optical viewing with its implied mastery, Marks, 2002, pp. 6-7; on visuality see also Foster, H. ed.(1999; originally published 1988)

[xviii] See Footnote 8.

[xix] As argued by Benjamin Buchloh (1984).

[xx] A good introduction to the concept of performativity which has been influential in a range of academic disciplines is James Loxley (2007). Performativity in art is discussed by Barbara Bolt (2004). The essay by David Joselit is also relevant here. Although he does not discuss the print as such, he relates models of identity to the modernist and postmodernist surface in works by Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns and African-American artists David Hammonds and Kara Walker. His welcome and necessary differentiation of the modernist surface to its often binary casting within modernism and postmodernism also ties the changes to/of the artistic surface to a ‘transformation in spectatorship’ whereby flatness becomes a ‘powerful metaphor for the price we pay in transforming ourselves into images’. He speaks of ‘compulsory self-spectacularization’ as a ‘necessary condition of entering the public sphere in the world of late capitalism’. (Joselit, 2005, p. 293)

[xxi] Marks, 2002, p. 13

Marks tentatively identifies a particular gendered quality in the haptic. Not surprisingly, she suggests that it is ‘a feminine form of viewing’. But she cautions against associating a ‘feminine quality in particular’ with it and ‘prefer[s] to see the haptic as a feminist visual strategy, an underground visual tradition in general’. [original emphasis] Marks, 2002, p. 7. It would be equally tempting to relate a gender element to the hapticity of the print: In its affinity with the surface; the multiple/reproductive and its (relative) marginalisation print could be regarded in gender terms as ‘feminine’ or, better, ‘feminised’ in contrast to more ‘masculine’ practices.