Guen Montgomery Printmaker and Performer

GUEN MONTGOMERY PRINTMAKER AND PERFORMER

Thank you to artist Guen Montgomery for contributing and cooperating.

To Matthew Peterson for having all the answers.

To Katie Geary and Katie Anderson for the support throughout the process.

To Lance Dixon at Dixon Graphics.

To Christopher Hohn and Tedra AshleyWannemuehler for keeping the love for bookbinding alive.

To Sue Steinfeldt for perfect binding.

All artwork copyright Š Guen Montgomery.

GUEN MONTGOMERY PRINTMAKER AND PERFORMER

CONTENTS CATS AND JOKES. CAT JOKES.

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PRINTS AND VISUAL COMMUNICATION: RECAPITULAITON

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PRINTS AND DRAWINGS

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THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION

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POWER AND PRY: MEANINGFUL CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE PRINT MEDIUM

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INSTALLATIONS AND TIME-BASED PIECES

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THE RE-VISION OF PRINTMAKING

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365 DAYS 365 ARTISTS: GUEN MONTGOMERY URBANA, ILLINOIS

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LEGACY COLLECTION PORTRAITS

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THE CECILS OF SCOTT COUNTY, TENNESSEE

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CATS AND JOKES

CATS AND JOKES. CAT JOKES.

GUEN MONTGOMERY

Katie Geary: Guen Montgomery:

Who are you?

As an artist or as a human being?

KG:

Both. What’s your story?

GM:

Okay. Hm, that’s a big one. I consider myself a fine artist who works across media, primarily with installation and printmaking. ‘Printstallation,’ if you will. I do a lot of printing with things that have been applied into different scenarios or environments. Although I have a very traditional printmaking background, I also have a little bit of a theatre background. Because of that, performance comes into it a lot. I have figured a way to meld my love of vi-

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“I CONSIDER MYSELF A FINE ARTIST WHO WORKS ACROSS MEDIA, PRIMARILY WITH INSTALLATION AND PRINTMAKING. ‘PRINTSTALLATION,’ IF YOU WILL.”

sual arts and printmaking with my enjoyment of scenery, acting, performance and installation environments. That’s where the ‘printstallation’ comes from. I continue to make traditional prints but my favorite kind of work to make is the kind that’s more modular and becomes something that you would walk through— something like a living museum or historical display, where things are recreated. I also love the idea of recreating or imitating artifacts that would be collected all in one place.

At the same time, I’m still involved in the traditional print community. I participate in portfolios and make prints that are just on paper rather than on fabric.

I’m currently working on a mezzotint, which is a specific kind of copper plate dry point method. Instead of using acid to etch into the plate, you rough the entire plate up with this mezzotint rocker, give it a texture, and it prints out a complete black that you work into reductively. It’s like reductive charcoal.

That’s probably the most traditional kind of printmaking I do, which is on the opposite end of the experimental and performance installation stuff. But yeah, that’s sort of my artistic identity.

I’m trying to do more performance so I can pull more of that theatre background into my practice. It was a lot easier, when I was a little bit less busy, to figure out how to do things that were of a greater scale. Right now, most of my work tends to be confined to short projects that I can

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get done and send out. That’s partly just because of my timeline. Ideally, if I had the Matthew Barney funds, that scope of work would include more video work.

I’m hoping to do that soon because I still consider performance to be vital to my interests and my practice.

In terms of my regular personhood, I was born in Colorado and lived there for a while. My dad was in the military, and having that military family background meant that we moved around a little bit. When I was about fourteen we moved to Hawaii. I attended high school and some college in Honolulu. I briefly lived in Washington State, and went to college there as well. I started school for theatre, actually. I did a lot of plays and took mostly theatre classes. I had a theatre minor so when I moved back to Honolulu, I switched back my major. I’m one of those people who took more like 6 years to graduate because I had not taken general education classes. I had only taken theatre classes so I had to get some of those still. That’s where I fell in love with printmaking, in undergraduate.

Like many people, I had never heard of it. Getting there and meeting the faculty involved, I knew I wanted to move towards fashion design, which is what put me in an interest area of drawing and visual arts. I had some good advisors that thought I should try taking some classes over there, which got me more into that environment, which I loved.

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For one thing, I liked the people and the faculty that were in the art and design programs. And I liked the theatre people.

I felt connected. I think I’ve always been really motivated by my connections to other people and the environment we make. It was a really hard decision whether to keep doing theatre or switch over and do art, which I had always done as a sort of side project. I had never really taken myself that seriously in terms of fine visual arts, like drawing. It was a scary thing for me to make that switch but I eventually came back around and now identify myself as sort of half and half.

What else? I have a dog. Three cats, which is more cats than I need. Most recently I was living in Tennessee, which is also where I went to grad school. My family is all from that area. A lot of my work tends to be about them and the place that they live, which is a really rural area of Appalachia in northeastern Tennessee. But yeah, Tennessee feels most like home if you were to ask me where home is. I have lived there for a consecutive number of years but I’m really from a combination of Colorado and Hawaii and all these places.

KG:

In terms of your practice, which one came first: theatre or fine art?

GM:

Theatre probably came first. I mean, more what came first is that I thought I was going to be a ballerina. After that, as an el-

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“A LOT OF MY WORK TENDS TO BE ABOUT [MY FAMILY] AND THE PLACE THAT THEY LIVE, WHICH IS A REALLY ­RURAL AREA OF ­APPALACHIA IN NORTHEASTERN TENNESSEE.”

ementary school kid, I always did both of them about equally. However, I think I got more attention from theatre. As an only child growing up, I was probably more motivated in that direction. Although the only award I ever got in elementary school was for something my teacher made up.

Everyone got these awards each year with this ceremony where kids were honored for doing their best in math or science. I never got one of these and I think it really started to get me down. My teacher was very sweet and made one up. It was for doodling—for drawing on all my papers even when not always necessary. There was actually a clause in the award about how it wasn’t always asked for.

I would always do these things, but I think I was more serious about theatre first, and a little more shy about the drawing stuff. I made my own paper dolls and things like that because it was always a desire to control my environment. Theatre is a way of becoming other people and becoming characters that could be very different from you. Sort of the same reason people read Harry Potter or other books; it’s this escapism where you can immerse yourself in an environment that doesn’t exist—or exist exactly how you want it to. Drawing and visual arts are very much the same. It’s a way of controlling all the elements of a made-up or drawn environment. Creating paper dolls was my way of being able

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to control completely what those figures looked like and what they had.

I think a lot of kids have active, playlife imaginations. Being an only child, I didn’t have a lot of other kids around so I had my own storybook world in my house. The stairs were a waterfall, the couch cushions were boulders, and these characters I drew would live amongst these boulders. I think it comes a little bit from being a weird kid, but they’re both sort of concurrent. Theatre was probably what I thought I was going to do first.

KG:

When it comes to printmaking, what is your process like?

GM:

The things that I do now are more of an intersection between installation, sculpture and printmaking, so the process usually begins with an idea that I’m intrigued by. A lot of my work revolves around my family members that live in the south, and being confounded by them inspires some of the things I do. I’m also very empathetic towards situations that I feel some people don’t necessarily have any control over. Understanding some of the female characters in my family, their personalities and where their motivations come from, is really inspiring. Before I even think about what I’m going to make, I think about those things; about the person or concept I find interesting or engaging.

There tends to be a story about it that

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“THE STAIRS WERE A WATERFALL, THE COUCH CUSHIONS WERE BOULDERS, AND THESE CHARACTERS I DREW WOULD LIVE AMONGST THESE BOULDERS.”

I am sort of telling myself. I work from there to start to figure out what media is most appropriate for what I want to express. If I want you to walk into the world with me, I would create an installation. If it’s just a snapshot of an idea I have, it might just become a two-dimensional print. I find it hard though—and I think this is why I consider myself more installation than performance, and this amalgam—getting everything I want to say in the two-——dimensional print. It’s a real struggle and I’m often not fully satisfied with it. I want there to be different elements of touch and the ability to be surrounded. I would want the three-dimensional aspect of sculpture and installation there.

When I am participating in a portfolio or I’ve volunteered to make a print for something, they usually want something on paper. So I take these ideas that are floating around and make it specifically so it’s just a print, but given my druthers, I would rather make objects or pieces of an environment or world. It’s kind of like chicken or the egg: it depends on what I need the piece for. It’s not a very romantic way to say it but it’s the utility of whether it is a printed thing that I have to send out as part of a portfolio or if it is just my exploration as an artist— which tends to be installation and more abstract.

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KG:

Have you found that a certain type of theme has developed in your work?

GM:

Yes. Talking about heredity and family, genealogy and family myth is a lot of it.

My interest in the women and matriarchal aspect of my Southern Appalachian family, I would say is a big part of it. So really if you’re looking for an overarching theme, like many people, it’s identity. I’m interested in the things that make up an identity. Part of that is regional identity and gender. A lot of my work is revolved around gender and its relation to rural places, but also gender in relation to your family members, expectations within inherited traits, and the gendered way of existing—what your role is as a family member. There’s also this regional and sexual identity that I’m interested in.

More recently, I’ve been bringing in a bit more queer aesthetic, trying to find this middle place where I’m continuing to investigate contemporary Appalachian culture and what it means for me to be there. As a lesbian, you’re this strange outsider–insider to this culture.

You’re both a part of it because you’re a family member, which means a lot in that part of the world, but I also feel separate. I think that there’s a lot of discomfort with even the idea of gayness still in that part of the country, and many parts of the country, but especially very rural, small, southern towns. So that sort of identity quest, or looking at my own

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identity and the identity of my family, has expanded into looking at the myths and stories that we tell ourselves, that set up our expectations for the way people are supposed to relate to each other.

A print I made recently depicted these lesbian southern bells and it’s supposed to be sort of humorous, but it’s trying to rewrite these pop cultural histories so that I can fit myself and my imagination into that history. Really a lot of the work, if you’re looking for theme, is identity and biographical, but it also reaches into these areas of family, history, and gender.

KG:

Is there a certain mood that you feel you have to be in to create? I know a lot of artists have rituals.

GM:

Yes, I think there’s a quote by Chuck Close about how you can’t wait for inspiration, you just have to work. It’s just work. I try to tell myself that because I think I am a little bit given to moodiness when it comes to feeling like making art. Especially when my practice is so esoteric. If I have a print that I need to get done for a deadline, that’s more of a day job, I just go and work on it. But then when I’m starting installation pieces or making a new sculptural piece, that’s a little bit harder for me, to make myself just do. I need to go into the studio space and sort of screw around for awhile before I feel like I can start working

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on it. Partly because it’s not laid out in front of me; it’s not entirely clear.

I think that printmaking is very seductive because it has a series of steps. You start here, then you do this, then you do this, then you do that. You never have to deal with that horror vacui, the white canvas, because you have so many directions—there is someone kind of holding your hand in the process.

Installation and sculpture are a lot more frightening to me because there aren’t steps, necessarily. There are steps to sewing something, but then after that, what do I do with it? And so to negotiate that gray space, I kind of just need to exist in my studio for awhile. And that requires me feeling like I have the time to do it.

And as far as mood, if anything, it’s feeling like I have this expanse of time in which I feel it’s okay for me to not be producing. With more traditional printmaking, it’s nice, like right now I have this plate that I’m working on because I can just pick that up and do it, anytime.

I don’t need to be in the mood because it’s already started and I know where it’s going, I’ve got the image on it. But like I said, I want to continue to move in the other direction so I’m going to have to continue to carve out more expansions of time where I can go screw around. It’s kind of mood, but it’s also a perception of whether I have that open space that I can fill or not.

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Courtney Podgorski:

GM:

Do you think you spend more time working on your own pieces, for yourself, or things that was commissioned for you to do?

Well, I don’t do as much commissioned stuff now. After I finished graduate school, I did a lot of that, parly to make money. I think that I spend a lot of time, as part of the print community, there are those portfolios that you get asked to be in. Being in them is a sort of a professional honor—you want to get your work out there, you want to be in this list with other fancy print makers. The printmaking community is really small, too, so everyone knows each other and if you’re in this portfolio, then people will recognize you and want you to be in more. So it’s professionally advantageous for me to do those, but like I said, it limits me to this flat page that I’m not necessarily all that happy to have to be in.

I love printmaking, but it’s more of an assignment, a portfolio.

So I’m always getting roped into these things or volunteering to do them. Or in the case of one I’m doing now, I’m actually facilitating it, so I’m organizing the portfolio and I spend a lot of time doing things like that and probably more time than I get to do the more experimental works. And that’s something that I’m going to try, very hard, in the new year, to change. And I think when there are other people expecting things of you, other people putting the deadline on you, and a group of people who are working towards a single print, it’s

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easy to prioritize that over the other stuff.

So that’s why it ends up getting a little more of my time. So it’s not as much commission, as it is professional activities—prints that are intended for these professional activities. There are also some going to conferences in there that also eat up some of studio time.

What I’ve tried to start doing is making prints that are maybe not the full answer to whatever it is I’ve been thinking about, whether it’s sexuality in the south or something, but that can start that discussion for myself. Then I’ll come back and make a more complicated installation piece on it later. It can be a page holder in my artistic practice, but I’m interested in a lot of stuff. I do a lot of fibers work and a little bit with metals and things like that. I feel like my journey as an artist is still underway, which is probably a good thing. I don’t want to be one of those people who figures out what they do and then just produces it. Although that’s one way of working, I get really bored with that and I need multiple processes and multiple ways of approaching something to stay interested.

Katie Anderson:

GM:

For the installation pieces, do you do those from start to finish?

If I have a specific deadline show to do it for, then yes, I will plan out, kind of like planning a play, I will plan out all of the

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elements of it and do it from start to finish.

My practice right now is that I’m working on multiple pieces for multiple installations at a time, so I have more than one, and this is just sort of natural. I have more than one pot on the stove, so I can move between them. And I think some of that is just the need, whatever space I’m in, to be able to do the work there. And some of the installation work isn’t as mobile as other things.

I’m doing this project right now with these wigs and they’re over in my studio and I work on that when I can, and when I can get into the metal shop and incorporated into the rest of my schedule so it’s probably going to be a little while before I finish it because it doesn’t have a specific place that it’s going yet. It’s good, though, to set deadlines to yourself.

KG:

When have you been most satisfied in your life?

GM:

Most satisfied? I’m pretty satisfied right now—Even though I have much more to do professionally, and I’d like to be in the Guggenheim and have more exposure in shows, of course. But as far as satisfaction, I actually feel pretty good at this level.

Part of that is getting to teach. I really like teaching, especially at the college level.

That’s quite satisfying because it allows me further my work and I have worked jobs where that was not true and where I was far removed from the art community.

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This is the community I want to be in so I feel really good about that. I don’t know, most satisfied? You guys ask the tough questions.

KA:

Diggin’ deep.

GM:

Yeah. I think it’s perhaps exponentially growing. I feel more satisfied as I progress further and I feel like I’ve gotten the farthest yet. I also think that it’s good to keep a little bit of dissatisfaction to keep you motivated. And I have plenty of really amazing peers to compare myself to, especially in this environment where people are doing really impressive things. That keeps me feeling like I need to achieve more and that there’s more satisfaction out there than I currently have—but I’m pretty pleased to be at the level that I am.

A lot of my peers in graduate school really struggled to find any kind of career after their fine arts, degree because it’s such a small world and there are only so many printmaking jobs, you know? Or even art jobs generally. I think that maybe in design there’s a little more flexibility. In fine arts, especially the specialized ones, you’re competing with a lot of people for the same job and I know that some of them have really struggled so I feel too blessed to be stressed. I feel like I’m very fortunate to be where I am, even though it’s not, by any means, the pinnacle of my career; it is good to feel like I’m on the road to somewhere.

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KG:

Very optimistic, which is good.

GM:

Yeah, I’m optimistic.

KA:

Do you know where you want to be as that road continues?

GM:

I want to be famous but I haven’t figured out how that’s going to happen. I was thinking about just burning money or doing just some outrageous… that’s the Unsinkable Molly Brown. You know I grew up in Colorado and that was this myth about a woman who just put her husband’s money in the fireplace because she wanted to get into the newspaper. And I think about that a lot, just some ridiculous action just to do something.

No, I mean, that’s partly a joke, but I want to be recognized for what I feel I’m good at. I want to have the financial and time freedom to work on these crazier pursuits to do more of my own studio work. I think that some of that comes with succeeding more and getting more opportunities, so I want to be in the position where I have that freedom and that tends to come with a certain amount of recognition.

KA:

Have you stayed involved in theatre, more on the play side of it, after graduating?

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GM:

Yeah, no... I guess I haven’t. Not in traditional theatre because it requires that you go to rehearsals. That takes up a whole lot of time. The last play I was in… the last actual play was in undergraduate, so I haven’t been able to do that. Grad school was one hundred percent printmaking, because that’s really what it was about was focusing on that. It was really nice, but I did miss the theatre aspect of it.

The last play I was in was Streetcar Named Desire in undergraduate. Since then I’ve done performance work—if you have seen my website it is on there somewhere—and I did a performance thing at Figure One gallery that was my attempt to play with the idea of printmaking as a part of a performance. And that was a fun experiment.

I was feeling the waters of what something like that would be. It felt good to get more community theatre based, because it was very much like a community theater activity. People were coming in and we were performing these prints that I was making for them, with the help of a bunch of other people. So, things like that are still happening, but I don’t get to go to the Krannert [Center for Performing Arts] and be in any plays. Although I’ve considered, just on a whim, auditioning for something because it would be fun. But I’m a little worried about how my time would shake out with that.

Now I just rely on the idea that my installation work could become my own play, that I can create a similar thing and

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be part of the performance via video or actual presence. I don’t know, maybe I will get involved with community theatre.

KG:

I’m interested to know how exactly you’ve combined the two—printmaking and performance art. How do you include printmaking in performance?

GM:

For the work that I did for my graduate thesis, for instance, I made a bunch of artifacts and most of them relied on printmaking in some way. So I screen printed antique wallpaper. I printed sculptural forms, printing on fabric and sewing it into pillows, or upholstery. Those things were in a museum setting with an audio visual component, where I was actually–this is something that I’ve done a bit of—lip synching to the audio of one of my family members. So, lip synching the voice of my mother or my uncle, but with my face and usually in costume as them.

This particular exhibition was about my family’s estate, and I was pretending that it was this grand estate. These were conducted as interviews with these people whose belongings they were supposedly.

There’s that element–me actually performing as somebody in an environment with printed objects—and then there is what we did at Figure One. That involved printing certificates for people who were going through this hyper-bureaucratic, ridiculous process,

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kind of like what you do at the DMV or any other place where you have to wait in a line and fill out paperwork.

We were playing with the idea of all the antiquated forms of printmaking, and reproduction, as well as newer technologies that are now antiquated, like the copying machine. I had a letterpress set up in the back, where I would finally print these certificates for people in real time. And I forget what my official title was, but I represented this department of antiquated transfer.

We would make people wait for three to five minutes for no reason and they would sit there. We would have people making copies and stamping things, and then at the end if they put up with all this silliness, they would get to set their name, or set something else, in type or their certificate. It’s sort of a “printformance” or installation that you’re part of as a viewer, it’s rather like playing house and playing with bureaucracy and getting to pretend that it’s fun, although it’s often just a burden and we’re sort of pointing to the absurdity of it, and the absurdity of all these copies and how easy it is now to copy forms though it comes from this history of labor and actual ink and rollers.

So, all of that is playing with the idea of the copy and the print, and how valuable the print is. If everybody is getting a certificate, does it have any

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“I ALSO LIKE TO THINK OF PRINTMAKING AS A CHURCH, OR SOMETHING, WHERE YOU’RE CONSTANTLY TRYING TO EXPLAIN TO PEOPLE WHAT IT IS AND CONVERT THEM TO YOUR WAYS.”

value? But then, of course, it’s this letterpress printed artifact, that you had to wait in a line for, so that must mean it is valuable. That’s something I am still playing with, trying to figure out, how can you be printing and performing at the same time, or how can the print be part of a performance? It kind of smells like relational aesthetics to me, that movement, and I don’t want it to just be that, where the audience, comes in and just navigates a space. I want there to be that theatrical element where I am conducting it to some degree. But I also liked that people had some freedom in the way they chose what to put on the certificate and that they were actually setting the type themselves. So, they were becoming a part of this antiquated process.

I also like to think of printmaking as a church or something, where you’re constantly trying to explain to people what it is and convert them to your ways. It’s this old fashioned thing where people have no idea what you’re really talking about, and they don’t know how much of their everyday lives are influenced by those technologies. I often feel like I’m preaching at people about the values of printmaking. I know a guy, actually a professor, who has himself set up as the “pastor of printmaking.” He pretends to be this firm creationist believer and he creates these prints that are supposed

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to be illustrations from some text or bible of these dual animals that combine a rhinoceros and snake and such. Then he has a little set up and he goes and pretends to proselytize about how creationism is real and that these animals are evidence. It’s a very complicated narrative, but it is also a performance united with print, cause he becomes part of it, too.

KG:

Okay, one last question. I learned that you’re supposed to ask this when you’re interviewing someone else: Is there anything that we did not cover that you would like to tell us about yourself?

GM:

I really like cats a lot. I feel passionate for them. I wish that I could have become a standup comedian.

KA:

You still can!

GM:

I could I guess, but it’s really hard. It really is. Those people work so hard.

I will leave it to Tig Notaro and Maria Bamford—my favorite stand up comedians—to do that for me, because I don’t think I could handle it. I wish that I had been born with the guts to just do that. I’m not very good at im­prov, as far as theatre goes. I like having a script.

Coming up with things off the top of my head tends to make me shut down.

I can be clever, but not necessarily in

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that situation. I can be clever if you give me 20 minutes, you know? So, that kind of spontaneity that you need to have to be a really good stand up comedian, I just don’t have. But I really like humor and I want to incorporate it into my work and daily life. So, cats and humor. Cats and jokes. Cat jokes! I should come up with that.

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PRINTS AND VISUAL COMMUNICATION: RECAPITULATION

PRINTS AND VISUAL COMMUNICATION RECAPITULATION

WILLIAM IVINS

The time has come to attempt a summary of the story and the argument that have so rapidly been indicated in the previous chapters. While the number of printed pictures designs that have been amde as a works of art is very large, the number made to convey visual information is many times greater.

Thus the story of prints is not, as many people seem to think, that of a minor art form but that of a most powerful method of communication between men and of its effects upon western European thought and civilization.

We cannot understand this unless we bear in mind some of the basic factors in communication between human beings.

Whatever may be the psychological and physiological processes which we call knowing and thinking, we are only able to communicate the results of that knowing and thinking to other men by using one or another kind of symbolism. Of the various methods of making such symbolic communication there can be little doubt that the two most useful and important are provided by words and pictures. Both words and pictures have been known to man since the most remote times. In fact, it may be said that until the animal had used them he had not become man.

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While both words and pictures are symbols, they are different in many ways of the greatest importance. So little are they equivalent to each other that if communication were confined to either alone, it would become very limited in its scope. All words need definitions, in the sense that to talk about things we have to have names for them. Verbal definition is a regress from word to word, until finally it becomes necessary to point to something which we say is what the last word in the verbal chain of definition means.

Frequently the most convenient way of pointing is to make a picture. The word then receives definition, or, if one likes, the thing receives a name, by the association of a sensuous awareness with an oral or visual symbol.

Any legible written word, whether it be drawn painfully by an illiterate or written in flowing calligraphy by a writing master, remains the same word no matter how it may look. The same thing is true of the sound of the spoken word, with all its personal peculiarities and local accents. The reason for this is that any particular specimen, whether spoken, written or printed, is merely a representative member of a class of arbitrary forms of sounds and visual signs, which we have learned or agreed to regard as having the same meanings. In every instance it is the class of arbitrary forms that has the definition as a word and not any particular oral or visual specimen. Thanks to this it is possible for a word to be exactly repeated, for what is given in repetition is not the same unique specimen but another equally representative member of the same class of arbitrary forms.

Hand-made pictures, to the contrary, we are aware of as unique things; we all see the differences between them and know the impossibility of repeating any of them exactly by mere muscular action. Thus so long as the only way there was of describing objects was by the use of repeatable words and unrepeatable hand-made pictures, it was never possible from an oral or visual description to identify any object as being a particular object and not merely a member of some class. In thinking about this we have to remember that identification of the location, the function, or some particular marking of an object, is not a description of the object.

Except for the words which are proper names or syntactical devices, a word is merely a name for a class of relations, qualities, or actions. The consequence of this is that what we call verbal description is very often no more than the accumulation of a series of class names. It is much like the game we play on board ship when we toss loose rings of rope about a peg. No one of the rings closely fits the peg. If it did we could not toss it over the peg. As it is each ring can go over a great many very different pegs. But by tossing a great many very loose verbal rings over an object we think that we describe the object.

Thus when we endeavour to make a full and accurate verbal description of even the simplest things, such for instance as an ordinary kitchen can-opener, we accumulate such an

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enormous and complicated heap of verbal rings that it becomes practically impossible for anyone but a highly trained specialist to understand what we have said. This is the reason the tool-maker wants not a verbal description of the thing he is asked to make but a careful picture of it. It is doubtful if any much more intricate intellectual process can be imagined than the translation of a linear series of verbal symbols, arranged in ananalytical, syntactical time order, into an organization of concrete materials, and shapes, and colours, all existing simultaneously in a three-dimensional space. If this is true of such simple abstract forms as those of can-openers, it takes little thought to realize what the situation is in regard to the infinitely complex and accidental shapes that occur in nature and in art. It brings home to us the utter necessity of properly made pictures if we wish to convey our ideas in exact and meaningful ways. Certainly, without pictures most of our modern highly developed technologies could not exist. Without them we could have neither the tools we require nor the data about which we think.

Furthermore, science and technology, for their full fruition, need more than just a picture; they need a picture that, like the words of verbal description, can be exactly repeated. A word or a sentence that could not be exactly repeated would have no meaning.

Exact repetition is of the essence for words, for without it they would be merely meaningless signs or sounds. Without exact repetition of the verbal symbols there would be no verbal communication, no law, no science, no literature. There would be only animal expression, like that of the barn yard. Over the years a good many people can see a picture, and many pictures can be sent travelling about the world. But, even so, a unique picture can make its communication to very few people, and it can only make it in one place at a time. There is a distinct limit to the number of persons who can seriously see and study and work from any single unique picture. As we have seen, the Greek botanists were fully aware of the limitation upon the use of hand-made pictures as a means of communicating exact ideas of shapes and colours. The reason for this limitation was that the Greeks, like their predecessors and, for many generations, their successors, had no way of making exactly repeatable pictures. They could only make copies of pictures, and when hand-made copies are made from hand-made copies it takes only a small number of copies for the final copy to bear no practically useful resemblance to the original. The meaning of this should be obvious so far as concerns the dissemination of accurate information about forms and shapes. In short, prior to the Renaissance, there was no way of publishing a picture as there was of a text.

While this is never mentioned by the historians of thought and art, of science and technology, it undoubtedly had much to do with the slowness of the development of science and technology and the thought based on them. Communication is absolutely

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necessary for scientific and especially technological development, and to be effective it must be accurate and exactly repeatable. Science in actual practice is not a dead body of acquired information but an actively growing accumulation of hypotheses put forth to be tried and tested by many people. This trying and testing cannot be done without exact repeatability of communication. What one or two men have thought and done does not become science until it has been adequately communicated to other men.

The conventional exact repeatability of the verbal class symbols gave words a position in the thought of the past that they no longer hold. The only important things the ancients could exactly repeat were verbal formulae. Exact repeatability and permanence are so closely alike that the exactly repeatable things easily become thought of as the permanent or real things, and all the rest are apt to be thought of as transient and thus as mere reflections of the seemingly permanent things. This may seem a matter of minor moment, but I have little doubt that it had much to do with the origin and development of the Platonic doctrine of Ideas and the various modifications of it that have tangled thought until the present day. The analytical syntax of sentences composed of words certainly had much to do with the origin of the notions of substance and attributable qualities, which has not only played a formative role in the history of philosophy but for long presented one of the most formidable hurdles in the path of developing scientific knowledge. At any rate, until comparatively recent times nominalism, with its emphasis on facts, its distrust of words, and its interest in how things act rather than in what they essentially are, has had little chance, and its great development has coincided remarkably with the ever-broadening development of modem pictorial methods of record and communication.

Some time at the end of the fourteenth or beginning of the fifteenth centuries men in western Europe began to make pictorial woodcuts, but no one knows when or where. For all we know it may have started simultaneously in many different places. By the middle of the fifteenth century men were engraving, and before its end they were etching. Printing from movable types began presumably in the 1440s; by the middle of the 1450’s the Gutenberg Bible had been printed; and about 1461 the Edelstein came from the press. The Edelstein was merely a book of popular tales, but its pages were decorated with woodcuts. At the time they had no informational value or purpose. In 1467 the Torquemada was printed. It was a book of devotion, but illustrated with rough woodcuts representing definite particular things, the pictures with which a named and located church had been decorated. In 1472 the Valturius appeared. It was full of woodcuts of machinery, which were specifically intended to convey information. Shortly after 1480 the first illustrated botany book appeared. Its woodcuts were the last of a long series of copies of copies that started far back of the ninth century, and in consequence bore no relation to the

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things they were supposed to represent. In 1485 came the first printed botany book with illustrations drawn at first hand from the plants described in the text. In 1486 Rewich illustrated and printed the first illustrated travel book, the famous Breydenbach. Rewich had accompanied the author on his travels and drew the things they saw. In that same year three colours were first used in the printing of illustrations. In 1493 several illustrated catalogues of precious objects in the possession of some of the German cathedrals were printed. These appear to be the first printed illustrated catalogues of any kind of collections. By the middle of the fifteen-hundreds illustrated books about every conceivable kind of subject were coming from the presses of Europe in an ever increasing flood.

Conspicuous among them were books about architecture, botany, machinery, anatomy, zoology, costumes, archaeology, numismatics, and, specially, some of the technologies and crafts. The single sheet print in the various mediums then available had begun its task of carrying across Europe in all directions information about buildings and works of art that themselves never travelled. The rapid pervasion of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque styles was accomplished by the single sheet print and the illustration.

Nothing like this had ever been known before. The same identical pictorial statements were made in each example of the edition, whether of a single sheet print or of an illustrated book. While for at least several thousand years men had been accustomed to having texts that repeated the same statements shortly after A.D. 100, referred casually to an edition of a thousand copies now for the first time men we regret getting accustomed to pictures that repeated the same statements. It began to be possible to convey invariant visual information about things that words were incompetent to describe or define.

With few exceptions, these illustrations prior to the middle of the fifteen-hundreds were what used to be called ‘facsimile wood cuts,’ i.e. woodcuts made by cutting away the surface of a wooden block between the lines drawn on it by a draughtsman. This was not a translation of the draughtsman’s lines but a saving of them, as many of the woodcutters were so skilful that the ‘hands’ of the draughtsmen can be recognized in the prints from the blocks. This skill made it possible for first-hand pictorial statements to appear in books, not only in some volume or volumes but in every copy of the entire edition of a book.

The first-hand pictorial statement by a competent draughtsman has much the same value as the testimony of a first-hand witness. If he is sharp-sighted and observant he can tell us much about an object or an action, but nevertheless his training and habit of seeing and drawing lead him to select certain things for statements and to omit others from them. Each school of art had its scheme for laying lines, and these schemes in time became neither more nor less than grammars and syntaxes which, while making hand-

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made pictorial statements possible, also greatly restricted and influenced their power of statement. Much as he might want to, a German in the fifteenth or sixteenth century could not draw like an Italian, or vice versa. This meant that neither could say the same things in his drawings that the other could. We get sharp evidence of this in the copies that each made from the other the Germans copying Italian engravings and the Italians copying German engravings. Although the specific lines of the original were there before him, the copyist never actually followed them closely in his copy, and rarely made any attempt to do so. Except in the most generalized of ways no two drawings, even one copied from the other, gave the same particularities. Especially was this true when the copy was not only a copy but a translation into another medium. The results of this are perhaps most easily to be seen in the prints after works of art, for in none of them are we able to find the kind of qualitative statement that is necessary for connoisseurship of the work of art itself. As represented in the prints it was impossible to tell the most arrant fake from the original.

However, no matter what its defects might be, the first hand visual statement in a print had the great advantage that it was exactly repeatable and invariant. This meant that in things like the descriptive sciences, such for instance as botany and anatomy, it was possible to produce what we may think of as representations that were standardized to the extent of the size of the edition. So long as the subject of the print was not a particularity but a generalized statement of the generic traits of some kind of object the situation was good enough. In fact, even today when we want to give a statement not of personal characteristics but of abstracted generic forms we still use drawings for our illustrations.

In the middle of the fifteen-hundreds several very important things happened in print making that were to have unsuspected results. The woodcut broke down under the constant demand for more and more information in the available spaces. To pack more pictorial information in a given space, the lines have to be made finer and closer together.

This led to the making of wood-blocks with such minutely reticulated surfaces that for practical purposes the printers were unable to get good impressions from the blocks with the paper and the techniques of printing that were then available. Whereas it is easy to find copies of the earlier books containing good impressions of their coarser blocks, it is sometimes exceedingly difficult to find copies of later books that contain good impressions from their finely worked blocks. It is probable that many of the most important picture books of the mid fifteen-hundreds never contained good impressions from their blocks.

The engraving, however, did not suffer from this technical difficulty. Its lines could be very fine and very close together, as compared to those on any wood-block, and still

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yield a sufficient quantity of clear impressions on the papers then available. I think it can be said that this fact had much to do with the general Increase in the use of engraving for illustrations that took place after the middle of the fifteen-hundreds. In any event, by the end of the century the engraving had taken the place of the woodcut in all but very few of the books made for the educated classes. This was not, as has been said, a mere superficial change in fashion, it was a basic change in modes and techniques made in response to an insistent demand for fuller visual information. In so far as there was a fashion as distinct from any need, I believe the fashion merely followed the norm set by the informational demand.

It thus becomes necessary to think about engraving and etching, which, from our present point of view, are to be regarded as varieties of the same technique. In the first years of engraving the engravers had been gold- and silversmiths. Then trained draughts men began to make engravings and, naturally, they used the linear schemes and syntaxes to which they were accustomed in their pen drawings and those of their schools.

The German syntactical scheme was very different from the Italian. In the early years of the sixteenth century Marc Antonio and others after him began to make engravings after drawings, paintings, and sculpture by other men. These prints were made and sold not so much as works of art but rather as informational documents about works of art.

Thus Dürer, in his Netherlands diary, refers to prints after Raphael as ‘Raphaels Ding,’ which he knew they were not. Marc Antonio evolved a novel scheme for the translation of sculpture into engraved reproductions. Instead of reporting about the surfaces of objects, their textures, their colour values, and the play of light across them, he devised a linear net which enabled him schematically to indicate their bosses and hollows. The most particular personal characteristics of the original works of art, their brash strokes and chisel marks, were thus omitted, and what was transmitted in the print was little more than an indication of iconography combined with generalized shapes and masses. At the end Marc Antonio used the same linear scheme in engraving Raphael’s drawings and paintings that he had worked out for ancient sculpture the characterless ‘Roman copies’ of Greek statues. It is important to remember this, for it had momentous consequences.

It is to be noticed that while the early engravers on occasion made prints of late mediaeval objects, such as Schongauer’s ‘Censer,’ it is difficult to find a reproductive print of such an object by any of the engravers who grew up in the linear syntaxes that came after Marc Antonio. For practical purposes it is impossible to find a reproductive print by one of the masters of engraving that represents an early painting or a piece of mediaeval sculpture. Such mediaeval statues as were reproduced were reproduced not carefully for their own sakes but merely as hastily indicated details in architectural ensembles. The

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vast number of these mediaeval things still in existence shows that they have always been held precious by somebody, if not as works of art at least as examples of skill, as antiquities, or as relics. Thus the lack of engraved reproductions of them cannot be explained simply on the ground of a change in taste or fashion. A much more likely explanation is to be found in the fact that they did not yield themselves to the kind of rendering which was implicitly required by the dominant and highly schematized linear practice of engraving.

When you have no vocabulary with which to discuss a subject, you do not talk very much about that subject.

Marc Antonio’s method was rapidly adopted and developed by engravers everywhere, for it had the great business advantages that it was easily learned and could be used, no matter how libellously, for many different kinds of subject matter. The very limited average instrument of a very limited average purpose, it became the dominant style of engraving in spite of the fact that it made it impossible for the engraver who used it to catch and hold the particular characteristics that gave the originals their unique qualities. Everything that went through the procrustean engraving shops came out of them in a form that had been schematized and made reasonable and reasonability meant conformity to the generalized abstract conventional webbing of lines that was an incident of manufacture. As every great work of art is as by definition unconventional in its most important aspects, a representation of it in terms of a convention that leaves out those aspects is by definition a misrepresentation.

Shortly after Marc Antonio began his grammatical or syntactical investigations, the print publisher and dealer began to make his appearance. He was a manufacturer-merchant, and often was not himself an engraver. He employed others to make prints, not of subjects that interested them, but of subjects that he thought he might be able to sell.

Very often that could have been the only interest that he himself took in them. Some of the publishers had the engravers work for them in their shops, just as though they had been mechanics. As ideas of business efficiency came in, the engraver gradually ceased to make the drawings after the originals he ‘reproduced’. The publishers procured drawings of the objects they wanted to make reproductions of. These were then handed to the engravers, who copied and translated them on to their copper plates, generally without ever having seen the objects their work was supposed to represent. The consequence was that the prints which came out of these efficient shops were at best second or third hand accounts of their distant originals, and, not only that, translations of translations as well as copies of copies. The scheme of operation made it impossible to give any pictorial report of such things as the brush work, the chisel strokes, or the surfaces, of the originals which, in fact, were the originals. Moreover, the prints became filled with cliches of rep-

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resentation based on the requirements of the linear syntax that had been adopted by the engraving craft, which interposed a flat veto on the representation of the most personal of all the traits of the original work of art. The linear network varied but little in its general scale, although the objects that were engraved, be they large or small, were all reduced or enlarged to a few typical scales which had no relation to the sizes of the originals. This had important effects on the vision of the people who used the engravings.

Naturally this schematic network of lines became the medium for the exhibition of a great deal of virtuosity, not of keen reporting but of the handling of the lines in the network. The extravagances of the virtuosi had their immediate effect on the day’s work of the more humble artisans of the copper plate. The textures of the network became ends in themselves and not merely aids to statement. Form and content were separated, and both got lost.

When engraving became a capitalist enterprise it became important to get as many impressions from the engraved or etched copper plate as possible with as little difference as might be between them. Towards the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century this problem was worked at with great business acumen by a number of men in different places. Among these men there may be mentioned Rubens, the painter, Callot, the etcher, and Abraham Bosse, who wrote the standard technical treatise on the craft. These men invented and rationalized ways of laying and sinking lines on plates in such a way that the plates would yield very large editions before they wore out.

This not only affected the weave of the linear net, but increased its independence from accuracy in reporting.

Rubens, if not actually the first important artist to have a financial interest in the reproduction of his work, was the first to create about himself a school of engravers who specialized in the reproduction of his pictures, and often was himself either the publisher or a partner in the publishing firms. Anthony van Dyck, his famous painter pupil, used the services of a group of these engravers of the Rubens school to produce a set of over a hundred portraits, the first few of which he himself had etched. The set ran through many editions, and its coppers were still being printed from in the present century. The influence of the set can be traced in many engraved portraits until the second half of the nineteenth century. In a way it may be regarded as having provided the norm for much of subsequent portrait-engraving and etching.

In France, the only country that had a single artistic capital, engraving had a popularity perhaps greater than it enjoyed anywhere else. The French engravers of the seventeenth century embarked on a search for linear methods that would be economically efficient and at the same time afford opportunity to show off their skill and agility in the

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choreography of their self-assumed goose-steps. Their skill in these goose-steps soon became of more importance than the fidelity with which they reproduced their originals.

Some of them engraved in parallel lines, others evolved elaborate schemes of highly artificial cross-hatchings, some became experts in the sheen of satins and metal and the barbering of hair. The subjects to be engraved were undoubtedly chosen to enable them to shine in their specialties. Few of the masterpieces of art did this.

In the eighteenth century the French fashion for framed drawings in interior decoration led to the attempt to give closer reproduction of the superficial qualities of the drawings that the engravers worked from. Up to this time engravings had looked like engravings and nothing else, but now, thanks to the discovery of new techniques, the test of their success began to be the extent to which they looked like something else. Among the new techniques used for this purpose were aquatint and stipple, and soft ground etching, the crayon manner, and others still. Some of the plates began to be printed in colour the more closely to imitate the drawings and water-colours. In the seventeenth century mezzotinting, a blurry medium devoid of sharp accents, had been invented as a way of reproducing oil paintings in tones instead of in lines. Except in England, where painting was lower in key than in France, it was not much used. One of the curious things about all these new techniques of making prints is that so little original work was ever done in them. Goya was the only great artist ever to produce more than a sporadic essay in aquatint. The best artists to make more than an odd soft ground etching were Girtin and Cotman. Turner made a few reproductive mezzotints after his own drawings. But I doubt if any great artist has ever regularly used any of the other methods for his first-hand expression. I think it can be said that as a rule the great artist has habitually used only such graphic processes as are comparatively direct, and that the desire for expression is incompatible with the indirections, the technical complexities, and the linear routine that mark most of the reproductive techniques. Direct a process as engraving was in the hands of the primitive masters, and notably in those of such men as Pollaiuolo and Mantegna, it is to be noted that from the point of view of the artist the ‘facsimile woodcut’ was still easier, for all that he had to do was to make a stylized drawing on the block which was then cut by a skilled mechanic. Even such a complete master of the technique of engraving as Dürer actually designed many more woodcuts than he made engravings, and, if we omit six or eight of his most popular engravings from the count, his most interesting work was done on the block. A further reflection of this easiness of the wood cut is to be seen in the fact that Holbein and Burgkmair made no engravings, and that Baldung and Cranach made but a very few. The wide spread of etching among original artists in the seventeenth century and again in the nineteenth century can probably be accounted for

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by the fact that it was the most direct and simplest method of making printing surfaces that was known prior to the invention of lithography.

However there is no getting away from the other fact that the easiest way for the original artist was to have his work copied by the professional reproductive engravers. The result was that by the end of the eighteenth century single sheet prints and book illustrations had, with few exceptions, become mere second–and third hand statements, in which everything had been reduced to the average common-sense level of craftsman’s shop work. By the end of the eighteenth century the first-hand visual statement had practically ceased to exist in the illustration of books, and in the single-sheet print it had become the rare exception. In France, at least, the manufacturing situation in the engraving shops had become even more complicated than it had been in the past, for the printing surfaces were often made by several men, beginning with an etcher, who laid in the outlines of the print from the drawing, and winding up with a finisher-engraver, who went over the etched lines and filled In between and reduced everything to the neat, tidy, characterless, and fashionable, net of rationality of engraving. Sometimes some equivalent of the quality of the drawings for the engraver made a ghostly flicker in the first etched states, but by the time that the finishers had done their work of degradation all qualitative equivalence to the originals and to the drawings for the engraver had completely vanished. The things that counted in public estimation were the brilliant moke of the damask of the engraved lines and the sentimentality of the general situations represented.

I personally have no doubt that the growth of pictorial reasonability In the eighteenth century was based on the economics and shop practices of the business of print manufacture. Neither have I any doubt that this business had a great effect on the public as well as on the artists, for it was through the engraved picture that the world received its visual notions about most of the things it had not seen and studied with its own which is to about eyes say most of the things in the world. One might think, if one had not waded through the contents of some of the great historic collections of old prints and illustrated books, that any visual report of a work of art would always tell much the same story about it, no matter where or when it was made, but the fact is that the reproductive prints and illustrations contained far more of the linear syntaxes and shop practices of their places and times of production than they did of the detail or character of the originals they purported to represent. Actually the buyers had come to appreciate prints and illustrations far more for the skill of their makers in the artificial dance steps of the engraver’s tool than for any representational fidelity.

Then the poor and the uneducated did not have reproductions. But the rich and the educated did, and their reproductions had a great effect upon their vision, which, as to-

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day, was based not so much on acquaintance with originals as on acquaintance with reproductions. I have spoken of the net of engraved lines and all that it omitted, but there was another equally important factor for vision in the old engraved reproductions. The sizes of the printed reproductions bore no necessary relation to the sizes of the originals.

In the printed picture the great mural might easily be smaller than a little portrait, a jewel greater in size than a fagade. Further, in the hand-made reproduction all trace of the handling of his tools by the maker of the original had vanished. There was no difference in the engravings between the texture of a painting by a young Raphael and that by an aged Titian, or between the surfaces of a ‘Roman copy,’ a Greek original, and a Gothic sculpture. The wilful theatrical stroke of Rubens’s brash in one of his sketches, like the dominant expressive gouge of Michael Angelo’s chisel, was smoothed out and obliterated. If the original artist had resorted to shorthand in his statement of any form, the engravers spelled it out at length in terms of the most commonplace vision and cliche of rendering. Had the engravers worked from the originals more than they did, and less from poor sketches by poor draughtsmen, this might not have happened to the same extent. But, whoever might have tried it would still have faced the problem of the longevity of his plates, and that absolutely required the artificial net work of line. Steel facing was not discovered until photography was in use.

As it was, a blighting common sense descended on the vision of the educated world.

This showed itself not only in the terms in which that world talked about art but in the contemporary art the world relished. Its principal interest had been diverted by the means of reproduction away from the actual qualities of the originals and works of art and directed to generalized notions about their subject matters. Thus the century failed to take account in art, just as so much of it did in writing, of the thing that Pascal, in the seventeenth century, had pointed out about writing that the quality of a statement consists more in the choice and arrangement of the particular symbols used in making it than in its general sense (Les sens recoivent des paroles leur dignité, au lieu de la leur donner). The eighteenth century talked about harmony, proportion, dignity, nobility, grandeur, sublimity, mid many other common-sense abstract verbal notions basal upon the gross generalities of the subject matter that came through into the engraved reproductions. The sharp particularities of which works of art are necessarily constructed and which give them their character and value were unknown and umnentioned, for they escapedverbal description and were never reproduced in the reproductions. Thus, in spite of Winckelmann’s remarks about engravings and the necessity of knowing the originals, the aesthetic doctrine of his History of Ancient Art of 1764 may be regarded as the rationalization of a set of values based on the catch of the engraver’s net. The same thing can be

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said of most of the critical discussion in such a standard book as Bosanquet’s History of Aesthetic which was published in 1892, i.e. at a time when the photomechanical processes were still in a very unsatisfactory state of development. It is amusing to think how few of the great weavers of aesthetic theory had any familiar first-hand acquaintance with works of art and how many of them either, like Lessing, knew the art they talked about only through engravings, or else sieved their ideas out of the empty air. Had it not been for this it is doubtful whether the Milords who made the grand tours would have been so happy and complaisant about all the poor copies of High Renaissance pictures and all the bad ‘Roman’ imitations of classical sculpture which they brought back to the North.

We can catch a glimpse of what was going on in still another way. Very few of us ever think to what an extent the painters of the fancy subjects and historical compositions, which were so generally admired during much of the eighteenth century and the first part of the nineteenth century, produced their canvasses to be engraved rather than to be seen in their paint. The sale of the painting was often of less importance than the sale of the prints after It. Hogarth knew this very well. The patronage of Mr. Alderman Boydell, the great print publisher, meant more to many an English painter than did that of His Majesty and a dozen dukes. Today in America we have a curious analogue in the novelists who write for the sale of their ‘movie rights’ rather than for the sale of their books.

At the end of the eighteenth century a number of things happened which were to have remarkable consequences. Men discovered that, by using the engraver’s tool on the end of the grain of the wood instead of a knife on its side, it was possible to produce wood blocks from which the finest of lines and tints could be printed in great quantities. Paper, smooth paper, began to be made by machinery run by power in a continuous process. Iron printing presses came into being, and in 1815 one was invented that was run by power and not by the strength of men’s backs. The number of impressions that could be run off in an hour was greatly multiplied. Stereotyping was remembered and put to practical use. In 1791 Senefelder discovered how to make lithographs; Wedgwood in 1802 announced the first practical step towards Talbot’s later discovery of photography. By early in the 1830’s the book publishers had discovered that there was a great market for cheap illustrated books, magazines, and cyclopaedias, directed at the man in the street and not at the classically educated gentleman in his elegant library.

Among these publications were many that dealt with techniques and the processes of making and doing things, and it was not long before the ordinary man, the uneducated man who used his hands and who knew how to read and to look intelligently at explanatory pictures, was finding out much from which he had ben effectually debarred.

The crafts instead of being the ‘arts and mysteries’ of highly restricted trades and guilds

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were thrown open to anyone who had the ability to teach himself from a book. Out of all this came such a rush of inventions and new processes as had never before been known. The same thing happened in many of the sciences and for much the same reasons. At least in England, which took the lead in all this invention and investigation, the outstanding engineers and scientists for a long time were not the graduates of the classicizing ‘public schols’ and the universities, but the ingeniously self educated. It had a great moral and ethical results, as well as economic and social ones.

In art, the lithograph made it possible for such artists as Goya and Delacroix to send out into the world their own drawings, not in unique specimens but in editions.Each impression had all their personality and all their daring, unhampered and unspoiled by the intermediary engravers. Things like Goya’s ‘Bull Fights of Bordeaux’ and Delacroix’s illustrations for Faust blew a great hurricane through the dead air of the single-sheet print and the book illustration in France. It shortly produced Daumier.

In the 1830’s Talbot and Daguerre worked out photography and the daguerreotype, and in a little while it became possible for the first time to have reproductions of works of art that had not been distorted and vulgarized by the middle-man draughtsman and engraver to have reports of work so fart that had not been reduced to the syntax and the blurring technical necessities of a manufacturing trade and craft. For the first time it became possible to have a reproduction of a drawing or a painting or a piece of sculpture that told enough about the surface of its original for anyone who studied it to tell something about the qualities of the original. By the third quarter of the century many experiments had been made towards getting the photograph translated into printer’s ink without the intervention of either the draughtsman or the engraver. About I860, Bolton, an English wood-engraver, thought of having a photograph made on Ms block of wood so that he could engrave a piece of sculpture without having to get a draughtsman to draw it on the block for him. This eliminated one of the two chief obstacles to getting truthful reproductions into the pages of books. Bolton’s method remained the principal way of making book illustrations until the end of the century. In the seventies attempts were made to produce what we now call half-tones. This came to fruition in the eighties and nineties with the invention of the ruled cross-line half-tone screen, a device which made it possible to make a printing surface for apictorial report in which neither the draughtsman nor the engraver had had a hand. Its great importance lay in the fact that the lines of the process as distinct from the lines of the visual report could be below the threshold of normal human vision. In the old hand-made processes the lines of the process and the lines of the report were the same lines, and the process counted for more than the report in the character of the lines and the statements they made. Until after the two sets of lines

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and dots, those of the process and those of the report, had been differentiated and separated and the lines and dots of the process had been lost to ordinary vision, as they are in the photograph and the fine half-tone, there had been no chance of getting an accurate report. Man had at last achieved a way of making visual reports that had no interfering symbolic linear syntax of their own. In the whole history of human communication it is doubtful if any more extraordinary step had ever been taken than this.

Within a very few years the new method had overrun the world. Not only did it revolutionize printing, but it gave such accuracy of reporting as had never previously been dreamed of. It was prerequisite to the existence of all our popular magazines and of our illustrated newspapers. It has brought about a very complete restudy and rewriting of the accepted history of the arts of the past, and more than that it has made all the exotic arts known of the ordinary man. It is interesting to notice how few of the books of connoisseurship published prior to 1880 are still either authoritative or on the shelves for ready reference. The very vocabulary of art criticism has been changed, as have the qualities for which men look in works of art. Whatever else ‘aesthetics’ may now be, it is no longer a scholastic quasi-philosophizing whose task is to justify a tradition of forms based in equal measure on obstinate ignorance and sacro-sanct revelation.

The flood of photographic images has brought about a realization of the difference between visual reporting and visual expression. So long as the two things were not differentiated in the mind of the world, the world’s greater practical and necessary interest in reporting had borne down artistic expression under the burden of a demand that it be verisimilar, and that a picture should be valued not so much for what it might be in itself as for the titular subject matter which might be reported in it.

The photograph and photographic process having taken over the business of visual reporting from the hands of the pictorial reporters and the engravers, the artists suddenly found themselves absolved from any need of verisimilitude in their expression and design. A great many of them, knowing nothing whatever about either expression or design, were lost, for they too had been members of the public and had regarded verisimilitude as the purpose and the justification of their work. Except in the work of the very greatest artists, creation and verisimilitude are incompatible, contradictory aims, and it is only at the hands of these greatest artists that creation has won out in the conflict between the two. With the photograph the magic dance of the creator’s hand became for the first time visible in the reports of his work. Thus photographic reproduction of works of art and of what used to be called ‘curios’ has raised basic questions about the validity of many of the most hard-shelled and firmly entrenched doctrines about both art and beauty. It has changed Asiatic and African, Polynesian and Amerindian curiosities into works of art. It

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has revealed to the public for the first time something of the actual qualities of the Greek and later European arts of the past. It has brought about not only a reconsideration of the curious and ambiguous notion of the masterpiece which often was no more than the object or picture which particularly lent itself to the linear net of the engraving but it has caused many famous and adulated things to fall from grace and bestowed grace upon many unknown ones. It has made the western European world see that ‘beauty,’ as it had known it, so far from being something universal and eternal was only an accidental and transient phase of the art of a limited Mediterranean area. Beauty is no longer the absolute that the pontiffs for so long proclaimed it to be. The photograph has made it obvious that what for four centuries the European world had acclaimed as purpose and beauty in art was no more than a peculiarly local prejudice about subject matter and mode of presentation. I think it is clear that this prejudice was to a great extent based on the methods of reproduction through which artistic and factual report alike had reached the public.

For generations that public had been circumscribed and made provincial by the limitations imposed by the syntaxes of its graphic techniques. It is significant, for example, that many line engravings of nudes are ‘good,’ and that very few in any of the other techniques are. The nude was the particular fish for which the net of engraving had originally been devised. In the photograph the nude is more than apt to become either a ‘naked’ or a vulgarity. The nude has ceased to be the great preoccupation of the artists that it was before the pervasion of photography.

For centuries the European world had been unable to distinguish between factual reporting, with its necessary requirement of verisimilitude (of which perspective was an essential part), and that expression of values, of personality, and of attitude towards life, with which verisimilitude is always at war. As the elder Haldane once remarked, ‘it is only through the constant negation of mere appearance that personality realizes itself.’

At last, thanks to the photograph, visual dream and expression were no longer required to conform to the informational reportorial demands of the ordinary businesses of life.

In addition to all this, the exactly repeatable pictorial statement in its photographic forms has played an operational role of the greatest importance in the development of modern science and technology of every kind. It has become an essential to most of our industries and to all of our engineering. The modern knowledge of light, like that of the atom, would have been impossible without the photograph. The complete revolution that has taken place in the basic assumptions of physics during the last fifty years could never have been accomplished without the data provided by the photographic emulsion.

The total effect of all these things upon technical philosophy has been remarkable.

Many of the old problems, the ‘perennial problems of thought,’ now seem in a way to be

PRINTS AND VISUAL COMMUNICATION: RECAPITULATION

resolved by the discovery that at least some of them are little more than accidents of unrecognized, unanalysed syntaxes of symbolization.

The seriousness of the role of exactly repeatable pictorial statement in all the long developmet since about 1450 has escaped attention very largely because that statement has been so familiar that it has never been subjected to adequate analysis. Having been taken for granted it has been overlooked. The photograph, as of today, is the final form of that exactly repeatable pictorial statement or report. Although it has very great limitations, it has no linear syntax of its own and thus has enabled men to discover that many things of the greatest interest and importance have been distored, obscured, and even hidden by verbal and pictorial, i.e. symbolic, syntaxes that were too habitual to be recognized. It is unfortunate that most of the world is still unaware of this fact.

In a way, my whole argument about the role of the exactly repeatable pictorial statement and its syntaxes resoves itself into what, once stated, is the truism that at any given moment the accepted report of an event of greater importance than the event, for what we think about and act upon is the symbolic report and not the concrete event itself.

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PRINTS AND DRAWINGS

PRINTS AND DRAWINGS

Considering Our Options screenprint 2014

GUEN MONTGOMERY

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HEREDITY

30 × 22 inches each lithograph on transparent easy-quilt fabric 2011

PRINTS AND DRAWINGS

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Rita McCart 19 × 12 inches letterpress 2011

PRINTS AND DRAWINGS

Appalachian Death Crown 19 × 12 inches etching with relief and digitally printed text “Angel Crowns: found in the feather pillows of the deceased, signified their accent to heaven.”

2011

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PRINTS AND DRAWINGS

COLORING BOOK PORTRAITS Collaborative series with the artist’s 10 year-old niece Bailey. screenprint, crayon 8 × 10 inches each 2014

screenprint 2014

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So Gay! 11 × 14 inches lithography, screenprint 2012

PRINTS AND DRAWINGS

Toxoplasmosis 22 × 30 inches screenprint 2012

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PRINTS AND DRAWINGS

500 Billion Galaxies in the Universe lithography, screenprint 2014

Christmas Ham intaglio, aquatint 2013

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PRINTS AND DRAWINGS

Have you considered Adoption?

14 × 8 inches intaglio with relief roll 2012

Lilian Smith 14 × 16 inches ballpoint pen on kidskin glove, guinea hen fathers, antique case, fabric paint 2013

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CLIFFORD NEAL

velum, lithograph over lithograph on paper 30 × 22 inches each 2011

PRINTS AND DRAWINGS

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HAUBSTADT, INDIANA lithograph, screenprint 30 × 22 inches each 2011

PRINTS AND DRAWINGS

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PRINTS AND DRAWINGS

Regrets 12 × 22 inches letterpress with colograph and screenprint 2011

Southern Sapphic 2 × 2 inches intaglio with aqua-tint 2011

The Amazing Life of Nannie L Dixon 30 × 22 inches lithograph, screenprint 2011

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PRINTS AND DRAWINGS

“L” 10 × 10 inches letterpress 2011 (Left) We ‘Preciateyuns 19 × 12 inches letterpress, relief block, screenprint 2012

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PRINTS AND DRAWINGS

(Left) Uncle James, Napoleon Bonaparte 5 × 5 feet lithograph 2011

Aunt Devona, Queen Victoria 5 × 5.5 feet lithograph 2012

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PRINTS AND DRAWINGS

Mock Turtleneck 14 × 11 inches lithograph 2011

(Left) Merge 22 × 30 inches lithograph 2012

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PRINTS AND DRAWINGS

Nostalgia 14 × 8 inches pronto plate lithograph 2011

(Left) Pica Pica 19 × 12 inches letterpress, reductive relief 2012

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PRINTS AND DRAWINGS

screenprint 2014

Betty and Veronica 11 × 15 inches relief block with screenprint colors 2013

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THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION

THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION

WALTER BENJAMIN

PREFACE When Marx undertook his critique of the capitalistic mode of production, this mode was in its infancy. Marx directed his efforts in such a way as to give them prognostic value.

He went back to the basic conditions underlying capitalistic production and through his presentation showed what could be expected of capitalism in the future. The result was that one could expect it not only to exploit the proletariat with increasing intensity, but ultimately to create conditions which would make it possible to abolish capitalism itself.

The transformation of the superstructure, which takes place far more slowly than that of the substructure, has taken more than half a century to manifest in all areas of culture the change in the conditions of production. Only today can it be indicated what form this has taken. Certain prognostic requirements should be met by these statements. However, theses about the art of the proletariat after its assumption of power or about the art of a classless society would have less bearing on these demands than theses about the developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production. Their dialectic is no less noticeable in the superstructure than in the economy. It would therefore be wrong to underestimate the value of such theses as a weapon. They brush aside a num-

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ber of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery— concepts whose uncontrolled (and at present almost uncontrollable) application would lead to a processing of data in the Fascist sense. The concepts which are introduced into the theory of art in what follows differ from the more familiar terms in that they are completely useless for the purposes of Fascism. They are, on the other hand, useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.

I In principle a work of art has always been reproducible. Man-made artifacts could always be imitated by men. Replicas were made by pupils in practice of their craft, by masters for diffusing their works, and, finally, by third parties in the pursuit of gain. Mechanical reproduction of a work of art, however, represents something new. Historically, it advanced intermittently and in leaps at long intervals, but with accelerated intensity.

The Greeks knew only two procedures of technically reproducing works of art: founding and stamping. Bronzes, terra cottas, and coins were the only art works which they could produce in quantity. All others were unique and could not be mechanically reproduced.

With the woodcut graphic art became mechanically reproducible for the first time, long before script became reproducible by print. The enormous changes which printing, the mechanical reproduction of writing, has brought about in literature are a familiar story.

However, within the phenomenon which we are here examining from the perspective of world history, print is merely a special, though particularly important, case. During the Middle Ages engraving and etching were added to the woodcut; at the beginning of the nineteenth century lithography made its appearance. With lithography the technique of reproduction reached an essentially new stage. This much more direct process was distinguished by the tracing of the design on a stone rather than its incision on a block of wood or its etching on a copperplate and permitted graphic art for the first time to put its products on the market, not only in large numbers as hitherto, but also in daily changing forms. Lithography enabled graphic art to illustrate everyday life, and it began to keep pace with printing. But only a few decades after its invention, lithography was surpassed by photography. For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens. Since the eye perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated so enormously that it could keep pace with speech. A film operator shooting a scene in the studio captures the imag-

THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION

es at the speed of an actor’s speech. Just as lithography virtually implied the illustrated newspaper, so did photography foreshadow the sound film. The technical reproduction of sound was tackled at the end of the last century. These convergent endeavors made predictable a situation which Paul Valery pointed up in this sentence: “Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.”

Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes. For the study of this standard nothing is more revealing than the nature of the repercussions that these two different manifestations—the reproduction of works of art and the art of the film—have had on art in its traditional form.

II Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownership. The traces of the first can be revealed only by chemical or physical analyses which it is impossible to perform on a reproduction; changes of ownership are subject to a tradition which must be traced from the situation of the original.

The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity. Chemical analyses of the patina of a bronze can help to establish this, as does the proof that a given manuscript of the Middle Ages stems from an archive of the fifteenth century.

The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical—and, of course, not only technical —reproducibility. Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority; not so vis-à-vis technical reproduction. The reason is twofold. First, process reproduction is more independent of the original than manual reproduction. For example, in photography, process reproduction can bring out those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens, which is adjustable and chooses its angle at will. And photographic reproduction, with the aid of certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion,

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can capture images which escape natural vision. Secondly, technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room.

The situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated.

This holds not only for the art work but also, for instance, for a landscape which passes in review before the spectator in a movie. In the case of the art object, a most sensitive nucleus—namely, its authenticity—is interfered with whereas no natural object is vulnerable on that score. The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter.

And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.

One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements. Their most powerful agent is the film. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage. This phenomenon is most palpable in the great historical films. It extends to ever new positions. In 1927 Abel Gance exclaimed enthusiastically: “Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make films... all legends, all mythologies and all myths, all founders of religion, and the very religions... await their exposed resurrection, and the heroes crowd each other at the gate.” Presumably without intending it, he issued an invitation to a far-reaching liquidation.

THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION

III During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well. The fifth century, with its great shifts of population, saw the birth of the late Roman art industry and the Vienna Genesis, and there developed not only an art different from that of antiquity but also a new kind of perception.

The scholars of the Viennese school, Riegl and Wickhoff, who resisted the weight of classical tradition under which these later art forms had been buried, were the first to draw conclusions from them concerning the organization of perception at the time. However far-reaching their insight, these scholars limited themselves to showing the significant, formal hallmark which characterized perception in late Roman times. They did not attempt—and, perhaps, saw no way—to show the social transformations expressed by these changes of perception. The conditions for an analogous insight are more favorable in the present. And if changes in the medium of contemporary perception can be comprehended as decay of the aura, it is possible to show its social causes.

The concept of aura which was proposed above with reference to historical objects may usefully be illustrated with reference to the aura of natural ones. We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. This image makes it easy to comprehend the social bases of the contemporary decay of the aura. It rests on two circumstances, both of which are related to the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life. Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things “closer” spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction. Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction. Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose “sense of the universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction.

Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable

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in the increasing importance of statistics. The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.

IV The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable. An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aura. Originally the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression in the cult. We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual—first the magical, then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function.

In other words, the unique value of the “authentic” work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty. The secular cult of beauty, developed during the Renaissance and prevailing for three centuries, clearly showed that ritualistic basis in its decline and the first deep crisis which befell it. With the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, photography, simultaneously with the rise of socialism, art sensed the approaching crisis which has become evident a century later. At the time, art reacted with the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, that is, with a theology of art. This gave rise to what might be called a negative theology in the form of the idea of “pure” art, which not only denied any social function of art but also any categorizing by subject matter. (In poetry, Mallarme was the first to take this position.)

An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead us to an all-important insight: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total func-

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tion of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.

V Works of art are received and valued on different planes. Two polar types stand out; with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the work.

Artistic production begins with ceremonial objects destined to serve in a cult. One may assume that what mattered was their existence, not their being on view. The elk portrayed by the man of the Stone Age on the walls of his cave was an instrument of magic.

He did expose it to his fellow men, but in the main it was meant for the spirits. Today the cult value would seem to demand that the work of art remain hidden. Certain statues of gods are accessible only to the priest in the cella; certain Madonnas remain covered nearly all year round; certain sculptures on medieval cathedrals are invisible to the spectator on ground level. With the emancipation of the various art practices from ritual go increasing opportunities for the exhibition of their products. It is easier to exhibit a portrait bust that can be sent here and there than to exhibit the statue of a divinity that has its fixed place in the interior of a temple. The same holds for the painting as against the mosaic or fresco that preceded it. And even though the public presentability of a mass originally may have been just as great as that of a symphony, the latter originated at the moment when its public presentability promised to surpass that of the mass.

With the different methods of technical reproduction of a work of art, its fitness for exhibition increased to such an extent that the quantitative shift between its two poles turned into a qualitative transformation of its nature. This is comparable to the situation of the work of art in prehistoric times when, by the absolute emphasis on its cult value, it was, first and foremost, an instrument of magic. Only later did it come to be recognized as a work of art. In the same way today, by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental. This much is certain: today photography and the film are the most serviceable exemplifications of this new function.

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VI In photography, exhibition value begins to displace cult value all along the line. But cult value does not give way without resistance. It retires into an ultimate retrenchment: the human countenance. It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty. But as man withdraws from the photographic image, the exhibition value for the first time shows its superiority to the ritual value.

To have pinpointed this new stage constitutes the incomparable significance of Atget, who, around 1900, took photographs of deserted Paris streets. It has quite justly been said of him that he photographed them like scenes of crime. The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance. They demand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way. At the same time picture magazines begin to put up signposts for him, right ones or wrong ones, no matter. For the first time, captions have become obligatory. And it is clear that they have an altogether different character than the title of a painting. The directives which the captions give to those looking at pictures in illustrated magazines soon become even more explicit and more imperative in the film where the meaning of each single picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones.

VII The nineteenth-century dispute as to the artistic value of painting versus photography today seems devious and confused. This does not diminish its importance, however; if anything, it underlines it. The dispute was in fact the symptom of a historical transformation the universal impact of which was not realized by either of the rivals. When the age of mechanical reproduction separated art from its basis in cult, the semblance of its autonomy disappeared forever. The resulting change in the function of art transcended the perspective of the century; for a long time it even escaped that of the twentieth century, which experienced the development of the film. Earlier much futile thought had

THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION

been devoted to the question of whether photography is an art. The primary question —whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art—was not raised. Soon the film theoreticians asked the same ill-considered question with regard to the film. But the difficulties which photography caused traditional aesthetics were mere child’s play as compared to those raised by the film. Whence the insensitive and forced character of early theories of the film. Abel Gance, for instance, compares the film with hieroglyphs: “Here, by a remarkable regression, we have come back to the level of expression of the Egyptians ... Pictorial language has not yet matured because our eyes have not yet adjusted to it. There is as yet insufficient respect for, insufficient cult of, what it expresses.” Or, in the words of Séverin-Mars: “What art has been granted a dream more poetical and more real at the same time! Approached in this fashion the film might represent an incomparable means of expression. Only the most high-minded persons, in the most perfect and mysterious moments of their lives, should be allowed to enter its ambience.” Alexandre Arnoux concludes his fantasy about the silent film with the question: “Do not all the bold descriptions we have given amount to the definition of prayer?” It is instructive to note how their desire to class the film among the “arts” forces these theoreticians to read ritual elements into it – with a striking lack of discretion. Yet when these speculations were published, films like L’Opinion publique and The Gold Rush had already appeared. This, however, did not keep Abel Gance from adducing hieroglyphs for purposes of comparison, nor Séverin-Mars from speaking of the film as one might speak of paintings by Fra Angelico. Characteristically, even today ultrareactionary authors give the film a similar contextual significance – if not an outright sacred one, then at least a supernatural one. Commenting on Max Reinhardt’s film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Werfel states that undoubtedly it was the sterile copying of the exterior world with its streets, interiors, railroad stations, restaurants, motorcars, and beaches which until now had obstructed the elevation of the film to the realm of art. “The film has not yet realized its true meaning, its real possibilities ... these consist in its unique faculty to express by natural means and with incomparable persuasiveness all that is fairylike, marvelous, supernatural.”

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VIII The artistic performance of a stage actor is definitely presented to the public by the actor in person; that of the screen actor, however, is presented by a camera, with a twofold consequence. The camera that presents the performance of the film actor to the public need not respect the performance as an integral whole. Guided by the cameraman, the camera continually changes its position with respect to the performance. The sequence of positional views which the editor composes from the material supplied him constitutes the completed film. It comprises certain factors of movement which are in reality those of the camera, not to mention special camera angles, close-ups, etc. Hence, the performance of the actor is subjected to a series of optical tests. This is the first consequence of the fact that the actor’s performance is presented by means of a camera.

Also, the film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor to adjust to the audience during his performance, since he does not present his performance to the audience in person. This permits the audience to take the position of a critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor. The audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera. Consequently the audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is that of testing. This is not the approach to which cult values may be exposed.

IX For the film, what matters primarily is that the actor represents himself to the public before the camera, rather than representing someone else. One of the first to sense the actor’s metamorphosis by this form of testing was Pirandello. Though his remarks on the subject in his novel Si Gira were limited to the negative aspects of the question and to the silent film only, this hardly impairs their validity. For in this respect, the sound film did not change anything essential. What matters is that the part is acted not for an audience but for a mechanical contrivance – in the case of the sound film, for two of them.

“The film actor,” wrote Pirandello, “feels as if in exile – exiled not only from the stage but also from himself. With a vague sense of discomfort he feels inexplicable emptiness: his body loses its corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, voice, and the noises caused by his moving about, in order to be changed into a mute image, flickering an instant on the screen, then vanishing into silence .... The projector will play with his

THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION

shadow before the public, and he himself must be content to play before the camera.”

This situation might also be characterized as follows: for the first time—and this is the effect of the film—man has to operate with his whole living person, yet forgoing its aura.

For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it. The aura which, on the stage, emanates from Macbeth, cannot be separated for the spectators from that of the actor. However, the singularity of the shot in the studio is that the camera is substituted for the public. Consequently, the aura that envelops the actor vanishes, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays.

It is not surprising that it should be a dramatist such as Pirandello who, in characterizing the film, inadvertently touches on the very crisis in which we see the theater. Any thorough study proves that there is indeed no greater contrast than that of the stage play to a work of art that is completely subject to or, like the film, founded in, mechanical reproduction. Experts have long recognized that in the film “the greatest effects are almost always obtained by ‘acting’ as little as possible ... ” In 1932 Rudolf Arnheim saw “the latest trend ... in treating the actor as a stage prop chosen for its characteristics and... inserted at the proper place.” With this idea something else is closely connected. The stage actor identifies himself with the character of his role. The film actor very often is denied this opportunity. His creation is by no means all of a piece; it is composed of many separate performances. Besides certain fortuitous considerations, such as cost of studio, availability of fellow players, décor, etc., there are elementary necessities of equipment that split the actor’s work into a series of mountable episodes. In particular, lighting and its installation require the presentation of an event that, on the screen, unfolds as a rapid and unified scene, in a sequence of separate shootings which may take hours at the studio; not to mention more obvious montage. Thus a jump from the window can be shot in the studio as a jump from a scaffold, and the ensuing flight, if need be, can be shot weeks later when outdoor scenes are taken. Far more paradoxical cases can easily be construed. Let us assume that an actor is supposed to be startled by a knock at the door.

If his reaction is not satisfactory, the director can resort to an expedient: when the actor happens to be at the studio again he has a shot fired behind him without his being forewarned of it. The frightened reaction can be shot now and be cut into the screen version.

Nothing more strikingly shows that art has left the realm of the “beautiful semblance” which, so far, had been taken to be the only sphere where art could thrive.

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X The feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor before the camera, as Pirandello describes it, is basically of the same kind as the estrangement felt before one’s own image in the mirror. But now the reflected image has become separable, transportable. And where is it transported? Before the public. Never for a moment does the screen actor cease to be conscious of this fact. While facing the camera he knows that ultimately he will face the public, the consumers who constitute the market. This market, where he offers not only his labor but also his whole self, his heart and soul, is beyond his reach.

During the shooting he has as little contact with it as any article made in a factory. This may contribute to that oppression, that new anxiety which, according to Pirandello, grips the actor before the camera. The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity. So long as the movie-makers’ capital sets the fashion, as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to today’s film than the promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art. We do not deny that in some cases today’s films can also promote revolutionary criticism of social conditions, even of the distribution of property. However, our present study is no more specifically concerned with this than is the film production of Western Europe.

It is inherent in the technique of the film as well as that of sports that everybody who witnesses its accomplishments is somewhat of an expert. This is obvious to anyone listening to a group of newspaper boys leaning on their bicycles and discussing the outcome of a bicycle race. It is not for nothing that newspaper publishers arrange races for their delivery boys. These arouse great interest among the participants, for the victor has an opportunity to rise from delivery boy to professional racer. Similarly, the newsreel offers everyone the opportunity to rise from passer-by to movie extra. In this way any man might even find himself part of a work of art, as witness Vertov’s Three Songs About Lenin or Ivens’ Borinage. Any man today can lay claim to being filmed. This claim can best be elucidated by a comparative look at the historical situation of contemporary literature.

For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local

THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION

organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers—at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for “letters to the editor.” And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer. As expert, which he had to become willy-nilly in an extremely specialized work process, even if only in some minor respect, the reader gains access to authorship. In the Soviet Union work itself is given a voice. To present it verbally is part of a man’s ability to perform the work. Literary license is now founded on polytechnic rather than specialized training and thus becomes common property.

All this can easily be applied to the film, where transitions that in literature took centuries have come about in a decade. In cinematic practice, particularly in Russia, this change-over has partially become established reality. Some of the players whom we meet in Russian films are not actors in our sense but people who portray themselves and primarily in their own work process. In Western Europe the capitalistic exploitation of the film denies consideration to modern man’s legitimate claim to being reproduced.

Under these circumstances the film industry is trying hard to spur the interest of the masses through illusion-promoting spectacles and dubious speculations.

XI The shooting of a film, especially of a sound film, affords a spectacle unimaginable anywhere at any time before this. It presents a process in which it is impossible to assign to a spectator a viewpoint which would exclude from the actual scene such extraneous accessories as camera equipment, lighting machinery, staff assistants, etc.—unless his eye were on a line parallel with the lens. This circumstance, more than any other, renders superficial and insignificant any possible similarity between a scene in the studio and one on the stage. In the theater one is well aware of the place from which the play cannot immediately be detected as illusionary. There is no such place for the movie scene that is being shot. Its illusionary nature is that of the second degree, the result of cutting.

That is to say, in the studio the mechanical equipment has penetrated so deeply into reality that its pure aspect freed from the foreign substance of equipment is the result of a special procedure, namely, the shooting by the specially adjusted camera and the

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mounting of the shot together with other similar ones. The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology.

Even more revealing is the comparison of these circumstances, which differ so much from those of the theater, with the situation in painting. Here the question is: How does the cameraman compare with the painter? To answer this we take recourse to an analogy with a surgical operation. The surgeon represents the polar opposite of the magician.

The magician heals a sick person by the laying on of hands; the surgeon cuts into the patient’s body. The magician maintains the natural distance between the patient and himself; though he reduces it very slightly by the laying on of hands, he greatly increases it by virtue of his authority. The surgeon does exactly the reverse; he greatly diminishes the distance between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient’s body, and increases it but little by the caution with which his hand moves among the organs. In short, in contrast to the magician—who is still hidden in the medical practitioner—the surgeon at the decisive moment abstains from facing the patient man to man; rather, it is through the operation that he penetrates into him.

Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web.

There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law. Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art.

XII Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert. Such fusion is of great social significance. The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion. With

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regard to the screen, the critical and the receptive attitudes of the public coincide. The decisive reason for this is that individual reactions are predetermined by the mass audience response they are about to produce, and this is nowhere more pronounced than in the film. The moment these responses become manifest they control each other. Again, the comparison with painting is fruitful. A painting has always had an excellent chance to be viewed by one person or by a few. The simultaneous contemplation of paintings by a large public, such as developed in the nineteenth century, is an early symptom of the crisis of painting, a crisis which was by no means occasioned exclusively by photography but rather in a relatively independent manner by the appeal of art works to the masses.

Painting simply is in no position to present an object for simultaneous collective experience, as it was possible for architecture at all times, for the epic poem in the past, and for the movie today. Although this circumstance in itself should not lead one to conclusions about the social role of painting, it does constitute a serious threat as soon as painting, under special conditions and, as it were, against its nature, is confronted directly by the masses. In the churches and monasteries of the Middle Ages and at the princely courts up to the end of the eighteenth century, a collective reception of paintings did not occur simultaneously, but by graduated and hierarchized mediation. The change that has come about is an expression of the particular conflict in which painting was implicated by the mechanical reproducibility of paintings. Although paintings began to be publicly exhibited in galleries and salons, there was no way for the masses to organize and control themselves in their reception. Thus the same public which responds in a progressive manner toward a grotesque film is bound to respond in a reactionary manner to surrealism.

XIII The characteristics of the film lie not only in the manner in which man presents himself to mechanical equipment but also in the manner in which, by means of this apparatus, man can represent his environment. A glance at occupational psychology illustrates the testing capacity of the equipment. Psychoanalysis illustrates it in a different perspective.

The film has enriched our field of perception with methods which can be illustrated by those of Freudian theory. Fifty years ago, a slip of the tongue passed more or less unnoticed. Only exceptionally may such a slip have revealed dimensions of depth in a conversation which had seemed to be taking its course on the surface. Since the Psy-

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chopathology of Everyday Life things have changed. This book isolated and made analyzable things which had heretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception. For the entire spectrum of optical, and now also acoustical, perception the film has brought about a similar deepening of apperception. It is only an obverse of this fact that behavior items shown in a movie can be analyzed much more precisely and from more points of view than those presented on paintings or on the stage. As compared with painting, filmed behavior lends itself more readily to analysis because of its incomparably more precise statements of the situation. In comparison with the stage scene, the filmed behavior item lends itself more readily to analysis because it can be isolated more easily. This circumstance derives its chief importance from its tendency to promote the mutual penetration of art and science. Actually, of a screened behavior item which is neatly brought out in a certain situation, like a muscle of a body, it is difficult to say which is more fascinating, its artistic value or its value for science. To demonstrate the identity of the artistic and scientific uses of photography which heretofore usually were separated will be one of the revolutionary functions of the film.

By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended.

The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject.

So, too, slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones “which, far from looking like retarded rapid movements, give the effect of singularly gliding, floating, supernatural motions.” Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye—if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man.

Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person’s posture during the fractional second of a stride. The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, it exten-

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sions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

XIV One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form. The extravagances and crudities of art which thus appear, particularly in the so-called decadent epochs, actually arise from the nucleus of its richest historical energies. In recent years, such barbarisms were abundant in Dadaism. It is only now that its impulse becomes discernible: Dadaism attempted to create by pictorial—and literary—means the effects which the public today seeks in the film.

Every fundamentally new, pioneering creation of demands will carry beyond its goal.

Dadaism did so to the extent that it sacrificed the market values which are so characteristic of the film in favor of higher ambitions—though of course it was not conscious of such intentions as here described. The Dadaists attached much less importance to the sales value of their work than to its uselessness for contemplative immersion. The studied degradation of their material was not the least of their means to achieve this uselessness. Their poems are “word salad” containing obscenities and every imaginable waste product of language. The same is true of their paintings, on which they mounted buttons and tickets. What they intended and achieved was a relentless destruction of the aura of their creations, which they branded as reproductions with the very means of production. Before a painting of Arp’s or a poem by August Stramm it is impossible to take time for contemplation and evaluation as one would before a canvas of Derain’s or a poem by Rilke. In the decline of middle-class society, contemplation became a school for asocial behavior; it was countered by distraction as a variant of social conduct. Dadaistic activities actually assured a rather vehement distraction by making works of art the center of scandal. One requirement was foremost: to outrage the public.

From an alluring appearance or persuasive structure of sound the work of art of the Dadaists became an instrument of ballistics. It hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality. It promoted a demand for the film, the distracting element of which is also primarily tactile, being based on changes of place and focus which periodically assail the spectator. Let us compare the screen on which a film un-

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folds with the canvas of a painting. The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested. Duhamel, who detests the film and knows nothing of its significance, though something of its structure, notes this circumstance as follows: “I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.” The spectator’s process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change. This constitutes the shock effect of the film, which, like all shocks, should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind. By means of its technical structure, the film has taken the physical shock effect out of the wrappers in which Dadaism had, as it were, kept it inside the moral shock effect.

XV The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of art issues today in a new form. Quantity has been transmuted into quality. The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation. The fact that the new mode of participation first appeared in a disreputable form must not confuse the spectator. Yet some people have launched spirited attacks against precisely this superficial aspect. Among these, Duhamel has expressed himself in the most radical manner. What he objects to most is the kind of participation which the movie elicits from the masses.

Duhamel calls the movie “a pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures who are consumed by their worries a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes no intelligence which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope other than the ridiculous one of someday becoming a ‘star’ in Los Angeles.” Clearly, this is at bottom the same ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator. That is a commonplace.

The question remains whether it provides a platform for the analysis of the film. A closer look is needed here. Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of art the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art.

This is most obvious with regard to buildings. Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction. The laws of its reception are most instructive.

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Buildings have been man’s companions since primeval times. Many art forms have developed and perished. Tragedy begins with the Greeks, is extinguished with them, and after centuries its “rules” only are revived. The epic poem, which had its origin in the youth of nations, expires in Europe at the end of the Renaissance. Panel painting is a creation of the Middle Ages, and nothing guarantees its uninterrupted existence. But the human need for shelter is lasting. Architecture has never been idle. Its history is more ancient than that of any other art, and its claim to being a living force has significance in every attempt to comprehend the relationship of the masses to art. Buildings are appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and by perception—or rather, by touch and sight.

Such appropriation cannot be understood in terms of the attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building. On the tactile side there is no counterpart to contemplation on the optical side. Tactile appropriation is accomplished not so much by attention as by habit. As regards architecture, habit determines to a large extent even optical reception. The latter, too, occurs much less through rapt attention than by noticing the object in incidental fashion. This mode of appropriation, developed with reference to architecture, in certain circumstances acquires canonical value. For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation.

The distracted person, too, can form habits. More, the ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction proves that their solution has become a matter of habit. Distraction as provided by art presents a covert control of the extent to which new tasks have become soluble by apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to avoid such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important ones where it is able to mobilize the masses. Today it does so in the film. Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.

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EPILOGUE The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system. It goes without saying that the Fascist apotheosis of war does not employ such arguments. Still, Marinetti says in his manifesto on the Ethiopian colonial war: For twenty-seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as anti-aesthetic ... Accordingly we state:... War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks.

War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others ... Poets and artists of Futurism! ... remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art ... may be illumined by them!

This manifesto has the virtue of clarity. Its formulations deserve to be accepted by dialecticians. To the latter, the aesthetics of today’s war appears as follows: If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that soci-

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ety has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society. The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production—in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets. Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of “human material,” the claims to which society has denied its natural material. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.

“Fiat ars–pereat mundus,” says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.

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POWER AND PRY MEANINGFUL CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE PRINT MEDIUM AMANDA ADREANI

While the School of Art + Design does not currently offer a degree in printmaking, interest in this medium has been revived in recent years. Various studio classes in the print shop are available to students, with instruction by Emmy Lingscheit and Guen Montgomery. Montgomery’s interest in printmaking stems from her appreciation of “the power of the multiple,” as well as “the process-centric nature” of the medium. She views hand printing as “a remedy for an increasingly instant, virtual, digitally saturated life,” and she enjoys, “how concrete the processes are and how they provide a better understanding of your materials.” While teaching these classes, she hopes to introduce students to “the camaraderie of the print shop, the interesting traditions, print-specific superstitions, and feeling of community that can form around people united in a specific way of working.”

In her own artistic practice, Montgomery is “interested in the complexity and inherent theatricality of real and imagined human characters,” and is “motivated by family, history, and identity discourse.” The artist recently produced two small prints, both the same size, with alliterative titles: Pry and Power. By strategically utilizing text, imagery, and artistic conventions, Montgomery conveys her social concerns within these two pieces. Matching embossment surrounds each image and says, “Have we the tools to

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dismantle the very structures we live in?” This question is expressed with rather particular word choices, which speak to the notions of building, strength, and destruction seen within the images. As this text circles the scene, half is elegantly hand-written, the words woven around decoratively arranged power cords attached to electric drills. Within two wooden panels, the rest of the embossed text conversely appears typeset. The delicate size of the actual printed images seems comparable to an object that one would own and keep as a personal possession, like a photograph or jewelry box.

Each image focuses on a singular woman, but denies certain canonical conventions of portraiture. While the women are clothed in what appear to be upper-class outfits, the seemingly 19th-century woman in Pry is not posed and seated in her living space.

Instead, she is seen taking action. While audaciously eyeing the viewer, she wields a crowbar and attempts to free herself from the dim, sparse room in which she has been kept. In Power, the hoop skirt-clad woman is centered within the image, but she is atypically turned away from the viewer. This apparently 18th-century woman stands with her back to us, and clutches anachronistic tools: a power drill and an oversized screwdriver.

These objects would typically be associated with the work of men building homes, consequently creating and delineating the domestic spaces of women. Unlike the scene in Pry, where the woman is stuck in the grim interior of a house, the woman in Power is situated in an allegorical space. The slabs of wall, floor, and ceiling around her appear unhinged.

It is as if some of the “dismantling” has already taken place but a lot of tough work still lies ahead. These structural fragments are heavily shaded, perhaps referring to dark days of the past. The woman in Power stands with upright posture, which connects with historical standards of ladylike poise. However, her body configuration can also convey that she is ready to take action. It is as if she is mentally preparing herself for the task ahead by taking a deep breath, tools in hand, and willing herself to move forward into the ambiguous space.

Clearly these are not scenes produced during the heyday of the printing press, but they harken back to the past and to the European tradition of printmaking. Montgomery created hand-drawn generalized images of Western women from history and then situated them in unexpected positions of strength. In these works, she demands the attention of today’s women and presents a call to action. By reworking the conventions of art, as well as notions of domesticity, femininity, and social structures, Montgomery’s prints Pry and Power evoke the unease she feels about the treatment of women in the past, and her lasting concerns about the issues that remain today.

GUEN MONTGOMERY

Guen Montgomery Pry, 2014

Guen Montgomery Power, 2014

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INSTALLATIONS AND TIME– BASED PIECES GUEN MONTGOMERY NANCY DREW ALTERED BOOKS Set of 5 pen and acrylic wash over text 2011

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We Own Your Bones dimensions variable screenprint, letterpress, mixed media

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QUIETLY QUEER: INVISIBLE SERIES 5 × 7 inches hand-etched glass 2013

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NANCY DREW

dimensions vary mixed media installation 2013

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THE FAMILY LEGACY dimensions vary mixed media installation 2011

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THE RE-VISION OF PRINTMAKING

THE RE-VISION OF PRINTMAKING

KATHRYN J REEVES

The re-vision of printmaking is long overdue, especially at a time when theorists, historians, and practitioners in so many fields are intensely interested in rethinking the foundations of their disciplines. Psychoanalysts Margaret Black and Stephen Mitchell wrote, “History is now understood by many as not a simple uncovering and assembling of facts, but as an active process between past and present, involving a selection and arrangement of some facts, from an infinite set of possibilities, to produce one among many possible understandings.” The re-vision of printmaking, then, is not a simple revisionist exercise, but a process of re-looking, re-seeing, re-arranging, and redefining both the historical and contemporary construction of the field. Little work has been done in printmaking related to semiotics, feminism, or psychoanalysis. This paper is a call for a new history and historiography of printmaking and, more than anything, is a call for dialogue that would examine the ways in which printmaking relates to the important theoretical issues of our time.

Re-visioning a printmaking historiography is an oxymoron of sorts: an history exists but the critical examination of its sources is missing. It doesn’t take long to identify some big gaps in the body of information that constitutes the history of printmaking; nothing has been looked over and almost everything has been overlooked. Art historian Kath-

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ryn Kramer noted the lack of a historiography of printmaking (other than chronicles of technical practice) and a neglect of the medium in art theory and criticism. It is, as she put it, “an especially puzzling slight when the medium seems so accessible to debates surrounding notions of authorship, originality, social formation, [and] agency...that have dominated the critical discourse of western art since antiquity.”

Where is our discourse? Where are the questions concerning this medium, so accessible yet unexplored, to be located in theory and history? And where is theory to be located in our practice? These questions must not be asked by theorists alone and experience tells us that few questions specifically concerning printmaking have been located in the literature of theory.Walter Benjamin’s germinal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, often cited, often misunderstood, must not be the sole theoretical basis of our historiography. And if it seems printmakers get mired in discussions of the same territory, perhaps it is because we are not looking in the right places or spaces for critical examination. James Clifford wrote, “To theorise, one leaves home.” So for a while let’s leave the familiar territory, a place with boundaries but without a concrete, fixed location. Spaces have been left unexplored and open, and print artists must enter if we are to understand where our identities and our linguistic and cultural practices are located and how those have been constructed.

Homi K. Bhabha said, “What theory does first of all is respond to a problem.” Our problem, a misleading and inadequate history and a missing historiography, requires that we try to discover what is present or absent, what requires identification, what must be decoded. The body, the matrix, theory, location, and past and present coding, are the missing who, what, why, where, and when of our historical narratives. Woven throughout the narratives are questions of encryption, marginality, originality, and binary opposition. I say narratives (plural) because I feel we must strongly resist the production of a grand narrative with its homogenising effect and its implicit singular voice.As we approach the 21st century, the modernist project of constructing or discovering a totalizing structure surely ought to be abandoned once and for all.

Histories often begin with mapping and locating activities. In Notes Towards a Politics of Location, Adrienne Rich suggested beginning with the closest geography available — the body. She considered the body a locus, but not the centre of discourse. It is the “site of more than one identity,” and at the same time, is “a place in history.” Many of us began our own experience and history with printmaking when as newborn infants a portion of our body was inked and a footprint taken. Touch always results in a print. It is safe to say that body prints, from fingers, lips, hands, feet, and skin exist in the billions. It is equally safe to say that the term “print” means many things to many people, and that no other

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term substitutes for these multiple identities. “Print” exists as trace, identity, evidence, and reproduction simultaneously.

That printmakers equate the print with the body is not in doubt. We “bleed” when the margin of the print is excised. The margin, and the identification with the marginal, is deeply imbedded within the printmaking psyche. Excision of the pristine, virginal space surrounding a print image may function as an attempt to make a print more like a painting—but the language, the naming of the bleed print, acknowledges the depth of the loss.

The printmaking corpus suffers the loss, but the loss is also one of the known identity. The margin is a discursive space, but, for the print artist, it exists largely as a tabula rasa and that must change if printmaking is to engage with the decentred perspective of contemporary thought.

Historians, curators, and we ourselves are active and vigilant in the maintenance of our identity. When paint is used in the production of our prints, we are all careful to call it hand-colouring. New Zealand artist Carole Shepheard wrote that “print challenges the notion of authorship and originality by the very nature of its methods....But printmaking has a legacy of marginalisation and this needs to be recognised and addressed for any changes to occur.” It must be said that printmakers support those same notions by avoiding infringement into the territory of painting. But this interpretation of the term “hand-colouring,” while accurate in its own way, is limited and does not take into account the desire to invoke the body via the hand in the print. It acknowledges the absence of a colour printing element or matrix and, at the same time, constructs the printmaker’s hand as another matrix.

Does the location of our artistic identity and practice also involve the print matrix, an inky middle ground between paper and pressure? Is this plane of activity a centre or a non-centre? And if the matrix is a centre of activity, is the print then not a centre? Derrida in Structure, Sign, and Play, described the “non-centre otherwise than as a loss of centre.”

Does the existence of multiple impressions of the same image also point to the print as a non-centre? The absence of the matrix in the visible artwork seems to point to a loss,an absence which serves to decentre attention from the art object. In modern printing technology and terminology, lithography was reinvented as offset—a term which implies a compensating equivalent, that is, compensation for a loss incurred by distancing the art object further from the matrix. If an art object acts as a presence signifying also the absence of the artist, is there a doubling of absence in a printed art object? Does this recognised absence alone account for the fanatical concentration on media and matrix in virtually every printmaking history? Is it this absent matrix which causes viewers (patrons

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and practitioners alike) to peer so closely at the surface of the print that the complete image cannot be seen in focus and to ask the perennial question, “How is this done?”

Given the intense curiosity about the matrix and technical practice, it is possible to construct the matrix as a psychosexual object and the making of prints as a psychosexual, reproductive act. The actual printing then, in a twist of Freudian theory, is a primal scene, a “fantasy of sexual activity.” Public demonstrations of printmaking technique and the act of printing satisfy the curiosity about the reproductive act and allow a vicarious participation in it. Otherwise the absent matrix causes anxiety for the viewer who experiences a kind of frustration and in some cases an inability to see the image. In print exhibitions, didactic information and displays of matrices and tools often are shown as surrogates which substitute for the primal scene.

That we increasingly describe printmaking as a matrix-based form of image-making begs us to ask further what is encoded or encrypted here. Questions concerning coding, especially identity and gendered code, have been dealt with extensively in theory and in other media or disciplines. The most significant question that can be asked is: why have we chosen “matrix” as an identifier? Matrix seems, on the face of it, an apt word to describe the models or forms from which images are pulled or produced,particularly when “plate”, “block”, or “stone” can’t describe the proliferation of current technological possibilities. But, matrix is not simply model or form, not simply that which gives origin or form to a thing, but, literally, matrix is “womb.”

The word matrix is omnipresent in contemporary humanities, arts, and sciences.

Found in metallurgy, polymer theory, literature, engineering, genetics, poetics, robotics,and virtually every discipline (it has even found its way recently into popular cinema), matrix is a most useful word, a Jack-of-all-trades, except that this Jack is really a Jane.

The matrilineage of the word should be clear. Though the meaning of the word has been partially cloaked in modern times, the etymology of matrix is easily traced. In Late Latin, matrix meant womb. From the Latin, it was incorporated intact and unchanged in the English language. In 16th century literature, metaphoric parallels were drawn between the matrix and the earth as Mother Earth, the great womb. By the early 17th century, the word was used in printing to describe moulds for casting type. In the 1850s, three mathematicians appropriated the word to describe a rectangular numeric array and hypercomplex numbers. Since then, every scientific discipline has found a use for the word.

While abbreviated dictionaries of the early 19th century often listed womb as the sole definition of the word,some contemporary counterparts of those heavily abridged dictionaries omit the original definition of the word altogether. According to linguistic models, the proliferation of scientific and scholarly redefinition of matrix might be considered

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as a process of amelioration or elevation, but it seems rather a change of a different sort.

Still, the matrilineage of matrix resonates and the link between matrix, reproduction, and printing is unmistakable.

Old art history surveys have described printmaking as one of the minor arts and even as the “handmaiden of the fine arts” because of its reproductive capabilities. It is also identified as a labour-intensive art form. Matrix, reproduction, labour. From those points, it doesn’t take an expert cryptographer to crack the code: printmaking is and has historically been gender coded “feminine.”

We know that gendered codes have been assigned to various art forms throughout history. Michelangelo gender coded Flemish painting feminine (and simultaneously coded Italian painting as its opposite). Michelangelo is said to have characterised Flemish art as that which “will appeal to women, especially to the very old and the very young, and also to monks and nuns...” because it is “done without reason or art...without skillful choice or boldness...without substance or vigour.” In a painting, it is understood that the ground has been gendered female. Mira Schor reminds us that “painting in the high Italian Renaissance increasingly became a system for ordering and subduing nature, laying a grid on chaos (femininity), which in the 20th century became a process of razing and asphalting.” A coded project of modernist painting, and particularly that of the Abstract Expressionists,was to reconstruct painting, which had become associated with the effeminate, as a masculine enterprise, “as an expression of virile passion.” In the United States, this recoding of art in the 1950s marked the end of a period of gender equality in the arts and the end of the intense activity in graphic arts funded by the WPA and the FAP (Work Projects Administration and Federal Arts Project) in the 1930s. We know that printmaking was in danger of disappearing in postwar America and that time period coincided with the gendered reconstruction of painting.

Whether one believes that a gendered code resides within or without, that is, inside or outside the coded subject is less significant than the fact that the code exists and operates actively, though covertly. By choosing not to consciously recognise the coding of our discipline (and I think that many of us felt rather than knew the code , and preferred to silence the discussion), by choosing to remain cloaked, even from ourselves, we missed a critical juncture in the 1980s in the Postmodern debate where issues of originality, post-structuralism, deconstruction, and critique of patriarchy intersected. While many writers at that time rightly questioned if Postmodernism was a masculine invention, a final ploy of patriarchy to leave the canon intact by declaring it obsolete, print artists missed that debate also. Photography was there, printmaking wasn’t.

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The gendered code of printmaking explains much in relation to issues of marginalisation, reproduction, and originality. If print images spring from a matrix/womb, they are ordinary mortals. The genius, who is never gendered female, produces something different. The offspring of genius has been likened to the birth of Zeus’ daughter, the goddess Athena, patroness of art. Athena was not born from a goddess’ womb, but instead sprang directly from the head of Zeus the father. Creation is constructed thus, and not as reproduction; it occurs without labour and without the matrix/womb. The destruction and cancellation of the matrix in the service of creating the uniqueness and “originality” of a limited edition multiple and the production of an evidential “proof” of the dead mother are fascinating practices. This modern printmaking practice, forming an equation between destruction of the matrix and the creation of originality, embraces outmoded concepts of opposition. And though concepts of genius and originality have been thoroughly debunked in theory, in practice, they still hold considerable power. Recently in an opinion contrary to Benjamin’s prediction, Michael Kimmelman posited that “the allure of the original will increase, not decline, and in direct proportion to the availability of reproductions.” Nevertheless, clinging to notions of genius, hierarchy, and originality is not to the advantage of those who have been coded as other.

The issue of gendered codes approached from another direction sheds more light on the problem. Histories of printmaking, as previously noted, are largely chronicles of technical practice arranged along a linear time line. Science and technology are traditionally coded as masculine enterprises, and are highly prized in both Western and Eastern cultures. Therefore, any field strongly associated with technology ought to be coded as masculine and, in the hierarchical structure of any patriarchal culture, ought to occupy the highest tier. That printmaking, arguably the most technical of all art forms, does not occupy this tier suggests that it has not been coded as masculine and that a different code is operative. Interestingly, recent technological shifts towards electronic digital imaging seem to cause printmakers to unconsciously reach for a masculine gendered code and refigure the field as printmaKING. Witness the recently adopted use in North America of the French word giclée to describe ink-jet prints. Clinton Adams, Emeritus Professor of the University of New Mexico and the Tamarind Institute of Lithography, suggests that the use of this term shows that American printmakers do not know colloquial French. However, giclée makes an obvious reference to the masculine and at the same time reinforces the notion of all printmaking as a reproductive function. Printmaking, it would seem, is always reduced to a sort of biological determinism. Attempts to reconstruct printmaking as masculine in order to reposition its rank in the art world is to accept patriarchy, hierarchy, and opposition as the natural order of things. It also ignores

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the central features of Postmodern thought related to “the redefinition of the nature of authority...the re-working of traditional gender roles,” and the understanding of gender “as an artefact of social structures.” What must occur is not a recoding, but a challenge to existing notions and a reconsideration of gender. The outmoded framework of division and opposition must be dismantled.

Within this Postmodern or post Postmodern era and within the context of a persistently patriarchal world, the master printer is a curiously archaic construction. This trope is unquestionably offensive on so many levels in so many cultures, and is yet seemingly perfectly acceptable to printmakers. Does the use of this term mean there are no feminists among printmakers nor men and women of goodwill who would avoid using exclusionary, colonialist language? I know that neither of those is entirely true. Yet this figure would seem to be a contradiction to the understanding of gendered encryption in printmaking. But it must be remembered that the master printer functions as a servant in collaborative printing. And, if considered as a masculine gendered figure, the master printer has a necessary role in conjunction with the matrix in a reproductive process, and thus serves to reinforce the gendered code of printmaking as feminine. At the same time, another equally complex function operates in printmaking and to understand it we must look to our habitual reversa—the printmaker’s understanding of the mirror image.

Beyond the reproductive function, the function of reversal explains the largely unquestioned use of the term “master printer.” Printmakers have the capability to see the dual nature of all images/texts/identities which exist always as themselves and always as their mirror images. But this experience of reversal is not shared with the rest of the art world nor with society; this experience further marks the printmaker and printmaking as other, as “eccentrics,” described by Linda Hutcheon as those who do not occupy the centre, the traditionally marginalised groups.

What are the other implications of the mirror image? Carl Zigrosser referred to the “potential duality” of prints as a characteristic that distinguished prints from other art forms, but he referred only to aesthetics and utility. While the mirror has been explored in psychoanalysis, especially in Freudian theory, and has been used in literature as a metaphor for reflection of truth, reality, or states of being, it has not been considered as a process of reversal. Printmaking’s particular duality of the mirror image, this capability of dual perception and reversal, has been little explored in imagistic, conceptual, or theoretical terms by printmakers. When left becomes right, right becomes left, and up becomes down, anything is possible in a curiouser and curiouser through-the-lookingglass world. In Postmodernity it is understood that history, language, and signs do not

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have fixed meanings, and the mirror offers a powerful tool for exploring this. Is this the site of “more than one identity” in the body of printmaking?

Recognising that not all print media involve a mirror reversal,is there yet another site that involves a relationship of a different kind—a site shared by all printmaking, photography, and digital imaging? Printmaking and printing have historically occupied a crossroads, now shared with photography and digital media, through which all cultural and scientific information passes. That constitutes another site, but it too has more than one identity. Perhaps the greatest challenge that must be faced is the recognition of the nature of that shared site, the recognition that these media are fundamentally based on binary opposition. Pairs of oppositions are the conceptual and technical basis for printmaking: black and white, high and low in relief and intaglio, grease and water in lithography, open and closed in serigraphy. Photography has been constructed as a medium which images with light, but it equally depends on darkness. The digital image is formed with off/on technology, the zero/one of computer programming. The computer never allows maybe, only yes or no. Perhaps it is absurd to ask civilisation, which is itself formed on sets of oppositions such as good/evil, strength/weakness, left/right, right/wrong, to conceptualise its information delivery systems in any other way. How could the emissaries of civilisation be conceived of otherwise? Even so, it is necessary that binary opposition, the model of polar thinking that has characterised patriarchal Western philosophy and culture, should be addressed in contemporary printmaking, and here also there must be a reconsideration and critique of existing notions of opposition as the natural order of things.

Printmaking is often described as a mediated art form, referring only in part to technical practice and the role of the matrix as mediator standing between the artist and the art work. Mediation also suggests the possibility and perhaps the necessity of interpolating, interposing, interceding, interfering, and inter vening in aesthetic, theoretic, philosophic, social, and economic ways. Can we now theorise a space for printmaking practice that, quoting Foucault, “is one in which space takes for us the form of relations among sites”? The great challenge for printmakers will be to determine the sites with which to engage and what form the relations among sites will take.

Print artists must negotiate with theory, location, identity, and multiple subjectivities.

“Printmaking proper” must engage with new technologies, reversals and oppositions, and with reproduction modes that include neither the pain nor the pleasure of touching materials. Artists who chose to work with print media and with print thought must resist the conceptual framework of binary opposition and try to bridge the huge spaces between polar opposites. We must, as Ruth Weisberg suggested, not be unwilling to “construct a framework of ideas and concepts that would locate our practice in relation to the

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larger intellectual paradigms of our time.” Will print artists successfully avoid the formation of new hierarchy, hegemony, and a grand narrative as we re-vision printmaking and negotiate with theory? Linda Hutcheon wrote, we must engage in “a more general questioning of any totalising or homogenising system...from the decentred perspective, the ‘marginal’ takes on a new significance.” Heterogeneity, mutability, and provisionality must become part of our theoretical and visual vocabularies. An understanding must be gained that theory and practice are not oppositional positions, nor is gender. Theory, when carefully and fully considered, has the capacity to make art and practice more interesting, to empower artists,to open spaces, and to deepen experience. As print artists revisit the primal scene of creation again and again,it must be remembered that the margins and other spaces, the matrix, and the conceptual challenges that await us are among the most interesting parts.

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365 DAYS 365 ARTISTS GUEN MONTGOMERY URBANA, ILLINOIS GREYMATTER COLLABORATIVE

BRIEFLY DESCRIBE THE WORK YOU DO.

Chiefly I am interested in the complexity and inherent theatricality of real and imagined human characters. I focus specifically on the identities of my rural appalachian family members, and the varied identities which haunt the words queer, lesbian, and femme. I’ve found that working in only one medium doesn’t satisfy my desire to express different thoughts in different ways. To investigate my areas of interest I cross disciplines, negotiating between printmaking, fibers, sculpture and performance. I tend to work on more than one project at once, simultaneously producing prints and experimenting with sculptural forms. Ultimately, I use visually seductive images, textures and forms to

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365 DAYS, 365 ARTISTS: GUEN MONTGOMERY

create hybrid pieces that are motivated by family, history, and identity discourse.

TELL US A LITTLE ABOUT YOUR BACKGROUND AND HOW THAT INFLUENCES YOU AS AN ARTIST.

THE CONCEPT OF THE “ARTIST STUDIO” HAS A BROAD RANGE OF MEANINGS, ESPECIALLY IN CONTEMPORARY PRACTICE. THE IDEA OF THE ARTIST TOILING AWAY ALONE IN A ROOM MAY NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT WHAT MANY ARTISTS DO FROM DAY TO DAY ANYMORE. DESCRIBE YOUR STUDIO PRACTICE AND HOW IT DIFFERS FROM (OR IS THE SAME AS) TRADITIONAL NOTIONS OF “BEING IN THE STUDIO.”

I am very close to my 68 year old mom, and my mother’s side of the family, who live in the Cumberland Plateau area of East Tennessee. My mom and her 8 sibling’s rural, relatively poor childhood, in contrast with my sibling-less, relatively well-off childhood, have both influenced me and my work greatly. The characters in my extended family, especially those of the women, have made a distinct impact on the way I think about strength and femininity. Southern family is strange, interesting, and a tie that truly seems to bind. As far as I remove myself geographically or otherwise, family continues to pull some part of me back. The people, and the general way of life there spawns a way of thinking that constantly butts heads with the esoteric values of the art world. This creates a sense that I am of two minds, both an insider and an outsider to both worlds. Ultimately, I have decided that this split consciousness is a good thing.

My studio currently is at home in a very nice, well lit little room. As nice as it is, I spend less time in this space than I would like. Partly this is because much of my more traditional printmaking work takes place in the University of Illinois’ Ink Lab, our recently established printshop.

I enjoy the expansive table space and the sense of community that comes

with a shared printshop. Printmaking provides a natural structure, and the shared space prevents one from feeling artistically isolated. I believe the work I do at home however, benefits from isolation. It tends to be more experimental, sculptural, and abstract. Although I enjoy the communal aspects of the shop and still plan to employ print, I would like to move my work towards the kinds of things I am producing in my home studio. My goal is to transition the majority of my work time out of the comforting confines of the printshop and back to my individual studio space, where I plan to push myself towards untested waters.

WHAT UNIQUE ROLES DO YOU SEE YOURSELF AS THE ARTIST PLAYING THAT YOU MAY NOT HAVE ENVISIONED YOURSELF IN WHEN YOU FIRST STARTED MAKING ART?

WHEN DO YOU FIND IS THE BEST TIME OF DAY TO MAKE ART? DO YOU HAVE TIME SET ASIDE EVERY DAY, EVERY WEEK OR DO YOU JUST WORK WHENEVER YOU CAN?

When I began earnestly making art I didn’t expect to become interested or excited about being a teacher. Teaching was not in my initial plan, although future plans have always been somewhat flexible. My current path in teaching slowly took form, and I am grateful to have stumbled into it. I love being an instructor at the college level, and believe it is something I am good at. Importantly, teaching like making art, rarely feels like work.

I do set aside time, usually 2–3 times a week, when I am not teaching, to focus on my studio work. Life and work make it hard to stick to this regimen though, so I sometimes sneak studio time into late evenings, or do mindless studio activities

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—like sewing—while we watch something on TV. In general it is easiest to work first thing in the morning, or late at night.

HOW HAS YOUR WORK CHANGED IN THE LAST FIVE YEARS? HOW IS IT THE SAME?

Past exhibitions like The Cecils of Scott County Tennessee, relied on sculpture and fibers to recreate a museum-like narrative space. My print practice in this show is in the installation’s details, the wallpaper and printed fabrics, and I plan to continue to employ print in similar ways as I move into new more sculptural territories. However, instead of jumping into a pre-defined, clearly representational body of work like The Cecils of Scott County, I want to experiment with my newly conceived sculptural pieces. In my home studio I have begun to explore forms that feel similarly plucked from a narrative but which are more obscure. These forms conceptually stem from a recent group of prints and drawings, made during the transitional period of our move, that respond to a “Southern Sapphic” sensibility. As someone who is equally deeply interested in her southern heredity, and personally invested in the contemporary discussion about queer “lifestyles,” I am excited about creating objects that, similar to these prints, combine a sense of antebellum kitsch in terms of fashion and femininity, with a distinct overtones of butch/femme sexuality, queer bodies, and gender jamming.

365 DAYS, 365 ARTISTS: GUEN MONTGOMERY

ARE THERE PEOPLE SUCH AS FAMILY, FRIENDS, WRITERS, PHILOSOPHERS OR EVEN POP ICONS THAT HAVE HAD AN IMPACT ON THE WORK YOU DO?

As I said above, mostly I am influenced by my family, deceased and alive, in Tennessee, especially my mother and her six sisters. I am very inspired by my partner, and fellow artist, Emmy Lingscheit. I also think I am still highly influenced by my gradeschool friend Emma with whom I made some excellent paper mache puppets and music videos in middle school. Illustrations, Archie comics, and old cartoons, especially Dr Suess’ Hooberbloob Highway, had a significant impact on me and my artistic tastes as well.

IF YOU HAD AN OCCUPATION OUTSIDE OF BEING AN ARTIST, WHAT WOULD THAT BE AND WHY?

I would like to think I would be an actress.

Or hopefully I would be famous, possibly in some other, inadvertent way, like the Unsinkable Molly Brown or the double rainbow guy.

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LEGACY COLLECTION PORTRAITS

GUEN MONTGOMERY James Cecil, Uncle 24 × 12 inches lithograph on hand-sewn pillow 2012

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Hannah Deese, Cousin, Marie Antoinette 5 × 5 feet monotype on hand-sewn tapestry 2013

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Suzie Montgomery-Cecil, Mother 28 × 30 inches lithograph on fabric, mixed media 2012

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Lord G. Montgomery 25 × 25 inches lithograph on hand-sewn pillow 2012

Guen Montgomery-Cecil, Scott County Tennessee 30 × 24 inches lithograph on hand-sewn pillow 2012

THE CECILS OF SCOTT COUNTY TENNESSEE

THE CECILS OF SCOTT COUNTY, TENNESSEE GUEN MONTGOMERY

The introduction to this exhibition asserts “The Cecil Family of Scott County Tennessee may have descended from the Cecil’s of Elizabethan England, a sixteenth century noble family which includes Lord Burghley, a trusted advisor to Queen Elizabeth I. Then again, they may have not.”

Presented in the style of the “Living Museum,” a middle-space between historical display and theatrical recreation, The Cecils of Scott County straddles truth and fiction by exhibiting the collections of my Appalachian family and our extensive imagined estate.

The insertion of our lives into a legacy of greatness honors family mythology by uniting the present with a meaningful, if not entirely accurate past.

The idea of a living museum reflects a dual desire to preserve things in their authenticity, to forever keep them living, unchanged, while also presenting them in their ideal, simultaneously capturing them as they were, and better than they were. As evidenced by the memorabilia of Lord Burghley and other noble Cecils, this impulse applies both to people and places we personally knew and those we abstractly link ourselves to, far beyond our immediate histories, the ideal of whom somehow lends meaning to our present. The concept of The Legacy Collection fulfills the desire to connect with that meaning, and to present the connection as possibly more significant than it was.

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The installation uses the museum, collection, and ancestry to explore humanity’s complicated relationship to time. It examines our attempts to keep from losing the people and places whose images dwindle out of focus as our present moves farther away from theirs. Collections, museums, genealogical records, oral histories, portraiture, souvenirs, family iconography, heirlooms and mementos all contribute to our ability to mentally preserve and condense time. A collection is evidence of time compressed, and through this compression, history, even our own, becomes a generalized “past.” The Legacy Collection builds on that notion. Here the 19th century blurs with the 17th century and Queen Victoria is presented alongside Marie Antoinette. This generalized approach to history is admittedly related to the kind of rose-colored nostalgia that ignores the unpleasant aspects of history. However, it also allows us to both possess a time long- gone, and imagine it as a single entity into which we somehow, purposefully fit. This possession allows for creative revision, which in turn, changes our perception of our present selves and projects this identity into the future.

The exhibition also highlights assumptive responses to Appalachian culture in relation to economic class. The family members portrayed through the collection come from a historically poverty-stricken part of rural Tennessee. This, along with preconceptions about the south, and traditional Hollywood portrayal of backwoods, “hill people,” paint a picture of Appalachia toward which my family is sensitive to, proud of, and defiant about.

Presenting the Cecil family as descendants of an English ruling class family, although partially based in genealogical truth, is as much a desire to confront cultural stereotyping as it is a humorous homage. I am aware of the tinge of irony inherent in inserting people who are notoriously poor into the roles of those who are notoriously rich, however, I differentiate this approach from satire—a polarization that would separate me from them.

As both an insider and an outsider to Appalachian culture, I intend to draw comparisons, not only between my family and the famous Cecil family of England, but also between my extended family and myself. I seek to establish myself as part of this family narrative, and use my role to perpetuate that narrative, however fictional. To do this in the installation I present “interviews” wherein I take on the personas of my uncle and mother, lip-synching to recorded audio of their voices, essentially becoming a conduit for another person’s recollections. This allows me to be both a living extension of family history, and to metaphorically embody the fluidity of truth in the larger tradition of oral history. It is also an opportunity to hear the voices and stories exactly as they were spoken, without reinterpretation. I impersonate them to emphasize our similarities and my presence, blended with theirs, further confuses fact and fiction.

THE CECILS OF SCOTT COUNTY TENNESSEE

The collection itself is composed of objects, some of which are actual heirlooms collected from my family, some are relics found second hand that become heirlooms via invented narratives, others are items altered to fit the collection and yet others I make specifically for the collection “by hand.” The Cecil Parlor Set, accompanying tea service, and related ceramic items are an example of this practice. I forged the table and chairs by hand, and etched the glass pattern for the table-top, while the chairs were professionally upholstered with fabric I printed. The tea service is decorated with my decals and luster painted, but was ordered commercially. Other ceramic pieces I, with the help of assistants, slip-cast, glazed and fired. Still others were found in Scott County in the surrounding area, or temporarily appropriated from the homes of my relatives. Integrating the found object, the heirloom, and the fabricated object, then displaying them as indistinguishable items of equal importance, questions the value and appearance of the antique, the relic and the hand-made. I am keenly aware of authenticity’s role in our acquisition of valuables, and see the ceramics—figurines, dishware and memorabilia—as an interesting way to further mix my roles as artist, curator and fellow collector.

The groups of “collectables” which make up the exhibition center primarily around the things one would find in a foyer, parlor, dining, or living-room. They are proudly on display, beautiful, engaging, and even tactile, but like the contents of a museum tableau, are not to be touched. This disparity between desirability and accessibility is especially present in the Oreillers Décoratifs, or “throw pillows.” The numerous pillows, which depict my family and myself as monarchy, range from traditionally conservative in size to enormous. They exist in a form that conflates pillow, commemorative portraiture, furniture and superfluous decoration. The pillows are both inviting and off-putting, soft and, because of their ornaments, a bit scratchy. One may be tempted to lean against or rest their head on one of these pieces, but might find the experience of cuddling a portrait of my uncle as Lord Burghley, embellished with buttons and trimming, a bit awkward.

Like the pillows, the Fauna Figures also draw you in while pushing you away. Carefully ornamented with real animal fur, ranging from rabbit to fox, beaver and mink, these ceramic animals are concurrently cute, funny, and because of their connection to their dead counterparts, unsettling. The collection of taxidermy ducklings function similarly.

They represent preciousness, futility, and the stagnancy of collection. I see the Fauna Figures especially as a site of time compression. The strangeness of real fur in juxtaposition with the ceramic collectable is both a reminder of mortality and a reference to an archaic value system in which the possession of animal fur was used as a form of currency and synonymous with wealth.

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THE CECILS OF SCOTT COUNTY TENNESSEE

I continue to investigate the push and pull of museum display by incorporating patterned hand-printed furniture which, although cushy and inviting, are also inaccessible or unpractical to the visitor. I love the idea of furniture so specific to a collection that its fabric matches the wallpaper, which in turn, matches the saltshakers etc. The furniture pieces are a perfect site for pushing the collection’s narrative into authenticity, both through the varied repetition of the patterned upholstery and the piece’s invented role in the fictional estate.

The repeated patterns within the collection each stem from small elements of the ‘real’ Cecil family crest and its rural life, multiplied through repetition into grandeur. In this way, the use of the multiple has a symbolic value in asserting the significance of the Cecil’s and creating an integrated family narrative. The Guinea Pattern is a particularly good example of this, seen within the exhibition on everything from a rocking chair to a family urn. Guinea Fowl, the absurdly shaped birds transplanted from their native Africa, are known in Appalachia and other areas as charming, attractively feathered, useful, albeit somewhat unintelligent birds which will both control your tick problem, and alert you of an intruder. The Guineas on our family homestead have been slowly dropping in numbers since their re-introducton to the area a few years ago. Ill-equipped to reproduce in wet climates and an easy target for local predators, the Guineas and their plodding, inevitable disappearance, are symbolic of the acceptance of loss, whether it be through the demise of people or belongings over time. I view the depiction of the Guinea and their modest plight, on a rich, toile-inspired pattern, as summation of the collection’s ornate homage to a specific place and time, inevitable loss, and the love of many beautiful, absurd things.

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DISPLAY: CASES 2 AND 3

SELECT ESTATE FURNISHINGS Crested Queen-Anne Style Channel-back

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Guinea Fowl Tea Service

Chair, On loan from the collecton of Delores

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Guinea Fowl Salver

Sue Cecil.

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Ingenue Figurines

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Guinea Fowl Gooseneck Rocker

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Civil War Officer, Note: although the figure

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Greco-Roman Side Chair

appears to be dressed in Confederate colors, historical

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Cecil Family Parlor Set: Engraved glass-top

evidence indicates that the County of Scott sided with the

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Union

iron cable and two Guniea Fowl chairs.

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Estate Hassock

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Opossum Urn

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Plant Stand, circa 1880

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Cecil Estate: Lidded Vessel Collection

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Child’s table, chairs

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Fauna Figurines

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Bailey Ivy Rose’s Rocking Horse

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Horse Figureine, marked: ‘She-Cheyenne,’ last remaining figurine from the collection: Equines of the Estate.

WALL PIECES 9

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Tapestry: Hannah Deese-Cecil, portrayed as

OREILLERS DECORATIFS

Marie Antionette 10

Neuschwanstein, hand-carved by James Cecil

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Cecil Family Crest, James Cecil

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Estate China: Coat of Arms, set of six

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Fowl chairs.

Queen Elizabeth I 30

Oral History: James Cecil, Delores Sue Montgomery-Cecil

Delores Sue Montgomery-Cecil, Mother to Jennifer Guenevere Montogomery-Cecil, portrayed as

plates, Engraved glass-top iron cable and two Guniea 13

Coal Miner, hand carved coal

Devona Deese, Sister to Delores Montgomery Cecil, portrayed as Queen Victoria

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James Cecil, Brother to Delores Montgomery and Devona Deese, unlce to Jennifer Montgomery and Hannah Deese, portrayed as William Cecil

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Daughter of Delores Montgomery Cecil, portrayed as

DISPLAY: CASE 1 14

Geneology Record

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Fox Glove, found on the estate, possibly belonging to a child or small woman.

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Nora’s Collection of Ladies’ Handerchiefs, Note: Handkerchiefs are attributed to Nor Randolf Cecil, Lonnie Eugine Cecil’s mother, who succumbed to Bright’s Disease in 1925. Lonnie was ten years old.

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Portrait of Robert Cecil, First Earl of Salisbury

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Cheese Knives, set of six

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Feather, Guinea Fowl

Jennifer Guenevere Montgomery-Cecil, Robert Cecil, Elizabeth Cecil

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Hannah Deese, Cousin to Jennifer Montgomery, mother of Bailey Deese, portrayed as Marie Antionette

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Bailey Ivy Rose Deese, Daughter of Hannah Deese, Second cousin to Jennifer Montgomery-Cecol, portrayed as a young king James I

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Designed and curated by Courtney Podgorski, a graphic design student at the University of Illinois.

Typeset in Utopia and Letter Gothic Standard.

Printed kindly by Lance Dixon at Dixon Graphics in Champaign, Illinois.

Sewn hardcover binding by Christopher Hohn and Tedra Ashley-Wannemuehler at Lincoln Bookbindery in Urbana, Illinois.

Softcover perfect binding by Sue Steinfeldt at the Illini Union Bookstore at the University of Illinois.