So here’s the latest project I’ve been working on – a field airbrush.

Much as I love airbrushes, they’re not that outdoors friendly. My current studio setup is a waist-high compressed air cylinder, going through a regulator and “powering” a pair of airbrushes. I’m probably going to replace this with a portable compressor setup soon, but in the meantime I wanted to be able to have the ability to use an airbrush when out of range of power. You can get aerosol cans to do the job, but I wanted something a bit more sustainable and able to be recharged in the field.

The main component is a 5 litre garden spray bottle. This has a pump handle in the lid to compress the air inside. Normally you’d put liquid in it that you wanted to spray, but here we’re keeping it dry.

The brass fittings are attached where the sprayer wand is unscrewed from the handle. The connection of plastic to metal is a bit tricky – you need to bulk it up with teflon plumber’s tape and silicone sealant to get a good seal. The brass fitting will cut into the tape and plastic, so the silicone is necessary. The smaller brass piece only needed tape to seal. I bought the brass fittings from a plumbing supplies place so they were able to match the airbrush’s airline cap thread and diameter.

The way it works is that you pump up the cylinder (which has a safety release valve so you can’t over-pressurise). The original trigger for the sprayer is still inline so that allows you to unplug the airbrush without losing pressure. It also allows you to isolate the metal / plastic connection from constant pressure. The trigger has a button to lock the valve open, so you don’t have to keep it pressed by hand.

In use, you get about 4-5 minutes continuous air from one fill of the tank. You can easily keep the system pressurised by continuing to pump the system with your other hand while using the airbrush.

Total cost, about $35.

Lens flares for all.

SALAMI RAIN!

This is an essay for the Modernist Sculpture elective in Art History & Theory at the National Art School. It received a High Distinction result. There’s a few issues with it that were largely symptoms of the constricted word length – such as the description of European isolation not placing enough emphasis on it being artistic isolation, while Europe was in fact very connected to the rest of the world through trade and imperial power. I also had to cut a discussion of Modernist architecture from Frank Lloyd Wright onwards being a result of FLW’s encounter with Japanese architecture at the Chicago World’s Fair. So, with those flaws in mind…

Essay Question 1: For centuries sculpture was conceptualised in terms of either taking away or moulding. Then, in the 20^th century, Picasso began assembling work, first as collage and then as three-dimensional object:

Pieces of scrap iron, springs, saucepan lids, sieves, bolts and screws picked out with discernment from the rubbish heap…. The vestiges of their origins remained visible as witness to the transformation that the magician had brought about, a challenge to the identity of anything and everything.

(Roland Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, London 1958, 241; as quoted in Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Sculpture, London, 1964, 67-8)

Discuss the historical and sculptural implications of this.

Construction and collage represent the expression of a fundamental change in western culture at the end of the 19^th century – the failure of the single-source, cohesive unified paradigm for society and aesthetics, and the creation of a fresh modern culture from a patchwork of disparate sources.

For hundreds of years following the fall of the Roman, and Byzantine empires, Europe was effectively isolated culturally. European culture and artistic traditions survived the dark ages to be reborn in the Renaissance and effectively spend the next four centuries chasing their own tails to rediscover and refine the existing artistic traditions of ancient Greece and Rome.

By the 19^th century, art in the mainstream had ossified as an academic movement within the neoclassical style, arbitrated by the salon. This was to change, however, as avant-garde artists began to explore the artefacts of both “primitive” and “refined” non-European cultures. After hundreds of years of isolation, Europe experienced an infusion of cultural artefacts such as prints from Japan, and masks from Africa & the Pacific. These crashed into European culture in a way that was largely unprecedented. Even the re-integration of Greece, which had previously been closed off under Ottoman rule, was primarily refreshing cultural D.N.A that was already present through the Roman cultural lineage.

I disagree with Herbert Read on the Asian art question¹, insofar as I don’t think it’s reasonable to suggest that when European painting changes course to a flatness paradigm after hundreds of years in pursuit of depth and naturalism, that its correlation with encountering the very same flatness in another culture’s art is just a coincidence², or at best a confirmation of what Europe was already going to do³. For a more modern example, I don’t think the “just so” arrangement of basic, yet imperfect, geometric primitives in Hepworth’s 1935 Three Forms can be explained without taking Asian aesthetics into account.

The sheer alienness of Asian, Pacific and African art is hard to over-emphasise. As a continent (including western-facing Tsarist / pre-communist Russia), Europe was effectively isolated by sea, with the Ottoman Empire on its landward face. For all the difference the Islamic world presented, at least it shared a mercantile culture, whose non-representative artistic style could be assimilated as a decorative feature within existing European aesthetics, such as at St Pancras Station. Additionally, it was structured around familiar institutions of dynastic rule and monotheistic, Abrahamic religion. Tribal art and culture offered no such common ground.

The ability of primitivism to demonstrate that a culture without the baggage of Christian morals was not only possible, but also potentially preferable, is a symptom of the gradual stagnation and failure of European cultural tradition⁴. This would culminate in the Great War, and lead to the creation of new cultural movements, and “ism”s. What these tend to have in common is that for all their pretence of being new, they’re still modelled within the neoclassical worldview. When thinking of construction in sculpture, what might immediately spring to mind is Constructivism. However, that movement is in fact the antithesis of what I believe to be important about construction and collage.

The constructivist premise is that all things should be united toward a common (political or social) goal. One spends one’s life in a constructivist building, goes to a constructivist workplace, makes constructivist art, eats a constructivist meal, and so on. The Der Stijl movement features a similar perspective – a Der Stijl city is made up of Der Stijl buildings, in whose Der Stijl rooms can be found Der Stijl furniture (preferably without people to ruin their lines). Both these movements are expressions of the neoclassical urge to press the entirety of culture into a single comprehensible framework, in which a detail is a perfect representation of the whole.

Take any square inch of a neoclassical painting, or any cubic inch of the surface of a neoclassical sculpture, or indeed any piece of Der Stijl furniture, and you will be able to extrapolate from it almost everything you would need to know about the plastic values of the whole work. In both collage and constructed sculpture, this extrapolative ability disappears, especially when works feature multiple materials such as wood, metal and plastic, or when salvaged readymade objects are used. Is there any one cubic inch of Picasso’s Head of a Woman that reveals the nature of the whole? Could an archaeologist reconstruct Head of a Woman from fragments and an understanding of other constructed works? Unpredictability in the work, the inability to discern the big picture from the details, and the failure of comforting aesthetic frameworks whose fractal grasp encompasses both macro and micro details should be unsurprising during a period of massive social, industrial, and economic change.

The inclusion of readymade objects within constructed sculpture also reveals some interesting facets of economic and technological progress. Firstly, as industrialisation worked its way down from heavy industry to consumer products, significant quantities of durable goods were being obsolesced and replaced, rather than repaired as would have happened previously. Improvements in smelting processes meant that recycling of steel was both possible and economic, so scrap yards became a viable industry. What they provided was a concentrated source of what were already, visually interesting objects, often juxtaposed with other potentially unrelated objects. These could be bought cheaply in bulk, or scavenged for free as consumerism and obsolescence accelerated. Secondly, the growth in manufacturing meant many of these same objects were produced cheaply enough that they could be bought new, for use in sculpture⁵. It says a lot about the wealth of resources available to a society when a highly manufactured new product of industry can be “wasted” by being used in a completely non-functional role.

Readymade additions to constructed sculpture also demonstrate what I believe to be a spectrum in construction (especially when dealing with a single material) between works that are completely designed by the artist, such as David Smith’s Cubi series, through works that include manufactured secondary raw materials, such as the I-Beams in Caro’s Midday, and on to inclusions of tertiary end-user manufactured readymade objects such as the wheels within of Jean Tinguely’s Heureka. From the experience of constructing in steel, I believe that works like the Cubi are better thought of as modelling in steel. There is a singular unformed raw material (plate steel), additions and subtractions can be made, and every part of the surface and form is at the artist’s discretion. As premade forms take up a greater percentage of the work, the artist’s hand becomes less direct – more orchestrator than maker. The emotional impact of the work becomes concentrated around and invested in the viewer’s own iconographic language associations with the readymades. This grows and intensifies as the readymade inclusions progress from objects that people associate with only distantly, like an I-beam, through to those they use with their own hands, like a colander. Returning to Picasso’s Head of a Woman, how does the viewer decide if the colanders are just interestingly pierced metal shapes, or if the known function of the colander as a strainer, when used to make a skull, is an important metaphorical factor in the work? The readymade is a depth charge of instant “meaning” for a sculptor⁶.

The construction aesthetic in its most pure form takes from multiple sources. It combines multiple materials, and produces three-dimensional collages. It came into being during a time in which European culture was reconstructing itself from similarly disparate sources – Greco-Roman democratic political apparatus, imperial bureaucracy, the guiltless sexual morals of primitivism, enlightenment science, Marxist ideas about work, to name a few.

While the single framework mode of culture may have been broken by the method and aesthetic of construction, and the inherent weakness of monocultures demonstrated by the repeated failures of autocracies in the modern era, the construction aesthetic continues to duel with the fractal paradigm in art. As new aesthetics develop into movements, they become codified, as for example Modernism, when it evolved away from painterly complexity towards minimalist aesthetics. Harnessing an underlying bed of chaos, such as might be experienced when viewing a square inch of a Pollock drip painting, allows artwork and cultures whose non-brittle strength comes from using the diverse patchwork nature of construction and collage as the base language and material.

Bibliography

A Concise History of Modern Sculpture – Herbert Read
Primitivism and Modern Art – Colin Rhodes
Picasso Sculpture – Werner Spies
Japanese prints in Europe before 1840 – Deborah Johnson

1. “But there was no unconscious assimilation of an Oriental style powerful enough to modify the general development of European art. In the same way, the importation of Japanese prints in the second half of the nineteenth century, which had such a decisive effect on Gaugain,Van Gogh and Whistler, did not change the course of the main stream of artistic development in Europe.” – Herbert Read: A Concise History of Modern Sculpture, 44 [↩]
2. “In France, the first documented group of prints were those belonging to Isaac Titsingh, head of the Dutch colony from 1780-83. His collection seems to have been on the Parisian art market as early as 1812, the year of his death, and again in 1814, 1820, and 1840” ­– Deborah Johnson: Japanese Prints in Europe before 1840. The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 124, No. 951 (Jun 1982), 344 [↩]
3. “An artist like Gauguin received confirmation from Japanese art of certain principles he had evolved from inner necessity, just as he also received confirmation of other stylistic features from such sources as medieval stained glass, folk art, primitive coloured woodcuts and other sources.” – Herbert Read: A Concise History of Modern Sculpture, 44 [↩]
4. “However it is no coincidence that an interest in alternative traditions and cultures often went hand in hand with artists’ Messianic desire to deliver a new beginning to a Europe they perceived as old and spent. One of the Blue Rider artists, Franz Marc, writing with reference to the Byzantine era, set the tone for the Primitivism of the first half of the twentieth century when he declared: ‘We are standing today at the turning point of two long epochs, similar to the state of the world fifteen hundred years ago, when there was also a transitional period without art and religion….The first works of a new era are tremendously difficult to define….But just the fact that they do exist and appear in many places today…makes us certain that they are the first signs of the coming new epoch – they are the signal fires for the pathfinders.’” – Colin Rhodes: Primitivism and Modern Art, 21 [↩]
5. “In Head Of A Woman, we almost forget that the volume of the head consists of two opposed colanders or salad-strainers, and that the hair has been concocted out of nails and bed-springs…Picasso did not base it on random pieces of material which happened to be available. He told me that it suddenly occurred to him to construct the back of the head out of colanders. ‘I said to Gonzalez, go and get some colanders. And he brought back two brand-new ones.’” – Werner Spies: Picasso Sculpture, 75 [↩]
6. “In almost all the Picasso sculptures which have grown out of combinations of materials, the original significance of an object survives as an underlying echo. A dual activity is enforced on the beholder. He has, first, to construe the formal symbol within the context of the work, and, secondly, to recognize the inherent meaning – transcended in the work itself – of the alien element which has been employed in it. The déjà vu effect, and the usurpation of the structural context by the foreign body, combine to produce a new tension which is experienced on the sculptural plane.” – Werner Spies: Picasso Sculpture, 75 [↩]

Just want to note down some impressions of the SCA graduate show, while it’s still fresh in my mind. Of course, it should be noted that I’m a sculptor who works in fairly “solid” materials, and have been trained is a relatively formalist manner, or at least have been trained to work from the premise that a piece must succeed on composition alone, before anything else is taken into account.

John Gruber over at Daring Fireball linked to this piece by Derek Sivers the other day. In short – ideas are cheap and easy, implementation is hard. One of the post-modernist scourges that has been such a malady on the art world, has been the veneration of the idea, at the expense of the craftsmanship of the artefact. Walking through the SCA graduate exhibition, I’m struck at how much idea and concept seems emphasised within the work, and how few of the pieces (especially in sculpture) are the sorts of aesthetically pleasing things you’d want to live amongst.

As an art student, you basically have nothing to say, that hasn’t been said before, and by someone better at it than you – that’s just the nature of the world, we all live in the shadow of the great masters of art history who had the advantage of intensive arts training from childhood. As an art school graduate, you’re coming out into the same culture as people who’ve spent entire careers doing exactly what you’re attempting to do. There were a number of pieces from either painting or printmedia that looked like parodies of advertising. When I can go onto Cracked or 4Chan and see thousands of these sorts of things done every day, is it really something that will be a satisfying use of time in an academic environment? Yes advertising is two-faced and shallow, commercial radio is formulaic, we all know that, AND?

A lot of the work seems to be quite “yelly” – the artists are yelling, something, what it is, well that’s open to interpretation – but yet again, we come to this problem of “meaning” in art. While a picture can paint a thousand words, the artist can’t control what those words say. This is the problem that crops up when artists try to send a “message” with their work – art is a very low bandwidth, inefficient communication device. If you want to talk about human rights, for example, you can achieve a lot more writing a piece of prose, or shooting a documentary, than you can with a painting or a sculpture. Indeed, the more serious the issue, the stronger the argument becomes that it’s actually unethical or amoral to choose a poorer communicator as your tool of expression.

By the way, none of these criticisms apply to the Jewellery  or Glass departments – their work was exquisite – beautifully made, aesthetically pleasing objects.

Painting was a mixed bag – there was some nice work – and by and large the nicest pieces were the ones that tried to be the least “experimental”, the ones that were happy to simply be, in which I didn’t feel the artist bludgeoning me with some agenda. I’ll paraphrase Penn Jilette on Kevin Smith’s radio show:

“A poor artist tells you what they want you to think. A great artist makes you think what they want you to think, and makes you believe it’s your own idea.”

Leaving aside the work, I want to talk about the exhibition itself, how it was set out, and what was good and bad. The major good point was the ready availability of contact cards for the students. This is SCA doing what it should be doing – promoting the students first and foremost, and making it as easy as possible for them to be put in contact with potential clients / commissions. At NAS we seem to have a culture within the gallery that doesn’t approve of that, probably as a way of protecting their 30% commission on student work sales, and probably because they think it’s not in keeping with the style they want to present.

So that’s the good thing. The bad? Oh, the bad…

Assessments being held when the exhibition is open to the public. What. The. Fuck. Who in their right mind thought it was a good idea to have an exhibition open to the public, in which rooms were closed , or you might be asked to leave because the students were being marked? Why hasn’t that been done and finished already, or why isn’t it being done outside of exhibition hours?

Incomplete works. I walked into some display spaces, and students were still setting things up. Huh?

Both these were solved by the fact that the Postgrad exhibition isn’t until December 7th so I’m assuming these were Honours students. which leads me to…

Signage, or the lack of it. SCA is a warren of small rooms and buildings and signage is sparse. There were signs pointing to buildings, but not indicating what those buildings were exhibiting. I walked past the sculpture rooms 2 or 3 times, because there was no sign outside actually telling me that there was work to be seen inside. What compounds this is that there’s no attempt to block off areas that aren’t open to the general public, so you don’t know if an unmarked room is an unmarked display space, or a student kitchenette area.

So, to sum up…

I’m sure there’s a good exhibition of good work within what’s there. I saw an amazing pair of curved plywood pieces in the middle of a space displaying work by a painting student, and some cool bamboo constructions in the sculpture studio.  Jewellery and Glass, for which SCA has a deservedly high reputation, excelled.

Overall, what I didn’t feel however, was that I was looking at the next group of professional artists. I didn’t see a body of work that spoke of selling pieces to people, of creating objects that deserve serious gallery space. Maybe, that’s something SCA reserves for Honours and Masters, but I can’t help but think that after 3 years of academia, you should be able to produce things that stand toe to toe with the rest of art history. What I suspect, again taking my own biases into account, is that much of the SCA culture is based around pushing students to think about their concepts and ideas, not about the physical manifestations of those ideas.

There’s a bizarre meme which seems to have cropped up in the technology journalism world, which can best be summed up as follows:

The iPad is a content consumption device, but has little value for content creation.

Now, if you look at Apple’s more advanced apps such as the iWork versions, iMovie, or the stunning new Garageband version, what you see very clearly, especially with Garageband, is that the iPad paradigm already does some things for content creation better than a desktop OS can. Application designers have only just begun to scratch the surface of what is possible, when freed from the necessary mindset of everything rotating around moving a single point focus-assigning dot around the screen.

The next extension of this meme seems to be that the iPad is poor for content creation specifically because there’s no programming tools on it – that in effect, you can’t create iPad software with an iPad. Some lament that this relegates the iPad to an ancillary role, forever enslaved to a desktop computer.

This argument has two main problems:

1. So?
2. Programs aren’t content, they’re tools.

I would argue that programming is not content creation. Content is what you make with programs. By way of analogy, consider a small village, in which you have a blacksmith, and a woodcutter.

The blacksmith uses his anvil to make axeheads, which the woodcutter then uses to cut down trees which both feed the blacksmith’s furnace, and produce rudimentary furniture. Is an axehead any less of a tool because it can’t make other axeheads? Is it any less of a tool because it can’t be used to make a hammer and nails to hold together the wood it cuts to make furniture? Do we think the axehead is a doomed or stupid tool because it can’t do these things?

Do we seriously want to use an anvil to cut wood?

The reality is that for most people, most of what they can, or would use computers to do can be done as well, if not better on an iPad. If your computing needs can’t be met by an iPad, then you’re probably not in the “most people” category. That’s something that never fails to amaze me – technical geeky types who are completely oblivious to the fact that their preferences for how technology should work are so far removed from what the general populace wants, that they can’t actually recognise that fact. You see it in tech journalism all the time, usually regarding Apple products.

This essay was produced for my Mechanical Image art history & theory elective this year, and is more or less the manifesto by which I produced and sell my Nervous Spaces prints. The essay got a distinction result, so I’m reasonably happy with it. Oh, it was also a topic I created, rather than one the lecturer set, and is heavily pruned to a word limit.

Essay Question: Does the digital process affect the concept of scarcity underying the sale of photographic prints, and how can photographers establish a “valid” scarcity in the era of digital printing?

Introduction.

The history of photography has been one of struggle for recognition as a valid equal of the traditional visual arts. Alfred Steiglitz’s strategy of presenting exhibitions at Gallery 291 alternating between photographs and traditional fine art media¹, such as drawing and painting, combined with his curatorial approach to the pieces appearing in Camera Notes & Camera Work, did much to normalise the medium in the minds of the arts patronising community. Through it’s ability to present “truth”, both real and fictitious, it is arguable that photography became the dominant artform, in terms of cultural influence, of the 20th century. Could even the greatest works of Rothko, Pollock or Warhol compete for universal emotional impact and social effect, with Nick Ut’s Vietnam war photograph of Phan Thi Kim Phuc running down the road with her skin burned off, or Eddie Adams’ image General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon². Having won its equality, photography in the modern digital era seems to be rejecting some of the primary characteristics of painting, sculpture and printmaking that elevate them as Art, as distinct from decorative or utilitarian, objects.

From the outset, I should be clear that my interest here covers a very specific form of photography – namely, “fine art” works that are printed digitally as multiple, but limited, editions. While this may seem a narrow focus, I believe that it is the closest relative to the making and sale model of the other reproduction-centric arts. Unless a counter-culture within photography returns ascendancy to analogue shooting and printing techniques, I think it is a focus on that which will come to represent the bulk of fine art photography.

Look at any photographic exhibition today, and you will almost certainly see prints listed with reference to their scarcity. Similarly, printmaking and cast sculpture are made, sold and collected on this basis. It is implicit in the sale of such work that once the total number in the series are sold, no more will be made, and a secondary, speculator market can develop. Given the historical desire of the photographic community to have their work considered as much Art as painting, sculpture etc, it is worth considering the making process which leads to scarcity of the actual purchasable work, within the three most commonly considered reproduction-centric artforms.

Reproduction in Sculpture

In the bronzecasting process, one works on a clay or wax original. From this, a multiple use negative mould is taken. Wax positive reproductions are cast from that, and a single use negative mould then built up around each wax positive. The wax is burned out of the mould and bronze is poured in. Once cooled, the mould is smashed, chipped and ground off, to produce the rough bronze sculpture. Afterwards, the casting infrastructure of spouts and air-escape sprews are cut off, welding repairs done, and the surface is chased to clean up casting imperfections and bring out the desired surface texture. The final step is chemical pattenation to colour the surface. This is all highly labour intensive and time consuming. At every step, differences from the artist’s original work inevitably creep in. Every piece in a series of sculptures cast in this fashion is a distinct and unique object. The process itself is inherently imperfect and there are many stages at which a failure of technique carries the risk of catastrophic damage, and ruination of the piece.

Reproduction in Printmaking

Printmaking’s multitude of image creation techniques, be it intaglio, block or lithographic processes, all resolve to the creation of an original printing plate by either drawing, carving, masking or etching (including photo-exposure), which is then inked by hand for each print. The work is then held against the plate, most commonly in a mechanical press, transferring and reversing the image. Screenprinted images rely on a series of masks rather than plates and work without a press, but aside from that, the same principles apply. If multiple colours are used, then registration technique has to be perfected to ensure each colour printing lines up correctly on the individual work. Just as in bronzecasting, every single print is a unique object. The process has a chain of events that must be performed manually, and at each, basic human fallibility ensures there will be variation, and the risk of catastrophic failure. There is also a tradition of permenantly damaging the printing plates after the run is complete, and then printing from the plate as proof that that no more can be made³.

Reproduction in Analogue Photography

In analogue photography, a negative created by the camera must be chemically developed to make it lightfast. The stabilised negative is projected through an enlarger onto chemically treated photosensitive paper. Areas of the negative allowing light through, chemically alter the paper progressively in response to the intensity of light, and the duration of exposure. The exposed paper is then chemically treated, colouring the exposed areas, halting development, and fixing the image to prevent further darkening upon exposure to light. All of these processes are highly dependant on time, the chemical composition of developing fluids (which changes as they are used), and the manufacturing and storage tolerances of paper and film. It is arguable that with this combination of variables not even the most careful timekeeping can ensure that any two prints made by human hands will be identical. Indeed, the individuality and uniqueness of prints as artefacts was valued by analogue photographers in recent history⁴. As with the previously mentioned analogue artforms, it is intensely hands-on and time consuming. Furthermore, any type of editing or modification happens invisibly, the results unseen until the print is developed and risks destroying the work that has gone before.

The Digital Frontier

All of the previous artforms share two main commonalities – they are hands-on processes, which are destructively edited. To make any change in the work, one must physically alter it in a way that cannot be undone. Certainly, one can attempt to repair a change that was undesirable, welding over an excessively ground part of a bronze sculpture for example, but that change cannot be unmade. The digital realm gives us undo.

Undo is a concept so fundamental, that its availability separates any work produced, from the rest of its medium as completely as the discovery of a new primary colour would separate pre and post discovery painting. Undo, and the related ability to save versions and duplicates, would literally be a godlike characteristic for an analogue artist. It would require being able travel backwards in time independent of one’s environment and to duplicate matter and objects at will. The power it grants, the freedom from risk, should these not have corresponding responsibilities? Should there not be a cost associated with making risk-free art? Additionally, to make work with digital tools, effectively only requires intellectual mastery of the functions of the tool. Analogue processes require total mastery of one’s body and muscles in order to use those tools on the work. It is the difference between a composer who may have mastery of the structure and design of music and a musician who can make that music actually happen without error. Analogue art requires the ability to work in real time.

Aside from being risk-free, the output from digital printing is hands-off. Fine art photography is increasingly printed on large format archival inkjet printers. Once the print button has been pressed, the artist’s need to be involved in the physical making of the artefact ceases. These printing machines, and the editing software used to non-destructively modify the image, are designed for one purpose – to reliably and repeatably create an image again and again as cheaply as possible with zero variation.

Why do many printmakers consider that manual printing with a press is Art, whereas prints made by a digital printer from a digital file are lesser objects? Why do we value sculptures cast by hand over those produced in a factory? It is not just the easy response of prejudice against the new. The answer lies in the hand of the artist. Our emotional connection with an artwork comes from an understanding that we are not only buying something that an artist has fashioned with their own hands, but that in doing so, they were unable to produce anything else during that time. We buy not only the artefact, but also the hours of the artist’s life used up in its creation.

In digital printing, there is no substantive difference for the artist between making ten, one hundred, or one hundred thousand of a work. So long as the ink and paper levels are maintained, the printer will keep churning out identical, risk-free replicas, even pausing to clean and recalibrate, while the artist is free to do anything else. Furthermore, as long as someone else has the same paper, printer, and file, the copies of the print they produce will be indistinguishable from the copy an artist produces (or orders to be produced), and they will have no less of the artist’s hand in their creation. The digitally printed photograph has more in common, both in editing and fabrication, with a mass-printed page in a disposable magazine, than it does with darkroom photography.

Digital printing has eliminated natural scarcity from the equation by effectively creating a potential infinite supply of prints that are in evey physical respect, identical. Truly valuable scarce objects almost always result from one of two scenarios. Either the resources of which they are produced are rare in absolute terms, or they were made in such overwhelming numbers, by virtue of being emblematic of their time, that noone thought to archive pristine versions for posterity.

A digitally printed photograph is made of printer ink, paper and a negligible or completely absent amount of the artist’s working life. It could be argued that the time taken shooting the picture, and editing it in post-production is amortised across every print made, but that is purely a conceptual conceit, not a physical reality. The amount of work by the artist is unchanged by the number of prints made. Therefore, unless the artist destroys all copies of the digital file, creating absolute scarcity, it is most reasonable to conclude that a digitally printed photograph is not in any way an organically or naturally rare object. In these circumstances, what possible justification can we have for claiming a photograph is a “limited edition”, other than to manufacture a tenuous scarcity?

What artist would choose for their work to be rare if it didn’t have to be? Who can honestly say that if money were not an option, they would refuse the opportunity of having their work in as many homes, galleries and museums as possible?

A Solution

How then can digitally printed photography return to being an equal of the other artforms, with scarcity that is a result of an organic process? The most obvious solution is to follow the printmaking example, and destroy the source files, the digital negatives, once a decided-upon printing limit has been reached. That would achieve absolute scarcity, but be anathema to the photographic mindset of negative archiving. Additionally, despite advances in printing technology, no large format photographic process has the sort of long-term stability of paint, ink or bronze.

In conclusion, the solution I would suggest, and which I used in my own exhibition Nervous Spaces, is to abandon “limited” editions altogether, and embrace the fundamental truth to materials nature of digital work – it is infinite. I propose that a fixed multiplier be attached to sale prices. An organic mathematical process will increase the price with each sale, dependant on the multiplier. A scarcity of fabricated examples will reflect true demand for the work, and each sale will contribute to the price inflation necessary for a collector’s market, while simultaneously rewarding buyers with value appreciation in direct proportion to how readily they buy works and support the artist.

Bibliography

Wikipedia article on Gallery 291

Eulogy: GENERAL NGUYEN NGOC LOAN, Eddie Adams. Time Magazine online

The Collection of Alfred Stieglitz, Weston Naef.

Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Notes, Christian A. Peterson

A Concise History of Bronzes, George Savage.

The Art of the Print, Fritz Eichenberg

A World History of Photography (Fourth Edition), Naomi Rosenblum

1. Authoratitive list of exhibitions - Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries by Sarah Greenough, pp. 543-547. Citation source Wikipedia. [↩]
2. “I won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for a photograph of one man shooting another. Two people died in that photograph: the recipient of the bullet and GENERAL NGUYEN NGOC LOAN. The general killed the Viet Cong, I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn’t say was, “What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?” General Loan was what you would call a real warrior, admired by his troops.  I’m not saying what he did was right, but you have to put yourself in his position. The photograph also doesn’t say that the general devoted much of his time trying to get hospitals built in Vietnam for war casualties. This picture really messed up his life. He never blamed me. He told me if I hadn’t taken the picture, someone else would have, but I’ve felt bad for him and his family for a long time. I had kept in contact with him; the last time we spoke was about six months ago, when he was very ill. I sent flowers when I heard that he had died and wrote,  ’I'm sorry. There are tears in my eyes.’ “- Eddie Adams eulogy for General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. Time.com Monday, Jul. 27, 1998  [↩]
3. “Cancellation: Defacing a plate, block or stone after an edition has been printed, to make further printing impossible; also, a proof showing such defacement.” The Art of the Print, Fritz Eichenberg: Glossary p582 [↩]
4. “Around the 1960s, attitudes about printing changed” … “Print technology became valued by creative photographers less for its ability to reproduce images than as a means to produce unique objects that often depended primarily on the processes used for their aesthetic interest. This changed attitude toward mechanical and, eventually, electronic printing might also be viewed as an aspect of a new Pictorialism in that the images are meant not as utilitarian objects – that is, advertising or political posters – but primarily as unique aesthetic artifacts” A World History of Photography (Fourth Edition), Naomi Rosenblum: pp614-618 [↩]

suffer the poor salami.

The third page. Want some delicious Klone yet?

And here’s the second page, and the first shot of my little Eraserhead inspired salami creature.