Does reproducibility contribute to a work's vitality in our increasingly wired culture? How might this effect our thinking about painting and sculpture?
Lightning Rod - David Humphrey
David Humphrey is a New York artist represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co. An anthology of his art writing, Blind Handshake, was released this year by Periscope Publishing. He is a senior critic at Yale and was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome last year. He currently has a collaborative exhibition with Adam Cvijanovic at Postmasters gallery called Defrosted, a Life of Walt Disney.
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Like if your work is reproduced in a porn magazine I can see it might be more vital. If I think about painting and sculpture next to pictures of things that I consider very vital, then I am more vital and so is art. You need to be able to take pictures of your art. My thinking is always more effective when I think about art.
ReplyDeleteIf you can't control how people use your images, you can still hope that the work stimulates, provokes or confuses. But I'm worried, anonymous, about your state of mind.
ReplyDeletei remember the first time i saw a painting that i had only seen reproduced in real life. i was so surprised by the size, the texture, the color. there are times when the surprise is pleasant and times when it is disappointing. i think as artists we fill in the missing information from the reproduction. sometimes it's in the artists' favor and sometimes not so much. aside from that i think that very graphic colorful work probably does better in the cyber world. i wonder if any artists work with this in mind...? my impulse is to say not but you never know. and i wouldn't condemn them if they did. but i am always a little in awe of people who make work that is almost impossible to put into digital form, like all black paintings or very light drawings. maybe they are the rebels of the 21st century.
ReplyDeleteAgree with the last post. I liked Van Gogh in books, but when I saw his retro at the MET - I was transformed. He sculpted with paint & could do things most painters cannot. We depend on slide portfolios & JPEGs to enter most shows (At least at my level), and they never do justice. High contrast developes better high contrast reproductions. Painting still outshines photography - but its cheap & easy to show photos of great art on a HD flatscreen (and change them according to mood), then it is to buy a painting. End of an era? - Tom A. Hoffman
ReplyDeleteI guess this question can be answered with a question
ReplyDeletewhat is the value of the piece and what's its desired purpose?
If the image of a painting, its message and two dimensional quality are the things thats important( the narrative aspect)( also, then this is no more than a illustration of a story or an idea) then reproduction is desired because it will reach to a wider audience.
If the actually physical quality of the piece is a big part of the essence of the art( paint quality, sculptural quality, transparency, size, location), then the art should be viewed to in person, and the art piece as an object is more important.
the tragedy is that most people will only pay attention to the image and the narrative and pay little attention to the physicality of art probably due to our amorous attachment to our monitors as Mr. Humphrey said.
to add to the top post, it is said that art, rather than the object it self, is the experience given by the object.
ReplyDeleteRegardless you still need the original image to reproduce. The original is always the one people seek out ...the same is true for pop culture icons, louis vuitton handbags & internet profiles.
ReplyDeleteis virality coming to replace vitality as the ideal?
ReplyDeletei am not so interested in experiencing a painting's 'essence'. i am however interested in the handmade nature of paintings, both image based and abstract.. as a way of empathizing with the maker. retracing steps and thoughts. a bit of this can be captured in jpeg, but it is never quite the same. so, i like looking at work on websites, etc.. and i enjoy the limitless access to art images. but much more exciting in person.
ReplyDeletevirality as a virtue for art might be a ruse. fool's gold? videos of kittens playing and hippies gawking at rainbows are viral. agnes martin, maybe not.
If art is to live, it has to live and grow in people's imagination. But if its only the two dimensional image that is effecting, and influencing people. only half of the art is doing the procreation.
ReplyDeleteabout the essence though, if a painting lacks essence, then it is pure seduction and no love.
To add my two cents, I've always been struct by the disconnect between the market value of an Atget photograph and a beautifully produced book of his work. There is seemigly no difference and yet an enormous value gap. If there is any advatage to reproducability it would be found here first.
ReplyDeleteAs an aside, I met a woman at the Drawing center whose work was so fine and light that you couldn't see them in slides. They were virtually unreproducable. It was partly because of this obstacle that I held onto her set of "white"slides and put her into a show. The thought of her going around handing people sheets of empty slides was so perverse and beautiful.
Tom A. Hoffman - Someone made a good point above, one my X-Wife - (I hate to admit), always professed, that is that only .1% of the population has the creative spark, either in industry, science, or art. That .1% contributes to the entire world that merely copies or enhances their main idea. With that in mind, an artist like W. Cotton can come up with a rare original concept, and it will either be stolen, or copied, or he can parley it into a commercial venue such as a CD/ album cover with 4 million copies. The Beatles music was sacred to a lot of folks until POP king M. Jackson outbid McCartney & then sold the rights to Beatles originals to commercial industry. The next Q is - 100 or 200 years from now, what will their perspective of W. Cotton or the Beatles become? I think they will look at the original, and its impact on society.
ReplyDeleteThe relationship between ownership and reproducibility is particularly fascinating in .jpeg culture. Vitality exists where expression overrides status quo. Commercial outlets are much quicker to identify and consume sprouts of vitality-- and instead of nurturing, redoubling or else squashing creative threats. Rare is the gangly weed that outmaneuvers commercial replanting.
ReplyDeleteThe Elizabeth Peyton effect is an example of squashing the history of painting into single facile layers. There is not much more to the originals than to the reproductions- but there is a little more. You could call that 'technical modesty.' Some have called it worse things.
James Jean (http://www.jamesjean.com/work/2010/Dancers/1) has done a lot of battling on the grounds of visual immediacy and . Despite extreme technical facility and a deep imagination he more often comes off as "pre-consumed." Succeeding commercially is still a kind of contextual death.
Personally I admire earnest salutes to reproduction culture. For every act of mass engineered consent and agitprop, there is an opportunity to take individual ownership of ones .jpeg life.
When we talk about reproducibility, we also talk about ownership.
The cultural value of our visions, our myths, our opinions, and our identities seems contingent on how effectively they can be shared and still preserved.
beautiful story Mr. Drake
ReplyDeletei think most contemporary painting deals with our image culture in one way or another.. either in embrace or self conscious retreat. i don't think of peyton, ruscha, polke, gary hume, or john wesley as cheap because their work has the illusion of being instantaneous. layers of experience are not always found in layers of paint.
ReplyDeletepainting's slippery adaptability and sticky connection to history means it is often performing many roles at the same time, sometimes (maybe preferably) in self contradiction. i'd like to create the possibility of a work's image having a life independent of it's body, even as it's body seeks engaged relations with embodied viewers one at a time. i agree with the well named nic rad.
ReplyDeleteSupply and demand - the more one thing becomes available, the less it is worth. Just like the
ReplyDeletemona lisa, seeing it reproduced a million times
reduces it to a commodity. Rewind a few centuries, I can imagine what it would be like to have to go to Europe to see the original in person, it would be a completely different and raw experience
you folks are missing the important christian aspect of this. the original should be martyred so that it can live on like the body of christ consubstantial with the host, cooked up in massive assembly line reproduction for spiritually starved consumers. the above supply and demand comment could not be more wrong (and sacrilegious!).
ReplyDeletemorgan lefry
ps zizek helpfully refers to "this etherial "undead" object, the surplus object that causes desire in its excessive and derailing aspect"
Nicola Verlato said exhibitions may start to resemble rock concerts; one comes to them already familiar with the work, to see it "live"--the real thing. Fortunately for painting, scale, and texture (the way something is painted) can't be reproduced on-line.
ReplyDeleteWe learn about art by both experiencing museum collections and also by studying reproductions in history books, monographs, and website catalogues. The reproduction seduces you to seek out the original to experience what it lacks. For me, it is a double edged sword. You have the problem of our digital demand for immediacy conditioning ourselves to have quantitative instantaneous modes of viewing art, rather than experiential "seeing." Yet, at the same time it provides access to a lot of work to put on your must see list.
ReplyDeleteright, so maybe artists can restore the magical connection between an image and its reproduction: between mimesis, thought and power.
ReplyDeletelefry
Lefry, in what way do you think that can be achieved?
ReplyDeletePerhaps a magical connection existed in the past because even reproductions were limited in contrast to the digital age. We respected a good reproduction because of its scarcity, despite its inherent short comings. Now we are inundated with images in an array of quality, and it's virtually free. It seems it becomes both an expectation and an accepted practice to digitally reproduce works of art. I guess I worry more about the culture that is arising out of this digital age, and what kind of connoisseurship practices we will be cultivating down the road.
ReplyDeletethe culture, of course, gets the crap it deserves. but magic needs the essential ingredient of consensual collective illusion: no fancy distribution, no fancy magic. connoisseurship is the self-interested slow-poke who comes along afterward; scarcity has nothing to do with it.
ReplyDeletexo,
morgan
Our being so inundated with virtual images may increase the need for the kind of slow, meditative looking that impressive paintings invite and reward.
ReplyDeleteit takes a long time love one girl, even though there are many beautiful ones out there (whether on screen or in real life)
ReplyDeleteits like when back in the days,
ReplyDeletethe kung fu student would travel from city to
city, dueling the masters of each town in order
to learn about the art and gain respect.
these days people can learn about kung fu through movies, television, and the internet. very few would take the time to find the master.
so... in these two (analogous?) allegories are you saying that finding the master and loving the girl are more profound because the process was more arduous than anything performed on the internet?
ReplyDeleteand to morgan lefry; are you saying that magic in art requires a really good dealer or museum to make it happen? that the whole thing is cooked up from social relations?
that's right professor! what's to be afraid of? significance is fragile and volatile and art is its emblem. the priests come and go but are weirdly necessary. almost but not quite vox populi=vox dei.
ReplyDeletemorgan lefry
i have to disagree with morgan and his brand of social narcotics. there is too much BS when galleries and dealers get invovled in the magic of your art.
ReplyDelete"Ultimately, martial art means honestly expressing yourself. It is easy for me to put on a show and be cocky so I can show you some really fancy movement. But to express oneself honestly, not lying to oneself, and to express myself honestly enough; that, my friend, is very hard to do." -Bruce Lee, THE MASTER