Poetry at a Standstill in Prints Exhibit at the Fogg

“Prints: System, Style and Subject,” currently in the Fogg’s Strauss Gallery, grew out of a seminar on the history of printmaking offered two years ago by Marjorie B. Cohn, Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints. Instead of a ten-page footnoted paper, Cohn said she wanted to demand something that was more of a challenge for a student of art history: a consideration of one’s practical position studying such ideas surrounded by such a luxury of reference. She wanted them to consider the actuality of this history of art, as it exists in objects that this institution holds.

The result is an exhibition that includes several methods of printing—woodcuts, lithographs, etchings, screen prints—while embodying several inflections of what the process of printing affords an artist for her audience, the consumer. For it is with printing that the deflationary rhetoric of economics takes hold over art, that the struggle of the painter over poverty is cast in a new light—with the possibilities of reproduction that print afforded, production itself gained a stronger reference to art.

Paul Valéry is cited at the beginning of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” as saying, “we must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.” The fulcrum of this exhibition, which spans the whole period of the techniques of modern flat printmaking, is the exposition of the vice and the virtue of this new technology. It sets before our eyes the history that Valéry predicted as “profound changes impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful.”

The process of print is overtly the subject of many of these printed works of art. The self-reflexivity of the media as mechanical, as reproducible, speaks to the subject matter that can be inscribed by it, as we see in Warhol’s “JFK Close Up in black” from his 1968 portfolio, FLASH. Here the subject is reflection upon the pixilation of the image itself, in all its power and ubiquity, the dot matrix print of a last televised smile is blown up to a size which sets it in a new focus–the previous image is lost, the idea of the smile is atomized by the reformulation of the image in oversized print, the dot matrix fragmentation of the last iconic smile as media exploded and blurred the idea of JFK. There is much of cultural critique in the work of the printmaker. It is as if by use of a mechanical impression with the same instantaneity that dehumanizes and desensitizes the modern individual, the artist hopes to reclaim this voice—originality by highjacking the apparatus of banality.

Larry Stark’s 1970 critique of the McDonald’s Nation, “One Culture Under God” is a stunning document in itself. There are four prints from this journey cross-country in which the artist ate only at McDonald’s outlets, foreshadowing Supersize Me by over 30 years. Even in 1970 below the golden archways was proudly emblazoned “Over 5 billion served.”

The marketability of art itself arrived with the advent of print. It became for the first time a potentially infinite set of representative objects, not just a single “true” artifact. Print was the great democratizer of the art world. No longer was art’s importance based on the Grand Tourism of those affluent enough to make the pilgrimage to the sites of culture in Europe. Suddenly, people who might have been lucky enough to hear of art, to read descriptions of the Louvre, could now from provincial distance actually observe the works of the masters for themselves.

This idea of the work of art in a world of art works is explored in the exhibition as well. There are prints which seek to render the Roman Colloseum as “Experienced Space” for those who cannot journey there. The cathedral at Rouen and all its intricacy is explored by print-makers again and again from the late 18th century until Lichtenstein.

The greatest moment of the exhibition is set at its extremity. Furthest from the entrance, as if deliberately hidden form the most ADD stricken of frivolous tourists, the democratized museum has brought us to a thoroughly different milieu. Here there is a comparison that sets before our very eyes the power and possibility of the media of print.

From Harvard’s collections two very painterly oil works are taken: Ingres’ 1814 “Raphael and the Fornarina” and Géricault’s 1822-23 “The White Horse Inn.” Set next to them are printed “reproductions”: an engraving of the Ingres (Pradier, 1827) and a lithograph of the Géricault (Volmar, 1824).

One is struck immediately not by the similarity, but by the dissimilarity in the works. The print really is a method of art production all its own. The works made à partir de the paintings are not mere copies of them: derivation is what is possible. Not duplication, but dissemination. The Ingres is recast in a world of matrices, etched linear lines, solid, dashed or dotted, with a constant and deliberate geometrical pattern by which effects of depth and texture are achieved. The color of the paint may be lost, but something else is gained.

The lithograph of the Géricault emphasizes the further difference between which exist printing processes themselves: The impassioned detail that the lithograph crayon permits the artist to inscribe leaves this work somewhere between painting and etching. The dynamics of the painting (while altered) are amplified in the lithograph, such that we are even aware of background details in it that we have to return to the painting, squinting, to pick out.

If print, as Cohn claims on her welcome mural, is a language all of its own—“with its own vocabulary, grammar, and syntax…poetry and prose”—we see that the reproduction of a work of art by any printed mechanism is in fact a translation, and therefore imperfect: a variation. In translation, the Ingres loses its chubbiness and cheerfulness but attains a sort of depth in its new black and white form that prefigures the transformation of depth of representation that would take place with the tension of photography’s acceleration of this mechanical picturing of the world in black and white.

Now that photography and film have eclipsed it in technology, the making of a print today is a very deliberate act. This is the story that is documented in this single room of the Fogg: history since the moment when the woodcut was the high-tech way to disseminate one’s art, and marked the acceleration of global vision, to the moment when the print is an antique process, a deliberate and elaborate activity whose moment of impression is used in a new way.

The deliberate moment of the print is strongly felt in front of Eric Avery’s work, showing the tactility of life that is left in those whose lives are accelerating towards being no more. Avery is a physician; his prints depict his patients, sufferers of AIDS. Here each moment seems to be of an expanded worth, as is the moment that his stark woodcut portrait squelched into the paper-pulp he chose as medium and soaked up the blackness of intention. As in “I won’t be no beast of burden” (Avery, woodcut 1999), in the instantaneity of the print is suspended an infinite expression of stillness, sympathy and strength.

The indelibility of the printed image is played with too, as well as its precision: There are modern woodcuts and prints that are deliberately altered after impression. The moment of the act of printing might have passed, just as the era of the print is fading, but therein lies the value of the museum, especially one of resource and direction as didactic as the Fogg.

“Prints: System, Style and Subject” will be displayed in the Fogg Museum’s Strauss Gallery until January 30th 2005.