Original Print

Despite everything that has happened in the past few decades to raise the profile of digital artwork, there still seems to be a widespread prejudice against digital prints in certain corners of the art world, one which seems to overlap with a similar prejudice against photography. If you look at the terms and conditions of various open submission exhibitions, you will often see wording like these real recent examples:

All work must be original (all prints must be hand pulled and NOT giclée). We regret we do not accept photography or other digital art forms.

Acceptable media: Paintings, drawings, pastels, original framed prints (excluding photography).

Submissions of work are invited from visual artists working in intaglio and relief printmaking. Including etching, lino prints, mezzotints, monotypes, lithographs, engraving, collagraphs, woodcuts and dry point. No giclée or photography.

A symptom of the problem seems to be the use of that word "giclée". Weirdly, we can blame the Hollies for this, or perhaps Crosby, Stills & Nash, or – to be absolutely fair – their common denominator Graham Nash. A keen photographer and collector of prints, Nash (in his guise as Nash Editions) was an early pioneer of high-quality inkjet printing, and one of his team coined the faux-French term "giclée printer" for the adapted Iris pre-press printer they had developed. I suppose it did sound more convincing than "squirty printer". I've never looked at any of those original Nash Editions "fine art" prints, but I'd bet that my humble desktop Epson inkjet (a SureColor P400) can knock spots off them, in terms of quality: things have moved on since the 1990s.

The term "giclée" has nonetheless stuck in certain circles, and I've always assumed that it was an attempt to throw a bit of magic French-fried fairy dust over the honest but mechanical-sounding "inkjet" print, rather like referring to "cuisine" rather than "cookery". Something similar happened in the past when screen-printing was referred to as "serigraphy" when used by artists, as opposed to commercial printers. If so, this attempt to posh-up "fine art" inkjet has clearly backfired: giclée has come to denote some sort of unearned, spray-on sophistication, lying somewhere between reproduction and fake. In gallery circles it seems to reek of a scam, a way of cheaply and mechanically reproducing and selling an "original" work – most likely a scanned or photographed real painting – to multiple suckers.

Which is ironic. Because, if I had to define what a "print" is (whether etching, lino-print, mezzotint, etc.), then "a way of cheaply and mechanically reproducing and selling an original work to multiple buyers" would do pretty well. After all, every one of these precious "hand pulled" techniques originated in the simple commercial desire to sell as many copies of a work as possible: just ask Albrecht Dürer or that Rembrandt bloke.

So what's the big deal here? From my distant academic past the phrase "petit-bourgeois skill fetishism" floats up. Reaching for my ancient copy of Christopher Caudwell's Illusion and Reality, I find:

... the development of capitalist production remorselessly turns the craftsman into a labourer. The machine competes with and ousts the product of his skilled hands in all departments and forces him into the “industrial reserve army” of the unemployed.

The effect is at first to make him revolt against the demands of a “commercialised” market by setting up his skill as a good in itself, detached from social uses. You will hear such a craftsman admire an old Napier car, for example, as a superb production of skilled craftsmen, and compare it with a modern mass production Ford, which fulfils the same social rôle and is cheaper. The old skill, although more wasteful of human labour, has acquired a special value to the craftsman because it is the condition for his existence as a class distinct from the proletariat, and is set over and against the market with its criterion of profit, which is the cause of the outdating of his skill.
Illusion and Reality, 1937

Marxist analysis and animus against the much maligned petit-bourgeoisie aside, the deep irony is that, as each successive new refinement of mechanical image-reproduction has rendered previous techniques redundant for commercial purposes, so these older skills have become revered and incorporated into the toolbox of acceptable artist's techniques. Resistance to industrialism has a long history, but is essentially a series of tactical retreats in the face of inexorable technical advances. Scriveners, hand-loom weavers, engravers, and even silkscreen-printers have all trodden the long road to the safe haven of Artencraft.

Now, we can all appreciate the time, effort, and skill that goes into any well-crafted object, but it's all too easy to confuse the value of, say, an engraving as a piece of craft with its value as a picture, and this nostalgia for difficult craft skills is a contradictory characteristic of the more conservative corners of the art world, especially where the making of  mechanically-reproducible, multiple pictures is concerned. That is to say, prints. I have taken evening classes in lithography and etching, and – fun as it is to make marks of various sorts on a metal plate and to discover how to etch it and ink it, as well as how to work and adjust the press – you quickly come to appreciate why it is so many successful artists delegate the actual work of making an edition of a print to a truly expert but anonymous press operator. Sure, there are thousands of kitchen-table printmakers who rub their own lino-prints with the back of a wooden spoon, but it's a much more expensive, complex, and, frankly, tedious task to get an intaglio print or a lithograph just right and then to get it consistently just right over an edition of, say, 50 or more "pulls". And yet, despite the esteem attached to the process, only one name ever appears on the finished print. The ultimate value is thought to reside in the artist's conception, the final picture, not the printer's labour in delivering it. The artist has bought that labour, just as a painter buys pre-prepared paints or some starchitect buys in actual building expertise [1], and thus, to all intents and purposes, owns it. It is just one labour-saving component in a process that results in, what? Nothing more or less than lots of identical pictures.

Something very similar happened in photography. From its very beginnings, there was always the suspicion that photography was too easy and too mechanical to be considered "art"; all you did was point the camera and press a button. Where was the skill? However, in the days of film and silver-based chemistry, every single print made from a negative had to be conjured up individually in the darkroom, and very repetitive and tedious it was, too (see my ancient post, Tears in the Stop Bath). That element of painstaking interpretive craft was what earned photography its grudging and still precarious place in the gallery world, even though, as with "proper" prints, it was always the photographer's vision that commanded attention, not the printer's careful realisation of it. Henri Cartier-Bresson's name is well-known; less so those of the artisans of Picto Laboratoires who actually produced most of his prints, often from less than perfectly-exposed negatives. But when it came to the undeniably mechanical business of making colour prints from negatives or transparencies – and who knows or cares what labs were used by the likes of Eggleston, Misrach, or Parr? – the gallery world backed away from the bad smell for a very long time. Until, that is, it became apparent quite how much money these glossy offences against handicraft could fetch. 

Enter digital. Everything that was tedious, repetitive, and labour-intensive about print-making and photography suddenly became straightforward, and the element of "craft" migrated back into the hands of artists who could create digital images from scratch and fine-tune them themselves on a computer screen. Which is not exactly simple, but all those fiddly bits of burning and dodging, developing and fixing, colour-wheel twiddling, plate inking and wiping, paper soaking, press pressure adjusting – in short, the whole tedious mechanical baggage of photography and printmaking – could be carried out without so much as putting on an acid-proof apron, and, best of all, saved as a single package: job done! Many more photographers and digital artists became highly-skilled at the whole end-to-end process, which could be done in the comfort of home with inexpensive kit, and with care could produce prints of great beauty and archival permanence on a wide range of paper surfaces. So, naturally, the art world looked at this fantastic new development with profound mistrust, and made the usual tactical retreat. No "giclée" here, thank you very much!

But, if the value of a picture truly does reside in the artist's own conception rather than the artisanal grunt-work of transferring it to paper, which it surely does, then why the snobbery about process? Yes, printing a digital image is relatively easy, from a technical point of view, but then so is drawing: what could be easier than making marks on a piece of paper? A toddler can do it. You may or may not like them, but anyone who thinks there is less skill, imagination, and artistry in, say, the creation of my own digital images as opposed to something I might scribble directly onto paper with a pencil is sorely mistaken. But the gallery world is still holding its nose. Why?

Good question! But, in order to avoid turning this post into a book-length study, I'll try to summarise what I think is going on in a follow-up post. Stay tuned. Your reflections on the subject would be very welcome in the meantime.

1. The most notorious example of this is probably Frank Gehry's "crumpled paper bag" building in Sydney.