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- The following article
is a section from a key note address titled "In Praise of
Neglected Printed Histories" presented by Beauvais Lyons,
from University of Tennessee, Knoxville (USA) at the
IMPACT Conference, Bristol, United Kingdom, September
22-25, 1999.
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The Cerebral Versus the Retinal in
Printmaking
- by Beauvais
Lyons
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- In 1924, Marcel Duchamp took up
playing roulette in casinos of Monte Carlo and developed
a winning system. In conjunction with this endeavor, he
designed and published a multiple plate, letterpress
printed bond titled Obligation de Monte Carlo for
the commercial exploitation of roulette. The bond, which
featured an image of the artist covered with soap suds
and sporting goat horns, paid a dividend of 20% for those
who bought it. For Duchamp, it was a way to create a work
of art which addressed the subject of chance.
- While Duchamp is seldom cited
as a printmaker, I think he offers a useful paradigm for
reassessing the conceptual potential of the print.
Duchamp wanted to erase the idea of the original in art,
and for many years he employed printmaking and other
mechanical processes to remove the hand of the artist
from the execution of the work. Mechanical processes
allowed him to stress the conceptual and cerebral
dimension of art rather than the retinal, hand-made look
of most art. While his "ready-mades" such as his
Bottle Rack are often attributed with removing the
artist's hand from the creation of the work of art, his
use of print technologies should also be considered in
this regard.
- In 1934, Duchamp published a
facsimile collection of 94 working notes for his best
known piece, the Grand Verre or Large
Glass. Titled the Boite verte or Green Box,
this project formed a catalyst for his subsequent
Boite-Valise, which were elaborate and carefully
printed miniature facsimiles of his most important works.
Rather than using speedy reproduction techniques that
were available then, Duchamp employed glass plate
collotype with extremely involved selective coloring
through pochoir. The refinement of these methods allowed
him to obscure the distinction between the original and
its mechanical reproduction. Duchamp broke down his own
originals into separate graphic steps and designed a
construction system which allowed the reproductions to be
seen in a miniature, unfolding exhibition space. While he
did work with printers, much of his effort went into
organizing the large number of successive print and
bindery operations. Some of the works included as many as
69 different items, each produced in an edition of more
than 300 multiples. Duchamp's use of complex antique
printing processes suggests another side to an artist who
is more often associated with the quick and easy
ready-made.
- Duchamps Boite Valises
reflect an approach to art which, like the tradition of
the print suite, stress the connections and linkages
between related works. For Duchamp, significant art is
not the aesthetic arrangement of pure retinal images, but
the formulation of meaning through conceptual
associations. Rather than being a merely reproductive,
commercial or technical exercise, his Boite
Valises may now be understood as elegant, refined
conceptual statements. In many ways they foreshadow the
current museum practice of marketing facsimiles and
reproductions in their gift stores.
- The British printmaker Richard
Hamilton, who was instrumental in the early Pop Art
movement, and who played a central role in the revival of
screenprinting and photo-mechanical processes in
printmaking was a great admirer of Duchamp. Hamilton
interviewed Duchamp for a BBC Radio program in 1959 and
collaborated with Duchamp in the 1960s on a table-top
replica of a section from the Large Glass.
Hamilton represents a link between Duchamp's conceptually
based use of reproductive techniques and the
appropriation strategies of Warhol and Rauschenberg.
- Also influenced by Duchamp, the
artists of the Fluxus movement in the 1960s tended to
view the print as an arbitrator between other works and
as a vital component of an intellectual process. Their
collaboratively generated Fluxboxes and
Fluxkits included a diverse range of printed and
multiple elements, produced through offset lithography,
screenprinting, rubber stamping, letterpress, and
numerous casting processes. In addition, Fluxus
performance posters and other printed ephemera were meant
as a vehicle for their collective process rather than an
end in themselves. Like Duchamp's Boite Valise,
these works undermined the ritualized cultivation of
originality and aspired to restructure publishing and art
distribution.
- While Walter Benjamin's seminal
essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction paves the way for considering
photography and ultimately film as the primary art form
of our century, Duchamp's use of print methods point to a
middle ground, a place which employs mechanical
reproduction while simultaneously using methods which
retain a historical aura. Printmaking is well suited to
exploiting this middle ground. Instead of seeing the
print as a handmaiden to painting, Duchamp offers a way
to regard the print in a more expansive and conceptually
dynamic way.
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- Date of Publication: September 2, 1999
This article has not been published previously.
- All rights of copyright are retained by Beauvais
Lyons. Reproduction or publication is forbidden without
the written consent of the author. For permission to
reprint, please contact Beauvais Lyons at the address
provided below.
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- BEAUVAIS LYONS, Director, HOKES ARCHIVES, Professor
of Art, DEPARTMENT of ART, 1715 Volunteer Blvd.,
UNIVERSITY of TENNESSEE, Knoxville, TN 37996-2410,
- email: blyons@utk.edu
- phone: 423-974-3202, fax: 423-974-3198
- website: http://web.utk.edu/~blyons/
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