In 1959 Kelpra Studio gathered a group of five artists to represent england and produce prints for the Paris biennale of 1965. The artists, included Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi, Patrick Caufield, and Richard smith. In reaction the growing use of photography generaly and in printing the International Congress of Plastice Arts held a meeting in 1960 in Vienna to define the meaning of an ‘original print. A number of the artists used photographic images as the base of their screenprints and this caused upset when the prints were entered. The ‘commitee’ decided that the prints were unoriginal because of the use of photography, and were not gained entry. By the early 70’s photo-processes had been completly removed from print biennales worldwide. As Pat Gilmore (initial curator of the tate print collection) notices, the guidlines for making an original print are particularly contradictorary. ‘The image is supposed to be made entirely by hand by the artist who concieved and signed it’ also she notes ‘the image is made on plate, block stone, or screen, with the exclusion of any and all mechanical or photomechanical processes’. Ironic! The press that every artists uses in a print workshop is a mechanical piece of machinery, thereby stating that artists cannot use presses at all. Ridiculous! Original Print : ‘a print made directly from a master image on wood, stone, metal, etc. Which is executed by the artist himself, printed by him or under his supervision and, in recent times, usually signed by him’ Oxford English Dictionary.
It is interesting that the oxford dictionarys definition of the original print notes that the artist may simply be supervising the creation of the print, which would certainly challenge the idea of originalty for the ‘commitee’ of a bienalle. Conceptual art which grew throughout the late fiftys and sixtys paid homage to the fact that the artist concieved the work, but, certainly didn’t use traditional materials and even responded to the smallest or biggest thing possible. The Italian arte Povera movement had conceptually based ideas, and artists such as Jannis kounellis, Mario merz and Piero Manzoni forged some post surrealist ideas and created action art.
In my opinion the originality debate started fifty years earlier when Duchamp challenged the entire context and tradition of artwork by using mass produced objects to depict mans growing reliability on mechanical instruments, and mass production, as well as commenting on sexual spirals of the social and natrual dependence on women and sex. Surely when photography was invented the whole notion of art was changed forever anyway. As man kind progresses so do his tools, and surly the artists cannot be asked to be excluded from these new means of experimentation and development. Duchamp described artists as ‘medium-type beings of our culture and time’ The artists job is to extract their subect matter from their surroundings, analyse it, and spit it out again with a defined message, whether it be, political, pschological, subjective, objective and of course personal.
Walter Benjamin dealt with the debate of originality in his book Illuminations, and specifically in the chapter ‘ The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. He talks of the ‘Aura’ surrounding an original artwork, and the effects reproduced imagery have on this aura. The Chapter opens with a quote which captures the reality that art ‘tradition’ was formed in great contrast to the capabilities and resources we have now. Any thing is possible. ‘We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bring about an amazing change in our very notion of art.’ Paul Valéry, Pièces sur l’art. The technique of reproducton substitute the unique existence of the artwork in tradition. Permitting this reproduction though as we should means that the artist holds a new position, as curator of his/her work. The artist has the ability to manipulate tradtion and choose the context inwhich the ‘aura, of the artwork is used. By simply making an arragment of reproduced objects the artist give the art the uniqueness that he would normally paint on a canvass. The artist is given a new tool ;manipulation. ‘From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints ; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceasces to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practise-polotics’.Walter Bejamin-Illuminations.
In the late fifties and sixtys, pop art dealt with these important facts, that the work was poloitical, questioning the current nature of the world, and the giant corprative network we live in. Artists like Warhol and Lichenstein attempted to execute work that reflected this. Lichenstein painted from comic books, and didn’t invent the image, ‘I want the painting to look as if it has been proggrammed, I want to hide the record of my hand’. his statement allows us to understand that his work didn’t invent, but re-invented. It shifts the context in which an ordinary thing might be in. Warhol’s mass produced imagery, of Coca cola bottles or brillo boxes, dealt with the same thing. Advertising and capatalism stemed from mans inventions and artists were in a place to comment of these growing methods the world uses, by using the very thing that the thing itself is made from.
In Paul saffo’s essay The Place of Originality in the Information Age, he once again summons the debate but in a much more recent format, ‘the machine has extended the power of the hand in precision and speed, making the scarce common and the dear cheap-often at great aesthetic cost, but also creating newer wonders never possible before’ are we supposed to ignore these wonders, or manipulate them in an artistic fashion allowing, a clearer message and more powerful art. He continues ‘the mot important issue of all may lie in an unexamined assumption that seems to be shared by the technophile and technophobe alike ; no matter how precise our machines become, the familiars of the industrial revolution will never invade the last sanctum of creativity, the human mind.’ Even if the artist cannot reproduce something as competently as the machine, he still has the ability to control the machine, twist its outcomes, or even just present the machine. ‘Human culture has been shaped by a dance of two opposing forces : memory and forgetfulness. Memory gives us context while forgrtfulness provides an opening for invention and originality. Sucessful creativity occurs when the two are balanced and originality is set within the larger context of tradition.’ Also, ‘We are entering a hyperdynamic world of connections, relationships, and abstracting tools that help us make sense of the information flooding about us.’
