- Split View
-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
K.E. GOVER, Are All Multiples the Same? The Problematic Nature of the Limited Edition, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 73, Issue 1, January 2015, Pages 69–80, https://doi.org/10.1111/jaac.12130
- Share Icon Share
The aim of this inquiry is to determine whether printmaking is best understood ontologically as analogous to a work‐performance relation. Are prints the visual analogue of symphonies? My motivation for pursuing the comparison of printmaking to music is twofold. First, because relatively little has been written on the ontology of fine art prints, our use of an already developed body of scholarship will help us to gain some traction on the question. Second, within the existing literature on the ontology of prints, there seems to be a persistent confusion about the difference between what makes a print an artwork, and what makes it a genuine or authentic artwork, signed or in some other way ratified by a given artist. I conclude by suggesting that prints are indeed ontologically unusual insofar as they occupy an intermediate position between pure multiples, of which there can be an unlimited number of tokens, and singular artworks that consist of one physical object.
I
In Spring 2003, the sibling artists Jake and Dinos Chapman exhibited an artwork that they made by defacing a rare set of Goya prints. Citing Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning (1953) as a precedent, they vandalized eighty mint‐condition Goya etchings, known as The Disasters of War, that they had purchased for £25,000. The scenes of violence and brutality depicted in the prints were inspired by Goya's experiences in the Peninsular War between Spain and the Napoleonic Empire. The series is widely regarded as a masterpiece. Because of its incendiary content, the series was never printed during Goya's lifetime. The Chapman brothers altered the prints by drawing puppy and clown heads on the faces of the war victims. The defaced work is fittingly titled Insult to Injury.
Insofar as they intended to outrage the public with their violation of such a rare and important artwork, the Chapman brothers certainly succeeded. But the provocation was tempered by the fact that the artwork destroyed was a multiple. Other, unmolested copies of the same series by Goya still exist; hence, they destroyed an instance of Goya's work, but they did not eliminate all of its instances. Aside from the ethical question of whether the Chapman brothers were justified in destroying the Goya prints, this case also raises some ontological questions: Did the Chapmans destroy an artwork, or just the instance of an artwork (treating the set as one unit)? Does the fact that the prints were pulled in 1937, over a century after Goya's death, count against their authenticity as Goya prints, or does his authorship of the work reside wholly in his etching of the plates?
The ontological structure of fine art prints is often understood as a type‐token relation. This puts prints in the same category as other art forms in which the work is instantiated by its tokens, such as music, dance, film, and literature. The reason why prints are understood as tokens is that each impression within an edition counts equally as an instantiation of the work. (I consider below whether visually identical prints that are not part of the edition should be counted as instances of the work as well). No single print counts as the “original” any more than any single performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or any copy of Huckleberry Finn does. Because multiply instantiable art forms have no single object that can be pointed to as the artwork, the ontological questions multiply in kind. We wonder what, exactly, constitutes the artwork, and how we can determine which instances count as successful iterations of the work. We might wonder whether it is even appropriate to understand multiples as ultimately pointing back to one single abstract object, the “type,” that counts as the artwork proper.
In his well‐known article on the ontology of musical works, “What a Musical Work Is,” Jerrold Levinson observes that “Philosophers have long been puzzled about the identity or nature of the art object in nonphysical arts, e.g. music and literature. In these arts … there is no particular physical ‘thing’ that one can plausibly take to be the artwork itself.”1 As Levinson's remarks imply, the paradigm example of an artwork continues to be the single, unique, tangible object (a painting or sculpture, say) that serves as the embodiment of a particular artwork. Philosophers struggle to define abstract, ephemeral, or linguistic works in terms of this model. But the ontology of the print is equally problematic for philosophers, yet for the opposite reason: rather than being a “nonphysical art,” one might say that printmaking is all too physical, as it essentially involves at least two material components: the template or matrix prepared by the artist, and the impression that results from pressing this matrix onto a surface. Fine art prints are importantly different from other kinds of multiples because their production is tied to a physical process involving a production artifact (the template) and a detailed and highly technical process involving paper, ink, and press.2 This raises the question of what “the artwork itself” consists in when we consider the case of the limited edition fine art print. Is it the matrix prepared by the hand of the artist, the print pulled from it, the relation between print and plate, or the edition? Or is “the artwork itself” an abstract object, the type of which the impressions are the tokens? This leads us to the counterintuitive notion that fine art prints give us access to, but are not themselves the artwork. Nicholas Wolterstorff endorses this view when he remarks that “In looking at a print one sees two things at once, the print and an impression thereof. In listening to a symphony one hears two things at once, the symphony and a performance thereof.”3 Printmaking and the nonphysical arts thus have a common problem when it comes to determining just where, exactly, the artwork is, and what it consists in when there is no single physical object to point to as the work.4
The past three decades have seen an explosion in the philosophical literature on questions surrounding the ontology of musical works and their performances, whereas printmaking has been largely ignored. As Kathleen V. Jameson observes, “prints simply have not demanded the critical assessment and analysis with which other media have been treated and studied.”5 Christy Mag Uidhir echoes Jameson's complaint when he asserts that this academic neglect is “deplorable because print artwork enjoys widespread artworld presence and the nature of print artwork itself demands philosophical scrutiny.”6 But perhaps the scholarly lacuna surrounding printmaking is not such a bad thing. It may turn out that the already existing literature on inherently multiple works of other kinds, which has been particularly robust in the philosophy of music, can be applied equally well to prints. What Mag Uidhir calls the “prima facie unusual ontology” of the fine art print may not in fact require extended philosophical scrutiny, because the labor has already been done in a neighboring vineyard.7
The aim of this inquiry is to determine whether printmaking is best understood ontologically as analogous to a work‐performance relation. Are prints the visual analogue of symphonies? My motivation for pursuing the comparison of printmaking to music is twofold. First, because relatively little has been written on the ontology of fine art prints, our use of an already developed body of scholarship will help us to gain some traction on the question. Second, within the existing literature on the ontology of prints, there seems to be a persistent confusion about the difference between what makes a print an artwork, and what makes it a genuine or authentic artwork, signed or in some other way ratified by a given artist.
And yet it is not at all obvious that we can simply apply the insights on the work‐performance relation in music to such a profoundly different medium as printmaking. For example, an important difference between prints and performances is that prints within an edition are (usually) expected to be identical in look and in status. There is no hierarchy of prints within the edition.8 Performances, on the other hand, are viewed as creative, interpretive acts. Variation is expected and even valued, so long as it occurs within the parameters of the score.
Both Nelson Goodman and Nigel Warburton raise the comparison between prints and performances only to reject it.9 I begin by assessing their arguments against understanding prints as analogous to musical performances. Then I turn to the contrasting view offered by Mag Uidhir in one of the few recent contributions to the literature devoted to the ontology of printmaking. I point to some problems with his argument that illicit and accidentally pulled prints can still be instances of the work in question if they are sufficiently similar to the authorized impressions. Here I appeal to David Davies's distinction between P‐instances and E‐instances in order to understand the conflict between Warburton's overly restrictive print ontology and Mag Uidhir's self‐described “permissive print ontology.”10 I conclude by suggesting that prints are indeed ontologically unusual insofar as they occupy an intermediate position between pure multiples, of which there can be an unlimited number of tokens, and singular artworks, which consist of one physical object.
II
It certainly stretches the ordinary meaning of the term ‘performance’ to suggest that prints are properly understood as such. And yet this may have more to do with the fact that we usually think of performances as temporal, nonphysical events rather than as a term we can apply to physical objects, which prints certainly are. Once we look past the bias of ordinary usage, it appears that the structure of the relation between a plate and the resulting prints does indeed share some important common characteristics with that of a musical work and the performances thereof. First, the printmaking process seems to mirror in certain respects the composer‐performer model. Artists very often rely on master printers to execute their editions. This is true even of artists who identify themselves primarily as print artists (as opposed to famous painters such as Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler who occasionally dabbled in printmaking). The production of the template can be seen as akin to the composition of the score. The master printer is like the musician who interprets the score and instantiates the work.11
Second, with the exception of monotyping, prints are inherently multiple. One plate can generate many instantiations of the work. Just as two people do not need to see the exact same performance of the opera Einstein on the Beach in order for both to say, accurately, that they have each experienced the work, so too is it unnecessary to look at the exact same physical print in order for each to claim an acquaintance with the work. Third, in both cases there is a “robust causal relation” between the artist's creation and the final product.12 Whether it be a musical composition or a copper plate, the resulting aesthetic object is shaped and determined by the artist's work, which is not encountered directly by the audience, but only indirectly through its performed instantiations.
The debates surrounding the work‐performance relation in music concern what counts as an adequate performance of the work in question, and how best to capture the nature of the relation between the work and the performances thereof. There is widespread agreement that in order for a performance to count as an instantiation of the work, the intentions of the artist must be fulfilled, intentionally so, and more or less accurately.13 However, in the case of music, no one requires that the composer personally ratify or authenticate any given performance in order for it to count as a genuine instantiation of the work.14
But the conventions surrounding printed artworks are different. Whereas anyone competent enough, and with the proper intention to do so, can play Rachmaninoff's Prélude in C Minor, prints are more difficult to instantiate: not only does one have to gain access to the artist's template and the requisite tools and skills for pulling a print from it, but even if one has a print, it is not clear if one also has a genuine instance of the work, or just a derivative exemplar thereof. Not only the artworld, with its venal concerns about provenance and market value, but also artists and theorists expect prints to be approved by the artist in order for them to count as genuine. Usually the artist's signature is the marker of this certification. This widespread practice seems to speak against the status of prints as analogous to musical performances because they require an extra level of oversight from the artist: she or he has a direct hand not only in determining the causal process, but the final product as well.
But simply pointing to the fact that the customs surrounding prints and musical performances are different in our culture is not yet enough reason to reject the comparison. It may be that our cultural practices are inconsistent from a philosophical point of view. And yet theorists differ on the question of why, exactly, we should not consider prints as ontologically analogous to performances. Goodman admits that there is a surface similarity between prints and musical performances, insofar as both are inherently multiple.15 However, he denies that they are, in fact, analogous. What is decisive for Goodman is that a musical composition is inherently abstract, and is embodied by notation. Well‐established conventions establish what counts as a correct translation of that notation into sound. A genuine instance of a composition can be determined simply by comparing the sonic event to the score to check that they correspond. A print, on the other hand, is genuine for Goodman by virtue of the history of its production: it is an authentic print if and only if it has been created through contact with a particular physical template.
Goodman's assertion that the correct sonic order is sufficient to count as an instance of a musical work has come under a great deal of scrutiny, perhaps most notably by Levinson.16 Levinson claims that accuracy is not enough: genuine instantiations of musical works must also be intentional performances of those works. Two identical sonic events may in fact turn out to be two different works. In other words, etiology and intention count in musical performances, too.
On the printmaking side of the equation, Warburton has criticized Goodman's assertion that having the right history is sufficient for ensuring that something be a genuine print. He points out that Goodman's definition would permit smudged or otherwise defective prints taken from the original matrix to be counted as instances of the work. And yet, Warburton points out, “This is implausible. Even with print‐making, history alone does not determine authenticity: there are some minimum standards of print‐making quality which have to be met for any print to count as a token for the particular type in question.”17 Goodman found it impossible to demand that there be standards of correct correspondence between a print and its plate in the same way that we can judge the accuracy of a performance to the score. This is presumably because musical notation functions as a symbolic system with a highly developed set of conventions governing correctness. An artist's prepared template, on the other hand, is a material object. When we ask whether a print is actually a ‘Rembrandt,’ we want to know, at the very least, whether it was pulled from the plate Rembrandt prepared, and not an imposter. And yet Goodman's understanding of the causal connection between plate and print seems crude. He seems unconcerned with the look of the print, despite the fact that this is ultimately the embodiment of the artist's intended artwork. Just because a template is a physical object, and not a linguistic one, does not mean that we cannot apply “minimum standards of print‐making quality” to putative instances of a printed artwork. A wrinkled Rembrandt should not make the cut simply because of its source.
Even with this correction to Goodman, however, Warburton is unwilling to regard prints as analogous to musical performances. Whereas Goodman was too permissive in his standards for what count as a genuine print, Warburton's rejection of prints as performances comes from the opposite direction. For him, no set of established conventions could ever be accurate enough to ensure that a print is a genuine instance of the artist's work. (His argument concerns photographic prints in particular, but applies equally well to other kinds of prints; his claims reflect the practices surrounding the editioning of fine art prints of all kinds.18) In every case, he says, the artist must approve the print, even if the print is visually indistinguishable from an already‐approved print.19 While the cynic might claim that such narrow standards for certification are motivated by the desire to restrict edition size and to thereby ensure higher prices, for Warburton it is a matter of the artist's moral rights:
There are never any guidelines for distinguishing the contingent from the constitutive in photographic print‐making. Consequently only the photographer can determine that a print is of sufficient quality for it to count as an authentic print. Anyone else can only hazard a guess, and may in the process seriously damage our understanding of a photographer's style, and thus his or her possibility of creative expression.20
For Warburton, what makes a print genuine is not simply its source, but its certification by the artist. This is particularly important because not only photography, but the production of prints generally, is a mechanized process, often accomplished by technicians and not the artist himself or herself. The artist's approval of the prints is a way to compensate for this mechanization and distance from the artist's hand. For Warburton, the artist's authentication of the print is an epistemic, not an economic, issue: only the artist is in the position to know whether a given print satisfies his or her intentions for the finished artwork.
Despite his criticism of Goodman's distinction between prints and musical scores, Warburton actually reiterates Goodman's reasoning in his own argument. Ultimately he agrees with Goodman that the reason why prints are not performances is that there is no publicly available standard of correctness for judging the correspondence of the print to its matrix. This leads Goodman to define a genuine print strictly in terms of its origin, without any oversight by the artist. Warburton, on the other hand, goes in the opposite direction: he insists that the artist retains sole authority to ratify each one as genuine. But both argue that the problem with treating prints as analogous to performances is that, unlike the work‐performance relation, there is no independent test for judging what is essential and inessential in a print.21
Warburton's account lends theoretical support to standard artworld practices surrounding prints by living artists. Yet his insistence that “even if two prints were virtually (or even actually) indistinguishable, only the one certified by the photographer would count as genuine or authentic,” seems implausible on epistemic and ontological grounds.22 To claim that the artist has the unique ability to determine whether a given print is authentic, even if the print shares the same causal history and looks exactly the same as others in the edition, enters dangerously into the realm of mystification. It is as if each print requires the special blessing of the artist in order to transform it into an authentic work of art. While it is certainly accepted practice nowadays for artists to restrict the size of their editions, even in the age of digital prints where no special darkroom manipulation is used and identical prints can be made at the touch of a button, it is also fairly obvious that this kind of manufactured rarity is in place because it helps to keep the prices up and enables artists to make a living.
But the question is whether such a practice is defensible on purely ontological grounds. On the one hand, Warburton is right to note that prints pulled from the same plate can vary widely in appearance. Many variables are involved in the process, and the production of fine art prints is not a matter of simply dropping off a prepared matrix at the shop to be processed just as we used to drop off rolls of film to be developed in the days before digital cameras. At the same time, however, there is something about Warburton's principled insistence on the necessity of the artist's sanction that seems disingenuous. If two prints are visually indistinguishable and share the same history of production, what difference should it make to their ontological status as a genuine iteration of the work whether one has the artist's official approval and the other does not? While the economic motivations for this practice are obvious, from an ontological point of view it seems arbitrary and threatens to violate the nature of printmaking as an inherently multiple medium—an attempt to turn prints into the equivalent of unique paintings. Even if the art market does not, perhaps we should regard prints as akin to performances.
III
In one of the only recent essay‐length considerations of print ontology, Mag Uidhir offers a striking account that stakes out a third path apart from Goodman and Warburton's approaches.23 It attempts to preserve the inherently multiple nature of printed artwork while at the same time respecting the importance of artists’ intentions in the execution of the work. Best of all, he avoids the mystification and preciousness that threatens Warburton's demand for artist authentication of each print. Mag Uidhir's argument is striking not only because of its extended and imaginative treatment of an overlooked subject matter, but because his conclusion contravenes standard artworld practices and assumptions governing genuine prints. He considers three hypothetical scenarios: the artist's own mistaken inclusion of a proof into an edition, the illicit printing of an artwork from the artist's template, and the unintentional pressing of a print by hypothetical (and highly improbable) forces of nature or, perhaps somewhat less implausibly, a runaway steamroller. In all cases, he argues, the mistaken, illicit, and accidental prints would be artworks, even absent the artist's authorization of those particular prints. No matter what the details of its production, if the resulting print is “relevantly similar” to the other, authorized, prints in question, then it is an artwork.
Mag Uidhir's argument hinges on his definition of “relevant similarity,” by which he means that the prints in question “share all constitutive appreciable properties in common in virtue of sharing a causal history. Two prints share a causal history if and only if they are printed from the same template (e.g., a particular etched copper plate), by the same process (e.g., intaglio), onto the same support (e.g., paper).”24 Mag Uidhir argues that prints mistakenly included in the edition, or made after the artist's death, or made illicitly without the artist's permission, are nevertheless artworks so long as they have the correct causal history. While prints pulled from forged, degraded, or altered plates are one thing, correctly executed prints from authentic, intact plates are artworks, even if the artist has not authenticated them. As Mag Uidhir puts it: “if our thief runs a print, in the right sort of way, of a Rembrandt plate, then the result is a Rembrandt print, and Rembrandt prints are artworks. That's the point of lifting the Rembrandt print in the first place.”25 Warburton would surely object that Mag Uidhir's standards of “relevant similarity” are far too loose. Even if running a print “in the right sort of way” means not only following the correct process but exercising quality control over smudges, mistakes in registration, and so on, he seems to make Goodman's mistake in relying purely on etiology. Mag Uidhir provocatively dismisses the significance of the artist's final oversight and approval by arguing that “relevant similarity” is “exhaustive” in determining the artwork‐status of the print. This is not to deny the importance of the artist's intention in creating an artwork and determining its disposition. The upshot of his argument is that those intentions can be fixed ahead of time by the artist in her preparation of the matrix and stipulation of the “right sort of way” to pull the print. No extra layer of ratification by the artist of any particular print is necessary in order to guarantee its status as an artwork—if it has the same constitutive appreciable properties as the prints that have been approved. Mag Uidhir seems to be suggesting that it is arbitrary and irrational to consider only those prints included in the edition to be artworks if the only difference between those prints and a print excluded from the edition is that it lacks the artist's intention that it be included. Once the artist determines the conditions for “relevant similarity,” and so long as those are followed, any print is an artwork because the artist's intentions have indeed been respected. While he does not belabor the comparison, we can see that Mag Uidhir, perhaps alone among theorists, treats the relation of a print to its matrix much as we understand the relation of a performance to a musical composition. So long as the performance is faithful (or faithful enough) to the score as set by the composer, then the performance counts as an instance of the work. No further ratification by the artist is needed.
But before I pursue the question of whether or not prints should be regarded as ontologically analogous to performances, I must point out two problems with Mag Uidhir's argument. The first is that his definition of “relevant similarity” does not ensure that the artist's intentions will necessarily be fulfilled. Recall that Mag Uidhir defines “relevantly similar” prints as those that “share all constitutive appreciable properties in common in virtue of sharing a causal history.” He further explains that by “constitutive appreciable properties” he means those “relevant descriptive physical (internal) features of the print (for example, color, shape, size) as well as those relevant descriptive nonphysical (relational) features (for example, aesthetic, semantic, representational features) supervening on (in part determined by) those relevant descriptive physical (internal) features of the print.”26 What is confusing about this definition of “relevant similarity” is that the term ‘relevant’ is employed three times, which seems to beg the question of what is and is not relevant when considering the ontological status of a print as art. But it seems clear enough from this definition, as well as from the hypothetical examples of accidental and illicit prints that Mag Uidhir provides, that for him the “constitutive appreciable properties” are fixed by the physical features of a print and its causal history: it has to have been pulled from the right matrix in the right sort of way. This is what enables his imaginary thieves and bunglers to make prints that lack the artist's authentication but nevertheless share in the same ontological status as those in the edition: they were made in the same exact way and look exactly the same as the signed prints.
Against Mag Uidhir, let us imagine that a certain contemporary artist with an affinity for conceptual art decides to make an edition of prints called Only on Tuesday. The concept behind this piece is that only prints produced on Tuesdays are eligible for inclusion in the edition.27 Suppose the trial proofs were produced on a Friday, and various colors were tested until the artist found just the right combination. Once the artist found that one of the proof prints had the right look for the edition, it was signed by the artist and labeled “B.A.T.,” which signifies that all of the prints in the edition should match it.28 And yet, because the B.A.T. proof was not pulled on a Tuesday, it does not fulfill all of the artist's intentions for the edition, which is that they not only be visually identical to the B.A.T. proof but that they be pulled on a Tuesday. According to Mag Uidhir's stated definition of “relevant similarity,” a print pulled on Monday or Wednesday could just as well be included in the edition with no loss to the fulfillment of the artist's intentions for its constitutive appreciable properties. Would the prints pulled on a day other than Tuesday be artworks? Sure, in one sense they are. But they are not genuine instances of the artwork Only on Tuesday. It seems that Mag Uidhir would either have to reject those sorts of avenues for artistic expression, or he would have to revise his definition of “relevant similarity” to provide for the particularities of artists’ intentions. In this case, he would have to say that being pulled on a Tuesday is part of the requirement for “relevant similarity.” But this is not how he defines “relevant similarity.” Being pulled on a Tuesday is a nonphysical feature of the print that does not supervene on its relevant physical features. If Mag Uidhir wants to add to his definition of constitutive appreciable properties “and any other special requirements that the artist has for the print,” then we seem to be on a slippery slope that leads right back to Warburton, for an artist could stipulate (as many in fact do, or at least assume) that only those prints that he or she authenticates count as genuine instances of the work. Many artists would balk at the idea that they have to accept as equally genuine prints that have been pulled illicitly or accidentally from their plates, unless the concept of the work involved precisely such an open approach to the edition. Mag Uidhir is of course aware of this; the implication of his argument is that these artists are being irrational.
Perhaps they are. But I would reply that an artist does not have the power to confer or withhold the status of “artwork” to a print with his signature, but rather the status of “member of the edition,” which means the artwork intended for publication. This leads us to the other problem with Mag Uidhir's argument, which is that it commits the fallacy of equivocation. He trades on the ambiguous use of the designation ‘artwork,’ which in some cases refers only to signed or otherwise certified authentic artworks of a certain artist, and in other cases can mean the simple ontological designation of something as an artwork as opposed to, say, a credit card statement, passport photo, or notebook doodle. For example, when discussing the status of prints that may be “relevantly similar” but are not included in a given edition, Mag Uidhir articulates a version of the standard view:
Whether or not a print is an artist proof or a trial proof or part of an open or limited edition is largely intention‐determined, that is, what purpose the print was intended to serve, especially whether or not the print was intended for public reception. Surely such distinctions must be preserved when considering prints as artworks [emphasis mine].29
Contrary to this view, Mag Uidhir claims that the conditions of “relevant similarity” are sufficient to guarantee that a print is an artwork, even if the print lacks the artist's sanction. He argues that the artist's intention that it be included in the official set of prints to be published—the limited edition—is irrelevant to the print's status as an artwork: “An artist's intention that a print be an artist proof is no more relevant to that print being an artwork than is the artist's intention that a print be used as a napkin to absorb a spill.”30 And yet the phrase “considering prints as artworks” exploits the ambiguity in our understanding of that term. Indeed, if we are talking about the descriptive designation “is an artwork” in the deflationary sense of simple ontological designations, then the artist's proof is doubtless an artwork. But then so are the broken, rejected, and unfinished works of art that litter artists’ studios. So are the smudged, discarded prints and the pristine proofs tucked away into master printers’ archives. But the question of whether something is an artwork in this most basic sense does not satisfy the further question of whether it is an artwork in the other, more restricted sense of that term. After all, artists sometimes make artworks that they detest and reject as “their” artworks. While certainly the hated creation is still an artwork, and a genuine one in the sense that it did issue from that artist, insofar as it falls short of the artist's desired intentions, for whatever reason, we usually do not consider it to be a work of that artist.31 And yet that is the issue: we are not concerned with the status of the artifact qua artwork, but whether it is an authentic instance of the artwork as intended by the artist.32 In other words, there is a difference between claiming that an unsanctioned print is an artwork, and claiming that it is the artwork, that is, an authentic instance of the artwork, no different than the ones the artist intended to publish. Mag Uidhir argues that, all other things being equal, the artist's intention that this print and not that one be included in the edition is irrelevant to their ontological status as art.33 But we can easily grant their art status in the more general sense while still withholding our assent that such unauthorized prints are necessarily part of the artwork as conceived by the artist. And it seems to be this latter, stronger claim that Mag Uidhir wants to assert.
When we look at the different ways in which prints are often labeled by an artist—for example, as an artist's proof, or a trial proof, or B.A.T.—these designations are indeed relevant when considering prints as artworks. But that does not mean that we are wondering whether the proofs are artworks. Rather, qua artworks, these designations point to important distinctions to be made among them. The question is whether proofs or accidental or illicit prints ought to be considered genuine instances of the work in question, even against the artist's (and the artworld's) protests. That is a much more difficult case to make.
Consider again Mag Uidhir's assertion that the print pulled from a Rembrandt plate is a Rembrandt print, and hence an artwork. Certainly, the posthumous, illicit print is an artwork, but is it really so clear that it is an artwork by Rembrandt, simply because the plate was by him and the print was pulled from it “in the right sort of way”? Even if the correct process were employed, a print pulled 350 years after the artist's death will use different paper, ink, and press machinery than the original prints. In this case, it would seem to fail even Mag Uidhir's self‐described “permissive” standards for “relevant similarity.” Here we might want to adopt Wolterstorff's dual view of the print: we are looking at two things, Rembrandt's image and the recently pulled impression which gives us access to a view of that image. Or perhaps this is akin to playing a Bach concerto on modern instruments rather than period ones. To borrow Andrew Kania's distinction between manifestations and authentic instantiations of performed artworks, we might say that in the case of both the Bach and the Rembrandt, authentic instantiations are simply impossible: not because the artists are not alive to sign off on the performance, but because the original tools to produce the works are no longer available.34 Are the latter‐day manifestations of the Bach and the Rembrandt artworks? Sure. But this does not tell us much. If we want to say that the Rembrandt print made in 2013 is not simply an artwork, but an authentic instance of the work, then we must regard the matrix handled by the artist and the directions (either stated or implied) for printing from it as the sole locus of the artist's creation, akin to a musician's score.35 But Mag Uidhir seems to want more than that from his “permissive print ontology.” He does not regard prints as instances of some antecedent work, but concrete, individual, distinct artworks.36 His account of “relevant similarity” locates the artwork qua bearer of the artist's intentions solely on the prepared plate and designated printmaking process. Anyone can carry out that process and produce a print of that artwork. In a way, Mag Uidhir seems to be repeating Goodman's argument: in printmaking, art is merely etiology: if the print has the right causal history, even if that causal history does not include the artist's final approval, then it is just as authentic as the signed prints in the edition.
Mag Uidhir's permissive print ontology has the undeniable appeal of avoiding the mystification that surrounds our cultural obsession with authenticity and provenance. It respects the inherently multiple nature of the printed artwork. But it does so at the expense of ensuring that the artist's intentions actually will be fulfilled in the finished print. The assertion that a “relevantly similar” yet unintentional, illicit, or posthumous print is nevertheless an “artwork” begs the question, because it fails to tell us whether it is a legitimate instance of the artwork in question. Hence we might indeed regard prints as analogous to performances, but this will not tell us whether those performances are merely manifestations of the work or authentic instantiations thereof.
One way to understand the difference between Mag Uidhir and Warburton is to say that they are operating with different conceptions of what constitutes an instance of an artwork. Davies argues that the philosophical discussions surrounding multiples tend to conflate two distinct senses of the term ‘instance.’37 Sometimes we understand an instance of a work to be one that gives the audience epistemic access to the work: ‘e‐instances’ offer an adequate experience of the work. On the other hand, we also speak of instances—as opposed to mere copies—as having a certain history of production, a provenance. Davies calls these ‘p‐instances.’ Using Davies's distinction, we can see that Warburton and Mag Uidhir are employing different standards for what counts as an instance. Mag Uidhir emphasizes that even illicitly or accidentally produced impressions of a print will be adequate e‐instances. Warburton, on the other hand, counts only as legitimate those impressions that are ratified p‐instances, even if the unsigned impressions are perfectly adequate e‐instances.38
This conflict is particularly salient in the case of limited edition fine art prints because, unlike symphonies or novels, they do not have indefinitely many instances. In some cases the limited multiplicity that we find with prints and cast sculpture may be a purely manufactured scarcity, and in other cases it may be a natural function of the physical process: plates degrade, materials run out, and even master printers grow weary and make mistakes. It cannot be the job of the philosopher to determine whether the size of the edition has been artificially restricted, or is a function of the artist's concept for the work, or is due to limitations posed by the medium itself. What makes limited edition prints problematic but also so interesting is that they are multiples, but not pure multiples. Mag Uidhir is right if he means to suggest that prints do not undergo some mystical transfiguration from nonartwork to artwork simply because the artist deigns to affix her signature to it. However, the question whether unsigned impressions are authentic instances of the work is a different issue.
It seems to me that one of the artist's tasks when creating an edition of prints is to set the size of the edition. While the prints within an edition are each authentic instances of the artwork, the edition as a whole is also, in an important sense, the artwork, that is, the one that the artist intended to publish. While edition size may seem arbitrary and irrelevant when interpreting fine art prints, a couple of considerations may remind us of its salience: first, from the perspective of the viewer, the membership of a print to an edition is visually reinforced on the print itself, when it is signed and numbered as, say, five out of an edition of fifteen. Thus when we look at a print, we are constantly reminded that it is one instance of the work out of a larger number of (possibly) extant instances. Moreover, from the perspective of the artist, the completed edition is the end result of the creative process that generated the prints. The entire set of prints is the finished “work.” (An artist of my acquaintance recently had this experience reinforced with his edition of fifty silk‐screened prints. The gallery that commissioned the prints sold thirty‐five of them, and returned the remaining fifteen to the artist to sell or give away as he wished. The artist said that he did not feel that “the work” had sold until all of the prints were gone. For this artist, the edition, not the individual print, was the salient unit when thinking about his creation as an artwork—and as a commodity.)
The artist Timothy Van Laar has attempted to make the case for regarding the entire edition as the artwork when considering fine art prints.39 He argues that an edition is not a collective unity, such as stones making a pile, but rather a constitutive unity, in which each part contributes to the whole like members of a body. As for the problem of the dispersal of the constitutive members of the edition, Van Laar claims, “a primary function of printmaking is to create flexible, constantly changing spatial structures, unified structures which exist through the necessary repetition of a visual idea. Each print in an edition is part of the overall structure which is an edition.”40 But this assertion is unconvincing. It is a primary function of printmaking to make multiple images from the same matrix. Most of the time, there is no structural principle uniting the prints in an edition beyond their shared history of production and whatever particular circumstances led the artist to include a certain number of prints within it. Van Laar is wrong; the edition is (usually) just a collective unity.
Nevertheless, we ought to take seriously the boundary of the limited edition as an essential element of the artist's intentions for the work. When creating a fine art print, edition size is one of the choices that the artist makes, along with the disposition of the matrix, the materials to be used, and the manner in which the print is pulled. The limited edition places prints in a middle position along a continuum between the singular work of painting or sculpture, on the one hand, and the infinitely repeatable tokens of performables. It may seem that membership of one print rather than another within an edition is arbitrary and irrelevant if the print was pulled in exactly the same way and looks exactly the same. Would it really alter the artwork if one more print were added or excluded from the authorized set? Perhaps not. But art making in any medium consists of numerous decisions by the artist that affect the final disposition of the work. Some of these decisions may indeed be arbitrary. And yet that is what makes the work the work: the artist's intention that it be so, and his or her ratification of those decisions as the ones that form the work's constitutive appreciable properties.41
IV
The phenomenon of the limited edition is an awkward case for the philosopher, who must confront an art form that is inherently multiple but not purely so. There are times, however, when this ontological uniqueness can be gainfully exploited, as the Chapman brothers did with Insult to Injury.
The Chapman brothers’ decision to use a set of rare, mint‐condition Goya prints as the fodder for their vandalism was precisely calculated to obtain its intended effect. By defacing a multiple, they were able to elicit the public's horror at the intentionally vulgar destruction of a treasured masterpiece, while at the same time avoiding the condemnation that would have ensued had they violated the only existing instance of Goya's artwork. If they had targeted a unique painting by Goya, or the only remaining set of prints, the destruction would have been so great that it would have made it difficult if not impossible to appreciate the defacement as having any artistic merit. On the other hand, if the Chapman brothers had chosen to deface facsimile copies of the Goya etchings, or had used some other common, mass‐produced set of images rather than a relatively precious object, their act of violence would have been stripped of its power. And that is precisely what is so compelling about Insult to Injury: what seems initially to be a crass, gratuitous act of violence against an artwork turns out to be just the point: the images of senseless suffering and needless brutality depicted in The Disasters of War are made viscerally real for us again by the Chapmans' defacement of those rare, precious prints.42 By exploiting the properties of the limited edition, the Chapmans made art lovers feel the impact of their violent gesture, while ensuring that their “insult” was not insurmountable.43
Footnotes
Jerrold Levinson, “What a Musical Work Is,” Journal of Philosophy 77 (1980): 5–28, at p. 5.
Nicholas Wolterstorff, Works and Worlds of Art (Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 95.
Wolterstorff, Works and Worlds of Art, p. 41.
This is not to say that the object simply is the work, even in the case of unique paintings and sculptures. But it is far easier in those paradigmatic cases to identify the artwork as coextensive with its constitutive object. See Peter Lamarque, “Object, Work, and Interpretation,” Philosophy in the Contemporary World 12 (2005): 1–7.
Kathleen V. Jameson, “A New State: Reassessing Prints,” Art Lies 46 (2005): 14–19, at p. 14.
Christy Mag Uidhir, “Unlimited Additions to Limited Editions,” Contemporary Aesthetics 7 (2009), http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=527.
Mag Uidhir, “Unlimited Additions to Limited Editions.”
This is a place where connoisseurs sometimes behave irrationally, by preferring lower‐numbered prints in the edition as if they were closer to some absent original. But in practice, an artist's numbering of prints within an edition does not necessarily (or even often) reflect the actual order in which they were pulled from the plate.
Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Bobbs‐Merill, 1986), pp. 118–19; Nigel Warburton, “Authentic Photographs,” British Journal of Aesthetics 37 (1997): 129–137.
Mag Uidhir, “Unlimited Additions to Limited Editions.”
The analogy between musical score and prepared matrix, both of which are prepared by the artist, becomes less clear when we consider who instantiates the artist's work. In the case of music, it will depend on the score whether it is instantiated by a solo performer or by a conductor leading a group. In the case of prints, the master printer may be in charge of all the steps involved in pulling the prints, or he or she may coordinate a shop of assistants. The point is not that there is necessarily a tight correlation between musician or conductor and master printer, but that both art forms are two‐step processes in which the artist is entirely responsible for the first step (preparation of the score or matrix) and whose participation varies widely in the process of its instantiation. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pushing me to clarify this point.
Craig Derksen and Darren Hudson Hick, “Performance Hero,” Contemporary Aesthetics 7 (2009), http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=541.
For a succinct overview of the standard accounts and major debates surrounding work‐performance relation in music, see Derksen and Hudson Hick, “Performance Hero.” See also Franklin Bruno, “Representation and the Work‐Performance Relation,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (2006): 355–365.
Certainly there may be cases in which living composers, or dead composers’ estates, demand royalties when their works are performed for a paying public. These are not treated as ontological matters, but are regarded as merely economic ones. It is a way for musicians and other authors of multiply instantiable works to protect their copyright.
Goodman, Languages of Art, pp. 118–19.
See Levinson, “What a Musical Work Is”; and Levinson, “Autographic and Allographic Arts Revisited,” Philosophical Studies 38 (1980): 367–383.
Warburton, “Authentic Photographs,” p. 133.
The question of whether photographs are technically speaking prints is an open one. Both Warburton and Mag Uidhir assume that photographs are a species of print. See Christy Mag Uidhir, “Photographic Art: An Ontology Fit to Print,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70 (2012): 31–41, at p. 32: “given that photography is a form of printmaking, no less so than other printmaking forms (for example intaglio, lithography, relief printing, aquatint, silkscreen, sugar lift, gum printing, and the like), being a photograph entails being a print.” But the difference is that in the case of photographs, as with Xerox copies, ink‐jet, and laser prints, the image is not strictly speaking an imprint: the result of physically pressing a surface against a prepared template. See Susan Tallman, The Contemporary Print: From Pre‐Pop to Postmodern (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), p. 214. A full exploration of this question is beyond the scope of this paper. For current purposes, I follow common practice and treat photographs as prints.
Warburton, “Authentic Photographs,” pp. 133–34.
Warburton, “Authentic Photographs,” pp. 133–34.
Warburton goes on to speculate that perhaps with the rise of digital photography, it will be possible to treat publicly available image files as akin to scores that can then be performed by printing them. But this seems akin to pushing “Play” on the stereo CD player, not to a performance.
Warburton, “Authentic Photographs,” p. 134.
Mag Uidhir, “Unlimited Additions to Limited Editions.”
Mag Uidhir, “Unlimited Additions to Limited Editions.” He repeats this definition in Mag Uidhir, “Photographic Art: An Ontology Fit to Print,” p. 33.
Mag Uidhir, “Unlimited Additions to Limited Editions.”
Mag Uidhir, “Unlimited Additions to Limited Editions.”
This may seem absurd, but these kinds of gimmicks happen all the time in contemporary art practice. As Wolterstorff observes regarding fine art prints in particular, “It is interesting to note that graphic art in the twentieth century has, if anything, retreated from routine in the production of impressions.” (That is to say, the production process has become less mechanical as printmaking has developed into an artistic medium in its own right and not merely a method for mass‐producing images.) Wolterstorff, Works and Worlds of Art, p. 95.
B.A.T. stands for “bon‐à‐tirer,” or “good to print.” In standard printmaking practice, it is the print that the artist designates as the master against which subsequent prints should be compared when running an edition. This print is customarily not included in the edition, even though it should (theoretically) be indistinguishable from the prints in the edition. It is often gifted to the printmaker, or included as part of his or her payment in the contract for producing the edition.
Mag Uidhir, “Unlimited Additions to Limited Editions.”
Mag Uidhir, “Unlimited Additions to Limited Editions.”
The law concerning artistic moral rights upholds this common assumption as well.
Our standards relax when the artist is very famous and/or deceased. Then we become fascinated with the sketches and rejects as well.
Mag Uidhir, “Unlimited Additions to Limited Editions.”
Andrew Kania, “Making Tracks: An Ontology of Rock Music,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (2006): 401–414.
In the case of The Disasters of War, no prints were pulled from Goya's plates during his lifetime, so the posthumously pulled impressions have a different and less problematic status than, say, the castings that continued to be made from Rodin's molds after his death. In the case of Disasters, we could say that no authentic instances of the artwork have ever existed, whereas in Rodin's case he oversaw the production of some of the castings and not others, but may have approved the continued production of his work after his death. All of the artifacts in question are artworks in the deflationary sense. Whether we want to consider the posthumous Rodins to be authentic will depend on a host of factors, including how much value we assign to provenance and proximity to the maker himself. These are normative questions, as dependent on culture, ideology, and market pressures as they are on the factors that determine “relevant similarity” in Mag Uidhir's sense.
Mag Uidhir, “Photographic Art: An Ontology Fit to Print,” pp. 32–33.
David Davies, “Multiple Instances and Multiple ‘Instances’,” British Journal of Aesthetics 50 (2010): 411–426.
Mag Uidhir himself eschews the conceptual framework of “instances” when considering the ontology of multiple artworks. See Christy Mag Uidhir, Art and Art‐Attempts (Oxford University Press, 2012).
Timothy Van Laar, “Printmaking: Editions as Artworks,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 14 (1980): 97–102. I am grateful to Aaron Meskin and Roy T. Cook for pointing to this reference in their article “Comics, Prints, and Multiplicity,” this volume.
Van Laar, “Printmaking: Editions as Artworks.”
My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pushing me to clarify this point.
A skeptical art critic makes this point when he admits that Insult to Injury is in fact surprisingly compelling: “The Chapmans have remade Goya's masterpiece for a century which has rediscovered evil. And I have fallen into their trap.” Jonathan Jones, “Look What We Did,” The Guardian (March 30, 2003), http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2003/mar/31/artsfeatures.turnerprize2003.
I would like to thank my colleagues Melanie Shepherd and Thorsten Dennerline for their informative conversations about this paper. I would also like to thank the participants at the Philosophy and Printmaking Workshop hosted by the University of Houston, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.