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Iconic representations sieved from the history of art informed the subject of 20 Works of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (2006-ongoing) and the subsequent series Concretions (2003-2006). In both projects, Doug Manchee sought pictorial representations that had attained popular status through photographic reproduction and dissemination in illustrated books, like histories of art and monographs, and by extension, the visual realm of digital imaging. To his mind, photographic reproduction, as critic Walter Benjamin had once supposed, posited a new kind of “original,” far removed from the constitution of its pictorial referent but nonetheless culturally influential and possessing.
Visiting a local library, Manchee scoured books for reproductions of iconic paintings, including The Mona Lisa, The Scream, and American Gothic. What he found were reproductions as various in dimensions and details, such as the size of the printed halftone dot, as overall appearance—a painting might be reproduced in color in one book, but in another it appeared in black and white. To emphasize this confounding diversity, he chose twenty reproductions of a particular painting and scanned each to build a dense digital file of illustrative artifacts. As each reproduction was “packed up” through scanning, they were also carefully resized so that a defining pictorial element—a signature, an umbrella handle, a barn—maintained a uniformity of size in each of the twenty scans. This element became a kind of synchronistic linchpin, linking each scan and thus each reproduction, as well as the pictorial referent, to one another. After blending all the scans, the final image file was reformatted once more to match the dimensions of the “original” painting. (Due to the limits of current printing technologies, some final images larger in dimension than the maximum width of 44 inches of a ink jet printer necessarily appear as diptychs or triptychs. This display naturally highlights both the nature and limits of reproduction technologies, including new digital imaging.)
A significant aspect of Manchee’s process and the resulting work is the contemporary remediation of related but competing technologies—the autographic painting, the printed book, and the computer. As essential technologies of human communication, each is also a cultural paradigm of how we acquire and preserve, disseminate and possess knowledge. 20 Works of Art… and Concretions are two series exploring today’s intertwining communication technologies through the iconic and ironic relationship of the original and the reproduction.
–Therese Mulligan
Director, School of Photographic Arts and Sciences Gallery
Rochester, 2007 |
