issue 1 summer 2011 ~ free
BLANK SLATE
Mechanical reproduction
brought about two major para-
digm shifts in artistic practice.
Firstly, mechanical reproduction
led to a new and ever increas-
ing range of media available to
the artist: it allowed photography,
film art and sound art to be cre-
ated and brought into the artistic
mainstream. Secondly, it allowed
for the wider dissemination of
imagery (both artistic and other-
wise) which in turn affected artis-
tic practice because it created
a more visually literate and artisti-
cally inspired society. This led to a
‘dialectic between art and pho-
tography’ – photography cre-
ated a new visual language that
painters then adopted within their
works, using photographic com-
positional techniques as a by-
word for modern ways of seeing
and introducing phrases such as
‘slightly out of focus’ into the lexi-
con of the art world. While both
these changes in artistic practice
are fundamentally important in
their own right, they both have
one underlying outcome: that art
became less elitist. In his seminal
essay The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction,
Walter Benjamin made the ob-
servation that both photography
and socialism were born of the
same age and stated that in this
new age ‘rather than than [art]
being underpinned by ritual it be-
came underpinned by a different
practice: politics’. In this essay I
intend to look at how mechani-
cal reproduction made possible
new art forms and introduced
new concepts, how it affected
the process of artists who main-
tained the more classical prac-
a n d t h e d e v e l o p mu c t i o n
tices and how it affected the un-
derlying philosophical core of art.
I argue each of photography,
of contempory wa t
film art and sound art owes its
n
creation and continued exist-
ys
ence to mechanical reproduc-
tion and they have all dramati-
e
Mechanical reprd
cally affected artistic practice.
These new vehicles for carrying
creative ideas changed artistic
practice in that they expanded
an artist’s horizons beyond paint-
ing, sculpture and draftsmanship.
This is not a process which imme-
diately happened at the turn of
the twentieth century though:
this is a process continuing to-
of se eing.
day, as exemplified by Susan
Philipsz being the first person to
win the Turner prize with a piece
of sound art (or in Benjamin’s
words with ‘the technological
reproduction of sound’) in 2010.
As society first turned to look in
amazement at photography and
became a photo-visual society,
photography became artis-
tic through the likes of Atget
1
 whose photos became ‘evidence
in the trial that is history’; then
with the invention of television art-
ists moved to communicate with
society on its level again. Christine
Hall explains how the mechanical
reproduction of film images being
beamed into living rooms worldwide
inspired a new form of art by sug-
gesting ‘a fundamental idea held by
the first video artists was that in order
to have a critical relationship with a
televisual society you must primarily
participate televisually’. This shows
how mechanical reproduction al-
lowed for art to leap off the canvas
and create new visual languages
but also shows how art became less
elitist. We can see, for the first time in
art history, an orientation of art and
reality towards the masses through
Eisenstein’s films in the popular cin-
emas and Atget’s images of poor
Parisian back streets.Furthermore,
the increasingly cheap prices of
mechanical reproduction equip-
ment throughout the twentieth cen-
tury (culminating in digital cameras
and computers) meant the ability
to be able to afford to produce art
was increasingly common. This has
lead to a shift in artistic practice
through the wider involvement of
people from all sections of society
and this combined with the broad-
ening of ‘the artistic practice, [and
the proposition of] new aesthetic
possibilities’ has inevitably lead
towards the creation of parallel
critical and philosophical thought,
again affecting artistic practice.
The main critical thought in-
spired by mechanical reproduction
finds its roots in Benjamin but does
not take full shape until the likes of
Roland Barthes and the post-mod-
ernist thinkers. These philosophies
of photomechanical reproduction
centre around photography, film
and sound art’s overt realism and
how this realism can be questioned,
how it breaks down the barriers of
art and reality and asking what au-
tonomy is left in art. Francis Bacon,
one artist to use photography as
source material, is said to have used
photography in an ‘ironic [and]
post-modern way’ because he was
conscious that his own paintings
would in turn ‘depend on mechani-
cal reproduction’ and be viewed
largely as reproductions rather than
in the original form with ‘aura’ in-
2 3
tact. Photography came to be
seen as a sort of simulacrum (fram-
ing a moment of reality and call-
ing it art calls into question where
the boundaries to art and reality
are) and it fits in perfectly with the
‘ever increasing tendency in art
towards eliminating the bounda-
ries between art and everyday
life’. The idea that reality can be
reproduced a hundredfold so as
to lose sense of true meaning and
create multiple layers of reality
was one explored by Andy Warhol
and one which also has a post-
modern basis. His prints of convicts
and car crashes showed how the
modern culture of mass produc-
tion leaves us empty when faced
with dreadful events or scenes be-
cause we are so over exposed to
them through the media and film
that we become desensitised. This
post-modern artistic philosophy
owes a direct debt to mechanical
reproduction because without the
photograph and photomechani-
cal reproductions there would be
little need for its existence or inspi-
ration for its creation. These critical
theories have changed the prac-
tice of art, especially in this age of
conceptualisation, in terms of pho-
tography, film and sound art but
they also played an important part
in modernising painting and sculp-
ture and creating instillation art.
Photomechanically illustrated
magazines such as the Illustrated
London News offered communities
in the nineteenth century access
to reality in a way never before
seen. For the first time they enabled
them to truly ‘conceptualise their
society’ but more interestingly they
created what Gerry Beegan refers
to as an ‘interpretive community’.
This means that the mechanical
reproduction of images allowed
the masses to truly become literate
in the image and art was hence-
forth effectively changed forever
in three key ways. Firstly, art
became ’art designed
for repro- duc-
i b i l -
ity’; the mindset of the artist
was changed forever for he
knew that his work would no
longer merely be hung on
the wall of a gallery but po-
tentially reproduced millions
of times. Secondly, there was
a wider dialogue around
art itself; Benjamin wrote in
1936 that ’the fact that the
whole of art can now be re-
produced by technological
means alters the relationship
of the masses to art. From
being very backward…it
has become extremely pro-
gressive’, showing how he
believed mechanical repro-
duction had ’revolutionary’
characteristics in terms of
its ability to open people’s
eyes to almost any aspect
of reality and influence new
artistic ideas. And thirdly, art
became overtly commer-
cialised and truly inducted
into the capitalist age; me-
chanical reproduction had
an important part to play in
the use of art for commer-
cial gain (advertising), in
the reproducibility of art for
sale (for example, the post-
modern irony that
thousands of repro-
ductions of Andy
Warhol’s prints can
be found for sale in
almost any coun-
try in the world)
and in creating an
inherently capitalist
art form: cinematog-
raphy, which is pro-
duced for ‘the audi-
ence of consumers
who constitute the
market‘. This final
change especial-
ly affected artistic
practice because it
created a di-
vide in art:
Klaus
Honnef talks of Warhol’s early ‘com-
mercial’ art and his attempts later to
become a ‘pure’ artist. When looking at
these three changes that mechanically
reproduced illustrated books and mag-
azines brought about one can see that
again there is an increasing ‘orientation
of reality towards the masses’. While iron-
ically driven by capitalist desire for a wid-
er market, these magazines and books
helped to empower future generations
of potential artists through the new egal-
itarian nature of visual information and
through the new ways of
“
seeing that pho-
tography
h a d
Mechanical
reproduction
broadened the
horizons of
artists.
pro-
duced.
The fact that these art-
ists were increasingly likely to
be of a lower class than the traditional
artist shows in itself one of the biggest
changes mechanical reproduction cre-
ated in artistic practice: the image had
become ‘homogenised - democratised
- by its reproduction through a mechani-
cal screen‘ allowing for the ‘increasing
significance of the masses‘ in a reality tra-
ditionally orientated towards a male elite.
This new
aesthetic plurality influenced artists in
two very direct ways. Firstly, new sub-
ject matters were opened up to art-
ists and, secondly, from analysing pho-
tography, new ways of seeing were
developed. Martin Harrison writes that
photography exposed the ’clandes-
tine, the forbidden, the pornograph-
ic’. I believe it certainly at least made
it more commonplace. We can see
in the work of contemporary paint-
er Cecily Brown how mechanical
reproduction of pornography has allowed
her to question the subject of
sex, exploitation and ‘looking as a form of
transgression’ from a post-feminist
point of view. Brown’s work can
be quite overtly explicit - look to
Performance (1999) - but surely
it would not have come about
without mechanical reproduction
breaking down barriers of conserv-
atism within society. It is work that
is relevant not just to our society
of reproducible pornography but
also for any society in time; if it took
until the twentieth century (the age
of mechanical reproduction) to
create art which truly and overtly
questions the power and intimacy
associated with sex then we can
see the importance mechanical
reproduction had on liberating
artists. But it was not just sexual
imagery that was opened up
“ to the public by mechanical
reproduction - almost eve-
ry activity was detailed
photographically in the
decades that followed
the invention of photog-
raphy. Francis Bacon
took much inspiration
from K.C. Clarke’s Po-
sitioning in Radiogra-
phy (1939), which had
over 2,500 illustrations.
It is widely documented
that photographically il-
lustrated books were of
massive importance to Ba-
con. In one exhibition partially
organised by Bacon’s future
agent entitled ’An Exhibition
of Paraphrases (free copies)’
in 1939, Victor Pasmore sub-
mitted a painting of Vermeer’s
The Lace Maker from a pho-
tograph - the original being in
the Louvre. This exemplifies just
how mechanical reproduction
broadened the horizons of art-
ists and made it easier for them
to access imagery. In fact,
Francis Bacon’s famous rein-
terpretations of Velazquez’s
Pope Innocent X were done
using many reproduced pho-
tographs of it - when he actu-
ally went to Rome (where the
original is displayed) Bacon
refused to go see the painting.
New ways of seeing were
also developed alongside the
dissemination of photographi-
cal imagery by mechanical re-
production. Bacon described
some of the ideas for his paint-
ings by saying things such as
‘slightly out of focus’, show-
ing how people’s exposure to
photography had altered the
visual lexicon as well as, more
fundamentally, how we view
images mentally. Film too al-
tered people’s perceptions of
reality and gave artists a new
visual repertoire to draw from.
Eisenstein’s The Battleship
Potemkin was an important
inspiration to Bacon, as was
Edweard Muybridge (four
copies of The Human Figure In
Motion were found in Bacon‘s
flat after his death). One can
imagine the blurred imagery
in Head VI (1949), with its ver-
tical brush strokes, to be a film
still captured as it quickly finds
itself succeeded by the next
still; the screaming mouth in
the image is directly painted
from a still of the Odessa steps
sequence of The Battleship
Potemkin. Martin Harrison said
of Bacon’s use of mass re-
produced imagery, ‘[Bacon
subverted] high art/low art
traditions through engaging
photography’s fragmented
instanaity, enmeshing Mi-
chelangelo and Muybridge,
Eisenstein and Velazquez’.
Many other artists have also
used mechanically repro-
duced films and photos as a
source of inspiration. Edward
Hopper’s utilisation of light-
ing has been compared to
the cinematography of Film
Noir and in turn is said to
have inspired future film mak-
ers such as Alfred Hitchcock.
Eric Fischl is another contem-
porary painter who has used
the new photographic way
of seeing in his art. But unlike
Bacon’s blurred images or
Hopper’s subtle use of light,
Fischl uses the way in which
a photograph is framed as his
starting point, presenting it as
a symbol to represent mod-
ern short sightedness and a
lack of understanding. David
Hopkins writes that ‘Fischl’s
work communicates moral
breakdown in the way it is
photographically derived…
Unlike Gericault he can-
not achieve a unified public
statement’. This is in reference
to Fischl’s painting The Old
Man’s Boat and the Old Man’s Dog
(1982) which quotes from Theodore
Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa
(1819). In Fischl’s painting the boat is
not portrayed as a whole - we only
get a snapshot, as if someone in the
corner of the boat had taken a pho-
tograph. This shows mechanical re-
production’s influence over artistic
practice at work in two forms; firstly,
being a New York based painter,
Fischl is likely to have observed
Gericault’s painting mainly through
reproductions and to have taken
inspiration from it. Secondly, the me-
chanical reproduction of imagery
has inspired Fischl to the extent that
he has taken on the compositional
techniques of the photographic im-
ages and given them a ‘connoted’
message - something which Barthes
said the photograph did not pos-
sess in its own right. This new way
of seeing was fundamentally about
seeing objectively and broke down
traditional rules on perspective and
framing. This continues the ’revo-
lutionary demands’ that Benjamin
hoped could be brought about
through mechanical reproduction,
in subtle but far reaching ways.
Through the creation and
promotion of new art forms, associ-
ated new critical theories, the com-
mercialisation of art, the removal of
a painting’s ‘aura’ and its autono-
my, the broadened access to the
artistic dialogue, the easy access
toimagery that led to new subject
matters, new ways of seeing, and
a visually educated society, we
can see the vast number of differ-
ing ways that art has been affected
by mechanical reproduction. While
these are all ways that it has directly
affected artistic practice, the indi-
rect effect on art has been to make art
a subject that is no longer the preserve
of the wealthy - I imagine almost every-
one in Britain today must have seen an
image of an Andy Warhol screen print.
This has broadened the dialogue around
art exponentially and while some in the
art world do their best to keep it elit-
ist through the constant building up of
concepts and vocabulary designed to
alienate most of society, art is now irre-
versibly within the grasp of all. Having
someone to say a piece of art work is
pretentious keeps artists grounded and
mechanical reproduction has meant
there will always be critics who have not
‘gone native’ in the art world to criticise
objectively. As one online blogger put it,
‘People should be allowed to…ask ques-
tions (if they suspect the Emperor has no
clothes)…If this admission should cause
me to be labelled as having plebeian
taste, bring it on‘. Conversely, thanks
to the revolutionary changes brought
about in ‘democratising’ art and im-
agery, artists from poorer backgrounds,
such as Tracey Emin, have been able
to climb the ranks of the art world and
this, I believe, is the biggest effect me-
chanical reproduction has had on ar-
tistic practice. The more people who
are encouraged to participate in art,
the richer the discipline must become.
Article by Thom Swann

Bibliography: Roland Barthes, The Photographic Message, Stephen Heath (Ed.), Image Music Text; (Fontana Press,
London, 1977) // Gerry Beegan, The Mass Image: A social history of photomechanical reproduction in Victorian
London; (Palgrave MacMillan, London, 2008) // Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Repro-
duction; (Penguin, London, 2008) // Suzanne Cotter, Cecily Brown: Paintings; (Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, 2005)
// Martin Harrison, Francis Bacon: Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting; (Thames and Hudson, London,
2005) // Klaus Honnef, Andy Warhol 1928-1987: Commerce into Art; (Taschen,Koln, 2005) // David Hopkins, After
Modern Art: 1945-2000; (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000) // Michael Rush, New Media in Late 20th-Century Art;
(Thames and Hudson, London, 2001) // Salome Voeglin, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of
Sound Art; (Continuum, New York, 2010) // S. Wagstaff, Edward Hopper; (Tate Publishing, London, 2004).

Design and illustration by Thom Swann. www.thomswannillustration@blogspot.com // thomswanndesign@hotmail.co.uk