kagablog

Artist: Michael Matthews
Title: The Necromancer
Medium: DVD projection or monitor display
Duration: 3 hours in a continuous loop
First Edition of five
Abstract: The Necromancer on one hand aims to reflect a state of mind. In a situation of bondage there is a stretching of time. In this case ten minutes can feel like three hours that loops forever. Mental awareness is heightened and the mind and body melt into a single substance. A substance that is so fragile that it could shatter like glass if an unquantisised equilibrium is overshot. As time passes there is a morphising process that takes place resulting in a multiplicity of symbologies from primitive structuralisms to meditative yoga positions and finally a total melt down of the ego. At this point a pensive cycle begins.

The viewer is looking at this process. The Necromancer is encased in glass and slowly melts down through a series of changes that are hardly observable but placed in linear time. It is like watching a series of magical changes of a meditative nature that occurs in the infinite. The figure starts off as a female form and at some point becomes male finally ending in gist.

Electronic sounds crackle and pop like electric fields that are switching in the body and create a presence that pulls the viewer back to a specific point of focus. This whole process is portrayed as a virtual simulacrum that is reminiscent of the computer electronic age.

On another level the Necromancer is you the viewer. You are also the voyeur and procurer who controls and manipulates the experience of the bonded. At any time you possibly can stop or change the experience in this case by walking away.

Michael Matthews
2007

At this point in history it is becoming increasingly difficult to believe in the concept of the individual genius. The genius can only be understood in the structure of the collective thought that has gone before. The individual genius as a concept is grounded in Modernist thought. The Modernist way of thinking has led us to believe that the genius idea can be found in originality. In this framework we understand the concept of the genius as the originator of original thought - the embodiment of originality. The struggle then is for individuality and originality though innovation. However, as the broad basis of knowledge increases so does specialisation. And as specialisation increases so does the need for collaborative knowledge pools.

The romantic notions of the artist in the studio struggling to create that last master piece, as is so often portrayed by popular fiction, becomes absurd in the 21st century. This is still a notion that is popularised by many American critics. The premise for this argument lies in the idea that the artist is still an individual genius, an idea that fits in well with the ‘American dream’. This kind of thinking is also often shrouded in myth. The 1980’s debate on the death of painting is rather glib and beyond the scope of this essay - a myth that points to an aspect of the crisis taking place in Art at the end of this millennium. The truth of this myth lies with the accepted notion that art has reached a crisis at the end of the 20th century and that the old forms of communication are riddled with confusion. Certain Art forms as forms of expression are locked in genres that carry too much past baggage that confuse meanings. If one can still see painting, or more specifically a painting, as a powerful communicator in a multi-media and multi-disciplined world culture then one’s approach is based on naivete. Walter Benjamin outlined the significance of meaning in artworks and the resultant crisis in 1935:
It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function. In other words, the unique value of the “authentic” work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty. The secular cult of beauty, developed during the Renaissance and prevailing for three centuries, clearly showed that ritualistic basis in its decline and the first deep crisis which befell it. With the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, photography, simultaneously with the rise of socialism, art sensed the approaching crisis which has become evident a century later. At the time, art reacted with the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, that is, with a theology of art. This gave rise to what might be called a negative theology in the form of the idea of “pure” art, which not only denied any social function of art but also any categorizing by subject matter (Walter Benjamin).

In recent times the ability to reproduce artworks mechanically has been made available to the general public on a mass scale. This availability is cost-effective and easily assessable to a majority that has opened the door to new forms of expression. The history of mechanical reproduction started with the Greeks using techniques of founding and stamping. In later centuries the woodcut allowed graphic art to be distributed on to a larger audience and in the 10th century engraving and etching techniques became available. In the 19th century, lithography allowed for inexpensive changes and recreations of graphic images, but this was soon surpassed by photography and film (Walter Benjamin).

It has been these changes that have undermined the concept of the presence of the original as a prerequisite to the concept of authenticity. The idea of authenticity in art has recently been a sensitive issue in Western thought. As Walter Benjamin says:
The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object (Walter Benjamin).

If we take this argument further, we see how reproduction has opened the gaps for collective ideas to seep through. As he states:
To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility matter (Walter Benjamin).
Walter Benjamin sees the shift that occurs in artworks as one from ‘been reproduced’ to ‘predetermined reproduction’ but what has actually happened is that the artworks are currently an ‘aspect of reproduction’. In other words, the shift that has occurred is one from the ‘observed’ to the ‘participant’.
In late 20th century Western cultures the reference framework for Art, through specialisation, is undermined. The author’s ideas have been increasingly isolated from a larger framework and meanings have become centralised in partial contexts. With Modernist values losing credibility, the information explosion, and with new ways of expression available to the artist, the artist as the isolated singular author becomes increasingly absurd. Even Walter Benjamin realized that “painting is simply in no position to present an object for simultaneous collective experience” (Walter Benjamin).

The 21st century will be a time of collaboration between specialists with a specific goal that is predetermined via common premises. An artwork may have a single or multiple author(s). Ultimately the artwork remains a singular isolated component that can only be understood in the context of the framework that has been attributed to it by the society within which it is contexturalised. The meaning of the object/item/artwork can only be altered as the social context and structure changes. A sort of one-to-many relationship is established between the object/item and its meaning. As Julian Scaff in discussing Walter Benjamin’s article on the “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” points out:
The digital reproduction of anything is not reliant upon any materiality in the process, apart from the quantification of an image of a material object. This makes it vastly different than any other technology of reproduction in history. Digital reproduction is actually based on a philosophy of quantification that began with the ancient Greeks. This philosophy of quantification lead directly to the invention of binary code, the representation of information with ones and zeros. The reproduction of art using this binary code removes any materiality from the process, and thus the digital is quite different than the mechanical. Although mechanical (especially photographic) reproduction forever changed our notions of authenticity and perhaps destroyed the ritualistic-ness of art in our society, these notions may not even apply at the simplest level to the digital reproduction. Much of this is due to the very apparatus of the computer. Just as the apparatus of the camera itself changed notions about art, imagery, and reality more so than the content of the medium, the computer apparatus is inherently resistant to older assumptions about the purposes of art, the substantiability of authenticity, and the role of the artist (Julian Scaff).

He goes further in showing the changes that have taken place in the values of late 20th century reproduction:

What is authentic with a digital reproduction? The artwork on the computer can be replicated a hundred or a million times, each copy being perfectly identical. With the ingress of the global internet, the digital work of art may be transmitted and viewed by millions of people in schools, offices, and homes any time of the day in countless different conditions. Not only does authenticity become meaningless, but space and time become an ambiguity for which we only have vague metaphors such as “cyberspace.” With the digital reproduction of art there may still be an “original” somewhere in the world that was scanned, sampled, or otherwise digitized, but the digital art form takes on a life of its own.
The apparatus of the computer is totally unlike the camera as a device for reproduction. The camera is a very accessible and inexpensive piece of technology, now requiring very little skill, and with processing labs abundant and relatively cheap in developed nations. However, the camera is only one step in the process of reproduction. Most users are quite removed from the film developing process, and do not have access to modes of mass production and distribution. The computer apparatus, on the other hand, serves as the mode of production, reproduction, and mass distribution. For around a thousand dollars, anyone with a telephone line can buy a computer with a modem and be “surfing” the web, grabbing digital art works, reproducing them, and distributing them to other web surfers (Julian Scaff).
Computer art and the Internet has been essential in breaking the hold that Modernist thinking has had on authorship, creativity and genius. As Julian Scaff says: “Not only is authenticity in question, but the idea of authorship is almost obsolete” (Julian Scaff).

The creation of artworks by many authors over a period of time is also important in understanding the loss of authorship. An object/item/artwork that is created by many authors over time, creates new facets of experience that regenerate meaning. When looking at an artwork created in this way it is important to understand the time and spatial based relationships. If the original work is the parent, the next generations are the child/ren and their sibling/s. In other words, the parent produces a next generation or child/ren that can also produce child/ren or sibling/s. The genes of the parent are passed onto the child. The work and its creator are positioned historically as time specific, but the work is also time-untied as it is a self-regeneration of a form by new creators. What happens here is that the meaning of each single stage of the artwork appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all proceeding events and the potential of all future ones.

The work as a living organism

Works that are created by multi authors over unfixed time frames are developmental. Multiple authors work in historical positions that are tuned to the current historical contexts, the present requirements and the context of the specific age. Sianne Ngai in discussing recent issues in contemporary art has coined the term ‘agglutination’ – “the mass adhesion or coagulation of data particles or signifying units” (Sianne Ngai) – to describe this move away from the singular author. However, she incorrectly sees agglutination as achieved only through the devices of repetition, permutation, and seriality and not as a collective process of progression and recreation. The result of only seeing agglutination in this way rather than as the potential rebirthing force that it is, is that agglutination becomes a negative force in contemporary art. The agglutination of an artwork is one that evolves to recreate meaning by removing the idea of the completed artwork.

The concept of the final or finished product is lost when the work is a recreation of potential and actual creators. The artwork is a result of the individual and collective reinvention and counter-invention of the artwork, which is the artwork. The artwork is in a constant state of evolution and meaning is reestablished in context to contemporary issues. To view the individual results or instances is equivalent to the understanding of moments in isolation – it’s like viewing a singular frame of a film.
What each of the creators do is to realize a moment of crystallisation of the work as a potential. The individual may be limited by a specific time frame but through mating with others is able to create a rebirth that occurs continually over time with an evolving meaning framed in changing contexts. The individual author is lost and replaced with the multi-author. The individual object/item/artwork is lost and replaced with the progressive state.
The individual genius is dead…

It seems as if one of the most singular achievements of science in the 20th century is the loss of the concept of the individual isolated object. This emphasis on the effects of objects can be found in the System and related theories. In the System Theory we find that objects and ideas are treated as trans-disciplinary. Broadly put, the System Theory is the investigation of the organization of objects and there inter-relatedness freed from the classification of physical identity (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SYSTHEOR.html).

The System Theory was originally a theory proposed in the 1940’s by the Biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy and further developed by Ross Ashby (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SYSTHEOR.html). It attempts to make the incoherence of scientific thought coherent by creating models, which look for the common principles that describe them. The result is the realization that systems interact with the environment through an evolutionary procedure. Hence, the Systems Theory focuses on the organization of parts coupled with the emphasis on the relationship of these parts to the whole structure. As Francis Heylighen and Cliff Joslyn have pointed out:

The developments of systems theory are diverse (Klir, Facets of Systems Science, 1991), including conceptual foundations and philosophy (e.g. the philosophies of Bunge, Bahm and Laszlo); mathematical modeling and information theory (e.g. the work of Mesarovic and Klir); and practical applications. Mathematical systems theory arose from the development of isomorphies between the models of electrical circuits and other systems. Applications include engineering, computing, ecology, management, and family psychotherapy. Systems analysis, developed independently of systems theory, applies systems principles to aid a decision-maker with problems of identifying, reconstructing, optimizing, and controlling a system (usually a socio-technical organization), while taking into account multiple objectives, constraints and resources. It aims to specify possible courses of action, together with their risks, costs and benefits. Systems theory is closely connected to cybernetics, and also to system dynamics, which models changes in a network of coupled variables (e.g. the “world dynamics” models of Jay Forrester and the Club of Rome). Related ideas are used in the emerging “sciences of complexity”, studying self-organization and heterogeneous networks of interacting actors, and associated domains such as far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics, chaotic dynamics, artificial life, artificial intelligence, neural networks, and computer modeling and simulation.
(Francis Heylighen and Cliff Joslyn http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SYSTHEOR.html)
A spin-off theory of the System Theory, the Chaos Theory, on the other hand has offered a more ‘organic’ interpretation of the world. This is a theory that has grown out of the System Theory but emphasizes the study of systems that are or appear to be not ordered.

A chaotic system is one in which a tiny change can have a huge effect. Thus the oft heard statement that a butterfly in China can cause a hurricane in the Atlantic. What makes the situation even more difficult is that we have only recently begun to forge the mathematical tools necessary to study these problems. As usual, some of the seminal works on chaos were performed by physicists of the former USSR, whose work received scant attention until recently; although today, chaotic systems are being extensively studied both experimentally and theoretically (http://membrane.com/chaos/sidd.html).

What these theories imply is that the singular object needs to be investigated in its environment. The object has lost its individual significance and can only really be understood in relation to the context or system from which it forms part of. Couple this kind of thinking with Werner Heisenberg’s (1901–76) Quantum Theory, and its scientific revelations, and we realize that we can no longer look at an object independent of the process of observation. The result is that, theoretically at least, the object is removed and we are left with the idea of the object rather than the object itself. The individual physical object is lost. We can no longer say with absolute certainty that we have an understanding of the object but rather only an understanding of our relationship with the object.

Niels Bohr points out that these states of object and observation are inseparable.

An independent reality in the ordinary physical sense can … neither be ascribed to the phenomena nor to the agencies of observation.
(http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html#78)

The object and the observer and the interpretation of the observation are inextricably locked together. A further complexity is added by Bell. Bell’s theory points out that in attempting to understand an object, that not only is the object affected, but also, that related objects are affected. It was this view that David Bohm termed “implicate order”. (http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html#125).

The implications of these Post Modern views of the world are that they tend to stress the symbolism and representation of the object under observation. The result of this worldview is that it moves beyond singular disciplinary boundaries. Alan D. Sokal points out:

It is not a question of whether these natural objects, or, to be more precise, the objects of natural scientific knowledge, exist independently of the act of knowing. This question is answered by the assumption of “real” time as opposed to the presupposition, common among neo-Kantians, that time always has a referent, that temporality is therefore a relative, not an unconditioned, category. Surely, the earth evolved long before life on earth. The question is whether objects of natural scientific knowledge are constituted outside the social field. If this is possible, we can assume that science or art may develop procedures that effectively neutralize the effects emanating from the means by which we produce knowledge/art. Performance art may be such an attempt.

This way of thinking has resulted in a pluralist view of the object. A view that has rejected the notion of a single reference system in which to establish truth but accepts multiple forms of approaches, evidence, and reasoning.

In contemporary thinking the object becomes a possible carrier of multiple meanings and connections. The individual object as an isolated entity is lost. The object as existing in isolated time is lost. In other words, we are moving into a century where the time-based object is lost. This thesis is complemented by the greater demands that technology has placed on the object. Just as the world is made smaller through the use of technology, so is the significance of the impact of the individual object made greater, through its loss of place.

“The new machines did not all come at once. It proved easier to mechanize”.

The manufacturing of productive goods may be seen as an essential aspect of a culture’s development and future progression. The manufacturing and development of productive goods is a necessary requirement of a food gathering/hunting society. The creation of productive goods cannot be separated from the social developments of a particular society. They reflect the advanced state of the technological development of that society.

When it comes to the production of goods, a nomadic tribe would make the simplest tools, weapons and containers. Possibly, of those materials that are most readily available from the immediate environment. Societies that are settled tend to develop more complex manufacturing processes. Over a period of time one may see a progressive refinement and intricity of the goods that this society manufactures. The refinement of goods can be seen to reach its highest level of development with industrialisation and mass production.

The 18th century saw the beginning of a technological development that has affected contemporary society. It began in Europe with the textile industry in Britain (1733) and developed further in America with the opening of Samuel Slater’s cotton mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island in 1793. Industrialisation in its beginning relied on a system. A system that created a demand for goods which were cheaper and free from regulation. This technological development, also known as the Industrial Revolution, was one of the main revolutions of this era. It changed manufacturing by changing the way people work. The industrial revolution introduced new kinds of machinery, which revolutionised the workers environment creating the factory system. The factory system in turn created the standardised product. The use of machines also enabled goods to be produced in greater quantities and at a fraction of the cost of hand produced goods for both producer and consumer. Eberhard Wenzel identified two consequences of technological developments:

the breakdown of community existence, and
the institutionalization of abstract power. (Wenzel Eberhard. 2000 How modern is post-modern?)
He goes further and looks at the consequences of the industrial process on political issues.

“In the Middle Ages power came from the aristocracy and religious institutions; the secularization of power afterwards has led to a diffusion concerning the social and cultural origins of power-holders. There have been people in power with no other qualification than that they were elected to their position. The secularization of power opened up a whole area of job opportunities for those having been excluded from power before. This type of democratization, however, has not proven to be successful in many cases because it motivated those in economic power to execute their influence in all civic affairs related to their businesses. Working class and middle class people do not get involved in that system of power distribution because they lack the substantial ingredient: money. The result is a sort of democracy permitting those in economic power to run for governmental office in case they were unable to find someone else they could pay for running on behalf of them”. (Wenzel Eberhard. 2000 How modern is post-modern?)

Before the introduction of machines and the factory setting, hand manufactured goods, in single homes or cottages, where the owner worked side by side with his employees was normal. This changed with the introduction of machines and mass production. Industrialisation in the 18th and 19th centuries has brought work out of the home and centralized it in the factory. This relocation of the work force can be seen as the keystone to the development of technology as we know it today. Thomas Carlyle epitomised the feeling amongst academics in Britain at the time of the Industrial revolution.

“Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practices the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helps and accompaniments, some cunning abbreviating process is in readiness. Our old modes of exertion are all discredited and thrown aside. On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster. The sailor furls his sail, and lays down his oar; and bids a strong, unwearied servant, on vaporous wings, bear him through the waters. Men have crossed oceans by steam; the Birmingham Fire-king has visited the fabulous East; and the genius of the Cape, were there any Cameons now to sing it, has again been alarmed, and with far stranger thunders than Gamas. There is no end to machinery. Even the horse is stripped of his harness, and finds a fleet firehorse yoked in his stead. Nay, we have an artist that hatches chickens by steam; the very brood-hen is to be superseded! For all earthly, and for some unearthly purposes, we have machines and mechanic furtherances; for mincing our cabbages; for casting us into magnetic sleep. We remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highway; nothing can resist us. We war with rude Nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils”. (Thomas Carlyle: from Signs of the Times: The “Mechanical Age”.)

In an industrial society there is a move away from the individual’s creation to that of mass and standard production. The ‘ills of nature’ are seen as vanquished by the ‘omnipotent mechanisation process’, or the ‘hand crafted item’ is replaced by the ‘machine finish’. The closer a society is to industrialisation the greater the chances are that the individual production of goods is associated with group processes and the combined efforts of mechanised processes. This process of corporate production results in a decline of the individuals creative energies. An example of this loss can be found in the Joshuna Drake’s family. The Drakes’ can be considered a typical household living in a small country village in England in approximately 1794. A Household where the men and boys were often unemployed and had to try and find some form of work if they could not get work in the local factories. The female contingent of the family faired much worse, who, when deprived of the local industry, Woolen Spinning, had no other form of employment, (except when they could go into the fields) to bring in any money towards the support of the Family.

In 1832 Michael Sadler secured a parliamentary investigation on the conditions in textile factories in Britain. The below excerpt was originally reprinted in an American textbook called Readings in European History Since 1814, which was edited by Jonathan F. Scott and Alexander Baltzly and was published by Appleton-Century-Crofts Inc. in 1930.

You say you would prefer moderate labour and lower wages; are you pretty comfortable upon your present wages?
–I have no wages, but two days a week at present; but when I am working at some jobs we can make a little, and at others we do very poorly.

When a child gets 3s. a week, does that go much towards its subsistence?
–No, it will not keep it as it should do.

When they got 6s. or 7s. when they were pieceners, if they reduced the hours of labour, would they not get less?
–They would get a halfpenny a day less, but I would rather have less wages and less work.

Do you receive any parish assistance?
–No.

Why do you allow your children to go to work at those places where they are ill-treated or over-worked?
–Necessity compels a man that has children to let them work.

Then you would not allow your children to go to those factories under the present system, if it was not from necessity?
–No.

Supposing there was a law passed to limit the hours of labour to eight hours a day, or something of that sort, of course you are aware that a manufacturer could not afford to pay them the same wages?
–No, I do not suppose that they would, but at the same time I would rather have it, and I believe that it would bring me into employ; and if I lost 5d. a day from my children’s work, and I got half-a-crown myself, it would be better.

How would it get you into employ?
–By finding more employment at the machines, and work being more regularly spread abroad, and divided amongst the people at large. One man is now regularly turned off into the street, whilst another man is running day and night.

You mean to say, that if the manufacturers were to limit the hours of labour, they would employ more people?
–Yes. (British Parliamentary Papers, 1831-1832, vol. XV. pp. 44, 95-97, 115, 195, 197, 339, 341-342.)

The Families in rural settlements were generally dependent on the local industrial employer, as consumers looked upon homemade and handcrafted goods as inferior and too expensive. A classic example of the marginaliseation of the individuals creative energies can be found in the lengths that William Morris went to in an attempt to reestablish the handcrafted item as an alternative to the industrial product in the early 1900’s.

But, not all authors see industrialisation as a necessary evil. Andrew Ure identified the industrialisation of a nation as an economic necessity in the 19th century.

“This island (England) is pre-eminent among civilized nations for the prodigious development of its factory wealth, and has been therefore long viewed with a jealous admiration by foreign powers. This very pre-eminence, however, has been contemplated in a very different light by many influential members of our own community, and has been even denounced by them as the certain origin of innumerable evils to the people, and of revolutionary convulsions to the state. If the affairs of the kingdom be wisely administered, I believe such allegations and fears will prove to be groundless, and to proceed more from the envy of one ancient and powerful order of the commonwealth, towards another suddenly grown into political importance, than from the nature of things….” (Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures London: Chas. Knight 1835, pp. 5-8, 14-15, 20-21, 23, 29-31).

Ure’s rightly correlates industrial implementation on a national scale with national wealth, but, fails to come to terms with the long-term loss of individual creativity and in consequence the loss of economic turn over. He fails to predict the eventual undermining of 19th century industrial processes with the drop off of economic grow in the 20th century. A result that was due to the lack of a creatively inspired work force, a need that has been identified as essential in the 21st century. With historical distancing we now know that without a creatively inspired Nation there is a general drop off in produced goods as it is not the quantity that is so important as the produced goods variety and functionality. The work force of today needs to produce items that are continually changing to meet ever-differing needs.

Ure further goes on to identify the aim if the industrial process in a factory work area. He highlights the role of the operator and shows how with a mechanised process the operator can be replaced by overlookers. Note his attitude to the operator or skilled workman.

“The principle of the factory system then is, to substitute mechanical science for hand skill, and the partition of a process into its essential constituents, for the division or graduation of labour among artisans. On the handicraft plan, labour more or less skilled was usually the most expensive element of production…. but on the automatic plan, skilled labour gets progressively superseded, and will, eventually, be replaced by mere overlookers of machines. By the infirmity of human nature it happens, that the more skilful the workman, the more self-willed and intractable he is apt to become, and, of course, the less fit a component of a mechanical system, in which, by occasional irregularities, he may do great damage to the whole. The grand object therefore of the modern manufacturer is, through the union of capital and science, to reduce the task of his work-people to the exercise of vigilance and dexterity, - faculties, when concentred to one process, speedily brought to perfection in the young. In the infancy of mechanical engineering, a machine-factory displayed the division of labour in manifold gradations - the file, the drill, the lathe, having each its different workmen in the order of skill: but the dexterous hands of the filer and driller are now superseded by the planing, the key groove cutting, and the drilling-machines; and those of the iron and brass turners, by the self-acting slide-lathe….” (Andrew Ure, 1835 The Philosophy of Manufactures. London: Chas. Knight, pp. 5-8, 14-15, 20-21, 23, 29-31).

He sees this reduction in the work force and skilled labour as an economic necessity.

“It is, in fact, the constant aim and tendency of every improvement in machinery to supersede human labour altogether, or to diminish its cost, by substituting the industry of women and children for that of men; or that of ordinary labourers for trained artisans. In most of the water-twist, or throstle cotton-mills, the spinning is entirely managed by females of sixteen years and upwards. The effect of substituting the self-acting mule for the common mule, is to discharge the greater part of the men spinners, and to retain adolescents and children”. (Andrew Ure, 1835 The Philosophy of Manufactures. London: Chas. Knight, pp. 5-8, 14-15, 20-21, 23, 29-31).

And the improvements of a mechanised society as:

The fabrication of articles that could not be made by hand.
A greater quantity of consistent quality.
They enforce a smaller skilled labour force. (Andrew Ure, 1835 The Philosophy of Manufactures. London: Chas. Knight, pp. 5-8, 14-15, 20-21, 23, 29-31).
These generalised modernist views of economic forces tend to ignore the creative energies of the worker. The emphasis on industry and machinery tends to breed a dependency on employment and a reduction in the productive skills of the worker. The individual becomes alienated and without a means for individual production and a creative outlet. The machinery and tools, apart from the loss of skills to apply them, are also out of the financial gasp of the middle classes. Industrialisation is a way that Governments and industrialists are able to reintroduce a kind of slavery. A ‘non-thinking’ society that is dependent on minority control. A slavery of the physical worker and later a slavery of the mind through a lack of stimulation and through the variety of opportunities offered to the individual. (It is interesting that with the development of the industrial revolution that factory workers were banned from leaving England in 1734.)

In a Post-Industrial society the creation of goods are more abstract and the individual is re-given opportunities for creative endeavors. In most countries there is a move away from agriculture to what A. Toffler has identified as a service based economy.

Technology is seen as the means of revolutionising the whole of society and creating an even greater social upheaval than did the industrial age. The industrial age may confuse work and productivity, but with the computer age we find that creativity becomes work. The individual is able to work from home and on work that becomes increasingly a manipulation of a symbol based system. In other works, the work takes place more in the individual’s head and is more depended on cultural and social factors.

“An important trend in the development of the post-industrial society in the 1990s is the increasing use of widespread computer-networks. The number of Internet users has grown to ca. 45 million and is still only at its starting position. The Net, having more and more importance, and without which life will soon be unimaginable, is developing into an environment totally different from the relations hitherto existing in the society that spawned it. This Net is not subordinated to any central control, its manipulation by any one force or its serving any one political, religious or commercial purpose or cause is practically impossible. It is the first free working structure, which lacks central control and the possibility for domination and control of ideas.” (Soosaar, Sven-Erik (translator) 1994 Ethno-Futurism as a mode of thinking for an alternative future.)

Industrialisation may begin by restricting individual creation, as we have seen at the beginning of this century. But through the advent of computerisation, it has moved from a time of mass control and uniform creation, to the technological and post-technological stages where the power has shifted back within the reach of the individual. The Post-industrial age is potentially an age of socio-cultural and technological development, which could free the individual from the burden of manual labour, class struggle, sexual exploitation and environmental destruction. The very instruments that due to economic unavailability in an industrial age is suddenly available to the individual in a Post-Industrial age. The individual now has means of economic independence in the form of small business and personal service opportunities. Using a variety of tools individuals are offered opportunities for universal and trans-cultural communication. The Internet allows worldwide assess almost instantaneously. Communication and time for the transfer of meanings becomes readily available at a reduced cost. A typical example of the effects of this kind of thinking can by found amounts a young group of Ukrainian’s who call themselves Ethno-Futurists. They attempt to use the Internet to cut across cultural and language groups and as a dynamic socio-political tool.

“The entity and idea of ethno-futurism is to connect the two extremities of culture - to make the indigenous meet the cosmopolitan and urban. At the point where these two find each other the spark of ethno-futurism is born”. (Soosaar, Sven-Erik (translator), 1994 Ethno-futurism as a mode of thinking for an alternative future.)

The shift is away from corporate industry to the home industry. From singular social groups to mixed cultural groups. The attempt to control copyright and the growth of collective knowledge becomes increasingly difficult. The individual becomes a collector of information that is assimilated and re-assimilated in an ever-widening spiral. A spiral where the basis of authorship is ever broadening. The purveyor of information now becomes the collective ‘We’. ‘Texts’ are rewritten and assimilated at a rapid rate.

Umberto Eco, in his well know example of Post-Modernism, gives a clear explanation of how the progression of concepts are accumulative:

“I think of the post-modern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, “I love you madly”, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution.

He can say, “As Barbara Cartland would put it, ‘I love you madly”. At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this, she will have received a declaration of love all the same.

Neither of the two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the challenge of the past, of the already said, which cannot be eliminated, both will consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony… But both will have succeeded, once again, in speaking of love”. (Umberto Eco, postscript to the Name of the Rose)

Layers of meaning are now conveyed through irony and a loss of innocence. The artist likewise cannot create objects in isolation or in innocence of the historical past. As an interconnected social organism it also seems as if the time fixed artwork, or the corporate object, is also something of a myth. What we are seeing is a liberation of the individual’s creative energies.

THE CHANGING FACES OF ART
 
PART I – THE SIGNATURE ARTWORKS
 
Since the Renaissance artists have at times made pints of their major artworks. Printmaking over a period developed into an independent art form. Artists found printmaking an economical way of making images that were affordable to the masses. Artists realised that they could reproduce an image manifold times, through engraving and later through an etching, cost effectively for the general public. It was a way of sustaining their productivity while they focused on their major artworks.
 
With the advent of commercialisation in the 20th century this became a matter of course. Vladimir Tretchikoff was one of he first artists to take advantage of modern printed reproduction techniques (“one of the most commercially successful artists of all time”). He worked closely with the commercial and businesses worlds and allowed his artworks to be reproduced synthetically. Many of his reproductions were sold at non-traditional art venues such as ‘BEARS’. In the 1970s he was relegated to the margins of South African high art. At this time he indulgently claimed: “I don’t care what they think I’m earning more than Picasso ever did from my art”.
 
Apart from the many issues and debates about his work, what is of interest in this thesis is the issue of reproduction. With Trechikoff he almost always reproduced uncostly printed images of his major works. This was, and in many cases is, an issue with investors in that they were concerned that the value of the artwork was being undermined. Prints have traditionally being considered as low art, just as painting and sculpture was considered as high art. In other words, when it came to the actual artwork, the genius of the artist was needed to give the artwork value. This kind of ideological outlook is closely tied to the 20th century and specifically Western thinking where progress is seen as consecutive and with ‘newness’ or ‘differentness’. With printmaking the artists ‘hand’ became a debatable issue and the multiplicity of the prints were and are the result in a reduced monetary value.
 
Added to these problems of the Western idea of an ‘individual genius’ were the developments of new printmaking techniques that were more cost effective - silk-screening and lithography, added new perspectives to the printmaking agenda. It is well documented that artists prior to he 20th century were seemingly threatened by the new developments in mass production. Mass mechanical solutions to printing and photography marginalised those artists who earned a livening from printmaking.
 
Photography offered a new way of realising the world but was seen as low art. Most of these ways are beyond the scope of this essay, but, apart from other concepts, photography did offer new ways of questioning the authenticity of the image. Photography offered a new way of mass producing an image which was and is cost effective. Photography was and is a superlative process that replaced the exclusivity of a growing middle class in art. The photograph seemed to be the ultimate subjection of bourgeois ideology long before digital reproduction did.
 
With the advent of digital reproduction the authenticity of the artwork was further subjected to scrutiny. There are many polemics in this arena; the one that concerns us is that of the original digital or multi-processional artwork in a digital age. Printmaking in the late 20th century appeared to become redundant. Artists were able to reproduce their artworks; to get their individual ideas communicated cost effectively to a wide public on a mass scale. Tretchikoff may have being one of the first (internationally) to realise this goal.
 
PART II – THE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
 
The debate of the authenticity of the artwork has raged widely in the 20th century, a debate that was exasperated by collage and furthered by Dadaism, Conceptualism and Photography. Although much of the philosophical debate missed printmaking, towards the end of the 20th century printmaking began to make its own way into the ‘high art’ Art scene. Printmaking due to its limited longevity and reproductive characteristic was always considered as a low art form. With the advent of digitalisation and mechanical specialised ‘high tech’ reproduction techniques this exclusivity of the individual object of ‘genius’ began to wane.
 
In the commercial market this idea of longevity began to take precedence. Art collectors appear to be after artworks that have longevity. The inherent multi-reproduction nature of digital art has negatively far superseded the collectors market that once was held by photography. Photography is an art form used by capitalism to collectively mirror society, through popular magazines and publications, and often as a Low Art presents itself as High Art. This in itself is a self-destructive duplicity.
 
The now ‘old’ forms of printmaking now became exclusive once again. Print shops and master printers emerged in the gaps that digital reproduction left. Printmaking as a craft seems to have emerged as a high art form at the turn of this century. Artists could now make traditional forms of prints that were considered to be high art and desirable by collectors. The printmaking studios were encouraged to leave there mark on the print as a sign of integrity - to indicate that this was a quality print.
 
Digital art seems to have replaced oil painting this century. The problem is that the digital artwork is amorphous. It is a work that exists in mathematical code. This is not only exclusive to ‘Photoshop’ type artworks but also digital photography which has quickly morphed into this new digital form (maybe because its one of the newer art disciplines). Presently digital art is considered to be low art as collectors are confused about the authenticity of the artwork. If they purchase a digital artwork “what is the work?” The image or artwork in a digital form can be reproduced thousands of times without losing quality. Should the print be considered the artwork or the conceptual data?
 
PART III – THE ARTISTS INTEGRITY
 
Chris Diedericks, a well known South African printmaker who has recently broken into Digital Art, in his recent body of works presents his digital prints with the name of the printing company printed blazingly on the print. He claims that just like traditional type printing studios, who insignia their prints, so to should the digital-print have an insignia of the printing company displayed. He believes that this gives the digital-print more “integrity”. Although, in effect, this appears to none initiates as a commercial sign that advertises the company who printed the work. It appears to be an illogical sign that carries an oxymoron concept. The reason for this is that digital print ‘shops’ are not places of expertise or high craftsmanship in the production of their prints they rely solely on mechanical processes where the quality of printing is correlated directly to the quality of the machinery that does the printing.
 
Chris Diedericks even admits that in the near future, when digital prints are seen as high, that this dramatic sacrifice of the printed artwork will not be necessary. On the one hand, he seems to be scratching around trying to find a way of adding value to his digital prints. On the other, this incongruent sign insults the viewer by indicating that the viewer needs to be educated into thinking about the longevity of the work - as if this is an issue in serious art.
 
PART IV – THE INTELLECTUAL BIGOTRY
 
In summary then: Chris Diedericks believes that it adds value to a digital artwork if the name of the printing company is brazenly printed into the work rather than subtlety displayed in the catalogue or on the label. The counter-argument is that these signs act as commercial advertisements that read as indicators of taste, in the widest consumerist sense, as found on national television or even in popular magazines.
 
Sadly, Chris Diedericks sees no merit in an artwork that has little longevity (which is relative -ed.) as its retail value is marginalised, but places a high degree of esteem on what he sees as his own “permanent intellectual property” even when he has appropriated other ‘artists’ images. As a justification he clams to alter the other artist’s works more than 30% - the legal requirement in copyright law on intellectual property.
 
This rhetorical attitude is the height of intellectual bigotry. So, in order to let off a little steam, I cruise down to the latest ‘Pick n Pay’ and peruse the local merchandise vigilant to avoid any brand names. Out of the corner of my eye I see ‘the word’ – NO NAME

The Greek Idealists were afraid of art because they saw art as aiming, by a miraculous craft process, to recreate the chimera of reality. It is widely believed that they saw the aim of art as imitating reality. In one story the artist recreates the illusion of “grapes so that even the birds pecked at them”. Plato in his ‘Republic’ banished artists from his ideal state because he was afraid that art could incite the populous to anarchy.
 
Religions throughout the world realised and utilised the power of images to tell stories that illustrated their messages. The Early Christians used impressive graphic depictions of Heaven and Hell to provoke emotional devotions. Politicians in less than ideal states than Plato’s have used images to gain control and manipulate mass opinion.
 
Dr Nigel Spivey in his BBC series ‘How Art Made the World’ pointed out that the human gift of realising images only dates back 30 thousand years or so. In this series he also illustrates the importance of images to culture and the way that images have gained an unprecedented power when connected to movement and sound.
 
Digital Art manipulations have removed authenticity from images by removing our belief in what we see and what we think we know. We can’t believe images any more. The digital artist with a little Photoshop tweak here and there can gimp out of reality and recreate a surrealist nightmare that prances in the Kings new clothing. Unfortunately we like the king see the new clothes as the king sees them, as real.
 
So every time we see an image – a photograph or film we have to re-examine what we are looking at. Is it a construct or is it a technical exercise in touch-ups that have used those same devices that the surrealists dreamed up? We believe in these new constructs, constructs from the popular (Toy Story), the photorealistic (Dinosaurs) and to conceptualisations (The Matrix).  Instead of examining the image as a vehicle to content we view it as a technological feat and dwell on the toneless after-image or final-cut.
 
We are now left with the primeval geek idealistic view of the world, always asking ourselves; “but, is it reality?”