I am writing this post in scrutiny of the emergence of 3-D printed object’s value as art.
No doubt there was a time in the late nineteenth century when a person took a photograph and claimed it to be a work of art and inside the gallery was a person thinking that a work of art had to be something more than a click. The modernists and postmodernists have abolished what art can be, (the list is too long for me to assimilate here) so here, I am only scrutinizing the medium for its emergence, limits and inadequacies.
Two of the predilections that have manoeuvred contemporary artists to printing objects or at least printing images to sculptural forms are time and strength, also a decline in craft but this is another matter. Time is the biggest constraint for any artists to maintain a rapid production of work to maintain themselves omnipresent in A – Z galleries, if we were to calculate the amount of time needed to make a work and the demand for a work, it would only be logical for any contemporary artist to jump on the typical bandwagon of printing objects. Strength, we are now long finished with the industrial age and growing out of the embryonic stages of the digital age, second wave into third wave, as the futurologist Alvin Toffler had put it, the dynamic of labour has morphed radically from physically demanding to mentally demanding. Look at how the Abstract Expressionists were influenced by their drudge jobs that served as their primary income compared to the generation X, Y and Z’s primary source of income, it is from the safety of a desk, screen, gallery, bar – the body is negated, unexercised, thus, inevitably inarticulate to the arduous demands of making artworks with the integrity of the hand, thus, the printer and a press-of-a-button breed of art.
Of course this phenomenon is nothing new. Did we not see in the late nineteenth century with the progression of the camera and the use of photographic film pioneered by George Eastman, 1888 and Kodak cameras becoming widely available to average consumers; the traditional painters became redundant in a breath, of course the same pattern will not emerge as contemporary artists have left depicting reality as a matter of exercise, play, a Sunday activity, and what need is there to represent something exactly if the camera can capture what is without interference. The same notion follows suit with 3-D printing. Artists can now represent 3-D things of the world with a push of the button, object-based art now has a means to become accessible as Warhol’s prints, but as much as Warhol democratized art by giving access to it to a wider public did he not just create a line hollow commodities?
The printed object is an object that we are looking at, yes, it is this thing, this thing we know by noun, familiarization, tautology but as with painting, painting that will timelessly always be a medium that can only represent a thing, event, et cetera, the viewer will only receive a mimesis of the essence the artist is trying to present. This is where 3-D printing fails, it negates on itself as fact, it contains in itself a truth-value of existing as this thing, but it is only a superficial reading and not the object’s elementary form, thus the object idles only as a superficial proposition whimpering for a superficial reading. I see no difference to how a poster should be read vis-à -vis one of these objects.
Katja Novitskova is an Estonian artist who prints enlarged images of mammals and juxes them to create sci-fi infused, comical, oxytocin receptive narratives. She is one of the many artists who have approached printing as a means of giving a 2-D image a weight and sculptural form, plugging flat images into a psychological cue of Doric columns.
I see that the use of 3-D printing will become normalized as a means of execution in the decades to come. There was no issue with the conceptual artist of the 60’s having their works fabricated after their intellectualization on the works nor is there much reaction to how contemporary artists will have their work fabricated once drawn, the only difference is in the how, the how is much different today in the fact that it is accessible, somewhat, to everyone. An average 3-D printer costs more or less two – three hundred pounds. Soon contemporary artists will be able to surpass the cost of the fabricator and have access to rapidly actualize their works as the dominant cultural producers. But when this happens, will the conceptual artist become redundant as the nineteenth century painter became nothing but a picture maker? Will the conceptual artist become a quarter-baked philosopher with no artistic fluency? Or will the format of a conceptual artist become as wince worthy as an abstract painter of today?
And as it does become normalized as with everything progressive, to a time, how will the viewers’ retinas be exercised? There is a sculpture by Henry Moore, Composition, 1931, where he depicts a warped head that could easily be recognized as a piece of digital art, the head is anonymous and shoulders present to give a corporeal reading, the gentle dips pressed into the skull shows Moore’s articulation of his hand and the proportions – the accuracy of his eye. Now, what will separate a sculpture of this magnitude to a 3-D printed object will not be the virtuosity of the artist, no, but a sincere moment of communication between artist and viewer. This is what a 3-D object will never be able to achieve, and I state this from my reflection of pictorial printed works, from Lawrence Weiner to Liam Gillick, the connexion is not there, it is inhumane, impersonal, like someone pushing a flyer in the hand.
My issue here stands in the relationship between viewer and object; the aesthetic of printed objects made is one void of the hand and has the inarguable air of a superficial surface and will always have the air of design, of an architectural model, I do not see much progression for 3-D printed objects in sculpture except from occupying space, which no doubt, some contemporary artists will attempt, just as Hollywood trailers are drenched in their necessary cathartic soundtracks.
However, maybe it is the viewers’ way of seeing that will have to adapt to these 3-D printed things, maybe it is an interaction in synch with how society today is brutally desensitized by the screen, microwave foods and that thing to become normalized – virtual reality. Maybe society is evolving to become satisfied with things printed.
A printed art to come in the 21st century? Bah! I truly hope the notion of printing stays within objects and not thought, imagine how damaged cinema would be?