Tessa Paneth-Pollak

anging at the entrance to MoMA’s Eye on Europe: Prints, Books, and Multiples 1960 to Now, Tacita Dean’s T&I seems to announce many of the qualities of the works to come—works which, according to MoMA, are “distinguished by a challenge to the dominance of painting.” The exhibit tracks not an artist, a nation, or a movement, but rather, a medium—the work of art produced in multiple—and the many forms it has taken in Europe since 1960. The show opened on October 15 and runs until January 1.

Dean’s piece, produced in 2006, is a photogravure. It is comprised of 25 prints, each in its own frame. They are arranged into a five by five grid to form an image of a coastal landscape roughly 11 feet tall by 14 feet wide. The work is internally divided and, despite continuities between its pieces, never fully resolves into one image. The upper-left-most panel bears the word “START,” suggesting that it and other words scattered across T&I will provide a map for viewing the work. But no sequence follows “START”; the words do not resolve into the network they appear to form. T&I’s fragmented form foregrounds the way that the multiplication of the work of art is also a division, which dismembers the original and unified work of art that Western tradition calls for.

Walter Benjamin was among the first to recognize the consequences of mass reproduction for the concept of authenticity. In his 1936 landmark, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he wrote that “the presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.” Benjamin pointed toward the connection between a concept of the original work of art and an essentialist concept of the genius artist. Such a definition of the artist has historically been accompanied by a similarly essentialist definition of art: that which is preconceived in the genius artist’s mind, then made external. It is this one-way model of art making that is understood to produce the “original” work of art: the work of art that is conceived by an inimitable intellect can never be successfully copied, for that work is the externalization of a great mind. In the Western tradition, concept is paramount, and artistic “skill” is traditionally prized as its conduit. Works identified as the products of mere mimicry are not considered authentic.

But art that exists as a set of roughly identical copies rendered by mechanical processes is able to shed the ideology of genius. The unique work has not only been multiplied, but divided, its meaning dispersed. Authorship, too, has been dispersed and decentralized. The artist’s hand is no longer the sole manipulator of the materials for the purpose of externalizing his unique vision; the machine joins the artist’s hand in the process of making. And frequently, it is not even the artist’s hand working the machine, but that of a professional printer or publisher. The internal-made-external model is precluded by mechanical reproduction, which moves the process of art making outside the individual body of the artist and disperses it.

The process of multiplying a work of art depends on a sequence of repetitions and transfers of that image. Each of these repetitions is an opportunity for material to manifest differently—for the image to change, and for difference to be created among replicas. Most printing processes, for instance, function by a series of image transfers: an image is either made directly on or transferred onto a surface (metal, stone, glass, or silk) from which it can, in turn, be transferred multiple times onto other surfaces. In the case of T&I, Dean had a printmaker chemically transfer segments of a found photograph (produced by someone other than Dean) onto 25 separate engraving plates. The 25 images were then printed onto 25 sheets of paper. Finally, the image became a field for text, as Dean inscribed words in white across the dark ink ground of her print. Consequently, the work is a manifestation of different visions and different hands—the photographer’s, the printmaker’s, and Dean’s. It is also the product of a commercial exchange between Dean and her printer. “Concept” is no longer something that precedes the work and is created in its service; concept is now layered and changed by a series of material processes and has become inseparable from material.

The “language” section of MoMA’s exhibition establishes the significance in the last 50 years of not only the artist’s book but other printed material, including pamphlets, posters, and mail art, all of which rely on the horizontal and sequential quality of textual signs for the construction of meaning. The book is an arrangement of printed sheets which can not be experienced all at once, but necessarily in sequence. It is a form characterized by the dissemination of meaning: its content is scattered across many pages and cannot be experienced all at once. For art to take the form of a book, then, is significant.

Pawel Petasz’s 1979 “Transparent Self-Portrait” performs a brilliant deconstruction of not only the concept of individual authorship but also the unity of the identity that the portrait has traditionally implied for its subject. Petasz’s self-portrait spans across the translucent pages of a book. On any given page, only certain parts of his body are rendered. The translucency of the pages allows the viewer to glimpse pieces of the figure on the previous and ensuing page, but not to perceive Petasz’s entire portrait all at once. The book form also doubles the portrait: as the viewer pages through the book, two Petaszes always stare back, each of whom is only partially present. Like Dean’s fragmented seascape, Petasz’s portrait must be synthesized in the mind of the viewer. Petasz represents his identity as contingent and constantly in flux, subject to the touch of the reader. The book invites a different kind of viewing than do paintings or sculptures—it asks to be approached, held, and paged through. Petasz’s book, along with the rest of MoMA’s fantastic array of artists’ books on display, is under glass, fixed in place and protected from being mobilized, as it demands. These frustrating viewing conditions only emphasize the challenge that the artist’s book poses to the conventions of the art gallery, designed for the stationary and vertical work.

The “Confrontations” section of the exhibit features explicitly political works. In these works, artists exploit the multiple form as a means for disseminating their social, political, and economic criticism. But the medium is more than a vehicle in these works: it becomes part and parcel of its institutional critique.

Joseph Beuys is perhaps the star of this section. The German artist cum cult political figure has six works on display in a group show where most other artists have only one or two. For Beuys and other artists associated with the Fluxus movement, use of the disseminated medium—which was often inexpensive to make and to buy—was part of a project to democratize art viewing and production. Beuys’s 1971 How the Dictatorship of the Parties Can Be Overcome seeks to combat the hegemony of the party system and disperse political power among individuals through “direct democracy.” Beuys issued over 10,000 plastic shopping bags, each printed with a colorful diagram that contrasts the existing political order with the direct democracy he proposed. He famously claimed that “every human being is an artist, a freedom being, called to participate in transforming and reshaping the conditions, thinking, and structures that shape and condition our lives.” For Beuys, “thinking,” or the concept, is material which every human being (not a select few geniuses) has the power to manipulate. His “everyone an artist” philosophy was thus inextricably tied to his political advocacy for a “direct democracy,” which he thought would empower the individual as a participant in society.

All of the works in MoMA’s show—whether books, printed ephemera, wallpaper, shoeboxes, posters, mail, or sausages—manifest an interest in playing with the societal structures by which objects are circulated, disseminated, and exchanged. They exploit the mobile quality of conventionalized systems within capitalist society—publishing, the postal service, food distribution, commodity production—and initiate difference within them. Mechanical reproduction has the capacity to homogenize experience, but these artists have seized upon its capacity to democratize and burst open the closed work of art. Their works participate in radical reconfigurations of art, artist, and viewer. As new modes for the dissemination of culture emerge in our time—the mp3, the digital image, the Internet publication—we constantly face new questions about their consequences. The questions raised by this show are urgent ones, which enable us to think about the emancipatory potential that reproduction might offer.