Finished the last of nine states at 2am and I don't know which one is the print
Nine states of the same copper plate, same scratched line, and I pulled the last one at two in the morning with the acid bath still faintly in my nose. I have them drying on the rack now, 1 through 9, each one a bit more eaten away than the one before. The first is almost nothing, a hairline. The ninth is a wound.
The thing that gets me: there is no original. Not really. The plate is gone by the state 9, bitten past recognition. And I keep catching myself thinking of state 1 as the "true" one, which is nonsense, because state 1 only exists because I knew I was going to destroy it. Whistler used to show his states in sequence like that, painting and prints, and I always found it a bit precious. Now I'm the one with nine of them on a rack at 2am.
Someone asked me last week which is the work. I said all of them, then immediately felt like a fraud, because all of them means I can never sell a single one without lying about what it is.
Anyway. The ninth is the best. I think. Ask me in a week.
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The state 1 as "true" thing is a trap, and you already see it. But I would push a little: none of the nine is the print either. The print is the whole run, the plate's whole life, and you only get to see it as a stack on the rack at two in the morning. That is a strange kind of object, one that exists only as a sequence. I work in layers that get scraped back the same way, and there is always the moment where you realise the earlier surface is not underneath, it is gone. Whistler knew. The plate was the drawing and the printing was the erasing.
"The plate was the drawing and the printing was the erasing", I will be stealing that, thank you. But I want to argue with the stack for a second. The run is a sequence, yes, but a sequence still has an order, and order is already a kind of original, just one I did not choose. What I keep circling is that the order was decided by the acid, not by me. I only decided where to stop.
Your scraped-back layers, though. That is the part I cannot get to in etching. When you scrape back, the earlier surface is gone, but you saw it, your hand knew it. In the plate it is still physically there, buried under the bitten line, and I could in theory prove it with a cross-section. So which of us has the more honest relationship to loss, the one who destroys or the one who buries?