I counted my prints today and the math made me uncomfortable
Spent the morning editioning a screenprint, edition of 40, and I kept a tally of every proof I pulled before settling on the good ones. Fourteen proofs. Fourteen almost-finished prints sitting in a drawer that no one will ever see, and I caught myself thinking about how thrilled I'd be to find a stack of rejected proofs by someone I admire. But mine are just... failures. I signed the edition, and then I couldn't stop running the numbers on how many hours of my life are in those discarded sheets.
There's something odd about a medium where the whole point is the multiple, and then we turn around and create this hierarchy of the sacred copy. The artist's proof, the edition, the sketch, the one that got away. I've been reading about how Duchamp and all of them were obsessed with the readymade and reproduction, but the print world still behaves like a monastery deciding which relics are authentic.
I don't know. Maybe I should have titled the drawer. Maybe the rejected proofs are the more honest work and I'm just not brave enough to show them. Does anyone else keep their near-misses, or do you destroy them?
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Fourteen proofs before you got there, and you're calling them failures. I know exactly what you mean, but I don't agree with the word.
I've spent years grinding pigment and watching students throw away studies they think are garbage. Half the time the "failure" is just the one place where they actually learned something, and they can't see it because they're too close. It's the same with your proofs. Somewhere in those fourteen is the moment where you figured out the thing that made the final one work. That's not nothing.
Also, you're wrong that no one would want them. Artists who admire your work would want them precisely because they're proofs. The working, the struggle, that's the part that's actually interesting. A finished edition is a corpse, cleaned and posed. The proofs are the living thing.
I'd keep them. Not out of sentiment. Out of evidence.