I keep a registration sheet from 2015 because the misalignment is the only proof I was there
Pulling a test sheet off the press yesterday, the third one in a row that came out slightly off, and I had the thought I always have now: I don't want to fix this one.
For those who don't print: registration is the alignment of the layers. You build a sheet in passes, and every pass has to land exactly where the last one did. There is a whole apparatus of crosses, pins, mylar, tape. It exists so the reproduction is faithful to the matrix. So the copy disappears into the original.
I have a registration sheet from a two-colour etching I made in 2015, and the second plate drifted maybe a millimetre and a half on every one of the forty prints. A hairline of the first colour, all around the edge of the shape, where it should not be. I kept the sheet. Not as a memento, more as an argument I was having with myself.
Because a perfect multiple has no author. It has a maker, a press, a process, but the sheet itself is just the matrix arriving. The misalignment is the one thing the plate cannot reproduce. It is where the hand is still visible, in a medium whose entire premise is that the hand gets edited out.
There is a whole conversation about the aura and the copy that starts in the 1930s and never quite ends, and I keep finding that the interesting part is not the copy. It is the error. The copy is the system working. The error is the system admitting someone was standing there.
I am in the middle of a series now where I am deliberately letting the second colour shift by a fixed offset on every print, the same amount, no variation. Which is its own trap, I know. I have turned the accident into a rule. A rule is reproducible. So I am back to no hand, just a more interesting system.
I don't have a neat place to land this. It is just that the sheet on my wall is eleven years old and I am still not sure if I kept it as evidence or as an excuse.
3
4commentsSaveFollow threadShare
This is the difference between a printer and a maker, and you've put your finger on it. Registration exists so the copy disappears into the matrix, yes, and the drift is the only place the hand shows through. I work in salvage, so I've spent decades with things that carry the mark of whoever handled them. People call that flaw. I call it the signature you didn't sign.\n\nKeep the 2015 sheet. Fix the next one if a client is paying. Only one of those two is evidence that a person was standing at the press.
I don't print so I'm probably missing the depth here, but the "signature you didn't sign" idea landed for me. I paint in acrylic and I'm always chasing the edge that looks too clean, then going back and softening it because the straight line looks wrong somehow. Maybe that's the same thing in a smaller way.
You're not missing depth, you're describing the same thing with a different tool. The softened edge is you refusing to let the hand disappear. A clean acrylic line can look like it came from nowhere, and the eye knows that's a lie. So you go back in and leave the evidence.
What I like is that you're doing it deliberately. In printing the drift is usually the accident, and the whole question is whether you keep it. You're choosing it at the other end of the process. Same decision, opposite direction.
"The signature you didn't sign" is going to live in my head for a while. It's almost the exact inversion of what the whole apparatus of registration is for. You spend the training years learning to make the copy disappear into the matrix, and then at some point you realise the disappearing is only legible if something refuses to. Maybe that's why I keep that sheet pinned where I can see it while I work. Not as sentiment. As a reminder.
One thing I'd push back on slightly, and I mean it as a question rather than a correction: I don't think it's printer versus maker, not quite. The printer who nails every pass and knows precisely why is also a maker, just one who chose fidelity as the idea. What I'm less sure about is whether the drift is really a signature, or whether that's just the story I tell to make an accident mean something. Some days I think the misregistration is evidence. Other days I think calling it evidence is a way of redeeming something I didn't control, which is a different move entirely.
Decades in salvage is a long time to have a position on this. Does the mark still read to you as a mark, or does it blur into the object eventually?