The edition I ruined by being too careful
I spent two days this week trying to keep an edition consistent and I hate every single print. The registration is perfect, the ink density is the same, the paper behaved. And they're dead. Completely dead on the page.
I think I've been doing this long enough that I should know better. But there's something about the discipline of the edition, the obsessive checking, that kills the life out of the work. The prints that always end up in the shows are the ones I pull a little too fast, when the squeegee angle drifts, when I stop thinking and just move.
I lined the dead ones up on the floor this morning. Thirty-two perfect, identical, worthless little objects. It should be the opposite. The multiple is supposed to be about the copy being alive in its own way, not a Xerox of itself. I keep telling people that. Maybe I should start believing it and pull the screens a little sloppier again.
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this is so real. with clay it's the exact same trap in reverse, the pieces i obsess over, weigh out every bit of clay, measure the walls, they come out of the kiln looking like museum replicas. correct. lifeless. then i'll be half asleep throwing something and my hand just drifts and suddenly there's a weird curve or a lip that's too thin and it's the best thing i've made all week.
i think there's something about the watching yourself work part that kills it. the moment you're checking instead of doing, you're not in it anymore. and the work knows. it can feel the difference.
the ones you pull too fast have you in them. the careful ones just have your attention.
which is annoying because the edition discipline is REAL and i respect it, but maybe the discipline is knowing when to let go of it, not always applying it. anyway i'd take your dead ones off your hands and hang them next to the alive ones, sometimes the contrast is the point.
Clay and stone have that same thing, yes. I've cut pieces where I planned every angle, measured twice, and they come out correct and dead. Then a piece where the chisel takes a chip I didn't intend and I follow it instead of fighting it, and suddenly there's something alive in the stone.
Difference is you can't undo it with clay the way you can with steel. Stone forgives nothing and rewards you for paying attention to what's already there. The checking instinct is about fear. You're afraid of ruining the material, so you hold it too tight. But the material tells you what it wants if you stop gripping.
The drift is not a mistake. It's the work correcting you. Took me twenty years to learn that.
Stone forgives nothing but it also keeps every decision you make, which is maybe the part I envy. With screenprint I can pull another one, the failure is cheap. Stone costs you. And you're right that the checking instinct is fear, I think it's fear of being found out as someone who doesn't actually know what they're doing. The careful edition is a way of apologising to the material in advance. But the material doesn't want an apology, it wants you to just make the mark.
Also the phrase "the material tells you what it wants", I want to fight that a little. I don't think it tells you anything. I think it sets limits and you get to choose whether to listen. The alive ones come when you stop treating the limit as a threat. Same result though. Maybe I'm just saying the same thing in a way that lets me feel clever about it.
"the work can feel the difference", I think that's actually it, and I don't even mean it mystically. The attention goes somewhere else. When I'm checking I'm looking at the print from the outside, judging it as object. When I'm not thinking I'm inside the gesture, and whatever that extra thing is, it's in the mark. The clay thing makes total sense to me, that half-asleep throw. It's like the skill is still operating, it just isn't looking over its own shoulder anymore.
I've been wondering if you can reverse-engineer it, get that state on purpose. Probably not. Probably you just have to let yourself ruin a few editions to keep the ones that matter. The dead ones on my floor are a pretty good reminder though.