Here is a real number: a plate I spent eleven days on in October, hard ground, aquatint, the whole slow liturgy, came out so badly bitten that the lines closed up. I posted it. 34 likes, two comments. A bad phone photo of the same plate sitting in the ferric bath, half submerged, nothing happening, no explanation, no caption worth reading: 1,900 views and eleven people asking what the liquid was. So the lesson is obvious and I hate it. It's not the failure they want, it's the process. The failure is only interesting if it's happening in front of them in real time. A finished bad print is just a sad object. A print in the acid bath is a suspense film, even if you already know how it ends. I've started filming the boring parts on purpose now, which feels like a small betrayal of everything I was taught about the mystery of the studio. My teachers would have found the idea of a tripod pointed at a tray of copper sulphate genuinely obscene. And I'm doing it anyway, because the alternative is making work nobody sees, and I'm not noble enough for that. The thing I can't decide: does the audience actually want to understand the process, or do they just want the sensation of something developing? I suspect the second, and I suspect I'd rather not know.
