arch. rania obead - wordpress.com · 2017-10-07 · a linoleum cut, or linocut, is very similar to...
TRANSCRIPT
Arch. Rania Obead
بيت اطلبي نسختك وتوصلك لل
In the vocabulary of printmaking, the sole of your sneaker served as a matrix, a surface on which a design is prepared before being transferred
through pressure to a receiving surface such as paper.
The printed image it left is called an impression.
You probably didn’t make your own sneaker, but
an artist makes a matrix to create prints from it.
A single matrix can be used to create many impressions, all of them almost identical , and
each of them considered to be an original work of art.
For that reason, printing is called an art of multiples.
With the development of industrial printing
technologies during the modern era, we have come to recognize a difference in value between original artists’ prints and mass-produced reproductions such
as the images in the text book or a poster bought in a museum shop.
Two broadly agreed-upon principles have been adopted
to distinguish original artists’ prints from commercial
reproductions.
The first is that the artist performs or oversees the printing process and examines each impression for quality.
The second is that there may be a declared limit to the number of impressions that will be made, this number, called an edition.
The term relief describes any printing
method in which the image to be
printed is raised from a background .
Think of a rubber stamp, When
you look at the stamp itself, you may see
the words standing out from the
background in reverse.
You press the stamp to an ink pad,
then to paper, and the words print right
side out—a mirror image of the stamp.
All relief processes work according to
this general principle.
To make a woodcut, the artist first draws the desired image on a block
of wood. Then all the areas that are not meant to print are cut and
gouged out of the wood so that the image stands out in relief.
When the block is inked, only the raised areas take the ink.
Finally, the block is pressed on
paper, or paper is placed on the block and rubbed to transfer the ink and
make the print.
The earliest surviving woodcut image was made in China.
Preface to the Diamond
Sutra. 868. Woodblock
handscroll
Two great Chinese inventions,
paper and printing, are here united.
in the mid–15th century, the
invention of the printing press.
The printing press, of course, made it easier to print images in quantity, often as illustrations for books.
Albrecht Dürer created this harrowing image of the Four
Horsemen of the Apocalypse
not long after the printing press
was invented.
By the 14th century, China had advanced to the next step in woodcut by using multiple blocks to print images in full
color.
Updated to our technological era, they still do: In images such as
Katsushika Hokusai’s Skeleton Ghost we see the ancestors of the spirits that appear in
today’s acclaimed anime films.
Hokusai’s print—with its chicken-clawed rather worried-looking
, ghost—illustrates a story
from a collection of one hundred tales of the supernatural.
Like a woodcut, a wood
engraving uses a block of
wood as a matrix.
But whereas a woodcut
matrix is created on a
surface cut along the
grain, a wood engraving
matrix is created on a
surface cut across the
grain, an end grain
block.
The tools used for wood engraving cut fine, narrow channels that show as white lines when the block is inked and printed.
We can see the effect clearly
in Rockwell Kent’s Workers of the World, Unite!
The billowing clouds of smoke
in the background, the modeling of the man’s torso and
trousers, and the menacing flames are all defined by fine white lines—narrow channels
cut in the block by engraving tools.
A linoleum cut, or linocut, is very similar to a woodcut.
Linoleum, however, is much
softer than wood.
The relative softness makes linoleum easier to cut,
but it also limits the number of crisp impressions that can be produced, since the block
wears down more quickly during printing.
Linoleum has no grain, so it is
possible to make cuts in any direction with equal ease.
John Muafangejo’s Men Are
Working in Town shows the
almost liquid ease with which
linoleum can be cut.
One of southern Africa’s most
beloved artists, Muafangejo
devoted most of his artistic
career to linocuts.
Among his recurring themes was
the daily life of the region’s
tribal peoples.
The second major category of printmaking techniques is intaglio (from an Italian word
meaning “to cut’’), which includes several related methods.
Intaglio is exactly the reverse of relief, in that the areas meant to print are below the surface of the printing plate.
The artist uses a sharp tool or acid to make
depressions—lines or grooves—in a metal plate. When the plate is inked , the ink sink into
the depressions.
Then the surface of the plate is wiped clean.
When dampened paper is brought into contact with the plate under pressure, the paper
is pushed into the depressions to pick up the image.
The oldest of the intaglio techniques, engraving developed from the Medieval practice of incising (cutting) linear designs in armor and other metal surfaces.
The armorer’s art had achieved a high level of expertise, and it was just a short step to realizing that the engraved lines could be filled with ink and the design transferred
to paper.
Lithography is a planographic process, which means that the printing surface is flat—not raised as in relief or depressed as in intaglio.
It depends , instead, on the principle that oil and water do not mix.
To make a lithographic print, the artist first draws the image on the stone with a greasy material—usually
a grease-based lithographic crayon or a greasy ink known by its German name, tusche.
The stone is then subjected to a series of procedures,
including treatment with an acid solution, that fix the
drawing ( bind It to the stone so that it will not smudge) and prepare it to be printed.
Print the image, the printer dampens the stone with water, which soaks into the Areas not coated with grease.
When the stone is inked, the greasy ink sticks to the greasy
image areas and is repelled by the water-soaked background
areas.
Although limestone is still the preferred surface for art prints, lithographs can also be
made using zinc or aluminum plates.
By using multiple stones, lithography can
reproduce images in full color.
During the 19th century it quickly became the
preferred method for reproducing art.
This book, for example, was printed using a
lithographic process.
Painters often take naturally to lithography,
for it allows them to work in color and to
draw freely with brush and ink.
One of a series of lithographs illustrating
Stories from the old testament, Solomon
relies on amorphous, floating areas of
complementary color overlaid with a brush
drawing in black that brings the image into
focus.
Many of Chagall’s paintings from this period
in his career use a similar approach, with
color floating free of form.
Today’s art screenprinting works much the same way.
The screen is a fine mesh of silk or synthetic fiber mounted in a frame, rather like a window screen.
(Silk is the traditional material, so the process has often been called silkscreen or serigraphy—“silk writing.’’) Working from drawings, the printmaker stops out
(blocks) screen areas that are not meant to print by plugging up the holes, usually with some kind of glue, so that no ink can pass through.
Then the screen is placed over paper, and the ink is forced through the mesh with a tool called a squeegee.
Only the areas not stopped out allow the ink to pass
through and print on paper.
Small wonder, then, that printmaking should find itself a naturalally of two
later revolutions in information technology, the camera and the computer.
During the 20th century, techniques were to print Photographic images by developed means of etching, lithography, and silkscreen, and many artists began
including photographic images in their prints.
The computer inserted itself easily into this process, allowing artists to digitize images, manipulate them as part of a design and then print the result
using traditional printmaking techniques.
This was the procedure followed by Victor Burgin in creating the series of prints called Fiction film.
Like Victor Burgin, Carl Fudge feeds camera images into a computer and manipulates them digitally, though to far different effect.
Rhapsody Spray is one of a series of
prints that began with an image of a Japanese anime character named
Sailor Chibi Moon.
Fudge scanned the image and
reworked it digitally into a composition dominated by vertical
and horizontal rhythms and
pulsating lozenge shapes.
He used the manipulated image as
the model for a series of traditionally executed silkscreen prints in four different color harmonies. Carl Fudge. Rhapsody
Spray
2. 2000. Screenprint,
In the world of art, the camera and the computer were born yesterday.
Although the earliest known drawn and painted images date back to the Stone Age, and the earliest surviving
print was made well over one thousand years ago, images
recorded by a camera or created on a computer belong entirely to our own modern era.
The camera relies on a natural phenomenon known since antiquity: that light reflected from an object can,
under controlled circumstances, project an image of
that object onto a surface. It was not until The 19th
century, however, that a way was found to capture and preserve such a projected image.
With that discovery, photography was born, and after photography, film and video, which recorded the
projected image in motion over time.
The computer, too, is rooted in discoveries of earlier times.
The first true computer, an electronic machine that could be
programmed to process information in the form of data,
was built around 1938.
Early computers were so large that a single machine occupied
an entire room! Over the following decades, technological advances chipped away at the size even as they made computers faster, more powerful, more affordable, and easier to use.
Beginning around 1980, the pace of change accelerated so dramatically that we have come to speak of a digital revolution.
The personal computer, the compact disc, the scanner, the World Wide Web, the digital video disk, and the digital camera appeared in rapid succession, together making it possible
to capture, store, manipulate, and circulate text, images, and sound as digital data.
With the digital revolution, the camera and the computer became intertwined.
The earliest written record that has come down to us of the principle behind photography is from a Chinese philosopher named Mo Ti, who lived during the 5th century B.C.E. Mo Ti noticed that light passing through a pinhole opening into a darkened chamber would form an exact view of the world outside, the Arab mathematician and physicist Abu Ali Hasan Ibn al-Haitham, set up an experiment in a dark room in which light from several candles passed through a pinhole in a partition, projecting images of the candle flames onto a surface on the other side.
With the development of lenses
during the 16th century, the
Camera obscura could be made
to focus the image it projected.
Artists of the time, concerned
with making optically convincing
representations through
perspective and chiaroscuro,
welcomed this improved camera
obscura as drawing tool.
Toward the middle of the 19th
century, the vastly superior
collodion process was
developed, which produced a
negative on glass.
In contrast to the sharp focus
and even lighting preferred
by commercial portrait
photographers, Cameron
explored more poetic effects,
with a softened focus and a
moody play of light and
shadow. Julia’s calm,
forthright gaze reaches out
to our time from hers.Julia Margaret
Cameron. Julia
Jackson
Then, in 1888, an American
named George Eastman
developed a camera called the
Kodak that changed
photography forever.
Taken in 1910, Crow Camp
records a moment in the life
of a Crow Indian family.
A man stands in front of a
dwelling, a tipi. In his arms he
gently cradles a child. His wife
and family look on from the
foreground.
One way in which photography changed the world was in the sheer quantity of images that could be created and put into circulation.
Whereas a painter might take weeks or even
months to compose and execute a scene of daily
Life, a photographer could produce dozens of such scenes in a single days.
But what purpose could this facility be put to? What was the advantage of quantity and speed?
One early answer was that photography could
record what was seen as history unfolded, or preserve a visual record of what existed for a time.
We could call these purposes bearing witness and documenting, and they continue to play important
roles today.
Dorothea Lange’s travels for the
FSA took her to nearly every part
of the country.
In one summer alone she logged
17,000 miles in her car. Lange
devoted her attention to the
migrants who had been uprooted
from their farms by the combined
effects of depression and
drought. Lange’s best known
image from this time is the
haunting Migrant Mother.
Yet from the beginning there
were photographers and
critics who insisted that
photography could also be
practiced as an art.
Today, over 150 years later,
photography is fully
integrated into the art
world of museums and
galleries.
Thus far in this subject, we have discussed the computer as a tool that expands the possibilities of older art forms such as printmaking, photography, film, and video.
Yet, in addition to being a tool, the computer is a place. Images can be created, stored, and looked at on a computer without being given a traditional material form at all.
With the development of the Internet, the World Wide Web,
and browser applications capable of finding and displaying
Web pages, a computer became a gateway to a new kind of public space, one that was global in scope and potentially accessible to everyone.
Not only could anyone find information on the Internet, but anyone could also claim a presence on the Internet by creating a site on the World Wide Web, a web site.
One artist who works with this aspect of the Internet is Wolfgang
Staehle. For an exhibition called 2001, Staehle had video cameras
Installed facing three sites: the Television Tower in Berlin ,the
skyline of Lower Manhattan, and a monastery in Germany.
Images transmitted over the Internet from the cameras were
projected onto the walls of a darkened Gallery , where they
suggested large, luminous paintings. One way to think of 2001
is as an update of Warhol’s film Empire .Like Empire, 2001 was a
way of watching time go by. But, whereas Empire recorded time
passing in a single location, 2001 showed it flowing in widely
separated places simultaneously.
And, whereas Empire was filmed for viewing at a later time, 2001
unfolded almost in real time (the images were delayed by several
seconds).
Visitors to the gallery could watch the night sky around the tower in
Berlin, then turn to the panoramic landscape of Manhattan,
where the sun was just setting.
Graphic designers attend to the visual
presentation of information as it is embodied
in words and/or images.
Books, book jackets, newspapers, magazines,
advertisements, packaging, Web sites, CD
Covers , television and film credits, road signs,
and corporate logos are among the many
items that must be designed before they can
be printed or produced.
Graphic design is as old as civilization itself. The
development of written languages, for example,
entailed a lengthy process of graphic design, as
scribes gradually agreed that certain symbols
would represent specific words or sounds.
Over the centuries, those symbols were refined,
clarified, simplified, and standardized—
generation after generation of anonymous design
work.
The field as we know it today, however, has its
roots in two more recent developments: the
invention of the printing press in the 15th century
and the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th
centuries.
On the most basic level,
we communicate
through symbols.
Symbols convey
information or embody
ideas.
Some are so common
that we find it difficult to
believe they didn’t
always exist.
Roger Cook and Don
Shanosky. Poster introducing the
signage symbol system developed
for the U.S. Department of
Transportation. 1974
Among the most pervasive
symbols in our visual
environment today are
logos and trademarks,
which are symbols of an
organization or a product.
Cultures throughout history
have appreciated the visual
aspects of their written
language.
In China, Japan, and Islamic
cultures, calligraphy is
considered an art.
Among the most famous of all 19th-
Century posters are those created by
Toulouse-Lautrec for the cabarets
and dance halls of Paris.
In this poster for a famous dance hall
called the Moulin Rouge, the star
performer, La Goulue, is shown
dancing the Cancan, while in the
foreground rises the wispy silhouette
of another star attraction,
Valentin, known as “the boneless one’’
The iPod was launched in 2001,but for the first two
years it sold only moderately well.
It was not until an advertising campaign known as iPab
Silhouette appeared that sales skyrocketed.
The black silhouettes of young people dancing against
Neoncolored backgrounds to music they heard over a
handheld white iPod were graphically bold, clear, and
simple.
Graphic design is all around
us, part of the look of daily
life. Many art museums
maintain collections of
graphic design, which
overlaps with art in
interesting ways.
Indeed, many artists have
worked as graphic designers,
And many graphic designers
also make art.
Designers working with digital motion graphics move with particular
ease between design assignments and the expanding field of new media art, where digital technologies are turned to expressive ends. For example, Universal Everything, the design firm behind the Audi video we looked at Earlier also curates a project called Advanced Beauty.
Advanced Beauty brings together programmers, artists, musicians, animators, and architects to create digital artworks born from and influenced by sound.
The project’s first collection consists of eighteen video “sound sculptures”