Digital Prints: A Round Table at the Brooklyn Museum

The following round table discussion took place on Monday, June 25, 2001, three days after the opening of Digital: Printmaking Now, an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Participants were the exhibition's curator, Marilyn Kushner; artists Jane Hammond and Adriane Herman; master printer Andre Ribuoli of Pamplemousse Press (at Pace Editions); Bill Goldston, master printer and director of Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE); and print collector Marc Schwartz. Faye Hirsch, editor of ArtOnPaper, moderated the discussion, which was held over lunch after the group privately viewed the exhibition.

Faye Hirsch: Marilyn, I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the background of the Print National. How did it come about that this turned into a digital print show?

Marilyn Kushner: Four years ago Patricia Nick invited nine print curators, myself included, out to Vinalhaven Island. She had also invited a person to demonstrate an Iris printer, though that never happened, because he couldn't come. But there were people running printers in Lancaster, and she herself had three or four different computers. Weeach had to go out there with an image, preconceived (I took a photograph), a drawing, something. And we learned how to scan those images into the computer and work with Photoshop. We played around with them, then transferred them to etching plates and made etchings. Then Pat put us all up in a farmhouse on the island. She sent us out there every afternoon to talk about computer technology and printmaking. For a week, we drank wine all night and had a wonderful time. All of that was followed up by a symposium that she ran in Boston that September.

That week at Vinalhaven was when I started thinking about digital technology and printmaking, but at the same time I was planning the Print National. At that point the National was a regional look at printmaking, which would have been nice but not as exciting as I wanted to make it, and when Arnold [Lehman] first came [as director] to the museum, I asked if I could make the Print National digital, and he had a little bit of a hesitation about it.. But he came to me about 15 months ago and said "You're right, can you do a digital Print National?" and I said absolutely. So he's been a really strong support behind this National being digital.

FH: Did he have any idea that there were these other big digital shows coming up?

MK: As far as I know, no. I don't know when the Whitney started to plan BitStreams.

FH: There's the exhibition in San Francisco as well [01010101].

MK: As a matter of fact, my show was supposed to open a year ago. But it was going to have to be in the small galleries downstairs. I said to Arnold, "I can't have it in the small galleries downstairs." He said, "Okay, I'll give you the big gallery." So he gave me the big gallery for June. Once it was decided that the show was going to be digital, I had the full support of everybody there to make it digital. As I had been looking at digital things since I went out to Vinalhaven, and just throwing them all into a pile, I had started to make a lot of contacts.

FH: Give us some idea of how, once this was announced as a digital show, you received things, because there's certainly a lot of stuff around, and it's very diverse and spread out.

MK: Every time I would go somewhere, I would seek out digital work, even when the Print National was not yet digital. I sort of made it a two-pronged trip. Let's say I was going to Chicago: I'd go printers, I'd go to the Art Institute, I'd talk to fellow curators, I'd talk to colleagues and, sometimes, I would even have people visiting me in hotel rooms laying their work out on the bed. I would try to network in as many different places and talk to as many different people as I could, and then it got to the point where,when it was announced that the show was going to be digital, I started getting slides-from 25 to 30 artists a week.

FH: Wow, that's a lot to look at.

MK: Yes, and when we first started looking at it all, we had somewhere around 20, 30, 40 carousels full of slides to look at.

FH: And then you obviously were in touch with the major workshops. When I went out to ULAE [Universal Limited Art Editions] last year, Bill, you showed me how you had created a digital workshop within your operation. Can you describe the process of deciding to make a digital workshop, and what you had to do to make this happen. Or was it an organic thing?

Bill Goldston: I think it was really very organic. For me it had more to do with enabling artists to think in another way about their work. From the beginning, ULAE has always been a place for artists to come in and work on prints, but it was always in response to what they were doing. You'd hope the prints would feed back into the paintings and into the drawings and then back again into the prints, so it would be a symbiotic kind of relationship between the work and the artist. We've always tried to understand how you could use technology on another level, not just in creating a final product.

There are still lots of artists making work with mud, and paraffin, and a stick-lots still struggling with issues like what happened to the canvas, what happened to the four edges, and what happened to subject matter. And you think to yourself, Well how can you give those people the possibility to go further with that? The digital workshop only provided another way to think -- maybe bigger, maybe not better -- but to think on another level about what they were doing. My motive was really just to give Jane [Hammond], if she came, or Bob [Rauschenberg] or Jasper [Johns] or Terry [Winters] or Tip [Carroll Dunham] the possibility to think again on another level about their work.

FH: So you started researching what kind of equipment you wanted to have there and what kind of a studio you wanted to set up.

BG: Yes, the thing that concerned me always was that artists never really leave anything alone. So, you know, if you give them a tool its going to get used, and that tool has to be on a certain level before it's really acceptable. I mean, you can't print out things that are just going to disappear. The technology today has gained speed, which allows us to do a lot of things we weren't capable of doing, say, five years ago or even two years ago. I mean, we were capable of getting results, but who would want to take the time? It was almost easier to just render things by hand than to wait two hours while your machine cranked and chucked along to process this information. So technology recently has given us the possibility to do things at the sort of speed at which the artist can think.

FH: Do you feel sometimes like it's just going to be an endless investment, because there will be new equipment all the time? You've established a studio where you can do digital photography. You have the Roland printer set up, but the new technology is constantly outpacing the old.

BG: I wish I could have my money back for the things that didn't work, or became outmoded. When we first got the digital camera, for example, it didn't have a built-in power manager. Now the way digital cameras function is that they're just a scanner in a miniature form. What you do is you set it up and the scanner comes through the head, and the image comes through the lens, and the scanner scans the image. You have a given exposure and a given ASA you're looking for, so that corresponds with shutter speed and aperture. What happened with Jane's print is that for the detail we wanted to have we had to stop the lens out. So there were five minutes or ten minutes that she had to stand perfectly still, while the scanner moved across and scanned all the information into the computer.

FH: It's like doing a daguerreotype.

BG: Yes, it's very similar, but what happens is, if the guy down the street turns on his lights in the refrigerator, the power coming into your building goes down just a little bit, so the scanner slows down just a little bit and picks back up. So you get a power manager. You plug it into the wall, and plug all the computers into that so it manages the power. Well the next evolution of the scanner back is that they build the power manager right into it. So you pay for being in the forefront. But you can't deny that the technology that's developed in the last ten years has just been remarkable. I just had a woodcut cut on a laser with great precision.

FH: That's what David Lasry did with those great Terry Winters prints, where he had the laser cut the matrix and then did a very traditional print from that. And then those great multiples that Kiki Smith did, where she used a CT-scan of her own skull and then made some very powerful 3-D pieces.

BG:The artists are the people who make things. If we weren't sitting here today dealing with digital technology, we could be sitting here dealing with something else, but we'd still be talking about the artists and the way they think about things.

FH: Now, Jane, you're an artist who has been working at ULAE for years. Suddenly there's this digital studio at ULAE for you to work in. What kind of possibilities does that present for you, and can you talk about how the technology inspired you to make the print in the Brooklyn show?

Concept and Material

Jane Hammond: Well, it's hard to know what's cause and what's effect. In a nutshell, my work has to do with exploring how meaning is created and taking lots of different kinds of information and combining and recombining that information. I often liken my work to recombinant DNA. And although I barely know how to use a computer, and I've only really begun to learn these things in the last year or so, I think as an artist I make this kind of work that could only be made in a computer age-a circuit of information, bodies or systems of information, an easily recombinable information that's contextualized. So, in a funny way, I've been thinking this way all along.

FH: When I was thinking of artists to have on the panel, I thought of you because of the fact that you have this huge image bank. I thought, what better person to be working on a computer?

BG: Terry Winters is a similar case. About five or six years ago, I went to Terry and suggested we should start making digital prints. I told him he could create a drawing, scan it in. We could save that file, then open it up and then print that file and then you could draw on top of it. He was very quiet about it for six or eight months, and then he explained that he had been making a drawing a day, stashing them away, and that stack of images became his "hard drive." He could use those images in his drawings, paintings, or prints. And then he began to use the computer technology with it after.

FH: So really you had a computer type of idea and translated it into a very physical project, which could then be translated back into the computer.

BG: Exactly, so he could open a file, work on the image, and then save that as a new file .He could keep the original and go back into an image again and again.

JH: And his sense of drawing has been so heavily informed by traditional printmaking, where you can separate a layer and change the order -- none of this can you do in drawing or painting.

FH: Jane, you too have drawers and drawers filled with little pieces of paper.

JH: I have notebooks that are put together with Scotch tape, which is sort of the same thing as people having files. For this particular print [Tabularosa], I was intrigued with the warping and contouring that Adobe Photoshop and this Andromeda subset can do. But, in general, I think this is going to be a very interesting thing for me, because the computer and digital printing privileges a certain kind of art -- it works better for some artists than it does for others. This is my own feeling. And it works better for art that is idea-based and concerned with information.

It's less good for art that's very haptic, very surface oriented, etc. I think a good example of this is the Jim Dine print. This print works very well, because the information is very interesting in that literary text. And then it has this plane which is a bed in the wall, and it has the information that there's been some tragedy or accident. So there's a narrative situation -- it's a tableau. The black-and-white part looks to my eye like a photograph of a chalkboard. But if you compare it to a Cy Twombly painting, the Twombly feels chalky in a way that the Dine print doesn't. The computer privileges certain ways of working, as Marilyn has written in her introduction to the catalogue: the technology creates a slick looking print, and that works better for some people than others. I think it will work well for me in many ways, because I'm very interested in information and meaning and context.

FH: But it's funny because in your print, by using that Japanese paper, you get a very velvety, textured feeling.

JH: But it isn't just the paper. I wish it could be so easy as to just be a gorgeous paper in there that then comes out looking like a "real print." But I worked very hard to get away from what I think of as that reproductive look, where you feel, just intuitively, "That's not a print, it's a poster," or, "That's not a thing, it's a picture of a thing." That is what you're up against. If you go around and look at beginning painters -- I mean, paint is fabulous when you squeeze it out of the tube, but it's like six years before you can do anything with the paint that looks as good as it looks when it's in the tube. I don't really like the surface of a digital print, so then I've got to do all this other stuff to make it into something.

FH: Almost to fool it.

JH: Yes, but I can only speak from my own perspective.

FH: How about you Adriane? You do a lot of work with computers; you've made cookies and cakes, which certainly have texture.

Adriane Herman: Well, touching on what Jane was just saying about downplaying the surface, or the less seductive qualities of the surface, I think that can be a very positive thing, in that it will allow the focus -- maybe not yet, because we're still giddy about technology, we're still talking about it over lunch and comparing megahertz -- but at a certain point, when it will be a given, when everyone will have these amazingly powerful computers -- then the focus will be on the image and the concept behind the work.

That's a point that's of interest to me, because I'm coming from the print world where there's often a lot of discussion about technology. And maybe from my perspective, not enough talk about -- at least in the academic art world -- the image. So it's almost refreshing for there to be a preciosity of surface; and yet I also think that for people that are excited about surface and tactility -- and I include myself in this category -- there are applications for the computer in terms of sketching things, planning things -- planning an etching, for instance, and how it's going to look when it's reversed -- and there are just certain things that the computer can do with process.

One of Marilyn's categories is the "hidden" computer. I think there are really exciting possibilities for artists working in all media to utilize the computer, to cut down on the time of certain processes, and shift scale. But in terms of my own use, I am particularly excited by the possibilities for dissemination that the computer presents, or just the fact that I can sit at home and output work and not need to rely on a studio where I have access to a lithography press and a gamut of inks. Those kind of things are wonderful to work with when you have access to them, but the computer presents a sort of link to the democratic history of the print. As prices drop for computers, printers, ink, the fact that individual artists have these souped-up tool boxes in their studios. A child can't do it.

FH: And prices for prints? I'm always very struck by how expensive digital prints are relative to the fact that ideally, I suppose, you could print a million of them.

BG: I disagree with that.

FH: Let's hear it.

MK: Why should a digital print be less expensive? You could print a lot of lithographs too, but you don't.

BG: Absolutely.

FH: Well, it seems, to the lay observer, that this is a pretty easy thing to do -- but maybe it's not...

BG: That's the old argument that my child could do it.

JH: But your child didn't do it. If your child did do it, make a hundred or a thousand of them.

FH: So what's hard about it?

BG: Well, this lady here [Jane] worked very hard --14 months. And several times I wanted to say "Jane, why don't we just do it another way?" Because it took an enormous amount of time and energy. Bill Jensen comes in the studio and he says to me, "You know, I've got this little camera and I'm taking digital pictures for the first time in my life." Well, he's photographing some paintings, and I say, "Well, why don't we scan them into the computer?" So we scan them into the computer and he puts one painting on top of another one and before you know it, we're outputting pieces of film on our printer,and we're taking film and we're making gravures from it. And then he's working on top of the gravures. So you give an artist a tool and they begin to do something with it you didn't expect was going to happen.

JH: I'll give you an example. Like 20 percent of the way into my print I got this idea that I wanted the skin to be extremely transparent and I wanted there to be a skeleton inside of the skin. But I didn't want to be radiated. So Craig went and got a skeleton and they digitally photographed the skeleton and they inserted the skeleton into my print. O of course, the skeleton was not my skeleton, so every bone had to be planed and shortened.

FH: That's pretty nutty, Jane!

JH: Days went by! And you know 12 months later I decided it was too busy and I didn't really need the skeleton.

MK: We all know that master printers are there for their expertise, and they can help an artist achieve what an artist wants to do. And I see master printers working digitally in the same way, and you don't question a good print, a lithograph, or whatever, done by a good artist working with a good master printer. You don't question the value of that. And in the same way I think that people have to start looking at master digital printers -- the people, not the hardware printers -- in the same way, for their expertise, for their guidance, for an artist going to them and saying this is what I want to do, and the printer will say to the artist this is how we get there. And the people who are helping make those digital prints, who are printing them out, are not just pushing a button and printing them out on an inkjet printer or whatever kind of printer they're using. They're offering their expertise, and that's what's behind these digital prints as much as what's behind any other print.

FH: Andre, this brings you in. Earlier you were talking about how you have Iris printers in your studio, but you're having to constantly research and find other ways of printing. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Andre Ribuoli: Well, one thing I think is kind of interesting at the moment is that I have a lot of artists that are going out and buying computers themselves and are going out and buying a pretty inexpensive Macintosh or PC, getting Photoshop, buying a scanner, digital cameras. So they can do a lot of preliminary work, whether it's in our studio with the printer or at home. One of the good things is that when you get the work to a certain point, you can send a digital file to other service bureaus, and other studios.... At Pace ,we have just a limited amount of equipment -- we're in the process of looking into and getting more equipment -- but one of the things I've been trying to do and we've started is that rather than making an investment in the latest and greatest and every new inkjet printer or every other process that's coming down the line, we have the capability of doing some of the work there in the studio and then working with another facility.

FH: Subcontracting.

AR: Pretty much. And something I want to touch on is that there's a certain learning curve with all this technology, and so there's a certain law that says the technology is increasing, doubling every 18 months, and that's true. The hardware is pushing so fast -- the software engineers have to write the appropriate software so the artists can use it. There's a lag time. Where is the leading technology hiding out?

FH: Can you give us an instance where you've had to go out and find a subcontractor?

AR: Well, at the moment, there's a lot of really super-wide-format inkjet printers. While I think they have their pros and cons, we've worked with other facilities in Manhattan, very commercial operations, but they have the right equipment. Granted, there's no one there that will take the time to work with the artists. But let's say I have a certain facility with the equipment, I can sort of speak the lingo, so I'll work with the artist and then work with the other printer. This way the artist doesn't have to deal with those service bureaus. We have produced some very large prints on canvas. It wasn't necessarily the greatest use of the technology, but the artist wanted to do something quite large. He was taking a 35 millimeter slide and making a really huge print -- 6x9 ft. It's what he wanted and actually the print became part of an installation, so for what the artist wanted, we found some way to do it.

FH: So you have to be constantly aware of what's out there.

AR: Pretty much, and one of the things I'm finding right now is that a lot of technologies and processes are quite new for everyone, so it's difficult to tell an artist, "Hey, there's something new that just came out. This is what it can do." I keep finding these new things, but the artists don't know about them, so I feel I have to do something, make something ,just to have a sample to say, "This is what this process can do, let's see if we can nurture an idea."

FH: And Adriane, you have had a very interesting experience with a non-art context. You have also had to go out and find commercial applications for things you want to use artistically.

AH: Right. I guess I could call them service bureaus, ranging from a grocery store bakery to a company that I'm dealing with now that does a lot of decorating on cookies by hand. But they also have an inkjet printer in the back room and they're not entirely sure how to use it. I'm in the position of coming into the situation and knowing more about the technology than the people running it. And I have to acquiesce. It's frustrating because that's the kind of equipment that I can't afford or I can't have access to. Although I did have access to it for a while -- I actually got a job at the bakery and spent a year there working just so I could use that technology.

FH: And they fired you.

AH: I was told that my shirt was too wrinkly.

FH: In a bakery?

AH: My response was that I didn't have an iron, which I suppose was not as respectful as it could have been. But that was a brutal moment, because I was standing there in the catfood aisle and was told my services would no longer be needed. I had come in that morning to find another cake decorator standing in my station. And I was torn because I wanted to be offended and walk out -t -the fired employee -- but I found myself begging for any kind of access to that technology.

FH: And that's not something you can find just anywhere.

AH: No, it's not.

FH: You can't just put food coloring into a regular Iris printer.

AH: You would need to clean out your cartridge first and you would need to somehow modify the printer.

AR: The technology does allow some freedom. You can push past certain perimeters and boundaries, but, in this case, you couldn't run food dye through an Epson or through an Iris.

AH: And also the substrate in an Iris moves, or has to bend around a cylinder. In this case the medium or the substrate just stands still and moves across it, so there are definitely differences.

FH: There must be tons of stuff like that out there in world of commercial technology that is somehow adaptable to artistic ends, but that we don't know about.

AR: One thing I watch is the world of special effects and the field of scientific visualization, and I find that with these industries -- they're the ones that keep demanding and pushing the hardware and the software, and from there, it just trickles down and eventually artists will see some of these processes. Then of course they'll have to go through the learning curve if they want to do it themselves. A good thing is that we can purchase -- I actually have -- really old equipment that years ago would have been quite expensive, but now it's had its time, and it's been sitting on a shelf somewhere, and a company is eager to get rid of it. Now as an artist, I can get a hold of something that's quite old.

FH: Can you get it on eBay?

AR: EBay is one place.

FH: Really? And you can use it in your workshop?

AR: I haven't brought it into Pace. Actually, the one that I did bring in to the studio was a 3-D digitizer that I got on eBay, but some of the other equipment I have at home, and play with myself. But there are a lot of things that can be found.

What Is It? And When Do You Stop?

FH: Marc, you partly underwrote the BMA exhibition, so obviously you have some kind of an interest in this, and I'm curious whether you actually collect digital work. Could you talk a little bit about what you collect and how you became interested in this particular project?

Marc Schwartz: Well, I'm an avid print collector. I've been collecting prints for 23 years, and only prints, which makes me a rare breed. People love prints, but they will typically buy paintings, sculpture, and drawings, in addition to prints -- not prints exclusively. Why I became involved in this project, was really because of, one, a deep love of prints, and, two, Marilyn and I have known each other for a number of years.

Really the first major introduction I had to prints was at the Nationals at the BMA. I've been very interested in digital printmaking, so when Marilyn said she was going forward with this, I thought it would be a great learning experience for me, which it has been. For 23 years I've really considered myself a print collector, and I think with these digital processes -- well, with technology in general -- I'm going to have to redefine what collect, and I think that probably museums and curators and even galleries are also going to have to redefine what they collect and sell.

The lines are becoming blurred between disciplines, and I think to a large extent because of technology. Traditionally, there was a painting department and a drawing department and a print department, and now I see, which is very well demonstrated in your show, Marilyn, that all these technologies are being used together, just as Jane used it and just as Adriane is using it. I'm not so sure that if you were to ask me a year from now, "What do you do in the art world?", I'm not so sure that I'm not going to say, "I collect contemporary art." There's a bunch of artists that I like, and it so happens that most of the time I'm more attracted to works on paper, typically from a multiple standpoint.

So I think I may have to redefine what kind of collector I am very differently than I ever have. Two months ago I would have said I'm a print collector, and I collect 1960s up to new editions. So this is the thinking process that I've been going through, particularly in the last couple of weeks as I've read Marilyn's catalogue and even more today listening to all of you and seeing the show.

FH: And the kinds of concerns that collectors had a few years ago, like archival issues, and things like that -- do those come into play for you at all?

MS: You know, I don't think they ever did, really. I mean if something was going to disintegrate tomorrow, I would want to know it, but I think I've been more drawn to things of beauty and other things that move me.

FH: You don't care if the plate's been canceled?

MS: Well, I certainly want a clear definition as to what I'm buying, so I would want to know whether this would be a unique work or if it was in an edition of 50 or 25, or whatever. In that context, I would want to know -- not specifically if a plate was canceled, but specifically what the edition size is.

FH: I think one of the very interesting issues your show raises, Marilyn, is that, in fact, images can appear in so many different ways. Like the Nam June Paik, for example -- there are three rolls, right?

MK: Yes, three rolls of wallpaper that are two images wide and 13 images long.

FH: But Andre remembers printing these as individual canvases.

MK: Right, so these pieces that come out can be printed in any number of ways, and any number of different times. I have had artists when I was working on this exhibition send me work and then say, "I want to change this because that color didn't come out right," or "I'm going to do this again, and it'll be easy for me to do it again, so I'm going to and I'll send you a different one and you can send this one back to me." So that's changed what I've done as a curator. I was thinking about what Marc said, as far as redefining what you collect. I've never done a print show where I had to tell my designers five months before the show where I want the electrical outlets to be. So this is changing the way I'm thinking too, as a print curator.

MS: I may be wrong about this, but it appeared to me as I was going through the exhibition today that I was trying to think of things that I might want to own myself, and, also, looking at the catalogue, that you didn't really say which things were done in edition, or if there was an edition size. You just kind of addressed them as a specific work. Was that premeditated?

MK: It's true -- I did not put that in.

FH: Is that because it's a nightmare?

MK: I think that putting edition information in this kind of exhibition would have opened us up to too many other issues that we would have had to deal with. That relates to what I just said. I would say to an artist, "Please print this out for me," and they'd say, "Okay."Then I would ask, "It's an edition of how many?" and they'd say, "Well, gee, I don't know." That's a whole other issue that has to be addressed when we're dealing with digital art. Is the artist going to plan out the edition size at the beginning, the way they do in a traditional edition -- how many pieces are going to be printed, how many artist's proofs are there going to be, how many prints. Right now that's not always done and that's one of the reasons why I didn't put the edition size down in the show. I don't think there's a standard yet as to how this is going to work. Are you going to make this an edition of 15, and if so, what size are all 15 going to be: will they all be the same size? There are so many variables now in digital printmaking.

FH: Are you finding this, Bill, to be an issue yet?

BG: Not for us. No, because we assign a number at the beginning of the project.

MK: Because you've been working in traditional printmaking for so long that that's just the way you do it. But there are enough new people coming into the field that have not worked in traditional printmaking but have done a lot of graphic work by themselves, or maybe commercially. They're able to do this alone -- they don't have to go to masterprinters like ULAE. They are not used to defining edition sizes.

FH: You must find this, Adriane, in your own work, and amongst your students.

AH: To some extent it seems unfair or overly limiting to say this is the edition, they're all going to be 22x30. In a way, that made sense before, when the plates were all the same size, and of course the size wouldn't vary. That's true, too, of the Dunhams, for example ,where you're transferring to litho plates after having used the computer earlier. But if you're working from straight digital output, you could output your image quite small or quite large, and, from my own personal standpoint, it seems a little unfair to have to commit so early. You might prepare something and see an opportunity to show it in a certain context, and then later have another opportunity that may be limited in scale, or you might just be forced to adapt to different factors in different spaces.

BG: But how about if you're making a painting or a sculpture -- on the way to making the piece you arrive at peace and say that's it, I'm finished with it. I'm not going to change it.

AH: But you're not forced to deal with that constraint on objects that exist. If a curator comes to you and says, "I'd love for this piece to be in our show, but we don't have a wall this big." They're probably not going to cut part of it out or fold it up and stick it in there. Whereas I could say, "Oh, I could print this out in 8x10." And then what do I do, I call that a proof or do I call that part of the edition?

JH: You can't actually do it again, because the moment's over. You can't make the same work again, even if you wanted to. Even if you thought your child was starving and you wanted to compromise your principles to feed your child -- it doesn't work. But with this digital thing you can actually just reprint.

MK: I really think there's a moment when the artist has to say, "I'm done."

JH: Oh definitely -- the artist wants to say, "I'm done."

MK: I had some artists say to me that they wanted to print their work over again. I said, "It's done, I can't take any more versions of it." As a curator, I think there has to be a moment in time when that piece is finished, just for the sake of its unique quality. If we want to maintain the uniqueness of a digital print the way we maintain the originality and uniqueness of a lithograph or an intaglio as we define it, there has to be a moment in that process where it's finished.

JH: Because collectors like Marc want to know what they're getting.

FH: But what if you don't want to do that?

MK: I do see a variable where the artist will say, "Okay, I'm going to do this print, and I'm only going to make 15 of them, period." And once those 15 are made that's it. Those 15 don't all have to be printed at the same time, and maybe there will be a variable in there where you can make one that was 8x10 and another that was bigger. But once those 15 are made, that's it. There are no more. It's printed out.

The Threat

BG: I sort of hoped we would get to the heart of this matter. What is interesting about a work of art, and why are we attracted to it? What makes it more attractive than another piece? Because technology shouldn't be the dictating factor in that decision. And I don't want it controlling me to the point that it tells me what I'm going to look at and what I'm not going to look at. I want the artist to be in control, and at a certain point, the artist has to decide, "This is what I'm doing, and I'm willing to commit to it." That commitment is the hardest thing for an artist. Right, Jane?

JH: Yes, but I also think you, Marilyn, said an interesting thing in the catalogue about editioning. You quote Walter Benjamin, saying that there is an aura of specificity about time and place. You draw a circle around the process of the piece that it is particular to this time and this place. Speaking from an artist's point of view, I really like signing the prints, because whenever I finish a painting, I always call the photographer over immediately. I love to take a photograph of the painting, because then I feel certain that the painting is finished. And I love signing the print, because you get to breathe a sigh of relief and pause -- it's a ceremony, it's a kind of ritual that enables you to feel that you've finished something. So I think I wouldn't like this idea that you could dip into it in 2004 and do a few more, because the flip side of that is you'd never feel finished. But I think if we replay this tape ten years from now, it will seem very marked by this moment. Technology is going to change printmaking and art-making in ways that are very, very profound, in the same way that Napster has changed the marketing of music -- you know maybe the music companies won the first battle, but they're going to lose the war. And this global world is moving towards mixing and blending, and it's conflating the high and the low, and it's democratizing things. It's like a glacial tide -- you can't stop it. If I sold you a print and there were two more than I led you to believe, I'd feel like a whore for the rest of my life, but I know this other thing is going on, too.

FH: I've been thinking about a panel at which Adriane and Brian Reeves spoke last summer. What struck me was that, in fact, the preciosity, the whole factor of limiting and of choosing and of stopping and of deciding, is something that is potentially going to be thrown out the window and something else is going to take its place, something we can only begin to imagine.

JH: Or even if it isn't thrown out, it'll be seen in a different light than the light we see it in now.

MK: But I have to say that I think we have to protect what we have now, because it's hard enough already for people who don't understand and love prints as much as we do to understand why a print is original. None of us has any problem understanding why an editioned print is original, or why we cherish it. But if you throw all that out the window and all of a sudden that digital print is being printed ten years from now, or you redo a plate that you've done ten years ago, and print it no differently than it was printed before -- in my mind, that throws out the specialness of its time and place.

FH: It's a huge threat to museums. It's a huge threat to collecting. It's a huge threat to a lot of stuff.

MS: I live with this fact every day, because I am in the music business. Besides just worrying about the artist and how the artist is going to limit the edition size, say Jane has a piece of artwork and she decides to put it on her Web site. Then I decide that, boy, it looks pretty good, so I'm going to print it on my printer at home. All of a sudden, I've go got a Jane Hammond in my house that I got for free, and certainly for experts in the print world, this is something that's going to have a huge effect.

AH: But in your house you do have a Jane Hammond that you can enjoy, you can enjoy it on the screen -- you don't have a problem with that. But it's not one you can resell. So, in a way, the fact is that you can enjoy it, and those images are out there. I think that the fine art world certainly is going to undergo changes but I don't see it as...

MS: That may not be any different an analogy, though, than the music business. You know what, I may not have the original song that was on the original disc with the original artwork but I downloaded it through Napster for free and I'm enjoying it and I've got pretty darn good quality Jane Hammond on my wall, you didn't print it, but it's beautiful.

JH: And then you call me up and you offer me 400 bucks for a signature, you know? That's the next step...

FH: Oh, that could easily happen.

AH: And that's beautiful to me, that you print it out because you love it, and no necessarily because you thought it would be worth this amount of money in the future. I think both worlds can coexist. There are certainly questions and issues to be worked out, but I think certain people are threatened by someone saying, "It's okay to make art with a computer," as though now that's the only way you can make art. The art world has, for along time, been so heterogeneous.

MK: What all this means to me is that people will continue working in traditional printmaking methods.

JH: I totally agree with that.

MK: We have one more new medium to look at.

FH: You called it the fifth medium before, right?

MK: Exactly, I've said this many, many times -- first there was relief printing, and then there was intaglio, and lithography and screenprinting, and photography, and now there's inkjet printing, it's just the fifth medium that we have to deal with and look at. Sometimes it's all going to be combined, and other times the media will be used separately. We have to get used to looking at a surface texture that is presented to us with inkjet printing. That doesn't mean it's not good. It just means it's different. We have to develop a sensibility for it. Artists are learning to work differently and create tensions within that medium. Four years ago, and you mentioned this before, Bill, what we saw coming out as inkjet prints had nowhere near the texture and depth that they have now. Because new ink has been developed, new paper has been developed. People are learning how to work with it. It takes time.

FH: What I'm hearing here, is that some of the best and most beautiful prints that are produced today -- and we're still talking about prints in this case -- are produced with the help of a workshop, that there's an intermediary. Do you think this is something that's going to continue to be really important in printmaking?

BG: Any place an artist works, whether they're in their own studio or in another studio, produces unique images that just can't be done any other way. The fact that you have a publisher like ULAE or Pace or Gemini or Landfall, or any organization that offers certain services, is bound to achieve something different, because it's a collaboration between several individuals in that case, so you get different input.

FH: Jane, at the opening yesterday, you were talking about when you first started making prints. How much you loved it because there were other people involved.

JH: I never played a team sport in school. I've spent my whole life alone, and I love being alone -- that's probably why I chose to be an artist. But it's fun to have this one thing where you go and there are these other people there and they really want your work to work out -- they want exactly what you want, they're on your team. Nothing else feels like that. It's a great feeling.

FH: But, then, Adriane, you don't regularly work in a workshop. It's extremely difficult to find people to work with who know what you're doing. How essential do you think workshops are to the creation of prints?

AH: From my perspective, workshops are really important for many reasons. One is that they bring in artists who are not as familiar with printmaking, and introduce them to the media. I think those artists have pushed the field. I'm fairly familiar with the prints Robert Rauschenberg has done at ULAE and some of the lore that's built up around it, and some of the things that you read where he was coming in and wanting to do things, and the master printers may not have known how to do it. It was a challenge, a kind of game of, "Well, he wants to do this, or Jane wants to do this, and how are we going to do it?" If I'm sitting in my studio, I might come up against something I know to be a limitation of the field at the time and I might just step back and try to go in a different direction, whereas I think there's a collaborative spirit of invention.

JH: Collaboration and even a little, "Can you do this?" You know, a little challenge. I wouldn't say competitive, but printers kind of want to be thrown a difficult problem.

BG: In defense, Jane had already made prints.

JH: I actually made prints on my own.

BG: I saw the prints, and I said, "This is really someone interesting.' Kiki Smith came to the studio because I went to the Brooklyn Print Biennial where Kiki had pieces up and I fell in love with the work. I'd be crazy not work with someone who makes such beautiful things, and she made those pieces at home.

JH: It's like the joke that Bill always tells about me. I didn't know what ULAE was, I had never heard of it, and I had never heard of him. And he came over and I showed him these prints that I'd made. I'd made these prints by renting the print shop at the school where I taught, in the three week period between school being over and summer school starting, and paying a woman to be my studio assistant. And I very nicely explained to Bill that I didn't need him, because I had my own place where I could make prints. Then I was recounting the story to some friends of mine and they were, like, "Call him back."

FH: You have to be a genius to figure out things by yourself, right? Or do you think it's a limit?

JH: Working on your own, you mean?

FH: Yes, and having these ideas about what you want to do and saying, "How can I do this?" It seems like you have to be very ingenious.

JH: I think really great prints are made by artists on their own.

AH: There is a lot more access for publishers who are more familiar with curators. It's easier to visit ULAE and see what many artists are doing. It's not as economically viable or time-efficient to visit everybody out there in their studios. There is definitely an issue of exposure. I'm certainly acutely tuned into that and it has informed the Slop Art project that I'm involved in, which is very much about artists marketing their work, or getting work out there, almost like a WalMart flyer.

FH: And also via the Internet, which is a whole other issue...

AH: And using the Internet. But you still have that glut -- there's only one Web site you can look at at a time, and how do you get people to look at yours? It's almost the same as how do you get people to look at your prints or your slides. How do you get people there? It's all about attention.

FH: Marc, do you pay attention to Web sites that sell prints? Do you go around and look? Do you use the computer in that way or not?

MS: Whenever I get a brochure from someone or I see something in your magazine, I look at the site out of intellectual curiosity. But I don't believe it's had any impact -- or it's had only a minimal impact -- on my educational process or my knowledge of art or what's going on in the print world.

FH: So you've never bought a print from a Web site?

MS: No.

BG: Marc is really a hands-on collector.

FH: Bill, do you believe there are people who do buy things from Web sites?

BG: I met a couple not long ago in Seattle who bought a piece that I showed in my presentation. They had bought it from a Web site.

FH: Without having seen it?

BG: Yes. They saw the image on the screen.

MS: I've had a little experience with that. I've never bought anything on a Web site, but when Bill was in Detroit about two months ago, he said he was working with Lisa Yuskavage. I said I was very interested in her work and I didn't own any of her prints, but I was interested in what she was doing. Bill said, "Let's see what we can do." So we sat down at a computer in the gallery and he had an image of her ULAE print emailed over. We looked at it together and he was able to describe to me that it, if I remember correctly, was a lithograph on stone and all that, and I loved it, so I bought it.

FH: So there you go.

MK: But it was with that personal interaction.

MS: And I was familiar with the artist's work. And, most importantly, I knew Bill and ULAE's reputation. They've got a personality which I just happen to be in love with, and I own an awful lot of their prints.

MK: But you also knew that you could give it back if you didn't like it, so it's almost like it had been sent on spec.

BG: I must say, they scanned a proof into the computer and emailed it to Marc and we got really good printout of it. We set up his printer so it would print it for him.

FH: Are there any questions that you all want to ask each other? Or do you all know each other too well?

JH: Does this mean that the Brooklyn Museum's biannual print retrospective is back?

MK: Biannual? I don't know if it's biannual. I would like to continue doing print retrospectives. This has been the big reaction from everybody: whether it's digital or no digital, keep doing the print show.

BG: Well, don't you think it's okay to do one digital show, but now we're going to have to assimilate digital prints with what's already out there? I mean, would you separate an acrylic painting show and an oil painting show?

MK: No, and that's a good point. I felt a need to do a digital show now because there had never been a digital printmaking show. Do I feel the need to do another digital printmaking show? No. I would like to do a show on the history of computer and digital technology, which is very different than this. I would like to do a show that demonstrates how we got here, starting in the 1950s, and I know somebody else is talking about doing it, and if that person doesn't do it, I'm considering doing it.

BG: Taking Adriane's position a little bit further, an idea for a show could be one devoted only to prints made by artists in their studios. That would be a great way to give exposure to a lot of young artists.

MK: One of the other shows I wanted to do was of a printmaker's printmaker, to do a show of prints by people who only make prints, because a lot of people who make prints are painters, or sculptors, or they're known for something else. So I would like to continue doing the Print National.

BG: Well,l it seems like you have a whole garden full of ideas.

FH: Marilyn, it was really interesting to compare your show to something like BitStreams. I heard a lot of artists walking around your show saying how valuable it was to them, because there were objects. People want to know what else is out there, and how they're being made. More than the BitStreams show, for example, where there's a technology at work that maybe is not the technology that a lot of artists are interested in or even working with. They want something that they can get their hands on and do now, and they don't have to learn a whole new vocabulary. So I think from that standpoint, even though it's a print show, per se, it's offered people a lot of possibilities for what they can do with their work.

MK: I know we've been talking about technology all afternoon, but I also don't want to get hung up on the technology. This is about art that is enabled by the technology. That's a very important point to make. For me to have chosen any piece for this show, I had to have liked it. I thought it was intriguing or interesting in some way. So it was about the technology, but it was also about the images and the aesthetics. We can't lose sight of that It was a fun show to do, because what I wanted to do was pick people who weren't as well known or pick people who were well known to show how they were working with the medium, and get a real mix of what's going on.