Printing and Writing

r\RTISTS'l STf\TE~'IENTS TheArtists' Statements section ofLeonardo is intendedtobea rapidpublicationforum. Texts can beup to 750 words in length with no illustrations, orup to500 words in length with oneblack-and-white illustration. Artists' Statements areacceptedfor publication upon recommendation of anyone memberof theLeonardo EditorialBoard, who will thenforward themto theMain Editorial Office with his orherendorsement. PRINTING AND WRITING John Sindelar, 529 B Longshore Drive, Ann Arbor, MI 48105, U.S.A. Acceptedfor publicationUy David Carrier. I have always seen printmaking as bringing some kind of technology to my drawing. Even the simplest mechanisms of reproduction, such as rubbing or monoprinting, take over for the immediacy of drawing and institute in its place a delay and a repetition that has always seemed uncanny and somewhat eerie. In printing an image, something slips into the gap and makes the image fascinatingly unlikeits model. My monoprints explore the uncanny gap that comes along with technology and its strange iterations. Made by rubbing objects with ink and then wrapping them in muslin, these monoprints translate objects in a precise yet hallucinatory fashion. What begins as a rigorous correspondence between the object and its print becomes unhinged in its excesses and differences . Most noticeably, the scale shifts, and the image is often doubled or its contour freakishly exaggerated as the muslin takes an impression from within each of the small spaces making up an object. The print is faithful to its subject at an unfamiliar scale. Thus, this most simple and neutral of representational techniques, the rubbing, contains the potential to translate the object almost completely outside our experience. My prints also take up the issue of printing per se by employing markmaking objects such as typewriters, hammers and pistols in more blunt and literal ways. Instead of a single key, the entire typewriter strikes the page, the whole of it becoming a new, unintelligible character (Fig. 1). This technique explores the tensions between supposedly transparent and more obviously opaque forms of representation. This amounts to a tension between printing and writing: between the print as an image and as a grapheme. It conjures up an almost elementary-school distinction between ordered, angular print and exaggerated , curving arabesques of script. In this context, the double images that occur in many of these prints recall the copybooks of composition students with their imperfect repetitions. What is fascinating about the technology of the print is not that the copy destroys the aura of the original. This work is compelling because if there is an aura, it exists between copies and beFig . 1.John Sindelar, Typewriter I, monotype, 52 X 32 in, 1995. Printing the typewriter by coveringit in ink and wrapping it in muslin takes the object at its word by approaching it naively as a markmaking machine. tween the print and its subject. It is the addition of a technology to simple drawing that invites the proliferation of meaning. The difference between a monoprint and a drawing of an object is that the print refers to its subject through a lexical framework, a concrete and repeatable translation. However primitive it is, this lexical attribute is not transparent. It is this slight opacity that technology brings to all its productions . It allows the image to move off on its own, under strict rules that yet lead only to uncanny variance. The printed images bear the direct imprint of their subjects while standing an irrecoverable and hallucinatory distance from them. These prints revel in this distance. Manuscript received 19July 1995. e 19961SAST LEONARDO, Vol. 29, No.4 pp. 309-310, 1996 309 ...