Project Details
Projekt
Printmaking as Process
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Magdalena Bushart
Subject Area
Art History
Term
since 2020
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 420353590
This subproject deals with the visibility or making-visible of work processes in relief and intaglio prints of the early modern period. These work processes can be read directly in the print media (woodblocks, copper plates, lithographic stones) as the trace of the knife or burin. In the printed images, however, the traces of work are present only indirectly—as disturbances, experimental extensions or technical exaggerations of the procedure, as well as in the divergences between the individual copies of a print. At the centre of this project are questions about the leeway given by procedures—despite (or precisely because of) their complexity – to demonstrate authorship in the reproduced image, and to situate this within a value system specific to a particular time, about the tension between systematisation and the deliberate breaking of rules, as well as about the interrelations between the various stages of production and skills. At issue here is, firstly, the shift between manual work and mechanical or chemical reproduction, and, secondly, the shift between two- and three-dimensions and the corresponding models of cooperation between the conceiving artist and the executing specialist. In this sense, the printing blocks used in woodcutting are defined, on the one hand, as artefacts and analysed with regard to their materiality, their formal qualities and their functionality; on the other hand, woodcuts, engravings and etchings, which in this context are to be understood as products of prior actions, are considered with regard to the information they provide on the work process and its evaluation. The aim is to consider the technical traces in a print as a form of content, and to draw attention to the variability of the reproduced.
DFG Programme
Research Units
