COURTNEY JOHNSON
Cliché-verre, French for glass negative, is a photographic process first used shortly after the invention of photography in the mid-1800s, when painters who were interested in the new medium—such as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Eugene Delacroix—drew onto smoked glass or glass coated in printmaking ground and then used the glass as a photographic negative. Unlike the cross-hatched printmaking style of the nineteenth-century cliché-verre, I paint additively on glass with many media, frequently in color, using the light that passes through the glass negative in the enlarger or scanner to correlate with a camera-made photographic image. The result is a cross between a hand-made painting and a mechanically reproduced photographic image.
The hand-painted images reference the historic painting tradition in art, and they also contrast the rigid mechanical forms they depict with each imperfection made by the human hand exaggerated as it is enlarged. The images are painted onto separate pieces of glass and printed onto different pieces of paper; each panel becomes individually abstracted into painterly textures, lines, and contours as they build into a collective image.
Unlike a painting, however, cliché-verre images are photographic and mechanically reproducible. As Walter Benjamin asserts, “nothing is more revealing than the nature of the repercussions that these two different manifestations – the reproduction of works of art and the art of the film – have had on art in its traditional form” (Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. New York: Schocken Books Inc., 1969. ); therefore, there is perhaps no artistic medium better suited to examine the repercussions of reproduction and human-made inventions than cliché-verre—which is at once ‘the art of film’ and a ‘reproduction of a work of art’.
Using a historic photographic process I exploit not only photographic history as content in my work, but also the wonder of lesser known processes to challenge the quantity of digital images visible in the world today. Alternative photographic processes serve as a bridge from one medium and one time period to the next. Fitting into a long tradition of art, my work is a vital part of the current technological transition, illustrating the present by linking the past and the future.
The contrast of mechanical and hand-made production questions the same subject matter that my work addresses. My work addresses the unvoiced, seemingly disconnected triangle between nature, technology, and humans. My images attempt to mend the fractures by linking present understandings to the oral and visual traditions of the past in a manner strong enough to compete with the wizardry of technology for human attention. In 1959, Richard Neutra wrote:
Form and pattern are biological necessities. Nature is the precedent from which man has sprung, and by adaptation and modification, derived the pattern of existence for tens of thousands of years. Since nature is so pointedly and systematically studied, especially in these last generations, man ought to have had better results. Nature has startling shape in its working: from infusoria to butterflies, there is form… Chaos has long been recognized as man’s concrete enemy, contrasted to “Kosmos,” the Greek word for shapefulness. What is simply called nervous strain is a product of the amorphousness in our urban life generally, not only the life of megalopolis. (Neutra, Richard. “Human cities—is art practical?” Arts in society. Ed. Donald White.1.2 (1959):7-19.)
Written
fifty years ago, Neutra’s words still portray the formlessness
of the contemporary city and technology. I study technology in my current
body of work, expounding upon Neutra’s words and trying to give
coherent shape to the current technologies and megalopolises by articulating
their abstracted patterns. A combination of the gestural paintings of
Julie Mehretu and the teeming photographs of Andreas Gursky, my current
series breaks down complex forms into representative shapes, which maintain
the evocative congested charge of the contemporary urban landscapes they
depict. Whether silhouetted oil rigs backdropped by an ominous sky, or
a Tokyo night skyline swarming with lights and buildings, I give human-made
machinery both form and meaning.
By working from a historical point of view as I dissect images of our current society into their composite abstract parts, I examine our technology just as artists of the past investigated mythology; I depict the forms of our cities as Rembrandt depicted Bathsheba and Goya represented Saturn. With technology as the protagonist, I develop images that connect to the story-telling traditions of the past and allow for depiction and reflection on our modern narrative.