Recently, I came into the possession of a number of art prints. An old man, of unspecified relation to the family – in the way only old people could be – gave them to me. He was moving houses and along with his furniture decided to get rid of the framed Hockneys, Pierneefs, and Laubsers. Not to say that they were the real thing; if that were the case, I wouldn’t be subjecting you to this crummy blog – I’d be off somewhere exotic not speaking to anybody or not thinking, as rich folk (I think) do.
The prints are prints in the truest sense: mechanically reproduced, sold thousands upon thousands of times at art galleries and pretend-art stores and boot fairs, their claim to aesthetics is their ability to be everywhere at once, and subsequently nowhere. Walter Benjamin, child and boon of Europe’s vibrant interwar intellectual circles, first noted the emergence of this phenomenon in his 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. He argued that technological reproduction,
“detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition. By replicating the work many times over, it substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to reach the recipient in his or her own situation, it actualizes that which is reproduced.”
For Benjamin, technological reproduction freed works of art from the constraints of tradition – of history – and revealed their revolutionary potential, one that not only expanded the access of art to an inflated audience, but by virtue of that process allowed the masses to formulate a collective response to artworks, thus developing both individual and class consciousness.
Looking at the Hockney reproduction, I wonder how much more I understand about myself because of it. The cool blues of either Swimming Pool with Reflection or Day Pool with Three Blues (the print in question could be either of these two) doesn’t strike me as particularly revolutionary, and instead a sense of ease passes over me as I look at it. Neither am I too aware of the class consciousness I am now privy to, apart from the quasi-mythical artistic classes who now deal in NFTs and live in certain areas of town and seem to be the ire of my conservative impulses. Theirs (ours?) is an aesthetic community, although I am suspicious that it ever will translate into real political action. But that's capitalism, ey?
What I'm left with then is the vague notion of what place art should occupy in my life - as something radical. The reality is different. A part of me is fatigued from a world surrounded by images. They are given too freely, ostensibly without the desire to be taken back. And that only aids my distrust and misunderstanding: why are these pictures and paintings and the multitude of other images given at no cost? Surely one day they will come collect it from me. Surely. But another part of me is less conspiratorial, more levelled; I've learnt that I often enjoy art as much as I enjoy putting up nails.
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I recently found the perfect place to hang up the Hockney print. It is a large square print and so it needs a large square space in order to fully appreciate the brevity of the tonal blues that seem to hang from each other until they dry out towards the edge of the frame, all blotched. The tall ceilings, the wooden floors, the erratic emptiness of the place I now live in - my stay will be too short to ever call this place home - all aid the obvious desire of the print to eventually dissipate, like a hot summer day by the pool. There is a plant framing the squarish open wall space and a leather-backed chrome chair floats around the living room along with a lamp.
I could, in even looser prose (resembling bad poetry), describe my room, the passageway, the bathroom, even the alleyway on the side of the semi-detached house; in theory I could put up a nail anywhere. But I'll spare you the histrionics; the point is this - that often what art means to us is intimately linked to, if not dependent on, the space it occupies. Every new nail I hammer in, whether it is above the bathtub or just below the ceiling board, creates the artwork anew. By continually affording the fading Hockney a new context, I promise to keep its desire to dissipate at bay. Perhaps the simple joy of putting up nails - an activity best done on a sprightly Saturday morning and aided by a measuring tape, a pencil, sometimes a spirit level, and the helping limbs of a loved one - is my small bit of heresy towards art, and its world that continually privileges the genius of money over all else.
This is closer to contemporary art theory than I initially imagined, or wanted. But with all that said, I still feel attached to the square print hanging in the square space with wooden floors and high ceilings and floating bits of furniture. There is something beautiful, joyous, comforting - we all fall into essentials when logic fails us, and I am no different - when I imagine it hanging it there. And I need to do it; you see, if I continue hanging the Hockney all over the place I'll soon have a wall full of nail-holes, polyfilla'd over, resembling a war-ravaged town, or the weeping wall (all frivolous metaphors seem to oscillate between death and God). But for now, the wall remains open, foregoing any choice. I guess that's the most sensible thing for me to do - there's often more joy in thinking about something than doing it.