Art & Journalism

Shirt 1 – 36×48…. and for sale!

There is an expression called ‘high tech-high touch’.

It means that in a high-tech world, there is a naturall attraction to high touch, or non technical things.

Like writing with a fountain pen.

My own high touch outlet is print making.

I started in college, where I did editions for Jim Dine.

Now, I go to the studio and print whenever I get a chance.

The print above is my most recent work.  (OK. Hey, no one said you had to  like it).

But I like the physicality of making the screens, working with ink and a press.  It’s so  far removed from manipulating electrons. You get your hands dirty.

The technique that I use is photo silkscreen.

I take a photograph and then transfer it ot a kodalith film, before making a chemical transfer to an emulsion that is coated in the screen.  The part that got me thinking about journalism is the kodalith.  It’s a film that transfers progressive images into dots. The dots turn to either black or white, depending upon how long they are exposed.

This is the way photographs used to be printed in newspapers. All I do is blow them up and play with the images, then print them.

But it was the dots that got me thinking.

If you look at the picture from a distance, you see the whole image and it makes sense. But if you get really close you only see the dots.

It’s the assemblage of the dots that makes the thing make sense and communicate an idea.

In the old world of journalism, like the pre-industrial world of painting, a single artist (or journalist), painted an image on a canvas with a brush and paint or words, or images.

My friend Len Shlain wrote a wonderful book called Art & Physics, in which he compared the development of modern art with the rise of post-Newtonian physics, both abstractions in a sense.

I would say that the rise of technology-driven, online journalism – in which many many people (blogger, vlogger, citizen journalists), being to contribute to what we might think of as a ‘matrix of truth’, is in many ways analgous to the rise of impressionist art or more specifically, pointalism, as a way of seeing the world.

The ‘truth’, the journalism is no longer one sole voice or one sole perspective. It is, instead, an amalgam, a ‘sense’ of reality driven by thousands of points of color or thousands of opinions, voices and facts, which through the vehicle of the web are ultimately seen as one greater and whole image.

This takes me back the idea recently discussed of empowering 1,000 people in Gaza with flipcams.  The idea here is not to get one ‘true’ story out of 1,000, but rather a sense of what the truth of life in Gaza is, from a thousand perspectives all merging to make one larger image.