Co-operative art techniques

Wider research context / theoretical framework The project is part of a collaborative research group studying different layers of the fundamental interdependency between art and technique. Against approaches in art theory and history, which operate with dichotomies between form and material, design and execution etc., we share a decisive interest in artistic processes, in practical procedures, and the skills involved in art making as well as their tradition. Within this framework the project focuses on a select group of art techniques, defined by the co-operative implication of factors or components, which are as such neither generated nor fully controllable by the executing artist. The projects participants will study specific procedures of printmaking and sculptural techniques in early modern period (16/17th ct.) as well as in early modernity (19th ct.). Involved are procedures such as the casts from nature, nature prints, photograms or the chliché verre. Approach / methods In cooperation with museum curators and restorers the project will systematically link object studies with the research of historical resources such as recipes and instruction manuals (16/17th ct.), periodicals and reviews (19th ct.). Guiding methods will be a close reading and interpretation of working procedures, formal and iconological analysis as well as an epistemology of images. Historically, the project will engage a diachronic comparison between visual practices in the 16/17 th and the 19th century. Hypotheses/research questions/objectives Based on a range of case studies, the project will show how the above mentioned co- operative aspect in the techne of fine arts was exposed (or hidden) in their esthetics and in which way these co-operative moments informed the status of these specific artistic work practices within the wider framework of questions about authorship, of the value and order of visual media and human artes. A further research question is how this deepened constellation of techne shaped since the mid19 century some of the long lasting narratives of Art History.

From a perspective of art history and Bildwissenschaft the project provided new insights into how specific technologies of pictorial representation basically inform which aesthetic expectations we form of images, their epistemological status as well as their use and circulation via medias. The moment of Co-operation, as highlighted in the title, hereby refers to the so-called practice of nature prints or printing from nature. Between the 16th and 19th century these nature prints went through several phases of intensive experimentation and a wide spread use in the natural sciences, in the fine arts, as a medium of rather private memory, and in industrially produced print media during their early decades. It challenged the representational qualities of drawing, established printing techniques and around 1850 was in many ways closely connected to early photography. A basic principle of these prints is that the process of representation always includes an initial procedure of transmitting an object's shape and features directly from the same object to an image surface or matrix. Co-operation thus means primarily a certain co-agency of the objects themselves and other components involved in the specific technologies. By studying these phenomena, previous research either focused more or less exclusively on the technical aspects of these practices. Use and functional contexts have been studied only very selectively and the art- and image-theoretical implications have hitherto been reduced to the semiotic concept of images as indexical signs. This concept of the image as a direct physical trace was indeed significant as a starting point for our project, but this semiotic paradigm could by no means be the primal basis for adequately studying the manyfold variants, adaptations and renaissances of nature prints over about four centuries. The project contains a collection of case-studies with emphasis on the 16th, 18th and 19th century; and its diachronic perspective made it possible for the first time to thoroughly investigate a wide range of historical contexts in order to analyze systematic connections and long-lasting traditions as well as radical transitions. On each historical layer comparable constellations turned out to be of specific significance: Pictorial authorship was (re-)defined relating to specific demands for images of intensified aesthetic qualities and abundance of information as well as to strategies of credibility and authentication, based on the calculated involvement of non-human causes in its generation. This also implied characteristic new syntheses between a unique emphasis on the irreducible value of the individual object and its translation into media of reproduction, increasingly adoptable by upcoming mass media.