As the topic has shifted from the original post, into a more generic discourse on redefining the branding of the process of digital print making it bears looking at how the term Giclee was used in the past and how museums are currently using and defining the process presently. At one point, Giclee implied that the end product of the process was a “faithful reproduction” of an original work of art, presumably a painting or drawing, rendering, whatever. The job of the Giclee was to deliver a facsimile of an “important” work in an acceptable quality, as to provide support of the original, thereby relegating all products made after the original, copies, never originals, themselves. Not unlike prints from a unique stone, each numbered giclee had an indexical relationship to the original, yet could never be equal to the original by virtue of this supportive role it was necessarily playing.
As time went on, photographers making their prints now with inkjet printers rather than via wet darkroom techniques, began viewing the prints themselves as original works, albeit now having an indexical relationship, presumably to the in-camera negative and subsequently processed image, pre-print. Therefore the inkjet print gained somewhat in stature over the previous “giclee-cheap-copy” by becoming an inkjet print copy of itself, which was hoped to be viewed as art as in a new art form, the way photography eventually became accepted as art eventually, after Adams, Weston, Steiglitz, et al.
So today, museums still very much view the Archival Pigment Print as the updated, evolved workhorse cum Giclee vehicle for supporting actual works of art rather than, even though the Archival Pigment Print is verified for longevity if executed on the correct substrates with the correct inks, (pigments), and stored under approved archival conditions. Today only very gradually are so-called Archival Pigment Prints being accessioned by museum collections in comparison to historical means of image making traditions.
Witness the Boston Museum of Fine Art which has an entire Digital Art Program whereby anyone can get life-like replicas of museum originals, for their personal enjoyment.
GET YOUR ARCHIVAL PIGMENT PRINTS NOWInsofar as the original concept of chewing up charcoal, mixing it with spittle, or animal fat, etc., and literally spitting the medium out upon and around one’s own hand on cave walls (called “spit painting”) in places like Lascaux, or Chauvet, could be more likely how the term Giclee came about, in reference to this context of “spitting ink”. But even then, the resultant image was only a crude “copy” of the hand, or whatever silhouette of original object.
So really, in terms of how few actually unique inkjet art prints made under whatever name are actually being collected, compared to how many “Archival Copies” of “Original Art” are being sold, the inkjet print has a long way to go to gain museum art acceptability in comparison with what is being truly focused on by museum curators, preparators, conservators, etc.
Until the Machine Made Cad Cam Reproductive Process somehow finds legitimacy in the realm of fine art, and I’m talking about the fine art that academicians argue over, in terms of content based constructs, the lowly inkjet print still has a long way to go, and a brilliant marketing schema in order to transcend into the anals of history in the contextuality of museum historicity.
It is my view that the machine made print has yet to come into its own in order for it to sufficiently gain museum heft. We have not yet seen the evidence of the transcendant process: the gift of the machine. We are still in the spitting stage. When we see innovation such as seen with the paradigm of crapping over a log evolve to sitting and squatting in a box with a door on it, to actually moving effluent via a flow of water away from immediate sight and presence, will digital image creation (not reproduction) then and only then will it come into its own.
What form will it take and still be considered a “print”? Beyond the obvious scientific innovations where paper becomes subsumed, I believe there is still room for innovation with materials via a manufacturing process of creating a substrate that is dyed while forming, and which can morph in many directions based on developing upcoming printing technologies while still existing within the confines of our traditional notions of exactly what a photographic print is. If in the process of becoming a “do-all” of process inclusive of making substrate and ink media, a new artform arises which so far and beyong exceeds current expectations, eventually then in all likihood, it would in addition obfuscate the need for museums which could no longer contain the vastness of innovation and evolution.
So are we going to keep talking about where we were and where we are, or are we going to focus on where we’re going? Once we no longer have the right to make prints that arent regulated and licensed, it may behoove us to make images/objects that are deemed “unique” unless that is, we will have become by then, forced to join the only currently licensed artists, the architects, and become required to be duly appointed in whatever capacity fullfills criterion and guidelines to even own simulation processing delivery systems (SPDS) complying with the National MAESA (*Minimum Aesthetic Standards Act).
