theGraphicArts |
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When I first heard someone talking about Iris prints in a gallery, it was in Alburquerque. I thought they were talking about reproductions of flowers, and so I didn't pay much attention, but then the gallery owner showed me one. It wasn't a flower at all. I'm not going to say who the artist was, but it was really beautiful, and I asked the gallery owner, "How'd she do that?" He said, "It's an Iris print." "But how'd she do it?" I continued my query. "Oh, she didn't do it," he said, "It's a print; it was done on a computer." Well, I wanted more information than that, so I asked him how many there were in the edition. He told me that there was no particular edition size and so I asked, "When does she cancel the plate?" Do you know he told me that there wasn't a plate? All that information was kept in the computer. "WHAT!" I exclaimed. No plate; no definitive end to the edition; like these damned things could just keep coming forever, maybe even after the artist's death. "Shades of Dal!" Then this gallery owner could see I wasn't buying his line of gobbledygook, and so he threw French at me. He said, "WELL, officially, they are referred to as Iris-Gicle prints." " Gicle," I astonished. "It means spray of ink," he said to me as if speaking to the uneducated. He then looked at me with the haughty pose of having settled the matter once and for all. I waited, feigned contemplation with a sense of having been corrected, and then replied, "In French, gicler means to squirt out, and when I was in France it meant to piss." He glared at me with all the disdain he could muster, and so, I couldn't stop myself. It was time to prick this balloon of nonsense, masquerading as a knowledgeable, perhaps even scholarly font of information. I was looking straight into the face of a mountebank. Then, he spoke from his cache or mountebankery, the arrogant sentence, "You just don't understand." Not being his sycophant, (and every mountebank needs his sycophants) it was my turn, "Yes, I do understand. I understand that you, in an attempt to justify this fallacious nonsense, tried to use a French word and you used it badly." I added, "I suppose it doesn't matter what you spray." His glare hardened and MY, how he did cluck as he flailed his arms about and informed me that they had been shown in a whole list of important place like The Metropolitan Museum in New York City, the museums of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Laguna Beach, and even The Corcoran Gallery in Washington. I broke into his list of important places and said, "I don't care if they have been and are presently being exhibited in The Museum of Modern Art in Heaven with Mary Magdalene as curator; they are not original pieces of art." In a time when provenance has become critical for all pieces of art, we should not have to deal with nonsense like open-ended editions from plates that the artist did not make. In a complete edition of etchings, no two will be exactly alike because they are made by hand and done individually. Iris- Gicle prints are reproductions: just that, reproductions. They make wonderful and beautiful posters; they are truly exquisite. But in short, and emphatically, an Iris-Gicle, no matter how beautiful, simply isn't art. It's just a damn shame; something otta be done. |
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