Notes on the Display Repro

The Display Repro addresses technological opportunity, the contingencies of interior decoration, archival concerns and theoretical nuance.

Duchamp’s readymades, Warhol’s silk-screened “paintings”, Judd’s industrial execution, Koons’s use of assistants and the art world’s embrace of large color photography provides a context against which the photo-mechanical enlargement of an original may be compared.

When I was a teenager I aspired that my artwork would achieve reproduction. This was based on my experience of illustrations reproduced in books and magazines. As my experience of art in museums increased I came to realize the primacy of directly confronting the authentic art object. Nonetheless my fascination with gain and loss and the shift of meaning in the process of presentation and representation persists.

I began to paint on photographs in 1976, conceptualized as the photograph reveals and the paint conceals, that photography serves representation and memory and that painting serves abstraction and imagination and that together a dialectical transformation was initiated. From 1981-1985 I finger-painted art book reproductions which I photographically enlarged and then painted on top of. I experimented with an industrial printing process which worked like today’s inkjet printers, but rejected it because the print’s resolution was inadequate. And then I solved the problem of enlargement by making pads on the ends of sticks, which performed like big fingers. This was my method for making wall-sized from 1985-1998.

After moving my studio from New York City to coastal Rhode Island, I began to work, as I had in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with watercolors. By the late 1990s inkjet printer technology had improved to the point that a print of a watercolor could be distinguished from the original, only by the warpage of the paper in the original, thereby enabling the direction I had attempted in 1985. The economy of making big finger paintings had become unsustainable in relation to working space, materials, transportation and storage. The perfection of inkjet technology now allows me to work small at my preferred rate and enlarge on demand.

It has long been a cliche that artistic intentions and decorative priorities are antagonistic. I disagree with this conceit because I want my work to be lived with and enjoyed and therefore view the relationship with my collectors as cooperative and proactive. I welcome the opportunity of tailoring my work to the collector’s interior circumstances.

That a work of art remains unchanging allows its unique cultural quality of being referred to over the expanse of time. This, of course, is relative to time frames such as human life expectancy or the history of the universe. Watercolor on paper is one of the more ephemeral art media. Museums generally exhibit such works on a limited basis and always with limited lighting. The relation that I initiate between the original and the Display Repro allows that the original be stored safely while the Display Repro, which is rated to remain unchanging for a hundred years the environmental abuse of being hung.

My personal regard for copyright is that images such as they are reproducible and may be held in memory are free as opposed to the objects which embody the image, which are proprietary. Therefore my website invites visitors to reproduce my images for personal, educational, not-for-profit purposes with proper attribution. The originals are mine and I offer them for sale at which point become part of a market. My “rules” for the Display Repro are that there is only one signed, authorized work of which, size, creation date, owner and location are held in my database to assure authenticity.

The Display Repro may be replaced for a fee, on return of the first or evidence of its destruction. If the original and the Display Repro are sold separately, the right to replacement is nullified. I retain the right to reproduce the work’s image in print or digital form.

Theoretically and practically the Display Repro “advertises” the original and calls into question the relationship of actual to simulation. The qualities and functions of authenticity, illusion and artifice, directness an distance are, likewise, framed. Expressionist conceit is countered by reflexive probity. Subtly but inescapably the tragic quality of the collision of the pathos of reproduction against the hubris of creation permeates the otherwise apparent simple pleasure of the image itself.