Post #2: Challenges and Opportunities in the Digital Humanities

For this post, I read  “Print Scholarship and Digital Resources,” by Clair Warwick. This writing discusses the dynamics between print and digital publications today, and the role that both can play in contemporary scholarship. The author keeps a fairly unbiased perspective about the benefits and shortcomings of both mediums. Most interesting to me is the physicality of printed books vs. their digital counterparts. Why do we still ascribe value to printed matter in an era when digital publishing should be the logical standard? Is there something unique about the experience of pouring over dusty volumes that simply cannot be reproduced via reading the same text on a kindle?

I find it easy to draw comparisons to the role of artwork in the digital age. We view more and more artwork online rather than in real life (IRL). This has some incredible benefits, namely that we have access to a much broader sampling of artists and we can easily follow up-to-the-moment trends and practices in contemporary art. A curator in New York can stay up-to-date with the programming of their favorite exhibition space in Los Angeles, read a blog post about a studio visit with a friend in Kansas City, and discover the website of an emerging artists in Japan, all without leaving the comforts of home! The world of art museums and galleries is notoriously limited in its ability to show new artists. There is only so much physical space available to exhibit work, and these institutions tend to favor time (and market)-tested, mid-career and established artists. What this leaves is a huge deficit in the representation of young and emerging artists. For many of these under-represented artists, the internet has become a democratizing space where they can create and maintain their own cultural presence outside of the preferences and market demands of the museum and gallery system.

The internet also presents its own set of challenges and limitations for the presentation of artwork. Primarily, it underscores the physicality of artwork. It would be safe to say that the majority of artwork that we consume is online (this is especially true for art world professionals who wish to stay current, but cannot physically be everywhere at once), and that the majority of artwork created today is made to be viewed by an online audience. Even an artist with a solo show at a major museum can only expect a small percentage of the total art world to visit the exhibition. Therefore, the internet, replacing catalogs and magazines, becomes the primary exhibition space. What gets lost in translation is the physical qualities of the artwork. How can an image on a screen ever truly reproduce the colors or scent of an object, the texture of its materials, or its physical scale in relation to the viewer? Photo documents are mere illustrations of physical things. They give us important clues about the nature of objects, but they can never truly reproduce the experience of physical interaction. In his seminal essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Walter Benjamin describes the relation of an object to its reproduction in terms of originality. An original artwork has an "aura of originality" that diminishes over subsequent reproductions. Presumably, the aura of an artwork reproduced online would be even further diminished from its printed reproduction because it can be viewed and re-posted indefinitely.

Regarding my students, I still find it difficult to convey the differences between physical artworks and their representations. One of my favorite tools to spark this conversation in the classroom is the painting, "The Treachery of Images" by the 20th century Belgian painter Rene Magritte. The painting includes a highly-representational depiction of a tobacco pipe with the text beneath, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." or in English, "This is not a pipe." I usually begin by showing an image of the painting and asking students to plainly describe what they see. Generally, they respond along the lines of, "I see a pipe and I see text." I then translate the text for them and ask, "How is this not a pipe?" After some discussion the consensus is that we are not looking at a pipe at all, but a collection of pigments, squished together with oil onto the surface of a canvas. Furthermore, we are not even examining the actual painting, but a photographic reproduction that has been converted into pixels and projected through light onto the surface of a projection screen. The ultimate takeaway? To truly understand a physical work of art, it must be experienced IRL.

As a side-note, I finally saw Magritte's painting IRL last year at the MoMA during their major retrospective of the artist. As an object, I found it to be fairly lack-luster. The paint surface was incredibly flat with a matte finish that looked surprisingly like that of a printed reproduction. Maybe Magritte intentionally negated the aura of his painting, anticipating the massively-reproducible potential of the image. The most physical aspect of experiencing the painting, for me, was navigating through the huge crowd of people milling in front of it.