Peter Kennard and Paul Coldwell in conversation
Space Studios, Martello St, London. 12th October 2007
Photograph of Peter Kennard in his studio
© Paul Coldwell
P.Coldwell The digital brings together photography and printmaking in a way that hasn’t happened before. You come very much from a photography background but your work in seen within a broad fine art context.
P.Kennard Well originally I had a painting background, then into photography. I went to the Slade School of Art as a painter and then went to the RCA to study painting even though I didn’t do much painting. For me its always been interested to combine photography with print and then with print with the hand made mark as well so there are these different layers. So before Digital, I did it through photography. If I made a montage, I’d re-photograph it, then make a photographic print. That then developed into making photo-copies and working into them with charcoal, and then it became more of a hand made work. With digital I was able to use photographs quite straight and combine digital photography with objects that were photographed on the scanner and use paint and other materials as well.
PC Can we go back to your interest in printmaking and your use of Xerox?
PK I started off using etching and dry point and then progressed to dyeline printing. I would make a picture in the darkroom and then make a 5×4 negative, blow it up onto transparent photographic paper and then roll it through a dyeline machine, which meant I could produce big prints very quickly and cheaply.
PC Dyeline was a very crude form of printing mainly used by architects to prints their plans…
PK Yes and also they faded. I did one on the subject of Kent State when the students were killed. I hung it in the street, it rained and it actually erased the image over time, so that was another element. And the prints in daylight went yellow, they were very fugitive. But I was able to make some prints using rolls of paper 30 ft long that was great.
PC There’s is a connection between your use of Xerox and Dyeline. I see your engagement with these processes as contaminating or corrupting an original image.
PK Well at one point I got giant photocopies made where (probably contrary to health & safety) the toner was not fused to the paper so I could then mix charcoal with them and totally merge the charcoal with the toner. It was merging the photographic with the hand-drawn. But as that technology became redundant it became difficult to get large Xerox machines any more and anyway the quality has changed… so getting into digital was an alternative. I always thought that the digital was about refinement and cleaning, but realised that it didn’t need to be about that. Although the whole propaganda around digital is about the clean, image, made in room where you don’t have any dust, everything is meant to be immaculate; it doesn’t have to be like that. But as a photographic image it is not as precise, well it can be, but with ink jet (which is what I have been involved with) it flattens out the photographic surface and one can print onto a matt paper so you can get a quality of what would have been like a silkscreen or a photo-litho. But the colours are slightly flattened out, I think, they don’t have the moulding that you get with, even photo-litho, you don’t get the same quality to it.
PC Its also to do with the inkjet ink is very uniform. If you make a four colour print there are different deposits of ink across the surface whereas with digital the image is resolved in one complete sweep. This can make the artist feel that the image is already finished. And it’s only if there is a blemish or that they recognise a mistake, that the artist can perhaps feel they can re enter the work.
PK But it’s still a proof, you can add stuff and take away, but I agree. In making the Awards sets, none of the work was done on the surface after the ink jet printing. In the end, Cat Picton-Phillips and I felt a bit frustrated which is why we set out to find a way to make digital prints on a surface that could then be beaten up and battered, taking it back into a more direct physical process, literally taking it backwards.
PC A criticism I would make of the Awards series is that the sharpness of the edge of the image acts against the activity that has gone on inside in the making of the images.
PK It’s too neat. But I don’t know if that is inherent in the inkjet process or just the point we were at.
PC I think its difficult to let mistakes occur or simply leave them in, because, given the ease of correcting and changing, mistakes can just look like laziness
PK Maybe because its not embedded in the process as with for example etching where the marks are carried forward through the process or else have to be physically removed.
PC That’s right in traditional practice you couldn’t go backwards
PK Yes, hadn’t thought of that. With digital you can go forward and backwards which is like being in a permanent present, re-entering the history of a piece and going forward which hasn’t been possible with other printmaking processes.
PC What interests me in your recent work is how you have taken the prints as starting points to then physically act on them. You are now physically engaging with the surface both initially at the scanning level and then on the resulting print. The surface of the print becomes a new starting point, a surface for more work.
PK We put dust onto images. We had to find ways of getting spontaneity back into the images, and counteracting the inherent elegance of digital prints. It’s avoiding merely refining and designing.
PC There’s also something rather paradoxical about your work. Here you are, now using state of the art machines, which claim that the prints will last for a 100 years and you are printing them on newspaper where the acid from the paper will destroy the image in a matter of weeks.
PK Well I like working with the cleanliness and precision of the inkjet and then to work against it, against the medium. It’s something to fight against. We didn’t need to do this when we used traditional processes because they were dirty to start with. So if you want to work in a hands on way then it does involve breaking down what digital printing was originally conceived as.
PC Is it too far to see this as a political gesture. The digital technology comes with all the baggage of the multinationals in a way that old printing technologies never did. I means artists cobbled together their own presses, made their own inks. But the digital is a sealed enterprise convened by supply and demand, the hardware is supported by an industry of software and sundries and its difficult to act independently of these.
PK Well you feel it with this printer. It is like a corporate brain with that impassive quality and clean design of the corporate state so I think you are right that there is an element of trying to break it up. But always with my work it is to do with subject matter. When I first made digital prints the were beautifully printed on hahnemuhle archival paper and there was a sense of aesthetising the subject matter and so through going on to cheap paper and newsprint its suggests the fragility of the situation that we are making work about, so its about content.
PC Do you want the texture also becomes an equivalent to the subject matter.
PK Well it’s always a failed equivalent but these new collaged prints are different from the box of Awards prints. But I’m not consciously saying I’m going to destroy ideas of digital, I think its taking technology and seeing how far you can make it your own because otherwise you are defined by what you are told it is.
That’s the joy of these new large scale works, it’s is the freedom we have. We can print one image on 50 newspapers and we can retain the quality of the newsprint. I could never do this before. Silkscreen sat very much on top of the image, while the digital inks sink into the paper. And of course when you work on newspapers you suggest that this a kind of event, a kind of reporting…
PC ….. a sense of urgency to get the message out? I mean if you were stepping back and taking months to make refined aesthetic decisions, the moment for action may have passed. There has always been a sense in your work of a reporting on the front line, making do…and the important thing is to get the message back even if its sometimes scrambled.
Pk Well also for me is the fact that the work disintegrates. This is part of the meaning of the work. Its curious that as Digital printing is now accepted in the art world, Gilbert & George are now working with inkjet and yet the urban art scene that has come out of Banksy are now screen printing all their images everything onto really thick art paper because they don’t think digital prints have the authority of silkscreen. They will make a 23 colour print which in the end, doesn’t look much different to the inkjet, which in my view is a bit bizarre.
PC After the symposium at Chelsea College of Art, Piers Townsend (Tate conservation) emailed me and talked about your work in terms of conservation. He suggested that rather than trying to preserve the pieces, you should present a disk from which the fresh image is printed each time, like a Sol le Witt drawing.
PK It wouldn’t work because of all the work that has gone on top, the physical work which goes in after its been made as a print. For instance we made one images that went on a hoarding. It was an image of a destroyed print, which was then printed photo litho as a poster. The original was in the gallery at the same time so there was a level of ambiguity which people found very confusing. On the hoarding was a photograph of a destroyed print but the print itself was in the gallery.
I began working digitally through Cat Picton-Phillips. She’s an artist and a printer and we got interested in how far we could push the Epson printer into getting the freedom we wanted as artists. And because you can divide up an image and print it in sections, it opened up a whole new opportunity for us to work on a really big scale, a recent piece being 5×3 metres, a colossal things but all printed in sections
PC When you begin working on a piece do you have a clear idea of its final size or is that something, which is resolved as the piece develops
PK We know if it’s going to be a big or a small piece. Some of the work we have done is very small, commissions for magazines or straight montages. There is a great change between making a digital montage now and before we had this technology. With the bigger pieces we don’t actually montage them on the screen, its actually done on the surface of the work so it has a raw quality. Most of them are made by printing out images and then collaging them but we don’t have a clear idea how it’s going to work. But the small ones are all done digitally on screen.
I can get images from The Guardian, then manipulate them on screen and then it’s sent to the magazine so it’s all virtual. I still find this weird. I spent half my life going to the darkroom, making 10 images slightly different sizes, cutting them with a scalpel, cow gum on the back, blacking out, it was totally physical and yet now I can end up with an image in a magazine a day later. I still find it hard to think it exists.
I wonder if that is one reason for getting into this physical aspect. It makes it real, but that’s to do with the way I’ve always worked. I’m used to being able to lay things out on a table. When I used to make work I would go to a picture library, which was a vast cavernous space by Russell Square. It was Kafkaesque, and you’d look through millions of images and they were all physical things. Then you would copy them onto negatives and manipulate them in the darkroom, whereas now you don’t have to go anywhere. If a magazine wants me to do a picture, I say I want 6 pictures of earthquakes and they send them down the line digitaly. And the danger is the homogeneity of all the images, which is why a number of graphic designers and illustrators who used to work digitally are going back to letterpress and hand made stuff.
PC A revolutionary aspect of the digital is that the artist, working in their studio, or even their bed-sit, can work on the scale of the Sistine chapel. But also it you are dealing with one off’s which is very much the case for you, using traditional processes there was a huge cost in printing one image and the unit cost greatly diminished the more you printed. Working digitally, there is a unit cost for each one, which is proportionally much lower.
PK Certainly in terms of scale I’ve never been able to afford to work on the size I’m working on now. And allow it to fail and really mess with it.
PC There seems to be a relationship between the finer the technology you are using and the violence with which you attack the image.
PK Well the world gets more violent so its not just trying represent an image. But its also through the physical process and I suppose printing on newspaper which is then churned up and broken is a representation of that violence. There is a danger of just getting into textural sing but I hope we avoid that.
PC Thank you.
© Peter Kennard and Paul Coldwell
The series of prints Award 2004 which are discussed in this interview are included in
Prints Now-Directions & Definitions. 2006 Gill Saunders and Rosie Miles. V&A.
From the Award series
41 X 33 cms,digital prints on hannemule paper
by Peter Kennard and Cat Picton Phillipps
Control Room is 2.7metres X 5 metres, digital
print,oil charcoal on paper on newspaper by Peter
Kennard and Cat Picton Phillipps
Soldier 1 is 2.7 metres X 7 metres,digital
print,plaster,oil,charcoal on paper on newspaper,by
Peter Kennard and Cat Picton Phillipps
All images© Peter Kennard and Cat Picton Phillipps
For further details of Peter Kennard and Cat Picton-Phillips please visit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kennard
