“Constellation”
zinc-etching on hard-ground with aquatint, 2019
Excerpt from “Constellation: Meditations on the Etched Line”
In his 1833 On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Charles Babbage invokes the spatiality of print in relation to casting. Charles Babbage describes etching, intaglio, as a form of copying. More specifically, it is a form of printing through cavities. It is a “painting of hollow lines,” rendered analogous to the casting of a mollusk’s shell. “It [printing] is often desirable,” he reflects, “to ascertain the form of the internal cavities, inhabited by molluscous animals, such as those of spiral shells, and of the various corals…”
The etching’s cast yields a seemingly two-dimensional image. Yet this image remains tethered to its spatial substrate. The very degradation of the plate (after 500 pulls for copper and 3000 pulls for zinc, according to Babbage) from which it emerges attests to this dependence. The paper curves around the contours of these hollow lines. The efficacy of its “spirals” decreases along a continuous, negative slope. The reproducibility of the image suggests pains leveled at the originary plate. “Almost unlimited pains are bestowed on the original,” Babbage writes. “An artist will sometimes exhaust the labour of one or two years upon engraving a plate…” To “paint with hollow lines” speaks of exhaustive labor. It invokes a certain kind of pain. Once more we return to pathos.
Touching the object becomes a procedure of reproduction in negative space. One does the impossible. One draws in cavities. The object comes to light through that which is not there. Babbage’s text proffers a fundamental paradox of print that escapes its often imagistic discourse: the inversion of space and light in addition to the more familiar inversion of right and left positionality. This is a sculptural inversion, calling forth a language of relievo, of relief. The plate operates on sculptural terms: it is negotiated through surface and ground simultaneously.
The naturalist attempts to enter the space of the spiraling shell and to illuminate it. Here, the microscope offers little by way of optical acquisition. Instead, a cast must be made. Plaster, viscous like ink, enters the spiraling hollows to produce a replica of the object from within. Etching, as form of casting, ventures into similar terrain—both physical and phenomenological. The print depends on an analogous entrance and illumination (via negation) of an object without sight.
Thus, an essential capacity of print is to explore the limitations of touch. To render touch:
as a form of acquisition,
as a form of possession,
as a form of collection,
as a form of insight,
as a form of sight,
as a form.
Touch recognizes form as opposed to image. The pre/early modern paradigm or archetypal figura of this conceit is the blind sculptor: he who depicts the face with the “eyes of the fingers.” The press provides this simultaneously forceful and delicate touch. As Jennifer Roberts writes, this “profoundly blind material operation can generate a pictorial effect of lightness and transparency.”
