Printmaking in Expansion:

Space and Time

Juan Martínez Moro

Key Speaker
IMPACT 10. International Multi-Disciplinary Printmaking Conference
Full Professor in Drawing. Cantabria University. Spain

Abstract

This work intends to define the presence of an expansive temporal-space

characteristic of the printmaking and of the graphic arts in general, not only from
the horizon of the practice and the contemporary aesthetic needs, but also analyzing
its singular historical background. The concept of expansion has had a growing
presence in the artistic system since the end of the last century. With it are defined
those proposals that, in each of the different artistic media, seek to overcome the
historical conventions and the physical dimensions of application, intervention and
presentation of the artistic work, as well as its adaptation to the exhibition context
in which it manifests itself. As it will be demonstrated, the general expansive
phenomenon constitutes a consubstantial factor to the set of artistic disciplines of
print reproduction of the image.

Expanded, or extended field

It was the art historian and critic Rosalind Krauss who, in the 1979 text
"Sculpture in the Expanded Field", established some of the new creative parameters
specific to postmodernity. Although Krauss was based on two lines of work, such as
land-art and minimalism, this expansive effect was defining a new aspect that could
be exported to the arts as a whole, as is the case here. The so-called "loss of the
center" of the minimalist sculpture, or the change of a centripetal focus of the work
by a centrifugal, expansive or extended, introduced an aesthetic potential in the field
of sculptural discipline, which was to be based, first on its modulated revolution in
space and, secondly, in the inherent adaptability of this modular structure to each
new and unique space. In this sense, similarities and parallelisms can be found
between minimalism itself and a strong idea of multiple art, which is typical of the
arts of print reproduction, manifested by the existence of a modular unit (the
matrix) and its multiplied revolution (the copies), as occurs in the paradigmatic case
of the cubic prism used by Sol Lewitt.

Any factual presentation of the work based on a multiple production and

configuration system presents an unprecedented and peculiar casuistry. It is evident
that in front of the traditional work in the singular, the composition by means of
independent and generally heterogeneous elements is considered as a task and a
fundamental challenge for the contemporary artist, since it is, neither more nor less,
than the materialization and final configuration, exhibition or installation of his/her
idea, thesis or project. This inevitably implies the establishment of an organization
or order (or of a disorder, of course), in the set of elements that make up the work,
which ultimately reveals an infrastructural level of cognitive and symbolic nature.
Under these assumptions since the eighties the installation became an artistic genre
of reference closely associated with the concepts of expansion and extension,
creating an inter-relational system that had to guarantee that all the material
occupied its precise place in the work, accommodating itself to a motive or common
postulate in pursuit of an ideal of internal coherence.

Experimental background of the historical printmaking

A key factor in understanding the development and evolution of printmaking

throughout history is the enormous experimental potential it offers. This is not only
something that has contributed the most recent history of this art since the first
avant-garde of the twentieth century, obviously immersed in an intense
experimental dynamic, but can be identified already in the very birth of the
medium. It would be thus possible to trace a long history of printmaking composed
mainly of authors and schools that at a given moment break with tradition or
innovate new technical and expressive solutions.

Such a perspective indicates a general evolution in which new possibilities

are added without interruption to the general problem of departure, such as the
multiple reproduction of an image on paper. At first it was the wood printmaking to
fiber, with its rough appearance, expressive lines broken and in high contrast, where
the image was pure and strong icon or symbol. With the Renaissance impulse
appeared the metal printmaking that allowed the detail, the tonal gradation and the
descriptive realism in the images. Once the intaglio began, the different techniques
that made it possible to etch the line, the stain, the texture, the photographic cliché,
the relief ... all of which gradually introduced new resources for a better and more
extensive record of the qualities naturalists of the image. Even in our days, new
solutions are still being found and incorporated into the calcographic repertoire,
both for the problem that involves the multiple reproduction of the image on paper,
and the more general one of transferring an image from one medium to another.

A history of printmaking and printing based on innovation would be formed by

inflection points in which the great inventions stand out, such as the mezzotint,
attributed to Ludwig von Siegen; the aquatint, Jean Baptiste Le Prince; the one of
the lithography of Alois Senefelder; the counterfiber woodcut by Thomas Bewick;
that of the collagraph, Rolf Nesch, Glen Alps and others; and so a very long etcetera.
To this we could add other more discrete facts, although not less profound or
influential, related to what may be personal tendencies to the digression with
respect to standards, such as contributions and variations to different effects of
artists such as Giovanni B. Castiglione and his early exploration of the monotype;
Hercules Seghers and his advanced interpretation and transposition of the etching
printed on the canvas; William Blake and the self-publishing of books; John Martin
and the aesthetic consecration of the mezzotint; James Mc Whistler and the
variation without limits through the “hand-wipe”1; Edgar Degas and the
Impressionist Monotype; Max Klinger and the idea of editorial project; Edvard
Munch and chromatic experimentation; Paul Gauguin and the engraving of low
technical resources; Max Ernst and the frottage and the matrix collage; Andy
Warhol and the versatility of serigraphic language; Jasper Johns and the exploration
of the temporal factor in etching; Mimmo Palladino and the eclectic use of
techniques; and so still a very long etcetera.

Within all this varied and complex history of print innovation, the inertia
towards the temporal-space expansion of the work, which in fact shows by its own
informative nature the printmaking and prints, is a potential factor of
experimentality that, from the eighties of the last century, it has been directing the
interest of contemporary art, having increased its forms and variants in recent times.

Expansive background in printmaking

As far as the printmaking is concerned, we can, for the purposes of its

expansive experimentalism, go back to certain positions of the mid-nineteenth
century, when the partial and progressive loss of pure editorial purpose and
professionalism began, as a result of the greater involvement of non-professional
artists in this environment through the Societies of Etchers, mainly in France, which
led to adopt a generalized initiative towards experimentation and collective and
personal research. The ultimate goal of these Societies of Etchers was to fully
develop the idea of "art for art". This shows the theoretical influence of Théophile
Gautier, Charles Baudelaire or Philippe Burty, soon appearing a first publication of
demand and renewal of the medium, the Traité de la gravure à l'eau-forte (1866) by
Maxime Lalanne, whose main Thesis directly links the technical realization to the

1
TN “hand-wipe” (entrapado) It consists of a veil that is left on the surface of the plate, increasing,
secondarily, the density of the ink that remains within the incisions.
https://tecnicasdegrabado.es/2012/el-entrapado
personality of the amateur artist-painter, to the detriment of the professional artist-
printmaker of previous centuries.2 The effective achievement of this position was
essentially possible thanks to the affordability, freedom at work and possibilities of
innovation that belong to the etching inherently, compared to other more academic
and professional techniques such as burin, or more linked to the publishing industry
as the photo etching.

Ludovic-Napoleon Lépic, Nemi lake, 1870.

The first and most radical event was the appearance of the concept of unique
work through the monotype, as well as the unlimited interpretation of the matrix at

2
Cfr. Jesusa Vega, "La estampa culta en el siglo XIX" en, El Grabado en España (siglos XIX-XX), Madrid,
Espasa Calpe, 1988, pp. 206-209.
the time of its stamping, by means of the technique of the “hand-wipe” which was
closely related to the impressionist ideology. The amateur aguafuertista Ludovic
Napoleon Lépic, introducer of Edgar Degas in this medium and in the practice of the
monotype, coined the concept of "variable etching" ("eau-forte mobile") in his
writing Comment je devins graveur à l'eau-forte (1876). This concept recognized
and defended the artistic status of each print as a distinct and unique work, with
what, what had been known until then as "rare print", was renamed belle épreuve.

The famous series of paintings dedicated to the Cathedral of Rouen made

between 1892 and 1894 by the French painter Claude Monet, introduced into the
general artistic system a notion and practice of multiple art unprecedented to date.
In principle it has been analyzed as the direct consequence of impressionistic
aesthetics latent in the environment of the end of the century. But what Monet also
introduces for operational purposes is the appropriation by artistic practice of what
is quintessentially a model of scientific experimentation: the paradigm of
experimental design that form a constant: the fixed and unalterable point of view in
which it is situated Monet; and a series of variables that are recorded by the artist-
researcher: the different and successive environmental conditions in terms of
atmospheric changes, whether daily or seasonal, which will be expressed in terms of
color and texture. That is, Monet creates a set of unpublished works for the History
of Art, which should be reviewed by its association with a strictly experimental way
of thinking, at least until the whole series is contemplated forming a modulated set
and, in short, expanded.

Similar experiences to the famous case of Monet had already been brought into
effective practice at least thirty years earlier, although with much less public
notoriety. For the experimental conditions exploited by Monet are none other than
those that, by their very nature, occur in the context of printmaking and the graphic
arts of reproduction in general, by virtue of the physical and functional distance that
exists between the temporary support of the image, which is an inked matrix, and
the final support that is the printed paper from that, that is, the stamp. This spatial-
temporal separation that allows the potential and unlimited interpretation of the
matrix image, gave rise in the mid-nineteenth century to the emergence of
alternative concepts and practices, in a heterodox and amateur context such as the
one developed by the Etchers Societies, even faced with those defended by
conventional printmakers, professionals and academics. It will be, therefore, they
who promote the virtues of the hand-wipe, as a technique of free interpretation
from a fixed chalcographic score, proposing even a new nomenclature, such as "eau-
forte mobile" ("variable etching").

Edvard Munch, s. d.
 All this is a consequence of the authentic experimental model underlying the
technical and methodological conditioning based on the trial-error exercise with
which the prints arts of reproduction have historically operated, from their very
Renaissance beginnings. Substantiated in what is known as the successive "state
tests" and printing, whether register and adjustment, inking, color, and so on; until
reach the final test or bon à tirer. Such is the example that Fritz Eichenberg also
offers us in his manual The Art of the Print (1976), with the workshop tests carried
out by Edvard Munch for some of his xylographic works that have been preserved.
Only, it had to know how to see and take advantage from a new perspective to the
powerful presence of this principle of expansive multiplication, whether for the sake
of offering the visual fullness of a visual archive, as in the case of the Eichenberg-
Munch tandem, or well, as it will appear from the second half of the 20th century,
through new formal proposals adopted by contemporary art.

Massive expansion

The latter, as Rosalind Krauss would also detect, came, rather than with
minimalism, with pop art. With the appearance of this movement, the most
redundant parameters of modern visual culture enter the world of art. This brought
with it a multiple exploratory path that had as main focus the means of industrial
production and mass communication. Thus, the binomial repetition-variation will
become a generative dialectic on which much of the artistic production will rise
from the sixties to the present day. A dialectic that is built on the idea of continuous
reinterpretation and deconstruction of historical texts and images, to which the
temporary accidents of memory and oblivion are inevitably subjected.

The most recurrent and well-known example is found in the work of Andy
Warhol. In it the generative double helix of this type of artistic intervention is
woven by two parallel strands: that of repetition and that of variation. The technical
support used by Warhol will be screen printing, using an open version of the
printing process that allows the ideal conditions to move between the fixation of a
module or graphic icon and its interpretation or alteration more or less random and /
or altered. In this sense, it is worth mentioning his portraits of historical figures and
mass icons, dedicated to Lennin, Marilyn, Campbell cans or Coca-Cola bottles, in the
form of series of endless transformations. Michel Tarantino in the catalog for the
exhibition Repetición-Transformación held at the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
(Madrid) in 1992, commenting on these serial works, interprets that Warhol, from a
post-modern review point of view: «... performs historical paintings of a very
different type from that David or Géricault did. Far from setting an event or
character in time, set the time on the character. His portraits of Lennin or Jackie
Kennedy are attempts to see what these figures look like."3

Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962.

3
Michel Tarantino, Repetición/Transformación, Madrid, Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 1992, p. 27.
 On the other hand, the form of presentation and composition with which
Warhol almost systematically shows his work in an orthogonal organization format,
recalls how Fritz Eichenberg made, from a documentary reading, the same with the
color and registration tests worked by Munch. In structural terms it is the same: a
checkerboard system of abscissas and ordinates, or, in short, an expansive
intervention system on the exhibition space without solution of continuity,
facilitated by the enormous reproductive capacity of the engraving techniques and
reproduction of the image. The hypertrophied development of this expansive
process, would take Warhol to paper all the walls of the exhibition space with rolls
of wallpaper, on which his images are silkscreened, as in the famous Cow
installation of 1966.

In all cases, these are redundant compositions based on a thematic unit, as

preformed symbols of consumer society and mass culture. Abandoned the identity of
the unique and original, it passes to the democratic identity of the multiplied image.
In Two hundred and ten bottles of Coca-Cola (1962), or in the series about Marilyn
as Marilyn x 100 and Marilyn Diptych of the same year, the artist has
instrumentalized the image as a unit-matrix (as well as a fragment) for the
achievement of a significant whole that leads us to perceive the meta-cultural
meaning of the work. As Michel Melot pointed out, in these repetitive exercises the
conventional picture is presented in «... series of images that are both materially
independent and intellectually linked, with different possibilities of accumulation,
repetition and intervention».4 To which Gilles Deleuze adds that: "... each art has its
imbricated repetition techniques, whose critical and revolutionary power can reach
the highest point, to lead us from the daily repetitions to the deep repetitions of
memory".5

4
Michel Melot, El Grabado, Barcelona, Carroggio, 1984, p. 36
5
Gilles Deleuze, Diferencia y repetición, Madrid, 1988, p. 461.
 These solutions of orthogonal composition from a modular unit, can also be
found much earlier in certain religious engravings belonging to the early history of
printing on paper. This is the case of the famous Buddhist prints of the eighth
century in which they are printed, with similar compositional criteria to the
previous ones, and one next to the other, hundreds of exactly identical images of
Buddha, made from a tiny wooden board. Faced with the closed layout of the North
American artist, benefiting from the accuracy of modern printing and media, the
Buddhist print connotes the manual printing process with which it has been made,
thereby expanding the temporal dimension of its genesis in terms of historical and
collective time. These two works, which appear at the extremes of the history of
engraving, made for other reasons and in radically different contexts, present the
consecration of two rituals: the circular recitative of religious mysticism and the
fascinating culture of modern consumption.6 However, and somehow, both make
use of a similar hypnotic and symbolic resource.

Temporary expansions

The expansive potential of the printmaking and the means of print

reproduction not only alludes to massive strategies of intervention on space, as in
the previous case, but it can also be considered in relation to phenomena, processes
and facts related to other dimensions, as it is concretely the reflection of the lived
time, or of the own rhythms of the artistic activity. The most famous example may
be a series of lithographs by Pablo Picasso with the title of Toro, formed by the
eleven progressive states or "state tests", made by the artist between December 5,
1945 and January 17, 1946 This is a graphic synthesis exercise carried out on the

6
It should be recalled here that Warhol began using a form of manual printing for his compositions in
grid, such as those dedicated to airmail stamps, using tampons made with erasers that he himself
carved and with which he stamped directly on the canvas. It will be in 1962 when he discovers the great
possibilities that in terms of exact repetition of the same motif, as well as the minimization of the
personal touch of the artist, he offered serigraphy, a technique he will no longer abandon.
same matrix (which only allows lithography to be easily done) that shows, as a
whole, the evolution of the author's visual thought.

The most obvious case of temporality is offered by a large part of Jasper

Johns' graphic work, such as the series The Seasons, which the artist developed
between 1987 and 1991. The temporal character is made explicit in the same title, to
which must be added that it is a work of deep autobiographical involvement,
indicated by the constant presence of the artist's silhouette, as well as personal
objects and cultural references that have influenced his artistic career. Johns
recreates himself in the most playful aspect of printmaking, making the plates
always open to permanent manipulation in terms of variations in inking,
combinations with other matrices, compositional alterations on paper, and so on.
The set "in expansion" of the work initially formed by four matrices (one for each
year station) are presented in very different ways: as individual printmaking,
stamped together in the same paper forming a linear sequence, in circular sequence,
or composed in the form of cross. All of this is done by Johns while moving in the
semantic space-time that determines the title of the series, giving it full meaning. In
addition, for each matrix has made a large number of "state tests" with significant
variations in the image from one to another, to the point that in some eighteen of
these tests are counted, becoming all part of the final result.
 J. Johns, The Seasons (1987-91)

This use of the set of "state tests" is a way of assessing all the "ages" of the
development of the work, appreciating in each of them an aesthetic result in which
it is worth stopping. The creative act is prolonged in time, remaining its final
solution from the first moment in suspense, because the possibility of a new
interpretation, a new intrusion of the time factor, is always open. Finally, the artist
has also used fragments of the plates to make further compositions, using, in short,
all the temporal-space combinations of which the matrices of intaglio printmaking
are susceptible. In this regard Jasper Johns has stated that: "In the printmaking I
think it would be perfectly reasonable never to destroy the images of plates or
stones, to be able to dispose of them in new works, new combinations"7. It is,

7
Christian Geelhaar, "Interview with Jasper Johns" in, Jasper Johns: Working Proofs, Basilea,
Kuntsmuseum Basel, 1979.
therefore, a multiple interpretation in radical expansion of seasonal as well as
biographical time, all achieved by virtue of the print medium employed.

Along with these temporal notions, the print arts and, more specifically,
intaglio printmaking, also show a sense of the passage of time subject to an idea of
transformation, wear, decomposition and, even, destruction of the work. In fact, the
technical process of etching consists in the erosion of a virgin surface by external
means, which are chemical agents. It can be considered for these purposes that
technically there is an equivalence between the means used in the workshop and
those of nature, with the exception that in the first one controls and precipitates the
convenience of the bite of the plate. In the latter case, the passage of time is nuanced
in a processual exploration of creative discourse. From this point of view, the
printmaking is related to those tendencies of contemporary art that are interested in
the process through which both matter and forms in the artistic genesis, whose two
extremes are the emergence and death of the object of art, go as it occurs with the
concept of work in progress, which here could be translated as "temporary
expansion" of the generative processes inherent in etching.

The artist Tom Philips has handled these ideas in one of his most famous
prints, which is entitled Birth of Art (1972). It is composed of three matrices for
stencil corresponding to the letters that make up the word ART, which were
exposed to the indiscriminate attack of acid on ten successive occasions, between
Monday and Tuesday of May 1972. After each exposure to the mordant the matrices
were stamped forming the word ART. Each of these impressions symbolizes the
different moments that the dialectic creation-destruction of the work goes through.
Well-known, therefore, the inescapable technical process that Philips has had to
carry out in order to speak metaphorically of the birth and death of art, there is
access to a meta-meaning of the work: the idea of the cyclic regeneration
experienced by art itself.

Tom Phillips, Birth of Art, 1972/73

Mestizo expansion

A type of movement or expansive position that acquires ideological

connotations, is the defense of miscegenation against any obstinacy in the
essentialism or academic orthodoxy. Miscegenation is, in fact, one of the defining
signs of contemporary art defended by ideals of interdisciplinarity,
transdisciplinarity and transversality. In printmaking this tendency would have
already been initiated by the members of the Societies of Etchers, or by some avant-
garde artists of principles of the 20th century, but it is from the middle of the 20th
century when it would explode in an endless variety of solutions. The subjection
and fidelity to a single technique or process was no longer intended, but all of them
were susceptible to be used and combined. It is the model not only of the virtuoso or
the specialist, but of the versatile artist who handles a wide repertoire, such as the
artists Mimmo Palladino and Frank Stella. In the same way, the printing is not done
exclusively on paper but it can be carried to very diverse supports, like the fabric to
be presented as, or combined with, painting. The most obvious and historical
example is that of Robert Rauschenberg, but more recently we find Anselm Kiefer,
Philip Taaffe, or Jaap Kroneman.

Anselm Kiefer, Grane, 1980-83 Frank Stella, Riallaro (1995).

Under this same position it is worth mentioning, as well, the universalization

of the concept of matrix, which will come in two ways: the first through surrealism
with Max Ernst and others, who used direct printing of objects with the technique
of the frottagge; for the art of action as in the case of John Cage and Robert
Rauschenberg; or by the art brut with Jean Dubbuffet at the head, who used as a
plate any everyday element that could be printed and stamped. The second line is
established from the new materials and everyday objects offered by modern
industry, as an object trouvé, which is used by authors such as Chirstian Marclay or
Willie Cole. Finally, the paper support itself abandons its historical passive character
to be also an object of exploration and constant experimentation, especially from
initiatives such as those developed under the tutelage of Kenneth Tyler and his work
with the work of artists such as Roy Lichenstein , Ellsworth Kelly, David Hockney,
Frank Stella or Anthony Caro.8

J. Cage y R. Rauschenberg, Willie Cole, Domestic I.D., IV, 1992.

Automovile Tire Print (1951)
The print that is not editable and / or supra-editable

The experimental and research development suffered by the printmaking

since the mid-twentieth century has as another of its consequences in the break of
conventional editorial models. This gap opens both below, with the appearance of
the unique work (of what has already been discussed with the monotype and the
hand-wipe); as above, with the appearance of unlimited editions, simply potentials
or open editions according to demand. The concept of unlimited (or at least almost

8
It should be pointed out that the general catalog of the famous Tyler Graphics workshop, published in
1987, does not happen to have the appropriate subtitle of "The Extended Image".
unlimited) edition is identifiable in the use of industrial media processes based on
the offset technique, as in the case of Félix González Torres, whose work was
presented in the early nineties in large stacks of copies that the visitor could
appropriate and that later they were replaced without any limit.

Félix González-Torres, 1990

Giving continuity to this last example, it is not unreasonable to understand

the appearance of new technologies as the last episode in the history of printmaking
and printing. Its connection with the publishing world is comparable —of course
saving the historical particularities—, to what the xylography, the intaglio, or the
lithography in its respective moments could suppose. In addition, both share
essential constituent factors such as the existence of a previous matrix, be it material
and permanent in wood and metal; chemical and latent on a stone; or, as it is now,
of an electronic nature.

Another principle of kinship and parallelism between traditional techniques

and new technologies is the use of paper as a final support. The digital impressions
on paper are born that will be susceptible to be printed later with other supports,
and, with it, a whole series of interconnections between the media. But we must also
speak of a common graphic language more or less codified and normalized (which
was previously expressed in frames and now does in pixels), and even a shared work
protocol, as suggested by the breakdown by layers and steps successive used in
computer applications. In this last sense, the cognitive peculiarity of the printmaker,
that is, his/her way of thinking when planning and carrying out his/her work, turns
out to be very close. Programs like Photoshop are based on a background procedure,
even a mental state, pleasantly familiar to all printmaker. Specifically, it deals with
the work by superimposing layers that establish computer applications and that is
nothing else than what historicians and printmakers have been doing historically
when proposing, by superposition and/or juxtaposition, a chromatic work with
several plates, as, already in a more sophisticated way, the very size of the
chalcographic matrix by bites and states.9

All this has a high potential for versatility and intervention on the set of
matrices or layers of information shared by both methods. Otherwise, the legitimacy
of the iconic heritage that the printmakers accumulate by default (as claimed by
Jasper Johns), is now both confirmed and surpassed in the concept of digital
archiving.

On the other hand, associated techniques such as collage, which since the
beginning of the 20th century has become a key strategy of creation, by virtue of
which the notion of print heritage acquires full meaning, as Max Ernst had shown,
has been charged in the "cut, copy and paste" digital his last and most perfect
consecration for modernity.

Lastly, the new technologies offer two directions in the publishing field: on
the one hand what virtual graphics would be, as a work to be "optically
materialized" exclusively on screen (what would be art on the Internet and other

9
Cfr. Daniel Canogar, “Horror vacui”, en AA. VV., Simposio Arte gráfico y nuevas tecnologías, Madrid,
Fundación BBVA, 2003.
interactive products). On the other hand, the possibility of materializing or
downloading the image on a physical medium, which is usually paper, through
personal printers, large plotters, etc., even though the printing equipment for this is
located 4,000 kilometers from the creative source. In both cases, an overcoming of
the conventional market idea would be implicit, since the work is susceptible of
being reproduced ad infinitum and, therefore, delivered directly or on demand to
the public for its use and enjoyment. The latter would be, on the other hand, the
consummation of the utopian ideal of art for the people, for which it is advocated
precisely from the most activist nodes of the Network.

Having seen the introduction of new technologies in the language and artistic
practice of the 21st century as a generalized fact, it is highly pertinent to develop
lines of research in accordance with this new situation, which will lead to a deeper
understanding of the phenomena that occur here and now. Even more so in the case
of graphic creation, since the principles that govern this discipline are embedded in
the historical dynamics and in the technological development from which these
media have emerged, as Lev Manovich has shown.10 As they have not been but the
best and greater diffusion of the information, the knowledge and the aesthetic
enjoyment on the one hand; and the cheapening of costs, the improvement of the
quality of registration and productivity by another, the engines that have evolved
the means of reproduction of the image.

The illustrated and globalized printmaking

The greatest cultural significance of historical printmaking and contemporary

prints lies in certain associated epiphenomena, such as the communication,
dissemination and democratization of information and knowledge, and also, of
course, of art itself. In the last six hundred years of Western culture there has been
10
Lev Manovich, El lenguaje de los nuevos medios de comunicación, Barcelona, Paidós, 2011.
an exponential growth in the weight that the image of print reproduction has
acquired, to the point that we identify our time as an authentic era of
communication, mass media, or domain of the media image. It is precisely in
relation to this vector that the print image establishes a historical link with the
concept of illustration, either through the printed book or the Web.

The use of a concept of print illustration and its elevation to a global

category, can be justified today as a metaphor for a new sensibility of time, or an
intention that is secularly focused on the media and reproduction of the image that,
in the contemporary panorama and by virtue of new technologies, it has gained
absolute relevance in digital creations. Digital support has made visual creation
information visualized, with the usual simultaneous participation of word and
image. To do this and to make the concept of interface itself practicable, its
interconnected or interactive links are using forms of presentation on screen taken
from the illustrating tradition in what has been the visual expression of thought and
knowledge since, at least, the seventeenth century, through diagrams and schemes,
emblems, ideographic and cartographic maps, visual games, hieroglyphics, etcetera.11

Among the many territories in which art and knowledge are expressed today
in terms of a globalized print illustration, cartography marks a double differential
leap. The Web has introduced images taken from satellites into our visual horizon,
through applications such as Google Maps and Google Earth —in addition to other
more local servers— that have served to build and reinforce an idea and a sense of
global solidarity. It is an authentic iconographic revolution, based on the
introduction of an unprecedented "point of view" for all previous representative
traditions: a top-down point of view in terms of orbital affordability that radically
modifies our perception of the Earth planet, its parameters and phenomena, both
physical, human and cultural. This new visual horizon leads us to adopt the role of a

11
Cfr. Juan Martínez Moro, La ilustración como categoría. Una teoría unificada sobre arte y
conocimiento, Gijón, Trea, 2004
"big brother" responsible and vigilant of all geo-political, social, structural, historical
or aesthetic events that may occur for human cause on the surface of the planet.

This cartographic model that historically had been circumscribed to the world of
graphic illustration, the book or on military and strategic shelves, in fact today is
part of some of the most promising lines of artistic intervention. All this
undoubtedly expressed in purely graphic key, because, conceptually, the
cartography is formalized as a projection shot down on the plane, which is
consistent with the discrete schemas or mnemonic ideograms, as universal as innate,
of which human thought is used for the representation of something so important to
survival such as the territory (as evidenced by ethnographic records and children's

art)

Clement Valla, from the serie Postcards from Google Earth, 2010

In the best land-art tradition, this new zenith vision offers interventions such
as the sculptor Andrew Rogers, which follows the line initiated by Michael Heizer
with his Effigy Tumuli Sculptures (1983-1989), connecting, of course, both artists,
with the atavistic, impressive and inscrutable Nazca lines in Peru, which in turn are,
without a doubt, the last antecedent of any aerial graphic expression. Since 1998
Rogers has been carrying out a project around the world under the title Rhythms of
Life, consisting of the development of large geographical forms in various countries,
which can be located and contemplated in Google Earth by entering their respective
coordinates (as also happens with Nazca geoglyphs).

Other lines of current work make analysis and aesthetic interpretations of this
new visual zenith reality, as is the case of Lu Xinjian's work, which synthesizes and
interprets aerial views of cities in terms of abstract structures, as urban genetic
codes; or the collective "Onformative" with the Google Faces project (2013), which
records landscapes that evoke human faces on the surface of the Earth. Both works
point to the fact that Google Earth is, in short, a discrete and anachronistic database
or, from the present approach, of graphic illustrations, with a pretension of realism
or truthfulness guaranteed by its photographic appearance, but in which retouching,
concealment, paradoxes and errors are more than frequent. Artists like Clement
Valla are working on the latter in Post Cards from Google Earth (2010), which plays
with the limitations and visual imbalances of the "model" Google; Daniel Schwarz in
Juxtapose (2012), who reflects on its technological infallibility; o Mishka Henner in
Dutch Landscapes (2011), who takes screen shots of strategic places censored for
security reasons.

In this last sense, very diverse lines of work are opened, highlighting the
compromised and belligerent positions, which can serve to denounce both the way
in which the powers falsify the information, or all kinds of urban and
environmental excesses. As well, and consequently with this, interactive proposals
can be made to modify the geostrategic, urbanistic and aesthetic image of the
terrestrial surface to the liking of each artist, activist or collective.
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