Researching a technique, what does that actually mean and how do I do it? These questions and more came to me during the first session of "Anthropologies of Technique, Techniques of Anthropology: Multimodal Ethnographies of Making" with Maxime Le Calvé and Sharon Macdonald. The assignment was as unusual as it was exciting. We were to pick a technique of our choice and explore it over the semester. In doing so, the first challenge for me was to find an appropriate technique. I knew I wanted to "make" and "create" something with my hands. I remembered the drypoint etchings that I had come across in books during my art history studies and I decided to try this technique more closely. Drypoint etching is an intaglio printing process. In contrast to the letterpress process, in intaglio printing the ink goes into the depressions. In intaglio printing, what is scratched into the plate later appears colored when printed. The density of the lines later determines the exact color tone of the print. The more densely the lines are set, the darker the area will appear later because more ink is absorbed by the plate there. Etching as a technique became widespread in Europe in the 16th century. The term etching comes from the Latin (radere) and means "to scratch" or "to scrape".
Worth knowing: The phrase, "something is razor sharp"? goes back to the oldest intaglio printing technique, copperplate engraving, because one of its characteristics is that the lines appear very clear. In etching and drypoint, the lines are softer.1
Materials: Metal plate, Etching objects.
If the print is not made in a workshop: Paper, Linoleum printing ink, Newspaper, Water, Cloth, Spoon.
Difference of letterpress and gravure printing methods:
Left: Letterpress process (linolium cut)
Right: gravure printing process (drypoint etching)
The sequence of etching:
Step 1: At the beginning of each etching, a decision must be made as to which motif should be scratched onto the plate. It can be helpful to draw the motif directly on the plate with a thin pencil. When doing this, be sure to remove the protective film from the plate!
Step 2: The desired motif is now scratched into the metal plate with the needle. The plate should lie on a solid surface. Since the needles are very sharp and injuries can easily occur, you should focus exactly on the process. The depth of the lines is determined by the pressure applied to the needle.
-> Feel how deep to scratch
-> Result only visible after the pressure, no "intermediate control" possible.
Step3: After the motif has been scratched into the plate, the edges of the plate must be sanded with an arrow. Sharp ones could cause holes or cracks in the paper. As an example, in the next picture we see the motif of a cornflower with smoothed edges.
Step 4: The last but most complex step in the production of a drypoint etching is printing. On the one hand, the plates can be printed in a professional printing workshop with a roller, but there is also the possibility to make the prints at home. The prints will always appear laterally reversed to the motifs on the metal plate:
Print Shop: In the print shop, the (handmade) paper is briefly soaked in water so that it can better absorb the ink. The plates are cleaned with a cloth and petroleum and the ink is applied with a swab through circular type. Next, the excess ink is removed from the plate outside the grooves: The roller is retracted and the plate is carefully placed on a piece of cardboard on the base of the roller. The paper is then carefully placed over it. Now the roller is activated and moves over the paper. After the printing process, the plate must be completely free of ink and the print must be laid out to dry. The plate can be used for several printing processes and bends over time due to the pressure of the roller.
Before printing in the roller:
After repeated printing in the roller:
Results of printing in the Workshop:
If you do not have the opportunity to make the print in the workshop, it can be done at home. For this, the plate is also cleaned and dabbed with paint. The moistened paper is placed on the print and rubbed firmly over the paper with a spoon. Due to the uneven pressure, different shades of color will appear later. If you want the result to be more, there is also the option of placing a cloth over the paper and then rolling it over the printing plate several times with a rolling pin.
Printing at home:
-> The moisture of the paper pulls the ink out of the grooves of the plate. When clear lines are preferred make sure that the paper is not too wet.
Already at the beginning I noticed how much time and rest I needed as a starting point for carving into the plates. I couldn't just carve something for 10 minutes and then move on to other things. The feeling of having enough time and being able to devote myself to the process with peace and quiet was very important for me. I also discovered a very meditative aspect to it, because once I was carving something, I couldn't think about anything else. All my concentration was on the movement and pressure of my hand. The knowledge that laws lines cannot be "erased" and thus also each "error" becomes visible put me thereby however at the same time mentally under pressure. Other people would only see my result, the finished print, but not the whole preceding process of "creating".
Scretching on the metal plate:
When I then learned the technique of printing in the print workshop, I first became fully aware of how complex the processes are from a scribe to a finished print. The printing process was a self-contained but very complex procedure. But since printing in the workshop also involves costs, I decided to do the printing process at home (see video). To do this, I first had to research how I could still make a print without the special tools, inks and rollers. I found a manual from the Städel Museum and tried to improvise with the material I had at hand. The results of the two processes can be seen in the pictures and they could hardly be more different. Although I used the same printing plate, the motifs are hardly recognizable when printed at home. When I saw the result, I was very frustrated and sad at first because I didn't feel that the effort and preparation would do the result justice. However, my perspective changed after a few days. I think with prints at home, the lines need to be carved deeper into the metal to make the contrasts sharper. And it was at this point that I realized again that this technique is emblematic of trial and defeat. You have to watch each of your steps closely to find possible explanations for success or failure at the end when the print is finished. I can only encourage everyone not to be discouraged and to look forward to the next attempt in this technique.
The process of feeling the line
So the first hurdle was cleared, I wanted to explore the technique of drypoint etching. But how do you explore a technique that you hardly know or don't know at all? My familiarization and appropriation of the process was based on the one hand on notes and literature from my art history studies and on the other hand on the exchange with a friend who had attended a workshop on the subject years ago. The deeper I delved into the creation of a finished print, the more aware I became that it was preceded by a series of complex steps. I bought the necessary utensils and tried my hand at creating the first printing plates. In the first part of the blog you will find the steps with detailed descriptions. It is the technical part of the blog. In the following I would like to go into more detail about the whole process in connection with our seminar and the conclusion with the presentation in the workshop. The seminar "Anthropologies of Technique, Techniques of Anthropology: Multimodal Ethnographies of Making" guided us through the multimodal ethnographic approach of observing and conducting our own study of the embodiment of a technique and the techniques of the self. The resulting references of interactive fieldwork and its transfer to other knowledge communities were reflected upon and analyzed through literature. The ethnographic experience of making practices was thereby based on the credo of experimenting. The scientific discussion of the literature was linked to the practical units of each seminar session.
In the practical parts of the seminar it became clear that the question of documenting one's own technique would play an important role. The meeting minutes that had to be prepared made it possible to try out initial experiences with forms of documentation that were not purely textual. I chose textual, photographic, and audiovisual forms to document my technique. Each medium highlights different aspects of the technique in order to be able to examine it from different angles. In the process of experimenting with my technique and trying to feel the lines on the metal plate, it became apparent that no line was identical to the previous one, even when I tried to reproduce it. Tim Ingold describes this with an example from a carpenter: "As the cut progresses, the force, amplitude, velocity, and torque vary, albeit almost imperceptibly, from stroke to stroke, as do the posture and musculoskeletal configurations of tension and compression that keep it in balance (Ingold, 2006, p. 74). From a viewpoint outside the action, it may seem that the carpenter is merely reproducing the same gesture, over and over again, or that sawing is merely the repetitive execution of a single step in the operative sequence (châine opératoire) involved, for example, in making a bookcase. However, for the carpenter himself, who is obliged to follow the material and respond to its singularities, sawing is about "engaging in a continuous variation of variables rather than extracting constants from them" (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004, p. 410)."2
The presentation in the workshop was one of the biggest challenges of the seminar and the process of exploring my technique: the transfer of knowledge. How can I convey the intrinsic knowledge I observed about drypoint to all seminar participants without resorting to the format of a lecture alone? Since I had no experience in planning a workshop, this was very difficult for me. How much time did I have to plan for my presentation and implementation, and what would happen if the participants did not participate? The goal of the facilitation was to show that the verbal description of the process of creating a print would not be enough for the participants to grasp the technique mentally as well as physically. To make this clear to the participants, they were to try to make a print themselves under my guidance and acquire their own intrinsic knowledge of the technique. Due to the time limitation, the participants should perform each step only for a short time. After a brief historical introduction, I explained the production steps for drypoint etching. I registered a certain uncertainty in the execution of the steps, which was only solved when I briefly explained the process of the specific step again at each station. Over time, small groups formed and exchanged experiences and tried to help each other if necessary. Some of them told me that their own experience helped them to understand how the technique worked, but also to relate it to the difficulties I had mentioned earlier. It quickly became clear that time and the desire to experiment were important factors in the process. The knowledge about the implementation of the technique was passed on from me to the participants. However, there are always personal and social factors that should be considered. Marcel Mauss describes in his text that techniques are movements of the body and require an enormous biological and physiological apparatus. In general, they are determined by education or by the common circumstances of life, by contact.3 All kinds of things of the same kind are specific to certain societies and are passed on or performed differently.
Overall learning
The joy and the interest to try something new was the basis of the whole seminar concept. The open design and the many possibilities given to us as participants to help shape the seminar and to design our own workshop offered an enormous opportunity to gain new ethnographic experiences. As we progressed, it became increasingly clear what it actually means to be able to engage in processes. It may sound simple but in the scientific community of the university there are still prevailing practices for generating knowledge that are brought to the students. Leaving these familiar paths was not easy for me and it meant not only engaging with new methods, but also focusing more on one's own self and engaging with the unknown without already having an idea of a "final product" such as a written paper. As Tim Ingold writes, "instead of reading creativity "backwards", from a finished object to an initial intention in the mind of an agent, this entails reading it forwards, in an ongoing generative movement that is at once itinerant, improvisatory and rhythmic."4 The difference of the collected experiences was not only related to new ethnographic knowledge but also to a changed self-perception and deeper self-reflections, which took place not only at the end but during the whole seminar. Through the practical parts like the pottery or the yoga session it became clear that the connection between body and mind plays an important role in all areas and is subject to an enormous number of transformation processes. In this process, each step is a development of the previous one and a preparation for the following one. In retrospect, I am still and hopefully always concerned with the questions of how we as ethnographers can generate knowledge and communicate it. It has made clear to me that one of our tasks is to leave relevant paths and surrender to processes without having an idea of fixed "end products". The fact that these ideas often cannot be reconciled with the everyday life of science should be understood as a challenge and an incentive.
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