Print Checking as Criticism: The Print Checker

Mandi Goodier
courtesy of Mandi Goodier

When the artist film is returned it is placed upon a shelf and there it waits: Z820, within a protective metal canister, patient and comfortable in a cool, dry, dehumidified archive. These conditions ensure film Z820 – amongst others – does not get damaged while waiting. None of that particularly matters. All that matters is upon my arrival there is a film, in this instance it happened to be film Z820. Z820 is a favourite of mine but that doesn’t matter either.

Carefully threading the film through the spools of the Research Technology Incorporated editing table (RTI) I become aware of the materiality of the 16mm film. In this state film Z820 looses its identification completely becoming a delicate ribbon woven through a clunk of a machine. The head of the film responds to touch, the mark of other handlers left in the form of fingerprints. It is safe to touch these parts, they are purposefully tough and will not be seen by the viewer. This is the beginning of the process of print checking: the making sure that the films have not deteriorated in their condition since the previous loan. Played perhaps as a one off, perhaps looped in a gallery space throughout the day, wear and tear is permitted as it is a direct consequence of the materiality of the artist film. The only exception to this rule comes from the digital era, wherein repetition refuse to deteriorate the film as the film is immaterial.

When checking an artist film for damage the artist film is no longer the subject of your gaze, instead its condition after subjection to projectionists, curators, art fans and other print checkers. The content is a discourse between the print checker’s gaze, any marks, scratches, visible/audible damage or interceptions and the object itself. My attention caught between my love of the man shouting into a microphone on the edge of a field in the middle of Letchmore Heath, about fifteen miles away from the place I was sat, and how to grade a film with mild to more pronounced tramlines and occasional dirt. Myself amongst a cacophony of previous print checkers, all arguing their grading on a form stuck to the inside of the film’s protective canister. Film Z820: (3)

Grade (1): tip-top, brand new and undamaged. Grade (5): completely unplayable and demanding immediate attention else CANNOT BE LOANED OUT! The grade is subjective despite there being a clear set of objective rules to follow. On film Z944 the grades differ between (2), (3) and (4); there is an argument taking place on the grading form. Damage is intentional (2). Damage is NOT intentional (4)!!! Damage is a trace of the artist’s unusual process, some pronounced TLs, (3). Serious dirt, TLs and scratches throughout, fading in places – probs seen better days, (4). Narrative added by the trace of artist whose medium demands/method of production requires hands on approach: FILM NOT ACTUALLY DAMAGED: it is a part of the print: (2)!

All of this passed me by as I grappled between watching the films and looking for damages, until alongside my checking notes I scrawled: When does a line become a narrative (in reference to Z17 (4)). A series of lines flick black and yellowish white across the RTI’s screen approximately 15cm x 10cm; it was a rhetorical question I wrote in order to get me thinking about what I was looking at. No sooner had I wrote this my eye became drawn to some thickening tramlines to the right of the screen. This is how I came to reflect upon my experiences so far, reasoning that the difficulty in watching these films comes through the tension between watching and looking; between repetition and deterioration; between removal and context. How does one begin to talk about these films? Does the mark become a part of a material narrative? It strikes me as analogous to the crisis of the art critic, whose place is suddenly overwhelmed; the question remarked over and over being: what can I say?

I will be exploring these tensions through a series of posts here on LUX, using the role of the print checker as a form of criticism; hoping to develop a criticism of criticism itself through my own practice of art writing, blurring the boundaries between watching and looking, fiction and truth, temporality and spatiality and repetition of medium.


Mandi Goodier is an artist and writer currently checking the films at LUX, as well as writing somewhere between fiction, theory and biography; about repetition, memory, the mark and otherness. Twitter: @mandigoodier

 

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