Climate Control, Modernism, and Mass Production

Abstract

Climate Control, Modernism, and Mass Production Mal Ahern (bio) Air-conditioning (AC) made images modern. It enabled two of modernity’s paradigmatic and seemingly opposite visual forms: abstract painting and the mass-produced image. AC transformed art conservation, securing the field’s scientific authority and adapting it to the demands of modernist painting. AC also played a crucial role in the development of industrial mass production, including the production of “mass images” in newspapers and magazines and on film. In both cases, AC transformed the labor of image maintenance and production by de-emphasizing the roles of gesture and manual inscription in favor of environmental management. Rather than touch up a damaged canvas, the twentieth-century conservator preferred to prevent visible changes from happening in the first place; rather than manually align color impressions, the twentieth-century printer sought to control flows and atmospheres in the pressroom. Of course, printing and preservation alike continued to require manual touch-ups and corrections long after AC transformed these practices. But expectations changed with the new technology: manual intervention on the image surface became more the exception than the rule, conceived as an act of repair or quality control, rather than regular maintenance. Climate control thus helped secure romantic and modernist ideals of the image’s autonomy—the artist’s control over and ultimate responsibility for [End Page 3] the image—by restricting the hand of the craftsperson whose work it was to preserve and transmit that image to others. Every image has two realities: every image exists as both object and appearance. W. J. T. Mitchell has proposed that we call “pictures” those local manifestations of more fluid and intangible “images.”1 While the image-as-appearance appeals to the eye, the picture-as-object reacts to and interacts with its environment. Wood and fabric swell and contract, wet ink seizes up or runs faster and thinner, and pigments fade in sunlight or darken with oxidation. In Nicole Starosielski’s recent work on the role of temperature in media, she argues that all varieties of matter “have their own thermo sensitivities.”2 We can say the same for materials’ sensitivity to light, humidity, and the surrounding air. Everything tangible will react to the matter and conditions that surround it; every picture will inevitably change over time. The “image,” in Mitchell’s terms, transcends the specifics of the more tangible, contextually rooted “picture.” An image can survive the destruction of the individual pictures that host it; it can live on in reproductions or reinterpretations or even in verbal descriptions and memories.3 What counts as the “original” or “true” image—indeed, whether and how we separate appearance and object at all—is historically and culturally contingent. Consider, as do Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood in Anachronic Renaissance, the shock of a Western visitor upon realizing that many ancient Chinese monuments receive a fresh coat of paint once a year and have for centuries.4 This visitor has encountered a radically different paradigm of historicity, one in which the artifact does not stand as the unaltered trace of a moment past but instead obtains its historical authenticity from the continuity of care it receives. Conservation practices change over time and vary across space. So too do the conventions for representing and reproducing artworks: the forms of remediation (a handmade copy, an engraving, a photograph, a photo-mechanical reproduction) that allow us to feel we have truly seen a work of art. The paradigms of conservation and reproduction I describe in this essay are specific to the twentieth-century West and particularly the United States. They constitute an “ideology of the image,” a phrase I use to describe how individuals and institutions understand the relationship between an image’s appearance and its materiality. (It is worth noting that Louis Althusser’s classic definition of ideology—“the imaginary relationship of individuals to the real conditions of their existence”—puts the imaginary, the image, at its center.)5 Image ideologies determine a picture’s “truth,” that is, what counts as a “good” copy in the production of multiples [End Page 4] or as an “authentic” artwork in the practice of restoration. These ideologies determine and are...