The Irksome Gap Between Theory and Practice: An Anecdote

Shot on a Polaroid ProPack (w/ ProFlash) using Fuji FP-100C
(Yes, that is my cat.)

Allow me to preface the following anecdote by saying that I'm all for a healthy balance between theory and practice, lest I somehow--gods forbid--offend someone (I'm looking at you, fine art and art history people).

I was heading to a soiree with a friend not long ago when we ran into two of his acquaintances by chance. Bereft of ice-breakers for want of real social graces, I thought that it'd be nice to bring my Polaroid ProPack along as a conversation piece, and sure enough it performed quite well in that capacity. Before long, I was engaged in an exchange about the capabilities of said camera with one of the two aforementioned persons, who had, as it turned out, written about Andy Warhol's Polaroid work, which he had made using a Big Shot, and had concluded that the intractable uniqueness (or irreproducibility, more accurately) of a Polaroid take was of vital import (something about its status as an object in the age of mechanically reproduced art, if memory serves).

Now, the Big Shot is a fixed-focus, rigid-body camera that, by pure coincidence, takes the same type of instant film as my ProPack (series 100 film packs). Said film is of the peel-apart variety, meaning that you have to separate the print from the negative after the development proces in order to view the print. This also leaves you with...a negative, which cannot be used as-is for enlargement/reproduction but can be salvaged through what I understand is a laborious and somewhat haphazard process. The salvaged negative works just like a regular one, and can be used in a condenser/enlarger to produce additional prints. One could, of course, eschew salvaging the negative altogether in favor of scanning or just shooting another photo of the Polaroid print itself under controlled conditions.

Given that her argument relied on the properties of the technology Warhol employed ands its consequences*, it's pretty easy to see why this revelation would challenge that whole thesis. To be fair,  the fact that Polaroid takes are reproducible doesn't completely undermine her point. Many variables are involved in salvaging and printing, wherefore there's no reason to assume that someone could make an exact facsimile of the original print. The more important point, however, has to do with the artist's judgment, something we tend to forget in our single-minded focus on technology. The decision to mass-reproduce or mass-disseminate any work of art in this our age of mass-produced, mass-disseminated images is, after all, just that: A decision made by human beings**.

Still, it's hardly an insignificant observation, and this story goes to illustrate the reasons why theorists--art history types in particular--should have some experience/practice under their belt, if only to improve their theory/research. They don't have to master the craft, but sometimes the best way to understand something is by doing it.

*I.e. Warhol chose his medium because of its irreproducibility

**I do think that the argument that technology compels us to do certain things is cogent, but I try to keep in mind that people behave like artificer-goldfish: We make and are in turn influenced by our own fishbowls, fishbowls that we forgot we made in the first place.