MACHINES FOR REPRODUCING SCULPTURE. COMPETITION OF REPRODUCTION TECHNIQUES 1770–1880

Project Description

As a research affiliate, my own DFG-Project (AL 1777/2-1) takes up the late 18th- and 19th-century technologies for reproduction in the arts with a focus on sculptural objects and materiality. By examining machines developed at the height of early industrialization in Britain, France, and – to some extent – in the USA, the research assesses how the increased mechanization and automation affected the traditional craft working methods of sculptors and engravers. The case of Benjamin Cheverton (1794–1876) shows that artists worked closely together with manufacturers, scientists, and engineers to build machines that made it easier to duplicate and scale-down the size of busts or three-dimensional works of art with high precision: Machine-made small sculptures, coins, reliefs, and busts in different materials became increasingly important regarding seriality, reproduction and the capacity of mass-production in terms of their advantages and usefulness upon art. Bringing together the art object from both the fine and the mechanical arts, aspects of collecting, exhibiting, and displaying ‘replicas’ raise new questions in the context of reproduction. Given the diversity of reproductive technologies that were competitively developed in the first decades of the 19th-century, it is further necessary to add contextual depth to different processes and elaborate on the entanglements. Therefore, the study compares the mechanical process and its reductions ranging from pottery manufacturers to materials such as plaster and ivory or electrotypes with other reproduction techniques by addressing questions of the materiality and the ‘practical turn’ on the one hand, and on the other hand – when negotiating early photography – by considering recent photo-historical discourses, like for example the role of photography in British scientific societies. In addition to the artistic and engineering practices in the context of scientific techniques and the production, distribution and reception of technical knowledge, the example of sculpture machines serves to shed more light on both the migration of objects and concepts of technological expertise as well as the interrelation between artists, scientists, engineers, photographers, markets, and institutions. As a consequence, the ontological approach on the materiality of machines and objects (Simondon 1958/2012; Latour 1996) will be contextualized according to the history and sociology of science concerning the artist/engineer and the notion of machines as active agents. Against this background, it is crucial to negotiate machines for reproducing sculpture as a part of the history/histories of reproduction to position them in the interplay of art, science, and technology in the theoretical context of the discourse about art and its materiality.