During the print workshop, I overheard professor Rippeon talking about how the printmaking process essentially meant that no two forms of a printed work would be the same: for a start, it would be impossible to complete a large volume all at once because the printer would run out of sorts or paper or other materials, so books were produced in stages. Furthermore, several printers or apprentices might be working on a book at once. I found this point interesting because it is sort of antithetical to our idea of the modern printing process. Xerox machines and printers are supposed to produce a series of identical iterations of a page of type. Of course all machines have their slight variations, but these too are assumed to be reproducible. Printing by press leaves the type vulnerable to a greater scope of variation because the process depended on human labor. I found myself thinking back to My Name is Red and the questions Pamuk raises about art, style, reproducibility, and variation.
Part of the mark of a master illuminator, according to the novel, was the extent to which he was able to mimic a form that encapsulated the sight that Allah has of the world; deviation from the style established by the old masters was a mark of incompetence because the artist was representing what he saw with his own eyes. This means that style and variation are idolatrous because they privilege the sight of mortals over the ‘seeing-blindness’ that allowed the artist to approach Allah’s sight. A representational artwork could come to crudely replace divine authority. I wonder if the same is true of text, if text can have the marks of ‘style’ and ‘representation’ that might make art into idolatry. There are text artists who use a representational form of type, like the example of concrete poetry by George Herbert that Sabrina pointed out. But could the text just as it exists on a regular page of type, full of the human variations that would make an artwork unique and recognizable, be idolatrous? Would people have revered texts themselves as religious objects? The first book ever printed was the Bible, solidifying the connection between printing presses and religion. And it is worth noting that, at least in Christian doctrine, there is a connection between words and divinity in the form of Jesus, the Word Made Flesh. Perhaps the first printed books, were seen as being invested with the divine and were venerated or even worshipped for their novelty, individuality, and association with the process of printing.
