BLUEPRINTS

BLUEPRINTS collects all seventeen poems and prints in the series (whose sixteen print portfolio was acquired by the Walker Art Center in 2014). It features an essay by Robert Batchelor, professor of history and director of digital humanities at Georgia Southern University.
BLUEPRINTS is a remarkable set of seventeen works by Sean Smuda produced largely between 2007 and 2011 (with a reprise of one piece in 2016) that in many ways chronicles the dislocations of that era of economic crisis and technological mobility. Each piece has a poetic text in a different language embedded in it, whose title is its translation. Their general theme is of transportation and the problem of grounding, or in Smuda's terms the 'entropic' relationship between 'nature' and 'human production.' Each presents what appears as a kind of totem in a landscape, some anthropomorphic and some anthropocenic. In many of them, one sees echoes of Albrecht Dürer's "Melencolia 1," (1514) with its strange beacon in the sky and despondent array of tools and technologies. Following Dürer, there is something of the Meisterstiche or "master print" to these images, and what Smuda refers to as an 'clusiveness of reproduction' that suggests the "end and beginning of the world." In their grandest form, Smuda's images allude more directly to the techniques of early nineteenth century photography the blue of the cyanotype and the copper base of the daguerreotype without being either. Instead, the process of printing on aluminum gives the images a furtive quality from an oblique view, disappearing into a kind of pure abstraction of light or black. There is a play with design here, composed during the years in which thanks in part to the iPhone (2007) images became radically mobile. In this context, the concept of Blueprints seems architectural, heavy and even nostalgically utopian in a constructivist sense. But this heaviness is one indication of an important historicity in these superficially ahistorical images. As with print, this is also a historicity of photography. One is reminded of the work of Anna Atkins whose Cyanotype Impressions of algae produced similar branching images and of John Herschel himself, who invented the cyanotype as a method of cheap reproduction similar to the photocopy. Tellingly, the technologies of photography have changed so much by the early twenty-first century that Smuda could no longer find printing shops in Minneapolis to do traditional blueprint work. This question of problematic materiality suggests reasons for the self-conscious chinoiserie at work at the level of authorship, a faux chop with the character (lightning" or shon for Sean) and another invented that in combination create a kind of false signature. The pieces themselves are collaborative in hidden and even post-human ways collages of images, translated poetic snippets in different languages, the use of Photoshop (1988) itself, which by 2005 had become part of Creative Suite (2003) and included the possibility of vector-scalable "smart objects." Such an approach to authorship then trickles into the images themselves, including one of the earliest, with its Maoist bicycle-ship on a mirror surface, entitled "Z. z. or in translation "Butterfly wheel, soaring heart, no pollution." It brings to mind the sail-wagons reported by Marco Polo that became in Milton's Paradise Lost the "Wagons light" of Sericana, a way-station on Satan's flight to Eden. The blue-and-white is thus both mythic and porcelain-like a transcultural surface of mashed-up and overlaid images that like Smuda's "Universal Capital" series has echoes going back to the seventeenth century. And the "butterfly wheel" (literally butterfly's wheel) reminds one of both Duchamp and Zhuangzi (369-286 BCE), the latter uncertain whether he is a man dreaming of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being a man. Is "soaring" here an Icarus-esque mistranslation or a deliberate propagandistic obfuscation of "," which means revolving or whirling? In these gaps and juxtapositions, the blueprints are dream-images asking this moment? us what would a great awakening of the heart-mind (xin) mean at this moment?