Friday, May 2, 2008

What is a Giclee?

The word giclée seems to be one of the most misused and misunderstood words in the art world today. It doesn’t help that the word itself has been through an evolution of meanings itself and still has a wide range of meanings. Ask an artist, a show promoter, or a person on the street and you will get as many definitions as people you ask.

Some random examples from the web – My comments are after the quote in parentheses.

From
http://www.giclee-information.org/
“Giclée is a term coined to describe inkjet printing at its highest level.”
(Well there’s a real precise definition, highest level of what?)

From
http://www.greatgiclee.com/art_printing.html
“The cost of a giclée printer as well the price of pigments and papers, is the reason why fine art reproductions using this method are expensive to produce. Also, because of the resolutions these printers have, it takes a lot of time to make the giclée. The new machines took the leap of beating the art printing color rendition limitations of 4 colors and added 2, 3 and sometimes even 8 to the mix. The results are stunning and no description does justice other than seeing a giclée print! “
(This appears to me to be just marketing hype. Depending on the settings I use I can print a panorama in 15 minutes; 1440 dpi, high speed printing, or an hour; 2880 dpi with high speed turned off. I always use the higher quality setting but very few people can tell the difference without a magnifying glass. So is one a giclée and the other is not – the paper is the same, the printer is the same, the ink is the same?)

From Wikipedia
“The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early
1990s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print and is often used in galleries and print shops to denote such prints.”
(There’s that subjective term, high quality again. Who and what determines this? Is it the type of printer, ink, paper?)

But also from Wikipedia –
“to represent any inkjet-based digital print used as fine art.”
(And we wonder why people are confused?)

From
http://www.giclee-canvas-art-in-trinidad.com/Giclee.html
“Regrettably, no official or legal standards have been laid down for this duplicating and printing process.”
(Woo hoo, somebody gets it)

And

“However, if a "Giclée print” is taken to mean “any printed, scanned image” then such a print can be called a Giclée print.”
(And if a “dog” is taken to mean any four legged animal then a cat can be called a dog. Of course by this definition a digital photograph is not a giclée because it is not scanned, confused yet?)

From
http://www.harryadamson.com/giclee.html
From the French verb "to spray", the word Giclée (zhee-clay) is used to describe a digital fine art printmaking process. Giclée prints are created using a high-resolution inkjet printer. Images or paintings are carefully scanned and reproduced using stable pigment-based inks.

From
http://giclee.netfirms.com - a page titled quite appropriately lies, dam lies, and giclée prints
“Just as they will tell you, giclée printing is ink-jet printing, the same process used by the ink-jet printer hooked up to your computer right now. The cheapest computer printers commonly used today.”

And a comment on why an ink jet print is called a giclée

“For the same reason that they would rather sell you lingerie in a boutique than underwear in a store.”

From
http://www.artreproservices.com/Advantages_of_Giclee_Prints.html -

“If it will take ink, and go through the printer, we can print on it.”


So a giclée is either
a) any inkjet print or
b) a “high quality” ink jet print with no definition of exactly what is high quality and what is not.
c) An inkjet print using pigment inks only

The original meaning for giclée however was an inkjet print on a specific printer with specific ink actually meant to fade, for use as a proof for a photograph. This is probably where the idea came from that many people have, that a giclée is a cheap, non-durable, print.

It is interesting to note that a google search on “giclée history” is well into 6 pages of results before photography is even mentioned and after that it is still rarely mentioned. But photographers are the ones suffering. The definition that has become prevalent in the art show world, at least among people putting on and judging art shows, is that a giclée is somehow of lower quality, and /or that a giclée is a print on canvas only. By the definition that a giclée is any inkjet print, a giclée can be a cheap way of printing. It can also be a very expensive, long lasting way of printing. The process, the printer, the ink, the paper; all are components in the level of quality of an ink-jet print. What is more prevalent in the art show world today is the idea that prints on canvas are the only giclées and that is false by any accepted definition. As I already talked about, a print on canvas can be high quality or low quality and while it is almost always an ink jet print, it is not the only type of ink jet print. And why shouldn’t a high quality photograph on canvas be judged among its peers as art instead of being judged with one strike against it.

I believe that the term giclée should be retired and standards for photographic prints should be defined in terms of the archival quality of ink, paper, and printer; not loosely defined terms like giclée.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't know why there is this confusion in the US over the term. I don't see the same problem here in the uK. For us, giclee was used to describe prints made with high end (ie expensive!) ink jet printers and pigment inks rather than the cheaper home printers available at the time. Now that consumer level printers have improved so much in quality it has become largely meaningless.

What it isn't is a term used to define a product - it is a description of a process.

Alison said...

The biggest confusion here in the US seems to be coming from art show promotors. Some of them are saying they are prohibiting giclees when what they mean is they are prohibiting photographs printed on canvas. (See my "Banning canvas" blog on that).

I like your comment that it is not a product but a description of a process. I will use that the next time someone comes into my booth and asks "are these giclees?"