Painting

1.

Painting is a meme.

What is a meme?

Meme is a term coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene to refer to units of cultural data which act like genes–replicating, spreading, and mutating in response to the selective demands of the culture in which they develop.  Many things count as memes–political slogans, film dialogue, emergent philosophical perspectives, technological breakthroughs, advertising brands, economic principals, fashion trends, viral YouTube videos, the very idea of a meme itself,  the list could go on.  What matters is that it is an idea which has the power to replicate itself from one mind to another to another and sustain itself through a stretch of cultural time.

So, if one is to take the history of painting as a meme spreading from mind to mind through its history—from cave paintings to Piero della Francesca to Thomas Gainsborough to Nancy Spero and beyond—each iteration in the history of the meme mutating itself in response to its own context—then what would it mean to extend the painting meme into the context of digital computer networks?  That is, assuming that painting did not, in fact, die sometime in the early 1980s, what would it mean to respond to the continually evolving painting meme in the context of ubiquitous computing in 2010?  How would the painting meme be translated when a painting is still an object, but an object dispersed through the network as a mutable digital photograph, as well?  This is not to say that all relevant painting must take this question of the network into consideration, but that it could be a pressing and fruitful intellectual question for at least some painters.

One way to think through an answer to this question is provided in the art historian David Joselit’s recent October essay “Painting Beside Itself.”  In this essay, Joselit suggests that recent painters such as Julia Koether, Stephen Prina, and Wade Guyton have developed practices which allegorize their objects’ own “transitivity” or continuous in-between-ness as they shuttle from one node of the network to another—from object, to photograph of object, to source material for another artist’s appropriation and re-circulation, and back again, in an ongoing circulation.  Works of art—here—are never situated in a static context; rather they are situated in continuous state of passage between contexts in a broader network of multiple contexts.

An alternative response to the question of the painting meme’s life in the network is being developed by young artists working on or around the Internet.  For these artists:

1. The computer screen is the primary surface on which painting will be viewed and, because of this, a new suite of phenomenological effects occuring between painting and viewer are opened for exploration.

2.  The rate of speed at which paintings travel is atrophied when uploaded directly to computer networks and this increase in speed allows one to, then, view the flow of painting in time.

In what follows, I’ll say a few more words about the relationship between painting and the computer, describe a recent trajectory of the painting meme amongst a group of Internet artists, and, then, focus, in particular, on the work of the PAINT FX collective.

2.

It’s possible that an “actual” Abstract Expressionist painting produced in the 1940s and a “fake” Abstract Expressionist painting created through the application of digital effects in a piece of software could be effectively indistinguishable when viewed through the light of the computer screen.  With this in mind, some painters have shifted their concerns from those native to the paradigm of the white cube to, instead, those native to the paradigm of the computer screen.  This shift has repercussions, though.  For example, the phenomenological effects of painting shift from the materiality of paint on canvas to the light spilling from a computer screen.  This bias towards the surface of the screen, then, nudges artists towards exploring different types of bodily shock effects.  The relationship of the body to the computer screen after all is different than that of the body to the physical painting in space–computers are open circuits in which cybernetic feedback relationships between computer databases and users allow users to actively shape the mediascape they inhabit.  These cybernetic relationships create a desire for clicking, scrolling, and following—dynamic motion premised on sifting through an accumulation of data rather than gazing for very long at a single pattern of light.  The Internet painter, then, begins to think in terms of multiplicity, the aesthetics of the surfeit, and, crucially, a strong temporal element which transforms painting into a variation on performance art.  Furthermore, jpegs, as digital files, are mutable, meaning that they can be radically transformed instantaneously at the level of code.  If one wants to merely touch up a single brush stroke or slap a picture of a sea shell on the top layer of the painting, the technology is agnostic in regard to the amount of variation each of these types of alterations suggests.  This mutability means that once it is part of the network, other artists and non-artists, as well, are given free reign to appropriate the image and alter it themselves, re-disseminating the mutated image through alleyways of the network which the painting’s original creator could not anticipate.  In other words, paintings here are a network of versions; a stream of evolving memes.

3.

The meeting of painting and the computer is not new.  MS Paint, for example, has long been mined for painting effects.  In the context of the Internet, the artist Tom Moody (a former “actual” painter) has built an important practice at the interface of painting and the computer screen which has evolved into making animated gifs and placing them on his own blog and sites like dump.fm.  This is not meant to be an authoritative history, though, so I’ll focus on the life of one strain of the painting meme as I’ve witnessed it over the past two or three years.

I first began to notice artists working on painting at the tail end of the surf club phenomenon.  Artists like Will Simpson, Thomas Galloway, and Travess Smalley on the surf club Loshadka, for example, were moving away from appropriated content derived from Internet surfing and towards original content created in painting software programs.

Around this time, the artist Charles Broskoski began increasingly focusing his work away from conceptual art pieces to a painting practice premised on volume, performativity, and innovations in presentation which were native to the computer screen.  The artist Harm van den Dorpel was working on a similar project, in which he straddled the borders between a computer model of a work and a work in physical space and allowed that very tension to become illuminated as the work.  Along the way, he raised an interesting set of questions regarding artistic deskilling and the borders between hand-made effects and automated effects.  In short, the “hand of the artist” was, on the Internet of all places, becoming an interesting area to explore.  Soon enough, there seemed to be an internal logic and momentum to this digital painting meme and the Supercentral II surf club and  Poster Company by Travess Smalley and Max Pitegoff, pushed it further, actualizing what was in the air.  A slightly younger generation of artists working on the tumblr platform and the emergence of a body of critical reflection by artists such as Ry David Bradley on his PAINTED, ETC blog continued to sustain the evolution of the meme, polishing certain presentational elements and building a community of people interested in these ideas.  Painting in the network was about fast-paced collective dialogue and mind-bending abstractions.  It was also about painting.  The imagery of these works are often collisions between digital gestures and painterly gestures, but, generally speaking, the concern is with the tradition of painting–pre-Internet–as opposed to the animated gif scene whose roughly concurrent rise (in the net art context) posed as a nice counterpoint to the painting meme.

If one was watching, one could view the evolution of the meme as it started in a sort of experimental phase, gained some steam, developed a community, and achieved some sort of level of self-consciousness about itself.  The meme here takes on its own form of life which one can watch live on the Internet.

4.

Recently, the PAINT FX collective composed of Parker Ito, Jon Rafman, Micah Schippa, Tabor Robak, and John Transue, have developed a new mutation of the painting meme.  Looking closely at what had been accomplished in the work mentioned above and also ideas at the intersection of photography, sculpture, and performance which the Jogging collective (Brad Troemel and Lauren Christiansen) was working on, PAINT FX designed an environment to both experiment with performative voices as painters and develop micro-versions of the painting meme in one ongoing stream of paintings.

Although the paintings are not explicitly associated with particular artists (there’s no supplementary text on the site, at all), one can view unique voices develop as each painter builds a vocabulary of specific paint effects he’s working with.  One views both the development of these effects and the exploration of their usage through these unique voices.  Additionally, one views both the artists engaged dialogue with the other members of Paint FX collective and the flows of specific memes threading in and out of the broader image stream.

There are, to date, just under three hundred paintings posted on the collective’s very lengthy single web page–paintfx.biz.  One can experience this body of work in multiple ways.  There is this performative element—a fast paced call and response game in which the members of PAINT FX evolve memes.  There is also the trace of this performance which exists as a totally different type of effect.  The artists chose to not divide their archive up into multiple pages which one would have to click through, but instead as one very long scroll.  What this choice nudges the viewer to do is consider the flow of images as an ongoing development—a long poem, say.  This effect, though, is open to further versioning in relation to the type of device one uses.  So, for instance, scrolling through Paint FX on an iPhone is going to be a different type of effect than scrolling through it on a flat screen computer monitor in the comfort of one’s living room.  PAINT FX, though, has created a platform robust enough to be dynamically experienced in a multitude of viewing contexts.

There are also other variations in how the work will be experienced which are dependent on the user’s context.  Let’s say that one chooses to let the entire page download and start at the earliest painting, scrolling up to the most recent.  One could, on the one hand, just hold the scroll button down and watch the paintings zoom by like objects outside the windows of a moving car.  The style of the paintings and their sequencing on the page are instantaneously visible enough to provide an ongoing series of shock effects which increase as one continues to ride out the scroll (which lasts for several minutes bottom to top).  By rapidly scrolling through this way, one gets a broad overview of the way the voices of the artists, the various vocabularies of painting effects, and various bursts of smaller memes each develop.  On the other hand, though, one could also go through and carefully consider each painting.  This, too, can be effective as the paintings are not merely eye candy.  They are generally each labored over and carefully considered from multiple points of view before they are uploaded.  Also, oftentimes, the phenomenological effect of looking at a static image on the site for a more extended point of time can be powerful.  Through the practical experience of simply looking carefully and observing their own reaction to consuming images on computers, these artists have become discriminating in relation to the types of effects possible through the light of the screen.  In turn, they have developed unique skills for crafting particularly optically-charged images.

Finally, the project is also a robust space  for painting memes to accelerate and disseminate in the most efficient possible modes.  On PAINT FX, the viewer watches the lifeform of memes develop in a sort of real time.  On the one hand, this is frustrating because one can’t hold out much hope for an individual painting to maintain a level of qualitative power after a few days and weeks as it becomes swallowed up in the flow of the entire project.  On the other hand, if one refocuses the way they view the project in terms of following this flow, new categories of aesthetic experience are opened up.

5.

On the Internet, the meme of painting has developed ways in which to increase the efficiency and acceleration of the dispersal of its own versions.  Keywords here are “speed” and “immediacy.”  A question which the Internet hasn’t effectively explored as of yet, though, is related to the ethics of this acceleration.  Now that one can view painting in motion, a question and a way to perhaps further evolve the meme may revolve around where this acceleration is headed and why.

Performance

The democratic culture of the Internet (blogs, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc.) is increasingly a part of daily life. If somebody wants their voice heard, they can do it with a couple of clicks. However, as this democratic culture creates more instantaneously available media on a daily basis than anyone could possibly consume in a lifetime, a tension emerges in which each of these individual units of media is transformed into noise. In this scenario, both Proust and pornography flatten out in value to right around zero – each just a drop of water in a continuously expanding ocean.

Information theorists like Claude Shannon and Norbert Weiner discussed this problem in the early days of cybernetics research. Information is a ratio of signal to noise. The more noise – or entropy – in a system, the less clear the information. On the Internet, there is so much culture that it becomes like what Weiner, in a different context, called a “Niagara of entropy.” There are so many people shouting in the room that one voice cannot be heard clearly.

For a contemporary artist, this scenario poses an interesting problem. In prior models of media dissemination it was difficult for an artist’s work to reach large public audiences, critics, or curators without the artist being based in one of a handful of cities or receiving support from a commercial art space or a not-for-profit art institution. The democratic culture enabled by the Internet, though, allows for anyone and everyone with a connection to have their work viewed by both casual audiences and international arts professionals. This means that an aspiring young artist is now able to radically disseminate her work. The flip side of this situation, though, is that the meaningful value of this work becomes relatively minuscule because it’s now just one drop in an ocean of other works. As an artist uploads a work to the Internet, the chance that it will be viewed by more than a handful of people or reflected upon for more than a couple of minutes is minuscule due to the massive amount of other media through which it’s competing against. The artist, then, is left in a tangle: what’s the point of making anything if, at best, the work becomes a viral meme for a couple of hours and, at worst, is completely ignored by anyone other than the person that uploaded it? For some, I guess, this is the dream of the Internet in which the postmodern death of the author is made official and all culture just swirls around as anonymous memes. For others, though, it may be frustrating.

One artistic stance in response to this question takes an ongoing, constructive approach to creating meaning on the Web. This stance sees that, if there is meaning in this context, then it is accrued through the ongoing performance of an artist making individual works through time – less the individual work and more the ongoing exhibition of multiple instances of work.

Before continuing, a step back in time:

Pablo Picasso began to consider the location of his art as residing in his entire ongoing practice – one action after another after another. Picasso wrote, “Paintings are nothing but research and experiment. I never paint a picture as a work of art. Everything is research. I keep researching, and in this constant enquiry there is a logical development. That is why I number and date all my paintings. Maybe one day someone will be thankful for it.” For Picasso, who pictured himself as a blind minotaur crashing his way through a labyrinth in many of his paintings, the work occurs in the cumulative effect of his ongoing search for meaning; each individual painting functioning as a piece of “research” conducted in the name of this search.

As Leo Steinberg demonstrates in his long essay “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large,” Picasso’s medium is not even painting at the point in his career in which he made the “Algerian Women” paintings, but, rather, “the artist” – in this case, the artist performing an allegorical quest for a “realistic” two-dimensional representation of three-dimensional perceptual space. It is, for Steinberg, only through the catharsis of following this performed myth wherein the most powerful meaning of Picasso’s work is realized for his audience. As such, Steinberg takes it upon himself to critique the performance as a whole, subjecting Picasso himself to the lens of “the work of art.”

In re-constructing the historical drama of a myth surrounding Picasso, Steinberg painstakingly re-constructs the order of historical events, giving the viewer a sense of Picasso’s evolution. One can surmise that the essay was something of a labor of love for the author to construct due to, if nothing else, the raw amount of time consumed in traveling to see these dozens of works in dozens of museums and other collections all over the world.

And that’s the wager of Steinberg’s analysis – it operates on a highly privileged scale and, as such, describes things that are effectively impossible to view for anyone but an academic art historian with an expertise in that particular field. For almost anyone else, be they casual art fans or enthusiastic ones, access to Picasso’s work is limited to the handful of art museums one has the ability to visit firsthand in the course of one’s lifetime. Because of this limit, Picasso’s audience cannot easily appreciate the work as an ongoing performance.

Viewed through the lens of the Web, though, this distance between dramatic stage and audience is dramatically squashed. When an artist uploads a work, anyone with an Internet connection can view it. Furthermore, the vast majority of work – from artists working both on the Web and outside of it (such as painters [even dead painters like Picasso]) – is now viewed in the context of the artist’s chronological development as it is displayed on a Web page. That is to say, the idea which Steinberg is at pains to describe in regards to Picasso – the artist’s self-authoring performance of the role of “the artist” in time – becomes, on the Internet, automatic.

The artist’s website, as a publicly accessible database, may be followed by a public interested in the artist’s work. As an artist continues to create work, this creation is knowingly performed – one views the drama of an unfolding practice in which each “move” is in dynamic dialogue with past practice as well as a navigation into future practice. If I encounter the work of the contemporary artist through their managed presence on the Internet and I do it again and again and again and again, then this managed presence itself becomes a performative work.

There are many examples of this type of approach to making work in the context of the Web. One of those examples is Poster Company by Travess Smalley and Max Pitegoff.

Poster Company is a Flickr page consisting of over two hundred paintings produced between July 2009 and May 2010. In this project, the artists, first, focus on collisions between automatic effects which read as either “painterly” or “digital,” and, second, shift the focus of their labor in the work from the production of the individual painting to the performance of producing many paintings over the course of months. As such, their work is in dialogue with the painter On Kawara’s Today series and Josh Smith’s influential painting project – each of which are meaningful when considered as reactions to the automatic reproducibility of images as well as an ongoing, long-form performance.

The question “what is a digital painting?” (a noun) is here better phrased as “what is digital painting?” (a verb). The significance of Poster Company’s work lies not in the individual compositions, nor in the volume of output (although these elements are undeniably crucial for the full execution of the work to occur), but rather in the performance of the work.

In many ways, digital technologies and the Web make life easier for those who use them. This ease, though, frustrates the sense of accomplishment and meaning involved in laboring over something. When everyone can easily broadcast themselves on the Web or create a modern art masterpiece with a few clicks of a mouse, these actions become meaningless. In the face of this quandary, some artists have conceived of art production less in terms of the creation of a single work and more in terms of the performance involved in creating multiple works over time which an audience may follow live.

Tom Moody

1.

Tom Moody is best known today as commentator on the net art scene and a member of the animated GIF and meme sharing community on dump.fm.  However, he is also an accomplished painter and a pioneer in employing consumer-quality paint software applications in a fine art context.  Throughout his career, his works have provided mesmerizing DIY optical effects balanced with thoughtful considerations of the impact of technology on image production, particularly in regard to the tradition of painting.  This text is an overview of some of his work.

2.

Tom Moody was born in Texas and attended high school in Northern Virginia.  He received a BA in English Literature and Studio Art in 1977 from the University of Virginia, did a year in the BFA program at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC from 1977 to 1978, and, following his year at the Corcoran, a summer semester at the School of the Visual Arts in New York City.  Following his education, Moody returned to Dallas, Texas as a painter.

A successful early body of work from 1979-1980 is a series of black and white photorealistic portraits of his male high school friends.  Photorealism was an established movement by the time Moody made these paintings, but his facility with the technique (they could be installed comfortably with Chuck Close’s Phil from 1977) and his embrace of the banal photographic portrait as his subject matter point to his interest in the movement’s conceptual underpinnings.  By laboring to create hyperrealistic photographic effects and employing banal subject matter, the work opens the door to a deeper subject—photography itself; or the use of paint to demonstrate for the viewer what photography, divorced from the photographic print, looks like.  This interest in exploring the formal aesthetic of an imaging technology is a strategy that Moody continues in his embrace of the lo-fi digital affects embedded in the Microsoft Paintbrush, Microsoft Paint, and Adobe Photoshop tools.

Another key work from this period is Wired Self Portrait (1978), a black and white photorealistic self-portrait depicting the artist wearing bug-eyed novelty sunglasses and standing in front of a bank of electrical meters.  The painting is connected to a piece of “hardware” (a white machine about the size of a home printer or fax machine with rows of black knobs whose function is unclear) via two telephone cords inserted into Moody’s neck. This imagery recalls Frankenstein and A Clockwork Orange and anticipates the cyberpunk movement in literature.  Additionally, the depiction of the painter as a cyborg can be thought of as a harbinger of sorts for the direction Moody’s involvement with painting will take.

3.

By the early 1990s, Moody had developed a brand of optically-charged abstract painting, developing his own style and visual vocabulary.  Many of the motifs present in his computer-based painting such as concentric circles, serialized rows and columns of illusionistically-rendered spheres he calls “atoms,” and graphic depictions of molecules as networks of nodes and edges are present in his painting from this period.

As Moody developed this brand of abstract painting, he began meeting other painters from Dallas and Houston who were also exploring abstract effects. These painters, including David Szafranski and Jeff Elrod, became grouped into a movement that Art in America covered in a 1995 article by the art historian Frances Colpitt.

What set Moody’s work apart from the other painters in this scene, though, was his approach to the ground of the paintings.  Instead of painting on canvas, Moody painted directly on, on the one hand, the packaging of consumer goods such as cereal boxes and promotional-size Advil boxes, and, on the other hand, computer print-outs of his own art criticism, re-arranged to disrupt the narrative or argument of each piece, that he would then tape together into grids.  These gestures add an explicit layer of conceptual meaning to Moody’s work.  In regard to the works painted onto his own art criticism, the abstract imagery does work on a purely formal level, but this formal level is complicated by the layer of jumbled art criticism upon which it rests.  The paintings are, in part, about the making of abstract paintings, including the complicated legacy of Modern art discourse.

It should also be noted that the application of paint in these works is often crude, the method of taping-together the computer print-outs of the writing lacks polish, and the consumer-quality of the paper itself is not sensuous in the way that canvas is, giving the paintings an over-all lo-fi, rough-around-the-edges quality.  However, at the same time, the paintings’ embrace of this rawness is both intentional and self-aware.  Part of the aesthetic becomes about a sort of garage rock DIY-ness.

4.

Just as the Art in America article was released and the painting scene Moody was involved in began to receive national attention, though, many of its members, including Moody himself, had left or moved elsewhere.  In Moody’s case, he moved to New York City, taking a clerical temp job with plenty of downtime.

With all of the downtime he had at this job and his interest in situating himself somewhere in the New York art world, Moody began to think of this office as an art studio.  The computer consoles at the office employed out-of-date versions of Microsoft Windows and the paint software application, Microsoft Paintbrush, which, even by the late 1990s, was itself out-of-date.  Moody embraced the banality and technological obsolescence that these tools offered, creating pixelated iconography that he would then print-out onto shades of yellow, pink, blue, and white copy paper.  He would also, in some pieces, create signal distortions from his console to the office printer, resulting in jagged, pixelated lines along the paper that add a further level of formal pattern.  Moody then cut these print-outs up into asymmetrical shapes and re-combined them into a painting using linen tape on the back surface of the paper.

When displayed at a large-scale (as they were in Moody’s solo show at the Derek Eller Gallery in 1998 and the “Post-Hypnotic” exhibition that traveled from the University Galleries at Illinois State University to multiple venues between 1999 and 2001) the patterns of the cut-up paper, punctuated by the simple black icons printed on their surface, resist the humbleness of their materials and give off a mesmerizing optical pop.

Additionally, the slight crinkle of the manipulated copy paper and the patchwork re-assembly of the cut-up pieces create a “quilted” effect on the surface.   The reference to a quilt has a particular resonance for Moody.  As a metaphor for the way the Internet works, the quilt takes on a different set of characteristics than would the “web,” “network,” “cloud,” or “information superhighway.”  For example, the quilt is highly tactile and often associated with femininity.  In a 2005 interview with the artist Cory Arcangel on Rhizome, he comments on this, stating:

In the late ’90s I was impressed by the writing of cyberfeminist Sadie Plant, who opened up for me a whole organic, non-analytical way of looking at computation. She traces digital equipment back to one of its earliest uses, as punchcards for looms, and talks of the internet as a distributed collaborative artwork akin to traditionally feminine craft projects.  At the time I was drawing and printing hundreds of spheres at work and bringing them home, cutting polygons around them, and then taping the polygons back together in enormous paper quilts.

There is also an embrace of lo-fi digital imaging in these works in which the rasterized pixel is not cleaned-up as one would find in contemporary imaging software, but rather visible as an indexical account of digital processes.  The sight of these digital traces in the imagery demands the viewer to consider the fact of the computer in the process of image-creation.  What appeals to Moody about this is an embedded acknowledgment that new media technologies are limited; always already on their way out the door.  This doesn’t make them useless as a tool for art creation, though.  On the contrary, the aesthetic or medium of an obsolete technology can be beautiful precisely because it understands its own inevitable obsolescence.  As he writes in his artist statement, technology is “a tool, not magic, and possesses its own tragicomic limitations as well as offering new means of expression and communication.”

What is also interesting to consider about the way Moody made these works is his clandestine re-purposing of the technologies around him at his bland office job.  He was making objects, yes, but also re-thinking the place of the traditional painting studio and perhaps even creating a portrait of the Gen X-era, mind-numbing corporate milieu in which he was situated.  The curator Richard Klein picked up on these aspects of the work, curating him into the “Ink Jet” exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 2000.  As did the painter Michelle Grabner, who showed this work in the “Picturing the Studio” exhibition she co-curated with Annika Marie at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010.

5.

During this period of Moody’s career, he also created a controversial series of portraits on the Microsoft Paintbrush application depicting physically attractive women whose images he found in print magazines.  In each of these images, Moody would “perfect” the features of the already idealized women using the digital tools at his disposal, bringing the eyes closer together or further apart, making the nose smaller or bigger, etc.  There is something uncomfortable about these images as they were carefully studied, drawn in a piece of software, and digitally “perfected” by a male artist without the female model’s knowledge.  One is provided a sort of unfiltered access to the male gaze.  Furthermore, the black and white, pixelated images provide an un-realistic, clearly computer-created look to each of the subjects, which makes them not erotic, but unsettling.  The women’s bodies are even further abstracted, even more on view as commodity objects than they are in the print magazine.  Like the artist Richard Prince before him, though, Moody walks a fine line in these works between purely fetishizing a woman’s body and providing a self-critical portrait of this very act.  Perhaps their success as artworks is the inability of the viewer to reach a synthesis or conclusion in regard to which side of that line they exist on.

6.

Through the early 2000s, Moody would continue to work in many different veins, both on and off the computer, in most cases combining processes occurring in both locations.  One of his most familiar icons, the molecular model, is an apt metaphor for this approach to artistic process between virtual and physical space.  The molecular model is a unified structure composed of at least two discrete parts that is itself part of a larger structure.  One work, style, or location of work can be thought of as one node or one atom in a larger network or molecular structure.  Taking a cue from the artist Gerhard Richter, the heterogeneity of this larger network is, in part, where the art in Moody’s project occurs.  His serial patterns of spheres or atoms, in which the focus is on a multiplicity of atoms in a larger pattern as opposed to a single atom, can be thought of in a similar way.

Within this rhizomatic structure, though, one of the modes of production Moody returned to quite often is the one he developed in his temp office job—creating imagery in a piece of software, printing (and often re-printing…and further re-printing) the image out onto relatively inexpensive consumer-quality printer paper, cutting it up into asymmetrical shapes, and finally re-combining these shapes using linen tape on the back surface into large, optically-charged rectangular paintings.

As this body of work developed, the patterns became more varied and visually maximized, developing into intense compositions with echoes of Russian Constructivism and late Kandinsky.  Additionally, the paper he worked with became increasingly white in color—a reference to his own vocational shift from the corporate office to the home office.

7.

At around the time that these works achieved a level of self-consciousness within Moody’s project, though, he began to focus elsewhere, exploring the animated GIF file as a robust Internet-native art media.  Moody had long posted digital drawings and paintings onto his blog, but with the GIF he found a more immediately powerful tool to make paintings expressly for the screen.

GIFs are short, looping animations, composed of a relatively small amount of frames and file size.  They have been a part of the vernacular visual lexicon of the Internet since the earliest days of the World Wide Web and have recently seen a surge of interest amongst digital natives on platforms like Tumblr and the website dump.fm.  Part of the appeal (or, for some, lack thereof) of GIFs is the sense that they are aggressively, endlessly instantaneous and, hence, work well for communicating lowest common denominator images and ideas.  However, this very crudeness also makes them particularly robust files to distribute socially, giving them a potential political efficacy that resonates with Walter Benjamin’s understanding of photography and cinema in the early 20^th century.

Moody’s embrace of the GIF came through the use of his pioneering art blog (that itself was the subject of a 2007 exhibition, “Blog,” at artMovingProjects in Brooklyn).  He found that, as an Internet native media, GIFs, in a way, effectively cut out the middle man to showing paintings online.  A photograph of a painting is often a poor substitute for the phenomenological impact of a “real” painting.  If one’s painting is going to be viewed far more often in the context of a website or blog (as Moody’s work was) than why not make digital paintings?  Furthermore, why not make those digital paintings move, catching the hyper-wandering Internet surfer’s eye?  And, finally, why not use a file type associated with viral Internet meme culture, providing the paintings with a dynamic life outside of the artist’s website?  With these points in mind, Moody began to experiment with GIFs.

Like his ink jet painting works, the GIFs embrace visual immediacy, pixelation hearkening to a form of technological obsolescence, and a rigorous economy of materials that result in a certain roughness in appearance.  One of his most widely-viewed GIFs (and, if not the first, among the first GIFs to be purchased explicitly as a work of art), is OptiDisc (2007).  This is an eighteen-frame animation depicting concentric circles that alternate at uneven intervals in color from black to red to blue to white, creating a crude, but hypnotic effect.  The work resembles a target, a Modern art favorite famously used by Jasper Johns and Kenneth Noland.  However, while Moody’s target possesses the same sort of visual punch that these others painters generated, there is also an embedded commentary about progress, be it technological or artistic, occurring here.  Through the use of pixelated imagery, a pointedly small file size, and the uneven temporal intervals of the circles’ alterations in color, OptiDisc is at once both dynamic and pathetic, visceral and antiquated. This tension is what makes it interesting to think of as a work of contemporary art.  The critic/curator Paddy Johnson, in her commentary on the work in the “Graphic Interchange File” exhibition text, writes that the GIF’s “emotive qualities last only as long as Moody allows a reverence for technology – in Moody’s world modernism  is only an afterimage, its spirit eventually replaced by mechanical functionality.”

8.

Recently, Moody has continued to work with GIFs and also created a series of large glossy prints made with Paintbrush, Paint, and Photoshop.  These prints feature complex layers of abstract iconography, much of which is created with a “spray paint” tool, as well as the representation of a crudely-drawn brick wall that functions as both a reference to the Modernist grid and to a wall tagged with graffiti.

This blurring of the polish of Modern art and the rough, democratic aesthetic of street art is a fitting description of Moody’s artistic project in general.  One of the acknowledged inspirations for his painting process comes from cyberpunk literature.  As Moody describes it, cyberpunk inherited the British New Wave’s dystopian, yet hauntingly beautiful, near-future science-fiction vision, mixed it with a dose of cutting-edge computer science, and threw in the science-fiction novelist Samuel R. Delaney’s “street kid” protagonist, resulting in a scrappy form of visionary pop.   One can see Moody, then, as a breed of cyberpunk artist–critically exploring the new, avoiding pretension, and approaching authenticity.

Each of the posts is itself composed of either (1.) a digital image depicting a 3D model, or (2.) a digital image depicting a 3D model as well as a short video clip in which a “camera” moves around the 3D model as if it were filmed in physical space.

The models Rafman uses are appropriated from Google 3D Warehouse and altered by him so that the “texture” or outer surface of the model reflects the style of (in most cases) a canonical Modern or contemporary artist.

So, for example, in the first post of the blog, Motherwell Elephant, one views an elephant whose surface reflects the rough confrontations between the colors black and white in paintings by the abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell; and, in the most recent post, David Hockney Studio Apartment, one views a modern studio apartment with natural light, expensive furniture and a flatscreen television in the color palette and iconography of David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash.

In-between these examples is a series of similar collisions between a particular painting style and a particular 3D model such as Warhol Commodore (a Warhol self-portrait over the 3D model of a Commodore 64 computer) or Parker Ito Condo (Parker Ito’s The Most Infamous Girl in the History of the Internet over the 3D model of an expensive looking condo apartment).

At first glance, these collisions may strike one as somewhat arbitrary postmodern one-liners; however, if one continues to view through the blog or follow its development as it happens live, then one begins to appreciate the way the posts function in greater depth.

Take, for example, Pollock Tank.

Pollock’s infamous dripping style serves here as a formal equivalent to the camouflage designs normally associated with the surfaces of a tank.

However, there are other things happening.

The aggressively armored shell of the tank nudges one towards viewing Pollock’s persona and his paintings as “tank-like” – excessively private and explosive – while this very explosiveness of Pollock’s canvases nudges one towards viewing the tank as itself wildly explosive (as opposed to defensive or keeping the peace).

In each of the cases presented through the blog, a similar collision between the 3D model and the painting style creates a two-way street of meaning in which the painting style says something about the model and the model says something about the painting style.

In regard to this point, Rafman writes:

A conversation is going on between the surface and the underlying structure. In this way, the clash of the cultural weight of a high modernist paintings and a mass produced vehicle is not simply another example of the blurring of the distinction between high and low culture.

*****

It’s often not immediately clear what the connections are leading towards, but this very wiggle-room in interpretation benefits the project as a whole by maintaining a certain ambiguity to each post.

For example, I’m not sure exactly what Lewitt Blue Whale or Morris Louis Penguin have to say about each of their respective collisions off of the top of my head, but in seeing the actual models, each case does make some sort of sense and part of the pleasure in the work is in thinking through why that sense may or may not exist (why is Sol LeWitt like a blue whale; why is a penguin like Morris Louis?)

Finally, when the blog is viewed as a whole, an interesting theme is demonstrated:

When viewed as digital images, canonical works from the history of 20^th century painting are inevitably going to lose whatever phenomenological power they possess in the physical space of the museum.

A .jpeg of a De Kooning is not going to afford one the phenomenological “De Kooning effect” which one would experience in a traditional art space.

However, what does afford one a certain phenomenological effect on the Web is the way that, over time, it’s not the style of the famous paintings that serve as art, but Rafman’s performed exploration of them.

1. The photo of a Greek sculptural bust.

2. A formal pattern of intersecting pink lines and “stars” at each of the intersection points that together map out the facial features of the figure depicted in the Greek sculptural bust.

At first glance, one views the contrast of the relatively smooth lines and monochromatic color palette depicted in the photo of the sculpture (which read as “ancient” – the photo comes across as signifying the era of Ancient Greece more than a particular artist or subject), with the rigidness and dayglo color-scheme of the lines and stars (which themselves each read as “artificial” – they create a pattern reminiscent of graphic iconography from the Transformers cartoon show and film series).

So, there’s an immediate collision between two starkly differentiated iconographic elements – each of which pull one in an opposed direction.

The title – Plato with biometric overlay – points out for the viewer where to go from there.

In the context of the philosophy of art, Plato is perhaps best known for his “mimetic theory” of art in which art is an imitation of an imitation of a real thing; there is – here – a higher level of idealized, capital-F “Form” (an abstracted, immaterial idea of a bed), an imitation of this ideal (an actual material bed based on the idea of a bed) and an imitation of an imitation (a drawing of an actual bed based on the idea of a bed).

Biometric overlay, on the other hand, is a surveillance strategy employed by security professionals in order to create an abstracted, immaterial representation of a person’s facial features which can be digitally stored and cross-referenced in a computer network in order to, for example, quickly see if the subject’s facial features match those of anyone on a terrorist watchlist.

When the biometric overlay is placed over the face of Plato, a collision occurs in the work between one vision of idealized Form and another – one vision of Form as the transcendental space outside of the “cave” of “normal” consciousness and another vision of Form as the nightmarish acceleration of Biopower in the wake of the military industrial complex (or some such).

In their own commentary on this work, the artists lay out a similar reading.

They write:

The form has become the Form – There is no longer a need for a distinction between the particular and the universal. Plato’s ‘faceness’ has been quantified and digitized and his biography, stress levels, horoscope, download queue, credit history and criminal record have all been cross-checked for potential threat-patternage. Are the laser lines a symbol of magic and wonder or of cold totalitarianism?

*****

With this in mind and as one continues to view through the work, the biometrics overlay, with its diamond-like rigidity, becomes aggressive, confronting Plato’s face like a muzzle or the “facehugger” alien from the Alien films.

However, against this pressure, the eyes of the philosopher – emptied out of content in the classical style – are able to momentarily resist, extending beyond the biometrics, pointing towards (without naming) something seemingly outside of any representation.

Of the eleven paintings exhibited, one of them was The Most Infamous Girl in the History of the Internet (which is discussed in the previous post) and the remaining ten comprise a series of digital prints on canvas which (1.) each depict a wide range of subject matter and (2.) over all of which the artist applies an acrylic texturing gel in order to give the surface a more tactile, painterly feeling.

At first glance, it’s difficult to see how the varying images in the series converse with one another.

One views, for example, the stock image of a bowl-of-fruit still life, a photorealistic portrait of a woman photoshopped to blur at the lower edge like a tableau vivant, broad squiggly lines which read as “digital” over a background of paint blobs which themselves read as “painterly,” a cliché image of messy abstract brushwork, a wheel of gradiating digital color, an “animal portrait” foregrounded by LOLCATS – style text graphics, a collage of varying pictorial strategies from the history of art placed in a grid, nude models covered in paint, a digitally drawn rendering of a Hudson River school style landscape, and, finally, a rigid formal pattern composed of a tactile material (in fact, it’s a close angle on the texture of the same canvas material Ito used to print the images in the series on).

So, as mentioned, there is a heterogeneity in subject matter here which is initially disorienting.

However, as one continues to view through this wide variety of imagery, taking the show in as a whole, one theme begins to emerge as a constant variable:

A collision between the physical act of painting and the simulation of the physical act of painting.

In each instance, a pictorial strategy or “effect” drawn from the history of painting is input into a computer, simulated through digital tools (where it gains its own currency as part of digital culture) and, then, re-output as paintings which were automatically “painted” by a digital printer.

On Ry David Bradley’s Painted, Etc. blog, Ito is quoted as calling the works in this series not paintings, but “painting objects.”

He writes:

[…] these “painting objects” were simulating hand made things, but also referencing modes which have been typically associated with the reproductions of paintings. The whole premise of the body of work was approaching painting as “found”, so I selected jpegs that referenced genres/history of painting (sorta based on wikipedia). The work is very involved in painting history and an awareness of that history, but I also believe the jpegs I selected reflect on other issues that are not so specific to this history, and are more specific to Internet culture.

*****

With that mind, the kick of the paintings is similar whether one views them in person or on the Web.

In both cases, what one views is a painting straddling each of those two worlds.

The resulting work – The Most Infamous Girl in the History of the Internet – exists as both these made-to-order paintings as well as a heavily re-blogged Web meme.

In regard to the paintings, they might be considered in relation to Warhol’s Marilyn series of silkscreened paintings.

Both Marilyn Monroe and “the parked domain girl” are icons of emptiness.

Monroe was a blank slate for sexual desire, the parked domain girl is a symbol of sites without content.

Furthermore, both painting series automate the painting process which, then, further amplifies the sense of an emptying-out of content.

And, finally, in both cases the artists are each interested in depicting the process of their own making as much as they’re interested in depicting the icon being processed.

For example, one views Warhol’s rough usage of the silkscreen technology as much as a legible image of Monroe, and one views the hands of the different painters Ito employs to create the painted images as much as a single painting of the parked domain girl.

However, at this level – the level of a process being depicted – Ito’s series takes a departure from Warhol’s own that allows it to exist as an intriguing version of pop art rather than an imitation of it.

What fascinated Warhol was the way that “real life” stars like Monroe developed a life of their own in the sphere of reproducible images.

Ito, though, picks up on the fact that an icon like the “parked domain girl” is not even based on a “real life” star – she’s an icon who short-circuits the previous paradigm of stardom.

In the wake of the Internet, pop culture is something consumed and lived amongst; there is no need for pop to reference a real world as the real world is to a great extent pop.

A model posed for the photograph, yes, but that model is anonymous; the parked domain girl’s identity is entirely native to the sphere of pop representation on the Web.

By hiring a company to create hand-made oil paintings of the parked domain girl, Ito brings her into the realm of “real life” for the first time.

His work is thus meaningful not for depicting the automated painting of a “real” icon, but for depicting the outsourced hand-painting of a “fake” icon and, in so doing, bringing Warhol’s joke full circle.

One views, in the image to the left of the diptych, a vertical composition composed of an open door that itself frames an arrangement of fruit situated on a small end table and the obstructed view of a window.

These figurative elements are each carved out in chunky, geometrically-legible units of color.

In the image to the right of the diptych, one views a similar composition whose differences with the first are localized to shifts in color and re-considerations of the given shapes of objects (perhaps most notably in the cubist-inspired centerpiece of the fruit arrangement).

Now, one might say that Broskoski’s model here is not necessarily an arrangement of objects in space, but rather, a painting style – say, Fauvism.

And these particular works are apt studies of the style; they’re well-executed and have a certain aesthetic appeal.

But, that said, whereas the Fauves (“The Wild Beats”) were notorious for depicting objects in space in an un-realistic manner (or, alternatively, mutating their own definition of “realistic”), Broskoski’s paintings lack that sort of “shock effect.”

They are not wild, but tame.

The fact that these images do not catalyze the shock effects that, say, Matisse’s work catalyzed in its own time should not be surprising.

After all, Matisse’s work was once contemporary, but is now safely at home in Ikea or Pier One Imports; it’s been absorbed and neutralized into the flow of commodified signage.

So, where does this leave Broskoski?

Well, to start, this diptych – as it is displayed on his website, anyway – is situated directly below another diptych which itself is housed under a heading reading “2 weeks ago…”

In the lower-most image of this second diptych, one views iconography reading less as painterly or in reference to any other art historical style than it does digital and “new.”

One views what might be taken for a 3D “metal fence” (3D in the sense of digital “3D animation” not trompe-l’oeil) through which undulating chunks of lightly-shaded colors which might be taken for “stingrays” pass through and intermingle with small, concentric circles of color which might be taken for “eyeballs.”

And, in the upper image of the diptych, one views a similarly surrealistic arrangement of iconography; however, in this case, the icons do not read solely as “painterly” or solely as “digital,” but rather as a collision between the two.

The background and immediate foreground here are composed of graffiti-like scribbles created with a tool that automatically re-produces this “real world” effect, and the middle-ground of the image is composed of a series of “3D” representations of what one might take to be “vertebrae” extending not in a straight line (as in a spine) but in a wild swirl throughout the space of the image.

It should be said, though, that as with the images in the diptych mentioned above, these more digitally-inflected images are themselves each well-executed and sort of privately powerful, but perhaps lack the bodily shock effects which the various avant-gardes of art history are interested in.

Which would be fine – perhaps Broskoski isn’t interested in that sort of thing – were it not for the fact that, if one is up for it, there’s another way to view what’s going on here with its own unique shock:

When the artist places these paintings in conjunction with one another and in the context of an ongoing stream of paintings which a viewer might follow (as in a performance) on his website, the viewer’s lens on the work here is nudged away from each of the individual images and closer towards the legible pattern of filtration through which the individual images stream.

The shock of shifting one’s lens from such simultaneously well-executed and differently well-executed images creates a space of indeterminacy – a sort of surrealist heterotopia picturing less space than movements in time.

The installation is composed of one-half modestly-sized abstract paintings produced by the artist and one-half similarly-sized glossy posters printed-out by the artist which themselves each depict an abstracted detail of one of her own abstract paintings (not – it should be noted – the paintings in this particular installation, though).

The first thing to say about the installation is that one isn’t immediately sure which of the works here are the paintings and which of the works here are the posters as they’re each roughly the same size and they each depict iconography which one reads as “painterly” – drips, slashes, goopy brush strokes, etc.

(If one were to view the works through a computer screen [or a printed-out checklist], it would be effectively impossible to differentiate them via their media [rather, the “take away” message – in that case – becomes the sign of “painting,” or, alternatively, of “art.”])

However, as one spends time with “Nothing To Blame But Gemini” (as in the case [if one goes for this sort of thing, anyway] of spending time with a person born under the sign of Gemini), what at first glance appears to be singular, gradually reveals a strong duality.

The key variable of difference between these works is their materiality as objects – the paintings are sculptural, tactile; the posters are flat, glossy.

In the paintings, one views onto a surface molded by the artist – that is to say, a phenomenological space – the action occurred “here”; in the posters, one views into a surface automatically printed-out by a machine – that is to say a conceptual space – the action occurred “out there.”

Going one step deeper, the surface of the paintings calls to mind production as the location of the work (present tense), while the surface of the posters calls to mind both pre-production as well as post-production as the location of the work (past and future tenses).

And, at this point, if one is willing to go this far with the work, another layer emerges wherein each individual image harnesses these very tensions between “the hand of the artist” and “automatic effects.”

For example, in the painting works, collisions emerge between, on the one hand, the application of objects (broken ceramic, pieces of canvas, newspaper, string, glitter, etc.) which automatically produce iconographic elements and, on the other hand, the artist’s application of paint which manually produces iconographic elements.

And in the poster works, collisions emerge between, on the one hand, the data of the photograph which automatically produces iconographic elements and, on the other hand, the artist’s digital manipulation (using “painterly” effects in an image editing software) of the photograph which manually produces iconographic elements.

Finally, the painterly gestures in the works themselves (be they conducted with paint or pixels) point one in the direction of these dialectical tensions as they reveal an indeterminacy – a hesitation to settle anywhere for certain.

One views wiggling lines and almost haphazard juxtapositions of iconography and media; things never quite coalesce.

However, if one is willing to think of the work occurring here as located less in the individual objects, and more in the dialectical tension pictured by the installation as a whole, then suddenly a strong, singular point of view reveals itself.

Right now, on the main page of Charles Broskoski’s personal website, one views paintings created with digital tools as well as clocks which read-out the amount of time passed since each artwork was initially uploaded to the site (in this case, for the more recently uploaded painting “2 days ago…” and, for the less recently uploaded painting “3 weeks ago…”).

One, thus, views both the paintings and the paintings’ built-in obsolescence.

The most recently uploaded painting, Avocado, is a token of a traditional painting genre – the still life with fruit; on the other hand – with its ghostly, blurred brush work which fights to keep from dripping down (to the past of the artist’s painting) and up (to the future of the artist’s painting) – the work is an allegory of painting on the computer:

Not present in space, but streaming through time, fighting for its life to be there in the room (on the screen) despite the inevitability of its passing.

That is to say:

1. A picture of avocados (they are there).

2. A picture of avocados blurring through time from future (an ideal) to past (a memory) (they’re gone – ghosts).