Open Letter To Artists (From An Art Critic) - Part 15
by Joan Altabe - 10/23/2006
Computer Art
Attention computer artists. You may need seat belts for this one. It’s liable to be a bumpy ride. I’m one of those critics with a blind spot for computer art.
In the beginning, electronic image-making belonged to software engineers. Later, the military began using computers for flight simulation. As far as I’m concerned, these uses should have stayed put.
Granted, artists have always taken lifeless matter, like clay, and transformed it into living form. And it may be said that to computer artists, circuitry is their clay. I also concede that electronic technology gets art out of its traditional spaces. It may even be argued that it doesn’t matter if art comes in cyber form, as long as it's good art.
It matters to me, though. For one thing, cyberspace images are a kind of virtual art. They have no physical existence until they're printed – machine-printed, no less. I’ve even heard it said that the world of technology links to spirituality. An example given: when people talk on the phone in their car, they don't remember driving. In that same way, the argument goes, computer art becomes a transcendental experience, soldering souls to circuitry.
Sigh.
As you can tell, computer art pushes my buttons. The way I see it, the only chord that computer art strikes is the one that is differently spelled and terminates with a plug. That’s because so much of computer art looks like painting. And my question is, why go to the trouble of electronically generating an image that looks as if it were painted by hand? Isn't that like a photo-real painting trying to look like a color slide? Why should something look like something else when the real thing is readily available?
Mind you, I like the way some machine-made paintings look. But I don't kid myself. I like the look because of their beguiling resemblance to painting. When I remember that the images are not painted, but push-buttoned, the light of the cathode ray comes on in my head and in a click, I become un-beguiled.
Every once in a while, though, computer art draws me in. That’s when it exults in what it is and doesn't try to be what it's not – painting; i.e., I’ve seen a multiple portrait – a photograph that was manipulated in varying ways on a computer and I could see the pixels that form the photo. For that I’d give A-plus for the honesty of the work.
But then, when the pixel image got framed, it took on the air of a painting by pointillist George Seurat, reminding me that there's a difference between pictures that come out of a machine and those that come out of man. The computer produces programs of unfaltering logic. Man does the same thing the hard way - by disciplining his hand, his eye, his heart.
Look, I agree that artists should be able to make art out of anything they want and that ought to include pixels on a screen. But to make art out of pixels that looks like art made out of paint seems pointless. It's not just that so much computer art sails under false colors. But when you remember that it’s machine-made, it throws the image out of the world of illusion into the real world, a world run by machines. And in a programmable instant, I see the computer image muscling in on humankind's strongest suit these days – the handmade one-of-a-kind.
— Joan Altabe | October 23, 2006
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I thought you might enjoy this from the great art critic Theodore Wolff - I admire him greatly ...
"I am not of course, suggesting that we discard our other modes of artistic expression and replace them with computer graphics. Far from it. I am only proposing that we add this new form to those we already have - much as we added photography a century and a half ago. We need all the help we can get in understanding the world - both seen and unseen - and every ounce of beauty we can find or help create. And since that's so, why shouldn't the computer, that ubiquitous medium of information and communication, also be called into service as an instrument of art?"
This speaks of Truth to me ....
Lisa Wray
October 31, 2006