postScript — The New Art Universe

Notes for educators: placing modeling within a digital-tactile phenomenological curricular framework.

Computers are useless

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

— Pablo Picasso ¹

At the time his declaration was made, Picasso’s dictum was true. The digital age was barely launched. The idea of binary, 0-1, yes-no, white-black systems of processing information did not seem a good fit for the nuanced, ambiguous, nebulous, gray areas of artistic expression. But when A. Michael Noll signed on with Bell Labs in the early 1960s, he did something with a computer that no one had thought to do. Instead of using it to answer questions, he used it to ask them. His early experiments with computer-generated art helped to evolve the most transformative period in visualization since the Renaissance.

The confluence of developments in the decade that followed Noll’s first works included, among others, digital art and Conceptual art. Informed by the same zeitgeist, it comes as no surprise that both happened to celebrate the supremacy of the immaterial idea as the art rather than the material object. Yet even the most rarified Conceptual work by Joseph Kosuth must be reified. It can’t help but have a material expression of its object (as distinct from the material expression of a unique object). Are lines of Noll’s code for creating Gaussian Quadratic the art? Such a question confuses technique with intent. Computers are useless — but then again, the same can be said for paintbrushes. As it turns out, all media are useless unless infused with artists’ ideas and until physical manifestations of those ideas are produced with them. This includes so-called new media.

Challenges to the Beaux-Arts status quo

While the fine arts have “traditionally” been divided into painting, sculpture, and architecture, these media classifications are the exception in the long span of history. After the development of easel painting in the Renaissance, the L‘Ecole des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) in France codified these categories as a curriculum structure. They have persisted in the West ever since. Given that the impulse to create art is as old as humanity, the painting-sculpture-architecture model is a mere 500-year “blip” on a 30,000-year-old art-making radar screen.

“Modern” art expressions that challenged the Beaux-Arts status quo include installation and performance art, cinema, and now “new media.” These means of expression can be termed immersive art environments because they often involve sight and sound or touch — in any event, more than one of the senses.

Cyclical return

But these expressions constitute a cyclical return to the first modes of expression in art! At the fundamental level, what is the real difference between the cave paintings at Lascaux and an installation by Jonathan Borofsky? The only exception may be that the “cave” Borofsky painted is built by humans.

Here lies the basic challenge to the not-so-longstanding Beaux-Arts tradition. “New media” and its use of the moving image finds historical roots in cinema. Cinema, in turn, develops out of photography. Photography, in turn, comes from — well, as you can see, within basic human proclivities, there is nothing “new” in “new media.” We are still telling our stories to stay the darkness. We’ve simply replaced the flicker of the campfire with that of the camera, the projector, or the monitor. Take away media dependency, and what remains is the notion of art as the carrier of an idea.

The death of the death of art

The notion of art as idea had its roots in Duchamp. He famously wished to “put painting once again at the service of the mind.” ² To some, the notion has been perceived as a threat, a continuation of the hysterical idea of the “death of art” that had been bandied about at least since Courbet challenged the highfalutin genres of the Academe with depictions of common life.

Claims of the “death of art” or the “death of painting” as the end game pursued by some artists became a defining critical tic of the era spanned by Modernism. The embrace of Duchamp by postmodern skeptics as the consummate and prescient ur-conceptualist killer of art masks his true intentions, however. To refute that we have to dive into history — briefly, but deeply.

The cave paintings at Lascaux exist as archetypal evidence of a peculiar human activity conducted through the millennia. They create a convergence of the space of the mind with the space of the body. The making of images and places, the activity of art and design, follows effectively as a unified human enterprise for 15,000 years, from the late Paleolithic until the early Renaissance.

Artistic singularities

Then, a singularity occurs. The popularization of easel painting in the Renaissance ushers in a world where the making of images, objects, and spaces become categorically distinct. A hierarchy evolves distinguishing painting, sculpture, and architecture as related but essentially non-interdependent disciplines. This hierarchy later became codified in the curriculum of the École des Beaux-Arts. This proliferates through Western culture as the model for arts education. Even the otherwise iconoclastic hierarchy-busters of the Bauhaus encoded disciplines in a way that would have had a familiar ring at the École. Gropius may have cast them as equals. But in the Bauhaus, these disciplines remained, for all intents and purposes, distinct.

Enter Marcel Duchamp and another singularity. This was the surprise creation, long after his “retirement” from art-making, of Étant donnés: 1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage. In this work, art disciplines converge back into the unity of image-object-space that distinguished art practice prior to the categorical distinctions born only 500 years ago. Duchamp returned art to a much more embracing and longer-lived tradition. His gift was the revival of absolute freedom felt by artists unfettered by counterproductive academic distinction, media dependency, and needless hierarchies.

Thus: if produced today, Lascaux would be called an immersive multimedia installation.

Convergence…

Art schools profess to engage students in the contemporary practice of art. Yet, almost every art program bears divisional categories, in fact if not on paper, that are derivative of the Beaux-Arts model. They carry this model as a vestigial organ of curricular structure out of step with today’s art environment. After exposure to this kind of cosmological model of the art universe, a young artist either risks cultural irrelevance or spends years unlearning the unnecessary.

Since Étant donnés, convergence has been the dominant paradigm in art making, with or without the influence of art schools. It would be better if it happened with us. And better still if our embrace of it manifests us as an active participant in its development.

Artificial boundaries

Some may see this as yet another argument for that Modernist shibboleth, the death of painting. Yet viewing Duchamp’s achievement through the long lens of history, it is evident that he did not “kill” painting, and had no real intention of doing so (can you ever trust a trickster?). He simply killed the artificial boundaries that divided disciplines. Painting still happens and is still relevant, but it cannot and should not happen in a context that denies both its ancient and contemporary convergence with other aspects of practice. Digital art, meanwhile, should not set itself up as a dichotomy or fall prey to an exclusivist sense of “progressive” superiority with respect to more “traditional” ways of working. By so doing, it falls into the old Beaux-Art trap.

Digital and tactile

Our reality, spurred by the twin engines of the digital revolution and the peculiarly American proclivity to hybridize, is that we live in a multi-media, non-hierarchic art universe that is both digital and tactile. Clearly, the artist who embraces this is at an advantage, but I don’t believe this embrace obsoletes expression or tool.

On the contrary. It is quite possible, even necessary, for a hard-core painter learning hard-core painting to exist in a multi-media universe. He simply cannot afford the romantic blindness to the circumstance of painting in the contemporary context that schools often unwittingly provide through poor curriculum modeling. It is equally necessary for the hands of the digital artist to stay dirty. To make work, she must make work. By denying the potentials of physical output, and how these can converge with the tactile universe we still (after all) live in, we end up making digital art a mono-, not multi-, media enterprise.

To put it simply: In our time, one need not make digital art, but one must certainly make art for the digital age.

… in the expanded field

There could not possibly be two sets of folks more disparate in outlook and temperament than computer scientists and artists. When Pixar was created, it brought two groups of people who knew almost nothing about their respective disciplines and activities, sat them down, and got them talking. The outcome is proof that the terms inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary are not buzzwords, but the way the creative world works. Increasingly, it is necessary not to be insular to a field, nor to define one’s practice as such. Is Alice Aycock a sculptor or architect? Frank Gehry? What a laughable prospect to have held such a yardstick to Michelangelo.

Much restructuring within schools is not borne of a philosophical position, but a response to the financial circumstances of our time. That said, there is ample reason to use these circumstances as an opportunity to bring about the necessary pedagogical changes among the disciplines that professional art practice has been demanding at least since Rosalind Krauss mapped its structure in her canonical 1979 essay Sculpture in the Expanded Field.

Krause and the expanded field

In her map, the logic of the new art universe is contingent upon the acceptance of, among other things, “designed” environments (architecture) into the “art” fold. As I implied earlier, the Renaissance—Modernist time frame is governed by divisions that still mark discipline categories recognized in the academy, but the art universe sketched by Krauss clearly operates on inter- or multi-disciplinary lines.

That said, her conclusions are based on a study between erstwhile “art” and “design” categories in a specifically spatial context. Toward the conclusion of the essay, she implies an expansion of the expanded field in the context of other media:

Thus the field provides both for an expanded but finite set of related positions for a given artist to occupy and explore, and for an organization of work that is not dictated by the conditions of a particular medium. From the structure laid out above, it is obvious that the logic of the space of postmodernist practice is no longer organized around the definition of a given medium on the grounds of material, or, for that matter, the perception of material. It is organized instead through the universe of terms that are felt to be in opposition within a cultural situation. (The postmodernist space of painting would obviously involve a similar expansion around a different set of terms from the pair architecture/landscape — a set that would probably turn on the opposition uniqueness/reproducibility.) It follows, then, that within any one of the positions generated by the given logical space, many different mediums might be employed. It follows as well that any single artist might occupy, successively, any one of the positions. …

— Rosalind Krauss ⁴

An expanded field for a new reality

In our cultural situation, the terms that are deemed oppositional are digital (or virtual)tactile (or actual). The concept of convergence implies we do not deal with these as absolute dichotomies, but rather as a spectrum along which a value is placed.

In the context of our own art program, and not unlike common practice as schools elsewhere, we have appended “New Media” as some additional foray into a media-driven, Beaux-Arts derivative model — where “New Media” is the digital pole and all others (painting, sculpture) are tactile.

This text is both a critique and an antidote to that strange map. In order to effectively redraw the map, we need to find the structure of the thing mapped.

The new art universe

Now: envision a curriculum that abandons all vestiges of a Beaux-Arts organizational model. It declares no tool or means of expression obsolete, but rather provides us with a cosmological model of our contemporary art universe, perpetuating no false romanticism about the privileges and responsibilities of being a professional artist.

Dimensionality

Some schools have already taken this evolutionary leap in defining art activity dimensionally rather than by relation to media: painting and printmaking become 2D, and sculpture becomes 3D. When introducing “New Media” or “Digital Arts” these schools augment 2D and 3D with 4D, filling out the model with time-based and interactive media.

2D — 3D — 4D

Phenomenology

But number implies hierarchy. It is false to assume that “4D” work is more complex, sophisticated, or privileged than “2D.” So, the dimensional model is insufficient remedy. We may find it instead useful to translate these dimensional categories from 2D, 3D, and 4D into phenomenal foci we might respectively call image, space, and time. Arraying these in a circular rather than a linear diagram permits a more fluid exchange among the phenomena. For example, video projection on a wall shares aspects of time and image. However, projection onto the floor (wherein an audience can walk around or into the work) incorporates the aspect of space. This model is ecumenical. Traditional and emerging expressions have a place at the table, and hybridization is not only possible but more probable.

image  —  space

\       /

time

Mediation

An unfortunate byproduct of this otherwise compelling diagram remains, in that no clear presence of the digital-tactile continuum is defined. Digital work can still be segregated into “time-based media.” A singularity that marks our age, and which visual disciplines have been reacting to for a generation, is the advent of digital media. For too long, the worlds of digital media and traditional fine arts media have been conceptualized as a dichotomy. Romanticizing or privileging either is a trap that does not allow one to visualize, for example, a charcoal drawing as the technological circumstance it is, or the Javascript driving a web interactive as a means toward the emotive or expressive.

Having freed the curriculum from media constraints, we can now use the digital-tactile toolbelt to define activity within and among these new, permeable phenomena. This allows us to define tools and materials in a continuum that more easily allows linkage and hybridization among digital and tactile media. We might describe this as an axis, the poles of which are defined by digital and tactile means. For example, a “sculptor” can move freely along the continuum. They may use traditional foundry processes alongside digital 3-D printing techniques to create unforeseen expressions.

tactile

|

digital

A convergent 3D diagram

If we combine the two preceding diagrams, something highly useful occurs with respect to convergence. The diagram becomes a three-dimensional matrix whose primary feature is connectivity, not categorization. All phenomena have focal points but can connect to every other and to the continuum of tools. It is a model roughly analogous to a three-dimensional Munsell or CIELAB color system. Just as any color can be accounted for in these systems, all art activity — traditional, emerging, or hybridized expressions; digital, tactile, or combined media — can be accommodated by such a curriculum diagram. Even a hardcore painter occupies a place, defined by image and tactility. She can be a painter, however, in an art universe grounded in, acknowledging, and exploiting the contemporary possibilities for paint.

If visualized as quantum states instead of distinct categories, anyone working in any hybridized situation can conceptually situate him or herself with respect to other practices. They may incorporate it into future as-yet-defined hybrids, defining emerging means of expression. Just as Krauss found a way to clarify the means by which we understood the work of folks like Morris, Smithson, Long, and Le Witt, the diagram below may be able to clarify the confusing currents of today’s convergent-by-nature art world, allowing artists to find the relevance of their practice in it.

1. This quote makes quite the rounds on poor internet quote sites without citation, but it paraphrases the semantic equivalent of a conversation between William Fifeld and Picasso. 1964 Summer-Fall, The Paris Review 32, “Pablo Picasso: A Composite Interview” by William Fifield, p. 62, Paris Review, Inc., Flushing, New York. An investigation of this dictum is at Quote Investigator.[↩]
2. Tomkins, Calvin. “Duchamp: A Biography | Chapter One: The Bride Stripped Bare.” The Washington Post. 1996. Web. 24 Oct 2010. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/duchamp.htm[↩]
3. Krauss, Rosalind. “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” October, Vol. 8 (Spring, 1979), p. 37[↩]
4. Krauss, pp. 42-43[↩]