Look, See

I read Donald Kuspit's The Matrix of Sensations at lunch today over a plate of string beans and vegi-chicken with garlic sauce over brown rice. Unlike some people, I don't mind a little "insanely overwrought thinking about art" as long as I can follow the words, the sentences, and the thinking to an idea that feels tangible enough for my brain to process, grasp, and hold.

As a reminder, Kuspit's "radical" thesis is that:

...the period of avant-garde painting, which officially began with the so-called color patches of paint in Manet’s Music in the Tuileries Gardens in 1862, and climaxed almost a century later in the dynamic tachisme of European art informale and American modernist painting, was a time of transition from traditional analogue art to postmodern digital art, that is, to an art grounded in codes rather than images.

Insanely overwrought thinking about art deserves insanely overwrought nitpicking. But before launching into that, I can't disagree with his final thought:

Digital architecture, digital painting and digital sculpture -- all premised on digital drawing using the "ingrained" algorithms of the computer -- are new modes of art with unexpected and still incompletely explored creative, esthetic and visionary potential.

OK, fine. Perhaps Mr. Kuspit finally just got one of those new computating machines and discovered the paint program. Cool. Wait until he discovers the internet!

It would be real helpful if Kuspit would define what he means by code- he never comes out and says it. He wavers between different uses of the word code: a system of rules; an alternate language that exists on its own or requires translation; or literally lines of code as written by a programmer. Strike One for failing to define terms and inconsistency.

He needs to support this statement, because plenty of people are going to disagree with the following, including me (emphasis mine):

The standard complaint against digital representation is that it loses the haptic quality of painted representation, thus making it less organic and intimate. Digital representation is supposedly more emotionally remote and intellectual than painted representation. But this is not necessarily so. The intensification of optical quality that digitalization brings with it more than compensates for the loss of the haptic dimension, all the more so because the digitalized sensation is in constant optical motion, generating an intimacy and vividness all its own.

So, lets all throw out our crayons, paper, paintbrushes, and scissors because optical intensity will compensate for my need to be touched. Let's see if that works with babies in orphanages who don't get held on a daily basis. As if the only way to my senses is through intense color and motion, as if my eyes can't assess and use real texture. Strike Two for futuristic forecasting of human affect. But is this supposed to matter- aren't we going to give up on images anyway and just involve ourselves in coding?

About a third of the way through Kuspit just about loses me with his opinion that

"Seurat’s pointillism makes him the first digital artist."

Uh, this is where I threw up my hands, or rather, my chopsticks. What about Byzantine mosaics, Tibetan sand paintings, Maori tatoos, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Celtic carvings, Aboriginal bark paintings, Lascaux cave paintings, Limoges enamel, needlepoint, lace, on and on? Isn't this all art based in code, the code being either a shared language and/or a system of rules that are shared and tweaked (whether or not the point of the rules is to represent something)? Does the fact that this isn't acknowledged have something to do with the fact that this list of art has, in some people's opinions (and I would argue otherwise) nothing to do with the development of Western art? OK, so what about Crivello? Or aspects of Vermeer? Strike Three.

Strike Four, and here the baseball analogy falls apart- the batter refuses to leave the batter's box and end this insanely overwrought thinking; is the following really true:

Before, the creation of material images was the primary goal of visual art, and the immaterial code that guided the process was regarded as secondary. Now, the creation of the code -- more broadly, the concept -- becomes the primary creative act. The image no longer exists in its own right, but now exists only to make the invisible code visible, whatever the material medium.

I'm not sure, just for starters, that Giotto, Uccello, Dürer, El Greco, Shitao, Hiroshige and so on would agree that "the creation of material images was the primary goal of visual art." Japser Johns won't agree, and neither will Matthew Barney. Georgia O'Keefe was a coder. Artists are always interested in the code. Bystanders, spectators, audiences, even intelligent ones, however, often just think artists are always trying to simply make representations. And coder artists, whoever they are, name your favorites- they're always going to be interested in some form of representation. Always. I'm just going to say Strike Five for the heck of it.

I could go on and on and on. A little more, but no more Strikes.

I have found this to be partially true, and also the reason for a lot of trivial image making:

There are more possibilities of freedom in digital art -- that is, the "mental elements" are "free[r] to enter into various combinations" and thus to be manipulated -- than in architecture, painting and sculpture.

But the ease of this doesn't necessarily equate with Art.

This is pure hogwash:

The most important aspect of digital art is that it makes the creative act -- creative functioning or the creative process -- explicit as it has never been before in any kind of art, indeed, in the entire history of art.

Explicit to whom? Is it really any more explicit than analog media? Does this begin to hedge towards the idea that the computer is making the art for the artist? No one outisde an individual's creative process is really going to know that individual's creative process, the many references and associations running through work, the various influences, passing thoughts, wishes and failures.

Somehow Art and manufacturing don't quite go together for me, but here goes:

The computer has enormously expanded creativity by allowing for a greater exploration of chance, and thus the creation of more complex esthetic "permutations" -- different combinations of identical elements -- than traditional art has ever created, indeed, allowed or even thought of. It has also given us a more efficient means of manufacturing art that never existed before.

Someone like Allan McCollum could really run with this. But I don't need every permutation of Peter Max or even Van Gogh. Warhol's Factory sort of tried to manufacture his work, but thankfully the (mis)touch of the hand and eye remained in the work.

This essay seems confused, as if the author hasn't quite worked out and supported his argument I agree with Tom Moody's assessment of Kuspit's examples of digital artists- not too impressive. And since one is talking about coding and painting wouldn't a mention of Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Rauschenberg been appropriate?

It's late. I need to go to bed and catch up on my coding. But here's my final thought:

Criticism often feels like a game to determine what's new, what's dead, and what hasn't been identified yet. And in this game there are (temporary, economic, social, historical) winners and losers, there is a tendency to narrow a field down, to sort it out and separate things so they can be opposed, to declare some things that are quite differnet from each other as more or less important. In the art world it feels like a race to be ahead of others. But I want the new and I want the old. I want more of anything good. I want better digital art, and I want better analogue art. I want it all. I don't want a battlefield with this year's model left standing.

Let's not let criticism drive us away all the possibilites. I don't think at all that Kuspit is trying to do this (see his other Artnet essays for quite a range of topics), but others can use this essay for the battered old "painting is dead" argument. That's not an argument that I'm going to buy. Otherwise, Joseph Nechvatal, one of Kuspit's chosen artists, wouldn't be printing on canvas.