We’ve all heard that successful artists “break the rules” of art. Ironically, some artists have “broken the rules” of the art world by embracing rules and programs traditionally associated with the tech world, responding to its increasing importance in our lives.
These are the artists shown in the Whitney’s newest exhibition, Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965-2018, sponsored by Audi. The exhibition is unique in that the Whitney owns all featured pieces, which occur in a wide range of media. Programmed examines the connections among works of art that are “programmed” using instructions, tracing how instructions in art have evolved over fifty years in response to the growing reliance on automated systems. The exhibition is organized by two main strands of analysis, within which works are grouped into more specific thematic sections. The first strand, titled “Rule, Instruction, Algorithm,” explores programs that are emphasized for their own conceptual or aesthetic value as mechanisms of visual creation. The second, “Signal, Sequence, Resolution,” explores programs used to manipulate televisions and other displays of digital images, generating novel experiences and environments that reflect the Information Age.
The exhibition begins with a section titled “Collapsing Introduction and Form,” which features some of the oldest works in Programmed. Among these are pieces by Josef Albers and Sol LeWitt, pioneers of conceptual art that emphasizes the underlying systems driving a work’s material form. Their works provide historical context for how the programmatic approach to conceptual art has evolved with the development of technology. Albers is best known for creating paintings as a system of analyzing color theory. His geometric abstractions in various color combinations demonstrate that our perceptions of individual colors are relative to the colors around them. LeWitt is best known for creating sets of instructions for wall drawings that could be executed by anyone. In Programmed, their works are juxtaposed with more contemporary pieces that they influenced, which adapt the roles of rules and instructions to computers.
John F. Simon Jr., Color Panel v1.0, 1999, photo by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Two of Albers’ paintings, including one from his iconic Homage to the Square series, are hung next to John F. Simon Jr.’s software art piece, Color Panel v1.0. This piece consists of a small laptop that has been hung vertically on a wall with its keyboard removed, displaying a composition of shifting rectangles that draws from motifs of geometric abstraction. The intricacy and tiny scale of this work draw the viewer closer, but it’s practically impossible to deduce without reading the wall label that the display is actually composed of multiple systems programmed to calculate the mixing of colors based on randomly selected combinations, a focus inspired by Albers’ work. For instance, one system involves tiny bouncing squares in randomly generated colors, which eventually compress into a bar that is the averaged color of the squares. One system of moving squares in the display actually functions as a clock whose complete run would span over hundreds of years, symbolizing the piece’s eternal timeline since color selection is left up to chance.
Casey Reas, {Software} Structure #003 B, 2004 and 2016, photo by Whitney Museum of American Art
One of the four walls of LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #289 is installed adjacent to Casey Reas’ {Software} Structure #003, consisting of two black and white projections showing the movement of one hundred circles throughout a surface. The first system (A) connects the intersections of circles as they overlap, creating a mesmerizing display of short, shifting black lines, while the second (B) records these changes over time in a process similar to a long exposure photograph, producing a chaotic array of growing and fading disc-like forms. Reas was inspired by LeWitt’s concept of creating only the instructions for a work of art, but instead of producing written guidelines and diagrams so that the execution can be handed over to other people, he produces code so that the execution is handed to a computer. The instructions underlying both works allow for variation each time they are executed: LeWitt’s guidelines for wall drawings include some leeway for adaptation to different architectural contexts, whereas Reas’ code generates randomized movement that never repeats itself.
Fascination with code’s ability to generate randomness and infinite variation is also present in the works of Cheney Thomson, Alex Dodge, and Ian Cheng, featured in the section called “Generative Measures.” To produce “generative art,” artists hand over artistic control to programs that act autonomously to produce the material works, which have their own aesthetic merit despite the conceptual art’s emphasis on the artist’s idea. And while aesthetic creativity is traditionally associated with imagination, considered unique to the human mind, artists who give agency to programmed chance are able to create the unimaginable. In this way, their works raise questions about the essences of creativity and authorship, and they reflect the changing role of human labor and intelligence in our increasingly automated societies.
The last section in “Rule, Instruction, and Algorithm,” titled “Collapsing Instruction and Form,” features artists who use the language of artistic instruction as its material form, deconstructing the duality that other conceptual artists had reinforced. The piece I found most interesting in this section was W. Bradford Paley’s Code Profiles, a video work that displays the progression of a programmed drawing superimposed over the very code that is generating it, as well as a white line that traces the mouse of the programmer as they activate different parts of the code. By highlighting lines of code to indicate when they are being executed and running the program at a pace readable by humans, Paley makes the instructions of his work accessible yet still largely incomprehensible to the majority of viewers, emphasizing the vastly different ways that people and computers process instructions and the role that the programmer plays in bridging that gap.
The second strand of artistic exploration is introduced by a section called “Image Resequenced,” which examines the use of rules and code to rearrange images. At its forefront is Nam June Paik’s Fin de Siècle II, one of the most visually compelling and memorable works in Programmed. The massive work is comprised of 270 stacked televisions of various sizes that display montages of edited clips from unrelated television programs and art videos, including, most notably, close-up footage of David Bowie’s face. By creating a program that shows different moving images on different televisions, that rotates certain images or stretches them across a grid of multiple screens, and that accompanies the display with upbeat electronic music, Paik replicates and augments the feelings of overstimulation, confusion, and hypnosis that often result from excessive exposure to electronic media. Though the work was created and last exhibited almost 30 years ago, its aesthetic is surprisingly trendy, and its commentary on the overwhelming nature of digital media is more relevant than ever in the age of smartphones and social media.
Jim Campbell, Tilted Plane, 2011, photo by Whitney Museum of American Art
The next section, “Liberating the Signal,” features artists who use electronic and digital signals outside of the contexts of their original functions. One of these artists is Jim Campbell, whose installation Tilted Plane is another standout piece. The installation builds upon Campbell’s approach in his “low-resolution” works, also on display, which explore the challenge of using individual units of lights to display a decipherable moving image. Tilted Plane further questions what constitutes a screen by applying this approach to image construction in an immersive, three-dimensional format. Hundreds of custom-made LED bulbs hang from the ceiling and function collectively as the array of pixels constituting a huge, tilted, extremely low-resolution screen. The bulbs flicker as images are transmitted through the matrix of signals governing the bulbs, but their flickering appears to be random as the images are completely indecipherable. As you walk under the bulbs and eventually between them as they hang closer and closer to the ground, your perception of the screen becomes increasingly abstracted, as you have now essentially walked through the screen and are peering through the other side.
Mendi + Keith Obadike, The Interaction of Coloreds, 2002 and 2018, screenshot
“Realities and Codes” showcases works that use programs to critique social codes and rules. Using an interactive, satirical website to draw attention to racism in the realm of online commerce, Mendi + Keith Obadike’s The Interaction of Coloreds is innovative and socially. The website’s Color Check System is a skin-color verification system that museum visitors can use to translate photos of their skin tone into hexadecimal numbers, used to represent color in HTML. Using the System to codify one’s precise skin tone is an undeniably amusing activity, but it also reflects serious real-world anxieties concerning privacy and discrimination on the internet, such fear of the growing effectiveness of electronic devices as tools for collecting personal information, or concern about the disproportionate targeting of people of color by government or corporate internet surveillance.
The exhibition concludes with an augmented reality project by Tamiko Thiel called Unexpected Growth. Imagining that the Whitney was underwater due to climate change, Thiel programmed a virtual growth on the Whitney’s sixth-floor terrace, consisting of coral littered with a variety of plastic objects that had ended up in the ocean of his imagination. Though Thiel certainly projects a foreboding vision of the future, the growth’s bright colors and whimsical forms of litter, including flip-flops and rubber ducks, create an element of playfulness. The most aspect of Unexpected Growth is that it is programmed to mimic nature in its response to overuse of resources: visitors experiencing the environment stimulate the corals’ growth, but once the number of visitors passes a certain threshold, the corals begin bleaching and die off. This interactive component shows that our technologies can be effectively programmed to resemble natural processes and that perhaps there is hope for harmony between nature and our increasingly mechanized world.
Programmed demonstrates excellent thematic organization, impressive restoration efforts, and thoughtful curation that challenges us to question the role of technological programs and to examine our changing relationships with digital media and automated systems.
The exhibition runs until April of 2019, and I would highly recommend making some time before then to go experience its diverse, interactive, and immersive works.
