Some call this surge of interest since the 1960s a renaissance, as if there had been some extended loss of engagement. If one considers the time span from the fall of the Roman Empire (476 CE according to Edward Gibbon) to Donatello (1386-1466), and then the period from Donatello to Michelangelo (1475-1564), generative art might more aptly be considered an emergent practice. I digress because I find it fatuous the way the study of contemporary art so frequently wishes to abandon its own extended historical moment and cut itself up into arbitrary decades of significance. It seems entirely reasonable to me to suggest that contemporary art launches with the debate between the surrealists and the socialists about how artists should bridge the needs of the creative self and the socius communis so well articulated in André Breton and Leon Trotsky’s Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art. That was in 1938. The role of autonomy was already under question. Could the artist earnestly claim creative impulse outside the cultivating context of the community? Weren’t those conversations and social services crucial to the ability to make art? Was the artist ever truly making art in isolation? Though those debates compelled examination of the human environment, they also set the foundation for post-structuralist critiques and help us ask why using the machine should still cause such distress about the autonomy of the artist.
Dare I suggest that use of the machine more explicitly makes evident the social and technological ties that bind an artist to the larger economic, political and public cultures of which they are a part?
I could hardly claim that every artist using a machine is aware of this, but in looking at some digital works, I find myself thinking about the artist in the studio with computers made from parts derived of earth minerals and devised by a global labor force, using electricity whose cables snake under our one ocean to wrap us into a connective net, drinking water that is more or less clean than others in this mesh…That thought brought me to think about the source of the canvas, earth pigments, solvents, rags of painters I know. When I visited the oil painter Lucy MacGillis in Umbria, Italy, she was able to tell me where much in her studio came from. But, not all. That gap is the reality of most of our lives.
Listen, I am not saying that looking at generative art will change the order of things, although in Foucault’s sense I am saying that it may make the order of things more apparent. Generative art is not just a bunch of random computer lines that don’t mean anything. Software is a crucial epistemology of our time and to address the potential and problems of our era probably demands that we address the ways of thinking that it presents. Examining this art allows a complex foray into the contemporary. As we glean the workings of code, we may discover new forms and debate the basis for cultural desires. The Albright-Knox Art Gallery curator Tina Rivers Ryan explains, “artists who truly master software as a medium are able to generate works that are aesthetically and conceptually and technically beautiful.” As a leading eye in the art world’s engagement with technology, Ryan reinforces the triad that has always been the basis for judging art.
If Art Basel is the crème de la crème of the art world, generative art’s prominent display by one of the popular blockchains for artists suggests that generative art has arrived. Headlining the Tezos booth was a 21:21 minute sequence of Franke’s Mondrian. The original work by Franke was a software designed in 1979 for the Texas Instruments TI 99/4 home computer that was then updated for Windows XP in 2006 and is now minted on Tezos (though not yet available for sale by the artist). The archival history of the work asks us to think through the developments of technology and artists’ use of iteration to explore those changes.
The work on display in the booth covered an entire wall and honored the strong lines and color blocks of the Constructivist master. The lineage of influence introduces art historical ties, and more besides. The neurobiologist Semir Zeki wrote for Tate Modern regarding Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue (1937-42):
Mondrian aimed to discover the ‘fundamental laws hidden in reality.’ He believed that horizontal and vertical lines are universal forms which ‘exist everywhere and dominate everything’ and that all complex forms could be reduced to a ‘plurality of straight lines in rectangular oppositions’….He had also unknowingly managed to represent a physiological reality about the brain. Many years after his death, it was discovered that the cells of the visual brain which are considered critical for the perception of form are responsive to straight lines of specific orientations. Moreover, the field of view to which they respond is rectangular in shape….This kind of evidence suggests that artists are, in a sense, neurologists who explore the organization of the visual brain, though with their own unique techniques.
I challenge myself to look at art and conceive of what organization the artist is presenting to me. Alongside the Franke work in the Tezos booth, artists Aleksandra Jovanić, Eko33, Ryan Bell, and Sam Tsao were also present. Jovanić’s work was partly inspired by Franke but equally by Alexander Calder. As much as artists working with emergent technologies cull from cultures beyond the art historical canon, they are also afflicted by an age-old anxiety of influence. This is compounded by a prevailing dilemma for artists of whether to engage with technology — and run the risk of fetishizing it — or to reproduce tired critiques of it (risking the same). As Alex Estorick of Right Click Save observes of generative art: “It seems to operate through two channels—both image and code—simultaneously, which given the current collision of art and technology makes sense. One only needs to consider a project by Zancan to witness the supremacy of the code over its own visual display. Generative art is an art form made for this moment of human-machine interdependence. But it is also an art of visual seduction, one bizarrely suggestive of modernist revenge. It therefore suffers from the very same technostalgia that defines crypto art in general.” The medium isn’t the only message.
The limitations of computer graphics in the 1960s remains why generative art is often associated with abstraction. Franke may have been thinking of art historical influences like Constructivism and Mohr may have been exploring the beauty of mathematics, but the variety in generative art today challenges any attempts to declare its style. In the Phillips auction, for example, works by Franke, Molnar, Frieder Nake, Gottfried Jäger and Vladimir Bonacic are positioned with the next generation of artists like Dmitri Cherniak, Snowfro, Harm van den Dorpel, and Rhea Myers, whose works, and artist trainings, differ significantly. Words beyond the medium or practice become necessary to describe qualities of the work, eg. abstract, abject, ardent, or absolutely awful. This is as it has always been in observing art.
Generative art spans the terse line of programmatic art through to the ebullience of NFT-based PFP (ie. profile pic) projects. The portrait characteristics inherent to most PFP projects are often but not always based in a generative practice. These avatars are just one of the many faces of generative art.
Artists working with generative art may have ties to the sixty year history of computer art or not. They may be recognized digital artists or new players with other careers. They may be artists who rarely relinquish control or emphasize it. They may use Javascript, GANs, or any number of other softwares. They may program it themselves or hand it over to coders and design teams. The works they make may be still, morphing, looping, multigenerational, singular, or come in series. Someone might make a generative art work but not be described as a generative artist because that approach is an outlier in their practice. If generative art means work that has been produced partly through the work of an autonomous system, then variety is to be expected. It’s a practice that may have been associated with a lean, abstract aesthetic but NFTs’ ability to mobilize an interest in coded art has made it obvious that the term designates a foundation, not the façade. Generative art doesn’t have a single face and represents a diversity we need for these times.