Guide The Work of Art in the Digital Age: The Painting and Pixel - an essay

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In order to understand how painterly work operates today we must first address the question of what, at a material level, it comprises. Today a two-dimensional or in some cases a sufficiently shallow projection hung parallel to a wall is enough to suggest a painterly conversation, which may take place through any number of materials.

We are thus not tackling the related question of those image-based works, called digital paintings by some, that are made with—and for consumption on—computers. Some require an internet connection to be experienced, others only function on social media apps viewed on smartphones, while still others stand alone on any screen. These must be understood as contemporary examples of the dispersal of the painterly as an effect. Their connection to specific painterly effects ranges greatly, though again they share in common their non-specificity, which is a practical necessity given the uncontrollable nature of the way that each individual will encounter a given work.

Laura Brothers, alfredo frenzy Sept 10, Detail area of x pixel digital image.

Histories of the Digital Now

For the sake of space, and also the different set of concerns suggested, I will focus almost entirely on those physical works that we might call paintings. First this meant adding a layer of clear acrylic gel over the printed canvas, to which he used combs and brushes to add staged painterly effects. Recently, this practice has evolved to having the work 3-D printed, using technology designed to read and simulate actual painting marks. This leads to curious effects when the machine is given entirely digital data, layering marks in odd ways and inverting positive and negative space.

However, how exactly in our present moment painting functions as a frame, and in doing so enables an artist the effortless and unquestioned ability to use the space of the wall for the accumulation and presentation of materials and objects, is one of the primary questions we must ask. I would contend that the answer lies with recent technological development. The flatbed picture plane makes its symbolic allusion to hard surfaces such as tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards—any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressed—whether coherently or in confusion.

The pictures of the last fifteen to twenty years insist on a radically new orientation, in which the painted surface is no longer the analogue of a visual experience of nature but of operational processes. But of course the space in which these operations occurred was still that of stretched canvas or panel, and the logic was an analog one—of labor and activity and knowledge.

In these it is most remarkable exactly how absent a painting discourse is from our engagement with these cheap inkjet printed canvases. Tracking the evolution of television size over the span of about fifteen years, for each television Denny placed two identical canvases parallel to one another and joined them with steel poles, miming the dimensions of the television in question.

(PDF) Elaine Reichek: Pixels, Bytes, and Stitches | Paula Birnbaum - leondumoulin.nl

He does this on down to the present, with the space between the panels getting smaller and smaller to the point where a single canvas will do. The canvas and the flatscreen have become quite literally one and the same. These are of far more interest to an artist like Denny than the history of painting, and no doubt he finds that there is no need for him to deal with that history. Take, for example, Ken Okiishi, who uses flatscreens as a support for painted marks that are, in a way, equally reminiscent of the swipe marks our greasy fingers leave on touchscreens, as they are of the gesturalism of Abstract Expressionists like Willem De Kooning and Joan Mitchell.

I. Physicality and Knowledge

Working on this series since , in the beginning Okiishi used recorded videos, often derived from old VHS tapes. Here the image is only fragmentarily discernable through the obscuring aggregation of paint.

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Recent work by Aaron Bobrow and Mary Ramsden also references the gestures inherent in the action of swiping and other tactile maneuvers of digital devices. That they do so with paint on panel suggests an analogy with the familiar path made by the brush as it traverses a receptive surface. It takes the image making process back to the most carnal implementations of pigment on cave walls, where muddy mixtures were applied very physically by hand. This approach appeared as early as the s in the work of David Reed, who must be acknowledged as a predecessor of this way of working. His work since has been engaged with juxtaposing different kinds of gestures, from the hand-made to the digitally altered to the stenciled, in an exploration of how meaning accrues through this supposedly most immediate and biographical mark.

Oil and alkyd on linen. Collection Orange County Museum of Art. As art historian Richard Shiff has recently noted, this is far more a failure of the tools of contemporary criticism than evidence of anemia in the field of painterly production; and, as he demonstrates, this incapacity to deal seriously with painting has dogged criticism since the s at least. This suggests that painting does not have a single, essential status, but rather a multiple and constantly changing one, due to pressures both internal and external to it, and to art more broadly. Flat art is all surface, the edges are simply edges of a surface.

The thickness is the thickness of the material chosen to work upon, and in some cases the additional thickness of the support needed. They are specific. If they are used directly, they are more specific. Also, they are usually aggressive. This brought canvas into the world of art, no matter what guise it took on, away from that of things—for example the sailcloth that it started as.

As such, it had to wait for another revolution in imaging technology—namely, the one we are presently experiencing—to bring painting back into a materialist dialogue with things in the world. Today the time has long since passed when painting referred only to art. Now paint on canvas finds itself bounded by a field of possibility as equally conditioned by the imagistic, material, display, circulation, and reception situation as that which is historically the province of painting.

Even more significantly, a printed Dibond panel intended to be hung parallel to the wall finds itself in the same position. Because the dialogue it is entering into is hybrid, in a way that is ultimately indistinguishable, between painting and digital devices there is not much functional difference between paint brushed onto canvas, and ink printed onto panel.

One could say that Robert Ryman was perhaps the first artist to systematically explore this expanded situation, which is one of display more than of painting. Ryman pursued, among other things, an investigation of both the expressive potential of these materials, and the possibilities for their display. The generation of artists active today are seeking out the best support for each of their aesthetic goals, and also want to establish integrity between materials and the ends to which they are deployed. Plywood can be hit with a hammer.

I like that fact. It's very important that the surface be a substantial thing.

The Aura of the Digital

Steel, a material with a relatively short history of use in a fine art context, and one with a familiarity in an industrial one, accomplishes this handily, as it did for Donald Judd years before. But it must also be acknowledged that many other artists have found that canvas can be as factual and workable a material as plywood, stripped of much of its historical specificity, and thus able to return to its origins in practical uses, such as for sailcloth.

That they are legible as paintings at all is a testament to the power of these materials. Still others have merged the organicism and history of woven cotton with the pragmatic familiarity of the 8-byfoot dimension common to industrial materials. Oil and lacquer on canvas, wood.

Professor Martin Irvine – Fall 2015

This is not to say that artists are now returning to the notion of a painting as autonomous from the world in which it necessarily exists. Far from it. For example, Jesse Stecklow has been involved, in a way that, like Denny, effortlessly traverses the languages of both painting and sculpture without relying too much on the specific conventions of either, with invisible but omnipresent systems of ecological data collection.

These range from the primitive system of fly tape to the more sophisticated and implicitly painterly wall-mounted steel boxes that record the microscopic content of the air in the spaces in which they are installed. Stecklow continues to periodically manually retrieve information from these sites, pointedly refusing to rely on the abstracted digital relay of this data.

This body of work is thus engaged with both physical and networked elements of circulation as it involves aspects of the surveillance of the spaces we navigate everyday, and in the process suggests numerous larger political issues, both benign and sinister. Steel, powder-coated aluminum, UV print, hardware, carbograph 5 Air sampler. All objects exist in this dual way today, as both discrete and networked—present and dispersed at the same time—and it is in this dual way that the most astute artists working today recognize any art object must be addressed.

This is to say that, while any given painting may be specific, the content that it delivers cannot be imagined as stable and singular, but as reaching any number of eyes and contexts, just as is true of the information that circulates through digital networks and arrives on innumerable screens. This is also quite literally true when we consider the role of reproductions of paintings, where many more people will view a given work in the glow of an iPhone screen, than will see it in person. In a sense, today flat works benefit from the ability to arrest an image and place it in state of stasis that is increasingly foreign to other modes by which images are beheld.

This is contra to the photograph, which, since the advent of film has been imaginable as a still in a sequence of events, or at least as temporally based, since it is necessarily a record of something—even if that something is entirely the fantasy of the photographer, manipulated either in the darkroom or in Photoshop—and thus mutable. This stasis such flat works inherit from painting allows for traditional modes of contemplation, meditation, and appreciation, which are still necessary for a critical appreciation of the material we are presented with.

I want to suggest the violence by which circulation is interrupted and situations of fixity are introduced when the image gets caught in a painting frame. Painting is, as I have been arguing, equally beholden to the conventions of digital technology as it is to those of art history, and as such, we bring to bear our expectations of interactivity and malleability, which have been cultivated by the former. Most often these play out in how we perceive the spatial terms of the work, which we do not so much penetrate optically as manipulate in a new form of opticality that is sutured to a virtual form of tactility, which is to say the new kinds of motor skills that are cultivated by the touchscreen—actions like clicking, swiping, pinching, tapping, and pressing.

Numeri con testo integrale

The issue for painting today does not have to do with pictorial space, but, rather, is engaged with the question of object versus image. This very access to and capability for manipulation that the image holds leads to this draining of significatory weight from distance and relative scale. In these works the canvas does not change orientation, but rather just the painted image that, in a confirmation of our suppositions about the screenic paradigm, is able to exist even when truncated and not fully filling its rectilinear container.


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Here the canvas functions along the lines, structurally, of a screen. Today any rectilinear support can assert identity with any painted image as long as this screenic logic is obeyed. Sebastian Black, "Completed Paintings. These things combine to create a new pictorial vocabulary for artists who import digital conventions like drop shadows, the harsh and arbitrary lines of cut-and-paste actions, and digital color schemes like gradients into painting. All this is linked to a larger flattening and collapsing of space, which can be seen in the various parts of paintings by artists like Laura Owens, Trudy Benson, Michael Williams, Jamian Juliano-Villani, or Josh Reames, where completely different spatial relationships can hold from one-square inch of the canvas to the next, creating complicated, even dizzying spatial twists and inversions in the work of the original master of this style, Owens, and more relatively banal importation of these devices to the ordered, conservative canvases of Reames, who seems to create rebuses consisting of random assemblages of contemporary iconography.