This paper was delivered
at the ÒPhotography, Painting and Sculpture: Working DigitallyÓ conference
organized by Saul Ostrow at The Cleveland Institute
of Art on February 23rd, 2005.
Fast and Beautiful:
ÒEroticism
which is a fusion, which shifts interest away from and beyond the person and
his limits, is nevertheless expressed by an object. We are faced with the
paradox of an object which implies the abolition of the limits of all objects,
of an erotic object.Ó
-Georges Bataille [}
For me, the digital has brought back from the
dead the practice of painting. It has made it alive. It has made it bloom in
the enthusiastic and relevant sense of the word alive - but it has made
painting alive in a more specific sense also, as I began mixing my digital
painting practice with techniques of artificial life (a-life). Therefore the
digital as applied to painting excites me - and this excitement allows me to
work with passion.
A curious alliance: the
cold impersonality of technology with the heat of ecstasy.
I am excited to work with
digital painting Ð which I have now been doing for 19 years - because certainly
it is true that hidden in connected computer space, there is something so
large, so astounding, and so pregnant with the darkness of infinite space that
it excites and frightens us and thus returns us to the experimental and to a
state of stimulating desire if we do not turn from it in fear.
So I have not twisted away, and as a result I am
incredibly energized by the practice of digital painting because it is Ð in my
opinion - where important things are happening in art
today. This is so because digital painting is
a precise reaction to critical things as they are now in the hyperactive
information age while maintaining the position of reflective criticality found
in the long tradition of silent and immobile painted surfaces. But this is only
a start.
In 1987 Deleuze and Guattari decoded
for me the tradition of painting and proposed another tack (*). A tack which
leads from and back to Artaud's Body-without-Organs (**), to swarms and
rhizomes, to processes of de-territorialization and reterritorialization
through the virtual - to desiring cyborg machines and visual lines of flight. They enhanced my general
conviction that art is first-rate when it brings compound conceptual
abstractions into the perceptual stage - where the result really is an
embodiment of real yet abstract forces. They made it clear that painting must reflect the digital if it is to be other than a
stinking cadaver. Painting must be digital to be, as Susan Sontag wrote in Against
Interpretation, "a new kind of
instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes
of sensibility" - because our consciousness and sensibility is largely now
molded by the virtual. But of course that raises the question: which
real yet abstract forces?
For me, the power of the abstracting force of
ideology in distributed information continues to be of critical interest and
continues to supply my art with its motivational urgency. In that we live in
the information age, the essential abstract political feature now is electronic
reiteration and its role in creating psychological viruses (memes) within our
culture. In that sense, my post-conceptual digital painting is a virtual dada (***) in its subjectivist approach
towards ideology (including the rules and ideology behind the practice of
traditional painting) within the field of reproductive technology. My practice
and craft is post-Postmodern (what I call viractual Ð a term which I shall
explain below) because it paradoxically defends Modernism as well as it
celebrates the radical plurality of a form of knowing that is undeniably
characteristic of contemporary electronics. This adherence to the
electronic/digital now rejects the relativism that postmodernists insist upon
and lends the work a formal consistency that is indicative of modernism.
Specifically, this intentional stance defends modernismÕs tradition of valuing
the opticality of flatness that was established in America just after World War
II.
What is valued in this tradition is the practice
of so-called ÒpureÓ visuality over material texture when it comes to painting.
This value is manifest through the strict flatness achieved in my
computer-robotic assisted paintingsÕ paint application where an
air-gun/air-nozzle pigment delivery system driven by a computer program sprays
and stains the canvas support. There is no 3D texture other than the minuscule
one provided by the canvas weave. There is no ÒcrouteÓ, as the French say
(which means crust). Thus my art creates a single case in point based on the
essential nature of digital virtuality. Making the concept of the virtual
visually perceivable in the actual terms of natural light and real time is
achieved through a process of creating a visual integration Ð a process that I
have termed the viractual, which is a state neither pure nor impure Ð but
complete.
Through this flatness one encounters a perceptual area
of virtual space/sex/death: extensively layered, nuanced, cadenced and
unfathomable - where the primal trepidation of losing control dominates.
This state of meaningful formal completion turns
our attention towards the conceptual subject matter of the paintings.
Generally, art concepts are formed by selecting essential criteria and
abstracting away any non-essential characteristics. The resulting visual
integration consists then of only the important features and an insistence on
the virtual conditions that create them.
In aiming to succeed within the essential
characteristics of viractuality, I have come to work over the last four years
on the subject of the hermaphrodite. Specifically a
hermaphroditic pre-bifurcation moment in human development called oogenesics. Oogenesics is a moment in the development of the fertilized
egg where both female and male potentiality exists simultaneously. This moment
of potentiality exemplifies the viractual concept brilliantly - indeed
virtuality, viractuality and code have myth status in terms of my oogenesic
hermaphroditsm. The hermaphrodite is an important viractual image in that it
suggests the truth in life that a thing can be both one thing and its opposite:
that two opposites can exist simultaneously and not cancel each other out.
Such peacefully sustained conflict
can be the agent of transformation and the creator of something new. Peacefully
sustained conflict engages the audience in a play of contradiction and excess
that encourages active critical thought and moves us away from sole positions
of passive emotion.
This oogenesic moment seizes a reflection from
the electronic flux with which I work Ð a flux into which itÕs results may or
may not be subsequently transformed by viral a-life infections. If an oogenesic
moment is launched into the Òactual worldÓ by being painted it performs a
peculiar incident in its own right. Through this working method I avoid seeking
the pursuit of endless electronic stimulation and rather seek out satiation.
Such satiation supplies me with a chain of pleasures
in which the delights of the body are not subordinated to the virtual - but
rather dominate and hence shape the virtual towards the living Ðyet classical -
ends of painting and its functions.
Joseph Nechvatal
www.nechvatal.net
1/2005 New York
[} Bataille, Georges.
Erotism, Death and Sensuality, p. 130
Trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986 ©1962)
* Deleuze,
G. and Guattari, F. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
** In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze
and Guattari describe a shift towards boundlessness as one's becoming a body
without organs (BwO) in terms of
our self-shifting representational planes emerging out of our field of
compositional consistency. The BwO (according to them) is an insubstantial
state of connected being beyond representation which concerns pure becomings
and nomadic essences. (Deleuze
& Guattari, 1987, p. 510) Deleuze and Guattari go on to say that the BwO
"causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It
is not space nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given
degree - to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced".
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 153) According to Brian Massumi, the
translator of A Thousand Plateaus, the BwO is "an endless weaving together of singular states, each
of which is an integration of one or more impulses". These impulses form
the body's various "erogenous zone(s)" of condensed "vibratory
regions"; zones of intensity in suspended animation. Hence the BwO is
"the body outside any determinate state, poised for any action in its
repertory; this is the body in terms of its potential, or virtuality".
(Massumi, 1992, p. 70) : Massumi, B. 1992. A User's Guide to Capitalism and
Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press
(***)My ex-centric practice of sending digital files on-line over the
telephone lines to a hired computer-robotic machine for painting on canvas
follows the dada proposition which is found in Richard Huelsenbeck's (ed.) "The
Dada Almanac" (****) that
an artist could order paintings over the phone and have them fabricated by a
third party. Of course this idea was famously realized in 1922 by L‡szl—
Moholy-Nagy when he ordered his "Telephone Pictures" by phone from a sign factory. (*****) Tony
Smith, the American sculptor, is relevant also to this emerging tradition with
his 1962 steel 6 by 6 by 6 foot cube minimal masterpiece entitled "Die"; a composition he ordered over the phone by
calling in the specifications to his fabricator.
(****)
Huelsenbeck, R. (ed.) 1920 (1993). "The Dada Almanac", p. 95
(*****)Moholy-Nagy L. 1947. "The New Vision and Abstract of an
Artist", p. 79