polyALTERITY : Joseph Nechvatal
by
Sarah Maline
The extravagant, seductive surfaces of Nechvatal’s computer-robotic assisted
paintings are formed of infection and inflection, delirium and decay. The
artist unleashes computer viruses on digital bodies and/or body parts: the,
in his words, "body-in-bits". Robotics then executes the paintings from the
contaminated files. The diffraction of the pixelated body in these paintings
– both as sexualized representation and as body of coded information, and
the dispersal of its vestigial meanings through the actions of the viral
agent - complete the process of sublime disincarnation begun when the body
first became sign; initially analog, then digitally encoded. While these
paintings at one level address alterity in the apparently oppositional
relationship between biology and technology, their fluidity and slippage of
meaning subvert the informational aura of the digitized realm.
Like his earlier computer-robotic assisted paintings of the mid-1980’s,
Nechvatal’s current work (2000) creates immersive saturated spaces dominated
by pattern. Fragments of soft human form are more clearly visible now,
emerging from patterns of coded overlay. There are glowing Barnett
Newmanesque zips in several works here (for Newman these signified genesis)
and in their relative coherence the lines provide a sharp, vigorous
opposition to the deterioration of the virtual body through viral infection
(and by extension to the death of the real body through sexually transmitted
disease). The effect of these paintings is rhapsodic and ecstatic in the
dizzying passages from the real to the virtual; from the fullness of meaning
to its emptiness.
Sarah Maline
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