Trust Metrics
Kara Walker cuts paper, every image, black and white. Seurat’s pointillism tells us ‘dot dot dot dot dot’ - how the hell did he not get tendonitis? Agnes Marten’s shimmer-trembling drawn lines imply her hand moving across the canvas again and again. Judy Chicago’s vacuum-formed plexiglass minimalist pieces? We can watch videos to understand the process. The body of the work often reveals the maker’s methods.
Computer-based art? Follow a coder on Twitter and see pieces coded in Lisp. Coded in what? “Artist + some complex, opaque process = result”. Sometimes Anders Hoff plots drawings from his coded images, that’s cool — what, a robot draws it for him?
When designing a literary magazine’s website in the ’00’s, I asked the editor what tech the previous web designer used.
“Witchcraft!” he said.
“Oh I haven’t heard of that software, what is it?” I said.
He blinked and smiled. “I have no f***ing idea. She just made it happen.”
He hired me because he trusted my aesthetic. He trusted me to make it happen.
Deconstruction / Creation
Anyone can put anything on the internet and say it’s true. I suppose this is the natural consequence of Reagan liberating media news platforms from actually telling the truth. Perhaps nobody expected digital media to become the watered-down, narrow-political-spectrum yammering clones of CNN’s ticker, the young vampires that would drain audience and authority from both “the evening news” and newsprint.
In today’s fake news context, Patrick LeMieux deconstructed Cory Arcangel’s early ‘oughts codehack Everything But the Clouds. In his really detailed critique (found over here) LeMieux close-reads the video Arcangel provided to the Whitney for the work’s inclusion in the biennale, in 2004. He also uses it as an artmaking tutorial, following Arcangel’s directions to code-hack their own copy of the work. LeMieux shows quite clearly what is and is not possible, with his own close-read of Mario Brothers along the way.
Turns out the process Arcangel claimed to have used to produce the work cannot have produced that work. Arcangel claimed to have manipulated Nintendo’s code to remove “everything but the clouds”. We have a romantic idea of the creative process, and a poetic result. The puffy white clouds float across the screen, decontextualized.
As LeMieux points out, Arcangel’s story roots the work in deconstructionist art. If he didn’t actually deconstruct the thing, and instead coded it — what do we think now?
Twitter got a little salty.
Role Confusion
A coder or technician produces a verifiable product like a videogame or a website. This product provides users with an experience designed to meet particular expectations, within a spectrum provided by the media, genre, and advertising. Playthrough gives the user a particular kind of consumable entertainment. That’s why the user plays.
Jonathan Blow’s Braid breaks that mold; for me, it is conceptual art. There comes a turning point in the game where they realize they had been tricked. It freaked out and upset some of its players to realize they weren’t rescuing the princess, they were playing as her stalker/kidnapper.
The artist tricks. Artists can make aesthetic escapes; material illusion’s lie is what got Plato’s goat. Artists skillfully deploy illusions. Sometimes, in the safety of the otherwise-useless art object, the viewer gets to safely consider dangerous ideas. Kara Walker tricks us to look at the American nightmare, tricks us to have a public zone for discussion of that nightmare, perhaps connecting it to forces moving in our culture today.
Some artists lie about their autobiography in order to make themselves into shamans or magicians. Joseph Beuys’ catastrophic plane crash probably didn’t happen. His ‘origin story’ of being healed by Tartars packed in a bathtub filled with fur, fat, and felt was materially coded into his work, even though, as an anon Wikipedia editor put it, “Records state that Beuys was conscious, recovered by a German search commando, and there were no Tatars in the village at that time.” His tricks continued across a lifetime.
My favorite often-prolific artists pranked others so much they interfered with their own ability to sell work or get shows. They alienated ‘the right people’.
Digital media’s a box of tricks with the lid off. I observed the Wisconsin recounts. I know a lot more about our voting machine’s firmware and its management than I ever wanted to. (The answer is, yes, it is reasonably possible.) All of us may be a little more sensitive to the dilemmas proposed by “the lie that tells the truth” in new media artwork.
Do I care that Arcangel may have tricked the Whitney with his documentary video? That he may have pulled one over on the museum folks who ‘don’t know how tech works’?
I want artists to succeed, to eat, to have careers. I root for artists.
Formally interesting, the work tugs at nostalgia by quoting familiar language. That “it’s familiar so that makes it comfortable” bit points to the contemporary hegemony of plug-ins and apps in digital culture. Everything But the Clouds stands on its own, without that origin story. Perhaps the code replacement makes it a repainting instead of a xerox or printmaking copy. #stillrelevant.
Swapping skins
If I tweak the CSS to turn the colors from pastels to plums, or plug the tumblr into my website, or use the bleach bypass filter (the digital version is so much more forgiving than actually bleaching 16mm workprint in my bathtub), or go to Hot Topic to buy a Joy Division tee shirt — If any skin can be swapped, there is something to the authenticity of the gesture. “Gesture” refers to “what direct act of manufacture generated the result”.
Editing and replacing manufactured content for aesthetics only ~ no more mustachio’d plumber jumping and climbing through a mundane world, getting paid and rescuing a lady ~ does something else. Everything But the Clouds isolated sample of the larger work tugs us to look; LeMieux expands our understanding of Mario Brothers as a built experience in his critical deconstruction. The trick undoes the illusion of the game as an invented whole world. Here are its working parts, the code for the pixels, the not-erasable coins built into the background sky tiles.
I want Arcangel to have made Everything But the Clouds how he claimed to have made it. The fact that he didn’t disappoints me. The work becomes less interesting. The ‘con’ echoes with other news these days, in a way I don’t want. It’s still beautiful though, I still like it.
Black box
The audience seriously DGAF how I coded the text-based artwork I projected in a gallery space last spring. On my documentation visit, one dad asked from the doorway, “Is the language child-safe?” Out in the lobby, his 9-year-old daughter waited on my reply.
That’s what it comes down to, really. What does the art say?
