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LeWitt’s Ideal Children

 

Domenico Quaranta

 

[Part 1]

"... in a way we are Duchamp's ideal children", declared the Slovenian artist Vuk Cosic [1] in an interview in 1997. It would be hard to find a better synthesis of one of the net art criticism's fundamental ideas: namely, the belief that net art has its origin in Dadaism, passing through Fluxus, Situationism, the Neo-avant-garde of the 60s and Conceptual Art. There is no doubt that in this genealogical statement, strategy played an important role. Nevertheless, this is not enough to explain a phenomenon that was entirely unforeseeable in the mid-nineties. Neither did this have anything to do with the then digital media's post-modern refinement or with what was proposed in the art world. The Internet seemed to convey expectations that had long been considered dead, namely a general rejection of the art system, of those still held dogmas such as uniqueness, "definition" and the work of art's "non-reproducibility"; the deconstruction of the medium; the dematerialisation of art; a new political inspiration. In short, only the medium's profound nature can help to explain this "modernism revisited in colour". Like it or not, we can still talk about political art, appropriation, process, the open work, "the moderns", it is for the most part thanks to the advent of the Web.

Software Art grew out of this situation and so inherits its genealogy, or rather, the tendency to reconstruct its own genealogical tree. It is interesting to note how in Software Art theory, the formulation of a definition continually interweaves with this retrospective investigation. Besides, this is only natural: the hypothesis to be proven is that software – namely an encoded sequence of formal instructions – can be art; and what better than a precedent could save us from a lot of useless complications? Hence, Florian Cramer's famous statement stating that Composition 1961 Nr 1, January 1, a piece of paper stating "Draw a straight line and follow it'' by the Fluxus artist La Monte Young, can be considered a perfect example of Software Art. Clearly, through La Monte Young, this recognition extends to all art based on the carrying out of a formally encoded process. And it is again Cramer who, in his fundamental "Concepts, Notations, Software, Art" [2], quotes Tristan Tzara's instructions for writing a Dada poem and mentions John Cage and Sol LeWitt, artists we will return to shortly.

The most interesting thing in this framework is that it is not at all a matter of misappropriation. In other words, we are not confronted with a son who recognizes a father who, in turn, if he were to find out, would immediately disown him; on the contrary, it is a question of a completely verifiable pedigree that is attested by some important events. Let's give it a go: software art is conceptual art's acknowledged son, is the sole heir not only able to fully take on its heritage but also to solve some of its perplexing difficulties.

Jewish Museum, New York 1970. For the first time the curator Jack Burnham exhibited some conceptual artists alongside the exponents of a digital art that had finally matured in a maior exhibition aiming to highlight the effects of the newborn information age on artistic production. The exhibition was called Sofware, and it presented Joseph Kosuth, Vito Acconci, John Baldessari and Hans Haacke alongside Theodor H. Nelson (the inventor of the hypertext), Les Levine and the Architecture Machine Group, directed by Nicholas Negroponte. In the catalogue Burnham stressed the fact that "the public can personally respond to programmatic situations structured by artists" [3], with or without using computers. Edward A. Shanken wrote of him:"Software was predicated on the ideas of "software" and "information technology" as metaphors for art. He conceived of "software" as parallel to the aesthetic principles, concepts, or programs that underlie the formal embodiment of the actual art objects, which in turn parallel "hardware." [4] Software was neither the first not the only declaration of a relationship between the advent of conceptual art and the rising information age (we should remember that MoMA was exhibiting Information at this time): but Burnham's idea of software as "metaphor for art", and his emphasis on the process, almost seem a prophecy of the future rise of Sofware Art.

One year before Software, in January 1969, Sol LeWitt published his "Sentences on Conceptual Art". This included statements such as: "10. Ideas can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical. [...] 27. The concept of a work of art may involve the matter of the piece or the process in which it is made. [...] 29. The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course." [5, my italics] His Wall Drawings are the perfect application of these theories: art exists as instruction, idea put on paper; its execution is a purely mechanical process that does not depend on the artist, but on the contrary can be entrusted to every executor.

Thirty five years later, in June 2004, the American artist and programmer Casey Reas wondered: why not entrust art to a machine, then? His reasoning was simple: "the relation between LeWitt and his draftsperson is often compared to the relation between a composer and performer , but I think it's also valid to look at the comparison between a programmer and the entity of execution. LeWitt writes programs for people to execute and interpret rather than for machines." [6]

Casey Reas, [software] structures - Wall Drawing #85, 2004

  Taking these ideas to extremes, Reas made [software] structures, a project that was exhibited at the on-line gallery of the Whitney Museum of New York. In brief, Reas set, with LeWitt's consent, three of his Wall Drawings into a form that could be interpreted by a program, but sought to keep the inevitable ambiguity of natural language; then he introduced a human variable, asking three artists friends to interpret the same "structure", and another formal one, using two different languages to display the code. The passage from human language to machine language involved some corrections. But, as Reas stated, "If this is a work of conceptual art, the concept should remain regardless of the medium."

The great conceptual revolution consisted in the opposition of an art made up of objects with a totally dematerialised art (Lucy Lippard), made up of ideas and processes. In the art system of that time a statement like that could not last for long. Indeed, collectors and museums soon began to confuse the work with its very execution; the walls painted by LeWitt have made us forget the concept they represent, the Art & Language archives have become more important that what they contained, and the Statements installation by Lawrence Wiener has gained such a visual majesty that makes the fact that it was originally a matter of purely spoken phrases of secondary importance. Conceptual art had lost its radicalism and the reaction was not long in coming.

[software] structures arose to answer a simple question: "Is the history of conceptual art relevant to the idea of software as art?" At this point, answering the opposite question in the affirmative can be justified: "Is the idea of software as art relevant to the history of conceptual art?" Software Art brings immateriality back to conceptual art; the prevalence of the idea over the product, of the process over the result, of the code over the output. By turning the executor into a machine, any doubt about the artistic nature of the finished product is removed. And must be sought elsewhere, or rather in the "code" that is the modern reincarnation of the "concept".

Software Art picks up the conceptual path at the point where it entered a blind alley; and the medium that it uses ensures that the crisis will not be repeated.

We have spoken of Software Art as conceptual art "aknowledged son". If on the one hand it seems difficult to explain the interest the Whitney Museum, the temple of America art, is showing to this kind of art solely from the brilliance of its new media curator, Christiane Paul; then on the other hand Sol LeWitt's recent career itself seems to strengthen this thesis. In 1998 the Sandra Gering Art Gallery of New York organised a group show entitled Formulations, setting the work of LeWitt alongside that of Hanne Darboven and the software artist John F. Simon, Jr.; while his latest sculptures, Splotches, are moulded out of fibreglass and painted by a machine that follows a set of instructions able to regulate both the shape and colour distribution. It is a pity that in the absence of instructions it is extremely difficult to re-enact the process that created these fascinating coloured blobs. There is nothing else to do but hope the next Splotches will be open source.

 

Sol Lewitt, 4 Splotch, 2005. Sculpture, 152x122x84 cm, courtesty of Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia

We have spoken of Software Art as conceptual art "aknowledged son". If on the one hand it seems difficult to explain the interest the Whitney Museum, the temple of America art, is showing to this kind of art solely from the brilliance of its new media curator, Christiane Paul; then on the other hand Sol LeWitt's recent career itself seems to strengthen this thesis. In 1998 the Sandra Gering Art Gallery of New York organised a group show entitled Formulations, setting the work of LeWitt alongside that of Hanne Darboven and the software artist John F. Simon, Jr.; while his latest sculptures, Splotches, are moulded out of fibreglass and painted by a machine that follows a set of instructions able to regulate both the shape and colour distribution. It is a pity that in the absence of instructions it is extremely difficult to re-enact the process that created these fascinating coloured blobs. There is nothing else to do but hope the next Splotches will be open source.

[PART2]

In May 2002, the first edition of the Read_me Festival, the first to be entirely dedicated to Software Art, took place in Moscow. A year later, in January 2003, the platform Runme.org, the largest available on-line artistic software "storehouse" was launched. On awarding the prizes, the festival’s jury formulated a definition which was to become a classic: "We consider software art to be art whose material is algorithmic instruction code and/or which addresses cultural concepts of software"[1]. Two years later, in a fundamental paper debated again at Read_me, the Danish critic Jacob Lillemose[2] stated that the slash dividing the two sentences, instead of acting as a support between the two notions, seemed to open a break: on one hand a formalistic research focused on the algorithm and its dynamics, while on the other hand what he called a "cultural vision" which roots software in the socio-political context from which it emerges. Besides, in his time, also Florian Cramer[3] noted the existence of two trends that he called "Software Formalism" and "Software Culturalism"; Lillemose went a little further, going back to the historical origins that he singled out in two ramifications of Conceptual Art.

The first trend, focusing on the aesthetics of code and programming languages, conceives of code as a process to analyze, as a series of instructions to apply or as a starting point of a work on the interface. This has affinities with two very different ramifications of Conceptual Art, namely the linguistic trend of Joseph Kosuth and Sol LeWitt and the process oriented work by John Cage and La Monte Young. And especially LeWitt seems to provide, with his Wall Drawings, the missing link in the chain.

In 1997, the American artist John F. Simon Jr. made Every Icon, a simple Applet Java whose function was that of showing every icon displayable with a 32 x 32 square grid (the standard size of the icons on the desktop). Rather than being a conceptual-inspired work of Software Art, Every Icon could be described as the last conceptual masterpiece, a proper sublimation of the process: its mission is easy, but the rigor with which it is observed opens a neverending process, turning into a reflection on time and eternity, comparable to Roman Opalka’s work. Besides, the work’s interface is so simple that Every Icon – formalized by Simon either as an on-line work or as a single object inclusive of hardware (an LCD display) and software – functions entirely as a describable and recordable concept: "Given: A 32x32 Grid; Allowed: Any element of the grid to be black or white; Shown: Every Icon." As the artist states, "While Every Icon is resolved conceptually, it is irresolvable in practice. In some ways the theoretical possibilities outdistance the time scales of both evolution and imagination."[4]

 

John F. Simon, Jr., Every Icon, 1997

Simon’s belonging to the formalistic trend of Software Art becomes evident in the minimal aesthetics of his following work, again aiming at creating abstract interfaces – prints, drawings or hardware panels assembled by the artist himself – which display an algorithmic operation, and in its going backwards from Minimalism to more mature models, but not for this reason any less attractive, such as Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee. Simon pays homage especially to the latter in his latest work which is both the summing up of a twenty-year-old research, a drawing tool everyone can use, and a reflection on the way a fluid medium like software enables bringing up to date some avant-garde intuitions that had only remained as projects. Published by Printed Matter, Inc. in collaboration with the Whitney Museum of New York – that allows trying some of its tools on its site – Mobility Agents. A Computational Sketchbook v1.0 (2005) [5] – is a CD together with a very complete booklet, in which Simon describes the birth of the three tools making up the software, able to create complex shapes starting from a very simple input: a point, a curved or straight line drawn at different speeds.

 

John F. Simon, Jr., Mobility Agents, 2005. The "Gate Page" in the Whitney Artport website

 

The anomaly lies in the fact that these instruments are subordinated to the gesture, to the impulsive nature of the improvised sketch, and that instead of imitating traditional painting tools (brush, spray can) oriented toward re presentative drawing or photo-realistic graphics, they encourage abstract research.

Simon has not written software which draws, but software to draw, ensuring the possibility to work on both levels, namely programming (which for him means "creative writing" since it can create) and abstract drawing. The same instrument which initiated Every Icon’s radical Conceptualism, now allows him to be a "painter" again without denying any of those premises: simply, after having delved into the catalogue of possibilities, he has made his choice.


The other Software Art trend leads to a diametrically opposite direction, one that Cramer calls "Software Culturalism". On one hand, it has its origins in the world of alternative software and in "software as culture" (Matthew Fuller), namely in the belief that software has the ideology it represents within its very code; while on the other hand, as Jacob Lillemose states, it refers to another two inflexions of Conceptual Art: the political stance of Hans Haacke, Dan Graham, Victor Burgin, Gordon Matta-Clark and the performance based work of Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman and Chris Burden. Making use of the term "contextual art", theorized by Peter Weibel in the 70s and taken up again in 1993 for the exhibition Contextual Art. Art of the 90s, Lillemose states that "Software Culturalism" belongs to the "contextual family", inaugurated by Conceptual Art which "criticized the art institution, a.k.a. the white cube, as an oppressive and restrictive space that only accepted a certain type of art and a certain type of aesthetics"[6].

The argument of software art is not specifically addressed to the art world, but to the current social and political situation, to which it opposes radical, alternative, or subversive instruments, able to subvert social practices and cultural forms. In this sense the software projects by Ubermorgen.com can be considered particularly emblematic. With its base in Vienna, Ubermorgen.com was born as a Dot-com devoted to a particularly virulent form of media activism, renamed "Media Aktionism" in homage to the Viennese Actionism of the 70s.

Ubermorgen.com has achieved international visibility thanks to the Vote-Auction (2000) operation, a site that, during the American elections, offered citizens the chance to put their vote up for auction to the highest bidder, making use of its undoubted economic value.

UBERMORGEN.COM, BANKSTATEMENTGENERATOR, 2005

  The operation, unfortunately, won not only an entire episode of Burden of Proof, the CNN legal programme, but also heaps of charges, and a series of injunctions sent by a court (American) to their server (Swiss) to close the site down (as punctually happened). The Injunction Generator (2000) is a sarcastic denunciation of this paradoxical situation (the American jurisdiction does not cover Switzerland, and neither can an injunction be sent by e-mail) transforming the injustice which Ubermorgen.com suffered into a public service: everyone can go on the project’s site and fill in a form on line, addressing it to the server of a site that one wants to delete from the web. The program sends out a perfectly regular injunction, and informs us whether our attack has succeeded. A masterpiece of dark sarcasm, formally moderate but conceptually explosive in depicting the Internet as a no man’s land where the law of the jungle is in force and in turning the illegality it uses against the law. Highly capable in creating false business identities, Ubermorgen.com puts the project into the hands of the IP-NIC (Internet Partnership for No Internet Content); in turn, the generated documents are "[F]originals", forged original documents (at this point, it is almost superfluous to remember the authenticity certificates by the pre-conceptual artist Piero Manzoni): exactly as the bank statements generated by B A N K S TATEMENTGENERATOR (2005), a software which keeps us update, in a rather unorthodox way, of our account status. Convinced that authenticity is a collective hallucination, Ubermorgen.com sows the seeds of doubts in the faith we place in a highly unreliable banking system.

 

Lastly, the very recent GWEI (Google Will Eat Itself, 2005), made in collaboration with the Italians Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio, shows how it is possible to turn business into an instrument of struggle against the establishment. The project uses the Adsense system: a service by which Google, on the request of a user, puts some links to potentially interesting businesses for the reader of the user’s site itself; with each clicked link, the site owner earns a small sum which can become considerable if the site is highly visited. In the case of GWEI, next to the monitor of real visitors, there is a small software that simulates new users and further clicks, thereby raising the site’s earnings that are reinvested in Google shares. In other words, GWEI is a slow but infallible system to devour Google by making use of its own money to eat away at one of the strongest businesses in the world through advertising. It may or may not function: what is important is its critical and imaginative force, the process that, in an absurd and surprising way, transforms capitalism and advertising into absurd instruments of struggle. In other words, the concept. Or software.

 

UBERMORGEN.COM feat. Alessandro Ludovico & Paolo Cirio, GWEI (Google Will Eat Itself), 2005

 

By now, we are very far from LeWitt. But Software Art is varied like Conceptual Art, whose complex genealogical tree, software art clearly makes reference to through the voices of artists and militant critics. We may or not believe in this complex pedigree that is also, it must be said, a precise cultural strategy aimed at enabling software art to come out from the isolation in which the art world persists in relegating it. From where they stand, the artists already have some documents ready to prove it. Forged original documents.

NOTES [Part1]

[1] In Baumgaertel, Tilman, "Interview with Vuk Cosic", sent to Nettime, June 30, 1997.
[2] Cramer, Florian, "Concepts, Notations, Software, Art", March 23, 2003, online at http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin
[3] Burnham, Jack, "Notes on Art and Information Processing". In Software Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art, exhibition catalogue, New York, Jewish Museum 1970.
[4] Shanken, Edward A., "The House That Jack Built: Jack Burnham's Concept of "Software" as a Metaphor for Art", in Leonardo, Volume 6, Number 10, November 1998. http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/ARTICLES/jack.html
[5] LeWitt, Sol, "Sentences on Conceptual Art", in 0-9, New York, no. 5. January 1969.
[6] Reas, Casey, "[software] structures", June 2004, online at HYPERLINK "http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/softwarestructures/"http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/softwarestructures/

NOTES [Part2]

[1] A. Alexander, C. P. Doll, F. Cramer, RTMark, A. Shulgin,Read_Me 1.2 Jury Statement, May 2002, URL http://www.runme.org/project/+statement/
[2] J. Lillemose, "A Re-declaration of Dependence. Software art in a cultural context it can’t get out of", in Read_me 2004, URL http://www.artnode.org/art/lillemose/readme2004.html
[3] F. Cramer, Concepts, Notations, Software, Art, 23 March 2003, online at
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin
[4] J. F. Simon Jr.,Every Icon Statement, in "Parachute", January 1997, online at
http://www.numeral.com/articles/paraicon/paraicon.html
[5] J. F. Simon Jr., Mobility Agents. A Computational Sketchbook v1.0, Whitney Museum & Printed Matter, Inc., New York, 2005. See also http://artport.whitney.org/gatepages/october05.shtml
[6] J. Lillemose, "A Re-declaration of Dependence. Software art in a cultural context it can’t get out of", in Read_me 2004, URL http://www.artnode.org/art/lillemose/readme2004.html
www.spore.com/screenshots.php

IMAGE SOURCES

1. Casey Reas, [software] structures - Wall Drawing #85, 2004. http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/softwarestructures/.
2. Sol Lewitt, 4 Splotch, 2005. Sculpture, 152x122x84 cm, courtesy Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia.
3. John F. Simon, Jr., Every Icon, 1997. http://www.numeral.com/appletsoftware/eicon.html
4. John F. Simon, Jr., Mobility Agents, 2005. The "Gate Page" in the Whitney Artport website, http://artport.whitney.org/gatepages/october05.shtml
5. UBERMORGEN.COM, BANKSTATEMENTGENERATOR, 2005, http://www.ipnic.org/bankstatementgenerator/
6. UBERMORGEN.COM feat. Alessandro Ludovico & Paolo Cirio, GWEI (Google Will Eat Itself), 2005. http://www.gwei.org/

 

This article has been published in 2 parts in the italian magazine "Arte e Critica" (Issue 44, December 2005 & Issue 45, March 2006).

 

Domenico Quaranta is an art critic and curator who lives and works in Brescia, Italy. He graduated in Contemporary Art in 2002 and has a Masters Degree for Curators. With a specific passion and interest in net art, Domenico regularly writes for magazines such as Exibart and Flash Art and has been Art Editor of Cluster Magazine. His first book titled, NET ART 1994-1998: La vicenda di ƒda'web (NET ART 1994-1998: ƒda'web Adventure) was published in 2004 and he also co-wrote the catalogue for the Legendary Connections exhibition in Milan, 2005. In 2006 he co-curated, with Matteo Bittanti, GameScenes. Art in the Age of Videogames, a book on gaming and art.

 

 

 

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