Surrendering Yourself to Computer Sensibility

NEW YORK —  Once upon a time painters who copied photographs hid them under their palettes when visitors came to the studio. Despite the fact that artists as distinguished as Delacroix and Degas cribbed from film virtually from the first time emulsion peeked at the light of day, the practice always felt like a dirty little secret. It didn’t suit the romantic image of either the imaginative inventor or the earnest observer. It was cheating.

Today, of course, we have Photo-Realism, which prides itself on making a painting look like a photograph, but a lingering stigma still attaches to art that relies on technology. Remember the movie satirizing the Abstract Expressionist whose paintings were done by a machine, or the musical comedy that sneered at the kinetic sculptors’ blinking, robot-like works?

The latest technological seductress to tempt the Saint Anthonys of art is the computer. The flirtation has been going on for a couple of decades and has created its own stereotypes. In 1971, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presented its massive “Art and Technology” exhibition. It actually included very little computer art but created that kind of general electronic-age aura. It left an aftertaste of art versus technology in collaborations that didn’t jell, works that blew fuses and art as thin as a photoelectric cell.

Now, some 17 years later, an exhibition in the Big Apple redeems the concept of “A & T.” Called “Computers and Art,” it is on view at the IBM Gallery to June 22. Organized by Cynthia Goodman for the Everson Museum in Syracuse, it would be properly termed the sleeper show of the season if it weren’t such an eye-opener. It is redolent with science-fiction bells and whistles that delight crowds plus serious art by people as well-known as Ed Kienholz, Andy Warhol, Jennifer Bartlett, Jon Borofsky, Ron Davis, Larry Rivers and Philip Pearlstein.

Philip Pearlstein? What is that crusty old realist doing in a show about computer art?

Ah, there’s the rub. About half the time the naked eye cannot detect the hand of the computer in these works. That’s because some, like Kienholz’s “The Friendly Gray Computer” or Lowell Nesbitt’s “IBM 729” only use them as subject matter for scorn or admiration.

What computers have to do with other works that look perfectly hand-made is explained by a bank of instruments set up in a hands-on gallery. Visitors sit and run these visual whiz-kids through their paces. One unit has a video camera attached. You see yourself on the monitor as on a TV screen, in motion. Push a button and you have a still photo-like self-portrait. Push another and the portrait turns to a mosaic of colored squares, flops your nose or solarizes the color like a cover for Omni magazine. Push another and the result prints out as hard copy.

We are not talking here about esoteric mainframe computers at CalTech, NASA or the Jet Propulsion Lab. We are talking about the kind of personal computers a lot of us have in the house these days. Rigged up with the right hardware and software they can be used to draw, color, collage, enlarge, shrink and who knows what all. In short they are terrific planning tools that save time and labor. It is hard to imagine even the most conservative realists not finding their capabilities useful and according to this show they work seamlessly for architects for plans, projections and concepts.

Anybody who still winces at that idea of computers messed in with art is probably in the thrall of a fantasy about the artist that was never true. Making art has a lot in common with being a house-painter, carpenter, plumber and general all-around handy-man. Artists have always used mechanical devices to aid their work even when they put a dust-cover over them so as not to disillusion the rubes. Holbein probably used a camera-obscura. Rodin certainly employed a pointing machine to enlarge and shrink his works.

As serendipity would have it, your faithful correspondent no sooner got back from being impressed with the New York computer show than Robert Graham--who is not in it--invited him out for a look at his current work in progress, a monument to Duke Ellington to be unveiled in Central Park next year and previewed at the County Museum of Art in September.

No artist spends more time working directly with models than Graham or is more demanding about detail and verisimilitude. Yet one of the technical discoveries that has excited him most in the course of making the complex monument is--you guessed it--the computer.

The monument involves three nude caryatids in multiple variations. After making his usual exquisitely detailed soul-trap renderings of the models, he had each laser-scanned, reducing all their contours to digital information on a floppy disc. The disc is then put into a lathe that can read the information and produce endless rough but workable copies of the original--in any size required--which Graham then varies and refines.

The end products have absolutely no mechanical edge and are--if anything--fresher, more relaxed and flexible than anything he has done in years. For his part, Graham is a computer-convert, excited about every aspect of it from its capacity to expand creative choices to time-and-money saving, which also augments final aesthetic clout.

The New York show--getting back to that--is both boggling and provocative in its range. HAL has come a long way from the ‘60s, when a printout of a reclining nude had all the charm of a laborious piece of typewriter art. These days it is used as everything from a simple tool to program wise and ironic maxims in Jenny Holzer’s moving-letter electronic signs to being pressed into the task of seeing after the baroque complexity of Nam June Paik’s homage to Laurie Anderson.

The show is tremendous fun but there is still an aesthetic gulf between what the computer can do as a silent partner and what it does when the electronic sensibility takes over.

We all know computer graphics from the spinning, twinkly logos that are on the tube every night. These apparently solid images never existed as real substances, having been completely generated within the computer. One cannot but be impressed by the ingenuity involved in these illusions, but all their permutations generate sensibilities that only work aesthetically if they are what you want. Here is a still life of smooth orange vases on a rippling reflecting surface by Michael Collery and Cranston Csuri Productions. It comes off aesthetically only if you want the look of a patently fake illusion.

Here is a film frame from Yoichiro Kawaguchi’s “Ocean.” It looks a bit like an extraterrestrial dog with a convex-mirror head. There is an ominous aura of science-fiction fantasy here that is so seductive and chilly it could only be effective in a context where it condemns its own fetishism. These days computer-graphic buffs are in a lather over fractal geometry--a new way of composing illusionist scenes that can be varied at the push of a button. We see three versions of a mountain landscape by Richard Voss, each craggier than the next. It is amazing stuff that may someday be refined for--say--movie special effects. As it stands it would only work in a situation requiring a landscape that looks like a special effect.

Traditional painting, of course, is also a set of conventions that do not fool the eye. Maybe we accept them because the materials are warm and earthy and the interpretation seems dominated by human concerns. Computer graphics still appear dominated by mathematic and electronic vision. To somebody trained in the fine arts they are as aesthetically incomprehensible as the illusionistic trickery of M. C. Escher and only workable when the situation requires something as bewitching, stylized and heartless as Salome dancing. They are a kind of electronic erotica.

There is plenty of dancing in “Computers and Art.” All us kids have a great time playing with Myron Kruger’s “Videoplace.” You stand in front of a screen that captures your silhouette life-size in a solid color. A little green electronic critter avoids your shadow-hand as you try to catch him. Who knows what combinations of video, computer and sensors went into this thing, but it is unpretentious fun that doesn’t aspire to art.

Probably the most sheerly enchanting work here is a fountain by New Yorker Wen Ting Tsai. Spotlit in a black room, its splashy water looks like liquid diamonds. Classical music plays and the fountain gracefully rises and falls to the sound. You are almost transported into the fairyland of “The Seven Dancing Princesses” when some yahoo gives a piercing whistle or claps loudly to make a jet jump. Never mind--the fountain is hypnotic. We see a vision. Good grief. It is the black apartment of the death-obsessed choreographer in “All That Jazz.”

You walk back out to bustling Madison Avenue with a sense of relief. You have been in the cave of the wizard Komputor. He does magic both white and black. By comparison with his wonder-world, mid-town New York looks scruffy, humane and natural.