![]() This show – again, with the benefit of hindsight – instead brings to the fore those cybernetic experimentalists who sought not just to conflate, but to harmonize, the concrete and the conceptual as best their tools as well as skills let them. Everybody with time reserved on a mainframe wound up in a survey, no matter how esoteric or unkind to the eyes. But those hoary gallimaufries of burgeoning metadata and electronic prestidigitation tended to err on the side of inclusion. In this, it quite deliberately revives the kitchen-sink-cum-funhouse aesthetic of computer- and information-art exhibitions of the very period it documents. The curation of “Coded” is broad and inclusive, and there is a lot to see and be distracted by, nay, sucked into. The overall curatorial narrative, celebrating artistic curiosity and the can-do tenor of those times, proves infectious. Though relatively little in “Coded” gooses the eyeballs, the show’s explication of history and process (its wall labels are detailed but quite readable and helpful) rivets the attention but keeps the objects in question foremost. (101.6 × 71.1 cm), University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, gift of Eduardo Paolozzi, © The Paolozzi Foundation, licensed by DACS/ARS 2023, photos courtesy of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film ArchiveĪnd it’s art. “Coded” succeeds partly through a deft employment of the Smithsonian Effect, provoking nostalgia amongst older visitors and a Tomorrowland retro-futurist swoon amongst preteen techies.Įduardo Paolozzi, Universal Electronic Vacuum: Computer-Epoch, 1967, screenprint, 40 × 28 in. ![]() And, of course, the vintage quality of the artifacts on display has its own charm. ![]() ![]() Thanks to forty years of hindsight, the curation of “Coded,” headed by LACMA’s Leslie Jones, keeps things visually as well as informationally engaging. Many who attempted to generate a substantive electronic oeuvre failed to produce much of anything at all many more failed to produce anything more than a stack of punch cards and grainy data charts. This (often surreptitious) siphoning of computer time was in effect playing with a robot – or robotic brain – the size and intricacy of a cathedral organ. Before then, artists would have to collaborate with scientists and/or technicians or learn Fortran themselves and cozy up at night to the IBM mainframe installed in the basement of the math building. The first personal computers became available in the early ‘80s, when the purview of “Coded” ends. In an era of nuclear delirium, the promise was at once one of destruction and one of revelation, a way through cold wars to warm art through hot wires. It’s an itch artists are always scratching, but in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s they were being tantalized by enormous machines doing peculiar things that seemed at once mind-numbing and mysterious. “Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982” brings back to life all sorts of creaky experiments and fugitive objects realized across the postwar era by artists itching to expand their toolbox with the most advanced tools, data-organizing and form-driving, science could provide them. LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART, through July 2Īt a moment of what seems like digital apotheosis - not least in the visual arts – a museum exhibition devoted to early computer art seems at once timely and corny. Installation photograph, Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, February 12–July 2, 2023, photo © Museum Associates/LACMAĬODED: ART ENTERS THE COMPUTER AGE, 1952-1982
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |