Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018
Sept 28, 2018–Apr 14, 2019
Rule, Instruction, Algorithm:
Ideas as Form
1
Artists have long used instructions and abstract concepts to produce their work, employing mathematical principles, creating thought diagrams, or establishing rules for variations of color. Conceptual art—a movement that began in the late 1960s—went a step further, explicitly emphasizing the idea as the driving force behind the form of the work. In his “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” (1967), Sol LeWitt wrote: “The plan would design the work. Some plans would require millions of variations, and some a limited number, but both are finite. Other plans imply infinity.” The works in this grouping—from Sol LeWitt’s large-scale wall drawing and Josef Albers’s series of nesting colored squares and rectangles to Lucinda Childs’s dances and Joan Truckenbrod’s computer drawings—all directly address the rules and instructions used in their creation. Essential to each is an underlying system that allows the artist to generate variable images and objects.
Frederick Hammersley, no title, 1969*
Frederick Hammersley (1919-2009), no title, 1969. Computer-generated drawings on paper, 77 sheets in total, 11 × 14 15/16 in. (27.9 × 37.9 cm) and 11 × 13 11/16 in. (27.9 × 34.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of the Frederick Hammersley Foundation 2016.177. © Frederick Hammersley Foundation
In 1968, Frederick Hammersley began using the University of New Mexico’s IBM mainframe computer to make images through an iterative process (repeated cycles of variations). He created these drawings using the computer program ART I, which was written in the programming language FORTRAN IV. The drawings use the 26 letters of the English alphabet and the 10 Arabic numerals along with 11 symbols within a working area 50 characters tall and 105 characters wide. The works demonstrate the connections between natural and programming languages by making the alphabet itself the material for generating visual patterns.
*Installed as part of an earlier version of the exhibition.
Artists
- Josef Albers
- Cory Arcangel
- Tauba Auerbach
- Jonah Brucker-Cohen
- Jim Campbell
- Ian Cheng
- Lucinda Childs
- Charles Csuri
- Agnes Denes
- Alex Dodge
- Charles Gaines
- Philip Glass
- Frederick Hammersley
- Channa Horwitz
- Donald Judd
- Joseph Kosuth
- Shigeko Kubota
- Marc Lafia
- Barbara Lattanzi
- Lynn Hershman Leeson
- Sol LeWitt
- Fang-yu Lin
- Manfred Mohr
- Katherine Moriwaki
- Mendi + Keith Obadike
- Nam June Paik
- William Bradford Paley
- Paul Pfeiffer
- Casey Reas
- Earl Reiback
- Rafaël Rozendaal
- Lillian Schwartz
- James L. Seawright
- John F. Simon Jr.
- Steina
- Mika Tajima
- Tamiko Thiel
- Cheyney Thompson
- Joan Truckenbrod
- Siebren Versteeg
- Lawrence Weiner