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.
Joan Truckenbrod, Coded Algorithmic Drawing (#45), 1975
Joan Truckenbrod, Coded Algorithmic Drawing (#45), 1975. Computer-generated drawing: ink on paper, 12 1/2 × 15 1/8 in. (31.8 × 38.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Digital Art Committee 2018.52
Joan Truckenbrod started making her computer drawings in the 1970s, using the programming language Fortran. She explains, “I saw that algorithms could be reconfigured, they were not a hard set of instructions but fluid, allowing me to transform ideas into new forms. There was a spontaneity that was related to this process, that then related back into the series of works.” Truckenbrod would frequently incorporate algorithms that described natural phenomena, such as light or sound waves, and give them physical substance through her projects. Unlike today, artists working on computer drawings at that time could not see the results of their code on a screen immediately after having written it. They had to work with a machine to punch their program onto a series of cards, which then communicated with the mainframe computer that guided plotters to draw the work.
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