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, Curvilinear Perspective, 1979
Joan Truckenbrod (b. 1945), Curvilinear Perspective, 1979. Heat-transfer print on fabric, 35 × 36 1/4 in. (88.9 × 92.1 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Digital Art Committee 2018.48
To make her patchwork textiles, Joan Truckenbrod implemented algorithms depicting natural phenomena in the programming language BASIC to create a series of abstract sequential images. She then turned the monitor of the computer, an Apple IIe, upside down on a 3M Color-in-Color copier and printed the images on heat-transfer material. After superimposing a curved pattern and reconfiguring the image components, she hand-ironed them onto polyester fiber to create the composition. The textile work is shown suspended so that its display becomes fluid—affected by light and air movement—and part of the “natural” world. Truckenbrod’s digital fabrics connect early computational art with the feminist textile art practice of the 1970s that challenged the relegation of techniques such as quilting, sewing, and weaving to the realm of “women’s crafts.”
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