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.
Tauba Auerbach, Binary Uppercase/Lowercase, 2005
Tauba Auerbach, Binary Uppercase/Lowercase, 2005. Ink, opaque watercolor, and graphite pencil on paper, 22 5/16 × 23 3/4 in. (56.7 × 60.3 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Drawing Committee 2010.79. © Tauba Auerbach
Tauba Auerbach’s Binary Uppercase/Lowercase is part of a larger project in which the artist investigated the lack of ambiguity implicit in the digital language of binary code. Binary is used to encode computing and telecommunications data, and employs the digits 0 and 1 to represent text or instructions. To make this work, Auerbach translated the English alphabet into binary, spelled in uppercase on the left side and lowercase on the right side with black squares representing 1 and white squares standing in for 0. In so doing, Auerbach explores how the computing language reduces information to a two-symbol system using black-and-white categories to convey nuanced or complex information.
Pick lowercase and uppercase characters of the alphabet from this Binary Character Table and input them into a Binary Image Creator to recreate Auerbach's image.
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