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.
Casey Reas, {Software} Structures #003 B, August 2004/2016
Casey Reas, {Software} Structure #003 B, 2004 and 2016. JavaScript. Commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art for its artport website
Casey Reas responds to Sol LeWitt’s concept that the idea is “a machine that makes art” by demonstrating that it is always true for works of software art. Reas generates and executes the drawing through programming, but, as with LeWitt’s early wall drawings, starts with a description in natural language:
A surface filled with one hundred medium to small circles. Each circle has a different size and direction, but moves at the same slow rate. Display:
A. The instantaneous intersections of the circles
B. The aggregate intersections of the circles
In Structure #003A, the points moving on the screen are the center of each circle, while the lines connect the intersections of overlapping circles. Structure #003B gives viewers a different view of the structure by compressing changes over time into the same visual space; it is created using a process similar to taking a long-exposure photograph of Structure #003A and is continually changing, erasing, and redrawing while never repeating.
See this live on artport, the Whitney’s portal to Internet art.
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