Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018
Sept 28, 2018–Apr 14, 2019
Rule, Instruction, Algorithm:
Collapsing Instruction and Form
3
Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth, both leading figures of Conceptual art, use language as their material to highlight the linguistic nature of all art and to shift emphasis from the object to the idea behind it. W. Bradford Paley’s more recent digital work also makes language its material but by displaying the code that generates his work. The pieces by these three artists all consist of the very instructions through which they have been created, self-reflexively erasing oppositions between form and content and folding them into one. Paley’s work draws attention to the fact that digital art—regardless of its visual appearance—always has a layer of code and is produced by the software used to create or manipulate it.
W. Bradford Paley, CodeProfiles, 2002
CodeProfiles looks at the computer program as text and visually comments on how code is read by people, written by programmers, and executed by computers. Reflecting on its own construction, the work consists of the code that makes the code visible on the screen. Three points in code space are indicated: the amber line follows the fixation point, tracing how people might read the text, line by line; the white line follows the insertion point and flows like the programmer’s thoughts, calmly in one place then jumping around to make other parts of the code perform; and the green line moves along the execution point of the program, creating wide swaths where the code was executed thousands of times and appearing as a thin thread where the processor rarely visited. W. Bradford Paley thereby foregrounds the conceptual nature of all digital art, which is always driven by a language formulating instructions.
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