Why Have There Been No Great Computer Artists?

Ed Kienholz, The Friendly Grey Computer—Star Gauge Model #54, 1965. Museum of Modern Art

LACMA's "Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age 1952–1982" is a thought-provoking exhibition for all pondering our AI future. It's also a paradox: a supremely relevant show of art that will strike some as "dated"; an important art show without much indisputably important art. 

The first room brings together art about the computer (rather than created with it). In the show's time frame, computers were "electronic brains" used by big government and big business to make bombs and profits. Stealing this part of the show is Ed Kienholz's The Friendly Grey Computer—Star Gauge Model #54. Kienholz intuited the true horror of computers that want to be your friend. (As organized by Leslie Jones, LACMA curator of prints and drawings, the exhibition stops just short of the PC age.)

Lowell Nesbitt, a photorealist in the New York Pop circle, took a Machine Age approach to his large painting of an I.B.M. Disc Pack. Nesbitt praised the subject (what we'd now call a hard disk) as "so silent, cool, and aloof, beautiful really…"

Lowell Nesbitt, I.B.M. Disc Pack, 1965. Lynn Herrick Sharp and H. Rodney Sharp

Angelo Testa, IBM Disks textile, 1952–1956. LACMA

Continuing the fetishization of data storage solutions is Angelo Testa's IBM Disks, a mid 1950s textile commissioned by IBM. 

The main thrust of the show is experimental imagery made with the aid of mainframe computers by people who were not well-known artists or artists at all. Typically the physical art was created with computer plotters or even character printers. 

Frederick Hammersley, Middled "H," 1969. LACMA

One real artist who was into computers was Frederick Hammersley. His 1969 "computer drawings" were created with Art1, an early software package for artists. The output was limited to what was later termed ASCII art, black typewriter-style characters on paper. Hammersley credited the foray into digital art as helping him get over a case of painter's block. 

June Harwood, untitled from Network Series, 1968. Collection of the Carl & Marilyn Thoma Foundation

None of Hammersley's paintings are on view. That seems unfortunate as the show does include works by his hard-edge colleague June Harwood and other well-known artists—Donald Judd, Bridget Riley, Victor Vasarely, Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weschler—whose connections to computers are more tangential. The argument is that the sleekly impersonal surfaces of Minimalism and Conceptualism, sometimes grounded in mathematical relationships, can be understood as part of a computer-age zeitgeist.

Victor Vasarely, Vega-Köntösh, 1971. LACMA

A. Michael Noll, Computer Composition with Lines, 1964. LACMA

Bell Labs was the Paris of computer art. Its engineers often collaborated with artists, and some made art themselves. In the latter category is A. Michael Noll. His Computer Composition with Lines (1964) is an abstract picture made with digital means. Like ChatGPT, Noll's algorithm was a plagiarist good at covering its tracks. Noll analyzed the statistics of Mondrian's Composition in Line, Second State (1916-1917) and used them to generate this remix. It captures the rhythm of the Mondrian even though every detail is different. As Picasso said, "bad artists copy, great artists steal."

Leon D. Harmon and Kenneth C. Knowlton, Studies in Perception I (Alpha Serendipity), 1966/2023. Exhibition copy. Philadelphia Museum of Art

Not all the experiments on view are as successful as Noll's. Many ring changes on randomness or the concept of pixels, ideas over-familiar to today's first-graders. Of course, even "bad" art can have an interesting story attached. Consider the so-called "computer nude" created at Bell Labs. It's simply a scan of a photograph (of dancer Deborah Hay) rendered as a 12-ft.-wide character-art mural. Engineers Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton put it in their boss' office as a practical joke. It immediately caused a scandal at Bell Labs. Harmon and Knowlton were instructed not to let the image be associated with Bell Labs or AT&T.

Nevertheless Robert Rauschenberg liked the image enough to use it as a backdrop for the press conference announcing Experiments in Art and Technology. This led to The New York Times running it—allegedly, the first nude "photo" that paper had ever printed—and a showing at the Museum of Modern Art.

Alison Knowles, The House of Dust, 1967. Aliso Knowles, New York, courtesy of James Fuentes, LLC

The last section of the show reminds us that "computer art" is part of the canon after all. Many key works of Fluxus, conceptualism, performance, and concrete poetry were created with the assistance of computers and friendly computer scientists. As Rauschenberg decreed, computer code is "the new artistic material."

One surprise: A 1975 Charles Gaines is in fact contemporary with much of the algorithmic art here.

Charles Gaines, Walnut Tree Orchard: Set B, 1975

I liked the show a lot. The one thing missing, however, was a truly great artwork that couldn't have been created without a computer. The low-res monochrome output is only part of the issue.

Today's "AI" art can command cinematic resolution and scale. It enthralls in ways that this show's objects don't. But how will it be viewed in 50 years? Who will be the viewer? 

"Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982" runs through July 2, 2023.

UPDATE: LACMA just acquired the "first and largest collection of artworks minted on blockchain to enter an American art museum."