Computational Media Design and Marcel Duchamp
Introduction. When the Times, in 1997, asked seventeen prominent "art-world participants and observers" the difficult question "What is art?" the respondents offered a unanimous, surprisingly simple answer, that there was no answer. The art historians Thomas McEvilley ("It seems pretty clear by now that more or less anything can be designated as art") and Robert Rosenblum ("By now the idea of defining art is so remote I don't think anyone would dare to do it"), William Rubin, of the Museum of Modern Art ("There is no single definition of art"), Arthur Danto, a philosopher and art critic of The Nation ("You can't say something's art or not art anymore. That's all finished") all agreed. [1] Clearly then, drastic changes have taken place concerning the common conception of art since Duchamp's Fountain (1917) was suppressed at the Independents show in New York for being "nothing but an ordinary object." Part of this transformation was necessitated by the advances in technology - exemplified by the field of "computational art." Marcel Duchamp is remarkable for being the catalyst for this transformation of the concept of art, the end product of which we now take for granted as creators of art in the computational medium.
Examining art from the 20th century perspective. As Krauss remarks, it is not difficult to see why the Independents had reservations regarding Duchamp's "readymades," the so-called works of art that had their origins as mere commonplace items. The rejection stems from the expectations we carry when reacting to the work: that "everything about the original image… [from] the individual strokes of paint as well as the peculiar physiognomy the artist gives to objects" [2] is an expression directly from the mind of its creator. By merely selecting his objects - for instance, the ordinary snow shovel which became "In Advance of a Broken Arm" (1915) - rather than actively partaking in their construction, Duchamp introduced an element of depersonalization to his works that flew in the face of traditional definitions of art.
What about MAS110? Interestingly, the computational medium likewise severs the connection between the artist and his work. No matter how profound or creative the output of computational design may be, it can ultimately be reduced into lines of instructions initially encoded by the author, in the same way that the "artwork" (recall, for example, the "complex" flood scene from the Bible) generated by the painting machines in Roussel's Impressions of Africa can be reduced to the mechanical workings of the machines that produced them. In addition, it is meaningless to speak of the "autographic nature" of a computational work. Krauss dismisses the concept of "painting -by-numbers" as a "parody of art," remarking that a "coloring-book style" reconstruction of Van Gogh's work as being distinctly separate from the original. However, in computational design, such as Design By Numbers (DBN), each work is generated as the viewer encounters it; hence, there cannot be any means to distinguish between an original and a duplicate work provided that the underlying code is identical.
To illustrate this, I have replicated Lihua's "For the love of the game" and Christine's "Duchamp's take on a walking Christine." Unfortunately, the replication isn't perfect. I had neither access to the original source codes nor the time to painstakingly analyze the pixel locations and the color values of the original. Yet, the point is: due to the nature of its presentation, it is not possible to arbitrarily distinguish between an "original" and "recreated" work in a computational medium as Krauss had done with the Van Gogh "coloring book." According to the early twentieth-century conventional view on art, then, the computational media artist is stuck in an unfortunate position. His work no longer qualifies as "art" for the medium diminishes the "intimate, causal connection between an individual and what he makes." [3]
However, one may object to this claim, stating that the "autograph" exists in the code itself. In other words, the "art" in computational media design is warranted by the act of code writing. This, however, is a dubious position at best, akin to claiming that each of the works produced by the machines in Impressions of Africa can be considered "works of art" on the account that the initial construction of the machine is an artistic process. Likewise, it is difficult to claim that the camera-maker is partaking in the creation of art as he encodes in a mechanism the instructions that allow photographs to be generated. (This leads into an interesting side-question: Should we consider photography to be "art"?)
At the same time, the observer is led into a conflict. Despite the restrictive "definition" of art - that a work must "bear the imprint of the [author's] very being" [4] - and the computational medium's subsequent failure to meet that criterion, works like Adrienne's "Runner Descending the Hill" and Ilan's introduction to Marcos have instinctive artistic qualities. Tamara's "Smile ascending m(onke)y face," in particular, defies the claim that computational media cannot be considered art. In short, the development of computational media design seems to have naturally brought upon a reexamination on the nature and definition of "art."
Duchamp's Influence. Interestingly, Duchamp's own questions about "what makes art, art?" seem to have been partly motivated by advances in technology. For instance, Roussel's Impressions of Africa was filled with mechanisms of art-making. Also, Duchamp's strategy of using "readymades" to attack the traditional concept of art was made available with the advent of mass production. In any case, Duchamp's remarkable contribution to the history of art is his decision to pursue these emanating questions concerning the assumptions on art, rather than dismissing the new aspects as aesthetically worthless.
His insistence that the idea behind a work, rather than some physical form of the work itself, constituted "art" is his legacy. His technique on basing work on "readymades" was adopted by the successive generation of artists, such as Andy Warhol who famously exhibited shipping cartons for Brillo boxes in 1964.
Duchamp's ideas in turn has come to define the current views on art - as seen in the Times article by the "triumph of consensus of no consensus." In conclusion, Marcel Duchamp is a key figure in expanding the definition of "art" to its modern understanding.
References:
[1] Menand, Louis. "What is 'Art': The question posed by a new play which no one on stage - or off - can answer." The New Yorker. (February 9, 1998.) 202-204.
[2] Krauss 70-71.
[3] Krauss 71.
[4] Ibid.
Krauss, Rosalind E. Passages in Modern Sculpture Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977.