"The poet is of no party." Baudelaire
New York City, March 2024
Let's just get this out of the way: "AI" is a silly term. Or at least, it's a bad fit for the current wave of computer technology getting labeled as such. Historically, "artificial intelligence" has referred to a kind of sci-fi dream state: a cognizant, autonomous, person-like mind, created out of machine parts. This recently developed software1 is not that at all—rather, these technologies leverage large sets of existing data to generate newspaper articles, children's book illustrations, film stills…the results aren't great, but they've been impressive enough to raise serious questions around creativity, authorship, and media, and also to get a lot of people fired (because why not just have the computer do it?). For better or worse (but let's be honest—generally worse), this is the terrain that artists and galleries have to forge through right now: where the very concept of human creativity is under weird scrutiny, in ways it's never been.
The Whitney has heeded this call by mounting an impressive show of Harold Cohen's AARON project2. At its heart, AARON is a collection of software that generates drawings and paintings. Cohen started the project in the late 1960s—before computers even had screens—and kept at it until his death in 2016. He had a distinct painterly style and, under his guidance, AARON's images tend toward a lightheartedness and buoyancy, with shades of easygoing portraiture reminiscent of Cohen's 20th-century peers, like Alex Katz and Alice Neel. It's a sharp—and welcome—contrast to the machine's inner logic: the herky-jerk robotics and endless lines of code that make AARON move. To me, it feels a bit off to call AARON an "AI" program—though the Whitney seems to have no qualms about doing just that—because the undergirding 'intelligence' here is clearly Cohen's: He's the one who built the robots and carefully defined their visual/symbolic parameters. Sure, there are elements of chance and volatility involved, but you could say the same thing about a blob of paint splashed onto a Pollock canvas. The trick is, contemporary "AI" image generators are doing the same thing as AARON, really: starting from a pre-defined visual lexicon and then semi-randomly combining those elements until, hey look, a picture.
Speaking of visual lexicons, Raymond Saunders's paintings3 don't try to hide or distort their assembled stores of cultural detritus, and that's a good thing. Saunders tends to start with a black ground, onto which he collages found image-objects (some examples: a page from an old anatomy textbook, a flattened carnival popcorn bag, a child's drawing of a Thanksgiving hand-turkey, a 'No Parking' sign, a strip of 19th-century wallpaper, a crushed cardboard fan, a photograph of a flower); each object hits its own particular frequency, and it's amazing how harmonious the end results are. I must admit that at first, I doubted these works, or maybe I was jealous—I felt like there wasn't enough change happening, between the objects being found and then being applied to canvas. I was wrong, though, and eventually I started to see how each thing is radically transformed through the act of being carefully chosen. These paintings avoid the tired pop-art trope of the overwhelmed consumer-subject, because they don't overwhelm, they're not trying to. It's like a dictionary where every word could also be a poem.
Rirkrit Tiravanija is best known for staging experiential happenings, like pad thai (1990), in which he constructed a simple, functional kitchen within a gallery, then served fresh plates of pad thai to visitors. While Saunders's paintings are nice examples of how anything can be incorporated into a work of art, Tiravanija's retrospective4 is a nice demonstration of how, through the simple magic of intentionality, anything can just be a work of art. There are some uncomfortable political questions floating around in that formulation, though—questions of who gets to choose which anything is art, and whose anything(s) actually get exhibited in museums. But if you're okay with that, then this show is honestly a lot of fun. You could drink strong coffee in a makeshift tented cafe, listen to a group of musicians laying down tracks in an open-walled recording studio, watch hours and hours of homemade Super 8 movies, or even just look at some paintings hanging on a wall, if that's your thing (pad thai was also on view, but I got there too late to get any pad thai, so that sucked). Tiravanija's work involves a sort of multi-directional openness—a willingness to accept choices made by the audience, by the exhibiting institution, or by Tiravanija himself, even. In our current high-tech context, it's also a reminder that intentionality is the key thing missing from ostensibly "intelligent" systems. Computers can do a lot, but only what they're commanded to—no one has yet figured out how to get them to choose anything.
Technological fascination is nothing new (of course) but, as of lately, there seems to be a glut of tech-minded tourist-trap exhibition halls cropping up in various big cities (New York chief among them). These places tend to promise some degree of interactivity and "immersion" (but what are you being immersed in, exactly?), all in service of a vaguely defined art-viewing experience: something to do with gauzy, projected videos, motion sensors, and pulsing LED lamps. There's nothing wrong with a cheap thrill, but these places aren't cheap (tickets tend to be around $50), and you probably won't be very thrilled.
I speculate that Pipilotti Rist's 2016 retrospective, Pixel Forest5, was ground zero for this phenomenon (or at least, one of a few grounds zero), especially the Pixel Forest itself: a dark room filled with hanging, color-changing lights. Ever since that show exploded on social media, there's been a push to replicate that same bit of paradise, that same sort of buzzing, candy-colored, populist, de facto photo studio. In her recent two-part exhibit in Chelsea6, Rist's pixel-y maximalism felt as beguilingly colorful as ever, with theatrical building façades, walls of dreamy video, and even comfortable beds to lay on, but it suffers a bit in context. It's a problem, because Rist's work would feel very different if it no longer felt like an escape—the utopian and feminist edges of her project getting slowly dulled by a world that's catching-up to her in terms of raw spectacle.
The videos in Rist's installations are often deliberately bleary and indistinct, and that lack of specificity can sometimes get frustrating. On the other hand, the projected slides in the pivotal late-'60s and early-'70s installations/happenings known as Cosmococas—devised by exiled Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica and filmmaker Neville D'Almeida—stick within a tightly, almost bizarrely circumscribed cycle of images drawn from that heady cultural moment. There are photographs of Luis Buñuel, John Cage, Jimi Hendrix, Marilyn Monroe, and Yoko Ono, borrowed from mass media and decorated with artful strips of powdered cocaine. That's it. At Hunter College's Leubsdorf Gallery7, visitors could partake in two Cosmococas intended for domestic spaces, with telephones, couches, and coloring books awash in Oiticica's coked-out imagery; Yoko Ono's Fly (1971) echoing out of a tinny set of speakers. I don't know what Oiticica and D'Almeida imagined of the future but, in plotting these spaces more than a half-century ago, it was wise of them to stay with their beloved counterculture: not just because the figures they chose have remained (as the kids say) iconic, but because the particular brew of avant-garde otherness, pop-culture fun, and druggy hedonism makes for a potent utopian shorthand, even still. Like, imagine a Cosmococa from the '90s where, instead of Hendrix, Ono, and Monroe, you were staring at slides of Eddie Vedder, Kim Basinger, and Björk. See what I mean? It wouldn't really work (though I guess it doesn't sound that bad).
All that said, in a time overrun with spectacle and "interaction," it can be so rewarding to find good art that knows how to stand still. As seen in Tribeca, Diane Simpson's late-'70s sculptures8 are resolutely material, proud to be what they are, playing with illusion and fantasy while refusing to stray past their own physical boundaries: cardboard, tape, pencil. They feel like the industrial discards of a more beautiful world (but not that much more beautiful, not necessarily). Down the street were Jennie C. Jones's sculptural canvases9, which use orderly strips of gray and red fabric to emit a sort of hauntingly soft glow. I kept pretty quiet while I was in the gallery, and I think the other visitors did, too: the work's effect was so delicate that it felt as if the show might collapse if we were too noisy. It didn't, though.
In Chelsea, there was a show of legendary "outsider" artist Bill Traylor10 who, famously, didn't start making his singularly dense, lively drawings until he was 85 years old. In SoHo, there was a modest but worthwhile exhibit of painting and collage by the underrated 20th-century master Jess (a.k.a. Jess Collins)11, who had a gift for creating smallish work of boundless intimacy and strangeness.
Our brave new world of constant input/output is also one of perpetual discord, you see. A sense of contemporary alienation is one of the rare threads binding the work in Mary Helena Clark's recent solo show12—a show of miscommunications and disparities that don't wish to be reconciled. There were motorized deadbolts writhing on the floor to no apparent end, fragile photographs of what may or may not be shoebox-sized egg incubators, and a two-channel collage-film (Neighboring Animals, 2024) which seems to speculate on how captive animals might interpret the human world. It's within this zone of calibrated estrangement that I found one of the most personally relatable artworks I've seen in a long time: Monitors (2024), in which two heavy, steel doors are hollowed-out and then filled with sounds of enthused, unintelligible conversation. The audio was recorded at a zoo, but it readily evokes the feeling of standing uncomfortably at the edge of a crowded party or reception, or something—you know what I mean. I'm sure you've stood on at least one side of that door.
Richard Mosse's Broken Spectre (2018-2022)13—an ambitious, sensorial film on modern environmental exploitation and devastation—features years' worth of carefully collected documentary footage, including airborne shots of the Amazon rainforest. Those overhead shots were captured with sophisticated multispectral cameras, but the final imagery feels like the result of a simple—almost childlike—palette-swapping trick: the verdant forest landscape becoming red instead of green. Is that all it takes, to make this world of ours feel alien and hostile? Yes, apparently.
It's a bit tricky to summarize Auriea Harvey—her work includes websites and commercially released video games, as well as drawings and paintings, 3D-modeled creatures, and eerie digital landscapes, along with cast-metal Medusas and Minotaurs. Harvey was there in the '90s for the first wave of online art, while her more-recent practice utilizes computer tools to realize refreshingly old-fashioned sculptures. Seeing it all together, though—as in her retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image14—there's a remarkable continuity across the decades: the gritty, nervous early-internet experiments and the fleshy, mythopoeic monsters of bronze and wax; the distorted, monochromatic photos of Harvey and her then-boyfriend hidden behind esoteric digital interfaces, and the horned demons grinning within state-of-the-art holographic displays. It all goes together, because her work doesn't divorce the digital from the corporeal—at every technological inflection point, it moves toward the body, rather than attempting a retreat into some post-human virtual nothingness (as so much modern tech seems to be doing).
Perhaps that's the real problem with the current culture of "AI" and concomitant attempts to digitize everything: It imagines the body as obsolete. Because, I mean, if you try to scrub-out the blood and skin, sex and death, pleasure and pain, then what are you left with? Just a bunch of stupid computers.
| 1 | GPT-4, DALL-E, Midjourney, and many others |
| 2 | Harold Cohen: AARON; Whitney Museum; the name 'AARON' is not an acronym, FYI |
| 3 | Raymond Saunders: Post No Bills; David Zwirner, Andrew Kreps |
| 4 | Rirkrit Tiravanija: A LOT OF PEOPLE; PS1 |
| 5 | Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest; New Museum, October 2016–January 2017 |
| 6 | Pipilotti Rist: Prickling Goosebumps & a Humming Horizon; Luhring Augustine, Hauser & Wirth |
| 7 | Cosmic Shelter: Hélio Oiticica and Neville D'Almeida's Private Cosmococas; Hunter College Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery |
| 8 | Diane Simpson: 1977–1980; James Cohan |
| 9 | Jennie C. Jones: Tonal Center; Alexander Gray Associates |
| 10 | Bill Traylor: Works from The William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation; David Zwirner |
| 11 | Jess: Piling Up The Rectangles; Tibor de Nagy |
| 12 | Mary Helena Clark: Conveyor; Bridget Donahue |
| 13 | Richard Mosse: Broken Spectre; Jack Shainman |
| 14 | Auriea Harvey: My Veins Are the Wires, My Body Is Your Keyboard; Museum of the Moving Image |