[NetBehaviour] The Immensity of Painting and the World

[Alan Sondheim via NetBehaviour]

The Immensity of Painting and the World

http://www.alansondheim.org/picture.jpg

This is what I've been thinking rambling at 3:15 a.m. -

(this is not about painting)

I want to talk about the immensity of painting . I've been lucky
in my life to know a great many painters and to recognize the
amount of time and energy that may go into a single painting.
But it is more than that . It is the fact that what is brought
to the painting, not only in the movement of the hand and the
brush in relationship to the canvas or other surface , but what
is brought to the painting is a background and complexity that
may very well be non semiotic non signifying and nonlinguistic .
In other words a painting comes from an Umwelt, a totality which
is almost indescribable, involving body, history, histories,
materialities, and the arrangements or presentings or
deployments or [xxx] that occur on or within or without or in
relation to or not, of the canvas or other surfaces and forms.
The seduction of the digital is that it does away with all of
this in its instantaneity. I attempt in my own digital work to
embrace both the digital and the body and muted signs,
articulations, and structures that bring me forward into
inordinate spaces. When I work in Second Life, there are
structures that crowd me, interfere with my speech, threaten to
bring the platforming down, to collapse the environment that I
have worked on for close to two decades now. Instead of
platform, I think of platforming. What bothers me now about AI
among other digital worldings such is "meta" is their ease of
attainment, the potentially infinite quantity of images and
objects that give a sense of distance from the world of the
body, suffering, disease, and so forth, replacing these with
surfaces that may be transformed almost immediately, or
discarded or presented. The ease of these tools rubs up against
Clement Rosset's "the idiotic real" - with, I think, a struggle
within and without immensity. The tools seduce emblems seduce;
communities and communities of immensity are elsewhere. Decades
ago I was teaching at Atlanta College of Art, and was able to
watch Apple offer free computers as well as the Apple world, to
the students. Trained on these tools, they dominated; I kept
hearing for example that it was literally impossible to do color
printing from PC's etc. - you _needed_ Apple. The Apple store a
couple of blocks from us in Providence is the result - advanced
lighting, the products displayed as precious objects from
another world which is our world plus financing. Linux and PCs
have never been seductive the same way - PCs not at all outside
of gaming, and linux varieties are another story based on
multiplicities. Facebook itself seduces, and we all know that
road. What worries me is that immensity of the real (whatever)
is collapsing in favor of the infinity of images and protocols -
as if the internetworkings no longer provide opportunities, but
the collapse of possibilities outside the RFCs and their
extensions. One sign of this is the continuous increase of
aphorisms on Fb and elsewhere; unlike, say, Adorno's Minima
Moralia, where the last world of print is drawn out into intense
and difficult abstractions, the aphorisms are short, pithy,
cool, resonant, and often scan; it's as if their answering deep
rifts of and in the social through well-turned phrases that
often scan. (Clearly the plenitude of words and images no longer
need us.) We need more interference, not less, more ruptures of
featureless surfaces that extrude features, more troubles rising
to the surface. Critical race theory, genderings, global news,
upheavals - images of war, genocide, starvation, disease,
poverty, refugees, climate kilter - all of these things are
necessary to present and re/present and represent; otherwise
we'll be riding some version of the Qanon roller-coaster in the
future, bang bang bang.

( ... Just to clarify - I don't mean that AI or any other tools
are inherently bad or useless; I don't mean that AI art should
be taken as seriously as any other; I don't mean that all art
should be grounded in the "real" (whatever that is); I don't
mean that art should be "difficult" to produce or should be, in
fact, anything at all. I worry, as do many about a kind of
removal that may be occurring now - for example students in art
schools who make pitches or the ad currently on tv saying that
"this chair will change the way the world sits" - without even
thinking for example, who exactly is sitting on that chair. We
need to embrace complexity, not tunnel through it via images.
... and finally I must admit I'm as guilty as anyone as doing
exactly these things, although the AI I've engaged with (and
wrote a little years ago) was enchanting. ... )

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