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. ... ) __ _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
[NetBehaviour] The Immensity of Painting and the World
Alan Sondheim via NetBehaviour Mon, 24 Oct 2022 00:35:06 -0700