2D Art

Automation in Art

"Only when he no longer knows what he is doing, does the painter do good things." - Edgar Degas

"Surrender to your Art and only go where it takes you." - Allyson Grey

Theory

In 1957, Marcel Duchamp presented a lecture to the American Federation of the Arts Convention in Houston, Texas. Duchamp told the audience:

In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions. His struggle toward the realization is a series of efforts, pains, satisfaction, refusals, decisions, which also cannot and must not be fully self-conscious, at least on the esthetic plane.

Marcel Duchamp, The Creative Act. Transcript of a lecture at the American Federation of the Arts Convention in Houston, Texas.

Thirteen years later, in 1970, Robert Morris wrote an essay in which he described the automating principle in contemporary art:

What is ... shared by many 20th-century artists is that some part of the systematic making process has been automated. The employment of gravity and a kind of "controlled chance" has been shared by many ... in the materials / process interaction. However it is employed, the automation serves to remove taste and the personal touch by co-opting forces, images, processes, to replace a step formerly taken in a directing or deciding way by the artist. Such moves are innovative and are located in prior means but are revealed in the a posteriori images as information. Whether this is draping wax-soaked cloth to replace modeling, identifying prior "found" flat images with the totality of a painting, employing chance in an endless number of ways to structure relationships, constructing rather than arranging, allowing gravity to shape or complete some phase of the work - all such diverse methods involve what can only be called automation and imply the process of making back from the finished work.

Automating some stage of the making gives greater coherence to the activity itself. Working picks up some internal necessity at those points where the work makes itself, so to speak. At those points where automation is substituted for a previous "all made by hand" homologous set of steps, the artist has stepped aside for more of the world to enter into the art. This is a kind of regress into a controlled lack of control. Inserting the discontinuity of automated steps would not seem, on the face of it, to reduce the arbitrary in art making. Such controlled stepping aside actually reduces the making involvement or decisions in the production. It would seem that the artist is here turned away from the making, alienated even more from the product. But art making cannot be equated with craft time. Making art is much more about going through with something. Automating processes of the kind described open the work and the artist's interacting behavior to completing forces beyond his total personal control.

Robert Morris, "Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making: The Search for the Motivated," Artforum VIII no. 8, April 1970, pp. 62-66.

Morris is describing the usefulness of automation in helping the artist to move beyond the confines of personal taste and aesthetic sensibility. In another part of the same essay, Morris invokes Duchamp by writing, "... art making has to be based on other terms than those of arbitrary, formalistic, tasteful arrangements of static forms." (click this link to hear Duchamp present his 1957 lecture, "The Creative Act.")