Opening
Clayton and I are going to talk about ideas and insights generated from an advanced painting course titled “Visual Systems,” that we developed and team taught in the spring of 2003. While the course was not specifically formed to deal with post-digital ideas in painting, the four dominant topics (Perspective and Anamorphic Perspective, Lens Culture, the Pixel and Color Separation Process, and Cartography) were each concerned with different technologies of reproduction and image translation. The class’s investigation naturally led to discussions about the ideas surrounding digital imaging and wondering about how its systems of translation might reveal certain tendencies in our contemporary culture.

To begin I would suggest that the two of us have approached the teaching of painting in the “post-digital” era from a variety of directions, including the opposite end of the spectrum as a “material” investigation, and that the class “Visual Systems” came not out of an attempt to answer the question of how to teach painting now, as it continues to be taught with varying success, but to continue to flesh out the tools that young image-makers have to work with as they develop a direction and are forced to contend with both the limits and the possibilities of the medium of painting. We focused on four methods for dimensional translation that are taught as techniques but perhaps not investigated as ideas about how the world is structured.

In “Visual Systems” we were specifically looking to mine the language surrounding some dominant ways of representing the three dimensional world in two dimensions so that students might gain insight into the work they were already making or find the impetus for new work by reading authors who had meditated on the visual structures that simultaneously articulated and changed the way society thought about the visual world. We hoped to find some fertile territory in the poetic/metaphoric, philosophical, and scientific ideas embedded in the seemingly neutral technologies of image reproduction. In reconsidering the ways others have written about and discussed methods of translation there seemed the possibility that our study might reveal hidden options within the different imaging techniques that had not been fully explored, or that might make particular sense if re-interpreted though the lens of this particular “post-digital” time. Finally, we wanted the students to understand that the “post-digital” condition is not particularly new to painting, that it might, in fact, come out of the long trajectory of painting, and that the history of painting, a wonderfully parasitic or as Clayton will suggest “vampiric” activity, could be viewed as a conscious or unconscious response to the advancement of the methods of reproducing the optical world.

Our discussion will focus on the ways that we understand imaging technologies to embody language, and therefore views about the world, and how artists, past and present, have made use of the ideological positions underlying different visual structures.

Perspective and Anamorphic Perspective
Perspective was, perhaps, the most obvious visual system that we chose to approach. Its status as the first rational, mathematical, geometric and supposedly objective system for translating visual space (the structuring of the course could be seen as a linear development of increasingly advanced devices for distancing the making of image from the human mind and emotions in an attempt at ever increasing objectivity, neutrality, and accuracy) makes perspective a kind of cornerstone for the beginning of a distinctly Western conception of space and also makes the idea of perspective particularly susceptible to the critique of Western Culture as rational, scientific, patriarchal, and perhaps driven to control. We hoped to look at both positive, negative and poetic responses to the perspectival system of representation and to look at where artists, historically and currently, have worked with and against the lens-like system of depiction, making use of its history and the audience’s understanding of the device. [Amselm Keiffer }

We discussed perspective as relying upon the idea of a rational, surface based, divisible, and unmoving space that can be accurately captured by applying the proper math. We attempted to explore the idea of neutrality and the objective representation of space, noting the way that even these basic ideas are contended in feminist theories of the gaze and the objectification of the other, are already in contention much earlier in the work of cubism and its practitioners suggestion of two eyes in a moving body rather than the single immobile (disembodied eye), and of course were in debate at the very time of Perspectives development with the debate between curved or straight space. Built into Perspective is the language of subjects and objects (“point of view”, “vanishing point”, “horizon line”, etc.) that will become central to the Twentieth Century’s discussion of identity and our continued attempt at the decentering of the subject by authors like Sartre and Lacan.

My consideration of the system of Perspective, and later Anamorphic Perspective, came from teaching a variety of drawing and two dimensional design classes. With my freshmen I always started with a couple of simple questions: “How do you know that anything is there?” and “How is a drawing different than the world?” These questions laid the groundwork for questioning ways that a still image must translate the dimensional world around us, must distort a “lived reality”, and, in those things that are different than reality (like the edges of the paper, the fact that a drawing doesn’t move, speak, or smell, the fact that there is no physical “space” in a painting but instead optical “space”) the making of images must reveal ideas about how the artist thinks about the world.

If Perspective metaphorized the painting as an accurate optical “window” which the audience could look into from the proper position, freezing all movement and allowing for the almost “monocular,” passive, and voyeuristic gaze, then its counter Anamorphic Perspective, a method that pinched or stretched the grided space of perspective, and developed soon after, reveals not only an acute understanding of the position of the painter in relation to what they are witnessing, but also an understanding of the viewer in relation to the “objectness” of painting in lived space [Sol LeWitt]. As described by Leeman in one of the classes’ readings called Hidden Images, “The system of central perspective not only rationalizes the relationship between objects within a picture, but also establishes a relationship between the viewer and the represented images. Anamorphoses are an extreme example of this subjectivization. The Etymological origin of the word, from the Greek ana (again) morphe (shape), indicated that the spectator must play a part to re-form the picture. Simply put, if you look at a painting from the side it looks different. So a viewer must place his or herself in a physical, as well as a psychological, position in relation to the thing they are interacting with. This was probably actually less surprising at the time of Perspectives invention because painting had always been intertwined with architecture, and as accuracy was the presiding currency, it was a simple matter of fact that as people looked up you did not want the figure to become horribly distorted, just as the Greeks, in their search for the perfect proportion, added girth to the tops of columns so that they would not dissipate in optical space. Regardless of historical speculations, Anamorphic Perspective had been used from its earliest conception for the hiding of specific subject matter, the creation of wonder as bodily movement generated changing image, [Holbein’s “The Ambassadors”] and as early as Holbein, been understood as a philosophical system depicting a kind of existential crisis between the things that could be controlled by vision, (and vision was, in the west, the “controlling” factor -“see it to believe it”-) and those things that were outside of the optical field, death and our knowledge of it, language, ideas etc.

I hoped that Anamorphic Perspective would help the students to consider their paintings as part of, or in relation to the structures they are physically and conceptually placed in. I also wondered if the students couldn’t begin to consider their work not only in relation to a “reading” mind, but also as part of a physical, bodily relationship between the audience and the image; to consider the fact that a painting could change meaning dependent upon where it was viewed from and not only the “psychological” position of the audience, and that these relationships could be played with to create meaning. This bodily relationship to images would be further explored in our study of the pixel and the breakdown of the image into smaller particles rather than a geometric grid.

Lens Culture
Since the advent of digital imaging, it is not uncommon to hear artists and theorists hold forth on the “death of lens culture” – which is, I suppose, meant to signal the importance of our particular historical moment as a radical break with the perspectival, analog past and all of its conceptual baggage. Ironically, though, digital imaging has brought with it a proliferation of lenses: digital cameras, remote surveillance systems, huge sophisticated telescope arrays, pen cams, PDA cameras, cell phone cameras, etc. Whatever else the digital revolution may be, it is not the death of, but just the most recent extension of our culture’s fascination with lenses. All of the advances in the manipulation, transmission, and interpretation of image data through digital systems would be impossible were they not piggybacked onto the existing and somewhat antiquated technology of the lens. This photograph by Abelardo Morrell demonstrates just how low-tech this whole business is: nothing but a cardboard box with a piece of polished glass taped to the front. This lens technology still carries with it the fundamental assumption that the world is cleanly perceivable according to Cartesian logic and accurately translatable through monocular perspective. As Jonathan Crary has so ably argued in his book Techniques of the Observer, during the 19th century conceptualizations of vision became increasingly complicated. Viewers interacting with stereoscopes, zootropes and other visual machines learned that vision was bodily, messy, full of blinks and pulsations, and capable of being tricked in a hundred ways. This is a painting of mine from 2000, titled Stereoscopic Sky.—The center parts are literally stereoscopic, so that if you cross your eyes just right, they jump into 3D, while the fringe of trees around the edges are random drips and stains which do not resolve into 3D.

It seems to me that the tools we have created for digital imaging could potentially continue to undermine and complicate the lingering totalizing authority of the lens (for example: Photoshop has trained us to look for traces of tampering in every image, VR goggles give you that queasy seasick feeling, etc.) but, more often than not, the people who work with these tools are desperately trying to reinforce the old Cartesian model – one point perspective has had a major revival in videogames, and illusionistic realism is the goal of so much 3D animation and VR.

So, what does this all mean for students of painting? Well, some of the most interesting paintings around today are interesting in part because they played with the problems of translation between different forms of photographic information. In the case of Vija Celmins, her fidelity to copying the photograph almost down to the very density of the silver nitrate grain, makes paintings that have an intensity, a compactness and a physicality that is truly extraordinary. A number of our students were quite sophisticated in the ways that they were attentive to the visual and physical qualities inherent in various photographic and digital media, using those subtle differences to explore what it means to look and to see. Elizabeth Deasy

In a recent Artforum discussion, David Reed suggested that photography, rather than being the kiss of death that rendered painting obsolete, was actually like the vampires kiss that made painting immortal—by providing it with millions of new ways of visualizing the world, which painting has, over the last hundred and fifty years or so, rebelled against, ignored, emulated, parodied, deconstructed, celebrated and generally just played around with. I see digital imaging having the same effect today. Photoshop, CAD programs, 3-d modeling, scanners, digital artifacting, data visualization, etc. as interesting as they are in their own right, have become for painting students just that much more subject matter . . . and material . . . and process that they can use. (or to use David Reed’s metaphor, just so many more victims whose blood can be drunk to extend painting’s immortality . . . .)

The Pixel and the Color Separation Process
While the color separation process ties closely to the mathematic deconstructing of space that comes out of the trajectory of perspectival thought as well as having a profound relationship with the lens and its valuation of optical space, the structure of the dot matrix and the four colors (CMYK) of the color printing process seemed to warrant their own investigation. This most current of image reproduction processes was probably the least “theorized” of the systems of translation we studied due to its shorter history, so the class and I tried to make sense of the technology on our own, with a little help from Deleuze and a piece of writing by Loretta Staples called “Blur” that begins with a quote by Lazlo Moholy-Nagy - “Every period has its own optical focus.” We wondered what ours might be and set out to describe the conditions of the color separation process as well as noting how our descriptions linked with other processes in our contemporary world.

Nearly all of the reproduced images in our culture are constructed out of four colors and varying densities of dots. Color separation is a process of scanning, mathematically separating, determining densities and putting this information back together again in a form that can be reproduced endlessly on different materials. The students picked up immediately on this languages relationship to biology and genetics, and further back to the Pre-Socratics who were trying to divide the world into its “fundamental” components. We also discussed how these disciplines relate to our current understanding of what is beyond our immediate perception, how differently the world behaves under different lenses, and how our distance from things determines our relationship to meaning. So while the Anamorphic images brought the body of the viewer into space, where linear motion shifted interpretation, pixelization brings the body into a relation of distance to the image, where the motion of in and out, rather than that of scanning across, shifts the way we relate to information.

The color separation process presupposes the most natural relationship to reproducing the image. There is no human intervention in the system of translation, no mind to get in the way. All information is equal under the gaze of digital technology, and anything that can be seen can be easily reproduced out of dots. As Staples’ describes it, “an edge is the binding that separates a thing from all that surrounds it. And in this new ambient space nothing seems more extraneous.” An edge is just a greater accumulation of dots. The students and I asked ourselves if we could not make use of the sheer neutrality of the dot, and learning from that are searching for that smallest bit of information in out universe, find out what happens when neutrality is lost or re-defined, like particles into strings.

Cartography
I was just arguing that the digital is, in many ways, nothing really new, but it does embody a new way of thinking, and there are qualities of the digital that insinuate themselves into our visual experience even of non-digital things. One of the side effects of pixelization and ever-increasing processor speed is the amazing speed with which we see and transmit images. Conversations about computers always boil down to speed & bandwidth – How fast can it go? How many gigabytes per second? Computers (and video) have trained us to expect images to appear quickly and to change effortlessly and seamlessly into other images in a constant stream. They have taught us that stillness is boring – that images are not meant to be stared at unless they’re moving.
The fourth section of our class dealt with mapping, which is of course very similar in attitude to scanning and pixelization. Maps are great equalizers [Ptolemaic World Map] . . . they grid off the world and painstakingly fill in the squares, one tiny bit of data at a time. Computers are excellent at mapping but still to get any degree of fine resolution, it is slow going. [Landsat Photo]

So, there is a major paradox inherent in the lessons we absorb from the billions of digital images that we see. First: we learn that images are meant to be consumed as rapidly as possible, that they should move, and be brightly colored to catch our attention briefly, then disappear. Second: we learn that images are created painstakingly and systematically through algorithms, mapping, scanning, frame-by frame animating, etc. Digital image editing programs train us to make progress only by endless series of incremental steps – and that success depends on making as many decisions as possible in advance so as to not waste months of your life making major changes later on. In essence, we learn that images are extremely slow to make and extremely fast to take in. This attitude makes painting even more of an absurd activity than it has always been. This piece of mine titled Antipodes indulges a bit in the masochism of this paradox. It was originally painted on the surface of a large sphere, from which it was then painstakingly removed and re-adhered to linen in an absurdly literal process of cartographic projection. In essence—doing something by hand in order to introduce an element of randomness and physicality into a process that could be done much more easily by computer.

So I find myself talking more and more about speed as I do studio visits – trying to convince my students that speed is an important aspect of painting. Inkjet prints have exactly one speed across the entire surface. That’s how they work; it’s all about regularity. Paintings, on the other hand, can have an infinite variety of speeds – of gesture, of line, of material, of surface treatment, etc. But the students proceed like inkjet printers; they are willing to put in hundreds of hours of painstaking work on a single image, but they do so with machine-like regularity, not wanting anything unexpected to happen. For most of them painting is an output process, anything surprising that might happen along the way is a printer error. One artist who works this way is Ingrid Calame, who literally begins her work by mapping random stains from sidewalks, then painstakingly transfers them to panels and fills them in with enamel paint like crazy paint-by number paintings.

Ingrid’s paintings are dizzyingly complex despite (or because of) her systematic process, but I find that I really have to sell my students on the virtues of complexity, subtlety and richness, qualities that I have to remind myself that they may not want their work to have. Sometimes they are subconsciously making paintings aimed at the lowest-common-denominator 640x480 pixel screen size. They don’t say it, but you can sort of hear them thinking: “Why make anything more subtle or variegated than that? It’s all gonna be lost when I turn it into a JPEG . . . .”

[Jake Feige] The positive side of this is that sometimes they hold their work up to the standard of beauty of the oversized plasma screen, with all of its smooth, glossy, liquid glow – no trace of hand, no filmic flicker, no gesture, no texture. And sometimes they do rise to this impossibly luminous challenge, making paintings that are made up of layers of cartographically precise, processed, calculated information, and which glow with an intense, cold light.