Orlando in the Thicket of Sasha (2020) 30x30cm virus-modeled artificial life painting on canvas
Joseph Nechvatal ~ Biographical Background
Joseph Nechvatal (born in Chicago in 1951) is an American post-conceptual artist living in Paris who creates virus-modeled artificial life computer-assisted paintings and animations. Themes he has addressed in his art include the apocalyptic, communication excess, the virus, and gender fluidity.
In 1975, he moved from Chicago to the downtown Tribeca area of New York City. He began studying at Columbia University with the philosopher Arthur Danto while working for the Dia Art Foundation as archivist to the minimalist composer La Monte Young.
In 1980, he moved from Tribeca to the sordid Lower East Side where he found artistic camaraderie and politically inspired creative energy. There he became closely associated with Collaborative Projects (Colab), the influential post-punk artists’ group that included Kiki Smith and Jenny Holzer, among others. Those were glory days for the famous Colab projects, such as Just Another Asshole, The Real Estate Show and The Times Square Show. He also helped establish the non-profit cultural space ABC No Rio, where exhibitions were animated by political purpose.
In the early 1980s, his art consisted of dense post-minimalist gray graphite drawings (that were sometimes photo-mechanically enlarged), of sculpture, of photographs, and of musique concrète audio collages.
In 1983, he co-founded the famous avant-garde art music project Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine.
In 1984, he created an opera called XS: The Opera Opus (1984-6) with the no wave musical composer Rhys Chatham that was presented in Boston and New York.
In 1986, Nechvatal began using computer-robotics to make conceptual paintings. Some were exhibited at Documenta VIII in 1987.
In 1992, when he was artist-in-residence at the Louis Pasteur Atelier in Arbois and at the Saline royale d’Arc-et-Senans, he created computer virus codes that he used as an artistic tool. This work was a reflection on his personal experiences of risk and loss with the AIDS epidemic.
In 1995, at the urging of Pierre Restany, he moved to Paris and began splitting his time between Paris and New York.
In 1999, he earned his doctorat in the philosophy of aesthetics and technology in England and soon wrote two art theory books: Towards an Immersive Intelligence and Immersion Into Noise.
In 2001, he extended his initial experimentations into the virus as an artistic painterly tool in a series of artificial life works. These works include various series of paintings, animations, and a lengthy audio composition entitled viral symphOny. He has created a series of virus-based themed exhibitions of artificial life paintings and animation projections that explore the fragility and fluidity of the human body.
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Joseph Nechvatal
Orlando et la tempête
Galerie Richard
74, rue de Turenne 75003 Paris
paris@galerierichard.com
September 5th – October 21st 2020
vernissage September 5th 5-8pm
Orlando et la tempête (Orlando and the Tempest) is a series of virus-modeled artificial life paintings by Joseph Nechvatal that indirectly addresses issues of gender plasticity within our tempestuous viral and social-political times by imagining nonexistent mythic scenes from the flippant 1928 novel Orlando by Virginia Woolf (the story of an aristocratic young male poet who transforms into a woman overnight and lives a tumultuous life for 300 years).
Orlando et la tempête treats the fantastical and voluble story of Woolf’s Orlando with corresponding puckish flippancy. But this playful flippancy is achieved by what Nechvatal thinks of as the responsibility of long looking—a shift into a non-binary visual noise field where viewers can re-appropriate their capacity to visualize on a personal basis.
Storms have no gender and mean full-blow fluidity. In Orlando et la tempête, the artist’s ambiguous Orlando avatar (a regenerated Lazarus) is embedded into just such noisy chaotic grounds to the extent that normal figure/ground relationships more-or-less merge, playing elusively with what is seen, what is suggested, what is repressed, and what is desired. That starring pansexual Orlando avatar plays a painful hide-and-seek with the tempestuous, viral whipped, environment, that, in the end, is meant to suggest carnal mystic queries.
Long term influences on Nechvatal’s pangender interests have been key works of Marcel Duchamp and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s term (from the mid-80s) panthropology: a transhumanist multi-spectrum poly-androgynous concept that transcends gender labels. In 2000 Nechvatal exhibited Computer Virus Project II artworks (with artist’s statements) investigating virtual hermaphrodite complexity in his ec-satyricOn 2000 exhibition, and again in his 2002 show vOluptuary: an algorithic hermaphornology. Nechvatal has continued to use viral, androgynous and trans forms in his work, since. In 2018, he penned a pansexual art theory paper entitled Before and Beyond the Bachelor Machine that was published in Arts.
As meticulously articulated in Nechvatal’s book Immersion Into Noise, Orlando et la tempête utilizes aesthetic visual noise that puts representation and abstraction into interactive play by flipping the common figure/ground emphasis (to some extent) so that the eye must navigate and unpack the phantasmagorical pandemonium presented. This entails an intimate act of seeing and imaging on the part of the viewer, which the paintings’ modest size encourages. As such, Orlando et la tempête dips under the surface of the turbulently shredding atmospherics of today to convey and encourage intimate fluid visualizations that resist social constraints.
Gender here is viewed as an act of becoming that fails to sustain sex oppression by ceasing to draw the boundaries of the Other. As such, it is a provocation not only to male/female constructions of heterosexuality, but also to homosexual constructions of identity. This critique of ‘representation’ in the aesthetic sense is part of a critique of ‘representation’ in the political sense (and vice versa).
The pictures in the exhibition are created with custom C++ artificial life software modeled as a virus (made in collaboration with the French programmer Stéphane Sikora) and archival inkjet on Hahnemühle Daguerre canvas. The black node graph panels in some of the diptychs and triptychs were made in a manner similar to Markov chains, tracking the word virus in William S. Burroughs 1970 essay The Electronic Revolution. In that essay, Burroughs draws attention to the subversive influence of the word virus on humans and the dangers of using the human voice as a weapon. A script was written to analyze the text, where, for every transition from the word virus to another word virus, a link was drawn between the nodes corresponding to that recurring word. Then Graphviz, an open source graph visualization software, was used to generate the graph, which Nechvatal then aesthetically treated.
