Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
September 2018
September 28, 2018–April 14, 2019
Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018 establishes connections between works of art based on instructions, spanning over fifty years of conceptual, video, and computational art. The pieces in the exhibition are all “programmed” using instructions, sets of rules, and code, but they also address the use of programming in their creation. The exhibition links two strands of artistic exploration: the first examines the program as instructions, rules, and algorithms with a focus on conceptual art practices and their emphasis on ideas as the driving force behind the art; the second strand engages with the use of instructions and algorithms to manipulate the TV program, its apparatus, and signals or image sequences.
Among the earliest works in the show are screenprints by Josef Albers, made long after the artist emigrated to the United States from Germany, where he had been an instructor at the Bauhaus. Albers was particularly interested in color theory and investigating the perceptual changes in hue caused by placing different colors next to each other. In the works from his Homage to the Square and Variant series exhibited in the show, he developed rules for nesting colored squares and rectangles to emphasize how our perception of a single color—its hue, saturation, and transparency—varies depending on its proximity to and interaction with adjacent colors.
Josef Albers’s work is paired with John F. Simon Jr.’s Color Panel v1.0 (1999), a work of software art based on the Bauhaus experiments with color and displayed on a laptop modified by the artist. Dividing the screen into five rectangles, the software written by Simon encodes variations of transparency and color coding and mixing. One of the rectangles is a programmed version of the “transparency problem” that Albers posed to his students, asking them to mix intermediate colors to make it appear that one shape overlays another. In Color Panel v1.0, it is the algorithm that mixes the colors to simulate transparency.