Art Then Technology (Part 6): Authority is a Technology

Fat Bastard: end of fourth day of installation.

(Return to Part 5)

I hate the canard about abstract art acting as a 'visual pause' in the otherwise hectic environment of consumer capitalism, I always have. The part I dislike is the justification of the 'pause', it's such weak tea. I am not a huge fan of either capitalism or consumerism, but I love the spectacle of Times Square and the squirrely density of consumer goods at my corner bodega. I enjoy the density of imagery and noise, and the press of the crowd; that has not always been the case however. Not long after I arrived in New York I took refuge in a Dan Flavin retrospective. 

Art Then Technology (Part 5): Abstract Art Is A Technology.

Fat Bastard: end of third day of installation.
(Return to Part 4)

As a participant in an exhibition of abstract 'generative' art called abstrakt - Abstrakt, I spent nine days installing, and had a lot of time to think about the work of the other artists in the show, most of whom used or addressed the crumbling edge of digital technology, and almost all of whom evoked for me the flatfooted logic of the last great wave of abstract art, 1960s era minimalism. My work is sometimes describes as post-minimalist. I like to describe it as post-Star Wars-minimalism, but not because it's high-tech. My art is not-at-all-crumbling edge; I use no advanced technology, my design and fabrication is entirely analog, but by the time I became aware of abstraction, Modernism had been recast as the Deathstar and destroyed. Abstract artist of my generation are "late-adopters." Late adopter is a term usually reserved for technologies. My decision to take up abstraction in the mid-1990s was because abstraction is not a style, that the difference between abstract art and earlier art is not a difference in quality, it is a difference in kind. But it has only been as I've been thinking about exactly what technology is that it occurred to me that the difference is the difference between a very old technology and a relatively new one.