Why the chips are no longer down for early computer art
This year is proving fertile for 50thanniversary celebrations in the art world, as baby boomers turn the clock back and relive their youth. First there were exhibitions in both London and Paris reviving memories of the 1968 student protests and the urban guerrilla street art that went with it. Now, it is the turn of the birth of computer art, or at least the first manifestation of it in Britain in a public gallery.
In 1968, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, which had just moved to its smart new address in Pall Mall, opened the show Cybernetic Serendipity. At the time, artists were challenging traditional art forms by experimenting with new media, including computer, digital and video. The ICA exhibition tapped into this, with sections on music, film, graphics and interactivity, showing how artists were playing with the concept of mechanical control to make chance discoveries. On view were robots, drawing machines, and photographs turned into linear images. “Where else,” asked the Evening Standard, “could you take a hippie, a computer programmer, a 10-year-old schoolboy and guarantee that each would be perfectly happy for an hour without you having to lift a finger to entertain them?”
Next month, the V&A hopes to reignite that sense of wonder, with a free display inspired by the ICA show. Chance and Control: Art in the Age of Computers will assemble 2,000 examples of computer-generated art and design made over the past half century, including work by artists such as Frieder Nake and Vera Molnár, who have been using technology as part of their practice since the Sixties. Remarkably, though, the market for 50-year-old computer drawings is still in its infancy. Technically known as “plotter drawings”, these early works were made with sets of instructions devised by the artist, translated into code and sent via a computer to a plotter machine. They are rare, though, because they were considered ephemeral, says Catherine Mason, author of the 2008 book, A Computer in the Art Room: the Origins of British Computer Arts. Indeed, many artists threw their work away in the Eighties and Nineties because there was no critical interest in them, she tells me. However, three who didn’t are now the subject of a selling exhibition at the Mayor Gallery in London.
The Italian-born Brazilian artist Waldemar Cordeiro (1924-1973) was already exploring art forms that proved sympathetic to computer technology. During the late Forties, he had been one of the pioneers of Concrete Art, a branch of geometrical abstraction. Cordeiro combined it with elements of pop art, before becoming the first artist in Brazil to experiment with electronic technology.
A technique he developed in the late Sixties marked him out as one of the few early computer artists to embrace figuration. The process of making a print such as The Woman That Is Not B.B. (Brigitte Bardot), a newspaper image of a distressed child taken during the Vietnam War that Cordeiro manually digitised to its numerical ordering, then transcribed to punch cards and applied visual effects, could take five hours. The 1971 offset print is now priced at $17,000 (£12,770).
The American artist Robert Mallary (1917-1997) had been a “junk artist” before he moved to computers. In 1969, he produced one of the first computergenerated sculptures – a kind of plywood laminate totem, a version of which is in the show priced at $175,000. His computer drawings, sometimes using two or three colours, are a more affordable $4,500 (£3,380) each.
The Hungarian Vera Molnár (b1924), who is still working at the age of 93, had always been fascinated with geometric form. Her plotter drawings in this show embody a judgment she made recently of her work: “My life is squares, triangles and lines. I’m mad about lines.” Meticulously preserved, her drawings are now priced from $15,000 to $50,000.
Though all three artists are in the V&A’S collection of computergenerated art, none has achieved great prominence in the booming post-war and contemporary market, perhaps because their pieces are a little too cerebral – which is good for collectors who don’t like runaway price movements.
James Mayor, gallery director, insists he doesn’t know anyone, other than the V&A, currently collecting early computer drawings – or maybe he is just being discreet. Surely it’s a budding collecting area for all those super-wealthy, 21st-century Silicon Valley computer geeks?