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June 5, 2023
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From the Archive: Dada to Data
This week, the editors revisit Max Kozloff’s “Men and Machines” from Artforum’s February 1969 issue. The critic’s reflections on art and technology are best read alongside our summer issue, which contains writings on artificial intelligence by hannah baer, Mario Carpo, and Zoë Hitzig.
“Comforting solipsisms do not forestall fear that our onetime extensions, the machines, are becoming our present competitors.” Written more than fifty years ago, Kozloff’s words ring with alarming prescience as staggering developments in generative AI portend the disruption and reorganization of human labor, knowledge, and creativity. Indeed, as Artforum editor in chief David Velasco writes in the magazine’s summer issue, it feels like we have arrived at an “inflection point, the beginning of a new era of spectacle.”
How did we get here? As Kozloff reminds us, the twentieth century was rife with cyborgian dreams and nightmares, from “messianic Constructivism” to Dadaist nihilism to the “Faustian concept behind E.A.T.” Reviewing MoMA’s 1969 exhibition “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age,” Kozloff envisions the boundaries between human and nonhuman cognition (perhaps never as solid as we believed) ultimately melting into air. “The more sophisticated the technology,” he observes, again with Cassandran foresight, “the more energy diffuses into thought, and output into symbols.”
Click here to read Max Kozloff’s “Men and Machines,” which will be unlocked for the next seven days.
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OF THE FLICKED AND TWISTED pigmented gristle of Francis Bacon’s faces, Lawrence Cowing recently wrote:
When a thing is ‘painted’ it is captured or reborn in a substance that is endlessly protean, metaphoric, adhesive and elastic, infinitely fantastic. The equivalence itself is a unique, improbable fantasy of Western man. It is always more or less uncontrollable, impulsive and automatic. It is not for want of trying that no picture has quite been repeated since painting began. The stuff of painting remains beyond comprehension; it is unreasonable and disturbing that the whole message must reach us through the magic accident that happens to only one man. (“The Irrefutable Image,” Catalog of Francis Bacon Exhibition, Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York, 1968.)
What a touching statement, this atavistic cri de coeur, proudly lamenting the “magic accident” of art! For it goes now increasingly against the grain of every demand of modern living, of contemporary survival itself, that we in life could ever be as gutsily happenstantial as an artist like Bacon in his work.
The disordered level on which physiological changes trigger feeling and performance through the unpredictable synthesis of mere proteins and the flash stimulus of nerves (although, in fact, that is what humanly occurs), is inadmissible within the ordered priorities of social intersection. Nothing in 20th-century experience has tabooed the individualism of the senses or drugged impulse more than the gross, electric, insatiable, effort-saving and mind-leveling effects upon us of spread technology. On pain of being reduced to a parasitical luxury, contemporary art, more than it has ever done in the past, negotiates (how, remains very much to be seen), with the machine as the central and most unavoidable presence of its time. For if there looms the menace that the range of creative responses might be drastically limited and standardized, there also emerges the possibility that our greatest accomplishments can be released from the “unreasonable” bondage of issuing mainly from the inexplicable, exclusive history of the viscera of a few men. Indeed, such a latter day idea of art is presently being given the bum’s rush in many of the esthetic chanceries of the West. Among the options being explored is the vision of transcending the biological origins of art, as in life, by transistorized instrumentalities to automate ultimately, rather than innervate, the imagination.
Click here to read the full article.
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