| I want to mount a small defense (softly? narrowly? I agree with most of your specifics) of the state of the art(s). Not looking for a fight. :) Procedural art is both new, and it isn't. There's already a reasonably rich (if still fairly new in the sweep of art history) tradition of procedural art within the broader category of conceptual art. Some simple, accessible examples are Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes, Sol LeWitt's line drawings, and Yoko Ono's Grapefruit. These aren't quite procedural in the sense you mean, but they are instructions designed to produce art when compiled and/or executed. They (along with many other examples) shatter traditional-art assumptions more profoundly and thoroughly (well, I think so...) than the cubists, dadaists, and abstract expressionists. They fully-realize conceptual art. If a natural reaction to Duchamp's readymades or a Pollock painting is an exasperated but I/my kid could do that, these works hand art-observers the blueprint and call their bluff. They foreground the gaps between the concept/idea of a piece, our interpretation of the idea, any given instantiation of the idea, and our experience of any instantiation. They highlight the difference between the traditional roles of the artist-as-thinker, the artist-as-craftsman/technician, and observer-as-interpreter--at the same time as they invite (or even demand) all parties to cross and blur roles. They expose the absurdity of the cults of the Author and the Original Object in a way that foreshadows what digital re-/production has forced most creative spheres to reckon with. With this as a lens, it's possible to expand the family tree. Composed sheet music (most purely if a band/orchestra/choir interprets it from the instructions without listening to how it's "supposed" to sound) smells like procedural art to me. Screenplays and stage-plays (which are, of course, scripts) have similar features. A decent slice of performance art--even if not openly published as one--can still be distilled to a repeatable set of instructions. Maybe it's hair-splitting, but from this perspective I see procedural art as a fairly rich tradition full of artists with a good feel for their media and the broad arc of their traditions. From here, I think it's easier to see modern-computer-aided procedural/generative art as a somewhat natural outgrowth of existing traditions--intersected with new technologies that I don't think we've caught up with yet. I'll artificially cut myself off here; I have too many thoughts on what the hurdles are to put a bow on. In short: it seems fair to say computer-aided procedural art(s) are immature and have a skewed technician:artist ratio, but I think it feels about right given the sheer amount of work+play+interplay that it takes to establish radically new creative practices. A significant fraction of computational-creatives are still hand-rolling their own toolchains. I'm not even sure the sun has risen. |
except when these scripts are interpreted, they do not lack performance ;-)