The “new grotesque,” as I use the phrase, refers to the irruption of new-media paradigms into traditional media. I take the term “grotesque” from Mikhail Bakhtin, whose use of the term has been tremendously influential on subsequent theories of culture and aesthetics. Bakhtin says of the grotesque:

The grotesque body is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body.

The grotesque is intimately related to another of Bakhtin’s central ideas, that of the unfinalizability of the self. For Bakhtin, the individual can never be completely known or understood, because the individual is never finished:

[n]othing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always be in the future.

Identity can only be understood as a momentary approximation of a contingent process, the process of being. It is easy to extend this idea of the unfinalized self not just to the individual and his body, but to the form of an individual work of art—very literally so in the case of digital media, since a digital file can be reopened and re-manipulated ad infinitum. But in this paper I want to address how static works are also becoming, in a conceptual sense, unfinalized, as they start to incorporate techniques and paradigms from digital media.

The change wrought by new media is not a revolutionary change, in the sense of a total, abrupt transformation from previous modes of thought and production, but the culmination of an ongoing, non-linear trend in thought and culture through Modernism and Postmodernism. In two-dimensional visual arts, the precursor we often cite for contemporary digital image making is collage. This is a little simplistic, and it isn’t my intention to force all digital art under the rubric of that term. But the parallels are obvious; even in the early days of Modernism, collage was a practical pre facto primer in the Postmodern process of decontextualization and recontextualization. Postmoderism identified the process of contemporary culture as images, language, and ideas being removed from their original context, and thrown together with alien elements in such a way as to force the pieces to develop their own, new context from direct experience (the Internet is the most obvious contemporary example of this process). To Postmodern theorists, this is the manner in which all contemporary culture constantly re-defines itself; but even in early Modernism, in particular through the work of the Dada movement, some artists predicted this breakdown of cultural objects into reusable pieces—in the most literal sense, through collage. In Kurt Schwitters’ Merz collages, for instance, scraps of paper from various mundane sources are turned into fragments, which become elements in formal compositions; thus Schwitters’ collage Untitled (Tea-Rose), 1924, obsessively re-uses the materials found in tea shops—wrappers, napkins, et cetera—to create an abstract collage that does not refer to a tea shop in any literal, representative way. The process is not one simply of decontextualization; the original source remains in highly structured and symbolic forms that depend on the material nature of the original rather than on its image-bearing quality. The effect of the casual viewer, unaware of these antecedents, is that even as the collage itself becomes a bulky, layered object, the affect of the source images is flattened into a single, new context. The disparate elements are synthesized, flattened, into a single pictorial composition that overrules the original subject matter even as it draws upon it. The collage borrows the apparent immediacy of its elements while elliding their actual, original nature.

In Bakhtin’s terms, these traditional collages partake of the nature of the grotesque—they are rebuilt, re-created bodies—but they fall short of full grotesquery; they are not continually re-created. Once the collage image is made, it reads as an image; it is finalized, and as such it can be displayed as an art object in a gallery setting in the same manner as a painting. In fact, the later history of Dada involves the reconstruction of original, ephemeral Dada productions precisely so that they could be “finished” for the sake of posterity. Many Dada works were created out of flimsy materials, meant to be ephemeral; some, like Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, were made only to be photographed and reproduced in avant-garde art journals, and were never meant to be displayed at all. In order for Dada to achieve the status of a real movement in art history, many of these works had to be re-made in later decades, out of more durable materials, so that they could be owned by museums in the traditional way that art objects are stored and remembered. Posterity was not equipped to understand them otherwise. This, I contend, is what has changed in contemporary attitudes towards collage, as I would like to examine a particular kind of contemporary artwork: digital prints deriving from a dynamic computerized back-end. These are static works, generally abstract images, presented as prints hanging on a wall, that are generated not through the specific aesthetic choices of a human artist, but by a computer program that was itself created by an artist/programmer. The artist has taken a step back from responsibility for the final image; he has removed himself from the traditional role of the artist as image-maker, even as the final product is a traditionally displayed image.

Joshua Davis is a designer and artist who first became known for his sophisticated Flash interfaces, made both for commercial clients and as art projects. Concurrently with his dynamic work, he has been making two-dimensional images using an increasingly complex series of computer programs. These programs create images drawing on shapes created by Davis, and combining them in randomly-generated ways. His ongoing series Once Upon a Forest, begun in the late nineties, is an example of such a process; each print, traditionally made and distributed in limited editions, has been generated by algorithm. A more recent series, bmw z4, consists of unique prints, each generated separately from a set of pre-programmed behaviors. These images draw on the contours of the BMW z4 and on geographic notes from German atlases; the application breaks the forms down and re-maps them along curves mathematically derived from those same forms. It is also worth pointing out that these prints are not distributed through the gallery system; they are sold through BMW’s web site, sight unseen by the customer, as a promotional tie-in. Until purchase, the print remains a hypothetical structure to the purchaser; as Davis describes it, “a kind of frozen image of the high-speed workings of [his] program codes.” But at that point it suddenly becomes a traditional print, composed of ink on paper.

The forms that Davis borrows to create these prints are represented in the generating engine as mathematical formulae, not as images. The resulting impression is one of an autochthonic image, as much as a unique product as an abstract painting, divorced from representation. The source material—the form of the z4—is precisely represented in the code, not as a model but by mathematical formula; but the source shapes are blended together in the final image into a seamless, and above all, a flat whole. It is this idea of flatness in which all digitally-made images partake. The flattening of collage is taken to a radical extreme; digital collage happens not through the juxtaposition of separate images but through the transposition within an image, in layers—in the case of the z4 prints, around 120,000 layers per image. In other words, flatness is made possible by the internal transparency of the imagery. Once the image becomes physical, the layers disappear. In the case of Davis’ images, the process of generation, and the source shapes, are never apparent at all. There is no border between the recurring shapes of Davis’ algorithmic images; the source materials are embedded within each other. The picture plane becomes a smooth, uninterrupted surface.

In my own work I have drawn on Davis as a model; but in doing so I work with dynamically generated or recombined text, which adds an entirely new type of structural complexity to the resulting work. Machine-created language has a long history, and many writers have attempted to grapple with its implications, even before it was really technologically possible. In his 1967 essay “Cybernetics and Ghosts,” Italo Calvino asks:

What would be the style of a literary automaton?…The test of a poetic-electronic machine would be its ability to produce traditional works, poems with closed metric forms, novels that follow all the rules…The true literature machine will be one that itself feels the need to produce disorder, as a reaction against its preceding production of order.

Calvino is supposing here that the machine will be autonomous, as autonomous as the human author seems to be. But that autonomy is to some degree a product of the author-reader divide caused by printing. As a counter-example before the printing press, I think of Ludovico Ariosto, the author of the other medieval Italian epic, Orlando Furioso. This poem took him ten years to write; apparently, during that time, he would leave the manuscript on a table in his front hall with a pen, so that visitors could record comments and additions in the margin. Of course Ariosto remained the author, in any meaningful sense of the term—he was free to disregard the interpolated comments if he wanted—but this is a much closer, more intimate and more fluid relationship than the printing press allows between the author and reader, or rather, between the text and the people who interact with the text, both as author and as reader.

But that was a long time ago. In 1967, when Calvino wrote this essay, the author-machine was a single, autocratic unit, whether human or technological in origin; the reader was a consumer, interacting with the author’s product in a purely mental, interpretive, non-participatory way. Elsewhere in the same essay, and repeatedly throughout his career, Calvino insisted that he was looking forward to being replaced as writer by a machine, so that the real job of literature could be seen to reside in reading. It’s worth examining what Calvino meant by reading.

In Castle of Crossed Destinies, Calvino creates several different stories programmatically, by dealing out all the face cards of the Tarot deck and deriving narrative from their physical relationships. He is “reading” the cards in precisely the manner of a fortune-teller, deriving meaning from the combination of symbolism and chance; this is reading as a kind of divination.

I think that this is what Calvino thought of as reading the works of a machine; an active reading, one that generated narratives rather than, or as well as, interpreting them. This makes reading a very active prospect, but it also means there is more than one kind of reader: there is Calvino, who is reading the cards, and there is me, reading Calvino. Calvino is the active reader—the new reader of the future, one might say—but the ultimate product is a static text in which I then participate in a very traditional way. This fixed, static, final product is, we are generally told, the casualty of the digital revolution; all texts in new media remain fluid at all times, all products remain nodes of authorship, through adding comments, through editing wiki pages, through adding incrementally to email or instant message exchanges, and so forth. It’s this unfixedness that many new media programs and art scholars are trying to come to grips with. But this “unfixedness” is only a factor in new media products, for instance in Web pages. Traditional, fixed media still exist, and while many of these media incorporate digital technologies into their production or back-end, the product is still a fixed physical object; for instance, a book written non-linearly in a word processing machine, digitally typeset, still ends up as a book. Is this merely a holdover from a previous iteration of the world, or is their real benefit to be gained from products of fixed media—even, or especially, fixed media that emerge from dynamic media in their production? That is, how have fixed-media works started to incorporate dynamic media? What consequences does this have for their nature, their exhibition, and their affect?

Why is it important that these works be static? Precisely so that they can be unfinalized; so that they can imply a continuing narrative, or a continuing field of meaning, without containing it. Implication depends on silence—in visual media, on stillness. For the work to be in motion marries the viewer unilaterally to the work’s process, rather than engendering a process of cognition in the viewer. Even for the work to remain screen-based makes it inconclusive; work existing on the computer implies that the work remains fluid, that is, still in process. For the work to be physically finished, captured as a traditional, static work, highlights its unfinalizability as an image—its essential contingency on other experience and knowledge. This relationship is a primary feature of dynamically-generated, static works.

Briefly, what are the consequences of this process on the presentation and the economic nature of these products? Joshua Davis’ z4 prints are meant to be hung on the wall, but not to be hung on the wall in a gallery. Since they do not really exist until they are sold, display for sale in a gallery would be misleading, at the very least. Gallery display becomes mere documentation. These prints really only work as a notional part of a larger whole; they do not lend themselves to gallery display. Thus the gallery continues to lose its central position as a node for the display and consumption of art, even for some traditionally displayed artworks. This is a real issue for artists who continue to pursue relatively traditional career paths.

Of course, Davis is not taking the next step: distributing not the prints, but the engine that generates them. Davis creates the mechanism as a personal machine, one that allows me to “read” the resulting works and shape them. These dynamic processes have allowed him to become his own reader, in the sense Calvino means. To return to Calvino’s essay:

And so the author vanishes—that spoiled child of ignorance—to give place to a more thoughtful person, a person who will know that the author is a machine, and will know how this machine works

. . . . . .

At this point I want to hearken back to Bakhtin; these works are unfinalized, literally in the case of the z4 prints, but also in something like the terms Bakhtin meant that term to describe individual identity. These works appear to be contained, coherent works, but they are not understandable without an awareness of their antecedents, and of the way they inhabit their present context, and that awareness can never be total.

And so I come back to the term grotesque. These works are grotesques of traditional art objects; not original to the artist, not unique to the immediate process, and yet not unoriginal, not merely repetitive. I am interested in this idea precisely because my own work is displayed, in its final form, in the most traditional of media: ink marks on paper. I am a “digital” artist, but only as an end-user: I use commercially available software in the ways made possible by the software developers, no more; I make a conscious effort to produce my finished work in “casual” media (that is, reproducible prints and books) that can be distributed and experienced without reliance on a particular event or context. Viewers and readers in contemporary society are surrounded by decontextualized imagery that can only be understood as meaningful if one understands that there is a contextual antecedent to the image; but that antecedent is generally, by nature, unavailable. Every image becomes unfinalized; the grotesque is no longer the exception, but the cultural norm. Art-makers, even painters, become not the autonomous authors of finished works, but participants in an unfinalized process.

Footnotes

1. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. 1965. HÄlÅne Iswolsky, trans.,. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 317.
2. Mikhail Bakhtin, , Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 166.
3. For a recent discussion of the later history of Dada’s influence and products, see Charles Stuckey, “Dada Lives,” Art in America June/July 2006: 142-151.
4. These images are viewable online at http://www.once-upon-a-forest.com/. Davis’ web site is http://www.joshuadavis.com.
5. Quoted on the z4byjd.com web site (no direct link; from the About the Project documentation).
6. Italo Calvino, “Cybernetics and Ghosts,” in The Uses of Literature: Essays, Patrick Creagh, ed. (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt, 1982), 12-13.
7. Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (part I), Barbara Reynolds, trans. ( New York: Penguin Classics, 1975), 71-72.
8. Italo Calvino, Castle of Crossed Destinies, William Weaver, trans. (New York: Harcourt, 1979).
9. “Cybernetics and Ghosts,” 16.

Bibliography

Ariosto, Ludovico. Orlando Furioso (part I). Trans. Barbara Reynolds. New York: Penguin Classics, 1975.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. 1965. Trans. HÄlÅne Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Bakhtin, Mikhail, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Calvino, Italo. “Cybernetics and Ghosts.” In The Uses of Literature: Essays, 3-27. Ed. Patrick Creagh. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt, 1982.

Calvino, Italo. Castle of Crossed Destinies. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt, 1979.

Davis, Joshua. Works and text online at joshuadavis.com and z4byjd.com.