Painting Digital, Letting Go

James Faure Walker

What is a painter (and in my case a digital painter) doing at a conference on computing and the history of art? The short answer is, I am as interested as anyone else in trying to understand this combustion of art fuelled by high technology, and, in part, it is my own history too. Along with my colleagues, I often wonder how I have arrived where I am, and wonder how many wrong turnings I have taken. Have I been tinkering on the edges while the important action has taken place over the hill? If histories are now becoming official, are they being dug out of cupboards, built out of theories, or drawn from the memory of witnesses? Do I see this as selfevident art history written in a sequence of major works, each deserving its marker at Tate Modern? No. Have I been programmed to think the way I do? Should I reboot my thinking in the light of new historical findings?

As a student at St Martin's School of Art in London in the 1960s, I watched here and there a few of the first clatterings of computer art: kinetic art at Signals, Cybernetic Serendipity, Bruce Lacey (who was the janitor of my studio from 1971 onwards), and the beige card science/art pages of Studio. As a painter and critic in the 1970s, I was aware of computerised typesetting (I was editing and designing an art magazine) and instinctively knew this was something I should know much more about, though, generally, I did not rate 'computer art' as art, apart from Richard Hamilton's Tyres. In the 1980s, I half-evolved into a 'computer artist' but without ceasing to be a painter. Now, I suppose, I am something of a sleuth, being an Art and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) Research Fellow, both practitioner and commentator.

I know of several books in production and plenty on the shelves documenting the route to Net Art, Information Art, Digital Art, or New Media art. Naturally, I am curious as to how this history develops. Will it be contested? For one thing, painting does not feature very much in these accounts except as a 'technology' – that is to say, pigment on canvas – a technology past its prime. My impression is that here is a history that zeroes in on the beginnings of 'computer art'; it identifies pioneer figures, particularly those developing what are best described as 'computer- generated' images, primarily linear patterns. Yet if I reflect on who have been the dominant figures and the dominant topics of discussions over the past ten or fifteen years, I find much broader influences at work. Important as they are, algorithmic artists would feature only as one strain alongside performance art, video, installation, conceptual art, interactive technologies, the Web, the futurology of Wired, innovations in computer graphics itself, and contemporary art in general. In other words, in the small segment of all this that concerns me – painting with the computer – the history of machine art is only one fraction. In today's 'digital art' it is not possible to isolate just one history, one DNA signature.

The subject of painting and the computer is complex, little understood, and neglected. To put it simply, each new survey that comes out on 'digital art' has an interest in saying, 'here is something new and distinct from the old order'. The thesis of the book I am writing, Painting the Digital River, How an Artist Learned to Love the Computer, argues that painting is a living, adaptable art form, and painters can weave these wonderful visual tricks into their repertoire. Art historians may object to the notion and argue that a painter has no critical distance; they could point to the lack of highbrow magazine articles, proper exhibitions, the lack of sustained interest by critics. All this I would have to concede, but I would also ask how anyone could be expected to find out about this way of painting except by doing it themselves. You cannot investigate retrospectively what does not yet exist. There have been one or two minor surveys and there are networks of artists but that's about it. With software, as with painting, only a user can really taste the difference. It is not like a documented installation with photos in a catalogue or a promotional critical essay; material that can become instant history – what Hal Foster has described as 'hind sighting the present'. I have found it hard to get the basics of computer graphics across to colleagues who are critics and sophisticated thinkers – I wonder how many understand the difference between bitmap and vector, not that I am that good at explaining it. They will always counter my argument by saying, well, as there is no major art – as yet – in that field, we do not need to bother with it. But some do.

I recall a Courtauld art historian a couple of years back, supposedly an expert on the Web and a curator, giving a talk with 35mm slides at the Tate. I also recall a leading expert on avant-garde film who did not know what a website was. At a talk I gave six years ago at the Tate on Patrick Heron, a number of the audience were quite unaware that you could 'paint' with the computer in colour. I still find it bizarre that a technology which has so many echoes back and forth in the history of painting (which would have been sheer dreamland for any assistant slaving in a Florentine studio 500 years ago) means little to today's cognoscenti. There are advantages in having so few art historians and critics around with expert knowledge. It is liberating to work with a powerful technology where there are few precedents, few established idioms, and few tracks in the snow to follow. The downside is that prejudices go unchallenged; in the Jerwood Drawing competition, digital drawing has been effectively excluded on the grounds that it is printed and so is not 'real drawing'. It is only in the past few years that galleries have recognised that inkjet prints are viable and sellable. In the teaching of fine art, the computer room is still labelled with...