| Analog or digital? Gallery offers a game Friday, March 28, 2003 BY DAN BISCHOFF Star-Ledger Staff There is a growing unrest among traditional artists, particularly among printmakers, about art made by computers. Some judges of art contests even reject certain techniques, like giclee printing, which allows photo-based works to pass for watercolors. Their arguments are not unlike the original arguments against photography as an art. Can anything that can be mechanically reproduced in endless series really compete with an original, hand-made object? "A lot of art competitions now specifically exclude any digital art," says Samantha Dorfman of Montclair, an artist and graphic designer who worked for many years with computers in New York's fashion industry. "People tend to have a fixed idea about how computers are used to make art, and it's really quite arbitrary. So I thought a show that demonstrated the whole range of how people use computers, many in ways that are really unexpected, would make an interesting exhibition." And that's "Analog/Digital," curated by Dorfman, which continues through April 16 at the City Without Walls gallery in Newark. The show includes work by 30 artists, some familiar from previous shows at the gallery and others new, and it is laid out like a kind of game. "Can you figure out the nature of the computer involvement in this piece?" is how gallery director Stephen Sennott puts it. Just to keep it interesting, there are a handful of entirely handmade pieces thrown in, too -- "controls" Sennott calls them; Dorfman says they're "placebos." It is hard to be vain about your media recognition skills these days, because so many of us can be so easily fooled. The machines go way beyond the color Xeroxes that can make fake money well enough to force the recent paper money design changes. Montclair artist Arthur Paxton, for example, is showing "Friday Harbor Reflections," which looks for all the world like a heavily abstracted watercolor. It is in fact a digital print on watercolor paper. New York artist Elizabeth Riley shows a large image, "Notes on Forgiveness/42," that includes smeared and dripping lines of pigment you might swear were hand made, but are in fact programmed. "I went to the School of Visual Arts (in Manhattan)," Dorfman says. "I studied theory. ... I did painting, drawing, casting in bronze, carving, the whole traditional fine arts bit ... and I think the computer is a great way for artists to visualize how things will look before they execute them, and many people use them that way. "And while I've thought personally about doing things in a traditional way again -- you know, it's much more sensual -- once I've put an idea into the computer and seen how it looks, I think, why bother?" Dorfman says. She is showing a seamless digital collage printed on canvas, "(The President's) UFO," in "Analog/Digital." "I have so many ideas and so little time." Playing the game is, as we've suggested, not easy. Harold Olejarz of Tenafly shows a pair of hands abstracted into a gladiolus bulb or a double helix, something you'd swear had to be digitized -- but was in fact made by passing his hands over the moving drum in a typical office Xerox. Cranford's Paul Lachenauer shows photos with such intense, saturated colors you'd assume they had been goosed on the computer, but they are in fact produced by "cross processing," developing color transparencies in print film chemistry, an entirely traditional darkroom method. Pennsylvania artist Damion Dreher scans drawings into his computer, prints them in different sizes and then adds paint to give different color and texture; Montclair artist Jay Seldin prints entirely digital images, but he frames them with what looks like the chemical bleed produced by traditional darkroom techniques, so you're sure to wonder. Bill Westheimer of West Orange, on the other hand, creates photograms by laying leaves over photosensitive paper and exposing them to strong light, but you'd swear the details were digital photography. You get the idea. Game over. |
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