Albert Oehlen may be one of the most successful painters in the world today, but the exhibition marking his 70th birthday, Computerbilder, at the Hamburger Kunsthalle is rather empty most of the time. You can peruse the twenty works on display without much distraction. Occasionally a lost couple may pass through, chatting away and swiftly disappearing upstairs for an exhibition that is densely packed with videos and installations by over forty artists. The show upstairs is relatable: the videos entertain and resonate deeply with current events. And isn’t that what an art museum should do – reflect on present times? In this context painting can seem like quite a detached, academic, and even hermetic discipline that reflects entirely on itself, having lost all connections to the world beyond it: l’art pour l’art.
What Oehlen’s show delivers today is exactly what the title promises: seventeen computer paintings, two pictures realised without any visual computer traces, and a large drawing. Filling the whole first floor of the Galerie der Gegenwart, they have been smacked straight on the walls, partially covering the windows and simply ignoring the notoriously difficult “quadratist” architecture of architect Oswald Matthias Ungers, in which every detail, from the façade to lighting and floor tiling, is rendered along a continuous grid of squares, creating spaces that require architectural interventions to create feasible presentation conditions.
The artist started this series in the early 1990s, and has returned to it over the years. The first works from 1992 are in black and white, silk-screened on paper, overpainted in acrylics or ink (Untitled, and Das Lämpchen im Inneren der Erde, both 1992) – fairly straightforward. They present ancient and crude computer graphics with tangled dotted and stepped lines and graphic patterns of varying densities atop which the artist has applied swaths of paint of different opacity and colour. A simplistic rendition of a brain pops up repeatedly, but there is none of the by now overfamilar colourful surreal imagery generated by artificial intelligence. Rather, the paintings are closer to digital stupidity. Nothing ages faster than technology.
In 1992, the artist spent six months in Los Angeles, initially unaware that a technological revolution was on its way as computer companies worked to make personal computers – then little more than glorified typewriters – central pieces to coordinate the contemporary lifestyle. When a friend showed off his laptop, the artist was hooked. The idea was there before he knew what it was going to be: computer paintings.
He acquired a similar model and commenced experimenting with rudimentary graphics programs. The software was extremely limited in its functionality and anything but intuitive. However, it offered different brushes and stamp tools for a small selection of basic motifs and allowed users to draw with the aid of a computer mouse. Every single element, from the shape of the brush to its size, had to be deliberately chosen from a menu. Making images in this way required systematic reflection of a kind strikingly different from the familiar automatisms of the atelier. Oehlen decided to accept these constraints as the terms for a dialogue, first with technology but, in essence, with painting or art-making as such. Drawing with the computer suggested a novel way to understand what he was doing; the dialogue with the machine pushed the artist to map out every detail of his artistic work, questioning not his vocabulary, but how he used it – the grammar and the syntax of his painting.
This came at a crucial time. Four years prior, Oehlen had abandoned his signature figurations and started painting abstractions. These were intentionally lacklustre and unrehearsed, but still channeled the punk vibes that informed his earlier work. However, he found himself struggling for a motif. When the system the computer represented offered an antagonist, a sparring partner, and a devil’s advocate, it opened a door for him to question the tools of his trade, both as a painter and as an artist.
Oehlen had his computer drawings printed and enlarged to the format he wanted to paint on, accentuating the extreme pixilation, choppy and simplistic, of the original low-resolution black and white images. But how to improve on a drawing generated with a computer? And what does pretty actually mean in the context of a machine that seemed to have no aesthetic faculty?
Over the years, the artist revisited his early computer drawings several times, creating new works. He painted over silk-screens on canvas, in black and white (Disco 2100, 1996), in purple and white (Blind in Texas, 1995), and in flesh colours (Fleisch, 1995). On the canvas, the additions and subtractions of the artist’s brush sometimes obscure details and sometimes mimic the pixelated lines. More often, however, they add to the overall structure with exactly the elegant organic brush strokes the computer isn’t capable of. Later works, such as the garishly colourful and cartoonish Captain Jack (1997) and the huge and intricate Annihilator (2001/2006), which barely fits into the space, are intensely complex digital collages with equally colourful layers of paint.
Strictly speaking, the works in the show in Hamburg were created in a fusion of techniques including printing, silk-screen, and painting. The artistic approach of twisting or adapting a complex technology by means of traditional painting makes the artist something of a pioneer in bridging the gap between analog and digital. This may lend these works historic significance, or so the show’s curator, Hamburger Kunsthalle Director Alexander Klar, claimed in a radio interview. But their main quality lies elsewhere.
Subverting dominant systems is a constant in the artist’s body of work, and these paintings offer an opportunity to explore this conceit. In an interview with Diedrich Diedrichsen published in Artforum exactly thirty years ago, Oehlen put it like this:
“Most painters seem to be the stooges of their projects, becoming the servants of ideas like ‘changing visual habits’ or ‘breaking up perception’, or of particular techniques, gestures, esthetic principles – justifications like that. By ‘autonomy’ I mean doing without these absurdities.”
Dropping the theoretical framework to defend his paintings, the painter’s work becomes pretty much intuitive, an exercise in composition, of organising tactical painterly decisions. In this sense, the paintings can be regarded as improvisational: one painterly mark following the previous, sometimes reaffirming, embracing or negating it, creating a discourse that is utterly nonchalant and immanent to the paintings. Oehlen’s pictures pay homage to the musical drama in the gestural paintings of Franz Kline while also mocking it; they caricature the film of Jackson Pollock painting to the music of Ornette Coleman. In the artist’s words: “no magic, no science, no excuses”
In a time when much art functions as a site of rituals of identification and empowerment, this could be understood as old-fashioned, backward, or even reactionary. But maybe it is more interesting to look at it as an inside job carried out with the confidence of an artist who intimately knows the limitations not only of his tools, but of art itself.
