The beginnings of the CGI form being utilized in art began with Charles Csuri, who in 1964 began to experiment with computer graphics technology and 1965 began creating computer animated films. The 4th International Experimental Film Festival, Brussels, Belgium, 1967, awarded him the prize for animation. His work was highlighted in the exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity held at The Institute for Contemporary Art, London, England, 1968. One of Charles Csuri's computer films is in the collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art.
It is now becoming to novel to see in narrative or non-narrative based video works, artists deploying a CGI caricature. It must be asked how the format of elucidating subject matter has taken this form; I believe it to be one of an anthropological progression and two, of the artist’s growth of computer literacy.
The body is declining in its usage, both generally and in art practice. Performance for what it once was, from Allan Kaprow to Chris Burden to Marina Abramovíc to Joseph Beuys to Andrea Fraser to David Wojnarowicz to Oleg Kulik, is now dead. Or, at the least, the artists who have considered using the body are now in quick decline, and this is not because contemporary artists are shy to perform, evident if one were to take into account the role of the fatuous “artist talk”, as this itself is the biggest performance, no, the reason is because of the number of contemporary artists utilizing the technological microwave of the digital age. It is the happy go, bim-bam-boo, CGI video applications: 3DMax, Daz 3D, Seamless3D, that churn out the production of the visually decadent listless mimeses’. But I am sure that this approach is not used simply because of its easiness, as of course, it still requires some comprehension of a computer-based-kind, but it is because of the evolving anthropology of the artist today too, how much physical impetus does an artist exert in their work? How much physical stamina does an artist have to spare compared to the discipline of the, minimalists, abstract expressionists, surrealists, cubists, impressionist et cetera. So it seems to me that the contemporary artist has fatigued from a bodily approach of making art, maybe even fatigued from an intellectual one to a base, comical formatted one, and this is only in uniform with the progression of the century, the digital age, so naturally, contemporary artists will look to the screen to resolve artworks. However this is not necessarily a good direction.
Now allow me to assimilate a quick timeline of the CGI caricature being utilized in video art. Phillip Parreno and Pierre Huyghe bought a manga character – Annlee and handed the work over to Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzales-Foerster, Rirkrit Tirvanija to imbue her with new personalities, No Ghost Just a Shell, 1999-2002.
Francis Stark reveals something of an autobiographical gauchely flirtatious web chat to who seems, a Swedish stranger, acting the dialogue through matt finished stubby figures, My lost friend, 2011.
Ed Atkins assembles glossy social settings with his Hyper-real Dave avatar droning melancholic woes, Ribbons, 2014.
Lu Yang problematically (and is so because the future generation will only be inclined to producing such McDonald’s trash), throws up digital art with a naïve palette of new aesthetics brutalizing her genderless figure in the process of stereotaxis, Power Of Will – final shooting, 2016.
Jordan Wolfson socially re-enacts and meagrely critiques the savagery of celebrity idolism through a finely matted wolf, River boat song, 2017.
Two of these artists have actually used 3D scanning to capture their physiognomy - Atkins and Yang. What binds all these artist’s approaches is that their video works pose a challenge to narrate or stage a moment of the human condition, some have attempted through a sci-fi route and others through a bestial one. Nonetheless they are all playing with a constraint of literature, the role of the protagonist, at least, the role of a character to explore or challenge ideas, and what is evident here when an artist chooses to hide behind an absurd or an absurdly rendered CGI figure is to me, a timidity, a lack of risk in laying one’s neck to achieve something deeply personal with the viewer. Thus, in essence, the communication breaks down with the artifice of the surface of these CGI characters vis-à-vis the sensitivities of the viewer.
Now of course, these are only forms and the tools apt for the typical artists of the century. However I want to compare Angust Fairhurts’, A Cheap and Ill-fitting Gorilla Suit, 1995, Francis Alÿs’, Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing, 1997, Andrea Fraser’s, Projection, 2008 as well thought and executed pieces of exploring constraints of the human condition through a physical expression, and they are profoundly receptive to the viewer because of how bare, simple and articulate they are – everything is in full concentration. In A Cheap and Ill-fitting Gorilla Suit, one can hear the foot stamps, the breathing, the rustling of tin foil. In Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing, one can hear the dogs, children, cars jounce form the streets of Mexico city, the texture of Alÿs trousers crease in each kick, the life of Alÿs hands guiding the ice block. In Projection, Fraser materializes herself to confront the viewer in an intimate psychoanalytical self-confession providing a sense that the fourth wall is broken.
These are all the simple subtleties that the CGI format will never be able to achieve but this does not matter, as it is not the quality of representation that the artist is responsible for anymore I do not believe, no, it is the reception of the viewer. Has the perception of the viewer been reduced to a comprehension of something only rendered, matted, hyper-realized? More or less, and it is more or less becoming so with the frequency of CGI art familiarizing itself with the public to this new artificial perception. And what is alarmingly depressing is to live in a time observing the profound senses of the human body waning. Soon this influence of art will cripple people even in sex.
A great shame.
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