Machine Painting

★★★★☆

On until 14 December 2024

Ask DALL-E to paint an abstraction and it’ll confidently produce a museum-worthy clone. Ask a human, and he falters. This exhibition tracks five decades of artists’ jealous frustration with the machine.

Jack Whitten’s rice paper Xerox, Albert Oehlen’s silkscreen plotters, and Christopher Wool’s CAD engravings perverted ‘new’ technologies in ‘old-school’ craft workshops. Rosemarie Trockel’s knitting and Mattias Groebel’s PAL television acrylics gave into remediation. Christopher Kulendran Thomas’ AI art history paintings, Seth Price’s bust-shelter poster print, and Jacqueline Humphries nominalism, finally, brute-force their hand on the algorithm. 

These are modest responses to one of humanity’s oldest problems: man made the machine and knows not how to unmake it. Art brings some taxonomical reassurance. But what help is it when Ai-Da robot’s “painting” has already outbid it at auction?


notes and notices are short and curt exhibition reviews. Read more:

Diego Marcon, Dolle at Sadie Coles HQ ★★★☆☆

Diego Marcon

Dolle

★★★☆☆

Idle work became indistinguishable from leisure, vegetative time-passing from family life.

Nick Relph, Fils, ta vision! at Herald St ★☆☆☆☆

Nick Relph

Fils, ta vision!

★☆☆☆☆

There’s little for the eye to hang on and none of the punk culture of Relph’s earlier practice emerges from the works.

The Imaginary Institution of India at Barbican ★★★★★

The Imaginary Institution of India

★★★★★

How does a curator tell an unfamiliar history yet evade the museum’ didacticism and the audience’s dulled expectations? Jhaveri’s ambitious review of India’s testing decades at the end of the 20th century could easily have been a torturous sermon: the…

Some May Work as Symbols at Raven Row ★★★★☆

Some May Work as Symbols: Art Made in Brazil, 1950s–70s

★★★★☆

Art history can catch modernity in splitting from the past and thus from itself.

Haegue Yang, Leap Year at Hayward Gallery ★★☆☆☆

Haegue Yang

Leap Year

★★☆☆☆

The funfair is shuttered, long live the fair.

RM, A Story Backwards at Auto Italia ★★☆☆☆

RM

A Story Backwards

★★☆☆☆

Having forgotten what the ‘dramatic’ in art stands for, visual artists today too often mistake hacked theory for stage directions.

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