"Post-painterly abstraction" was Clement Greenberg's term for a kind of self-referential art that, by the 1960s, was becoming increasingly less rooted in the physical world of art-making materials. The then-new polymer paints made possible a kind of uninflected visual experience: color experienced as pure presence. The minimalists took this logic further than Greenberg was willing to go with an emphasis on found materials and processes: e.g., Dan Flavin's many-hued fluorescent light bulb. Extend the logic even more and art would be a series of Sol Lewitt-like commands to a piece of hardware such as a computer monitor, telling it to beam certain colors in certain configurations directly to a remote viewer's eyes.

And that's what Christopher (or Chris) Ashley is doing with his "html drawings," it seems to me: these aren't jpegs that can be right-clicked and saved but a series of instructions to your browser, telling it to draw tables in particular shapes and fill them in with hexadecimal colors (#0088bb, #00bbbb, #0077cc, #00CCCC, #0099cc, and #00dddddd in the piece above, for example). As you can see from Ashley's archive, some of the configurations get quite elaborate. I like the simplicity of Santa Cruz, Monterrey, Pacific Grove (reproduced here without permission by saving the html in "View/Source" on my toolbar, hope it's OK), but also the complexity of The Asian Influence in Drawing, I - XV and the super-baroque Hippie Dreams, I - XII, the latter of which also incorporates .gif files. One quibble: an aspect of a project like this ought to be that each viewer experiences the work as his/her browser interprets it, just as painters ultimately must lose control of the lighting conditions and surroundings in which their art is viewed. Ashley has said that certain pieces are best viewed on IE, which favors a proprietary format and kind of stunts the magic of a million possible readings (including "incorrect" readings) of the work.

Ashley also has a nice weblog here. This is my off-the-cuff take on his work, BTW, and may not jibe at all with his own theory; looking forward to exploring the site(s) and learning more.

November 18, 2003 (link)

An earlier thread on Christopher Ashley's html drawings got sidetracked into other issues, such as browser and display technology and whether web designers are artists (I'd say they're designers, but that's not to say design can't be artistic). Ashley's abstractions are consistently inspiring and imaginative, accomplished with the most minimal and available of means. New patterns, color relationships, and strategic approaches to that Modernist mainstay, the grid, just seem to pour out of him.

A painter friend of mine was over recently and really responded to Ashley's works onscreen. We agreed they (html drawings) were the type of thing Peter Halley would be doing if his work wasn't "stuck." Halley talks a good cyber-game but he's never made the leap to actually composing with or for the computer. Usually he uses it to illustrate or document ideas in his paintings, or as digital window dressing to make his art seem more "now," while he continues producing traditionally-fabricated canvases.* His biggest problem, though, is being a prisoner of his own cells and conduits. Ashley, on the other hand, working only with the computer, shows a wide range of places the "Halley-type painting" could go: intriguing figure-ground play, simulated transparency, flirtation with applied design (logos, pictograms, game boards).

I think on some level, though, my friend still thinks of Ashley's work as reproductions of paintings, and is critiquing them imagining them "in the flesh," with smooth surfaces and crisp-but-not-brittle edges like, say, Cary Smith's. But such paintings don't exist, it's all illumination in your browser. Somehow people with an eye for traditional abstraction are going to have to subtract out that extra step they're taking of imagining the reified image and just enjoy the fleeting thing they're seeing on the screen. This is true anti-materialist practice: what conceptualism promised thirty-five years ago but never delivered, at least in a visually compelling form.

*See for example, this jacket illustration for a recent Halley book. Behind the all the naked models you can see a Halley painting fuzzed out with some kind Gaussian filter. The inside of the book features More Wacky Photoshop Fun With Halley Paintings. Oh, and I guess I should say I generally like Halley's work but find his recent forays into installation and trying to position himself as a Warholian media maven unconvincing.