Chris Ashley: Zen Arcade, Side 1, 2004, HTML, 594 x 575 pixels (November 30, 2004)

The society whose modernization has reached the stage of integrated spectacle is characterized by the combined effect of five principal features: incessant technological renewal; integration of state and economy; generalized secrecy; unanswerable lies; an eternal present.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 1967

If the United States stands for civilization, a thoroughly secular notion, Europe symbolizes culture, a quasi-religious one. Art is finally compromised by a society which enthuses over it only in the auction room, and whose abstract logic strips the world of sensuousness. It is also tainted by a social order for which truth has no utility, and value means what will sell.

Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture, 2000

Quoted in Carol Becker, Surpassing the Spectacle Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art

This talk is:

1. Conditioned by PPT (but breaks the rules)
2. Full of facts, ideas, questions (answered and unanswered) and some probable contradictions
3. About three things:
   1. A little background
   2. Weblogs in general
   3. HTML drawings

Background

1. SF Bay Area, BA Studio Art CSUH, MS EDU Dominican
2. Work
   1. Oakland 4/5/6 teacher (important to POV)
   2. Curriculum & Instruction/Educational Technology
   3. UCB K-12 tech outreach/manager/program development/designer
   4. Currently UCB IT Policy Analyst
3. Primary identity: artist
4. Bias- When I hear "art" I think "painting"
5. Learned HTML in 1995 (early classroom site)

Early weblogging

1. Playing with edutech teaching tools: writing, interaction, portfolios, "building community"
2. First weblog- XYZ, on NT workstation (Mar. 2000-Feb. 2001)
3. A Place to Write Work, Nothing Fancy on Berkeley server (Feb. 2001-Oct. 2003)
4. Focus on edutech writing, .edu audience
5. Soon realized the need for a personal policy: post a day
6. Weblogs in K-12 work
   1. # Part I- Weblogs: Another Kind of Website, July 2001
   2. # Part II- Weblogs: A Swiss Army Website, March 2002

About weblogs

1. Most early webloggers were geeks
2. More than the "blogs" in popular media (e.g. 2004 election; diaries)
3. Places of individual authorship (voice, design, schedule)
4. Alternative sources of news, gossip, criticism
5. Pushed on definitions of journalism
6. Community, networking, relationships
7. Optimally places of iteration, accumulation, reflection
8. Weblogs are still an "alternative space"
9. Increasingly embedded into an integrated suite of coporation services

1. Between weblogs and online artzines the print art world media is almost... (e.g. MAN, Philly Artblog)
2. Peeks into studios, galleries, collaborations
3. And the artist's words about their own and the work of others
4. A place to develop, define, deepen, expand a POV
5. A place build community- natural, personal, not just local
6. Not many weblogs are "the art" (Screenfull)
7. Bypassing the system (think Major League Baseball vs. High School Baseball)
8. Need: real edited online art magazine(s), but a tough econ model (think $alon, $late)
9. Peer reviewed journals (à la academia)

But getting back to me...

1. But soon the art crept in
2. A drawing everyday
3. Ownership of all phases of production and delivery
4. The weblog as studio, gallery, archive (iteration, accumulation, reflection)
5. Portfolio: history, reflection, growth, synthesis
6. I host it, I own it
7. Relationships
8. And still a place to write

#12, 20 from Untitled 1-20, 2005, 2005, HTML, 380 x 300 pixels each

HTML drawings

1. Why HTML?
   1. Embedded
   2. Easy, "democratic," accessible, cheap
   3. Early images (2001-02?)
2. Limitations
   1. Right angles, hard edges, uniform surface, color, size
   2. As motivating factor
3. Playing with color blocks into a real art practice
4. DEMO in Dreamweaver
5. Collage?

Things to note

1. Why are they called drawings and not paintings?
2. Must make an image (figure or place) because the drawing really has no surface
3. The image is all light
4. Work hard to submerge the grid
5. Working at composition- tension and surprise
6. The drawings are thin and light- they have no body themselves

Still noting

1. Subject matter-lists
2. Titles- at the risk of illustration
3. Materials are cheap and inexhaustible (except in a power failure)
4. I fill all the modes of productions: design, fabricate, deliver, install
5. The design of the weblog- clean, plain, empty white cube
6. Static images, nothing for sale

Untitled, 2005, HTML, 500 x 460 pixels

"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 colored light bulbs. 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.

...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...

From Chris Ashley's HTML Drawings
George Lawson (September 2004)

His method is constructivist but his manner is decidedly expressionist—he builds his grid-bound images intuitively, almost in spite of the grid, through a series of choices that accumulate and graft onto one another.

By working in an iterative medium that is so responsive to the moment, so readily updated and refined, Ashley has found a way to introduce even more plasticity into painting’s inherent ability to manipulate time. He enjoys both the suspended release of static painting and the serial accumulation of the web, a kind of painted journalism.

The simple language he chooses keeps him much more closely aligned to the painter’s vocabulary than to the dizzying technology of computer generated imagery. He uses the inherent constraints of HTML to create new freedoms and uses this freedom to imbue his work with fresh meaning, extending the vernacular and experiential impact of constructivism.

From Singing the Body Electric
Jim Harris (August 2004)

It would be a mistake to consider these as images created only for instant consumption—they present a panorama of temporality in the synoptic revelation of light, color and shape; they depict tension and resolution in formal choices rendered onscreen while deploying a full range of painterly strategies. Ashley's relentless rectangular shapes—called to the service of color—jostle for primacy, get on top of one another, are symmetric at times, asymmetric at others, resolved today, ruptured tomorrow; some pictures are labyrinthine, others multi-dimensional; the most haunting invite a viewer to meditate on propositions of depth or movement aglow on the still surface of the screen.

Whether these pictures are art, as opposed to decoration or doodling, depends not on how and where they are produced and reproduced, not on the use or absence of historical materials, not, in the end, on tradition or fixed ideas, but on the possibility and intensity of perceptual experience...

From They Are What They Are & Layers
MANIK (Marija Vauda & Nikola Pilipovc) , Belgrade, 2005
Translated from the Serbian by Vanda Perovic

Identities are partially constructed by the kind of space, which is here phallocentric, linear, ascending and affirmative in the tradition of the modernist paradigm.

LAYERS reveal the links and ways of bonding between the units-modules of visual tables and they open the access to the lateral... (the titles, the time element, the linearity, description, and explanation)

The performance-weblog, regardless how much it has been hidden and is closed into a visual structural autonomy, always allows for the possibility of surprise, and thus contrary to the established theatre performance, we do not known where, at what point, the text will flow out, bend, situate itself.

Performance-archives-weblog is a discipline of repetition and storing.

Tuolumne, 20031117, HTML, 400 x 380 pixels (from Places I Have Slept)

1. Too easy to mention Malevich and Mondrian (squares, edges, right angles)
2. Too easy to mention Rothko and Noland (glowing color and flat flat flat)
3. Don't even mention Peter Halley
4. Why not mention:
   1. Caravaggio (1571-1610)
   2. Georges de La Tour (1593-1652)
   3. David Caspar Friedrich (1774-1840)
   4. e.g. 19th century Hudson River or California landscape painters
   5. Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)
   6. George Seurat (1859-1891)
5. A Book of Days: A Book of Hours is the most common type of surviving medieval illuminated manuscript. Each Book of Hours is unique, but all contain a collection of texts, prayers, psalms along with appropriate illustrations to form a convenient reference for christian religious worship (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_days).

Think About...

1. Specifially
   1. Giotto- Scrovegni Chapel, Padua
   2. Indian miniatures
   3. Shi Tao (1642-1710?) (albums, variety of style)
   4. W. de Kooning
   5. Additionally
      1. D. Judd (variations, limitations, plain materials)
      2. E. Hesse (seriality, materials, bodies of work)
      3. B. Marden (the plane, space, line)
      4. R. Ryman (pursuit of variety in focused project)
      5. West Coasters:
         1. J. McLaughlin*, L. Feitelson, K. Benjamin, F. Hammersly
         2. R. Diebenkorn
         3. E. Moses