Made by Hand / Born Digital
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, March 3-Aug. 23, 2024
by James Glisson
Either/or oppositions are everywhere, and they have the virtue of compressing complexities into easy to remember pairs. Cats versus dogs; socialism versus capitalism; secular versus religious; coffee versus tea; pen versus pencil; or friend versus enemy. Their virtue is being a cognitive shortcut to keep attention focused. No better way to lose an audience than meandering through a thicket of facts. This virtue is also a vice, however, as it drains away color and subtleties, leaving us to deal with unreal stark binaries. Their simplifications can obscure entirely what is out there IRL, in real life, turn into accidental misrepresentations, or even lies with everything from minor miscommunications to horrific injustices following suit.
Over a series of studio visits over the past year, I saw that one such opposition—analog versus digital—did not hold up when it came to contemporary artists. I kept encountering artists who paint, throw clay on a wheel, or work with other mediums making objects by hand, yet they all turned to digital tools at stages in the process. The Santa Barbara Museum of Art exhibition Made by Hand/Born Digital (March 3–Aug. 25, 2024) features artists who use brushes, AI, paint, 3D printers, scissors, magazines printed on paper, digital looms, potter’s wheels, Photoshop and Apple Photo (formerly iPhoto), and who complicate a clean distinction between the hand made and digital. These artists are neither nostalgic for an analog past nor starry-eyed about a digital future, but they all do make a critical and important intervention, one both obvious but also in need of reiteration: These machines are nothing without us to hold them, fill them with content, plug them in and fix them. (At least until the demonic entity of the AI singularity arises to punish humans like an angry Biblical prophet.) While infinitely more complicated and capable of something like human cognition and creativity, AI is a tool just as brushes, straight edges and kilns are tools—an instrument wielded by a person towards some end. This article explores a selection of the artists in the exhibition, Ena Swansea, Yassi Mazandi, Analia Saban and Taha Heydari, and it shows how their hybrid ways of working confound the distinction between working by hand and using digital tools.
Swansea’s area code, 2019 shows a little boy alone inside a phone booth in a forest clearing. The phone booth is lit from inside, as if it were night time, while the blue sky suggests the sun is out. The time of day is ambiguous. The creeping black patterns on the forest floor indicate nighttime or late evening or melting patches of snow. This ambiguity about the time of day—one that you probably did not register—hints at disparate photographic sources that the artist loosely drew from to make this composition. Her process begins by perusing the more than 80,000 photographs she has taken and archived on her computer. She has been shooting with a digital camera since the late 1990s, though now mostly uses her iPhone. area code, 2019 mixes together a few of her photographic interests: the now antiquated but once ubiquitous phone booth, the dense deciduous forests of the eastern US, an abandoned NASCAR track in North Carolina, and her son, the child in the booth. As she shared recently, she starts by looking at photographs on the computer monitor and “stays in that world until it becomes clear to me what the image will be. Only then is it translated out of the digital realm into the studio.” These photographs are not collaged together to make the painting. Instead, they are visual prompts that lead her to a rough composition in her head before she steps in front of the canvas.
Ena Swansea, area code, 2019, (2019), oil and acrylic on linen, SBMA, Museum purchase with funds provided by Kandy Budgor, Luria/Budgor Family Foundation
Swansea starts digitally and ends working by hand. Others take the opposite route. Mazandi’s Nine began as clay thrown on a potter’s wheel that she then carved and fired. She calls them flowers, but they also resemble vertebrae, corals and the microscopic mineralized shells of diatoms. After firing, the ur-form of Nine was X-ray scanned. This digital file was enlarged. Then, an experimental machine that used pulverized stone bonded with a magnesium compound printed the file. As a final step, Mazandi brushed on a coating to heighten the nubby texture, as if Nine had been submerged in the ocean and coated with accretions barnacles. The sculpture is stone, albeit spit out from the nozzle of a printer, but resembles the mineral depositions of an arcane biological or geological process.
Yassi Mazandi, Nine, 2013, a unique Born-Porcelain TM work, geo-polymer bound Dolomitic stone, casein-based coating, SBMA, gift of Beth Rudin Dewoody
Saban’s concatenation of analog and digital in Pleated Ink (Music Synthesizer: Max/MSP, 1996) is not about the process of making an artwork, though she does sometimes mix approaches in her art marking by using laser cutters and digital printing. Instead, Pleated Ink is a picture of a computer screen running the music synthesizer program MAX/MSP (Mix signal processing). Released in 1996, the program used the innovative method of a Visual Programming Language, also called Block Coding. Rather than typing lines of commands, the user visually moved around blocks and connected parts together with lines to link together functions. This painting transforms the familiar experience of staring at a computer monitor with its bright clarity and crisp edges, a place beyond human touch and without dimensionality or texture, into a bumpy tactile surface. The wisps of ink are like pulls of taffy laying across the canvas. Their presence heightens the painting’s connection to a human person holding a tool to apply the ink and recalls the goopy unruliness of paints and inks.
Analia Saban, Pleated Ink (Music Synthesizer: Max/MSP, 1996), 2020, ink on panel, courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallerry, NY/LA
Finally, Heydari’s Reterritorializaiton (2023) might be a decrepit greenhouse filled with trees and overgrown plants. The roof resembles a dropped ceiling found in bland corporate offices everywhere. This ceiling might or might not be glass. Water pours down in streams and puddles everywhere. Sheets of water obscure the background. A greenhouse, a gathering of people, lawn furniture, a paneled ceiling, overgrown plants, and maybe someone nude reclining next to a pond. These elements have the horrific quality of a nightmare in which only the dreamer knows something is amiss.
In an interview in ArteEast, Heydari said that his paintings’ illogic and disorientation—its blurs, perplexing subjects, ambiguous shapes—come from a need to pull apart the totalizing ideology of contemporary Iran, where he grew up before coming to the US to pursue an MFA.
As a member of the generation that emerged following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, I incorporate different modes of mark-making to reveal and deconstruct the binaries that have shaped my identity: East and West, body and soul, past and future.
The way that Reterritorializaiton holds together initially but ultimately crumbles offers a visual parable for how anyone might move away from the binaries of ideologies—and not just those from Heydari’s experience—to all the leaky and creaky and unsatisfactory confusion of the world in which we actually live. In an exchange with this author, Heydari called his paintings “autopsies of found images.” He said that “objects in the painting are stretched between two states, decaying material and unraveling grid-like systems.” The immediate object of the autopsy is the AI-generated image, which he manipulated and changed as he put brush to canvas. While this painting is proof that there is not a firm boundary between being made by hand and born digital, there is also a much bigger lesson to take away from this painting about being a critical thinker, about keeping your eyes open. Do the pieces support the edifice they are shoring up? Question. Look carefully. IRL is messy, confusing and full of real possibilities, if you stay open.
Made by Hand/Born Digital at SBMA artists include Alex Heilbron, Taha Heydari, Yassi Mazandi, Justin Mortimer, Analia Saban, Ena Swansea, Sarah Rosalena and Joey Watson
Cover Image: Taha Heydari, Reterritorialization 2023, acrylic on canvas, courtesy of the artist and Jack Barrett, NY
