Statement
by Lauren Sedofsky
In a catalog essay for Manfred Mohr's show at the Josef Albers
Museum (Bottrop, Germany) in 1998, I had occasion to situate the
inception of his work within the forces at play in the late '60s and
early '70s between Minimalism and Conceptual Art. By historicizing an
oeuvre that now covers some thirty years in this way, I had hoped to put
to rest the notion that "computer graphics" or what we now call "the
digital image" necessarily represents an epiphenomenon outside of art
history proper. It permitted me as well to account for the singular way
in which Mohr had seized upon Minimalism's pre-eminent simple, single,
symmetrical, geometrical solid -- the cube -- precisely to recast it as
a base of operations in which an open-ended, on-going
detection/production of its elusive linear facets might itself
constitute the work of art. This temporally indeterminate, programmatic
approach participates unequivocally in the Conceptualist redefinition of
art as an instrumental, often language-based, principle, but with an
audacious twist. For, the Conceptualist redefinition figures in the
history of art as a signal critique of an increasingly technologized
culture, whereas Mohr's turn toward the computer -- or, to be more
exact, its cognitive interface: the formalized language of computer
programming -- at once ratifies the critique and embraces the
technology. This step, both logical and defiant at the time, permitted
Mohr to append a salient clause to Conceptual Art's proscription of
visual effects: some systematic artistic procedures, once launched,
generate vast quantities of visual images, not at all in the traditional
sense, not as ends in themselves, but as documentary evidence, as
"by-products" susceptible, in their own right, of engaging perceptual
experience.
Recent efforts to theorize the digital image shed a good deal of
light on Mohr's unique, if not to say critical, position in the
development of computer-generated art. Whether of the dithyrambic or the
apocalyptic variety, such speculation reposes all too frequently on the
erroneous assumption that the digital image is primarily geared to
photo-realism. In this regard, Mohr's highly abstract, multi-dimensional
"graphic entities" serve the very salutary purpose of repositioning the
issue of "binary" art within the concerns and aspirations typically
associated with Constructivism. The abstraction involved -- the
creation of an autonomous formalized universe whose inherent
possibilities become accessible to exhaustive exploration -- connects
obliquely, but pertinently with the current scientific practice of
modeling and visualizing theoretical systems. Needless to say, such an
approach requires an ability to conceive and progressively reconceive
the software. The theoreticians of the digital, however, have yet to
entertain the idea that the artist might intervene at this level. It
will remain one of Mohr's major merits, therefore, to have assigned to
the artist, from the outset, the role of scriptor and to have identified
the digital image, unambiguously, as one that is written. And the issue
of digital art, such as Mohr has posed it, lies in this new equation
between language (0/1) and image, that is to say, in the unforeseen and
unforeseeable results of a translation.