#43: What People Are For
I just finished Lawrence Weschler's biography of Robert Irwin, the painter and installation artist, which was a fantastic examination, via an ongoing, decades-long conversation between author and subject, of how Irwin obsessively pursued an ideal of pure, unmediated perception in his work. The turning point in Irwin's early career—the phase when he became Robert Irwin, so to speak—occurred during the early '60s, when he painted his ten "late line" paintings over a two-year period. Each of the ten paintings, at a glance, was a monotone, brightly-colored canvas with two thin, horizontal straight lines painted across the field. Irwin describes the process of sequestering himself in his studio, staring at his work, and repeatedly adjusting the positions of the two lines for optimal effect: "Renaissance man tells the world what he finds interesting about it and then tries to control it. I took to waiting for the world to tell me so that I could respond...After weeks and weeks of observation, of hairline readjustments, the right solution would presently announce itself."
Today, there's an additional layer of interest to Irwin's process: Couldn't his manual act of tweaking and refining over weeks and years be automated? A computer could take the instructions to generate two horizontal lines on top of a colored rectangle and spit out thousands or even millions of iterations in a matter of seconds, algorithmically determining which versions were the "best." This alternative is useful to think about because it raises a few important questions that are easy to ignore in other domains: What should people be doing, when should people keep doing something that can also be automated, and what is the point of having people around in general? The very possibility of the scenario I just posed is itself an affirmation of Irwin's art: Beyond any visual appeal, his work has me asking these questions 50 years after its creation.
People are best at doing precisely what machines can't do. One of our least appreciated advantages is our ability to do things imperfectly: I don't care at all about seeing the most optimized version of a painting of two lines; I want to see the version that Robert Irwin believed was best after weeks of slaving away in isolation, the version that induced "a rich floating sense of energy" when he finally stared at it. Plenty of quasi-mechanical human practices exhibit this quality, such as playing drums, the value of which endures in many musical genres because knowing that a person is doing it (and even hearing the slight rhythmic imperfections) actually matters. Marshall McLuhan wrote, "The horse has lost its role in transportation but has made a strong comeback in entertainment." For humans, despite whatever labor we hand off to automation, that transition will at least free us up to make our own comeback in perception and meaning creation.
Last week Graham Johnson interviewed me about "the state of the internet" for Are.na. I talked about modernism and information overload a lot. It was fun.
Reads:
The Precarious Existence of London's "Property Guardians"—people who provide live-in security for vacant buildings, effectively becoming squatters themselves.
Bloomberg created a weird, cool game in which you try to keep a dying mall alive as long as possible.
Dinner at the End of America: a heartbreaking reflection on the Planet Hollywood in Times Square (there are only six left in the world!)
Until next time,
Drew