Georg Nees — Computer-Grafik — Studium Generale, Stuttgart

1965

Artists: Georg Nees, Max Bense (curator) · Year: 1965 · Medium: Exhibition of plotter drawings · Substrate: Siemens Graphomat plotter, ALGOL programs by Nees · Place: Technische Hochschule Stuttgart, Germany · Institution: Studium Generale, TH Stuttgart The February 1965 Computer-Grafik exhibition at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart ran for two weeks in a lecture-hall corridor. It was small — perhaps twenty plotter drawings by Georg Nees, pinned to the walls. The philosopher Max Bense, who had supervised Nees's doctoral dissertation on Generative Computergraphik, opened the exhibition with a lecture to a handful of attendees, mostly students and a few invited artists from the Stuttgart scene. During the Q&A, one of the invited painters — by most accounts a well-known abstract artist — reportedly shouted that the works on the wall were not art. Bense, standing calmly, is supposed to have replied: "Dann ist es künstliche Kunst" — then it is artificial art. The exchange, which may be partly apocryphal in its sharpest form, was recorded in several contemporaneous accounts and has become the genre's most-quoted founding moment. Three things make the Stuttgart show historically definitive. It was first — by nearly three months, beating Howard Wise Gallery in New York, where Noll and Julesz opened their exhibition that April. It was institutional — held at a university, supervised by a philosopher, with an academic dissertation as its intellectual spine. And it was contested — the argument that this was not art was raised immediately, in public, by an artist with credibility. Every subsequent debate about computer-generated art has been a variation on that one Stuttgart evening. The Stuttgart school proper — Bense's seminar on Information Aesthetics, and the artists it produced, chiefly Nees and Frieder Nake — was a philosophical project before it was an artistic one. Bense believed art could be analyzed as statistical signal, and that if it could be analyzed this way it could also be generated this way. The plotter drawings were evidence. The dispute at the exhibition opening was whether evidence of a philosophical claim is the same as a work of art. Sixty years later, looking at Nees's Schotter and Nake's Hommage à Paul Klee in any major museum collection, the answer is clearly yes. In 1965 it was still being decided. Lore Widely considered the first public exhibition anywhere in the world of computer-generated art. It ran for two weeks in February 1965 in a lecture-hall corridor at the TH Stuttgart. The philosopher Max Bense, whose Information Aesthetics seminar had produced Nees as a doctoral student, opened it. During the Q&A, one of the invited painters reportedly shouted that what Nees had shown was not art. Bense, unruffled, replied with the phrase that would follow him: 'Dann ist es künstliche Kunst' — 'Then it is artificial art.' Three months later, A. Michael Noll and Béla Julesz held the first US exhibition at Howard Wise Gallery in New York. Sources • ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien — Stuttgart school archive • Bense, Max — Aesthetica (1965) • Taylor, Grant D. — When the Machine Made Art (Bloomsbury, 2014)