Colette Bangert — continuing solo practice

2015

Artists: Colette Bangert · Year: 2015 · Medium: Plotter drawings and digital prints — continuing the joint Bangert algorithmic-landscape practice solo after Charles's death · Substrate: Continued use of the joint Bangert algorithms; contemporary plotters and digital output · Place: Lawrence, Kansas, USA · Institution: Independent; Spencer Museum of Art affiliate Colette Bangert, widowed since 2008, continued the long-running algorithmic-plotter practice that she and her late husband Charles Bangert had built collaboratively from 1967 forward (the earlier Bangert moments appear elsewhere in this archive). Her 2015 solo exhibition at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas — the institution that holds the joint Bangert archive — presented new work from the period after Charles's death, in which Colette had begun running the FORTRAN programs the two had written together, on the same CalComp plotter, alone in the studio they had shared for four decades. What the 2015 show argued, implicitly, is that the joint practice had never actually been joint in the way that the surface collaboration suggested. Colette had been the visual sensibility throughout; Charles had been the implementation partner. When Charles died, Colette could still run the system — the programs worked, the plotter worked, the FORTRAN interpreter on the machine they had maintained for decades worked — and the resulting plotter drawings from 2009–15 are recognizably in the Bangert vocabulary but carry a specific emotional weight that the earlier joint work did not. The hand-mixed inks are slightly different. The paper choices slightly shifted. The Bangert style is present, but inflected by solitude in ways that the 2015 curator Kate Meyer found specifically moving. The show travelled modestly — to a few university-art-museum venues through 2016 — and Colette's subsequent work has continued at a deliberately slow pace. She is in her late nineties now and still producing, though at a reduced tempo. The 2015 solo show is in this archive as the specific case of a pioneer-generation American computer artist whose career has lasted long enough that she is now producing work in the 2020s that is genealogically continuous with work from 1967. Colette's story is, in many ways, the counterfactual for the period's other American algorithmic-plotter artists: she has continued, while most of her generation has stopped. The continuity is the argument. Lore Colette maintained the CalComp plotter in her and Charles's home studio in Lawrence, Kansas through most of the 2000s and 2010s; the plotter is genuinely the same physical machine the couple purchased in the early 1970s, periodically repaired with salvage-yard components. The 2015 exhibition's installation included the plotter itself as a sculptural object beside Colette's new plotter drawings, so visitors could see the specific instrument that had produced the work. The Spencer Museum has since acquired the plotter as a collection object with the explicit agreement that it will remain functional for as long as that is technically feasible. Colette's daily practice — a studio visit most mornings, a small plotter run of perhaps an hour, a few new drawings per week — has continued essentially unchanged for over fifty years. Sources • Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas — Bangert archive. • Meyer, Kate — Colette Bangert: Work in the Studio (Spencer Museum, 2015; exh. cat.). • Bangert, Colette — Daily Drawing Journal (private, extended by the Spencer acquisition).