A. Michael Noll — Computer-Generated Pictures — Howard Wise Gallery

1965

Artists: A. Michael Noll, Béla Julesz, Howard Wise (curator) · Year: 1965 · Medium: Exhibition of plotter drawings, microfilm plots, random-dot stereograms · Substrate: IBM 7090 mainframe, Stromberg-Carlson 4020 microfilm plotter (Bell Labs) · Place: New York, USA · Institution: Howard Wise Gallery, 50 West 57th Street The Howard Wise Gallery at 50 West 57th Street in Manhattan was a small room in a building of small rooms on a block lined with commercial galleries. Between 1960 and 1970 Wise showed work that almost no other commercial gallery in New York would consider — kinetic sculpture by Len Lye, cybernetic work by Wen-Ying Tsai, light art by Julio Le Parc, and, in April 1965, Computer-Generated Pictures by A. Michael Noll and Béla Julesz of Bell Telephone Laboratories. The exhibition's timing was historically precise. The Stuttgart Computer-Grafik exhibition at the Technische Hochschule had opened two months earlier, in February. Wise's show was the first commercial gallery exhibition of computer-generated art in the United States, and the first anywhere in the world held in a venue whose primary purpose was to sell art to private collectors rather than to teach philosophy students. The commercial framing mattered less than the fact of it. Selling was not the point. The point was the assertion — that plotter drawings produced by mainframe computers belonged on gallery walls, with lighting and titles and a printed checklist, like any other contemporary art. Noll showed Gaussian Quadratic, his Mondrian-style Composition with Lines, and a series of Gaussian-distribution line studies. Julesz showed his random-dot stereograms — paired images that, when viewed stereoscopically, revealed hidden three-dimensional forms that existed in neither image on its own. The inclusion of Julesz's stereograms extended the exhibition's argument beyond decorative plotter work into perceptual research, and that extension was crucial. Computer-Generated Pictures was not a display of images. It was a demonstration that computation could do things no non-computational medium could do, and that those things were worth attending to as art. Wise closed his gallery in 1970. He had, by his own account, lost money on nearly every exhibition he had mounted across its decade of operation. What he had given the field in that decade was a room in New York where the work was allowed to exist. In 1965 that was rare. Every subsequent American exhibition of computer art — and there were few for the next fifteen years — descended from the willingness of one commercial gallerist to lose money on the proposition. Lore Howard Wise opened his gallery in Cleveland in 1957 and moved it to 57th Street in New York in 1960. He closed it in 1970 after a decade of losing money on nearly every show. Computer-Generated Pictures was reviewed by the New York Times — politely, dismissively — and reportedly nothing sold. Noll, who had come up from Bell Labs to install the show, stood in the gallery with Julesz during the opening and watched visitors react. He has written that the artists who came were either fascinated or offended; almost nobody was neutral. Wise closed the gallery in 1970 because kinetic and technological art was not supported by the New York market. Sources • Taylor, Grant D. — When the Machine Made Art (Bloomsbury, 2014) • The Getty Research Institute — Howard Wise Gallery records • Noll, A. Michael — memoirs and essays at noll.uscannenberg.org