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Lot Essay
A vast black monolith stretching over three metres in height, the present work is a monumental example of Wade Guyton’s dialogue with technology. Created by feeding canvas through an industrial Epson inkjet printer, the work transforms the black monochrome – the ultimate modernist archetype – into a plane littered with glitches, smudges and errors. Pulled into the twenty-first century against its will, the work poses a question that has long haunted image-making: can art be created by machines? Extending the legacy of artists such as Andy Warhol and Christopher Wool – both of whom exploited technology in their re-evaluations of contemporary image production – Guyton’s mechanically-induced surfaces are almost painterly in their profusion of ruptures, rivulets and nuances. No longer wielding a brush, the artist’s fingers instead manipulate the canvas, working in disruptive tandem with the halting efforts of the printer. Sourced from a single digital drawing – a simple black rectangle – the present work is bisected by a thin white line: a scar from where the material was folded to be printed first on one side and then the other, thus allowing a double width to be covered. As man and machine rage against one another in a battle for artistic control, Guyton drags painting and technology into unholy alliance.
Guyton’s earliest experiments with printing as a medium stemmed from his frustration with the tedium of drawing. The artist would create designs in Microsoft Word which he then printed onto pages ripped from books and journals, noting that ‘the printer did a much better job’ (W. Guyton, quoted in D. Armstrong, ‘Wade Guyton’, Interview, June-July 2009, p. 79). In 2005, the artist extended this process to the creation of large-scale ‘paintings’, which involved printing pre-designed imagery – letters, symbols and other motifs – onto blank canvas. Sourcing high-quality pre-primed linen from Provence, the artist describes how he was obliged to coax the machine into printing, by folding and taping the canvas in order to override the printer’s sensors. ‘Fabric is tricky because it bunches, so you have to trick the printer into thinking that it’s printing on something else’, explains Guyton. ‘Because it has a sensor, it actually can figure out what it’s not supposed to be printing on … It does have problems, but I’ve figured out how to trick the machine’ (W. Guyton, quoted in D. Armstrong, ‘Wade Guyton’, Interview Magazine, June-July 2009, p. 81). The black monochrome was once hailed as art’s new ‘ground zero’, worshipped by the likes of Malevich, Rodchenko and Reinhardt. Here, it proclaims a similarly brave new world. Painting, once consigned to the scrapheap, is given a terrifying, uncertain lease of life in its stuttering encounter with the future.
Guyton’s earliest experiments with printing as a medium stemmed from his frustration with the tedium of drawing. The artist would create designs in Microsoft Word which he then printed onto pages ripped from books and journals, noting that ‘the printer did a much better job’ (W. Guyton, quoted in D. Armstrong, ‘Wade Guyton’, Interview, June-July 2009, p. 79). In 2005, the artist extended this process to the creation of large-scale ‘paintings’, which involved printing pre-designed imagery – letters, symbols and other motifs – onto blank canvas. Sourcing high-quality pre-primed linen from Provence, the artist describes how he was obliged to coax the machine into printing, by folding and taping the canvas in order to override the printer’s sensors. ‘Fabric is tricky because it bunches, so you have to trick the printer into thinking that it’s printing on something else’, explains Guyton. ‘Because it has a sensor, it actually can figure out what it’s not supposed to be printing on … It does have problems, but I’ve figured out how to trick the machine’ (W. Guyton, quoted in D. Armstrong, ‘Wade Guyton’, Interview Magazine, June-July 2009, p. 81). The black monochrome was once hailed as art’s new ‘ground zero’, worshipped by the likes of Malevich, Rodchenko and Reinhardt. Here, it proclaims a similarly brave new world. Painting, once consigned to the scrapheap, is given a terrifying, uncertain lease of life in its stuttering encounter with the future.