Without trying to espouse the ‘genius function’ on Apple Music (something I often refer to as “DJ Steve Jobs”), Fabian Marti’s forthcoming exhibition at O-Town House certainly isn’t being flippant about the proverbial ‘algorithm’.
Just this past September, on a cross-country roadtrip, within minutes of crossing the border from Pennsylvania into Ohio, DJ Steve Jobs put on a track by Guided by Voices (a band from Dayton, Ohio) that I hadn’t heard since I was in college in Ohio, now nearly 25 years ago. And then, not much more than an hour later, once I decided to swing by that same campus for the first time in over 20 years (it was only a 20 minute detour), DJ Steve Jobs decided to play a track by fellow alumnus Liz Phair from the album she purportedly wrote about her time on that very same campus. To my knowledge, honestly, I hadn’t heard either of those songs since I lived in Ohio.
This anecdote may seem indulgent, but I offer this story here as an attempt to describe the remarkable scope of this thing we call ‘the algorithm’. Please know: this is definitely not a paranoid conspiracy rant or a cautionary tale. I was genuinely surprised and quite pleased to hear this music again. It was the cathartic trip-down-memory-lane I didn’t even know I was yearning for.
This catharsis is curious. Long-since faded memories conjured by songs played by DJ Steve Jobs. The computer-mind thought I might also enjoy ‘discovering’ these artists. Weirdly enough, however, it was myself that I recognized (discovered?) in the playlist created by an algorithm!
*breath*
Fabian Marti is a new father - frightened and fascinated in equal measure - and this mysterious exhibition, Lullaby Essentials, is a series of paintings he thought his son, Leopold, might enjoy looking at. Leopold, however, is still very young and it is hard to discern his ‘preferences’. So Marti filled in the blanks:
what makes Leopold stop crying?
what helps Leopold fall asleep?
what makes Leopold laugh? brings him joy?
etc…
Caring for a young child is about observing their needs a process akin to data collection (is it not?). A parent wants to know what’s happening inside their child’s rapidly forming mind.
Amy Cappallazzo once said, famously, that green paintings are the hardest to sell. Presumably, she was inferring that the people who buy paintings don’t respond to the color green. So why then, in 2019, did Fabian Marti start making (almost) exclusively green paintings? Was it to prove that the color green isn’t as unpopular as the Sotheby’s CEO claimed? Or was it way of questioning that which we are told we like or dislike? The data may show that green paintings are more difficult to sell, but that may not necessarily mean that people enjoy them less.
If artists made work according to an algorithm predicting what people prefer too look at, there would no be more green paintings.
Thankfully artists usually don’t make work according to a predictive algorithm, but Marti’s paintings for Leopold explore what that process could look like.
The resulting paintings are odd, surreal dreamscapes. They seem somehow familiar and alien at once, oscillating between abstraction and figuration. Is that an face? Just an eye maybe? Is that a dinosaur? Do you see an octopus too? There is a small Giacometti-esque sculpture that jumps from painting to painting: a gift to the exhibition from artist Louis Henri Meyer.
The paintings are all hung on the gallery walls at a toddler eye-level, reminding us who these paintings were designed for.
Marti has created a body of work based on what he imagines his son would like to see. He’s created a so-called algorithm by the very act of caring for Leopold. These collected, if imagined, prompts (or data points) are then translated into works of art for not only his son, but for all of us to enjoy. (Scott Cameron Weaver)
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