Modern and postmodern art, unlike most prior movements in Western art, are heavily based on abstract representations of thematic elements. Instead of attempting to depict reality visually through a certain style, technique, or medium, these movements typically aim at evoking a certain theme or reaction through artistic devices which may or may not accurately represent a real-world subject. Prominent examples include Rene Magritte’s The Treachery of Images – which consists of a drawing of a pipe with the words, “This is not a pipe” in French below; the various works of Jackson Pollack – which are typically made through seemingly-random splatters of paint; and Michel Duchamp’s Fountain – a men’s room urinal signed “R. Mutt.”
What all of these works have in common is that they are intended to detach meaning from pure representation. Duchamp’s Fountain can be seen as a rebellion against formal art, while Magritte’s The Treachery of Images makes the metaphysical statement that the object shown in an artistic work is solely an image, not the actual object in itself. Pollack’s work can be seen as a liberation from form, authority, style, and content, the epitome of the often-used slogan, “art for arts sake.”
The Facticity of Art follows this theme, attempting to evoke a reaction or statement without solely relying on representations of the physical world. However, unlike the works previously referenced, this piece is digital and user-driven. As Lev Manovich states in The Language of New Media, contemporary advancements in aesthetics – particularly in illusional aesthetics like (post-)modern art –“turn the subject into a user. The subject is expected to interact with representation” (205). In other words, instead of being simply a viewer, digital art invites the viewer to become part of the art, making it through their own actions.
The theme in The Facticity of Art is the transformation and evolution of art. The work draws from two traditions in abstract Modern art: Suprematism, as interpreted by Khazmir Malevich, and De Stijl, as interpreted by Piet Mondrian. The work opens with a digital representation of Malevich’s Black Square, geometric abstraction par excellance. However, the work is not static, as the user can click on any part of black square.
Once a user clicks this square, a section that is clicked becomes lighter. The user is given the freedom to click any section of the square, and it should now be clear that the work is not a unified square, but rather a collection of pieces that fit together. There are sixteen quadrilaterals of various size, shape, and orientation which make up the larger square, contrasted against a white background with a heavy black border.
The user can make any section lighter, until it approaches white. Once a user clicks on a white section, it turns to a random color. If that section is clicked again, it turns black and the process with that individual section starts all over again. However, if the user clicks any other square, the colored square changes color randomly. When the user has advanced into the work, it appears to be a geometric conglomeration of color and strict form, representative of Piet Mondrian’s works in the De Stijl style.
While the user-driven shift from one tradition of modern art to another is most certainly representative of the importance of the viewer and critic in the evolution of art, this is not the main theme of the work. The viewer can create their own artwork in this piece; however, one should resist the temptation to call it “unique.” While the number of possible combinations is astronomically large (3,552,713,678,800,500,929,355,621,337,890,600, to be precise), it is by no means infinite.
Above all, The Facticity of Art is a system within which a user can create and manipulate art. While the user can change the colors of the various squares, the code behind the work cannot be changed. The work thus takes part of its name, facticity, from an ontological term by Jean-Paul Sartre. For Sartre, facticity is that which we cannot change about ourselves. One’s facticity – which includes one’s birth place and time, biological parents, and previous actions – is an essential part of one’s being, as it directly limits one’s possible decisions and futures.
The facticity of this work is that one can never break outside of it. No matter how many times the user clicks the page, it will still behave predictably and according to the code upon which it was built. Aside from hacking into the web server and changing the code (which would make it a different work of art), a user has no control over the nature of this fundamental system. While interactive digital art can be considered user-centered, The Facticity of Art attempts to illustrate that this new style and medium is only centered around those possibilities that the creator wishes to make available to the user.
Bibliography
Calinescu, Matei. The Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987).
Greenberg, Clement. Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961).
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002).
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness (New York: Citadel Press, 1956).