Plexus: Joseph Nechvatal

Joseph Nechvatal: These are works originating from the bullfights in Arles, France. They are marquettes for computer-robotic assisted acrylic on canvas paintings (dimensions variable).

Joseph Nechvatal
Critical Pleasure (an excerpt)
Johana Drucker

Electronic activity has wrought a transformation on nearly every aspect of current culture so that the very term current resonates with the electronic pulse of active charges flowing across a continually shifting differential. The body of the fine arts has suffered an infusion of new processes and data manipulations so that it now lives the same cyborg hybrid life as every other entity. Rather than reject this situation as an aberration, Joseph Nechvatal makes use of the mutation of visual art by electronic manipulation to reengage the critical pleasure of aesthetics. Though seduced by the potent possibility of new technologies, Nechvatal doesn't merely celebrate technologically driven change or flirt with fashionable trends in image manipulation. On the contrary, Nechvatal is endeavoring to salvage something fundamental for the visual arts through his approach -- a self-conscious continuation of the transgressive terms on which the avant-garde has historically functioned as a site of strategic intervention in cultural activity. Nechvatal believes that art may still -- in this networked new world disorder of random connections and virtual encounters -- be able to reveal something about the ways in which culture operates in and through images, language, and representations.

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