Chris Ashley is a painter. That's the first thing I want to say, and as it may turn out, the most radical, because he creates his color images without paint. Ashley uses HTML (hypertext markup language), the original and rudimentary instructional software of the internet, and delivers the results to his audience via the web. No brushes to clean. No walls to leave nail holes in. His studio/gallery is, in the parlance, a Blog, an online journal he maintains on a day to day basis. As a typical viewer, my experience with his work is quite a bit more intimate than it would be in a gallery setting, checking in every few days as I do, usually curled up in bed with a laptop, to find out what's new in this 24/7 digital version of Malraux's Museum Without Walls. Ideas and images flow unfettered out of Ashley's agile, leaping sensibility, and if I've been away for a week, it's generally quite a feed, for every day brings a new image.
Ashley creates his art through coded instruction, simple commands that give his rectangles hue, width and breadth, and determine their location relative to one another. His method is constructivist but his manner is decidedly expressionist;he builds his grid-bound images intuitively, almost in spite of the grid, through a series of choices that accumulate and graft onto one another. The result is organic: a kind of cluster, like rectangular grapes on a rectilinear stem. He feels his way into the color, and into the broader implications of his task. The daily offerings unfold serially, usually around a conceptual theme cued in by the title. A week's worth gives one the chance to see the development of Ashley's running idea and to consider the relationship between his formally constrained abstraction and the narrative reference he extends by association. It is in this timely accumulation, with images so easily archived and cross-referenced, that Ashley finds the real strength of his medium.
There are philosophical implications to the virtual reality, the non-physical aspect of these HTML images. Rather than painting, one might call them coding, and one could ask angel-on-a-pinhead questions like, "What direction is the light coming from?" and, "How big are they?" They don't conform to painting's standard vocabulary, deriving their color as they do neither from mass tone nor undertone. For the many ways they are different from painting, though, what seems to differentiate the actual experience of viewing them most is their convenience, how readily accessed they are. Considered as paintings, Ashley's images conjure the same pros and cons compared to physical objects as emails do compared to handwritten letters. What digital correspondence lacks in the perfumed, autograph, keepsake department, it makes up for in its running immediacy, and the same holds true for the generative nature of Ashley's art, lending itself as it does to published output with its own built-in currency. A visit to Ashley's blog always feels like late breaking news. Traditional painting, by its static nature, has a way of arresting and stretching time. Images unfold according to inner clocks. By working in an iterative medium that is so responsive to the moment, so readily updated and refined, Ashley has found a way to introduce even more plasticity into painting's inherent ability to manipulate time. He enjoys both the suspended release of static painting and the serial accumulation of the web, a kind of painted journalism.
Since the pioneering days of the internet, creatives have described the challenges of making online art as "designing on water. " Ashley seems perfectly at home with the flux of his medium, with colors that shift from monitor to monitor and an oeuvre that consists at its core of nothing but electronically stored chains of zeroes and ones. Whether or not his art conforms in fact to any conventional definition of painting, his artistry, its intent and application, is very much in keeping with the highest standards of the painter. The simple language he chooses keeps him much more closely aligned to the painter's vocabulary than to the dizzying technology of computer generated imagery. He uses the inherent constraints of HTML to create new freedoms and uses this freedom to imbue his work with fresh meaning, extending the vernacular and experiential impact of constructivism. In spite of their classical roots, these are subtly tuned and freshly spawned works. The substantive value of Ashley's imagery will outlive any novelty value that his working in HTML carries. He never forgets that his true medium is color and light, and he wields these basics with a deftness any painter would envy. By whatever means, he paints. In the process, and through the accumulative context within which he frames his work, he breaks down the false dichotomy between formal structure and narrative content, creating an art which is as rewarding to ponder as it is to view.
George Lawson
Oakland 2004
= = = = = = =
James Harris: Singing the Body Electric
Illuminations:
. . . Celestial Light,
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate; there plant eyes; all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.
John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book III, 51-55
~ ~ ~ ~
All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from
whence the rivers come, thither they return again.
All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied
with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is
done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? . . .
Ecclesiastes, Book I, 7-10
Observations:
Chris Ashley's pictures, illumined images on a flatscreen surface that cross over from inner-vision to realization via keyboard and code, not brush-stroke and paint, are surprisingly embodied. These are "table drawings" created using HTML--hypertext markup language, the programming code that enables the World Wide Web. Individual pictures appear as part of a series or set, with the sets accumulating over days, months and years at Ashley's website. That's the practicum, the result is a body of work that interrogates color, and in the bargain, investigations of arranged space interrogate time. These discrete events, going past as daily images, gather and grow together, becoming a metamorphosis . . . which is, after all, an embodiment of time.
It would be a mistake to consider these as images created only for instant consumption--they present a panorama of temporality in the synoptic revelation of light, color and shape; they depict tension and resolution in formal choices rendered onscreen while deploying a full range of painterly strategies. Ashley's relentless rectangular shapes--called to the service of color--jostle for primacy, get on top of one another, are symmetric at times, asymmetric at others, resolved today, ruptured tomorrow; some pictures are labyrinthine, others multi-dimensional; the most haunting invite a viewer to meditate on propositions of depth or movement aglow on the still surface of the screen.
I find most compelling those pictures made of delicate, discrete rectangles, patterned across larger color fields toned to hues that mimic translucence--the Hummingbird and Three Edges sets are good examples. These formally austere medleys rise above the clichéd noise of saturated color working too hard for emotional approval--a frequent outcome in computer generated imagery. Look into the bounty of these pictures: a straight line fibrillates along the edge where two colors meet; a synonymous hue spreads across a paced gap of smooth, tepid space; a jumble of small box-shapes pulsates.
The underlying formal strategies often appear effortless, or better, quietly inevitable; they rarely over-reach the artist's active eye, rarely fail to heed slow zones of light and color where the mind seems to pause and catch its breath (find inspiration?). The most successful creations in Ashley's work--and plenty exist to choose from--are saturated with an invitation to dwell in their amplitude, to enter an idealized space that seduces like raw reality.
The pictures I frequently return to (in addition to the sets mentioned above, also see 18 Lohans, 11 Bodhis and Dasarâjadharma) stream into view free of the fantods and caprices of a computer image beholden to its aura of technological origin; these are seminal creations, not illustrative examples; given color, given light, given bounded space, they are phenomena not epiphenomena.
On many occasions when returning to look at these pictures, I encounter musical elements that inform and suffuse them. It's difficult to choose a good way to explain this. For starters, consider how the existence of a musical score is analogous to the source code that defines and circumscribes, but does not enact, perform or present the "table drawings". If you've listened to an 18th Century keyboard piece, played on both harpsichord and piano (think of Keith Jarrett's harpsichord and Glenn Gould's piano performances of Bach's Goldberg Variations), you will have come across an antecedent to a 21st Century debate about computer-enabled imagery: where is the artist's intent when code-generated images based on one source display differently in different computing environments?
But there's more. When Keats wrote, "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/ Are sweeter," he had been looking at the images on a Grecian urn, an "unravish'd bride of quietness" and the "silent" revelers depicted at a wedding. Something like Keats' experience--to hear, or imagine, music when looking at an image--is one reaction I have to Ashley's work. I've had similar experiences looking at the later paintings of Piet Mondrian--aware of something musical that is more formally fundamental and essential than simply the suggestive words in titles: Rhythm, Fox Trot and Boogie-Woogie. I also find musical elements in several of M.C. Escher's graphic sets: Sky & Water and Symmetry and Metamorphosis. Why these two Dutch artists, dissimilar as their work is, when other examples might be given? Because each of them--and Ashley--achieves, with minimal compositional elements, the effects I find musical. Furthermore, it's fair to say that some of Ashley's images echo, if distantly, Mondrian's rectangular grid and limited palette. And, Ashley can create the illusion of dimensionality and depth on a flat plane through the transformation of basic geometric shapes, as does Escher.
In Ashley's practice, the ongoing daily presentation of each picture makes it available as part of a lineage that can approach visual melody through subtle color variation, or in a shape doppelgänger, and often both. This referential accretion within the sets--of color palettes and kindred abstract forms--creates a larger context for the individual images. These forward driving re-organizations and re-statements unify a thread (a kind of content free narrative excursion) that arcs through claimed time in a visual sequence of tones, crescendos and recapitulations. One trope of Ashley's practice, invoked occasionally at the conclusion of a set of pictures--to re-present the whole group in a single concatenated image--makes readily available the fugal elements that migrate and turn up from one picture to the next in many of his sets.
Daily improvisation drives the images through time. This is as true for these pictures as it is for the found melodies of jazz. In the liner notes to Miles Davis' album Kind of Blue, pianist Bill Evans compares jazz improvisation to the spontaneity demanded in Japanese zenga--lively brush-stroke painting. Evans remarks: "As the painter needs his framework of parchment, the improvising musical group needs its framework in time." One of the fascinating things about the pictures being considered here is how their improvisations unfold, and remain visible, while incorporating a temporal dimension. The incongruent notion of temporality represented in stasis that these pictures embody--a sort of cousin to Keats' unheard melodies--carries with it an invitation to contemplation, meditation, and a rainbowed celebration of space and time.
The source-coded way of making pictures electronically is still in an early stage of emergence, not yet fully fledged. Again, think of a musical analogy: for most of human history the auditory vibrations that create the sounds of music have been produced by physical acts of scraping, plucking, banging, shaking, blowing; recently, technologies that create sound electronically have opened new possibilities for instrumentation and musical exploration. Similarly, computer generated graphics extend the traditional, physically mediated, realm of images--paint, dye, canvass, silk, wood, ceramic, plaster, metal, and so forth--making possible the creation of light and color and pictures out of only electronic impulses.
Whether these pictures are art, as opposed to decoration or doodling, depends not on how and where they are produced and reproduced, not on the use or absence of historical materials, not, in the end, on tradition or fixed ideas, but on the possibility and intensity of perceptual experience purchased by the made thing, purchase that enables imagination to restore a fragment of time to wonder through the spirit of a thing created. The last two lines of Walt Whitman's I Sing the Body Electric are:
O I say now these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,
O I say now these are the soul!
It seems to me the pictures Ashley's making are worth looking into.
Meditations:
Shot with innumerable hues - Sappho
Light is the first of painters - R.W. Emerson
Isn't that the artist's best joy, to control light? - Dorothea Tanning
Doubt leads to form - Paul Valéry
The shapes nearest shapelessness awe us most - A. R. Ammons
Time seen as an image is time lost to sight - Barrett Watten
Why isn't the power of sight absolute? - Czeslaw Milosz
Viewing is not a trivial shift - Lyn Hejinian
James Harris
Summer 2004
Chris Ashley
1957 born in Hayward, California, United States
Lives and works in Oakland, California, United States
Education
BA, California State University, Hayward, CA
MS, Dominican University, San Rafael, CA
