No Regrets
Surprise, but not regret: I dont have any doubt about the relative importance of what Im doing compared to what I was doing as a painter, even as a successful painter. Back in the 1960s I was one of a
Surprise, but not regret: I dont have any doubt about the relative importance of what Im doing compared to what I was doing as a painter, even as a successful painter. Back in the 1960s I was one of a number of very good painters, and now Im me. Ive always thought that ones goal in life, as an artist certainly, was very much to do with differentiating oneself from everything else, and Ive done that much more than I could ever have done as a painter. Thinking about it later on, I wondered if, unspoken in those words, lay the thought: Much more than I ever intended.
The great problem about being a lone pioneer is that you have no-one to share the journey with and, more importantly, no peers to measure yourself against. Having abandoned the traditional art world, yet culturally too alien to be a part of the computing mainstream, Harold Cohen inhabits the no-mans-land that divides the two cultures. How do these two worlds view him? My own colleagues who are the bunch of artists I happen to know best right now, as soon as they found I was showing in places like the Tate where they would give their right arms to show, that authenticates it. But respect for his position isnt the same as understanding or being interested in his work. They dont know what the hell I do, theyre nervous Most of what happens in art isnt conscious and people dont rely on conscious thinking to move them forward in their careers, they rely upon intuition, taste - so youre suddenly faced with something that you dont understand, and you simply back away.
The world of computing is just as wary: Ive had a lot of respect, as it were, from computer science people that I think is based mainly upon the fact that they know Im doing something they dont know how to do. Whether its more than that, I really dont know... Very few of them have enquired about how things actually work.
In fact, one of the things that I find dispiriting is that my work has been written about a great deal relative to most other artists work, and no-ones actually said anything so far. I never get any of the kind of feedback that I can use, because people who write about the art side arent even going to face up to the computing side, people who write about the computing side arent going to face up to the art side. He shrugs with an open-handed gesture: Thats life, what can you do.
Cohen recalls having once said jokingly at a cocktail party that hed be the first artist in history to have a posthumous exhibition of new paintings. That throwaway line has been quoted back at him ever since. But, of course, hes right. To the extent that all creativity is a ploy to cheat death and time, Cohen has beaten the odds. Hes achieved what no other artist ever has - a magic paintbrush that will produce new pictures unto eternity with no need of a guiding hand: an autonomous meaning generator.
One of the original questions that had puzzled me was: Why would such an eminent artist want to build a surrogate? I believe I now see why he did it: the artist needs a meaning generator too. Cohens intense need to understand what art is could only be satisfied by putting the process of his art outside himself, where he could see it. In conventional terms, hes paid a high price for that insight, but what rankles, I think, isnt the loss of what hes given up, rather its the fact that so few people are able to understand how much hes gained.
This article appeared in the April, 2000 issue of PC Authority.
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