by Renny Pritikin
“…the Gregorian chants entered people’s bodies and rearranged their DNA, so that they were part of everything around them…Everything was splendid and everything was equal.” –Louise Penny The Beautiful Mystery
Rhonda Holberton doesn’t swoon with pantheistic ecstasy like the monks Penny refers to above. But the title of her ICA San José show, A Knotted World, comprised of works from four prior series, suggests how our lives are made of interdependent aspects: our bodies, nature, and the digital world. A concurrent show of new work, Two Handfuls of Silver Dust, at CULT Aimee Friberg in San Francisco, focuses on collaborations between the artist and various AI systems.
In an essay for the ICA show, Holberton argues that technology is the liaison between “humans and our physical world.” Even so, technology has not reduced violence or divisiveness. Instead, it’s destabilized everything. Her 3D animation, Best of Both Worlds, projected into a small alcove, depicts a model—the artist—moving through a set of Vinyasa yoga positions. The body, barely more than a black silhouette, appears abstract, distressed and blatantly artificial. Her skin and body parts are sometimes absent, as if the video signal had failed. When translated through computation, the body is misunderstood, misrepresented, and abused; the surrounding landscape is false and unimportant. According to the artist, the piece represents the internal breakdown of her own auto-immune disordered body, thereby connecting global maladies to those experienced by individuals.
Comprised bodies are also central to two digital prints, All the Actors Have Withdrawn and Still Life (Vanitas). The first depicts two female bodies (the artist’s) dramatically enmeshed and simultaneously exploding. Projected on a small acrylic rectangle, they evoke mortality and decay, like figures from Pompeii captured in death. The second, executed in the manner of Dutch still life paintings, portrays two contemporary women having tea, their bodies reduced to white shells. Protestant-influenced 17th-century vanitas paintings, which held that life was merely a prelude to death and worldly success is merely transitory, are, in Holberton’s view, unconsciously echoed in today’s self-aggrandizing social media posts. More corruptions of the still-life tradition appear in a pair of fractured, almost cubist photographs of flowers, Lilium Candidum, ‘Rosa Madame A. Meilland’ and Alstroemeria (Night 1 and II).
Digital Urban Camouflage, a design Holberton created, covers the gallery walls in a pattern suggesting sedge, transformed to invoke the diminution of nature into decorative wallpaper: one of many references Holberton makes to military origins of the technology that now dominates life. Like The Best of Both Worlds, this also embodies an unmentioned autobiographical reference: Holberton’s father worked in military intelligence. A silk sculpture, No Seams to Match, hangs from the ceiling, a “soft” re-creation (a la Oldenberg) of a bunker, another military reference that, again, demonstrates how technology links humanity to nature: silk exists at the capitalist nexus of human ingenuity, animal biology and early biotech.
Two Handfuls of Silver Dust, the title of Holberton’s exhibition at CULT Aimee Friberg, was the only salvageable line in a poem written by an AI program (ChatGPT) from her prompts. The poem is a rhyming bit of doggerel, so bad it undercuts any fears of AI displacing writers and artists. In fact, the whole exhibition is, in part, a tongue-in-cheek mockery of technoparanoia. Such disdain merely demonstrates how artists have always glommed onto innovations they think they can use. I remember how video was kidnapped from television’s clutches in the 1970s and how exhibitions of work made on fax machines were held in the 1980s. (I own a fax made by Robert Gober.) The difference with AI-generated art is that it ostensibly negates authorship, though I am skeptical about that. Does giving a machine access to every scanned image actually upend the traditional artist-implement relationship? We’ll soon see. Given the way that Holberton cajoles the AI systems she works with to produce anything interesting casts doubts on such fears. It feels akin to the mental process I employ to write this sentence.
Consider the additive process by which she creates the works in this show. The artist begins by feeding her short text to the DALL-E AI system – including phrases like “what it means to create life” and “humanity’s relationship to the future of life.” She then asks the system to design sculptures “inspired” by that text. The results, based on a database of twelve million sculptures, are familiar, dull amalgamations based mostly on the human body. Holberton shows two such works fabricated in bronze and glass: small abstract forms made of handsome materials that, in the end, are unremarkable. A computer also wrote sci-fi-like prose pieces following the same prompts. For these, Holberton instructed the AI system to make a painting from lines of the AI-generated text, e.g., “a gold spine floating in the sky growing roots, hovering above a silk sheet.” She then reworked the painting, showing five 60 x 48-inch examples printed with UV-cured acrylic pigments augmented with her own hand-painted gestures in gesso on wood panel. They’re more interesting than the sculptures, but they feel haunted by the ghosts of other artists: Shimmer Black could have been painted by Brice Marden; Last Light brings to mind some of Francis Bacon’s pinkish, fleshy flourishes.
Holberton added one additional twist. She instructed a computer to make five short, constantly morphing abstract video animations, each using a different painting as the source. As the videos evolve, they extrapolate on the theme of evolution expressed in biological, veiny, viscous imagery. Something about light emanating from a hi-res, colorful and cartoony image stimulates my brain’s calming alpha waves to take over. I have nothing against pure rollicking fun, especially if it all takes place at the borderline where the ramifications of her research and humor overlap with serious inquiry about the nature of the creative process. The show points to one possible future for visual art huddled just over the horizon.
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Rhonda Holberton: “A Knotted World” @ Institute of Contemporary Art San José to August 13, 2023.
“Two Handfuls of Silver Dust”: Rhonda Holberton @ CULT Aimee Friberg to June 17, 2023.
Images courtesy of the artist and CULT Aimee Friberg.
About the author: Renny Pritikin was the chief curator at The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco from 2014 to 2018. Before that, he was the director of the Richard Nelson Gallery at UC Davis and the founding chief curator at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts beginning in 1992. For 11 years, he was also a senior adjunct professor at California College of the Arts, where he taught in the graduate program in Curatorial Practice. Pritikin has given lecture tours in museums in Japan as a guest of the State Department, and in New Zealand as a Fulbright Scholar, and visited Israel as a Koret Israel Prize winner. The Prelinger Library published his most recent book of poems, Westerns and Dramas, in 2020. He is the United States correspondent for Umbigo magazine in Lisbon, Portugal.
Great article!