Gradients

Bret Schneider

A cursory flip through the many websites featuring new media online often shows a widespread use of the gradient.  Taking many forms – from multimedia collage, to Adobe Illustrator-style drawing, to plexiglass sculpture, photographic tableau, and many more – the gradient is a common material choice in a vast sum of new work.  At first glance the ubiquitous inclusion of gradients can be dismissed because it seems trendy and obvious.  But art is always trendy in that it presents new forms.  It is a moot criticism.  The ‘obvious’ charge is a more interesting one, because it seems to want to call it banal when in fact it is anything but.  If a viewer gets beyond initial reactions, they realize that the gradient is an absolutely new phenomena and that it is to be found in few historical instances.  While it has precedents in the formal techniques of shading, only within the past few years has the gradient been isolated out and dealt with as a form in its own right.

What the viewer sees on myriad websites, as well as many photographic works like Jessica labatte’s, and sculpture like Ben Schumacher’s Blue Demon is a new technical use of gradient freed by new technological and production means.  In other words, the gradient in its current exploration is reliant on new technology.  But to be more specific than the vague charge of ‘technology’, production seems to fit better.  Though many artists utilize software programs like Photoshop and Illustrator to achieve the gradient effect, the gradient is a much more adaptive and mobile form.  Schumacher’s Blue Demon and Focus uses not computer effects to construct the gradient, but rather appropriates a found material: gradient mirrored window tint for car windows.  This is already an abstraction from the initial gradient construction process, as the manufacturers likely use software to make the tinted sheeting.  Schumacher’s gradient then is twice removed, which already suggests that the gradient is pervasive enough to be passed between mediums and complicated by repeat usage.  Widespread usage reflects widespread need.  The gradient is a latent device which is utilized in seemingly disparate products.  That artists collectively explore the gradient today suggests that there is a project to collapse the difference between these products by allowing its background device to emerge to the surface.

Backgrounds on countless websites and most browsers rely on gradients for scrolling and viewing ease, and this often unregistered ‘background’ effect shows exactly how pervasive and unconsciously perceived the gradient is.  Gradients are seemingly used to decorate everything from cars, to websites, to various product designs.  But ‘decorate’ is the wrong verb, even when it appears to be accurate.  Gradients articulate objects and define the contours of new industrial forms which are not immediately graspable.  The gradient on the Firefox browser is the most minimal element necessary to delineate the illusion of different tabs, for example.  As such, it constructs false auras which mimic three dimensional space where there are merely two.  New photographic work like Jessica Labatte’s and Carson Fisk-Vittori’s frame objects similarly in ways that take them out of their typical functions and rely on the gradient in differing ways to exploit latent perceptions of (historically speaking) newly created objects.  As Carson Fisk-Vittori has explained, the background gradient frees the object from perspective.  Fisk-Vittori adds to the background gradient mundane consumer objects with their labels removed to further frame the objects and abstract them from daily use.  The final effect is a free-floating abstraction of recognizable objects.  In Desktop cd’s, paperclips, and receipts are itemized in a minimally delineated viewing space.  This is brought about exclusively by the manipulative device of the gradient to liberate perceptions of reference from banal everyday utility.  Abstracting objects such as these suggest an inability to accept them as they exist, as well as an ingrained curiosity at whether or not they suggest something more than their current incarnation.  However, the refusal to use them as they are and itemize them in carefully considered, meticulous configurations reminiscent of shrines, reflects and pedestalizes the weird consciousness of reification and all the confused wonder at objects ingrained within it.

At the moment, the dominant theoretical framework to view work like this is to default to inherited notions that it subverts advertising norms.  This viewpoint is indebted to a history which experimented with appropriated imagery and texts from advertising (the pictures generation), and which was built around a theoretical targeting of the supposed domination of media catalyzed by Chomskyian paranoia and the extraordinarily one-dimensional hypotheses of Jean Baudrillard, as two examples.  Rather than subversion as the qualifying legitimizer, which inherently suggests that it is solving the supposed problems of advertising, we should view these works as being the highest, most perfected forms of media.  Add to the art the reified consciousness of Chomsky, McLuhan, Naomi Klein, Baudrillard et al which erringly mis-targets consumer culture as the supposed ethical evils of modern life.  In other words, the sheer existence and persistence of media theory which has tangible proof in many young artists in this vein is problematic in itself, as it materializes reified ideology (fantasizing a static overlord who controls the media instead of recognizing media as a sum of social relations that can and does change).  Reorienting our viewpoint would mean to frame the artwork as symptom, instead of antidote.  The gradient is used in advertising regularly – a flip through a Uline product catalog will feature gradients in the same way that many artists do.  So, by artists using gradients they are actually trying to isolate the form, perfect the form, and further canonize it.  However much the gradient grows out of advertising culture, it nevertheless reaches an esteemed status where reflection can encounter it in more dynamic ways.  Desktop is not an antidote to advertising, it is the smartest incarnation of it, and therefore is unavoidably entangled in the same ideology.

The precious itemizing and photographic shrine for objects is a way of constructing an individual aura around mass produced objects.  As mentioned, the same technical device is commonly used by product catalogs, so the gradient is utilized even in mass culture to construct a free-floating false aura around reproducible objects.  In Jessica Labatte’s photography the aura itself is manipulated by way of using the gradient paper itself as photographed object along with other objects typically used for the construction of photographic construction (e.g. tape).  Ribbons with digitally created gradients on them meander through the picture and articulate different contours.  But just as the Uline catalog keeps salable objects in a state of a priori, perfectly rhetorical reflection, Labatte does the same with the device itself.  In other words, she keeps the conditions of viewing likewise in this infant state of disambiguation.  As such, it is a placeholder for viewing, or an exercise in the viewing experience.  Identifying the device and working it materially takes vital steps towards a consciousness of it, but doesn’t inherently cross beyond it.

Tauba Auerbach has also been exploring the gradient in technically more manual ways, with glass and paint.  Gradients are created manually with acrylic in yet again a novel exploration of contours.  A simple black and white gradient is applied to what is presumably each shard of a broken glass, articulating the difference between each one, in Gradient 3.  It is a simple and methodical exploration of a common occurrence which utilizes the device of the gradient specifically.  The glass serves as canvas to view micro-gradients and again what is commonly an unregistered background is brought into the conscious foreground.  As a result its devisive character is brought to the surface and emerges as an isolated phenomena to be assessed critically.  The perfection of the canned gradient in Adobe Illustrator templates is mimicked by manual applications through serialized labor in the studio.  An obvious question is, Why wouldn’t Auerbach use available software gradients?  One answer is that she can’t print the gradient onto the complicated surfaces she works with.  By applying the gradient manually to materials which deter its easy application is the mastery over material which is featured prominently via an objective gradient.  It is another attempt to freely distribute the gradient, the placeholder of viewing, and get to a ground zero.

What all of these instances show are varying attempts at mastering a natural form.  After all, a most common natural occurrence of the gradient is the sky, in different manifestations of sunlight.  The emergence of the gradient is a way of formalizing a natural phenomenon and using it for human ends, not nature’s.  Perhaps the most striking thing about the gradient is that, like the square or circle, it has a platonic form – meaning that we know a priori what it looks like, and the mental image of the idea of gradient almost always surpasses the particular material manifestations.  This is why it makes it so interesting to view how the various interpretations of a singular identity measure up.  In many ways, forms like these are laboratories for viewing how artistic technique is utilized by current artists, in that it eradicates the anthropological-cultural-study urge which devalues objective viewing scenarios and fetishizes difference.  That many artists pursue the same form and attempt to perfect it makes it a social phenomena that in its evasion of exploitative instrumentalization allows us to see social procedures and real difference in their own light, uninfected by vulgarly iconic political posturings.  While it may seem non-political, or not ‘about anything’, the collective pursual of the gradient is a more revealing and experimental project than many of the current depraved themes immediately available.