Peter Halley Author Halley, Peter Date 1997 Publisher The Museum of Modern Art, Department of Prints and Illustrated Books Exhibition URL www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/261 The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition history— from our founding in 1929 to the present—is available online. It includes exhibition catalogues, primary documents, installation views, and an index of participating artists. MoMA © 2017 The Museum of Modern Art NewConcepts in Printmaking 1 y fhe Museum of Modern Art Library ^ , ^ New Conceptsin Printmaking While Halley's paintings are inherently object- This exhibition is the first in a new series that will basedand involved in critiquing issuesof modernist present the work of contemporary artists who abstraction,his prints often contain more illustrative expand the boundaries of traditional printmaking. and recognizable imagery. He has frequently used Each will be based on a recent acquisition to the printmaking to communicate what is happening in collection. The major components of the current the hermetic, coded world of his paintings and to installation by Peter Halley are wallpaper and two provide evidence for the theoretical underpinnings 3 flowcharts, all generated from digital files on a that inspire and inform his art. For example, Halley computer disk that the Museum acquired in 1996. has made press-onvinyl or silkscreenedwall works Whenever these works are to be included in a site- that replicate, in enlarged format, flowcharts found specific installation, a siIkscreen printer uses the in psychology,sociology, and computer sciencetext disk to print the wallpaper on large sheets of books.Designed to map and model behavior,whether newsprint paper, and a vinyl-maker fabricates the animal or mechanical,these diagrams representthe flowcharts as press-on vinyl to be transferred same kind of organizational spacesHalley treats in directly to a wall. Here, Hal ley's wallpaper and his paintings. Disassociatedfrom their original texts, flowcharts are installed alongside examples of his Halley'sflowcharts take on the characterof absurdist more traditional prints and one painting. Halley's poetry. (One of the Museum'stwo flowcharts has technology-derived abstractions, together with his been re-created, in a different color scheme,as the startling color combinations, produce a dense, fold-out in this brochure). dynamic environment that serves as a metaphor In other print projects—most notably in the vari for the electronic saturation that has come to char ous versions of one of his trademark cells in the 1 acterize the information age. processof exploding—Halley has capitalized on the narrative possibilities inherent in printmaking.These Geometryas SocialSpace serial images convey that his geometric cells and Peter Halley is best knownas a painter,and sincethe conduits are not simply abstract compositions, but early 1980she has made reductive imagesthat treat symbolic,diagrammatic representationsof architec geometry as a reflection of social rather than formal tural or social bodies. Halley's first print of an space. Halley refers to the rectilinear constructs he exploding cell was Narrative , a 1992 diptych in paints as "cells," and they are usually shown con twenty-four-framecomic-strip format, in which a cell nectedto one or more incomingor outgoing circuits, first appears on an empty landscape,then mutates or "conduits." The images are meant to evoke the from a unified whole into states of contamination, hiddensystems and ideologiesthat governactivity in explosion,meltdown, and finally emptinessor static. postindustrial society. Emphasizingthe relationship He made some related prints in 1993, but the idea between computer technology and contemporary was most dramatically realized in a 1994 suite of social structures, Halley has called his paintings nine monumentalcolor screenprintstitled Exploding "digital fields" and likened them to "the simulated Cell. The Museum'swallpaper, first created in 1995, spaceof the video game,of the microchip,and of the is a simplified, black-and-white version of the nine 2 office tower." color screenprints. Technologyand Tradition usedfor commercial advertising before being cham For this exhibition, Halley has generated his nine pioned by the Pop artists in the 1960s. Regarding exploding cell imagesyet again, as part of an inter his involvement with the computer, Halley has said, active project that demonstratesthe computer'srole "I usethe simplest, most obvioussoftware products. as a tool in printmaking. A terminal in an education I also like that sort of low-budget aesthetic that is 4 area of the print galleries has been programmed associated with Warhol." It is not the computer's with the digital files containing the wallpaper promiseof high-techsolutions that appealsto Halley, images. Visitors may select one of the images, but its association with the machine-made look of reduced in size for this project, and then follow a inexpensive,mass-produced objects. series of instructions to choosecolors for different Following the example of other artists including areas of the picture. Onceprinted out, the resulting Gretchen Bender,Sherrie Levine,and RonaldJones, composition represents a collaboration between Halley beganto manipulatesome of his imageson the Halley and the visitor. Halley has also used the computer in 1992. He first useda computer program same images for a special project on the Museum's to work out the colors for his exploding cell prints; World Wide Web site (www.moma.org). he usedanother program to plot new proportions for Halley's re-creation of the exploding cells in dif his paintings.In 1993, Halley madea computer print 5 ferent traditional and digital techniquesreflects an for a site on the Internet known as The Thing, and appreciation of the possibilities for altering the ele he also began to re-create his found flowcharts on ments of an image—by changingthe colors, adding the computer. It was around this time that he layers, or reworking lines—that have always been became interested in creating and distributing digi intrinsic to printmaking. Digital files are comparable tal imagesthemselves, not just in usingthe computer to traditional etching plates or lithographic stones, as a tool for making traditional artworks. which can be used,stored for future use,then revised During the last twenty years, digital technology and usedagain. New technologyhas expandedthese has become increasingly pervasive, notably as the possibilities, allowing for an unlimited number of basis for consumerelectronics. It has been incorpo changeswithout any sacrifice to the original or to rated more gradually into the fine arts, mostly those any subsequent generations of an image, each of mediums that also have commercial applications, which can be savedas its own file. For Halley and suchas videoand photographyas well as printmaking. other artists, the wide disseminationof images and Until the mid-1990s,most pictures that artists made ideas through the potentially infinite replication of on the computer were transferred for printing to digital files may also be seen as an extension of the traditional plates, suchas those usedfor photolitho populist appeal printmaking hasalways had. graphy,photogravure, or screenprint. More recently, Working on the computer similarly representsa some print publishers have devoted themselves to continuation of Halley's preference for processes the new processof Iris printing, which allows for an with commercial or mass-printing origins. Among exceptionally high level of resolution and color satu the other techniqueshe has usedare relief halftone, ration in the printing of digital images.In turn, Halley a common technique for illustrations in books and and other artists have begun to make editioned 6 magazines, and screenprint, which was primarily works in this technique. Evajuc Compi Test c Is res .Yes. Compute another step. Test constraints. Is response improved? Adjust step size. Compute a step. Test constraints. Take a step. Yes. Is response improved? gradient. response improved? Retract half a step Are minimum steps used? Terminate. Return to last position. Although Halley has made a fortuitous marriage the basic principles that underlie the creation of social institutions. between computer-generated techniques and Disciplineand Punishaddresses the developmentof the prisonsystem. technology-related imagery, his attitude toward the 4. Interview with the author,July 18,1997. 5. Artist Wolfgang Staehle created The Thing as a site on computer is more ambivalent than all-embracing. the Internet where information on contemporary art could be While the computer has become the means for exchanged.Many artists have created original works for the site. ever-faster and wider-reaching communications,its Halley's edition was unlimited, but others have been limited to ramifications also include the mechanization and betweentwenty-five and ninety, with prices ranging from fifteen to paradoxical isolation of the individual. In addition, forty dollars. A buyer downloadsthe selected image onto his or her own computer,and the cost is automatically charged to his or her Halley suggeststhrough his work that the computer credit card. The owner can then print the work as often as desired. can be seen as a metaphor for the many hidden 6. The Iris printer was introduced in 1987 and has been used networks that structure society.The combination of mainly by graphic designers.Among the workshopsthat haveencour fascination and skepticism that Halley feels toward agedartists