Manfred Mohr

Computer art pioneer Manfred Mohr has a show up at Bitforms in NYC. Haven't seen it but I did talk about his work a couple of times when he showed there in '04.

Mohr himself commented on the first post (speaking of fighting in comments). Am a little embarrassed for going nuclear on a canonical figure, but he was correcting something that doesn't matter much: who was the first artist to do "variations of incomplete open cubes"? The drift of the post was that, as Rosalind Krauss explained in her essay "LeWitt in Progress," such supposedly ratiocinative extrapolations as working through dozens or hundreds of variations of a geometric form are more about filling an existential vacuum a la Samuel Beckett that limning the "look of thought" (a phrase Donald Kuspit had applied to Sol LeWitt in the early '70s). Science and logic exist to avoid redundancy, not to celebrate it, she explained in that essay.

I was sort of complimenting Mohr for (i) having the good sense to do his exhaustive variations with a machine rather than by hand and (ii) admitting his aim was "visual invention" rather than conceptual pedantry. To quibble over whether he or LeWitt "did it first," then, seemed to rather miss the point.

edits for clarity, tone