This two-part column focuses less on a specific show or event, but reflects on this idea of the avant-garde to observe its dramatically shifting application to art movements and practices. Part one focused on the nineteenth and twentieth century references. This second part continues last month’s history of the term avant-garde, to consider its application to media art.
WHAT IF WE BEGAN the story of digital art not with a screen but with a canvas? In the first room of the exhibition “Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, visitors are confronted by I.B.M. Disc Pack, a large grisaille painting of six thin, industrial-looking disks stacked on a spindle. As the title indicates, this 1965 work by Lowell Nesbitt which evidences Pop art’s fascination with commodity fetishism while anticipating the sometimes frigid Photorealism of the 1970s offers a close-up view of the spinning magnetic hard disks IBM invented in the