Paul MacDonald Barrington’s Digital (Fine) Art
By David Markus
Paul MacDonald Barrington’s Digital
She would have liked me to have in my room photographs of ancient buildings or beautiful places. But at the moment of buying them…she would find that vulgarity and utility had too prominent a part in them, through the mechanical nature of their reproduction by photography.
-Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
In the age of mechanical reproduction, it has become common practice for artists to draw source materials from the filtered depictions of digital media. It is somewhat ironic that these source media themselves have often been subverted by the mentality that art qua "high brow" cultural product must be accompanied by traditionally accepted materials–most notably (for two-dimensional visual artists) paint. "Pixel Perfect: The Digital Fine Art Exhibition" seems designed to debunk the pretenses commonly held against those who would seek to ignore the credential-bestowing materials of traditional media.
Myself possessing traditionalist leanings, I have nonetheless often wondered if artists who portray the "digital aesthetic" in paint are not merely erecting a consumable fa�ade between the presumably biased viewer and the artist’s true vision–for to sugar coat a pill can be effective if the dosage treats a cultural ailment, but to mask something which needn’t be masked is unnecessary, possibly even counter-productive. It may be that paint provides an adequate mode for deciphering the syncretic relationship between digital media and contemporary visual culture (see "Gross Domestic Product," this issue), but the arduous process of, say, replicating the pixelized effect of a digital film frame has never seemed to me anything but just that–arduous. Chuck Close may be an example of someone who has barely managed to escape such criticism, but, then, the Polaroid pictures he has so tirelessly immortalized seem, by contrast to today’s image-capturing techniques–in particular their capacity for electronic transference–old fashioned, certainly analogue, almost…traditional.
Paul MacDonald Barrington’s kaleidoscopic photo-tapestries succeed in the realm of digital art for two important reasons. One, they circumvent the pitfall of "pretty picture making" so endemic among the digital community by ignoring the question altogether, appropriately embracing the decorative arts while coming just short of disavowing the conventions of photo-static composition by whose tendencies so many lackluster landscapes have been rendered. Two, they utilize their source medium (digital photography), exploiting its capacity for detail and manipulation while maintaining a pictorial ambiguity that is the trademark of no specific medium, but only of a cleverly executed work of art.
To see the idealizations of Corinthian masonry or Oriental tapestry so effortlessly rendered, not by the human imagination but by carefully selected technological imprints of nature itself, is not so much a swipe at traditional craftsmanship as an expansion of its means. Nature is no doubt domesticated in these works–at short glance they could easily be mistaken for wallpaper–but only to the extent that the interior in which they hang is naturalized, and with what whimsical peculiarity! A shaded leaf, an arching tree branch, a cluster of ripe berries or an entanglement of roots and mulch spiraling through layers of self-similar iterations, all become revitalized through the necessity–imposed by the works themselves–of close inspection. One is left with a keen fascination, and a restored faith in technology’s capacity not simply to replicate, but to create, beauty.
That Barrington can take a medium often thought of as "source" and argue its existence as "product" demonstrates his profound dedication to the practice of digital imaging. That he can furthermore effectively subsume the more "craftsy" discipline of textiles into his "fine art" aspirations, achieving, through symmetry, repetition, and arrangement, a synthetic whole that would astonish even Whistler, demonstrates a profound appreciation for universal modes of aesthetic expression. Indeed, one can imagine Barrington’s work extended into a kind of 21st Century "Peacock Room," an integrated work to be admired for its complementary effect on less decorative examples of art as much as for the ornate beauty of its own scaffolding.
As Proust illustrates in the above quote, even traditional photography has had to fight for its place among the fine arts, for its ability to capture, with artistic credibility, "ancient buildings or beautiful places." Nowadays, few would question, say, the artistic "thickness"–to use the Proustian term–of Ansel Adam’s Yosemite National Park (particularly when MoMA feels inclined, for better or worse, to dedicate solo exhibitions to his silver gelatin prints). While digitally manipulated imagery may still be in the running for such credentials, Barrington has no doubt found an original manner for depicting his subject. Place specificity is obviously essential to his artwork; his bio states that he began photographing his surroundings after falling in love with the Tasmanian countryside whose natural minutiae is portrayed in his prints. Yet he manages to transcend the armchair curiosity of National Geographic, creating something more attentive to the extra-pictorial concerns of design, proportion, and form. For this, he has digital technology, in part, to thank. In their inventive application of digital resources to images of diverse aesthetic influence, Barrington’s works are, indeed, "pixel perfect."
