Gazelli Art House is thrilled to present Harold Cohen: Refactoring (1966-1974), a solo exhibition exploring transitional work from 1966-1974 by represented artist Harold Cohen, coinciding with a major exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art (3 Feb - 19 May 2024). Following Gazelli Art House’s seminal exhibition The AARON Retrospective (2022), Harold Cohen: Refactoring (1966-1974) investigates Cohen’s practice in the years preceding, and inaugural to, his creation of AARON – the pre-eminent computer programme designed to create art autonomously. By 1966, to which the earliest works in this exhibition date, Cohen was an internationally respected visual artist, immersed in devising new rules for painting. Having held a solo retrospective at Whitechapel Art Gallery, London the previous year, Cohen would represent the UK at the 33rd Venice Biennale in Five Young British Artists in 1966. The work of this period – such as Sentinel (1966), shown in the aforementioned Biennale – embodies what Cohen deemed “paradoxes” – tensions of form and surface brought about by fluctuating texture and fragmentary line – described by Artist and Critic Andrew Forge as “painting about the meaning of painting”. In 1967, Cohen’s works for Young British Painters at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels were said to possess an “overallness” and “unitary impact” by Critic and Writer Gene Baro, an observation reflective of Cohen’s ambitions for “everything to be determined from the first mark. All arrives”. This immediacy is evident in Aragorn (1967), where formal elements work together as a synonymous, resolute whole. 

In the subsequent years, Cohen’s investigations are telling of a society undergoing rapid technological democratisation: he asked “Why must a painter find himself in so totally private a situation in a society abounding in the most sophisticated techniques for public address and public presentation ever known?” In the same year that Cohen exhibited New Paintings at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford – claiming he would “like to get to the state where the painting disappears and just leaves colour” – he began coding, and relocated to the U.S. as a visiting lecturer at the University of California, San Diego. By 1969, Cohen told Jasia Reichardt, curator of Cybernetic Serendipity (ICA, London, 1968), where Cohen saw his first computer, “I am now myself a competent programmer, and have just finished my first set of completely computerised paintings. Just wait until you see them!”

These early computerised works were shown at the Fall Joint Computer Conference, Las Vegas, in 1971, the accompanying text explaining Cohen “sought to use [the computer] to find definitive answers to specifically painterly problems”. 

The following year, Cohen’s exhibition Three Behaviours for the Partitioning of Space, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, displayed three kinds of maplike works determined by differing rules for growth. These can be seen here in the Untitled (1970) artworks that show Contour Maps, Territorial Maps, and Mazes. Of the latter, Cohen said: “Were it not for this program I suspect that I would have been showing only paintings at this point in time”. This dialogical learning is referenced in Cohen’s essay Parallel to Perception (1973), which implied, as Pamela McCorduck states, that Cohen’s work “plunged him into the centre of the largest of the twentieth century’s intellectual conflicts, the War on Authenticity”. 

Cohen’s theory of artistic conception as a hierarchy – of which the artist, or human, comes first, followed by machine, then artwork – is crucial in understanding AARON’s anthropological origins. Prior to Cohen’s two year visit (1973-1975) to Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the artist began drawing by hand on dacron sailcloth in what he called his “first serious rule based program”. Here the artist would find more use in his subconscious manipulation of the rules than the rules themselves. 

Visiting the Chalfant Valley petroglyphs prompted Cohen to question what human qualities are necessitated for a machine to turn marks into an image – subsequently the artist began writing programs with simple cognitive abilities. These new analytical skills – to differentiate between closed and open form, to recognise boundaries, space, and to perform feedback behaviours – are evident in works such as Untitled (1974), where floating forms convey an uncanny human application. AARON would “come alive” at Stanford in 1973. AARON works were first exhibited alongside Cohen’s Dacron drawings in Drawings by Hand/ Drawings by Machine (1974) at the University of California’s Worth Ryder Gallery, Berkley. These works were suggestive, not representative and, as Cohen said in a 1974 lecture at the University of Kansas, “Since these evoked meanings are likely to be highly individual to the individual viewer, there is no reason to demand any high level of agreement as to what the images evoke”. 

The research and practice of Cohen from 1966-1974 is indicative of transformation, both individually and institutionally, as museums and audiences adapted to burgeoning technology. A trailblazer of computer arts, Cohen’s musings still have searing relevance today: “When the new machines, the even more complex, computers, get going next time around, would I want to be in front of them or behind them?”

“Refactoring makes an important contribution to connecting Cohen’s early analog works to the practice he would pursue with his artmaking AI AARON. The exhibition shows that Cohen’s work through the decades is always motivated by creating rules for artmaking — rules that reflect on the essence and methods of generating meaning through painting and drawing.”

 — Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art

“We are delighted to be spotlighting this pivotal juncture in Harold Cohen’s practice via works that prequel our 2022 exhibition, The AARON Retrospective. Via these historically significant pieces, Refactoring (1966-1974) is a timely presentation of Cohen as a crucial forebear to the thriving contemporary interest in generative art.”

 — Mila Askarova, Founder & CEO of Gazelli Art House