tony curran | post-humanist human interest
Written by Miranda K. Metcalf | Published 21 jan 2020
Printmaking is often seen as archaic. When one looks at the engravings of the Jan Collaert series, which depicts new inventions of the then modern times, the 1600 press in the image has much in common with the ones we use today. Four hundred and twenty years later we still use a bed, blankets, and a wheel to squash damp paper into the small lines and textures of an etched sheet of metal. Because of this, printmaking is seen as a traditional medium. Because of this, we forget that we are in fact interacting with technology. A piece of technology that changed the way humans share information. It did this so profoundly that it ushered in the challenges to the then all-powerful Catholic Church in what is now referred to as the Reformation. When we create prints with a press our creative process is being mediated with technology. It lacks the immediacy of painting, and our making experience is in some ways limited by this technology. The written word, the printing press, and the internet: these are the three big stepping stones in the history of the way we communicate, share ideas, and start revolutions.
Jan Collaert I (Netherlandish, Antwerp ca. 1530–1581 Antwerp), publisher Philips Galle (Netherlandish, Haarlem 1537–1612 Antwerp), ca. 1600, Engraving, Sheet: 10 5/8 x 7 7/8 in. (27 x 20 cm)
Dr. Tony Curran’s practice investigates where all these areas meet. Where humans’ interaction with technology and with each other come together. As an artist, Curran works in drawing and painting, but also collaborates with people across print media, psychology, and computer science. He teaches art history and theory and cyberculture at Australian National University and offers his students the opportunity to question what an image means in today’s day and age.
He grew up in a musical family in the suburbs of Sydney as a massive Astroboy fan and cinema head. He was just about finished with a psychology degree when during a trip through Europe and Iceland visual culture began to capture his imagination. This is when he realised he wanted to pursue the arts. To his own surprise, during the trip when he was bored or didn’t want to talk to the people he was travelling with, he found himself drawing. But his watershed moment was seeing an Egon Schiele exhibition at the Albertina in Vienna. He had never imagined that lines could capture such anguish and eroticism, the two things of most interest to a young man in his early 20s. This experience completely changed the way he saw how images could fit into culture, and the very fact that such things could be exhibited in a museum was all new to him.
Curran at Cicada Press
He returned home to Australia, finished his psychology degree, and enrolled in art school. Originally, he thought he was going to make comic books, but he had a professor who liked the errors in his drawing style and pushed him to start thinking about the ways his psychological interests could be pursued through drawing. Upon completion of his MFA at UNSW Art & Design, he moved to Wagga Wagga for his PhD., which was three to fours years of dedicated practice with full funding that profoundly deepened his practice. Curran now describes it as “...finding ways to think about what we imagine or what we feel like a self to be in an age that is post-humanist. In an age where we don’t trust humanist rationality or philosophy or those ways about how a person ‘ought’ to be.”
The term post-humanism has at least two meanings that are applicable to Curran's work. The first being a rejection of humanist values. These values we have come to understand as being inherently anthropocentric, meaning being concerned with humans and only humans and because humanism has its roots in the seventeenth century, “human” can be defined in this context as white, educated men. As the definition of what and who possesses value has been expanded over the intervening centuries, we begin to see all of the ecological and political problems such thinking has gotten us into. We are beginning to expand our definition of a good life to include the ways in which we look after the environment, non-human animals, and marginalised groups of people.
The second meaning for post-humanism comes from the idea that humans will eventually become obsolete. That what we are and what we do will give way to, or be taken over by, artificial intelligence. Not to be confused with trans humanism, which is the idea that we end up as cyborgs in a way that technology will improve our lives. All definitions show up in the work of Curran as he is primarily interested in how humans interact with the world which includes each other and technology.
Throughout Curran’s graduate school practice he made works that engaged with technology. As someone whose primary practice is drawing and painting, there were times that the immediacy of the mediums were too freeing. Curran would look to technology as a way to actually limit what he could do. In one of his past projects, Curran was trying to hack the Instagram scroller. He posted a series of images that, when seen in the feed, each 4 x 5 image functioned as a complete, individual piece. However, when the user would go to his profile the collective squares would form a new image. Through this project he was trying to get people to ask: What is this medium? How does it build our experience? What are the quirks of it? By Curran’s estimation, once people are thinking about it critically they can consciously choose to dip out of or into the curated experience.
Curran at Victoria College of Arts at University of Melbourne
Curran’s practice also extends to the ways in which humans interact with each other, otherwise known as relational aesthetics. He set out to answer the question: What is a portrait in the post-humanist age when we don’t believe in the essence of a person? To answer this, Curran sat in the Gordon Darling Hall at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra or 33 days straight, across from an empty chair. Curran would draw anyone who sat in the chair for as long as they remained seated. He was drawing his subjects on an iPad so at the end of the session he could email the portrait to the participants. Curran saw this practice as testing the possibility for portraiture and relational aesthetics in the digital age. “If a portrait is nothing else, it’s a time when the subject gets seen,” he says “You need to book an appointment to get someone’s full attention - like in psychology.”
When Curran was studying psychology, one of the areas in which he was of particular interest was the study of what it is to live a good life. He discovered however that in psychology the answers offered are descriptive rather than prescriptive. The scientific nature of the method meant that even if one has a hypothesis for this eternal question, the parameters within which it must be tested are so narrow that they are almost useless towards any practical application. This experience is one that I have actually had myself: going to school for psychology only later to discover that what you were actually searching for was philosophy. As it happens, one of the best ways to study what it is to have a good life is to examine the ways in which we interact with each other and the world. Thus he has been able to pursue this question more fully through this art practice than he ever could in psychology.
If you define a computer as a programmable machine, the first computer, in Curran’s view, was the loom. However, if you define a computer in terms of reproducibility, dissemination of information to masses of people, and storage of data, the printing press wins the trophy. His first introduction to collaborative printmaking came through work he did with Ben Rak at Throw Down Press in Sydney. He came to the residency with many ideas, but started to find that some of what he was hoping to accomplish aesthetically couldn’t be rendered through print media. Finding these limitations actually opened up all the ways he could play with image production such as optical texture through CMYK and sets of interference patterns. After this introduction he has gone on to make work collaboratively at Megalo Print Studio + Gallery, The Victoria College of Arts a the University of Melbourne, and Cicada Press. “Every time I do it, I get new ways to see my work.” Curran says of the collaborative printmaking process.
Horizontal Attention Machine, 2019. Etching with aquatint on BFK Rives, 40x31cm (unframed). Edition of 20. Printed by Cicada Press, Sydney
In his series, “Attention Machines,” Curran plays with the idea of the new pixel. There was a time, and children of the 1980s will remember this particularly well, when pixels were just squares, but now they are different shapes such as triangles and lines. This innovation comes from computer manufacturers’ arms race to determine who can make the most seductive screens. Curran went about making his own pixels that seduced through their loud, gestural abstraction. He ended up with wiggly color abstractions of red, green, and blue that will repeatedly make the viewer’s eye confuse the foreground and background depending on how close or far they are from the image. Unlike our screens which hungrily consume our attention, he is trying to make a rectangle that will give your attention back to you, so you can spend it on the other things you care about. Being trained in the scientific method, he readily admits that he’s not sure how he would ever test if this is working.
“One of the biggest attacks that abstract art gets is the question ‘what does it do?’” Curran says of his kind of abstraction, “One of things I want to do with abstract art is make something that definitively gives the impression that it indeed does something and that that something functions separately from its artist statement. Every rectangle has inertia, and I’m just trying to make rectangles that do something.”
In his most recent printmaking collaboration, “Growth Potential”, Curran is creating a series of 3D color separation aquatints in RGB of children and babies holding screens. This process also antiques the images a little bit, giving them a touch of brown and having the red stand out quite vibrantly. The idea came to him when drawing in the National Portrait Gallery, where he noticed that the subjects’ children would often be given a screen to keep them occupied while their parent sat for the portrait.
“There is so much around the way that screen culture seduces us to pay attention. Look at Trump. At a certain point we believed that technology was going to make us better, but now we’ve found it gives people a chance to have power over us. It’s a kind of predatory capitalism of ‘get ‘em young,.’ Most objects in the world reflect light, and those that produce light don’t last very long - including animals. The things that are shiny get scratched and degrade so quickly.”
Growth Potential #1, 2019. aquatint etching, 56 x 38cm. Printed with Clare Jackson and Tim Pauszek.
So while this series is clearly about the ways in which we interact with technology, it is also about the ways we interact with each other. Curran is anticipating people will have strong reactions to these images considering the internet’s callout culture. His thought is that people will assume that he is judging them for how they are raising their children or that he is saying something bad about their culture, which is interesting given that the images themselves are quite neutral. They are simply a snapshot of a very common scene from our contemporary world. Kids can be exhausting and cranky. When you take away a screen that has been given to them it can be a nightmare. Curran recognises this and simply maintains that the images are meant to exist within the digital world and be received within it. How that reception manifests is yet to be determined.
Printmaking, like Curran’s practice, is one place where humans come together with each other and with technology. While we now know there are many other non-human animals that cooperate and use tools, for centuries collaboration amongst ourselves and with machines is how we defined what it was to be human. It is interesting then that these same things seem to be perfectly suited for explorations into a post-human world.