Controversial art has the power to compel a reevaluation of entrenched beliefs and impart novel insights. While distinct in form, both Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) and Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised-Machine Hallucinations (2022), also known as Unsupervised, depart from convention, utilizing the functional, defining objects of their respective eras as the foundational elements for their art. Duchamp employs mass-produced objects as his readymade, whereas Anadol's readymade is data [1]. Through use of these “readymades” Unsupervised and Fountain not only redefine art practice as an increasingly collaborative endeavor, but also establish human intent as central to art, giving rise to entirely novel aesthetics.
Fountain is a white, porcelain urinal, signed by the artist in black paint with “R.Mutt 1917”[1]. (While there is ongoing debate about true authorship, partly due to Duchamp's use of the alter ego Rrose Sélavy, this paper adopts the prevailing perspective that Duchamp is the artist [3]) Notably, Fountain was rejected in 1917 from the exhibition of the American Society of Independent Artists [4], in 2004 it was voted as the most influential artwork of the 20th century [5]. The original Fountain has been lost; what endures is a photograph captured by Alfred Stieglitz, a renowned photographer and supporter of artists, along with several (ironically) handcrafted reproductions [6].
Unsupervised uses AI to transform visual archives into a digital, hyper-saturated, moving-image installation, inaugurally displayed in MoMA’s Gund Lobby in New York City [7]. Anadol describes the work as a “data pigmentation or fluid dynamics [whereby] hundreds of millions of molecules touch and transform each other in a non-Newtonian manner” [8]. The piece incorporates site-specific data such as light and sound, expanding beyond an archival interpretation to an interactive, temporal experience that embodies elements of chance and control (reminiscent of the dynamics found in performance art)[9].
While visually diametric, Fountain and Unsupervised both exemplify art’s evolution from an individual act to one increasingly reliant on, and mirroring, a collective. Fountain encapsulates avant-garde concepts of the DADA movement, which emerged in reaction to the outbreak of World War I in 1914, featuring nonsensical imagery and approaches to art that prioritized ideas [10]. This period was also defined by a flywheel of industrialization and urbanization marked by world fairs that showcased the industrial strength of imperial powers with mass-production replacing craftsmanship [11]. In response, the French government instituted technical drawing as a fundamental part of education and Duchamp grew up drawing in a “colorless, technical and relentlessly geometrical” manner, mirroring the conformity of industry [12]. Unsurprisingly, his readymades “seem to have been plucked from a distant mechanical drawing,” explicitly reflecting the collective knowledge of his era [13].
Since the advent of mass production, technology has experienced unprecedented exponential growth creating a vastly more complex and interconnected world [14]. Unsurprisingly, Unsupervised is a product of a 13-person studio(15) that draws on a huge cache of collective knowledge. Its reliance extends from MoMA’s data, to NVIDIA’s supercomputers [16], to decades of open-source software and AI development. Moreover, from a linguistic standpoint, AI-generative artists often describe themselves as human/machine collaborators [17], reinforcing the overarching notion that "everything is a result of a collective” [18].
In our globally connected, knowledge proliferating world, "art's true power is selectivity”[19]. To choose is to have intent, and living in a time when art was divorced from state and church, Duchamp was autonomous [20]. Amid a plethora of mass-produced objects, Duchamp embraced control and intentionality, diverging from his DADA peers who sought to subvert it [21]. Recognizing the “new meta of …relying on the cultural cache of pre-existing material” Duchamp elevated an ordinary object to art status by mere choice [22]. Additionally by using deliberate language [23] Duchamp created an emotive oscillation between the disgust of bodily functions to desire of bourgeois courtyards. Essentially, through intention alone, Fountain dematerialized art, challenged craftsmanship, and initiated a lasting ontological exploration of art from conceptual to pop art [24].
The power of selectivity becomes even more pertinent in the 21st century. Unsupervised demonstrates this at various stages of the creative process from data to computation. Firstly, Anadol made a conscious choice to work with “140,000 artworks in MoMA’s collection, represent(ing) one of the most creative and experimental periods in human visual history” [25]. That choice engages the work in a dialogue on the nature of creativity and appropriation on an unprecedented scale. The data is then transformed. Using software and machine learning, Unsupervised relies on the highly modular, constantly evolving nature of these technologies (also built by appropriation of code from open-source databases like Github). Anadol describes this reality well: “To me, every morning is a new morning, with a new AI model, a new data set, and most likely a new algorithm” [26]. With rapidly evolving technology and the democratization of generative tools “choice and intention...become the crucial defining elements in new media art" [27].
The challenge for both works is art’s susceptibility to viewer "intention guessing” [28]. Rooted in romantic ideals of art liberated from rules and rational decisions [29] viewers value visible signs of human intervention. When tangible brushstrokes are replaced by concealed realms of thought and code, showcasing human control becomes imperative [30]. Unsupervised magnifies this challenge due to the enormous scale of training data, surpassing human comprehension. Nevertheless, what is undeniable to viewers of both works are distinct, novel aesthetics.
Fountain has been conventionally interpreted as anti-aesthetic [31]. However, Rothman recently observed that Duchamp failed to mention Fountain with respect to “visual indifference” in his 1961 statement on the readymades [32]. Rothman proposes that this omission opens the door to a reconsideration of a "ubiquity of beauty" in Fountain [33]. Aesthetically pleasing or not, Fountain introduced the idea that art could go beyond aesthetic contemplation, severing the notion that beauty is an inherent property in art [34].
On the other hand, Unsupervised undeniably possesses beauty. It also stands with a long tradition of appropriation, modernist tendencies of non-composition [35] and database art, yet introduces a novel aesthetic through its expansive scale and dynamic, temporal nature. To be clear, regardless of training data, AI generative works are not inauthentic mechanical copies or simulations of what exists; they are genuinely new, unseen cultural artifacts [36]. In lieu of kitsch, idealized representations, Anadol imagines a machine that can dream [37], forging a conquest of time and space that could perhaps be described as a new type of Kino-Eye [38]. Reviews that describe Unsupervised as a “narcotic pudding” or “pointless museum mediocrity” fail to comprehend the techno-socio-visual coherence in the work [39]. Its indeterminate and iterative nature [40] evades precise description, reflecting the very reality of living in contemporary society and in the age of AI.
At the hands of human mal-intent there is no tool that is neutral, AI or other [41]. How art engages with contemporary issues is the choice of the artist (see Fountain). What’s certain is that Unsupervised takes a contrarian stance in a sea of dystopian headlines. Far from exhibiting “spectatorial passivity” [42] it draws us into a sublime state of reflection deriving from the scale of its ambitions: What does it mean to interpret an entire century of human creativity? By extension, the viewer is pushed to reflect on their own image archives quietly collecting digital space-dust, triggering in turn a much deeper reflection on the ambiguity of human existence.
And so, yes, Unsupervised really might “feel more like an experience than a work of art” [43] and Fountain really is a signed urinal. Which is the point. Echoing Marshall McLuhan “the medium is the message” [44], both works demand attention and ask: Who do we want to be amid all this ready-made ‘stuff’ floating in a gravity-devoid infinity (that very much resembles a “massive techno lava lamp” [45])?
It seems to me that we’re the species that relentlessly chooses to experience new “unconscious optics” and to “calmly and adventurously go traveling” [46].
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3. Haworth, 2000.
4. Ibid.
5. Higgins, Charlotte. “Work of Art That Inspired a Movement ... a Urinal.” The Guardian, December 2, 2004. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/dec/02/arts.artsnews1.
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9. MoMA, “Refik Anadol: Unsupervised”.
10. Stokstad, Marilyn, and Michael Watt Cothren. “32.3 Extending Cubism and Questioning Art Itself.” chapter, In Art History, 6th ed. Upper Saddle River: Pearson, 2018.
11. Ibid.
12. Nesbit, Molly. “Ready-Made Originals: The Duchamp Model.” October 37 (1986): 53-64 https://doi.org/10.2307/778518.
13. Ibid.
14. Kurzweil, Ray. “The Law of Accelerating Returns.” the Kurzweil Library + collections, March 7, 2001. https://www.thekurzweillibrary.com/the-law-of-accelerating-returns.
15. “Studio.” Refik Anadol Studio, July 26, 2023. https://refikanadolstudio.com/studio/.
16. Estorick, 2023.
17. Ibid.
18. Lescaze, Zoë. “An Artist Who Disavows the Possibility of Individual Agency.” The New York Times, November 12, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/12/t-magazine/agnieszka-kurant-art.html.
19. Navas, Eduardo. “Remix[Ing] Art.” In Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling, 136. Originally published 2012. Berlin, Boston: DE GRUYTER, 2012.
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21. “Chance Creations: Collage, Photomontage, and Assemblage.” MoMA, About Dada. https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/dada/chance-creations-collage-photomontage-and-assemblage.
22. Navas, 2012, p.136.
23. Nesbit, 1986, p. 53-64.
24. Rothman, 2020, p. 66-78.
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26. Estorick, 2023.
27. Navas, Eduardo. “Remix[Ing] Sampling.” In Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling, 31. Originally published 2012. Berlin, Boston: DE GRUYTER, 2012.
28. Epstein, Ziv, Aaron Hertzmann, Laura Herman, Robert Mahari, Morgan R Frank, Matthew Groh, Hope Schroeder, et al. “Art and the Science of Generative AI: A Deeper Dive.” arXiv.org (2023), 5.
29. Manovich, Lev. “Artificial Aesthetics: A Critical Guide to Artificial Intelligence, Media and Design, Chapter 4 (Lev Manovich): AI and Myths of Creativity.” Architectural Design Vol. 92, no. 3 (2022).
30. Epstein, 2023, p.3.
31. Rothman, 2020, p.66.
32. Rothman, 2020, p.71.
33. Rothman, 2020, p.66.
34. Ibid.
35. Wise, Lloyd. “Refik Anadol.” Artforum, February 20, 2023. https://www.artforum.com/events/refik-anadol-250940/.
36. Manovich, Lev. “Towards ‘General Artistic Intelligence’?” Art Basel, June 1, 2023. https://www.artbasel.com/stories/lev-manovich.
37. Ibid.
38. Staton, David. “Manovich, Movies and Montage; New Media New Narrative?” Academia.edu, December 16, 2014, 7, https://www.academia.edu/9790068/Manovich_Movies_and_Montage_New_Media_New_Narrative.
39. Saltz, Jerry. “Moma’s Glorified Lava Lamp.” Vulture, February 22, 2023. https://www.vulture.com/article/jerry-saltz-moma-refik-anadol-unsupervised.html.
40. Wise, 2023.
41. Lossin, R H. “Refik Anadol’s ‘Unsupervised.’” e-flux Criticism, March 14, 2023. https://www.e-flux.com/criticism/527236/refik-anadol-s-unsupervised.
42. Kim, Leo. “At Moma, Artists Are Making Sense of the World’s Most Dangerous and Valuable Resource: Data.” ARTnews, September 7, 2023. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/moma-museum-of-modern-art-refik-anadol-data-ai-art-1234678904/.
43. Warne, Vince. “ARTIFICIAL INDULGENCE: REFIK ANADOL’S UNSUPERVISED: Museum of Modern Art, November 2022-October 2023.” Millennium film journal, no. 78 (2023).
44. Staton, 2014, p.6.
45. Saltz, 2023.
46. Staton, 2014, p.11.
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