Journal Article

HAROLD COHEN’S AARON

SHEYNFELD, IRINA

2024

Overview

Harold Cohen: AARON, the show recently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art is perhaps the first posthumous show of new work. It featured the artist's famous drawing robot AARON working tirelessly and creating new work in front of a live audience. With the present explosion of AI technology, the Whitney's show had both contemporary relevance as well as historical significance. Harold Cohen (1928 -2016), the British-born artist, built AARON'S hardware and wrote its software in the late 1960s at the University of California, San Diego. The Whitney's exhibit brings AARON to New York about sixty years after its debut and eight years after its creator's death. The show includes AARON'S output from its first attempts at abstract expressionism, wiggly lines on paper, to the complexities of representational art, figures in landscapes. The show gives viewers a glimpse not only of the machine's output throughout the years but of the changing nature of the relationship between the artist and his creation.

• Publisher: University of North Carolina Press,The University of North Carolina Press
• Subject: Abstract expressionism / Art and technology / Art exhibits / Art galleries & museums / Cohen, Harold (British painter) / Contemporary art / Criticism and interpretation / CULTURAL CONNECTIONS / Exhibitions / Posthumous works / Viewers