Adversarial Networks: on Joseph Nechvatal
Installation view, Joseph Nechvatal: Information Noise Saturation, Magenta Plains, New York, NY, 2025. Courtesy of Magenta Plains.
In Joseph Nechvatal’s diptych graphite drawings, figures navigate a world without coordinates. Amidst Mind of the World (1984), an armored, oversized, machinic assemblage of a soldier charges toward little but apparition; on the left print, partial outlines of bodies collide with a haphazard array of jagged graphite lines, concentrated in the ominous, barely visible gaze of a man’s face at the center. In False Friends (1982), policemen scrutinize a protester and stand firm amidst pop-cultural figurative sketches. In earlier drawings by Nechvatal, done with gouache on paper, similar figures of gonzo caricature appear, but the works on display in Information Noise Saturation at Magenta Plains show a texture of overload obscuring the legibility of their form.
Joseph Nechvatal, No Future, 1983. Graphite on paper. Diptych, Overall: 11 x 28 in. 27.9 x 71.1 cm. Individual: 11 x 14 in. 27.9 x 35.6 cm. Framed: 17 3/4 x 34 3/4 x 1 1/2 in. Courtesy of the artist and Magenta Plains.
Nechvatal’s compositions approach something like narrative, however fragmented and mercurial, filled with characters who would be right at home in noir and detective fiction were they not thrown into the information landscape of the 1980s. The drawings depict a terrain not quite a cyberspace (a term coined amidst the years during which the works were made), in which axes appear as simulacra, but an imaginary geography without landmarks, where figures emerge in associative disunion. That absence of landscape is a lack endemic to Nechvatal’s post-A Thousand Plateaus world—writing in Artforum in 1984, Kate Linker noted that postmodernism’s “empty discourse of surfaces” leads to the “erosion of all coordinates of value,” a haphazard disintegration in which individuals are left to decode the irrational simultaneity of a greyscale information space.[1] In Nechvatal’s approach, the consequences of such erosion are best expressed as a density. Skeptical of pop art, whose absorption of mass media Nechvatal might consider unequipped to address consumer fetish, he once described it as “art noise,” which “counters the effects of our age of simplification.” Noise is an appropriate pictorial language to accommodate the proliferation of information technology, visual media, and financialized markets that characterized the 1980s—but it’s the delicacy of Nechvatal’s marks, however condensed they may become in whole, that best suggests a more nuanced sentience to the scene.
The three larger-scale works in the exhibition, made a few years after the graphite drawings, attend to Nechvatal’s “Informed Man” character, who lends their moniker to his Profusely Informed Personage (1986). A statue of Babalú-Ayé, a popular orisha in Santería worship, is covered in and set against a background of scans of figures taken from popular magazines, layered with drawing by Nechvatal. His photograph of this scene was then taken up by an imaging service for billboard production, which airbrushed the digital image onto canvas. In this process, Nechvatal’s work invokes a similitude to other considerations of the automatic: Wade Guyton’s inkjet prints, with the wrinkled imprints of a machine’s errors and will, or the fuzzy outputs of Matthias Groebel’s airbrush painting machine. The spray method is attractive in that it joined (and predated others in) a long genealogy of artists using automation to consider the withdrawal of the painter’s hand over the past half-century. Here, though, that withdrawal is interesting only to the extent that it bears on the character—that the informed man is being subjected to yet another step of image production, blurring the distinction between the fictional world in which he resides and the real method of his construction.
Joseph Nechvatal, Profusely Informed Personage, 1986. Computer-robotic assisted acrylic painting on canvas. 72 x 96 in. 182.9 x 243.8 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Magenta Plains.
Between 1997 and 2002, Jack Pierson utilized a similar acrylic spray technique for billboards in a series of works; both foreground the printing marks and pixelation, which render the scene mediated, but Pierson’s images are airy and dislocated, while Nechvatal’s works with his Informed Man dip into a register of violence. The figure is a carcass, the rot of which is conveyed in the accumulation of detritus upon its form. What is he covered in? The same image of the Santería statue constitutes Infinite Apocalyptic Messenger (1987), focalized to the scale of his head and shoulders. Layered atop the strained figure in an all-caps, imprinted typewriter font is text from the aforementioned Artforum essay on simulacra, and certain phrases stand out: “grounds for objective truth have been annihilated,” “no longer possible,” “authentic and inauthentic,” “massive fabrication.” The essay reads Baudrillard and Debord, examining the loss of indexicality and reference—that “erosion of all coordinates”—as third-order simulacra settled in at the dusk of the twentieth century. If theorists of the hyperreal tended to focus on glossy surfaces, spectacular effects, and shining ahistorical artifice, though, Nechvatal’s informed personage, weighed down by such mediatization, shares less in common with the Disneyland phenomena of simulacra that captivated Baudrillard and Umberto Eco.
The figure is not so much a model of excess’s gleaning emptiness than of the density of the zombified form which it saturates: certainly, the anguish in his hunched shoulders, in the burden of information he carries without say, is a kind of body horror. One thinks of N. Katherine Hayles’s observation that posthumanism erases the distinction “between the biological organism and the informational circuits in which it is enmeshed,” and of the height of cyberpunk, concurrent with Nechvatal’s work, seeking to represent the disfiguration and contamination endemic to early onset information society.[2] The body of the 1980s, absorbing electromagnetic waves and nuclear radiation, was antimaterialist and permeable—Nechvatal’s figure is a useful character, then, for recalling a kind of somatic fatigue. In this, the Informed Man is a more neo-expressionist cousin to something like Ed Paschke’s televisual figure in Nervosa (1980): a body as seen through an interface, through a strange grid of uncanny exposure in the early days of screen glow, moire distortions, raster lines, and channel surfing. However attractive the rhizomatic epistemology of poststructuralism may be, here the physical consequences are given their due.
A later work, Without Chains (1990), is a somewhat abstracted composition of the Informed Man as Narcissus, gazing upon his unfocused reflection—a darkened greyscale tone, similar to topography from a distance, renders him almost unrecognizable. There’s certainly humor in the reflection now, being that of an actual statue, not merely a seductive likeness to marble. If it functions as an intimation of the frayed postmodern subject with no exalted Renaissance self left to lose to idolatry, it insists equally on the possibility of a profusely informed self-recognition. The scene is reflected along a line which runs across the middle of the canvas, an imprint of Nechvatal’s hand in the printing process: intentional or not, it underscores the politics running against the ostensibly totalizing force of visual noise. (Without Chains was made the same year the Gulf War began, which was described by Frances Dyson as a conflict in which the consequences of action were seen through “the snow of signal termination.”) Together, the three depictions of the Informed Man are a starkly hopeful narrative triptych, as though his persona may be wrenched back into the register of affect, once said to have been traded for surface in postmodernism. It becomes a gambit that the suggestion of subjectivity, however warped behind an interface that seeks to level it, remains alive somewhere in this deterritorialized plane.
Joseph Nechvatal, Without Chains, 1990. Computer-robotic assisted acrylic painting on canvas. 96 x 72 in. 243.8 x 182.9 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Magenta Plains.
The informed man looks quite a bit like Charles Csuri’s Sine Curve Man (1967), an early figurative computer drawing completed by an IBM 7094. Thin, clean lines constitute Csuri’s drawing, which was completed with a drum plotter, and are prescient more so of a treachery undergirding technocratic efficiency. But both faces collapse and sink, rendered grotesque by the necessity of information technology in their construction. The disfigurative portrait seems to remain an ever-attractive strategy of picturing the subject in the territory of his age. For Nechvatal, this might be the seeds of a scattered and profuse information society, in which a dense and disheveled horror of figuration defends the status of the subject. At a time in the mid-80s when computer graphics were leaning towards metallic seductions and a rudimentary palette (popularized on MacPaint and Paintbrush for Windows), it’s an assertion that living with transmission and mediation is not about surfaces but about obfuscated depths. As contemporary artists like Phillip Schmitt foreground the opaque, disembodied character of machine learning, one finds an ambivalent relief in figuration.
There is an initial longevity to the Informed Man series, with its intimations of screen media and boundary-melting emulsion of body and technology. It’s a consideration taken up with device after device, up through works like Tishan Hsu’s distorted topographical compositions over the past few years. A body embedded in information, native to representational strategies of the 1980s, is still a compelling landmark.
But if the raw material of noise was once central to the task of visualizing (and, it’s implied, evaluating) information’s excess, its status is more volatile than it was in the age of radio waves and television. It is less the “stuff” that penetrates and degrades the human body living amidst nuclear proliferation than that which constitutes the image itself: the addition and removal of noise—forward and reverse diffusion—furnishes the training process for generative models, which learn to make images by finding forms in randomness. The idea, as it was put in early papers on these models, is to destroy structure in data, such that it is possible to put it back together again.
Joseph Nechvatal, Infinite Apocalyptic Messenger, 1987. Computer-robotic assisted acrylic painting on canvas, 72 x 96 in. 182.9 x 243.8 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Magenta Plains.
Nechvatal’s triptych is useful, then, in thinking about what kind of form might be constituted in such a violent array of randomness. But it’s curious that this series on the Informed Man, ostensibly apropos in their attendance to the deteriorative effects of immersion in screen media, ends up yielding to the more reticent fury of Nechtaval’s graphite drawings. The uneven lines and variable shades invite viewers to see noise itself as a process of mark-making. Before classical empiricism defined information as the external “stuff” of experience, it meant a conferral of form, a process of shaping—one suspects the drawings get closer to that significance. The Informed Man may be likened to a figure made in noise’s timestepped removal of perceptual features, but the alternative allure of the drawings lies precisely in their method, not so much about reproduction as about entropy. In foregrounding form over affect, they are slyly tenable.
There is an irony here, a strange inversion: the hand involved in the diffusion happening in these drawings is now a recursive algorithm, while the automated method invoked in the acrylic work feels based in a visual culture both valuable and overfamiliar. All of Nechvatal’s work contains a classic tension between the profuse disorder of experience and the forms that order that chaos. It is the potential of the drawings, though, that most stands out: in thinking not only about how noise may confer and obscure form, but how both noise and form are manipulable—spun and undone, added and removed, legible and then not. Graphite may no longer be a paradigmatic tool by which that process occurs, but the artificial forms that constitute new images find a curious ancestry in that lineage.
Joseph Nechvatal: Information Noise Saturation is on view at Magenta Plains from November 6 through December 20, 2025.
[1] Kate Linker, “FROM IMITATION, TO THE COPY, TO JUST EFFECT: ON READING JEAN BAUDRILLARD,” Artforum 22, no. 8 (April 1984): 44–47.
[2] N. Katherine Hayles, “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers,” October 66, no. 4 (Autumn 1993): 69–91.