Issue 1: Intro/Ornaments/Crimes?
Some notes on format; Ornament
Hi Everyone,
Thank you for reading this first issue of Tokens of Affection. Using this Substack, I intend to produce an irregular but frequent email newsletter with short thoughts on new pieces of NFT art. I’ll draw on literary, art historical, and other contexts, and tie it all together in a short list of recent loves/interests/rabid hates/singular infatuations &c. At the bottom of each section will be n00b notes. For those of you new to web culture, “n00b” is a term used in early online gaming spaces to denote a newbie player. Each little amusing digression will explain terms and materials often new to the NFT audience (like ‘historiography’), or NFT terms to the art historical and literary audience— like n00b* itself!
I’m starting with a set of generative pieces today: Jan Robert Leegte’s Ornament.
Read on for more below the break.
xx
A
*All n00b notes will be asterisk marked. Nerds of a certain subtype might be amused to know that I too was a n00b as a tween girl who played original edition Starcraft online on Battlenet ca 1998-2000. Protoss architecture is ABSOLUTELY a baroque, FYI! Hawksmoor requires more Vespene gas.
Ornament//Jan Robert Leegte
On Opensea
Leegte, an artist who has been making born-digital works since the 1990’s, returns to concepts of light, form, and architectonic illusion in the 256 works in Ornament. Each token was generated for its first buyer using its official hash as a source of randomness. You can read a detailed technical explanation of how hash codes work on the blockchain here, but for the purposes of this short review, suffice it to say that this ensures each individual image has a unique set of black and white lines the instant it is minted, changing its perspectival view to appear differently intruding or extruding from the screen.
It’s a deceptively simple complicated thing. The name of the piece gestures toward the infamous Bauhaus manifesto, Ornament and Crime*. But Loos’ claims that ornamental is somehow a thing superficial and extraneous to function is hard to apply to an NFT. Are the lines somehow superficial to the grey square Leegte uses as a default background? If the essential function of NFT’s as financial assets defines them rather than their status as decorative art, are all images on tokens, in fact, a type of ornament? Does it matter that Leegte’s lines, the ornament in question here, are randomly generated by algorithm rather than directly applied by human hand?
For Loos, ornament is simultaneously criminal (because it defaces what it is utilitarian and function) and also intrinsically linked to a racial (and racist) theory of cultural evolution. This is interesting here because web3 and crypto advocates often call NFTs ‘the future’ or the ‘evolution’ of the art object. This is— to me— just as sloppy and perhaps dangerous as Loos’ claims from the early 20th century. Leegte, who knows his theoretical stuff, makes a piece that looks like a bunch of lines on an old Windows blank text box do the work of asking us how NFTs as new media want to define purpose, function, and futurity.
For all of Loos’ flaws, I also love a lot of Bauhaus design personally. And I love Leegte’s Ornament series. Both share intrinsically interesting and problematic nominal conceits; both purposefully provoke. Would Leegte’s work be “crime” in Loos’ terms? I don’t know. I like that state of epistemic uncertainty, the space between a white and black line.
p.s.— I didn’t want run with this in full, but Leegte also asks us what a frame is here, evocative of the painting of Howard Hodgkin. Frames are a topic I’ll return to in time, I’m sure!
*You can read Adolf Loos’ whole 1908 work for free in translation here.
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