A Man, A Machine, and An Electric Image
Anton Perich is “doing strange things with electricity” as he combines traditional art styles with new age technology.
Published March 1, 2006
By Adelle Caravanos
Since the ink jet printer was introduced in the late 1980s for putting words neatly onto paper, myriad scientific uses have been found for the revolutionary technology, from depositing DNA onto microarray chips to “printing” three-dimensional human organs.
But few are aware that an early predecessor to the ink-jet printer was built by a New York City artist. Anton Perich, a contemporary of Andy Warhol, invented his electric painting machine to transfer paint, line by line, onto canvas in 1977. And unlike Hewlett-Packard, he hasn’t had to improve on the technology since. Higher resolution doesn’t interest Perich, nor does perfection: stray lines and pools of ink make for interesting art, after all.
At a recent dorkbot-nyc meeting in Soho, the silver-haired Perich captivated a crowd of 100 young technologists, students, designers, and artists — and other “people doing strange things with electricity” as he described his invention and his art, and recalled his days among the Studio 54 crew. Perich has two upcoming shows in Europe, and has been re-entering the New York City art scene, having recently moved back to Manhattan from upstate.
Industrial Artist
In Perich’s bright and airy Chelsea studio, six stories above West 24th St., the walls are lined with large-scale canvases covered in thin, horizontal stripes of red, purple, blue, and yellow. From some, the image of a recognizable face or body emerges — Warhol, George W. Bush, the Mona Lisa. Others are collections of bands of varying width, color, and density, images unto themselves.
And fastened to one wall, wedged against a half-painted canvas, is an unexpectedly industrial-looking piece of equipment. The painting machine is a metal frame hung with copper wiring and roller chain supporting a printer head that rides a horizontal metal bar, gliding back and forth across the canvas, like a typewriter head moving across paper, painting as it goes.
In the late 70s Perich was already working as a painter, video artist, and photographer for Interview magazine when he began looking for a way to electrify his brushstroke, so to speak.
“Every great artist has his brushstroke,” he says. “Take out Van Gogh’s paint strokes from his paintings and you no longer have a Van Gogh. I wanted to create my own brushstroke — an electric one,” he says.
If You Make It, It Will Paint
From a collection of amplifiers, photocells, and wiring that he acquired in the electronics shops that populated Canal St. at the time, Perich assembled what was essentially a primitive ink jet printer.
A 130-square-foot metal frame supports a machine head that holds an airbrush, or can be adjusted to hold a simple marker. As the painting head runs over a canvas, it applies varying amounts of pressure during a 15-second pass. A bicycle chain supported by a counterweight controls the back and forth motion, and every two passes the head automatically drops down.
The machine applies pressure to mark the canvas, either by pushing the marker against it, or by signaling the airbrush compressor to release. The pressure can be controlled manually or automatically, as can the colors choice.
To manually control the painting, Perich uses a control panel that is a cross between a color palette and a switchboard, comprised of five buttons and a set of corresponding lights connected by wiring to the moving paint head.
But Perich creates many of his electric paintings automatically, by projecting his own photography onto a canvas and directing the machine to paint it. A photocell in the head senses gradations of light, and relays this information to the switchboard, which controls airbrush pressure. The machine can replicate the image by breaking it down into areas of shadow and light and increasing pressure correspondingly.
Everyone Makes Mistakes
As with any technology, the painting machine is not immune to breakdowns. “I’ve had to make many adjustments over the years,” Perich acknowledges, pointing to a rubber band holding the photocell in place.
But unlike users of modern ink jet printers, Perich appreciates the imperfections. For instance, the printer head has been known to drop down too far between passes. “It will drift down the canvas,” he says, which creates a visible squiggle of paint across the work. “But those are the things I love,” he says. “These mistakes, they give something extra to the painting.”
That being said, Perich is quick to point out that the machine is not part of the art. “My painting machine is an instrument, like a musician who uses a piano or an organ. The air vibrates through the airbrush in the same way that air vibrates in organ pipes. The machine is a tool for painting,” he says.
“I rather like that as everyone’s been moving towards high-resolution images, I’ve been going to the other extreme,” Perich says. “But it is important sometimes,” he says with a smile, as he points to a side table, on which sits a large, industrial-quality printer. He bought it recently, to print out the photographs that he has taken over his career.
In addition to his paintings, Anton Perich works with video, photography, and poetry. Since 1978, he has published Night, an art and culture magazine. His first showing of electric paintings was at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York in 1979, and he continues to show his paintings, video, and photography in New York and Europe.
Also read: Art and Science at the Academy
