Commissioned by M+ Hong Kong, one of Asia’s leading museums of visual culture — for distribution on social feeds.
The essay reads Pablo Picasso’s Guernica — how art evolves through generations, how great ideas serve as the catalyst for other great ideas, and how those ideas are transmitted through art.
Painted in 1937 in response to the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica, Picasso’s mural-scale canvas became the twentieth century’s defining image of war — and one of the most quoted, reproduced, and answered artworks ever made. Its afterlife is the essay’s subject: the way a single idea moves through protest, reproduction, and the generations of artists who keep answering it.
Each essay is an algorithmic essay — a short film and writing in the sequence that constitutes Codex Algorithm, the major conceptual artwork of Matthew Olivier. The work is made in the algorithmic feed itself — the medium the artist claims for the work — and composed for that feed: made for it, not adapted to it. All essays are written by the artist; the narrator’s voice is rendered through synthesis as a deliberate mask.
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