Abstract, 1978, oil on canvas, 4×3 feet.
Artist. Editor. Revolutionary. Anton Perich has been exploring the boundaries of art and culture since the late 1960s, when he lived in Paris. Upon arriving in New York City in 1970, Perich charted his own path that included, among many things, the invention of an electric photography machine in 1977–87. The work was truly ahead of its time, as the mechanization of the work of art had not yet been embraced by the world. Perich speaks with Crave about ingenious invention, one which prefigured the very era in which we live.
Jerry Hall, 1979, ink on paper, 3X4 FEET.
What was the inspiration for electric photography?
Anton Perich: The inspiration was TV. The old-fashion cathode tube. I didn’t grow up with television in former Yugoslavia. I watched some in Paris where I was in the late ‘60s. It was magic, French TV with sensual overtones, with sexual undertones.
In the ‘70s, before building the painting machine, I did lots of photography and video. I really loved the video image, and I wanted to paint and create photography with electricity. I realized then that the future of image would be electric and not chemical.
Immediately after completion of the machine I produced some very large photographs with the machine. About 5×6 feet, ink on paper. Looking at them today, they definitely told the future of the electric image. They look like they were made with Photoshop today, and not 35 years ago.
Please speak about the machine you constructed: how was it made, how did it work, and what were the results?
I designed and built the machine in 1977 to 1978. It was basically an ink-jet printer and scanner, It was made with a large floor to ceiling metal framework, air compressor, electric motors, airbrush, electric valves, amplifiers, photocells, lots of cables and switches, magnetic switches, and a painters palette-shaped control board. I bought all the parts in the military surplus stores on Canal Street in NY. In the Seventies, you could even buy uranium there.
It took me many months to build it, lots of tests, errors, breaks, electric shocks. Finally it worked, and I could leave it alone with confidence. I would leave the machine painting an image for a while, and come back to admire the finished work. There were also lots of glitches automatically incorporated in the painting. I love digital painters who are these days torturing their large Epsons to produce glitches. These days glitches are bourgeois, and in 1978 they were a pure avant-garde.
Idol, 1979, oil on canvas 3×2 feet
Who or what were some of your subjects for the works? How did you decide on these subjects?
Since I came to painting via video and photography, my first electric images were of the most glamorous models in the world. Patti Hansen, Nathalie Delon, Jerry Hall. Yes, the most recognized faces in the ‘70s. The challenge was to paint them beyond recognition, beyond the known.
Removing the layers of the familiar and dig deep bellow the surface. To discover and reconstruct an inner portrait. Not immediately recognizable, but there anyway. The portrait that will grow on you and reveal itself in time. It was a revelation to find myself there. Warhol stayed on the surface, I was charting the bottom of the ocean. That is how deep is human appearance. I was in a different landscape, I took the known and I turned it into the unknown with the help from an instrument, my painting machine. It is an analog machine, but it produced digital works. 1 0 10 01 was substituted by on off on off on on. The machine brought another layer of abstraction to my work. It stored the essential and discarded the superficial. It reacted with a surprising graphic desire to skin, lips, eyes, legs, it loved dance movements. I am still talking about the machine.
I loved when the machine hesitated. There was a delay between reading the image and painting it. It was a creative moment of hesitation, a decisive choice between on and off. The image was taken apart, taken few inches away and reconstructed there. It was like winds moving ancient mosaics. Well, I am getting poetic. Must say, poetry ran it all.
Seated FiguRE, 1979, oil on canvas, 6×5 feet.
What was the response to your electric paintings when you first made them? Why do you think they responded this way?
People couldn’t see my images. It was as if they were walking through them. As if the pictures weren’t there. Like my images were in twenty-first century and the viewers were still in nineteenth century.There was some humor in it. When I tried to walk through my works I would bump into it because for me it was there. For art dealers there was nothing there, and the nothing cannot hurt you. I guess, to see it you had to be in the quantum world. Some of my friends were already in the quantum world, and they saw it all complete.
Tony Shafrazi gave me my first show in his modest gallery in 1980. John Hersey gave me my second show in Hirondelle in 1985. They were shown again in 2014 at Postmasters Gallery, NY. The New York Academy of Sciences in their journal Science and the City said that perhaps I built the first ink-jet printer in the world. I am not denying it.
All photos ©Anton Perich
Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.
