Michelle Kuo, editor of Artforum, writes in the January 2017 issue that with Donald Trump as the next president of the United States “Art must counter image with image—constructing pictures but also precipitating their undoing, their disruption, their unmooring.” I fully agree. Just after his election, I took official Wikipedia photo portraits of The Donald and with the acidity of a golden shower buried these images in gilded visual noise: denying (to some degree) Trumplethinskin’s recognizable presence in the resulting series of computer-robotic assisted paintings and animations called Portrait of the 45th President of the United States. The idea of this series is to symbolically refuse to acknowledge Trump. To stop reproducing him and his brand. To bury him in a shower of visual noise.

 

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Since 1986 Joseph Nechvatal (nechvatal.net) has worked with ubiquitous electronic visual information, computers and computer-robotics. His computer-robotic assisted paintings and computer software animations are shown regularly in galleries and museums throughout the world. His book Immersion Into Noise was published in 2011.