What is the Manifesto?

The Blue Rim Gallery specializes in recursive visual art.  That is to say, art that can be replicated or reproduced without loss – and indeed often with significant gain – in subsequent copies. The types of art that fall into this category: photos, woodblock prints, digital art and so on.

For a while now, I’ve been thinking about prints and photos and recursive art. This is the art of our age. It is everywhere from computer desktops to prize mantelpieces.

It is the art of our age; and it is without rules.

The purpose of this site is to share my rules with you, and solicit you for new ones. Rules matter. They have the benefit of being rules and therefore of themselves carry a conveyed authority. They are not necessarily right, but this does not defeat their purpose. Whether something is right or wrong is not so important or interesting as whether it makes one think.

The best rules are, by their nature, arbitrary without being capricious, and inexhaustive without being naïve. Yet their quality is such that they impose restraint on the would-be gallerist that defines that gallerist as a recursive visual gallerist.

Why do we need rules?

Suppose a man were born who had a head big enough and hands that were quick enough to dash off a hundred artworks of equal quality instantaneously. We would rightly proclaim this big-headed, many-limbed man a genius.

Now we all have too many limbs and over-large heads. We have been in this state of group genius for over 500 years, since Caxton and the printing press. If we who are interested in the study of prints and other recursive artworks are to carry the idea behind art forward into an age where recursion is instantaneous; where copy is instantaneous; where art can be produced and ended at will, we who are of a certain disposition (who want to see art move rather than stay still; to expand its head and attach more limbs with the age, not in spite of it) need help. For those of us with normal heads and four limbs, rules are a guide and a compass.

North: So much dross out there; South: So many tints and programs; West: so much data, information; East: so much content.

So, when is a copy art?  And what puts the art in recursive art?

Disclaimer: the Blue Rim Manifesto cannot tell you what art is; but a good set of rules can tell you who you are. Just as there is the genius of a critic and the genius of an artist are one; so the rules that underpin the Blue Rim Manifesto, and the art that forms our collection, are one.