(By Maxwell Cohen)
In 1989, the Guerilla Girls, an anonymous all-female art collective, placed the above billboard all around New York City, confronting the urban population with a question often wondered in museum corridors, during art historical discussions, after every enormous auction house sale.
“Where are the women?”
The emissaries of art history have for centuries been overwhelmingly male. Dalí, Warhol, Picasso, Monet etc. Abstract Expressionism is another perfect example. This highly-emotive, brushstroke-laden art movement of the 1940’s and 50’s is culturally dominated by names like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, all remarkable artists in their own right, but still the question remains:
“Where are the women?”
They were undoubtedly vital contributors to Abstract Expressionism, with their own remarkable oeuvres. But where are Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner or Elaine de Kooning in our collective awareness of this artistic epoch? Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning were married to Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and still, their statuses in the art world hierarchy hardly scrape those of their spouses. Their work is no less staggering. Within their pieces is the same spontaneity and the same trembling rage.
Renata Chebel, a Brazilian multidisciplinary multimedia artist who investigates "alterity and the relationships between memory, body, ecology, ancestry and the feminine,” has crafted a kojii.ai model which employs the fire of these female abstract expressionists to challenge the status-quo of art history itself.
Because in Chebel’s “Sintography,” the women are here, there, everywhere.
The Sintography model —trained heavily on the bold brushstrokes and palettes of over 100 Abstract Expressionist paintings by Frankenthaler, Krasner, de Kooning, Grace Hartigan and many others— merges these aesthetics with another central medium of Chebel’s practice: photography. The word “Sintography” itself is wordplay between photography, image synthesis and the word sinto (or “I feel” in Portuguese).
Beside the Abstract Expressionist paintings, the Sintography dataset includes more than 200 photographs depicting women engaged in an experimental, psychosomatic dance practice called Danzamedicina. Created by Brazilian body-psychotherapist Morena Cardoso, Danzamedicina is an “embodiment method” aimed at unlocking female joy and expression previously suppressed by patriarchal constraints. Cardoso’s practice is all about wild movement, emotional expression, and transcension of the fear-guilt-shame triad imposed by patriarchy, seducing the same values championed by the female Abstract Expressionists. Chebel is a long-time collaborator with Cardoso, and all the 200+ Sintography photos were captured during one Danzamedicina session in São Paulo. Therein, another Brazilian artist, Selva de Carvalho, plumed the stage with fabric sculptures and inanimate bodies; by engaging with de Carvalho’s sculptures, participants explored relationships between the organic and inorganic, symbolic and fantastic. Strings of brilliant color, like slashrs of perpendicular paint, wrap many of the subjects and settings within Sintography’s outputs.
Kojii.ai users have but a few choices to make within Sintography. We decide how many subjects the work will contain, one woman or multiple. We choose the aspect ratio, portrait or landscape, and then set the output’s level of abstraction, ranging from 40% to 90%, the lower-end being more figurative than outright abstract. Finally, we choose whether our outputs will appear in color —pink, beige, and seafoam swatches snaked with the stark, neon-like lines that de Carvalho draped throughout the Danzamedicina session— or a brushstroke-emphatic black-and-white.
By offering only these few parameters, the Sintography model is empowered to plumb the deep well of its dataset for radically-unlike generations. Outputs branch in infinite different directions depending on whichever seed images the model randomly chooses as starting-points from within itself. The Abstract Expressionist compositions manifest themselves in countless different color schemes and brushwork styles. The subjects, exposures, and compositions of Chebel’s photographs invoke diverse details, forms, emotions. Joy, rage, pain, guilt, doubt, fear, jealousy; Sintography feels these emotions as capriciously, unexpectedly, and powerfully as its subjects. In what is yet another small masterstroke, we can’t ever mistake what’s on Sintography’s mind.
But Sintography’s largesse lies less in its UI and more in the brilliant conceptualism at its core. All Sintography knows is female artistry, female forms, female expression, female creation. Every choice, every detail and surprising addition within the generations is rooted in femininity. In Do Women Have to be Naked to Get Into the Met. Museum?, the Guerilla Girls railed against the artistic continuum’s once ubiquitous feminine objectification. Sintography incinerates that male gaze. These outputs conjure the vastnesses of female form and emotion, honoring spaces populated, orchestrated, and decorated by women. Sintography is a scornful challenge to all of the male-centric art history which came before it.
Emerging ashy from the smoldering emotions of dance, Sintography engages in a dance itself. Between eras and technologies and aesthetics. Between a limited dataset and a limitless capacity to tessellate. Between spinning and incendiary new perspectives. Chebel leads us into this dance, we both twirling gracefully into and throughout the timeless female gaze.