Karl Otto Götz

K.O. Götz – as his name is usually given – is one of the most important and most productive artists of the German Informel style. His enormous production since the mid 1950s in this style easy to distinguish from all other art. In the context of digital art it is interesting to observe the greatest possible distance in this artist’s production. He unites in his life an unceasing urge to paint immediately out of his body’s movement with an intellectually rigorous analysis of the image. He was interested in the latter for reasons of an information-theoretic theory of perception. Götz is unconditioned body and rigorous mind at the same time. In his raster images (1960s) he experimented with large panels of small sized grids whose squares were filled randomly with black or white color. He employed students of his class at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie to fill moderately sized parts of large raster-images according to given probabilities. This made him on of the forerunners of digital (algorithmic) art.

A large number of later famous artists came out of Götz’ class at the Kunstakademie (1959-1979): Kuno Gonschior, Gotthard Graubner, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Manfred Kuttner, Rissa, HA Schult. “Man kann aus allem Kunst machen” (you can turn everything into art), was one of his beliefs. Nam June Paik, then in Düsseldorf, claimed that Götz inspired him to use television for artistic experiments.

When algorithmic art came up in 1965, K.O. Götz started a discourse with Frieder Nake on matters of information aesthetics. In the early 1970s, he advised the collector Hans-Joachim Etzold to expand his collection of constructivist art by acquiring very early computer art. Sammlung Etzold came into the possession of Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach. The museum thus became the first in the world to have a substantial collection of early computer art (about 50 pieces).