Art & Exhibitions
Pong: Judd Scores, Alcorn Assists
THE DAILY PIC: Could the great video game have channeled Minimalism?
Blake Gopnik
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The Museum of Modern Art is displaying a working game of Pong – of which this of course is a still – in “A Collection of Ideas”, an exhibition based on its holdings in design. I remember playing the game when it was new, but looking at it now, I’m struck by how utterly minimal, even minimalist, its graphics are. In a brilliant Artforum essay of a few years back, the glass artist Josiah McElheny pointed out how little Donald Judd’s classic minimalism really had to do with industrial making, despite the cliché that insists that they’re linked. The screen from Pong, a game designed by Allan Alcorn in 1972–a good half-decade after Judd found his footing–is a rare counterexample. It’s a kind of found minimalism, the way outsider art functions as found expressionism or a torn poster can be found AbEx. Or it could it be that Pong was deemed acceptable to its designers and owners because they already knew the look of Judds, and computer graphics had made that level of simplicity more available (or more inevitable) than heavy industry could.
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