“The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970-2020” is a sprawling exhibition filling nearly the entirety of the MCA Chicago’s fourth floor. The title is a dig at the so-called death of painting, which has been foretold at least since the invention of the camera. The subtitle is where the action is, because the show is really a survey of new ways to paint, beginning in the mid-’60s with early computer collaborations and coming nearly up to the digitized present. A lot of the work is ugly, plenty of it is funny, and nearly all of it is experimental, or was when it was first created. The show proceeds more or less chronologically, and viewers may find themselves relating very differently to artworks based on their own age and relationship to individual technologies. Do you remember television static? Were your baby pictures shot on an iPhone? “The Living End” is for you either way, but it will probably be a very different show. One of the earliest works on view, Barbara T. Smith’s “Orange,” from 1965, is essentially a grid of 21 sheets of paper covered in sinuous lines of dots, mounted behind a large piece of orange Plexiglas; the designs were created by Xeroxing a metal chain. Frederick Hammersley’s “Computer Drawings,” from 1969, a series of simple patterns formed from arrangements of letters, numbers and symbols, was plotted out on an IBM computer. If you’re a digital native, this might seem ridiculously unimpressive. Heck, it might seem so to anyone: aesthetically, the results are somewhat middling. But at that time most people had not seen a photocopier or a computer up close, never mind actually used one, and the idea of employing them as artistic tools was wildly new. It’s good to know your history. The far older technique of screen printing gets a nod, too, because of how Pop artists made the centuries-old method their own. And thank goodness: the examples by Roy Lichtenstein and Thomas Bayrle are stunners. Lichtenstein began making paintings that mimicked the effect of Benday dots in 1961; “The Living End” includes a gorgeous late canvas of this sort, from 1996, the year before his death, depicting a Japanese-style mountain landscape wreathed in fog. The dozen prints by Bayrle are terrifically amusing; each presents an image of a common thing made up of tiny versions of that thing — a glass of beer from thousands of tiny ones, ditto a swimmer, a factory worker and so on. When television became commonplace in the mid-20th century, it changed the world. It also changed what counted as art. A trio of “Video Drawings” by Howardena Pindell demonstrates the weird process she innovated by marking up sheets of acetate with lines and arrows, sticking these transparencies to her TV, setting up a camera, then clicking the shutter release whenever she felt the image on the screen lined up compellingly with her composition. Roy Colmer’s shimmery horizontal stripe painting from 1972 captures the buzzy feel of raster lines, a feature of old-school sets. But the real star of this section is Stan VanDerBeek’s “Poemfield No. 2,” a 6-minute-long animation of one painting transforming into another and then another. It’s witty, musical and one of the first instances of computer animation. A surprising amount of “The Living End” is dedicated to performance art. It’s not so much that performance is a type of technology but that presenting the confluence of performance and painting often involves documentation with film, photography or video. Get ready: There are a lot of body parts being used, to varying effects. At a Fluxus Festival in 1965, Shigeko Kubota attached a brush to her underwear, crouched over a bucket of red liquid, and scuttled across a large piece of paper laid on the stage floor. In the ’70s, a naked Carolee Schneemann swung around a white-walled space making gestural scribbles; Paul McCarthy dipped his face and genitals in housepaint then crawled around and did handstands. In 1993, Janine Antoni mopped the floor of a gallery with her hair drenched in black Loving Care hair dye, while the live audience backed away uneasily. These works feel at least in part like send-ups of the machismo of Abstract Expressionism, an inescapably dominant force in American painting until recently. Likewise, John Baldessari’s “Six Colorful Inside Jobs” — a 32-minute film from 1977, in which a ceiling-mounted camera records him endlessly repainting the same small room in a series of brilliant hues, plus cigarette breaks — mocks the color field paintings of Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko. A hilarious series by Leidy Churchman from 2010, featuring people covered in bedding undergoing various extreme painting treatments, appears to take on any number of popular styles. If you can’t join ‘em, satirize ‘em. Photorealism, a genre in which an artist painstakingly renders reality as captured in a photograph, is well represented by its best-known practitioners. There are paintings from the ’70s by Audrey Flack and Robert Bechtle, as well as a nifty portrait series by Chuck Close that demonstrates the techniques for making such work. Cynthia Daignault’s “At Picture Lake (Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky),” 2017, offers an update, presenting two dozen meticulous renderings of a picturesque natural setting, artfully stacked on a long shelf. It’s suspiciously complete: great draftsmanship, critical thinking about the way we take too many pictures today, and soothing to look at. Check! Here and there are some fantastic individual works that don’t seem to quite fit the exhibition theme. Whatever, just don’t miss that teeny photograph over which Gerhard Richter swiped some oil paint; it provides a key to his entire oeuvre, if not this show. Ditto a Roger Brown shelf painting, which combines his penchant for collecting (mugs in this case) with his zingy, jokey painting style. Jack Whitten’s “Pink Psyche Queen,” which I originally took to be a Richter, is a breathtaking blur of pink obliterating a nauseating underlayer of green. Richard Jackson’s big, muscular target painting, inset with a pair of smaller canvases with stretcher bars that face out, uniquely reckons with the carpentry of making a painting. Cynthia Daignault's "At Picture Lake (Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky)" from 2017 are 24 framed oil-on-canvas paintings. Courtesy of Cleveland Clinic Art Collection; part of "The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970-2020" at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. (Robert Chase Heishman)A still from John Baldessari's 1977 film, "Six Colorful Inside Jobs," during which the artist paints and repaints a room. Part of "The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970-2020" at MCA Chicago. (Electronic Arts Intermix / John Baldessari Family Foundation / Sprüth Magers)Works by Tishan Hsu (from left), Michel Majerus and Cory Arcangel in "The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970-2020" at MCA Chicago. (Robert Chase Heishman)A late painting by Roy Lichtenstein (from left), three of Howardena Pindel's "Video Drawings" and a canvas by Ed Paschke in "The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970-2020" at the MCA. (Robert Chase Heishman)In the 1960s and '70s, artists such as Frederick Hammersley (left) and Miriam Shapiro (right) used early computers as tools for making art. From "The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970-2020" on the fourth floor at MCA Chicago. (Robert Chase Heishman)Show Caption1 of 5Cynthia Daignault's "At Picture Lake (Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky)" from 2017 are 24 framed oil-on-canvas paintings. Courtesy of Cleveland Clinic Art Collection; part of "The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970-2020" at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. (Robert Chase Heishman)Expand The remainder of the exhibition is concerned with the era of late computing, as in almost present day. Here you will find pictures that look as unsettling as what appears on our screens 24/7, courtesy Jamian Juliano-Villani, and those that attempt to humanize it, as do Celia Hempton’s small, brushy oils of video chat callers. Many are the artists who have been influenced by the possibilities of Photoshop, but Laura Owens does it best. No one makes as thrillingly bad a painting as she: The one on view, from 2016, clocks in at nine feet tall, with thick strokes that insist “I am paint! Really!” and a greyed-out checkerboard background, just like in the ubiquitous software. Cory Arcangel’s iconic Nintendo hack, where he rejigged a Super Mario Brothers cartridge to play a never-ending loop of the video game’s sky, hovers happily. But it isn’t all beeps and clouds: other tech-capable artists have taken strikingly cynical approaches. Siebren Versteeg created a program for algorithmically generating infinite variations on Jay DeFeo’s legendary abstraction “The Rose,” which DeFeo toiled on for eight years. The implications depress, as do those suggested by the dull painting Wade Guyton composed by running linen through an Epson printer that really wasn’t up to the task. That’s about where “The Living End” stops, a few years short of the present, and also the emergence of artificial intelligence. Will it mean the true death of painting? Wait and see. Lori Waxman is a freelance critic. “The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970-2020” runs through March 16 at MCA Chicago, 220 E. Chicago Ave., 312-280-2660, visit.mcachicago.org