I wonder if there ever has been or ever will be, a period of time more symbolic of change, transition and transformation than the 1960Õs. I was born right in the middle of that decade: in fact, as I discovered while researching this essay, on the exact day that The Who released ÒMy GenerationÓ. So for me, the 1960Õs consist of a few hazy visual memories indecipherably merged with archive television and film, photographs, tunes, phrases and of course intellectual influences encountered much, much later.
This short essay is not an attempt at history, but is instead a kind of selective, impressionistic collage. It draws upon a body of research which is not a comprehensive set of facts, but admittedly the result of patterns of luck and happenstance: chance encounters with people, objects and printed matter. More than anything, therefore, it is a product of the politics of documentation and collecting: a politics tagged with the necessity for critical excavation, even though this is not the task here. However, looking through the admittedly distorting lens of archive research has revealed surprising similarities and subtle differences in the polemics, practices and pre-occupations of artists working with technology in the 1960's and the 1990's. For me, these parallels - and perhaps it is the slippages that are more interesting than the similarities - speak about context; they form a dialogue across time on the topic of technology as a transformative force in society, the role of the artist in social change, and the constant conversation between artistic production and the discourses and images of popular culture, mass media and world events
1968 is the year perhaps most emblematic of the 1960's clash; events that proved the irreconcilability between the "traditional values" of centuries-old ruling elites, the politically-driven, 1950's discourses of post-war optimism and reconstruction with the new social values they embodied, and the fragile groupings working toward a non-capitalist alternative. A minor occurrence was the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at London's ICA: not an isolated event, however, but but part of a nexus of exhibitions, meetings, publications, groupings of artists who in this fast changing world were bringing different approaches to art, science, technology and society.
"The purpose of experiments in art and technology, Inc, is to catalyse the inevitable active involvement of industry, technology and the arts. EAT has assumed the responsibility of developing an effective collaborative relationship between artists and engineers... the collaboration of artist and engineer emerges as a revolutionary, contemporary sociological process"
EAT: Statement of purpose printed in edition 1 of its newsletter, 1967
In 1966, Robert Rauschenberg collaborated with engineer Billy Kluver to produce "9 Evenings - Theatre and Engineering" - nine days of performance at the Armory on Lexington Avenue in New York. Artists worked with teams of engineers to devise completely unrehearsed performances using custom-made technologies. John Cage performed "Variations VII" which "used as sound sources only those sounds which are in the air at the moment of performance, picked up via the communication bands, telephone lines and microphones, together with, instead of musical instruments a variety of household appliances and frequency generators". In "Open Score", Robert Rauschenberg played a tennis game in darkness that was relayed onto a screen. Despite the event being characterised by breakdowns, frustrations and bad reviews from mainstream critics, Kluver and Rauschenberg defended their work in the spirit of promoting the creation of a new set of values for a new practice. Interviewed by Douglas Davis for "Art in America", Kluver said: "the relationship between art and technology should be experimental and intuitive, in the same sense that scientific research is... and therefore full of risks" (1) A few years later, in response to questions by the same author, Rauschenberg stated: "Successful is not an artistic consideration. Works and don't works are part of development". (2)
Following this event, "Experiments in Art and Technology" was set up as an organisation to carry on the spirit of collaborative, interdisciplinary work and investigation of processes. In 1969 the open submission "Some More Beginnings" exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, which coincided with and contributed to the concurrent exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art "The Machine as seen at the end of the Mechanical Age", displayed countless examples of collaborative projects from film projection devices, to inflatables, to interactive sculpture and robotics.
"Todays world: I demand my own forms and symbols... In the 20th Century, technology as united art with science... today musicians, physicists, actors, architects, psychologists, engineers, sociologists and poets - TOMORROW KINETICISTS" Manifesto of the Russian Kineticists, 1966, Moscow
Throughout the pre- and post- World War II period artists in East and West Europe maintained an interest in Kineticism as a practice that implied the unification of art, science and society. Light and movement were the key "materials", changing and developing mechanical and electrical systems were the underlying means. Examples might include: Moholy Nagy a teacher at the Bauhaus whose "Light-Space Modulator" of the 1930's is often cited as a precursor to today's electronic art and Zdenek Pesanek and inventor and film-maker who designed light and kinetic sculptures for architectural settings from department stores to the electricity generating housings in Czechslovakia in the 1920's and 1930's. Nicholas Schoeffer, a light and kinetic artist based in Paris was already, in the 1950's, making what he called "cybernetic" sculptures and "luminodynamic spectacles" in public spaces which were responsive to their environmental conditions.
In London in 1964, Issue 1 of the journal "Signals" was published, a publication based from a gallery and small grouping of individuals that championed kineticism. Artists exhibited there included Takis, Liliane Lijn, David Medalla and Frank Malina - a kinetic artist who was also a geophysicist and aeronautical engineer. In New York, the Howard Wise Gallery showed a large number of kinetic and light artists.
The On Charles Square Gallery in Prague exhibited work by the Czech Synteza group including Milan Dobes and Stanislav Zippe, and in Russia, Lev Nusberg was one founder of the group "Dvijzenie" which translates as "movement". Kinetic and related film artists in the then Soviet-dominated communist countries seemed to have variable and fluid relationships with authority and official sanction. Some artists at certain times were well resourced in order to contribute to the showcasing and celebration of scientific and technological prowess of the communist nations, especially for the world fairs and "expos" with their emphasis on national achievement. At other times, the same and other artists were barely tolerated, unable to work with tools of any sophistication, and despite statements that might seem in harmony with the project of socialism and socialist economic reconstruction, unable to show their work.
"Cybernetics: adj: of cybernetics: a science of control and communication in complex electronic machines like computers and the human nervous system" (3)
In 1948, Norbert Weiner published his book "Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine". Cybernetics is the study of messages as a means of controlling machinery and society. For a moment at least, bridging the 1950's and 1960's, this discourse of control through communication, and its proposition of principles applicable across mechanical, biological and social systems was widely adopted in fields including sociology, business management, and art. Perhaps it seemed a fitting model for an increasingly systemised, urban age, and a world in which the computer was playing a growing part, and a new set of possibilities as launced for artists already interested in the visual aesthetics produced by mathematical formulae. Computer graphics systems, using input devices like punched cards, and output devices such as rudimentary line plotters, could produce more complex patterns, more quickly. In the mid-1960's a number of exhibitions took place, featuring work including that of Michael Noll, Geog Nees, Kenneth Knowlton, Charles Csuri, Herman de Vries and Lillian Schwartz. Some were artists, some computer scientists, and many of them also experimented with image manipulation and early versions of computer-animated films.
This activity in computer graphics certainly brought up issues concerned with the originality and reproducibility of the artwork, but also began to hint at the possibility that artistic creation might not be restricted to the human imagination. This was a theme that had been quite widely explored in music and poetry, with the use of random systems, and had been teasingly exploited by the skeptical, ironic works of Jean Tinguely. The possibility of the machine, whether mechanical or electronic as a collaborator in the creative process was touched on in the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition, but was perhaps more thoroughly explored in the year-long series of events that took place in Zagreb, then in Yugoslavia, called "Dialogue with the Machine". As part of the "New Tendency" series of events at the Galerije Grada Zagreba, the event brought together artists working with the "new media" of light and movement with their mechanical and electrical underpinnings, with those beginning to explore the aesthetic and philosophical implications of computerised systems for creativity.
"Auto-destructive art is primarily a form of public art for industrial societies. Self-destructive painting, sculpture and construction is a total unity of idea, site, form, colour, method and timing of the disintegrative process"
Gustav Metzger, from the Auto-destructive art manifesto, 1959, published in SIGNALS, Sept 1964
Gustav Metzger was probably the artist who worked most consistently with an approach to technology that was profoundly critical while still engaging with its processes. Since 1961 he had been engaged in a programme of "Auto Destructive Art" projects. They included public actions such as his "acid-action painting" in which he destroyed canvases in front of a crowd on London's South Bank in 1961, to the creation in 1967/68 of a computer modeled proposal for a huge environmental sculpture, to be sited on a housing estate, that would self-destruct within 50 years. Metzger was constantly aware of the role of technology in the mass destruction of war and ecological damage, and that concurrent with the technological utopianism of the space age is the constant, threatening presence of the nuclear age.
Away from the breathless optimism of many, especially American artists, the sense that science and technology was having a profound effect on society and the environment was affecting the practice of many 1960's artists and activists associated with the "underground" - cultural practitioners more directly identified and related to the political activism of the time. >From the experiments in form and material of Jeffrey Shaw, Tjebbe van Tijen, John Latham and others in "Event-Structure Research" to the regular happenings, light shows, performances and concerts in the basement of "Better Books", the activities of the London Arts Lab, new materials, the social value of art and the divisions between "high" and "low" culture were constantly explored. With humour and irony, but equally critical twists, the collective of architects "Archigram" published their magazines containing Buckminster-Fuller inspired propositions for streamlined but human-centred and environmentally aware living represented voices of caution from the heart of the reconstruction project.
Lets not forget that 1968 saw the publication Jeff Nuttalls "Bomb Culture", a bitter and impassioned indictment of post-war values consumerist values and the collusion of the British ruling class in promoting them set against the threat of mass destruction through nuclear warfare. Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" was released in 1968; a film that borrowed the "light show" from the underground art scene and drew on its interest in spiritual enlightenment, but also presented a destructive, dysfunctional computer, Hal.
In 1970, for the Osaka Worlds fair, EAT took on its most ambitious task; to design and fill the Pepsi Cola pavilion with the most spectacular of audio-visual technology. The project was bedevilled by technological breakdown, misunderstanding and mis-matched expectations between artists, organisers and sponsors. Billy Kluver and Barbara Rose, in "Pavilion" the book about the project by published in 1972 write: Ò(The pavilion) represented that values American society and the corporate structure that manages it are as unwilling to embrace as the bureaucrats who brought TatlinÕs project to a halt were unable to understand his meaning... the gap is not between art and science, but between the values of aesthetic and human experience and those of purely commercial interestsÓ (4)
"Can we build a new kind of politics? Can we construct a more civil society with our powerful technologies? are we extending the evolution of freedom among human beings?.
Wired Magazine, Editorial, December 1997 (5)
In the 1990's technology is again taking a central place in the process of envisioning the future, with the technological determinist narrative of the "digital revolution" as the driving force behind building a better world dominating popular imagery. American libertarian rhetoric has cut the understanding of "Cybernetics" adrift from its grounding in control and systematisation. More than ever, who is in control is obscure. Artists once again are engaged in a range of processes of experimentation, invention, re-positioning and critique.
1968 was a generation ago. A generation is a fixed measurement of time, but it also implies a human and creative cycle. Is this fascination with the relationship between art and technology a phenomenon that is bound to appear, disappear and resurge with regular pendulum swings, or else perhaps within predictable social and political conditions? Or is science and technology now such an integral part of everyday life that its role within the arts can only now grow exponentially? Are the institutional structures of knowlege and legitimation in both science and art now sufficiently altered to allow a deeper critical engagment; one with the potential to open and occupy a space between the polarities of subjectivity and objectivity? Or is further loss of political vision and corporate encroachment the built-in obsolescence of this project? Time will tell, and the rest will be history.
July 1998
References
1. Davis, D, "Art and Technology: Conversations" in Art in America Jan/Feb 1968, USA, p. 41
2. Davis, D, "Art and the Future: A History/Prophecy of the Collaboration Between Science, Technology and Art", Thames and Hudson, London and New York, 1973
3. Reichardt, J (ed), "Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts - A Studio International Special Issue", London, 1968, p. 1
4. Kluver, B, and Rose, B, "Pavilion", Dutton Paperbacks, 1972, New York
5. Wired Magazine, 5.12, December 1997, San Francisco, p. 68
With thanks and acknowlegement to my collaborator in this process of research, Helen Sloan, and to many colleagues who have given help and information especially: Kate Bush, Emma Dexter, David A. Mellor, Chris Hill, Carol Maund, Keiko Sei and Tjebbe van Tijen.