by Sabeth Buchmann
(from a talk first given at the Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970 conference, Tate Modern, London, 17 September 2005)
Concerning the question which the curator Donna de Salvo raises in her abstract of the conference on Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970[1] “How can we use the period of the 60s and 70s to rethink notions like open systems today?”, I’ll focus on the conceptual and technological 'rhetorics' and 'aesthetics' which are still relevant today to claims for more interdisciplinarity between art, science and new technologies. Three years ago, in their text 'Software Art', Florian Cramer and Ulrike Gabriel wrote about, “a shift of the artist’s view from displays to the creation of systems and processes themselves".[2] This shift implies a transformation to a mode of production which traditional definitions of artistic practice no longer adequately describe. Keeping in mind the form of presenting instructions for action which has historically been so central to conceptual art, Cramer and Gabriel contest the assumption that there is a “generative code exclusive to computer programming“ [in so doing, they extend a mathematical model of computer programming from the realm of technology to that of artistic practice]. The authors take, as an example, the immateriality of the work of Fluxus artist La Monte Young titled Composition 1961, No. I, January I. In Young’s presentation of the written instructions to “draw a straight line and follow it,“ Cramer and Gabriel recognize a new, metaphysical, conceptual and epistemological tendency in art practice. They see this emerging practice as capable of transcending or moving beyond the confines of the object. Cramer and Gabriel find this tendency in other projects of historical significance such as the exhibition entitled Software – Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art which was curated by artist and critic Jack Burnham in 1970 at the Jewish Museum in New York. Before curating this show, Jack Burnham had participated in several interdisciplinary projects at MIT. His show Software… also took place one year after the publication of Joseph Kosuth’s 'Art after Philosophy'. Burnham’s reference to Kosuth’s controversial manifesto of Conceptual Art becomes obvious in the foreword of the catalogue. Building on Kosuth’s references to structural linguistic theory, Burnham draws parallels between mathematical information theories[3] and conceptual art. The inherent similarities between conceptual art and mathematical information theory that Burnham sees mean for him a fundamental shift in the focus of art production from the traditional art object to a cultural, social and societally overlapping system of signs, one that eventually undermines the mythical structure of modern art.
Burnham’s theory about the commonalities between conceptual art and the new information technologies was not only influenced by the work of Kosuth, but also by that of Lawrence Weiner, Robert Barry and Douglas Huebler – all of them artists who worked at that time with Seth Siegelaub. Siegelaub was a gallerist whose project was to redefine traditional forms of presentation, distribution and reception of art by curating shows in the format of catalogues and other print media.[4]
Burnham was very explicit in showing that it was Siegelaub’s idea of integrating art and media that inspired his theoretical and curatorial work. For the illustration of his article titled 'Real Time Systems' published in Artforum,[5] Burnham chose a photo from Siegelaub’s catalogue presentation. In his article, Burnham explained “systematics” as a new paradigm or model, in which the transformation of object production results in a system-oriented society. Burnham develops this position in the show Software as well as in his book Beyond Modern Sculpture published in 1968. As with other interdisciplinary projects in which he participated, his intention was to retell the history of modern art from the perspective of an emerging modern technology. Working from the assumption that art from the beginning of modernity had been seeking to move beyond the restrictive borders of matter, it was Burnham’s thesis that modern sculpture would be replaced by what he called “life-simulation systems.”[6]
The exhibition Software which he curated raised important and timely questions about the appropriate role of new technologies in society at large, at a time in the early 70s when these technologies were still reserved primarily for scientific development and military uses.
The computer subsequently found its way into the spheres of business and government, and soon after into private homes. The greater accessibility of computers paved the way for the computer as a primary medium of information and communication, and later as a widespread consumer product. But, during the early stages of conceptual art, the computer had not yet become a part of everyday social and cultural experience. It is therefore even more noteworthy that by the middle of the 70s the possibilities of computer technology had managed to so capture the collective imagination. The popularity of cybernetic theories at this time was due in part to the role of Norbert Wiener’s book Cybernetics which had been published in 1948, and was widely accepted by artists and theorists working in the field of conceptual art.[7]
The term “cybernetics” referred to what Norbert Wiener describes as a scientific approach that was concerned with control and regulation processes within dynamic systems. Wiener’s theory introduced a mathematical model whose coordinates were constantly in flux. Each of these changes and its assigned numerical coordinate was re-integrated into the mathematical system and formed the matrix for further mathematical processes. Every system of regulation which uses such a model can be described as cybernetic, whether it is a weapons system or a description of chemical or biological processes. According to Wiener, cybernetics served as a supporting system of knowledge through which analogue connections or processes could be demonstrated. This could be extrapolated to include, for instance, the connections between missile defense systems, neurology and virtual reality technologies:
For Wiener, the nervous system no longer appears as a single organ, which receives input from the sensory organs and delivers it to the muscles. Rather, many of its characteristic processes are only recognizable as processes of circulation, in which impulses pass through the nervous system to the muscles and then return again through the sensory organs to the nervous system.[8]
An example of the way in which theoretical models of this nature were received by artists and scientists can be found on the cover of the catalogue for the Software show. The image is taken from an installation by Nicholas Negroponte and the Architecture Machine Group, a forerunner of the MIT Media Lab. This installation depicted a computer controlled, interactive environment composed of multiple small mirrored cubes. Edward Shanken described the work as an “intelligent architecture”[9] – one that was intricately connected with the habits and behavior of its inhabitants – in this case gerbils.
The cover and illustrations of the catalogue for the Software show demonstrated as early as the 1970 the surface elements of a new computer culture: complex and similar in design to today’s computers, the images evoked a high-tech atmosphere. The catalogue also contained a didactic introduction to the newest computer technology as written by Theodore H. Nelson. His text, titled 'Computers are not what you think', seems intended to correct or contradict a cultural attitude toward computers that he perceived as false or pessimistic. Nelson’s graphically illustrated explanation of the structure of a computer is written in a generally accessible way and apparently intended to promote the daily usefulness of the computer. The participation requested of the public, however, is reduced to a simple set of instructions for limited use, such as the entering of personal data into the machine Everything else remains in the realm of futuristic fantasy, as is indicated in a section of the text that reads, “Ways to program a display system to respond to user actions, or to time a presentation and show ’movies’ must here be left to the reader’s imagination”.[10]
For the exhibition Software, Burnham had chosen works that could fit into the category of cybernetic feedback systems in the broadest sense. Edward Shanken later wrote of Burnham that he was not really concerned with selecting “works of art that demonstrated his theories”.[11] It was rather the anti-hierarchical presentation of artworks alongside technical gadgets that formed the core idea of his curatorial concept. The differentiation between art and non-art was a distinction that for Burnham was to be left to the viewer to make. The Software show was neither meant to be a demonstration of engineering know-how, nor an art exhibition in the traditionally accepted sense. To a certain extent, the show presented the findings or results of artistic involvement within a framework of contemporary issues of control and communication technologies. As Burnham himself wrote:
In just the past few years, the movement away from art objects has been precipitated by concerns with natural and man-made systems, processes, ecological relationships, and the philosophical-linguistic involvement of Conceptual Art. All of these interests deal with Art which is transactional; they deal with underlying structures of communication or energy exchange instead of abstract appearances. For this reason most of Software is anti-iconic; its images are usually secondary or instructional while information often takes the form of printed materials. In such forms information processing technology influences our notions about creativity, perception, and the limits of art. Thus it may not be, and probably is not, the province of computers and other telecommunication devices to produce art as we know it; but they will, in fact, be instrumental in redefining the entire area of aesthetic awareness.[12]
Burnham was apparently not of the opinion that information technologies would play a dominant role in advancing or determining the actual production of art; he declared them rather as new forms of cultural and aesthetic perception. According to Burnham’s argumentation, the consequence of such changes would be the re-evaluation or re-classification of the artist from a producer of objects to a mediator of ideas and their communication. Yet at the same time, his vision of the role of the artist retained notions associated with the traditional attributes of a creator or producer of original artworks, insofar as the artist was expected to find creative and innovative or “new” ways in which to use the emerging information technologies.
And – ironically – the Software exhibition is one example of the phenomenon in which conceptual art was institutionalized by and incorporated into the museum structure at exactly the same time as it was calling for a de-institutionalized system. But such problems were recognized even by those artists who had turned away from an object-centered mode of production. In her 1969 interviews with Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Lawrence Weiner and Siegelaub, the artist Patricia Norvel confronted these artists with Burnham’s theories. Interestingly enough, they appeared unimpressed or uninterested in Burnham’s application of system theories. When interviewed by Norvell, they indicated either, as with Huebler, that they were unfamiliar with the ideas or, as with LeWitt and Smithson, they argued that the object was and would continue to play an important role in artistic production. While LeWitt explained that, “people that do objects, in many cases, do them with a system in mind”,[13] Smithson described systems as merely extensions of the object or “expansive objects”.[14] The responses from LeWitt and Smithson can be recognized as an indication that they saw these theories of paradigmatic change as nothing more than an implementation of new terms into a field of traditional object-based categories. Smithson made this more explicit when he attributed a utopian perception of modernistic progress to Burnham:
It’s another abstract entity that doesn’t exist. I mean there are all these things... there are things like structures, objects, systems. But then again, where are they? I think art tends to relieve itself of those hopes. Like, last year we were in an object world and this year we’re in a systems world. Well, Jack Burnham is very interested in going beyond and that’s a kind of utopian view.[15]
With his labelling of Burnham as utopian, Smithson made it clear that Burnham’s concept of technology had become inseparable from the ideology of modern art and that a mode of cultural production that took as its subject matter the topics of knowledge, communication, information, or even the broader category of speech had to be careful not to become an unwitting agent of scientific and technical progress at the expense of art and/or artistic freedom.
Following Smithson’s reasoning, the self-reflexive system and the decentralization of the object lead not only to a relativising of the idea of artistic production. These changes also lead to a complete emptying of the societal meaning of production. Thus within a fully integrated cultural system the audience becomes a producer, but only to consume their own participation as a product. This dynamic becomes a cultural paradigm.
Looking at conceptualism historically, it appears that it is exactly this tension between object- versus system-oriented production which somehow resulted in both a resistance to or rebellion against the art market and, at the same time, a more or less ambivalent complicity and engagement with its integration into an imminent corporate culture. This becomes visible in the discourse of the exhibition catalogue for Software. Obviously the participation in a communication, information, and knowledge-producing system requires of the artist new strategies for representation and self-representation. The suggested form of participation goes with a transformed understanding of artistic competence, in which resources such as communication and information skills and access to a knowledge base play a significant role. Fax machines, TV, radio and cybernetic environments are as much a part of the exhibition as technical demonstrations and secondary or accompanying communication such as artists in discussion with engineers, trustees, managers, chairmen of corporations, museum organizers and visitors.
If we agree that there were corresponding developments in economic, societal and artistic fields around 1970, the question becomes whether or in which ways a socially dominant business model evolving away from the Ford style assembly line production affected the development of artistic practice. How are characteristics that we see in the economic and job sector such as flexibility, mobility, just-in-time production and so forth carried over into art production and its technologically-oriented forms of reception?
An important aspect of the media theory of that time was its focus on social control. In 1976, the sociologist Jean Baudrillard analyzed this process as a transition from a society based on production of goods to one based on a production of signs, which he labelled a “semiocracy”. For Baudrillard, the role of the new communication and information technologies is demonstrated in the differences between “imitation” (during the classical era), “production” (in the industrial age), and “simulation” (in the information age).[16]
Here, Gilles Deleuze’s 'Postscript to Societies of Control' can offer a further interpretation by introducing questions of whether the transition between a “disciplinary society” to a “society of control”, which partly correlates with the transition from fordism to postfordism, is a phenomenon which is of importance for the historical understanding of the correspondences between conceptual art and system-oriented practices:
In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything – the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation.[17]
Deleuze sees a similar change in the status of the art object, when he writes “that even art has left the spaces of enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the bank”.
But those analogies of economic, societal and cultural developments were not only of a theoretical nature at that time, but were also re-stated when conceptual art had its revival in the end of the 1980s. This was a period when – under the influence of Niklas Luhmann and the media discourses of postmodernity – system theory was of great importance within so called 'media art' as well as in the so called 'context art'. I quote Mel Ramsden from an interview with Mary Anne Staniszewski in Flash Art:
Conceptual art was the first upwardly mobile art. It moved artists into the same role, into the same space, as that of the managers and curators. And it seemed that what you had to do was to make a kind of space where you could produce work which was not simply and automatically part of that system (Mel Ramsden, 1988).[18]
This quote from Ramsden alludes to the growth of a fully self-referential and enclosed art system, and raises the question of whether the implementation of conceptual art into a capitalist system of signs and meaning was not from the beginning an insuperable contradiction of the movement. It reveals the conflict between conceptual art’s stated goals and its attempt to meet the requirements of, or respond adequately to, a modern information and knowledge-based corporate culture and art market. Against this theory of a causality or even complicity between art and economy, one could postulate that, with conceptual art, a new mode of production was introduced, one that sought to define its own economic rules. These rules wanted to take into account or even incorporate, while at the same time challenging, the illusionary characteristics of the mass media and its accompanying information age.
Looking at the Software show, this meant that the artist was situated in a much wider and more abstract frame of reference than the studio, gallery and museum could offer. The loss of meaning (even if only temporary) which the object-oriented process of production suffered through changes in strategies of distribution, resulted in a shift and expansion of artistic production into a technological realm. This then required other, more media-dependent and media-conscious self- promotion strategies than those that had been needed by artists who understood themselves exclusively as creators or authors of art objects.
In light of this, one can take a look at the concept of postfordist production analyzed in Michael Hardt and Toni Negri’s book Empire, one which lets us describe the main goal of the artist as that of a bio-political producer in terms of a new type of entrepreneur and manager:[19] it is his or her ambition to extend his or her territory to sectors of society which are traditionally associated less with production than with reproduction. It is relevant then to ask whether the convergence of conceptualism, new technologies and system theory actually contributed to the building of the “social factory” which Hardt and Negri describe as an enlargement and modification of factory- oriented labour. The “social factory” is a form of production which touches on and penetrates every sphere and aspect of public and private life, of knowledge production and communication.[20]
A similar approach to certain factors at play in conceptual art can be found in the writings of Jeff Wall. In his essay on Dan Graham’s work, the artist and writer deals with the work of several conceptual artists, particularly that of Kosuth. For Wall, these works presented the elements of “value-free” academic disciplines (such as empirical sociology, information and media theory, and positivistic linguistics) in the trendy style of 60s advertisements. For Wall, conceptual art was clarifying or forcing the point that, “in many works explicitly the university system as well as the media monopolies, after having been cleansed of Marxism during the cold war, had become the primary support systems for the new art, and were anchored, as were the artists themselves, in structures of authority and knowledge, whose cognitive constructions, even their epistemology, was publicity”.[21]
To return to Donna de Salvo’s question quoted at the beginning, we can find within it a starting point for a productive re-evaluation of system-oriented forms of thought and practice in the 60s and 70s. It is useful to note that the establishing of a context for decentralized work, which bridges the traditional categories of art and institution, media and marketing, knowledge and the academy is also re-examined in the ambivalent concept of the biopolitical producer. The image of the critical and yet at the same time constantly productive, non-stop artist has been formed by increasingly co-existent practices of holding lectures, printing newspapers, curating exhibits, establishing off-spaces, self-organized galleries and museums and generally taking the business of art criticism into one’s own hands.
Yet in spite of the negative dialectics implicit in this process, the search continues for a better model. Such a model needs to be able to both call into question and survive an art market which is profoundly influenced by corporate power. In light of this, the show Software. Information Technology and Its New Meaning for Art was able to effectively touch significant questions concerning the relation between the new technologies, art market and corporate culture – something I miss in the regular business of art criticism and art history of today.
•FOOTNOTES
[1] Tate Modern, London, Sept. 16-19, 2005. See the webcast at http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/archive/OpenSystems/ [1]
[2] Florian Cramer/Ulrike Gabriel: 'Software Art': http://www.netzliteratur.net/cramer/software_art_transmediale.html [2]
[3] His ideas were influenced by Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s, 'General Systems Theory' (see the conference papers by Luke Skrebowski 'All Systems Go: Recovering Jack Burnham’s 'Systems Aesthetics' and Matthias Michalka’s 'Antagonistic Systems'' (unpublished).
[4] See for example Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity, Cambridge, MA, 2003
[5] Jack Burnham, 'Real Time Systems' in Artforum Vol. 7, September 1969, pp 49-55 and 'Problems of Criticism' (1971), reprinted in Gregory Battcock, ed., Idea Art, New York 1973, pp 46-69
[6] Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture, New York 1968; see Rosalind E. Krauss’ critique of Burnham’s theories in her Passages in Modern Sculpture, Cambridge/London 1994, pp. 209ff.
[7] Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Cambridge, MA, 1948
[8] See Wiener, quoted from German translation: Kybernetik: Regelung und Nachrichtenübertragung in Lebewesen und in der Maschine, Düsseldorf/Wien/New York/Moscow, 1992, p 34.
[9] Edward A. Shanken, 'The House That Jack Built: Jack Burnham’s Concept of ‘Software’ as a Metaphor for Art',
http://www.duke.edu/giftwrap/House.html [3]
[10] Theodore H. Nelson, 'Computers are not what you think' in Software: Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art, exhibition catalogue. The Jewish Museum/ The Smithsonian Institution, New York and Washington, New York, 1970, pp 66f.
[11] See Shanken, ibid.
[12] Jack Burnham, 'Notes on art and information processing', in Software..., ibid., pp 0-14, here p 10
[13] Patricia Norvell, Sol LeWitt, 12 June 1969, in Alexander Alberro and Patricia Norvell, eds., Recording Conceptual Art. Early Interviews with Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub, Smithson, Weiner by Patricia Norvell, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2001, pp 112-123, here p 120.
[14] Norvell, Robert Smithson, 20 June 1969, in Alberro and Norvell, ibid., pp 124-134, here p 133
[15] Ibid.
[16] Jean Baudrillard: Der symbolische Tausch und der Tod, München, 1982, pp 24f. (in the French original: L’échange Symbolique et la Mort, Paris 1976).
[17] Gilles Deleuze, 'Postskriptum über die Kontrollgesellschaften' in Unterhandlungen 1972-1990, Frankfurt an Main, 1993, pp 254-262 (in the French original Pourparlers 1972-1990, Paris 1990.
[18] Mel Ramsden, interview with Mary Anne Staniszewski, 'Interview: Alternatives to Critical Theory and a Corrosive Irony', in Flash Art, 139, March/ April 1988, pp 106-107, here p 107.
[19] See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000, p. 28.
[20] See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, The Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State Form, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1994.
[21] Jeff Wall, “Entwurf zu ‚Dan Grahams Kammerspiel“, in Gregor Stemmrich, ed. Jeff Wall, Szenarien im Bildraum der Wirklichkeit. Essays. Interviews, Dresden, pp 47-88, here p 63f.