Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-To-Reel Collection “Post Object Sculpture” with Jack Burnham, 1967 Good Afternoon, Ladies An

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Post Object Sculpture” with Jack Burnham, 1967

MALE 1 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the third in a series of lectures on contemporary sculpture, presented by the museum on the occasion of the Fifth Guggenheim International Exhibition. Today’s lecture is by Mr. Jack Wesley Burnham. Mr. Burnham is an individual who combines the extraordinary qualities of being both artist and scientist, as well as writer. He was born in 1931 in New York City. He studied at the Boston Museum School, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds an engineering degree. He holds the degrees of Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts from Yale University, at which institution he was on the faculty. [00:01:00] And he’s at present a professor at Northwestern University. He is the author of a major new study of modern sculpture, to be published next year by Braziller in New York, entitled Beyond Modern Sculpture.

His lecture today is entitled, “Post-Object Sculpture.” After the lecture, there will be a short question-and-answer period. Mr. Burnham.

JACK BURNHAM Mr. [Fry?], I’d like to thank you for inviting me. And I’d like to [00:02:00] thank all of you for being here today. I’m going to read part of this lecture, and part of it will be fairly extemporaneous. But I’d like to begin by saying that I find the task of speaking on post- object sculpture difficult for two reasons. First, because the rationale behind object sculpture and the art form itself have developed to such a sophisticated degree in the past two years. Most of the top critical energies of this decade have devoted themselves to this area of sculpture because it has taken up the challenge of propelling the [wanting?] forces of formalism one or two steps forward, hopefully. The literature in this area is presently formidable and convincing.

Secondly, I’m not quite sure, but I have a suspicion that the term “post-object sculpture,” as applied to any form of art of the future, is a misnomer. The [00:03:00] reason for this is that the term “sculpture” implies certain pre-requisites or pre-conditions, which I don’t think the new form will or can follow. It’s been the near-heroic task of object sculpture to retain the last few invariant qualities of sculpture. But to the more sensitively-aware object sculptures, I suspect they understand the cost of holding on to these qualities.

The new aesthetic of object sculpture, as it is called by some, owes a good deal to the insightful text of Ad Reinhardt, who, even by the late 1950s, had grasped the need for post- compositional art, which resisted all the traditional forms of anthropomorphism. What you are seeing are three almost black canvases by Rhinehart. These he called abstract paintings. For him, they were the last word. And in part, he described them [00:04:00] thus: a square, neutral, shapeless canvas, trisected, no composition, formless, no top, no bottom, directionless, brushwork brushed out, a mat flat, free-hand painted surface, glossless, textureless, nonlinear, non-hard edge, no soft edge. A pure, abstract, unobjective, timeless, spaceless, changeless, relationless, disinterested painting.

In a sense, this work by Tony Smith, called Die of 1965, is only the most obvious manifestation of everything that Ad Reinhardt was trying to get across. The word “die,” which, among other things, connotes the death of something, expresses readily a kind of romantic nihilism, which is shared by some of the more alert object sculptures. And for which Ad Reinhardt was not a little responsible. But also, the square-sided Die [00:05:00]

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Post Object Sculpture” with Jack Burnham, 1967 implies the incredible precisionism found within the tool patterns of the machinist’s workbench.

The roots of this nihilism is to be found somewhat in an obvious cause. This is the technological imperative, the urge never to mark time by standing still. It can be derived from this painting, which is very nearly a non-painting by Frank Stella. That’s the object in back of the shape, which you see, the [dura vera?] sculpture. It is the nature of categories of objects, when they are subjected to the focus of modern inventive techniques, to pass into the realm of other categories. The psychological root cause for this in a sense of anxiety within the artist himself. In an interview a year or so ago, Frank Stella made these revealing remarks. Stella: [00:06:00] “I don’t want to make variations. I don’t want to record a path. I wanted to get the paint out of the can and on the canvas. I tried to keep the paint as good as it was in the can.” And Bruce [Glazer?] asked him, “Are you implying that you’re trying to destroy painting?” And Stella said, “It’s just that you can’t go back. It’s not a question of destroying anything. If something is used up, something’s done, something’s over with, what’s the point in getting involved in it?”

On your right, you see a piece by Henry Moore called Locking Piece of a few years ago. It stands against the background of the Bank Lambert in Brussels, as a kind of homage to a now-almost defunct [00:07:00] sensibility. This was the intimation that a piece of sculpture could, at least metaphorically, embody life. Certainly the near bone-like projections, the polished and pitted surfaces of this work, are meant to express just that. The vitalistic tenor of this work expresses an intimate, if not introspective, rapport between the artist and his materials. While this remains for Moore the personification of truth to material, the very practical hollowness of the pieces is hardly apparent. That’s why the many modern techniques of fabrication and advertising, which finally move this work in front of the Bank Lambert.

On the other side, you see a work by Gabo, this construction in space. And it would be good if it got a little bit sharper than it is. But maybe it’s just a little imprecise. In a sense, the name of Gabo, the [00:08:00] creator of this construction, and Henry Moore, these two names have been linked by Herbert Read in a particular way as representing a very distinct polarity in sculptural sensibilities. These are, in the case of Moore, organic, life-embodying, semi- closed forms, at times quite monolithic. And Gabo, whose ethereal, open, semi-geometric constructions embody pure intellectual conceptualization. The differences between these two types of work have long been noted. But I suspect, in the years to come, perhaps even less than 25, the approaches of these two men will have more in common and seem more the result of a single cultural attitude than they do at the present time.

I know that in the middle ’50s, I had some chances to visit Gabo. And on one of these visits, I was struck by a certain contradiction, which [00:09:00] has only been noted by critics in the last few years. I saw Gabo making patterns for his constructions, cutting these parts out on a band saw, then meticulously filing and sanding the results. Gabo undoubtedly is a craftsman, and this is precisely the situation which seemed contradictory to me. Here is a man, anywhere from five to 50 years ago. For practically anybody in the arts, he embodied a sculptor who was dedicated to the age of technology, of industrialism, of scientific research, of scientific idealization. But at the same time, he was using techniques that would have not seemed out of place in the shop of a metalsmith or a fine watchmaker in the eighteenth century.

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Post Object Sculpture” with Jack Burnham, 1967

This is certainly not meant as a slight to Gabo, certainly not that. But it does point out, in the first half of this [00:10:00] century of modern sculpture, the division between the techniques of industrial fabrication and the techniques used by those artists caught up in the ethos of [techniks?]. What seems amazing today is that a few years ago, constructivism represented the epitome of industrialization and technology, as it is applied to the scientific ideal.

What we have on the right here is a pile-on sign. This is what you call a [double-faced?] plastic, internally illuminated sign, illuminated by a bank of fluorescent tubes. And of course, it’s mounted on this single Lally column. Over this is posed an arrow of programmed incandescent lights, which you can see silhouetted against [00:11:00] the sky. The programmer for this little arrow here is what is known in the sign trade as a flasher. From this basic double-faced Coca-Cola sign, any number of auxiliary signs or [encrustations?] or what you’d like to call them can be hung and are hung.

This technique of hanging sign from sign is about 30 years old and has been used with great originality in the past 10 years. In the 1950s, when I first worked on neon signs, it was with a profound sense of spatial shock that I opened one of them for the first time and found the hollow inside. Somehow, I passed these for years on the street, and they’d always seemed just as heavy and monolithic and solid as any tree or anything else. A rock, boulder.

It’s been suggested recently that David Smith is a direct precursor of the so-called object sculptors, but [00:12:00] I rather doubt that. David Smith, in his Cubi series, doesn’t [body?] a sensibility, which does begin to impinge upon the technological method at perhaps the expense of the spirit of sculpture. This is a projection of a late notion that an object is hollow, fabricated from plate metal. While it gives very much like Moore’s castings, the outward sense of a solid, monolithic piece, Smith leaves these works with just enough of a welded seam on the edge to assure you that these are joined parts.

This is a later member of the Cubi series by Smith, the piece that you see on your left. It’s significant that by 1963, Smith was preoccupied with finding alternatives to the pedestal [00:13:00] and plinth as a form of a base. But the base could be a kind of mounting for a picture frame-like structure and has not been lost on some critics. The hollow consistencies of these members are a bit more apparent right here. But they still have the same kind of jutting and off-center quality, as if the whole thing could be tipped over at the slightest push.

Not surprisingly, the pile-on sign that you see on the other side here anticipates, by some years, the kind of fantastic polychrome formalism, which is quite common today. The vertical ground members of this sign are built up structural steel channels, placed face-to- face. Like Smith’s forms for his late Cubis, the two vertical V-like lines are continued, disjointed after the intersection of the box sign containing the word “hamburger.”

What I wish to propose here is that the infrastructure [00:14:00] of technological capability and knowledgeability have been creeping up on sculpture and on all of us for some time. And that the closer we come to duplicating the circumstances under which industry produces the artifacts of our culture, the closer we draw to producing those artifacts in our art. The idea of keeping our fine art as a segregated cultural pursuit is possibly a luxury that we’re finding harder and harder to afford or even do. Actually, this separation is being steadily eroded by the forces of technique and intentionality, not the morality of fusing art and techniks, as once suggested by Ruskin or Morris, William Morris.

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Post Object Sculpture” with Jack Burnham, 1967

This is a photo of Donald Judd’s first show in 1963 at the Green Gallery. At the time, Judd, along with most of the other minimalists, were constructing [00:15:00] plywood-painted forms. Actually, Anne Truitt had done something very much like this a year before. These lacked the beguiling gestalt and the focus of earlier sculpture. They are not meant to be read ideally as separate pieces, but perhaps in concert and as an ambient exercise. Most of all, they define space. Yet because we know they’re hollow, they do not fill it in the traditional sense of objects. Just so, a highway pile-on, one of those huge signs that you see looming along the side of a street or a highway, imposes and blots out our view of the vistas beyond, just as they lack the substantiality and presence of real architecture. But again, this is part of the infrastructure of the technological landscape.

On your right, [00:16:00] these two L-shaped forms by Bob Morris appeared a year or so again at the America ’68 show in Chicago, at the Art Institute. And the way they got there is rather curious, and I think it’s extremely significant. The Art Institute called up Leo Castelli, I guess it was, and ordered the pieces. And they said, “Well, why not fabricate them yourself?” And so they did. And carpenters there at the museum built them out of plywood, painted them the elephant gray that he used to use, and that was the end of it. They used them for the show. And somehow, by phone or note or message, Bob Morris gave his blessing to these two pieces, and they became Bob Morrises. Which I think is very pragmatic.

Later on, I think it was at Pasadena, they wanted these two pieces. [00:17:00] And they knew that they were in the collection of the Chicago Art Institute. So what they did was call up the Art Institute and ask them to send them along. The Art Institute did the same thing. They said, “Well, why not build them for yourself?” And the museum did it. And then somehow, by mail or telephone or however benedictions are given, Bob Morris did the same thing and made them Bob Morrises.

What this says is something about the way our culture is beginning to handle and feel about objects. One of the ideas of our Anglo-Saxon heritage has been that of real estate and primogeniture and handing down objects, whether it’s real earth with a house on it, or objects in one’s family’s possession, from [00:18:00] generation to generation. And objects have intrinsic value. And it’s essentially the technological age that has made objects meaningless. They just don’t function as objects anymore, although we’re led to believe, by advertising and by other means, that what we really are buying in a gallery or in an automobile showroom is an object.

A car we see is an object, in 30 or 40 years ago, we were induced by advertisers and automobile companies to give our cars names, to pet them, and to paint them whatever color we wanted, and to polish them, and so forth. But more and more, what an automobile is really is a kind of system. In fact, it’s a multi-layer of systems. And it’s a system of private transportation. It’s a system of use, of public [00:19:00] highways. It’s a system of insurance. It’s a system of parts supply. It’s a system of eating and resting places called motels and drive-ins. All these systems are made available only for the use of this one object, the automobile. The object itself, the automobile, lasts about three years. And no one gives it names anymore, and some people have discarded with owning the object altogether. And they’d rather rent them. And the trend towards renting automobiles is going to be probably larger in the future, not smaller.

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Post Object Sculpture” with Jack Burnham, 1967

In other words, it’s becoming harder and harder for people to attach themselves to objects because of the very nature of the way objects are duplicated, proliferated, dispersed with our modern techniques of buying and advertising. And the only thing I wish [00:20:00] to impress upon you at this time is that this situation cannot possibly help but influence the type of art that we see, the way we make it, the way we buy it, and also the way we handle it.

On your left here, we have an untitled work by Robert Morris of last year. This is a product of a metal fabrication shop. Perhaps of all the sculptors working today, Morris, in his “Notes on Sculpture,” has understood, defined, and applied to his own work what he calls “mechanics of production.” This includes modularity and the other kinds of syntax of industrialism, forming techniques, notions of part-to-whole relationships, and modes of public acceptance of such works. However, I’m sure that Morris recognizes the technical and aesthetic limitations of such industrial-inspired artifacts, as [00:21:00] you see before you. This kind of wire cage.

Among other things, Morris has been one of the first to note the progression towards more industrially-sophisticated forming techniques, particularly by the so-called object sculptors. First, they worked in plywood forms, then sheet or plate metal boxes, then thermoforming plastics, then dye-stamping plastics. Each, in a way, represents a more flexible, visually impervious standard of fabrication, also one that is carried out only with more sophisticated and expensive tools and equipment. And that means from handicraft to true mass production.

Even more significant, Morris has grasped the fuller implications of technical control and construction. These are implications that go beyond the limitations of object sculpture. And I wish to quote Morris on this one point. [00:22:00] He says, “The means for production seem to be an accomplished fact. Control of energy and processing of information become the central cultural task.” And then he quotes from a Russian scientist at the State Astronomical Institute, “All civilizations can be divided into three classes, according to the amount of energy they consume. The first class would comprise civilizations which, in terms of their technological development, are close to our civilization, the energy consumed by these civilizations being something like 4.1 to the nineteenth power per second. The second class would consist of civilizations with an energy consumption of the order of 4.1 to the thirty-third power per second. These civilizations have completely harnessed the energy of the stars. Civilizations [00:23:00] belonging to the third class would consume as much as 4.1 to the forty-fourth power, which is a fantastic number — it just can’t be imagined — per second, and control the energy supply by the entire galaxy.”

Now, what he’s doing and using as a measuring rod is the amount of electrical, or by any other means, atomic energy, the amount of energy produced by a given civilization or country. In the last 30 years, this has become the standard measurement, in terms of industrialization and even standard of living of a country. It’s probably the best and shortest and most accurate footrule that there is.

Morris says that control of energy and information processing become the concentral efforts of our culture. [00:24:00] Then, if this is true, what are our artists doing? Manipulating rather small metal and plastic boxes into more and more unlikely formed compressions. Actually, the formed concoctions of Morris and others are possibly the last very sophisticated relics of the compact, stone-age totem images that have their beginning sometime in the Upper Palaeolithic, about 10,000 or 20,000 years ago. In no way is this meant to denigrate

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Post Object Sculpture” with Jack Burnham, 1967 the works or the thinking of Robert Morris. Morris is, without doubt, one of the rarest minds in sculpture today. His work is of the very highest sensitivity.

In this respect, I wish to say that I was going to say, at this lecture, that I think that Morris, within two to [00:25:00] five years, is going to go into various types of energy sculpture or kinetic art. Or call it what you may. And I and some friends of mine had the good fortune this afternoon, just before this very show, this very lecture, to go to a small show and see a drawing by Morris using fog and steam on a large scale. And here’s Morris, the purest of the purest of the object sculptors, beginning to move into a whole new realm. And if you’re keenly sensitive to Morris through his writings, you can see this beginning to happen and evolve in his mind for some time.

It’s been suggested by one or two writers that we may be heading towards a minimal future, [00:26:00] riding on the wave, as it were, of minimal art. Let me point out just one or two minor fallacies about that suggestion. The pyramids of Giza represent the kind of Euclidean simplicity that some of us feel we are descended from. And from the pyramids, they jump to Bucky Fuller’s Skydome. That was to span the center of New York City as a kind of five square mile environmental control system.

Actually, there is all the difference in the world between these two shapes, between the massive tombs of the Old Kingdom, with the [Cyclopedian?] stone blocks, and what Fuller was proposing. While Fuller’s dome is a hemisphere and theoretically feasible as a structure, its lifespan is extremely problematic when compared to the pyramids. That’s naturally because the pyramids are made of stone and, unless there’s an atomic explosion around them or some other kind [00:27:00] of monumental holocaust, they should last. First, the dome will suffocate everyone in it without proper air ventilation. This, in itself, is a massive job of recirculating air. And secondly — and this is rather a small matter — Fuller, in designing a similar but smaller dome in Japan, was informed that just five inches of snow piled on top of it would destroy his structure and crush it under a great dead load of snow, in spite of its lateral resistance to high winds and so forth.

Fuller proposed that the entire roof be fitted with heating coils, which makes sense and could probably be done, so as to melt the snow as it comes down. But then, what would happen, someone informed Fuller, if the electricity suddenly went off during a snowstorm? Fuller’s client would be minus a dome.

To my knowledge, this is the first [00:28:00] time that the very existence of a building was predicated on its internal utilities. And I think this is a significant technological step and something that should be pondered, for better and worse. Back in the 1930s, Stuart Chase and others talked about technological vulnerability and what could happen if electrical systems went off that were hooked up to each other. And now, we already know the answer. But what I am, of course, suggesting is that Fuller’s hemisphere is no ordinary minimal work of art, expanded a thousand times. But it’s a very tenuous, delicately-balanced system that, while it may have the poise of a soap bubble, it also has many of the problems of a soap bubble in extending its lifespan.

[00:29:00] I think some of the best projects of minimal sculpture stem from the efforts of artists like Claes Oldenburg. Somehow, the giantism of industrially-fabricated artifacts, such as this, have more relevance and beauty. Perhaps even more so than it does in the hands of some of Oldenburg’s more didactic colleagues, the minimalists.

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Post Object Sculpture” with Jack Burnham, 1967

From this point, I will not make this a lecture on kinetic art, although I want to touch upon it, because its implications are just as important as some of the things that I’ve already shown you. [00:30:00] The same is very much true, in terms of implications for future art, about Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel and some of the following objects. They represent an overlapping historical continuum of technological advances. Yet this alone should not be equated with aesthetic sophistication, though this, perhaps, has much to do with it.

At this point, I will touch on the crux of my talk. It’s obvious that something has been happening to the commercial gallery structure for the past five years. The very mercantile idea of selling objects — paintings or sculptures — is indeed trouble for anybody who’s been around New York for a few months or a few weeks. Mainly, this is true because the [inventive exhaustion?], which has overtaken the private production of such an object, is apparent to all — buyers, gallery people, and perhaps even to artists.

From the time of Duchamp, it seemed [00:31:00] that another form had been wanting to be born, which had really nothing to do with the art object. This new alternative is the art of the system. The first manifestations of this are kinetic works, both in light and solid substances, that is, in the [ephemeral?] quality of emitted light. And some of them, I’m going to show you. Let me say, before I go any further, that I don’t think that kinetic art, as we know it today, is the answer to post-object art. Rather, I think it is symptomatic of the many current attempts to move beyond object art.

One fact is evident, though. If there is to be a new art of systems or a new systems art, I feel that these will be systems with which man can interact. Call these, if you want, responsive systems. Then these will alter radically the gallery structure, [00:32:00] the museum structure, the modes of showing and presentation, and the working relationships of the artist with his various material suppliers, his own gallery, and so forth. There are already evidences to that effect, and I will touch upon some of these.

This is Len Lye’s stainless steel, motorized work of two years ago, Flip and Two Twisters. These works, by Lye, are incredibly arresting and successful as mechanically-programmed works of art. The scale, vitality, and sound effects are psychological imposing for the violence alone. Compared to the music box format of most kinetic art, Flip and Two Twisters very possibly represents a high point in making art out of mechanisms of the first Industrial Revolution.

I have to make [00:33:00] myself a little clearer about this idea of the first Industrial Revolution. These various engines and the various auxiliary machines that were attached to them — the looms and so forth, for the first Industrial Revolution, the tooling machines, the [caning?] machines — all the artifacts, in fact, that we knew that existed in a factory and were made to go up to make art, present environment up until I would say 1950, belonged to the first Industrial Revolution.

They belonged to forms of mode of power and forms of translating that power, which go back to the time of the twelfth and thirteenth and fourteenth century. And even earlier, to the Greeks themselves. And were perhaps best philosophically crystallized with various ideas [00:34:00] by Newton and his own idea of what the cosmos is, as a giant, ever-revolving machine. And we’ve been quite happy with this idea. And even Alexander [Coller?], back in 1934, made several little mock, almost heroic comic models of the Newtonian universe

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Post Object Sculpture” with Jack Burnham, 1967 attached to tiny little motors. And Len Lye I think, perhaps has realized this in its most imposing form. And what I’m saying is that, not that it represents a certain standard of aesthetic quality, but a certain standard in technological capability and awareness.

At this point, it may appear to some of you that we’re back to minimal art again. However, these forms by Robert Greer, these Styrofoam floats, are little [00:35:00] robot-like vehicles that travel about six inches a minute. They have touch-sensitive switches that allow them to reverse their motors and back up when they run into any other object. In a sense, these objects are almost social creatures. And Greer has told me that sometimes, he feels very protective about them, the ones particularly that seem to have individual personalities. And in a deeper sense, I would consider these almost social sculptures. They’re sculptures that you would not want to buy alone, although you can, but you want to buy a group of them and just have them batting around the house.

This, of course, is Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s Light-Space Modulator. And again, I’m showing this not as an example of light art, but because it represents a certain [00:36:00] level of technological proficiency and also of capability. It’s a massive object. It’s turned by this belt shaft here, this gear belt, these gears, and the belts. And a number of the parts work. They turn at different speeds, and you have various types of lattice structures inside of it. Lights are shown on it, and you’ve got a number of evolving patterns and shadows on the walls.

Actually, this is probably one of the first works that really thinks about the environment, not just the art object itself but about what’s happening on the walls around the object. This is almost more important. And in a sense, I would say that this is a precursor to the system sensibility, a sensibility that really sees not so much importance in individual objects but objects in terms of how they are [00:37:00] components and relate to a particular environmental set and how they can function with each other and with those organisms that step into their midst.

This is a piece of my own, and I only go to it for a second to demonstrate a point. It’s a program for mica construction, and lights move underneath it in reverse patterns, depending on where the spectator stands. In the past few years, there’s been both something of a breakthrough in both public and artistic acceptance of what has generically been termed illuminous art or kinetic art. And to me, this is something of an irony. This work does have to have a cord and a plug. You do have to put the plug into the wall. It may look like a self- sustaining object, but in reality, much of its meaning is lost without the work [00:38:00] being attached to an electrical outlet. And this is one thing. We’re in a kind of stage now where most of the kinetic or plugged-in sculpture that we see, the artist does as much as possible to hide that electrical outlet, to make believe, if possible, that the work is autonomous and runs by itself, as if it really weren’t part of a larger system but were very much a self-sustaining system.

I began to make these light pieces in 1955 while I was working in a sign shop. In 1956 and ’57, I tried, unsuccessfully, to enter a piece of neon sculpture in the Boston Arts Festival. Both times, I got a rather disdainful answer, one time by telephone, one time a note. And they told me that electrical outlets were not for sculpture entries. Sculpture was not to be plugged in. It was about this time that I began to understand the cultural [00:39:00] and technological implications of what you might call post-object sculpture.

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Post Object Sculpture” with Jack Burnham, 1967

These are Chris’s Ampersand series. For me, the most striking things about these works are the clarity and the undisguised fashion with which the artist treats the electrodes and housing units, which we see are neon tubes. The electrodes are these things here, that end in neon tubes (inaudible) [encase?] the electrode. Here, the artist has incorporated the electrical system, or at least a part of it. The transformers are still in the base of the sculpture, into the visible components of her art object or art system. [00:40:00] I think this is a step. And you might say that the most honest sculpture possible, if you’re looking at it as a system, is that sculpture which includes every aspect of the system.

And the one thing about systems aesthetics or systems consciousness that you begin to learn, which is absolutely divergent and a radical departure from the art object, is the art object, except for some circumstances, lays everything out. If there’s a gestalt, you grasp it. If there’s a need of closure of that gestalt, you can feel and sense where that closure is. It’s not true of a system, because many times, all the parts of the system and their interactions are visually unrelated. And this somehow takes a whole new psychological sensibility to penetrate these relationships.

This is a very striking relief by Howard Jones that [00:41:00] we see here on the left. It’s called Skylight Two. Here, 161 three-watt pilot lamps are mounted on a [spun?] aluminium face, so you see these as a kind of radial pattern. The relief is structured so that there are approximately 80 variations of symmetrical light patterns in all. A bank of thermal relays ensures that these patterns never evolve in the same sequence.

To the right of that is a copy of a drawing sent to me by Howard Jones. And this is how he structured the timing sequence for his Skylight series. This is actually just one sheet of another of [timed?] drawings. To me, this diagram is amazingly similar to some of the serial compositions and notational drawings made by such electronic composers as Stockhausen, (inaudible), and Pierre Boulet. What I am suggesting is that now, some visual artists, at least some, [00:42:00] anyway, have to compose their works for at least two parameters, the traditional one of space and scale and material form, and a more recent one of time. Here is time structured, not simply ignored, in the most repetitive, mechanical, kinetic art that you see.

Light has other ways of extending itself, as with Dan Flavin’s Greens Crossing Greens that appeared last year in the (inaudible) Exhibition of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. As the German light artist — and here’s the green room here with Flavin in the background — as the German light artist, [Otto Pena?], has insisted, light wants to disperse. It wants to move out into space and create an environmental quality all of its own. In this way, it’s very systems-orientated. And I don’t wish [00:43:00] to have you confuse his word “systems” as it’s thought about in general systems theory or systems analysis, with a term that has currency now in art, which is systemic, related to systemic painting.

Systemic painting, which usually applies to modular and grid patterns and various types of numerical progressions, is something all of its own and has its antecedence, I would say, in the 1930s and 40s in Dutch and German art. But the systems consciousness is something that’s been growing since the late 1940s and really has its basis in general systems theory, which I’ll get to in a few minutes. The [same?] about this idea of light dispersal and the system really being the environment and not the lights themselves, is true about this work on the other side.

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Post Object Sculpture” with Jack Burnham, 1967

This is a photograph taken of a dynamic environment [00:44:00] arranged by (inaudible) in Paris for the 1964 (inaudible) Exhibition. Here, one moves through an ambient space of black partitions, from which were hung, at different heights, grids of neon tubing, which random blinked on and off. And the effect, of course, was to almost blind you at one point so that when the light went off, you were actually in the dark. And you were bombarded from various sides as you walked through this thing. Not a very subtle or sophisticated environment, but really one of the meaningful ones, I think, for some of today’s art.

One of the things that I think we can expect, to a great extent, is to see more art that we don’t readily identify with the galleries or museums. This, of course, is the New York Cheetah, a total environmental rock club with strobe effects. And where these banks of colored lights above [00:45:00] are electronically made sensitive to the beat and tonal pattern of amplified music. These media environmental experiments have been extended in other directions, for instance, by [Usco?], with their psychedelic art effects. Here, multiple pattern effects are projected as a couple or a number of people are spun on a rotating couch. And just the five or six works that we’ve witnessed, a kind of continuum of light effects from very imposing mechanical works, such as the object by Moholy-Nagy to these spaces, which really don’t contain any kind of work of art at all. But they’re simply an environment arranged in which light effects impinge upon the viewer.

And I think this is significant. Actually, back in the 1920s, Oskar Schlemmer, when he proposed his total theatre, [00:46:00] spoke a great deal about this and wrote and designed. But of course, at that time it was, if not technologically unfeasible, politically unfeasible, for him being in Germany the way he was.

A more ephemeral form of light is a laser image. Billy Apple, among others, has written about the laser as a source of future sculpture. Already coherent laser images have been projected into empty spaces to form seemingly tangible objects. [Alan Schooner?] has written that possibly in the future, laser hologram plates can be projected three- dimensionally, will become the means by which a museum starts a vast compact form of collected three-dimensional objects. As yet, no artist to my knowledge has any success in experimentations with coherent laser images. That is, laser light beams that are projected [00:47:00] through a hologram to form a definite pattern.

But at present, there is a very startling show, or there was until a day or two ago, at the Pace Gallery of Robert Whitman’s Laser Light Forms. These are not images so much in the sense of a concrete form as a line or a band of light that moves and adheres to all surfaces which it touches. In talking to Whitman, I got the feeling that these things have been done. He may use laser light in the future, but not in the same direction. Also, it’s significant that this show got exceptionally good reviews. It drew an abnormal number of people. But it was really not the type of show that could be marketed. And as far as I know, all the pieces are going back to Whitman’s studio.

This in itself — and I’m not saying this derogatorily — because they shouldn’t be sold, or they should [00:48:00] have been sold, but simply because this represents a whole new sensibility. What Whitman expects people to do is to take his system and put it into a context in which the whole environment can be accommodated to the system. This is almost impossible, or it would be extraordinarily expensive for most people outside the range of a museum. So what you see here is a kind of technological gap beginning to occur between the galleries and the buyers, and the more adventurous artists. And I would suspect that this gap

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Post Object Sculpture” with Jack Burnham, 1967 is going to increase rather than decrease. And I’ll talk about the implications of this a little bit later.

This is called The Machine by Francois [Delagray?]. And actually, it looks like a mammoth piece of sculpture. But in reality, it’s a giant electronic organ with about [00:49:00] 162 lights and electronic eyes that are positioned between two horizontal (inaudible). What you can do, or what you did do when shows opened, is to run along here, putting your hand in the various intervals. And in time beginning to sense how this operates as an organ, because each time you broke a light beam and the switch for the electronic eye, what you did is set off a tone. And playing with this enough, you could begin to have some sensitivity about where you were on the keyboard as you ran along. Very much this is a kind of interacting art system.

[00:50:00] Another one of these is called Slipcover, a place by Les Levine. This is, for the most part, metallica-coated mylar. The whole thing is like a series of giant bags. And the walls, the ceilings, the roof were covered with this slippery, shiny, mylar material so that you had to take off your shoes when you walked into it. It was almost like being inside some kind of a fantastic metallic body because these forms sort of breathed out at you and pressed you against the wall. For some of you who knew about this, this was in the Architectural League last spring.

Several other artists that are working, I would say, in a systems context, hovering somewhere between kinetic art and systems art, [00:51:00] are, one is [Jans Hocka?] here. This was a show at MIT, and it shows two works. The [balloon?] here (inaudible) comes out of this white box that you see. These works have been improved by Hocka to the point where a balloon can float almost free by itself and not have to stay over the box itself. You can almost say the balloons are autonomous beings. And I think you’ll see these perhaps in January, when Hocka has a show at Howard [Wiese?].

Another area of systems, besides growing organic things and fog sculptures, condensation sculptures, [00:52:00] these aerial sculptures of various types, are these freezing sculptures by Hocka. This is called Ice Stick. And these can be frozen. What you could do is get a collection of condensation on the tube here, or it can be a plate, or it can be almost anything. And then the artist or whoever wants to can break the ice off, reform it at will by raising the temperature of the room, or whatever he wants. This is what you call a very, very slow- working kinetic work, that piece of kinetic art, because it grows, I would say, almost infinitesimally by the week, so that you can’t see it. But at the end of six months you have a fairly huge piece of ice caked on the work.

Here’s another area of what you might call systems art, although at the time being, it’s fairly far removed. This is [00:53:00] called 34-CV, and it’s a work by Johann Severtson. It’s a computer sculpture. And it was actually designed at the computer center at the University of Chicago. Basic’s decisions are the computers, that is, the angle and length of intersection between the two planes. The computer, at best, is really not an instrument for designing traditional sculpture. But there are other functions that I think it can perform better. In this case, I’ve had talks with Severtson, and he’s as much as admitted that. In other words, it’s more of a feat, a kind of tour de force, to produce a sculpture by computer. But somehow, the computer or computer programming has to be pushed to the point where the computer’s actually producing sculptures which are significantly different from things that can be

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Post Object Sculpture” with Jack Burnham, 1967 produced by the [00:54:00] human mind alone at this time. But I think it’s an omen of things to come, at best.

What are on-time relationships? This has been suggested by other people. On-time relationships are relations of a human programmer or human operator with a computer itself, so that both can actually talk or correspond to each other by very quick means, not having to wait to interpret a punch-out tape. These have also been called interactive aesthetic experiences by Michael Noll at the Bell Labs. As an interactive feedback situation, it would be completely dynamic. And one thing it could do is change environmental effects, colors, and patterns. And one way of doing this, and it’s already been attempted, is by projecting [00:55:00] electroencephalograms that have been made by the various brain patterns in the human brain. And these are neural impulses that are relayed to a kind of display board that could be put all around a room.

And actually, as you walked around the room with a series of electrodes attached to you, what you’re thinking would actually determine the light patterns which you would have around you. And I would say this is the most intimate of interactive feedback situations which I’ve heard of yet. There are many, many other ways of working these types of computer interaction. Marvin Minsky of MIT showed me pictures of computers’ display boards that they had an MIT when they were doing artificial intelligence simulation problems. And these various colored photos of the display boards were fantastically [00:56:00] beautiful, as much, if not more, than much art that I see around today.

An artist who’s rather sophisticated and who’s already gone into the area of cybernetics, which is really the basis of systems theory as I’m talking about it, is James Seawright. Seawright has probably thought more about the problems of programming than any other artist. He sees it as a matter of devising a programming system with a long duration, variety of effects which, at the same time, will not break easily and will remain inexpensive. The whole idea of programming will work, and every artist who works with the element of time or parameter of time has to program, whether he admits it or not. This whole idea of programming has been ignored, for the most part. And I think that, in the sophistication of his approach, [00:57:00] Seawright really has an answer for the future.

In Searcher, this particular piece here, the artist uses what he terms a closed-loop feedback, a relation in which the environmental stimuli and the actions of the mechanism stimulate each other to produce a rich pattern of movement and light impulses. On the other hand, mechanical programming would result in a sculpture organism which would simply repeat the same program. Seawright feels that his work results in a cybernetic sculpture that may, in his work, be given a definite personality. In other words, instead of making a mechanical program that you simply inject into the work itself, if you know enough about circuitry, you can actually make the sculpture develop its own program by the stimuli [00:58:00] that it’s subjected to.

And in this particular piece, I would say it’s still in a really early and almost crude stage. The work is more of the tinker toy variety, almost, than of anything that we think of as having the [swell?] of finished sculpture. At the same time, you have to realize that this is no longer sculpture that you look at so much. In fact, what it looks like is really irrelevant. And I would say that this is something that creeps over into many types of sculpture of the day, the idea of neglecting, if not negating, the whole idea of visual acuity and visual [steady?].

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Post Object Sculpture” with Jack Burnham, 1967

The work on your right is a series of small works by Grey Walter. [00:59:00] Grey Walter, along with Norbert Wiener and several other scientists, are the inventors of what you’d call cybernetics. Grey Walter did this particular set of pieces. One was called Elsie. One’s called Elmer. You can see these two objects, turtle-like objects, over the side here. He did these in 1948. And actually, they represent the first actual cybernetic organisms. They have in them two sets of electronic components, which not only represent but also simulate two neural cells. And so that these two little works, when they can go, actually register excitement, lethargy, hunger, anger, and all the other emotions which seem quite human to use. [01:00:00] The one work here is going along, it’s going into a little light hutch. When it gets into the little light hutch, it’s going to hook up to a series of little magnetic bars. These magnetic bars will translate current. And the current actually, when it gets up to seven volts, it stops. Or, I’m sorry, the little organism disengages itself because it’s had its food. It’s been fed. And between five and seven volts, the organism runs around. And then when it gets down to five and a half volts, it begins to feel hungry again and has to go back into the hutch again to feed. And if one of these little organisms is or was frustrated in some way from getting back to the hutch, it begins to get very, very desperate and try all kinds of hunting actions. And finally, of course, it just dies. And it literally dies.

Seawright is after the same thing. [01:01:00] And on your left-hand side, you see a work by Seawright called Watcher. And actually, this is two mechanisms, both mechanically controlled and mechanically related to each other by feedback. On one side, you have a raster of light receptors, this piece here that [are?] sensitive to light. I’m sorry, [these are the lights themselves?]. These are the light receptors over here. And the light receptors over there sometimes catch a glimmer of light that comes from these here. (inaudible) and actually alter the program (inaudible) on that side. So actually, these two, this double sculpture, as it were, oscillates back and forth, each picking up and returning the signals of the other. And very much this is a kind of cybernetic work.

[01:02:00] For most of us, particularly art critics or any of us who are seriously involved in art, this still in the realm of almost the tinker toy speculation. It doesn’t have the feel of art for most of us. But what I’m going to suggest at this point is that these works, although they are almost prototypes, have extremely profound implications for the art of the future.

And I’ll give you a hint of how this might work. These are called [deibels?]. And what they actually are, mechanical cells that a man by the name of Richard Landers developed. And Landers said about these cells, “Both a human cell and the deibels have protective membranes, which are outer sheaths to allow control of the flow of desirable and undesirable fluids. [01:03:00] Both sense their own [difunction?] or malfunction and remove themselves in the event of failure. Both have internal pressures, which apply force against adjacent cells or [dieblocks?] to maintain structural integrity.” Future dieblocks are planned, which will contain the means to generate their own energy and which contain sets of blueprints for the complete machine, in much the same way as cells containing genes and chromosomes in our bodies.

What’s actually beginning to happen, and particularly with Richard Landers and other people — Landers happens to be at a research foundation out in California — is that scientists are beginning to think seriously and are actually growing very basic machines. We think of manufacturing machines. We think of manufacturing all the artifacts of our culture. But the idea of growing them is really not very [01:04:00] far ahead of us. And if you read Arthur Clarke’s book about the future, you can understand this a little bit better.

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Post Object Sculpture” with Jack Burnham, 1967

What’s the difference between manufacturing an object and growing an object? What’s the difference between having an innate piece of sculpture, which just stands there, and a piece of sculpture which actually reacts to you or you react to it, or it moves around as a kind of artistic preoccupation with you? Well, I think the implications are significant, and therefore the future. We’re moving towards a culture which is object-oriented, towards a culture which is totally systemically-oriented. And by systems context, I mean the technology and environment in which we think of everything as being a system.

Certainly, we haven’t thought of our [01:05:00] environment as being a system. This is obviously one of the problems that we have, and one of the reasons why we’ve destroyed so much of the natural ecology of our own land. We’ve built mechanical systems in our cities and in our transportation and so forth, which are almost totally incompatible with the natural systems around them. And this whole problem of compatibility, of natural with artificial systems, is one of the areas that systems analysts who are interested in ecology are becoming very, very keen about in their researches.

What are objects? Well, objects, if you were to look at them from a systems point of view, are stable and they’re complete entities. They do not exchange information, material, or energy with their environment. They have theoretically an infinite lifespan, as long as they’re not destroyed physically or impinged upon in some way. [01:06:00] They’re solid entities, usually, and they’re not usually gas, liquid, or plasma, which are the other areas of material.

What are systems, if that is the category of an object? Systems, on the other hand, interact with their environment. They have an input and an output. They store and trade energy and information. They replace their material or solid components. They can and are broken down into subsystems. They employ both dynamic stability and instability to achieve their effects. Actually, when Mondrian wrote about plastic dynamic symmetry, he was really very much a kind of forerunner of cybernetic structuring, as it can and will undoubtedly be applied to art in the future. And also, systems have finite lifespans because their lives are always in jeopardy.

[01:07:00] What’s beginning to happen, I think, is that artists and groups allied to art are beginning to understand this, if only understand it subconsciously. They’re understanding the systems terminology, the systems attitudes, and they’re beginning to build their own infrastructures within the domain of art, I think, to meet these demands. If you look in today’s New York Times for Sunday, November 12, there’s an announcement on the art page. And the announcement, in part, goes that, “Experiments in art and technology announces a competition for engineers and artists and requests submissions of works of art made in collaboration to be selected for an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.” Of course, if you read onward about [01:08:00] this and the terms of the competition, you find out that the engineer has a lot to do with this, and that he’s an immensely important person. He’s simply not a [flunky?] for the artist. And there are certain implications to this.

Now, we have numbers systems, data processing systems, ecological systems, information storage and retrieval systems, geopolitical systems, control systems, weapons systems, and many other systems. The (inaudible) systems was not nearly in so much evidence a few years back. Now, everyone — not just scientists and the military — live intermeshed in a

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Post Object Sculpture” with Jack Burnham, 1967 hierarchy of extremely tenuous and complex systems. This is the new biological, technical reality, which not only people but, I feel in time, art must abide by.

What you see up on the board is a kind of organizational chart, outlined originally by [01:09:00] EAT, or Experiments in Art and Technology, a group gotten together here in New York City. There’s already a certain amount of pro-sentiment and a certain amount of anti- sentiment and resistance to the whole tenor and whole philosophy of Experiments in Art and Technology. EAT itself, I don’t think, is half as complicated as this chart. But somehow, I think it’s one of the divine ambitions of engineers to do this sort of thing once in a while.

In closing, I’ll show you these two slides here. The one on your right is a work called Open Score, devised by Robert Rauschenberg. And actually, it’s a tennis court with two tennis players. There’s an infrared light that floods the stage. In fact, a number of [01:10:00] infrared lights and also a television camera which, whose lenses are only sensitive to infrared light. So what, of course, is supposed to happen, to my knowledge, is that when the lights go off, these two people here play tennis. And they play tennis more or less in the dark. And the audience can only see it on these two large overhead hanging screens that you can see here, which shows the tennis playing.

So in a sense, much of this show, this nine evenings of theatre and engineering that went on in October of 1966, was meaningless to art critics. It was meaningless to the average theatre spectator. It didn’t settle and didn’t satisfy either one. For one, it was not enough art. And for the other, it was not enough theatre. But I think the point here is that we have artists that are really beginning and almost [01:11:00] desperately, and with a very strong dedication, trying to ally themselves with this feeling of systems, a feeling that there’s no use in just making objects and peddling them on the market anymore. But somehow, they have to be enmeshed in the artworks themselves. As Marshall McLuhan said some time ago, he said, “I think the implications of pop art is a kind of public recognition that the entire environment is ripe to become a work of art.” I would say not only that, but that there is a kind of feeling among the people at EAT and a number of other artists that I’ve talked to that if we don’t make the environment a work of art, we’re all going to perish. And I mean that literally.

I would say that this is almost a transcultural awakening that’s beginning to happen among young people, even [01:12:00] people in galleries and other high places. And I would say that the open sculpture shows, which you see all around New York now, are the mere vestiges, almost like the peak of the iceberg, of this sensibility which says, the city has to be a work of art. And of course, the only way to do this is not by placing these objects in these rather obvious contexts, but actually beginning to treat the city as an aesthetic system.

On the left here is a work by Alex Hay and Robert Rauschenberg. There was a work task of picking up these peach-colored clothes. And Alex Hay is sitting here. All his body sounds are amplified over a microphone so that the whole audience can hear them. And also his face, this rather ghastly projection in back of him, is a projection for the entire audience to [01:13:00] see. And actually, what this is is a phase where the machine promises biological compatibility with its human component.

What we’ve managed to do so far is to produce an environment in which a machine [isn’t compatible?] with human beings. And it’s my fervent hope that the artist begins to understand this, as the layman does, too. And he helps the artist in his task.

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Post Object Sculpture” with Jack Burnham, 1967

In a last word, I’d like to say something about the dangers and perhaps the context of systems art as a kind of salvation. Already, these groups of art and technology have crystallized or are beginning to crystallize in New York, Cambridge, Los Angeles, Detroit, and even possibly Chicago. One danger is, as a friend of mine phrased it to me, is that there’s going to be a kind of [01:14:00] syndrome of articles and shows of the kind of message of how I found God in art through technology. And the results of this can be just horrible and terrible, as anybody knows who’s already seen a lot of the kinetic art that’s around. Certainly, we play with kineticism and systems, and we play with light and environments. But we really don’t know very much about these, either as sensitive human beings or as scientists, or as city planners, for that matter. Very much this idea of technology of art is in danger of becoming a fad, and it’s just a matter of who can outdo who. Who can sensorily overwhelm the next artist, who can collect the most money for his particular project, and seem to be the best and everybody’s favorite.

However, technology is not just a tool, as some people seem to think, but it is [01:15:00] also a mode of cognition, a means for apprehending and transforming the world. It’s special unto itself and not really [antithetical?] to the aims of art, I think. But used of and by itself, with a motive of personal profit and personal gain, as it is in most of our society and particularly the galleries, technology can destroy not only the environment but also the souls of those dwelling in the environment.

I would like to see a systems aesthetic applied to art and life. I’m working in that direction myself now, and I heartily encourage all those other who are, too. I would like to see a systems aesthetic that recognizes life-amplifying goals, not life-stifling goals. And the understanding that we live in a world in which there’s a goal conflict between various systems. And that hopefully, we will and we must iron these [01:16:00] goal conflicts out.

In closing, I’d simply like to say that I thank you for listening to me this afternoon, and I hope my ideas are not too far afield, as far as yours as concerned, with the future and the present contents of art. Thank you very much.

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Post Object Sculpture / Jack Burnham, 1967/11/12. Reel-to-Reel collection. A0004. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York