Jack Burnham. “Real Time ,” Artforum , September 1969.

62 doi:10.1162/GREY_a_00204

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00204 by guest on 26 September 2021 Jack Burnham’s “Real Time”: Sculpture as , 1967–1969

COURTNEY FISKE

For critic and curator Jack Burnham to declare a new sort of in 1967 was also to declare a new sort of time: “real time,” as he put it, a term that had emerged some two decades earlier to describe the seeming instantaneity of processing. The art he diagnosed, variously dubbed a “post-formalist” or “sys - tems [a]esthetic”—a “ Art” of “unobjects”—emerged, first and foremost, as a matter of this new temporal articulation. Trained as an engineer, Burnham studied sculpture at Yale before seeking success as a light artist, fabricating kinetic con - structions from incandescents, plastics, and metal. Written in 1967 and published the year following, his first book, Beyond , marked his abandonment of art-making for . ’s legacy was then in contention, with ’s “Specific Objects,” Robert Morris’s “Notes on Sculpture,” and Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” having appeared in the condensed two years prior. 1 Expounded in an eponymous 1968 article in Artforum , Burnham’s “systems esthetics” aimed to transcend the confines of isms and, with them, a structured by the parameters of style. Burnham’s essay aspired to the canon. The artists it assem - bled—Morris, Judd, Carl Andre, and , among others— were the principals of first-wave , a field (aesthetic, discursive, and otherwise) that found sanction as a movement that same year with the publication of Gregory Battcock’s anthol - ogy Minimal Art .2 Burnham’s article came in explicit response to Fried’s staging of minimalism as “theatricality”: a mongrel art that pushed aesthetics , properly autonomous and pure, toward the mundane condition of “objecthood.” Reclaiming Fried’s pejorative, Burnham positioned theatricality as systems aes - thetics’ overture: a “preparatory step” that anticipated his more fully realized taxonomy of . 3 Systems aesthetics’ namesake, , was both con - ceptually eclectic and historically specific. Loosely bracketed by statistician ’s , published in 1948, and biologist ’s General Systems Theory , published in 1968, systems theory cannibalized approaches

Grey Room 65, Fall 2016, pp. 62–87. © 2016 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 63

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00204 by guest on 26 September 2021 from biology and computer science, compounding them in an at times productive, at times vexed whole. Organization and communication across living tissue and machines were its pri - mary concerns. Rooted in the study of organisms as “organized complexities,” it reflected the automated technological land - scape brought about by what Wiener, following economic historians, termed the “second industrial revolution.” 4 Joining Judd’s demand for wholeness, Morris’s call for spatial contingency, and Sol LeWitt’s declaration of idea-as- machine, Burnham’s “systems esthetics” collapsed distinctions among minimalism, , and art and technology. Its thesis was willfully eclectic, combining concepts from dis - parate sources in ways that eluded the precision of other, more scientifically acceptable approaches. 5 In Burnham’s exposition, a system defined itself by conceptual rather than material limits: as he insisted, “any situation, either in or outside the context of art, may be designed and judged as a system.” 6 As such, a system was neither object-bound nor fully available to vision. Process was privileged over end result; information, radically immaterial and often unvisualized, took priority over site. By contrast to inert, stationary objects, systems were self- organizing and articulated in dialogue with their environment. Made meaningful in and through its given context, a system’s components held no higher significance or value. Together, they demanded apprehension as a self-contained, if necessar - ily contingent, whole. 7 For Burnham, the promise of a systems’ perspective was its ability to push art beyond formalist criti - cism, with its fixation on objects, and toward a concept of art that undermined understandings of the medium as a determi - nate material support. In September 1969, on the heels of Beyond Modern Sculpture and “Systems Esthetics,” Burnham’s “Real Time Systems” appeared in Artforum . Here he attempted, however impre - Jack Burnham. cisely, to articulate the changed experience of time that both “Systems Esthetics,” Artforum , September 1968. motivated and conditioned the heterogeneity of contemporary

64 Grey Room 65

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00204 by guest on 26 September 2021 sculpture. The time he posited—“real time”—was an import from systems theory, ascribed to by way of cells. Building on its definition in computer science and , Burnham theorized real time as a means of control. Its goal was to maintain conformity within a given system: to detect, then streamline, deviations from an optimized norm. Feedback, a process that structured both organic life and com - puter processing, was its mechanism. If real time was respon - sive and inherently vital, metabolic or cellular in nature, it was also technological: the time of the ENIAC, a thirty-ton compos - ite of circuitry and control panels commissioned by the United States military to calculate ballistic trajectories. As has been repeatedly argued, the rise of new media in the late 1960s made temporal experience an effect of the artwork’s technological support, video being the prime example. 8 For all its overtures toward the real as an innocent (because unmedi - ated) ground, Burnham’s real time similarly forecloses access to a realm of experience outside of technology. After listing a handful of systems that traffic in real time—the human space - flight program Project Mercury, the online banking system Telefile—Burnham comments, “These computer systems deal with real time events, events which are uncontrived and happen under normal circumstances. All of the data process - ing systems I have referred to are built into and become a part of the events they monitor.” 9 The dissonance is subtle but deci - sive. In the first sentence, real time connotes the directness of firsthand experience; in the second, it describes technologies that abstract experience into data, placing the firsthand forever out of grasp. Thus figured, the real becomes an equivocal object, presupposing the mediation it claims to stand outside. At Burnham’s late-1960s juncture, time was an uneasy term, reflecting complex concerns around the rise of information technology and the pressures it placed on lived experience. 10 Computer processing, automated warfare: both produced a new sort of temporality—the same real time as Burnham’s new art. Real time, then, was never strictly about time but indexed both the moment’s temporal anxiety and its confusion over the location of reality. Formalist modernism tended to conflate the real with materiality: the radical presence of the abstract canvas, reduced to the blunt physicality of its support. A 1968 show at the Museum of deemed minimalism an “art of the real,” with “the real” opposed to “”: a mode of expression concerned with “an illusion of the fact rather than the fact itself,” as curator E.C. Goossen argued. Grouping Andre, Morris, and Judd with abstract expressionist painters, Goossen’s presentation assumed that to skirt the symbolic— to reduce aesthetic experience to the “simple, irreducible, irrefutable object”—was to access the real. 11 Yet, as rehearsed

Fiske | Jack Burnham’s “Real Time”: Sculpture as System, 1967 –1969 65

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00204 by guest on 26 September 2021 by Burnham, the real assumed a different texture that traded materiality for simulation. The implication was that art came closest to the real through an act of representation: through its ability to recreate life, not as a mimetic likeness—a realistic image of itself—but as a structural logic. For Burnham, real time was a malleable concept, useful in and for its imprecision. Though never explicitly defined by Burnham, real time lends itself to multiple levels of articula - tion: it is anti-ideal (opposed to the modernist logic of the instant); biotic (pertaining to the organism); cybernetic (constituted through feedback); and nonhuman (unoriented by a perceiving subject). Applied to the artworks it theorizes, Burnham’s real time frustrates dominant readings of minimalism as the visual analogue to phenomenology. Read through phenomenology’s discursive frame, the minimalist object organizes itself around the human subject: the constancy of the body’s size, the con - tingency of its perceptual apparatus, and so forth. Thus con - ceived, minimalism locates reality as a fullness: an “imperious unity” or “insurpassable plenitude,” as Rosalind Krauss, quot - ing Maurice Merleau-Ponty, argued in a 1966 article on Judd. 12 Burnham’s real time, by contrast, displaces the lived experi - ence of the phenomenological subject, implicating a time immanent not to the self but to the system: a complex whole produced and sustained in concert with its surroundings. “Systems Everywhere,” the opening line of Bertalanffy’s General Systems Theory proclaimed. 13 Spanning science, indus - try, and popular culture, systems was a 1960s buzzword. It dou - bled as a concrete technology and an unresolved metaphor, suggesting both sinister totalitarianism (“the System” against which counterculture inveighed) and the mystical ecology of Buckminster Fuller’s “Spaceship Earth,” which posited the globe as an interconnected whole. Adopting systems discourse for art criticism, Burnham’s real time locates art’s value not in its compensatory promise—its potential to restore bodily full - ness to the reified modern subject—but in its engagement with the mediatized condition of its contemporary control society. 14 In what follows, I elaborate on Burnham’s concept of real time by pairing his text with three artists whose work he champi - oned: Gianni Colombo, Les Levine, and . Locating Burnham’s temporal model within the material and discursive fields to which it staked claim, I suggest its utility as an alter - native and radically actual perspective on 1960s art.

Real Time, Anti-ideal Time Five paragraphs into Burnham’s 1969 article, real time receives its first mention, only to be defined by its opposite: “ideal, nonexistential time.” “Making, promoting, and buying art are real time activities. That is, they happen within the day-to-

66 Grey Room 65

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00204 by guest on 26 September 2021 day flow of normal experience,” Burnham writes. “Only Art Appreciation happens in ideal, nonexistential time.” 15 Derisively capitalized, “Art Appreciation” refers to the rari - fied formalism that Burnham’s “post-formalist esthetic” maligned. In the late 1960s, formalism was synonymous with the critic Clement Greenberg. Breaking with its tenets was a rite of passage for artists and thinkers seeking alternatives to his theory of purified modernism. As Burnham’s flip dismissal suggests, this theory was less specific than synecdochic: a stand-in for a host of conservative values that Burnham’s sys - tems aesthetic aimed to reject. Far from specific to Greenberg’s midcentury moment, these values, which privileged opticality over the physical existence of painting, were holdovers from nineteenth-century aesthetics, grounded in the writings of sculp - tor Adolf Hildebrand and the physiological optics of Hermann von Helmholtz, among others. Theirs was a theory of space as two-dimensional: an effect of planes arranged serially and in parallel. 16 To this essentially pictorial space, sculpture could be accommodated only as a species of image: a “picture in three dimensions,” as Greenberg described. 17 Oriented frontally toward the canvas, the viewer experienced it “at a glance . . . in an indi - visible instant of time. 18 Confined to a single “point,” perceptual experience assumes a strangely atemporal quality for Greenberg; it is a suspended or negated time, a departure from the body into the duration - less “instant.” Removed from space, ideal time transpires in a movement internal to the eye, which moves between depthless planes. 19 Real time, by contrast, is continuous and contextual: part of the “day-to-day flow of normal experience,” in Burnham’s words. 20 To extract it from the world is to contravene its nature as unarrested movement: to render it an abstract (because quantified) thing. Ideal time, made identical with modernist painting and Greenberg’s theorization thereof, was the model against which Burnham’s real time had to be vectored. Yet while Burnham’s text invokes formalism, it promptly exits its frame. Introducing real time at the end of one paragraph, it shifts at the beginning of the next from aesthetics to scientific method. “Ideal time and ‘experimental ’ are both outgrowths of the classical frame of reference. They stem from the intuition that location and proportion transcend the illusion of time,” Burnham writes. Classical science holds to a methodology of “reduction, isolation, and manipulation.” Excluding unwanted variables, it constructs an idealized version of its system of study that fixes time as invari ant. For Burnham, formalism harbored an analogous logic. Through “picture frames, bases, spotlights, guards, galleries, hypostatic objects, and the concept of ‘high art’ itself,” it sought to bracket aesthetic experience in a hermetic, atemporal realm. 21

Fiske | Jack Burnham’s “Real Time”: Sculpture as System, 1967 –1969 67

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00204 by guest on 26 September 2021 Burnham borrowed the term “experimental idealism” from Harold Sackman’s specialist text, Computers, System Science, and Evolving Society , published in 1967. Real time was to abide by an opposed methodology: what Sackman termed “experi - mental realism.” Eschewing and symbolic logic, experimental realism relied on concrete data culled from “real world” situations. 22 Premised on the open system definitive of organic life, its “real time information structure” extended the organism’s promise of totality: its ability to coordinate dis - parate parts into an interdependent whole, wherein every con - tingency could be controlled. “Control” serves as an organizing trope of Sackman’s dis - cussion. As first defined, real time orients itself “toward increas - ing human regulation and control of real-world events”; properly deployed, it effects a “radical advance in human control” over the system that it structures. 23 Geared toward the time to come, control offers a means to produce the future through continual, coercive monitoring. “The twentieth century is witnessing the development of a new and practical attitude toward time, an attitude of designing and constructing the future through cooperative planning and control,” Sackman explained. 24 Focused by real time, the future becomes something plastic and malleable: manipulable and therein able to be mastered. Sackman’s text is inseparable from the ideology of its Cold War moment. Command-control systems, optimized through the strategic use of information technology, were seen as America’s first line of defense against an at once urgent and nebulous Soviet threat. An engineer employed by the System Development Corporation, Sackman and his colleagues were charged with the creation of an automated air defense system— the Semi-automatic Ground Environment, or SAGE—capable of intercepting enemy bombing formations before they breached American airspace. The most ambitious system of systems ever envisioned by the U.S. gov - ernment, SAGE’s functioning depended on immediate data relay among radar stations, direc - tion centers (each outfitted with a 250-ton AN/FSQ-7 computer), and air bases spaced across the country. 25 Real-time information processing was its crux, and Sackman’s text elaborates various technical developments that

68 Grey Room 65

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00204 by guest on 26 September 2021 aimed to realize this uniquely contemporary sort of time. In his second mention of real time, well into the third page of “Real Time Systems,” Burnham adopts Sackman’s terms, acknowledging the phrase’s origins in computer science and its martial valence. “Organic stability is predicated upon exten - sive communication networks, including memory, feedback, and automatic decision-making capabilities,” he writes. The rudiments of such networks already exist, in the form of large-scale digital computer control systems. SAGE, the first computer-based air defense system; Project Mercury, the first real time digital support system for space flight; Telefile, the first online banking system; and SABRE, the first computerized airline reservation system are a few of many operating real time systems which gather and process data from environments, in time to effect future events within those environments. 26 Burnham’s chronology is circular: real-time systems antici - pate the organisms whose structure they mime. As Burnham insists, real-time information processing is “metabolic” in nature, aligned with Fuller’s pop theorization of the earth as a “total organism.” The article’s images are sourced almost uni - formly from nature and include stills of works by Hans Haacke, Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Barry, and Donald Burgy: a chicken emerging from its shell, a wheat field in aerial view, a barren stretch of Central Park, and an arrangement of rocks in low grass. Each illustrates Burnham’s assertion that art’s newfound informatic structure was “a matter of ecological insight.” 27 Opposite and below: Jack Burnham. “Real Time Systems,” Such confusions of organic and inorganic structure Burnham’s Artforum , September 1969. thought. Rather than relating hier - archically, nature and technology emerge as entwined terms . Nature features not as an origin or founda - tion but as an inflection, preceded by the technology that then pro - duces it as an effect. In Beyond Modern Sculpture , Burnham prospects “the passage toward a new form of civilization peopled as well with a new type of life.” In the future that he forecasts, “synthetic re-creation” replaces “procreation,” while “natural selec - tion and mutation” yield to “self- inflicted evolution” guided by the imperatives of efficiency. The result is the “gradual phasing out, or programmed obsolescence, of

Fiske | Jack Burnham’s “Real Time”: Sculpture as System, 1967 –1969 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00204 by guest on 26 September 2021 all natural organic life.” 28 Superseded by more-sophisticated, simulated versions of itself, nature becomes a derivative phe - nomenon, a product of, rather than an outside to, technology.

Real Time, Biotic Time “For our time the emerging major paradigm in art is neither an ism nor a collection of styles,” “Systems Esthetics” concludes. “Rather than a novel way of rearranging surfaces and spaces, it is fundamentally concerned with the implementation of the art impulse in an advanced technological society.” 29 Far from autonomous, art is thrust forward in time through a twinning of science and technology or technics , a term taken from the writer Lewis Mumford. developed from mod - ern engineering. stemmed from Freud’s theories of the mind. So, too, would art after formalism echo the postwar shift from Machine Age to Information Age. The “new indus - trial state” presaged by economist J.K. Galbraith had arrived. Control rested not with individuals but with the “technostruc - ture,” a collective, anonymous entity defined by its concentra - tion of technical knowledge. 30 Echoing Galbraith, Burnham announces a transition from an “object-oriented” to a “systems- oriented” culture. In this nascent technocracy, what mattered were not individual objects but larger processes and organiza - tional structures: not “things” but “the way things are done.” 31 As Burnham explains: A major illusion of the art system is that art resides in specific objects. Such artifacts are the material basis for the concept of the “work of art.” But in essence, all insti - tutions which data, thus making information, are components of the work of art. Without the support sys - tem, the object ceases to have definition; but without the object, the support system still sustains the notion of art. 32 The object requires the system; the system renders the object superfluous. Burnham’s use of “specific objects” alludes to Judd’s essay. Despite Burnham’s oppositional rhetoric, the system’s unitari - ness—its subsumption of parts into an integrated whole— extends Judd’s claims for the new “three dimensional work,” a term that Burnham borrows. 33 “Real,” “specific”: each denies intellectual schematization, the positing of an a priori ground that the art object belatedly expresses. Echoing Judd’s diagno - sis of painting and sculpture as “set forms,” Burnham deems sculpture an “archaic endeavor.” 34 Both critics agreed that sculpture had stiffened into a convention; the new, advanced work pushed toward the quotidian and the nonartistic. Its autonomous status disclosed as fiction, art inserted itself in an external order: for Judd, the “one thing after another” of

70 Grey Room 65

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00204 by guest on 26 September 2021 industrial capitalist production; for Burnham, the “real time” of automated information technologies. 35 Burnham’s conviction of contemporary art’s disconnection from history threads through Beyond Modern Sculpture . Its title reflects Burnham’s understanding of sculpture as a cate - gory in eclipse. In this, he echoes the belief, widely shared among contemporary critics, that recent work had stretched sculpture’s field of operation to the point where it merged with other practices: architecture and landscape, or “not-architec - ture” and “not-landscape,” in Krauss’s parsing. 36 Yet Burnham’s account differs from Krauss’s in that it remains tied to teleol - ogy. Foregrounding words such as drive , apogee , and fate , Burnham portrays history as propelled by a “scientific demi - urge, which moves ceaselessly in an irreversible direction”; art is “a dwindling part” of this “unstoppable scheme of events.” 37 For a thinker so self-consciously contemporary, Burnham’s account of art’s “preordained” course presents a puzzling dissonance. His developmental narrative proceeds as follows: Since its emergence in the ancient world, sculpture had been mimetic in intent. Its singular ambition was to replicate the human form, to capture, in inanimate matter, some of its “life-emitting properties.” 38 Sculpture became obsolete when it achieved a consummate mode of realism. This had occurred as early as antiquity. Burnham cites funeral images, waxworks, and Galatea from Ovid’s Metamorphoses .39 Subsequently, the sculptural object succumbed to “time extinction,” persisting in the pre - sent as totemic artifact. In advanced technological societies such as Burnham’s own, the mimetic drive of art was transfig - ured by the system, which no longer reproduces the human figure (as in classical sculpture) but replicates the “life impulse” itself. Seen in retrospect, sculpture appears as a “preparatory stage” for this more literal simulation of biological life that is achieved by imitating machinic processes. 40 By harnessing information-age technologies, Burnham argues, art would not simply mimic life but re-create and, moreover, replace it. “The modern meaning of the organic lies in the gradual moving away from biotic appearances toward biotic functioning via the machine,” he asserts. 41 Begetting biological life by nonbiologi - cal means, the new “cyborg art” would realize the ancients’ dream of a living sculpture. 42 This ideal of simulated vitality is what drew Burnham to the work of Colombo. For the Italian artist, likeness to life was like - wise not outward but produced at the level of the concept or scheme. His work treated nature not as an image but as a reser - voir of energies and forces. Based in Milan, Colombo founded Gruppo T with fellow artists Giovanni Anceschi, Davide Boriani, and Gabriele De Vecchi in 1959. The group participated in the

Fiske | Jack Burnham’s “Real Time”: Sculpture as System, 1967 –1969 71

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00204 by guest on 26 September 2021 New Tendency exhibitions whose participants shared an aver - sion to art informel and an interest in the computer as a medium of art. The “T” stood for “tempo” or “time”: a dimen - sion the trio aimed to integrate within their art. Reality existed Top: Gruppo T. Miroriama 1 mani - festo, October 15, 1959. Courtesy in a “continuous state of becoming,” the group insisted, and art the Gianni Colombo archive. was to reflect this flux by undergoing “continuous variation.” 43 Bottom: Gianni Colombo. Burnham celebrated Gruppo T’s approach, upholding its Strutturazione pulsante kinetic form of “space-time art” as a model of the worldview (Pulsating structure), 1959 . of modern physics, which conceived space and time as an Courtesy the Gianni Colombo archive. unbroken continuum. 44 Colombo’s first solo effort opened in Milan in 1960. The show was one in a series of exhibitions titled “Miriorama” (from the Greek for “myriad visions”), sequentially numbered so as to stress Gruppo T’s com - mon program. On view were a selection of Colombo’s mechanized reliefs, all dated to the year prior: Rilievi intermutabili (Intermutable reliefs), Superfici in vari - azione (Surfaces in variation), and Strutturazioni pulsanti (Pulsating struc - tures). Presented in a serial exhibition, the works were themselves serial, produced successively and in various sizes. Each consisted of a single, monochrome mater - ial—rubber, foam, or synthetic fiber—that Colombo alternately stretched across or set within a wooden frame. While the Reliefs and Surfaces were acti - vated by the viewer’s hand (through direct touch or engagement with a subtending row of keys), the Structures drew their impe - tus from an “electromechanical device,” in Colombo’s phrase, whose mode of opera - tion was unspecified. Concealed by a grid of foamed polystyrene blocks, the device produced what Colombo termed “alternat - ing extroflexions” or “simultaneous kinetic actions” at the grid’s interstices. The sequence of these movements, though pro - grammed, was not evident to the observing eye. Together, they produced a “polyvisual rhythmic situation” (again, Colombo’s phrase) whose unfolding in time appeared undetermined. 45 Each block was not quite rectangular, such that the grid formed by the blocks’ iteration was slightly skewed, recalling less

72 Grey Room 65

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00204 by guest on 26 September 2021 the efficiency of industry than the looseness of organic form. 46 This correspondence to the organic was not accidental. The series’ titular verb, pulsating , denotes a specifically biological cadence: the throb of blood as it circulates through the body. Here bulging, there recessed, Colombo’s Pulsating Structures mimicked the expansions and contractions of an artery. Their animacy was shored up by the texture of polystyrene, which, when foamed, is both bubbled and hard, like dehydrated tissue. For Burnham, the resulting reliefs instanced his notion of sculpture as a biological endeavor: “a vestigial biological activity closely related to the technological drive.” 47 Rather than fix life as an image, Colombo’s structures demonstrated its processual logic. The Pulsating Structures behaved as if they were alive. Burnham’s prognostics for art were of a similarly literal nature. “The stabilized dynamic system will become not only a symbol of life but literally life in the artist’s hands,” he declared. Biological in its aim to “‘bring to life’ the human- shaped entity,” art was to become a form of biology. 48 His liter - alism squares with that of much 1960s American art, including Judd’s, which endeavored to exceed modernist aesthetics by making its premises concrete. Yet while Judd’s literalism aimed at an experience of “immediate sensations,” Burnham’s literal - ism forecloses access to a positive form of firsthand experience. 49 In Burnham’s rendering, the real is not an objective plenum Gianni Colombo with headlamp that is “whole” and “not part of another whole,” as Judd wrote and Strutturazione pulsante (Pulsating structure). Courtesy of Barnett Newman’s paintings. 50 Rather than a given, Burnham’s the Gianni Colombo archive. real is problematic. Consider, for instance, the following passage from Beyond Modern Sculpture : The drive that finally prompted the sculptor to forsake naturalism and the human figure was not that of the desire to destroy the biological replica, but the realization that if he was serious in his quest to bring inert matter to life, anthro - pomorphism would not accomplish it. The machine, he intuitively realized, as unsubtle and inefficient as it was, remained the only means by which man would eventually reconstruct intelligent life, or what might be called life-bearing artifacts. 51 Literalism leads Burnham not to the brute phenomenality of a “specific object” but outside of aesthetics and into the realm of life. Yet it is a life that escapes traditional

Fiske | Jack Burnham’s “Real Time”: Sculpture as System, 1967 –1969 73

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00204 by guest on 26 September 2021 expression. Able to simulate life as an abstract logic, the machine destabilizes life in turn. “Life” gives way to “life-bear - ing artifacts.” This “life” is no longer primary and integral but a remainder with no privileged connection to the real. Reality can be neared only in an asymptotic fashion; it has become inaccessible because it is always mediated. In Burnham’s gloss, art had ceased to confine itself to objects. The perceptible support had yielded to the impercep - tible processes of systems. Yet it was precisely in becoming- system that sculpture achieved its ultimate goal: the creation of life by artificial means. “Systems may manifest some of the fun - damental characteristics of life itself: self-organization (if there is such a process), growth, autonomy, self-preservation, and death,” Burnham ventured in an early article. 52 Beyond Modern Sculpture makes the point unequivocally: “The system (an interacting assembly of varying complexity) is the means by which sculpture gradually departs from its object state and assumes some measure of lifelike activity.” 53 The temporality of the art object becomes the temporality of the organism, a dynamic entity that organizes and sustains itself. Life becomes a matter of time that enters the art object in the form of move - ment, as in the mechanized surface modulations of Colombo’s Pulsating Structures . Their biotic time presents the paradox of a temporality whose claim to vitality hinges on automation. Coupled through Colombo’s nonspecific “device,” organic and inorganic become irreducible terms, the one conditioning the other. A 1967 lecture finds Burnham proposing “growing sculpture,” by which he means sculpture that grows after the artist is finished with it, as a prospect “not very far ahead of us.” 54 As in Colombo’s reliefs, art becomes life, but only by means of the machine.

Real Time, Cybernetic Time The Oxford English Dictionary (OE D) pegs the inaugural use of real time to a lecture delivered by J. Presper Eckert in the sum - mer of 1946. An engineer by training, Eckert was part of the team behind the first electronic digital computer, ENIAC, developed under contract with the U.S. military. Completed in late 1945, the machine weighed thirty tons and commanded an entire thirty-by-sixty-foot room. 55 ENIAC could calculate a complex artillery trajectory in thirty seconds; the same prob - lem would take an engineer several weeks to solve. Real time emerged as a term to describe the novel, near-instantaneous time of computer processing: “1,000 times” more rapid than human computational abilities, the New York Times effused. 56 Here, as in Sackman’s formulation, was a time that exceeded the human. Advancing at previously unfathomable speeds, real time

74 Grey Room 65

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00204 by guest on 26 September 2021 rendered the past peculiarly simultaneous with the present, as if rushing forward too rapidly to loosen itself from what had just occurred. Real time, per the OED , “designat[es] or relat[es] to a system in which input data is processed so quickly so that it is available virtually immediately as feedback to the process from which it emanates.” 57 Feedback is here the key term. If real time is a neologism of the Information Age, its mechanism inheres in biology, feedback being the means by which organ - isms maintain the narrow parameters of temperature and acid - ity necessary to sustain life. Cybernetics was the science of this collapse of the machinic and the organic: the intellectual parallel of system aesthetics’ concern with “the creation of stable, on-going relationships between organic and non-organic systems.” 58 The field devel - oped as an attempt to map the common functions of new tech - nologies and living things, made isomorphic through their shared reliance on feedback. Its architect, Norbert Wiener, was a child prodigy who earned his Ph.D. in from Harvard at the age of nineteen. Codified in his eponymous 1948 treatise, cybernetics announced itself as a science of control and communication—“the entire field of control and commu - nication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal”— grounded in the process of feedback. 59 Its name derives from the Greek kybernetes , or “steersman,” a precursor of the mod - ern word governor : a person who “steers men.” Yet the term also refers, quite literally, to the steering apparatus of a ship: “one of the earliest and best developed forms of the feedback mechanism,” Wiener explained. 60 Feedback—“the property of being able to adjust future con - duct by past ”—was cybernetics’ means of con - trol. 61 Predicated on a permeability of inputs and outputs, feedback enabled systems to regulate their own function, beget - ting a state of dynamic equilibrium around an optimized norm. Enfolding its environment, the system structured by feedback orbited a paradox—stasis, maintained through dynamism— that softened distinctions between interior and exterior. “More than being a set of operational procedures, the systems approach provides the broadest scope for perceiving the real world as a totality,” Burnham maintained. 62 Achieving specificity through a diffusion out rather than a winnowing in, feedback’s promise of self-regulation threatened to dissolve the very self that it defined. “Organization,” “control,” and “progress” were the fulcra of Wiener’s argument. They converged through feedback’s pro - leptic temporality, its incessant insertion of the past into the present so as to manage the future. Cybernetics was a science obsessed with time, as the first chapter of Cybernetics , “Newtonian and Bergsonian Time,” makes clear. Here, Wiener

Fiske | Jack Burnham’s “Real Time”: Sculpture as System, 1967 –1969 75

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00204 by guest on 26 September 2021 juxtaposes the determined, reversible time of Newtonian physics with the undetermined, irreversible time of philoso - pher Henri Bergson and aligns cybernetics with the latter. 63 Newton’s was the time of objects idealized as single-point masses, a vision of “a compact, tightly organized universe in which the whole future depends strictly on the whole past.” 64 Bergson’s, by contrast, was the time of biology: the time, pre - cisely, of feedback. Wiener draws on Bergson’s 1907 text Creative Evolution , which theorizes real time (here, in the French temps réel) as a form of duration or durée .65 In Bergson’s understanding, each moment was both continuous with and constitutive of the next, a persistence of past in present that created the future. 66 Wiener’s equations crystallize Bergson’s philosophy in terms of integrals, wherein time is defined as an interval stretching from negative infinity to positive infinity: a variable at once end - lessly past and interminably future. Colored by Bergson’s durée , feedback implicates a dilated, dense sort of time. While circularity implies reversibility—a ceaseless return to an orig - inary point—feedback’s logic of continuity-in-flux denies a similar movement. Rather than taping or looping, feedback accumulates, “piling up . . . the past upon the past.” 67 While the circle rotates around a fixed center, feedback traces the topol - ogy of an open curve whose terminal point simultaneously approaches and distances itself from the others. Norbert Wiener. Cybernetics: That Burnham considered Les Levine to be systems aesthetics’ Or Control and Communication “most consistent exponent” joins Levine’s project to Bergson’s in the Animal and the Machine (2nd ed., 1965) . Interior spread. own. 68 The preeminent “philosopher of Life” may seem an

76 Grey Room 65

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00204 by guest on 26 September 2021 unlikely lodestar for Levine, whose art took plastic, a decidedly inorganic material, as one of its subjects. Plastic’s promise inhered in its promiscuity: its ability to incarnate other materials (glass, woodgrain, leather, and so forth) in inexpen - sive, readily reproduced forms. Inextricable from the postwar expansion of American capital, plastic came to symbolize the latter’s negative aspects. 69 By the early 1960s, it had hardened into a pejorative: “a symbol for everything in modern life that seems anti-humanistic,” critic John Perreault distilled. His 1968 feature on Levine images the artist in front of Slipcover (1966): a congeries of wind machines, closed-circuit televisions, and slide projectors encased in MIRRO-BRITE, a commercial brand of metallized plastic. Likewise sheathed in MIRRO- BRITE, Levine sports sunglasses, implying that the laminate’s gleam is unsalutary: a danger against which his vision requires defense. 70 Fed by scientific studies, popular fears pegged plas - tic as a carcinogen: the source of an invisible irradiation whose effects, like those of a detonated atomic bomb, would manifest only years after exposure. Metastatic and materially strange, plastic served as a site of displaced nuclear anxiety, as Perreault’s title, “Plastic Man Strikes,” makes clear. 71 Plastic’s threat to the organism then seemed urgently literal. Yet for all of its presumed hostility to life, the forms it assumed were often uncannily lifelike. Vacuum-formed in the same manner as product packaging, Levine’s plastic environments were swollen, smooth, and hyperbolically taut. They thema - tized their own surface tension, approximating the condition of a membrane, skin, or turgid cell. Their unbroken enclosure of space recalled both the womb—critic Max Kozloff called them “uterine”—and the ergonomic design of electronic-age John Perreault. “Plastic Man technologies such as the computer, whose casing was typically Strikes,” Art News , March 1968.

Fiske | Jack Burnham’s “Real Time”: Sculpture as System, 1967 –1969 77

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00204 by guest on 26 September 2021 composed of plastic. 72 Ergonomics conceived the body as a surface to be coordinated with that of the machine, which it at once configured and conformed to. At stake in the ergonomic project, as in Levine’s and Bergson’s, was not a binarization of organic and inorganic but the beat between the two. 73 Television was the horizon of this hyphenation: the module of what Levine, echoing Burnham’s “Cyborg Art,” termed “cyber - netic sculpture.” Thus subtitled, his Contact (1969) consisted of two identical sides, each equipped with nine television moni - tors. Set behind transparent plastic in a three-by-three grid, the monitors linked to closed-circuit cameras that captured the space in front of them at close, medium, and long range. Overlaid with chemically colored plastic, the monitors made space suddenly strange. Standing before Contact , the viewer saw herself iterated in incongruous images that circulated among the screens at an irregular clip. The concealment of cameras and circuitry produced the uncanny impression that the sculpture was seeing. Bowed at the edges, its structure stood as a surrogate for the viewer’s eye, which now seemed menacingly inhuman. Its title indexed its alterity, recalling the moment’s fascination with making “contact” with extraterres - trial life. “Contact is a system that synthesizes man with technology,” Levine asserted. The description reflects his view of television as a form of life: a “micro-organism” productive of a “techno - logical symbiotic relationship” between human and machine. 74 Like the organism, Contact operated in “real time.” “The input from the people is used as output from the machines and the output is used again as input for the people,” Levine explained in a near-dictionary definition of feedback. 75 Yet while the verb Les Levine. Contact , 1969. © Les Levine. Courtesy the artist. synthesize implies alignment—the coordination of disparate

78 Grey Room 65

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00204 by guest on 26 September 2021 parts into an integral whole— Contact effects not coherence but confusion. Its closed-circuit setup collapses the spaces of record - ing and reception, dramatizing television’s quality of “being- there and here,” and, hence, never fully in either place. Figured as a cycling of electrons and photons, proximity and distance lose their ability to orient. The definitiveness of xyz -space dis - solves across the depthless, denatured interface of the screen. 76 Like the “real time” it enacts, Contact produces difference as a structural condition. “There’s really no image , no definite image. . . . It always somehow looks the same, but it’s always doing something different,” Levine insisted. 77 Grafting “here” and “there” in the absence of adequation, Contact ’s closed circuit conjoins only to disjoin, promising yet ultimately with - holding closeness. Recall the OE D’s definition of real time as a process of “virtually immediate” linkage of inputs and outputs. Unfolding in real time, Contact ’s immediacy is likewise quali - fied, spaced by the delay constitutive of electronic transmission. Entered as data and emitted as signal, its viewer is processed, her body fissured in and through its technological reconstitu - tion. Contact ’s imagery persists in a state of ongoing self-pro - duction. Its system endures, unconsummated and continuous.

Real Time, Nonhuman Time Of all the artists Burnham nominated to his new aesthetic, Haacke was his favorite. The two met for the first time in 1962. Burnham introduced Haacke to systems theory. Shortly there - after, Haacke’s art began to mine its tenets, a tendency to which Burnham’s writing enthusiastically responded. 78 Haacke’s early systems were composed from natural materials such as rain, ice, grass, moss, and wind. 79 These works aimed not to aestheticize nature but to expose its architecture; that is, to reveal its subtending forces and organizational patterns, which Haacke, rehearsing cybernetics’ slide from life into technics, located as technology’s base. 80 While sculpture historically relied on the viewer’s subjective projections to complete its meaning, Haacke’s early systems insist on their semantic self-sufficiency. Their operation, Haacke wrote, “remains autonomous—aloof from the viewer. As a tree’s program is not touched by the emotions of lovers in its shadow, so the system’s program is untouched by the viewer’s feelings and thoughts.” Unaffected by “his knowledge, past experience, the mechanics of perceptual psychology, his motions or degree of involvement,” the system neither requires nor solicits a perceiving subject. 81 “There are systems which function properly when the viewer is not present at all, i.e., their program operates absolutely independently of any contri - bution on the part of the viewer,” Haacke affirmed. 82 The con - trast with Greenberg’s viewer, his self ecstatically dissolved in

Fiske | Jack Burnham’s “Real Time”: Sculpture as System, 1967 –1969 79

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00204 by guest on 26 September 2021 identification with the art object, could not be sharper. Haacke’s early systems are an art unassimilable to the self. Self-organized and self-generating, they enact a Bergsonian reorientation from a human- to a nature-identified time that cybernetics insists is also a technological time. Consider Condensation Cube (1963–1965), a twelve-by-twelve- inch Plexiglas box filled with one centimeter of water. As light filters through Plexiglas and the cube’s interior warms, water accumulates as vapor at the structure’s top. As the light wanes and the cube’s interior cools, water coats its sides with spheri - cal drops. Smaller drops combine with larger ones until, even - tually, gravity overcomes adhesion and the aggregates slide down the cube’s planes, terminating in a pool at its base. The process continues uninterrupted, supplying the cube with, in Haacke’s words, “a constantly but slowly changing appearance which never repeats itself.” 83 That the cube’s structure does not show any joints is highly significant. The elision of all traces of human fabrication is heightened by the synthetic texture of Plexiglas. Unmodulated and purged of image, mark, and color, it resists tactile appre - hension. To touch it would be to contaminate it. Distilled and treated with copper sulfate so as to prevent biotic growth, the Below: Hans Haacke. Condensation Cube , 1963–1965. cube’s water becomes an alien substance. As Burnham com - © Hans Haacke/Artists Rights mented of Haacke: “It is as if he is willing to except [ sic ] the Society (ARS), New York. phenomenal forces of Nature, but only as long are they are Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. hermetically sealed in a kind of artificial environmental labo - ratory—not lake water, but distilled chemist’s H O.” 84 Reduced Opposite: Jack Burnham. 2 “Hans Haacke: Wind and Water to its molecular formula, water becomes something abstract: a Sculpture,” Tri-Quarterly sterile liquid for experimentation that is not to be consumed. Supplement (Northwestern The cube’s ability to behave as a system depends on its partial University), Spring 1967. Front cover. isolation from its surroundings. This separation is necessary to

80 Grey Room 65

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00204 by guest on 26 September 2021 establish a temperature differential: a warmer interior to per - mit evaporation; a cooler exterior to allow for condensation. The small hole in the cube’s upmost corner that enables the introduction of water must be stopped with clear tape or a set screw so as to maintain the barrier between the cube’s inside and outside. Yet, while technically accurate, Burnham’s description of the cube as “hermetically sealed” is misleading. The adverb hermetically suggests perfect enclosure. In the case of Condensation Cube , however, separation proves as impor - tant as continuity. Without an influx of light from the gallery space, no cycling of water from liquid to vapor and back again could occur. The Plexiglas functions less as an absolute limit than as a threshold that is permeable to light and heat despite its physical solidity. Balancing containment and contingency, Condensation Cube is structured by the same ambiguity that defines the open sys - tem. Theorized by biologist Bertalanffy, whose writings Haacke discovered through Burnham, the open system was articulated through its opposite, the closed system. Radically isolated, the closed system exchanges neither energy nor matter with its exterior. It serves as a common model for the physical and chemical sciences because it allows problematic variables such as friction and drag to be reduced to zero. It forms the basis, for instance, of Sackman’s experimental idealism: the philosophy of a deterministic “laboratory world” in which time moves in a strictly linear, causal fash - ion. 85 Modern biology, by contrast, cleaves to the model of the open system whose auton - omy is always qualified. In an open system, closure hinges, paradoxically, on porousness. The closed system’s logic of compartmental - ization, which conceives interior and exterior as self-contained wholes, cedes to a logic of connection. Bertalanffy offered the example of a candle’s flame: seal it from an external influx of oxygen and fuel, and it suffocates. 86 As an open system, Condensation Cube disallows the self-identity of the modernist art object. “From the beginning,” Haacke insisted, “the concept of change has been the ideological basis of my work. All the way down there’s absolutely nothing static . . . nothing that does not change, or instigate real change.” In this fashion, the artist analo - gized his sculpture to “a living organism” defined by its ability to calibrate itself in response to its environment. 87 His cube courts indeterminacy. Hydrodynamics becomes a

Fiske | Jack Burnham’s “Real Time”: Sculpture as System, 1967 –1969 81

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00204 by guest on 26 September 2021 motor for the generation of difference or what Burnham described as the cube’s “slow endless variation.” 88 As a system that is both real time and open, Haacke’s cube resists a fixed form. At certain conjunctions of light and angle, it appears to dissolve into ambient space, creating the illusion that it is all planes and no edges. Its tautological structure stands in tension with the indeterminacy of the now gaseous, now liquid water. Yet although Haacke downplayed the signif - icance of his chosen geometry (the cube, he insisted, was a neu - tral container, a shape that “didn’t impose itself as something important”), the work’s materiality and form matter in that they set the cube in direct relation to the minimalist object. 89 Industrial plastics were among minimalism’s privileged mate - rials and the cube among its most iterated geometries. Yet while Condensation Cube inhabits minimalism’s formal vocab - ulary, it diverges from its temporal logic. Unlike the minimal - ist object, the temporality of Condensation Cube is not keyed to that of the human body. Haacke’s cube, moreover, does not require a perceiving subject to complete it, a premise Fried would turn against minimalism, accusing it of holding the viewer as if she were a hostage. Condensation Cube is not grounded in the embodied mode of perception that Morris, opposing Fried, celebrated as a phenomenological drama unfolding between “the known constant” and “the experienced variable.” 90 In the case of Haacke’s cube, such arguments do not apply. Its “minimal” materials and forms provide a framework to disarm the expectations that they might elicit within the contemporary context of minimal art. Haacke could not be clearer about his distance from a phe - nomenological model of minimal art. “For physical or biological processes to take their course,” he declared, “there is no need for the presence of a viewer.” Condensation Cube , he insisted, did not depend on “perceptual interpretation.” 91 Its internal cycling of water was a function of “the intensity and angle of the intruding light.” Only “statistical limits” constrained the forms that its contents could assume. 92 Defined in terms of data, the cube’s environment registers the viewer as a computable quantity of heat and humidity, as mathematically manipulable as the intensity and trajectory of light. The viewer figures not as a site of seeing and feeling but as a variable that must be managed in order to ensure the cube’s continued functioning.

Coda From 1967 to 1969, real time was a term with multiple, con - flicting claimants. For formalist critics, it was a term of abuse, denoting the realm of life from which art was to be separated. For minimalism and its interlocutors, it was the temporal corol - lary of the “real space” of three dimensions, which emphasized

82 Grey Room 65

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00204 by guest on 26 September 2021 “the physical here-and-now” in resistance to both spectacle and metaphor. 93 To these two well-known models of formalist and phenomenological time, Burnham answers with a third: a “real time” that joins cellular metabolism and computer pro - cessing within a cybernetic circuit of feedback. Adopting the logic of systems, Burnham’s model assimilates the terms of the contemporary discursive field of information and communica - tion theory, thus enabling a reevaluation of artists—Colombo, Levine, and early Haacke among them—whose work otherwise appears anomalous. At its most expansive, Burnham’s real time offers the outline of a media theory: a reading of the artwork as an open system defined by an incessant process of self- differentiation. Conflating organism and apparatus, the real-time artwork sets immediacy at an impossible remove. The reality that it configures no longer refers to a positive ground but to a structure that admits only of simulation.

Fiske | Jack Burnham’s “Real Time”: Sculpture as System, 1967 –1969 83

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00204 by guest on 26 September 2021 Notes Sincere thanks to Branden Joseph, Sam Lewitt, and the editors of Grey Room , especially Noam Elcott and Eric C.H. de Bruyn.

1. Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Yearbook 8 (1965): 74–82; Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 1,” Artforum 4, no. 6 (February 1966): 42–44; and Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (June 1967): 12–23. 2. Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1968). See James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 247–49. 3. Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century (New York: George Braziller, 1968), 368. “Rather than maintaining Mr. Fried’s adjectives, ‘theatrical’ or ‘literalist’ art . . . the term systems esthetic seems to encompass the present situation more fully,” Burnham maintained. Jack Burnham, “Systems Esthetics” (1968), in Great Western Salt Works: Essays on the Meaning of Post-Formalist Art (New York: George Braziller, 1974), 17. 4. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954), 150. 5. The article’s endnotes position Judd and Bertalanffy alongside a study of military decision-making funded by the RAND Corporation. Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” 24–25. 6. Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” 17. 7. Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture , 12; and “Systems Esthetics,” 21. 8. See, for example, Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October 1 (Spring 1976): 50–64; and Anne Wagner, “Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of Presence,” October 91 (Winter 2000): 59–80. 9. Jack Burnham, “Real Time Systems” (1969), in Great Western Salt Works , 30. 10. This is the thesis of Pamela Lee’s important study, Chronophobia: On Time in of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 11. E.C. Goossen, The Art of the Real: USA 1948–1968 , exh. cat. (New York: , 1968), 7. 12. Rosalind Krauss, “Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd,” Artforum 4, no. 9 (May 1966): 25. 13. Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General Systems Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications (New York: George Braziller, 1968), 3. 14. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” in Negotiations 1972–1990 , trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 177–82. Here, Deleuze identifies computers and cybernetic machines as the control society’s defining technologies. 15. Burnham, “Real Time Systems,” 28, 30. 16. Detlef Mertins, “Transparency, Autonomy and Relationality,” AA Files , no. 32 (Autumn 1996), 4, 8. 17. Clement Greenberg, “Review of a Joint Exhibition of Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism , vol. 2, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988), 226. 18. Clement Greenberg, “The Case for ,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism , vol. 4, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 80. 19. Greenberg, “The Case for Abstract Art,” 81. 20. Burnham, “Real Time Systems,” 28.

84 Grey Room 65

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00204 by guest on 26 September 2021 21. Burnham, “Real Time Systems,” 28. 22. Harold Sackman, Computers, System Science, and Evolving Society: The Challenge of Man-Machine Digital Systems (New York: Wiley, 1967), 520. 23. Sackman, vii, 250, 522. 24. Sackman, 223. 25. “The SAGE Air Defense System,” Lincoln Laboratory, MIT, n.d., http://www.ll.mit.edu/about/History/SAGEairdefensesystem.html. 26. Burnham, “Real Time Systems,” 29. 27. Burnham, “Real Time Systems,” 38. 28. Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture , 373–76. 29. Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” 24. 30. J.K. Galbraith, The New Industrial State (New York: New American Library, 1967), 54–66. 31. Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” 16. 32. Burnham, “Real Time Systems,” 27. 33. Donald Judd, “Specific Objects” (1965), in Complete Writings 1959– 1975 (Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975), 181. 34. Judd, “Specific Objects,” 184; and Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture , 3. 35. Judd, “Specific Objects,” 184. 36. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 37. 37. Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture, 4. 38. Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture , 1. 39. Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture , 186–87. 40. Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture , 3–6. 41. Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture , 76. 42. Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture , 9–10, 313. 43. Gruppo T, “Miriorama I” (exhibition statement, 1960), in Gianni Colombo , exh. cat. (Milan: Skira, 2009), 209. 44. Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture , 240. 45. Gianni Colombo, “ Strutturazione pulsante ,” in Gianni Colombo , 118. Originally published in Ricerche a Milano agli inizi degli anni ’60 , exh. cat. (Milan: Studio Luca Palazzoli, 1975). 46. Colombo, “ Strutturazione pulsante ,” 118. 47. Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture , 6. 48. Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture , 186, 376. 49. Donald Judd, “” (1967), in Complete Writings , 195. 50. Donald Judd, “Barnett Newman” (1970), in Complete Writings , 202. 51. Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture , 5. 52. Jack Burnham, “Sculpture, Systems, and Catastrophe,” Prologue 2 (Winter 1966): 4. 53. Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture , 10. 54. Jack Burnham, “Post-object Sculpture,” Contemporary Sculpture lecture series, Guggenheim Museum, 12 November 1967, digital audio file in Reel to Reel Collection (A0004), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives. 55. T.R. Kennedy Jr., “Electronic Computer Flashes Answers, May Speed Engineering: New All-Electronic Computer and Its Inventors,” New York Times , 15 February 1946, 1. 56. Walter R. Baranger, “J. Presper Eckert, Co-inventor of Early Computer, Dies at 76,” New York Times , 7 June 1995, B12. 57. “Real time, n., adj., and adv.,” Oxford English Dictionary Online .

Fiske | Jack Burnham’s “Real Time”: Sculpture as System, 1967 –1969 85

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00204 by guest on 26 September 2021 58. Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” 16. 59. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine , 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965), 11. 60. Wiener, Cybernetics , 12. See also Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (Autumn 1994): 228–66. 61. Galison, 33. 62. Jack Burnham, “Some Thoughts on Systems Methodology Applied to Art,” p. 5, in Burnham file, Center for Advanced Visual Studies Special Collection, Program in Art, Culture, and Technology, MIT. 63. Wiener, Cybernetics , 37–38. 64. Wiener, Human Use of Human Beings , 7. 65. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution , trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt, 1913), 3. 66. Bergson, 11. 67. Bergson, 7. 68. Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” 20. 69. See Jeffrey Meikle, American Plastic: A Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995). 70. John Perreault, “Plastic Man Strikes,” Art News 67, no. 1 (March 1968): 36. 71. Meikle, American Plastic , 238. 72. Max Kozloff, “New York,” Artforum 5, no. 5 (January 1967): 56. 73. John Harwood, The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design , 1945–1976 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Arguing for design as a corporate use-value, Harwood presents “the inter - face” as a complex apparatus that mediates the interaction of bodies and technologies, producing the strategic fiction of an integrated “man-machine system.” 74. Les Levine, quoted in John S. Margolies, “TV—The Next Medium,” Art in America , September/October 1969, 49; Les Levine, “For Immediate Release,” Art and Artists , May 1969, 49; and Thelma R. Newman, “The Artist Speaks: Les Levine,” Art in America , November/December 1969, 87. 75. Levine, quoted in Newman, 93. 76. Samuel Weber, “Television: Set and Screen,” in Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 120; and Paul Virilio, The Lost Dimension , trans. Daniel Moshenberg (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), 85. 77. Levine, quoted in Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1970), 340. 78. Caroline A. Jones, “Hans Haacke 1967,” in Hans Haacke 1967 , exh. cat. (Cambridge, MA: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2011), 25 n. 14; and Luke Skrebowski, “All Systems Go: Recovering Hans Haacke’s ,” Grey Room 30 (Winter 2008): 60. 79. By “early systems,” I mean those works where Haacke engaged with physical and biological processes, produced from roughly 1963 to 1969. 80. Hans Haacke, statement (September 1967), in Hans Haacke 1967 , 48. 81. Hans Haacke, statement (September 1967), 51. 82. “For physical or biological processes to take their course, there is no need for the presence of a viewer,” he would later reiterate. Haacke, quoted in Jeanne Siegel, “An Interview with Hans Haacke,” Arts Magazine 45, no. 7 (May 1971): 20. 83. Hans Haacke, statement (October 1965), in Hans Haacke 1967 , 48.

86 Grey Room 65

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00204 by guest on 26 September 2021 84. Jack Burnham, “Hans Haacke: Wind and Water Sculpture,” Tri-Quarterly Supplement (Northwestern University), Spring 1967, 13. 85. Sackman, 520. 86. Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Robots, Men and Minds: Psychology in the Modern World (New York: George Braziller, 1967), 73–80; and Bertalanffy, General Systems Theory , 29. 87. Haacke, quoted in Siegel, 19. 88. Burnham, “Hans Haacke,” 8. 89. Haacke, quoted in Siegel, 18. 90. Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2” (1966), in Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 17. 91. Haacke, quoted in Siegel, 16, 20. 92. Haacke, statement (October 1965), 48. 93. “Three dimensions are real space,” Judd writes in “Specific Objects,” 184. See also Hal Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” in The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 62.

Fiske | Jack Burnham’s “Real Time”: Sculpture as System, 1967 –1969 87

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00204 by guest on 26 September 2021