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Jack Burnham's Jack Burnham. “Real Time Systems,” 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 System, 1967–1969 COURTNEY FISKE For critic and curator Jack Burnham to declare a new sort of art 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 computer processing. The art he diagnosed, variously dubbed a “post-formalist” or “sys - tems [a]esthetic”—a “Cyborg 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 Modern Sculpture , marked his abandonment of art-making for art history. Modernism’s legacy was then in contention, with Donald Judd’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 history of art structured by the parameters of style. Burnham’s essay aspired to the canon. The artists it assem - bled—Morris, Judd, Carl Andre, and Dan Flavin, among others— were the principals of first-wave minimalism, 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 contemporary art. 3 Systems aesthetics’ namesake, systems theory, was both con - ceptually eclectic and historically specific. Loosely bracketed by statistician Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics , published in 1948, and biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy’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, conceptual art, 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 computers by way of cells. Building on its definition in computer science and systems biology, 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 Modern Art deemed minimalism an “art of the real,” with “the real” opposed to “realism”: 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.
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