ON TIME IN THE ART OF THE 1960s

PAMELA M. LEE
ON TIME IN THE ART OF THE 1960s
PAMELA M. LEE

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
©2004 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic
or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and
retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book was set in Bitstream Charter with Kievit display by Graphic Composition, Inc.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lee, Pamela M.
Chronophobia : on time in the art of the 1960s / Pamela M. Lee.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-262-12260-X (hc : alk. paper)
1. Art and technology —History —20th century. 2. Time in art. 3. Nineteen sixties.
I. Title.

N72.T4L43 2004
700'.9'046—dc22
2003061092

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FOR GEOFF
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Preface
ix xi

PART I: PRESENTNESS IS GRACE

Introduction: Eros and Technics and Civilization
4
Chapter 1: Presentness Is Grace
36
PART II: ALLEGORIES OF KINESIS
Chapter 2: Study for an End of the World
84
Chapter 3: Bridget Riley’s Eye/Body Problem
154
PART III: ENDLESS SIXTIES
Chapter 4: Ultramoderne: Or, How George Kubler Stole the Time in
Sixties Art
218
Chapter 5: Conclusion: The Bad Infinity/The Longue Durée
258

Notes Index
309 359
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The wisdom and support of many individuals have been critical in

the making of this book. I am grateful to the artists and critics who
contributed their time, insights, and observations to my research, as
well as those institutions whose archives and holdings are central to
what follows. Deepest thanks to Guy Brett, Pol Bury, Liliane Lijn, David
Medalla, and Carolee Schneemann. Research for the book was con-
ducted at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; the Archives of the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Archives of the Museum of
Modern Art, New York; the Archives for American Art, Washington,
D.C.; Rare Books and Manuscripts, Sterling Library, Yale University;
the Jewish Museum, New York; and the Archives of the Museum Jean
Tinguely, Basel (with thanks to Claire Wüest).
The research, writing, and production of this book were gen-
erously funded by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Getty Research
Institute, Los Angeles; a Dean’s Fellowship in the Humanities from
Stanford University; and a McNamara Grant in the Department of Art
and Art History at Stanford. I am extremely pleased to be working again
with the MIT Press and am indebted to Roger Conover for his continued
advice and support. At the MIT Press, Lisa Reeve facilitated the book’s
production at all stages.
Former teachers and friends make all my work possible. Yve-Alain
Bois continues to inspire. To Joseph Koerner I owe more than a few
e-mails. Rosalind Krauss was my first teacher in graduate school; I
have never adequately thanked her for that. Nor could I ever repay the
following individuals, whose friendship well transcends the business
of academia: Pauline Abernathy, Leah Dickerman, Maria Gough, Karin
Higa and Russell Ferguson, David Joselit, Juliet Koss, Jennifer Lee,
Michael Lobel (and yarn, by proxy), Christine Mehring, Richard Meyer, x
Eric Miles, Steven Nelson, Alex Nemerov, Julie Ries and Ken Miller, Gus
Stadler, and Ellen Tepfer. Cheers to David “Empire” Karam and the good
folks at nukes.org (aka Steve Hartzog) for their technological empathy.
The conclusion of this book is dedicated to the memory of Henry Jay
Tobler, with whom I first stumbled into the wilderness of post-
modernism many years ago.
I’m indebted to the readers and interlocutors who have granted
portions of this book a receptive audience and whose feedback has
shaped my thinking in important ways. They include Alex Alberro, Rhea
Anastas, Doug Ashcroft, Eric de Bruyn, Benjamin Buchloh, Thomas
Crow, Lane Relyea, Chris Wood, Cecile Whiting, and the editors of Grey
Room: Branden Joseph, Reinhold Martin and Felicity Scott.. Colleagues
and students in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford
University have been unstinting in their support. Thanks to both the art
history and studio faculty, particularly Professors Wanda Corn, Michael
Marrinan, Joel Leivick, and Bryan Wolf. For all matters photographic,
I’m grateful to Davey Hubay for her conscientious work and goodwill;
for all matters bureaucratic, thanks go to Stephanie Chang and Liz
Martin. Among past and present graduate students, many of whom took
my seminar on time and the work of art several years ago, I wish to
acknowledge Carrie Lambert, Gwen Allen, Jill Dawsey, Lisa
Pasquariello, Corey Keller, and Tirza Latimer. Gabriela Muller began this
project as my research assistant; Dana Ospina continued her efforts and
completed the odious task of securing reproduction rights and
permissions. Their sense of humor, hard work, and incredible patience
with its author’s demands and peculiar interests (Flugblätter? Mind
Control?) has neither gone unnoticed nor unappreciated.
My family has always given space to my obsessions—both
academic and otherwise—and here, as elsewhere, their support has
been critical. Fred, Margaret, Felicia, Serena, and Sondra Lee have been
there for me in more ways than they could know. Alice Yao and Peggy
Chan generously opened their home to me in London during an ex-
tended research period spent abroad. Finally, it is Geoff Kaplan who has
seen this project and its author through multiple, seemingly endless
permutations and revisions; he’s listened to me go on and on about the
matter of time. He’s seen this project over the (relatively) long durée. It
is in no small part because of his love, patience, and great good humor
that he’s seen the book to its conclusion. I dedicate it to him.
PREFACE

Clutch at the moments as I may, they elude my grasp: each is my

enemy, rejects me, signifying a refusal to become involved.
Unapproachable all, they proclaim, one after the next, my isolation
and my defeat.
We can act only if we feel they convey and protect us. When
they abandon us, we lack the resources indispensable to the
production of an act, whether crucial or quotidian. Defenseless, with
no hold on things, we then face a peculiar misfortune: that of not
being entitled to time.

—E. M. Cioran1

In his 1964 book The Fall into Time, E. M. Cioran offered a bleak prog-
nosis for the condition of time in late modernity, a time understood
as at once desperate and fatal. Describing moments that endlessly elude
one’s grasp—of being abandoned by the safe haven that history once
represented—Cioran gave voice to the acutely contemporary
phenomenon of noncontemporaneity, of “not being entitled to time.” To
fall in and out of time and to lose one’s bearings in the process: this
would seem to be one of the great tropes of literary modernism, that the
ever-rushing pace of contemporary life had outstripped one’s attempts
to make sense of the present. And yet Cioran’s pronouncements, poetic
and existential as they are, are also historically specific to the 1960s.
Countless writers, philosophers, and social critics confronted the
question of time back then. The Counterculture, popular music, and
other forms of mass entertainment likewise grappled with the subject.
The figure of revolution—of radically changing times—is critical to xii
the image of that decade.
Indeed to survey the art and art criticism of the sixties is to
encounter a pervasive anxiety that I describe as chronophobic: as
registering an almost obsessional uneasiness with time and its measure.
Cutting across movements, mediums, and genres, the chronophobic
impulse suggests an insistent struggle with time, the will of both artists
and critics either to master its passage, to still its acceleration, or to give
form to its changing conditions. In charting the consistency as well as
diversity of such efforts, this book restitutes the question of time to
the history of sixties art. But, just as important, this preoccupation
illuminates the emergence of new communications and information
technologies in the postwar era, offering a historical prelude to our
contemporary fixations on time within digital culture. The philosopher
of history Reinhart Koselleck characterized late modernity as being a
“peculiar form of acceleration,”2 and the computer technology of the
sixties, with its rhetoric of speed and seemingly instantaneous infor-
mation processing, represents a radical attenuation of this model. This
book reads the chronophobic tendency in much of that decade’s work
as projecting a liminal historical moment, for which there was no clear
perspective on the social and technological horizon yet to come. And
time, I argue throughout, becomes the figure of this uncertainty for
many artists and critics.
Michael Fried’s injunction against time in the reception of
minimalist sculpture; Robert Smithson’s obsession with entropy and
futurity; video art’s politics of presence; conceptual art’s preoccupation
with seriality and “real time” aesthetics; Andy Warhol’s musings on the
fleeting character of modern celebrity, on the one hand, and his
cinematic endurance tests, on the other; kinetic art’s literalization of
movement; John Cage’s soundings in time; the discourse of per-
formance art and the lived and timely body: all of these examples,
covering a wide range of sixties art making, are informed by a marked
grappling with temporality. Paradoxically, however, this engagement
with time on the part of artists and critics is so foundational, so basic to
any narrative about sixties art, that it remains largely untreated in the
decade’s general histories.3
This book traces the ubiquity of the chronophobic impulse,
considering how artists implicitly, even inadvertently, wrestled with new
 xiii technologies in the United States and Europe in the sixties, of which
time is both symptom and cure. I treat the obsession with time in 1960s
art in tandem with two indissociable shifts in the culture following
World War II: the alleged waning of the “Machine Age” on the one
hand, and the concomitant advent of computer technologies, on the
other. I suggest that the rise of the Information Age and its emphasis
on speed and accelerated models of communication serve as the
cultural index against which many artists and critics gestured.
Historically rooted in the military science of World War II, the
information technology of the sixties found a much broader audience
than the research covertly linked to the war effort. Now introduced into
the spheres of both commerce and culture, its impact was startling and
seemingly abrupt. By 1970, for example, the best-selling author Alvin
Toffler famously bemoaned the condition of “Future Shock,” a gen-
eralized social anomie caused by rapid transformations in tech-
nology: the book was an instant best-seller. This sense of historical
unknowing and the cultural history that surrounds it crucially inform
my study, not only at the level of Toffler’s “pop” sociology, but in
seemingly disparate communities of readers, spectators, and producers.
Indeed the sixties mark the beginning of the “computer race”—a furious
competition on the part of companies historically associated with
bureaucratic technologies to develop the fastest and most efficient
computers possible. Radical innovations such as IBM’s first
transistorized computer of 1959 and its development of “mainframe”
systems in the sixties offered the potential of virtually instantaneous
data processing. And in 1965, Gordon Moore, the research director of
Fairchild Semiconductor, would prove lucky (or at the very least,
prescient) in his speculations about the future of computer production
and its accelerated information processing. His law (“Moore’s Law” as it
is now widely known), argued that engineers would be able to cram an
ever-increasing number of electronic devices on microchips, and it
estimated that the number would roughly double every year.
Developments of this sort seemed to extend the promise of
technology associated by many with the historical Machine Age,
however much that promise was itself radically contested by earlier
PREFACE critics. Yet for the many commentators and philosophers struggling
with the catastrophe of the Second World War, they also raised pressing
questions about technological progress and its effects on subjective
experience. Debates on the changing character of social life under the xiv
shifting modalities of time were central to discussions about the role of
technology in the postwar era. The writings of Norbert Wiener, Jacques
Ellul, Marshall McLuhan, and Theodore Roszak, among many others,
attest to a deep ambivalence about time and the future, engendered by
the information technologies at the crux of their respective accounts.
Thus this book engages the question of technocratic rationality in the
sixties, ranging from the dour social prognoses of the late Frankfurt
School to the liberatory ethos of the Counterculture. By the same token,
it confronts the way in which the technological optimism of the prewar
era lingered in the public consciousness of the sixties. Throughout, I
argue that the larger cultural ambivalence surrounding technology
parallels the production of a diverse body of art and art criticism in the
sixties, with time standing as its most compelling, if elusive, cipher.

PHOBIAS THEN AND NOW;

OR, LOST HORIZONS AND ENDLESS HIGHWAYS
But why chronophobia, one might reasonably ask? Why not chrono-
philia an almost erotic absorption with time? No doubt there is a fine
line between a phobic obsession with time and an almost perverse
fascination with its unfolding, as if the brute gravity of that unfolding
demanded a respect of equal but opposite weightiness to the anxiety
time might produce. Nonetheless, I have leaned toward the phobic
side of this equation in what follows. For with the exception of the
artists in the introductory chapter, the figures who are at the center
of this book remain suspicious of the conjunction of time and technol-
ogy in sixties culture, some denying altogether the application of
technology in their work. Theirs is neither a matter of intention nor
declaration; nor what might appear, at least on a superficial level, to
be a wholesale embrace or even rejection of cybernetic culture. Not at
all: the lip service artists and critics paid to the Information Age is a
fundamentally different pursuit from the structural operations of works
of art and their reception, or what is repressed within that moment’s
writing and criticism.
This book seeks other means to think about the relationship
between art and technology beyond an explicit iconography of postwar
 xv technics or even a discussion of “new media” as such. I take very
seriously Fredric Jameson’s account of the operations of technology and
representation within postmodernism, which could well stand as the
secret mantra for many of the artists working here. “It is immediately
obvious that the technology of our own moment,” he writes,

[n]o longer possesses the same capacity for representation: not the
turbine nor even [Charles] Sheeler’s grain elevators or smokestacks, not
the baroque elaborations of pipes and conveyer belts, nor even the
streamlined profile of the railroad train—all vehicles of speed still con-
centrated at rest—but rather the computer, whose outer shell has no
emblematic, or visual power, or even the casings of the various media
themselves, as with that home appliance called television which
articulates nothing but rather implodes, carrying its flattened image
surface within itself.
Such machines are indeed machines of reproduction rather than of
production, and they make very diKerent demands on our capacity for
aesthetic representation than did the relatively mimetic idolatry of the
older machinery of the futurist moment, of some older speed-and-energy
sculpture.4

No statement more effectively dramatizes the pressure recent

technology places on its representation. Even still, one might think the
relationship was business as usual upon surveying the visual environ-
ment of today. Turn on the television, flick on the computer, and scan
quickly those endless advertisements selling this new Website or that
new digital technology. Far too often, one confronts a series of iconic
0s and 1s floating in a sea of ether, a pallid representation of the on/off
flipping of the binary code.
But time (and attitudes toward technology along with it) is a far
more slippery proposition than any image or thematic that would seek
to encode it. For at the edges of the art critical discourse that concerns
us in the 1960s (and at the edges of the art itself), there remains a
thinking about time that is undecidable as both theory and represen-
tation. How to theorize process at this historical juncture? How to figure
PREFACE temporal presence in the work of art? How to retain a model of artistic
subjectivity that at once acknowledges the historicity of its maker while
deferring to the dramatically changed time of artistic production under
postwar technology? These are the kinds of questions posed by artists xvi
and critics of the 1960s, whether implicitly or explicitly; and their
responses do not necessarily cohere around the image of technology
or any ostensible narrative of new media.
As for other “whys” behind this study: I’ll show my hand in
sharing a personal phobia. It reveals that what might seem a “sixties”
problem is embedded in the web of our own present. It’s an open secret
among friends of mine that I have long harbored a certain discomfort
around the most patently banal “technological” activity: driving. This is
not something to be proud of; admittedly, it’s an absurd fear for some-
one who grew up in Los Angeles. Then again, perhaps this is to the
point. But even more to the point is what this activity suggests about its
temporal orientation to the world, and how its implications get played
back—like a tape-loop—between our contemporary moment and that
of the recent past.
Consider the experience of driving, mundane as it is. Behind the
wheel, the world speeds by like an image over which one is alleged to
have some agency. The body connects to the machine it occupies;
the body coordinates the movement of that machine through space; the
horizon assumes the status of moving picture as framed by the machine
in turn. The car is its own medium: vistas accelerate and decelerate
with the pressure of the foot on the pedal, flash into view and disappear
with the turn of a head. In The Railway Journey: The Industrialization
of Time and Space in the 19th Century, Wolfgang Schivelbusch histor-
icized a parallel phenomenon to driving in relation to the rise of the
railroad in the nineteenth century. For him, the evolution of train travel
produced a new modality of embodied spectatorship—a spectatorship
conditioned by a new temporality.5 With the car, however, control is
ceded to but one driver and the sense of the body moving in time places
new stress on that driver as well. In fact, I would argue that the driv-
ing body does not necessarily square with Marshall McLuhan’s fa-
mous narrative of technology and prosthetic subjectivity, the idea that
technologies are but seamless “extensions” of man. What McLuhan
downplayed in his treatment of new media is the negatively inverse
relationship between technological prosthetics and the subject who
would seek to control them. No seamless body/machine meld here. It
is one’s relationship to time that announces this very condition: it
throws the question of technology into high relief.
 xvii Now the modernist in me acknowledges the ridiculousness of
these remarks at the same time as I can see them in terms of a much
grander theoretical tradition: Siegfried Kracauer on distraction, for
example, or Walter Benjamin on shock, or, much more recently, Paul
Virilio on the pressures of a dromological culture. And there is no
doubt that these psychic tics in my technological imaginary find their
analogue in the literature on sixties art. Take, for instance, Tony Smith’s
famous interview with Samuel Wagstaff, in which the minimalist
sculptor described the reception of art in terms of a thematic of end-
lessness, notably depicted as an open road. Persuasively treated as an
allegory for the new sculpture, the passage demands to be revisited
through the logic of temporalization. As Smith said:

When I was teaching at Cooper Union in the first year or two of the
fifties, someone told me how I could get onto the unfinished New Jersey
Turnpike. I took three students and drove them somewhere in the
Meadows to New Brunswick. It was a dark night and there were no lights
or shoulder markers, lines, railings, or anything at all except the dark
pavement moving through the landscape of flats. . . . This drive was a
revealing experience. The road and much of the landscape was artificial,
and yet it couldn’t be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did
something for me that art had never done. At first, I didn’t know what it
was, but its eKect was to liberate me from many of the views I had had
about art. . . .
The experience of the road was something mapped out but not
socially recognized. I thought to myself, it ought to be clear that’s the
end of art. Most painting looks pretty pictorial after that.6

In Smith’s postwar retelling of the classical travel narrative, the

sense of the Great Unknown is held at a distance, metaphorized by
the dimness of the road and its lack of legible street architecture: open-
ended interpretation is analogized to the business of incomplete road
construction. But it would be a mistake to stop here. For Smith’s
discourse on a literal passage analogizes the question of a temporal
passage, of duration, before and around the work of art, providing an
PREFACE object lesson for our own deeply mediated relationship to visual art and
the environment as inflected by time. Indeed this study finds its origins
at the heart of the Silicon Valley, where I teach and have lived; and one
conceptual horizon of my project, like Smith’s narrative, might be xviii
played out as an endless highway. Nothing quite like the spectacle that
confronts the commuter as he or she makes her way up and down
Highway 101, the main artery connecting San Francisco to the Silicon
Valley. A parade of billboards lines the road, each screaming for atten-
tion. But what do they advertise? Dot.com start-ups; net connections
and service providers; cyberspaces for cyberevents. It’s hard to ignore
the paradox, a beautiful paradox. It’s an odd encounter between hard,
primitive communications media and the soft, virtual, new media those
signs would attempt to sell.
In the wake of more recent economic realities, those signs don’t
blare as loudly as they used to, their arrogance muted by the censorious
realpolitik of failed initial public offerings and mountains of pink slips.
But the peculiar contrast they stage between then and now is just so;
and it underscores one of the central issues of this book, the endless
temporal switching that occurs between past, present, and future. The
recursiveness between old and new media in the sixties is something we
can better see, with hindsight, from our millennial (or rather, post-
millennial) perch. How do we figure or conceive of our own horizon of
contemporaneity; and how is that contemporaneity at once augured and
shadowed by the faith we place in our technology? This book attempts
to address some of these questions by means of a historical horizon only
recently past.

TERMS
Some prefatory remarks on the terms that comprise the subtitle of this
book—time, art, and the 1960s—as well as the term technology, which
figures prominently—are in order. These terms seem transparent
enough. As this book will make clear, however, both the language and
the historical conditions that shape them are far from transparent,
are far more ambiguous than they might seem; and it is precisely this
lack of consensus around their meanings and implications that endows
the history that follows with its acutely anxious charge. This is a
study whose objects of criticism, whether works of art or texts or the
matter of time itself, have blurred edges at best. In the name of politics,
 xix culture, and ideology, they will be mobilized to radically different ends
by equally different constituencies.
I’ll start with the seemingly self-evident coupling of the concepts
art and technology. I say “seemingly self-evident” because the linking of
the two has been a cornerstone of modern art history, but one, I think,
that demands to be nuanced within the context of postwar art making.
Mention the pairing of “art” and “technology” and the art historical roll
call begins: think the futurists, the constructivists, experimental film
and photography, video. Or think “new” media: telematics, portables,
motion graphics, biotechnology all pressed into the service of advanced
art making. Examples of this sort occupy a central role—easily the
most privileged role—in the archive of art and technology. And that’s
certainly right: we could hardly do justice to considering new imaging
technologies today, for example, without parsing the historical and
scientific rhetoric that informs the invention of photography.
Yet to treat the art and technology relationship as exclusively the
encounter between artist and technical “thing,” whether medium or
tool, or in the will to represent technology, is to conceive of technology
as merely the stuff of objects, things whose materiality or ontological
security is self-contained and self-evident. When Herbert Marcuse,
Theodore Roszak, and so many others decried technological rationality
and the ascendant technocracy in the 1960s, however, they were little
concerned with mere things. They were not, it bears saying, just
referring to computers, missiles, and television sets. They were refer-
ring, in the bluntest of terms, to an attitude peculiar to that moment,
an attitude internalized socially, culturally, and politically, whose
consequences stood in dramatic excess of technology’s literal
representation. I address this attitude—what Marcuse called a logic
of domination or administration—in the introduction of this book.
Such issues are brought to bear on the works of art I have chosen
to discuss as well. Inevitably, questions (perhaps objections) will be
raised as to the exclusions of certain works of art and artists, not to
mention the short shrift given to entire genres. Let me be clear that
this is neither a survey of time in the art of the sixties, nor a history of
“tech art” or “new media” in that decade, although the historical exi-
PREFACE gencies surrounding such developments are critical to what follows.
This project, rather, is at once more narrow and ambitious in think-
ing through the art and technology nexus with respect to time. In
considering time as a trope for the increasingly fraught confrontation xx
with technology in the 1960s, I want to appeal to the deep structure of
technological change taking place then. More often than not, this
structure is registered at the level of reception rather than production,
consumption rather than intention, and organization, rather than
representation.
Thus when I speak of the relationship between art and tech-
nology, I broadly acknowledge the original formulation of technology
in techne—that is, its grounding in an Aristotelian tradition of applied
cognition. It is in the Nicomachean Ethics that the word techne finds its
philosophical articulation, by which is meant “the skill, art or craft and
general know-how, the possession of which enables a person to produce
a certain product.”7 Techne, then, as opposed to the understanding of
technology as a “tool,” grants us a far more expansive perspective into
the historical problem of art and time in the 1960s.8 Indeed, techne
defines art and technology as contiguous, whether the art of the laborer
or craftsperson. “There is no art,” Aristotle observed, “that is not a char-
acteristic or trained ability of rationally producing, nor it there a
characteristic of rationally producing that not an art.”9 What follows
from this conceit, which acknowledges the epistemic, calculational, or
rational dimensions that inhere in any formulation of technics (because
of the maker’s “know-how”) is a base understanding that technology—
as practice and thinking all at once—is not neutral but necessarily
subjective. “Technology is (therefore) no mere means,” Martin
Heidegger wrote in his “Question Concerning Technology,” an essay that
would describe the Western technological narrative as progressively and
therefore dangerously instrumental.10 This warning will ring true for
much art of the 1960s, which I argue at once registers and produces the
sense that a peculiar contest over the technological is taking place, a
sense of both defense and revolt. And that contest, we shall see, gets
played over and over through time.
Time, then, is up for grabs here. With the revolutions in quantum
physics that mark the first half of the twentieth century, it can’t be
anything but. And although Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg
stand as irreproachable figures in any discussion of time and change in
late modernity, it is not the new science that concerns me—less the
business of imaginary time and relativity—as much as the larger issue
of time, history, and periodization with respect to technology.11 Any
 xxi study that takes up such a proposal needs to be concerned with the
methodological risks of technological determinism, the belief that all
forms of culture get swept up in technology’s inexorable wake.12 In
laying stress on the notion that technology is not neutral—“no mere
means”—one emphasizes the deeply “relative” character of this deter-
minism. It is relative to the ideologies that manage, support, and
underwrite technology’s production and distribution; and relative in
terms of those communities who would subscribe to such ideologies as
well. In pointing to the radical unknowing that attends questions of time
in the art of this period, I also stress the degree to which notions of
determinism are themselves progressively compromised. To be sure, it is
one of the paradoxes of both science and technology in the postwar era
that this phenomenon is thematized as uncertainty and contingency, its
methods described as a certain anarchy.13 If this is determinism of a sort,
it begs liberal qualification, hardly the kind of determinism that
accompanies old-school historicism.
In this sense, much of what follows suggests—but does not
completely square with—Thomas Kuhn’s profoundly influential reading
of change in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) and his
conception of the “paradigm shift.” “Normal Science often suppresses
fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its
basic commitments,” Kuhn wrote.14

When the profession can no longer evade anomalies that subvert the
existing tradition of scientific practice—then begin the extraordinary
investigations that lead the profession at last to a new set of commit-
ments, a new basis for the practice of science. The extraordinary
episodes in which that shift of the professional commitments occur
are the ones known in this essay as scientific revolutions.15

These revolutions, to follow Kuhn, are ruptures in the existing order

of scientific knowledge and practice. And as their “new set of commit-
ments” wear on, they become more institutionally entrenched, only to
be displaced by yet another revolution.
Much of the work discussed in what follows would seem to antici-
PREFACE pate such shifts, as if forecasting the radical change on the horizon.
But I also stress that the scientific and technological ruptures that usher
in the Information Age are at this point, historically ambiguous, their
implications ambivalent and their consequences still far afield. This xxii
remark begs another question: if not a paradigm shift, then what? How,
in other words, do we periodize work that seemingly resists the logic of
periodization?
The answer, in part, is to take that as a sign for the period itself.
For when historians and critics write about periodizing the sixties, they
mean, first of all, to reject the crude historicizing that sees that time as
beginning on January 1, 1960, and ending at midnight, December 31,
ten years later. They mean to see something more expansive about that
moment, irreducible to marks on a calendar or dates on a page, a
“common objective situation” that is at once deeply historical but does
not essentialize an “omnipresent and uniform shared style or way of
thinking and acting.”16 A stark way to address this issue takes the form
of a question: When did the sixties end? The sixties, I argue in the
conclusion, are endless in peculiar ways: endless in that we are still
dealing with its political and temporal legacy. But there’s also no
shortage of answers to that question if by the sixties one refers to a
specific postwar/Cold War ethos, in which an acute faith in political
agency found its systematic manifestations in the antiwar, civil rights,
and national liberation movements. If that’s a working definition for the
period, or at least an impressionistic one, then one might make claims
for a number of “ends,” ranging from a post–May 1968 moment to a
slew of events moving into the early seventies. Such a list might include
the violence at the 1969 Stones concert at Altamont, the Tate/LaBianca
murders committed by Charles Manson followers, the growing splits
within Students for a Democratic Society, the withdrawal of U.S. troops
from Vietnam in 1973, Watergate even. It goes on and on, this list, and
that seems fitting as well. How history gets made, how it gets written,
finds a peculiar orientation specific to the period. It is specific to a
matter of time anxiously felt back then.

CHAPTER OUTLINE
The first part of the study, “Presentness Is Grace” establishes the terms
of this history. The introduction, “Eros and Technics and Civilization,”
attends to the problematic nature of art and technology collaborations
in the sixties, characterized by an unbridled love of the new technology.
 xxiii The centerpiece of the chapter is the history surrounding the Art and
Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
(LACMA), begun in 1966 and culminating with an infamous exhibition
in 1971. The program was highly controversial not only for the quality
of the work produced (dismal by most accounts) but also for its
partnership with corporations whose links to the Vietnam War were
indisputable. I read LACMA’s program against the grain of another local
history, that surrounding Herbert Marcuse’s analysis of art and tech-
nology in sixties culture. The comparison frames the terms for the de-
bate on art and technology in the decade and opens up the possibility
of considering this relationship through noniconographic means.
Accordingly, the first chapter, “Presentness Is Grace” introduces
the thesis of “chronophobia” by revisiting Michael Fried’s famous essay
“Art and Objecthood” (1967). A canonical text of high modernist art
criticism, the essay’s centrality for the sixties, I argue, has as much to do
with its peculiar, even phobic, thematization of time as it does with a
modernist account of visuality. Fried does not address technology
explicitly in this essay, but his hostility toward the temporal dimensions
of minimalist sculpture—its experience of endlessness, duration, and
repetition—can be read against a generalized movement in sixties art to
work based on nonlinear paradigms of seriality, systems-based (as
opposed to medium-specific) production and its attendant models of
recursion and autopoiesis. As such, the chapter puts pressure on the art
historical readings by which medium is conventionally understood, and
it provides a means to think critically about the relationship between
medium and “new media” in postwar art.
The second part of the book is entitled “Allegories of Kinesis.”
It contends with issues of movement and time in sixties art as they
relate to the ascendance of what has come to be known as media cul-
ture, the “global media,” and “global technocracy.” Chapter 2, “Study
for an End of the World” treats the explosion of kinetic art in the early
sixties. The proliferation of this work suggested a revival of avant-garde
practices and has correspondingly suffered a historiographic reputation
as derivative and regressive. Regardless, I take seriously the question
of what this “return” to a Machine Age aesthetic might represent
PREFACE through the rhetoric of overlapping technological worlds, particularly,
the emergence of automation and communications media and the
question of temporality in an expanding global context. I compare the
self-destructive work of one of its most famous practitioners, the Swiss xxiv
artist Jean Tinguely, to the excruciatingly slow sculpture of the Belgian
Pol Bury and the global propositions offered by the London-based
Signals group. The third chapter, “Bridget Riley’s Eye/Body Problem,”
considers Op art, another mid-decade “movement” typically discussed
in terms of technology and time. I focus on the work of the British
painter Bridget Riley and Op’s peculiar fetishization of visuality. I read
the visual “tempi” internalized by her work in terms of the phenom-
enological response of its viewer. This virtual disembodiment of the
spectator’s eye from its corporeal subject occasions a reading of the
temporalized body under the conditions of a shifting technological
culture and its potentially liberatory or repressive implications. As a
comparative foil to Riley’s practice and reception, I take up the kinetic,
intermedia, and performance-based art of Carolee Schneemann.
The last part of the book is called “Endless Sixties.” The book’s
fourth chapter, “Ultramoderne: Or, How George Kubler Stole the Time
in Sixties Art” concerns a peculiar episode in the art and art criticism in
the sixties: the reception of George Kubler’s The Shape of Time: Remarks
on the History of Things (1962). Hailed in art historical circles for its
rejection of stylistic historicism, Kubler’s book also found an enthusiastic
if unlikely audience of contemporary artists, as demonstrated by Robert
Smithson’s essays “Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space” (1966)
and “Ultramoderne” (1967). Although Kubler’s account of an inter-
mittent, nonlinear history of art converged seamlessly with Smithson’s
distaste for the modernism of Clement Greenberg, I speculate that, more
significantly, it allowed Smithson to think through questions of seriality,
technics, and futurity in his own artistic production, as well as to reflect
on a critical discourse that had only recently emerged within popular
consciousness in the fifties and sixties: namely, cybernetics. Smithson
made occasional reference to Norbert Wiener and cybernetics in his
writing, but paradoxically, he seemed to have found the most apposite
spokesperson for these interests in the figure of Kubler.
In the concluding chapter, “The Bad Infinity/The Longue Durée,”
I discuss the almost compulsive desire to register time in numerous
examples of sixties art, ranging from Warhol’s Empire to the work of
the Japanese-born, New York–based artist On Kawara. Such practices
are considered in light of theories of postmodernism and the rise
of technological forecasting in the 1960s, as well as two seemingly
 xxv incompatible models of history: G. W. F.’s Hegel’s “Bad Infinity” and
Fernand Braudel’s “Longue Durée.” I argue that both Empire and
Kawara’s practice endlessly belabor the present as a particular comment
on the status of “futurity” articulated in that historical moment.

UNSTUCK IN TIME
Billy Pilgrim, the antihero of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969),
is a time traveler. Throughout the book, he claims to have come unstuck
in time. In a series of increasingly vertiginous narratives, Billy Pilgrim
moves with blinding speed through time and space. In a flash he is at
the Dresden slaughterhouse, where he was kept as a prisoner during the
Second World War. Next he is in Ilium, Ohio, a suburban optometrist
stuck in a loveless marriage. Then again, he is whisked to the planet of
Tramalfagore, held captive by aliens. One approach to the book might
read Billy’s time traveling as a function of madness—of a mental break-
down brought on by the traumas of war. It is no doubt that, as much
as it is a meditation on the war that Billy’s own son now supports—
Vietnam. Vonnegut’s book, then, is a dizzying comparison of two
military events split along a temporal trajectory: World War II and the
war in Southeast Asia act as chronological bookends to one of the most
critical periods in world history.17 But Pilgrim’s madness, or schizo-
phrenic relation to time, also betrays something of the temporal crisis
that is a signal feature of postmodernism.18 And like all good crises, this
one calls for a certain degree of decision making.19 How is one to act in
the face of it?
Artists and critics of the 1960s needed to make such decisions.
Often enough, their response came in the form of a disavowal, an
uncertainty in their approach to the question of time. Perhaps some
recognized that it had become one of the great clichés of our time, the
subject of time. But that very recognition also announces a reckoning, a
historical reckoning, that theirs was a moment endlessly recasting its
own version of timeliness. The task of this book is to bear witness to
that version, however transient it might seem to be.
PREFACE
 PART I
PRESENTNESS IS GRACE
INTRODUCTION
EROS AND TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION
THE PICTURE
On the evening of July 20, 1969, time stood still. Everything seemed
to stop. A brutal war abroad, civil strife at home, the very earth itself:
all the chaos of that moment appeared to recede into the distance,
contracted to points. Near the end of a decade catalytic in its rate of
change, the future looked endlessly hopeful. It was a future pledged on
the spectacle of technology.
For it was then that Apollo 11 made good on its promise to put a
man on the moon, and the images from that moment are now stock in
trade to our technological imaginary (figure I.1). Buzzed cut and teeth
flashing, the astronauts are proud in their space armor; while the
heroes’ wives clutch handbags and handkerchiefs, fingers nervous in
anticipation of the countdown. Mission Control vibrates with hulking
mainframes; NASA men are brisk in short sleeves, thick glasses, and
headsets. Then there is the moon itself, a pale curve stamped against
the black. Out on the Sea of Tranquility, two would emerge from their
lunar module, make their slow descent down a ladder, and plod
noiselessly across its cold surface. That picture has come to stand as
among the most profound in the history of technology, offering a view
of the 1960s buoyed by the Enlightenment platforms of reason and
progress. A utopian vision, perhaps, it is a vision of unflagging
optimism, of limitless horizons, and the can-do ethos of American
invention.
Yet this is only a partial vision of the technological landscape.
It is partial because, in turning its gaze to the stars, it is blind to the
decidedly worldly technology of everyday life, the mundane stuff
transmitting the image. No account of the mission, after all, would be
complete without the television sets, all those black and white altars in
 7 living rooms or mounted in a corner at the local bar. Millions would
I.1 Apollo 11 landing, July 11, 1969.
Courtesy NASA.
watch this history play out on television, and for many, it was a history
that couldn’t come soon enough. Because in 1961, smarting from the
humiliations of the Soviet lead in the space race, JFK had committed
the country to put a man on the moon before the decade was out.
Hence the picture is partial because it is also ideological, born
of a culture steeped in Cold War values and military proscriptions.
Americans had trained in that culture for close to ten years by then,
watching the most horrific images unfold through the same medium
that broadcast this message of hopefulness. They came fast and furious,
those images, and too often they pictured a state of emergency
technocratic in its violence. Hueys and F–111s descending on a far-
away land; civilians brutalized by national guardsmen and police; men
with dead eyes carried off on gurneys; women and children seared by
napalm: these images remind us that the technological picture in the
1960s is a blurred one, its contours messy and indiscrete. Whether seen
from the sublime heights of Apollo 11 or the abject realities of Vietnam,
it is a deeply shadowed, ambivalent picture. And because such images
lack visual coherence—any gestalt that might inform us about the
actuality of the situation—we grasp the limits of treating such represen-
tations transparently, of facing them head on.

˚
This book takes the oblique view of technology and art in the 1960s and
it does so with a concept introduced at the outset: the matter of time.
Time and technology, I want to argue, are twinned phenomena in that
decade; and works of art provide special insight into this relationship as
much as they model that relationship in turn. Time, we shall see, plays
no small role in the richly diverse practices that constitute sixties art
making. From performance to painting to sculpture to “new media,”
time becomes both a thematic and structural fixture, an obsession, for
INTRODUCTION
critics, artists, and audiences of that moment. It will come to signal
EROS AND TECHNICS AND something about technological change.
CIVILIZATION But not just any kind of time will do here. This is not the time
inscribed by the face of the clock. We know in the 1960s that time takes
on a dread urgency within popular culture. “Time has come today,” “the
times they are a changin’”: it’s the standard refrain of the moment, 8
playing over and over like a television jingle. No doubt, revolution is
an unavoidable trope in the sixties historical record, a cliché even; and
however we treat that revolution with hindsight—whether failed or
hopelessly romantic or marginally successful—the vision of a time
radically changed remains with us. Revolution, however, not only
suggests a confrontation with authority but a peculiar mode of tempo-
rality. For revolution is as much about cycles of change—the repeti-
tion of that change as circular—as it is some vision of establishments
overthrown and repudiated, of Red Guards with their little red books or
students amassed in protest. With that turning comes a sense of prom-
ise and expectation, yes, but also a darker anxiety about what is yet
to come.
In other words, the time we are dealing with is troubled and
undecidable. Often it is accelerated, anticipatory, and repetitive. The
art of the sixties, this book argues, produced an understanding of this
time that I call chronophobic, a neologism that suggests a marked fear
of the temporal. Cutting across movements, mediums, and genres, the
chronophobic impulse names an insistent struggle with time, the will
of both artists and critics either to master its passage, to still its
acceleration, or to give form to its changing conditions. In charting
the consistency as well as diversity of such efforts, this book restitutes
the question of time to the history of sixties art. Just as important, I
argue this preoccupation illuminates the emergence of new information
technologies in the postwar era, offering a historical prelude to our
contemporary fixations on time and speed within digital culture—what
has been called “dromology” by Paul Virilio or described through the
terms of “Nanosecond Culture” by others.1 This book understands the
chronophobic tendency in much of that decade’s work as the projection
of a liminal historical moment, for which there was no clear perspective
on the social and technological horizon yet to come. Time, in other
words, becomes a figuration of uncertainty about the mechanics of
historical change itself.
Before we can begin to address this question, we need turn to the
more standard accounts of art and technology in the sixties. Consulting
one of the better-known records of this relationship, we come away
with the same sense of possibility that marked the Apollo 11 mission.
 9 An unbridled love of technology—we could call it an erotics of
technology—characterized many of these efforts initially. Yet in nar-
rating the history of one such collaboration, we also confront their
shortcomings on a number of levels, describing in the process the
anxiety around the question of technology in the sixties more generally.
Here, then, I briefly treat the Art and Technology Program of the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art against the grain of another local
history, that surrounding Herbert Marcuse’s contemporaneous critique
of postwar technocracy. The comparison, we shall see, introduces the
terms of the debate and opens onto the possibility of considering this
relationship through the seemingly elusive, if no less historical, matter
of time.

˚
Earthbound now. In 1971, just two years after the Apollo landing, and
no doubt basking in its technological afterglow, the Art and Technology
program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is set to
display its efforts to the public. Maurice Tuchman, the museum’s curator
of modern art, launched his ambitious program in 1966, involving some
thirty-seven corporations and seventy-eight artists, many of whom
would not make the final cut for the exhibition. The idea was to bring
industry together with artists in a creative “synergy”—to follow that
moment’s fashionable jargon—so that the technology that was
commonplace to a JPL (Jet Propulsion Lab) or a TRW or an IBM would
become accessible to artists who otherwise had little contact with it.
“The purpose of the enterprise,” a museum brochure distributed to
corporate executives reads, “is to place approximately twenty important
artists ‘in residence’ for up to a twelve week period within leading
technological and industrial corporations in California.”2 That enterprise
would produce a small share of critical successes, mostly outweighed by
artistic failures. Richard Serra’s famous Skullcracker series, massive
INTRODUCTION
cantilevered stacks of cast iron or steel, originated in the yards of Kaiser
EROS AND TECHNICS AND Steel’s Fontana Division, for instance (figure I.2) Tony Smith, Robert
CIVILIZATION Whitman, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Otto Piene,
Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Irwin, and many others were also invited to
participate. As for the corporations, Tuchman designated five descend- 10
ing levels of commitment (Patron Sponsor, Sponsor, Contributing
Sponsor, Service Corporation, and Benefactors) each representing
varying degrees of monetary and technical support for the program. I.2 Richard Serra, from Skullcracker

Primarily located in Southern California, the sponsors would come series, 1971. © 2003 Richard Serra/
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
to include, among others, the Ampex Corporation, IBM, Lockheed
Aircraft, Hewlett-Packard, the RAND Corporation, Rockwell, and
Twentieth Century Fox. From the beginning, both the bureaucratic
and technological complexities of the program were acknowledged
and extensively documented in the exhibition’s fascinating catalog. It is,
as we shall see, an unwitting testament to the late sixties’ technocratic
mindset, in the sardonic words of one critic a “micro-analogue” to the
Pentagon Papers.3 But there was probably no more telling icon for the
program than Claes Oldenburg’s gigantic pneumatic ice bag (figure I.3)
Although relatively simple in form, the work’s lengthy and tortured
 11

I.3 Claes Oldenburg, Giant Ice Bag,

1969–70. Vinyl over steel structure,
with motors and blowers; top: fiberglass
painted with metallic lacquer.
18 ft.(5.5 m) diameter; 7 ft. (2.1 m)
high at resting position; 16 ft. (4.9 m)
maximum height; top: 8 ft. (2.4 m)
diameter. Collection Musée National
d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges
Pompidou, Paris.

history of production would serve as the bluntest allegory for the entire
LACMA affair. It was a monumental headache.
This is not to say that Tuchman was attempting to reinvent the
wheel or stage a show without relevance to the larger context or sixties
art making. His introduction to the Art and Technology catalog is
plainspoken about the local culture that inspired him and the ever-
pressing sense that the project was historically necessary. “In 1966,”
he wrote several years later,

when Art and Technology was first conceived, I had been living in
Southern California for two years. A newcomer to this region is par-
ticularly sensitive to the futuristic character of Los Angeles, especially as
it is manifested in advanced technology. I thought of the typical Coastal
industries as chiefly aerospace oriented (Jet Propulsion Lab, Lockheed
INTRODUCTION
Aircraft); or geared toward scientific research (The RAND Corporation,
EROS AND TECHNICS AND TRW Systems); or connected with the vast cinema and TV industry in
CIVILIZATION Southern California (Universal Film Studios). At a certain point—
it is digcult to construct the precise way in which this notion finally
emerged consciously—I became intrigued by the thought of having
artists brought into these industries to make works of art, moving about 12
in them as they might in their own studios. 4

That move from studio to industry was hardly new to the annals of
modernism: witness the Constructivists, the Bauhaus, the pretensions
of the Futurists, any number of art and technology experiments in
the avant-garde. And though a gargantuan effort—“immensely im-
moderate” to follow some—LACMA’s program was far from unique to
the era as well.5 Art and technology collaborations in the 1960s were
legion, perhaps rivaled only by the utopian practices of the 1920s and
the digital euphoria of more contemporary practice.
Chief among such efforts in the 1960s was the organization
Experiments in Art and Technology, best known as E.A.T. Their history
foreshadowed many of the problems later encountered by LACMA’s
program. In 1966, Billy Klüver, a Swedish engineer working with laser
technology at Bell Labs, collaborated with Robert Rauschenberg in the
production of an infamous series of performances called 9 Evenings:
Theater and Engineering. Prior to this moment, Klüver had provided
technical support for a number of curators and artists: he had assisted
in the making of Jean Tinguely’s self-destructive Homage to New York at
the Museum of Modern Art in 1960 as well as Pontus Hulten’s massive
exhibition of kinetic art that toured Europe in 1959. But 9 Evenings was
intended to place the collaborative efforts between artist and engineer
front and center, granting parties an equal footing on the artistic stage.
Hosted in New York at the sixty-ninth Regimental Armory, the event
included Rauschenberg, David Tudor, Yvonne Rainer, Alex Hay, and
Steve Paxton, as well as numerous dancers and performers associated
with the Judson Memorial Church: forty engineers supplied technical
support. Rauschenberg’s tennis game, Open Score, for instance, saw
performer’s rackets wired for amplified sound throughout the armory so
that the game produced a “musical score” of sorts when the ball was
volleyed across the armory’s makeshift court.
Not long after 9 Evenings, Klüver, Rauschenberg, John Cage, and
others formally established E.A.T. At the first meeting of the group, held
in New York in November 1966, close to 300 artists showed up, through
sheer presence alone demonstrating the need for some institutional
vehicle to mediate the relationship between art and technology. “To
 13 involve the artist with the relevant forces shaping the technological
world,” its bulletin states,

the artist must have access to the people who are creating technology.
Thus it was decided that E.A.T. act as a matching agency . . . through
which an artist with a technical problem, or a technologically com-
plicated and advanced project be in touch with an engineer or scientist
who could collaborate with him. E.A.T. not only matches artists and
engineers to work on collaborative projects but also works to secure
industrial sponsorship for the projects that result from the
collaboration.6

With these words, E.A.T. echoes, as would many technologists in

that decade, the “Two Cultures” rhetoric espoused by the British author,
physicist, and educator C. P. Snow.7 In 1959, Snow delivered his famous
Rede lecture “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution” at
Cambridge, speaking to the virtual divide that separated the sciences
from literary intellectuals in Western educational life. That divide itself
had a far longer genealogy in the nineteenth century, but as Thomas
Pynchon has noted, Snow’s “lecture was originally meant to address
such matters as curriculum reform in the age of Sputnik and the role of
technology in the development of what would soon be known as the
third world.”8 Snow advocated that the two needed to come together in
an active partnership, particularly after the historical catastrophe
of the war. The progressively industrial character of postwar culture
demanded the humanizing influence of the liberal arts. At the
same time, Snow’s background in science led him to make extremely
polemical remarks about the role of the humanities, remarks that
sparked ferocious debate among literary critics.9 “The reasons for the
existence of the two cultures are many, deep and complex,” Snow
observed.

But I want to isolate one which is not so much a reason as a correlative,

INTRODUCTION
something which winds in and out of any of these discussions. . . . It
EROS AND TECHNICS AND can be said simply, and it is this. If we forget scientific culture, then
CIVILIZATION the rest of western intellectuals have never tried, wanted, or been able
to understand the industrial revolution, much less accept it. Intellec-
tuals, in particular literary intellectuals, are natural Luddites.10
That charge—that “literary intellectuals” were Luddites—is thought to 14
have found its motivation in the class politics of postwar England. One
commentator remarks that Snow, of middle-class upbringing, believed
firmly that science was the only true meritocracy—the one hope to
advance in the world—and that the “literary intellectuals,” to the
manor born, were categorically elitist. For all the hostility expressed
toward the humanities, Snow’s position was critical in articulating the
historical confluence of arts and sciences from the sixties forward: the
lecture anticipated, in numerous ways, what would later be described as
the phenomenon of interdisciplinarity within academia. This model of
integration will be subject to criticism in what follows, but at the time
of its historical formulation it seemed to offer a promise to both
“cultures”—that the two might evolve or rather, had to evolve—in
dynamic exchange with one another. Snow’s tone was urgent, even
desperate, about the matter. “Isn’t it time we began?” he asked at the
conclusion of his lecture. “The danger is, we have been brought up to
think as though we had all the time in the world. We have very little
time. So little that I dare not guess it.”11
The mandate was clear, and it was precisely this kind of language
that informed so many art and technology collaborations in the 1960s.
But if Snow’s reading betrayed a barely masked antipathy to the
“natural Luddites” that were literary intellectuals, most collaborations
seized on the possibility of a happy rapprochement between technology
and art. Often enough, these collaborations were characterized as a
love of technology by artists reciprocated by a love of art by tech-
nologists. Groups, programs, and media collectives engaged with such
terms proliferated on the international scene, ranging from Gyorgy
Kepes’s Center for Advanced Visual Study at MIT to WNET’s experi-
mental television lab to the communelike approach to technology used
by USCO (a collaborative community—short for “US Company”), not
to mention European collaborations such as Group Zero and the Groupe
Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV). And then there were numerous influ-
ential and spectacular exhibitions: Jasia Reichardt’s Cybernetic
Serendipity at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London in
1968; Software at the Jewish Museum in 1970; Kynaston McShine’s
Information at the MoMA in 1970; the same institution’s Art as Seen at
the End of the Mechanical Age of one year earlier. As one critic described
the LACMA affair in a suggestive turn of phrase this was “art mating
 15 with technology,” a technophilic coupling imagined to spawn the most
innovative work of the day.12 Typically artists paid lip service to such
exchanges through the belief that technology was little more than a
tool, no better nor worse than a paintbrush or chisel. It was with such
transformative tools in hand, supported by the forces of industry, that
the progress of art was advanced.
From one perspective, it would seem the success story of the
decade: Snow’s challenge was being met in museums and galleries,
lofts and laboratories, television studios and universities. And as the
most visible organization to spearhead this trend, E.A.T. would come to
stand as an icon for later collaborations. With the support of an artist
as famous as Rauschenberg, E.A.T. enjoyed great institutional prestige,
hosting the enormous exhibition Some New Beginnings at the Brooklyn
Museum in 1968, as well as showcasing their wares at a spectacular
pavilion at the Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan.13 So too was E.A.T. an inter-
national affair: it had local chapters in Boston, Chicago, Vancouver,
Seattle, Amsterdam, and Paris, among other cities.14 According to its
own figures, E.A.T. counted nearly 6,000 members nationwide by the
end of the sixties.
In spite of, or perhaps because of, E.A.T.’s popularity, such efforts
courted their own kind of controversy, centering largely on the fruits
of the collaborations themselves. Few art events of the mid–1960s
were as widely reviled as 9 Evenings.15 The popular press called it an
unmitigated disaster, requiring over 8,500 engineering hours and
costing some $150,000 to produce, but to what end? However much
labor, money, and time was invested in the affair, the outcome yielded
little in the way of aesthetic returns. As Clive Barnes, the theater critic
for the New York Times, put it, it was “rather like an elephant going
through two years of gestation and then giving birth to a mouse.” 16
This radically condensed narrative on E.A.T. telegraphs just one
of the risks of the art and technology collaboration during the decade,
problems consistent with the later history and reception of LACMA’s
program. On one level—unconsidered by most involved in the enter-
INTRODUCTION
prise—it posed the larger question as to what actually constituted the
EROS AND TECHNICS AND relationship between art and technology in the mid-sixties: what, for ex-
CIVILIZATION ample, were the philosophical and political stakes that arose out of
this coupling? Technology, as we have described it, was considered by
many simply as a means to an end, a neutral instrument in the service
of producing art. This belief would prove troublesome in ways that ex- 16
ceeded local questions of artistic merit and technical competency.
Regardless, it would seem that LACMA had learned little from
E.A.T.’s example; and the kinds of problems that sabotaged 9 Evenings
were legion to the even grander collaborations envisioned by Tuchman.
Once-enthusiastic corporations bowed out due to lack of both human
and financial resources, not to mention the creeping suspicion that some
artists were having a laugh at their expense. And why shouldn’t they be
suspicious? Why should Disney, after all, see fit to sponsor Oldenburg’s
colossal ice bag, a collaboration that the company would hasten to
terminate? When the artist later suggested the appeal of working with
Disney reduced to wanting “to know what people who have been
making animals without genitalia . . . are like,” their decision was all
but justified.17 In any case, some of the artist’s proposals were simply
unfeasible from the technological standpoint, and numerous partner-
ships between artist and corporation soured considerably in the process
of reaching this conclusion. Both artist and industry appeared to fall
back upon, rather than transcend, their prescribed roles, reconfirming
for the other the worst stereotypes of both professions.
An especially telling case involved John Chamberlain’s residency
at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica. Established in 1948, the
RAND Corporation was the prototypical postwar think tank: a nonprofit
organization devoted “to further and promote scientific, educational
and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare and security of the
United States.” Following its own bulletin, the Corporation

works toward these purposes through an extensive program of research

and original investigation in the physical and social sciences. Although
the program places special emphasis on interdisciplinary, policy-oriented
studies, it includes theoretical research within such diverse fields as
economics, mathematics, geophysics, nuclear physics, electronics, com-
puter science, aeronautics, astronautics, linguistics, sociology, polit-
ical science, medicine, education and many others. In the past this
program has been oriented mainly towards scientific analysis of impor-
tant problems of national defense.18

RAND’s collaboration with Chamberlain was unhappy to say the

least. Chamberlain was approached by Tuchman as late as 1969, but the
 17 artist was eager to participate in the program because, as he reasoned,
“I’m initially interested in anything I don’t know about.”19 Like many
of his peers, Chamberlain’s preliminary meetings with industry proved
unproductive. He discussed the possibilities of a film project, perhaps
with Ampex, RCA or CBS, but when neither these nor other proposals
seemed viable (one of which included an “olfactory-stimulus-response”
multiple), he was ultimately paired with RAND, then already working
with Larry Bell.
Chamberlain’s project for RAND exhibited little of the high-tech
paraphernalia of many other artists involved in LACMA’s program.
Granted office space and secretarial support by RAND, Chamberlain’s
proposals—cutting off the phones for one day, for example, or dis-
solving the corporation itself—were of a rigorously conceptual (that is
to say, unfeasible) bent. Such ideas met with little excitement or, rather,
acceptance, by many of RAND’s denizens, and the distaste was recip-
rocal. As his residency continued, Chamberlain discovered his RAND
colleagues to be impossibly “uptight” and “very 1953” and resistant to
the line of questioning his proposals suggested. As if to interrogate his
own technological sophistication, the artist posed a series of queries
in keeping with the concerns of the corporation itself. “What do I know
about weather modification?” he asked rhetorically. “What do I know
about cloud formations? What do I know about the war in Vietnam?
What do I know about the psychology of reflexes in New York City when
faced with a police car?”20 Instead of pursuing such topics, Chamberlain
saw the use value of exploiting humor in his “collaboration,” tweaking
the rituals of bureaucratic culture in the process. For three days he
screened his film The Secret Life of Hernando Cortez during the com-
pany’s lunch hour. With Warhol “Superstar” Ultraviolet and poet Taylor
Mead romping about in trees in various states of undress, the movie
seemed to confirm for RAND’s employees the worst clichés about artists
in general. Following the screening, Chamberlain distributed a cryptic
memo to all consultants at RAND in a gesture that at once pays tribute
to and lambastes the endless paper trail of the corporate environ-
INTRODUCTION
ment (figure I.4). The mimeographed sheet reads: “I’m searching for
EROS AND TECHNICS AND ANSWERS. Not questions! If you have any, will you please fill in below,
CIVILIZATION and send them to me in Room 1138.”
The answers spoke volumes to the divide between Chamberlain’s
conceptual leanings and RAND’s technological methods. Clearly the
 19
I.4 John Chamberlain, “Memo for
RAND corporation,” Credit: © 2003
John Chamberlain /Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York.
exercise had won Chamberlain no supporters; it fact, it produced the
exact opposite effect. “The answer is to terminate Chamberlain,” one
rejoinder states, and that was the least of it. There was no shortage of
vitriolic responses, a partial list of which reads:
You’re sick! While you were up in the Tree in your love scene, you should
have STAYED.

Quit Wasting RAND Paper and Time. The Air Force needs thinkers—
where do you fit in?

The world has moved up a level. They now call stag movies “ART.” GO TO
HELL MISTER!!

An artist in residence is a waste of money.21

And then there were those responses all the more striking for their
abruptness. “Drop dead,” one reads flatly.
Such replies neatly illustrate the usual batch of prejudices that
obtain between art and industry. Artists were seen to be loopy or
decadent, whereas technologists were considered white-collar squares
stuck in the Eisenhower fifties, clichés that seemed to find visual
confirmation with the cover of the LACMA catalog itself. With the letters
A&T printed discretely in the upper left corner, it presented a grid of
sixty-four black-and-white portraits of its participants, all of whom were
men (apparently technology was irrelevant to women) and all of whom
were white (ditto the case for people of color). One needn’t consult
the book’s legend to determine who fell on the side of technology and
who fell on the side of art. It seemed that the technologist’s sartorial im-
perative was to wear ties or thick glasses or sports coats, hair neatly
dressed with Bryll cream, whereas the artists were almost categorically
dressed down, sporting long hair and open collars.
But there was more to this split than appearance or self-
INTRODUCTION
presentation. If the catalog’s cover represented the superficial distinc-
EROS AND TECHNICS AND tions between artists and industry types, its back pages revealed
CIVILIZATION something far more critical at stake in the collaboration. They
illustrated the progressively spectacular relationship between art and
 21
I.5 Back pages from Maurice Tuchman,
A Report on the Art and Technology
Program of the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, 1967–71 (Los Angeles:
Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
1971), p. 375. Courtesy Los Angeles
County Museum of Art. Norris Trade-
mark courtesy NI Industries;
Rockwell Trademark courtesy Boeing.
INTRODUCTION
EROS AND TECHNICS AND
CIVILIZATION
corporate sponsorship in the 1960s, not to mention the decisive role
that technology played in mediating those exchanges (figure I.5). To
leaf through the last twenty or so pages of the document is to survey
the state of the branding field at the end of the decade and to confront
the necessarily ambivalent partnership between art and advertising.
Here the blank face of modern typography is meshed with the icons of
late capital, whether those of the media or the aerospace industry or the
military. All those corporate logos, so clean and so cold in their graphic
presentation, dramatize the sense that Tuchman’s program was as much
business venture as it was aesthetic experiment, a remark cheerfully
echoed by many of the sponsors themselves. As the president of the
Lockheed Corporation wrote in a press release for the show, “Industry
today is increasingly aware of the importance of relating technology
to human needs. It is good business as well as good citizenship. The
sensitivity of the artist should contribute significantly to these de-
veloping relationships.”22 Such proclamations fed directly into the belief
that A&T was little more than “corporate art” or that the real experi-
ment behind the program had less to do with advanced technology
than advanced capital. It was, to follow some critics, an experiment in
the business of sponsorship.
Perhaps none of this reads as especially shocking to anyone
with even the dimmest grasp of art history and its Byzantine record
of patronage. Art and the market have long been faithful if uneasy
partners; and Tuchman wisely acknowledged such implications at the
beginning of the catalog, glancing as the perspective was. This was as
true for LACMA’s program as it was for organizations such as E.A.T.,
whose reputation for landing substantial grants and corporate support
would prove infamous. As the artist, curator, and critic Jack Burnham
described it, E.A.T.’s
greatest success was its ability to extract relatively large sums of money
from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Arts Coun-
cil, large corporations and various patrons of the arts. . . . If business had
been the business of the United States in the 1920s, surely in the 1960s
the business of the United States was to acquiesce to the mystique
of technology, as epitomized by the uses of the “automated battlefield”
and systems analysis during the Vietnam War.23
 Experiments in Art and Technology was hardly immune to the 22
criticism attached to such associations. Only a year before LACMA’s
program, Klüver’s organization came under attack at Expo 70 in Osaka,
due to the progressively ugly turn in its relationship with the Pepsi-Cola I.6 Lockheed “advertisement” in

Corporation. In attempting to stage its Buckminster Fuller–inspired Newsweek, October 30, 1967, p. 7.
Courtesy Lockheed Martin.
pavilion there and after “many delays and financial fiascoes,” E.A.T.
“presented Pepsi . . . with a maintenance contract for $405,000,”
although “the previously proposed sum had been $185,000.”24 Pepsi
would soon pull out of the deal, but E.A.T. would suffer an even greater
blow in the battle over public opinion. To follow some, this was an
elitist organization, focused more on securing grants for a few blue chip
artists than facilitating genuine dialogue between art and technology.25
The LACMA program, although different in its financial
specifications, was no less problematic, but it was problematic in ways
that went beyond the standard accusations that art was bedding down
with industry. It was perhaps best summed up, however elliptically, by
one of the many charges made against John Chamberlain’s project at
the RAND Corporation. “An artist in residence,” the anonymous
response to Chamberlain’s memo reads, “soothes the conscience of the
management.” That message channeled the profound distrust harbored
by many around the art and technology nexus in the sixties; and it is
that much more acutely felt because delivered from a RAND “insider.”
Because, of course, RAND and Lockheed (not to mention Rockwell,
JPL, and HP) were among the least neutral corporations based in the
West at that moment, their “tools” deeply entangled with the war in
Southeast Asia. The history of RAND, after all, was inseparable from
that of the postwar American military. “The Corporation is sponsored
chiefly by research contracts with agencies of the United States
Government, such as the Air Force, the Advanced Research Projects
Agency and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration” a
RAND bulletin blandly states.26
Lockheed, for their part, was enjoying a windfall in the aerospace
industry with the introduction of their Cheyenne helicopters in 1967.
It is important to stress here that neither RAND’s history nor Lockheed’s
production was privileged information. A Lockheed “advertisement”
from Newsweek from the fall 1967, for instance, pairs a graphic
Cheyenne with a “future” Lockheed invention, a Poseidon ballistic
missile (figure I.6) and a Lockheed press release in the LACMA archives
proudly states its “success” in this endeavor. “Combining the speed and 24
maneuverability features of a fixed-wing airplane and the vertical take-
off and landing capabilities of a helicopter,” it reads, “the new U.S.
Army Cheyenne adds up to the world’s fastest, toughest and most agile
rotorcraft gunship.”27
These observations cut a little too close to the remark that an
“artist in residence soothes the conscience of the management.” For that
comment stops just short of a guilty confession, and its culpability, we
shall see, reduces to the profoundly ambivalent status of technology in
the 1960s. It is as if the management of RAND, deadly aware of its role
in international politics, pressed art into the service of a public relations
coup, as if to render its technology happy and user friendly. Art, in
other words, might be exploited to soften the hardboiled, militaristic
reputation of such corporations in the public sphere, which is not to say
that artists were innocent of such charges themselves. “During the term
of the project,” Max Kozloff wrote in a withering article in Artforum on
the LACMA program,

there occurred the My Lai massacre, the Chicago Democratic Convention

riots, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the
invasion of Cambodia, and the student killings at Kent and Jackson state.
While these convulsions were taking place, inflaming the radicalism of
our youth and polarizing the country, the American artists did not
hesitate to freeload at the trough of that techno-fascism that had in-
spired them.28

Kozloff was clearly outraged, and his words are outrageous.

To his thinking, the artists who participated in LACMA’s program were
wholly complicit with the corporations who sponsored such techno-
logical violence.
Even still, there is a more fundamental level at which the art and
technology relationship might be open to criticism in the 1960s. There
is a deep structure that suggests the collaboration is troubling not only
because of the specific “business” ventures of the industries partici-
pating, “a rogues gallery of the violence industry.”29 Submitting the
relationship to critical analysis reveals something about technology in
excess of its particular hardware or tools—dangerous as those tools
might be—something about the power of its logic, organization, and
 25 control. Attending to one influential reading from the period, we come
to see the limitations of the “Two Cultures” model for treatments of
art and technology at this moment. More and more, in fact, Snow’s
narrative might even read as a red herring. Art and technology, it turns
out, were not just separate fields to be bridged or traversed, although
such institutional distinctions clearly existed and differences in protocol
were unimpeachable. Instead, perhaps technology had long begun to fill
the gap through the force of its reason. Perhaps it had already begun to
colonize art through its administrative logic.

˚
About a two-hour drive south of the RAND Corporation, one response to
this issue was taking shape. Down at the University of San Diego, the
Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse was beginning his tenure as
the “Father of the New Left”—a title foisted upon him by his counter-
cultural acolytes, if a somewhat uncomfortable fit for the old Berliner.
Even still, Marcuse would prove a decisive influence upon a generation
of radicals ranging from Angela Davis to Abbie Hoffman to Kate Millett.
Seventy years old at the time of his arrival, Marcuse first set foot on
San Diego’s campus in May of 1965. Earlier that year his contract at
Brandeis University had failed to be “renewed.” This, as anyone in
academia well knows, is polite speech. Marcuse was effectively fired
from the university due to his increasingly contro-versial (read: politi-
cized) profile within it.
That the Frankfurt School stalwart would wind up in San Diego in
the 1960s is perhaps no less absurd than imagining his former colleague
Theodor Adorno living in Los Angeles in the 1940s. The contradictions
of their respective environments could hardly be ignored by either. The
dialectics of Southern California living seemed especially urgent at the
time, at once calling up the golden pleasures attributed to the state’s
mythic lifestyle and it’s darker entanglements with the military indus-
INTRODUCTION
trial complex of the postwar moment.30 San Diego’s general affluence,
EROS AND TECHNICS AND after all, could hardly be separated from its military—particularly
CIVILIZATION naval history—its ports, and historic airstrips; nor from the conserv-
ative sector of its population, which would mount a challenge to Mar-
cuse’s presence on campus.31 To envision Marcuse taking up residency
there—ambling the gentler trails of Torrey Pines or taking in the refresh- 26
ments of the Pacific—might seem a gross paradox in light of his politics.
And yet his presence, as well as that paradox, would prove critical.
For in 1955, Marcuse published Eros and Civilization, a book of signal
importance for the Counterculture. In it he attempted to read the
history of civilization through the history of repression in what was then
a particularly innovative marriage of Freud and Marx. The goal was to
treat repression and domination as historical and material phenomena
in their own right and to offer prescriptions—of a sort—for a social
therapeutic, even an erotics of liberation. Following Freud, Marcuse
arrived at the conceit that civilization had “progressed” by its
suppression of sexuality.32 Even before “childhood and birth . . .
repression was a matter of the species.”33 The dialectic of civilization
was one in which culture was affirmed and therefore contained with
the sexual drives scientifically managed and rationalized.34
Yet the dialectic was not so neat. Some forms of work, Marcuse
noted, were pleasurable; and however qualified, they granted the
subject some space of the imagination. The making of art, first and
foremost, was that which refused the libidinal economy of advanced
industrial society. “Artistic work, where it is genuine,” Marcuse wrote,
“seems to grow out of a non-repressive instinctual constellation and to
envisage non-repressive aims—so much so that the term sublimation
seems to require considerable modification if applied to this kind of
work.”35 Some eighty pages into Eros and Civilization, Marcuse men-
tioned art for the first time in his book. Less than one page later, he
introduced another concept for the first time: the notion of technics.
If the making of art arose out of the nonrepressive drives for
Marcuse, the evolution of technics represented the partial sublimation
of the aggressive impulses. “The development of technics and tech-
nological rationality absorbs to a great extent the ‘modified’ destructive
instincts,” Marcuse observed, following Freud.36 “Technics provides the
very basis for progress; technological rationality sets the mental and
behaviorist patter for productive performance, and ‘power over nature’
has become practically identical with civilization.”37 Marcuse was at
pains to qualify such developments, acknowledging the catastrophes
of recent technological history: “the fact that the destruction of life
(human and animal) has progressed with the progress of civilization,
that cruelty and hatred and the scientific extermination of men have
 27 increased in relation to the real possibility of the elimination of
oppression.”38 The progress of technics, in other words, had far from
wholly integrated the destructive instincts. In too many dangerous
ways, those instincts found their counterparts in mid-century
technology.
That position set the tone for things to come. In 1964, Marcuse
published One-Dimensional Man, a book described as having “the value
of a portent”—a manifesto of sorts for the U.S. student movement.39
At equal turns indebted to C. Wright Mills, Freud, and Marx, Marcuse
endeavored to speak to the dialectic of rationality and irrationality in
advanced industrial society: the more humanity was enslaved to the
forces of progress and reason, he argued, the more irrational was its
psychic character. One-dimensional man is the product of one-
dimensional society, a wholly integrated society under the sway of
“technological rationality.” A multidimensional society is that in which
the negation of social reality—whether expressed as politics or art or
critique—still retains some possibility. One-dimensional society, by
contrast, is a unification of opposites, a false totality.
Following Marcuse, the rise of One-Dimensional Man was a
function of changing models of control in advanced industrial society—
control of an altogether different cast than earlier forms of historical
oppression. Rather than assert its authority through brute violence and
its visible presence within the public sphere, the new control stems from
“a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom,” which
“prevails in advanced industrial civilization,” as “a token of technical
progress.”40 Notably, this kind of control has a distinctive relationship to
modern temporality. “The apparatus imposes its economic and political
requirements for defense and expansion on labor time and free time on
the material and intellectual culture,” he wrote.41
For Marcuse (and to a different degree, the Adorno and Max
Horkheimer of The Dialectic of Enlightenment) the rational character
of irrationality in advanced industrial society was a partial function of
changed modes of techne. He argued that the “prevailing forms of social
INTRODUCTION
control are technological in a new sense in the contemporary period,”
EROS AND TECHNICS AND for “the technological controls appear to be the very embodiment of
CIVILIZATION Reason for the benefit of all social groups and interests—to such an
extent that all contradiction seems irrational and all counteraction
impossible.”42 Such remarks offer a useful, if highly debated, précis on
the issue of technological rationality in the postwar era.43 This is not 28
simply a matter of technology controlling the subject through physical
dominance—the dystopian vision of humanity enslaved to factory
production. It is, rather, an internalization of these principles at the
level of the unconscious. As in Eros and Civilization, Marcuse articulated
this process through the language of psychoanalysis: social control, as
he put it, has been “introjected.”44
From this perspective we cannot understand technology in the
1960s merely as the stuff of invention—its objects or engineering—nor
can we treat it as operating from the usual bases of political authority.
Technology—and for the purposes of this book, its historical relation-
ship to the art of this moment—is far more formidable because far more
subtle than that, increasingly organized around an administrative logic.
We could put it crudely: postwar technology is organization. Function-
ing at all levels of the social relation, it takes on its own psychic
character and “leads to change in attitude and consciousness of the
laborer.”45 Here, to follow Marcuse, “domination is transfigured into
administration.” This is the dialectic of progress and unfreedom.46
With chapter 3, “The Conquest of the Unhappy Consciousness:
Repressive Desublimation,” Marcuse described the effects of tech-
nological rationality on art and literature and its larger impact on
patterns of cultural behavior.47 Its relevance to our discussion of
LACMA’s program is unavoidable, for it uncovers an especially troubling
aspect of the art and technology relationship and implicitly suggests the
shortcomings of the “Two Cultures” mandate. Here Marcuse echoed
other Frankfurt School critiques in articulating how the objects of high
culture stand as figures of alienation under capital: how works of art, in
expressing some ideal world, represent the negation of social reality. But
in the One-Dimensional society, there occurs “a corresponding inte-
gration of culture with technological society” to the extent that the
“progress of technological rationality is liquidating the oppositional and
transcending elements in the ‘higher culture.’”48 “Higher culture was
always in contradiction with social reality,” Marcuse wrote,

and only a privileged minority enjoyed its blessings and represented its
ideals. The two antagonistic spheres of society have always coexisted. To-
day’s novel feature is the flattening out of the antagonism between cul-
ture and social reality through the obliteration of the oppositional,
 29 alien and transcendent elements of the higher culture by virtue of which
it constituted another dimension of reality.
. . . This liquidation of two-dimensional culture takes place not
through the denial and rejection of the cultural values but through their
wholesale incorporation into the established order, through their re-
production and display on a massive scale.49

Marcuse acknowledged that alienation is not the sole character-

istic of advanced art. Nevertheless, he insisted upon how historically art
had represented “the Great Refusal—the protest against that which is.”50
But technological rationality was now closing the gap between this
“great refusal” and social reality, the result of which is a newly emerging
form of aesthetics under the One-Dimensional Society. It is what he
called the aesthetics and language of “total domination” or “total
administration.” “Domination has its own aesthetics,” Marcuse wrote,

and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics. It is good that

almost everyone can now have the fine arts at his fingertips, by just
turning a knob on his set, or by just stepping into his drugstore. In this
diKusion, however, they become cogs in a culture-machine which
remakes their content.51

It is almost a little too suggestive that Marcuse drew upon the

example of the RAND Corporation to make his argument about art and
technology. In the corporation’s laying claims to the “neutrality” of its
technics, it effectively performs the new forms of social control in the
One-Dimensional Society.52 Speaking to the ways in which such cor-
porations absorb and therefore contain any possibilities of critique—
“soothe the guilty conscience of the management,” as Chamberlain’s
astute interlocutor put it—Marcuse argued that they

arrange games with death and disfiguration in which fun, team work,
and strategic planning important mix in rewarding social harmony.
INTRODUCTION
The RAND Corporation, which unites scholarship, research, the military,
EROS AND TECHNICS AND the climate and the good life, reports such games in a style of absolving
CIVILIZATION cuteness. . . . [I]n this picture, RAND has transfigured the world into an
interesting technological game, and one can relax—the “military
planners can gain valuable synthetic experience without risk.”53
One might as well add art to the list. In doing so, we take measure of 30
the powers of integration constitutive of the One-Dimensional Society.
We see it as a strategy of absorption and containment rather than the
neutral meeting of two cultures, the sciences and humanities on equal
footing.
These remarks shed a cold light on LACMA’s technology project
beyond the already unflattering one cast by the notion of its depen-
dence on corporate sponsorship. For if artists had believed they were
using technology as “tools” in the service of their production, here the
tables have been completely turned: art was now the tool of technology.
This would seem to support, on the one hand, the deeply technophobic
belief of an ultimately autonomous technology, a kind of “technics out
of control,” as Langdon Winner has importantly described it.54 On the
other hand, it represents the most perverse literalization of the phil-
osophical understanding of techne. If all art is a kind of technology, to
follow the Aristotelian formulation of the term, at this historical mo-
ment art has now been fully subsumed under the logic of techno-
logical rationality.
Perhaps the Art and Technology Program was most complicit with
such charges in its failure to acknowledge there was anything to be
complicit about. Helicopters for Vietnam or game theory for Cold War
maneuvering were all to be shrugged off as business as usual. The
language employed throughout the catalog further confirms such ten-
dencies: it suggests the peculiar “closing of the universe of discourse”
constitutive of a society in which radical negation has lost its force.
It is a language of total administration that corresponds seamlessly
with the exhibition’s aesthetics of domination.
For language under technological rationality is functionalized,
rendered pure instrumentality; and its repeated use is also internalized
as social behavior.55 Nowhere is this more evident than in the radical
abridgement of language in postwar corporate culture, as witnessed in
the proliferation of the acronym and the stunted syntax associated with
the rhetoric of advertising. For Marcuse this “syntax of abridgement
proclaims the reconciliation of opposites”; it is a “telescoping and
abridgement of discourse” that “cuts off development of meaning by
creating fixed images.”56 Abridgement of language, in short, signals
abridgment of thought. Grammar becomes technologized. So, for
example, the acronym NATO reads with all the finesse of corporate
 31 branding; and there is a concomitant projection, on the part of the
reader of NATO’s unity as an organization—a monolithic totality that
obscures both the complexity of its political motivations and the cultural
specificity of its historical actors. Flipping through Tuchman’s catalog is
to take stock of this phenomenon as it circles back upon the very
industries that give rise to it. IBM, JPL, TRW, GE, HP, RCA, ICN: all of
these corporations make their way into the Art and Technology pro-
gram, and were it not for the fine print, one would be hard pressed
to identify ICN as the “International Chemical and Nuclear Corporation”
or even “RAND” as standing for “Research and Development.” Nor were
the participants themselves absolved of this technocratic language. The
program is designated throughout the catalog as A&T; whereas Maurice
Tuchman—as if playing the role of corporate entity himself—was
consistently referred to as MT in its pages.
But what was to be done? With what other means might we parse
the relationship between art and technology in the present, or rethink
the ways in which art could productively pursue an understanding of
technology’s terms? The situation, as formulated by Marcuse, was to
varying degrees taken up and disseminated widely by the New Left. One
such preliminary response was Theodore Roszak’s 1968 The Making of
a Counter Culture, a book that grew out of his influential essay first
published in the Nation. His argument seems impossible without
Marcuse’s example, for in using the term the counterculture Roszak
described the emergence of a youth movement (notably, a white,
middle- to upper-class youth movement) as the product of postwar
affluence. The counterculture, he argued, emerged as a reaction to the
technocracy of Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex, and its very
ignorance of history and radical politics was, in some respects, its
strength. “Ironically, it is the American young,” Roszak began,

with their underdeveloped radical background . . . who seem to have

grasped most clearly the fact that, while such immediate emergencies as
the Vietnam war, racial injustice, and hard core poverty demand an ideal
INTRODUCTION
of old-style politiking, the paramount struggle of our day is against a
EROS AND TECHNICS AND far more formidable, because far less obvious opponent, to which I will
CIVILIZATION give the name “technocracy”—a social form more highly developed in
America than in any other society. . . .
 By the technocracy, I mean that social form in which an industrial 32
society reaches the peak of its organizational integration. It is the ideal
men usually have in mind when they speak of modernizing, updating,
rationalizing, planning. Drawing upon such unquestionable imperatives
as the demand for egciency, social security . . . the technocracy works to
knit together the anachronistic gaps and fissures of industrial society.57

Roszak could easily be taken to task for generalizing the degree to

which American youth in the 1960s lacked knowledge about the
“tradition of radical politics,” but his assimilation of Marcuse’s account
struck a deep chord nonetheless. With an argument that pays direct
tribute to the critical theorist (he would devote a chapter to both
Marcuse and Norman O. Brown), he presented his challenge to the
Counterculture. The challenge is how it might mount an affective front
against the technocracy and its larger appeals to scientific authority, for
“the technocracy easily eludes all traditional political categories. . . . [I]t
is characteristic of technocracy to render itself ideologically invisible.”58
The answer, so it would seem, could not simply take the form of polite
or even unruly protest. Opposition, if it were to have any impact at all,
had to recognize that radical negation had been progressively weakened
under technocracy’s regime. “Technocracy’s children,” as Roszak
described them, would need to find other means to challenge its seem-
ingly monolithic force.
To return to Marcuse briefly and finally: one such “mean” might
have revealed itself in the philosopher’s critique of the language and
aesthetics of total administration. We’ve noted that Marcuse’s analysis of
technocratic language cleaves well with the pretensions of LACMA’s
program; and it could just as easily apply to any of the countless other
art and technology collaborations that flourished in the era—E.A.T.,
GRAV, USCO. Writing on the rampant deployment of the acronym in the
1960s, Marcuse attended to the political nature of its grammar,
organized around the temporal logic of its condensation. “I have
alluded to the philosophy of grammar,” he argued, “in order to illumi-
nate the extent to which the linguistic abridgments indicate an
abridgment of thought which they in turn fortify and promote.”59 In
contracting or abridging language, rendering it one-dimensional, so to
speak, something else gets repressed in the technological picture: “The
suppression of this dimension and in the societal universe of operational
 33 rationality is a suppression of history and this is not an academic but a
political affair.”60

The functional language is a radically anti-historical language: opera-

tional rationality has little use for historical reason. . . . Remembrance
of the past may give rise to dangerous insights, and the established
society seems to be apprehensive of the subversive contents of memory.
Remembrance is a mode of dissociation from the given facts, a mode of
‘meditation’ which breaks, for short moments, the omnipresent power
of the given facts. Memory recalls the terror and the hope that passed.61

History, in other words, is obscured by the language of technological

rationality as is the subversive potential of memory along with it. And
memory has an especially important role to play in this scenario. For
memory—and perhaps more critically, its larger relationship to time—
might well counter the ideological force embedded in notions of
progress, technological reason, the fallout of which is the culture of
technocracy. Marcuse cited Adorno on the issue:

The spectre of man without memory . . . is more than an aspect of de-

cline—it is necessarily linked with the principle of progress in bourgeois
society. Economists and sociologists such as Werner Sombart and Max
Weber correlated the principle of tradition to feudal, and that of ra-
tionality to bourgeois, forms of society. This means no less than that the
advancing bourgeois society liquidates Memory, Time, Recollection, as
irrational leftovers of the past (my emphasis).62

To this statement, which opposes bourgeois notions of progress to

“Memory, Time, Recollection,” Marcuse added another layer of critique.
“If the progressing rationality of advanced industrial society tends to
liquidate, as an ‘irrational rest,’ the disturbing elements of Time and
Memory,” he wrote, “it also tends to liquidate the disturbing rationality
contained in this irrational rest.” 63
INTRODUCTION
Time, to follow both Marcuse and Adorno, is a disturbing “ir-
EROS AND TECHNICS AND rational rest.” It disturbs the seamless image of things. Its liquidation
CIVILIZATION reveals dialectically, something of its critical potential, its historical
charge; and so it follows that a provisional “recovery” of time—and the
analysis of how it models our understanding of history—grants insight
into advanced industrial society and the character of its technological 34
reason. As this book wants to demonstrate, this is especially true in the
relationship between art and technology in the 1960s. Time comes to
signify things that the literal image of technology cannot.

˚
Art and technology rarely works, I think, and it has to do with the
element of time, the surprise situation when timing becomes ab-
solutely the most important thing.

—Maurice Tuchman64

Time is political. Like technology, it is not neutral. “The metaphysics of

capital is a technology of time,” Jean-François Lyotard once observed,
an enormously resonant phrase in the context of the 1960s. It was
then—with Apollo 11, with Vietnam, with the historical emergence of
what has come to be known as the Information Age—that the contest
for time assumed a decidedly technological aspect. Whether liquidated
or celebrated, whether sped up or slowed down, time is understood
as an “irrational rest”—an “irrational leftover”—whose movements and
motion in the 1960s some sought endlessly to transform and control.
To track those movements through the work of art, its criticism, and re-
ception is the project of this book.
CHAPTER 1
PRESENTNESS IS GRACE
“It is certain with me that the world exists anew every moment;
that the existence of things every moment ceases and is every moment
renewed.”1 Thus with this epigraph from Jonathan Edwards—a promise
of renewal and therefore redemption—Michael Fried introduced one of
the most important essays of art criticism of the 1960s, “Art and Object-
hood.” At first it seems a strange way to begin his canonical attack on
minimalist sculpture. Those dumb, repetitive objects Fried would reject
as “literalist” or “theatrical”—so obdurate in their industrial manu-
facture and yet so obsequious in their appeal to the spectator’s lived
experience—seem worlds apart from the temporal prescriptions of the
eighteenth-century theologian.
But that contrast is just so. And by essay’s end, Fried returned to
that very point. The essay begins with a reference to Edwards and so too
would it conclude with a theological pronouncement. Fried ended with
a message as if delivered from the Very Judgment Seat of art: “We are
all literalists most or all of our lives,” he wrote, before bestowing the
now infamous Edwardsian edict “Presentness is grace.” The reader,
then, has come to view the world anew. Come full circle to a temporal
imperative about art. As Fried was to explain it over thirty years later,
his initial reference to Edwards in “Art and Objecthood” was intended as
“a gloss on the concept of presentness . . . as suggesting that what was
at stake (in modernism) was something other than mere instantaneous-
ness.”2 It was not just mere—modernism’s sense of the instant—and
only the moral authority of an Edwards could do justice to this
condition. A more pressing battle was being waged in the service of
modernism, one with its own chiliastic implications.
For just as “Art and Objecthood” is a championing of a medium-
specific art, it is just as much a championing of presentness. And just as
it is an indictment of “theatricality,” it is just as much a condemnation of 38
duration, of time. Hence the intractability of time and medium for the
critic; and there is no doubt that “Art and Objecthood” inscribes a
marked anxiety about time. Time in the work of art; time in the
experience of minimalism as quotidian; time experienced as the endless,
“on and on” of a new kind of art making. Time as the foundation of
what Fried called theatricality: the staging of minimalist sculpture as
contiguous with the actual conditions of the beholder’s surroundings.
This is what interests me in “Art and Objecthood”: the Edwardsian
bookends that would uphold the virtues of modernist presentness
against the debasements of temporality found in the gallery and
elsewhere. Time not just as it is thematized in the conflict between
modernism and minimalism, but time as it is inflected by, and inflects in
turn, the larger arena of cultural production of the sixties. For in Fried’s
fear of time—his chronophobia even—lies an implicit concession to the
weakening status of the “purely present” work of art. And this fear
further suggests, unintentional as it may be, conditions of art making
that intersect with the discourse of postwar technology.
Of course few essays on the art of 1960s have received as much
attention or generated as much hostility as “Art and Objecthood,” and
there are few lines in the history of art as imminently quotable, as
famous or infamous, as “presentness as grace.”3 To revisit Fried at this
moment would seem to belabor the point, a calculated redundancy:
how many times must we return to this canon text? Yet as many critics
and historians have noted, such attention is deserved, for no text
articulates the peculiar mechanics of minimalism’s reception as
brilliantly as its does, in spite of its antagonism toward the work in
question. In acknowledging both the essay’s centrality for postwar art,
not to mention the importance of its critical reception within theories of
postmodernism, my goal in this chapter is both simple and speculative
in its address. My argument is roughly organized into two parts. First,
I offer a close reading on the problem of time so critical to Fried’s
account. Submitting his text to its own temporal logic, I wend a few
paths around modernist criticism in both art and film along the way.
Hence we encounter interlocutors as diverse as Clement Greenberg
and Robert Smithson, Stanley Cavell and Rosalind Krauss, all of whom
weigh in on the problem of time and medium; and all of whom wrestle
with the implications of that relationship for modernism.
 39 Second and more expansively, there is the speculative dimension,
in which I read Fried’s obsession with time against the grain of other
temporal phenomena within the larger culture of the sixties. Just as
Fried’s essay has been deployed to unmask the logic of postmodernism,
however negatively, so too does it offer a counterexample for under-
standing a new model of time at work in the art of that moment.4 Here
questions around the discourses of emerging technologies assume
priority. Without making claims to a direct or even symptomatic
relationship between Fried and such discourses, I want to suggest that
the time Fried condemns in literalist art can tell us something about the
question of endlessness encountered in the natural and social sciences
of the day. We will find that this time is explicit to the rhetoric of much
art of the period as well, including minimalism. It is the time of the
work of art now understood as a system, recursive and shuddering like
an echo, the time of an expanding new media and the articulation of its
logic within and by art.
What follows, then, might be characterized as a dialogue of
sorts—at first glance an apparent confrontation—staged between two
parties seemingly at war with one another. Provisionally, we could call
this a dialogue between medium and new media. In my argument’s
unfolding, however, it becomes clear that the dialogue between art and
technology in the 1960s—in this case, that between minimalism and
technology—is not a matter of medium reduced to its material essence.
Time comes in to mediate that dialogue; and that mediation takes on its
own circular logic, its own recursive force.

MODERNISM AS CHRONOPHOBIA
None of this is to say that “Art and Objecthood” is a thinly veiled
diatribe against video art or new forms of computer graphics or new
media, loosely defined. Nor is it to propose some relationship between
the text and technology that is iconographic or repressed. To make such
claims would be to miss the point entirely of Fried’s endeavor. Thirty
CHAPTER 1 years after the fact, “Art and Objecthood” may read as one of modernist
PRESENTNESS IS GRACE sculpture’s last stands, a fierce polemic against the plodding, in-your-
face banality of minimalism. But to the extent that this perspective is
one of hindsight (Fried argued that the situation of modernist sculpture
back then was not nearly as desperate as some suggest), we might 40
reverse its temporal flow and argue for the anticipatory status of the
essay.5 In its defensiveness about the sculptural medium and its
relationship to time, it anticipates, if phobically, the integration of 1.1 Larry Bell, “Memories of Mike,”

media as a function of time. cover of Artforum, June 1967. Courtesy

Artforum and the artist.
Published in the June 1967 issue of Artforum—a special issue
devoted to sculpture—Fried’s text was one of a cluster of essays
confronting the staggering array of new work of the mid-sixties that
begged the category of sculpture itself: primary structures, yes, but also
Oldenburg’s deflated, even lugubrious “soft machines”; the dissolute
funk of West Coast assemblage; Sol LeWitt’s seemingly invisible con-
ceits; Smithson’s proposal for an airport terminal. Fitting, then, that a
Larry Bell cube in Plexiglas graces the magazine’s cover (figure 1.1),
emblematic as it is of the contents held within.6 In its blankness of form
and liquid translucency, a thin veil of iridescence skimming its surface,
it suggests a critical starting-from-scratch. This, then, is sculpture at its
zero degree, sculpture as tabula rasa—awaiting new thoughts to be
impressed upon it. And inside the magazine’s covers, many critics and
artists would projects such thoughts—and with a vengeance.
That vengeance had to do with rethinking sculpture itself, or
better put, rethinking the language used to define it. For what was to
count as sculpture now—what criteria could be used to determine its
aesthetic norms—had proved among the more vexed issues for critics of
contemporary art. In comparison to painting, after all, postwar sculp-
ture was characterized by formalist critics in the mid-sixties largely in
secondary terms: it was thought of as “pictorial” or parasitic to the
achievements of Abstract Expressionism and the later generation of hard-
edge painting. Fried, who had spent the better part of the early sixties
writing mostly on painting (with, of course, the profound exception of
Anthony Caro) was no different in this regard. He was to follow the
example of his former mentor Clement Greenberg, whose thinking on
sculpture was always in partial thrall to the dictates of high modernist
painting and whose verdict on minimalism was summed up in the
damning (if at other moments, ambivalent) phrase that it was little more
than “good design.”7
Greenberg’s words will come back to haunt us, as will his buried
attitudes toward time in the work of art. But his hostile stance toward
minimalism would nevertheless seem representative of a whole range
of critics—many of whom would be loathe to characterize themselves 42
as high modernists—seeking to reinvent an appropriate vocabulary for
the new sculpture. This was as true for Fried as it was for any artist or
writer, even as Fried had begun to distance himself from Greenberg’s
particular modernist polemic around 1966.8 Undoubtedly the summer
1967 issue of Artforum sought to clear the ground in many respects. Yet
even among textual company that included LeWitt, Robert Morris, and
Smithson—some of whom Fried would attack in his own contribution
to the issue—his was the clear standout. Not only was this the case
because its antagonism toward minimalism was so deeply felt but also
arguably because it opened onto another kind of shift in artistic culture.
That shift is best understood through the progressively environmental
reach of three-dimensional work from the mid-sixties to the present; its
extrinsic coordination of mixed media, even intermedia; and crucially,
the structure of time that organizes it.
There is no shortage of close readings of Fried’s text, but we need
to review his argument in order to establish its formative role with
respect to the temporal context. Fried began by calling the “enterprise”
of minimalism (ABC art, primary structures, specific objects) a largely
“ideological” one. Ideology, of course, equals false consciousness, is
“mainly a term of abuse,” to follow Raymond Williams; and minimalist
or literalist art is such a falsifying (rationalizing) of thought around the
gestures it performs. What Fried seemed to object to at the outset was
the work’s position on taking no position, its “neither/nor-ness” in
relation to how it was defined against the classic genres of painting and
sculpture. That neither/nor-ness, we shall see, concealed a larger
problem that couldn’t be easily brooked. For all intents and purposes,
it reduced to the knotty relationship between medium and time.
To make that point, three texts in particular provoked the critic’s
ire, all written by artists with whom he has some truck: Donald Judd,
Robert Morris, and Tony Smith. As James Meyer points out, these were
figures who diverged significantly in both their artistic and critical prac-
tice even as Fried identified a unifying logic between them.9 Famously,
Fried lambasted Judd’s formulation of the “specific object”—a work
of art that occupies a liminal zone between the traditional categories of
painting and sculpture—for violating both media at the same time.10
Robert Morris’s “Notes on Sculpture” comes under additional attack,
principally because of the artist’s explicit understanding of the new
 43 work’s reflexivity and its reference to the beholder’s situation: duration
would underwrite this situation. And Tony Smith’s account, taken up
shortly, perhaps thematizes the time problem most explicitly for Fried’s
argument. The artist’s acknowledgment of the changed status of
sculptural objects only confirmed Fried’s worst suspicions. “I didn’t
think of them as sculptures,” Smith offered, “but as presences of a sort.”
There’s no need to detail the finer points of Fried’s discussion of
Judd and Morris here. It suffices to recall that Fried rallies against
minimalism’s “objecthood” and the twinned condition of its “theatri-
cality”: the sense in which the object “is concerned with the actual
circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work.”11
To gauge something of the force of this remark—and highlight its
relevance to the subsequent concerns of this chapter—we need to gloss
modernism’s project of self-criticism, that which would effectively
“save” art from the forces of banality or theatricality. And we should
state, in no uncertain terms, that Fried’s modernism in “Art and Object-
hood” departs considerably from Greenberg’s. Nevertheless, rehearsing
a more global account of this narrative, oft repeated and itself banal-
ized, underscores the core issues at work in Fried’s essay. Indeed, it
suggests that painting take up an analysis of its own conditions from
the “inside”—“through the procedures themselves of that which is being
criticized,” as Greenberg put it.12 Through such procedures, painting
reentrenches itself in the area of its own “competence”; it shores up its
painterly status against the extra-aesthetic.
By now the argument is familiar if no less startling. It describes
nothing so much as the modernist object’s profound antipathy to the
beholder, a resistance that describes the avant-garde’s turn away from
the popular. For some historians, this is, in its most schematic represen-
tation, the philosophical conviction of an Adorno as routed through the
painterly prescriptions of a Greenberg. It is one version—among the
most insistent version—of the story of modernism.
Far less discussed in the literature around “Art and Objecthood”
is the degree to which the limit condition of Fried’s critique is time.
In this context I use the phrase “limit condition” to underscore the
CHAPTER 1 foundational status of time in the discussion of theatricality; but I also
PRESENTNESS IS GRACE mean to stress, dialectically, its conditions of possibility. This is also to
say that time is too often regarded as secondary to the spatial consider-
ations of minimalist sculpture as it is also to suggest a model of time
that haunts the margins of Fried’s discussion.13 Rightfully, the literature 44
on minimalism has taken up its phenomenological “turn” as articulated
by Fried, seizing upon its environmental dimensions as central to its
art historical legacy. Time, though, is indivisible from any experience of
art, minimalist or otherwise, conceived of phenomenologically. For the
object’s demands upon the beholder’s actual circumstances necessarily
links it to his or her relation to time. Fried was explicit about this,
adamant even, when he wrote on the interpretive stakes raised by Tony
Smith’s cubes and the way in which these blank-faced objects project a
peculiar air of endlessness:

Like Judd’s Specific Objects and Morris’s gestalts or unitary forms,

Smith’s cube is always of further interest; one never feels that one has
come to the end of it; it is inexhaustible. It is inexhaustible, however, not
because of any fullness—that is the inexhaustibility of art—but because
there is nothing to exhaust. It is endless the way a road might be, if it
were circular, for example.
Endlessness, being able to go on and on, even having to go on and
on, is central both to the concept of interest and to that of objecthood.
In fact, it seems to be the experience that most deeply excites literalist
sensibility, and that literalist artists seek to objectify in their work—for
example, by the repetition of identical units (Judd’s “one thing after
another”), which carries the implication that the units in question could
be multiplied ad infinitum.14

Fried addressed the experience of duration engendered by the

minimalist object. The object produces an experience that manages to
be both anticipatory and repetitive, a time that is at once proleptic and
endless. In its dependence on the beholder, the minimalist object has
been “waiting for him”—anthropomorphically—but once the encounter
is made, “the work refuses, obstinately, to let him alone.” Minimalist
sculpture is a badgering, unavoidable presence, waiting to be
acknowledged.15
It is telling, for all these reasons, that Fried’s account ends
decisively with a consideration of time and theater, as if his argument
were reaching its logical crescendo. And so it is worth noting the way in
which he italicized his final remarks about minimalist sculpture as a
matter of time:
 45 Here finally I want to emphasize something that may already have
become clear: the experience in question persists in time, and the pre-
sentment of endlessness that, I have been claiming, is central to literalist
art and theory is essentially a presentment of endless or indefinite
duration . . . The literalist preoccupation with time—more precisely, with
the duration of the experience—is, I suggest, paradigmaticality theatrical,
as though theater confronts the beholder, and thereby isolates him, with
the endlessness not just of objecthood but of time; or as though the
sense which, at bottom, theater addresses is a sense of temporality of
time both passing and to come, simultaneously approaching and receding,
as if apprehended in an infinite perspective.16

Fried’s argument links the open endedness or sense of duration

of the minimalist object to its violation of medium as theatrical. His
anxiety about this endlessness is so deeply felt—so inimical to what he
regarded as modernism’s project of radical self-criticism—it takes on a
moralistic charge by the essay’s last sentence, in which, citing Jonathan
Edwards, Fried proclaimed, “presentness is grace.” But presentness is
grace not just because the work of art is grasped as the instant or now.
What the modernist work of art seeks to accomplish is an experience of
time independent of the beholder’s presence that would “complete” it.
Modernist painting and sculpture “has no duration,” to follow Fried’s
terms; the view of Anthony Caro’s sculpture “is . . . eclipsed by the
sculpture itself—which it is plainly meaningless to speak of as only
partly present. “It is this continuous and entire presentness,” Fried
claimed,

amounting, as it were, to the perpetual creation of itself, that one ex-

periences as a kind of instantaneousness, as though if only one were
infinitely more acute, a single infinitely brief instant would be long
enough to see everything, to experience the work in all its depth and
fullness, to be forever convinced by it.17

This is the language of belief at work—of conviction—and it

CHAPTER 1 too subscribes to its own temporal reasoning. In opposition to the
PRESENTNESS IS GRACE endlessness of minimalist sculpture, that sense of conviction is
equivalent to the object’s presentness. The modernist work of art’s
presentness is no less than a function of its self-criticality. In order to
propel conviction, in order to maintain its status as modernist painting 46
or sculpture, the work of art must always be vigilant about what con-
stitutes its terms through repeatedly testing its limit conditions. In part
this is what is meant in saying “the perpetual creation of itself.” For Fried,
this is a “perpetual revolution.”
It’s all a far hue and cry from the notion of a timeless and tran-
scendent work of art—of some irreducible essence to be mined in
painting and sculpture—and it tells us something about both the
urgency and “moral tone” of Fried’s text. James Meyer’s scholarship
on minimalism explores this moralizing turn; and his argument will
help us understand the considerable threat posed by temporality later
discussed in this chapter. Through his careful analysis of the expression
“presentness is grace,” Meyer describes the way in which Fried’s essay is
at once informed by the Stanley Cavell of Must We Mean What We Say?
(the Harvard philosopher’s first published collection of essays) and
Jonathan Edwards’s Puritan theology. In balancing the doxa of
eighteenth-century religion with the decidedly secular worldview of a
twentieth-century philosopher, Meyer restores to the text its larger
project for modernism, what he calls Fried’s “Ethics of Communication.”
Meyer’s essay foregrounds the significance of Cavell’s dialogue
with Fried in the 1960s, a dialogue that is also critical to important
readings by Rosalind Krauss and Stephen Melville. Cavell, whose
writing on film will be explored subsequently, was both friend and
mentor to Fried, whom he met when joining the Harvard faculty in
1963. Their bibliography is a dialogue of sorts: Cavell’s thinking
radiates throughout the art critic’s work as much as Fried’s inflects
his own. For conviction—in the Friedian sense—bears parallels to
conviction in the antiskeptical sense of Cavell’s philosophy. A brief on
the subject not only demonstrates this connection but will later inform
our reading of the time problem in the visual arts of the 1960s more
generally.
Cavell’s project of diagnosing and “defeating” skepticism was
born of his study of the ordinary language philosophy of his teacher
J. L. Austin and his reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical
Investigations.18 He would counter the skeptic’s doubt, shore up
conviction, through his inheritance of Wittgenstein’s formulation of
“criteria” and the related notion of “acknowledgment.”19 Skepticism,
following the tradition inaugurated by René Descartes and David Hume,
 47 rejects the belief that our habituation in language can provide epis-
temological certainty or knowledge, and it rejects further the logic of
induction to make such claims. Cavell challenged the skeptical attitude
through his philosophical appeals to everyday speech, which is not at
all to say that he believed skepticism can either be proven or repudiated
by ordinary language.20 The gesture of acknowledgment enables con-
viction, for acknowledgment crystallizes ways in which communities
of speakers produce meanings, consensus, and judgment through
language. As a commentator on Cavell puts it, “humans are able to
transcend their own isolation . . . though not on the base of knowledge
alone. What knowing presupposes is acceptance and acknowledgment—
ways of responding that, though epistemically unassured, secure our
habituation with things and others” (my emphasis).21
We will take up Cavell in more depth in the following discussion,
but first we need remind ourselves of the rhetorical pitch of Fried’s
essay. In discussing the essay’s “moral tone,” Meyer pays equal attention
to Jonathan Edwards’s theology as to Cavell’s antiskepticism, and it
bears saying that their respective attitudes on time converge in
significant ways.22 Here the question of redemption for the Calvinist
theologian was by no means guaranteed by either good works or
proclamation, but, following Protestant doctrine, was secured by faith
and faith alone, that is to say, conviction. “Presentness is hardly
secured,” Meyer reminds us, “grace is not a given but rather is the
exception.”23 And so it is with Fried’s modernism. In distilling what was
to count as a modernist work of art, Fried understood that each
instance, each iteration, raised the stakes as to what modern painting or
sculpture could be or do. Most efforts were doomed to fail; a rare few
would achieve that elusive presentness.24
For all its appeals to said state of grace, Fried’s own antiskeptical
account is necessarily a historical argument. Close readings of “Art and
Objecthood” allow us to approach his language critically and parse the
operations internal to the wholly present work of art. To read Fried’s
text only at the level of his argument’s elaboration, however, is to
repress its external motivations: its awareness that time has encroached
CHAPTER 1 upon the viewing of art and from the outside no less. This is, I will
PRESENTNESS IS GRACE argue, as much a historical proposal as it is an ethical or epistemological
one. Embroidering upon Meyer’s reading, we shall see that Fried’s ethics
of communication run up against a different logic of communication,
altogether subject to new conditions of temporality. Time, then, 48
becomes an unavoidable problem for anyone confronting mid-sixties
art, minimalist or otherwise. And who better, or more prescient, than
artists to get this notion right?

LONG FOREVER

[T]here will be no end to this exquisite, horrible misery, when

you look forward you shall see a long forever, a boundless duration
before you, which will swallow up your thoughts.

—Jonathan Edwards25

Thus with this epigraph from Jonathan Edwards—a vision of hell

as a long forever—Robert Smithson threw down the gauntlet in his
published response to “Art and Objecthood.” Appearing not long after
Fried’s text, Smithson’s letter is filled with the usual good stuff we
attribute to the artist’s critical pursuits: a dark and incisive wit, a fluid
sense of word play, and most of all, an attention to the dialectical flip-
flop works of art and art criticism perform. What’s more, in seizing upon
the “long forever” or endless duration represented by the serial works
of Judd, Morris, and Smith, Smithson identified Fried’s thesis as a
temporal problem. Even the critic graciously acknowledged the artist’s
canniness, although he recalls it took him many years to reach this
conclusion. “Smithson’s writings of the late sixties,” he would concede,
“are by far the most powerful and interesting response to ‘Art and
Objecthood.’ “26
It is important that Smithson does not respond to Fried’s essay
as a personal attack against his community of artists. Instead he finds
striking that the critic’s hostility toward minimalism closes in on the
matter of time, a sense of fallen time in the work of art (“fallen”
because in the work’s appeal to the phenomenal rather than the
aesthetic, it no longer offers the modernist object’s redemptive
promise). Theatricality is the term that provides entrance into the
debate: “Michael Fried has in his article ‘Art and Objecthood,’ ”
Smithson argues,
 49 declared a “war” on what he quixotically calls “theatricality.” In a manner
worthy of the most fanatical puritan, he provides the art world with a
long-overdue spectacle—a kind of ready-made parody of the war
between Renaissance classicism (modernity) versus Manneristic anti-
classicism (theater). . . .
What Fried fears most is the consciousness of what he is doing—
namely, being himself theatrical. He dreads “distance” because that
would force him to become aware of the role he is playing. His sense
of intimacy would be annihilated by the “God” Jonathan Edwards feared
so much. Fried, the orthodox modernist, the keeper of the Gospel of
Clement Greenberg, has been “struck by Tony Smith,” the agent of
endlessness. . . .
This atemporal world threatens Fried’s present state of temporal
grace—his ‘presentness.’ The terrors of infinity are taking over the mind
of Michael Fried.27

For Fried’s purposes, reviewing Smithson some thirty years after

the fact, a few “key sentences” in the artist’s response (which Fried
italicizes) identify the critic’s own peculiar repression of time in his
account.

At any rate, eternity brings about the dissolution of belief in temporal

histories, empires, revolutions and counter-revolutions—all becomes
ephemeral and in a sense, unreal, even the universe loses its reality.
Nature gives way to the incalculable cycles of nonduration. Eternal time
is the result of skepticism, not belief. Every refutation is a mirror of the
thing it refutes—ad infinitum. . . . What Michael Fried attacks is what he
is. He is a naturalist who attacks naturalist time. Could it be there is a
double Michael Fried—the atemporal Fried and the temporal Fried?
Consider a subdivided progression of “Frieds” on millions of stages.28

Smithson was nothing if not wholly immersed in the problem of

time and technics in the sixties (this is the subject of chapter 4). Cer-
tainly, he saw its iterations in the work of the artists he supported:
CHAPTER 1 Morris, Judd, Tony Smith, Eva Hesse, Serra, LeWitt. Hence he calls
PRESENTNESS IS GRACE the critic’s bluff. “Every refutation is a mirror of the thing it refutes—
ad infinitum. What Michael Fried attacks is what he is.” Smithson implies
that such “temporal” enemies are in fact the critic’s uncanny double: the
doppelganger that prophetically foreshadows a symbolic death, in this 50
case, the twilight of the purely present work of art.
Artists would get it right in other ways. Of all the texts Fried
would attack in his essay—and one Smithson himself seized upon in
his letter to the editor—perhaps Tony Smith’s famous interview with
Samuel Wagstaff best allegorizes the problem of time and medium that
Smithson underscores. Well rehearsed as they are, Smith’s words
demand to be revisited in this light.

When I was teaching at Cooper Union in the first year or two of the
fifties, someone told me how I could get onto the unfinished New Jersey
Turnpike. I took three students and drove them somewhere in the
Meadows to New Brunswick. It was a dark night and there were no lights
or shoulder markers, lines, railings, or anything at all except the dark
pavement moving through the landscape of flats. . . . The drive was a
revealing experience. The road and much of the landscape was artificial,
and yet it couldn’t be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did
something for me that art had never done. At first, I didn’t know what it
was, but its eKect was to liberate me from many of the views I had had
about art. . . . The experience of the road was something mapped out but
not socially recognized. I thought to myself, it ought to be clear that’s
the end of art. Most painting looks pretty pictorial after that.29

I have used this quote in the preface to this book; repeating it here
stresses its urgency relative to the question of time and medium in the
work of art. Indeed the literal refusal of the road to signify—of Smith’s
“object” to be clearly read—is crystallized around the indeterminacy of
both the site and the experience it produces. At the same time, the drive
is nothing short of a “revealing experience.” Not quite a work of art, it
nevertheless “did something” for Smith that a “work of art” could never
fully accomplish. This oddly paradoxical encounter—of failing to
recognize the contours of an object (the Turnpike) while at the same
time gaining insight into the very limits of the traditional work of art—
is expressed, metonymically, through the sheer banality of a night
drive on an unfinished freeway. Openendedness of interpretation is
analogized to the business of incomplete road construction.
And yet, as discussed earlier, Smith’s discourse on a literal passage
analogizes the question of a temporal passage, of duration, before and
 51 around the autonomous work of art. Regard, for example, the final
claim of his highway epiphany: “The experience of the road was
something mapped out but not socially recognized,” he wrote, “I
thought to myself, it ought to be clear that’s the end of art. Most
painting looks pretty pictorial after that.” For Smith, the end of art
approached: at least the end of art that “looks pretty pictorial after that”
or, by extension, “sculpture that looks pretty sculptural” after a long
drive on a night freeway. Implicit in these comments—and explicit in
the reception of minimalist sculpture—is the way in which the staging
of the object as a temporal unfolding violates a reading of the work of
art as static, as ontologically secure, and as either genre or medium
specific. The car literally drives this sense of medium.
Smith’s narrative conveys a sense of openendedness around the
work of art that is a function of the organization and expansion of its
media. Something that defies not only the categorization of the discrete
work of art but signals the very “end” of art itself because, paradox-
ically, it is endless. The question can now be put bluntly: what is the
nature of the relationship between time and medium? And following
on this, why does this question become so pressing in the art criticism
around sculpture in the 1960s, as effectively demonstrated by Fried’s
protests against minimalism, Smithson’s riposte to the critic, and
Smith’s meditation on the New Jersey Turnpike, his open highway a
figure of a long forever?

MIDDLE CONDITION
Some notes toward a preliminary account of this relationship:
Medium, from the Latin, from neuter of medius, “middle.” Date:
1593. Something in a middle position: a middle condition or degree.
A means of effecting or conveying something. A channel or system of
communication, information, or entertainment. A mode of artistic
expression or communication.
Reciting a dictionary definition amounts neither to writing history
CHAPTER 1 nor to proposing a genealogy. Yet Merriam Webster’s is to the point in
PRESENTNESS IS GRACE its main entry on medium. In its etymological roots as a “middle con-
dition,” the word medium foregrounds a liminal stance at its heart. The
term underscores process or mediation, is a vehicle of communication
rather than the fact of communication itself. This is an important 52
distinction, for though the word medium is most commonly understood
as the physical basis of a work of art (a definition we could hardly dis-
miss), a more fundamental reading of the term emphasizes its formative
value as a communicative agent between two points. Medium is always
already in between; becomes like a speech act, is performative in
staging a dialogue between work of art and beholder. And in this sense
medium always internalizes a singular engagement with time. For the
act of mediation is a process, and that process (because in the middle of
things) is necessarily partial. Hence Tony Smith’s allegory of the New
Jersey Turnpike as a model for rethinking the sculptural medium. Some-
thing about that drive dramatizes for the artist the communicative
contingency of the work of art. Hence Fried’s claim that much minimal-
ist work is anthropomorphic, as if its encounter with a beholder in space
is that which completes it, as if in a dialogue.
Note also that when the dictionary entry on medium gets down
to the business of art, it refers to medium as a “mode [that is, a use,
method or practice] of artistic expression or communication.” It is less
so the rigid determinations of painting and sculpture—determinations
based exclusively on the work’s material properties. Not that materiality
gets thrown out of the picture by any means: this is not to reinvent the
wheel for modernism. If anything, it is to restore to the word medium its
sense of communicative and therefore temporal contingency, whether or
not that of painting or sculpture or drawing or some other middle
condition.30
To be sure, the relationship between time and medium has been a
long-standing problematic within modernism: for modernity itself folds
into its understanding the emergence of a new time.31 Ever since G. E.
Lessing published his famous Laocoön in 1766, we have been heirs—
Enlightenment heirs—to a thinking about the arts judged not only
through the laws of their respective media (the separation between the
temporal and spatial arts) but the importance of time in passing such
verdicts.32 Famously, Greenberg’s well-known account of 1940, “Towards
a Newer Laocoön,” revisits Lessing’s formulation in an effort to justify
the evolution, and by extension, autonomy of abstract painting.33 An
unpublished draft of the essay, introduced with a passage from Paul
Valéry’s Eupalinos, the Architect, reveals the very matter of media to be a
 53 matter of time. So, then, at the start of this formative essay, Greenberg
gave us a dialogue:

SOCRATES: Whether that singular object was a work of life, or of art, or

whether one of time, and a sport of nature, I could not tell. . . . Then,
suddenly, I threw it back into the sea.

PHAEDRUS: There was a splash, and you felt relieved.

SOCRATES: The mind does not dismiss an enigma as easily as that.34

The passage seems brusque, mysterious, in the context of Greenberg’s

discussion. Yet Valéry’s prose piece speaks precisely to the question of
medium and time suggested by the critic. Presented as a pseudo-
Socratic dialogue, it sees the shades of Socrates and Phaedrus, drifting
in the Elysian Fields, discoursing on the architect Eupalinos. In an
especially resonant moment of their conversation, Socrates recounts a
pointed, and poignant, episode from his youth. Walking along the
seashore, he stumbles upon a “singular object” that is at once so com-
pelling and ambiguous, so enigmatic in form, purpose, and origin that
it presents an ontological dilemma.35 Here, a mysterious thing inspires
a philosophical turn on the nature of medium itself. So absorbing is its
hold over the young Socrates that he has no choice but to it fling into
the sea, as if its power to control him were itself dangerous. For whether
a work of life, or of art, or whether one of time, the status of that
singular object is a question “not easily dismissed.”
The attractions of these lines for Greenberg are obvious. Posi-
tioned at the opening of his essay, they express a confusion about an
object as a matter of production, medium, and, by extension, time.
If, as many critics argue, Eupalinos concerns the relationship between
“knowing and constructing” in making works of art, here time gets
folded into the equation. Had the object been made purposefully, by
human hands, according to the logic of techne; or was it the chance
accident of nature, a “readymade” produced through the roiling motion
CHAPTER 1 of the sea? As if to foreshadow discussions of the art/life thematic so
PRESENTNESS IS GRACE popular in the postwar era, Valéry’s mysterious object anticipates the
Friedian sense in which a literalist object ranges anthropomorphically,
and therefore dangerously, on the limits of our actual space.
 But something is missing in both Greenberg’s discussion of 54
painting (and Fried’s subsequent essay on sculpture) and for the pur-
poses of twentieth-century art, the silence that surrounds this lack is
critical.36 For when we gloss the relationship between time and medium
in the visual arts, painting and sculpture is hardly the first thing that
springs to mind as much as film and its parent medium, photography.37
(Video, of course, also applies here, if with some structural distinctions
from film; performance will also prove relevant.) We think, for instance,
of Erwin Panofsky’s characterization of film as “the dynamization of
space or the spatialization of time”—properties that are “self-evident
to the point of triviality.”38 Perhaps we think of Roland Barthes’s account
of the photograph, invariably crystallizing around it being an art of
time, an art of the “that has been.” The conjunction between time and
medium is so intrinsic to the cinematic image—“the movement image”
as Gilles Deleuze felicitously called it—that film is reflexively called a
time-based medium. Given our previous reading of the term medium, it
is a buried tautology but a significant one for thinking about the “static”
arts’ relationship to temporality.
But what can this tell us about sculpture? How is Fried’s thinking
on the topic inflected by the more obvious relationship between time
and medium within film? The critic, significantly, does not offer a for-
mulation for the term medium itself within “Art and Objecthood,” and
he would later acknowledge that the notion remains undertheorized in
his account. In the course of his argument, he would employ the term to
describe the “medium of shape” as much as the medium of painting or
sculpture as such. But Fried let dangle a rather mysterious caveat about
film in “Art and Objecthood.” The passage is worth citing in full, as it
unintentionally points to the “time problem” in the visual arts of the
moment more generally.

It is the overcoming of theater that modernist sensibility finds most

exalting and that it experiences as the hallmark of high art in our time.
There is, however, one art that, by its very nature, escapes theater
entirely—the movies. This helps explain why movies in general, including
frankly appalling ones, are acceptable to modernist sensibility whereas
all but the most successful painting, sculpture, music, and poetry is not.
Because cinema escapes theater—automatically, as it were—it provides a
welcome and absorbing refuge to sensibilities at war with theater and
 55 theatricality. At the same time, the automatic, guaranteed character of
the refuge—more accurately, the fact that what is provided is a refuge
from theater and not a triumph over it, absorption not conviction—means
that the cinema, even at its most experimental, is not a modernist art.39

There is much to parse here—perhaps too much for the

immediate concerns of this chapter. The passage itself is dense, its
vocabulary elliptical. But in reading these lines through the temporal
framework of “Art and Objecthood,” one can’t help but feel confronted
by that same “singular object”—that enigma—that begins Greenberg’s
“Laocoön.” For film (or, more pointedly, “the movies” with its popular
cultural associations) makes an abrupt but significant appearance in this
Friedian context, and it casts a peculiar light on the remainder of his
discussion on sculpture. Theatricality is that which the movies would
effectively “defeat”—indeed, cinema escapes theater automatically, is
an “automatic, guaranteed form of the refuge.” Yet Fried qualified this
defeat by suggesting that it offers a “refuge” rather than a “triumph”
over theater as such. And though even “frankly appalling” movies are
“acceptable” to the modernist sensibility, Fried was not willing to con-
cede to cinema the imprimatur of modernist art form. Nevertheless,
something about the ontology of film for the critic—something about
its automatic quality—allows further speculation on the problem of
time as it relates to other artistic media of that moment.

FROM TOTAL THERENESS TO RECURSIVENESS

Cavell might shed light on the matter. Maybe Fried’s friendship with the
philosopher suggests a thinking of time specific to film and, through its
inverse, other contemporary media, both time based and static. Already
we’ve noted that Cavell’s interest in modernist painting was shaped by
the Fried of “Three American Painters.” It’s not hard to imagine the art
critic similarly influenced by the philosopher. The debt is reciprocal.
Of course, “Art and Objecthood” appeared a few years before The
CHAPTER 1 World Viewed (1971), Cavell’s first contribution to the literature on
PRESENTNESS IS GRACE cinema. But as Rosalind Krauss has argued in an extraordinary series
of essays on the “post-medium condition,” Cavell’s reflections on film—
particularly his readings of “automatism”—are instructive for the
problem of medium in contemporary art.40 The title of the book reveals 56
a certain affinity: Cavell had been reading Heidegger’s Being and Time
around the period; had avoided and then taken up “The Age of the
World Picture”; and had hoped to dramatize the sense of Weltanschau-
ung that film provided as suggested by the title of Heidegger’s essay.41
Questions of time—automatism, first, followed by the twinned concepts
of “total thereness” and the “instance”—would indeed prove critical,
revealing the decisive role Fried’s theory of painting played in Cavell’s
reading of film.42
To unpack the concept of “automatism,” we need first gloss
Cavell’s thesis. At its most fundamental level, The World Viewed is an
ontology of film, one in which the projection of the world by the moving
image—its projection of reality—is a world viewed without the viewer
being seen. Film satisfies “our wish to view, unseen, the world re-
created in its own image,” as if we, its viewers, were invisible. The
concept stems from our fundamental displacement from the world as
modern subjects—from the larger philosophical acknowledgment,
steeped in Cartesian doubt and Kantian epistemology, that it is im-
possible to know the world in its totality, to see everything.43 Hence to
view the world unseen, as we do in the movies, is a “mode of perception
(that) feels natural to us,”44 for we can no longer claim to see or know
the world as a whole. Film, though, magically fulfills that wish. As
Cavell himself wrote, “The world of a moving picture is screened. . . .
A screen is a barrier. . . . It screens me from the world it holds—that
is, makes me invisible. And it screens that world from me—that is,
screens its existence from me.”45 For Cavell, the notion that one wishes
to view the world as if from behind a screen (or from behind the self) is
an issue of modern subjectivity; and it cleaves suggestively with Fried’s
later art historical account of the absorptive powers of modernist
painting, already at work in “Art and Objecthood.” But Cavell drama-
tized the extent to which we have naturalized our desires and fantasies
as private, invisible. Watching movies confirms this sensibility by
externalizing, and quite literally projecting, what is in essence internal
to the self.46
Cavell’s book is rigorous, difficult. Attuned though it is to the
subtleties of ordinary language, the vast implications of his text go well
beyond the commonplace. To say that The World Viewed is just an
ontology of film is like saying “Art and Objecthood” is merely reportage
 57 on minimalist sculpture. In its wide ranging meditations upon cinema—
what constitutes the medium, why its appeal is so broad, its relationship
to audience, the shortcomings of the criticism surrounding it, and so
on—Cavell’s is a larger treatment on both modern subjectivity and the
modern work of art’s capacity for self-criticism or acknowledgment.
Earlier we discussed how acknowledgement, for Cavell, leads to
the kind of conviction necessary to overcome philosophical skepticism.
In the context of the visual arts, acknowledgment might mean how a
serious work of art recognizes the conditions of its possibility through
the medium and thus restores its sense of conviction and connection
to the viewer’s reality as a function of presentness. “The concept of
acknowledgment is immediately related to issues of presentness,” Cavell
wrote; acknowledgment within modernist painting refers not just to the
work of art but to “what the painting of them is. At some point the work
must be done, given over, the object declared separate from its maker,
autonomous.”47
It is at this juncture that Cavell’s formulation on automatism
enters the argument, and it is significant that it immediately precedes
his chapter “Excursus: Some Modernist Painting.” For Cavell automat-
ism was defined largely in relation to a medium’s “manufacturing
mechanism”: what is automatic to the medium, how the medium can
reproduce within itself its own mechanism, in short, a medium’s
recursiveness. As Krauss notes, the term automatism resonates sig-
nificantly with other dimensions of modernist art history, calling up
the surrealist notion of psychic automatism, while at the same time
invoking the modernist object’s impulse to autonomy. Film and, even
more fundamentally, photography suggest a particular relationship to
automatism in their presentation of “reality.” Like the term automation,
to which it is also etymologically close, automatism describes a mode
of production of a wholly present character. “Photographs are not
hand-made,” Cavell offered, “they are manufactured. And what is
manufactured is an image of the world.”48 Because film finds its basis
in photography, it relies upon this mechanism to an even greater degree.
As Cavell noted on automatism:
CHAPTER 1
PRESENTNESS IS GRACE I said also that what enables moving pictures to satisfy the wish to view
the world is the automatism of photography . . . Reproducing the world is
the only thing film does automatically. I do not say that art cannot be
made without this power, merely that movies cannot so be made . . . It 58
may lose its power for us. For what has made the movie a candidate for
art is its natural relation to its traditions of automatism.
. . . One might explain the movie’s natural relation to its traditions
of automatism by saying that a given movie can naturally tap the source
of the movie medium as such. And the medium is profounder than any of
its instances. . . . One might say that the task is no longer to produce
another instance of an art but a new medium within it. (Here is the
relevance of series in modern painting and sculpture, and of cycles
in the movies, and of the quest for a “sound” in jazz and rock.) It follows
that in such a predicament, media are not given a priori.49

For Cavell, medium was not a given, is not an a priori; a point that will
prove critical for his reading of the work of art’s relationship to time as
well as those practices that depart from his model. “I characterized the
task of the modern artist as one of creating not a new instance of his art
but a new medium in it,” he wrote. “One might think of this as the task
of establishing a new automatism. The use of the word seems to me
right for both the broad genres of forms in which an art organizes it-
self . . . and those local events or topoi around which a genre precipitates
itself.”50 Automatism, then, is the mechanism intrinsic to a medium’s
self-productive logic; but its importance extends beyond its generative
capacities. Indeed, in line with the notion of a world viewed from
behind the self, automatism underscores something about modern
subjectivity as well. As Krauss points out, automatism not only names
the mechanical, “automatic” dimension of photography or film but
“mechanically assures that as spectators our presence to that world will
be suspended.”51 Film, in other words, automatically suspends the
presence of the beholder in her confrontation with the medium. To
follow Fried’s account, it offers a guaranteed form of refuge from
theater, for the world of the film does not appeal to the actual circum-
stances in which the viewer encounters it.
Cavell’s subsequent chapter “Excursus: Some Modernist Painting”
makes even more explicit the temporal prerogatives so crucial to “Art
and Objecthood.” In discussing Fried’s own aesthetics of presentness,
Cavell elaborated on what he calls the “total thereness” of painting, by
which he meant how a painting is “wholly open to you, absolutely in
front of your senses, of your eyes, as no other form of art is.”52 It is “an
 59 event of the wholly open, and of the declaration of simultaneity.”53 In an
astonishing passage, Cavell articulated the function of the series within
modernist painting with respect to the “instance”; and this instance, one
gathers, is not unlike the self-productive logic of a movie’s automatism.
The acutely Friedian tenor of his reading stems from the way he
thematized the moment of the instance as a certain loss: a loss of the
world, perhaps, or the lost beauty or youth. It is precisely that recog-
nition of loss that demonstrates the fragility—and therefore the
preciousness—of the instance, something deeply refined. There is
the ring of the Edwardsian in Cavell’s language; it shimmers with the
sense of a fallen time and the possibility of a redemptive temporality
along with it, one in which each new instance restores “conviction” to
the viewer. “A new medium establishes and is established by a series,”
Cavell wrote. “Each instance of the medium is an absolute realization
of it; each totally eclipses the other.”54

The fact about an instance, when it happens, is that it poses a permanent

beauty, if we are capable of it. That this simultaneity should proKer
beauty is a declaration about beauty: that it is no more temporary
than the world is; that there is no physical assurance of its permanence;
that it is momentary only the way time is, a regime of moments; and that
no moment is to dictate its significance to us, if we are to claim
autonomy, to become free.
Acceptance of such objects achieves the absolute acceptance of
the moment, by defeating the sway of the momentous. It is an ambition
worthy of the highest art. Nothing is of greater moment than the
knowledge that the choice of one moment excludes another, that no
moment makes up for another, that the significance of one moment is
the cost of what it forgoes. . . .
In its absolute diKerence and absolute connection with others,
each instance of a series maintains the haecceity (the sheer that-ness) of
a material object . . .55

The “instance” for Cavell is a kind of Friedian presentness, and in this

CHAPTER 1 lies its importance for both film (as it applies to its automatism) and
PRESENTNESS IS GRACE modernist painting (in its exploration of medium through the series).
In A Voyage on the North Sea, her account of Marcel Broodthaers,
Rosalind Krauss takes up the question of automatism to turn the received
wisdom of medium specificity on its head. For Krauss, Cavell’s reading 60
of both film and painting offers a way out of modernism’s medium-
specific essentialism, those readings that reductively emphasize a
medium’s physical properties as timeless and unchanging. This standard
reading of medium may tally with some of the Kantian aspects of
Greenberg’s writing, if not the Fried of “Art and Objecthood.” As Cavell’s
thinking reveals, however, the success of an art form, whether painting
or film, lies in its capacity to restore conviction through the “instance”
or its “total thereness”—a kind of “event” organized around a medium
that is not a priori, as he writes. Krauss will find something especially
provocative in these remarks; they line up with the notion that the
medium is internally differentiated. “What ‘automatism’ thrusts into the
foreground of this traditional definition of ‘medium,’” she writes,

is the concept of improvisation, of the need to take chances in the face

of a medium now cut free from the guarantees of artistic tradition . . .
The attraction of Cavell’s example for me was on the internal plurality
of any given medium, of the impossibility of thinking of an aesthetic
medium as nothing more than an unworked physical support.56

Krauss underscores further the notion of medium as something that is

“made”—not given—and thus points to the possibility (as in the film
and mixed-media work of Broodthaers) of its aggregative or hetero-
geneous quality.
Krauss’s reading of medium highlights a key feature of Cavell’s
thinking with respect to time: automatism is internal to the medium
of film. That is, film internalizes time automatically. Intrinsic to its
structure, time is film’s one constant. Perhaps one reason Fried could
provisionally accept film in “Art and Objecthood,” even though a time-
based medium, is that its self-reproductive mechanism is not unlike
what modernist painting attempts to do repeatedly in a series; and
through that very mechanism automatically keeps at bay a sense of the
viewer’s presence. Each new instance, then, offers the potential state of
presentness; each new work attempts to sustain that sense of con-
viction. For in this formulation, medium builds, improvisationally, from
a set of rules that came before. Critically, Krauss identifies this as the
recursive structure of medium, and this identification allows us to iden-
tify a parallel reading of time at work in another context.
 61 The term recursion names an increasingly important model of
temporality in the postwar era, one with peculiar implications for the
art of the 1960s.57 Although the concept by no means originated in the
period, its applications grew exponentially at the time. The word derives
from the Latin for “a return” and implies a process of “running back,”
marking a decisively temporal relationship to problems of self-reference
and, one might add, self-criticism or self-reflexivity. Recursion refers to
the process of repeatedly applying a set of rules, operations, or con-
ditions to a given thing in order to define or test it. It can be applied
indefinitely. Practically speaking, it is a principle most commonly
applied to mathematics (set theory or recursion theory), linguistics,
and computer science: it is bedrock to the logic of programming, for
instance, even as it generates its own problems of computability.58
But as Krauss’s reading of automatism makes clear, the
implications of recursion extend well beyond algorithms and software to
a problem of time more broadly understood, in this instance, organized
around the question of medium. And if recursion refers to the process
of circling back to a given set of conditions—conditions, we might add,
that with each instance restore themselves through that very process of
running backward—the mechanism behind that bears a distinct
relationship to automatism. We might also refer to this process as
autopoiesis—self-production or self-making, or self-organization. That
neologism, coined by the Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana in the
1960s and elaborated on further in collaboration with Francisco Varela,
was itself born of postwar science and progressively employed with
respect to that era’s technology. Its formulation, coupled with the notion
of recursion more generally, might tell us something about issues of
time so pressing to the art of the sixties.59 For it is within the discursive
sphere of systems theory that we see how a class of objects self-
reproduces a temporal logic not dissimilar from the mechanism of
automatism described by both Cavell and Fried. In fact, we will see this
kind of time in a great deal of sixties art: the work of serial systems and
of systems aesthetics. Its modeling of time bears a peculiar family
resemblance to Fried’s, suggesting that sense of presentness so esteemed
CHAPTER 1 by the critic may not be forthcoming after all. To borrow from
PRESENTNESS IS GRACE Smithson’s letter on the art critic, “every refutation is a mirror of the
thing it refutes . . . What Michael Fried attacks is what he is.”
 So, then, we turn to the second party in this dialogue, bracket 62
Fried’s reading for a moment to gain insight into a notion of time
beyond presentness. Fried’s “atemporal world,” to invoke Smithson once
more, finds an inverted model of itself outside itself in systems. It is one 1.2 Pages on “Whole Systems,” from

that will talk back. Stewart Brand, The Whole Earth

Catalogue, 1969, pp. 8–9. Courtesy
Stewart Brand.

SYSTEMS
What does it mean to speak of a work of art as a “system” in the
1960s?60 To invoke the word system as it applies to the culture of the
sixties and early seventies is to solicit a range of competing associations.
Viewed against the activist backdrop of the era, the phrase “the System”
may resonate with political implications of a totalitarian or sinister
nature, calling up a dark social machinery—a monolithic authority—
against which the counterculture variously rallied. This would be the
position advocated and popularized by Students for a Democratic
Society. For others yet, the “systems” view of things granted a more
ecological perspective on the world at large: the sense of inter-
dependence or mutual causation organizing operations of both the
social and biological. The Whole Earth Catalogue (1968) for instance,
described by Todd Gitlin as “The Sears Catalogue for the New Age,”
promoted dozens of books and products under the rubric of systems
with the result that texts by the cybernetician Norbert Wiener bumped
up against paperbacks on tantric art, John Cage, and yoga, while
Buckminster Fuller–inspired domes shared space with tepees and
kerosene lamps (figure 1.2).61
Yet systems analysis, systems discourse, General System Theory, or
just plain systems theory refers to something quite historically specific at
the same time as it signals a certain openness in the study of scientific,
natural, and cultural phenomena. Historically coincident with what
Norbert Wiener called the “Second Industrial Revolution” of the com-
puter and automation era, not to mention the military technology of the
war effort, the expression has a scientistic or bureaucratic ring to it. And
that is to the point, for systems theory is a theory of organization and
communication. In the pithiest terms, systems theory, in part descendent
from the life sciences, is the study of an organism as an “organized
complexity.” In parallel fashion, cybernetics—reductively put, the
science of circular causal mechanisms or feedback—was devoted to 64
thinking about bodies through the terms of organization and infor-
mation exchange. Here, organization refers to the patterning or con-
figuration of relationships that constitute a certain unity; it means to
highlight “relations that define a system as a unity, and determine the
dynamics of interaction and transformations which it may undergo as
such a unity.”62 This covers a great deal of ground for a definition so
succinct, but the elasticity of the term was critical. As the English
physiologist Ross Ashby described it, cybernetics “treats not things, but
ways of behaving.”63 Not semantics, in other words, but grammar. Not a
what but rather a how.64 Or, as it is applied to a recursive universe, not
ontology—what things are, but ontogenesis—how things become.
Although generally treated under the rubric of systems discourse,
systems theory and cybernetics are not wholly congruent terms, and
their institutional histories diverged in significant respects.65 Nor, as we
shall see shortly, is systems theory a unified field in its own right: its
“first-order” and “second-order” manifestations are organized around a
distinct understanding of the role of the observer in each. A closer
reading of cybernetics follows in chapter 4; what concerns us here are
the issues explicit to the broad cultural reception of systems discourse.
Following a reading by the Austrian biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy,
General System Theory is an organicist approach to the sciences, which
posits an isomorphism between the structure of communication and
events in bodies typically thought of as distinct and autonomous from
one another. Its earliest proponents acknowledged a growing special-
ization within the sciences, to the extent that engineers, physicists, and
biologists, in spite of—or because of—their training, could no longer
efficiently communicate their interests across disciplinary lines. Yet
developments within the computer technology of the forties and the
postwar era, von Bertalanffy writes, “placed new demands on ‘hetero-
geneous technologies’ and obliged an approach that transcended the
authority of a specialist in one field.”66 Von Bertalanffy also spoke to the
world-historical implications of system discourse as emerging out of and
responding to the technological catastrophes of mid-century.67 As such,
General System Theory is seen to recast the relationship between the
sciences and other disciplines—clearing the lines of communication, so
to speak—so as to avoid the kind of technocratic reason that cul-
minated, to follow some, in the Bomb. Noble as such intentions are, the
 65 irony is not lost in translation: systems discourse was in certain respects
intended to humanize the sciences, but it does so through effectively
colonizing other disciplines.
As systems theory works to undo the aggressive tendency of the
scientific professions toward autonomy, it is necessarily environmental
in its scope and interdisciplinary in its reach, if initially embedded in
the “hard” sciences. In this capacity, it reproduces, at the level of its
institutional and professional motivations, the demands of its object
of inquiry. As von Bertalanffy wrote in his introduction to his volume
of collected essays General System Theory of 1968,

What may be obscured in these developments—important as they are—

is the fact that systems theory is a broad view which far transcends
technological problems and demands, a reorientation that has become
necessary in science in general and in the gamut of disciplines from
physics to biology to the behavioral and social sciences and to philo-
sophy. It is operative, with varying degrees of success and exactitude, in
various realms, and heralds a new worldview of considerable impact.68

Systems theory initially did finds its applications in the sciences;

as mentioned before, it was closely linked to the contemporaneously
emerging field of cybernetics as well as the war-connected game and
information theory of John von Neumann, Oskar Morgenstern, Warren
Weaver, and Claude Shannon. In the fifties and sixties, though, its
operations were neither restricted to the Pentagon nor the scientific
elite but were meant to account for the interrelationship of all types of
cultural and natural phenomena. Its list is a disparate one. Psychology
and modern religion; anthropology and urban planning; business
management, cognitive science and the ecological movement: all find
their place under the systems umbrella. It is a testament to the reach
of system analysis that one might count, among the vast literature
on its applications, examples ranging from Buddhism to Alcoholics
Anonymous.69 Indeed, by 1972, systems theory would be seen as a
model for conceptualizing the art world.70
CHAPTER 1 As a theory of organization and communication, von Bertalanffy’s
PRESENTNESS IS GRACE biological account of systems discourse concerned itself principally with
open systems.71 Open systems exchange matter and energy with their
environment in the maintenance of a steady system: they are self-
regulating. Physics, on the other hand, deals largely with closed 66
systems; and following the Second Law of Thermodynamics, those
systems demonstrate the will to disorganization known as entropy.72
(Open systems, by contrast, function through negative entropy, meaning
they become more and more differentiated and more organized over
time.)
The later generation of systems theorists, influenced largely by
Heinz von Foerster’s notion of second-order cybernetics, would find
General System Theory increasingly problematic, instead emphasizing
the role of the observer on the system. Second-order cybernetics rests
with the idea that the person who engages the system fundamentally
alters it, or perhaps more radically put, constructs it, by virtue of the
language used to describe its operations or ask its questions. The
system is “autonomous” insofar as it is implicitly “constructed”: it is
what von Foerster refers to as “cybernetics of cybernetics.”73 “Second-
order observation observes only how other observes,” Niklas Luhmann
remarks. “The first-order observer concentrates on what he observes,
experiences, and acts out within a horizon of relatively sparse
information.”74

The activity of observing establishes a distinction in a space that remains

unmarked, the space from which the observer executes the distinction.
The observer must employ a distinction in order to generate the diKer-
ence between unmarked and marked space, and between himself and
what he indicates. The whole point of this distinction (its intention) is
to mark something as distinct from something else. At the same time,
the observer—in drawing a distinction—makes himself visible to others.
He betrays his presence—even if a further distinction is required to
distinguish himself.75

In other words, the system is necessarily bracketed by the acknowledg-

ment of an observer’s construction of the system itself, as well as the
observer’s self-construction (or even acknowledgment) as an observer.
The epistemological dimension of systems theory is paramount in this
sense: the observer is implicated as that system’s first principle, its
“structurating” mechanism.76
Whether the systems are closed or open, whether environmental
or wholly autonomous, the impact of systems discourse within both the
 67 sciences and humanities is immeasurable. My argument is that its
rhetoric informs and certainly facilitates a new understanding of many
of the artistic practices of the 1960s, notably those that Fried would
identify in terms of their theatricality. For both systems theory and
cybernetics are fundamentally engaged with problems of time, a notion
critical for our revisionist appraisal of Fried’s text. If systems theory is
concerned with the communication and patterning of relations within
an organization, in both its first- and second-order approaches, time
would play a formative role in that behavior.
Here the reader might be inclined to see such behavior as deeply
theatrical—theatrical in its expansiveness; in opening itself to those
very things that admit to the systems’ “impurity”; or alternately in
acknowledging the observer’s construction of the system from outside
it. It is in that system’s extended (and extensive) relation to time that
we confront such theatrical behavior, perhaps viewing it as a kind of
dark mirror to the automatist mechanism inherent to film and modern-
ist painting. Recursion, after all, is a form of circular organization; auto-
poiesis is self-producing, repetitive. As one commentator of autopoiesis
put it, “one reason the concept of autopoiesis excites me so much is that
it involves the destruction of teleology.” “When this notion is fully
worked out,” he continued, “I suspect it will prove to be as important in
the history of the philosophy of science as was David Hume’s attack on
causality.”77 The cybernetic account of causality and teleology in the
communication of a message is critical here.78 It focused on how the
type of “message” or “variable” introduced into a system constitution-
ally alters it, a point subsequently taken up in terms of “feedback”.
Indeed systems theory and cybernetics devoted themselves to
predicting results in systems, attempting to regulate the future behavior
of a system by anticipating both the type and quantity of messages or
information introduced at a given moment. Both, then, are probabilistic
sciences oriented toward questions of temporality, futurity, and flux:
endlessness, in short.79 Crucially, however, those predictions are not
determined through principles of linear causality but are arrived at
negatively or recursively. As the anthropologist Gregory Bateson
CHAPTER 1 described them:
PRESENTNESS IS GRACE

Causal explanation is usually positive. We say that billiard ball B moved

in such and such a direction because billiard ball A hit it at such and such
an angle. In contrast to this, cybernetic explanation is always negative. 68
We consider what alternate possibilities could conceivably have occurred
and then ask why many of the alternatives were not followed, so that the
particular event was one of the few which could, in fact occur. . . .
In cybernetic language, the course of events is said to be subject
to restraints, and it is assumed that, apart from such restraints, the
pathways of change would be governed only by equal probability.80

Causation and causality, of course, are hardly novel problems

within either philosophy or the history of science: from Hume to Heisen-
berg to Karl Popper, challenges to causal determinism have been central
to the discourse of scientific modernity.81 But the negative or recursive
aspect of Bateson’s example spins this history in a slightly different
direction. What this may represent, to borrow Luhmann’s more contem-
porary reading of systems discourse, is a “recursive universe”—a uni-
verse always subject to the laws of autopoiesis.82 It is recursive insofar
as a system always returns to its own patterns of behavior—always
“runs back” to them—as much as it projects itself into the future
through the input of new messages.
Conceit in hand, we are now positioned to read the art of the
1960s relative to systems theory and the question of time. For in the
spirit of its interdisciplinarity, systems topics found a ready audience
with much art of the period, much as it had an impact on other
branches of the humanities. When, for example, we read of “serial
systems,” “systems aesthetics,” or even “real-time aesthetics” in the
art criticism of the moment, we are in direct confrontation with its
rhetorical legacy.83 Not surprisingly, the new time-based media of video
fell under its purview as did the newly emerging field of computer
graphics; so too would early experiments in cyborg art and artificial life.
But this is not my interest here, crucial as it is to the art of the late
twentieth century. Systems theory was applied to emerging forms of
digital media, yes, but it also served to explain art not expressly
associated with technology today: conceptual art and its linguistic
propositions, site-specific work and its environmental dimensions,
performance art and its mattering of real time, minimalism even.84
Given our investment in the Friedian narrative so far, the particular
association between minimalism and technology might not seem
immediately obvious. When the relationship is discussed, more often
 69 than not some acknowledgment is paid to the representation of
industrial manufacture and labor: Carl Andre and his railroad ties, for
instance, or Serra wielding his molten lead at the blast furnace.85 When
such work is treated through systems analysis, however, we highlight
the kind of time problem Fried found so pressing in “Art and Object-
hood” and the deep structure—the communicative structure—of a
recursive temporality by implication. We also put some pressure on the
word medium in the broader cultural context of the 1960s and we begin
to see how it becomes progressively permeable to other uses of the term
within the culture, namely, the temporal implications that derive
broadly from the expression new media.
Medium/New Media: the pairing is etymologically close but may
seem art historically tenuous, calling up a host of morphologically
skewed comparisons. In what art historical universe, for example, might
a Kenneth Noland coexist with silicon and punch cards? Posing the
relationship in these terms, though, is to miss the point; bluntly put,
it is to mistake hardware for software, to hypostatize objects over
information. As Lev Manovich makes clear in his genealogy of new
media’s “language,” however, the term media necessarily internalizes
something of its communicative function. In attempting to define what
it is that makes media “new,” he speaks to media transformations from
the historical avant-garde to early cybernetic culture to our present
digital one. If the popular understanding of new media revolves around
everyday things, Manovich emphasizes its productive and communica-
tive logic. “Today,” he writes, “we are in the middle of a new media
revolution—the shift of all culture to computer-mediated forms of
production, distribution and communication. The computer media
revolution affects all stages of communication.”86
Manovich’s definition is suggestive in rethinking the historical
convergence between medium and new media in the 1960s. In fact,
many artists and art critics elaborated upon the nexus between the two,
some originating in the hotbeds of technological and scientific inquiry.
At the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, for instance, Gyorgy
Kepes fostered a community that by all appearances may seem to
CHAPTER 1 subscribe to the conventional understandings of art and technology
PRESENTNESS IS GRACE partnerships. Founded by the former Bauhaus associate in 1967, the
center’s residency program brought together artists, engineers, and
mathematicians in a seeming effort to bridge the Two Cultures divide
articulated by C. P. Snow. Yet it was with Kepes’s important edited 70
publications, the “Vision + Value” series, that the systems ethos became
explicit. There, in his seven-volume set dating from 1965–66, artists and
critics expounded on the notion of art as communication—as language 1.3 Book Jacket, Sign, Image, Symbol,

and symbolic systems, as structure and environment, as module and ed. Gyorgy Kepes (George Braziller,
1966). Courtesy George Braziller, Inc.,
proportion—in no uncertain terms. The book jacket for Sign, Image,
Publishers.
Symbol (1966) (cover pictured in figure 1.3) speaks explicitly to
such concerns. “Communication, in the very broadest sense of the term,
is the subject of this volume,” it begins.

Everything that exists and happens in the world, every object and
event, every plant and animal organism, almost continuously emits its
characteristic identifying signal. Thus, the world resounds with these
many diverse messages, the cosmic noise, generated by the energy
transformation and transmission from each existent event.87

Hardly the stuff of traditional art criticism, this was systems

“speak” addressing the question of the visual arts as a sign system. From
a contemporary perspective, the contents of the book are all the more
surprising in this light. Appropriately enough, the prominent
cyberneticians Lawrence Frank and Heinz von Foerster contributed the
opening salvos. But in the rarefied mix appeared Saul Bass—the graphic
designer best known for his title sequences to Alfred Hitchcock and
James Bond flicks—as well as Ad Reinhardt, at the time painting the
blackest blacks. As if to close the circle, von Bertalanffy offered his own
take on visual symbols and “The Tree of Knowledge.”
The relative success of Kepes’s series (that is to say, the fact of
the series’ existence itself) demonstrates the relevance of such concerns
for certain art communities of the mid-sixties. But there was no better-
known supporter of this tendency than the artist, critic, and curator
Jack Burnham, author of the volume Beyond Modern Sculpture and or-
ganizer of the Jewish Museum’s exhibition Software: Information
Technology. Its New Meaning for Art of 1969. Even more explicitly than
Kepes’s project, Burnham argued that the systems perspective allowed
the artist to move beyond the formalist legacy of art criticism, with
its emphasis on the autonomy of the discrete and singular object, and
by extension, the value of a work of art’s “presentness” championed by
Fried (and further explored by Cavell with respect to film). On the
contrary, Burnham and others saw the best new art as a kind of 72
organism, indivisible from other contemporary sign systems, open to
“variables” (to use one of systems discourse’s most cherished terms)
or messages from the outside world, and no longer subject to linear
models of historical development. As Burnham described its emergence,
“a polarity is presently developing between the finite, unique work of
high art, i.e., painting or sculpture, and conceptions which can loosely
be termed ‘unobjects,’ these being either environmental or artifacts
which resist prevailing critical analysis.”88
Burnham’s perspective on the art and technology nexus in the
1960s was wide ranging. He could deliver the most withering critiques
of its spectacles: as noted in the introduction, he wrote punishing essays
on E.A.T.’s infamous 9 Evenings and LACMA’s A&T program. In his role
as a curator, his conception of what constituted the relationship
between art and technology was expansive, in large part due to the
systems perspective he was mining in the field of contemporary art. In
writing on the Software exhibit, for example, he stressed that he made
no distinction between art and nonart and that the show “did not
represent a synthesis of art and advanced information-processing tech-
nology.”89 “In just the past few years,” he wrote in the catalog of that
exhibition,

[t]he movement away from art objects has been precipitated by concerns
within natural and man-made systems, processes, ecological relation-
ships, and the philosophical-linguistic involvement of Conceptual Art.
All of these interests deal with art which is transactional; they deal with
underlying structures of communication or energy exchange instead of
abstract appearances. For this reason, most of Software is aniconic; its
images are usually secondary or instructional.90

Burnham’s statement attests to the expansive and largely non-

representational character of systems theory, given form in the con-
temporary work of art’s “transactional” dynamics. Its communicative or
ecological dimensions effectively render the work “aniconic”: without
iconic reference or ostensible sign character and without the traditional
“look” of painting or sculpture. Hence the checklist for Software might
feature the usual batch of now-old-then-new-media experiments.
Sonia Sheridan’s Interactive Paper Systems, for instance, involved a
 73 3M Thermofax machine—a primitive photocopier—exploited for pur-
poses that might now seem like little more than water cooler high jinks.
Participants could make prints of their hands and face through use of
the machine.
It was this kind of art that earned exhibitions such as Software
their hi-tech pedigree; and undoubtedly such then-spectacular effects
were what drew the lion’s share of attention in the popular press. But
Burnham’s thesis also accommodated Douglas Huebler’s “Variable
Pieces”—conceptual propositions that highlighted the temporal and
spatial organization of its participants through linguistic documentation
and the affectless look of newspaper photography, pieces that, in other
words, bore little if no resemblance to the iconography of “tech” art.
Should anyone miss the point, Huebler’s catalog statement implicitly
brought home the attractions of systems theory for a conceptual artist,
emphasizing the autopoietic nature of the work, its interconnections to
extra-aesthetic systems (namely, the perceiving subject) and the object’s
decidedly nonaesthetic quality. Huebler put it thus: “Reality does not lie
beneath the surface of appearance. Everything looks like something:
everything is accessible to the purposes of art. No thing possesses
special status in the world: nor does man.”91
“No thing possesses special status in the world.” What statement
could be at a greater remove from the Friedian mandate of presentness,
to say little of a work of art that propelled conviction? Clearly, for
Huebler, there is no singular thing that can inspire conviction, achieve
presentness; and the “Variable Pieces” dramatize this sensibility in their
decisive projection of the spatiotemporal coordinates of the artist and
audience. Staged in the context of Software, Huebler’s statement under-
scores the peculiar equivalence that obtains between bodies in systems
discourse, a nonhierarchical relationship.
For Burnham’s larger reading of contemporary art, that equi-
valence between bodies was also at work in the “anthropomorphic”
tendencies attributed to modern sculpture. Anthropomorphizing art
signaled the relationship between humans as organized complexities
and other systems. In part, Beyond Modern Sculpture outlines an
CHAPTER 1 uncanny narrative of modern sculpture’s history as progressively
PRESENTNESS IS GRACE anthropomorphic. Including automata, kinetic art, the new field of
“cyborg,” and robot art, it points generally toward the potential meet-
ing of art and artificial intelligence. Yet though Burnham identified
work that literally moved, aped the human body’s range of motion, 74
he was just as likely to describe nonobjective, static work as satisfying
these system-based principles. Following both the Greenbergian and
Friedian critique of presence within the new sculpture of the sixties—
if to radically different purposes—Burnham too saw analogues to the
anthropomorphic within minimalism. And so “Art and Objecthood,”
which had only appeared a short time before the publication of Beyond
Modern Sculpture, served less as critique of such work than a means to
diagnose its anthropomorphizing logic, providing a new vocabulary for
such tendencies as they found their articulation in systems discourse.
Citing Fried within the body of his text, Burnham wrote,

Since the creation of the first nonobjective and Constructivist sculptures

in the early part of the twentieth century . . . [a]rtists have consistently
denied the anthropomorphic and mimetic content of their works. Each
successive generation of non-objective (or to use the most recent term:
‘literalist’) sculptors has accused the previous generation of anthropo-
morphism. Even the present generation of Object sculptors do not
escape this charge. (Fried, Summer, 1967, p. 19)92

There was, however, more to Burnham’s attraction to the Friedian

argument than the notion that minimalism was anthropomorphic, a
system analogous to the human body. From Burnham’s perspective,
Fried’s reading (and formalism more generally) itself paved the way
for a systems-based account of the arts. It did so through taking the
ideational out of the analysis of works of art, deemphasizing content,
theme, and expression for structure, pattern, and organization. This is,
to borrow Harold Bloom’s formulation, a strong misreading if ever there
was one: Burnham inverted Fried’s stake in “objecthood” in the service
of his stake in systems theory. Fried could only be horrified by the
prospect. But the misreading is a productive one as well, as it claims
turn around the matter of temporality. A passage is worth citing at
length to understand the train of Burnham’s thought:

It is the peculiarly blind quality of historical change that we only grasp

the nature of a political or cultural era after it has reached and passed
its apogee of influence. Certainly the materialist properties of modernist
sculpture have been evident to the thoughtful observer for more than
 75 half a century. Yet the total awareness of what formalism implies has
only been recently encapsulated into a single term “objecthood” by
the critic Michael Fried. As the masks of idealism have dropped from
sculpture, the process of inverse transusbstantiation completes itself:
sculpture is no longer sculpture, but mechanistically an object composed
of inanimate material. Still, if we are to obtain aesthetic and spiritual
insight from contemporary sculpture, it must be achieved within the
context of objecthood. Fried responds that sculpture must resist
becoming theater in order to remain an independent art. Yet it is more
probable that the acknowledged theatricality of present modes of static
sculpture are preparatory steps toward the acceptance of a systems
perspective.93

Not only did formalist criticism prompt new ways of engaging

the work of art’s medium, a medium that, in the context of Burnham’s
analysis, prefigures the very logic of that which would effectively over-
take it. Rather, its self-reflective mode opened onto a self-generative
logic: the recursive logic of autopoiesis. Burnham articulated the closing
gap between artistic modes of production and the work of art’s own
self-reproduction:

They are theatrical not only in their implicit phenomenalism, but

also in the sculptor’s mock aloofness and objectivity toward the process
of fabrication—which are, in fact, parodies of the industrialist “doing
business.” The shifting psychology of sculpture invention closely parallels
the inversion taking place between technics and man: as the craftsman
slowly withdraws his personal feelings from the constructed object, the
object gradually gains its independence from the human maker; in time it
seeks a life of its own through self-reproduction.94

When Burnham spoke to the “shifting psychology of sculpture

invention” and its close parallel to “the inversion taking place between
technics and man,” he was giving voice to systems discourse. The
timeliness of the minimalist object—its endlessness—permits that
CHAPTER 1 reading: for the new sculpture “in time seeks a life of its own through
PRESENTNESS IS GRACE self-production.” Automatism, in other words, squares off with the
autopoietic: ever expanding, ever generating, and so on.
 77
1.4 Hans Haacke, Grass Cube, 1967.
© 2003 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
CHAPTER 1
PRESENTNESS IS GRACE
METALOGICAL
Here, then, minimalist objecthood assumes a new contextual meaning:
Fried’s theatricality gets recoded as Burnham’s systematicity. Objects,
too, take on different readings. They are caught up in a dialogue
between minimalist criticism and systems discourse. To illustrate this
point, our final case study is Grass Cube (1967) a work by Hans Haacke
(figure 1.4). A Plexiglas box, a few square feet, is set directly on the
floor; on top rests a patch of grassy turf. It produces a strange visual
disconnect at first, prompts readings of nature/culture confrontations.
A cube is modeled in plastic, the medium of institutions, new tech-
nologies, new business, hygiene, and economy. It’s hard, dumb,
and empty that minimalist cube, quite literally vacuous. But with the
addition of grass, it becomes an especially strange thing, a strange
presence, even. That earthy earth, those unkempt blades—like a shock
of tousled hair—might appear to sully the chill formalism of the
minimalist box. Put in these terms, Haacke’s gesture seems a violation.
It’s as if he dragged the formal purity of that box through the dirt.
In fact I want to suggest that the meeting of such media is less
iconoclastic than systematic, less about confrontation than analogy.
And time is what links those seemingly disconnected media together.
In its stark simplicity, the cube tallies with the formal operations of
minimalism; in using grass, it appeals to the thematization of time in
process art or even the ideational principles of conceptual art. And that,
too, suggests one the fundamental laws of systems theory: it’s all part
of a piece. Haacke’s object plays upon the communicative contingency
of all of these various art “systems”—the extent to which they are
indiscrete, permeable, and open to one another. Systems analysis
provides recourse to that discussion and recasts Fried’s text as anti-
cipating such developments, however unintentionally. It forces him
into the dialogue.
But back to Haacke. Since 1963, Haacke had been producing art
indebted to his own reading of von Bertalanffy, a tendency Burnham
immediately seized upon in his work.95 “The working premise is to think
in terms of systems; the production of systems, the interference with
and the exposure of existing systems,” Haacke wrote about his
conceptual gesture. “Such an approach is concerned with the opera-
tional structure of organizations, in which the transfer of information,
energy and/or material occurs. Systems can be physical, biological or
social; they can be man-made, naturally existing, or a combination 78
of any of the above.”96
Haacke’s well known “real-time systems”—works from the end of
that decade and the early seventies—pay literal homage to his involve- 1.5 Hans Haacke, MoMA Visitor’s Poll,

ment with General System Theory and have likewise been considered 1970 © 2003 Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
with respect to Luhmann’s social systems.97 In his presentation of word
and image, photographic and textual documentation, graphs and
statistical data, Haacke’s art spoke to its environmental, that is,
institutional, underpinnings. So, for instance, his contribution to the
Museum of Modern Art’s 1970 exhibition Information could consist of
little more than a visitors’ poll: guests to the museum were solicited to
cast ballots into Plexi boxes on “a question referring to a current socio-
political issue.”98 (figure 1.5) The question, phrased as a double
negative, addressed the political demographics of MoMA’s audience
and implicated the work of art in an ever-widening circle of external
influences. In the neutral aesthetic of its sans-serif typography, Haacke’s
question to the poll read as follows: “Would the fact that Governor
Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon’s Indochina policy
be reason for you not to vote for him in November?”
The strategy would come to be known as “institutional critique,”
for it sought to highlight the range of institutional networks that ac-
corded both meaning and value to works of art. It is a reading that lines
up seamlessly with a systems approach to art making: it emphasizes the
audience’s (or observer’s) role in the construction of the work of art,
how the audience brings information to its production and how the
object changes with the input of their perceptions as information.99 And
this is presented by Haacke as a democratic process, a social process—
of casting ballots in an empty (perhaps minimalist?) box. Thus art is
understood as a social system—social in the sense in which it literally
internalizes the perceptions its audience brings to it and self-organizing
in the sense described by second-order cybernetics. Far more
reductively, Haacke would come to be known as a “political” artist:
political in thematizing such issues as the “subject” of his practice.
His systems approach, though, is as irreducible to the matter of content
as it is to the matter of form. For Grass Cube is necessarily expansive in
that regard, and it achieves its expansiveness, paradoxically, through the
brilliant economy of the minimalist cube. Produced within a year of
Larry Bell’s Memories of Mike (1966–67)—the Plexiglas box that graced
the cover of Artforum’s special sculpture issue—Grass Cube does not 80
so much parody the formal vocabulary of minimalism as it uncovers
its recursive impulses. It fulfills the Friedian critique of time and
theatricality by turning the cube’s “presence” into something literally
alive. If the minimalist box threatened to spill over into the real space
and time of its beholders as theatrical, Haacke allegorizes those terms
in stressing the environmental dimensions that underwrites that
relationship. A piece of sod, some grass make plain the work’s
embeddedness in that environment. Its life depends on that environ-
ment and the various bodies that support it. Simply put, it grows. It
expands into its surround.
And what of that relationship to its surround? Benjamin Buchloh
has written of the semiotics of the square and its “stereometric rotation”
as a cube within the conceptual art of the mid-sixties. It was then that
LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner, Robert Barry, and Robert Morris produced so
many squares to reckon with. This was a moment, as Buchloh describes
it, when “a rigorous self-reflexiveness was bent on examining the
traditional boundaries of modernist sculptural objects to the extent that
a phenomenological reflection on viewing space was insistent on re-
incorporating architectural parameters into the conception of painting
and sculpture.”100 The cube would play a central role in that exploration,
reflexively signaling the spatial coordinates of its environment. The
white cube of the gallery would contain yet another cube within, thus
nesting within its interior space a demonstration of its own organiza-
tional complexity. Point to point and plane to plane, the boxes would
line up. Like the girl on the Morton salt box, her image ever collapsing
into itself as a mise en abyme, Buchloh describes such operations
through the structural mechanics of tautology. Grass Cube is such a
tautology, but it goes even further than that. Not only does it reflect
upon its environment as a transparent box; it seems to mediate a dia-
logue between minimalist criticism and systems discourse, a mediation
on the self-productive and temporal character of medium itself.
Not only a tautology, then, but something which admits to its
recursive temporality: this structure is akin to what Bateson has called a
“metalogue”—a dialogue on a dialogue.101 Introducing the first section
of his influential volume of collected essays, Steps to an Ecology of Mind,
Bateson described a metalogue as “a conversation about some
problematic subject. This conversation should be such that not only do
 81 the participants discuss the problem but the structure of the con-
versation as a whole is also relevant to the same subject.” Grass Cube
is metalogical. It’s a self-generating dialogue about self-generation:
about the recursive, autopoietic relationship between media and the
environment. Grass and Plexi are two sides of the same coin. They are
parties to a conversation about time and media through the work’s
expansion in the gallery.
It is, perhaps, some version of this metalogical sensibility that
converges most significantly with Friedian theatricality, that shuddering
expansion ever outward, that endless presence in time. For that
dialogue might devolve into inexhaustible chatter, might resonate and
echo if never to resolve itself—a kind of no exit to history that some
might damn with faint praise as postmodern.102 We’ll get to this question
in due course, but for now the legacy of Friedian presentness will haunt
our discussion on time and technology in the art of the 1960s, no
matter how distant from the minimalism he so criticized or the modern-
ist works he so respected. Chronophobic for some, liberatory for others,
the stakes will be high indeed. Grace may not be forthcoming after all,
for redemption is hardly possible without an end.
Begin the begin.

CHAPTER 1
PRESENTNESS IS GRACE
 PART II
ALLEGORIES OF KINESIS
CHAPTER 2
STUDY FOR AN END OF THE WORLD

Rien est plus inepte qu’une horloge.

—Jean Tinguely1
ENDS
“1, 2, 3, 4, 5 . . .” On the evening of April 6, 1962, the NBC broadcast of
David Brinkley’s Journal opens to an inauspicious soundtrack. In a
European accent of ambiguous national origin, a man counts out his ac-
tivity with the slow and measured pace of a metronome. As if to grant
some authority to the ritual taking place, his tone is incantatory—
“1, 2, 3, 4, 5 . . .”—broken now and again by some off-camera
mumbling. The ritual itself, however, betrays the seriousness of his
inflections. For there, in the midst of the Nevada desert, the Swiss artist
Jean Tinguely is busy at work. About an hour away from the radical
excesses of Las Vegas, and even closer to the wastelands of atomic bomb
test sites, he has set himself to the most ridiculous task. He is collecting
junk (figure 2.1).
Something was afoot. It had to be for a television crew to follow
Tinguely into the middle of nowhere, a landscape strewn with car parts
and toys and old plumbing, so much spent mechanica. Preparations
were at hand for the artist’s vision of the “End of the World” (to be more
precise, his Study for an End of the World, No. 2), and for both art-world
cognoscenti and followers of popular culture alike, the occasion could
only signal a “Major Television Event.” Since the late fifties, Tinguely
had been known as one of the most infamous artists in both Europe and
the United States, at once reviled and acclaimed in the popular media
for his startling kinetic objects. These were noisy, erratic, mechanized
works, assembled from scraps of metal and wire, pieces of junk, springs,
the occasional feather. Some of them—especially comic in their frenzied
paroxysms—spat out abstract drawings for the cost of a few cents.
Others led short, pathetic lives only to go up in smoke in large-scale
performances. One event staged outside Copenhagen in 1961, for
 87
2.1 Jean Tinguely, still from Study for
an End of the World, No. 2, 1962.
© 2003 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York /ADAGP (Société des
Auteurs Dams les Artes Graphiques
et Plastiques), Paris.
Copyright NBC News. Archive.
CHAPTER 2
STUDY FOR AN END OF THE WORLD
example, witnessed Tinguely set a group of his swaggering, caco-
phonous automata ablaze as his “first” study for the End of the World.
This time, however, would be the most spectacular, perhaps because
the most fatal. This time, the work would be documented by David
Brinkley’s popular telecast so that the artist’s peculiar, or better put,
comic message of destruction could be beamed into living rooms all
across America.
“Fantastic, that’s great . . . that’s what Americans do.” Styled as
an archaeologist amidst the killing fields of consumption, Tinguely
begins hoarding trash while his partner, the American-raised artist Niki
de Saint-Phalle, surveys the scene from behind the wheel of a pickup
truck. “Formidable,” she exclaims at the sight of a blue toy automobile,
a miniaturized complement to the vehicle she occupies. Brinkley then
narrates Tinguely’s activity in mock-serious tones (figure 2.2). “He
found a square mile of junked automobiles, toys, tin cans,” he states
archly. “He finds beauty in these things because they are the refuse of
our age, used, lived with and discarded . . . symbols of our prosperity
and materialism.”2 The message is grave, serious in its testimony against
American culture, but the journalist can barely mask his skepticism
toward the artist. His words resound with a smirk.
This skepticism haunts the visual presentation of the scene as
well. An event as cataclysmic as the End would seem to demand an
appropriately mordant backdrop; and the parched, almost Biblical
terrain of the desert might appear to fit the bill nicely. But for all the
landscape’s stark brutality—and for all the violent associations the site
brings—the image of the artist at work unfolds with the eye-popping
crispness of a cartoon.3 Colors are pure Pop, a little too confident in
their blinding intensity. The sky is a postcard blue, the pickup truck
saturated like a paint chip. Even the eyes of Saint-Phalle—incessantly
referred to in the American press as “Tinguely’s pretty young assist-
ant”—are as crystalline in their clarity as Technicolor. Ambling across
the landscape in a bright orange shirt, Tinguely himself appears a
laughable cliché of the cowboy artist and perhaps this was to the point.
Out in the heart of the American West, the renegade vision he was
about to stage would assume both mythic and comic proportions.
We will have to stay tuned for the conclusion of this event, but for
now, one last exchange will do before the camera cuts to another locale.
Sifting through the debris, Tinguely stumbles across an especially
 89 pathetic object, which he waves proudly like a trophy. An old doll—one
leg missing, its remaining limbs splayed, its head lost to the desert—
is offered to Saint-Phalle as a kind of final, ridiculous sacrifice.
2.2 Jean Tinguely, still from Study for
an End of the World, No. 2, 1962. “Nikki . . . look . . . the ‘End of the World!’” he calls out in accented
© 2003 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
English.
New York /ADAGP, Paris. Copyright NBC
“Boom,” she replies flatly, and with a smile.
News. Archive. Image of David Brinkley
courtesy Estate of David Brinkley.

WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS

And with that smile, at once sly, knowing, and ironic, begins an inves-
tigation into the paradoxical nature of Tinguely’s endeavor: its comical
seriousness; its made-for-television artiness; its sense of humor coupled
with its deeper ambivalences; and the social and technological issues of
the period it both purposefully and inadvertently dramatizes. For what
would it mean for an artist of the early sixties to perform a Study for an
End of the World, No. 2 on American television? What would such an
event suggest for a kinetic artist of European descent in particular? And
what of the place of kinetic art in the sixties in general, not to mention
its longer history within the twentieth century as the machine age art
form par excellence?
Played out for the benefit of an U.S. television audience, and ac-
companied by a press corps at once amused and outraged by Tinguely’s
actions, Study for an End of the World, No. 2 might appear, at a distance,
to be an episode in studied self-promotion: the artist at the cusp of his
“fifteen minutes of celebrity.” This was a moment roughly contempor-
aneous with Warhol’s ruminations on fame and popular culture after all;
and the press had already mounted their attacks against Tinguely as a
ludicrous emissary in European avant-gardism, a huckster, or an art-
world sloganeer.4 So what better forum for the artist than to broadcast
his work on American television? What more efficient way to pull the
wool over the public’s eyes than on a show prefiguring the “info-
tainment” phenomenon of a few decades later?
CHAPTER 2 There is much truth to claims about Tinguely’s showmanship—
STUDY FOR AN END OF THE WORLD claims that will be confronted in this chapter—but it is still too easy
a read to accommodate a reception as dense and various as his, not
to mention the larger history of postwar kinetic art to which his work
belongs. The reading is too flat for a character whose contours were 90
so wildly uneven, and too stabilizing for an art that militated noisily
against the static. Tinguely’s work and its criticism remain an art his-
torically undecidable affair, whatever its apocalyptic pretensions. Yet
in this undecidability lies my argument, which underscores something
of the historical unknowing of the period, a moment when the social
and technological worlds of the United States and Europe were at a
peculiar turning point, but to what end? Here we could claim that this
undecidability speaks not to the End of the world—the inexorability of
the End as chiliastic or as catastrophic in its design as the Bomb—but
an end, as Tinguely chose to call his Las Vegas event. His work revels in
the possibility of not one but multiple ends and therefore multiple
worlds. By implication, he opens onto the beginning of worlds that are
indissociable in the late fifties and sixties through the temporal
conditions that serve as the connective tissue between each.
Now the notion of “world” takes on deep resonance for larger
considerations on art, time, and technology within late modernity, for
it is a cornerstone of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger
wrote of worlds on several occasions, beginning with Being and Time
(1927) and his lecture of 1935 “The Origin of the Work of Art”; and
though he may seem a provocative figure to recruit for an analysis of
kinetic art, it is his take on “world” in the postwar era that renders his
position so critical. Though that trope in his thinking the work of art
confronts the logic of time and technology. Because for Heidegger,
world is not to be understood as merely a collection of tangible things
or a physical environment to be inhabited, sourced, mined, and
enframed. World, rather, is the intricate net of our everyday activities—
our dealings, our use of language—and how we are enmeshed in a
series of meaningful relationships with things and beings.5 As one com-
mentator put it, “the concept of world first means the how of the beings
taken as a whole,”6 stressing the process-oriented or even performative
dimension of world. In his earlier work, Heidegger was particularly
interested in world’s relationship to his formulation of Dasein—the
particular existence that belongs to us as beings in time, beings oriented
toward our own finitude. And it is precisely when part of that world
ends or breaks down that the connections and processes that constitute
world are made wholly obvious to us. Indeed we tend to take world for
granted as we move within it, as if its operations were invisible.
 91 In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger regarded art as
opening up such a world. Art reveals “the unity of those paths and re-
lations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and
disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human
beings.”7 His famous (or rather, infamous) example is that of the Greek
temple: the temple discloses a world that was not there before it. With-
out the temple bringing forth the landscape, he argued, the landscape
wouldn’t exist; nor would the practices and relationships established in
and around the temple as a work of art.
Heidegger’s discussion on the artwork as world dovetails with his
larger critique of technological reason. To follow the thinker, world is
increasingly displaced by objects of quasi-scientific description or
technocratic rationality within modernity; for him, the technological
attitude is the very foundation of modern consciousness. As opposed
to a work of art that opens onto a world—let things be, to use his
jargon—technological thinking is a dangerous, calculative kind of
reasoning, one that saw all being as “standing reserve”: something to
control, consume, enframe (Gestell). Heidegger wrote especially
vehement polemics on information processing and cybernetics in the
postwar era, which represented for him the logical terminus of the
West’s technological rationality. As he put it in the later essay “The End
of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (1966),

No prophecy is necessary to recognize that the sciences now establishing

themselves will soon be determined by the new fundamental science
which is called cyberneticism. . . . [I]t is the theory of the steering of the
possible planning and arranging of human labor. Cybernetics transforms
language into an exchange of news. The arts become regulated
regulating instruments of information.8

This Heideggerian précis stresses the notion of the work of art

CHAPTER 2
STUDY FOR AN END OF THE WORLD
as a world: its resonance as both an opening and a process, a “how”
rather than a what, a “worlding” in time as opposed to an enframing
of a material thing in space. We might speculate on Tinguely’s worlds
as such a process, a kinetic process even, that discloses the relationship
between time and technology, and how art might become “regulated
regulating instruments of information,” to borrow Heidegger’s phrase.
A charting of Tinguely’s worlds, interconnected as if in a Venn diagram,
will be traced in the reception of his work. Those worlds might read 92
as follows:

1. An end of a world formerly supported by a Machine Age ideology,

now at the cusp of an automation revolution, one that offered both a
promise and a threat to traditional notions of labor and time.

2. An end of a world measured strictly by the compass of national

borders, now moving decisively toward new geopolitical reconfigur-
ations shaped by emerging communications media and postwar
America’s example. Although positioned at the historical crossroads
of Cold War politics, what this end anticipates, to borrow Jameson’s
précis on globalization, is “the sense of an immense enlargement of
world communication, as well as the horizon of a world market.”9

3. An end of a world annihilated in the moment it takes to push

a button. Or, to be more accurate, a world that has collective
knowledge of that possibility.

All of these worlds are virtually collapsed into one another, and
that collapse is more often than not accompanied by a certain con-
densation of time, both its withering and attenuation as inescapably
transient. That transience, however, is a historically material phe-
nomenon. Kinetic art, we shall see, would go far to make it literal.
It may seem a great deal to ask of Tinguely’s art, that it speak
to such matters of historical and conceptual weight. Yet when we treat
the Study against the backdrop of kinetic art in the late fifties through
mid-sixties, we gauge how this complex of historical issues returns
insistently in the works’ reception. Thus I also consider two bodies of
kinetic art that act as dialectical complements to Tinguely’s output:
the exercises in slowness offered by the Belgian artist Pol Bury and the
global propositions around movement, invisibility, and energy put forth
by various artists associated with the Signals group in London. Both
serve to rupture any notion of kinetic art as a seamless and unified
affair. None of the artists is American, an observation that will register
its importance shortly.
Finally, serious as such topics may be, they are leavened by the
laughter erupting from both artists and audience alike in the face of
 93 much kinetic work; or the surprise of the sheer visual pleasure granted
by its more elegant locutions. When Tinguely was not being hailed as
the savior of postwar European art, he was seen by many as an art-
world hustler, his work little more than bells and whistles and puffs
of smoke. That many critics saw his work as descending to whimsy
or curiosity or just plain silliness is not to be taken lightly, however.
Complaints of this sort demand a certain straight-faced scrutiny, as if
Tinguely’s ironies (or even gallows humor) contained a distorted image
of the world within them. If much of this art—Tinguely’s and others—
was greeted by the popular media as a joke, perhaps the joke was at
everyone’s expense. Historically speaking, that is.

KINETIC ART AND THE ART WORLD: PART I

CHAPTER 2
STUDY FOR AN END OF THE WORLD
An abbreviated history of postwar kinetic art leads us to the heart of
the problem for Tinguely, a problem that might be summarized as both
the speed and direction of history itself. I am concerned here with the
question of kinetic art’s regressiveness and forward motion, the con-
flicted glance it offers on its own aesthetic and social ambitions. This
conflictedness, organized around its scientific attitudes on the one hand,
and its reception as so much art-as-entertainment, on the other, alerts
us to a split history accompanying its reemergence following the war.
Admittedly, it first seems an exercise in irrelevance, the discussion
of such art today. For when we think of kinetic work, particularly as it is
encountered in the public sphere, more often than not we recall objects
that elicit a faint tinge of nostalgia, a futurist vision of the fifties and
sixties that no longer upholds its vanguard promise. Or perhaps we
conjure the image of something cold and corporate, a cube stationed
in a civic plaza, say, or those seemingly endless numbers of Alexander
Calderesque constructions that don’t quite approximate the master’s
sense of tension and balance. In all instances, generalized as they are,
the viewer is struck by precisely how inanimate and stiff such objects
appear, the very antithesis of kinetic. How stilted and mannered.
Dead even.
Such associations make it difficult to imagine the excitement that
greeted kinetic work in the postwar era; how radical this work was
considered by many; and its currency as a sixties phenomenon as new,
 94

2.3 Len Lye, Universe, 1963–76.

Courtesy the artist, Plymouth,
New Zealand.

as fashionable, and as experimental as any other form of popular

culture. (The “kinetic kraze,” Time magazine breathlessly called it, as
if reporting on the latest dance steps.) Indeed, from the mid–1950s to
roughly the end of the following decade, countless works of art moved.
They moved in disparate and sometimes disorienting ways. Almost all
of the work was abstract and largely nonrepresentational—separating
it from the larger field of automata—but the quality of the movement
itself exhibited dramatic range.10 Some of the movement was actual.
Bolts of satin rippled and seethed like waves, billowed up by the low-
tech support of a fan. Strips of metal shuddered and bowed, producing
their own quavering and resonant music (figure 2.3). Surfaces seethed
and receded as if caught in mid-breath. Objects whirred above magnetic
fields (figure 2.4). Cybernetic towers twinkled and beeped. If silence
once communicated its gravitas upon the museum and the gallery, now
the clatter of gears and the hum of electricity represented a wholly
different turn.
Another kind of movement presented by and within kinetic art
was virtual.11 In these instances, the literal movement of the spectator
animated the virtual (and internal) dynamics of the work, seeming to
 95
2.4 Takis, Ballet magnétique, 1961.
Courtesy Private Collection, London.
CHAPTER 2
STUDY FOR AN END OF THE WORLD
alter the space of the object as one passed around or before it. Some
work demanded an even more collaborative partnership if it was to
exist at all. A limp Mobius strip set on a table, for instance, only sprang
to life as it was coupled with the play of curious hands (figure 2.5). In
both actual and virtual movement in kinetic art, motion and time
signaled an acute, perhaps less hierarchical relationship to its audience
than traditional sculpture or painting, either set at a distance from its
viewer on its pedestal or colonized and neatly sealed up within its
frame. Kinetic art, by contrast, seemed to crystallize the phenomenal
experience of viewing art as material and embodied, as contingent and
site-determined. It did so through its explicit address to the timeliness of
the audience, whose encounter with the work mirrored its ever-
fluctuating configurations.
Not for nothing did the popular press christen this the “Movement
movement,” although there was clearly no single leader, manifesto, nor
aesthetic to establish a set program for the work. Even so, for a moment
in the two decades following the war, it seemed that few artists—in
countries ranging from Greece to Czechoslovakia, Taiwan to Ven-
ezuela—could escape kinetic art’s almost gravitational pull. Kinetic
art appeared to offer a vision apart from the seeming hegemony of the
New York art world, occupied as that world was with the continuing
legacy of Abstract Expression or the emerging phenomena of Pop and
minimalism. In contrast to the relatively scattered number of individuals
 96

2.5 Lygia Clark, Dialogue of Hands,

1966. Photo: Courtesy Cultural
Association “The World of Lygia Clark.”
Credit: Family Clark’s Collection.

working “kinetically” in the United States, a high concentration of this

work in Europe took shape as a kind of group activity, as much directed
to the ethos of the laboratory as to the studio.
The implications of this split between American artists and non-
Americans working in a kinetic idiom will be taken up shortly. For the
moment, tracing a brief genealogy of postwar kinetic practices yields
a relatively consistent history that rests with two European exhibitions.
The first, dating from April 1955, was hosted at the Galerie Denise René
in Paris and was simply entitled Le Mouvement, a pun on both the
motion of the work in question and an attempt at conveying the art
historical coherence of the artists grouped together. Organized by the
Hungarian painter Victor Vasarely and René, its roster of eight artists
(Tinguely, Yaacov Agam, Bury, Calder, Marcel Duchamp, Robert
Jacobsen, Jesus Rafael Soto, Vasarely ) furnished an international
and cross-generational perspective on movement in abstract art. Its
 97 organization was less bent on establishing a strict set of aesthetic rules
than acknowledging a broad continuum between all types of kinetic
practice in the twentieth century. There is little doubt that the presence
of Duchamp and Calder helped legitimize the cluster of younger artists
who had, for the most part, shown in Paris for a year of two at most: all
were born a good generation or more apart from the “grand père” figure
Duchamp came to represent.12 Vasarely himself contributed a quasi-
manifesto to the accompanying catalog, referred to by some as the
“Manifesto jaune” for the bright yellow paper on which it was printed.13
Relying heavily upon scientific jargon to stake his claim (in subsequent
years he would lean on the discourse of optics in particular), he
betrayed a marked confidence about the uses to which science could
be put for art.14 His is a language of a certain bravura—an insistence
upon the promise of technology—but it is also the outworn rhetoric of
an avant-garde barely resuscitated one short decade after the war.
Such talk persisted within discussions of kinetic art all the
same, which is not to say that many of its earliest practitioners had a
sophisticated grasp of physics or engineering. Nonetheless, allusions to
the fourth dimension served as code for the problems of time and
movement within kinetic art; while whole paeans to speed appeared in
the press as the raison d’etre of the work.15 As one French critic put it in
his review of René’s show, “La vitesse est la caractéristique de notre
siècle,” suggesting that kinetic art was perhaps the most relevant form
of contemporary art making by extension.16 Regarding the work as a
kind of weather vane for postwar scientific tendencies, both critics and
practitioners suggested it had picked up technological currents yet to be
fully expressed in everyday life. Tinguely himself remarked, “I’m trying
to meet the scientist a little beyond the frontier of the possible, even to
get there a little ahead of him. That’s the world I’m trying to live in.”17
“As we push deeper into the twentieth century,” the art critic Katherine
Kuh wrote, “what recently resembled haphazard art symptoms are now
taking shape to predict the future.”18 “Kineticists are space-age artists,”
the San Francisco-based artist Fletcher Benton also reported in the mid-
sixties. “[W]e’re the pioneers, but think of the artists growing up today.
CHAPTER 2 They will know about computers, programming and electronics. Think
STUDY FOR AN END OF THE WORLD of what they’ll be able to do. Buck Rogers is coming to life.”19
Benton concluded his remarks on the work’s vanguard status
with a suggestive reference: an allusion to a sci-fi, comic-book hero.
This tongue-in-cheek aside would seem to undermine the case he was 98
building for the seriousness of kinetic art, namely, its self-appointed
allegiance with science and its implicit gesture of technological fore-
casting. But he was by no means at odds with other contemporary 2.6 Jean Tinguely, Cyclo-Graveur, 1961.

readings around the work. For also at stake in kinetic art’s reception was © 2003 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York /ADAGP, Paris. Photo Lennart
the sense of entertainment, play, and humor that it engendered in many
Olsson.
of its viewers, as if its objects were gigantic, overwrought toys and its
exhibition spaces were playgrounds for a new kind of art audience. “The
public, so long shut out of the private worlds of the abstract painters,”
one offered, “is now being urged by kinetic artists to come in and have
a rattling good time.”20
To be sure, after the success of René’s relatively modest offering,
the group shows of kinetic art became increasingly more ambitious and
sensational. Some exhibitions had the air of traveling carnivals, show-
casing their spectacular effects to a number of institutions across
Europe. By 1961, when K. G. Pontus Hulten staged his massive exhibi-
tion Art in Movement (also known as Bewogen Beweging) first at the
Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and then at the Moderna Museet in
Stockholm, where he served as director, the roster of eight artists in
Le Mouvement had expanded considerably to sixty figures from twenty
countries. It was a testament to the currency of the work that an
exhibition as grand in scale and as difficult to mount as Hulten’s also
traveled to the Louisiana Museum outside Copenhagen and finally the
Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris.21 Back then, as now, this could not have
been an easy undertaking. Things broke down time and again. Motors,
nuts, and bolts went missing.
Even still, it was an enormously popular affair, and how could it
not be? That kinetic art was the stuff of play is supported by the visual
record, which frequently turned around Tinguely’s work. One image
captures brilliantly the sense that this was so much art as entertain-
ment, but it also begs the question: Entertainment for whom? A
photograph taken from the opening of the exhibition at the Moderna
Museet stages an odd encounter between a proper haute-bourgeois
woman and a bicyclelike contraption by Tinguely known as the Cyclo-
Graveur (figure 2.6). In her veiled hat, neatly appointed dress suit,
and ladylike pumps, she wears a costume befitting a vernissage,
communicating in its details the marks of privilege, urbanity, Culture.
And yet there she is, astride the work of art. She is seated on high,
but ever precariously, as if her dignity were itself in the balance. Her 100
laughter—perhaps a bit nervous, certainly loud—seems to usher from
the corners of her mouth and the drop of her jaw, here stretched
cavernously, embarrassingly wide. The ridiculousness of the situation is
conveyed further through her efforts to pedal Tinguely’s object-going-
nowhere. Its multiple gears, wheels, and chains seem to defy any
attempts at a seamless passage, and her shoes, with their ornamental
heels and neat trimmings, could only signify a compromised athleticism.
Focusing our attention on this absurd detail, a young boy provides a
subtext to the event. His eyes are fixed on the bicycle’s mechanisms,
as if to avoid looking at its passenger. There is a certain tentativeness
to his interaction with the work—note how he leans forward to
investigate, but just barely—thus resisting the invitation the artist
has set into motion.
The image conveys a skewed message. In the most literal fashion,
it serves as an artistic emblematizing of Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens:
here is a person at play atop a work of art that has invited her to play, to
indulge in a space otherwise reserved for aesthetic contemplation. It
calls upon her to accept the work as a child would, releasing her from
any critical distance or any inhibitions about her experience of the
object. The woman seems to be enjoying herself completely, and why
shouldn’t she? The ring of her laughter reminds us of our presump-
tions about what works of art are supposed to do. Should we always
presume, for instance, that our art viewing be a serious, chin-stroking
affair, devoid of any playfulness? The photograph implicitly asks us to
shift our expectations of the object in question, just as it positions the
young boy near the center of the image as a metaphorical surrogate for
the kind of behavior that would have been expected of the woman. If
the picture registers a sense of surprise and then amusement, perhaps
it is because so much art of the period was lacking in both.
And yet the work’s sense of humor also stems, uneasily enough,
from the quality of its embarrassment. Our passenger is laughing and
delighting at her new-found toy, but we, in turn, might be laughing at
her. Something of a social disconnect is at play here, for there is no
doubt that this woman’s art world pretensions are a bit laughable,
clashing up against the strange object that has made her an unwitting
player in its spectacle. That the participant happens to be a woman
serves to feminize the reception of the object as nonserious and
 101 acritical. The object seems to revel in a complicitous kind of humor,
and we are made to bear uncomfortable witness to its joke.
Entertainment, then, acts a double-edged sword for reading
kinetic art, at once the droll material of New Yorker cartoons but
something a little more menacing as well, slightly sadistic even. Taken
together with the other pole of its general reception (kinetic art as
scientistic), a strikingly odd picture of its postwar history emerges,
seemingly divided between high seriousness and sheer goofiness,
daunting futuristic ambition, and infantalizing regression. Such a split
in the general perception of this work went far to support George
Rickey’s claim that “an artist who uses movement may behave like a
clown or a philosopher or a school teacher or a research scientist.”22 But
far from being merely pluralistic, this split also attests to a dialectical
turn with marked historical reverberations. Consider how both positions
coincide roughly with points on a developmental trajectory, one futur-
istic and forward looking, the other atavistic and primitivizing. Not
unlike the movement of many kinetic works themselves, there is a
temporal pull between these positions, a see-saw motion between
futurity and pastness. Pointing forward and backward simultaneously,
the movement betrays an uncertainty about the presentness of kinetic
art, perhaps the present tense in general. No clear balance is struck
in the present, but its opposite extremes coexist.
I would argue that these dialectical poles serve notice to a far
longer history of kinetic art—a doubled history—that appeals to the
clashing and embeddedness of worlds new and old, worlds that are
revisited and imagined by Tinguely’s example. Here, then, we need
focus our attention on an earlier narrative around kinetic art, as if the
clock were somehow turned backward, with the more recent postwar
work auguring its regression.

KINETIC ART AND THE ART WORLD: PART II

CHAPTER 2
STUDY FOR AN END OF THE WORLD
By now the reader is justified in wondering about the “prehistory” of
kinetic art glancingly acknowledged in my offhanded references to
Duchamp and Calder, not to mention my passing remarks on the
attempted “resuscitation” of the avant-garde. We’ve noted that curators
often invoked such historical figures, perhaps in the interest of art
history, perhaps also to legitimize their postwar “progeny” by estab- 102
lishing a virtual genealogy for the newer work. As such, the short
history of postwar kinetic art just described is only half of a story,
one that alerts us to the problems of history and time that mark
considerations of Tinguely’s project.
Certainly postwar kinetic art represented a peculiar revival of an
earlier art historical moment, a backward glance at the Machine Ages.23
No artist or critic could rightfully claim that the new kinetic art was
produced ex nihilo; and in the new writing on kinetic art a roll call
of its prewar predecessors was inevitably rehearsed. A short list of these
developments, repeated over and over again by writers and curators,
would read as follows: Italian Futurism awakens an interest in virtual
movement in 1908. Duchamp mounts a bicycle wheel on a stand in
1913, followed by his roto-reliefs in 1935. Vladimir Tatlin imagines his
Monument to the Third International in 1920. Naum Gabo motorizes a
rod to produce his Standing Wave the same year. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
constructs his Light-Space Modulator a decade later. Calder invents the
mobile around 1932. And there was no shortage of primary texts in
support of the visual evidence.
Yet neither a list of objects nor a batch of random quotations can
stand for history. Few artists defined themselves principally in terms of
kinetics; and movement seemed a secondary concern—perhaps even
epiphenomenon—to some of their larger aesthetic and conceptual
criteria. The breathless recitation of these developments by the postwar
critics was both historically pat and culturally totalizing, as if no
difference existed between a Duchamp and a Gabo or no aesthetic,
political, or theoretical positions separated the futurists from Tatlin.24
Still, the list has the benefit of demonstrating, in rhetorical fashion, the
extent to which these writers produced a certain image of the avant-
garde. If they recognized an inexorable relationship between prewar
figures and postwar kinetic art, perhaps it was because they naturalized
its history as linear and unbroken.
And yet this backward narrative, meant to furnish a seamless
continuum between prewar kinetic forms and postwar ones, remained
unquestioned as a historiographic phenomenon. Kinetic art seemed to
advance without interruption, with virtually no acknowledgment of the
world historical disaster of the war to say little of its implications for
industrial production, scientific endeavor, and technological progress.
 103 The war was treated as little more than an inconvenience for some of
these writers, a pause button in the greater evolution of kinetic art.
Critics appeared untroubled by the fact that the work seemed to carry
on in its implicit faith in machinic forms and the potential of science, in
spite of the Bomb and in spite of the Holocaust.25 Yet the reception of
Tinguely’s work, we shall see, allows us to interrogate kinetic art’s
business-as-usual attitude, disclosing the problem of worlds his work
would address, not to mention issues of temporality that postwar kinetic
art introduces more generally.26
Was there, then, a prewar history of kinetic art? Yes, in a manner
of speaking. Was it the one endlessly rehearsed in the countless books
and catalogs published on this work in the sixties. Probably not. “It’s the
art of our time,” proclaims Willem Sandberg, director of the Stedelijk
Museum in 1959.27 Clichés notwithstanding, the statement permits
some speculations on the work’s timeliness. Perhaps its backward and
forward glance spoke to a deeper structure within the culture, a prob-
lem, in short, of representing history.
One of the few critics to tackle this issue with any modicum of
seriousness was not an art historian at all but the social critic Alvin
Toffler. In his best-selling book of 1970, Future Shock, Toffler described
information in contemporary society as being a “kinetic image,” moving
with blinding speed in and out of consciousness. In hyperbolic, even
alarmist rhetoric, Toffler wrote of the “transience” of late twentieth-
century life as presented by equally ephemeral images. “Instant food,
instant communication and even instant cities”28 all underscored the
speed with which cultural information was reproduced, distributed,
internalized, and rendered obsolete in the sixties. And this was as true
for art as it was anything else. “In the past,” Toffler argued, “one rarely
saw a fundamental change in an art within a man’s lifetime. Today the
pace of turnover in art is vision-blurring—the viewer scarcely has time
to ‘see’ a school develop, to learn its language, so to speak, before it
vanishes.”29
For Toffler, kinetic art in particular allegorized the mounting
acceleration of the art world and its movements. Kinetic art’s “raison
CHAPTER 2 d’être,” as he saw it, was transience itself. Like other artistic develop-
STUDY FOR AN END OF THE WORLD ments in the sixties (most notably the Happenings), it represented a
historical moment that could not quite keep its bearings straight—
could not quite determine its trajectory—because the moment itself
was rushing by so fast. Toffler echoed, in this sense, John Canaday’s 104
words on Tinguely a decade earlier, in which the critic sees the subject
of his art “the transient and inchoate nature of much contemporary
art.”30 Although Toffler emphasized the forward-looking motion of
kinetic art, he did not so much confirm the progressivist or scientistic
view of many kinetic artists as he spoke to the sense of historical
uncertainty it evokes:

Kinetic sculptures or constructions crawl, whistle, whine, swing, twitch,

rock or pulsate . . . arranging and rearranging themselves into evan-
escent patterns within a given, though sometimes concealed, framework.
Here the wiring and connections tend to be the least transient part of
the structure. . . . The intent of kinetic work . . . is to create maximum
variability and maximum transience. . . .
Thus we find artists from France, England, the United States,
Scotland, Sweden, Israel and elsewhere creating kinetic images. Their
creed is perhaps best expressed by Yaacov Agam, an Israeli kineticist,
who says: “We are diKerent from what we were three moments ago, and
in three minutes more, we will again be diKerent. . . . The image appears
and disappears, but nothing is retained.”31

Toffler underscored the international dimension of kinetic art.

As we shall see, his comments also suggest the global dimension of the
phenomenon of transience.
Toffler’s words would resonate with both Tinguely’s pronounce-
ments and his journalistic reception. Here we are confronted with an
art that appears to charge forward into the future with such gathering
velocity—and that analogizes its own movement to the speed of the
contemporary art world itself—that its sense of the present is severely,
perhaps fatally, compromised, its “worlds” rendered increasingly un-
stable. And yet transience, in and of itself, seems a mere symptom of a
larger historical undercurrent pulling at the edges of Toffler’s discourse.
That his writing has the ring of both the inevitable and apocalyptic
should sound warning bells to both reader and historian to slow down
a bit.32 His prognosis for the future demands a historical parsing of sorts,
a clearheaded perspective that enables the reader of Future Shock to
consider more fully her particular place within its network.
 105 And so too does this apply to Toffler’s reading of kinetic art, which,
suggestive as it may be, neither reflects upon the heady rush of its own
prose nor on the technological determinism that underwrites his
method. The sense of virtual transience projected on kinetic art, after
all, was born of deeply material conditions of postwar European and
American culture; and Toffler’s approach, described by one detractor as
“schlock sociology” is hardly historical in any scholarly sense. As we
move chronologically toward discussion of Tinguely’s Las Vegas Study,
beginning with his works known as the “Meta-matics,” we are now
better positioned to contend with the historical specificity of these
worlds and the progressively global phenomena of transience.

“AT TENTIONS: ROBOTS”

CHAPTER 2
STUDY FOR AN END OF THE WORLD
Let me return to a world articulated at the beginning of this chapter,
one at the cusp of an automation and media revolution. Tinguely’s art
of 1959, I want to argue, is caught up in a peculiar debate about shift-
ing technologies, namely, the relationship between mechanization and
automation in the postwar era: the historical confrontation between the
machine and the computer. But just as it is difficult to distinguish back-
ward and forward motion in kinetic art, so too does this world embed
itself in another previously described. For the reception of Tinguely’s
work also discloses a world in which the status of the European nation-
state was put under increasing pressure with the emergence of incipient
global technologies, more often than not linked to the cultural and
military prominence of postwar America’s example. I am suggesting that
an anxiety around what will subsequently be described as global tech-
nocracy is inchoate in the criticism of Tinguely’s art. His reception an-
ticipates at least two understandings of that ubiquitous, even amorphous
term globalization, one that hinges upon the marked Westernization of
the world, on the one hand, and the cultural and economic preeminence
of global communication media, on the other.33 Globalization is a word
we will use with some caution in this context: we cannot ignore the
desperate stakes at play in the Cold War politics of this moment. Yet
Tinguely’s example foreshadows many of the issues attending its
contemporary discussions nonetheless, revolving largely around the
technologies supporting the rise of postwar communications industries.
 In the late fifties, a few short years after his Paris debut, 106
Tinguely’s star was ascendant, his name synonymous with postwar
European avant-gardism in both its best and worst incarnations.34 In
March of 1959 Tinguely inaugurated one of the first in a series of events 2.7 Jean Tinguely, distributing the

that earned him the reputation as little more than a publicist to his own “Manifesto for Statics” over Düsseldorf,
March 1959. Credit: © 2003 Artists
cause. On the occasion of an exhibition in Düsseldorf, he hired an air-
Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP,
plane to fly over a neighboring suburb and cast out 150,000 handbills,
Paris. Photo Charles Wilp.
his “Manifesto for Statics” (figure 2.7). The gesture functioned in a
quasi site-specific way. The action of a Swiss artist dropping literature
over Germany carries with it patently militaristic associations: namely,
that of Americans and Allied forces leafleting occupied countries during
the war years and the Eastern Bloc countries that emerged in the Cold
War.35 That the distributor in question was Swiss—of politically
“neutral” background—does not so much disqualify these associations
as amplify its sense of psychological warfare through parody. None-
theless, the message delivered went beyond the iconography of military
strategy. It reads:

FOR STATICS
Everything moves continuously. Immobility does not exist. Don’t be
subject to the influence of out-of-date concepts of time. Forget hours,
seconds and minutes. Accept instability. LIVE IN TIME. BE STATIC—WITH
MOVEMENT. For a static of the present moment. Resist the anxious
fear to fix the instantaneous, to kill that which is living. Stop insisting
on “values” which cannot but break down. Stop evoking movement
and gesture. You are movement and gesture. Stop building cathedrals
and pyramids which are doomed to fall into ruin. Live in the present; live
once more in Time and by Time—for a wonderful and absolute reality.
March 195936

Tinguely’s is a reformulation of the classic Heraclitean dictum that

the only thing that remains constant is change.37 Unfortunately for the
artist, these words were to bear practical consequences. As reported by
Hulten, none of Tinguely’s flyers “actually landed on Düsseldorf,” for
“the currents of warm air . . . blew the leaflets far out into the surround-
ing countryside.”38 The manifesto, in other words, quite literally obeyed
its author in refusing to stay put—to be static.
 In spite of its outcome, the action dramatized the peculiar con- 108
vergence between the work of art, the spread of information, and the
question of time within Tinguely’s practice. We could say it allegorized
his message on time itself. The marriage between the two—the artist’s
use of media as a form of artistic labor coupled with his thinking on
temporality—may, in fact, place stress on a larger phenomenon
attending the historical reception of his work: information processing.
Following the Düsseldorf event, Tinguely’s art would progressively
address the speed with which information became a kind of “kinetic
image,” to borrow Toffler’s words. It was under the rubric of automation
that this discourse flourished.
In the postwar era, the term automation has been subject to
considerable debate, its implications, as well as its very definition,
achieving a weak consensus at best. And that failed consensus about
automation was organized largely around issues of labor and time.
The postwar use of the term itself has a decidedly American pedigree.
According to one author, it was popularized in the late fifties by a works
manager at the Ford Auto Plant in Detroit in order to dramatize a “scale
of technological change . . . so vast that (the word) ‘automatic’” was no
longer sufficient to describe it.39 Automation was fundamentally an issue
of time, both in terms of the historical change it represented and the
speed of production it offered. “In a rigorous and technical sense,” one
critic wrote,

[automation] should refer only to those forms of technological change

or mechanization which combine the elements of the computer, transfer
devices and automatic controls. The central idea is that mechanical or
chemical processes are directed, controlled and corrected within limits
automatically, that is, without further intervention once the system is
established.40

According to this definition, automation signals an acute synthesis

of mechanical processes—machine manufacture most notably—with
computer-based ones. It is in this sense that automation brings together
a Machine Age paradigm of production with the postwar emergence
of cybernetics. But the extent to which automation is wholly the product
of computer culture is a matter of degree. One British economist
 109 emphasizes the cybernetic dimension of automation at the expense of
the mechanical.

It is a concept through which a machine-system is caused to operate with

maximum egciency by means of adequate measurement, observation
and control of its behavior. . . . Automation in this true sense is brought
to full fruition only through exploitation of its three major elements,
communication, computation and control.41

Automation, as such, is “the exact opposite of mechanization.”

CHAPTER 2
STUDY FOR AN END OF THE WORLD
Taken together, these perspectives demonstrate that the two
components of production within automation are not readily dis-
associated technologically, historically, or socially: they cannot be
neatly historicized as “prewar” or “postwar” technologies, nor strictly
characterized as “machinic” or “digital.” The terms do not separate so
easily. To be sure, the belief that the Machine Age of the prewar era was
fully superceded by the so-called automatist (i.e., computer) era also
betrays a marked ideological perspective. It is to make claims for a
whole and complete transition from an industrial economy to a service
economy and, by extension, a radical shift in the character of labor that
attends that transition.42
Indeed, the strongest supporters of automation believed that
the new information technology would solve a variety of managerial
problems precisely by eliminating unnecessary labor. An automated or
cybernated system effectively cut costs, cut bureaucracy, and—most
important for issues of efficiency—cut time. One critic suggested that
the “the distinguishing quality” of the computer controlling an auto-
mated system is “a speed beyond human imagination, a speed measured
in nano-seconds. . . . A higher speed in computers means that their
complexity can increase very rapidly, and that they can more easily
engage in activities in what we call ‘real time.’”43 Here, the Taylorist
paradigm of scientific management, historically linked to the Machine
Age, accelerates to the point of its own nullity.
Yet for all its promise as a postwar model of efficiency, automa-
tion simultaneously represented the most dangerous threat to
traditional conceptions of labor, for some contributing to the pro-
gressive dehumanization of all social life. “For many people,” one writer
suggested, “automation is a terrifying word. It conjures up visions of
tyrannical machines reducing man to the status of a mere pusher of 110
buttons or watcher of dials.”44 Dystopian as such visions are, they also
found their practical counterpart in issues of policy, issues far from
obsolete within the current climate of labor politics. “The major
domestic challenge of the Sixties,” John F. Kennedy said at a press
conference on the theme of automation in February 15, 1962, “is to
maintain full employment at a time when automation is replacing men.
It is a fact that we have to find over a ten-year period 25,000 new jobs
every week to take care of those displaced by machines and those who
are coming into the labor market.”45 Kennedy’s tone was sanguine and
proactive, but for many others, automation augured the progressively
hostile confrontation between humanity and machine. Hence the figure
of the robot came to represent the greatest danger posed to the indi-
vidual worker, inspiring a kind of neo-Luddism ranging from the
sophisticated polemics of Jacques Ellul to the cruder prognoses of a
robotic takeover in the popular media.
These debates, we shall see, are imperative to the contemporary
understanding of Tinguely’s work and its reception, but they are
nowhere addressed in the artist’s historical appraisal. Marshall
McLuhan’s remarks on automation, however, shed light on the ways in
which the position of the artist and his labor is transformed in the age
of automation.

The future of work consists of earning a living in the automation age. . . .

This is a familiar pattern in electronic technology in general. It ends the
old dichotomies between culture and technology, between art and
commerce, and between work and leisure. . . . As the age of information
demands the simultaneous use of all our faculties, we discover that we
are most at leisure when we are most intensely involved, very much as
with the artists in all ages.46

McLuhan suggested that a virtual collapsing takes place in the nature

of work under automation: culture and technology, art and commerce,
work and leisure (and by extension, entertainment) become one and
the same. It is a lesson that could well hold true for Tinguely and his
particular take on the end of worlds. His work of 1959 was consistently
thought to emblemize the risks of automation and was linked further to
the suspicion that the artist was a publicity machine—an instrument of
 111 information—in his own right. Starting with the Düsseldorf event, it
would find its crescendo with his Las Vegas performance, Study for an
End of the World, No. 2.
The “Meta-matics,” as the artist called them, were begun around
1955–56 (figure 2.8). Tinguely made about thirty in 1959 and their
numbers were to exceed fifty in the next two years. The works sold—
and sold very well—for about $3,000 each at the beginning of the
sixties, and they caused something of a media frenzy in Düsseldorf,
Paris, and London. Described by one critic as “weirdly handsome
devices looking like a surrealistic cross between a block and tackle
and a dentist’s drill,”47 they were bent iron constructions shaped by
an oxyacetylene torch, ranging in size from a “table-top” model to
freestanding works of human scale. Painted a matte, uniform black,
they were typically composed of a series of rotating discs, tangled skeins
of metal, sharply drawn scythelike forms, and a miniaturized easel-like
component to which a sheaf of paper was secured. Among the most
important elements in the work were the small slot that accepted a
slug or coin that read “meta-matic: Tinguely” and an arm that held up
a marker pen to the attached paper. When a slug was inserted into the
machine, the Meta-matic erupted into spasmodic fits that caused the
pen to move, almost seismographically, across the paper’s surface.
The resulting “drawing” was really more of an intense, tremulous
scribble: concentrated, furious dashes of color delimited by the range
of motion the artist built into the machine in advance.
The Meta-matics came to be known as Tinguely’s “drawing
machines,” and they dramatized a critical paradox that runs throughout
his practice. These were objects meant to facilitate artistic “expression,”
but by the same time they were necessarily mechanical objects, denying
its user the freedom mythically alleged to guide the creative process.
The hundreds of flyers Tinguely distributed to advertise his shows (both
in Paris and London) implicitly call on this paradox. “LIBÉREZ-VOUS
EN CRÉANT VOUS-MÊME VOS OEUVRES D’ART avec les machines à
peindre ‘Meta-matics’ de Tinguely,” his flyer for the Galerie Iris Clert
reads. To free one’s self, by creating “do-it-yourself” works of art
CHAPTER 2 through a machine strikes a somewhat dissonant chord with the con-
STUDY FOR AN END OF THE WORLD temporary debates on automation, and it is here collapsed within
Tinguely’s own promotional rhetoric.
 113
2.8 Jean Tinguely, Meta-matic No. 9,
1958. Credit: The Museum of Fine Arts,
Houston; gift of D. and J. de Menil.
CHAPTER 2
STUDY FOR AN END OF THE WORLD
As it is, the phrase Meta-matics represents a neat contraction of
the words metaphysics and automatic, as though the automatic (and
by implication, automation) was a kind of modern metaphysics. Some
critics suggested that the Meta-matics were ironic commentaries on
European Art Informel or Tachisme, the kind of painting, with its thick
swabs of impasto and blunt facture, often dismissed as avant-garde
scribbling. Others made reference to the example of Duchamp’s “ready-
mades” as the model for Tinguely’s practice. Such allusions, however,
bore significance beyond their implicit stake in positioning Tinguely as
heir apparent to the master’s legacy. For Tinguely emphasized the
absurdist tradition of the machine that figured into his work; he was
adamant that the Meta-matics were deeply irrational in their move-
ment, employing, as he put it, “the functional use of chance.”48 Thus
Tinguely’s apparent indebtedness to the prewar iconography of the
machine centered less on its promise as a bearer of standardization than
in its capacity to invert such ideals. Speaking on the drawings produced
by the Meta-matics, he noted, “their work is always different since their
unusual controls and motors are constructed in such a way that they
cannot produce that dull repetitive action so typical of ordinary
machines.”49
The Meta-matics were not, then, the mere repetition of the
Machine Age art form par excellence, but in their convergence with
the question of artistic production, they suggested a more ambivalent
treatment of contemporary technology. Tinguely spoke to such thinking
in commenting upon the audience response to the work. “Most people
have the same reaction,” he said. “[W]hile the machine is going, they
smile, they think it’s ridiculous. Then it stops, and they begin to feel
doubt, a kind of anxiety.”50
This “kind of anxiety” undoubtedly stemmed from the equivo-
cating nature of the Meta-matics. Cleaving to the larger debates within
popular culture on the historical tensions between mechanization and
automation, they were themselves undecidable objects, at once seeming
to pay homage to Machine Age iconography and embodying the threat
of cybernated technology. Never mind that the Meta-matics themselves
were relatively simple machines, in no way subject to the complexities
of taping, feedback, or computer programming. Never mind that the
iconographic readings that followed were neither confirmed nor denied
by the artist, who seemed content to watch the journalistic frenzy play
out without comment. It was, rather, the appropriation of the artistic 114
process by the Meta-matic that caused many to cry the death of art by
automation. In one of a number of pictorials published in Paris-Match
on Tinguely’s debut at the Biennale in October of that year, one
journalist gravely intoned that “in our epoch of electronic machines
and jet airplanes, the arts themselves risk being automated. . . .
Admirers of abstract painting have learned, with stupefaction, that there
exists a machine which can, with the greatest ease, replace the creation
of the painter.”51
It was a theme that would run throughout the Tinguely criticism.
Jean-Jacques Leveque edited an entire dossier for the magazine Sens
Plastique inspired by the Meta-matics entitled “Procès de l’Automat-
isme.”52 In it, he gathered commentary by a number of French critics,
most of whom were dismissive of the whole project: “Tinguely n’existe
que dans la mesure où les imbéciles le font exister,” one wrote, “Quant
à l’automatisme, je préfère l’I.B.M.”53 The one contributor who did
not reject the work out of hand suggested that the very presence of
machinic technology in the Meta-matics sounded a cautionary note on
the dangers of automation in the present day. In his suggestively titled
piece “ATTENTIONS: ROBOTS,” he wrote: “A mon sens, Tinguely,
montant ses machines, a fait la oeuvre salutaire et saine de moraliste et
de la penseur, en disant à nombre de nous, peintres, par le truchement
de ses ressorts et de ses écrous: ‘ATTENTIONS: ROBOTS!’”54
The rhetoric of robots taking over labor (as well as that which
attempted to resist commodity fetishism altogether, the making of art)
was repeated incessantly in the Tinguely literature over the next few
months. The Meta-matics were “willing participants in the capitalist
economy, desirous of your participation in their creation” and were
therefore the “first primitives of the robot école.”55 They were the ideal
representation of automation’s condensation of time.56 One British critic
saw in Tinguely’s Meta-matics a constructive, or edifying, failure—a
failure to approximate the conditions of a genuinely seamless automa-
tion process. In this failure, he claimed, lies the work’s great success:
its capacity to ironize the process of automation.
Yet if this reading was in opposition to most commentary on the
Meta-matics, it shared with the French and German criticism a peculiar
fixation on the nationalist implications of Tinguely’s art. It seized upon
the artist’s heritage as offering a peculiar response to the contemporary
 115 status of the machine; for who had more authority than a Swiss-born
artist to counter such technology? As one writer remarked,

To comprehend Metamatics, one must consider Tinguely’s origin. His

native Switzerland—his father is a chocolate worker—is a country whose
standard of excellence is the delicate precision of the watch. The national
image is one of order and method. Thus if the artist is, as the maxim
goes, always in rebellion against society, then irregularity, or organized
chaos—is the natural goal of the Swiss artist.57

The statement borders on parody in its marshalling of Swiss stereotypes:

CHAPTER 2
STUDY FOR AN END OF THE WORLD
the exactitude and order (anality?) of the Swiss character, the precision
mechanics of their watches, the inevitable reference to chocolate.
Tinguely, to follow this view, would seem embroiled in a nationalistic
Oedipal struggle.
Yet there was little doubt he encouraged this reading: Tinguely
had no interest in being regarded as a provincial “Swiss” artist. Far more
pervasive than the “Swiss” interpretation of his art, however, was the
belief that the Meta-matics were somehow a little too American, even
for a European artist who may have implicitly been criticizing American
culture. The works seemed taken with, or perhaps tainted by, American
culture in myriad ways. They appeared as much engaged in a dialogue
with Abstract Expressionism as with Tachisme, as if the automated hand
of the Meta-matic offered a witty riposte to the automatist gesture of a
Jackson Pollock. And then there was the nagging sense that the Meta-
matics were publicity-making machines in and of themselves, smacking
of a particularly American fascination with specularity at the expense of
culture. More than a few European critics remarked that the greatest
market for Tinguely’s works was American, and their journalistic state-
ments could barely repress the vulgarity they attributed to the
collectors.58
Leave it to an American to spell out the connection explicitly. In a
Washington Post article entitled “The Fine Art of Press Agentry,” Waverly
Root bemoaned the relationship between art and publicity in the “era
of Dali” and centers on Tinguely’s Meta-matics as the most pointed
expression of this phenomenon. Noting the American vogue for
Tinguely’s work, Root began with a kind of allegory that Pablo Picasso
had invented a painting machine to produce his art, a story that flies in
the face of the master’s much vaunted genius. The story, of course, was 116
patently false (and started by no less than Picasso himself), but it
represented for the journalist a veritable “act of treason” to the loftier
goals of art making. The gesture was subsequently related to recent
developments associated with Tinguely. “It was bad enough to have
machines think,” the critic noted before observing that Tinguely acted
“as if the fantasies of artists could be programmed on an electric
computer.”59 The implication is that automation and publicity go hand
in hand, are handmaidens to the same cause. That American comedians
and humorists engaged the Meta-matics for publicity purposes doubt-
lessly fueled such speculations. When, for example, Danny Kaye posed
with one of Tinguely’s works at the Paris Biennale for a glossy French
pictorial, it was difficult not to draw a parallel between the show-biz
motivations of the Hollywood entertainer with the boisterous antics of
Tinguely’s anthropomorphic objects.60
But the Americanist (and, as we shall see, ultimately globalist)
reception of Tinguely’s work would bear graver associations for his art
that followed: the performances ending with their own self-immolation.
Before moving decisively toward such a world, we might slow down
and consider two “ruptures” into the narrative of kinetic art: the work of
the Belgian Bury and the proposals of the international group, Signals.
Both demonstrate, in their respective fashion, the historical tensions
animating Tinguely’s art—problems that reduced to the issues of time
and technology.

RUPTURE 1: SLOWNESS, OR THE DIALECTIC OF DURATION

To repeat: Tinguely’s practice as a kinetic artist cannot be viewed in
isolation, as a number of prominent artists active at the moment offered
equal but opposite views on transience. In so doing, they throw into
relief the web of concerns in Tinguely’s reception as at once general and
historical, while attending to aspects of that “transience” unexplored by
the Swiss artist’s proposals. Bury, for instance, sustained a critical en-
gagement with the notion of slowness, revealing attitudes about dura-
tion at some distance from Tinguely’s headlong rush into automation.
Bury’s work might appear to share little with the Swiss artist’s
clanking mechanica, although the two were friends and converged in
 117 their background in several ways. Both were born in the early twenties;
both participated, to varying degrees of involvement, in liberation
movements during the war years; both claimed strong allegiances to
Dada and surrealism; and both appeared in the seminal exhibitions of
kinetic art, Denise Rene’s Le Mouvement and Art in Movement at the
Stedelijk. Likewise, the literature surrounding the two tends to begin
with a kind of origin myth. Tinguely, to follow some biographers, took
on a slavish, excruciatingly dull job in a department store, whereupon
he tore down a wall clock and was summarily fired. Bury’s story is no
less ridiculous, centered on the space of the home and a paternal
obsession with mechanics. To follow the artist, then very young (about
four or five years of age, as he recalls), his father, a garagiste, had some-
how allowed his professional enthusiasms to spill over into his domestic
arrangements.61 Nuts, bolts, and carburetors claimed any free surfaces
to the point that part of a car appeared smack in the middle of an
upstairs bedroom. Bury’s father had begun assembling the vehicle
without considering the consequences, and sure enough, it soon came
to colonize the space.
However apocryphal, the story takes on an allegorical function for
understanding Bury’s practice. It acknowledges the presence of ma-
chinic forms in an everyday capacity, sees them as ubiquitous but not in
the spaces typically associated with them. Rather, it hides—or secrets—
them away only to reveal them at work in another context, perhaps
more insidiously than in their blatant appearance elsewhere. Bury may
have grown up in an environment in which machines took on a marked
importance, and he would later have firsthand experience with mech-
anics before devoting himself completely to producing art. (In 1939, for
instance, he spent time in a factory manufacturing, among the ultimate
signifiers of labor, the pick-hammer.) But the presence or representation
of technology would not serve as the end goal of the work.
Unlike Tinguely, for instance, Bury went to some lengths to ob-
scure the mechanics behind his art, and throughout his continuing
practice, the quality of movement his work registers is at some remove
from the frenetic gestures of a Meta-matic. Deeply influenced by Calder,
CHAPTER 2 he began producing abstract planar surfaces in 1954, which allowed
STUDY FOR AN END OF THE WORLD the spectator to rotate their various components in a semi-interactive
fashion. By the early sixties, Bury introduced the series known as the
Vibratiles and the Punctuations: in both he dispersed the trajectory of
movement along numerous units or parts with the use of a motor 118
hidden behind the work. In some works, dozens of balls migrated
slowly along invisible axes, whereas in others, multiple ambiguous
forms swelled and receded behind the pictorial surface. But whatever 2.9 Pol Bury, 1110 Dots Leaving a

his chosen forms—whether globes or cubes or fibrous threads or Hole: Punctuation, 1964. Collection
Städtisches Museum, Gelsenkirchen.
mirrored surfaces—his kinesis was not easily tracked. In contrast to the
chaos, speed, and noise associated with most kinetic art in the popular
press, Bury went to the opposite extreme. He slowed down the
movement of his works to an almost mordant stillness.
Consider a Punctuation from 1965 (figure 2.9). It sets a large
cluster of blackish nylon filaments, tipped with white, within the
darkened recess of a painted wooden surface. There they lie, without
apparent gestalt, around the mouth of the hole. But then slowly and
without notice, one of the stems registers a twitch. Or was it? Was this
movement incidental, the function, say, of a vibration in the gallery or a
current in the air? Some optical trick caused by an errant eyelash?
And then a few more twitches, although now it is hard to discern if the
movement stems from the same thread or if it is actual movement in
the first place. After all, the white bulbs of the threads, seen across the
black, produce their own kind of illusionistic flicker, like a constellation
traced against the darkened sky.
It continues this way, this ever-so-slight twitching and flickering,
not to mention the questioning by the spectator as to whether this
movement is happening at all. And then one detects a shift among the
filaments, gradual as it may be, a kind of collective falling of the threads
as if gravity were taking its course. Drawing nearer, the spectator is now
made auditor to Bury’s work. There is movement, and its effects are
heard as a mufled clenching of fibers. One begins to see this movement
too between the threads. Here and there, movement seems to touch off
corresponding movement. The vibration of one is met by the slight
bending of another. Now the movement is generalized throughout, but
it is not an organized movement. Watching the sequence of the object’s
small events over and over, taking close measure of its unfolding, one
realizes that no one overriding principle guides this kinesis. Bury has
built randomness into his work.
Still, critics were quick to point out the figurative and naturalizing
aspects of Bury’s art. They saw in his bending threads and lugubriously
paced balls the evocation of natural phenomena: grasses swaying,
anemones opening, creatures wending their slow and deliberate paths 120
along the ocean floor. His was like watching a time-lapse film of some
strange organism coming into blossom. Bury’s surrealizing tendencies
lend the work a somewhat uncanny character, but his anthropomorph-
ism, if one can call it that, is not the movement of automata.62 No robots
here. The artist grudgingly acknowledged the winking and humorous
allusions to the erotic in his art, particularly the Erectiles (a swelling
breast, phallic tumescence, etc.) but denied that they were conven-
tionally animated or anthropomorphic. If the work is figurative in any
sense, it lies in its appeal to the spectator’s kinesthetic identification
with the object’s movement. It is a movement not like that of an animal,
or human locomotion, but the sensation of an itch that travels—
seemingly without time—along the labyrinthine network of a nerve
path. One knows it’s there, that it is happening, but it resists easy
location.
Even still, Bury’s kinesis can be read. Crucially, however, it can be
read only as a matter of duration; for in order to grasp its full range of
motion, one needs to attend to it for fifteen minutes at the very least.
Not that these are exercises in museological patience: there is no
pedagogical motivation behind this work. Bury’s art demonstrates that
movement, however small or frenetic, can only be registered over time;
and it is in slowness (or rather, especially in slowness) that duration is
revealed to be discontinuous.
Bury’s movement is seen as random movement, and slowness is
that which ultimately lies behind it. Slowness was for the artist the
means to reveal time’s unevenness. In his 1964 essay “Time Dilated,”
a text that stands as the closest thing to a manifesto in his long career,
Bury wrote of the revelations intrinsic to an encounter with slowness.

Between the immobile and mobility, a certain quality of slowness reveals

to us a field of “actions” in which the eye is no longer able to trace an
object’s journeys.
Given a globe travelling from A to B, the memory we shall retain
of its point of departure will be a function of the slowness with which it
achieves its journey. . . . The journey from A to B, perceived in terms of
speed, is less a voyage than a confusion which can become so great that
A and B approach close enough to each other to become indistinguish-
 121 able. But perceived in terms of slowness A is no longer necessarily the
point of departure towards B. . . .
Thus, we can see that slowness not only multiplies duration but
also permits the eye following the globe to escape from its own
observer’s imagination and let itself be led by the imagination of the
travelling globe itself. The imagined voyage becomes imaginative.63

Slowness, then, facilitates a process of imagination impossible

for the observer in real time or accelerated time to grasp. Slowness
reveals the fissures and gaps within duration that may otherwise appear
without incident. Slowness was, for Bury, as much linked to mobility
as immobility—and the extent to which the existence of immobility
interrupted the apparently seamless flow of things. “Immobility does
exist,” Bury argued. “[I]t exists by contrast to movement as silences
exist in music. It would be better to speak of some immobilities. I
am searching for the point which exists between the moving and the
non-moving.”64
And slowness, for Bury’s supporters, also evoked a perspective on
time that resonated with the generalized anxiety about the present
shared by many commentators on kinetic art. On the occasion of Bury’s
second one-man show in New York, Eugène Ionesco interpreted the
artist’s movement in relation to the disquietude underlying all modern
experience:

We are surrounded by people who forget. They tell us: the universe
is the way it is, the way it’s made, the way it’s made once and forever, it
is stability itself, everything is secure. . . . But then comes Pol Bury to
disquiet us, to show us that this is not true. Society is not still, the pillars
over which the sky, the universe, the certainty rest are not solidly
rooted, and the earth itself is cracking. . . . For Pol Bury there is constant
anguish originating from the basic intuition that everything might
collapse under us at any moment.65

Ionesco sees in Bury’s work the undercurrents of the catastrophic.

CHAPTER 2 Slowness for him is a means to confront the unexamined life, to
STUDY FOR AN END OF THE WORLD uncover in the rhythms of the everyday something far graver than the
appearance of things might suggest. “He was always so morbid,” Bury
recalls of his close friend and smiles, without wholly dismissing his
appraisal.66 The playwright, after all, was not alone in his reception of 122
the artist as producing darkly critical work. Peter Selz suggested that
the quality of slowness in Bury’s art was a response to its very opposite
within contemporary society: the acceleration of culture by new tech-
nology, “the rushing pace in our time.”67 Slowness, then, was not only
the revelation of the micromovements underwriting the appearance of
things. It also offered a stern commentary on the accelerated pace of life
as naturalized, as something internalized and thus taken for granted.
In contradistinction to Tinguely’s reading in “For Statics,” which argued
for the embrace of instability and continuous flux, Bury’s critics would
have us see it otherwise. For them, he would slow it down.68
Indeed, Bury’s conception of slowness participates in a thinking
about duration that extends well beyond the immediate concerns of
kinetic art, not to mention technology’s “look.” Slowness, I suggested
earlier, is only understood through duration, for duration serves as the
backdrop against which our perception of movement and immobility is
grasped. But what kind of duration? To make reference to duration
would seem to invoke the philosophy of Henri Bergson, whose books
Creative Evolution, Matter and Memory, and Time and Free Will were
read closely by the artist.69 For Bergson, duration was the time of the
lived body and subjective experience; it was that which militated
against what he called “spatial” accounts of time. Spatial time, to follow
the philosopher, was abstracted and rationalized, best represented by
the form of the clock and its parceling of time into discrete and isolated
units of experience. “Real” time, by contrast, was “lived time”—the time
of succession without distinction, the time of mutual penetration and
solidarity with the things of the world.70 As he put it in Creative
Evolution (1911), “we do not think real time . . . we live it.”
Perhaps Bergson’s most famous demonstration of the succession
of lived time is that of watching sugar dissolve in a glass of water. “If I
want to mix a glass of sugar and water, I must, willy nilly, wait until the
sugar melts.”

This little fact is big with meaning. For here the time I have to wait
is not the mathematical time which would apply equally well to the
entire history of the material world, even if that history were spread out
instantaneously in space. It coincides with my impatience, that is to say,
with a certain portion of my own duration, which I cannot protract or
 123 contract as I like. It is no longer something thought, it is something lived.
It is no longer a relation, it is an absolute.71

Bergson lay stress on the subjective experience of temporality—the

boredom or impatience, say, in waiting for water to melt sugar, a
moment that is indivisible to the subject’s relation to time (“no longer
a relation, it is an absolute”).
Yet it was not Bergson’s contribution that bore upon Bury’s
considerations of slowness, but the poetics and epistemology of Gaston
Bachelard. In 1950, well before kinetic art enjoyed its postwar vogue, a
young Bury wrote a letter of admiration to the philosopher of science,
then at the Sorbonne, who in turn responded to the artist by acknowl-
edging the importance of the artistic imagination.72 Bury was especially
taken with three of Bachelard’s books: L’Intuition de l’Instant (1932),
L’Air et les Songes: Essai sur l’Imagination du Mouvement (1943), and,
finally, La Dialectique de la Durée (1950).73 Bachelard’s rethinking of
duration, as well as his epistemology of the new science, affords us a
broader historiographic perspective on Bury’s slowness and its potential
relationship to kinetic art and postwar technology.
In both L’Intuition de L’Instant and La Dialectique de la Durée,
Bachelard confronted Bergson at the outset, arguing that duration is
neither the continuous nor seamless flow of time described in his texts.
He was deeply opposed to Bergson’s idealism, his “conception of pure
consciousness, of pure duration” and particularly suspicious of “the insis-
tence on the priority of the body” in Bergson’s reading of lived time.74
Duration is, for Bachelard, multiply and consistently riven, fractured,
discontinuous. Duration, in other words, is dialectically conditioned by
that which interrupts it. As opposed to the theory of lived time as
successive time, Bachelard’s duration is a series of microevents. “When
we still accepted Bergson’s idea of duration,” he wrote,

we set out to study it by trying very hard to purify and consequently

CHAPTER 2
STUDY FOR AN END OF THE WORLD
impoverish duration as it is given to us. . . . Yet our eKorts would always
encounter the same obstacle, for we never managed to overcome the
lavish heterogeneity of duration. . . .
. . . In due course, as one might expect, we tried to find the
homogeneous character of duration by confining our study to smaller
and smaller fragments. Yet we were still dogged by failure. . . . However 124
small the fragment, we had only to examine it microscopically to see in it
a multiplicity of events.75

Bachelard’s thinking on duration as a “lavish heterogeneity” is

consistent with his central contributions to the history of science. In The
New Scientific Spirit (1934) and Rational Materialism (1953), he argued
for the “epistemological discontinuity in scientific progress . . . based on
the history and teaching of science in the twentieth century.”76 The very
discontinuity of the new science (Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle,
Einstein’s theory of relativity) inspired Bachelard to formulate an epi-
stemology that might approximate its “new spirit.” His concept of
“epistemological break (rupture)” was that which overcame “epistem-
ological obstacles,” allowing the scientist to both answer and ask
questions of material that was previously impossible with an earlier
approach.77 This notion stemmed in part from Bachelard’s earlier
formulation of “approximate knowledge”—a form of knowledge that
admits to the necessarily contingent relation between observing subject
and object of inquiry. Writing against the notion of science as wholly
progressive and teleological, Bachelard stated, “It would be incorrect,
therefore, to say, that real knowledge proceeds in one direction only. If
we are to see knowledge at work, we must not hesitate to place it at the
point at which it oscillates, where the ‘mathematical’ and the ‘intuitive’
mind converge.”78 In another context, he put it in these terms: “scientific
progress always reveals a break, or better, perpetual breaks, between
ordering knowledge and scientific knowledge.”79
I want to suggest that Bachelard’s rethinking of duration, coupled
with rupture, found its artistic analogue in the micromovements of
Bury’s slowly moving objects, which internalize discontinuity and even
randomness as their structural mechanism. Bury’s movement reveals
that what appears to be without interruption—what might seem a
prime example of Bergsonian duration—is in actuality, a series of
breaks, fits, starts. There is no pure sense of duration for Bury, just as
there is no seamless historical (and scientific) trajectory for Bachelard.
As such, Bury offers something of a microperspective on history
(“micro” because isolated to a seemingly inconsequential segment of
time) that provides a dialectical complement to that of his friend,
Tinguely. Tinguely’s reading of statics, in which change serves as the
 125 only constant, cleaves well with Bury’s claim for discontinuity, disclosed
only through the pacing of his slowly moving objects. The difference,
of course, is that Tinguely’s sense of movement is frenetic in both its
futuristic and regressive allusions to automation technology and the
historical Machine Age, whereas Bury’s perspective is more sober as it
is slower, far less celebratory in its confrontation with the rhetoric of
kinesis. It should come as little surprise for such reasons that Tinguely
seemed to engage wholly the postwar rhetoric of technology whereas
Bury bore no ostensible interest in it. For him, the ruptures that
occurred in time were more insidious, always at work beneath the
surface of things. If Tinguely’s “For Statics” represented a paean to
speed and duration, Bury’s “Slowness” was its cautionary tale. And so
we come full circle to Ionesco’s account of Bury’s art. “For Pol Bury,” to
repeat his claim, “there is constant anguish originating from the basic
intuition that everything might collapse under us at any moment”: “we
are sure of nothing.”80

CHAPTER 2
STUDY FOR AN END OF THE WORLD
RUPTURE 2: SIGNALS
Still, it was not all darkness for postwar kinetic art: neither for Bury,
whose work is as whimsical as it is grave, nor others. The existential
pronouncements of Ionesco could hardly pass muster with Tinguely, nor
many other members of the younger generation of artists working with
movement, particularly affiliates of the Signals group based in London
in the early to mid-sixties. With Tinguely they shared a conceptual
interest in movement and its possibilities for scientific consideration.
Nonetheless, their priorities were directed to far different ends from the
readings of the Swiss artist within the popular press, assuming two
intersecting propositions: first, the exploration of matter as energy itself
or as timeliness, expansive in nature; and second the expansion of the
art world as increasingly global in character.
Signals was a loose community of artists and critics that formed
around 1964. For two years they published a newsletter and staged
exhibitions of among the most important kinetic work of the era (their
shows included Tinguely, Bury, and Takis but also a large constituency
of Brazilian, Colombian, and Venezuelan artists, among them Lygia
Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Sergio Camargo, Mira Schendel, Lygia Pape, and
others). Hardly a “movement” in the conventional sense, its kernel 126
formed around the Filipino artist David Medalla, the critic Guy Brett,
Paul Keeler (who served as director of the space), Gustav Metzger (best
known for his work on “Destruction in Art,” or “Auto-Destructive Art”),81
and the Italian artist Marcello Salvadori. Brett made the acquaintance of
Medalla at a party in 1960, when the young artist had just arrived in
England by way of New York. The two were still in their teens.
Something of a child prodigy in the Philippines, Medalla shuttled
between London and Paris and New York in the early sixties. He made
pilgrimages to sites once haunted by Arthur Rimbaud, studied at
Columbia University as a special student, and for a time stayed at a
progressive camp in Pennsylvania.82 He would also explore the respec-
tive art scenes of the major cities. Consistently subject to visa problems,
Medalla was itinerant by necessity. On one trip to Paris in the early
sixties, he happened upon an exhibition at the Galerie Diderot of works
by the Greek artist Takis, the Belgian Bury, and the Venezuelan Jesús
Rafael Soto. The encounter proved catalytic. On returning to London,
Medalla reported to Brett that he had seen “the most amazing work in
Paris” by an artist using magnets, and he then announced that they
must organize an exhibition of the work in England.83 Along with Paul
Keeler, Medalla organized a show in Oxford entitled “Soundings,” an
odd mix of kinetic artists and figures working in a more traditional
expressionist idiom.
Soon after Signals was “founded” in 1964, Medalla and Keeler
began staging shows in their South Kensington flat but were sub-
sequently able to obtain, through Keeler’s father, use of a large empty
building at 39 Wigmore Street. The group took its name following a
work by Takis: it would also serve as the title of the newsletter. But the
titular homage to Takis’s work—one of his well-known constructions
with magnets—also implicitly evoked the topic of communication over
time and space, which in turn bore a marked relationship to the group’s
larger interest in the invisible energies of physics. In the first issue of
August 1964, the editors (but mostly Medalla), introduced the project
in the following terms:

We hope to expand and increase our pages in the future: to include

essays by architects, art historians, scientists, technologists, economists
and town planners. Signalzs shall bring to the attention of the artist new
 127 developments in technology and science which might be of assistance in
the formation of the artist’s discipline. We hope to provide a forum for
all those who believe passionately in the correlations of the arts and art’s
imaginative integration with technology, science, architecture and our
entire environment.84

Key to understanding the relation of Signals to technology and

science is its “imaginative” character. In contrast to the contempor-
aneous experiments of GRAV, whom Brett felt were a little too
“behavioristic,” or the collaborative projects of E.A.T., or even Gyorgy
Kepes’s think-tank like Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT,
Signals approached technology less through the terms of media than
through the structural implications of quantum physics for the reception
of works of art.85 The newsletter brims with discussions of the space
race, disarmament, “biological engineering,” and “robot” art; excerpts
from writings by Lewis Mumford and Bachelard were published along-
side Russian and Latin American poetry. John Newell, the European
science correspondent for the BBC, contributed a regular column
entitled “Science Today.” For his part Medalla took a special interest in
Heisenberg: having drafted a “fan” letter to the physicist, he was able to
secure an excerpt from Heisenberg’s Physics and Philosophy: The
Revolution in Modern Science for publication in the bulletin.86
Even so, much of the art associated with the principle figures of
Signals did not explicitly thematize technology or science as content.
This was neither iconographic nor imagistic work; nor did it find its
historical genealogy in the usual batch of names and references cited by
so many postwar kinetic artists. Rather, its interests were in articulating
new perceptual models for the spectator, anticipating the effects in-
troduced by modern science through seeing works of art as vehicles of
energy. As John Gardiner suggested in his announcement for a Signals
exhibition curated by Paul Keeler in the summer of 1965,

CHAPTER 2
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As its title implies, Towards the Invisible is an exhibition which will trace
the development of modern art from the disintegration of Renaissance-
type forms to the present-day researches of avant-garde artists into
the . . . exploration of natural phenomena and formal relationships nor-
mally unperceived by the unaided human eye.
 The natural phenomena and new formal relationships which today’s 128
artists are exploring in their work include energy (Takis, Medalla,
[Eduardo] Chillida); dematerialisation and growth (Sergio de Camargo);
vibrations. . . . The major aim of Towards the Invisible is to show that the 2.10 David Medalla, Cloud Canyons:

apparent diversities of modern art are, in reality . . . united by at least Bubble Mobiles, 1964. Courtesy the
artist, London.
one great theme: the search for dynamic structures underlying the
visible world.87

The invisible, for Signals, was not a code word for the meta-
physical or idealistic but suggested microscopic or cosmic propositions
at play in the structural relationships of any work of art. The terms
energy or dematerialization (the use of which predated Lucy Lippard
and John Chandler’s well-known discussion of conceptual art by several
years) were employed in speaking to the dynamic principles of avant-
garde abstraction and their subsequent legacy in postwar kinetic
experiments. Not that this was a cryptoformalism. “Energy,” for many
of its artists, suggested the radical breaks in twentieth-century physics
as it did its demonstration within modern art.
A good example of this phenomenon is Medalla’s Cloud Canyons:
Bubble Mobiles (1964) (figure 2.10) and his attitude toward the very
matter of art as energy itself. Medalla described himself in the bulletin
as “a ‘hylozoist’ (in reference to the Old Ionian pre-Sokratic philo-
sophers—one of Those-Who-Think-Matter-is-Alive),” and it is in this
respect (along with his amateur appreciation of quantum mechanics)
that one might regard this work. The notion that matter carries within
itself a certain timeliness because energized and therefore “alive” was
at the foundation of his earliest kinetic sculptures. The Cloud Canyons
themselves appeared as a two-page spread in the Newsbulletin in
September 1964, and they were exhibited widely in the following
years. Black-and-white photographs picture coils of filmy, meringuelike
soap—not quite opaque and yet not wholly immaterial—ushering forth
from that most traditional signifier of sculpture, a simple pedestal. The
juxtaposition of the hard rectilinearity of the plinth with the distended
form of the soap throws into relief the sense that the object is somehow
energized and active, that its matter is subject to time and therefore
serves as a mattering of time. Strict geometry is dissolved by the active
expansion of the bubbles, leading ultimately to its breaking off into
unforeseeable forms. One picture traces the ephemeral flight of a bubble
as it drifts over Cornwall Gardens; another image, taken from above, 130
shows the dissipation of the soapy matter as it meets up against the
hard surface of the brick pavement that supports it. Through photo-
graphic means, Medalla revealed how the object is always subject to a
peculiar expansion. He demonstrated its slow and inexorable radiation
into the viewer’s space, just as he signaled its transformation in time.
The “expansive” dimensions of Signal’s practice had its logistical
counterpart in the social organization of the group. Its history pointed
to the precipitous erosion of the once nationally circumscribed fields of
postwar art-making and its exhibition: if New York could still triumph-
antly claim its artistic predominance, Signals would see otherwise.
As a Filipino living and working in London, Medalla’s consciousness
of cultural difference within the art world was matched only by the
peculiar disparities in technology he would confront internationally: he
recalls, for example, the alienating experience of taking an escalator
for the first time in New York. And yet his passage between England,
France, New York, and the Philippines (and, as we shall see, South
America) quite literally dramatized the increasingly migratory practices
of artists, their expanding networks of reception and distribution, and
the technological means that made such movement possible at that
historical moment.
Complementing this progressive networking of the art world
was the sense that the British art scene (for the members of Signals,
at least) was largely parochial, presenting itself as a kind of reaction
formation to activities in New York. To follow Brett, it was “a period of
the British love affair with American art.” It was a time, he recalls, in
which the word tough was floated around the rhetoric of British art
journalism, a cipher for an aesthetic practice aspiring to the brute
objectivity of minimalism, or even (and still) the machismo of abstract
expressionism.88 Yet American art was regarded as boring if not outright
dead by many associated with Signals. Save for the marked exception of
the kinetic artist Liliane Lijn, who had spent much of her life in France
and Greece up to that point, and who had aligned herself with an
expatriate group of American poets living in Paris, few Americans were
involved in the group’s activities. Even American artists whom the
Signals group admired—among them Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns—
were thought to be a little too pictorial in their formal language, their
objects perceived to be too self-contained to address the questions that
 131 so occupied them. A short, unauthored editorial in Signals on the Venice
Biennale, for example, suggests nothing so much as the regressiveness
of new American work. “The American pavilion,” it reads, “had the look
and smell of built-in obsolescence.”89
Signals turned to other places for inspiration. In 1964, Brett,
Keeler, and Medalla met the artist Sergio Camargo in Paris, and the
summit revealed for them “the whole Latin American, but especially
Brazilian art scene.”90 Camargo’s studio served as an ersatz gallery in its
own right, as the Signals artists encountered there for the first time the
work of Lygia Clark, among other Brazilian artists. The following year,
Brett traveled to the São Paolo Biennale, where he met Clark and
Oiticica. (Clark had her first solo show in England at Signals that same
year, and issue no. 7 of the news bulletin was devoted to her practice.)
As a result of this exchange, “revelatory” by Brett’s account, Clark would
become among the most important figures in Signals’ exhibition history,
her small “constructions” serving as invitations to act. Extremely
reductive in their use of media—and yet no less variable because of
this—these are kinetic works in the most expansive sense. Sometimes
made of folding plates of metal, other times from rubber, they depend
on a participant to animate their relatively simple forms if they are to
exist at all. A small, inflated bag with a stone placed at its dimple,
for instance, becomes an allegory of kinesis. On its own, it is a lugubri-
ous thing, resting flaccidly on a table. But as it is compressed between
gathered hands, it transforms into an eloquent demonstration of weight,
balance, and resistance: the lessons of phenomenology at their most
critical and fundamental (figure 2.11).
Clark’s practice could well occupy the space of several books—
and it has—but for our immediate purposes, it outlines both the
aspirations and epiphenomena attached to Signals and its history. In
Signal’s expansiveness toward the shape of the object—toward art’s
endless temporal possibilities and toward the participant who comes to
engage it as a matter of energy—it expressed a deep optimism about
the purposefulness of art, mirrored by its widening circle of inter-
national artists who regarded their practice as both politically and
CHAPTER 2 socially therapeutic. Brett recalls that the participatory nature of much
STUDY FOR AN END OF THE WORLD of this work heralded a growing consciousness toward collectivism and
activism. By 1968, when Medalla and others became involved in ex-
plicitly politicized activities around street theater and performance—all
 133
2.11 Lygia Clark, Stone and Air, 1966.
Photo courtesy Cultural Association
“The World of Lygia Clark.” Credit:
Family Clark’s Collection.
CHAPTER 2
STUDY FOR AN END OF THE WORLD
inclusive, nonhierarchical affairs subject to the shifting contingencies
of its actors—it seemed, at least with hindsight, that the kinetic object
anticipated these practices in condensed form.
This is, of course, quite different from the cynical pronouncements
attached to Tinguely’s work, to say little of Bury’s bleak reception. It
suggests that the subject of movement in kinetic art in the 1960s was
anything but universalized, and its implications—as seen through
the lens of science and technology—were as plural as the movements
themselves. This brings us back to Tinguely, the performances that
followed his Meta-matics, and finally, explosively, his Las Vegas Study.
The work of both Bury and Signals articulates important issues for
understanding Tinguely’s worlds: the temporal ruptures that disturb
duration and the problems of history that attend it; the speed of that
history as naturalized; the notion of movement and time as a “signal”
itself; and the increasingly global dimensions of their shared interests
and practices.
SUICIDE MACHINES: TINGUELY IN AMERICA
Si la scie scie la scie, et si la scie qui scie la scie, est la scie que scie la
scie, il y a suissscide métallique.
—Marcel Duchamp on Tinguely 91
For Tinguely, 1960 was not so much a beginning but an end. It was that
year, in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), that the first
of three versions of the “end” would reveal itself. Just a few short months
after the notoriety of his Meta-matics, Tinguely made his first extensive
visit to the United States in January for a one-man show at New York’s
Staempfli Gallery. He also came at the invitation of the museum—
especially that of Peter Selz, then curator of Painting and Sculpture,
and Alfred H. Barr Jr.—to produce his first American performance.
The context was paramount. Time commented that he could not have
possibly conceived of a suicidal sculpture anywhere else.92 If Tinguely
was both heralded and reviled in Europe for his references to auto-
mation, now the stakes seemed much higher. In the United States, a
country his art had been metaphorically linked to by the press, he 134
would make a suicide machine: a machine that would destroy itself.
For what could be more American than a machine that consumes
itself as entertainment or an art that takes novelty as its first and, no 2.12 Jean Tinguely, Homage to

doubt, last principle? A number of critics suggested that the notion of New York, 1960. Credit: © 2003 Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP,
an autodestructive art form (or a practice that thematized principles
Paris. Photo David Garr.
of destruction as art) was not new in itself: one journalist hailed the
example of Piet Mondrian as engaging in a destructive practice, whereas
the Signals affiliate Gustav Metzger took the concept to another ex-
treme in the sixties. But Tinguely’s suicide machines would now unleash
their specifically nationalist associations on American soil, and they
seemed to confirm the readings of the Meta-matics that saw the artist as
both victim of and mouthpiece for the country’s postwar hegemony.
For his first American performance, Homage to New York, Tinguely
assembled a most impressive theater of junk (figures 2.12 and 2.13).
A spread some twenty-seven feet long and thirty feet high, it recycled
scraps from the Newark dump for its armature: eighty bicycle wheels
and a bassinet, washing machine parts and a weather balloon, pots and
a piano, cable drums and a radio, oil cans, an American flag, a child’s
toilet. The whole construction was then glossed over in pristine white
paint and was to be operated through the use of a relay system in part
designed by Billy Klüver, introduced to the artist through his Swedish
countryman Pontus Hulten (the work was driven by fifteen motors and
eight timers).93 Tucked away in a Bucky Fuller dome in the museum’s
garden, Tinguely set to work on his creation. He labored tirelessly for
three weeks in late February with four assistants. The weather was cold
and slushy, and the artist would succumb to a fever for his efforts.
His idea was to let the thing destroy itself on March 17 before a
large audience of museum executives, collectors, donors, journalists,
and other assorted art-world types. The performance was set for
6:30 PM and would last half an hour. During that time, the “gadget to
end all gadgets,” as it was repeatedly called by the press, would churn
itself into oblivion as directed from the control panel designed by
Klüver. The trial balloon would be raised and inflated, saws would saw,
wheels would turn, a piano would play, and various Meta-matic-like
mechanisms would dash off paintings on an expanded scale. And just
like the Meta-matics that it followed by less than a year, the Homage
would take on both grave and humorous readings, suggestions of both
 137
2.13 Jean Tinguely, Homage to
New York, 1960. Credit: © 2003 Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP,
Paris. Photo David Garr.
CHAPTER 2
STUDY FOR AN END OF THE WORLD
nuclear apocalypse and entertainment. As Selz argued in the museum’s
press release,
Jean Tinguely’s experiments are works of art in which time, movement
and gesture are demonstrated—not merely evoked. Being very much
part of his time Tinguely uses machines to show movement, but he is
fully aware that machines are no more permanent than life itself. Their
time rubs out, they destroy themselves.94
Within the very same press release, however, Tinguely’s art also
occasioned comparisons to Rube Goldberg’s comic strip contraptions,
fantastical, multipart things assembled from rubbish and designed for
ultimately futile ends. Perhaps no document could attest more to the
value of Tinguely’s art as entertainment than a letter sent to the artist
by the Walt Disney Corporation. They had read of the Homage in the
press and were eager to secure a film of the event.95
Whatever Tinguely’s pretensions, the performance itself was a
wash. Braving the March cold, some 250 guests assembled in the
museum’s garden, awaiting the proverbial fireworks associated with
the notorious Swiss artist. It was a “white-glove” affair of the highest
order—Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III was herself in attendance—but the
performance itself strayed far from the original script. The apocalyptic
scenario envisioned by Tinguely, in which the machine would go out in
a haze of gunpowder, ear-shattering noise, and precisely choreographed
pyrotechnics, was dramatically undercut by the system’s failure to act
on schedule, to be on time. Designed to last an economical thirty
minutes, the performance spun out to over an hour and a half, and
rather than exploding on cue, the machine sputtered and hiccuped pa-
thetically toward its own collapse, emitting the occasional puff of
smoke along the way. A tube of paper that was to serve as the ground
for Tinguely’s automata, for example, rolled out of reach of the paint
brushes, never to be painted; another section fell over before it was sup-
posed to do so. Then a fire broke out in the piano. As MoMA had been
damaged by a fire only two years earlier, museum officials had in-
stalled firemen on the premises in the event of a recurrence. When
firemen stepped in to extinguish the blaze, the audience, now excited,
booed their efforts, many chanting “let it burn.” Finally when it was all
over, the machine smoldered under a blanket of Foamite. Onlookers 138
scavenged the wreckage for relics.
Always his best adman, Tinguely proclaimed the event “marvelous,
marvelous”—a wild success that well demonstrated the unpredictable
chaos of the machine. Others were far less confident in their
assessment. The spectacle that unfolded that evening was variously
called “an unbeautiful joke with no punch line”; while its machine
“wasn’t quite good enough to make (the artist’s) point.”96 Most reviews
resorted to the kind of vulgarisms that plagued Tinguely’s European
reception: this was, pure and simple, a cultural fiasco better known as
the avant-garde. But it was the peculiar nature of the fiasco, or the
lengths to which Tinguely carried it out, that inspired some critics to
see in the Homage a troubling, if unintended, commentary on art’s
relationship to its self-presentation: the medium, we could say, which
delivered its message. On the front page of the New York Times, John
Canaday wrote, “the significance of the event lies not in the fact that it
was, over all, a fiasco, but in the intention of Mr. Tinguely, and the
Museum of Modern Art, in staging it in the first place.”97
A far more damning verdict on Tinguely’s MoMA spectacle came
in the form of an editorial published in the Nation. Describing the
rarefied social world of its privileged audience, the authorless editorial
lamented the diminished possibilities of a genuinely radical art practice
at the time:

We feel great sympathy for Jean Tinguely, a Swiss artist who belongs to
the noble company of missionary aesthetes whose lives are dedicated
to outraging convention. Spiritual son of Marcel Duchamp, he has seized
on the nihilism of Dada and added motors to it—his work is mockery in
motion. . . . Most recently, M. Tinguely constructed a work of art that
destroyed itself. . . . It was called “Homage to New York.” Powered by
fifteen motors, controlled by eight timers, the edifice reduced itself to
shambles in half an hour.
Now this is outrageous behavior and right-thinking people should
be made profoundly indignant; what are right-thinking people for if not
to be made indignant at the appropriate moment? So you would expect
that Tinguely set up his contraption in someone’s remodeled stable. You
would be wrong. The “occasion” took place in the sculpture garden of
the Museum of Modern Art and was attended by an invited audience
 139 of the museum’s most cherished friends and patrons . . . [T]he perfor-
mance was thoroughly ogcial.
This is what protest has fallen to in our day—a garden party.98

Although sympathetic to Tinguely’s art, the editorial bemoans the

CHAPTER 2
STUDY FOR AN END OF THE WORLD
state of affairs for avant-garde “protest.” It echoes Herbert Marcuse’s
well-known prognosis on the state of modern cultural production in his
influential essay “The Affirmative Character of Culture” (1937), a text
which argues that the allegedly radical gestures of politically inflected
art are necessarily affirmed and therefore contained by a dominant
culture.99 Cutting as its judgments may be, the Nation’s editorial
articulates the inseparability of Tinguely’s event and the medium of its
presentation, in this case, the Museum of Modern Art. It is an awkward,
too-close-for-comfort relationship. Well before his Homage to New York,
critics of Tinguely carped endlessly about his promotional tactics—his
Meta-matics, his Düsseldorf event—even as they contributed to the
hype around him. By the time of Tinguely’s early sixties performances,
the link between the content of the work and the site of its mediation
was more pronounced, as the Nation editorial demonstrates. Nowhere
was this more perfectly dramatized than in Tinguely’s Study for an
End of the World, No.2, a performance whose reception speaks to the
inseparability of those worlds in postwar art as much as it revels in their
undecidability in its present.
So to an End of the World. Tinguely’s Study for an End of the
World, No. 1 was performed at the Louisiana Museum at Humlebaek
near Copenhagen in 1961. Held in conjunction with the exhibition
Movement in Art, it was staged on the grassy banks of the park between
the museum and a nearby river. Like the Homage two years before it,
the Study consisted of the self-immolation of a clanking and sputtering
arrangement of machines, here composed of five central figures, again
glossed over in white, and with the addition of fireworks to round out
the arsenal. For all the planning involved, an especially nasty accident
occurred that quickly found its way into the press. A dove intended to
soar above the spectacle during its fiery conclusion was incinerated.
When its carcass turned up at the end of the performance, Tinguely was
charged with exploiting that most benign signifier of peace for his own
promotional (and violent) ends.100 Calling his work Study for an End of
the World, after all, called up images associated with mass destruction,
and laying waste to the pacific iconography of the dove could only have 140
supported such a reading.
Even still, the first Study was not unlike Homage to New York in its
politesse, performed as it was before a decorous museum audience. As if
challenging his critics on this front, Tinguely decided to return to the
question of the “end” the following year but was now bent on staging
an event far more cataclysmic in design. During a visit to Los Angeles,
Tinguely was contacted by the producers of NBC’s David Brinkley’s
Journal to commission such a spectacle for television.101 It seemed a
logical extension of everything the artist had done up to that point: only
four years earlier, he had dropped thousands of flyers from a plane over
Düsseldorf as a means to promote his thesis on statics. His relationship
with the print media was, by now, well established. Television seemed
the most obvious step for this most inveterate PR man. The invitation
from NBC gave Tinguely the opportunity to scale up his performance to
proportions befitting the broadcasting capacities of television—his
second “end” exceeded the demands imposed by his museum per-
formances—as it did the most powerful forum to advance his career.102
In this sense it is fair to say that Study for an End of the World, No. 2 was
ultimately media driven; television was at once Tinguely’s vehicle, his
audience, and his object of fascination.
This statement demands further qualification, though, as
Tinguely’s showmanship carried implications beyond the vulgarities
of his endless self-promotion. Clearly he was self-conscious about his
exploitation of television in his second Study, but this self-consciousness
about his chosen medium not only affected the scale of the perfor-
mance: it seemed to complicate its implicit message about the “end” as
well. For Study for an End of the World, No. 2 represents the most cogent
collapsing of medium with message in Tinguely’s practice; its reception
seemed to treat the technology behind it as both point of critique and
speculation. The work, in other words, cannot be read exclusively
through the iconography of nuclear destruction, however critical to its
understanding. Far more than any other kinetic work, the study
illustrates—through the question of time—the historical problem
of “worlds” that augurs a global expansion of automation and mass
communications, not to mention the Bomb around which these points
also converge. In the process it reveals the extent to which art has
become, following Heidegger, “regulated regulating instruments of
 141 information.” To grasp this idea as it relates to Tinguely’s practice
requires a detailed exegesis of its unfolding.
Upon accepting NBC’s offer, Tinguely began to envision something
created specifically for the Nevada desert. Since January 1951, the five-
year-old Atomic Energy Commission had begun atmospheric and
underground bomb testing at the Nevada Test Site, a 123-square-mile
dry lake bed some seventy-five miles from Las Vegas. Between 1951 and
1962, a total of fourteen atmospheric bombing tests took place, and five
underground nuclear weapons tests were conducted between 1965 and
1968.103 The juxtaposition of Las Vegas with the Yucca Flats satisfied
Tinguely’s fondness for the extremes he saw as characteristic of
American culture: its rabid consumerism, on the one hand, its rampant
militarism, on the other. These were two kinds of stockpiling (of
“standing reserve,” as Heidegger would call it) linked by consumption
and destruction.
Well in advance of the actual performance, the spectacle unfolds
for the camera. After the first frames of the broadcast, which witnessed
Tinguely and Saint-Phalle scavenging junk in the desert, the camera
cuts quickly to the gambling tables and glittering lights of the Las Vegas
strip (figure 2.14). The blinding, ascetic whiteness of the natural envir-
onment finds its match in the glare of spotlights, dazzling in their
intensity, ludicrous in their sheer accumulation. Brinkley has already
launched into his rather starchy commentary, and he is quick to describe
Las Vegas as “famous for a great many natural and manmade things, but
it has no reputation for cultivation of the arts.”104 But nothing would
compare to Tinguely’s actions, unparalleled, so the narrator would have
it, in their farce. The artist is variously filmed in and around the city
doing his weird artistic things: here he is seen marveling at its casinos, a
European explorer in the New World; there he is witnessed going to a
toy store, gleefully stocking up on numerous props for his performance;
somewhere else he is spied bargaining with a junk dealer, in fractured
English, for a worthless item that might complete his Study.
The quick cuts between these scenes, the popping and flashing of
images, suggest a virtual acceleration of Tinguely’s activities, as if all of
CHAPTER 2 this effort were rushing headlong into an inexorable climax. Not that
STUDY FOR AN END OF THE WORLD there is anything marginally improvisational about this, of course. There
is a staginess to the dialogue between Tinguely, Saint-Phalle, and those
they encounter that betrays the deeply performative quality of their
 143
2.14 Jean Tinguely, still, Study for an
End of the World, No. 2, 1962. Credit:
© 2003 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York /ADAGP, Paris.
CHAPTER 2
STUDY FOR AN END OF THE WORLD
actions, displayed for the benefit of the camera. When Saint-Phalle
attempts to bargain for some junk on behalf of her partner, she delivers
a line that rings with all the spontaneity of a stand-up comedian. “Could
you make a cheaper price for him,” she quips, “if he brings you back all
his junk after he blows up the world?”105 The irony is a little too
scripted, and it registers as flat.
All the while, the foreignness of the experience is communicated,
but whether that foreignness is an attribute of Las Vegas itself, or
Tinguely, or both, is a matter of debate. The broadcast goes to some
length to estrange its viewer from the workaday aspects of its subject:
as the clichés hold today, the city is treated as a vast and exotic waste-
land, untutored in its principles and deeply atavistic in its behaviors. It
is a place, to follow Brinkley, “famous for its frontier freedom and gaudy
newness.” By the same token, Tinguely—here playing the role of
European anthropologist—himself becomes an object of scrutiny by the
city’s denizens. Installed at the Flamingo Hotel, he sets up shop in its
parking lot, hidden away from curious onlookers by eight-foot walls of
plywood. A sign announces the presence of the artist and his work-in-
progress within, lending the proceedings a slightly cryptic air: perhaps a
class-one secret with military implications. We are told that Tinguely
labors from 6 a.m. to midnight for four days straight, and the rapid
montage of images of the artist at work—drafting, hammering, forging,
sawing—suggests he produced his machine with neither manual nor
technical assistance. Only Saint-Phalle is allowed into the inner sanctum
of his makeshift studio. Even the clusters of bombs used to ignite the
machine were created by the artist, if in the comfort of his hotel room.
One hundred sticks of dynamite are secured from a county sheriff,
20,000 firecrackers are brought in from California, and some thirty
electric motors are assembled for the task.
Finally the walls come down, and the spectators descend upon the
site like vultures. “Some of the people thought he was crazy,” Brinkley
offers, “but in Las Vegas that is a relative term.” Everyone is an art critic.
A man outfitted in a cowboy hat and a bolo tie describes Tinguely’s
practice through a remarkable tautology. “Press one little button, [and
it] causes this huge idea that everything in the world will eventually
destroy itself. . . . [H]e has managed to collect all of this material and
it will destroy itself with the push of a button.” Another onlooker, an
African American man in shades, is more sanguine: “I don’t know if I go
along with this guy, Tinguely, or not.” It is a mixed consensus, and ap- 144
propriately there is an air of the traveling circus, of controlled anarchy,
to the scene. Cars swarm around the Flamingo Hotel for a quick peek
while lines of tourists scratch (or shake) their heads in amusement. 2.15 Jean Tinguely, detail, Study for an

Quickly, then, the scene cuts back to the desert, where a caravan End of the World, No.2, 1962. Credit:
© 2003 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
of trucks transports Tinguely’s creations out to the Yucca Flats. Stream-
New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo John
ing dust, it is a bizarre parade of the artist and some assistants, the local
Bryson.
sheriff, policemen, and, most important, a media “cortege”: NBC, of
course, but also the AP and UPI wire services, the Saturday Evening Post,
Time, Life, and dozens of local papers. From this perspective, it seems
possible that Tinguely was among the earliest artists of the sixties to
exploit the media culture of the decade so intrepidly. It is open to
further speculation whether his peculiar philosophy of kinetics gave
him insight into that world’s acceleration and global reach. Tinguely
was no naïf about the commission of his study, nor the potential hazards
resulting from a performance of its scale. Witnesses to the study were
required to sign contracts absolving NBC and the artist of any liability in
case of an accident.
Yet when the camera pulls back, Tinguely’s vision of the world
presents itself with all the orderliness of a stage relief (figures 2.15 and
2.16). This is a world reduced to the flatness of the television image. A
neat row of four assemblages lines up across a seventy five-foot stretch
of desert, a picture as limitless, horizontal, and blank as a television
screen. If once the site was thought to be stark and ascetic, conjuring
for the public the blast of atomic cataclysm, now the gathering crowds
suggest a perverse spectacularization of such an event. This is, in other
words, Marshall McLuhan’s utopia of a global village turned desperately
fatal, at once bathetic and entertaining; and it is this tension that under-
lies Tinguely’s broadcast. The philosopher Samuel Weber reminds us
that television quite literally means “distance seeing”; but he reminds
us as well that TV is not an actual overcoming of distance and time but
the illusion of making that collapse immediate and available to a gen-
eral audience.106 Study for an End of the World signals both the gravity
and ridiculousness of that very situation: it laughs at the sheer lunacy of
representing such an event on television as it ironically highlights its
very possibility.107
As for the Study itself, the actual arrangement was straightforward
enough. Composed of a central grouping of four elements, the layout of
 147
2.16 Jean Tinguely, detail, Study for
an End of the World, No. 2, 1962
Credit: © 2003 Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo
Coliene Murphy.
CHAPTER 2
STUDY FOR AN END OF THE WORLD
the sculpture sticks close to the basic format of his earlier suicide
machines and so too does it indulge equally in their cheap symbolism.
There is a blue water tank with a long sticklike object protruding from a
hole at the far right; when powered by a motor, the stick begins moving
in and out of the recess, a frenzied, mechanical coitus. There is a refrig-
erator decorated in feathers and a toilet seat to its left, a bad metaphor
of consumption and expenditure. A flat painted sign representing a horn
of plenty is positioned to its left in turn, and then an armchair appears
to the side: as Brinkley puts it, the horn “was to symbolize destruction
of the world’s plenty, and the big overstuffed arm chair symbolized
ease and comfort.” Flanking the tableau is a shopping cart filled with
explosives and a cement mixer, as if waiting in the wings of this virtual
theater. And to the extreme right sits a little motorized cart intended to
crash into—and then set off—the shopping cart and its contents.
Up to the very last minute, Tinguely runs frantically about,
checking the tangled network of cables at the control board, consulting
the local police, and planting his homemade bombs in the desert soil
(figure 2.17). Then the wail of an air-raid siren announces the begin-
ning of the end, as police order the audience to move back. Images
of cops scanning the horizon are intercut by pictures of Tinguely and
Saint-Phalle donning hard hats and aviatorlike goggles, evacuating the
vicinity, kicking up dust. It is perhaps one of the few, if brief, moments
in the telecast that Tinguely’s parodic take on world destruction (and
Brinkley’s smirking asides along with it) seems lined by a genuine edge
of panic. Somehow, the loss of control that augurs the End—its sense
of threat and unknowing—seems barely contained beneath the nar-
rative’s surface.
At the same time, this loss of control signifies something patently
mundane about the technology surrounding the performance. The
inevitable failures of the work are as pathetic as its motivation is both
comic and apocalyptic. For as usual, at least usual for Tinguely, a series
of mishaps upset the timing of the performance and its original plan.
The little cart meant to collide with the shopping cart misses its mark,
the result of a faulty generator. The cement mixer designed to roll into
the scene and “explode on contact” gets caught up in a cable. A cluster
of bombs rests dormant in the desert sand. At the control board, the
artist is seen scratching his head as others shake theirs, doubtlessly
wondering when the pyrotechnics long attributed to the artist would
 149
2.17 Jean Tinguely, detail, Study for
an End of the World, No. 2, 1962
Credit: © 2003 Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo
Coliene Murphy.
CHAPTER 2
STUDY FOR AN END OF THE WORLD
get going. It is in this sense—a failed sense—that the performance un-
derscores Heidegger’s thinking about the very breakdown of worlds;
that it is only at the moment when a world ends, fails to operate, that
we become deeply conscientious of its existence. Paradoxically, that
breakdown itself seems specific, even natural, to Tinguely’s worlds;
yet it throws the seamlessness of the televisual world into stark relief.
But then finally, as Brinkley describes it, “the world began to
blow up in a more satisfying and artistic way” (figures 2.18 and 2.19).
To the alternately shrill and percussive soundtrack of fireworks and
bombs, objects begin to whir, pop, and shake, while the horn of plenty
turns dizzyingly around its axis. A series of larger and more violent
explosions erupt; clouds of flying debris break the surface of the desert
plane. There is noise, heat, dust; people are stopping their ears and
shielding their eyes; and, for Brinkley, as for other observers, there is
the sinking irony of a well-designed, even artful, chaos. As the camera
rolls back to take it all in, we see Tinguely, ever the daredevil, run into
the scene in order to set off eighteen sticks of dynamite by hand. Last to
go is the water tank, exploding as the performance’s final denouement.
It is, for Brinkley’s purposes, “a splendid geyser of smoke, fire and
noise.”
In the somewhat anticlimatic aftermath of the event, the artist is
seen strolling through the wreckage, admiring “a scene of triumph
under an odor of gun powder.” A strain of almost sentimental music
plays, and the camera focuses briefly on the body of the doll seen in the
telecast’s introduction, now charred with powder burns. If any symbol-
ism is intended for this final image—the loss of innocence, say? the
infantilism of politics?—its gravity is swiftly undercut by the sweeping
crescendo of the music, which sounds far more risible than mournful in
tone. It is a slightly confusing way to end this end; but even so, the
ambiguity of the conclusion seems in keeping with the general pro-
ceedings. Brinkley’s narration, after all, has all but ceased at this point.
And so the audience is left in a rather discomforting position with a
batch of equally uncomfortable questions: Who—or what—is the object
of this joke? Who gains, or alternately loses, from its message? And
what, really, is the message?
The press that covered the performance weighed in by the dozen,
their accounts echoing earlier readings of Tinguely’s work: here, they
claimed, is an artist shamelessly involved in his own self-promotion;
 151
2.18 Jean Tinguely, detail, Study for
an End of the World, No. 2, 1962.
Credit: © 2003 Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo
John Bryson.
CHAPTER 2
STUDY FOR AN END OF THE WORLD
here is the decadence of the so-called avant-garde. Here is NBC paying
good money for the Swiss artist’s efforts; here is the final descent of art
into entertainment. And what kind of entertainment! All seem to flag
the ridiculousness of the performance while they inadvertently make
nods to its importance through the sheer performance of their coverage.
And while the American press—Time, Life, the Christian Science Monitor,
and others—seemed vaguely content to treat Tinguely’s study as a
media event in itself, half-heartedly acknowledging the nuclear threat to
which the work pointed—its more explicitly political implications were
not lost on his international audience. Shortly after the performance,
the Moscow-based newspaper Izvestiya published an article lambasting
Tinguely’s art for its atomic and, by extension, American associations.
Describing his performances as “the grimaces of a bourgeois society,”
the essay is quick to paint Tinguely as an artist complicit with the worst
order of American militarism.
The abstract artist Tinguely is Anglo-Saxon [sic] by birth and a cosmo-
politan by virtue of his work. He spends some of his time in New York
and some of his time in Paris and is at present on his way to Tokyo.
Tinguely is the prophet and show-man of “self-destructive art.”
What exactly is that? It means the products of a sick mind, the
fantasies of a madman who ought to be in a strait jacket. But Tinguely is
at large. Not only that, but he is a welcome guest in the capital cities of
the Western world. . . . If we remove the abstract wrapping, what is left
of Tinguely’s “self-destructive” art? Tinguely and his well-wishers are
spitting on the human race and the whole achievement of human civil-
ization. They are the next of kin to the nuclear madmen who wear the
American uniform. Tinguely’s self-destructive art is much in demand
with them.108
This is over-the-top, humorless stuff to be sure, deeply inflam-
matory in its use of Cold War rhetoric and grim in its prognosis for the
state of modern art. For all its polemical excess, however, it dramatizes
the world problem Tinguely’s kinesis sets into motion. According to the
Soviet reading, Tinguely would seem to have fallen victim to the
American military/industrial complex and prey further to its irredeem-
ably bourgeois notions of avant-gardism. In spite of or because of that,
the text gives decisive measure of the artist’s global status at that point,
 153
2.19 Jean Tinguely, detail, Study for
an End of the World, No. 2, 1962.
Credit: © 2003 Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo
John Bryson.
CHAPTER 2
STUDY FOR AN END OF THE WORLD
confirmed by the wider reception granted the article itself. Not long
after the appearance of the Moscow review of Study for an End of the
World, No. 2, a newspaper article was published in France devoted
exclusively to the Soviet appraisal of a Swiss artist who acted like an
American who at present was on his way to Japan. This journalistic
collapsing of nation-states both presaged and underscored a deeper
phenomenon at work in Tinguely’s practice: its own condensation of
technological worlds as both temporal and global in character, crystal-
lized around the sign of the Bomb. Televisions flashing the news of the
world in real time; jet planes that will whisk you to Tokyo, Paris, and
the capital cities of the Western world; missiles delivering their deadly
cargo at lightning speed: this is a world historically specific to the early
sixties if paradoxically registered through its transience—the transience
of the kinetic image. Less than a year after Tinguely’s Study, events in
Cuba would reveal all too dangerously both the precariousness and
closeness of those worlds.
This is a world, in other words, in which the flash of the kinetic
image within the information society was matched only by the split-
second annihilation of the world picture. This was a withering of time
with global reach. In Tinguely’s study, the at once implosive and
explosive force of the bomb was allegorized by the radical compression
of time and space that is television. Now, forty years after Tinguely’s
television broadcast, we are confronted by the fallout of these con-
ditions. Switzerland has resigned itself to joining the United Nations;
the government sees fit to reopen the Yucca site in Nevada as a nuclear
garbage dump. Heidegger’s claim that the work of art augurs such a
world found its parodic double in Tinguely’s art. It is a world that
reveals, self-destructively and with complicity, how art descends to
“regulating information” to borrow the philosopher’s words, a work
of art about the very technology that would destroy it. By turns
spectacular, comic, and desperate, Tinguely’s study opened onto such
a world, if through its very closing, an end.
CHAPTER 3
BRIDGET RILEY’S EYE / BODY PROBLEM

Let the hand be numb, but let the eye be agile, perspicacious,
cunning.

—Félix Féneon1
Current (figure 3.1). Stand in front of Bridget Riley’s painting of this
title from 1964, and ask yourself, “What do I see?” Or rather, think to
yourself, “How do I feel?” It is a picture that plays with the terms of
seeing and feeling, of eye and body, as starkly as it is rendered in black
and white. Yet just as black and white admits to a vast range of grays in
between, so too does Riley’s work beg similar questions of value and
scale. To what extent do we see this painting? In what lies its retinal
appeal? To what extent do we not so much see it but feel it, experience
the picture less as an abstraction than as a woozy sense of gravity
visited on the body—a body endlessly subjected to the vagaries of time?
Stand a little longer, look a little harder, and then what happens? In
time, the surface begins to flicker, like a stroboscope; or wave, like a
lenticular screen. Look longer still, and surprising colors—psychedelic
phantoms—emanate from between the lines. Spangles of gold, pink,
and green burst and flash, lining the eyelids, rattling the skull. The eye
is enervated while the body feels something else: nausea, perhaps, or
even a blinding headache.
Here is another picture (figure 3.2), presented to complicate the
problem of seeing and feeling in Riley’s art. For the sake of shorthand,
let us call this problem an Eye/Body problem. The picture was taken the
same year as Current was painted by no less of a celebrity photographer
than Lord Snowdon, and it appeared in a frothy volume on the London
art scene of the mid-sixties called Private View. The image is alternately
striking and silly. It presents the thirty-three-year-old Riley emerging
from between the disassembled walls of her only installation work, no
longer extant, entitled Continuum. Crisply decked out in opaque black
tights and a white pencil skirt, she assumes a pose befitting the worst
kind of fashion photography. With her right hand to her cheek and her
 157
3.1 Bridget Riley, Current, 1964.
Copyright Bridget Riley, all rights
reserved. Credit: Art Resource and the
Museum of Modern Art, New York.
CHAPTER 3
BRIDGET RILEY’S EYE / BODY PROBLEM
left elbow propping her up, she leans forward slightly and balances on
her right leg, the other bent so far behind that it disappears into the
depths of the photograph. It is an improbable, certainly uncomfortable,
posture. Still its effect it to locate the artist in the work of art, as if
stationed at the picture’s vanishing point.
Now I want to suggest that this image of the artist physically
embedded within her work—and the time associated with that body in
turn—can tell us something about the Eye/Body problem that charac-
terizes Riley’s black-and-white paintings of the early to mid-sixties.
Admittedly it may seem odd to speak of the body at all in relation to
the movement with she was most famously, if erroneously, associated:
Op art. As the reluctant heroine of this sixties phenomena, Riley, it was
repeatedly claimed, produced an art of pure visuality, a virtual stroking
of the retina through the most dazzling painterly effects, effects
described by the artist through the notion of “visual tempi.” Indeed,
during its brief, not quite brilliant career of a few years in the mid-
sixties, Op was variously described as an art of high reason and
technology, a rigorous, retinal art linked to the science of optics. For my
purposes, though, Op’s virtual fetish of visuality occasions a reading of
the body under the conditions of a shifting technological culture and,
more to the point, how the time of that body speaks to the repressive
consequences of a burgeoning technocracy. The body, I want to argue,
is the blind spot to Op’s obsession with the technological; and it is its
temporality that gives the lie to this. The body performs what Op’s
supporters insistently failed to see. More often than not, this body is
a specifically gendered body, feminized and thus deemed impotent.
Because Riley was perhaps the best-known artist associated with Op,
it is her body that becomes the allegorical nexus of debates that turn
around the mythic antinomies of reason and irrationality, the ideal and
the phenomenal, control and chaos, the abstractions of science and the
debasements of fashion and mass culture.
Riley was quick to challenge the notion that she be considered a
“woman artist” as she was to reject her status as a painter of “Op.”2
“I have never consciously based any work on a scientific principle (nor
studied ‘optics’ as such),” she remarked. “I personally dislike the term
optical painting because it implies that optics are the raison d’être of the
work.”3 But in what else lies Riley’s denial? Why the vehemence? I want
to consider how the reception of Riley as a woman artist and embodied
 159
3.2 Lord Snowden, Bridget Riley, in
Private View, 1964. Image courtesy Lord
Snowdon/Camera Press/Retna Ltd.
CHAPTER 3
BRIDGET RILEY’S EYE / BODY PROBLEM
artist participates in larger suspicions surroundings the technologi-
cal optimism that Op art was alleged to represent, suspicions that ac-
crue around the peculiar time of the body in question. Focusing on
events surrounding the artist’s appearance in an important group exhi-
bition of 1965, “The Responsive Eye,” I will argue that the Eye/Body
problem bears significant implications for sixties media culture beyond
her example, as witnessed in the fitful, temporally destabilized body
of her work’s audience. Comparing Riley’s approach to another woman
artist with whom she would seem to share little—Carolee Schneemann—
we gain insight into the charged relationship among the visual environ-
ment, the human sensorium, and the time that underwrites both.
OP AND THE TWO CULTURES
To begin, a narrative on Op itself is in order, a story far shorter than
that of kinetic art, if no less rife with its contradictions. Like kinetic art,
which preceded it by an art world season or two, Op art burst onto the
scene with something of a groundbreaking exhibition. It had an inter-
national roster of artists and the clientele to match, and it was exten-
sively covered by the spectrum of mass media—television, international
news services, magazines. And just as quickly as kinetic art had seized
the public imagination and then sputtered into outmodedness, so too
did Op ride high on a media frenzy only to be proclaimed old hat a
couple of years later.
Indeed, Op art’s “history,” such as it is, uncovers a range of
paradoxes around its themes and motivations. In the late fifties and
early sixties, a certain strain of kinetic art—namely, work that sug-
gested virtual movement in time, rather than objects that literally
moved—appeared to assume its own kind of force as a genre unto
itself.4 Generally the art was two-dimensional and abstract, relief work
or painting, and like the example set by kinetic art, much of it claimed
a kinship with the historical avant-garde.5 If Duchamp was heralded
as the spiritual father to Tinguely, Josef Albers and the Bauhaus were
frequently cited as elder statesman by the critics around this new work.
And just as the reception of kinetic art turned around problems of time,
so too did Op’s reception.6 The term optical, or Op, art came well after
the fact of the work. Credit is frequently given to Jon Borgzinner, the 160
critic of Time magazine, for “inventing” the expression in 1964.7
If Op existed in many forms prior to the sixties, it was not until
the 1965 that it assumed a genuinely public face, with the Museum
of Modern art playing a central role in its appearance. William C. Seitz,
the museum’s curator of painting and sculpture, had begun work on
a large-scale exhibition that spotlighted the proliferation of the new
“Optical” or “retinal” art some three years earlier. Originally intended
as a historical retrospective, the show would feature “123 works by 106
artists from fifteen countries”8 bringing together figures as diverse as
Albers, Larry Poons, Gego, Noland, Richard Anuszkiewicz, François
Morellet, Reinhardt, and Heinz Mack. Under the rubric of “perceptual
abstraction,” the work was organized into six categories alleged to play
with the viewer’s perception through a dazzling array of new visual
techniques. What many works had in common—and what certainly
garnered most of the attention in the popular press—was the sense
of dynamism these static forms seemed to engender: the walls of the
museum appeared to quicken, flicker, pulse, and vibrate, as if somehow
the art was subject to the conditions of temporal flux. If kinetic art had
engaged time in the most literal fashion, here the works projected a
virtual temporality on the environment (and, as we shall soon see, the
viewer who entered into it). Entitled The Responsive Eye, the exhibition
opened in February 1965 and quickly became the most popular exhib-
ition in MoMA’s history up to that moment. During its run, thousands
attended, visitors crowding the museum’s galleries on the weekends.9
Just how popular will be discussed momentarily, but the phenom-
enon itself begs a bluntly worded question: Who would have thought it?
On paper at least, a show dealing exclusively with abstract art, much
less one that made claims for a certain intellectual pedigree, hardly
makes for blockbuster museum entertainment, and the language pro-
moting the Responsive Eye was anything but popularizing. Instead, it
was self-serious, dry, academic, making generous allusion to the
historical study of optics within and around impressionism and
postimpressionism: George Seurat, Michel-Eugène Chevreul, Jules
Laforgue. For all its references to the nineteenth century, Seitz’s
language seemed equally indebted to the very contemporary notion of
the “Two Cultures” by the British author, educator, and technologist
C. P. Snow in 1959. “It is only recently, “Seitz wrote, “that a meeting
 161 ground is being established on which artists, designers, ophthalmol-
ogists and scientists can meet to expand our knowledge and en-
joyment of visual perception.”10 Seitz’s faith in emerging postwar
science and technology was unwavering and his belief in their influence
on the visual arts deterministic: “the visual impact of mechanization,
modular building, automation and cybernetics everywhere around us,”
he noted, “has also influenced perceptual art.”11 “We have reached a
time when, as Michael Noll of the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New
Jersey has demonstrated, visual images can be created by the electronic
computer.”12 As a result of such associations, the discussions of Op
were just as likely to appear in the pages of Scientific America as in Arts
and Artforum.13
Whatever its scientific pretensions, the new “perceptual abstrac-
tion” would be understood at a radical distance from its promoter’s
claims. Instead, much of the energies surrounding the work would
be directed at Riley. Her body of work—her body itself—would soon
become a screen for some of Op’s most heated controversies, and it was
through the perceived relationship to time in her work that its effects on
the body were most clearly registered. Here, then, we need to look more
closely at the formation of her black-and-white painting and its peculiar
thematic of temporality before detailing an infamous episode in Riley’s
history, one that saw the dispute close in on her sense of autonomy with
a certain force, even violence.

CHAPTER 3
BRIDGET RILEY’S EYE / BODY PROBLEM
HESITATE
Imagine being a young Bridget Riley, recently landed in New York in
1965 for a three-week visit. It is an exciting time for her. She will have
her first one-person show in the United States at the Richard Feigen
Gallery; the show will sell out before it officially opens. Soon after, her
painting will appear in the much-vaunted The Responsive Eye, an exhib-
ition that will swiftly ensure her international celebrity. Only three years
earlier, her painting debuted at London’s Gallery One and things began
to happen with dizzying speed after that. From show to show, review to
review and one award to the next, Riley was soon heralded as a painter
of considerable rigor, talent, and exactitude, an artist closely attuned to
the traditions of modernist abstraction and embraced by Serious Minds
of British culture. For all the efforts made to recuperate her as an icon 162
of Cool Britannia, she had internalized painterly lessons from far across
the pond. She had greatly admired Pollock’s work at the New American
Paintings exhibition at the Tate, enjoying the movement and line of 3.3 Bridget Riley, Kiss, 1961. 2003

abstract expressionism. Soon after she would be drawn to hard-edge Copyright Bridget Riley, all rights
reserved. Courtesy Karsten Schubert,
abstraction. In fact, her earliest published reviews refer to her as a hard-
London.
edge abstractionist, squarely locating her art alongside such American
luminaries as Ellsworth Kelly, Reinhardt, and younger artists such as
Noland and Frank Stella.14 And now there she was, in New York City,
about to meet those very luminaries.
Perhaps Riley paused to think about the paintings that got her
to this point in the first place. There is no question that her emergence
as a young British art star was precipitated by a startling break in her
artistic output. She had undergone the requisite art school training
(Goldsmiths, Royal College of Art); studied the masters up close in
France and Italy; felt a particular affinity for Seurat, whose work she
copied; taught art at Croydon, England. She even had a stint working
in a commercial ad agency. In 1961, however, the artist made her first
black-and-white painting, and nothing would be the same. Among the
first of these was the painting Kiss (figure 3.3), a work whose title might
refer to her failed affair with the painter and writer Maurice de Saus-
marez as much as the composition of the work itself. It is a two-by-two-
foot square of linen, covered in black acrylic. Just slightly below the
halfway mark, the field is split by an irregular white horizontal, open
at the left edge, pinched and compressed to the thinnest of lines at
the middle, spread out like a bell curve at the far right. However
reductively, the painting contains many of the qualities that would
animate Riley’s better-known abstractions of just a year or so later.
There is a fidgety sense of figure and ground at play here, not to
mention a certain ambiguity as to the direction the forms take them-
selves. Is this a cleaving or convergence? Kiss or Kiss off? The picture
veers between gravity and lightness. The white in the middle is
experienced as lumbering and claustrophobic, but as it expands to
the right, it seems to accelerate.
Accelerate might seem an odd word choice to describe what
colors do, but Riley understood well the effects of juxtaposing black
and white, fiddling with the degree of their contrast as they were scaled
up or down within the picture plane. Early on she expressed interest in
the “visual tempi” of her painting and was quick to exploit the tension 164
between formal stasis and virtual movement, a speed that would all at
once acknowledge the implied time of “action” painting, the literal time
of kinetic art, and the live art of performance. “I became very interested
in the question of visual time,” Riley observed in response to the notion
that her work employed “changes in speed.”15 Scaling areas of black
and white was crucial to the dynamism accorded the work, its sense
of falling or rushing or even concentrated pacing. For Riley, this com-
positional device had strong thematic undercurrents. Of the black-
and-white works, she declared, “they were an attempt to say something
about stabilities and instabilities, certainties and uncertainties,” as if
their implied movement could produce ambivalent phenomenal states.16
From the beginning, then, the artist acknowledged the destabilizing
character of her work—that an element of temporal unsettling was
built into their composition, a kind of “tension” as one critic put it.
Indeed Riley spoke of her early work as being either “slow” or “fast”
painting, insistently appealing to the canvas’s temporality.17 She dwelled
on the notion that the painting represented a disturbance or event and
even declared that there was an element of performance or happening
about them. Riley’s interest in the open, decentered space of Pollock’s
work suggested that each painting presented its own kind of “situation”
not unlike the arena famously ascribed by Harold Rosenberg to the
scene of action painting. “It all has to do with a loss of certainties,”
Riley suggested about the question of movement in her painting and
its multifocused space.18
By 1963—and with her second show at Gallery One—Riley had
introduced her more dynamic black-and-white paintings. These were
fields of discrete geometric units—lines or dots or triangles mostly—
in which “the whole picture surface is used to plot the transformation
of a gradual pattern.”19 The artist, in short, had arrived upon a com-
positional device that would have a great impact on the subsequent
reception of Op art more broadly: the periodic structure. Periodic
structure: the name evokes something of a foundational shift, tem-
porally conditioned. Difference within repetition. And indeed, the
periodic structure presents the methodical, although not necessarily
mathematical, repetition of a formal unit, which then slowly gives way
to subtle or fractional irregularities in its placement, proportion, and
design. The effect of this gradual shift over the painterly surface is one
 165 of intense vibration, or a kind of shimmering, conveyed further by
Riley through her peculiar choice of titles. Climax. Shift. Shiver. Hesitate.
Arrest. Nouns and verbs all at once, words that flip between conditions
of restiveness and calm, these are titles that attest to the very instability
of phenomenal or visual states. Take, for example, the 1963 work
Fission (figure 3.4). Here is a square of black dots on a white ground—
what could be more simple?—that seems to be pulled into the center
of the picture plane. The circles of black, so regular, so flat at the edges
of the canvas, appear to warp and bend around an invisible vortex, their
forms distended as if sucked into the painting with gathering velocity.
Clearly there is an implied temporal movement from the stamped and
blank quality of the dots to their attenuation at the center. Yet when one
attempts to parse the work and analyze Riley’s visual tempi, a pattern-
ing of sorts emerges at the center like a cross, only to give way to the
headlong rush the work illusionistically engenders.
Riley’s illusionism will be taken up in greater depth in this chap-
ter. For now, two remarks need be made about the working method
arrived at through her black-and-white paintings. The first is that
Riley was insistent that the black-and-white (and shortly after, gray)
paintings were not in any way mathematical in design; she repeatedly
declared that she possessed only the most rudimentary knowledge of
math, much less science. Her proportions were simple and worked out
in paper studies, her forms discovered through trial and error. Yet in
contrast to this process-oriented means of finding her geometry, Riley
made the critical step in 1961 of abandoning the actual labor of
painting. Although always conceiving of the work in preparatory
drawings, Riley has, since the early sixties, employed assistants to
execute the final product. Controversy ensued over her means of pro-
duction, but she rejected any notion that hers was a conceptual ges-
ture mirroring the assembly line.20 Warhol she was not.
Regardless of how her technique was received, Riley arrived in
New York bolstered by a powerful body of work and a great sense of
promise. Excited by her surroundings, struck by the differences between
London and New York, she was thrilled and flattered to meet some of
CHAPTER 3 her heroes of Abstract Expressionism: Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman,
BRIDGET RILEY’S EYE / BODY PROBLEM and Robert Motherwell. The city’s sense of time stayed with her. “This
was the first thing I felt on coming back to England,” she remarked to
the London Bureau Reporter of Women’s’ Wear Daily. “It’s tremendously
 167
3.4 Bridget Riley, Fission, 1963.
Copyright Bridget Riley, all rights
reserved. Credit: Art Resource and the
Museum of Modern Art, New York.
CHAPTER 3
BRIDGET RILEY’S EYE / BODY PROBLEM
different—how one organizes one’s time here, the values, stresses,
priorities are quite different.”21 So too was she impressed by New York’s
everyday culture. “The first thing that struck me were the wonderful
smoking manholes . . . so marvelous . . . they’re terrific. . . . I liked the
subways . . . spent a long time down there. . . . I loved that stinking,
cheap artificial life underneath.22 Far be it from any New Yorker to reject
such high praise, but Riley’s comments were not limited to the urban
surround. “The Clothes?” she offered. “I couldn’t believe it. The men’s
trousers so wide. And the women. Beautiful silks and furs, but years
behind Europe.” As for her own take on personal style and its trans-
atlantic differences, she remarked, “I love this English movement in
fashion and I’ve got quite a lot of it. This idea of the grimly dressed
woman in the arts is ridiculous. There’s no reason why an artist can’t
be well-dressed and aware of clothes and food and things like that.”23
Like that indeed. Such impressions are no doubt interesting as a
document of a young Briton in sixties America, but her words would
take on a gravely ironic resonance in the context of her larger New York
experience. For soon after hanging her works at the MoMA, Riley met
up with Larry Aldrich, among the best-known collectors of contem-
porary art in the city. A dress manufacturer for B. Altman’s, among
other stores, Aldrich owned one of the two Riley paintings in the show,
Hesitate, and had built a public institution to house his collection in
Ridgefield, Connecticut. He had a good reputation for supporting the
work of emerging artists, and so Riley was pleased to meet him. After
exchanging introductions in the gallery, Aldrich invited her to his
Seventh Avenue studio for a “surprise.” The surprise was such that
Aldrich arranged a photographer to document the event.
Yet upon her arrival, Riley was not so much surprised but
shocked and offended. For Aldrich had taken the pattern of Hesitate,
now hanging at MoMA, and commissioned Maxwell Industries to make
a mass-produced textile out of it. Aldrich’s in-house designer “Morton
Myles for Young Elegante” then fashioned the fabric into simple modish
shifts, all the better for the wearer to serve as a moving screen for the
optical dazzle. An obscure, blurry photograph (figure 3.5) records the
tension of the summit.24 Hands in pockets, Aldrich attempts to gauge
her response. Riley presses her fingers to her temples as if massaging an
incipient headache. “I was shocked,” she stated flatly of the encounter.
“In England, there are laws that take care of things like that,” she
 168

3.5 Bridget Riley meets Larry

Aldrich (from “Inside Fashion: At a
Loss for Words,” New York Herald
Tribune, March 5, 1975, p. 15).
Courtesy New York Post.

Photo © by Jill Krementz.

complained to a fashion reporter. “Nobody even asked my permission

for the fabric.”25 The encounter between Riley and Aldrich inspired a
deeply American response on the part of the British artist. She con-
tacted a lawyer. But in spite of strong moral support from artists such
as Newman (who recommended his lawyer to her), lack of financial
resources and emotional energy militated against her will to press the
case. As she remarked months after leaving New York, “I left three
weeks later with feelings of violation and disillusionment.”26
For his part, Aldrich willfully ignored Riley’s claims by suggesting
his actions were populist in intent. “Everybody else thought it was gay
and amusing,” he shrugged. “I respected her attitude, but I made no
effort to apologize. After all many people approached me to get Hesitate
fabric or buy dresses for the Op art show at the museum. They wouldn’t
have wanted to if it were wrong.”27 In the spring and summer fashion
season of 1965, he would produce a number of Op art dresses from
 169 paintings in his own collection. In addition to Riley, the artists Julian
Stanczak, Richard Anuszkiewicz and Vasarely would also have their own
work transformed into the dresses by “Young Elegante,” as seen in a
photo spread in Art in America (figure 3.6). Unlike Riley, however, they
were content to oversee the metamorphosis.
Here, then, begins the vertiginous rush into the craze for Op
fashion of the mid-sixties. Coverage was not limited to the fashion
trade, although Vogue, Harper’s, Women’s Wear Daily, and other style
magazines weighed in on the phenomenon exhaustively. In addition to
design magazines, which seized upon Op as an important trend in
interior decor, local American papers from all across the country
clamored to get a piece of the Newest Thing. Days after the opening,
photos appeared in the papers documenting the wild and vibrant styles
that various artists, collectors, and socialites wore to the event. Black
and white was the order of the evening, taking the form of checks,
stripes, dots, and mind-numbing patterns. Ethel Scull attended with
Warhol on her arm, mysterious behind huge black glasses and a wavy
line lamé suit.28 Larry Rivers showed up wearing two ties, one black,
one red, as if playfully dressing the part of an afterimage. Store
windows in New York—Bonwit’s, I. Miller, Lord and Taylor, Elizabeth
Arden, and Altman’s among them—all scurried to showcase the new
fashions against equally eye-popping backdrops. “Op fabrics, Op
stockings, Op maternity wear, Op everything,” one reporter put it,
“exploded on the style scene.”29 There were even such inventions as
Op restaurants, Op beachwear and, improbably enough, Op girdles.
And in a presumably unironic twist, Women’s Wear Daily reported on
Op cosmetics, highlighting a fanciful new way of adorning the eyes.30
In record time, then, Op became something of a media spectacle. It
even made it to the airwaves in a show hosted by no less of an art
authority than Mike Wallace, entitled “Eye on New York.”
Bad optical puns notwithstanding, the frenzy for Op as a fashion
and design phenomenon begs the question of its popularity. To be more
precise, it raises issues of Op’s “translatability” from the medium of art
to mass media in general, to say little of the implications of this trans-
CHAPTER 3 formation in the broader context of the 1960s. For some fashion
BRIDGET RILEY’S EYE / BODY PROBLEM insiders—for some artists even—the reason for its acclaim was obvious
enough, and it invariably crystallized around the body. “Women have
long been aware that certain stripes and patterns are slimming or
 171
3.6 Larry Aldrich with Op fashions,
published in Art in America, April 1965.
Courtesy Brant Publications, Inc.
Photographer unknown.
CHAPTER 3
BRIDGET RILEY’S EYE / BODY PROBLEM
becoming,” one fashion editor wrote of Op’s broad-based appeal.31
Such were the local, that is, bodily reasons justifying its proliferation
as fashion. For others, the fashion explosion around Op might seem
business as usual for the art historian—at least to the art historian who
imagines that the relationship between “high art” and “low culture” is
simply one of undialectical borrowing, a unidirectional gesture of either
sublimation or debasement.
But the Op art-fashion nexus points to a far more complicated
association; it shows up, in fact, the false dichotomy that has long
structured discussions around the so-called High and Low. Although
Riley’s complaints about the appropriation of her art are to be taken
seriously (one can hardly begrudge her cries of foul play here), they
distract from a quite transparent observation about the phenomenon
itself. That is, the blatant grafting of the optical on the bodily contra-
dicts the most basic claims made of this art by its promoters, if not
necessarily Riley: its sense of reason and its appeals to science and
technology; its intellectual abstractions; its fetish of the visual; its
desire to be seen as the apotheosis of an art historical legacy begun with
impressionism. That the body in question happens to be the exclusive
domain of women is likewise to the point. Fashion and interior design,
cosmetics: this is the stuff of the domestic, after all, and one needn’t
belabor the issue of how the domestic is conventionally gendered
as feminine and therefore irrational, the antithesis of science’s
masculinization.32
Regardless, the feminization of Op was pervasive throughout
the media, with a good share of the commentary coming from women
journalists who had little or no previous experience writing about art.
Some remarked on the family resemblance between Op’s periodic
structures and textile designs: “More than anything else it resembles
a herringbone fabric pattern,” observed a writer with a regular column
entitled “A Woman’s New York.”33 As if to justify these views, Riley’s
femininity was discussed extensively in the press. Unlike Vasarely and
Gerald Oster, artists whose works were frequently exhibited alongside
hers, Riley’s physical appearance was consistently made an object of
public scrutiny: here was a “pretty, smiling Irish girl,” as one rag con-
descendingly described her, or perhaps she was “slender, shy and
garbed all in black—as achromatic as a Riley canvas, though much
easier on the eye.”34 More often than not, Riley’s practice was linked
directly to the domestic arts, as if her technical skills as an artist derived 172
from the conventionally underprivileged crafts of the home.35 Recalling
the critic Nigel Gosling on her work, Riley herself paraphrased such
observations: “He said, ‘If I had to track down a feminine footprint here,
I would point to a certain unforced patience, that quality which can add
the thousandth stitch to the nine-hundred-and-ninety-ninth without a
tremor of triumph.’ “36 Patience, modesty, and the labor of hands: such
were the virtues of the feminine arts, less so Riley’s concentration,
focus, and acute relationship to artistic process. In spite of the fact that
the artist had employed assistants to execute her work since 1961, the
image of Riley as a sewing woman would persist. That image, for some,
had an almost dangerous element to it—dangerous because the art’s
appearance belied its capacity to hypnotize or bewitch. One critic of
the black-and-white paintings wrote that Riley “assumed the modest
patience of sewing, but it was the disguise of a femme fatale.”37
At once insidious and banal, such statements are a commonplace
in the reception of women artists. But Riley’s story cannot, and should
not, be simply accommodated into the historical archives of their
marginalization. The flagrant gendering of Op brings us closer to the
most troubling aspects of the Eye/Body problem in mid-sixties visual
culture at large, which raises the question: How might fashion speak
to technology? The answer lies less in thinking of Op fashion as the
debasement of Op art than in taking it seriously as an acutely
embodied form of its reception.

FASHIONS OF THE TIMES

What can fashion tell us about technology? How might something as
seemingly innocuous as a polka-dotted shift—a girdle for that matter—
speak to the cultural surround of technology in the sixties? Here I am
not concerned with the iconography of technology in fashion—André
Courrège’s space age stylizations, for example—nor the technology
behind its manufacture. To be blunt, fashion is not merely the stuff
of clothes. What lies beneath the surface details of a dress, a coat, or a
pair of pants extends to domains far removed from the interests of hem
lengths or style. For fashion, in its broadest sense, is a kind of complex
of temporal projections, a means to think about history or a model for
 173 history itself. Its endless cycles and its turning of seasons, its periods
of stagnation and acceleration, its retrograde visions and its forward
motion: fashion betrays a certain temporality of the historical. “The
eternal is in any case far more the ruffle on a dress than some idea,”
Benjamin wrote in his formulation of the dialectical image.38 Fashion,
for Benjamin, was the historical. The eternal in this instance is crystal-
lized by the smallest detail of fashion, which in its currency—and by
extension, outmodedness—shores up the notion that change or
consumption is the only constant, is the eternal within modernism.
Fashion, then, is implicated in the relative shelf life of commodities,
whether clothes or art or technological forms. For many, the rapid
changes taking place in the art world of the sixties inspired com-
parison to the giddy rise and fall of fashion itself.39
Indeed “Pop goes to Op” was the saying widely used in the press,
as if to suggest that Op had outdone Pop art in its trendiness, novelty,
and mass appeal. That the subject of Pop was, of course, the business
of mass culture only seemed to support the idea that art had taken on
the drive of fashion, with Op quickening its already frenetic pace. “This
present craze is treating it too much like women’s fashions—rather like
short skirts,” one British critic complained.40 This was not an isolated
response: more than one writer was prompted to consider Op as “art’s
newest dress length” or “the mode à la mode.”41 Some critics went even
further in suggesting that the peculiar tempo of Op was guided by
specifically American habits of consumption and expenditure. “People
have been forecasting the death of Op art for months,” one English critic
put it. “They say that Britain has been lured into the American way
of planned obsolescence by producing Op art gimmicks made to
throw away.”42
But the temporality associated with Op as either fashion or art or
both was also stamped on the body itself. For as much as Op seemed to
move in time, however virtually, so too did the body that encountered
or wore it: it put into motion what inhered in its representation. And
far from the technological rationality ascribed to Op by its supporters,
Op’s larger reception dwelled upon the visual enticements of the object,
CHAPTER 3 which then passed oven to a sense of bodily assault, vertigo, and nausea.
BRIDGET RILEY’S EYE / BODY PROBLEM This was work of a keenly felt physicality, even a dangerous physicality,
and the spectator’s kinesthetic identification with Op was articulated in
equally anxious terms: “What (Op) does aim to do,” one critic wrote,
is to assault the eye and stimulate it, often with devastating results. . . . 174
At a Kensington boutique not long ago an Op Art dress on a dummy
dazzled so many shoppers that it had to be removed and at one of
Bridget Riley’s exhibitions—she is perhaps the best known British Op
Art painter—someone is said to have fainted after looking at her
paintings.43

The statement neatly collapses a number of concerns surrounding

Op’s reception: the eyes are somehow attacked by the paintings and are
experienced as a peculiar aggressiveness on the part of the artist; the
body is accordingly disturbed and physically upset; the movement of
the body in fashion is allegorized to the movement of the viewer in
her reception of Op. Descriptions of bodily repulse, headaches, and far
worse are commonplace in the literature.44 Viewers were reported to
have passed out in the galleries, a kind of postwar Stendhal syndrome
gone violently amok. “I think I’m going to be sick,” was typical of such
responses.45 Op’s body was therefore a powerless, perhaps even hyster-
ical, body, one that could no more resist the seductions of fashion as it
could the spell cast by Op’s illusionistic dazzle.
Not surprisingly, Riley’s work was the most frequent target of
such complaints. Hers were paintings that made the public “go crazy”
or feel strangely light-headed. Hers engendered the most severe optical
phantoms—flashes of acid-tone colors appeared to streak out from
between the black and white—producing the most intense bodily
reactions as a result. Riley accepted on principle the notion that the
bodily and the visual were inseparable and that her practice (and its
reception) had managed to tap into that link. “I agree with [Umberto]
Boccioni that even smells, noise and so on have a visual equivalent
and can be presented through a certain vocabulary of signs,” she said.46
The statement suggests that a synesthetic dimension underwrites the
viewing of her painting, which engaged with “physical forces” beyond
visual ones. But Riley also seemed genuinely surprised that anyone
would find the work visually aggressive, as demonstrated by this
(unintentionally humorous) exchange with the British critic David
Sylvester, a longtime supporter of her work:

SYLVESTER: Do you want your work to be aggressive to the spectator?

Do you like it to hurt the eyes?
 175 RILEY: I don’t mind either way. But I remember being very surprised
when people first complained that it hurt their eyes, because it has never
hurt mine.

SYLVESTER: No?

RILEY: No, never. Not hurt them.

SYLVESTER: Does it make them water?

RILEY: No.

SYLVESTER: Doesn’t it give you a pain?

RILEY: No—no pain! It gives me pleasure.

SYLVESTER: Does it give you that famous ad-mixture, pleasure-pain?

RILEY: Possibly, in that it is stimulating, an active, a vibrating pleasure.

SYLVESTER: Comparable to what?

RILEY: Running, early morning . . . cold water . . . fresh things, slightly

astringent . . . things like this . . . certain acid sorts of smells. . . .

SYLVESTER: . . . You see the lines moving to and fro?

RILEY: Yes, but I find that an exhilarating thing, a stimulating sensation

. . . never painful physically.

SYLVESTER: That sounds very masochistic, Bridget.

RILEY: I have been accused of that, but I don’t think it is that.47

CHAPTER 3 One gets the feeling that the back and forth could go on and on.
BRIDGET RILEY’S EYE / BODY PROBLEM Painful? No. Pleasurable? Yes. Riley is insistent, adamant even, that the
aggression so widely documented in the viewer’s encounter with her
painting is not present for her or is at the very least “beside the point.”
Whether or not she had personally experienced the “eye hurting” that 176
Sylvester and so many others described in their confrontation with the
work, there is something defensive in her refusal to acknowledge that
others consider it violent. If the work is abrasive, it is invigoratingly so,
shocking only to the point that it offers the viewer a kind of cognitive
jolt, like a splash of cold water in the face or the astringent odor of
sharply cut grass.
The force of such denials gives pause. On the one hand, implicit
to the dialogue is Riley’s understanding of the interconnectedness of the
senses, stimulated by information coming in from the eye. Her longer
exchange with the critic, for instance, speaks of the visual in terms of
listening to music; likewise, the sense of smell is invoked. On the other
hand, the synesthetic aspect of the work stops just short of being seen
as violent. Irresolvable as the dialogue may seem, it underscores a
debate on the vulnerability of the body in relation to what the eye
brings to it, as signaled by a change in time in that body experienced as
a certain physical duress. The public well understood that Eye and Body
were indivisible in the reception of Op, and that a tension was at the
base of their relationship. But to what extent does their permeability to
one another allow for the kinds of effects Riley so consistently denied?
Eye/Body, embodied eyes: what was the actual fallout of this confronta-
tion? As far as a few art critics and philosophers of the moment were
concerned, the question of the degree to which the eye and the body
adhered or converged opened onto the problem of Op’s illusionism
itself. And that illusionism, we shall see, would bear stark implications
for recent technology.

HAPTICAL OPTICS AND PHENOMENAL SUBJECTS

No doubt, the art historian engaged with the problem of the visual
and the phenomenal is likely to correlate the terms to a much longer
tradition. More than any other, Jonathan Crary has demonstrated that
the disassociation of vision from the body in the nineteenth century
coincided with the emergence of a nascent spectacular culture; the body
was industrially “remapped” or rebuilt to meet the “tasks of spectacular
consumption.”48 To the point: that separation was not free of ideology,
as the impulse to rationalize the practice would suggest. As Marx
 177 described capital’s abstraction of the sensorium, “the senses have
therefore become theoreticians in their immediate praxis.”49
In separating out seeing from the other senses—particularly that
of touch—one invokes the categories of the optic and the haptic so
fundamental to the earliest historians of art. Indebted to a critical
tradition informed by the writings of Adolf von Hildebrand as well as
the protobehaviorist psychology of Johann Friedrich Herbart, Alois
Riegl isolated these terms as they found their concrete expression in art
history. In Late Roman Art Industry (1903) most notably, Riegl treated
the problems of the haptic (or tactile) and the optic as manifest in the
development of antique relief. With the haptic, the organization of a
figure upon its ground was delineated by a distinct sculptural contour,
treated as an isolated body in space, and, as such, perceived by the
beholder as a tactile and individualized entity. Self-contained and
autonomous, it was seemingly impervious in its disposition to the
spectator’s gaze. Riegl went on to demonstrate that in time, the relief
plane in Antiquity grew shallower so that the individuation between
one figure and the next diminished, and space became more homo-
genous. This gesture appealed less to the tactile sense than it implied
a certain opening onto a new visual plane, one that admitted an en-
counter with a beholder through its suggested expansion into space.
Riegl may seem at some distance from the more contemporary
concerns surrounding Op and the body (to say nothing of antique relief)
but his rhetoric informs our discussion in crucial respects. For the legacy
that saw the optic as superseding the haptic is no less than the founda-
tion of high modernism. Clement Greenberg’s apotheosis of flatness,
after all, staked a claim for the evolution of modernist painting as
an emptying out of the illusionistic “cavity” of the easel picture, and
the reorganization of its pictorial elements into a homogenous (read:
allover) frontality. “Optical” painting by his account was therefore
advanced painting, whereas the illusory space of perspective appealed
to the haptic and was therefore regressive. “All we can conclude is that
the future of the easel picture as a vehicle of ambitious art has become
problematical,” Greenberg declared toward the end of “The Crisis of
CHAPTER 3 the Easel Picture.”50
BRIDGET RILEY’S EYE / BODY PROBLEM Given such pronouncements, one might speculate about
Greenberg’s stance toward Op and by implication, Riley. As Lisa G.
Corrin notes, the critic never committed words to paper about Riley,
effectively damning her practice through his silence.51 And there can be 178
no question, certainly, that Riley’s coronation by popular culture was
offensive to the writer of “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” By the same token,
when The Responsive Eye came to public prominence, Greenberg’s own
position on flatness had shifted from the decentered space of the ab-
stract expressionist painting to the singularity of the hard-edge canvas.
He acknowledged the persistence of illusionism as a limit condition of
painting itself. “The flatness towards which Modernism orients itself can
never be an utter flatness,” he reasoned. “[T]he heightened sensitivity
of the picture plane may no longer permit sculptural illusion or trompe
l’oeil, but it does and must permit optical illusion.”52
Such concessions would seem to admit to the “trickery” at the
basis of much Op art, but they hardly excuse or justify it. Frances
Spalding reports that Greenberg met Riley on a couple of occasions,
first in New York and then a few times at Anthony Caro’s London
residence; and though it’s nice to think that their shared investment
in the moderns inspired serious discussion, one can’t imagine much
coming from the exchange. Riley, however, was well read in American
art criticism, clearly drawn to its principal postwar figures. And strange
as it may sound, her work was a kind of allover painting, organized
around the studied repetition of a single formal unit across the picture
plane. But Greenbergian it was not. Riley’s work seemed a kind of visual
trickery masquerading in the formal elements of high modernism.
It was in this (acutely Greenbergian) light that Rosalind Krauss
attacked Op art in her damning critique of The Responsive Eye, entitled
“Afterthoughts on Op.” In it she argued vociferously that “Op Art in all
the multiplicity of its visual guises really operates from a single, basic
concept: the trompe l’oeil” and that moreover, it was at a far remove
from the concerns of genuine optical painting.53 Underlining her
account is a thinking about the haptic and optic as dangerously mixed
in this work, as if the tactile in Op had somehow invaded or contam-
inated the visual priorities of the most progressive art making. What’s
more, Op art resorted to techniques and formal structures that were
deeply regressive compared to the strides made by “genuine optical
painting.” As Krauss observed:

The term optical has always been used in the description of painting or
sculpture to refer to that mode of presentation which addresses itself
 179 solely to one’s vision and which in no way elicits sensations that are
tactile in kind. Haptic, or tactile, art on the other hand exploits the
viewer’s sense of touch. Painting which employs the conventions on
which illusionism is built, that is of modeling and perspective, to induce
in the perceiver the idea that behind the picture-plane lies three-
dimensional objects which could actually feel is thus essentially haptic
rather than optic. The whole tradition of trompe l’oeil painting rests
on the ironic heightening of the intensity of this imagined tactile
exploration, heightening at the same time the feeling of duplicity
which knowledge of the painting’s actual flatness always brings.54

Duplicity is the word that haunts Krauss’s reading of Op, tied

CHAPTER 3
BRIDGET RILEY’S EYE / BODY PROBLEM
as it is to its literal tricking of the eye (e.g., as trompe l’oeil). And that
visual chicanery, which takes place in the service of producing bodily
responses, is immediately applied to the work of—who else?—Bridget
Riley.55 Krauss proceeded to gloss the longer tradition of optical theory
within modernism, discussing phenomena ranging from optical mixing
in divisionism to the sensation of the afterimage. Her verdict for the
show is punishing: its curatorial choices begged justification and its
work was “perceptual gimmickry.”56 “And further,” Krauss concluded,
“given its exclusively tactile concerns, one is staggered at a designation
of it as ‘optical’ art.”57
Krauss’s identification of the haptic and optic in the reception of
Op is instructive. Notable here is that in the vast art critical literature on
Op, she is alone in linking her argument to a longer Riegelian tradition
that sees the haptic and optic in historical tension with one another and
that likewise calls up allusions to a critical literature around perceptual
(or protoperceptual) psychology. This is not to say that Krauss believed
the haptic and optic were separable in the perception of works of art or
that the senses could be fully isolated; hers, rather, is a modernist’s
advocacy of the virtues of a genuinely optical painting, compelled by
an almost ethical furor over the illusionism Op art entertains. It was
precisely that comingling that fueled Op’s greatest controversies.
Anton Ehrenzweig, the British perceptual psychologist, like-
wise addressed Riley’s mixing of seemingly opposed terms. His essay
“The Pictorial Space of Bridget Riley” does not take on the rhetoric
of the haptic and the optic as Krauss’s analysis does (and indeed,
it is as enthusiastic in its endorsement of Riley’s practice as Krauss is
disparaging). Yet it too considers the ways in which the experience of 180
her work brings together spectatorial positions largely considered at
odds with each other. Ehrenzweig challenged the notion that Riley’s
painting is merely an exercise in visual trickery. In his posthumously
published The Hidden Order of Art (1967), a book that would have a
significant impact on a later generation of sixties artists (Robert Morris
and Robert Smithson among them), Riley is repeatedly singled out as an
artist whose work effectively defeats the gestalt and gestalt psychology
along with it, the basis of his own theories on the creative processes.
Introduced to Riley in 1962, Ehrenzweig quickly identified in
her work its acute tension between control and chaos, between the
rational and the unorganized, and he saw these positions as not
opposed but complementary.58 He regarded this tension as productive
and as process oriented, arguing for the diachronic processing of the
work’s reception, which he saw as encompassing a range of seemingly
contradictory phases. Here, the aggressive, hard, and cold merge into
the expansive and warm; feelings of assault give way to a sense of
reassurance. This perceptual to and fro, Ehrenzweig suggested, mili-
tates against simple analyses that Riley’s art is motivated exclusively
by illusionistic concerns.

One can distinguish two contrasting phases in the subjective experience

of BR’s paintings—the first phrase can be called cold, hard, aggressive,
“devouring”; the second warm, expansive, reassuring. It is idiomatic to
speak of our eyes “devouring” something. Here the reverse happens,
our eyes are attacked and devoured by the paintings. We are faced with
a subtle inexorable variation of linear units. So smooth is the transition
that it does not allow our eye to organize the units into stabler larger
entities that could serve as focusing points. . . . There is a constant tug-
of-war between shifting and crumbling gestalt patterns.
But at a certain point of our experience this relentless attack
on our normal viewing habits can peel our eyes into a new crystal clear
sensibility which has none of the cold aggressiveness of the first phase.
To achieve this transformation we have to submit to the initial attack
in the way in which we have learned to enjoy a cold shower bath. There
comes the voluptuous moment when the senses and skin tingle with a
new warmth and sharpened awareness of the body and the world around.
 181 When this moment of transformation arrives the single units of the com-
position cease straining and pulling at each other. A total vision comes
through that is akin to a true hallucination and transcends the intellectual
calculation of the single elements. It is quite inadequate to speak of
“Optical illusion” which lacks the important feeling of revelation.59

At one point in the passage, Ehrenzweig’s prose seems to blossom.

CHAPTER 3
BRIDGET RILEY’S EYE / BODY PROBLEM
The shift from coldness to warmth, the aggressive to the reassuring,
is correlated specifically to an Eye/Body nexus. Somehow, visual infor-
mation that once assaulted the eye is now expressed as a voluptuous
sensation of the body: the “senses and skin tingle with a new warmth
and sharpened awareness of the body and the world around.” No
wonder Sylvester described Riley’s own position toward her work as
masochistic. Riley’s visual information, once so astringent, so cold, has
now infiltrated the body as sensuous experience, and with no less than
the force of a “revelation” or a “hallucination.”
Hallucination or trickery, or revelation, or both? Coming from
extremely different positions as they are, Krauss and Ehrenzweig
were alike in attributing the relative force of Riley’s work to its mixing
of the visual and the corporeal. The currency of this issue within the
art criticism of the mid-sixties found its match in readings that took on
the Eye/Body problem from other disciplinary perspectives, mostly
of a philosophical orientation. As Frances Spalding has written, Riley
engaged the debate in her own intensive reading of Maurice Merleau-
Ponty. It was his writing of the late fifties and early sixties that
resonated most strongly with the artist, especially the essay “Eye and
Mind,” which deals extensively with the phenomenology of painting.
Spalding remarks that “an entire thesis could be constructed on the
relevance of that essay to Riley’s art,” and in the text’s appeal to a vision
“occasioned” by the body, it affirms the back-and-forth between seeing
and feeling experienced in the encounter with her painting.60
Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy indeed dramatized the inter-
twining of the visual, the carnal, and the phenomenal world such that
subjectivity itself was shot through with an acute materiality. In The
Visible and the Invisible, published posthumously in 1964 and translated
into English in 1968, eye and body were part of the nexus of subjective
being. Seeing and touching, touching and seeing, were the “chiasm” of
immanent experience. The eye inhabited the thickness of the body, just 182
as the body literally motivated the eye, put it into movement. “Since the
same body sees and touches, visible and tangible belong to the same
world,” he wrote,

It is a marvel little too noticed that every movement of my eyes . . . even

more, every displacement of my body—has its place in the same visible
universe that I itemize and explore with them, as conversely, every vision
takes place in tactile space. There is a double and crossed situating of the
visible in the tangible and the tangible in the visible.61

Vision is a palpation with the look. Merleau-Ponty repeatedly insisted

upon a relationship of “encroachment” between the eye and body.
Although he did not claim that eye and body merge fully, neither did
he privilege one over the other in subjective experience. And unlike
Ehrenzweig, who approached the “intertwining” of eye and body
through terms that suggested a diachronic processing by the body,
Merleau-Ponty did not parse the experience temporally.
It is tempting to think that Riley’s reading of the philosopher,
coupled with her personal dialogue with Ehrenzweig, inspired her own
reading on what her paintings did for their viewers. “Running, early
morning . . . cold water . . . fresh things, slightly astringent . . . certain
acid sorts of smells”: these were the artist’s own impressions of her
work, and they are implicated precisely in Ehrenzweig’s corporeal pro-
cessing of visual information, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. These
were the terms, after all, that would excuse Riley’s art from being
treated as merely “assaultive,” violent paintings that attacked the eye.
And yet without meaning to, Ehrenzweig’s own assessment opens onto
the very charges Krauss would make of Riley’s painting. In suggesting
that Riley’s work assumes the power of “a hallucination” not only did
Ehrenzweig court the possibility that the painting is transformative; he
tacitly acknowledged the very phantasms and illusionism Krauss so
detested in Riley’s work. And when Krauss referred to the new “optical”
painting as “duplicitous,” she moved closer to a different kind of
rhetoric around Op art, which saw in the Eye/Body/art/fashion
nexus—and its conjunction through time—a dangerous proximity to
the abuses of sixties technology: namely, the behavioristic and con-
trolling aspects of a postwar visual culture gone dangerously haptic.
 183 SENSE RATIOS AND THE PROBLEM OF CONTROL
What was at stake was not only the notion that the eye could be
tricked but also that the trompe l’oeil excesses of the new optical art
represented a deeper threat concealed under the sign of technological
progress. This was not, in short, the rational, scientific eye described
by The Responsive Eye, the corporeal emblem of insight and Enlight-
enment. This was an eye, rather, vulnerable to damaging external in-
fluences, an innocent, even stupid eye that passively absorbed visual
information without critical distance or judgment. Long before the
Responsive Eye opened in 1965, Jon Borgzinner, the critic of Time
magazine widely credited with coining the term Op art, offered the
following on the eye’s capacity to be misled. “Man’s eyes are not win-
dows, although he has long regarded them as such,” he wrote.

They can be bahed, boggled and balked. . . . They often see things that
are not there and fail to see things that are there. In the eyes resides
man’s first sense, and it is fallible. . . . Preying and playing on the fal-
libility of vision is the new movement of “Optical art” that has sprung
up across the Western world.62

There is, of course, a long tradition within Western philosophy,

CHAPTER 3
BRIDGET RILEY’S EYE / BODY PROBLEM
aesthetics, and art history that holds to the very fallibility of the eye
and its openness to contamination. One needn’t go back to Plato to
mine sources that speak of the eye’s defenselessness. The “denigration
of vision,” as Martin Jay refers to it, represents a decided complement—
or better put, a dark underbelly—to the sublimities long accorded the
visual sense.63 And a modernist, seizing upon the image of a subject
absorbed and then stupefied in the face of contemporary visual phen-
omena, might describe such conditions through terms of an acute
critical pedigree: shock, for instance, or distraction, or even empathy.
This is a theoretical legacy deeply internalized within the reception of
Op; and it announces that the historicity of the Eye/Body problem is
far from unique to the postwar era. Even still, the “optical” dimension
of popular culture in the mid–1960s arrived with a markedly expan-
sive sense of what constituted the visual—and of what the visual had
progressively colonized—with the decade’s emerging electronic culture
serving as its backdrop.
 Television and the visual potential attached to new forms of 184
computer technology were the most frequent objects of attack, and the
rhetoric stemming from their powers of manipulation—their capacity
to “handle” the subjects of visual culture as physical beings—points
precisely to the Eye/Body nexus around Op.64 When, for instance,
Ellul’s The Technological Society was translated into English in 1964,
his warnings on the capacity of “technique” and television doubtlessly
resonated with his new American readership, who embraced the book
with far greater interest than their French counterparts.65 “Television,”
Ellul wrote, “because of its power of fascination and its capacity of
visual and auditory penetration is probably the technical instrument
which is most destructive of personality and human relationships.”66
Ellul was hardly alone in his complaints. He would be joined in
his criticism by writers with whom he shared little ideologically. But
his statement also attests to new conditions of viewership that ratify
the contemporaneous discussions within art criticism on the Eye/Body
problem. Note that for Ellul, television is an instrument of both visual
and auditory penetration: it is as much something to hear as it is to
watch, and is therefore a tool of doubled instrumental capacities. It
both fascinates and destroys and does so implicitly through its engage-
ment of multiple senses synchronically linked. As such, Ellul’s words on
television, originally published in 1954, fulfilled Marshall McLuhan’s
well-known prognosis on media culture in advance of the fact.
McLuhan’s infamous volume of 1962, The Gutenberg Galaxy, suggested
nothing so much as the complete reorganization of the sensorium
through the introduction and transitioning of new media, in this case,
the shift between the pretypographic culture of the Greeks and the
Middle Ages, to the invention of moveable print under Gutenberg, to
the electronic age of the postwar era. Although not principally con-
cerned with this later period, The Gutenberg Galaxy bears enormous
relevance for the postwar moment, particularly in introducing a
concept explored more fully in his subsequent Understanding Media:
The Extensions of Man of 1964. It is with the concept of the “ratio of the
senses” or the “sense ratio” that we approach the issue of the Eye/Body
problem as it is thematized within sixties popular culture and begin to
see its inflections in the criticism around Op art.
Briefly put, the “sense ratio” is the relative and shifting index
between the senses in the assimilation of knowledge or information.
 185 It is a kind of balance sheet of the sensorium, whether the privileging
of one sense faculty over the next or their virtual mixing as synesthesia.
In part the notion derives from McLuhan’s formulation of “extensions,”
a concept also developed in The Gutenberg Galaxy. Extensions are little
more than tools or technologies that serve to “extend” the usefulness
of the body and its senses, forms of media that negotiate the body’s
relationship with the phenomenal world. Extensions might be as tech-
nologically primitive as clothes (extensions of the skin and its capacity
to protect the body) or the wheel (extensions of our legs and our
capacity to walk) or as technically sophisticated as computers. What-
ever the degree of their refinement, extensions play a formative role
on the body in altering the relative balance between the senses.
The historicity of extensions suggests likewise that the sense ratio
is a deeply historical phenomenon and, by implication, culturally specific
as well. “If a technology is introduced either from within or without a
culture, “ McLuhan wrote, “and if it gives new stress or ascendancy to
one or another of our visual senses, the ratio among all other senses is
altered.”67 For McLuhan, the transition between the pretypographic
world of the ancients and the world of print fundamentally changed
the subject’s sense ratio. The pretypographic universe of the Greeks,
he argued, was largely auditory and tactile, organized around the
importance of the oratory within their culture. He then claimed that the
invention of print with Gutenberg fixed or interiorized the relationship
between the word and its subject, placing a new and unprecedented
stress on the visual sense. Crucially, this shift in the sense ratio also
changed the way in which history and, more specifically, time was per-
ceived. McLuhan reasoned that in the culture of the book, with its
graphic unfolding of the word from page to page, information is availed
of and experienced almost protocinematically, that is, in linear or teleo-
logical sequence.
In opposition to the culture of the book and its resultant teleology,
it is with the advent of the electronic age that McLuhan detected a kind
of “return” to a more synesthetic relationship to culture, one that en-
gages the tactile, auditory, and visual senses all at once, because the
CHAPTER 3 individual is no longer exclusively a typographic subject. Gone too is a
BRIDGET RILEY’S EYE / BODY PROBLEM fixed spatiotemporal perspective on the world and a linear sense of time
along with it. For with this radical change in extensions comes a radical
inversion of one’s perceptual orientation: the unsettling recognition that
the coordinates that once determined one’s relationship to the world— 186
namely, time and space—have been fundamentally displaced.
In spite of, or because of, its argumentative economy, The
Gutenberg Galaxy laid itself open to the most strenuous criticism and
controversy, as did McLuhan’s technological forecasting in general.
A mechanistic reasoning underwrites the concept of extensions and
the ratio of the senses, to the degree that the body’s relationship to
information technology is treated in explicitly causal terms. Hence with
the arrival of new media, so the narrative goes, the senses would follow
in kind. As a result, McLuhan might not only be accused of techno-
logical determinism: he seems equally guilty of fetishizing the sense
faculties as little more than “extensions” of the technology alleged to
serve the human subject. In turn, this would reduce to the notion that
McLuhan’s linkage between media and the body is one of stimulus and
response. The implications are troubling. “What if he is right?” some
social critics wondered publicly, sounding the alarm for the potentially
dangerous consequences McLuhan’s thesis suggested. To follow his
argument to its logical extreme, the subject is virtually remodeled after
changing technologies in an ever-deepening relationship of control. For
even as McLuhan made a claim for the synethestic dimension of the
electronic age, he granted little in the way of the subject’s autonomy
over the senses.
Such criticism seems the inevitable fallout of any project attempt-
ing to historicize technology’s relationship to perception, and to his
credit, McLuhan addressed such charges in the introduction to The
Gutenberg Galaxy. But the significance of his volume in this context lies
not so much in the correctness of his claims (in fact, his considerations
of new media were largely affirmative, utopian in its promise of a newly
retribalized “Global Village,” and for many critics, technologically
deterministic)68 as much as in their resonance with the discourse
surrounding the Eye/Body problem in sixties art. McLuhan obliquely
took up the notion that the visual within the electronic age has such a
bodily dimension, that it is imbricated with the body in its shifting sense
ratio. In Understanding Media, he painted a picture of its effects in the
most literal strokes possible, speaking about the body’s relationship to
television: “Perhaps the most familiar and pathetic effect of the TV
image,” he wrote, “is the posture of children in the early grades. With
perfect psycho-mimetic skill, they carry out the commands of the TV.
 187 They pore, they probe, they slow down, and involve themselves in
depth.”69 The notion that a controlling power could be attributed to
new visual technology—one that literally refigured the body—strikes
a distinct chord within the literature around Op. One passage from
Understanding Media makes a prescient (if inadvertent) remark around
fashion and television that applies well to the “optical dazzle”
associated with Op fashion. McLuhan noted,

Clothing and styling in the past decade have gone so tactile and so
sculptural that they present a sort of exaggerated evidence of the new
qualities of the TV mosaic. The TV extension of our nerves in hirsute
patterns possesses the power to evoke a flood of related imagery in
clothing, hairdo, walk and gesture.70

These are deeply suggestive comments for the reception of Op,

CHAPTER 3
BRIDGET RILEY’S EYE / BODY PROBLEM
and they go far to confirm Samuel Weber’s incisive analysis of the
“differential specificity” of the medium of television.71 Weber reflects
critically on the word television, both its commonplace usage and what
is obscured within its everyday understanding, and thus uncovers a
range of concerns for the Eye/Body problem in the visual arts of the
mid-sixties. Attending to the English prefix tele in the word television,
he restores to the medium its emphatic internalization of distance;
quite literally, it is a modality of “seeing-at-a-distance.” There is, then,
as much a spatializing as a visual component to the operations of its
technology, and Weber argues, “the notion of ‘distance’ [in the word
television] is preserved only as an obstacle to be surmounted.”72 Even
more to the point, the spatializing capacity of television bears profound
implications for the coordination of the spectator’s body. “The over-
coming of distance in [television and other technologies of distance]
is linked to the ability to transcend the spatial limitations usually
associated with the body,” Weber writes. “If television thus names
‘seeing-at-a-distance’, what it appears to overcome thereby is the body,
or more precisely, the spatial limitations placed by the body upon seeing
and hearing.”73
Following on such pronouncements, it is clear that the suspicion
of the optical within the reception of Op was not just organized only
around the idea that appearances lie. It went much further in insinuat-
ing that the visual could wreak havoc on the body through a peculiar
loss of control, signaled by a change in bodily time. As numerous 188
confrontations with Riley’s work demonstrate, this anxiety was tri-
angulated further around the terms of gender, the popular, and tech-
nology. It bears repeating that Riley was at pains to deny these terms
in her own critical reception, and yet there she was: condescendingly
feminized and upheld as a figure deeply engaged in contemporary
technology. Thomas Hess, for instance, neatly stitched together the
elements in this chain—woman, the popular, technology—as a means
of demonstrating the dangers of an expanding visual culture at this
moment. He began with a pointed (and transparent) anecdote on Riley
and The Responsive Eye:

At the press opening, it was noticed that one black and white Op panel
by Bridget Riley had been dirtied in transit. The artist happened to drop
by and she volunteered to make repairs. I came across her cheerfully
scouring the surface with Ajax, the “Foaming Cleanser,” while a staK
carpenter stood nearby with the expression of an old baron’s retainer
watching the new tenants install hi-fi in the clavichord. (Just a whiK of
Ajax, he hinted, would melt a dozen [Pierre] Bonnards that had hung on
these walls a few weeks before.) Obviously this was all for the best. . . .
But the quick association from the episode is pure TV.74

There is a kind of stream-of-consciousness logic at work in Hess’s

ruminations. Riley the Op artist, attending her own press opening, has
somehow metamorphosed into Riley the dutiful domestic, scrubbing
paintings at the Museum of Modern Art. A canister of Ajax captivates
Hess’s attention, and it comes to figure as a trope for the artist her-
self. Its presence suggests that things are definitely not business as us-
ual at the museum, as if its space had been trespassed (contaminated?)
by a foreign (female?) body, leaving the old guard with their Bonnards
shrinking in her wake. Hess’s implicit domestication of Riley then
segues—and seamlessly—into a broader reflection on television, a
passage that makes the by-now-obligatory reference to McLuhan:

Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media, suggests that the content

of every new medium is another, usually older form. Thus the content of
the movies is the novel. The content of television is the movies. Etc.
The content of both Pop and Op Art is advertising, especially display
 189 advertising. Pop used printed commercial art—magazines, illustrations,
billboards, packaging. Op uses T.V.—its image made up of hundreds of
tiny dots which the eye reads by filling in the gaps; in times of distress
the screen is covered with appalling moiré patterns. There is the same
quivering glare to the light, the same ping eKects, the radar blips. And
there is the same immediacy. Like the TV viewer, the Op audience
passively participates, conditioned into giving up critical faculties, or
at least suspending disbelief. Peripatetic zombies.75

Op was a kind of Pandora’s box for the new media age: the idiot box of
television. When opened—or switched on—it exerted a damaging toll
on the spectator through a barrage of visual media. Like zombies, one
was stupefied and made stupid in its presence.
This notion is critical to the deepening suspicion, even paranoia,
about Op. Nevertheless, Op was considered user-friendly stuff in spite of
the aggression attributed to it, its eye-hurting glare, virtually hypnotic
powers, and nausea-inducing effects. As Barbara Rose put it cynically:
“Op is absolutely gratifying in this respect because you know that you
have gotten the message once nausea or vertigo set in.”76 Compared to
most forms of painterly abstraction, Op was an open community—a
club for all comers—precisely because it didn’t take a genius to “get it.”
For many others, though, this was technological optimism at its
most insidious: the conviction that Op was a kind of visual Esperanto, a
universal technology of and for the people. Far from the rarefied vision
of the Two Cultures, critics detected a consumerist threat in Op, most
often linked to the body and women in particular. As Hess noted,

CHAPTER 3
BRIDGET RILEY’S EYE / BODY PROBLEM
The content of Op may be TV, but it is not the amateur’s look at TV, not
its electronics. . . . If Op is an alliance of Science and Art—Lord Snow’s
Third Culture—Science is conceding only its obsolete apparatus.
. . . Actually Op is not involved with science, but with the pseudo-
scientific crafts of display—shop-window designs, textile patterns, eye-
catching wrapping papers—which in turn have salvaged a few techniques
from the commercial labs. . . . This is gadgetry, bitten by art, dreaming
about science. 77

Hess’s language is useful in parsing the conventional (if problem-

atic) understanding of science as opposed to technology.78 It is not so
much that he critiqued a genuine confrontation between art and 190
science; rather, he found fault with Op’s pretensions to do so. In this
sense Hess maintained the commonplace distinction between science
as a pure and academic discipline and technology as little more than
“applied science”—the business of craft or commercial labor, science
brought down from its pedestal. Whatever divisions he drew between
the two, his words betray an acute chauvinism toward technology as
popular culture. Shop-window designs, textile patterns, wrapping paper,
Bridget Riley, and Ajax: technology, in opposition to science, has been
feminized as craft, as the domestic, and women seemed especially
susceptible to its designs. By extension, the viewer of Op who falls prey
to its spell it likewise made the dupe of such feminine wiles. If, then,
the Op viewer was conventionally gendered as female—because of the
fashion frenzy that accompanied the art—that viewer’s patterns of
consumption would seem to influence, and insidiously, the other half
of the population. The notion of Riley as a “femme fatale” returns. Like
the clothes with which she is associated, her work fascinates and
thereby pacifies the spectator, who then passively or “easily joins.”
This passivity suggested that the new art assumed an unprece-
dented degree of control over its viewers, and there is no doubt that the
language of control carried its own technocratic associations. In what
has subsequently been described by Joseph Beniger as the “control
revolution,” the rise of electronic media in the postwar era was ex-
plicitly linked to the control of information. There is good reason why,
after all, Norbert Wiener’s groundbreaking study of information theory
was called Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and
Machine. And over and over, the dialectical knot between control and
passivity was correlated with the idea that Op art “programmed” its
viewers as much as Op artists “programmed” their own work.79
Curiously enough, Op’s sense of “programming” and its
“impersonality” were treated by some as one of its strongest points,
the sign of its claims to scientific objectivity and the advanced tech-
nology of computers, automation processes, and communications
media.80 “Perhaps these experiments,” John Canaday observed, “are
in truth only the first steps towards a new concept of form in painting,
one that can develop into systems which will enable a once-static art
to control retinal response and create a kind of kinetic color ballet” (my
emphasis).81 As Seitz similarly proclaimed of the work, “we cannot yet
 191 estimate the potential of static or moving images for the alteration of
consciousness.”82
This is a deeply troubling recommendation for the new abstrac-
tion, implying that the work might effectively discipline the perception
of its viewer. For both Seitz’s and Canaday’s rhetoric touches on a kind
of social engineering organized around the power of the image.83 Indeed
the involuntary responses demanded by Op sounded warning bells for
many critics, who detected in its reception an abrupt end to free will
through a peculiar form of visual conditioning. Here the specter of a
radical behaviorism raises its head, a behaviorism that reflects the
darker possibilities attached to a culture of “programming.” Op was
implicitly seen, to borrow a phrase of B. F. Skinner’s, as such a “tech-
nology of behavior.”84 “In its very title, ‘The Responsive Eye,’” Max
Kozloff warned in the Nation,

hints of realms enticing because involuntary, and of a sure-fire con-

tinuum of stimulus and reaction from which no one, with reasonably
normal vision, would be excluded. . . . To reduce the viewer to a helpless
scoreboard of sensations, to deprive him of his will, is a fundamental
breach of propriety, committed by many artists through an appalling
scientistic innocence. . . .
The disturbing question posed by “The Responsive Eye” is the
weight and importance that it must be accorded as a phenomenon of
contemporary art. . . . It might be seen as the search to untap resources
within the impersonal, almost computerized, geometries and visual arti-
facts of an automated age. . . . Yet this spectacle is extremely deceiving.85

Like Seitz and Canaday, if from a radically different perspective, Kozloff

CHAPTER 3
BRIDGET RILEY’S EYE / BODY PROBLEM
regarded the emergence of Op not simply as a pale reflection of its era’s
technologies but as a potential means to “untap (the) resources . . .
of an automated age.” Yet such “resources” might be exploited as an
excessive manipulation, to the point where the viewing subject is effec-
tively deprived of free will. Kozloff expressed a marked cynicism about
Op as such a vehicle of information—necessarily deceiving informa-
tion—and in this sense his review corresponds with the Nation’s deeply
skeptical position on popular media in general.
But if Kozloff was unrepentant in his stance toward Op, he did not
begin to approach the hostility toward media implicitly expressed in a
nameless editorial from a local Richmond, Virginia, newspaper. At first, 192
the article is typical of the reception around The Responsive Eye in its
descriptions of eye-hurting, involuntary responses and manipulation.
Then it sharply veers off in other direction. Taking its observations to
their rhetorical extreme, it analogizes Op’s effects to the way news and
information are distributed and received in mid-sixties America:

And what is the point of this, someone will ask? Well the point is this,
that art is the expression of the age. The pressures and upheavals of our
time have the same eKect on our observers: Now you see it, now you
don’t. Now the facts are clear, now the facts are muddled grey. The
distortion of old values, and the crowding of new cultures, presents a
peculiar aspect to the eye. It is painful.
Who is to tell what are the facts in Viet Nam, for instance? The
government of one day is not the government of the next; the actions
of our own ogcials there are deliberately distorted, and friend slips into
foe and back again. The alliances with Europe are not what they seem,
and the image of the Communist world clashes with reality. . . . It is all
painful.86

One might forgive the authorless editorial its tired clichés about art
(“art is the expression of the age”), as well as its argumentative leaps.
What is striking about this passage is its profound distrust toward the
image in society, its somatic risks. We are informed two times in as
many paragraphs that “it is painful.” The viewing of Op art is taken as
an allegory for the evening news, with its deeply painful imagery.
Neither is to be trusted. That Vietnam was, of course, the television
or living room war goes far to confirm the connection that Op was itself
regarded as a kind of new media, a new “technology of behavior.” For
some critics even, the Op image was thought to penetrate the body,
so insidious was its control over the passive observer.

TECHNICS AND HALLUCINOGENICS

Op’s technological duplicity found other analogies for the perceptual
sensations and loss of autonomy it produced for the subject. In both a
figurative and literal sense, Op was regarded as something to consume;
 193 and in its consumption, it upset the temporal stability of the viewer
in question. It was imminently consumable, on the one hand, because
of its convergence with consumer culture: it could be bought as art,
fashion, and design. On the other hand, it was also metaphorized to
something that was literally ingested, blurring further the distinction
between the haptic and optic and effecting a decisive temporal change
over the body along the way. Sometimes this was expressed through the
idea that the body was a communicative system, absorbing visual infor-
mation as “data” to be processed synesthestically. Other times that
notion was linked to a process of habituation—how a consumer of
Op was habituated to its dizzying effects.87
This allusion to “habituation” strikes a chord beyond its resonance
with the language of “programming.” The consumption of Op was also
likened to the consumption of psychedelics and the various change in
states they induced for a habituated “user.” To the degree that Op was
thought to incapacitate the viewer as so many other forms of emerging
media, the drug metaphor implied a deprivation of free will and
conscious decision making; alternately, it induced a state of trance,
euphoria, or complete lack of control. As Cherill Anderson remarked in
her suggestively titled “Op Art’s Tiny Time Pill,” “The effect is rather like
having the ‘tiny time pills’ of the much advertised cold capsules popping
away in one’s head,” and she continued,

The analogy may be frivolous, but its implications are not. One of the
reasons for taking the Op movement seriously is precisely this kinetic
potential. In skilled hands, working under the direction of a creative
mind, optical phenomenon could endow the figurative and abstract visual
arts with a fourth dimension—the ability to move in time—heretofore
reserved for music and the other performing arts.88

Anderson went on to describe the physiological effects of Op art

CHAPTER 3
BRIDGET RILEY’S EYE / BODY PROBLEM
through a pointed psychedelic reference, acknowledging the strange
convergence between drugs (this time, of the controlled variety) and
the moiré patterns of the engineer–cum–Op artist Professor Gerald
Oster, who believed looking at his work could produce strong halluci-
nations. Achieving a limited degree of art-world celebrity at the time,
Oster’s nerdy demeanor seemed to fly in the face of his advocacy of Op
as a hallucinogenic “technique,” although in other respects he mirrored
the academic fascination with psychotropics as “research experiments.” 194
(Here, the prototype would be professors Timothy Leary and Richard
Alpert, both “relieved” of their appointments at Harvard’s Department
of Psychology in 1963 for their drug-induced “research” on graduate
students, beginning with psilocybin and moving on to LSD.)89 Although
it’s doubtful that looking through Oster’s moirés successfully reproduced
the effects of a good trip, the analogy is to the point. This is mind-
altering, and with it, body-altering stuff, understood as an artist’s
symptomatic response to a culture that had largely “become numbed.”
Kozloff, too, entertained the drug metaphor as a technological
metaphor, and like Anderson, he read its druggy effects as meshed with
the changed reception of time in the work of art: “Finally, encounters
with works of this persuasion have a temporal pulse—due to periodic
popping or blipping—more or less well-defined, which (depending on
one’s fatigue and body movements) resembles an auditory experience
sometimes more than a visual one. One waits in time, rather than scans
in space.”90 For Kozloff, the drug analogy was like the television analogy
in the stupefying effects Op produced for its viewers. Unlike the sub-
sequent appropriation of Op by the Counterculture in the late 1960s
(one thinks of the loopy psychedelic graphics and black light posters of
Rick Griffin, Wes Wilson, Stanley Mouse, and others associated with the
rock promoter Bill Graham in San Francisco) or the “expanded” media
associated with experimental cinema and new forms of installation,
the comparison was not meant to connote enlightenment or visionary
consciousness.91 Quite the opposite: Op participated in the “soporific”
tendencies of the culture through its peculiar temporality, through the
literal kinesis of the viewer’s body and the periodic “blipping” the work
produced. In this regard, the reading tapped into the more insidious
experiments with hallucinogens and mind control covertly taking place
in the postwar era.92
Kozloff’s hallucinogenic technics further raise the question of
sixties technology in terms of the senses engaged. The numbness he
ascribes to Op is displaced from the visual to the auditory and tactile
senses, precisely those domains of the sensorium that McLuhan de-
scribed as ascendant with the rise of electronic culture. For McLuhan,
this sudden shift within the sense ratio produced an acute numbness, a
kind of “auto-amputation” meant to protect the central nervous system
with a changed relationship to the senses. “The principle of self-
 195 amputation as an immediate relief of strain on the central nervous
system applies very readily to the origin of the media of communication
from speech to computer,” McLuhan wrote.93 “[T]he principle of numb-
ness comes into play with electronic technology, as with any other.
We have to numb our central nervous system when it is extended and
exposed, or we will die. Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media
is also the age of the unconscious and of apathy.”94
Such were the effects that so many critics derided in Op art, ef-
fects that resulted in a passive state akin to zoning out in front of the
television if not the comfortable numbness of a drug-induced high.
Both experiences—taken to produce a state of deep lassitude for some,
a loss of control for others—suggest a profound uncertainty about the
stimulation provided by Op. Here we need to reconsider what this
rhetoric might suggest for Riley’s mid-sixties career and to interrogate
what her denials about Op implied about a woman artist’s relationship
to the Eye/Body problem more generally. The strange notion of “obliter-
ation” takes on a paradoxical usefulness at this point, for it suggests a
certain effacement of the female body as a critical intervention in this
debate. Through the example of another women artist—namely, Carolee
Schneemann—these terms betray other implications.

“OBLITERATION”: A WOMAN ARTIST’S VERSION OF TRANSCENDENCE

CHAPTER 3
BRIDGET RILEY’S EYE / BODY PROBLEM
Bridget Riley and Carolee Schneemann: could there be any two artists
more different? The one compelled by the rigors of modernist abstrac-
tion, the other engaged with the inevitable contingencies staged by “live
art”—performance; the one who denied a fully bodily response to her
work, the other delighting in the sheer stickiness of the body; the one
quickly embraced by the “official” art world, the other largely marginal-
ized by it. Apart from their gender—and they had radically different
perspectives on how it related to their practice—the two shared little
or nothing in their approach to art making. Yet in spite of—or rather
because of—these differences, Schneemann’s relationship to the Eye/
Body problem sheds peculiar light on Riley’s history within Op.95
Indeed Riley’s self-positioning within the debate invites com-
parison with other woman artists’ confrontation with this problem. She
had three major complaints about her reception as Op artist. First,
she rejected the notion that her work bore any alliance to science and 196
technology.96 Second, as much as she acknowledged the Eye/Body
nexus in the encounter with her art, she denied strenuously that her
work was in any way violent. Third, and perhaps most troubling, was
her position on being regarded as a “woman artist.” In 1973, Riley
published a short essay entitled “The Hermaphrodite,” in which she
dismissed the idea that feminism bore any viable relationship to
woman’s art making. In a line that generated enormous controversy
within feminist art circles, Riley proclaimed, “artists who happen to
be women need this particular form of hysteria like they need a hole
in the head.”97
There is something deeply disappointing about this remark,
particularly as it comes from an artist who achieved art-world success
(coupled with an acute trivialization) in advance of the institutional
strides made by women artists in the decade that followed. Although
Riley’s perspective on women’s liberation in the arts cannot be ignored,
it does deserve to be recontextualized within the framework of her
earlier reception. Read against the backdrop of her other denials, one
sees a concerted if fruitless effort to refuse her association with Op
and its perception by the public: here is an artist rejecting the label of
women artist precisely because of its correspondence to the Op label.
Not that this is unproblematic. Riley’s thinking on the artist’s relation-
ship with the social is at once romantic and desperate, a plea for artistic
transcendence from a culture that would seek to turn her art into
fashion. “You see,” Riley once wrote, “the only commitment he (the
artist) has to society today—at least in my opinion—is to his accept
his liberation from it.”98
Given Riley’s (deeply oppressive) experience within the reception
of Op, such statements beg the question. What kind of critical stance
might a woman artist take with respect to the Eye/Body problem in
sixties media culture? One cue might be located in the language Riley
used to describe her own art. Her considerations of time within her
painting—of visual “tempi”—open onto a temporally determined
reception of art against the notion of its timelessness or universality,
stressed further by the idea that it stages an “event.” We need to recall
that Riley’s earlier engagement with Abstract Expressionism (action
painting) points to the performative dimension she attributes to her
work, as well as when she speaks of pacing the work, or of the kind
 197 of transformative process that occurs phenomenologically in one’s
encounter with it.
That the implied kinesis of her black-and-white paintings is
“performative” in nature invites comparison to other women artists
working similar terrain at the same moment. Artists who worked with
the body—or whose work trafficked between performance art and more
conventional artistic media—produced their own takes on the Eye/
Body problem. Performance, after all, was almost categorically under-
stood as an “Art of Time”—the time of the lived body.99 The troubling
dualities that held that women artists were somehow more “embodied”
than their male counterparts suggest a particular if hardly essentialized
approach to this very question. One perverse model of liberation, what
I have called obliteration, places stress on the ways in which a woman
artist might confront the implicit violence of the Eye/Body problem
in the sixties. And it was the Japanese-born artist Yayoi Kusama who
introduced the term.
In the late sixties, Kusama was notorious for her increasingly
spectacular and controversial Happenings, orgiastic street theater
involving numerous participants—both men and women—stripped
naked and engaged in various countercultural activities on the streets
of New York. Much earlier in the decade, however, she was known for
a much “cooler” aesthetic. Her painting, reticulated surfaces crawling
with obsessive lines and dots, was hailed by the likes of Donald Judd,
who saw in her proliferating geometries a prototype for later abstract
(even minimal) work (figure 3.7). Variously called Infinity Nets or
Accumulations, these works parallel some of Op’s concerns in their
looping, almost hallucinatory patterns and repetition of abstract form.
Kusama’s affiliations with various members of the Zero and Nul groups
seemed to support this interest in both virtual and kinetic movement
(likewise, she has also been linked to Pop and the tradition of mono-
chrome painting). Finally, her later assemblages, covered with cotton-
batting-stuffed-phallic-like protrusions, have cast her as an artist in
advance of feminism’s Second Wave.
But invoking Kusama here need not extend to her occasional
CHAPTER 3 association with Op art, nor her ties to performance, nor even the broad
BRIDGET RILEY’S EYE / BODY PROBLEM morphological affinities between her Infinity Nets and the decentered
space of Riley’s work. It is the origin myth at the heart of her practice
that ironizes the stakes of the Eye/Body problem as approached by a
 199
3.7 Yayoi Kusama, No. Green, No. 1,
1961. The Baltimore Museum of Art:
Edith Ferry Hooper Bequest Fund. BMA
1996.11. Courtesy the artist.
CHAPTER 3
BRIDGET RILEY’S EYE / BODY PROBLEM
woman artist. For obliteration (or self-obliteration) was the term that
Kusama gave to a distinctly feminized sensation of unbounding, of
somehow being subsumed into the visual environment around one’s
self, of feeling a loss of boundaries between the self and world, subject
and object, eye and body. During a childhood spent in postwar Japan, a
period that saw the emergence of Kusama’s lifelong bouts of neuroses,
the artist was afflicted with a spatial hallucination that she has cited as
the principal motivation behind her work. She has recalled:
One day I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a
table and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling,
the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and
the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to resolve in the
infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to
nothingness. As I realized it was actually happening and not just in my
imagination, I was frightened.100
This is a phenomenology of the “hysteric,” of a woman whose
visual hallucinations lead to a peculiar intertwining of the body and the
environment. It is the most extreme case study in a “palpation with the
look”—to borrow Merleau-Ponty’s phrase—producing in the subject a
loss of control over the body itself. Note, for instance, how the visual
cues of Kusama’s immediate environment assumed a spatializing force,
resulting for the artist in a failed attempt to escape wholly from the
image around her. And yet the violence ascribed to this image in space
would lead to the artist’s peculiar inversion of it. For Kusama’s obsessive
repetition of patterns, dots, and nets in her early work takes on an apo-
tropaic function in relation to the vision that would overcome her. Her
subsequent capacity to produce the image that swirls around her serves
as a means to ward it off, to keep it at bay through its possession.
Kusama’s insistent patterning acts to control the image in the environ-
ment, as much as that image threatens to subsume the artist. Oblitera-
tion, then, suggests a parodic erasure of the woman’s body within
the visual environment, a critical self-effacement in her encounter with
the world of images. Obliteration speaks to the kind of phenomen-
ological violence committed against women subjects in their acute po-
sitioning within that world.
 For such reasons, it should come as little surprise that Kusama’s 200
good friend Carolee Schneemann was especially taken with her friend’s
notion of “obliteration.”101 And to be sure, Schneemann had no truck
with the body. Nor was she troubled with the problem of the eye. Unlike
Riley, Schneemann’s being a woman artist was not a problem to tran-
scend; it was, rather, the problem of being taken seriously as such a
body. Parallel to the debates Riley’s painting was to set into motion,
Schneemann had produced a series of work—one is tempted to call it
a body—that seemed to dissolve those binaries in advance of the fact.
What Riley could only point to in her denials was fully and critically
thematized in Schneemann’s early to mid-sixties practice, from her
discrete kinetic objects to her indiscrete kinetic theater. She understood
well the terms of Kusama’s self-obliteration.
Schneemann’s early kinetic works—motorized objects with
mirrors—as well as her later performances, Ghost Rev (1965) and
Snows (1967) in particular, register precisely the fine line between the
eye’s motility and the body’s temporality; and more often than not they
do so by acknowledging the problem of space and the environment
inevitably introduced by the body’s movement within it. They also
allegorize the body’s kinesis to the technological, even as they implicitly
criticize the technocratic. As a young landscape painter in the late
fifties, as obsessed with Paul Cézanne as with Willem de Kooning,
Schneemann was especially interested in the body’s relation to the eye,
with time mediating that relationship. Several privileged texts animated
this interest, Henri Focillon’s Life of Forms in Art (1934) in particular.
Schneemann’s initial engagement with Focillon’s work in part stems
from an activity that dramatizes the inversion of eye with body as a
matter of movement in time, a peculiar encounter with the objects of
the world motivated principally by the tactile sense. Following the
artist’s recollections, she would move through libraries with her eyes
closed and her hands up, “waiting for a charge” to emanate from the
stacks. It was this way, Schneemann reports, that she (blindly) came
upon Focillon’s book.
In the Life of Forms in Art, Focillon argued for a new model of
understanding artistic forms as occupying a dual relationship with
time. “What is the place of form in time, and how does it behave there?”
he asked.
 201 To what extent is form time, and to what extent is it not? Now, on the
one hand, a work of art is non-temporal; its activity, its struggle occur
primarily in space. And on the other hand, it takes its place in a sequence
both before and after other works of art. Its formation does not occur on
the spur of the moment, but results from a long series of experiments. To
speak of the life of forms is inevitably to invoke the idea of succession.102

Although acknowledging the essentially static form most works

CHAPTER 3
BRIDGET RILEY’S EYE / BODY PROBLEM
of art take, Focillon pressed the notion that art serves to index temporal
secession. He made a claim for the essential (and temporal) contra-
diction that such objects represent: they are at once, “unique and
affirmative”—because concrete and material—but also “immersed in
the whirlpool of time,” and therefore subject to historical contingency.
Particular approaches to the history of art are jettisoned as locking the
art object into false dichotomies: conventional determinations of form
and matter, for instance, come under special attack.103 Against such
oppositional readings, which underscore the interpretive stability of the
art object through antithesis,104 Focillon proposed a model of time in
the forms of art that was also a thinking about space: a space-time
continuum. His was not the space “of soldiers and tourists” but space
specifically qualified as “matter and movement.” Time took on a spatial,
that is, environmental dimension.
Focillon’s is a particular kind of formalism, and it pertains to
Schneemann’s take on the Eye/Body problem and her performative
works. “Form is the modality of life,” he notes. “Form is the graph of
activity.”105 Form, then, is an index of process, less so the art historical
fetish of artistic technique. And it is ultimately the sense of touch
around which all of these concerns are organized. Touch, so Focillon
argued, is the “term that best condenses (the) quadruple alliance”
between form, matter, artistic tool, and hand.106 Visuality is given
relatively short shrift in the book.
For the young Schneemann, then struggling with the conventions
of landscape painting, Life of Forms in Art was a revelation. “Focillon . . .
gave me a sense of the structure of tactility,” she recalls. “What Focillon
offered to me was that my position could be both fixed and shifting . . .
that it could be in motion and still discover form . . . and that form
could come out of a visceral or gestural identification with what I was
looking at.”107 That “visceral identification” would increasingly occur for 202
the artist at the site of her own body, an object of perception that was
likewise shifting “visual territory.” For the artist, then, there was a
continuous flipping between the terms of subject and object, looker-at 3.8 Carolee Schneemann, Eye Body,

and looked-at. Describing this move to the body, Schneemann partly 1962–63. Copyright the artist.
Photo Erró.
reasons, “landscape painting was something at which one could only
fail,” a statement that implies that her attempts to fix the vision of the
world through painting could never adequately convey her haptic
relationship to it.108 Instead she strived to “break the plane” established
by the history of landscape by acknowledging the materiality of her
own body in its construction.109 “If my body is a seeing vehicle and a
source of perceptual energy,” she wonders, “then how can I reestablish
a female body, pull it off of this dead canvas?”110 Introducing her body
into the mix, Schneemann literally exposed the organon of her percep-
tion as it thrummed—and in time—with the environment around her.
The environment would stare back.
In her serial project Eye Body (1962–63) for instance, Schnee-
mann performed a set of “actions for camera” developed out of a room-
sized environment in her studio (figure 3.8). She recalls wanting to
counter the ways in which the female body had been typically
represented in Pop art. The Great American Nudes of Tom Wesselman,
for instance, infuriated her—and she endeavored to produce work that
would restore some agency to that body in dialectical relationship with
the environment. Schneemann’s handwritten notes to the action record
the sense in which her bodily imbrication within space trafficked
between the registers of seeing and touching, as much as it switched
between the roles of subject and object.

I worked with my whole body—the scale of the panels incorporating my

own physical scale. . . . I then decided I wanted my actual body to be
combined with the work as an integral material, a further dimension of
the construction. . . . Not only am I an image-maker, but I explore the
image values of my flesh as material I choose to work with.111

What is critical here is that this is not just any body in any space. This is
not the universalized corpus of phenomenology, blank and denuded like
a tabula rasa. Photographs taken by Schneemann’s friend, the Icelandic
artist Erró, present a female body who revels in her sexuality, if hardly a 204
“sexual object expected, determined by masculinist culture.” The images
themselves suggest a “graph of activity”—to borrow Focillon’s felicitous
expression—that further mediates the woman artist’s relationship to
the world as such a body. The body pictured is far from an abstraction:
Schneemann’s use of protofeminist iconography throughout the work—
namely, the serpentine forms of ancient matriarchal cultures—squarely
locates it in a historical tradition with deeply gendered implications.
Paint, grease, chalk, and rope produce a chameleonlike subject who
exhibits a bodily identification (empathy?) with the environment,
an environment she herself produced.
But if there is a marked visual correspondence between
Schneemann’s body and the space that surrounds her, never is she
fully subsumed by it. The body has a stake in the visual environment to
the extent that it organizes that environment. For Schneemann’s body is
further refracted in these images, given back to the viewer as reflection
through her placement of mirrors throughout the space. The use of
mirrors might conventionally suggest interiority or, at worst, female
narcissism, but Schneemann’s incorporation of them in Eye Body acts
to externalize the relationship between the gendered body and space,
exposing it and opening it to spectatorship. Motorizing her mirrors was
yet another means of “breaking the plane,” of “trying to get the interior
energy of the body into some extensivity that would also have an
equivalence to the materiality of the work.”112
Eye Body stages, at a relatively early moment in her career, many
of the concerns that Schneemann would bring to bear on her more
“public” kinetic theater. The title of the piece makes plain the virtually
synesthetic dimension of her practice, in which the various components
of the human sensorium take on a deeply felt interconnectedness. Here,
haptic and optic cannot be parsed; they work in concert perceptually,
and their inseparability as sensuous perception is temporally indexed
through the serial logic of the camera. Here, too, Schneemann presents
the body as a kinetic instrument, one that converges radically with the
rhetoric of technology. Schneemann’s use of motors thematizes this
explicitly. In 1965, the same year Op burst onto the international art
scene with The Responsive Eye, she wrote the following of her process
in New York:
 205 I am after the interpenetrations and displacements which occur between
various sense stimuli; the interaction and exchange between the body
and the environment outside it; the body as environment, for the mind
. . . where images evolve . . . that total fabric wherein sensation shapes
image, taste, touch, tactile impulses; various chemical changes and
exchanges within the body and their eKect on the immediate present,
on memories, actions in the present.
Vision is not a fact but an aggregate of sensations.113

For Schneemann, vision is less a privileged term than an “aggregate”

CHAPTER 3
BRIDGET RILEY’S EYE / BODY PROBLEM
of all varia of sensations. Haptic and optic would find their meeting
ground in the body, and that body goes on to perceive an environment
in which it is simultaneously embedded. A position that is at once
“fixed and shifting”: these were the terms that Schneemann so admired
in Focillon, and her sensitivity toward that position as gendered would
be played out with even greater vehemence in her subsequent per-
formance work.
Two kinetic theater pieces, as she preferred to call such per-
formances, take off from the conceptual cues established by Eye Body,
implicitly exploring the increasingly spectacular dimension of the mid-
sixties visual environment and the body’s obliteration within it. They
present the human sensorium through technological means: intermedia
becomes an analogue of the synesthetic. “Technology is always for me,”
Schneemann recalls, “the way that I can use soft fleshy stuff. I’ve got to
(incorporate) some hard systems to use soft fleshy stuff. In order to
physicalize the body, I also have to have a technology that establishes
some kind of tension.”114 That tension between the body and technology
was acknowledged in the very notion of “kinetic theater.” The kinetic
was the mechanical and the machinic—it assumed predictable func-
tions—but it was also the body’s systematicity: the heart is a pump,
the lungs are valves, the veins a hydraulic system.
At the heart of both Ghost Rev and Snows is the convergence and
then interference of visual and technological media with and by the
body. Both were intermedia works variously incorporating dance, per-
formance, painting, installation, sound, and film projections. Compared
to Schneemann’s most famous performance work of 1964, Meat Joy,
both were characterized by a relatively high degree of technical input.
Ghost Rev was developed with the “collaborative community” USCO
(short for “Us Company”); whereas Snows received technological 206
support from Billy Klüver and various participants in E.A.T.
Schneemann’s collaboration with USCO proved among her most
important mid-sixties performances. Led by the charismatic figure of
Gerd Stern, USCO was akin to an artist’s co-op based in an abandoned
church in Garnerville, New York; any artist “who wished to live at the
church and work on projects was welcome.”115 Utopian in their commit-
ment to the marriage between art and technology, USCO created
kinetic-light and intermedia environments before disbanding, at which
point Stern took up a post at the Harvard Business School and formed
“Intermedia Systems, Inc.” with George H. Litwin. For Schneemann, the
opportunity to collaborate with USCO fulfilled her peculiar engagement
with technology as it cleaved with the body in space. “USCO wanted me
to collaborate with them,” she recalls, “and I wanted to introduce a set
of movements and actions that would fracture and interfere with the
fixity, the rigidity of projection—its predictability. . . . Since they were
doing projection systems that had built-in variable systems to them,
they seemed perfect.”116
Produced for Jonas Mekas’s “New Cinema Festival” at Manhattan’s
Cinematheque, Ghost Rev consisted of Schneemann and the dancer
Phoebe Neville performing against and interacting with films and
projections developed by USCO and Schneemann. The idea was to
“work against the physical integrity of the films” while at the same time
immersing themselves within its visual space through shared actions.
The suggestiveness of this act was to the point for a mid-sixties culture
made increasingly aware of communications media. Subversion was far
from the issue—to believe one could wholly disrupt the system of
images was naive—but to produce a certain ambiguity around the
image as it progressively came to dominate the environment was some-
thing else. As early as 1963, the artist wrote about the colonization of
urban space by the visual sign systems of advanced capital, namely,
advertising: “Advertising so permeates the environment; people cannot
make adjustment to landscape or cityscape; the body does not extend
into space but is caught mind-focused, message bent. . . . Messages/
Instructions gird the senses. Otherwise, the visual rape of our cities . . .
could not proceed as it does.”117 Schneemann gives voice to the senses
being controlled, girded, or reigned in by cues supplied by the visual
 207 environment. The cues themselves are explicit—they are given in the
service of selling a bill of goods—and their cumulative effect is a kind
of “visual rape.” Bodily space is increasingly threatened by it, so en-
vironmental space is feminized as well. No longer can the body
simply “extend” into a space progressively choked with such visual
information.
But that invasion of bodily space by the image of advertising
found its parodic inversion in Schneemann’s attempt to “enlarge
painting” through multimedia performance. Schneemann had yet to
incorporate film into her performance at that point: only a year earlier
she had begun making her first film, Fuses. Hence she saw the Ghost
Rev collaboration with USCO as “increasing the ambiguity of the
focal point of film into actual space”118 (figure 3.9). Against the films
Highfreethrusafeway, Y, Omix, and Ghost Rev (one film, Jud Yalkut’s
Diffraction Film, was projected without their performing), Schneemann
and Neville began their actions. They ranged from shredding layers of
paper with knives on which the images were screened; trying to paint
words and numbers as those images flashed by as projections; crawling
into and around the audience from ladders connecting the stage to the
seats; tying each other together with ropes in a precarious balancing
act; “sculpting” or painting the other performer’s face, ghostlike, with
whiting. A simultaneous cutting into and melding with the projections
characterized the performance, as if to arrest the flow of images as the
performers’ bodies merged with them. The goal was, according to
Schneemann, “to disrupt it, but it was also to be inclusive, because it
had that endless layering or merging.”119 As she further puts it, the
image’s “own surface was being questioned instantly, and interactively.”
To be stressed here is how Schneemann conceived of the body’s
interaction with an image now spatialized by new visual technologies.
Describing the body as it simultaneously sought to control and blend
with that image, she claims, “you could be both presence and shadow,
you couldn’t tell if you were film or live action, there was a constant
back and forth.”120 Even more telling is the language of blindness
Schneemann accords to her work. As the performer’s body emerges
CHAPTER 3 fully illuminated to the audience, caught up in the visual cone of the
BRIDGET RILEY’S EYE / BODY PROBLEM filmic projection, the eye, paradoxically, is momentarily deprived of its
sensory function. The performer couldn’t see. And yet for Schneemann,
 209
3.9 Carolee Schneemann, Ghost Rev,
1965. Courtesy the artist, New York.
Photo Peter Moore, © Estate of Peter
Moore/VAGA, New York.
CHAPTER 3
BRIDGET RILEY’S EYE / BODY PROBLEM
this blindness was oddly empowering. “Being hit by the beam,” as
Schneemann recalls, produces the sense in which
you are suddenly encapsulated within this projection that you can’t see
. . . but you’re definitely making some kind of interaction with it. . . .
[I]t’s all about going blind. . . . It’s very physical, being caught in that
beam (but) it’s also completely freeing because you can’t see a damn
person. . . . [T]he audience is gone. They’re looking right through you and
they don’t know they’re gone!121
This is a strange form of liberation, but freeing for Schneemann none-
theless. It is even described by the artist as “transcendent.” The
spatialized image is so full, so excessive, that the performer reaches
the limit condition of visuality itself: “I’m so suffused that I’m blind,
like your whole system is just this suffused eye.”122 What remains in the
wake of vision is the body, if a body haptically grasping: tearing at
the space of the image, attempting fruitlessly to secure numbers, letters,
pictures as they flit by as ghostly projections; “sculpting” the face of
one’s performing partner while simultaneously obliterating her with
whiting—all against a blinding beam of artificial light.
Such gestures, for Schneemann, constitute a peculiar type of
obliteration, of being obliterated into the materiality of an image that
had assumed an environmental or architectural force.123 And yet that
obliteration was paradoxically transcendent, if provisionally so. It was
transcendent to the extent that a woman artist might confront the
material limits placed on eye and body in a new technoculture or might
find some way of controlling the image as it threatened to engulf her. To
be sure, while the actions of Ghost Rev themselves seemed violent, as if
anticipating Laura Mulvey’s famous discussion on women and the Gaze
in narrative cinema (and though no feminist can avoid the patently
Oedipal connotations attached to blinding), Schneemann’s loss of sight
in this performance was at the same time a refusal to see. Refusing
to see was a refusal to participate in the conventional economies linking
vision to control.
These concerns found a more politically topical analogue in
Schneemann’s later Snows (1967) a large-scale performance that
similarly played with the thematics of bodily interference within a
 211
3.10 Carolee Schneemann, Snows,
1967. Courtesy the artist, New York.
Photo Peter Moore, © Estate of Peter
Moore/VAGA, New York.
CHAPTER 3
BRIDGET RILEY’S EYE / BODY PROBLEM
newly technologized, visual environment (figure 3.10). This time,
however, the particular object of Schneemann’s performance was the
atrocity images coming daily out of Vietnam; the proliferation of these
photographs in the media produced for Schneemann their own form of
“collective insanity,” sprawled as they were across newspapers, tele-
visions, and magazines, both public and domestic space. Performed at
the Martinique Theater in New York for eight nights at the end of
January and the beginning of February in 1967, it included Shigeko
Kubota, Tyrone Mitchell, Phoebe Neville, James Tenney, and Peter
Watts. As in Ghost Rev, the performance incorporated film footage:
Snows contained five films, including Schneemann’s montage of
Vietnam images Viet-Flakes.
Insofar as Snows was a performance about the “image” of Vietnam
in the mass media, so too did it provide commentary on the technology
of the media that produced that image. The living room war brought
those images into constant circulation. To make a performance about
this issue required enormous technical input; it certainly begged
Schneemann’s own faith about the importance culture placed in the
technological.124 Various members of E.A.T. facilitated the construction
of an interactive relay system between performers and audience. What
concerned Schneemann was that the images, however horrific, did not
immediately read as pictures from the war; likewise, she was bent on
keeping the roles of the performers flexible, open to cues established by
the audience. “The imagery of Snows is ambiguous,” she wrote,
shifting metaphors in which the performers are merely themselves, as
well as victim, torturer and tortured, aggressor, love and beloved. . . . A
dozen audience seats were wired with contact microphones; when people
in these seats shifted about, the contact microphones amplified the
sound which in turn was channeled into a scr converter and changed the
moving light machines.125
Schneemann further rationalized the use of a complex relay system
through the following terms:
I wanted to have these systems of interference, so that even after I
could make the most complex, determined sequences of projections . . .
there could be some system to interrupt them so that the performers
or participants would also be constantly oK-guard. . . . [W]e were always 212
sort of lost in the process of the piece and on edge because we were
being retriggered. What we were responding to was complex.126
3.11 James Stevenson, Op Art cartoon,

On the one hand, Schneemann’s work provided a means to The New Yorker, 1965. © Cartoon
Bank.com. All rights reserved.
interrupt the system of images; on the other, that interruption itself
underscored the mediation of the body by the visual environment. The
notion that one was “retriggered” or, better, “reconditioned” by visual
cues given in space produced, for Schneemann, something of the
confusion one faced in the barrage of images streaming rapid fire out
of Vietnam. How to respond? How to locate one’s self in relation to a
conflict deeply mystified by both distance and the media? Ultimately,
the confusion that ensued in Snows was a bodily confusion, a loss of
control of the body by the image at large. Snows, Schneemann recalls,
“had to do with the toughening of the materiality of the media . . .
they’re here now, they’re entering . . . and they’re changing my body.”127
Visions of atrocity and dread, “transcended” either by a peculiar
kind of bodily confusion or, as in her earlier work, blindness: this was
Schneemann’s response to the Eye/Body problem—the problem as it
existed for a woman artist who wholly acknowledged the horizon of
new technology and the changed nature of the sense ratio along with it.
This brings us full circle to Riley and her denials. Riley’s insistence on
rejecting the controlling aspects of her work only dramatized the force
of her larger reception. Schneemann’s approach, though the farthest
thing from Op, managed to tap into the broader social controversies
that art called up. Unlike Riley, Schneemann’s engagement with the
Eye/Body problem in sixties media culture—and its peculiar effect on
women in particular—allowed her to move forcefully within it.

˚
And on that note, one that takes account of the dangerously spatializing
effects born of mid-sixties visual culture, I want to end with a 1965
cartoon from the New Yorker. It is from a series that treats the Op art
phenomenon as literally closing in on the spectator as an environmental
force (figure 3.11). In the final image of the suite, a man strolls out
from a building, perhaps the Museum of Modern Art, perhaps a mid-
town Manhattan gallery, only to discover a world gone vibrantly, if 214
suspiciously, optical. Checks and dots and grids veil the facades of
buildings, pavement, garbage cans; the sun itself glows like a cathode
ray tube. But though the cartoon is playful in its winking allusion to the
effects Op produced for its viewers, it also suggests a far more sinister
scenario for Op’s detractors. It is as if the paintings inside the museum
were hooked up to a vast network outside it, one that conspired in its
visual effects to produce a tactile experience of the world more real than
real, like a hallucination. It is the image writ everywhere, the world
picture gone haptic. And it is Riley, as the reluctant “It Girl” of Op, who
has been forced to lead the charge, from the walls of the museum to the
shop windows on the street to the television screen in the living room.
The Spectacle is just around the corner.128
 PART III
ENDLESS SIXTIES
CHAPTER 4
ULTRAMODERNE: OR, HOW GEORGE KUBLER STOLE THE TIME IN SIXTIES ART

The universe has a finite velocity which limits not only the spread
of its events, but also the speed of our perceptions. The moment of
actuality slips too fast by the slow, coarse net of our senses.

—George Kubler 1

The matter of time is essential in all estimates of the matter of

information. A code or cipher, for example, which will cover any
considerable amount of material at high-secrecy level is not only a
lock which is hard to force, but also one which takes considerable
time to open legitimately.

—Norbert Wiener 2

Art not only communicates through space, but also through time.

—Robert Smithson 3
THE PROBLEM
In November 1966, Robert Smithson published a remarkable essay
in Arts Magazine entitled “Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space”
(figures 4.1 and 4.2). Like many of the artist’s most important writings
of the sixties, it takes up the question of time in contemporary art.
Equal parts concrete poetry and hallucinatory rant, “Quasi-Infinities”
subscribes less to the syntax of traditional art writing than it makes
scattershot reference to the most disparate cultural phenomena:
pyramids and ziggurats; modernist literary criticism, classical physics,
science fiction. It is not an easy read. The essay makes graphic use of
the space of the page: textual information and visual information are
held in dynamic tension with one another, its ground noisy with
pictures and splintered citations. Underscoring the importance of its
design, Smithson began the piece by attending to its layout. In prose
both blank and tautological, he wrote,

Around four blocks of print I shall postulate four ultramundane margins

that shall contain indeterminate information as well as reproduced
reproductions.4

Thus the four-page article is structured around four text columns, each
graphically quarantined by a thick black border. Yet what is literally
peripheral to these sections is by no means marginal to the work. The
notes and images to the piece swirl dizzyingly around the language
blocks, as if to offset their semantic authority. Vying for the attention
of the reader, they dramatize the flipping between word and image
that recurs throughout Smithson’s art.
 221 One piece of marginalia deserves particular note as it finds its
mirror reflection in the space of the text. At the left-hand gutter of
the second page is a quote by the Mesoamericanist and architectural
4.1 Robert Smithson, “Quasi-Infinities historian George Kubler, taken from his 1962 book The Shape of Time:
and the Waning of Space,” ArtsMagazine Remarks on the History of Things (figure 4.3). “Although inanimate
(New York) 41, no. 1 (November 1966).
things remain our most tangible evidence that the old human past really
Art and text © Estate of
existed,” it reads, “the conventional metaphors used to describe this
RobertSmithson/Licensed by VAGA,
New York.
visible past are mainly biological.”5 Spliced from its originary source, the
citation at first seems no more nor less important than any of the other
textual and visual scraps that circle the main body of Smithson’s essay.
Here, however, I want to take this reference seriously, wondering
what roles Kubler might play in the interpretation of Smithson’s strange,
vertiginous system. How might we treat “Quasi-Infinities” through
Kubler’s terms? And how, if at all, are these terms in dialogue with the
larger rhetorical field of the essay, not to mention the art of the 1960s
in general? Now what is not under dispute in the following is the art
historian’s importance to the artist and a broad range of his contempo-
raries. Scholars have alluded to this relationship, treating the rhetorical
similitude between Smithson and Kubler as a kind of deconstruction
before the letter.6 No doubt Kubler’s thinking about time courses
throughout “Quasi-Infinities” as well as another Smithson contribution
to Arts Magazine of the following year, a piece entitled “Ultramoderne.”
The connection is borne out by numerous other artifacts. Smithson’s
essay “Some Void Thoughts on Museums” bears ample reference to
The Shape of Time, and an earlier draft of “Quasi-Infinities” carries the
far more prosaic, if telling, title “Art and Time.” It is less the question of
pairing Kubler and Smithson that is at stake than the peculiar nature
of their imagined exchange.
These textual encounters occasion a different assessment of
Kubler’s writing in the art and art criticism of the sixties. For why
might The Shape of Time, a book filled with the most arcane references
to Riegl, the Visigoths, and the sequencing of Greek vase painting,
resonate so strongly within the most progressive circles of sixties art?
Kubler’s audience of contemporary artists was not restricted to
CHAPTER 4 Smithson. The prominent figure Ad Reinhardt published a review
ULTRAMODERNE of The Shape of Time in Art News in 1964, and the radically experi-
mental art magazine Aspen saw fit to invite him to contribute to a 1967
issue that included John Cage, Morton Feldman, Susan Sontag, and
 223
4.2 Robert Smithson, “Quasi-Infinities
and the Waning of Space,” Arts
Magazine (New York) 41, no. 1
(November 1966). Art and text
© Estate of Robert Smithson/Licensed
by VAGA, New York.
CHAPTER 4
ULTRAMODERNE
Merce Cunningham.7 Perhaps the best-known example in which a
contemporary artist treated Kubler is Robert Morris, whose master’s
thesis on Constantin Brancusi attempted to examine the sculptor’s
output through Kubler’s terms. The art historian himself reflected upon
the prestige accorded to his book by artists. In the working notes for a
lecture delivered in 1981, he observed, “there have been rumors that
The Shape of Time has its largest following among artists in this country.
It is also said that their interest in it arises from the freedom it offers
them from those rigid hierarchies defined by the textbook industry in
the history of art.”8 Kubler’s suspicions might be correct in the most
general sense, but they are neither especially descriptive nor useful in
addressing the question of his reception among a contemporary art
audience.
This chapter attempts to account for this problem. Focusing on
Smithson’s “Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space,” I will argue that
Kubler serves as a cipher in the reading of much sixties art, one through
whom concerns about time and technology were implicitly addressed if
not consciously articulated. My claim might be reduced to a Smithson-
ian shorthand: what is “ultramoderne” about Kubler for Smithson—
that is, what is excessively modern about the Mesoamericanist—is a
consideration of time that illuminates theories of information tech-
nology just emerging within the popular consciousness of the two
decades following the war. What follows, then, is a buried history of
reception organized around three figures: Kubler first, Smithson second,
and finally—perhaps, surprisingly—the MIT mathematician Norbert
Wiener, one of the founders of the theory of communication known as
cybernetics. The constellation of the three opens onto an important if
curious episode in sixties art, one that distills a fundamental crisis of
temporality from the larger culture of that moment. We might call this
crisis the acutely contemporary phenomena of noncontemporaneity, of
not being with the time.
KUBLER’S ACTUALITY FOR SMITHSON
Let’s begin with Kubler and Smithson, an odd match at the face of it.
Perhaps the relationship between Kubler and the contemporary art of
the sixties, much less Smithson and technology, seems untenable at
 225
4.3 George Kubler, cover of The Shape
of Time: Remarks on the History of
Things (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1962). Courtesy Yale
University Press.
CHAPTER 4
ULTRAMODERNE
first. To be sure, Kubler’s scholarly profile as a Mesoamericanist does
not immediately recommend him to the pantheon of postwar critics
that includes Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. His biography
demonstrates the traditional, if not conservative, itinerary of the well-
heeled academic, far less so the radical art critic. The son of Frederick
Kubler, an art historian who trained in Germany at Würzburg University,
he was born in Los Angeles, or “Hollywood” as he was fond of saying, in
1912. He received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1940 as a student of Henri
Focillon, whose La Vie des Formes would prove central to the younger
art historian; he also undertook extensive coursework at the Institute
of Fine Arts with Panofsky.9 Anthropology—particularly the work of
A. L. Kroeber—played a correlative role in this formation.10 Soon after
writing his pioneering dissertation on the religious architecture of
New Mexico, Kubler joined the faculty at Yale, where he taught until
his retirement in 1983. He continued to live in Hamden, Connecticut,
until his death in 1996. Throughout his long career, Kubler authored
a series of highly influential publications whose subject matter was
regarded as quite unorthodox when they first appeared. They include
Mexican Architecture of the Sixteenth Century, “Population Movements in
New Mexico: 1520–1600,” “The Kuchua in the Colonial World,” Building
the Escorial, and a survey Art and Architecture of Ancient America.
From this short biography, one is tempted to argue that
Kubler’s scholarship on Latin American culture held particular sway
for Smithson, given the connections drawn insistently between pre-
Columbian art and the earth work of the late sixties and seventies for
which the artist is best known. The land art of the moment, including
both Smithson’s and Michael Heizer’s exploration of pre-Columbian
architecture, would seem to make this connection explicit.11 Smithson,
after all, made critical references to both Mesoamerican and colonial
Mexican culture in works as formative as “Incidents of Mirror Travel in
the Yucatan,” and “The Hotel Palenque.” And “Ultramoderne,” an essay
in which Kubler figures prominently (figure 4.4), concerns the modern-
ist architecture of 1930s New York as a transhistorical nod to the
religious structures of the Aztec, Inca, and Maya. There, the blocked
forms of a Manhattan apartment building were thought to replicate
the stepped profile of an Aztec ziggurat.
Yet to claim an affinity between the two on these terms alone
is to miss the point on a number of levels, not the least of which is that
 227
4.4 Robert Smithson, “Ultramoderne,”
Arts Magazine 42, no. 1 (September
1967). Art © Estate of Robert
Smithson/Licensed by VAGA, New York.
CHAPTER 4
ULTRAMODERNE
Smithson engaged Kubler in his art well before his Yucatan-inspired
works of 1969.12 To make such connections necessary—to read Spiral
Jetty as the historical terminus of the Nazca Lines, for example—is to
succumb to the kind of enfeebled historicism both Kubler and Smithson
violently rejected. It is, in other words, to confuse the iconography of
architecture and its surface effects for the conceptual and procedural
logic subtending their respective accounts. It is useful to recall Krauss’s
warning against making such connections in the site-specific practices of
the sixties and seventies. In her 1979 essay “Sculpture in the Expanded
Field,” she argues precisely against those readings—so common to the
art criticism of the day—that understand land art as the inevitable
coda to the monumental sites of prehistory.13
Instead, at play between Kubler and Smithson is something
of the deep structure of history elaborated in The Shape of Time. Written
while its author was recovering from a serious illness, it was referred to
by Kubler as his “little book,” a rather modest assessment for a work
that was translated into over ten languages; that was reprinted con-
tinuously from its initial publication in 1962; and that counted among
its enthusiastic supporters thinkers ranging from Panofsky to Kracauer.14
A slim volume whose physical dimensions belied the enormous impact
it would have on both the art and art history of the decade, The Shape
of Time staked a radical, certainly broad claim in its imperative to speak
to “the history of things.” By things, of course, Kubler was not describ-
ing works of fine art typically conceived but material culture more
generally. Both its objects of study and methodological approach were
interdisciplinary decades before the notion assumed the academic cur-
rency it now carries. Drawing from the language of anthropology,
geology, linguistics, physics, archaeology, philosophy, astronomy, and
math, it moved freely between discussions of the “potters of Kaminal-
juyu” to graph theory to Charles Darwin to the Carracci family. As
such it served Kubler’s interests of “enlarging the scope of aesthetic
experience,” as much as it foregrounded the importance of a multi-
cultural approach to the discipline.
In step with its interdisciplinary reach, The Shape of Time was also
rhetorically expansive. Critics remarked that the book, which numbered
a brief 130 pages, veered dramatically in writerly tone and method-
ological sensibility. They noted that Kubler’s approach to his subject
was compressed to the point of being elliptical; that his comments on
historical change in the arts were presented in a clipped, sometimes 228
clinical language. Occasionally, though, Kubler’s almost epigrammatic
prose gave way to deeply poetic, sometimes florid passages, recalling
his indebtedness to Focillon’s La Vie des Formes and its signature literary
style. In this virtual switching of authorial voices—the one dry, terse,
and analytic, the other purplish and romantic—Kubler unwittingly
betrayed a methodological ambivalence toward the very disciplines
he was himself attempting to breach. It was as if his training in the
humanities had met up with the hard, prescriptive language of the
sciences; and the writerly encounter was less seamless and compatible
than what the author might have imagined.
Although the point is of more than passing interest—and we
shall consider its reverberations in other fields of inquiry—it was not,
of course, what garnered The Shape of Time its particular acclaim.
Rather, the book drew the share of its attention in offering a new
system for describing historical change in the visual arts, one with
deeply structuralist implications.15 In its broad concern for both the
technics of preindustrial art making as well as modern art, The Shape
of Time was a radical rejection of a linear art history, one that flatly
dismissed the dominant iconographic accounts of the period as so much
pallid symbolism. Instead Kubler’s approach was organized around the
principle of formal sequencing, emphasizing the structures and tax-
onomies of historical change over an investigation into the meanings
and content of artifacts themselves. “Historical time . . . is intermittent
and variable,” Kubler wrote. “[E]very action is more intermittent than it
is continuous, and the intervals between actions are infinitely variable
in duration and content.”16 This intermittent, even disjunctive theory of
history was explained through the intertwined concepts of the “form-
class,” the “closed series,” and the “open sequence.” For Kubler, the
peculiar organization of these terms underscored the unevenness of
historical development, the lurching and halting of artistic “problems”
throughout time writ large across a broad, seemingly random swatch
of material culture.
Central to this account was the form class. The form class was not
so much an objective thing as much as it was a “problem” that occurred
across time and was represented by a series of artifacts, each of which
acted as early, middle, and late versions of the same problem or action.
The form class was inaugurated by what Kubler called a “prime object”;
 229 its subsequent incarnations might include a replica or copy called a
“replication.” Kubler described the form class as being like a chain of
linked solutions with the chain itself being history. “The history of art,”
he noted, “resembles a broken but much-repaired chain made of string
and wire to connect the occasional jeweled links surviving as physical
evidences of the invisible original sequence of prime objects.” 17 Depen-
ding on when the problem emerged at a particular historical moment—
when it made its virtual “entrance” into the chain—a provisional
solution might become available. If the “problem” was resolved over
time, the form class was part of a closed series. If it required additional
elaboration, it belonged to an open sequence and might be reactivated
under entirely different historical circumstances. “The field of history
contains many circuits which never close” 18 Kubler remarked, as if to
suggest that new historical conditions bring with them new contin-
gencies. History would thus seem the stuff of endless problem solving,
with the peculiar shape of time a repeated uncertainty.
Still, for all its emphasis on the linkage between different eras
and cultures, Kubler’s was by no means a reading of history as style, let
alone archetype. Notions of period style—a kind of historical glue that
binds all objects of the same time together in a sticky morass—would
prove strongly offensive to the art historian. Kubler considered the form
class as being “analytical and divisive” rather than synthetic in nature.
Yet if he pointed to a certain continuum of “problems” throughout art
history, it was less in the service of universalizing cultural production
than rejecting the avant-gardism of his own critical moment. Speaking
to the situation of the contemporary artist and art historian, he made a
claim for “the approaching exhaustion of new discoveries in art” and the
possible end of the avant-garde.19 “Aesthetic fatigue,” as he called it, was
the fallout of this endless questing for originality, not to mention the
faith placed in this questing. More generally, Kubler understood this
artistic phenomenon as embedded within a condition of the larger cul-
ture. “A signal trait of our own time is an ambivalence in everything
touching upon change.”20
There is, in such phrasing, a thinking about futurity that bears
CHAPTER 4 upon the widespread currency of The Shape of Time for a sixties art
ULTRAMODERNE audience. Although Kubler’s strangely technical language proved
obscure to a few early reviewers of his book, many critics embraced
its general critique of stylistic historicism.21 His considerations on the
rhetoric of progress, above all, bore significant implications for his 230
audience engaged in contemporary art. For Kubler, the reading of art
history as style was grounded in the language of biology, to be avoided
at all costs. “However useful it is for pedagogical purposes,” he wrote,
“the biological metaphor of style as a sequence of life stages was histor-
ically misleading, for it bestowed upon the flux of events the behavior
and shape of organisms.”22 The idea of art history as an organism—
as a self-contained and homogenous system—was antithetical to the
discontinuous history Kubler proposed.
These remarks tell us much about Smithson’s attraction to Kubler.
In both “Quasi-Infinities” and “Ultramoderne,” Smithson linked issues
of style to formalist criticism, which he further rejected for its biological
resonance. In note 15 of “Quasi-Infinities,” he meshed the two when he
wrote about the contemporary criticism of abstraction: “the biological
metaphor is at the bottom of all formalist criticism.” The sentiment
courses throughout the main text. And a year later in “Ultramoderne,”
Smithson read the art of the sixties in general as a turning away from
this model of criticism, observing “a transhistorical consciousness has
emerged in the sixties that seems to avoid appeals to the organic time
of the avant-garde.”23
Thus the equation between Kubler and Smithson would appear
not only seamless but complete. Kubler’s distaste for biological meta-
phors—readings of art history in terms of progress and growth—fits
neatly with Smithson’s distaste for Greenbergian formalism. The circuit,
to paraphrase the art historian, would seem all but closed. But a reading
of the two that stops here is no more satisfactory than saying Smithson
makes reference to Kubler for his expertise in Latin American art. It sets
the two in parallel with one another as little more than a mirroring of
similar quotations, the reflection of which seems at once direct and
transparent. Doubtlessly Smithson rejected the biological model of art
historical time, but far more was at stake in his encounter with Kubler.
For an artist who consistently thematized process and ruin in his larger
corpus—and for an article that graphically delights in the fragmenting
and dispersal of information at its borders—one questions the hermetic,
even mechanistic, nature of this exchange.
Kubler himself provides some cues to an alternative reading of his
appearance in Smithson. In The Shape of Time he wrote,
 231 We cannot clearly descry the contours of the great currents of our
own time. . . . [W]e are too much inside the streams of contemporary
happening to chart their flow and volume. We are confronted with inner
and outer historical surface. Of these only the outer surfaces of the
completed past are accessible to historical knowledge.24

Here Kubler gives voice to the problem of contemporaneity. It is a

problem of presentness. Standing in the “streams of contemporary
happening” as we are, we cannot stabilize our relation to the currents
of our own time. Only when one is at a historical distance from the
present might the processes of historiographic reconstruction be set
into motion. Only then might the contours of a “completed past” be
rendered “historically legible.”25
This issue raises the question of time for both Kubler and
Smithson. Might there be some logic to Smithson’s work about which
he was not fully aware, as if his contemporaneity with Kubler acted as
a blind spot in reading The Shape of Time? In other words, might this
invocation of Kubler point to another model of time altogether, one
whose contours were not wholly accessible to the very presentness the
artist inhabited? Earlier I mentioned that Kubler acts as a cipher for
Smithson, by which I mean he represents something beyond his putative
role as “art historian proper.” And that “something” is the trope of
technology, signaled by yet another bit of marginalia in “Quasi-
Infinities.” For on the same page as the reference to Kubler, occupying
the same gutter space, is a quote as seemingly elliptical as the art
historian’s. “Dr. J. Bronowski among others,” it reads, “has pointed
out that mathematics, which most of us see as the most factual of all
sciences, constitutes the most colossal metaphor imaginable, and must
be judged, aesthetically, as well as intellectually, in terms of the success
of this metaphor” (figure 4.5).
The citation is drawn from a book entitled The Human Use of
Human Beings by Norbert Wiener. It dates from 1950, and its larger field
of reference is the study of cybernetics, a theory of messages and the
control of information (figure 4.6). Like the quote by Kubler placed
CHAPTER 4 almost directly above it, it addresses a problem of communication, or to
ULTRAMODERNE be more precise, metaphor—the way one figure of speech is employed
to describe another figure of speech, which in turn hooks up to another
 233
4.5 Robert Smithson, detail, “Quasi-
Infinities and the Waning of Space,”
Arts Magazine (New York) 41, no. 1
(November 1966). Art and text
© Estate of Robert Smithson/Licensed
by VAGA, New York.
CHAPTER 4
ULTRAMODERNE
figure of speech. Metaphor, understood in its broadest sense, is the
endless concatenation of language. As Roland Barthes succinctly put it,
“metaphor does not stop.”26 Metaphor points to the metaphoricity of
all forms of communication, the porosity of any discursive system. Say,
then, that metaphor is the thematic link between the two margin notes
on the same page of “Quasi-Infinities.” What about the second text in
this chain and the metaphoric work it performs on Kubler, and vice
versa? This connection between Wiener’s book and The Shape of Time
is crucial. It coordinates the relationship between pastness, futurity,
and technology—long an obsession in Smithson’s art—with the way he
structures information in “Quasi-Infinities.”
CALLING OVER TIME: NORBERT WIENER’S DRIFT
[T]he historian’s idea of change is related to the linguist’s idea
of “drift” exemplified by the progressive separation that widens be-
tween cognate languages. This “drift,” produced by cumulative
changes in the articulation of sounds can be related in turn to the
interferences that distort any audible communication. The telephone
engineer calls such interferences “noise.” “Drift,” “noise,” and
change are related by the presence of interferences preventing the
complete repetition of an earlier set of conditions.
—George Kubler 27
As much as the link between Smithson and Kubler has been established
by art historians, so too has the connection between Smithson and
technology. Accounts by Caroline Jones and Eugenie Tsai respectively
have treated the relationship in terms of the artist’s fascination with
postwar industrialism and a parallel engagement with science fiction.28
Far less considered is a reading of Smithson through the lens of cyber-
netics; as an artist wrestling, however implicitly, with debates on
systems and information theory. Yet these references exist in his work
as much as—and certainly run parallel to—the artist’s engagement with
the ruins of a Machine Age culture that his generation of postwar artists
inherited. Indeed, Smithson’s preoccupations with the past were
 235
4.6 Jacket cover from The Human Use
of Human Beings by Norbert Wiener,
1950. Used by permission of Doubleday,
a division of Random House, Inc.
CHAPTER 4
ULTRAMODERNE
matched only in intensity by his engagement with futurity, and such
concerns took acute shape in his own thinking about new technologies
as well as the contemporary appraisal of his work. However removed
such readings might seem from our thinking about Smithson in the
present, and whatever his own suspicions about his work’s reception,
his art was consistently regarded by critics and curators in relationship
to systems theory.29
Here, then, I want to argue that “Quasi-Infinities” is both a con-
frontation with and adumbration of a cybernetic model of temporality,
and it is through the mouthpiece of Kubler that such interests are ven-
triloquized. Not that this is a matter of intention or declaration on the
artist’s part—far from it. My claim is that Smithson reads both Kubler
and Wiener in parallax with one another. He reads them against the
grain, positions them heuristically, as a virtual process of assimilating
the other author’s work. One helps situate the other.
In both cases for Smithson, it all comes down to communication
over time. Or to be more precise, the problem of communication over
time. Although the placement of Wiener and Kubler on the same page
of “Quasi-Infinities “ might seem incidental, little more than the random
collision of two roughly contemporaneous figures, their literal proximity
sheds light on their conceptual intersection nonetheless. Smithson did
not discuss Wiener with the same frequency as he treated the art his-
torian, but it is more than suggestive that when the term cybernetics
is mentioned in his writings, the name of Kubler is likely to augur its
appearance. In his piece called “The Artist as Site-Seer; or, a Dintorphic
Essay” (1966–67), for example, Smithson ranged over a number of
topics with the same slack prose-style as in “Quasi-Infinities.” Tellingly, a
ramble on the notion of Kubler’s prime objects gives way to a discussion
on cybernetics as “tombic communication”—a kind of mortified dis-
course bearing parallels to the grave architecture of ancient Egypt.
Whatever noise or interference exists between Wiener and Kubler as
historical figures belies their linkage in Smithson’s thinking on time.
In Wiener’s 1948 Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the
Animal and Machine and the layperson’s account of information theory
cited by Smithson, the mathematician presented a model of commu-
nication through the term cybernetics a word whose root (kubernetes)
derives from the Greek for “steersman” as well as the modern word
for “governor.” As the etymology suggests, cybernetics is a science of
control, or predicative value—of taking account of futurity and its 236
probabilistic tendencies and attempting to regulate it through the
management of messages. Cybernetics, therefore, subscribes to the time
of prolepsis, the future tense. Growing out of research and develop-
ments in antiaircraft technology, its history is intractable from the
military science of World War II. The capacity to foresee—or foreread—
the actions of the enemy is a projective capacity; and it was Wiener,
along with Vannevar Bush, Arturo Rosenblatt, and John von Neumann,
who played a pivotal role in its development. Wiener opened Cyber-
netics with a chapter on the shift between Newtonian models of time
and Bergsonian ones in the modern age, highlighting the importance of
temporality for considerations of the new communication science. As
we shall see, how this inflects an understanding of history as a linear
unfolding is played out in the very margins of Smithson’s article.
Indeed, from its inception, one branch of cybernetics took up
the question of temporality and teleological mechanisms: how self-
regulating systems internalized a notion of time far removed from its
commonplace understanding as lived experience or “clock time.” 30
The topic was to occupy Wiener consistently throughout his career,
particularly in his publishing forays into neurology.31 But at an even
more general level, the subject of time became something of a cottage
industry for engineers and biologists alike within the institutional
culture of science in the sixties.32 The cybernetic perspective, it is
doubtless, had a significant impact on such proceedings.
Now why cybernetics might be of interest to Smithson, let alone
any contemporary artist of the period, demands some explanation.
To some extent this book has already addressed this question in the ac-
count of “Art and Objecthood,” tracing the logic of systems in the art
criticism of the era. Likewise, cybernetic discourse in the first two
decades following the war extended well beyond its’ original military
foundations, perhaps even served to suppress that history of its origins.
Its widespread applications were such that a famous series of con-
ferences on the theme were sponsored by the Macy Foundation in
New York between 1946 and 1953. They included not only cyber-
neticians—famous mathematicians and engineers such as Wiener,
John von Neumann, Warren McCullough, and Claude Shannon—but
anthropologists, social scientists, psychoanalysts, and linguists ranging
 237 from Margaret Mead to Gregory Bateson to Eric Erikson to Roman
Jakobson.33 As detailed in chapter 1, systems discourse took on many
formulations at this moment—highly influential readings include
Shannon’s account of information theory and the general systems
analyses of von Bertalanffy. But it was Wiener’s name that would be-
come synonymous with cybernetics’ broad understanding in the popu-
lar imagination.
In the years following the book’s publication, and well after
Wiener’s death in 1964, cybernetics became something of a pop culture
buzzword, used to describe or interrogate phenomena as wide ranging
as the centralization of power during the Cold War, modern religion,
behavioral psychology, child rearing, alcoholism, dialectical materialism,
and deteriorating ecosystems. Its impact extended well beyond the
spheres of institutional science and its original military applications: as
the historian of science Steve Heims observes, it made itself felt widely
in the humanities and the postwar culture of literature, art, architecture,
and poetry. But the popular understanding of cybernetics was not just
multidisciplinary. Not only did it attempt to theorize the gap between
math, engineering, and the social sciences; it also hoped to analogize
the workings of the human and nonhuman. For Wiener, writing in
1950, cybernetics was “a tentative new theory of scientific method”
that referred not only to the study of language but the capacity to
regulate or control the transmission of information within a range of
different systems: biological, mechanical, electronic, and temporal.34
Thus animals and machines were subject to cybernetic analysis, and the
human nervous system and its capacity for learning was regarded as
roughly analogous to the functions of the new computers. The distance
between man and machine seemed to close, anticipating what Manfred
Klines and Nathan Clyne would subsequently call the cyborg in 1960—
a neat contraction of the words cybernetic and organism.
For all its multidisciplinary relevance, the man principally re-
sponsible for the theory of cybernetics expressed a certain ambivalence
about the uses to which his research was put. Relatively early in the
history of the theory, Wiener voiced his suspicion over making neat
CHAPTER 4 analogies between communicative and information systems and be-
ULTRAMODERNE tween social and biological ones, even as it was popularly employed
(and often by his own colleagues and friends) to do just that and even
as much of his own words seemed to support such analogizing. “Infor- 238
mation is information,” Wiener wrote in Cybernetics, “not matter or
energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the
present day.”35 Such statements seemed to draw a virtual line in the
sand between the scientific and the humanistic; they seemingly pre-
clude, if in a tentative way, the interdisciplinary impulse that drew
many to cybernetic discourse in the first place.
But an even more pressing anxiety about cybernetics existed—
not so much how it was understood as a theoretical conceit or even
method but what is was exploited for as science. Peter Galison attests
to Wiener’s fears about the technology he himself created, themes
consistent with the engineer’s subsequent writing on the topic. Galison
cites Wiener’s letter to a friend from 1945:

Ever since the atomic bomb fell I have been recovering from an acute
attack of conscience as one of the scientists who has been doing war
work and who has seen his war work as part of a larger body which is
being used in a way of which I do not approve and over which I have
absolutely no control.36

There is no small irony in the observation that Wiener’s theory of

control had exceeded his very grasp of it. He acknowledges a deeply
fraught history at its origins, one that saw scientific progress and
military destruction as unhappy but necessary bedfellows.37 Another
consequence might be understood from his observations. In both his
concern surrounding the uses of cybernetics, as well as his reservations
about analogizing all varia of communicative systems, Wiener points
to a larger problem of communicability between systems that his own
research would seek to transcend.
Although this history is critical on its own terms, most likely it
fails to resonate with art historians.38 In its telling, admittedly, it does
not answer to the relationships among the cybernetician, the art
historian, and the artist. Yet strange, perhaps muted signals as to this
connection exist in the work and reception of other contemporary
figures and the art critical discourse that accompanied them. They
reveal that what is obscure for a reader in the twenty-first century was
at least tacitly understood for a sixties artist, namely, the very problem
 239 of communication in general and a problem of communicating history
as a system in particular.

THE PROMISE OF SYSTEMS

Take, for example, the strange case of John Baldessari and his par-
ticipation in the important exhibition at the Jewish Museum called
Software: Information Technology: Its Meaning for the Arts. In chapter 1,
I discussed this show with respect to the Friedian account of tempor-
ality. Here it is invoked to slightly different ends, and a review of its
background is critical as such. The show was organized in 1970 by
Jack Burnham, then a professor at Northwestern University as well
as an artist. Best known for his 1968 book Beyond Modern Sculpture,
Burnham argued generally for a fundamental historical transition in the
production of works of art: the shift from the making of discrete objects
to systems-based work, alleged to mirror the waning of the Machine
Age and the concomitant emergence of digital technology after the war.
In a number of essays dating from the late sixties, he made claims that a
new “systems aesthetic” was laying siege to the traditional categories of
Western art and its media. Writing on artists ranging from Smithson to
Hans Haacke to Alan Kaprow to Carl Andre, Burnham suggested of this
new model of art that

[t]he emerging major paradigm in art is neither an ism nor a collection

of styles. 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. As a culture producer, man has
traditionally claimed the title Homo Faber: man the maker (of tools
and images). With continued advances in the industrial revolution, he
assumes a more critical function. As Homo Arbiter Formae his prime role
becomes that of man the maker of aesthetic decisions. These decisions—
whether they are made concertedly or not—control the quality of all
future life on earth.39
CHAPTER 4
ULTRAMODERNE “Man” as the maker of objects was now supplanted by the artist as
rational decision maker, an information processor or even bureaucrat.
Burnham employed Kuhn’s reading of scientific revolutions to articulate 240
such shifts;40 the General System Theory of Ludwig von Bertalanffy
was also called upon to rationalize these artistic processes. Although
Burnham’s methodological proclivities bore a decisive authorial stamp,
it’s good to recall here that his art-as-systems platform was all of a
historical piece; his overweening emphasis on the shift between object
and nonobject ran parallel to (and was deeply inflected by) the process
and conceptual art moment of the late sixties. What some critics had
described as “the dematerialization of the art object” or “postformalism”
was for Burnham coded in the rhetoric of communication theory and
the new technology.
As such, the exhibition Software was not unique in its attempt to
address such shifts nor was it alone it is celebratory embrace of new
media. Along with Jasia Reichardt’s 1968 exhibition Cybernetic Seren-
dipity, held at the ICA in London, Software was one of a cluster of large-
scale offerings dating from the late sixties and early seventies devoted
to the changing role of technology in the visual arts. Here it was art as
so much technological progress, if not the Machine Age ethos of the
prewar years, then the information society of the computer-race era. “It
demonstrates the control and communication techniques in the hands
of artists,” Burnham wrote in the introduction to the catalog.41 These
words signal a clear debt to Wiener as did much of the work grappling
with explicitly cybernetic themes. Hence, for example, the Architecture
Machine Group of MIT (whose chief participant, Nicholas Negroponte,
would go on to find the Media Lab) produced an “environmental” piece
tracking the interaction between computers and gerbils.
Yet amidst the clicking and humming of some rather clunky forms
of new media art, one of Baldessari’s contributions to the catalog was
strikingly primitive, begging the question as to its place in Burnham’s
thinking altogether (figure 4.7). One of a series of paintings begun in
the mid-sixties, the work was not so much low-tech as it was “no-tech,”
a flat, acrylic gray field against which a generic hand read:

This painting owes its existence to prior paintings. By liking this solu-
tion, you should not be blocked in your continued acceptance of prior
inventions. To attain this position, ideas of former painting had to
be rethought in order to transcend former work. To like this painting,
 241

4.7 John Baldessari, Painting for Kubler,

1969. Courtesy Ted Spence.

you will have to understand prior work. Ultimately, this work will
amalgamate the existing body of knowledge.

This is something of a mouthful for Baldessari, whose paintings of the

moment were characteristically terse in their allusions to the art critics
and theories of the day. By contrast, the title of the work was flat footed
and laconic. Entitled Painting for Kubler, it articulates—by means of a
winking paraphrase of the art historian—the sense that works of art
are not produced out of a historical vacuum, refusing the romantic
discourse of originality long upheld as the criteria for evaluating works
of art. Instead it was dedicated to an art historian with seemingly little
CHAPTER 4 connection to computer technology, much less the new media work that
ULTRAMODERNE was the show’s central attraction.
But credit is due Baldessari, for there is no doubt that Kubler’s
writing inspired such associations.42 In The Shape of Time, he questioned
the methodological divide between the study of art and the study of 242
science, suggesting that a rapprochement between the two might occur
through acknowledging the metaphors of production and obsolescence
shared by both fields. Even more incisively, Kubler countered his rejec-
tion of biological metaphors with the language of new technology.
“Perhaps a system of metaphors drawn from physical science would
have clothed the situation of art more adequately than the prevailing
biological metaphors,” he wrote.

Especially if we are dealing in art with the transmission of some kind

of energy; with impulses, generating centers and relay points; with
increments and losses of transit; with resistances and transformers in the
circuit. . . . In short, the language of electrodynamics might have suited
us better than the language of botany; and Michael Faraday might have
been a better mentor than Linnaeus for the study of material culture.43

Here the rhetoric of information technology flashes throughout Kubler’s

theory of historical sequencing. In his intermittent history of material
culture, he further described the nature of time as being like a signal:

The instant of actuality is all we can ever know directly. The rest of
time emerges only in signals relayed to us at this instant by innumerable
stages and by unexpected bearers. These signals are like kinetic energy
stored until the moment of notice when the mass descends along some
portion of its path to the center of the gravitational system. . . . The
nature of a signal is that its message is neither here nor now, but there
and then.44

Given the peculiar nature of the signal, the “problem” that the form
class represented was either switched, altered, or closed down. “As
the solutions accumulate,” Kubler remarked, “the problem alters.”45 By
the same token, he also suggested that as the problems accumulate, the
solutions alter throughout history. As if to drive the point home, he
illustrated his thesis with a mathematical diagram of conflicting and
converging vectors. Borrowed from a colleague’s research on graph
theory, the diagram made no pretension to linear development.
Kubler’s model of time, then, is neither wholly causal nor pro-
gressive; like an electrical circuit charged with a new signal, it breaks
 243 off into vectors that may fire up others, short-circuit, or potentially link
different solutions to a shared problem. As a result, The Shape of Time—
a book ostensibly devoted to the historicity of things—reads like a
manifesto of information theory. It resonates with two of the central
tenets of cybernetics in particular: the notion of feedback and the
related concept of circular causal systems. A brief excursus on both
establishes a link between Kubler’s reading of material history and
cybernetic temporality and opens further onto the possibility—or more
accurately, impossibility—that either system fully contain the uneven
temporalities both writers admit. It is this understanding of systems,
and art history as a system along with it, that “Quasi-Infinities” ul-
timately addressed.

THE PROBLEM WITH SYSTEMS

An extract of “Fragments from an Interview with Robert Smithson by
P. A. Norvell”:

NORVELL: Jack Burnham feels we are going from an object-oriented

society to a systems-oriented society.

SMITHSON: System is a convenient word, like object. It is another ab-

stract entity that doesn’t exist. I think art tends to relieve itself of those
hopes. Jack Burnham is very interested in going beyond, and that is a
utopian view. The future doesn’t exist, or if it does exist it is the obsolete
in reverse. The future is always going backwards. Our future tends to be
prehistoric. I see no point in utilizing technology or industry as an end in
itself, or as an agrmation of anything. That has nothing to do with art.
They are just tools. If you make a system, you can be sure the system is
bound to evade itself, so I see no point in pinning any hope on systems.
A system is just an expansive object, and eventually it all contracts back
to points.46

CHAPTER 4 If you make a system, you can be sure the system is bound to evade itself.
ULTRAMODERNE In an interview conducted by Patsy Norvell in 1969, Smithson spoke
with confidence about the new systems-based art that critics and
curators such as Jack Burnham supported. The artist was confident that
the work was no more advanced than the old-fashioned “object”-based 244
art it was alleged to supercede and that the de facto label of progress
attached to new media or systems work was not simply utopian but
deeply misguided. If efficiency was the usual characteristic attributed
to new systems, whether artistic or technological, Smithson would
concede only one point. That is, whatever a system was designed or
intended to do, it would just as surely fall out of those bounds.
In crucial respects, the very problem of a system’s evasiveness—
that it inevitably escapes its systematicity—was the first principle of
cybernetics. Wiener had a means and a name for rationalizing this
problem. He called it feedback. Following Wiener, feedback controls
the input of information into systems in order for the system to perform
smoothly. It is “the property of being able to adjust future conduct by
past performance” or more specifically “ a method of controlling a
system by reinserting into it the results of its past performance.”47 Like
an endlessly playing tape loop, it enables a system to assimilate and
therefore learn new behaviors with the introduction of new messages.
Some of the feedback supplies positive reinforcement; others are
directed toward negative ends.
But the system, however efficient, admits to its own decay. For
feedback regulates what Wiener called entropy—a system’s tendency
to move probabilistically toward contingency, disorganization, the will
to chaos. This is a point I will return to at the conclusion of this chapter.
For now, it’s worth considering the strangely recursive temporality
of feedback as a concept. All at once, feedback is prophylactic and
predictive. It presumes to control a system whose very breakdown is
projected as inevitable.
Feedback was hardly a new “invention.” James Watt’s governor
was cited as one such historical instance of feedback from the industrial
revolution. Wiener offered other examples that had little if nothing
to do with the technology of the emerging digital era: an elevator’s
response to a button repeatedly pushed by an impatient passenger; a
gun with a special steadying mechanism that accounted for the errant
flight of a bullet; applause—or alternately, silence—in a theater and its
impact on an actor’s performance. Banal as the examples are, they are
not only provided to make feedback understandable as a concept to a
lay readership. What these examples demonstrate was the circuit of
information that occurred between one system and another.
 245 Now just how such a circuit occurred in time, and how it altered
the course of action and reaction over time, relates to notions of
circular causality and recursion, discussed in chapter 1. To review its
terms: Heims describes circular causal systems in a manner that reflects
Gregory Bateson’s earlier definition. “In traditional thinking since the
ancient Greeks,” he writes,

a cause A results in an eKect B. With circular causality A and B are mu-

tually cause and eKect of each other: Moreover, not only does A aKect B
but through B acts back on itself. The circular causality concept seemed
appropriate for much in the human sciences. It means that A cannot do
things to B without being itself eKected.48

Thus circular causality inverts the conventional axis of cause and effect.
Here a continuous relay occurs between two points. A kind of “taping”
or “looping” takes place between systems to the extent that they
become mutually constitutive of one another; we could call this a dia-
logical model of causality or even a structuralist account of meaning
production. To be drawn from this reading is that determinations of
both origin and end goal are rendered strangely negligible, as are con-
ventional models of historical development.
This dialogue resonates in other ways, extending to other models
of history of that moment. Cybernetic temporality and Kubler’s remarks
on time share much in their respective thinking about causality: both
are nonlinear, recursive, and multidirectional all at once. For Kubler,
historical change is enacted though the transmission of information
from one signal to the next, but nothing about that transmission is con-
tinuous; there is an almost accidental quality to the way in which
forms of material culture occur through time and the way this almost
random cycling alters existing signals. The signal of an art historical
event, then, is a kind of communicative recurrence: it moves in multi-
directional tangents; it shapes our understanding of things not as a
matter of chronological development but belatedness. To borrow one
example from Kubler, our historical knowledge of Auguste Rodin forever
CHAPTER 4 changes our reading of Michelangelo, as if history moved not forward
ULTRAMODERNE but backward, and then forward again. Writing further on this kind of
temporal switchback, he noted, “All substantial signals can be regarded
both as transmissions and as initial commotions. . . . [A] work of art
transmits a kind of behavior by the artist, and it also serves, like a relay, 246
as the point of departure for impulses that often attain extraordinary
magnitudes in later transmissions.”49
Circular causal systems find their art historical correspondent in
Kubler’s notion of the work of art as both artifact and message. “A work
of art is not only the residue of an event,” he wrote,

but is its own signal, directly moving other signals to repeat or improve
its situation. Our lines of communication with the past therefore orig-
inated as signals which become commotions emitting further signals
in an unbroken alternating sequence of event, signal, recreated event,
renewed signal, etc. Celebrated events have undergone the cycle millions
of times each instant throughout their history.50

The message, in other words, cannot remain pure; it is necessarily, even

progressively, “deformed” in its communication across history. Nowhere
in The Shape of Time was Kubler more explicit about the reading of art
history as a message system as when he remarked, “within the history
of things, we find the history of art. . . . [W]orks of art resemble a
system of symbolic communication which must be free from excessive
‘noise’ in the many copies upon which communication depends.”51
A history that is once progressive and deformative, a system that
unfolds in time only to circle back endlessly on itself: for Kubler and
Wiener alike, as messages or works of art cycle throughout history, they
are implicated in a process of deepening regression, as if the system
of history was both evading itself and swallowing its own tail. “The
Enlightenment,” Wiener wrote in The Human Use of Human Beings,
“fostered the notion of progress . . . even though some felt this progress
was subject to the laws of diminishing returns.” Wiener here gives voice
to his dialectic of enlightenment; and to be sure, a central concept in
cybernetics treated this dialectic in terms of communication. For as
much as the network between Wiener, Kubler, and Smithson should
read more clearly, there is one point left undiscussed in their respective
considerations of time. It is around the notion of entropy that the
problem takes on an acute significance for contemporary art.
 247 AESTHETIC FATIGUE: ENTROPY AND THE COLLAPSE OF ART HISTORY

In the arts, the desire to find new things to say and new ways of
saying them is the source of all life and interest. . . . Beauty, like
order, occurs in many places in this world, but only as a local and
temporary fight against the Niagara of increasing entropy.

—Norbert Wiener 52

Well over two-thirds into The Human Use of Human Beings, a book that
attempts to explain theories of communication through a diverse range
of phenomena, Wiener made one of two substantive comments on the
visual arts.53 “Everyday,” he remarked,

we meet with examples of painting where, for instance, the artist has
bound himself from the new canons of the abstract, and has displayed no
intention to use these canons to display an interesting and novel form of
beauty, to pursue the uphill fight against the prevailing tendency toward
the commonplace and the banal.54

Compared to the relative lucidity of the rest of his book, the knottiness
of this passage betrays its author’s discomfort with treating art as a
cybernetic system, not to mention a certain confusion in the face of
recent art practice. Modern art in general, abstract painting more spe-
cifically, presented an especially difficult problem for communication
and the transfer of messages. Wiener insinuated that avant-garde work
was being produced only for the sake of “the social and intellectual
prestige of being a priest of communication,” and the results of this
were such that “the quality and communicative value of the message
drop like a plummet.”55 Much recent art in other words was little more
than visual jam or interference, that which blocked the communication
of a truly important artistic message. Only “true beauty,” analogized by
Wiener to the order of a functioning cybernetic system, could stem this
“Niagara of increasing entropy.”
The statement is elliptical, revealing as much about its author’s
CHAPTER 4
attitudes toward contemporary art as it does his frustration in meta-
ULTRAMODERNE
phorizing art as a system. Wiener implies that the history of modern
art—distilled as it is to vanguard abstraction—is itself an entropic 248
process. Insofar as entropy is a central category in both Wiener’s and
Smithson’s thinking—and one that haunts Kubler’s discourse as well—
the point is crucial. In the second chapter of The Human Use of Human
Beings, entitled “Progress and Entropy,” Wiener understood entropy as
the will to disorder or chaos that inevitably entered into any closed
system. Based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics—that a system
of order is bound to move to disorder—Wiener applied entropy’s laws
to the matter of communication over time. In any system of informa-
tion, any exchange of messages, the greater the input, the more likely
entropy will take place.
Following Wiener, Smithson understood that entropy’s effects
were not linked to physical and chemical processes alone. They had an
impact on time itself. As systems move forward in time—as art objects
move forward in time—what might seem to be advancing historically
necessarily falls into entropy. In his important essay of 1966 “Entropy
and the New Monuments,” Smithson wrote that time was subject to
a process of decay or monumental inaction and that the art of the
moment served as an analogue of this process.56 Work by Ronald
Bladen or Sol LeWitt—serialized objects—underscored the possibility
that the future of art was a horizon of sameness, unending and unerring
in its blankness, devoid of symbolic meaning. Just as he argued in
“Quasi-Infinities,” Smithson’s reading of entropy was opposed to
modernist notions of time as progressive and systems as efficient and
mechanistic. And for Smithson, as for Wiener, it was the avant-garde
that represented a last-ditch effort in this movement toward progress.
Now what is not commonly acknowledged in discussions of
Smithson and entropy is the extent to which he drew upon its formu-
lation in information theory.57 As he reported to Alison Skye in the 1973
interview “Entropy Made Visible,”

Norbert Weiner [sic] in The Human Use of Human Beings . . . postulates

that entropy is the devil, but unlike the Christian devil which is simply a
rational devil with a very simple morality of good and evil, the entropic
devil is more Manichean in that you really can’t tell the good from the
bad. There’s no clear cut distinction. And I think at one point Weiner also
refers to modern art as a kind of Niagara of entropy. In information
theory you have another kind of entropy. The more information you
 249 have, the higher degree of entropy, so that one piece of information
tends to cancel out the other.58

Smithson linked together what might seem disparate to us: the way a
system of communication inevitably breaks down over time. However,
the system Smithson describes is the system of objects—art objects in
particular—and the way they are communicated over history. And what
deteriorates with that system is the methodological armature that once
supported it: the virtual article of faith that art historical time is pro-
gressive and organic. In its place comes the realization that aesthetic
fatigue has set in, with the collapse of art history not far off in the
distance.
This point brings us full circle to The Shape of Time. Recall
how Kubler’s antibiological rhetoric spoke to contemporary artistic
phenomena: his creeping sense of “the approaching exhaustion of new
discoveries in art” and the possible end of the avant-garde.59 Recall too
his remark that “a signal trait of our own time is an ambivalence in
everything touching upon change.” At the conclusion of his book,
Kubler connected the weakening status of contemporary art, the end
of all radical art practice, to a fundamental problem of perception and
communication. He noted:

Radical artistic innovations may perhaps not continue to appear with

the frequency we have come to expect in the past century. It is possibly
true that all the potentials of form and meaning in human society have
all been sketched out at one time or place or another, in more or less
complete projections. We and our descendents may choose to resume
such ancient incomplete kinds of form whenever we need them.
As it is, our perception of things is a circuit unable to admit a great
variety of new sensations all at once. Human perception is best suited to
slow modifications of routine behavior. Hence invention has always had
to halt at the gate of perception where the narrowing of the way allows
much less to pass than the importance of the messages or the need of
the recipients would justify. How can we increase the inbound tragc at
CHAPTER 4 the gate?60
ULTRAMODERNE

In speaking on the human mind’s failure to assimilate too many new

sensations (and by extension, too many new forms of art), Kubler’s
language anticipated recent discussions on bandwidth: how informa- 250
tion is blocked in the circuit, its input or output, the potential overload
of information, and the breakdown of the system that would attempt
to internalize it all. These comments pulse with the beat of entropy,
the sense that all those artistic signals flashed through time might
ultimately generate a vast and homogenous incoherence. The word
entropy itself does not appear in his text. Yet at the edges of Kubler’s
writing, and at the heart of his theory of formal sequencing, lies
the notion that works of art from the past were like “weak signals”
sent across the “void.” It should come as little surprise that Smithson
returned, over and over again, to this particular expression by Kubler
in his own writing.

QUASI-INFINITIES
Bearing these connections in mind, let us return to Smithson’s “Quasi-
Infinities and the Waning of Space” and read it as a push/pull
dynamic—both visually and textually—between entropy and control,
between progress and fatigue, between signal and noise, pastness and
futurity. Some remarks on the history of the text shed additional light
on such tensions and the peculiar nexus of concerns that attends the
artist’s reading of both Kubler and Wiener. Before it was published in
the fall issue of Arts Magazine in 1966, “Quasi-Infinities” assumed
several different iterations, three of which can be specifically identified.
The attempt to revise and rethink the terms of this text over a period of
half a year underscores Smithson’s conscientiousness surrounding its
ideas. It is, in short, not to be regarded as a one-shot.
The first “version” suggests that much of the present content of
the essay—particularly Smithson’s rather glib comments about the
history of the avant-garde—was intended as a response to a survey on
the state of contemporary art sent to a number of artists by Irving
Sandler in May of that year.61 By contrast, the second iteration is a
typed essay entitled “Art and Time.” An undated text in Smithson’s
archives, its contents are nearly identical to what would later become
“Quasi-Infinities.” Finally, an earlier typewritten version of the essay
dating from October 6 (and bearing the same title) begins with some
deeply resonant observations. Smithson wrote:
 251 Around a series of inaccessible abstractions, I shall construct an in-
accessible system that has no inside or outside, but only the dimension
of reproduced reproductions. The first obstacle shall be a labyrinth,
through which the mind will pass in an instant, thus eliminating the
spatial problem. The next encounter is an abysmal anatomy theater.
Quickly the mind will pass over this dizzying height. Here the pages of
time are paper thin, even when it comes to a pyramid. The center of the
pyramid is everywhere and nowhere. From the center, one may see the
Tower of Babel, Kepler’s universe, or a building by the architect Ledoux.
To formulate a general theory of this inconceivable system would not
solve its symmetrical perplexities. . . . Arcane codes and extravagant
experiments conceal the absolute abstraction.62

As in the published form of the essay, Smithson’s first paragraph makes

sweeping reference to a broad range of cultural phenomena, mostly
architectural or architectonic, sometimes fabulous (the Tower of Babel),
sometimes not. He then attends to “how quickly” the mind passes over
this information, as if absorbing these various historical artifacts in
rapid-fire succession.
These opening remarks are not far removed from the final version
of “Quasi-Infinities,” as the images in the published essay correspond to
the litany of things the artist presents in the early text. In revisiting this
draft, however, one is struck by the language of systems, codes, and
general theories that introduces—even frames—the essay itself. One is
struck equally by the artist’s characterization of such systems as
“inaccessible” and “inconceivable,” as if the very concept of systems was
untenable to the artist at that point.
The published essay underscores this condition even as it compli-
cates Smithson’s understanding of it. At first read—or at first glance—
“Quasi-Infinities” would appear to succumb to a kind of textual and
visual aphasia.63 Images of Kepler’s universe rub up against models by
Dan Graham, and references to the art of Eva Hesse and Zeno’s second
paradox jostle for space at the margins. In the language of cybernetics,
“Quasi-Infinities” might initially present itself as little more than
CHAPTER 4 communicative “jamming”—an excess of codes without a coherent
ULTRAMODERNE message, let alone an organizing principle. And yet if Smithson thought
of his work as a system, however provisional, he nuances his treatment
of this term in the essay’s final version. Consider his opening sentence
as such a challenge and revision. The challenge reads like this: “Around 252
four blocks of print I shall postulate four ultramundane margins that
shall contain indeterminate information as well as reproduced repro-
ductions.” The design of the text is explicitly foregrounded, yet it is
qualified in terms of its margins and their “indeterminate information.”
The phrasing resonates with both Kubler and Wiener alike. Indeed, if
notes are conventionally thought to authorize or legitimate the material
within a text, here, the information they supply is radically indetermin-
ate because they no longer anchor the text both literally and figur-
atively. Smithson’s article makes endless, even circular, allusion to these
notes, but none signifies autonomously. They do not so much explain
the text as they progressively refract what is already quite incoherent
within it.
Much of this seems to turn around the notion of “reproduced
reproductions,” which appeals to a reading of both Kubler and Wiener
on a number of counts. “Reproduced reproductions” are the chosen
manner of Smithson’s presentation; to follow his earlier draft, they are
the only means possible to allude to, if not access, his “inconceivable”
system in “Quasi-Infinities.” The reproductions in this instance are the
visual bits (clip art, even) that encircle the main body of the essay, as
well as the fragments of quotations that share the same marginal space.
At the outset they are acknowledged by the artist as reproductions—
that is, nonoriginals—an assessment that also admits to the chain of
mediation Smithson has set into play in the context of an art magazine.
As such they cannot signify autonomously, transparently. Their meaning
is at a secondary, possibly tertiary, remove from their inaugural context.
That they are reproduced reproductions suggests that this copying can
continue ad infinitum. They are, then, analogous to Kubler’s notion of
the replication of a prime object, Wiener’s circuitous message. They
have the horizon of sameness, unendingness, and nondevelopment that
marks accounts of entropy. They evoke the virtually heedless way in
which visual images inflect, refract, and signal one another through-
out history, “an endless slide show,” to borrow Jameson’s phrase,
dramatized by Smithson in the sixties by their circulation as mass
media.64 Hence, they exemplify the clashing and circulation of images in
Smithson’s work, which might appear, at the face of it, to have little
connect with one another.
 253 At the same time, if neither the notes nor images consolidate a
stable or monolithic reading of the essay, they simultaneously produce a
type of signifying chain that links, like a network, one reference to the
next. Thus what might seem culturally and chronologically random in
“Quasi-Infinities” is not unlike the historical model of a form class
proposed by Kubler—one that treats the very problem of time in art
history as a series, or perhaps, an immanently overloaded system. All
those dizzying vortices and images of infinite regress address the
problematic of space and time in the work of art, however historically
removed from one another. They range from models of monumentality
and stasis, such as the pyramids, to the desiccated and entropic forms of
Eva Hesse, representative as she is of the contemporary artistic moment.
Understood in these terms, Kubler himself serves as the feedback
mechanism of Smithson’s work. His place both within the four blocks of
print, as well as at the margins, controls the literal circulation of these
messages from collapsing into entropy, sheer noise. It is, however, the
most tenuous of balancing acts, and Smithson knows it—and is deeply
ambivalent about it. “The fullness of history is forever indigestible,”
Kubler wrote in The Shape of Time; and there is no doubt that the sys-
tem of history in “Quasi-Infinities” threatens to break down under its
weight. Here, then, the paradox of being ultramoderne is complete. For
Smithson consults a historian concerned with the pastness of things to
take on a future prefigured by collapse.

NOT A CODA (DIMINISHING RETURNS):

STARS, ART, AND THE WANING OF SPACE
For Kubler, Wiener, and Smithson alike, the question of futurity and
belatedness they share begs a return to such problems in the present.
With varying degrees of ambivalence, each author expressed anxiety
about historical time, inflected by their respective concerns with
communication theory. All this resonates, in significant ways, with
readings of postmodernism and its peculiar litany of ends—the end of
CHAPTER 4 history, progress, authorship, to name among the most frequently cited.
ULTRAMODERNE It is the “endless slide show” of art history, the sense of nondevelopment
that marks a certain account of entropy.65 What, then, is the fallout of
constellating these three figures in the present? What remains for us 254
today in their confluence as art history?
Perhaps Kubler should have the last word. In 1981, nearly thirty
years after publishing The Shape of Time, Kubler delivered a lecture on
several different occasions entitled “The Shape of Time Reconsidered,”
reflecting upon the book’s reception and its diverse interlocutors. A brief
section treats the prestige accorded to the book by contemporary artists.
In the working notes to the lecture, Kubler speculated that “their
interest in it arises from the freedom it offers them from those rigid
hierarchies defined by the textbook industry in the history of art.”66 The
statement is suggestive if hardly descriptive, and the author’s con-
clusions are just as perfunctory in the lecture’s published form. On
Robert Morris, Kubler referred to “an unpublished research report”
on Morris’s interest in sculptural problems and the critique of icon-
ography.67 On Smithson he is even briefer, as the artist’s name is
mentioned in passing only in relationship to Morris.
So, then, there was an awareness of such figures, glancing as the
perspective is, and it is fair to say that Kubler’s archives carry its impress
far more clearly than the essay itself. A faded photocopy of “Quasi-
Infinities” can be found in his papers. A number of letters from artists,
devotional in tone and character, are tenderly preserved. Announce-
ments for gallery shows and video screenings coexist with scholarly
exchanges on Mesoamerican building techniques. It is as though the
art historian were continuously assimilating new messages in an at-
tempt to understand his own contemporaneity.
One document thematizes this conceit as a matter of historical
belatedness. In the spring of 1973, over a decade after publishing The
Shape of Time, Kubler was interviewed by Robert Horvitz for Artforum.
The discussion concerns itself with the book as well as other con-
temporary matters: the unedited transcript moves easily from consid-
erations of television to Kubler’s opinions on Marshall McLuhan. But
missing from the published version is a brief exchange that attests to
the book’s very thinking on the problem of contemporaneity:

RH: You have strongly criticized the use of the biological metaphor in
the depiction of historical processes, and you suggest that electrodynam-
ics might be more productive. But what you were essentially describing,
 255 with “relays,” “signals” “routines” has now been developed as Infor-
mation Theory.

GK: Of the Wiener type, rather than the Shannon type, yes. I suppose
the theory was then in existence, but the applications weren’t.68

It would be a mistake to conclude with this passage for its evidentiary

capacity, and one should take care not to fetishize Kubler’s statement
as proof of Wiener’s influence in writing The Shape of Time. The notion
of “proof,” after all, suggests a linear relationship between Wiener
and Kubler, causally determined, but such determinations are not at
issue here.
And yet the matter of communication is. For Kubler’s exchange
reveals something of the temporal and communicative logic that all
three authors confronted in their work and that animates their peculiar
intertwining as figures of postwar culture. Over ten years after its initial
appearance, The Shape of Time was regarded by its author as an art
historical demonstration of information theory—but not quite. Kubler
claimed that the “theory was then in existence but the applications
weren’t.” Such a delay between theory and its applications thematizes
the larger argument of The Shape of Time: its modeling of art history as
a kind of cybernetic Nachträglichkeit, the Freudian notion of deferred
action or belatedness that is the result of repression.
There is a beautiful passage in The Shape of Time that suggests
nothing so much as this kind of lateness, likening the twinkling of stars
to the historical “event” of works of art. Yet any romantic glimmer
attributed to the metaphor is quickly short-circuited. “Knowing the past
is as astonishing a performance as knowing the stars,” Kubler began.

Astronomers look only at old light. There is no other light for them to
look at. This old light of dead or distant stars was emitted long ago and it
reaches us only in the present.69

Space abhors a vacuum. So too does history. History fills, stuffs

CHAPTER 4 space, so that form classes and feedback loop back on themselves like
ULTRAMODERNE the light of dead stars, endlessly reflecting. Here signals collide and
bounce off one another; and Kubler’s chain of history, so seemingly
delicate and evanescent, has now tied itself into a Gordian knot. That 256
Smithson called his essay “Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space”
seems especially illuminating with respect to Kubler’s remarks on stars.
It is as if he understood that a space waning under the laws of entropy
was also exhausted by the matter of history itself. The on and on of
history is such a Quasi-Infinity—like space, it only seems to go on, ad
infinitum. And art and its history, for Kubler, Wiener, and Smithson
alike, seems a set of diminishing returns. Nothing new under the stars.
History, then, becomes a matter of both belatedness and
regressivity, eternal recurrence reinscribed as a problem of communi-
cation. Compromised by an endless temporal switching, one always
returns to the past too late, just as one always projects into the future
too early. The problem, however, is that the fullness of the present
is forever at a loss, flagging the crisis of historicity that is a constituent
feature of postmodernism.70 If Kubler, Smithson, and Wiener grappled
with this problem as a matter of futurity, perhaps they foreshadowed
for us in the present an increasingly accelerated horizon of technologi-
cal entropy. No doubt they registered in advance how we might struggle
with their message today, as so many distant, barely audible, signals.
CHAPTER 5
CONCLUSION: THE BAD INFINITY/ THE LONGUE DURÉE
The sixties are endless. We still live within them. Not only do we live
within them as a matter of historical reckoning—of grappling with the
trauma of the Vietnam War, the afterlife of the Counterculture, and
the continued relevance of that decade’s liberation movements. Rather,
the Sixties are endless in staging endlessness as a cultural phenomenon.
Of revealing, in the long shadows cast by its technological entropy, a
vision of the future ever quickening and repeating. This is one legacy
of sixties art that continues to haunt us today.
Even now we inhabit the time problem the sixties introduced. We
still mingle with its ghost. The spate of books recently published on the
time problem—books with words like faster and accelerating in their
titles—all share in the belief that what constitutes history, telos, pre-
sentness, has been deeply compromised; and for all intents and pur-
poses, that compromise comes at technology’s bidding.1 In this regard,
they’re not far off from the future shocks and cybernated hysteria of
the sixties and early seventies, the “long forevers” or endless duration
voiced in so much criticism of the period.
Perhaps we need only consider the millennial episode to trace
the continuing impact of that decade as an endless one. We might recall
the dark scenarios envisioned for its coming. Mass violence, doomsday
prophecies, nameless cults descending into their bunkers. Panic that,
for some, took shape in the survivalist props of canned food and bottled
water; tins of Sterno and batteries stockpiled. But if this was the Second
Coming, it was technological rather than theological in nature; and the
face of God was less sublime than digitized, the End less fiery than net-
worked. Most people referred to this as Y2K (although the happier term
millennium bug also got some play) and that abbreviated moniker—so
clinical and thus so charged—captured something of the impending 260
disaster it imagined.
Though tired and slightly embarrassing, the Y2K phenomenon
demands to be revisited in the present as much as it suggests a glance
to the sixties past. The problem stemmed from the way dates were
represented in old computer programs, by which was meant programs
that originated as early as the 1960s. Those dates would cause systems
to crash when 2000 rolled around, and it was precisely because systems
were so systematic—so linked in an ever expanding universe of con-
nectivity—that once one function crashed and burned, everything else
would fall in kind. A computer consultant named Peter de Jager was
among the first to address this potential crisis in 1993, and his tone
was nothing if not apocalyptic.2 “The information systems community
is heading toward an event more devastating than a car crash,” he
warned. “We are heading toward the year 2000.”3 For Y2K was based
on the idea that early “computer programmers were parsimonious about
how much storage space their programs used” so that “they allocated
only two digits rather than four to represent the year.”4 The year “1993”
became “93” for instance. That was all well and good for the short
term—in 1967, maybe—but who could foresee the problems that arose
with the year 2000? De Jager suggested that if a computer was asked to
calculate the age of someone born in 1955, the computer would simply
subtract the “55” in the birth date from the last two digits of the coming
year. Simple math, until the year 2000: because by the time that time
rolled around, “the same formula would make that person minus 55
years old.” 5
And so the planners and politicians took notice, spent time and
money on upgrades, made proclamations. Don’t panic, they urged the
public, but be prepared for any contingency. An elevator might get stuck
somewhere, ATMs might not disburse cash, and, alas, the trains would
not run on time.6 But the future could look far worse than a brief glitch
in the circuit of modern conveniences. It could look far more desperate,
punctual, and dark. Literally dark: power grids might be knocked out,
leaving cities mired in black. Mass suicides were predicted, not unlike
the rash that swept medieval Europe at the start of 1000.7 These were
the images projected by the media, images of collective anxiety augur-
ing surrender and retreat.
 261 Yet the aftermath of the event was something else entirely. Not
long after the clock struck midnight, the rhetoric of apocalypse gave
way to the calm of resignation, inevitability, even boredom. The turn of
the century, so it would seem, could only fail to astonish. As events go,
it was a bust. “No big deal,” one observer put it the morning after. “Got
up and had some eggs. Nothing special.”8 So worldly and mundane,
such remarks tell us something critical about this turn of events. Save
for a window smashed at Starbucks, there was no dramatic rupture, no
radically changed perspective to usher in this historical moment. The
dawning of the millennium, as the pundits put it, was rather the
“yawning” of the millennium.
Had any of those pundits bothered to pay attention, none of this
should have come as a surprise. For the noneventfulness of this millen-
nial shift, although initially marked by anxiety, had been a staple of
criticism since the 1960s. Since that time (at the very least), historians,
philosophers, critics, and social scientists had been alternately describ-
ing, celebrating, debating, and worrying about such conditions under
the sign of postmodernism. Postmodernism, of course, bore witness
to a vision of history that no longer subscribed to the linear, the evolu-
tionary, the progressive, to an Enlightenment history of sublation and
transcendence. It was the end of history, or rather, a history without
end: “the waning of historical affect” as Fredric Jameson has put it.
Whether or not history had “ended”—and just how it ended—was not
just the province of historiography; nor was it just a matter of recycled
styles, the bland ethos of “everything old is new again.” For this was
also a matter of ideology: of who “controlled” history by virtue of what
was being controlled in other arenas of the social.9 By extension, who
controlled the future—or better put, who controlled the image of the
future—was a battleground for the Right and Left. As Andrew Ross
observes, “for the left, the lessons to be learned from these images
speaks acutely to our traditional responsibility to think about a
better future.”10
For many, the question of history stemmed from technological
CHAPTER 5
shifts in information processing and the status of knowledge itself.
CONCLUSION: Lyotard titled his profoundly influential polemic Postmodernism (1979),
THE BAD INFINITY/ THE LONGUE DURÉE and the subtitle of his book (“A Report on Knowledge”) attests to the
ways in which the organization, distribution, and production of infor-
mation in the postwar era opened onto a decidedly new thinking 262
about power—and history along with it. His was about the failure of
traditional causal models—God, Civil Society, Revolution, the Subject,
Progress—to legitimate the current situation and about how the
expansion of scientific and technological discourse necessarily eroded
the attendant metaphysics of such models as well the political conceits
that grew out of them. So, for Lyotard—as for those against whom he
argued, namely, Jürgen Habermas—the debate as to how knowledge
was legitimated was paramount to the continued relevance of modern-
ity. By extension, his was also a challenge to the kind of determinism
that underwrote such “metanarratives.”11
What this culminated with, following Lyotard, was a certain
“crisis in narratives,” a crisis analyzed through the model of the
language game. “I will use the term modern to designate any science
that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind
making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative,” Lyotard wrote in
the introduction to his book, “such as the dialectics of Spirit, the
hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working
subject, or the creation of wealth.”12 Hegel and Marx and Adam Smith
all felled in one postmodern blow. In their place, Lyotard argued,

I define postmodern as incredulity to metanarratives. This incredulity

is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress,
in turn, presupposes it. . . . To the obsolescence of the metanarrative
apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of meta-
physical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past
relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero,
its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal.13

The crisis in narratives was partial fallout to the cybernetic and

automation revolution of the late 1950s and 1960s. As cybernetics was
wont to go, the question of legitimation and consensus would follow
suit. “For brevity’s sake,” Lyotard argues, “suffice it to say that functions
of regulation, and therefore of reproduction, are being and will be
further withdrawn from administrators and entrusted to machines.
Increasingly, the central question is becoming who will have access to
the information these machines must have in storage to guarantee the
right decisions are made.”14
 263 It could go either way, the response to that “central question.” It
could succumb to the kind of deadening technocracy so feared by many
in the sixties—the ultimate triumph of late capitalism—or it could just
as easily spark new models of productivity, desire, and resistance. As
Jameson reminded us, Lyotard’s account is not only diagnostic but pro-
phetic in nature. Comparing Lyotard’s reading to the Anti-Oedipus of
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, he detects in the philosopher’s think-
ing the possibility of a new politics, perhaps motivated less by revo-
lution than survival—survival strategies for the Information Age.
“Lyotard’s celebration of a related ethic emerges most dramatically in
the context of that repudiation of Habermas’s consensus community,”
Jameson noted,

in which the dissolution of self into a host of networks and relations, of

contradictory codes and interfering messages, is prophetically valorized.
This view not surprisingly will then determine Lyotard’s ultimate vision
of science and knowledge today as a search, not for consensus, but very
precisely for “instabilities,” as a practice of paralogism, in which the
point is not to reach agreement but to undermine from within the very
framework in which the previous “normal science” has been conducted.
The rhetoric in which this is conveyed is to be sure one of struggle,
conflict, the agonic in a quasi-heroic sense.15

Even as postmodernism represents a crisis in metanarratives—

and as a result performs its own kind of endlessness—there still exists
the potential for a new conflict, struggle, and politics to emerge, organ-
ized not around consensus but “instabilities.” Jameson identifies the
“formal problem” that attends this logic, namely, the sense in which
Lyotard might himself be creating a new metanarrative, nested in an old
one. His reading, though, is salutary. However endless the horizon may
appear—however weak its narrative functions or drained of historical
affect—the possibilities to maneuver within it may themselves be end-
less. And this is one lesson that we might take from that decade: that
CHAPTER 5
possibilities exist, whether in art or politics or both, to move within
CONCLUSION: that network, to play with its temporal fortunes, to show us something
THE BAD INFINITY/ THE LONGUE DURÉE about that time—even manipulate it—as it would seem to manipulate
us in turn. Postmodernism’s instabilities, in other words, might facili-
tate a relationship to time which presages endless potentiality.
THE FORECAST: PROBABLE 264
And it is for this reason that such possibilities—here described in
terms of politics—might better be described as probabilities. For perhaps
the slyly prophetic character of Lyotard’s reading could itself be read
through the predictive capacities of systems analysis and cybernetics—
as that which attempts to forecast the “future” through the probabilistic
tendencies of the present. That, too, is a feature of the endless sixties. It
was in that decade, after all, that technological forecasting achieved a
heightened visibility, both within popular culture and the academy. As
we shall see, the art of the moment provides inadvertent commentary
on such phenomena.
To get there, we need to offer a brief on the forecast in the
sixties and its historical precedents. Clearly the impulse to forecast, to
speculate or bank on the future, is hardly exclusive to that decade or
modernity itself. As long as we’ve checked the movement of stars, read
lines in the palm of one’s hand, cast runes or tea leaves or tortoise
shell fragments, we’ve practiced some quasi-science of speculation.
But modernity’s track record in the business of prophecy has proven
especially impressive. It sets the general template for the technological
prognostication that becomes critical to the futurologists in the 1960s.
Perhaps more than any other, the philosopher of history Koselleck
has attended to the question of the “end-time” within modernity. He
described modernity as a “peculiar form of acceleration,” in which the
art of the forecast took on heightened significance in the progressively
fractious encounter between religion and politics. The secularization
of time would play no small part in this history. No doubt, the question
of an end time—of expectations of salvation—would serve as the flash
point for debate during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. But
apart from such doctrinal and institutional controversies, salvational
expectation would increasingly run counter to the practice of rational
prediction. Indeed, beginning in the fifteenth century, the notion
of “rational” prognosis developed against the church in the matter of
prophesy, as would an emerging philosophy of history. Forged in the
crucible of modern politics (Renaissance Italy), rational prognosis
would become a “conscious element of political action for those who
engaged it.”16 In opposition to apocalyptic prophecy, which “destroys
time through its fixation on the End,” rational prognosis “can be seen to
 265 be the integrating factor of the state that transgresses the limited future
of the world to which it has been entrusted.”17 “The future became a
domain of finite possibilities” Koselleck wrote,

arranged according to their greater or lesser probability. Weighing the

probability of forthcoming or non-occurring events in the first instance
eliminated a conception of the future that was taken for granted by the
religious factions: the certainty of the Last Judgment would enforce a
simple alternative between Good and Evil through the establishment
of a sole principle of behavior.18

To put it crudely, rational prognosis serves to reassure the polity that

everything is OK, that the state maintains some measure of control over
the future through its reasoned analysis of the probable.
Koselleck’s reading describes the multiple cycles and revolutions
in end times and prognoses that have occurred from the Renaissance
to the Napoleonic era. And he provocatively suggested that the endless
alternation between revolution and reaction within modernity “which is
supposedly to lead to a final paradise has to be understood as a future-
less future.”19 We will return to the historically specific implications of
this “futureless future” for the sixties in due course. What we might take
from Koselleck’s reading now is that the practice of forecasting, as it
emerges in the modern period, has a marked ideological dimension.
Those who control it, in a sense, control history. During the 1960s, the
explosion of these practices—and the failure of consensus around both
their goals and motivations—suggests an especially heated climate
with respect to the future.
We’ve encountered the most vulgarized forms of this prognosti-
cation in previous chapters. Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, exhaustively
reviewed and debated, presented itself as a report on the future,
and from Toffler’s vantage point, things looked scary indeed. The
accelerating conditions of change he described were infinitely repeat-
able; the endless striving for novelty within consumer culture almost
CHAPTER 5
guaranteed it; hence the condition of shock that resulted—collective
CONCLUSION: social trauma—and Toffler’s recommendations on how to “survive our
THE BAD INFINITY/ THE LONGUE DURÉE collision with tomorrow.” “To understand what is happening to us as we
move into the age of super-industrialism,” he wrote, “we must analyze
the processes of acceleration and confront the concept of transience.”20
These twinned concepts inform the entire narrative of his book. In its 266
concluding chapter, “The Strategy of Social Futurism,” the futurologist
was adamant that the last half of the twentieth century would witness
the end of technocracy. At the same time, though, he offered little in the
way of practical solutions to any such problems, apart from the greater
and generalized need for society to “control” the rate of change.
Toffler’s alarmist hyperbole and determinist leanings won him few
supporters in the academic press but no matter. He had clearly struck a
nerve. By 1972, only two years after its appearance, the book had gone
through some two dozen printings and garnered effusive praise from
such technoluminaries as Buckminster Fuller and McLuhan, the latter
who trumpeted on the back cover, “FUTURE SHOCK . . . is ‘where it’s
at.’” And he was one to know. McLuhan was undoubtedly the most
famous prophet of the coming media age in the 1960s; like Toffler, he
warned of the possible dangers lying in wait unless some diagnosis of
the present situation was forthcoming. Toffler could not have existed
without McLuhan’s example, whose writings achieved mass appeal with
audiences as diverse as hippies, literary types, and policy wonks. Unlike
Toffler, of course, his reading was potentially celebratory. For McLuhan,
the proliferation of new communications media would likely result in
his infamous notion of a retribalized “global village.” A world ever
connected, a world always in touch, this newly technologized world
was fast becoming a globalized universe, the spheres of communication,
commerce, and culture intractable.
He was right on that front, McLuhan was—dead on, in fact, about
the fundamental emergence of global communication, if hardly its bleak
inequities. There’s no insult in saying McLuhan wasn’t equipped to make
such prophecies: why should a Catholic Shakespearean scholar know
how to analyze data on the nuances of economic cycles and the redis-
tribution of labor and wealth in the new media age? In any case, he
did have his associates at the Center for Technology and Culture at the
University of Toronto to help him with the projections. Better leave it to
the experts—sociologists, economists, engineers, scientists, especially
computer scientists—to work out the details.
The experts did weigh in from all corners. They came from
different disciplines and professions to debate the promise or, alter-
nately, the threat of the future, producing models for long-range
planning indebted to the probabilistic tendencies of game theory and
 267 systems analysis. Indeed the mid-sixties gave rise not only to the
institutional study of time (as discussed in chapter 4) but the institu-
tionalization of what has come to be known as future studies, futures
research, futurology, or technological forecasting, concomitant as it was
with the rise of the “Advice Establishment” after World War II.21 And
yet just as the future of time remained uncertain for those who would
study it, there was little consensus as to what constituted technological
forecasting or whom its findings should benefit. Many involved in tech-
nological forecasting, defined simply as the “forecasting of technological
change,” conceded to the nebulousness of the project and method,
not to mention its implications for the philosophy of science more
generally.22 And how was this information to be used, many asked? As
public policy rooted in nationalist interests, itself generated out of Cold
War politics, or toward a more collective (global?) approach to the
future and all that the term global implied?
In spite of or because of these methodological issues, a vast
new literature on speculation, strategic planning, and forecasting
proliferated in the sixties, along with a new breed of social scientist,
economist, hard scientist, and theorist variously known as “future
planners,” “futurists,” or “technopols.” To follow some, the years
1960–75 “witnessed an explosion of activity in the predictive domain.”23
Its rise began in the fifties, growing largely out of military and industrial
think tanks organized around Cold War politics. The RAND Corporation
proved formative in this regard, gathering together among its many
participants mathematicians and philosophers in addition to military
and corporate personnel. On the other side of the ideological spectrum,
Fuller, whose work on the future originated in the prewar era, became a
model for many sixties futurists with his visionary theories of world
design. Countless more would follow suit. W. F. Ogden, Herman Kahn,
John McHale, Donald Schon, Bernard de Jouvenal, Dennis Gabor, and
Robert Ayres would all author books with titles that spoke plainly to the
urgency of the future: The Future of the Future, The Age of Discontinuity,
The Unprepared Society, The Art of Conjecture. Just as many futurist
CHAPTER 5
organizations flourished, mostly of conservative stripe. Groups such
CONCLUSION: as Fuller’s World Resources Inventory, the World Future Society,
THE BAD INFINITY/ THE LONGUE DURÉE L’Association Internationale Futuribles, the Delphi Society, Project RAND,
Futures Research Group, the Club of Rome, Resources for the Future, the
Commission on the Year 2000, and the World Future Studies Federation
were either all established in the mid to late sixties, or gained public 268
prominence at that moment.24 Sometimes utopian, sometimes
Malthusian, their studies predicted everything from the elimination
of world hunger to the catastrophic outcome of impending population
explosions.
Many of these forecasts imparted the seduction of science fiction,
the stern admonitions of public policy, or less commonly, the revolu-
tionary energies of the counterculture; and the sheer mass of the liter-
ature alone provides an important perspective on our recent millennial
obsessions. “By the year 2000,” the chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy
Commission announced, “housewives will probably have a robot maid
shaped like a box [with] one large eye on the top, several arms and
hands, and long narrow pads on each side for moving about.”25 Isaac
Asimov offered an equally fantastic projection in declaring that “man”
will be living underground by millennium’s turn. More sober reports
attended to the broader sociological impact of advanced technology.
When for instance, the Commission of the Year 2000 published Toward
the Year 2000: Work in Progress, in 1969, its editor Daniel Bell warned
that “what matter[s] most about the year 2000 are not the gadgets that
might, on the serious side, introduce prosthesis in the human body or,
on the lighter side, use silicon to lift wrinkles, but the kinds of social
arrangements that can deal adequately with the problems we shall
confront.”26 Alternately, the enormously popular countercultural
publication The Whole Earth Catalogue, though by no means intended
as a “predictive” document, was meant to furnish critical “tools for free
thinking individuals” in preparation for this coming age.
Strangely enough, one prediction made in the mid-sixties
resonated little with that moment, although it has proven far more
enduring than any spectacular claims of robot maids or subterranean
domestic arrangements. In April 1965, Gordon Moore, the founder of
Fairchild Semiconductor and now retired chair of Intel, published his
inelegantly titled prediction “Cramming More Components onto
Integrated Circuits.” Numbering only three pages and finding audience
with the specialized readership of Electronics magazine, the article
appeared modest enough, as was its contemporary reception. Moore
argued that advanced technology in computer electronics—specifically,
its progressive miniaturization—would lead to accelerated growth in
the production of integrated circuits. “With unit cost falling as the
 269 number of components per circuit rises,” he suggested, “by 1975
economics may dictate squeezing as many as 65,000 components on a
single silicon chip.”27 Moore believed that engineers would be able to
cram an ever-increasing number of such devices on microchips and
guessed that the number would roughly double every year. “The future
of integrated electronics is the future of electronics itself,” he wrote.

The advantages of integration will bring about a proliferation of elec-

tronics, pushing this science into many new areas. . . . Integrated circuits
will lead to such wonders as home computers or at least terminals
connected to a central computer, automatic controls for automobiles,
and personal portable communications equipment. . . . But the biggest
potential lies in the production of large systems. In telephone com-
munications, integrated circuits in digital filters will separate channels
on multiplex equipment. Integrated circuits will also switch telephone
circuits and perform data processing.28

Although now debated for the accuracy of its predictions, “Moore’s Law”
as it has come to be known, stands as one of the most prescient of the
1960s.29 It starkly illustrates the rate of technological change as both
accelerating and endless. It offers a vision of the future in which the
constancy of historical change is both matched and presaged by the
speed of its technology. And though Moore probably couldn’t imagine
how it would be deployed after the year 2000—as so much advertise-
ment copy for the microchip company that he would co-found three
years later—it has come to serve as shorthand for an always accelerat-
ing future (figure 5.1).
But now I’m getting ahead of myself, projecting a bit too far in
advance. I’ve been speaking to the sixties as endless, and I’ll conclude
by describing this condition with respect to that decade’s art. That
impulse to take heed of the future through the dogged figuration of the
present is played with by two “agents of endlessness,” to borrow Robert
Smithson’s phrase: Andy Warhol and On Kawara. In chapter 1, I pointed
CHAPTER 5
to Michael Fried’s contempt for minimal art as a function of its endless-
CONCLUSION: ness. In chapter 4, I read the art and art criticism of George Kubler and
THE BAD INFINITY/ THE LONGUE DURÉE Robert Smithson through the logic of feedback, emphasizing how a
system needs to account for all data in the present in order to accom-
modate any potentiality in the future. Here I want to consider Warhol
 271
5.1 Intel, “Will Moore’s Law Stand
Forever?” New York Times, Tuesday,
July 23, 2002 C22. © 2002 Intel
Corporation. Intel is a trademark or
registered trademark of Intel
Corporation or its subsidiaries in the
United States and other countries.
All rights reserved.
Artwork courtesy Euro RSCG
MVBMS Partners.
CHAPTER 5
CONCLUSION:
THE BAD INFINITY/ THE LONGUE DURÉE
and Kawara through two seemingly incompatible models of end-
lessness: Hegel’s notion of “the bad infinity” and Fernand Braudel’s
reading of “The Longue Durée” Something about the encounter between
these readings underscores the inherent tension that animates our own
moment of art and of art history.
Endless sixties. A Bad Infinity? Or a longue durée? Perhaps both
at the same time. And perhaps the most fitting conclusion to a world
without end.
THE ENDS
The problem of “ends” so central to the futurologists in the 1960s finds
its complement in the art and art critical discourse around and about
that period. There are at least two different ends to that story, and their
conclusions might tell us something, in the style of the short story
“Rashōmon,” about the risks at stake. The first “end” is organized spe-
cifically around the art and technology encounter. Stemming from the
futuristic possibilities of that collaboration, it sees the “end” of art as a
kind of technologically determined avant-gardism. That is to say, it
proposes a new model of art making that wholly sublates that which
came before, superceding conventional definitions of the work of art
through advanced technology. It is, in its most reductive form, one that
champions the notion of “new media” without putting any critical
pressure on its qualifier as “new.”
In opposition to this, the second approach regards such readings
with deep suspicion, which it counters with the seeming inexhaustibility
of an extended duration. This latter approach, I want to argue, is in fact
more in keeping with (and is more canny about) the discursive impli-
cations of sixties technology than the first model, however removed it
may seem from it. The former, in always training its eye on the future,
fails to acknowledge the horizon of its own historicity as much as it fails
to acknowledge the repetition at the heart of its avant-gardism. The
second approach—that of bad infinities and long durées—takes on
the repetition inherent in such forecasting and foregrounds it as both
its structural and thematic operation and its object of critique. In its pe-
culiar affirmation of a failed dialectic, this approach refuses any notion
of a transcendental end-time and implicitly reclaims the speculative 272
possibilities of the futurist project.
For the first approach, we turn to a book that makes the theme of
prophecy explicit. The video artist and critic Douglas Davis published in
1973 a book called Art and the Future, and its subtitle speaks plainly to
the matter at hand: “History/Prophecy of the Collaboration between
Science, Technology, and Art.” Its goal was no less than to document the
history of technology in modern art as well as offer predictions about
what was to come. Hence the book is not unlike other art and tech-
nology accounts of the time in its usual list of sources and historical
influences: the constructivists make their obligatory appearance; the
futurists follow in kind; homage is paid to Duchamp. The twenties then
give way to the sixties. The bulk of the text is devoted to art of that
decade that by now appears a nostalgic vision of the future. We see
faces emerge from matrices of sine curves or from graphics composed
of ASCII characters (figure 5.2), Bruce Nauman’s clownish holography,
the clanking contributions of robot art. We see utopian video collectives
extolling the democratic virtues of new media; the filmmaker John
Whitney tentatively prodding at an IBM (figure 5.3); and an enormous
mainframe festooned in ribbons of multicolored cables, a computer
almost baroque in its organization, lavish cascades of wire falling from
its gridded surface. Futuristic, all—and all completely outdated—these
images inspire both weary recognition and temporally garbled asides.
“Ah yes, that was the future.” “So that’s what the future was supposed
to look like.” Such is the nature of these prophecies and thus the lesson
Davis’s volume teaches today. As with entropy, the future of art is
always already past.
Although his book was largely a celebration of art and technol-
ogy’s collaborative potential, Davis wisely acknowledged the Luddite
currents specific to the art criticism of the period and throughout the
twentieth century more generally. “God knows, I sympathize with
the emotions behind this reaction,” he wrote in his introduction. “The
war has sickened us all, and we hear little at this hour about creative
potential about technology and much about its destructive capacity.”30
His concluding chapter, called a “Prophecy,” was meant to dispel any
and all fear generated by the popular cultural prognoses on the future
and technology. In speaking to the “futurist ideology all around us”—
the often alarming predictions of McLuhan and Toffler, Arthur C. Clarke,
 273

5.2 Charles A. Csuri, Sine Curve Man,

1967. Courtesy Charles Csuri Archive.

Victor Ferkiss, John McHale, and Herman Kahn, Davis hoped to offer a
more metaphysical understanding of the future.

In no specific case do I wish to deny any of their claims (as Robert

Mallary observes, we have learned not to discount even science fiction),
and Clarke, I might add, predicts that the option of immortality will
be available by the year 2010. It is simply that I wish to go beyond this
or that technological milestone ahead to the most distant and meta-
physical goal. By far the most striking writer on this last-named subject
is the scientist J. D. Bernal, whose little book The World, The Flesh and
the Devil, published in 1929, is the most complete analysis I have yet en-
CHAPTER 5
countered on the destiny of many read in the context of developing
CONCLUSION: technology.31
THE BAD INFINITY/ THE LONGUE DURÉE

Hence Davis took his inspiration not from the sixties futur-
ologists—even though explicitly acknowledging them—but a voice
 274

5.3 John Whitney at an IBM 2250

computer, 1969. Courtesy IBM
Corporation.

from the twenties. He found Bernal’s conclusion especially persuasive

in light of the emerging information society.

It is his contention—admirably supported by the accuracy of his other

predictions . . . that the logic of evolution is leading man progressively
away from matter toward mind. In concert with art and with technology,
man himself is dematerializing. . . . He saw the gradual acceleration of
the process, through artificial brains to the preservation of the brain
after the breakdown of the body, in an artificial environment. He saw
connections being established between these disembodied brains and
the emergence of “compound” thinking. . . . At the last Bernal sees an
escape even from the solidity implied in the compound-mind image.32

It plays like a bad episode of Star Trek, all those disembodied brains
pulsing in artificial environments. Still the underlying logic of this pas-
sage, and of Davis’s larger attempt to predict the “metaphysical” goal
of the art and technology nexus, was to the point. Honoring Bernal’s
predictions, Davis was essentially giving voice to the logic of artificial
intelligence and the increased capacities for human/machine inter-
actions. Once again we’re brought back to systems aesthetics. But there
was more to such claims than the immediate confirmation of his techno-
 275 logical forecasting. Davis wished to transcend the impulse to make
“specific” predictions organized around scientific and media innovations.
Bernal was useful to him in offering a metaphor for progressive art
making, one in which the frank materiality of a work of art gave way to
something more ephemeral and transient, something dematerialized.
Of course, rhetoric on the “dematerialization of art” was legion
in the period. In 1968, Lucy Lippard and John Chandler famously
described this phenomenon with respect to conceptual art: they
detected a virtual withering away of the material presence of art
objects in the face of new strategies and approaches emerging since
mid-decade. That art could now be systems, linguistic propositions, or
air conditioning or stains on carpets suggested that the old categories
of painting and sculpture, so larded in their physicality and so weighted
by the history of their respective media, were very much a thing of the
past. Instead, Lippard and Chandler would argue, the dematerialization
of art represented a moment when “the anti-intellectual, emotional,
intuitive process of art making” shifted to “an ultraconceptual art that
emphasized the thinking process almost exclusively.”33
Davis’s understanding of dematerialization was not concerned
with conceptual art but runs parallel to Lippard’s emphasis on art’s new
informational status. Here was the radical demise of a conventional
notion of the art object—not to mention the end of art history along
with it. Not only was this the end of slavish demonstrations of mimesis,
it augured a new kind of artistic production on behalf of many, not
simply the privileged figure of the individual artist/genius. What comes
to take the place of the traditional work of art in the future has the
character of Mind. For him, dematerialization signaled something of the
collective Mind beyond the individual intellect; and to such ends, Davis
leaned also on readings by Fuller and Michael Noll to round out his
thinking on Bernal. As the utopian drift of this précis makes clear, this
coming together of Mind—in a creative symbiosis—had profound
implications for the social. It was what Davis, parroting Bernal, called
“World Mind.”
CHAPTER 5
It doesn’t take a philosopher to hear in such phrases the echo
CONCLUSION: of a muted Hegelianism. Davis’s art of the future, bound progressively
THE BAD INFINITY/ THE LONGUE DURÉE to scientific enlightenment, echoes in its prognosis the dialectical force
of Hegel’s aesthetics. Rendered something of an art historical cliché by
now, this narrative has been caricatured as the death of art and its
supersession by philosophy. It stakes out man’s progressive movement 276
toward self-reflection or Absolute Knowledge as coordinated through
a specific era’s production of cultural artifacts. In the Aesthetics, the
work of art is cast as a local actor in the sweeping historical movement
toward the Absolute. But Hegel also argued that art had long exhausted
its capacity to be equated with Mind. “Thought and reflection have
spread their wings above fine art,” he noted, in the process becoming
“a thing of the past.”34
Both philosophers and art historians have taken up this Hegelian
narrative in thinking about modern art of a conceptual bent.35 The art
and technology nexus, however, begs the question of this particular
kind of end—certainly begs any possibility of sublation. For the faith
placed in the work’s avant-gardism is ultimately contradicted by the
technology behind it. As my survey of Davis’s images makes plain, that
sense of the future bound to the technological is always condemned to
repeat itself in a circuit of novelty and obsolescence, innovation and
outmodedness. What constitutes vanguardism in the arts is what also
foreshadows that outmodedness; and what is, in part, radical about
the technology of the sixties is that it always comes back to itself,
recursively. The rhetoric of the new in the avant-garde obscures this
structural logic. Yet as Krauss has argued in her formative contribution
to theories of postmodernism, the mechanics of repetition always
underwrite the myth of such originality.36
As such, the first type of “end” we encounter in thinking about
the art of the sixties is a dead one. It is dead not only because it doesn’t
work but also because it offers no escape, as if Davis’s prophecies amount
to a kind of Hegelian technics. For this reason, we might deploy the
philosopher to far different rhetorical effect than this teleological ideal.
In the second approach to the matter of sixties endlessness, we might
take up the philosopher’s worries about a “bad infinity” in order to
think about the relationship between technological forecasting and that
decade’s art.
It is in The Encyclopaedia Logic that Hegel defined the bad infin-
ity. In the first volume of his treatise, he subjected the procedures of
logic to his dialectical method. The section on “quality” warns of a
moment within critical reasoning that might succumb to endless repe-
tition. “Something becomes an other, but the other is itself a some-
thing,” he wrote,
 277 so it likewise becomes an other, and so on ad infinitum. This infinity
is spurious or negative infinity since it is nothing but the negation of
the finite, but the finite arises again in the same way, so that it is no
more sublated than not. In other words, this infinity expresses only
the requirement that the finite ought to be sublated. This progress ad
infinitum does not go beyond the expression of the contradiction, which
the finite contains, (i.e.,) that it is just as much something as its other,
and (this progress) is the perpetual continuation of the alternation
between these determinations, each bringing in the other one.37

The spurious or bad infinity is the nightmare of the dialectic. As applied

to logic, it suggests the mind’s failure to sublate the contradictions
inherent in the finite relationship between subject and object, hence
leading to a perpetual, ultimately fruitless, oscillation between the two.
When such thinking is applied to history, the bad infinity repre-
sents a failure to transcend the immanence of one’s own historical
moment. Koselleck described modernity’s futureless future as such
an “evil endlessness.”

This self-accelerating temporality robs the present of the possibility of

being experienced as the present and escapes into a future within which
the currently unapprehendable present has to be captured by historical
philosophy. . . . This alteration of Revolution and Reaction, which sup-
posedly is lead to a final paradise, has to be understood as a futureless
future, because the reproduction and necessarily inevitable supersession
of the contradiction brings about an evil endlessness. In the pursuit of
this evil endlessness, as Hegel said, the consciousness of the agent is
trapped in a finite “not yet” possessing the structure of a perennial
imperative (Sollen).38

The result is the seemingly endless repetition of the present, like a

phonographic stylus stuck in a groove. And yet in deploying this “bad
infinity” as a model for thinking about the endlessness of sixties art,
CHAPTER 5
this repetition might suggest its own pleasures, might even represent a
CONCLUSION: critical stance on the question of time, technology, and ends. For this
THE BAD INFINITY/ THE LONGUE DURÉE repetition, to borrow from Deleuze, is a repetition with difference.
Artists will take up its possibilities as a means to address working within
the conditions of endlessness. Already I have discussed minimalism’s
serial forms as a kind of endlessness because they are recursive: min- 278
imalism was an art that offered an experience of duration so unwieldy
that it implicitly screamed out for something to happen. In concluding,
we’ll see how other practices of art making, namely, some of Warhol’s
early films and the ongoing work of Kawara, arrive at this question from
different ends of both the formal and thematic spectrum. Common to
both is the work’s temporal extensiveness, suggesting a peculiar projec-
tion into the future through belaboring the present. What happens, or
rather, what doesn’t happen, is uneventful at best. Not much takes
place—not of obvious interest any way—and it is the paradox of this
uneventfulness that calls upon the viewer to forecast what’s coming
up next, however repetitive or boring that which has just passed.
Waiting for something to happen, the forecast may look bleak.

PERPETUAL PRESENTS

Digital clocks and watches show me there’s a new time on my hand.

And it’s sort of frightening.

—Andy Warhol39

In so many ways, the work of Warhol and Kawara seem at radical odds
with one another. On the surface at least, the former appeals to the
louche anomie of the New York underground: a world of head-spinning
celebrity; of beautiful boys and glittering surfaces; of the electric, un-
blinking rush of amphetamines. The latter appears Warhol’s oppo-
site in its routinization, anonymity, and abstraction, all numbers and
flat fields and starkly drawn type. Still both are deeply methodical in
their temporal operations, and both speak to the logic of the bad
infinity. A system with its own laws and limitations is put into place,
and we, the audience, are made to watch and to wait. We are made to
wait for some figure to emerge from its repetitive ground; to detect the
small, almost infinitesimal, incident against the yawning relief of du-
ration. In short, we are made to anticipate, even hope for, the temporal
fallout of this bad infinity. And in this perpetual present both gestures
stage, they cast a critical eye on the future of the future.
 279 In Warhol’s case, this is especially so for the films Sleep, Kiss,
Empire (1963–64) and the sublime twenty-five hour experiment
“★★★★,” also known as Four Stars (1968). Their brilliance lies in their
seemingly literal relationship to time—of extended duration—and this
feature, coupled with the works’ deadpan systematicity, amounts to the
cinematic equivalent of minimalism. Watching them, we are dealt too
much presentness, too much repetition. Like the industrially manu-
factured cubes of minimalism, the film rolls along and rolls out with
the studied repetition of a factory commodity. All puns are intended.
Peter Wollen has written of Warhol’s film enterprise relative to Ford’s
assembly line, and a précis of the early works appeals to that endless
labor of representation and the watching and waiting attendant to it.40
A poet sleeps, abdomen rising and falling: we watch for some six hours
(figure 5.4). People kiss, mash lips, tongues together: we bear witness
for fifty minutes (figure 5.5). The Empire State Building appears before
the camera; some eight hours pass between the first reel and the last
(figure 5.6).
Warhol’s own stated attitudes toward time were schizophrenic at
best. In a testament to the speed of a culture if ever there was one, he
made his notorious pronouncement on the status of celebrity in the
future: that everyone would be granted a cool fifteen minutes of fame
before obsolescence set in. But Warhol also directed a film that lasted
close to eight hours, its slow, artless camera immobilized before the
iconic figure of the Empire State Building. If these positions seem at
odds with one another, I would argue they are ultimately dialectical;
or perhaps more accurately put, they represent the failed dialectic of the
bad infinity. Both speak to the phenomena of cultural repetition if paced
at temporal extremes. Together they suggest a kind of irresolvable
grappling with finitude and the infinite, the push-pull tension between
the utterly mundane gestures of daily life set against the blank expanse
of something yet to come. As one observer said of Warhol’s films: “we’d
just sit there and wait for something to happen and nothing would.”41
Indeed his films of 1963–64 implicitly articulate this tension
CHAPTER 5
through their cunning manipulation of the medium. There’s an air of
CONCLUSION: artlessness about them. Silent, black-and-white, 100-foot rolls of film,
THE BAD INFINITY/ THE LONGUE DURÉE they seem the homegrown experiments of a technical illiterate.42 Either
that or we could call these works noncompositional, if provisionally so.
To let the camera go with no zoom or in-camera editing, stationary on
 280

5.4 Andy Warhol, frame enlargement

from Sleep, 1964. © 2003 The Andy
Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Pa.,
a museum of the Carnegie Institute.

its tripod, points to a deliberate withdrawal of the artist’s hand, a

refusal to control the representation of the image. But in this lies a
deception of sorts and Warhol’s canniness about the semiotics of film.
Warhol may not have directed his actors, but he did play with the time;
and it is in this sense that his work has been persuasively linked to
structuralist film.43 The film Sleep, for example, made with a Bolex
camera, appears a literal registration of nonactivity. For six hours, the
viewer confronts the torpid image of the poet John Giorno sleeping as if
filmed in real time. But not so: as countless Warhol scholars remark,
time is controlled not at the level of narrative but as projection. The
time is “actually faked,” as Warhol described it. It is faked not in the
performance or sleeping (“Oh, you sleep so well!” Warhol was reported
to have told Giorno) but in the looping of the footage.44 What appears
continuous is discontinuous, but there’s more to it than that. Like all
16 mm films, Warhol’s silents are shot at twenty-four frames per second,
yet as Stephen Koch wrote, “they should be projected at 16 fps” so that
“the effect is an unchanging but barely perceptible slow motion.” 45
His “work seems to insist upon its hallucinated literal time.” 46
These films, then, are one and the same time both representation
and experience of duration, both subject and object. And that movement
 281

5.5 Andy Warhol, frame enlargement

from Kiss, 1964. © 2003 The Andy
Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Pa.,
a museum of the Carnegie Institute.

between the literalness of real time experienced by the viewer, its

manipulation by Warhol as representation, and the projection into the
future as constructed by the medium is a kind of bad infinity. No film
walks this line more effectively than Empire, which performs this bad
infinity at the level of both its internal operations and its external
reception. The first Warhol flick to be made with an Auricon camera,
that marginal step toward mechanical progress bore no ostensible
relation to the movie itself. “So stupendously perverse, it is almost
awesome,” as Koch put it, the idea behind Empire is credited to a young
Factory hanger-on named John Palmer.47 Shot by Jonas Mekas from the
CHAPTER 5
forty-fourth floor of the Time-Life building on June 25, its manipulation
CONCLUSION: of time, like Sleep, is subtle, exacting, and—perhaps most obviously—
THE BAD INFINITY/ THE LONGUE DURÉE excruciating. It exploits the mandate of the forecast in its projection
of extended time, but on and on it begs the question: to what end?
To what end might this perpetual present tell us about what’s on the
 283
5.6 Andy Warhol, frame enlargement
from Empire, 1964. © 2003 The Andy
Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Pa.,
a museum of the Carnegie Institute.
CHAPTER 5
CONCLUSION:
THE BAD INFINITY/ THE LONGUE DURÉE
horizon? The critic Gregory Battcock, editor of an important collection
of essays on minimal art and himself a subject of a Warhol screen test,
wrote on the strange tension between immobility and time in Empire.
Movies are supposed to move, but the subject of Empire doesn’t. Yet as
the mechanics of the film suggest, the time of the film is elongated in
another way. “In commercial films” he wrote,
events are rarely presented in their full time span. Time is distorted in
such films, usually by compression. The time in Empire is distorted
in a diKerent way. . . . It is distorted, perhaps, simply by its not being
distorted when one would reasonably expect it to be. In addition the
action in the first reel is speeded up, possibly so that the change from
day to night, the major “event” in the film, could be summarily disposed
of in order to clear the way for the timeless “real” time of the unchanging
image of the building.48
The image of the building is unchanging, but the medium that records
it continues apace. It is the paradox of “timeless ‘real’ time.”
Fair enough, but all this speculation raises an unavoidable
issue. Who has actually has seen Empire? Seen all eight hours of its
monumental, if mutely drawn, architecture, from its first soundless
flicker to the last? A rhetorical question, perhaps, for few, not even
the most slavish Warhol devotees, could claim to have passed the
antiauteur’s cinematic endurance test. As the Warhol clichés would have
it, this is a movie more frequently discussed than seen, a concept best
played out in the mind’s eye than actually burned—and interminably
so—on the retina. Part of its legend, so the story goes, accrues around
its resistance to spectatorship. Who would willingly subject themselves
to watch a movie as long as a workday, a movie in which narrative
comes to a virtual standstill, and which, in its representation of a
building, appears either impossibly remote or reads as a dumb (and
endlessly dumb) phallic joke? The “achievement” of Empire is to force
the issue of duration as something that might be imaginatively pro-
jected into the future but which is practically difficult to rationalize
and even more challenging to experience in its actuality.
Not to say that the movie is without interest or incident. Many
things happen, if very small things, and all the more importance is
accorded them given the noneventfulness of the rest of the film. In
contrast to those who would claim Empire is without action, I would 284
argue that it has its fair share of critical “moments,” quiet as they
are compared to most narrative film. Battcock remarked that the
compression of time earlier in the movie lends the first reel, in which 5.7 Andy Warhol, frame enlargement

the building emerges from fog, an almost heightened sense of drama; from Empire. © 2003 The Andy Warhol
Museum, Pittsburgh, Pa., a museum of
it shapes our continued expectation of the movie to come. In the first
the Carnegie Institute.
thirty minutes, as dusk gives way to night, the building is illuminated
and we nearly jump out of our seats. Noiselessly, something like a
pigeon flaps by and the audience bursts into applause. Hardly the stuff
of action-packed drama, it is climatic in relation to the sheer lethargy
that follows.
For most of Empire is given over to darkness punctuated by
occasional glimmers of light and motion, solarized flashes, chance
accidents of the printing process. It is a slowly shifting study in figure
and ground (figures 5.7, 5.8). We see a tiny, starlike light crowning the
building, its armature obscured by black, glinting on and off and on at
periodic intervals. To the bottom left, a bright globe from a building in
the distance goes on, goes off, goes on again. We see an office light in
the Empire State turned off several hours into the film, and so imagine
the company man, ever faithful to his employ, burning the proverbial
midnight oil. We see a few glimpses of Warhol’s reflection itself, flitting
like a shade before the window. And then almost all the lights go out,
leaving a field of murk with just a few white specks twinkling. Not
much long after—a reel perhaps—the movie ends abruptly, without
fanfare; we are not even granted the satisfaction of watching the
sunrise. Instead we are left with the ghostly afterimage of the building
lining our eyelids. For in Empire, the building is both actor and clock;
and much as the business of clock watching, it produces an anxiety
around what may or may not happen, what may or may not occur in
the not-too-distant future. It registers the migration of blacks, shadow,
and light just as a piece of celluloid or film registers the exposure of
light in time. In this sense, Empire (the building) internalizes some-
thing of the structural logic of Empire, the film medium.
Yet as many have suggested, the movie’s seeming lack of incident,
or better put, its demands upon on our patience to distill those inci-
dents, is what makes the work so “engaging.” Those fabled reports
of audience members coming and going over the course of the movie
suggest that what is taking place off screen is as fundamental to the
 287
5.8 Andy Warhol, frame enlargement
from Empire. © 2003 The Andy Warhol
Museum, Pittsburgh, Pa., a museum of
the Carnegie Institute.
CHAPTER 5
CONCLUSION:
THE BAD INFINITY/ THE LONGUE DURÉE
work as what is being projected on screen. Empire thus stands as an
allegory for time located elsewhere: not only the time of its audi-
ence, engaged in business other than that of watching, but the future,
anticipated in making one’s escape from the theater. At the same time,
the experience of the film also rests—discomfortingly, fitfully—within
the body watching the film in the present. Shifting from side to side, at
first quietly and then with increasing impatience, we experience our
body as a duration machine. The bones poke through, head lolls on the
stem of its neck. With each moment that passes, the eyes play tricks
while the mind wanders: we see things that aren’t there or perhaps
discount what is there. Self-consciousness descends over the audience
at first, but that self-consciousness quickly dissipates and the body
registers anticipation’s disappointment. The erect carriage of the com-
mitted cineaste gives way to the slouch and sprawl of the tired, the
jaded, or the bored. And it’s at this point that one relaxes into the
deeply social experience of the movie and its accessories: food and
drink, music and dance (this was a film often screened in night clubs,
after all), cigarettes, and most important, conversation.
In its peculiar tracking of time in (fictive) real time, Empire offers
a perversely meditative experience, fidgeting continuously between
moments of sheer restlessness, boredom, and pronounced anticipation.
In 1964, the same year Empire was filmed, McLuhan famously described
television as a “cool media”—a “mosaic mesh”—suggesting a parcel-
ing and fragmentation of information that required a more active
engagement on the viewer’s part to make its information cohere.
Cool media, as opposed to the hot, highly defined stuff of print,
was low resolution; it demanded a new kind of engagement about
which Warhol’s films inadvertently comment. A good anecdote about
the viewing of Sleep applies well to Empire. According to the artist—
hardly the most reliable source on his work—one viewer had to be tied
to a chair with a rope by Mekas upon hearing what was about to be
screened. The punch line, of course, was that Warhol got up and left
after a few minutes himself. He was bored by the film, bored by the
prospect of having to watch it for six hours straight.49
It may be so much Warhol apocrypha, but the story neatly
illustrates a critical feature of these durational exercises. One might see
in the temporally contrary world that is Empire a satiric litmus test for
the distracted masses, a way to prove one’s spectatorial mettle at a time
in which media was constantly scattering one’s attention. Boredom may 288
well serve as a defense mechanism to the onslaught of technologically
mediated information streaming endlessly into the future. It is revenge
taken against the demand to stay awake.50 As such, the simultaneously
glazed and blissed-out attitude Warhol allegedly adopted on watching
his films seems a fitting response. “Sometimes I like to be bored, and
sometimes I don’t—it depends what kind of mood I’m in,” he noted,
ever the sage. “I’ve been quoted a lot as saying, ‘I like boring things.’”
He then became uncharacteristically emphatic. “Well, I said it and I
meant it. But that doesn’t mean I’m not bored by them.”51 An alternately
ambivalent and defiant tone runs through this statement. Warhol likes
boring things in spite of the fact that they’re boring. Boring things don’t
grab one’s attention; they deflect it. And that’s the point: to say one
likes boring things is to challenge any expectation of an expectation.
In Empire the future is boring.
The temporality of Empire runs parallel to other practices within
the art of the sixties, perhaps none more so than the serial and systems-
based gestures commonly associated with conceptual and process art.
And parallel to the reception of Warhol’s films, many find conceptual art
deadly boring: drained of emotional affect, lacking in visual pleasure,
tautological and seemingly solipsistic, metronomic in its tracking of
time. We could write volumes on conceptual art’s engagement with
time: it is an obsession that is endless in itself.52 We might consider
the example of Hanne Darboven en route to our longer discussion of
Kawara. An extensive and extended graph of activity—like music or
like a diary—her systematic “writing” of time assumes a computational
logic specific to each piece. In 1968, Darboven arrived at the structural
principle that has been at the foundation of her practice to the present.
Using the four to six digits required to mark a standard Gregorian calen-
dar date (for example, October 20, 1963, is represented as 10/20/63)
Darboven devises numerical sequences based on the span of an
entire century. Methodically, she then plots ascending and descending
numbers page after page, row after row, column after column to explore
its seemingly endless possibilities in neat, handwritten script.53 Entering
into a space lined with one of her works is a peculiar confrontation with
the temporal sublime.
It is a deeply impressive feat, Darboven’s computation and
registration of time. But the figure that concerns us principally exhibits
 289 an especially impressive kind of longevity about the length of time itself.
For On Kawara has been engaged with the marking of time since
1966—has made it his life his work, in fact—and it continues apace up
to the present. It is with his Today Series that we close in on, and
conclude with, the meshing of the bad infinity with the longue durée;
gauge something of the sly criticality of this work; and see its
reverberations in our own endless present.
In 1965, Kawara painted a tripartite work that suggested what
was yet to come. With Title we are confronted with three laterally
organized canvases, done up in hot, hot pink. “One Thing,” “1965,”
“Vietnam,” they read (figure 5.9). The year 1965 occupies the central
position in the triad, as if organizing the information that surrounds it.
That was the year the first American combat troops were sent to Viet-
nam; it was also the year Kawara took up partial residence in New York.
The phrase “One Thing” places further stress on the date. In her work
on On Kawara, Anne Rorimer argues that the date of this painting (and
the Today Series that follows) might be read as a comment about the
formalist criticism on painting’s autonomy in the late fifties and early
sixties.54 The starkness of the date against a monochrome field becomes
a parody of modernist painting’s self-reflexivity. If modernist painting
registers some measure of its process or its indexical quality, Title speaks
literally to its presentness by furnishing it with a birth date. Dates of
paintings, Rorimer writes, usually stand as supplement to the content
or form of each work. Typically they occupy a modest place within its
composition, tucked away in the corner, say, or on the back of a
stretcher. But in Title, the date is front and center and acts as form,
content, and “evidence” of a sort: evidence of the painting’s timeliness.
That impulse to timeliness is the foundation of Kawara’s
practice. The intelligence of his work rests in its endless questioning
of the presentness of art (as well as its past) with respect to the future.
Kawara’s art is commonly, by no means erroneously, thought in terms
of the “passage of time” or the presence of the art object; but I would
argue that it is the implied futurity of the work that embeds it spe-
CHAPTER 5
cifically in the larger cultural horizon of the 1960s. This is especially
CONCLUSION: so with his Today Series, begun in January 1966 (figure 5.10). It is a
THE BAD INFINITY/ THE LONGUE DURÉE deceptively transparent system. Each canvas announces the date on
which it was painted. If Kawara fails to finish the work by day’s end,
it is destroyed. Some years are more productive than others. In one year,
 291 241 came out, in another only 30, but who would dare fault this labor
of temporality?55 By now there are well over 2,000 canvases, and if the
artist is slightly less punctual than the clock, he is certainly just as
5.9 On Kawara, Title, 1965. Courtesy periodic as the calendar.
the artist and David Zwirner, Plainspoken as they are in broadcasting the moment of their
New York.
origin, the objects that in part comprise the Today Series are none-
theless discrete objects. Not discrete in the matter of their individuality
but discrete in their relative modesty. They are horizontal fields of
various dimensions, highly saturated, matte surfaces, rendered in a
variety of colors: a brackish gray, a vibrant blue. Hand-painted numbers
and letters are then carefully laid on these surfaces in white, following
the standard calendar format of whatever place Kawara happens to be
working at the moment. Much has been made of the handmade quality
of the work—the precision with which Kawara paints his numbers and
letters without the use of template or stencil. But this observation opens
onto one of the many paradoxes of his practice, for that precision is
directed toward the effacement of his own hand. There is no painterly
gesture so to speak of, no expressive facture or trace of brushwork.
We should stress that the Today Series is not just painting. Running
parallel to this painterly exercise—temporally pacing it, so to speak—
is the production of cardboard boxes, also handmade. Together with
the canvases, they constitute a single “work.” Indeed the relationship
between part to whole in Kawara’s art, as in systems theory, is funda-
mental to understanding his rendering of time as future oriented.56
The paintings are housed in the boxes, although container and con-
tained are not often displayed together. Each box is lined with a news-
paper clipping from the day the painting was begun and finished. So,
for instance, on May 10, 1968, Kawara was in Mexico City, and the
box for that date displays a yellowed feature from its daily news
(figure 5.11). On October 21 of that year, he’s in Santiago; a picture
from El Mercurio, showing marathon runners sprinting to some long-
forgotten finish line, helps locate the artist’s presence in both time
and space (figure 5.12).
CHAPTER 5
But there’s no instantaneity here, no presentness. Our reception
CONCLUSION: of the work does not square with the time of its production, nor the
THE BAD INFINITY/ THE LONGUE DURÉE totality of the series as projected into the future. To call the work the
Today Series at once seems an elaborate metaphysical joke or a pro-
found commentary on time. For in the Today Series, time is first doubled
 293
5.10 On Kawara, Today Series,
January 4, 1966. Courtesy the artist
and David Zwirner, New York.
5.11 On Kawara, from Today Series,
Mexico, May 10, 1968. Courtesy the
artist and David Zwirner, New York.
5.12 On Kawara, from Today Series,
Santiago, October 21, 1968.
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner,
New York.
CHAPTER 5
CONCLUSION:
THE BAD INFINITY/ THE LONGUE DURÉE
and then multiplied ad infinitum. Time first gets shunted back and forth
between the work of painting and the act of reading, as though the
contents of the box might confirm the time of the painting’s existence,
authenticate the artist’s presence at a peculiar moment, or endow the
blankness of days with aesthetic singularity. Hence the relevance of
those interpretations of Kawara’s practice as an act of deferral: those
readings that suggest, following Jacques Derrida, that the “now-ness”
of Kawara’s Today Series is actually held in suspense, is an “in-between”
time.57 It is the movement of the bad infinity at work: each day of the
Today Series is unable to transcend its particularity. Immanence is all.
Yet the insistence of days gets played out on an even grander
scale in Kawara’s work. Empire, we have seen, is organized around a
temporal distortion: the building is endlessly present, is static, but the
movie moves, on and on and on. It stages the paradox of a long, seem-
ingly interminable now: the present repeated as futurity. And so it is the
case with the Today Series, in which every day—even tomorrow, even
yesterday—is today.
Of course it can’t be literally endless. Its closure is inevitable with
Kawara’s passing. Still, it has gone on this way for close to forty years.
The canvases, the boxes, the newspapers: for Kawara, it’s all a part of
the daily grind, the stuff of routine, like brushing your teeth or reading
the mail or, perhaps more to the point, going to work. For the viewer
confronting the Today Series, typically displayed in multiples, that sense
of the present sliding into futurity and back again is unimpeachable,
and it feels like the labor of days. A photograph of the artist’s studio,
taken in 1966, makes the point explicit (figure 5.13). A black-and-white
picture, it has the studied anonymity of a newspaper clipping. Here we
see the classic artist’s loft complete with high ceilings, roughly hewn
beams, white-washed brick, unfinished wood floors, pipes. Industry
meets art and time gets rationalized. Hanging at eye level and propped
up against the baseboards are the paintings. We see the disciplined
registration of days: May into June into July into August. The canvases
from July are larger than the earlier months, and an especially enor-
mous picture Sept. 20, 1966 dominates the center of the photograph.
Who knows why this particular date assumes such prominent scale,
but in the end such reasons may not matter. What makes the image so
impressive is not one individual work but the totality of the project: the
 297
5.13 Kawara’s studio, 1966.
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner,
New York.
CHAPTER 5
CONCLUSION:
THE BAD INFINITY/ THE LONGUE DURÉE
notion that this photograph, taken in the mid-sixties, logically extends
into the present. And the future.
That is the projective cast of the Today Series, and it takes on other
equally mundane associations. The patience demanded in producing
the paintings has been characterized by some critics as “Oriental” in its
temperament, a crude essentializing of Kawara’s practice that, among
other critical lapses, fails to acknowledge the artist’s global itinerary
(the “date paintings,” after all, have been produced in over eighty-nine
cities).58 No doubt inflected by concerns specific to Japanese postwar
culture, the timing of Kawara’s practice also betrays a decidedly Western
aspect, one that runs parallel to Warhol’s trajectory as well as those of
countless other conceptual artists. For each canvas requires the time
of a work day—approximately eight to nine hours—to complete. The
Taylorist implications of this schedule, day in and day out, undercut any
Zen-like tranquility attributed to the art. Like the sequencing within a
Warhol film, the date paintings too stream out from the studio with
the dull regularity of commodity production. In this sense, the work’s
repetitiveness bears a marked connection to both technological
rationality and a systems approach to time. The engine of Kawara’s
production is the day, but presentness always casts its eye expectantly
on the future.
So it is, and it goes on in other ways, goes on at both the macro-
and micro-historical level. There are the most monumental projects
of them all, the enormous volumes One Million Years—Past, begun in
1969, and One Million Years—Future, begun in 1980, pages and pages
of numbers, column after column of dates and dates and dates, the
blank face of courier type working endlessly to list the years (figures
5.14, 5.15). Ten volumes in length, with 500 dates to a page, they
register the years from 998031 B.C. to A.D. 1969 and A.D. 1981 through
1001980. There’s the series of postcards he began sending friends and
colleagues from all over the world, each stating, by use of a rubber
stamp, the precise time the artist got up (figure 5.16). The series began
in 1968, and was nearly a decade in the making when someone stole
Kawara’s rubber stamp kit and thus put an end to it. There are also the
telegrams, sent intermittently since 1970, vouching for the continued
existence of the artist (figures 5.17, 5.18). “I AM STILL ALIVE,” they
read. One variation of the telegrams, sent to the French curator Michel
Claura, announced “I AM NOT GOING TO COMMIT SUICIDE DONT
 298

5.14 On Kawara, One Million Years—

Past, 1971. Courtesy the artist and
David Zwirner, New York.

WORRY.” Another one followed within a matter of days: “I AM GOING

TO SLEEP FORGET IT.” With these last two gestures, the artist drama-
tizes communication over time as a matter of communication over
space. Not only are we confronted by the geographic distance between
sender and receiver—highlighted in the postcards by the florid, slightly
surreal imagery of tourism. We are also confronted by a concomitant
temporal gap, the durational lag between when the artist got up, went
to sleep, didn’t kill himself: and his expectation that someone far away
would eventually get his message in due time.
And so we bear witness to the artist’s own immanence, qualified
as it is, the small gestures of the everyday jostling up against the broad
anticipations of the future. This movement forward in time is not un-
like Warhol’s bad infinity. Yet should anyone mistake either artist’s
practice for nihilism—for the vacant emptying out of days—I would
propose another model of history that limns this antitranscendent
 299

5.15 On Kawara, One Million Years

Future, 1981. Courtesy the artist and
David Zwirner, New York.

one. This extended duration allows us to think about endlessness as

historically specific—in the process demonstrating the social, cultural,
and technological underpinnings of its emergence—and it grants some
space to the artist to move within it.

“EVENTS ARE DUST ”

In 1958, some ten years before On Kawara got up, Fernand Braudel
published the important essay, “History and the Social Sciences:
The Longue Durée.” The text is considered formative in the historian’s
approach to method; it would be reprinted in 1969 as the centerpiece
to his collection Ecrits sur l’histoire. Not that time was a new subject for
its author, one of the principal members of the Annales School, famous
for revolutionizing historical method in France. Braudel had labored
for several decades on this very problem before the publication of this
relatively short text. For Braudel, time—historical time—assumed a
CHAPTER 5
tripartite scheme, if hardly the epiphanous, transcendent moment of
CONCLUSION: the dialectic: thesis/antithesis/sublation. Instead Braudel offered a
THE BAD INFINITY/ THE LONGUE DURÉE reading of three types of intersecting histories: the long view or la
longue durée—slow, almost glacial in its registration of change; the
middle view, a kind of historical in-between organized around cultures
 301
5.16 On Kawara, I got up, April 1971.
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner,
New York.
and societies; and the short view, crystallized around individual events.
This schema roughly corresponds to the kind of temporality prescribed
in his massive study of 1949, La Méditerranée: geohistorical time, social
time, and individual time, emphasizing the play between these various
strata of time as producing historical meaning.
The notional longue durée remains one of Braudel’s signal con-
tributions to historiography; as we shall see, it offers particular insight
into the nature of Kawara’s bad infinity. The impact of this concept has
been inestimable for historians and sociologists (today we see it most
prominently in the World-Systems Analysis of Immanuel Wallerstein
and Giovanni Arrighi), but it was first understood as a radical, perhaps
inassimilable, contribution to historiography.59 Its importance, Braudel
argued, stemmed from the conviction that history itself had reached a
crisis point:

Among the diKerent kinds of historical time, the longue durée often
seems a troublesome character, full of complications, all too frequently
lacking in any sort of organization. . . . For the historian, accepting the
longue durée entails a readiness to change his style, his attitudes, a whole
reversal in his thinking, a whole new way of conceiving social aKairs.
It means becoming used to a slower tempo, which sometimes almost
borders on the motionless. At that stage, though not at any other . . .
it is proper to free oneself from the demanding time scheme of history,
to get out of it and return later with a fresh view burdened with other
anxieties and other questions. In any case, it is in relation to these
expanses of slow-moving history that the whole of history is to be
rethought, as if on the basis of an infrastructure.60

As to the historical factors motivating this change of approach, Braudel

was clear. The catastrophes of the two world wars signaled a crisis of
a particular existential cast in the production of history: What would
history mean if the entirety of human existence was under imminent
threat of annihilation? Braudel also recognized that the rise of the social
CHAPTER 5
sciences in the postwar era posed unique challenges to the way history
CONCLUSION: was written. The cross-disciplinary impulses of many of these emerging
THE BAD INFINITY/ THE LONGUE DURÉE practices threw into relief the limitations of traditional historical method.
The longue durée was illustrated by means of competing geological
metaphors. In focusing principally (if not exclusively) on the long view,
 303
5.17 On Kawara, I’m Still Alive, 1978.
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner,
New York.
Braudel meant to slow things down, to question the value accorded
documents and events in nineteenth-century historiography or l’histoire
événementielle. In characteristically poetic prose, he saw this kind of
history as little more than “a surface disturbance, the wave stirred up
by the powerful movement of tides.” This was “a history of short, sharp
nervous vibrations. . . . A world of vivid passions, certainly, but a blind
world, as any living world must be, as ours is, oblivious of the deep
currents of history.” That marine metaphor—in which the long view
of history moved in almost plate-tectonic fashion—was opposed to the
short span of history, a ripple or the slightest surface disturbance. And
the “event” could be even more inconsequential than a mere stirring of
the waters. In his scholarship on the Mediterranean, Braudel condensed
his thinking on the history of events to a statement as pithy as the
subject that inspired it. “Events are dust.”61
Events are dust. Events as mundane as getting up, as going to
sleep, as snipping articles from the paper, as painting a date against a
flat field, are dust in the sense of their smallness and evanescence: they
are particular in the ways that dust particles are particular. Events are
dust because, in their finiteness, they speak to historical finitude and
the relative triviality of events compared to the broad span of the longue
durée. Braudel (and the first and second generation of the Annales
school more generally) saw events as little more than dust in opposi-
tion to those who privilege them as the very ground for the writing of
history. With all its “explosive intensity,” the event is like the pivot point
of Lyotard’s metanarrative, whereas the actors behind it are its prime
movers, its heroic individuals. Braudel preferred to call this phenom-
enon a “short time span,” and however inconsequential it might seem,
he acknowledged its relative importance against the backdrop of the
longue durée.

So, to put things more clearly, let us say that instead of a history of
events, we would speak of a short time space, proportionate to
individuals, to daily life, to our illusions, to our hasty awareness—above
CHAPTER 5
all the time of the chronicle and the journalist. Now, it is worth noting
CONCLUSION: that side by side with great, so to speak, historic events, the chronicle
THE BAD INFINITY/ THE LONGUE DURÉE or the daily paper oKers us all the mediocre accidents of everyday life: a
fire, a railway crash, the price of wheat, a crime, a theatrical production,
a flood. It is clear, then, that there is a short time span which plays a part
 305
5.18 On Kawara, I’m Not Going to
Commit Suicide, Dont Worry, 1970.
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner,
New York.
CHAPTER 5
CONCLUSION:
THE BAD INFINITY/ THE LONGUE DURÉE
all forms of life, economic, social, literary, institutional, religious, even
geographical (a gust of wind, a storm), just as much as political.
At first sight, the past seems to consist in just this mass of di-
verse facts, some of which catch the eye, and some of which are dim
and repeat themselves indefinitely. The very facts, that is, which go to
make up the daily booty of microsociology or of sociometry (there is
microhistory too). But this mass does not make up all of reality, all the
depth of history on which scientific thought is free to work.62
Instead of thinking history only in terms of the short time
span, Braudel proposed seeing lapidary time spans, overlapping cycles,
which, in their intersection and convergence, produce far more complex
readings of historical change than the neat linear sequencing organized
around discrete documents and dates. The influence of social science
methods, in particular the rise of conjuncture and long-range fore-
casting, augur this shift in the production of history. “There has been
an alteration in traditional historical time. A day, a year once seemed
useful gauges,” he wrote.
Time, after all, was made up of an accumulation of days. . . . What is
quite clear is that the historian can make use of a new notion of time, a
time raised to the level of explication, and that history can attempt
to explain itself by dividing itself at new points of reference in response
to these curves and the very way they breathe.
. . . Science, technology, political institutions, conceptual changes,
civilizations (to fall back on that useful word) all have their own rhythms
of life and growth, and the new history of conjunctures will be complete
only when it has made up a whole orchestra of them all.63
A history of conjuncture was necessarily open to other disciplines,
and Braudel’s analysis made ample reference to them, from the struc-
turalist anthropology of Levi-Strauss to the game theory of John von
Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern.
In what ways does this apply to Kawara’s practice? Calling his
work a bad infinity names a failure to transcend its own moment, its
gestures repeated endlessly into the future. That failure, however, is
instructive. I have been arguing for the critical position this reading of
time implies; by reading the longue durée alongside this model, I want
to suggest a simultaneous heuristic at work. Just as the bad infinity 306
outlines something of the nature of the endless sixties, Kawara’s longue
durée gives some space, however much the space of the short time
span, to the microactivities of history, the small movements of the
everyday negotiating an extended duration.
It boils down to his parodic relationship to the event coupled
with his own longue durée. If, following Braudel, the “event” within
traditional histories was the nexus of l’histoire événementielle—a linear
history or for that matter a “metanarrative”—Kawara’s approach to the
event is at once deadpan, funny, and utterly serious. The “events” that
comprise the Today Series, the postcards and the telegrams—getting up,
painting a date, going to sleep—doubtlessly constitute what Braudel
called “the mediocre accidents of everyday life.” Kawara continuously
makes good on those mediocre accidents. Not only that, but his collec-
tion of headlines from the days he produced his paintings affords a
glimpse of what Braudel cites as “the chronicle or the daily paper . . .
the railway crash, the price of wheat, a crime, a theatrical production,
a flood.” The acts behind the production of the work, day in and day
out, are practically negligible when viewed in isolation.
Yet when taken together, they constitute the most fundamental
gestures of an artist’s being in the world. The habitual recording of such
acts, and their communication over time and space, are a means to
impress upon the viewer their significance, trivial as they may seem.
For though it is so much historical “dust,” that dust, in the end, is not
negligible. In the spirit of Braudel’s history, that dust will collect,
amounting ultimately to something of historical consequence. Let
me repeat Braudel’s words on the potentially larger (and political)
consequences of the event within the short span. “It is clear, then, that
there is a short time span which plays a part all forms of life, economic,
social, literary, institutional, religious, even geographical (a gust of
wind, a storm), just as much as political.”
At the same time, Kawara manages to sidestep the critical risks
involved in placing himself so insistently in the historical picture. For
all the use of the personal pronoun I in his art, the work is decidedly
anonymous. It is a chronicle without emotional affect, a diary without
ego: we gain little in the way of insight into his psyche by following his
days. Even as he telegraphs (or rather telegrams) a message suggesting
urgency—“I AM NOT GOING TO COMMIT SUICIDE DONT WORRY”—
 307 there is no suggestion of a historical “actor” behind them. Gestures,
yes—small ones take place, and their cumulative effect takes on its
own charge; but there is no heroic individual to perform the meta-
narrative. Quietly and steadfastly, Kawara deflects that role. Here is a
subject with seemingly little subjectivity confronting the future of time
nonetheless.
With Kawara’s small events, then, we confront the issue of agency
within this endlessness and are thus brought back to the place of the
subject within postmodernism. And so we might recall Jameson’s
account of Lyotard’s “formal problem” within the philosopher’s book:
the possibility that Lyotard may be reproducing a metanarrative in his
own right, in spite of his declared intentions. Not so. To take another
page from that discussion, perhaps we might see in Kawara’s art a
“celebration of a related ethic” if an antiheroic ethic. Perhaps an ethic
of surviving, strategizing, under the sign of postmodernism, however
much without fanfare, with a staunch diligence to the Everyday that
runs counter to the seeming inexhaustibility of this present.64 Indeed the
logic of this endlessness—a kind of eternal recurrence—will itself call
for a new mode of decision making, a new ethic: how are we to act in
the face of this time? It is an ethic of slowness and commitment, as if to
bear unflagging witness to its endlessly accelerating projections.

AND SO ON.
For the sake of some closure, provisional though it is, I repeat some
comments made at the beginning of this book. When historians and
critics write about periodizing the sixties, they mean, first of all, to
reject the crude historicizing that sees that time as beginning on Jan-
uary 1, 1960, and ending at midnight, December 31, ten years later.
They mean to see something more expansive about that moment,
irreducible to marks on a calendar or dates on a page. The sixties, I
have been arguing, represented a marked grappling with that changed
CHAPTER 5
temporality, and, more often than not, technology figured into the
CONCLUSION: picture. The art of that moment grappled too, struggled with the very
THE BAD INFINITY/ THE LONGUE DURÉE notion of the moment itself.
We see it in Kawara, in Warhol, in the “on and on” that is mini-
malism. We see it in Carolee Schneemann’s intermedia performances
and Pol Bury’s kinesis, in countless tracts and polemics and art criticism 308
of the period. They remind us of our own confrontations with time and
contemporary art. When, for instance, we walk into a gallery today
and encounter LED signs blinking like digital clocks or plasma screen
“paintings” or the bland, pseudo-democratic art variously described as
“interactive,” we come face to face with new media that’s always
already on the way out, work that begs the very question of “new.” To
wit: remember VR? And what about television?
In worlds in which the speed of technology is matched only by
its spatial reach, time becomes that much more political, of global
consequences. Perhaps this is why now, more and more, we hear of
groups, communities, and scattered networks of individuals taking
pause. They’re pausing not in any naive effort to “go back”—following a
luddite’s primitivist convictions to return to a mythic past—but to slow
down.65 For it is in slowness and the capacity to parse one’s own present
that one gains ground on what’s coming up next, perhaps restores to
the every day some degree of agency, perhaps some degree of resis-
tance. In slowly taking measure of the endless present, one refuses
teleological end games. Instead one rests with the immanence of being
and the potential to act.
Through the example of the art of the 1960s, we return to a his-
tory in which such lessons found their most cogent articulation, with
time serving as the foundational medium. In tracking its laws and
internal contradictions, we take the long view of a moment that would
have us fall sway to the economy of transience. To borrow from Gaston
Bachelard, we scrutinize its rhetoric, its mechanics, and fallout to con-
front “the lavish heterogeneity of duration.”
NOTES

Preface

1. E. M. Cioran, “The Fall out of Time,” in The Fall into Time, trans. Richard
Howard (Chicago: Quadragle Books, 1964), p. 173.

2. Reinhart Koselleck, “Modernity and the Planes of Historicity,” in Futures Past:

On the Semantics of Historical Change (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), p. 13.

3. The major exception here is Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture

(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), particularly the essay “Mechanical Ballets:
Light, Motion, Theater.” Krauss argued for the centrality of time in under-
standing the structural logic of modern sculpture; her account extends far
beyond the art of the 1960s, however, and is not especially concerned with
technology.

4. Fredric Jameson, “Culture,” in Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late

Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 36–37.

5. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and

Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1986).

6. Samuel Wagstaff Jr., “Talking with Tony Smith,” Artforum 5, no. 4 (December
1966): 14–19.

7. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis: Bobbs-

Merrill Library of Liberal Arts, 1983), p. 315. The definition continues: “The
term is used not only to describe, for example, the kind of knowledge which a
shoemaker needs to produce shoes, but also to describe the art of a physician
which produces health, or the skill of a harpist which produces music.” More
recent discussion of the term as it relates to contemporary artistic production is
R. L. Rutsky, High Techne: Art and Technology from the Machine Age Aesthetic to
the Posthuman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
 Definitions of technology are aggressively debated, and I can only point 310
to the vast literature in the philosophy of technology that treats this issue. For
instance, Don Ihde narrows the definition by stressing the existence of a “tech-
nological component.” Don Ihde, Philosophy of Technology: An Introduction
(New York: Paragon House, 1993). Also see James K. Feibleman, “Pure Science,
Applied Science, and Technology: An Attempt at Definitions,” in Philosophy and
Technology: Readings in the Philosophical Problems of Technology, ed. Carl
Mitcham and Robert Mackey (Free Press: London, 1972), pp. 33–41.

8. For a philosophical account of the relationship between techne and time, see
Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (Stanford, Calif.:
Meridian, Stanford University Press, 1994). The question of time, of course, is
the philosophical issue par excellence. A selection of both introductory and more
advanced texts include D. H. Mellor, Real Time (London: Routledge, 1981);
Philip Turetzky, Time (London: Routledge, 1998); Christopher Ray, Time, Space
and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1991); Eric Alliez, Capital Times (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). An important book that addresses
philosophies of time—particularly Marxian notions of temporality—relative to
contemporary politics of resistance and the multitude is Antonio Negri, Time for
Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarini (New York: Continuum, 2003).

9. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, p. 151.

10. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question

Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper
and Row Publishers, 1977), p. 12.

11. For his layperson’s account of relativity theory, see Albert Einstein, Relativity:
The Special and the General Theory, trans. Robert Lawson (New York: Outlet,
1988). A few useful introductions on the question of time within modern physics
include Stephen W. Hawkings, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam
Doubleday, 1988); Paul Davies, About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution
(Touchstone: New York, 1995); Igor Novikov, The River of Time (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998).

12. Merrill Roe Smith and Leo Marx, eds., Does Technology Drive History? The
Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).

13. See, e.g., Isabelle Stengers and Ilya Prirogone, The End of Certainty: Time,
Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature (New York: Free Press, 1997).

14. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1962), p. 5.

15. Ibid., p. 6.

16. See, e.g., Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the Sixties,” in The 60s without
Apology, ed. Sohnya Sayres, Anders Stephenson, Stanley Aronowitz, and Fredric
Jameson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 178–209.
 311 17. Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein argue that the period between
1945 and 1967/ 73 represents the “A” phase of what historians and sociologists
call a Kondratieff cycle, named after the Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratiev,
theorist of the notion of “long waves”—a period of global economic expansion
and contraction. The “A” phase refers to a period of accelerated growth that then
(in this example by the mid-1970s) slows considerably. Of this historical
moment, the authors note a convergence between this cycle and the “period of
unquestioned U.S. hegemony in the world system.” Terrence K. Hopkins and
Immanuel Wallerstein, “The World-System: Is There a Crisis?” in The Age of
Transition: Trajectory of the World System, 1945–2025 (London: Zed Books,
1996), p. 9; also see Wallerstein, “The Global Picture,” in the same volume,
pp. 209–225.

18. Not incidentally, Jameson describes this in terms of aphasia or Lacanian

schizophrenia. “The crisis in historicity now dictates a return, in a new way, to
the question of temporal organization in general in the postmodern force field,
and indeed, to the problem of form that time, temporality and the syntagmatic
will be able to take in a culture increasingly dominated by space and spatial
logic. If indeed the subject has lost its capacity actively to extend its pro-tensions
and retensions across the temporal manifold and to organize its past and future
into coherent experience, it becomes difficult enough to see how the cultural
productions of such a subject could result in anything but a heap of fragments
and in a practice of the randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary and aleatory.”
Jameson, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Postmodernism, p. 25.

19. On the genealogy of the term crisis as an event that calls for immediate
decision making (linked to the sense of its being a medical emergency), see
Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of
Modern Society (Oxford: Berg Limited, 1985).

Introduction: Eros and Technics and Civilization

1. See Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans. Mark
Politzotti (New York: Semiotext[e], 1986), and his The Art of the Motor, trans.
Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). On “Nanosecond
culture,” see Jeremy Rifkin, Time Wars: The Primary Conflict in Human History
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).

2. Maurice Tuchman, A Report on the Art and Technology Program at the

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1967–71 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, 1971) (hereafter A & T), p. 11.
NOTES 3. Max Kozloff, “The Multi-million Dollar Art Boondoggle,” Artforum 10, no. 2
(October 1971): 72.
4. Tuchman, A & T, p. 9. 312

5. Jack Burnham, “Corporate Art,” Artforum 10, no. 2 (October 1971): 66–71.

6. Experiments in Art and Technology, E.A.T. News 2, no. 1 (March 18, 1968): 2,
Art and Technology Archives, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles
(hereafter, LACMA).

7. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

8. Thomas Pynchon, “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” New York Times Book Review,
October 28, 1984, pp. 140–241.

9. Stefan Colloni, “Introduction: Reactions and Controversies,” C. P. Snow, The

Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. xxix–xliii.

10. Snow, Two Cultures (1998), p. 22.

11. Ibid., p. 51.

12. Henry J. Seldis, “County Museum Exhibit Mates Art and Technology,”
Los Angeles Times, May 16, 1971, p. 47.

13. On this history, see Calvin Tompkins, “Outside Art,” in Pavilion, ed. Billy
Klüver, Julie Martin, and Barbara Rose (New York: Dutton, 1972), pp. 105–172.
It is to E.A.T.’s credit that they published this largely unflattering portrait of the
Osaka event, which characterized most of the proceedings as “inept.”

14. Experiments in Art and Technology, E.A.T. News 2, no. 1 (March 18, 1968): 1.

15. For a critical account of E.A.T. and 9 Evenings, see Jack Burnham, “Art and
Technology: The Panacea That Failed,” in The Myths of Information: Technology
and Postindustrial Culture, ed. Kathleen Woodward (Madison, Wisc.: Coda Press,
1980), pp. 200–215.

16. Quoted in Burnham, “Art and Technology,” p. 204.

17. Tuchman, A & T, p. 241.

18. “The Corporation,” Rand Corporation Bulletin, 1968, Santa Monica, Calif.

19. Chamberlain, in A & T, p. 71.

20. Ibid., p. 71.

21. Files 1 and 2, “John Chamberlain, Art and Technology Files,” Archives,
LACMA.

22. Press Release “For LA County Museum of Art, ‘Art and Technology’ Program:
Press Conference (Incorporation in Museum News Release), n.d. Art and
Technology Archives, LACMA.

23. Burnham, “Art and Technology,” p. 204.

 313 24. Ibid., p. 204.

25. Ibid., p. 203.

26. “Corporation,” p. 1.

27. Press Release, “Newsbureau, Lockheed-California Company (A Division of

Lockheed-Aircraft Corporation), For Release: 9 A.M., EDT, May 9, 1968. Art and
Technology Archives, LACMA.

28. Kozloff, “Multi-million Dollar Art Boondoggle,” p. 76.

29. Ibid., p. 78.

30. Not to mention, of course, the character of the irrational Adorno described
with respect to the astrology column in the Los Angeles Times. Theodor W.
Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture
(London: Routledge, 1994).

31. San Diego’s identity as a modern city is doubtlessly linked to the enormous
presence of the military there—concentrated in the 1930s—and the influence
of aerospace technology on the region’s industrial fortunes. In spite of or perhaps
because of this, the city has long had a radical presence in both the prewar and
postwar years: communist demonstrations in 1933, for example, resulted in a
large-scale riot. See Robert Mayer, San Diego: A Chronological and Documentary
History (New York: Oceana Publications, 1978); Michael McKeever, A Short
History of San Diego (San Francisco: Lexicos, 1985).

32. See Marcuse, “The Origin of Repressed Civilization (phylogenesis),” in Eros

and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (New York: Beacon Press,
1955), pp. 56–83.

33. Ibid., p. 58.

34. In this sense, Marcuse’s 1937 text “The Affirmative Character of Culture”
foreshadows his postwar aesthetic theory. On the relationship between these
earlier and later texts, I have learned much from the scholarship of Claudia
Mesch, whose lecture on Marcuse at the annual College Art Association
meeting in New York in 2001 has proven very helpful. Claudia Mesch
“Forgetting Marcuse” (unpublished talk) on the panel, “Art Writing of the
Sixties,” convened by Keith Moxey.

35. Marcuse, “Origin of Repressed Civilization,” in Eros and Civilization, p. 77.

36. Ibid., p. 78.

37. Ibid.
NOTES 38. Ibid., p. 79.

39. George Lichtheim, “The Threat of History: One-Dimensional Man,” New York
Review of Books, February 20, 1964, pp. 15–16.
40. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced 314
Industrial Society (New York: Beacon Press, 1964) (hereafter ODM), p. 1.

41. Marcuse, ODM, pp. 2–3.

42. Ibid., p. 9.

43. See, e.g., Herbert Marcuse, “Some Social Implications of Modern Tech-
nology,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arrato and Eike
Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1982), pp. 138–162; and Jürgen Habermas,
“Technology and Science as ‘Ideology,’” in Toward a Rational Society: Student
Protest, Science, and Politics, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press,
1970), pp. 81–122. Also see Steven Vogel, “New Science, New Nature: The
Habermas-Marcuse Debate Revisited,” Research in Philosophy and Technology:
Technology and Politics 11 (1991): 156–157.

44. Marcuse, ODM, pp. 10–11.

45. Ibid., p, 29.

46. Ibid., p. 32.

47. As cited in note 34, Claudia Mesch has spoken on Marcuse’s impact on the
art criticism of the late 1960s, noting the importance of Marcuse’s An Essay on
Liberation in addition to Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man. Among
other examples she cites his “Art in the One-Dimensional Society,” and his 1969
lecture at the Guggenheim, “Art as a Form of Reality,” in broader discussions of
“anti-art” at the time. See Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1969); and “Art in the One-Dimensional Society” Arts Magazine,
41, no. 7 (May 1967): 26–31.

48. Marcuse, ODM, p. 56.

49. Ibid., p. 57.

50. Ibid., p. 64.

51. Ibid., p. 65. It is here that Marcuse began to formulate his notion of
“Repressive desublimation.” If art had once been considered sublimation, to
follow the conventional Freudian account, in the new technological society, its
transformation to popular culture represents desublimation—because it is no
longer needed to express the contradiction of social reality or represent its
alienation under capital.

52. Ibid., p. 80.

53. Ibid., pp. 80–81.

54. Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-of-Control as a Theme

in Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977). Winner’s notion of
autonomous technology was informed by his reading of Jacques Ellul’s “techno-
logical society.”
 315 55. Marcuse, ODM, p. 88.

56. Ibid., pp. 89, 91.

57. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Techno-
cratic Society and Its Useful Opposition (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1968), pp. 4–6.

58. Ibid., p. 8.

59. ODM, p. 96.

60. Ibid., p. 97.

61. Ibid., p. 98.

62. Ibid., p. 99.

63. Ibid.

64. Tuchman, A & T, p. 260.

Chapter 1: Presentness Is Grace

With thanks to Christine Mehring.

1. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum (June 1967); reprinted in

Art and Objecthood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 148 (page
citation is to reprint edition).

2. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” p. 146.

3. On that resonant phrase, see T. J. Clark, “Arguments about Modernism:

A Reply to Michael Fried,” in Pollock and After: The Critical Debates, ed. Francis
Frascina (New York: Harper and Harper, 1985), pp. 86–87. Rosalind Krauss
offers a recollection of first reading those lines—coupled with Fried’s reference
to Frank Stella and Ted Williams. Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 6–7. I will take up James Meyers’s
analysis of the topic in the body of this chapter.

4. The most important statement of this relationship is Hal Foster, “The Crux
of Minimalism,” in The Return of the Real (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996),
pp. 35–71.

5. Fried, “Introduction,” in Art and Objecthood, p. 17.

6. This cover has garnered much critical attention of late. Here I need to
NOTES
acknowledge the work of Gwen Allen, whose dissertation on the art magazine
in the 1960s attends to the design of Artforum relative to the work of art it
presents on its cover. Gwen Allen, Ph.D. dissertation in progress, Stanford
University.
7. As historians have noted, Greenberg’s “Recentness of Sculpture” (1967), 316
which appeared only a few months before Fried’s text, provides some important
cues for considering the later essay. Published on the occasion of the large
group show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art American Sculpture of
the Sixties—an attempt to survey the state of the sculptural field—Greenberg
seemed to define minimalism by what it was not; or, as Fried did in his later
essay, in close relationship to well-established categories of object: painting,
mostly or, far more damning, “good design.”
In the second-to-last paragraph of the essay, Greenberg drew upon a term
that will signify in a different way with “Art and Objecthood”: that is, the new
sculpture’s presence. More than anything, that sculpture’s presence was regarded
as anthropomorphic in nature, like a “stage presence,” as Fried would later call
it. Speaking about an encounter with Ann Truitt’s work in 1963, Greenberg
recalled, “I noticed how this look could confer an effect of presence. That
presence as achieved through size was aesthetically extraneous I already knew.
That presence as achieved through the look of non-art was likewise aesthetically
extraneous, I did not yet know.” Presence—established by the sheer size of the
work of art—signals “the question of the phenomenal as opposed to the aes-
thetic or artistic,” Greenberg concluded of the new sculpture. Clement Green-
berg, “Recentness of Sculpture,” American Sculpture of the Sixties (Los Angeles:
LACMA, 1967), pp. 24–26.

8. Jill Beaulieu, Mary Roberts, and Tony Ross, “Interview with Michael Fried,”
in Refracting Vision: Essays on the writings of Michael Fried (Sydney: Power
Publications, 2000), p. 381. See also Michael Fried, “How Modernism Works:
A Response to T. J. Clark,” in Frascina, Pollock and After, pp. 68; and Fried,
“Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s New Painting,” reprinted in Art and Objecthood,
pp. 77–100.

9. James Meyer, “The Writing of Art and Objecthood,” in Refracting Vision, p. 68.

10. Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” in Arts Yearbook 1965, New York, pp. 74–
82. Also see Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2,” reprinted in Continuous
Project Altered Daily (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).

11. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” p. 149.

12. Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Clement Greenberg, vol. 4:

Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, The Collected Essays and Criticism,
vol. 1–4, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986–
1993), p. 85.

13. There are some notable exceptions. Alex Potts has usefully discussed the
time of minimalist sculpture as being like a musical loop—the kind of loop
associated with “minimalist” music—and the suggestiveness of his argument
lies with its bridging the temporality of Fried’s discussion with the spatial
coordinates of the work’s “phenomenological turn.” Just as the musical loop of
 317 minimalist music occurs repetitively in time, so too does the object stage for its
viewers the repeated circumnavigation around it. But from Potts’s perspective,
minimalist repetition admits to difference. Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). On the time of minimalist music in
minimalist art, see my “Phase Piece,” in Sol LeWitt: Incomplete Open Cubes
(exhibit Catalogue, the Wadsworth Athenaeum) (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
2001), pp. 49–58.

14. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” p. 166.

15. Ibid., p. 163.

16. Ibid., pp. 166–167.

17. Ibid., p. 166.

18. Stanley Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” in Must We Mean What We

Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 238–266.

19. For an important account of Cavell’s formulation of “criteria” as it relates to

Friedian aesthetics, see Stephen Melville, “On Modernism,” in Philosophy Beside
Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1986), pp. 17–33.

20. See Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” p. 238.

21. Espen Hammer, Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity, and the Ordinary
(Cambridge: Polity Press, Blackwell Publishers, 2002), p. xii.

22. Joseph Koerner provides a useful précis on the subject. “On Reformation
notions of temporality there are two crucial issues. One is that Protestants
focused religion on the here and now over against the longer duration because
they located salvation in faith enacted in the very moment. The other is that
Protestants rejected tradition as basis for truth and returned to Scripture. That
meant that they saw tradition as contingent, and were able to write a critical
history of tradition, specifically critical histories of the Church. Historical
consciousness therefore was fueled by Protestantism’s inherent need to be
revisionist.” Joseph Leo Koerner, e-mail to the author, November 3, 2002.

23. Meyer, “The Writing of ‘Art and Objecthood,’” in Retracting Vision, p. 79.

24. Ibid., pp. 72–79; Also see his reading of Fried’s text in Minimalism: Art
and Polemics in the 1960s (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999),
pp. 345–359.

25. Jonathan Edwards, in Robert Smithson, “Letter to the Editor,” in The

Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California
NOTES Press, 1996), p. 66.

26. Fried, Art and Objecthood, p. 73, n. 76.

27. Robert Smithson, “Letter to the Editor,” in The Writings of Robert Smithson, 318
ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 66.

28. Ibid., p. 67.

29. Samuel Wagstaff Jr. “Talking with Tony Smith,” Artforum 5, no. 4 (December
1966): 14–19.

30. Rosalind Krauss has attended to the resonance of the word medium as a
channeler of communication, for example, as a spirit medium, in “Video: The
Aesthetics of Narcissism,” in Video Culture, ed. John Hanhardt (Layton, Utah:
Peregrine Smith Books, 1986), pp. 179–219.

31. On the question of modernity’s temporality, see Reinhold Koselleck, Futures

Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1985). There are countless texts on time within both modernity and
postmodernity. One useful discussion of modernity’s time is Peter Osborne, The
Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (Verso: London, 1995). Also see
Stephen Kerr, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918 (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1983).

32. To rehearse this argument is to insist upon its foundational status for the
criticism of a more recent past and to uncover the intractability of these terms
as they inform Fried’s own confrontation with minimalist sculpture. For Lessing,
a recently discovered Roman copy of the ancient Laocoön group occasions a
debate with Winckleman on the nature of verbal versus visual representation.
Comparison of Virgil’s poetic rendition of the topic with the sculptural work
leads to the famous distinction between the temporal arts of poetry, literature,
and music and the spatial arts of painting and sculpture (he does not attempt
to parse these further). Lessing speaks to painting and sculpture’s impossible
fantasy of properly representing time, of consolidating in static form that which
is flagrantly nonstatic. Hence his well-known account of the classical Laocoön
group, which, in representing the figure of Laocoön and his two sons ensnared
in a web of serpents, walks a thin line between evacuating a dynamic event
of any emotional affect and anticipating in sculptural form the temporal crux
of a narrative. Lessing’s claim is that the relative restraint the sculptor used
in depicting that dramatic moment underscores the limitations of the medium
itself.

33. Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoön” (1940) in O’Brian, Clement

Greenberg, vol. 1: Perceptions and Judgments, p. 32.

34. Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoön”(unpublished version), in

Clement Greenberg Papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 950085, Series
III: Manuscripts, Essays on art and aesthetics, box 25, folder 1.

35. See, for example, Wallace Stevens, “Two Prefaces,” in Modern Critical Views:
Paul Valéry, ed. and with an introduction by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea
House Publishers, 1989), pp. 31–47.
 319 36. It is worth speculating about why Greenberg did not include these lines from
the published version of the essay. Perhaps the question of temporality that
Valéry’s work invoked would show up the relative character of Greenberg’s
notion of medium as a function of time.

37. Here we might consider Greenberg’s occasional critical forays into photo-
graphy, in which, as Christine Mehring has pointed out, the “relativity of his
arguments” about medium specificity becomes especially clear with respect to
issues of time. For Greenberg, the best photography, such as that of Walker
Evans, should be like literature, which is to say, a temporal art. “Let photography
be ‘literary,’” he advised at the end of a review of Edward Weston’s photographs,
which he condemned as following modernist painting a little too closely.
Greenberg’s account of photography, just like Fried’s aside on the movies in
“Art and Objecthood” (to be discussed), reveals how time may well be more
fundamental to either critic’s discussion of medium than he is willing to
acknowledge. See Clement Greenberg, “The Camera’s Glass Eye: Review of an
Exhibition of Edward Weston,” in O’Brian, Clement Greenberg, vol. 2, Arrogant
Purpose, pp. 60–63.

38. Erwin Panofsky, quoted in Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (hereafter, WV)
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 16.

39. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” p. 164.

40. These essays include Rosalind Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art
in the Age of the Post-medium Condition (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999);
“‘. . . And Then Turn Away?’ An Essay on James Coleman,” OCTOBER 81 (MIT
Press) (Summer 1997): 5–33; “‘The Rock’: William Kentridges Drawings for
Projection,” OCTOBER 92 (MIT Press) (Spring 2000): 3–35.

41. Cavell, “Preface,” in WV, p. xxiii.

42. Cavell wrote, “It could be said further that what painting wanted, in wanting
connection with reality, was a sense of presentness—not exactly a conviction of
the world’s presence to us, but of our presence to it. At some point the unhinging
of our consciousness from the world interposed our subjectivity between us and
our presentness to the world. Thus our subjectivity became what is present to us,
individuality became isolation. The route to conviction in reality was through
the acknowledgment of that endless presence of self. . . . Then the recent major
painting which Fried describes as objects of presentness would be painting’s
latest effort to maintain its conviction in its own power to establish connection
with reality—by permitting us presentness to ourselves, apart from which there
is no hope for a world.” Cavell, WV, p. 22.

NOTES
43. For a thorough exegesis on the book’s philosophical underpinnings, see
William Rothman and Mariane Keane, Reading Cavell’s The World Viewed: A
Philosophical Perspective on Film (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000).

44. Rothman and Keane, Reading Cavell’s The World Viewed, p. 175.
45. Cavell, WV, p. 24. 320

46. Ibid., p. 39. Cavell wrote, “In viewing films, the sense of invisibility is an
expression of modern privacy or anonymity. It is as though the world’s projection
explains our forms of unknownness and our inability to know. The explanation
is not so much that the world is passing us by, as that we are displaced from our
natural habitation within it, placed at a distance from it. The screen . . . makes
displacement appear as our natural condition.”

47. Ibid., pp. 110–111.

48. Ibid., p. 20.

49. Ibid., p. 103.

50. Ibid., p. 104.

51. Rosalind Krauss, “The Rock: William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection,”
OCTOBER 92 (MIT Press) (Spring 2000): 12.

52. Cavell, WV, p. 109.

53. Ibid., p. 111.

54. Ibid., p. 116.

55. Ibid., p. 117.

56. Krauss, “Voyage on the North Sea,” pp. 5–8.

57. Within contemporary art criticism, recursion has more recently been con-
sidered with respect to artificial life and recombinant technologies and the
ecological implications that derive from this. See, for example, Aaron Betsky,
“The Age of the Recursive,” in 010101: Art in Technological Times (San Fran-
cisco: SF MoMA, 2001), pp. 41–46. My thanks to Jennifer Gonzalez, whose
comments on a presentation of chapter 4 of this book helpfully pushed my
thinking in this recursive direction.

58. See, for example, p. Odifreddi, Classical Recursion Theory: Studies in Logic
and The Foundations of Mathematics, vol. 125. (Amsterdam: Elsevier Science
Publishers, 1989).

59. Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition:

The Realization of the Living (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company,
1980). For a less technical account, see Maturana and Varela, The Tree of
Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (Boston: Shambhala,
1987). Influenced by Gregory Bateson’s metalogy (about which more will
follow), and by Wittgenstein’s theories of language and later cybernetic theories
of radical constructivism, the theoretical biologists Maturana and Varela have
had a profound impact on the later generation of cybernetics and systems
theory. In research on both frog vision and biology of cognition in the late fifties
 321 and early sixties, Maturana repeatedly ran up against the limits of treating
organisms as open systems particularly with respect to theories of perception.
As he put it, “What was still more fundamental was the discovery that one had
to close off the nervous system to account for its operation, and that perception
should not be viewed as a grasping of an external reality, but rather as the
specification of one, because no distinction was possible between perception
and hallucination in the operation of the nervous system as a closed network.”
“Introduction,” in Autopoiesis and Cognition, p. xv.
What this called for was a more rigorous theory of closed systems and the
articulation of its organizational mechanism. A pseudo-Greek term, autopoiesis
refers to an organization’s self-production. Maturana later recalled its origins as
arising out of a conversation with Varela on the notion of circular organization.
Varela remarked: “If indeed the circular organization is sufficient to character-
ize living systems as unities, then one should be able to put it in more formal
terms”; to which Maturana replied: “I agreed, but said that a formalization could
only come about after a complete linguistic description, and we immediately
began to work on the complete description. Yet we were unhappy with the
expression ‘circular organization’ and we wanted a word that would by itself
convey the central feature of the organization of the living, which is autonomy.”
Autopoiesis and Cognition, p. vii. Strictly speaking, an autopoietic organization is
autonomous and therefore belongs to second-order systems discourse, meaning
the system is operationally closed and self-referring. Those elements that make
up an autopoietic system are recursive in generating the same conditions that
produced them. Autopoiesis, then, is a kind of homeostasis, whose immediate
applications are biological. Autopoietic machines are “unities because, and only
because, of their specific autopoietic organization;” they “do not have inputs or
outputs.” Ibid., p. 81.
Theories of autopoiesis have been widely employed in the larger analysis
of systems, whether of organisms or social systems such as corporations and
states. Niklas Luhmann’s theories of social systems, we shall see, takes off from
earlier scientific models of autopoiesis. See, for example, Gunther Teubner and
Alberto Febbrajo, eds., State, Law, and Economy as Autopoietic Systems (Milan:
Giuffré, 1992). For a discussion on the limitations of this model for second-order
cybernetics, see William Rasch, “Theory of a Different Order: A Conversation
with Katherine Hayles and Niklas Luhmann,” in Niklas Luhmann’s Modernity:
The Paradoxes of Differentiation (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
2000), pp. 172–174.

60. A philosophical account of art and systems theory by the social theorist
Niklas Luhmann is Art as a Social System (Stanford, Calif.: Meridian Press,
Stanford University, 2000). Luhmann’s is not a history of this question as it
NOTES
relates to the art of the 1960s, but it takes up the issue of perception in the
observer in constituting notions of the work of art. Luhmann’s particular
brand of “Second-order cybernetics,” elaborated on more fully in the body of
this chapter, stresses the role of the observer in articulating and defining the
boundaries of what constitutes a system; and thus, for the purposes of art, it is 322
especially attentive to issues of perception and environment for art’s audience.
Of course, the problem of observation has a long genealogy within the
history of modern science, ranging from Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to
Kurt Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem to later notions of Radical Constructivism.
For an excellent recent art historical account that takes up Luhmann’s theories
with respect to the thematic of surveillance, see Christian Katti, “‘Systematically’
Observing Surveillance: Paradoxes of Observation according to Niklas
Luhmann’s System’s Theory,” in Control Space: Rhetorics of Surveillance from
Bentham to Big Brother, ed. Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel
(Karlsruhe and Cambridge, Mass.: ZKM and MIT Press, 2002), pp. 50–64.

61. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam,
1993), p. 431.

62. Maturana and Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition, p. 137.

63. Ross Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics (London: Chapman and Hall,

1957), p. 1.

64. Here I deliberately invoke the rhetoric of Stephen Melville, who has
described Fried’s formalism not as “a semantics, but a grammar”—not “what is
art” but “how is art.” Melville, “On Modernism,” Philosophy Beside Itself, p. 15.

65. As both Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson recall, systems theory was
much more successful than cybernetics in finding both institutional support and
mainstream acceptance in the United States. See Stewart Brand, “For God’s
Sake, Margaret,” CoEvolutionary Quarterly, no. 10 (June 1976): 32–44.

66. Ludwig von Bertalanffy, “Introduction,” in General System Theory (New York:
George Braziller, 1968), pp. 3–4.

67. “The mechanistic world view, taking the play of physical particles as ultimate
reality, found its expression in a civilization which glorifies physical technology
that has led eventually to the catastrophes of our time. Possibly the model of
world as a great organization can help to reinforce the sense of reverence for the
living which we have almost lost in the last sanguinary decades of human
history.” Ibid., p. 49.

68. Ibid., p. vii.

69. For more on cybernetics-generalized applications in the 1960s and their

relationship to time, see chapter 4, “Ultramoderne.”

70. It is a measure of the pervasiveness of systems theory within the art of the
1960s that Lawrence Alloway defined its terms with respect to the art world. See
Lawrence Alloway, “Network: The Art World Described as a System,” Artforum
11, no. 1 (September 1972): 28–33.
 323 71. Von Bertalanffy recognized the inherent limitations of certain scientific
models based in physics that neither admit to the influence of external systems
nor have any interaction with things outside themselves. Although such “closed”
systems allowed for a certain precision of scientific analysis (insofar as all data
was constant and therefore controlled), they were necessarily hermetic and
abstract, their applications less practical than theoretical. By contrast, von
Bertalanffy’s treatment of open systems, based in the life sciences, understood
well the contingent dimension of an organism’s behavior: there was no such
“pure” system in nature.

72. On the distinctions between systems theory and cybernetics, as well as my

paraphrase on closed and open systems, see Robert Lilienfield, “Systems Theory
as Ideology,” Social Research 42 (Winter 1975): 637–659.

73. Heinz von Foerster, “Ethics and Second-Order Cybernetics,” Stanford

Humanities Review 4, no. 2 (1994): “Constructions of the Mind,” p. 2.

74. Luhmann, “Observation of the First and of the Second Order,” in Art as a
Social System, p. 62.

75. Ibid., p. 54.

76. On structuration and praxis within the social applications of systems theory,
see Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of
Structuration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). As Peter Harries-
Jones observes, “In social science the term ‘recursion’ has become familiar with
the writings of Anthony Giddens. Social activities, he writes, ‘are continually
recreated by (social actors) via the means whereby they express themselves as
actors.’ In and through these activities, social agents reproduce the conditions
that make these activities possible. In Gidden’s view, recursion is an important
component of ‘structuration,’ structure itself being the rules and resources
recursively implicated in social reproduction.” Peter Harries-Jones, A Recursive
Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1995), n. 1, p. 267.

77. Sir Stafford Beer, preface to Maturana and Varela, “Autopoiesis: The Organ-
ization of the Living,” in Autopoiesis and Cognition, p. 67.

78. On the problems of causality and teleology in General System Theory, see
von Bertalanffy, General System Theory, pp. 45–46; also see Norbert Wiener,
“Newtonian and Bergsonian Time,” and the highly technical “Time Series,
Information, and Communication,” both in Cybernetics: or, Control and
Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1948), pp. 30–44, 60–94. There is an enormous body of literature on the time
NOTES
problem within cybernetics and information theory; see the notes to chapter 4,
“Ultramoderne: Or, How George Kubler Stole the Time in Sixties Art.”
79. On the rise of technological and social forecasting, prognosticating, and 324
futurist studies in the 1960s, see this book’s conclusion: “The Bad Infinity/The
Longue Durée.”

80. Gregory Bateson, “Cybernetic Explanation,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind

(San Francisco: Chandler Publishing for Health Sciences, 1972), p. 405.

81. It is Hume who first uses the example of billiard balls to illustrate the
skeptic’s account of causality. (Bateson was doubtlessly aware of this in form-
ulating his cybernetic example.) Among the most prominent “heirs” to Hume’s
antideterminism (or rather “indeterminism”) is Karl Popper. See Karl Popper,
The Open Universe (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1956).

82. Niklas Luhmann, embroidering upon the concept of autopoiesis within

the biological research of Maturana and Varela, devoted his work to thinking the
social in terms of a “recursive universe” in which “disorder, non-linear complex-
ity, and unpredictability are the rule . . . and the collapse of the boundaries
between observer and observed has stimulated the exploration of theoretical
models capable of handling problems of self-reference.” Foreword, Niklas
Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz Jr., with Dirk Baecker (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. xii.

83. On serial systems, see, for example, Mel Bochner, “The Serial Attitude,”
Artforum 6 (December 1967): 28–33. Historically, the notion of “Real Time” was
specific to early mainframe systems; users working on connected terminals were
considered to be working together in “real time.” Nowadays, the expression is far
more generic, suggesting the proximate ways a computer responds to the
immediate needs/conditions of its user: it stands as shorthand for “interactivity.”
The work of Hans Haacke will be discussed in these terms at the conclusion of
this chapter.
For an excellent account of conceptual art’s relationship to the time
problem, see Alexander Alberro, “Time and Conceptual Art,” in Tempus Fugit:
Time Flies, ed. Jan Schall (Kansas City, Mo.: Nelson Atkins Museum of Art,
2001), pp. 144–157.

84. One need only turn to a standard text of conceptual art, such as, for
example, Ursula Meyer’s Conceptual Art, to gauge the pervasiveness of systems
theory within the art speak of that moment. From Victor Burgin’s “Situational
Aesthetics” to Adrian Piper’s “Three Models of Art Production Systems” to Hans
Haacke’s “Communication System,” systems discourse is critical to the rhetoric
of conceptual art. Ursula Meyer, Conceptual Art (New York: Dutton, 1972).

85. See Caroline A. Jones, The Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar
American Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

86. Tracing the history of this revolution to the invention of photography by

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, Manovich repeatedly describes new media
through the terms of distributing, exhibiting, and processing information, as
 325 well as communicating a message. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), p. 6.

87. Gyorgy Kepes, ed., Sign, Image, Symbol (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1966).

88. Jack Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” reprinted in Great Western Salt-Works:

Essays on the Meaning of Post-formalist Art (New York: George Braziller, 1974),
p. 15.

89. Jack Burnham, Software. Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art
(New York: Jewish Museum, 1970), p. 10.

90. Ibid., p. 100.

91. Douglas Huebler quoted in Burnham, Software, p. 35.

92. Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Tech-
nology on the Sculpture of this Century (New York: George Braziller, 1968),
p. 332. It is worth noting that Burnham changed his position a bit a couple
years later; in an interview with Willoughby Sharp, his particular attitude
toward formalist criticism (for his purposes, those who attack “literalist art”—
e.g., Fried) conceded to how removed it was from his systems-based approach.
See Willoughby Sharp, “Willoughby Sharp Interviews Jack Burnham,” Art
Magazine 45, no. 2 (November 1970): 21–23

93. Ibid., p. 368.

94. Ibid.

95. Jack Burnham, “Steps in The Formulation of Real-Time Political Art,”

Framing and Being Framed (Nova Scotia: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design,
1975), p. 9.

96. Hans Haacke, statement in Donald Karshan, Conceptual Art and Conceptual
Aspects (New York: New York Cultural Center, 1970).

97. See Astrid Wick-Kmoch, “Kunst+Systemtheorie+Sozialwissenschaften,”

Kunstforum International, no. 27 (1978): 125–142.

98. Jack Burnham on Haacke in Framing and Being Framed, p. 9. We need

to note that Haacke’s own attitude toward systems (and its implicit scientism)
would shift from the early sixties to the end of that decade; his relationship to
Burnham (and the critic’s reading of von Bertalanffy) would itself prove com-
plicated and ambivalent. On this history, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Hans
Haacke: Memory and Instrumental Reason,” Art in America, 76, no. 2 (February
1988): 97–109; 157, 159. Also see Buchloh, “Hans Haacke: The Entwinement
NOTES of Myth and Enlightenment,” in Obra Social, exhibition catalog (Barcelona:
Fundaciao Antonio Tapies, 1995).

99. See Luhmann, Art as a Social System.

100. Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of 326
Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” OCTOBER 55 (MIT Press) (Winter
1990): 130.

101. Gregory Bateson, “Part I: Metalogues,” Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p. 2.

Also see Bateson’s essay in the same volume, “From Versailles to Cybernetics,”
pp. 477–485.

102. William Rasch and Cary Wolfe, eds., Observing Complexity: Systems Theory
and Postmodernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Note also
that Robert Lillienfield argued against systems theory as being strongly ideo-
logical. See Lilienfield, “Systems Theory as Ideology.”

Chapter 2: Study for an End of the World

Some of the references taken from the Archives of the Museum Jean Tinguely
(hereafter MJT), Basel, Switzerland, are incomplete with respect to page
numbers: the information was not available from the preserved documents.

1. Jean Tinguely, quoted in Albert Sonnard, “L’art motorisé,” Panorama (Paris,

1959) (December 1–7, 1959): 1–7.

2. David Brinkley’s Journal, New York, NBC, aired April 6, 1962.

3. The show was broadcast in both color and black and white. Copies of the
telecast at the Tinguely Museum are in color, whereas those distributed by NBC
are in black and white.

4. “That’s kulture with a capital K,” one journalist offered dismissively of his
work in 1959, “the Art World never fools us . . . do they?” Simon Ward, “Press
the Button and out Pops Art,” Daily Sketch (London), June 24, 1959, MJT.

5. David Farrell Krell, ed., “Introduction,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings

(San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 20.

6. Martin Heidegger, “The Worldhood of the World,” in Being in Time, trans.

John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962),
pp. 91–148. For the distinction between Heidegger’s earlier notion of world
and his later formulation, see Joseph Kockelmanns, Heidegger on Art and Art
Works (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Martinus Nijihoff, 1985), p. 148.

7. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language,

Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).

8. Martin Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in

Krell, ed. Martin Heidegger, p. 376. See also Martin Heidegger, quoted in Michael
Heim, “Heidegger and McLuhan: The Computer as Component,” in The Meta-
physics of Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 56.
 327 9. Fredric Jameson, “Preface,” in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric
Jameson and Masao Miyashi (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999),
p. xi.
Jameson’s brief on globalization necessarily informs a contemporary
understanding of the “art world” and, along with it, how we conceptualize the
“world” of the work of art. This is a question I can only acknowledge at this
juncture; it is the subject of my current research on more recent artistic practices.
Although the relationship between globalization and the art world is a common-
place in art criticism, few accounts have adequately theorized or historicized this
relationship, nor defined the terms globalization nor, for that matter, art world.
In my study “Forgetting the Art World,” I consider these deeply historical (and
political) issues relative to philosophical formulations on the notion of art world.

10. For morphologies on kinetic art, see George Rickey, “The Morphology of
Movement: A Study of Kinetic Art,” in The Nature and Art of Motion, ed. Gyorgy
Kepes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967), p. 81.

11. The distinction between actual and virtual kinetic art is derived in part from
Guy Brett, “Introduction,” in Force Fields: Phases of the Kinetic (London: Hay-
ward Gallery, 2000). Also, Guy Brett, in conversation with the author, London,
June 26, 2000; June 30, 2000; and August 1, 2000.

12. Listen to René on the exhibition’s formation (which she repeated twice in
1965 and 1975): “In 1955 when this exhibition devoted to ‘Movement’ opened
in Paris, Abstract Expressionism dominated the international scene. Since the
end of the Second World War the École de Paris in France and its conservative
aesthetics had succeeded in imposing itself in every path of artistic life. In this
unfavorable context, my gallery represented the only bastion engaged in the
defense of that abstract art which had developed out of Constructivism and
was known as geometric abstraction.” Denise René, “Twenty Years Later,” in
Le Mouvement / The Movement, Paris 1955 (Paris: Editions Denise René, 1975),
pp. 9–10.

13. Victor Vasarely, “Manifesto jaune,” Galerie Denise René, Paris, April 1955,
unpaginated, MJT.

14. A prefiguration of what would be called “Op art” a decade later, Vasarely’s
work produced the illusion of movement. He would analogize his paintings to
the mouvement-temps of the movie screen, further bolstered by references to the
tools and techniques of modern science. See Vasarely, “Manifesto jaune.”

15. See K. G. Pontus Hulten’s “Mouvement-Temps; ou les quatre dimensions de

la plastique cinétique,” in the “Manifesto jaune.”

NOTES
16. Louis-Paul Favre, “Le Mouvement,” Combat, Paris, May 1955, p. 6, MJT.

17. Tinguely, quoted in William Byron, “Wacky Artist of Destruction,” Saturday

Evening Post, April 21, 1962, pp. 76–78.
18. Katherine Kuh, “Recent Kinetic Art,” in Kepes, Nature and Art of Motion, 328
p. 116.

19. Fletcher Benton, quoted in “The Movement Movement,” Time Magazine,

January 28, 1966, p. 69.

20. Ibid., p. 93.

21. Hulten had worked on the exhibition for some four years before he saw its
realization, and like René’s Le Mouvement it included Calder and Duchamp,
Tinguely, Vasarely, and Soto, as well as Robert Rauschenberg (who had just
won the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale) and Jasper Johns.

22. George Rickey, “Morphology of Movement,” in Kepes, Nature and Art of

Motion, p. 81.

23. See, for example, Sigvard Strandh on the history of kinematics (in the
work of André-Marie Ampère, Gustave-Gaspard Coriolis, and Charles Nicolas
Peaucellier), in A History of the Machine (New York: A & W Publishers, 1979).

24. Our key example here is the writing of the sculptor and erstwhile critic
George Rickey, perhaps the best-known American kinetic artist of the sixties.
His essays on the subject were inevitably steeped in references to Russian
Constructivism. Rickey had a certain claim to stake in the widespread, inter-
national interest in constructivism among ixties artists. Camilla Gray had just
published her groundbreaking The Russian Experiment in Art in 1962, and the
constructivist content of her book found an especially engaged audience with
minimalism’s best-known figures. Five years after Gray’s publication, Rickey
himself authored a widely read account of the movement in which Constructiv-
ism served as the key model for postwar kinetic developments, a position he
would reiterate in other contexts. The figures of Anton Pesvner and Naum
Gabo were especially critical to his account.
Yet in his efforts to draw an unwavering and direct line between postwar
kinetic art and Russian Constructivism, Rickey forced the issue in one critical
respect: Gabo and Pesvner were not full-fledged participants in the Soviet avant-
garde and could not in any convincing way be identified as constructivists. The
brothers themselves declared their work to be at some remove from the move-
ment’s most cherished formal and political values. And yet it was their name, as
Christina Lodder put it well, “that became synonymous with Russian Construct-
ivism in the West.” Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 34–42. Rickey’s book played its fair share in
promoting this equation, at least in the artistic circles of mid-sixties America.
See George Rickey, Constructivism (New York: George Braziller, 1967), p. 81.

25. No account of the relation between prewar and postwar artistic practice
would be complete without acknowledging Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-
Garde. Here, the German literary critic considered the changed status of the
“historical” avant-garde—that is, the prewar avant-garde of Dada and
 329 Duchamp—in relation to its postwar iteration as the “neo-avant-garde.”
His argument is organized around the claim that the principle aspiration
of the historical avant-garde was to negate the institution of art as bourgeois
autonomy, and to eliminate the distance between art and life as such. In opposi-
tion to the historical avant-garde, the neo-avant-garde represents a significantly
different turn in its critical intentions. For Bürger, this is a function of how the
avant-garde’s former provocation has now been assimilated as art, reabsorbed
by the very culture industry against which it protested in the first place. And by
virtue of the neo-avant-garde’s compromised status toward the institutions of
art—that which the historical avant-garde sought to demolish—he saw the
contemporary art as unable to sublate the distance between art and life that
was the historical avant-garde’s principle task. Peter Bürger, The Theory of the
Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1984), p. 49.
Bürger’s argument allows us to frame kinetic art’s prewar and postwar
iterations as a historiographic issue and so to challenge the seamless historicist
trajectory connecting the earlier moment to the later, as well as the claims that
kinetic art was implicitly progressive. By extension, it also illuminates the
ambivalence that courses throughout kinetic art’s fifties and sixties reception:
its Janus-faced role as either regressive or futuristic in both its attitudes and
ambitions.

26. In opposition to Bürger’s thesis, Hal Foster argues that the neo-avant-garde
turns less around repetition than a kind of recognition of the avant-garde for
the first time. He suggests that the contours of the historical avant-garde were
neither defined nor coherent in its contemporary moment and that it is only
with the latency of the neo-avant-garde that the anti-institutional mission of the
earlier moment is fully articulated. Far from being bad repetition, Foster’s model
is a reading of history as Nachträglichkeit (the Freudian notion of deferred action
or belatedness linked to repression). This point enables him to restore to the
practice of contemporary art some of its potential as critical intervention, not
merely a tired rehearsal of a long-dead avant-garde, a point that has marked
applications for postwar kinetic art. Hal Foster, “Who’s Afraid of the Neo-Avant-
Garde,” in The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).

27. Willem Sandberg, quoted in “For Movement’s Sake,” Newsweek, March 13,
1961, p. 9.

28. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 172.

29. Ibid., p. 173.

NOTES
30. John Canaday, “Odd Kind of Art: Thoughts on Destruction and Creation after
a Suicide in the Garden,” New York Times, March 23, 1960.

31. Toffler, Future Shock, pp. 176–177.

32. Toffler was roundly criticized as being technologically deterministic, a pop 330
sociologist, and an alarmist of social forecasting. See Robert Claiborne, “Future
Schlock,” Nation, January 25, 1971, pp. 117–120. Also see Etting E. Morrison,
“Book Review: What to Do Today before Tomorrow Gets You,” New York Times
Book Review, July 26, 1970, pp. 3, 20; and Marc Bornstein, “Book Review:
Future Shock,” Technology and Culture 12 (1971): 532–536.

33. See, for example, Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World: The
Significance, Scope, and Limits of the Drive towards Global Uniformity, trans.
Rosemary Morris (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996).
Historicizing the phenomenon or process known as globalization
has generated enormous debate among political philosophers, economists,
historians, and social scientists and theorists (not to mention politicians, activ-
ists, corporate heads, etc.). We can agree at the outset that the term is not
monolithic but multivocal, particularly given the range of uses to which it is
put in the service of industry and politics. In the World-Systems Analysis of
Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi, what some regard as a con-
temporary phenomenon (e.g., a postwar phenomenon) in fact has its roots
within early modernism, a function of colonial expansion in the age of
exploration. For Wallerstein in particular, globalization only represents the
latest incarnation of a massive historical shift. See Immanuel Wallerstein,
“World-Systems Analysis and the Social Sciences,” in The Essential Wallerstein
(New York: New Press, 2000), pp. 71–185.
By contrast, others argue that globalization represents a quantitative
shift in relationships of power and the movement of capital. Although the
rhetoric often deployed to justify military and economic expansion has its roots
in historical juridical traditions (e.g. the notion of the “Just War”), some argue
its contemporary articulation is fundamentally different from the logic of
imperialism. For Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, this is due in part to changed
notions of sovereignty in late capitalism relative to the power of the multitude
and its efforts to reclaim “the revolutionary plane of immanence.” For them,
globalization (what they call Empire) is less a function of imperialism than a
partial response to the revolutions that arose in opposition to such forms of
historical oppression. Empire, then, is a condition resulting from the liberation
of the multitude from previous structures of domination and control; the
deterritorialization of power that is Empire emerges in confrontation with
movements that have historically challenged the sovereignty of the nation-state.
Significantly, Hardt and Negri stress the role of communications media in
the expanding networks of power foundational to Empire. As they write, “The
development of communications networks has an organic relationship to the
emergence of the new world order—it is, in other words, effect and cause,
product and producer. Communication not only expresses but also organizes
the movement of globalization. It organizes the movement by multiplying and
structuring interconnections through networks. It expresses the movement and
 331 controls the sense and direction of the imaginary that runs throughout these
communicative connections; in other words, the imaginary is guided and
channeled within the communicative machine.” Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 32.
Indeed, we need note a marked intensification in the relationship
between expanding media technologies and global capital in the postwar era.
This is a historical moment that bears witness to the founding of both the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund at the Bretton Woods conference in
1944; it is a moment commonly described in terms of the rise of global media.
On that history, see Armand Van Dormael, Bretton Woords: Birth of a Monetary
System (London: Macmillan, 1978). Although Terence K. Hopkins and Waller-
stein depart from those readings of globalization which describe its effects as
wholly distinct from earlier movements of international capital, they recognize a
particular shift in the postwar economy. As discussed in note 17 to the preface,
they observed, “When we look at the period 1945–1990, we immediately notice
a few things about it. It starts out as a period of incredible global expansion
which then slows down. It starts out as the period of unquestioned US
hegemony in the world-system and then this hegemony begins to decline.”
Terrence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein “The World System: Is There a
Crisis?,” in The Age of Transition: Trajectory of the World System, 1945–2025,
London: Zed Books, 1996, p. 9; also see Wallerstein, “The Global Picture,” in
the same volume, pp. 209–225. For a reading that considers globalization largely
in terms of global media, see Edward S. Herman and Robert W. McChesney, “The
Rise of the Global Media,” in The Global Media (London: Cassell, 1997).

34. In 1958, Tinguely had a joint show at the Galerie Iris Clert with Yves Klein
in which the two friends collaborated in making six monochrome discs painted
in Klein’s famously patented “International Klein Blue.” In 1959 he was to have
five shows in Europe, including the Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf (January–
March), Galerie Iris Clert in Paris (July), the Biennale in Paris (October), the
Kaplan Gallery in London (October/November), and finally, an infamous
performance at the ICA in London on November 13.

35. Leafleting and psychological warfare were twinned operations. The

American Ad Hoc Committee of the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee
established the terms of psychological warfare through the operations of
leafleting during World War II: “The planned use, during time of war, or threat
of war, of all measures, exclusive of armed conflict, designed to influence the
thought, morale, or behavior of a given foreign group in such a way as to
support the accomplishment of our military or national aim, with the following
objectives: (1) To assist in overcoming the enemy’s will to fight; (2) To sustain
the morale of friendly groups in countries occupied by the enemy; (3) To
NOTES improve the morale of friendly countries and the attitudes of neutral countries
toward the United States.” Note how the definition is explicit about shifting the
attitudes of neutral countries toward the United States through leafleting.
Quoted in James Morris Erdmann, U.S.A.A.F. Leaflet Operations in the ETO 332
during World War II, Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, University of
Colorado, 1969, p. 558. On the Allied Forces’ leafleting operations as
psychological warfare, also see Karlheinz Ossendorf, Wahrheiten flatterten von
Himmel: Flugblätter als psychologische Kriegswaffe (Siegburg: Rheinlandia Verlag,
1995); Klaus Kirchner, Flugblatt—Propaganda im 2.Weltkrieg: Flugblätter aus den
USA 1943/44 (Erlangen: Verlag D+C, 1977).

36. Jean Tinguely, “Manifesto for Statics,” reprinted in Zero (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1969), p. 119.

37. In a longer, and more descriptive version of the “Manifesto,” delivered as

part of a performance staged at the ICA in London that same year, Tinguely ar-
gued even more vociferously that time is not something to possess or own
and that acknowledgment of the state of impermanence should lead not to a
state of resignation but the celebration of instability. For the full statement, see
K. G. Pontus Hulten, Meta /Jean Tinguely (London: Thames and Hudson,
1975), p. 79.

38. Ibid., p. 79.

39. Leon Bargit, The Age of Automation: The BBC Reuth Lectures (London:
Weidenfeld, 1964), p. 19.

40. Automation: A Report on the Technical Trends and Their Impact on Manage-
ment and Labor (London: Department of Scientific and Industrial Research,
1956), pp. 2–3.

41. Bargit, Age of Automation, pp. 14–17.

42. The formulation is associated with Daniel Bell’s theses on “end of ideology”
on the one hand, and the coming “Post-industrial” Society, on the other. Bell’s
prognosis transcends historiographic issues, for his thesis of a society that is
beyond industry bears marked implications for the question of labor. To suggest
that capitalism has entered wholly into a paradigm of a service economy is to
justify its neoliberalism and repress the continuing viability of labor issues. Not
surprisingly, Bell has come under heaviest attack by Marxists. See Daniel Bell,
The Coming of Post-industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York:
Basic Books, 1973).

43. Bargit, Age of Automation, pp. 24–25.

44. Ibid., p. 1.

45. John F. Kennedy, cited in Automation and Technological Change, ed. John T.
Dunlop (New York: American Assembly, Columbia University, 1962), p. 1.

46. Marshall McLuhan, “Automation: Learning a Living,” in Understanding Media:

The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 346–347.
 333 47. William R. Byron, “Wacky Artist of Destruction,” Saturday Evening Post,
April 21, 1962, pp. 76–78.

48. Ibid., p. 76.

49. John Rydon, “Mr. Tinguely Puts on a Show of Self-Propelled art,” Daily
Express, London, Wednesday, October 14, 1959, MJT.

50. Ibid.

51. p. A. Illustré section in Paris Match, 1959, “Art Mecanisé: Debuts a la

Biennale de Paris,” MJT.

52. Jean-Jacques Leveque, ed., dossier on “Procès de L’automatisme,” Sens

Plastique, unpaginated, October 1959, no. 8I, Paris.

53. Or, as another responded sarcastically to the question, “Non, je répète que
cette exposition de Tinguely ne met pas plus en question l’art que les machines
cybernétiques ne mettent en question la cervelle humaine.” Ibid.

54. Guy Dornand, “En Attendant le Salon des Robots,” Le Hors-Cote 5, no. 145
(August 5, 1959), MJT; and Guy Donard, “Des ‘Nouvelles Réalités’ à la peinture
des robots,” Liberation, no. 2 (July 30, 1959), MJT. For articles that dismiss the
artist as yet another example of the ridiculousness of the avant-garde, see
“Whirr! Splash! And There’s a Work of Art,” Evening Telegraph and Post
(Dundee), November 4, 1959, MJT.

55. Michael Shepherd, “Tinguely,” Art News and Review 11, no. 41 (October 24,
1959): 7, 10.

56. In purple prose, Shepard remarked on the Meta-matics’ historical appear-

ance: “For the artist, space was forever altered as a medium; and could he ignore
time? . . . So do-it-yourself, ushered in by the age of automation to fill and round
out our modern-Morris lives, joins hands with automation itself, to enable
Tinguely’s visitors to participate in this activity and in the eternal present and
nonstop Time, thanks to this visionary who believes that while floating down
the river of time we should not throw our anchors or photograph the beauty of
the banks, but instead, accept the flow.” Ibid.

57. Byron, “Wacky Artist of Destruction,” p. 77.

58. “M. Tinguely a déjà vendu plusieurs exemplaires de son appareil à de riches
Américains. Ceux-ci trouvent le Meta-matics très amusant.” p. A. Illustré section
in Paris Match, 1959, “Art Mécanisé: Débuts à la Biennale de Paris,” MJT.

59. Waverly Root, “The Fine Art of Press Agentry,” Washington Post, Sunday
June 2, 1963, p. E5. See, for example, Ward, “Press the Button and out Pops Art.”
NOTES
60. Jean Durieux and Charles Courriere, “Danny Kaye découvre la machine à
faire de la peinture,” Paris Match, no. 548 (October 10, 1959): 98–99. See also
Art Buchwald, “The Latest Thing in Abstract Art,” New York Herald Tribune 334
(Paris), June 3, 1959, p. 5.

61. Pol Bury in conversation with the author, Paris, France, July 12, 2000.

62. Bury interviewed by Peter Selz in Selz, Pol Bury (Berkeley: University Art
Museum, UC Berkeley, 1970), p. 4.

63. Bury, “Time Dilated,” republished in Dore Ashton, Pol Bury (Paris: Maeght
Editeur, 1970), p. 107.

64. Bury, reprinted in Selz, Pol Bury, p. 6.

65. Eugene Ionesco, ibid., p. 14.

66. Pol Bury in conversation with the author, Paris, July 12, 2000.

67. Selz in Pol Bury, p. 4.

68. Ibid., p. 4.

69. On Bergson and photography, see Marta Braun, Picturing Time: the Work of
Etienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992);
on Bergson, see Gille Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans.Hugh Tomlinson (New York:
Zone Books, 1988).

70. See Mary McAllester Jones, ed., Gaston Bachelard: Subversive Humanist
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 29.

71. Henri Bergson, “Unorganized Bodies,” in Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur

Mitchell (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1998), pp. 9–10.

72. Bury in conversation with the author, Paris, July 12, 2000.

73. Bury’s conception of slowness echoes Bachelard’s rhetoric in L’Air et les

Songes and La Dialectique de la durée. In the former book, part of a series
devoted to the relationship between natural phenomena and the psychology
of the imagination, Bachelard took on the subjects of the air—clouds, the sky,
constellations, the wind—in order to reflect upon the movement of the imagina-
tion. Aerial imagery, in other words, provides a metaphor for the reach of
subjective thought, both its mutability (as in the drifting of clouds) and its
aspirations. For Bachelard, imagination and the mobility of images were
inextricably linked; imagination was, first and foremost, a “type of spiritual
mobility.” In his earlier study L’Eau et les rêves, Bachelard studied the imagery
of water to consider how “the imagination projects intimate impressions on
the outside world.” In his subsequent readings of aerial flight and the heavens,
soaring eagles and nebulae, imagination takes on a sublimating force, centered
less around “intimate” impressions than the elevation of the “entire being.”
Gaston Bachelard, L’Air et les Songes: Essai sur l’imagination du mouvment
(Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1943), p. 11.
 335 74. Jones, Gaston Bachelard: Subversive Humanist, p. 27.

75. Gaston Bachelard, from L’Intuition de l’instant, in ibid., pp. 34–35.

76. George Canguillhem, “The History of Science,” in A Vital Rationalist: Selected

Writings by George Canguillhem (New York: Zone books, 1994), p. 32. For a
shorter summation of the problems offered in both, see Gaston Bachelard,
“Continuité ou Discontinuité?” in Épistémologie: Textes choisis (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1971), pp. 185–195.

77. Hence critics have suggested that Bachelard’s formulation of rupture antici-
pated Thomas Kuhn’s notion of the paradigm shift. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

78. Bachelard, from “Essai sur la connaissance approchée,” reprinted in Jones,

p. 21.

79. Ibid., p. 5.

80. Eugene Ionesco, “Pol Bury,” in Selz, Pol Bury, p. 14.

81. See Kristine Stiles on Gustav Metzger in “Uncorrupted Joy: International Art
Actions,” in Paul Schimmel, Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object
(Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998).

82. David Medalla in conversation with the author, London, June 28, 2000.

83. Guy Brett in conversation with the author, London, June 26, 2000.

84. Editorial, Signalz: Newsbulletin of the Centre for Advanced Creative Study
(London) 1. no. 1 (August 1964): 1.

85. Guy Brett in conversation with the author, June 27, 2000; David Medalla in
conversation with the author, London, June 29, 2000.

86. Werner Heisenberg, “The Role of Modern Physics in the Present

Development of Human Thinking,” in Signals 1, no. 9 (August–September–
October 1965): 3.

87. Paul Keeler, Announcement in Signals (February–March 1965): 12.

88. Guy Brett in conversation with the author (August 1964): London, June 26,
2000.

89. First Signals Newsbulletin, no. 1 2.

90. Guy Brett, in conversation with the author, London, June 26, 2000.

91. Marcel Duchamp, in Peter Selz, “Press Release of the Museum of Modern
NOTES
Art: no. 27 for release Friday, March 18, 1960,” Archives of the Museum of
Modern Art, New York.

92. “Homage to New York?” Time, March 28, 1960, p. 40.

93. For a more technical, “behind the scenes” account of the Homage, see Billy 336
Klüver, “The Garden Party,” reprinted in Video Culture: A Critical Investigation,
ed. John Hanhardt (Layton, Utah: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1986).

94. Peter Selz, “Press Release of the Museum of Modern Art: no. 27 for release
Friday, March 18, 1960.”

95. Letter from Walt Disney Corporation to Jean Tinguely, April 1960, MJT.

96. “Homage to New York?” p. 40.

97. John Canaday, “Machine Tries to Die for Its Art,” New York Times, March 18,
1960, p. 1.

98. Editorial, “Tinguely’s Contraption,” Nation, March 26, 1960, MJT.

99. Herbert Marcuse, “Affirmative Character of Culture,” in Negations: Essays in

Critical Theory (London: Free Association Press, 1988), pp. 88–137.

100. “Da Kunsten sprang I lufte,” Ekstra Bladet (Copenhagen), September 23,
1961, MJT.

101. The first telecast of the show was in October 1961; its last regular program
was presented on August 26, 1963. The show was well received by the critics: it
won Emmy awards in both 1962 and 1963 as the best public affairs series on
television. Its viewership, however, was relatively low. Ratings for the week of
Tinguely’s broadcast are unavailable, but as we shall see, the event itself was
well documented by the print media. See Tim Brooks and Earl Marsh, The
Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows: 1946–Present, rev. ed.
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1981), p. 185.

102. A comparison between television consumption in the United States,

England, France, and Germany is instructive here. From 1952 to 1962, the year
that Tinguely broadcast his performance, the percentage of American house-
holds with television jumped from 34.2 to 90; some 48,855,000 homes owned
a TV at the time of the study. Corbett S. Steinberg, TV Facts (New York: Facts
on File, 1980), p. 142. The statistics are only slightly lower in Great Britain;
the “size of the television public” in 1962 is at 88 percent. See John Corner, ed.
Popular Television in Britain (London: BFI Publishing, 1991), p. 161. In Germany
and France, television consumption is far lower. In 1964, only 41 homes owned
TV for every 100 households in Germany. For more statistics, see Walter Giott,
Medien im Wettstreit (Münster: Verlag Regensberg, 1979), pp. 20–21; and Hervé
Michel, Les grandes dates de la télévision française (Paris: Que Sais-Je?, 1995),
p. 47.

103. On the history of the Nevada Test Site, see Terrence R. Fehner and F. H.
Gosling, Origin of the Nevada Test Site, United States Department of Energy,
December 2000; National Nuclear Safety Administration, Nevada Test Site Guide,
United States Department of Energy, November 2000.
 337 104. David Brinkley, David Brinkley’s Journal, NBC, April 6, 1962.

105. Ibid.

106. Samuel Weber, “Television, Set, and Screen,” Mass Mediauras: Form,
Technics, Media (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996).

107. As it turned out, life would prove far stranger than art. Over the years,
the Atomic Energy Commission hosted some dozen spectacles at Yucca Flats
that saw VIPs watch atomic bomb test explosions from the “safety” of nearby
bleachers.

108. V. Silantev, “The Grimaces of Bourgeois Society: An Abstract Artist with

an Atom Bomb,” trans. in K. G. Pontus Hulten, Meta/Jean Tinguely, p. 246. On
the European reception of this article, see René Barotte, “Ce bricoleur est un
criminel de guerre,” Paris-Presse, May 1, 1963, p. 3d.

Chapter 3: Bridget Riley’s Eye/Body Problem

A version of the chapter was published in October 98 (MIT Press) (Fall 2001):
26–46.
Some of the references taken from the Archives of the Museum of Modern
Art, New York, are incomplete with respect to page numbers: the information
was not available from the preserved documents.

1. Felix Fénéon, as paraphrased by Bridget Riley, in “The Experience of Painting

(talking to Mel Gooding)” in The Eye’s Mind: Bridget Riley Collected Writings,
1965–1999, ed. Robert Kudielka (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), p. 125.

2. See, for example, Bridget Riley, “The Hermaphrodite,” reprinted in The Eye’s
Mind: Bridget Riley Collected Writings, 1965–1999, ed. Robert Kudielka (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1999), p. 61.

3. Jack Burnham, “The Art of Bridget Riley,” Tri-Quarterly, no. 5 (1966): 60–72.

4. On Op’s distinction from kinetic art, see Stephen Bann, “Unity and Diversity
in Kinetic Art,” in Kinetic Art: Four Essays by Stephen Bann, Reg Gadney, Frank
Popper, and Philip Steadman (New York: Motion Books, 1966), p. 49.

5. On Op’s relation to the prewar avant-garde, see Sidney Tillim, “Optical Art:
Pending or Ending,” ARTS, (January 1965): 16–23.

6. It is a suggestive that George Rickey played a role in the museological

formation of Op art, as he had with kinetic art. The catalog to the Responsive
Eye thanks the artist in the foreword for his help in developing the show and
NOTES furnishing the names of potential artists and contributors. William C. Seitz,
The Responsive Eye (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1965).
7. Jon Borgzinner, “Op Art: Pictures That Attack the Eye,” Time Magazine, 338
October 23, 1964, pp. 78–86.

8. “Op: Adventure without Danger,” Newsweek, March 1, 1965, unpaginated,

Archives of the Museum of Modern Art, New York (hereafter MoMA Archives).

9. The popularity of the Responsive Eye was maximized by related traveling

exhibitions organized by MoMA, including Bridget Riley: Drawings, 1966.

10. William Seitz, “The New Perceptual Art,” Vogue, February 15, 1965,
pp. 141–142.

11. Ibid., p. 142.

12. Ibid., pp. 141–142.

13. See, e.g., Gerald Oster and Yasumori Nishijima, “Moiré Patterns,” Scientific
American, May 1963, pp. 54–63.

14. See, e.g., David Sylvester, “Fences,” in New Statesmen, May 25, 1962, p. 770;
and Norbert Lynton, “London Letter,” Art International 7, no. 8 (October 1963):
84–87.

15. “Development as a Painter,” in Kudielka, Eye’s Mind, p. 62.

16. “The Experience of Painting,” in Kudielka, Eye’s Mind, p. 125

17. On “slow” and “fast” painting, see Bridget Riley, “In Conversation with
Maurice de Sausmarez (1967),” in Kudielka, Eye’s Mind, p. 51.

18. Ibid., p. 80.

19. Ibid., p. 84.

20. Eugenia Sheppard, “Inside Fashion: At a Loss for Words,” New York Herald
Tribune, March 5, 1965, p. 15, MoMA Archives, MN#98034, Reel #34, no page
number given unless otherwise noted.

21. Ann Ryan, London Bureau, “Interview with Bridget Riley,” Women’s Wear
Daily, Tuesday, May 11, 1965, p. 4.

22. Ibid., p.5.

23. Ibid.

24. For the full account of this story, see Eugenia Sheppard, “Inside Fashion:
At a Loss for Words,” New York Herald Tribune, p. 15.

25. Ryan, “Interview with Bridget Riley,” p. 5.

26. Bridget Riley, “Perception is the Medium,” Art News 64, no. 6 (October
1965): 32–33.

27. Eugenia Sheppard, “Inside Fashion: Come in Two Ties,” Herald American
(Syracuse, N.Y.), March 7, 1965, MoMA Archives.
 339 28. Ibid.

29. Jean Noe, “Fashion Flips over Op-Pop,” Chicago, American, April 4, 1965,
MoMA Archives.

30. See, e.g., Women’s Wear Daily (New York), February 26, 1965, MoMA
Archives.

31. Angela Taylor, “Op Art Opens up New Design Vistas,” New York Times, Febru-
ary 16, 1965, MoMA Archives.

32. On the domestic and its relationship to art history, see the essays in Not at
Home: The Suppression of the Domestic in Modern Art and Architecture, ed.
Christopher Reed (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996); also see Dirt and
Domesticity (exhibition catalog), Whitney Independent Study Program (New
York: Whitney Museum, 1992).

33. Alice Hughes, “A Woman’s New York,” Eagle (Reading, Penn.), February 16,
1965, MoMA Archives.

34. Grace Glueck, “Ripples on the Retina,” New York Times, February 28, 1965,
MoMA Archives.

35. Sheppard, “Inside Fashion,” p. 15.

36. Bridget Riley, “Personal Interview with Nikki Henriques,” in Kudielka, Eyes
Mind, p. 21.

37. Robert Melville, “The Riley Dazzle,” Architectural Review, October 1971,
p. 225.

38. Walter Benjamin, The Arcade Projects, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1999), p. 80.

39. See, for example, Robert Coates on the speed with which movements
accelerated in and out of the art world. Robert Coates, “The Art Galleries,” New
Yorker, March 27, 1965, p. 161. Also see Barbara Rose, “Beyond Vertigo: Optical
Art at the Modern,” Artforum, no. 7 (April 1965): 30–33. On Op and the speed
of the times, Rose recommended, “Paradoxically enough, in a time of such
constant flux and change in art, it is possible that the most ‘modern’ thing
the Museum of Modern art could do would be to emphasize, with its historical
program, the many traditions of modern art rather than attempt to reflect the
hectic day-to-day situation in the art world.”

40. Joyce Hopkirk, “A Plain Guide to Op,” Woman’s Journal (London) February
1966, pp. 26–29.
NOTES
41. Thomas Hess, “You Can Hang it in the Hall,” Art News, April 1965, pp. 41–
43, 49–50.

42. Hopkirk, “A Plain Guide to Op.”

43. Ibid. 340

44. Alice Hughes, “A Woman’s New York” Eagle (Reading, Pa.), February 16,
1965, p. 28.

45. See, e.g., “Op? Urp.” Miami Herald, July 25, 1965, MoMA Archives.

46. Kudielka, The Eye’s Mind, p. 59.

47. Riley, “Interview with David Sylvester,” in Kudielka, Eye’s Mind, pp. 70–79.

48. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1990), p. 19.

49. Karl Marx cited in Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 62.

50. Clement Greenberg, “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” in Art and Culture
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), p. 157.

51. Lisa J. Corrin, “Continuum: Bridget Riley’s 60s and 70s: A View from the
90s,” in Bridget Riley: Paintings from the 1960s and 1970s (London: Serpentine
Gallery, 1999), pp. 35–43.

52. Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in The Collected Essays and

Criticism, vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, ed. John O’Brian.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1986).

53. Rosalind Krauss, “Afterthoughts on Op,” Arts International 9, no. 5 (June

1965): 75–76.

54. Ibid., p. 75.

55. Ibid.

56. Ibid.

57. Ibid.

58. To follow Ehrenzweig, “Just because much optical art is intellectually con-
trolled it throws the final transformation into sharper relief.” Anton Ehrenzweig,
“The Pictorial Space of Bridget Riley,” Art International 9, no. 1 (February 1965):
20–24.

59. Ibid., p. 24.

60. Frances Spalding, “The Poetics of Instability,” in Bridget Riley: Paintings from
the 1960s and 1970s (London: The Serpentine Gallery, 1999), p. 18.

61. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” The Visible and

the Invisible (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 134.

62. Borgzinner, “Op Art: Pictures that Attack the Eye.”

 341 63. See, e.g., Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1996); and Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1993).

64. There is an almost site-specific dimension to the reception of Op generally

and Riley specifically. The British press, for instance, made virtually no allusions
at all to technology or science in the reviews of her work, nor to media culture at
large. Nor was she considered an “Op” artist to the extent that she was labeled
in the United States.

65. On Ellul’s reception, see Katherine Temple, “The Sociology of Jacques Ellul,”
Research in Philosophy and Technology 3 (1980): 223–261.

66. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage, 1964), p. 380.

67. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto

Press, 1995; originally published 1962), p. 24.

68. For the most incisive critique of McLuhan’s technological determinism, see
Raymond Williams, “Effects of the Technology and Its Uses,” in Television:
Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), pp. 126–130.

69. Marshall McLuhan, “Television: The Timid Giant,” in Understanding Media:

The Extensions of Man (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997; originally published 1964),
p. 308.

70. Ibid., p. 328.

71. On the differential specificity of medium in the visual arts, see Rosalind
Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-medium Condition
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1999).

72. Samuel Weber, “Television: Set and Screen,” in Mass Mediauras: Form,
Technics, Media (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 114.

73. Ibid., pp. 114–115.

74. Thomas Hess, “You Can Hang It in the Hall,” pp. 41–43, 49–50.

75. Ibid., p. 43.

76. Barbara Rose, “Beyond Vertigo: Optical Art at the Modern,” Artforum,
pp. 30–33.

77. Hess, “You Can Hang It in the Hall,” p. 49.

78. The distinction between science and technology represents one of the
fundamental debates in the philosophy of technology. For an introduction
NOTES
to the problem, see James K. Feibleman, “Pure Science, Applied Science, and
Technology: An Attempt at Definitions,” in Philosophy and Technology, ed. Carl
Mitcham and Robert McKay (London: Free Press, 1982), pp. 33–41. Note that
Seitz uses the terms interchangeably.
79. Borgzinner, “Op Art.” As the critic noted, “Much Op art is removed from the 342
artist’s subjective discovery. It is the result of a mechanical muse, and the artist
becomes a computer programmer churning out visual experiences.” For Op’s
supporters, this sense of “programming” stemmed from Op’s scientificity and
its aesthetics of impersonality, seen to be critical of the emotional excesses
attributed to abstract expressionism. Or, as William Seitz wrote, “the
technologically oriented perceptual artist speaks of the units repeated in his
work as ‘information’ and their arrangements as ‘programming.’” Seitz, “New
Perceptual Art,” pp. 141–142.

80. Vasarely was perhaps the best-known Op artist who spoke of his work in
terms of programming, which he justified as cybernetic. See, e.g., Werner Spies,
Vasarely (New York: Harry Abrams, 1971), p. 127. Programming, of course, is
also a term associated with mind control and brainwashing.
Michel Foucault’s reading of the historical shift from a disciplinary society
to the society of control (e.g., his famous model of the “Panopticon” and the
thematics of surveillance) also bears enormous relevance here. For him the
modern subject internalizes and thus generates the mechanics of social control—
what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call “Biopower” or “Biopolitical Produc-
tion.” Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York:
Vintage, 1979).
On Op’s objectivity, see, John Canaday, “Art that Pulses, Quivers and
Fascinates,” New York Times, February 21, 1965, sec. B., p. 57.

81. Canaday, “Art That Pulses,” p. 57.

82. Seitz, “New Perceptual Art,” p. 141.

83. David Thompson and Bridget Riley, Studio International 182, no. 935 (July–
August 1971): 16–21.

84. On behaviorism and control, see B. F. Skinner, “The Question of Control,” in

About Behaviorism (New York: Vintage Press, 1974), pp. 208–227; and Gardener
C. Quatron, “Deliberate Efforts to Control Human Behavior and Modify Per-
sonality,” in Toward the Year 2000: Work in Progress, ed. Daniel Bell (Boston:
Beacon Press and the Daedalus Library, American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
1967), pp. 205–221. My use of the term behaviorism approximates the popular
understanding (or perhaps, strong misreading) of behavioral psychology as a
disciplinary technique commonly associated with Pavlovian experiments and
rats caged in Skinner boxes. Its supporters in the 1960s and 1970s, however,
regarded behaviorism as the most scientific means to counter the insistence of
mentalism within psychology. Even still, Skinner’s attempts to consider behavior-
ism as a way to improve social relations can be understood in terms of a longer
historical tradition of social engineering.

85. Max Kozloff, “Commotion of the Retina,” Nation, March 22, 1965,
pp. 316–318.
 343 86. “Editorial Page: The Painful Eye,” Richmond News Leader, March 6, 1965,
pp. 8–9.

87. On Op’s sensuous “habituations,” see Hess, “You Can Hang It in the Hall.”

88. Cherill Anderson, “Op Art’s Tiny Time Pill,” Morning Sun (Baltimore),
April 12, 1965, MoMA Archives.

89. Speaking to Op’s potentially liberatory consequences, David Bourdon

suggested that Op might provide a “visionary” solution to the anesthetizing
affects of a culture that was already numb: “I think that one of the underlying
reasons for the interest in Op art is a yearning for deeper, more physiological
sensations to replace sensibilities that have become numbed. . . . Dr. Oster
believes that moiré patterns provide a way of experiencing the effects of
hallucination—producing drugs without the drugs.” David Bourdon, “Art:
Dr. Oster’s Moirés,” Village Voice, February 11, 1965, MoMA Archives.

90. Kozloff, “Commotion of the Retina,” p. 316

91. See, e.g., Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: Da Capo Press,
1970). I am indebted to the scholarship of both David Joselit and Branden
Joseph, whose respective accounts on the EPI (Exploding Plastic Inevitable) and
expanded media bear enormous relevance for this chapter and throughout this
book. Joselit’s research in psychedelics has proven especially inspiring to my
reading. See, e.g., David Joselit, “Yippie Pop: Abbie Hoffman, Andy Warhol, and
Sixties Media Politics” and Branden W. Joseph, “My Mind Split Open: Andy
Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” both in Grey Room 8 (Summer 2002)
(MIT Press): 62–79, 80–107.

92. In the 1950s and 1960s, LSD was infamously (and covertly) exploited by the
CIA and other governmental agencies as a potential tool of mind control: it was
regarded as among the most technologically advanced “perceptual” weapons of
the Cold War. On this history, see Martin A. Lee and Bruce Schlain, Acid Dreams
(New York: Grove Press, 1985).

93. McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 43.

94. Ibid., p. 47.

95. Not that Schneemann had any connection socially or otherwise to Riley.
On Op, she states flatly, “those weren’t my people,” describing instead the art,
music, performance, and dance community that included the Judson Church
and Allan Kaprow. (Schneemann in conversation with the author. New York,
October 12, 2000.)

96. “It . . . surprises me that some people should see my work as a celebration
NOTES of the marriage of art and science,” she reflected. “I have never made any use of
scientific theory or scientific data.” Bridget Riley, “Perception Is the Medium,”
pp. 32–33.
97. Bridget Riley, “The Hermaphrodite,” in Kudielka, Eye’s Mind, p. 39. 344

98. Riley, “The Artist and Society,” in ibid., p. 40.

99. See, e.g., Michael Kirby, The Art of Time: Essays on the Avant-Garde
(New York: Dutton, 1968). Kirby wrote mostly about performance in this book;
an earlier work on the Happenings demonstrates his allegiance to the rise of this
form of art making in the 1960s.

100. Yayoi Kusama, cited in Alexandra Munroe, “Obsession, Fantasy, and

Outrage: The Art of Yayoi Kusama,” in Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective (exhibit
catalog) (New York: Center for International Contemporary Arts, 1989), p. 14.

101. Carolee Schneemann in conversation with the author, New York, October
12, 2000.

102. Henri Focillon, Life of Forms in Art (Cambridge, Mass., and New York: MIT
Press and Zone Books, 1934), p. 137.

103. Ibid., p. 35.

104. Ibid., p. 31.

105. Ibid., p. 33.

106. Ibid., p. 109.

107. Schneemann in conversation with the author, New York, October 12, 2000.

108. Ibid.

109. Ibid.

110. Ibid.

111. Carolee Schneemann papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles,

Accession no, 95001, series 1, box 1/1960–67, folder 1.7 for Eye-Body 12/63.

112. Schneemann in conversation with the author, New York, October 12, 2000.

113. Carolee Schneemann papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles,

Accession no, 95001, series 1, box 2/1967–71, folder 2.2.

114. Schneemann in conversation with the author, New York, October 12, 2000.

115. On USCO, see Stewart Kranz, Science and Technology in the Arts: A Tour
through the Realm of Science + Art, ed. Margaret Holton (New York: Van Nostrand
Reinhold Book, 1974), p. 262.

116. In developing both performances, Schneemann recalls a “strange aspect

of renunciation was expected” of her, namely, of her capitulating to the demands
or expectations placed upon her as a woman artist. Because USCO was a
collaborative community, no artists signed their name to their work, and they
 345 asked the same of Schneemann with Ghost-Rev. But Schneemann pointed out
that the group was always listed as “Gerd Stern and USCO” and that women
artists were rarely allowed to sign their works, a historical tradition she
attempted to counter in their collaboration. Schneemann in conversation with
the author, New York, October 12, 2000.

117. Carolee Schneemann papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles,

Accession no, 95001, series 3, box 27 correspondence.

118. Schneemann, “Ghost Rev,” in More than Meat Joy, ed. Bruce R. McPherson
(New York: Documentext, 1979), p. 97.

119. Schneemann in conversation with the author, New York, October 12, 2000.

120. Ibid.

121. Ibid.

122. Ibid.

123. As Schneemann puts it, “Continuum . . . the obliteration—which I think

Kusama writes about—I realized that yes, it’s that sense of being obliterated into
your materials. . . . You really disappear into your materials.” Schneemann in
conversation with the author, New York, October 12, 2000.

124. From a typed statement on technical aspects of Snows and E.A.T. (in E.A.T.
Journal). The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Accession no. 940003. As
Schneemann observed: “My problems with technology are concrete, personal;
my difficulties with using technicians are mechanical. I want to work with the
gestures of machines: to expose their mechanical action as part of the total
environment to which it contributes its particular effect. I would like technicians
to be interchangeable with performers whenever possible. The work of the
technicians should become one other action parameter of my work, to be taken
into the form of the whole thing explicitly. For myself this means greater
familiarity with possibilities of available technology and time to explore: a diet
of E.A.T.”

125. Carolee Schneemann papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles,

Accession no. 95001, folder 2.1 b, box 2/1967–71.

126. Schneemann in conversation with the author, New York, October 12, 2000.

127. Ibid.

128. The reference is, of course, to Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle,
which famously articulates the hardening of the commodity form into an all-
pervasive image. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald
NOTES Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994). The paranoia stemming from
a visual culture that has the power to control and even (literally) penetrate the
body will become a staple narrative within postmodernism, as in, for example,
David Cronenberg’s now canonical Videodrome. On Videodrome, see Fredric 346
Jameson, in The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press and the British Film Institute, 1995),
pp. 1–35.

Chapter 4: Ultramoderne: Or, How George Kubler Stole the Time

in Sixties Art

A version of this chapter appeared in Grey Room 2 (MIT Press) (Winter 2001).

1. George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962), p. 18.

2. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society,
2d ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1950), p. 122.

3. Robert Smithson, “The Artist as Site-Seer; or, a Dintorphic Essay,” in Robert

Smithson: Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1996).

4. Robert Smithson, “Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space,” originally

published in Arts Magazine, November 166, reprinted in The Writings of Robert
Smithson, ed. Nancy Holt (New York: New York University Press, 1979 ), p. 32.

5. Ibid., p. 33.

6. See. e.g., Gary Shapiro, Earthworks: Art after Babel (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995), pp. 84–88.

7. Ad Reinhardt, “Art vs. History,” Art News (New York) 64, no. 19, (January
1966): 19–21. See also the reverential letters sent by Asger Jorn, Juan Downey,
and Brian O’Doherty in the Kubler archives speaking on the impact of The Shape
of Time on contemporary artists. George Alexander Kubler Archives, Group no.
843, Accession no. 98-M–103, Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Library, Yale
University, New Haven (hereafter GAKA).

8. George Kubler, undated notes, c. 1981, related to the lecture “The Shape of
Time Reconsidered,” GAKA.

9. On Focillon’s influence, see George Kubler, “Henri Focillon, 1881–1943,” and

“The Teaching of Henri Focillon,” in Studies in Ancient American and European
Art: The Collected Essays of George Kubler, ed. Thomas F. Reese (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 378–381.

10. See, for example, John Howland Rowe, “Review: The Shape of Time: Remarks
on the History of Things,” American Anthropologist 65 (1963), 704–705. Although
Kubler did not formally train with Kroeber, they had a long-standing correspon-
dence. On the relationship between art and anthropology, see George Kubler,
 347 “History—or Anthropology—of Art,” in Reese, Studies in Ancient American and
European Art, pp. 406–412.

11. Heizer’s father was a professor of archaeology at UC Berkeley, where he

specialized in pre-Columbian material. A further interesting connection: as
professional colleagues, Heizer Sr. and Kubler corresponded on occasion. GAKA.

12. The first written example of Smithson’s interest in Kubler is for the working
notes for the neon sculptural piece Eliminator, dating from 1963. See Holt,
Writings of Robert Smithson, p. 327.

13. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” in The Originality of the
Avant-Garde and other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996),
pp. 151–171.

14. Panofsky’s iconographical method was roundly criticized in The Shape of

Time; in spite of this, Panofsky expressed strong admiration for the book. See
letter to Chester Kerr, Director of Yale University Press from Erwin Panofsky,
May 21, 1966, GAKA.
In his archives, Kubler also acknowledged the tribute paid to The Shape of
Time by Siegfried Kracauer. Kracauer had clearly read Kubler’s work sometime
shortly after it was published in 1962, as he died in 1966. His posthumously
published work History: The Last Things before the Last contains a discussion of
Kubler. History: The Last Things before the Last (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1969), pp. 142–150.

15. Provisionally, we could call The Shape of Time a structuralist art history:
Kubler’s relationship to structuralist anthropology and his reading of Thomas
Kuhn’s groundbreaking The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has relevance here.
Kuhn and Kubler met each other on at least one occasion: they presented on the
same panel at a conference on comparative studies at the University of Michigan
in May 1967. On this relationship, see George Kubler, “Comments on Vanguard
Art,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 11, no. 4, (October 1969):
398–402.

16. Kubler, Shape of Time, p. 13.

17. Ibid., p. 40.

18. Ibid., p. 36.

19. Ibid., pp. 11, 62.

20. Ibid., p. 62.

21. Jonathan Barnett, “Art Apart from Style,” Architectural Record (September
NOTES
1962): 58.

22. Kubler, Shape of Time, p. 8.

23. Robert Smithson, “Ultramoderne,” The Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. Jack 348
Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. 66.

24. Kubler, Shape of Time, p. 31.

25. As Kubler remarked, “the historian communicates a pattern which was

invisible to his subjects when they lived it, and unknown to his contemporaries
before he detected it.” Ibid., p. 13.

26. Roland Barthes, “Requichot and His Body,” in The Responsibility of Forms
(Berkelely: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 225–226.

27. Kubler, Shape of Time, p. 160.

28. Caroline Jones, Machine in the Studio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996); and Eugenie Tsai, Robert Smithson Unearthed: Drawings, Collages,
Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

29. Smithson’s reception in the late sixties was not limited to a strict reading
of his works as minimalist, site, or process oriented—his work was consistently
thought of in terms of systems and contemporary technology in addition to
Machine Age culture. See, e.g., the letter exchange from the summer of 1969
between Gyorgy Kepes and Smithson regarding his contribution to Kepes’s
important Vision and Value series, in particular Art and the Environment;
Smithson was invited to MIT to participate on a panel on art and the environ-
ment, a topic that, as promoted by Kepes, had deeply cybernetic implication.
Also see Douglas Davis, letter to Smithson regarding Smithson’s contribution
to the book Beyond Technology (subsequently published as Art and the Future),
Robert Smithson Papers, Roll #3832, Archives for American Art, Washington D.C.
Smithson was also invited to participate in an international exhibition
of artists at the CYAC (centro de arte y communicacio) in São Paulo in 1971,
which was organized in opposition to the official São Paulo Biennale (which
had been boycotted due to Brazilian government’s curtailment of democratic
liberties in the late sixties and early seventies). Like the official American
biennial, organized by Gyorgy Kepes, this particular exhibition concerned new
technology; it was called Art Systems.

30. See L. K. Frank, “Foreword,” Teleological Mechanisms, Annals of the New York
Academy of Sciences 50, no. 4, (October 13, 1948): 189–196.

31. See, e.g., Norbert Wiener, “Time, Communication, and the Nervous System,”
in Teleological Mechanisms: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 50, no. 4
(October 13, 1948): 197–220; “Random Time,” Nature, 181, (1958): 561–562;
“Time and the Science of Organization,” Scientia (1958); see also Wiener’s
edited volume, Cybernetics of the Nervous System: Progress in Brain Research,
vol. 17, (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1965).

32. The study of time took on an institutional dimension in the mid-sixties, and
it frequently had a cybernetic dimension. Of many examples, see the proceed-
 349 ings of the conference “Interdisciplinary Perspectives of Time” held by the
New York Academy of Sciences on January 17–20, 1966. It is worth noting that
among a number of well-known participants (e.g., Isaac Asimov), George Kubler
gave a paper along with several notable cyberneticians; indeed Kubler served as
a discussant on a panel with Heinrich Klüver and Warren S. McCulloch entitled
“Of Tee and Tau.” For some of the papers from that conference, see e.g., Inter-
disciplinary Perspectives of Time, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
138, no. 2 (February 6, 1967). Also see the program notes for the conference
in GAKA.
The mid-sixties also saw the formation of the International Chrono-
sophical Society, later known as the International Society for the Study of
Time, founded in 1965. Kubler was an active member of the society, serving on
its advisory board. The society’s major publication was J. T. Fraser, ed. The Voices
of Time (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1966). Note that Smithson
footnotes this book in “Quasi-Infinities.”

33. For the most comprehensive history on the Macy conferences, see Steve
Joshua Heims, Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America: The Cybernetic
Group, 1946–1953 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991). For a shorter, but no
less important account, see N. Katherine Hayles, “Contesting for the Body of
Information: The Macy Conferences on Cybernetics,” in How We Became Post-
human (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 50–84.

34. Wiener, Cybernetics, p. 15 .

35. Wiener, ibid., p. 155. Note that a sociologist as conservative as Daniel Bell
acknowledged Wiener’s ambivalence over this issue, even as Bell employed
models of information classification to describe the economy. Daniel Bell, “The
Social Framework of the Information Society,” in The Computer Age: A Twenty
Year View, ed. M. L. Dertouzos and J. Moses (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1979), p. 171.

36. Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the
Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1. (Autumn 1994): 253. Also see
N. Katherine Hayles, “Liberal Subjectivity Imperiled: Norbert Wiener and
Cybernetic Anxiety,” in Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, pp. 84–113.

37. See also Norbert Wiener, cited in David Noble, Progress without People: In
Defense of Luddism (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1993), p. 153. My thanks to Allan
Sekula for the reference.

38. For an important exception within the study of architecture, see the work
of Reinhold Martin, as in “The Organizational Complex: Cybernetics, Space,
Discourse,” Assemblage 37 (December 1998): 102–127.
NOTES
39. Jack Burnham, “Systems Aesthetics,” Artforum (September 1968): 35. It
bears saying that Burnham’s place within the history of sixties art remains con-
troversial. Rosalind Krauss’s formative work on modernist sculpture, Passages in
Modern Sculpture, represents an explicit critique of Burnham’s thesis in Beyond 350
Modern Sculpture; she argues against Burnham’s notion that modern sculpture is
anthropomorphic and by extension, mimetic. See Krauss, “Mechanical Ballets:
Light, Motion, Theater,” in Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, Mass.:
The MIT Press, 1977). Edward A. Schenken’s extensive research on Burnham
usefully articulates the relationship between structuralist theory and the notion
of software in his criticism as well as the organization of the Jewish Museum
exhibition. Among other texts on Burnham by the author, see Schenken, “The
House That Jack Built: Jack Burnham’s Concept of ‘Software’ as a Metaphor for
Art,” in Leonardo Electronic Almanac, MIT Press ejournals; 6:10 (November,
1998).

40. See note 15. To repeat: the relationship between Kubler and Kuhn represents
yet another episode during this period in which the disciplines of art history and
science confronted one another.

41. Jack Burnham, “Note on Art and Information Processing,” in Software:

Information Technology. Its Meaning for Art (exhibit catalog) (New York: Jewish
Museum, 1970), p. 10.

42. Baldessari acknowledges the importance of The Shape of Time for his
generation of artists and connects his reading of it to his thinking about Kuhn at
the same time. Baldessari in conversation with the author, February 20, 2000,
San Francisco.
It is hardly coincidental that Burnham cited Kubler on the back jacket of
Beyond Modern Sculpture. Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and
Technology on the Sculpture of This Century (New York: George Brazillier, 1968).
The citation from The Shape of Time reads: “The value of any rapprochement
between the history of art and the history of science is to display the common
traits of invention, change and obsolescence that the material works of artists
and scientists both share in time.”

43. Kubler, Shape of Time, pp. 8–9.

44. Ibid., p. 17.

45. Ibid., p. 31.

46. Robert Smithson, interviewed with Patty Norvell in Flam Robert Smithson:
Collected Writings, p. 194.

47. Wiener, Human Use of Human Beings, pp. 33, 6.

48. Heims, Constructing a Social Science, p. 23.

49. Kubler, Shape of Time, p. 21.

50. Ibid., p. 22.

51. Ibid., p. 61.

 351 52. Wiener, Human Use of Human Beings, p. 134.

53. Ibid., pp. 117–118.

54. Ibid., p. 134.

55. Ibid., p. 134.

56. Ibid., pp. 28–48.

57. Yve-Alain Bois attends to the communicative model of entropy in his writing
on the “formless” in modern art. Yve-Alain Bois, “Entropy,” in Formless: A User’s
Guide, ed. Bois and Rosalind Krauss (New York: Zone Books, 1997). See also
Bois’s discussion of entropy in the word paintings of Ed Ruscha, Edward Ruscha,
Romance with Liquids: Paintings 1966–1969 (New York: Rizzoli and Gagosian
Gallery, 1993).

58. Alison Skye, “Entropy Made Visible,” (interview with Smithson,) in Flam,
Robert Smithson, pp. 301–302.

59. Kubler, Shape of Time, pp. 11, 62.

60. Ibid., p. 124.

61. Sandler’s survey was later published in Flam, Robert Smithson, pp. 329,
with Smithson’s remarks far different from his drafted version. The earliest,
handwritten response by Smithson to his question “Is there an avant-garde
today?” contains lines that were subsequently published in “Quasi-Infinities,”
June 15, 1966, Robert Smithson, Archives of American Art (hereafter RS AAA),
Roll #3832, “Biography, Schedules, Correspondence.”

62. Robert Smithson, unpublished version of “‘Quasi-Infinities’ and the Waning

of Space,” dated October 6, 1966, RS AAA, Roll #3834, 01–1394, “Writings.”

63. To the extent that I am describing Smithson’s text as aphasiac, his essay
might also confirm Fredric Jameson’s diagnosis of postmodernism as a kind of
Lacanian schizophrenia. On schizophrenia, see Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991),
pp. 25–32.

64. Ibid., p. xvii.

65. Ibid., p. xvii. I borrow the expression “endless slide show” from Jameson.

66. George Kubler, undated notes, c. 1981 related to the lecture “The Shape of
Time Reconsidered,” GAKA, box #1, folder #2.

67. George Kubler, “The Shape of Time Reconsidered,” in Reese, Collected Papers
NOTES
of George Kubler, p. 430, n. 12.

68. Robert J. Horvitz, “Toward a Synthetic Overview: A Talk with George Kubler,”
July 7, 1973, unedited transcript of interview later published in Artforum, Oc-
tober 1973, GAKA box #2, Folder “Conversation with G. A. Kubler.”
69. Kubler, Shape of Time, p. 19. 352

70. Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 22.

Chapter 5: Conclusion: The Bad Infinity/ The Longue Durée

1. See, for example, Jay Gleick, Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1999); Jeremy Miller and Michiel Schwartz, eds.,
Speed: Visions of an Accelerated Age (London: Photographer’s Gallery and
Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1998); Doug Aitken and Dean Kuipers, I Am a Bullet:
Scenes from an Accelerating Culture (New York: Crown Publishers, 2000).

2. Peter de Jager, “Doomsday 2000,” Computer World (September 6, 1993):

105–109.

3. Ibid., p. 105.

4. Jay Romano, “Your Home: Dealing with the Y2K Bug,” New York Times,
August 16, 1998, sec. 11, p. 3, col. 1, “Real Estate Desk.”

5. Ibid., p. 3.

6. Travel Advisory, New York Times, October 24, 1999, Sunday, sec. 5, p. 3, col.
3, “Travel Desk.” Japan Rail stopped services a few minutes before midnight,
and Eurostar—the high-speed train that runs under the English Channel—
canceled all services that day.

7. Keith Nuthall, “Countdown to the Millennium: Greenwich Fears Cult Mass

Suicides,” Independent (London), January 17, 1999, “News,” p. 7.

8. Ed Hayward, “Century Turns Uneventful in Yawning of Millennium: Y2K

Fears Unfounded as Calendar Hits 2000,” Boston Herald Sunday, January 2,
2000, p. 6.

9. On the one hand, Francis Fukiyama proclaimed in the late eighties that the
rise of liberal democracy signaled the “end of history.” On the opposite side of
the spectrum, Fredric Jameson described the seeming loss of a sense of history
through the logic of late capitalism, drawing upon the Marxian time frame of
the economist Ernst Mandel. Hal Foster, who has done the most to think about
the relevance of postmodernism’s “afterlife” within art history and criticism,
gives a compelling brief on Jameson’s behalf and provides a genealogy of its
concerns in both the mid-1930s (of Walter Benjamin and the surrealists) and
the 1960s of Guy Debord and Marshall McLuhan. Hal Foster, “Postmodernism
in Parallax,” OCTOBER 63, (MIT Press) (Winter 1993): 3–20.

10. Andrew Ross, “Getting the Future We Deserve,” in Strange Weather: Culture,
Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 169–192.
 353 11. In contrast to Lyotard, Habermas’s discourse ethics sees modernity as an
unfinished project. Habermas still maintains faith in certain democratic values in-
herited from the Enlightenment—namely communicative action and consensus—
although conceding to the progressive dismantling of Reason as discussed within
critical theory. Habermas’s notion of consensus, the collective agreement reached
between all members of a democratic polity on shared rules and procedures, has
been especially subject to critique. Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans.
Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), pp. 68–75.

12. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,

trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984),
p. xxiii.

13. Ibid., p. xxiv.

14. Ibid., p. 14.

15. Fredric Jameson “Preface” in ibid., p. xix.

16. Reinhardt Koselleck, “Modernity and the Planes of Historicity,” in Futures

Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985)
pp. 13–14.

17. Ibid., pp. 13–14.

18. Ibid., p. 13.

19. Ibid., p. 18.

20. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 17.

21. Nicholas Reschler uses the phrase “the Advice Establishment” to describe
“academics, working scientists, technical experts, and pundits of all sorts serving
on advisory boards, policy study groups and public commissions developing
information, ideas, and speculations to provide guidance about the future.”
Nicholas Reschler, Predicting the Future (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1998), p. 29.

22. Donald Schon, “Forecasting and Technological Forecasting,” in Daniel Bell,

Toward the Year 2000: Work in Progress, ed. Daniel Bell (Boston: Beacon Press,
Daedalus Library, 1967), p. 130.

23. Reschler, Predicting the Future, p. 29.

24. This is a subject whose history can only be pointed to briefly. For the
most incisive critical analysis on the future as it relates to the fate of the Left,
see Andrew Ross, “Getting the Future We Deserve,” in Ross, Strange Weather.
NOTES
For a more extensive Marxian reading, see Raymond Williams, The Year 2000:
A Radical Look at the Future—and What We Can Do to Change It (New York:
Pantheon, 1983). An introduction to this phenomenon, if written at the moment
of its emergence, is John McHale, “Prophets of the Future,” in his widely read
The Future of the Future (New York: George Braziller, 1969), pp. 241–264. 354
McHale collaborated closely with Fuller in his World Design Initiative. Also see
Nicholas Reschler, “Historical Stagesetting,” in Reschler, Predicting the Future,
pp. 19–37.
The founding of the Club of Rome provides an especially interesting case
study in the history of future studies research because of its relationship to the
historical movements of global capitalism. Its founder, Aurelio Peccei, was an
Italian industrialist and president of Fiat and Olivetti, and the group became
well known for its deployment of systems analysis in its predictive enterprise.
The Club of Rome is perhaps best known for their 1972 document The Limits to
Growth, authored by Donella Meadows. Translated into thirty-seven languages,
the book confronts the potential consequences of population growth as projected
at intervals of 10, 20, 50, and more years. The group engaged the services of the
prominent cybernetician Jay Forrester in preparation of their study; the Systems
Dynamic Group at MIT facilitated the collection and processing of data that was
the foundation of their research.

25. Dr. Glenn T. Seabord, cited in Daniel Bell, “2000: The Trajectory of an Idea,”
Toward the Year 2000: Work in Progress, ed. Daniel Bell (Boston: Beacon Press,
Daedalus Library, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1967), p. 2.

26. Ibid., p. 6.

27. Gordon Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,”

Electronics 38, no. 8 (April 19, 1965): p. 1.

28. Ibid., p. 1.

29. On the viability of Moore’s Law, see Charles C. Mann, “The End of Moore’s
Law?” Technology Review 103, no. 3 (May–June 2000): 42–48; and Ted Lewis,
“The Next 10,000 Years: Part 1,” Computer 29, no. 4 (April 1996): 64–70.

30. Douglas Davis, Art of the Future (New York: Praeger, 1973), p. 106.

31. Ibid., p. 184.

32. Ibid.

33. John Chandler and Lucy Lippard, “The Dematerialization of Art,” Art Inter-
national, February 20, 1968, pp. 31–36.

34. G. F. W. Hegel, The Aesthetics: Introductory Lectures on Fine Art, trans.

B. Bosanquet (New York: Penguin Books, 1886), pp. 10–11.

35. See, e.g., Arthur Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of the Common-
place (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); and Hans Belting, The End
of the History of Art, trans. Christopher Wood (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987).

36. Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist
Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985).
 355 37. G. F. W. Hegel, “A. Quality (86–98),” in The Encyclopaedia Logic (Indianapolis
and Cambridge: Hackett Press, 1991), p. 149.

38. Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 18.

39. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Any Warhol (New York: Harcourt, 1975),
p. 117.

40. Peter Wollen, “Raiding the Icebox,” in Andy Warhol: Film Factory, ed. Michael
O’Pray (London: British Film Institute, [BFI] 1989), p. 14.

41. Gregory Battcock, “Four Films by Andy Warhol,” in Andy Warhol: Film
Factory, ed. Michael O’Pray (London: BFI, 1989), p. 46.

42. David James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 62.

43. Ibid., p. 65.

44. Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties (New York:
Harcourt Brace and Company, 1980), pp. 32, 50.

45. Stephen Koch, Stargazer: The Life, World, and Films of Andy Warhol (London
and New York: Marion Boyars, 1963), p. 39.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid.

48. Gregory Battcock, “Four Films by Andy Warhol,” in O’Pray, Andy Warhol: Film
Factory, p. 45.

49. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, p. 50.

50. Here I’d like to acknowledge the work of Carrie Lambert and her research on
Yvonne Rainer and the thematics of attention and sixties media culture. Carrie
Lambert, Yvonne Rainer’s Media, Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 2000.

51. Ibid., p. 50.

52. Alexander Alberro, “Time and Conceptual Art,” in Tempus Fugit: Time Flies,
ed. Jan Schall (Kansas City, Mo.: Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, 2001),
pp. 144–157.

53. For the clearest explication of Darboven’s practice, see Anne Rorimer,
“Systems, Seriality, Sequence,” in New Art in the 60s and 70s: Redefining Reality
(London: Thames and Hudson, 2001), pp. 165–166.

54. See Anne Rorimer, “On Kawara,” in Reconsidering the Object of Art, ed. Ann
NOTES
Goldstein and Anne Rorimer (Los Angeles and Cambridge, Mass.: Museum of
Contemporary Art and MIT 1995), p. 144; and Rorimer, “The Date Paintings of
On Kawara,” in Date Paintings in 89 Cities (exhibition catalog) (Rotterdam:
Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, 1991), pp. 220–227.
55. Karel Schampers, “A Mental Journey in Time,” in Date Paintings in 89 Cities, 356
p. 198.

56. The title of the enormous catalog on Kawara, Whole and Parts, implicitly
points to one of the key structural relations within systems discourse: the
extent to which the “part” (e.g., variable) informs the “whole” (system) in that
system’s disposition toward change over time. See On Kawara, Whole and Parts
(Villeurbanne: Le Nouveau Musée/Institut d’Art Contemporain and les presses
du réel, 1996). Kawara’s work has been discussed in the rhetoric of systems and
communications before. “On Kawara: Le Opere E I Giorno,” Domus 600 (Milan),
(November 1979): 49.

57. Kathryn Chiong, “Kawara on Kawara,” in OCTOBER (MIT Press) 90 (1999):

50–73.

58. Ichiro Haryu, for instance, acknowledges (but does not expand upon)
Kawara’s work with respect to postwar Japanese art and what he regards as its
shared interest in reproduction. Ichiro Haryu, “Le rôle de la ‘reproduction’ dans
l’Art,” in Xxe siècle (Paris), no. 5, vol. 5, no. 46 (September 1976): 84–96.

59. See, e.g., Immanuel Wallerstein, “Introduction,” in The Essential Wallerstein

(New York: New Press, 2000), p. xxii. The Fernand Braudel Center was founded
in 1976 at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where Wallerstein
is professor.

60. Fernand Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée,” in
On History, trans. by Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1980), p. 32.

61. See Wallerstein, “Time and Duration: The Unexcluded Middle, or Reflections
on Braudel and Prigogine,” in Essential Wallerstein, p. 163.

62. Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences,” p. 28.

63. Ibid., pp. 29–30.

64. I need to show my hand here. The time of endlessness I am describing

relative to Warhol and Kawara recalls for me two other modalities of time. The
first is Friedrich Nietzsche’s considerations of eternal return or eternal
recurrence of the same, a deeply anti-dialectical notion of time (and therefore an
anti-Hegelian temporality). Nietzsche’s famous aphorism in The Gay Science
(developed in Thus Spake Zarathustra) poses an ontological as well as ethical
question, which might be paraphrased as follows: if confronted with the pos-
sibility of living one’s life over again, exactly as it happened, would you accept
the possibility? Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kauffmann
(New York: Vintage, 1974), pp. 273–274.
Numerous philosophers have argued that Nietzsche’s eternal return is less
a cosmological proposition (as in, for example, the prospect of reincarnation)
 357 than an ethical one: it is a proposal for thinking of the future in terms of selec-
tion and of the will to act in the present as speculation. In both Warhol’s Empire
and Kawara’s work, the affirmation of a failed dialectic (a bad infinity) squares
with a particular kind of ethics that is eternal return. Gilles Deleuze’s words on
Nietzsche apply here, particularly to the notion of art as a mode of willful
resistance to time. “It is the thought of the eternal return that selects. It makes
willing something whole. The thought of the eternal return eliminates from
willing everything which falls outside the eternal return, it makes willing a
creation, it brings about the equation ‘willing-creating.’” Gilles Deleuze,
Nietzsche and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 69.
The second mode of temporality follows on Baruch Spinoza’s speculations
on “the revolutionary plane of immanence” in the context of globalization. This
is the time that upholds “functional inconclusiveness” against “the end of the
dialectic of modernity” under Empire. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,
Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 42–43. See also
Negri’s discussions on Spinoza’s philosophy of immanentism as “metaphysics of
time as constitution, the time of further constitution, the time that extends
beyond the actuality of being, the being that constructs and selects the future.”
Antonio Negri, “Difference and the Future,” in The Savage Anomaly: The Power
of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis, Minn.:
University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 228.

65. Slowness, of course, has its politic uses: the union “slowdown” remains a
common strategy in labor negotiations. But consider more recent developments,
such as, for example, the “Slow Food” movement, which emphasizes sustainable
agriculture, environmental consciousness, and regional or “slow” culinary tech-
niques in the face of the fast-food industry and its implications for global
capitalism. On “Slow Food,” see Slow Food, ed. Carlo Petrini (White River
Junction, Vt.: Slow Food Editore and Chelsea Green Publishing Company).
On a kind of “slow time,” see Stewart Brand, The Clock of Long Now: Time and
Responsibility (New York: Basic Books, 1999). Note also that Brand authored
Cybernetic Frontiers and The Whole Earth Catalog—books with marked
implications for this study.

NOTES
INDEX
“A” phase, 311n17
Acceleration, 162
Accumulations, 197
Acknowledgment, gesture of, 47
Adorno, 33
Aesthetic fatigue, 247–250
Aesthetics, 68
Aggressiveness, 173–176, 180, 211.
See also Domination; Obliteration;
Study for an End of the World, No. 2;
Suicide machines
Airplanes, 22, 23f, 24
Aldrich, Larry, 167–168, 168f
with Op fashions, 170–171f
Ambivalence, 164
Anderson, Cheryl, 193
Anthropomorphizing art, 73–74
Anxiety, 113
Apollo 11, 5, 6f, 7, 8
Approximate knowledge, 124
Aristotle, xx
“Art and Objecthood.” See under Fried
Art and the Future (Davis), 272–274
“Art and Time” (Smithson). See
“Quasi-Infinities and the Waning
of Space”
Art in America, 169, 170–171f
Art in Movement (Bewogen Beweging),
96
Art object, 275
“ATTENTIONS: ROBOTS,” 114
Automation, 57, 105–106, 109–111,
113–116
connotations, 109–110
definitions and meanings, 108–109
Automatism, 55–61, 75
Autonomy over senses, 186
Autopoiesis, 61, 67, 68, 75, 321n59
Autopoiesis and Cognition (Maturana
and Varela), 320–321n59
Avant-garde, 139, 178, 229, 230,
271, 276
and neo-avant-garde, 328–
329nn25–26
Bachelard, Gaston, 123–124, 334n73
Baldessari, John, 239–241, 241f,
350n42
Ballet magnétique (Takis), 95f
Bateson, Gregory, 67–68, 80, 245
Battock, Gregory, 283, 284
Beauty, 59
Behaviorism, 342n84
Bell, Daniel, 332n42
Bell, Larry, 40, 41f
Beniger, Joseph, 190
Benton, Fletcher, 97–98
Bergson, Henri, 122–123
Bernal, J. D., 273–275
Black-and-white works. See under
Riley
Bodily confusion, 212
Bodily space, 207
Bonnards, Pierre, 188
Boredom, 288
Borgzinner, Jon, 183
Bourdon, David, 343n89
Brand, Stewart, 62–63f
Braudel, Fernand, 299, 301, 303,
305, 306
Brett, Guy, 126, 127
Bridget Riley (Snowden), 155, 158–
159f
Brinkley, David, 85, 87, 140, 143,
147, 149
Bronowski, J., 231, 232
Buchloh, Benjamin, 80
Bürger, Peter, 328–329n25
Burnham, Jack, 70, 72–75, 77, 239–
240, 349–350n39
Bury, Pol, 116–118, 119f, 120–125
Camargo, Sergio, 131
Canaday, John, 104, 190
Causality and causal explanation, 67–
68, 245, 246
Cavell, Stanley, 46, 47, 55–60,
319n42, 320n46
Certainties and uncertainties, 104,
164
Chamberlain, John, 16–19, 22
Chandler, John, 275
Change, 106
Cheyenne helicopters, 22, 23f, 24
Christianity, 47, 264, 265, 317n22
Chronophobia, xii, xiv, 8, 38, 81
Chronophobic impulse, xii, 8
Cinema. See Film
Cioran, E. M., xi
Circular causality, 245, 246
Clark, Lygia, 96, 96f, 131, 132–133f
Clothing, 167, 169, 171. See also
Dresses
Cloud Canyons: Bubble Mobiles
(Medalla), 128, 129f
Club of Rome, 354n24
Communication, 64, 65, 69, 70, 246. 360
See also Cybernetics
ethics of, 46, 47
over time, 235
Communications media and networks,
330–331n33
Conceptual art, 275
Conditioning, 191
Contemporaneity, problem of, 231,
254–255
Control, 190. See also under Sense
ratios
Counterculture, 31, 32
Criticism, 61
Cube, 80. See also Grass Cube (Haacke)
Current, 155, 156f, 157
Cybernetic Serendipity, 240
Cybernetic temporality, 245
Cybernetics, 62, 64–70, 91, 231, 233,
236, 237, 244, 320–321n59. See
also Human Use of Human Beings;
“Quasi-Infinities and the Waning
of Space”
Cybernetics (Wiener), 190, 235
Cyclo-Graveur (Tinguely), 98, 99f, 100
Danger, 173–174
Darboven, Hanne, 288
Davis, Douglas, 272–276
Deleuze, Gilles, 54, 263, 277
Dematerialization (of art), 128, 240,
275
Destruction, 173–176, 180. See also
Obliteration; Study for an End of the
World, No. 2; Suicide machines
Desublimation, 314n51
Dialogue of Hands (Clark), 96f
Digital technology, xv
Discontinuity, 124, 125
Distance and television, 187
Domestic arts, 171–172
Domination, 26–30. See also
Aggressiveness
Dresses, 167–169, 170f, 172
 361 Drift, 233, 235–239
Driving, xvi
Drugs, hallucinogenic, 193–194
Duchamp, Marcel, 96, 97
Duplicity, 179, 182. See also Haptical
objects; Illusionism
Duration
dialectic of, 116–118, 120–125,
357n65
experience of, 44, 45, 280–281 (see
also “Long forever”)
Edwards, Jonathan, 37, 47, 48
Efficiency, 109
Ehrenzweig, Anton, 179–182
Ellul, Jacques, 184
Empire, 330n33
Empire State Building, 279, 282f
Empire (Warhol), 282f, 283, 284, 285–
286f, 287–288
“End of the World.” See Study for an
End of the World, No. 2
Endlessness, 44, 45, 48, 49, 307, 356–
357n64. See also “Long forever”
Ends, 85, 87, 89, 92, 271–278
End-time, 264
Energy, 128
Enlightenment, dialectic of, 246
Entropy, 66, 244
and the collapse of art history, 246–
250
“Entropy Made Visible” (Weiner),
248–249
Epistemology, 124
Eternal. See Endlessness
“Events are dust,” 303
Existence, 90
Experiments in Art and Technology
(E.A.T.), 12–13, 15, 21–22
Extensions, 185, 186
“Eye and Mind” (Spalding), 181
INDEX Eye Body (Schneemann), 195, 202,
203f
“Eye hurting,” 173–176
Eye/Body problem
defined, 155
Krauss and, 182
Merleau-Ponty and, 181–182
Riley and, 155, 157, 159, 174–176,
181, 196
Schneemann and, 195, 200, 201, 212
and sixties media culture, 159, 181–
184, 186, 187, 196, 212
Fall into Time, The (Cioran), xi
Fashion(s), 171. See also Dresses; Op
fashion(s)
meaning and essence of, 172–173
of the times, 172–176
Feedback, 64, 244
Feminine arts, 171–172
Feminism and feminists, 196, 197, 204
Film, 54–55, 60
automatic quality, 54–55
time and, 279–281, 283–284, 287,
288
from total thereness to recursiveness,
55–62
Fission (Riley), 165, 166–167f
Focillon, Henri, 200–201, 228
Forecasting, 264–269, 271, 275
Form class, 228
Formalism, 74, 75, 201, 230
Foster, Hal, 329n26
Foucault, Michel, 342n80
Free will, 186, 193
Fried, Michael, 40
“Art and Objecthood,” 37–40, 43–50,
54–56, 60, 74, 75, 77
“moral tone” of, 46, 47
Smithson’s response to, 48–50
Cavell’s dialogue with, 46
and duration, 44–45
ethics of communication, 46, 47
on film, 54–55, 60
and minimalism, 42–45
modernism of, 43, 56
nature, naturalism, and, 49
Fried, Michael (cont.)
“presentness is grace,” 34, 38, 45, 46
theater, theatricality, and, 38, 45, 49,
54–55, 77, 81
and time, 39, 43–45, 61–62
urgency and moral tone, 46
Future Shock (Toffler), xiii, 103, 104,
265–266
Futurism, 102, 264–267, 272–273
Futurity, 289, 293
Gardiner, John, 127–128
General System Theory, 62, 64, 65,
240, 323n78. See also Systems
theory
Ghost Rev (Schneemann), 205–207,
208f, 209
Giant Ice Bag (Oldenburg), 10–11, 11f
Giorno, John, 280
Globalization, 104, 105, 265, 267,
330–331n33
Gosling, Nigel, 172
Grass Cube (Haacke), 76f, 77, 78, 80,
81
Greenberg, Clement, 40, 43, 52–54,
177–178, 316n7, 319n37
Gutenberg Galaxy, The (McLuhan),
184–186
Haacke, Hans, 76f, 77–78, 79f, 80
Habermas, Jürgen, 353n11
Habituation, 193
Hallucinations, 181, 182, 199. See also
Illusionism
Hallucinogenics and technics, 192–
195
Haptical objects and phenomenal
subjects, 176–182, 193
Hardt, Michael, 330–331n33
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 275–
277
Heidegger, Martin, 90–91, 140–141,
149, 153
Heisenberg, Werner K., 124, 127
Helicopters, Cheyenne, 22, 23f, 24
Hesitate, 167–169 362
Hess, Thomas, 188–190
High and Low, 171
Highways, 50–52
Historical time, 299, 301, 303, 305
History, 228, 229, 242, 243, 255–256.
See also Shape of Time, The (Kubler)
technological rationality as sup-
pression of, 33
“History and the Social Sciences”
(Braudel), 299
Homage to New York (Tinguely), 134,
135–136f, 137–140
Hopkins, Terence K., 311n17, 331n33
Horvitz, Robert, 254–255
Huebler, Douglas, 73
Huizinga, Johan, 100
Hulten, K. G. Pontus, 98
Human Use of Human Beings, The
(Wiener), 218, 231, 234–235f,
246–248
Humor, 100, 101
Hysteria in women, 196, 199
I got up (Kawara), 300–301f
Ideology, 42
Illusionism, 165, 176, 178–181. See
also Haptical objects
I’m Not Going to Commit Suicide, Dont
Worry (Kawara), 304–305f
I’m Still Alive (Kawara), 302–303f
Imagination, 334n73
Improvisation, 60
Infinite perspective, 45
Infinity, bad, 276–279, 281, 289, 301,
306
Infinity Nets, 197
Information Age, 34
Information exchange, 64
Information processing, 108
Information technology, xiii–xiv, xviii
Instances, 59
Institutional critique, 78
Intermedia, 205
Intermedia Systems, Inc., 206
 363 Invisible, the, 127–128, 181–182
Ionesco, Eugène, 121, 125
Jameson, Fredric, xv, 263, 307,
311n18, 327n9
Kawara, On, 269, 271, 278, 289, 291,
293, 296f, 297–307, 356n56
I got up, 300–301f
I’m Not Going to Commit Suicide,
Dont Worry, 304–305f
I’m Still Alive, 302–303f
One Million Years—Future, 297, 299f
One Million Years—Past, 297, 298f
Title, 289, 290–291f
Today Series, 289, 291, 292f, 293,
294–295f, 306
Keeler, Paul, 126, 127
Kennedy, John F., 110
Kepes, Gyorgy, 69, 70, 71f
Kinetic art, 92–93, 159
and the art world, 93–98, 100–105
historical uncertainty evoked by, 104
international dimension, 104
prewar history, 103
“ruptures” into the narrative of, 116–
118, 120–128, 130–131, 133
Toffler on, 103–105
“Kinetic image,” 108
Kiss (Riley), 162, 163f
Kiss (Warhol), 281f
Klüver, Billy, 12
Koch, Stephen, 280, 281
Koerner, Joseph, 317n22
Kondratieff cycle, 311n17
Koselleck, Reinhardt, xii, 265, 277
Kozloff, Max, 24, 191, 194
Krauss, Rosalind, 58–60, 178–179,
181, 182, 227, 309n3
Kubler, George, 221, 223, 245–246,
249–250, 252–256, 347n15
INDEX actuality for Smithson, 223, 225,
227–231, 233
Horvitz’s interview of, 254–255
as Mesoamericanist, 223, 225
model of time, 242–243
The Shape of Time, 223, 224f, 227–
231, 241–242, 246, 254, 255
Kuh, Katherine, 97
Kuhn, Thomas, xxi
Kusama, Yayoi, 197, 198f, 199, 200
Language
abridgment of, 30–32
of blindness, 208–209
Laocoön (Lessing), 52, 55
Le Mouvement, 96, 98
Leafleting, 331–332n35
Lessing, G. E., 52, 318n32
Life of Forms in Art (Focillon), 200–
202
Limit conditions, 43
Lippard, Lucy, 275
Literalist sensibility, 44, 45
Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, 22,
23f, 24
“Long forever,” 48–51
Longue durée, 299, 301, 303
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
(LACMA)
Art and Technology program, 9, 12,
14–17, 21, 22, 24, 28, 30
catalog, 19
Luhmann, Niklas, 66, 321–322n60,
324n82
Lye, Len, 94f
Lyotard, Jean-François, 261–264, 307
Machines. See Automation;
Technology
Making of a Counter-Culture, The
(Roszak), 31
“Manifesto for Statics” (Tinguely),
106, 107f
Manovich, Lev, 69
Marcuse, Herbert, 26–33, 313n34,
314n47
on art, 26
background, 25–26
Eros and Civilization, 26, 28
Marcuse, Herbert (cont.)
One-Dimensional Man, 27
“The Affirmative Character of
Culture,” 139
Mattering of time, 128
Maturana, Humberto R., 320–321n59
McLuhan, Marshall, xvi, 110, 194–
195, 266
The Gutenberg Galaxy, 184, 185
Understanding Media, 186–189
Mechanization, 109
Medalla, David, 126–128, 129f, 130
Medium, 51–52, 60, 69
time and, 52–54
“Memories of Mike” (Bell), 40, 41f
Memory, 33
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 181–182
Metalogical, 77–78, 80–81
Metalogue, defined, 80–81
Meta-matics, 105, 111, 112f, 113–
115, 117, 133, 134, 139
Metanarrative, 306, 307
Metaphor(s), 231, 233, 242
Meyer, James, 46, 47
Middle (condition), 51–55
Minimalism, 80, 81, 277–279
the anthropomorphic within, 74
Burnham on, 74, 75
Fried and, 42–45
Greenberg on, 40
Meyer on, 46
technology and, 68
time and, 43–44
Minimalist cube, 77, 78
Minimalist objecthood, 75, 77
Minimalist sculpture, 44–45, 51
as musical loop, 316–317n13
Modernism, 37, 52, 54–56, 178, 223
as chronophobia, 39–40, 42–48
Modernist art, 45
Modernist painting, 57–59
Modernity, xii, 264
MoMA Visitor’s Poll (Haacke), 78, 79f
Moore, Gordon, 268–269, 270f, 271
Moore’s law, 269, 270–271f 364
Movement, 106. See also Film
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 133–
134, 137–139, 160, 167, 188
Nature and naturalism, 49
Negri, Antonio, 330–331n33
New Jersey Turnpike, 50, 52
“New media,” xv, xvi, xix, 69, 192,
271
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 356–357n64
9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering,
12, 15, 16, 72
1960s, xxii, 259, 307. See also specific
topics
forecast in, 264–269, 271
No. Green, No. 1 (Kusama), 198–199f
Noncontemporaneity, xi
Norris Industries, 20f
North American Rockwell Corpora-
tion, 20f
Norvell, Patsy A., 243
Numbness, 194–195
Obliteration, 195–197, 199–202, 204–
207, 209, 211–212, 214
Observation, 66
Oldenburg, Claes, 10, 11f
One Million Years—Future (Kawara),
297, 299f
One Million Years—Past (Kawara),
297, 298f
1110 Dots Leaving a Hole: Punctuation
(Bury), 118, 119f
One-dimensional man and society,
27–30
Ontogenesis, 64
Op (art), 157, 178, 179, 341n64,
342nn79–80, 343n89
feminization, 171
history, 159
illusionism, 176
Riley and, 157, 159, 161, 168–169,
171–174, 188, 196
 365 sense ratios, the problem of control,
and, 183–192
technics, hallucinogenics, and, 192–
195
and the “Two Cultures,” 159–161
Op art dresses, 168–169, 170f
“Op Art’s Tiny Time Pill” (Anderson),
193
Op fashion(s), 169, 171–174, 187
Aldrich with, 170–171f
temporality, 173–174
Open endedness, 45
Optical painting, 157, 178–179. See
also Op
Organization, 64, 65
Oster, Gerald, 193–194
Painting for Kubler (Baldessari), 241,
241f
Paradigm shifts, xxi–xxii
Passivity, 190
Perceptual abstraction, 161
Periodic structure, 164
Perpetual presents, 278–281, 283–
284, 287–289, 291, 293, 297–299
Perpetual revolution/self-creation, 46
Phobias then and now, xiv–xviii
Photography, 54, 57, 319n37
Physics, modern, xx
Political artists, 78
“Pop goes to Op,” 173
Postmodernism, 261–263, 307
Postmodernism (Lyotard), 261–264
Prediction. See Forecasting
Presence, 316n7, 319n42
Presentness, 45, 57, 59, 60, 70,
319n42
of kinetic art, 101
time beyond, 62
“Presentness is grace,” 38, 45, 46
Prime objects, 228–229
INDEX Probabilities, 264–269, 271
Programming, 190–191, 193
Protestants, 317n22
Psychological warfare, 331–332n35
“Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of
Space” (Smithson), 219, 220f, 221,
222f, 223, 230, 232f, 233, 250–254
RAND Corporation, 16–18, 22, 29
Rational prognosis, 264–265
Rationality vs. irrationality, 27, 33, 34
Rauschenberg, Robert, 12
Recursion/recursiveness, 57, 60–61,
64, 67, 68, 75, 323n76
Refutation, 49, 61
Remembrance, 33
René, Galerie Denise, 96, 327n12
Repetition, difference within, 164, 277
Repression and oppression, 26–27
Reproduced reproductions, 252
Reschler, Nicholas, 353n21
Responsive Eye, The, 160, 161, 178,
183, 188, 191, 192, 204
Retinal art. See Op
Revelation, 181
Revolution, 8
Rickey, George, 328n24
Riegl, Alois, 177
Riley, Bridget, 181, 190
and art criticism, 177–178
black-and-white works, 162, 163f,
164–167f
Bridget Riley (Snowden), 155, 158–
159f
career as artist, 161–162, 165, 167–
172, 174
Current, 155, 156f, 157
exchange with Sylvester, 175–176
and Eye/Body problem, 155, 157,
159, 174–176, 181, 196
and fashions of the times, 174–176
Fission, 165, 166–167f
illusionism, 165, 176, 178, 180–181
and interconnectedness of senses, 176
Kiss, 162, 163f
Krauss and Ehrenzweig on, 179–182
meets Larry Aldrich, 167, 168f
and Op, 157, 159, 161, 168–169,
171–174, 188, 196
Riley, Bridget (cont.)
painting in the show Hesitate, 167–
169
phases in the experience of her
paintings, 180
pleasure, pain, aggression, and the
art of, 173–176, 180–182
position toward her work, 181
Schneemann compared with, 159,
195, 200, 212
“The Hermaphrodite,” 196
version of transcendence, 195–197,
200, 212, 214
as woman artist, 157, 159, 171–172,
190, 196
Robots, 114. See also Automation
Root, Waverly, 115
Rorimer, Anne, 289
Roszak, Theodore, 31–32
Rupture. See Signals; Slowness
Sainte-Phalle, Niki de, 87, 89, 141, 143
San Diego, 313n31
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, xvi
Schneemann, Carolee, 345n124
Eye Body, 195, 202, 203f
Ghost Rev, 205–207, 208f, 209
and language of blindness, 208–209
Snows, 205–206, 209, 210f, 211
USCO and, 205–206
version of transcendence, 195, 200–
202, 204–212
Science, history of, 124
Scientific revolutions, xxi
Sculpture, 40, 42–44, 54, 74–75. See
also Minimalist sculpture
Secret Life of Hernando Cortez, The
(Chamberlain), 17
Seitz, William C., 160–161, 190–191
Self-amputation, 194–195. See also
Obliteration
Self-creation, 46
Self-criticality, 45, 61
Self-destructive art, 151. See also
Suicide machines
Self-reproduction, 75 366
Sense ratios
defined, 184–185
and the problem of control, 183–192
Senses, 176–177, 181, 202, 204–205.
See also specific senses
Serra, Richard, 9, 10f
Sexuality, 26, 204
Shape of Time, The (Kubler), 223,
224f, 227–231, 241–242, 246, 254,
255
Sign, Image, Symbol (Kepes), 70, 71f
Signals, 125–128, 130–131, 133
time and, 242–243
Sine Curve Man (Csuri), 273f
“Singular object,” 53, 55
Skepticism
vs. antiskepticism, 46–47, 49
toward artists, 87
Skullcracker series, 9, 10f
Sleep (Warhol), 279, 280, 280f
Slowness/dialectic of duration, 116–
118, 120–125, 357n65
Smith, Tony, xvii, 43, 50–51
Smithson, Robert, 218, 219, 221–222,
224, 250–254, 256, 348n29
on Fried’s “Art and Objecthood,” 48–
50
interview of, 243
Kubler’s actuality for, 223, 225, 227–
231, 233
“Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of
Space,” 219, 220f, 221, 222f, 223,
230, 232f, 233, 235
“Some Void Thoughts on Museums,”
221
“Ultramoderne,” 221, 225, 226–227f,
230
Snow, C. P., 13–14
Snowden, Lord, 155, 156f, 157
Snows (Schneemann), 205–206, 209,
210f, 211
Socrates, 53
Software: Information Technology. Its
New Meaning for Art, 70, 72, 73
 367 Space, waning of. See also “Quasi-
Infinities and the Waning of Space”
stars, art, and, 253–255
Space-time continuum, 201
Spalding, Frances, 181
Spatial (accounts of) time, 122
“Specific object,” 42
Spinoza, Baruch, 357n64
Square, 80. See also Grass Cube
Stabilities and instabilities, 164
Statics, 106, 124–125
Stevenson, James, 212–213f
Structuration, 323n76
Study for an End of the World, No. 2
(Tinguely), 85, 86f, 87, 88f, 89,
92, 139, 142f, 143, 144, 145–146f,
147, 148f, 149, 150f, 151, 152f,
153
Suicide machines, 133–134, 137–141,
143–144, 147, 149, 151, 153
Swiss character and stereotypes, 115
Sylvester, David, 174–175
Symbols, visual, 70, 72
Systems, 61–70, 72–75, 77–78
meanings, 62
open, 65–66, 323n71
problem with, 243–246
promise of, 239–243
“real-time,” 78
Systems aesthetics, 68, 239, 274
Systems analysis, 65, 69, 77
Systems discourse, 62, 64, 65, 75
Systems theory, 61, 62, 64–67, 72–74,
77, 320–321n59, 321–322n60. See
also General System Theory
Systems-oriented society, 243
Tactile sense, 177, 179. See also
Haptical objects and phenomenal
subjects
Takis, 95f, 126
INDEX Techne, xx
Technics, 26, 27
and hallucinogenics, 192–195
Technocracy, 31–32
Technological determinism, 186
Technological rationality/thinking,
26–30, 32–33
Heidegger’s critique of, 91
Technological Society, The (Ellul), 184–
185
Technology, xiii–xxi, 64. See also
Automation; Sense ratios; Signals;
Suicide machines; Systems
art and, xx–xxi, 7, 14, 34 (see also
Experiments in Art and Technology;
Kinetic art; Los Angeles County
Museum of Art)
“Two Cultures” divide, 13, 25, 28,
30, 69–70, 159–161, 189
eros, civilization and, 9 (see also
Marcuse)
as means to an end, 15–16
Technophobia, 30
Television, 144, 184, 186–189
Temple, Greek, 91
Theater. See also under Fried
time and, 44–45
Theatricality, 38, 43, 48–49, 67, 75.
See also under Fried
Time, 8, 33. See also specific topics
calling over, 233, 235–239
literalist preoccupation with, 45
(non)entitlement to, xi
obsession with, xiv
Tinguely, Jean, 85, 86f, 88f, 89, 90,
93, 106, 124–125
in America, 133–134, 137–141, 143–
153
Bury compared with, 116–117
Canaday on, 104
Cyclo-Graveur, 98, 99f, 100
“For Statics,” 122
Homage to New York, 134, 135–136f,
137–140
and kinetic art, 98, 102–105, 108,
116
“Manifesto for Statics,” 106, 107f
“Meta-matics,” 105, 111, 112f, 113–
115, 133, 139
Tinguely, Jean (cont.)
Study for an End of the World, No. 2,
85, 86f, 87, 88f, 89, 92, 139, 142f,
143, 144, 145–146f, 147, 148f, 149,
150f, 151, 152f, 153
suicide machines, 133–134, 137–
141, 143–144, 147, 149, 151, 153
technology and, 104, 105, 110, 116
(see also Meta-matics)
vision of world, 144
worlds of, 91–92
Title (Kawara), 289, 290–291f
Today Series (Kawara), 289, 291, 292f,
293, 294–295f, 306
Toffler, Alvin, xiii, 103–105, 265–266
“Total thereness,” 58–60
Touch. See Tactile sense
Transcendence, a woman artist’s
version of, 195–197, 199–202, 204–
207, 209, 211–212, 214
Transience, 92, 103, 104, 116, 153
Trickery. See Illusionism
Tuchman, Maurice, 21, 34
“Two Cultures” divide, 13, 25, 28, 30,
69–70, 159–161, 189
“Ultramoderne” (Smithson), 225,
226–227f, 230
Universe (Lye), 94f
USCO (Us Company), 205–207
Valéry, Paul, 52–53
Varela, Francisco J., 320–321n59
Vasarely, Victor, 96, 97
Vietnam, 192, 211
Violence. See Destruction; Obliteration
Virilio, Paul, 8
Virtual movement (in time), 159, 164
Virtual temporality of the environ-
ment, 160
“Visual rape,” 206–207. see also “Eye
hurting”
Visual tempi, 157, 164, 196
von Bertalanffy, Ludwig, 64, 65,
322n67, 323n71
Wallerstein, Immanuel, 331n33 368
Warhol, Andy, 269, 271, 278–281,
283, 287, 288
attitudes toward time, 279
Empire, 282f, 283, 284, 285–286f,
287–288
Kiss, 281f
Sleep, 279, 280, 280f
Weber, Samuel, 187
Whitney, John, 274f
“Whole System” (Brand), 62–63f
Wiener, Norbert, 244, 252, 256
Cybernetics, 190, 235
drift, 233, 235–239
on entropy, 244, 246–248
The Human Use of Human Beings,
218, 231, 234–235f, 246–248
theory of control, 238
“Will Moore’s Law Stand Forever?,”
269, 270–271f
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 46
Women, 171
in art, 100
Women artists, 157, 190, 195. See also
specific artists
version of transcendence, and
obliteration, 195–197, 199–202,
204–207, 209, 211–212, 214
World Viewed, The (Cavell), 55–60
World(s)
concept of, 90
systems analysis, 65, 69, 77 (see also
Wallerstein)
within worlds, 89–93
Y2K phenomenon, 259–261