ISSN 1753-9854 SPRING 2006
All Systems Go: Recovering Jack Burnham’s ‘Systems Aesthetics’
LUKE SKREBOWSKI
Had Hans Haacke’s proposed Guggenheim show of 1971 gone ahead, gallery visitors would have been confronted with the following:
A white cube. A black bird with bright yellow stripes around the eyes sits in a chrome cage. It rocks gently on its perch. Silence. Occasional scrabbling sounds as the bird readjusts its footing. Time passes. Nothing happens. Suddenly, the caged bird speaks. ‘All systems go’ it squawks. And again, ‘All systems go.’ A pause. ‘All systems go. All systems go.’ Repetition to inanition. ‘All systems go.’
 |
Fig.1 Hans Haacke Norbert: ‘All Systems Go’ 1970-1 Unfinished project Photograph of the mynah bird Hans Haacke attempted to teach to say: ‘All systems go’ © DACS 2006 |
However, the piece my fictional narrative purports to describe,
Norbert: All Systems Go, 1971 (fig.1), remained unrealised. Haacke had
tried to teach a mynah bird the phrase, ‘All systems go,’ which the
bird, installed in a cage in the gallery space, was to have repeated at its own
volition. The bird’s reluctance to parrot the phrase and the now infamous
cancellation of Haacke’s show, put paid to the piece. Nevertheless, even
treated as a conceptual proposal, it can be compared instructively with an
earlier avian installation that Haacke did realise, Chicken’s
Hatching, 1969 (fig.2). Here, freshly laid chicken eggs were collected from
a brooder, transferred to an adjacent hatchery and distributed among a grid of
eight small incubators. The hatching process was controlled artificially, via a
simple feedback system of lamps and thermostat.
 |
Fig.2 Hans Haacke Chickens Hatching 1969 Fertilized eggs, incubators, lamps, thermostat Dimensions variable Photograph of installation in New Alchemy: Elements, Systems and Forces, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto 1969 © DACS 2006 |
Excepting
their awkward logistics, both works might well have been included in the
Tate Modern’s Open
Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970 exhibition, held in 2005.1
Both pieces were conceived c.1970; both do advanced critical work on received
notions of artistic agency, the object status of art, the role of the
spectator and the medium of the artwork’s execution; and both works
deploy systems theory as a conceptual resource for vanguard art practice.
However, while Chickens Hatching makes direct use of the possibilities
presented by cybernetic systems, Norbert: All Systems Go seems
to negate them. In the later work the technology is stripped away and
cybernetic theory, as developed by celebrated mathematician Norbert Wiener,
is mocked, its optimistic feedback-steered vision of human progress undermined.
The affirmative ‘All Systems Go!’ of Chicken’s Hatching
becomes the sardonic refrain of a trained mynah bird in Norbert.
How then should we account for the ideological gulf separating these two
works? What broader implications might this brief narrative have for rethinking
art c.1970?
It would be simple enough to rehearse a familiar argument here, explaining
away this situation as a Neo-Avant-Garde repetition of the historical
Avant-Garde’s failure to reconcile art and advanced technology, or, more
precisely, the failure to respond affirmatively to the perpetual question of
whether the labour of industrial production and the labour of cultural
production can and should be
related.2 However, this would amount
to little more than a stock response - it offers insufficient purchase on the
complex issues at play.3 Surely a
relation between the labour of industrial production and the labour of cultural
production might be conceived that is not strictly isomorphic? Surely modes of
theory and practice could be imagined which do not immediately collapse culture
into industry?4
 |
Fig.3 Unknown photographer Photograph of Jack Burnham (exhibition curator) Reproduced in Software. Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art, exhibition catalogue, The Jewish Museum, New York, 1970, p.10. |
Systems theory, as it came to be understood and applied in art practice in
the late 1960s and early 1970s, seemed to offer exactly such possibilities.
Haacke had been introduced to systems thinking by Jack Burnham, a prominent
critic, occasional curator and close personal friend. In fact, Haacke
justifiably credits Burnham with introducing systems theory to the 1960s art
world at large, through his writing on ‘systems
aesthetics’.5 Yet the
enthusiasts of systems aesthetics (including Burnham himself) came to reject the
theory almost as quickly as they had taken it up. In this, Haacke’s work
can be read as paradigmatic of a broader historical movement. Systems theory
came to be considered unavoidably complicit with its industrial and military
applications and thus illegitimate for an art opposed to commerce and war. Yet
was this reaction legitimate and, even if it was, what might this narrative of
rejection have to teach us today? All systems go but some can be worth
rehabilitating. To revisit Burnham’s theory and reconsider its value is
the intention here. It will be suggested that the precipitate and to some degree
unwarranted rejection of systems aesthetics has obscured a useful theoretical
tool for analysis of the field of cultural production c.1970 and beyond.
Consequently, in the remainder of this discussion, I want to undertake three
critical operations on Burnham’s theoretical corpus: to recover; to
reprise, and to reassess his work, specifically as it relates to the artists,
works and issues that were presented in Open Systems: Rethinking Art
c.1970. It will be argued that the continuing relevance and influence of the
show’s artists is paralleled by an ongoing significance for
Burnham’s less well-known critical work.
For a writer who was a significant theoretical force in his day - sitting on Artforum’s masthead alongside Lawrence Alloway, Annette Michelson, Michael Fried and Rosalind Krauss - Burnham’s work is now relatively obscure. Despite the pertinent inclusion of his ‘Systems Esthetics’ essay in the Open Systems catalogue, his work is not widely anthologised and has been relatively little discussed within mainstream art history. One might want to investigate in some detail the fraught editorial politics of Artforum for a pragmatic explanation of Burnham’s historical occlusion. This, however, will not be undertaken here. Instead, Burnham’s systems aesthetics will simply be restored to view as one of the first, fully developed, theoretical schema to attempt the description and analysis of postformalist artistic practice.
Burnham’s theory of systems aesthetics was developed out of his reading
of the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s General Systems Theory,
(1969). Sharing a publisher with Bertalanffy, Burnham picked up on systems theory
as a key strand of his broad-ranging attempt to develop a position adequate to
then-emerging postformalist practice. Burnham sought to crack open
the hermetically sealed theoretical environment of his time, disturbing
formalist criticism’s increasingly dysfunctional relationship with its
array of treasured, ‘autonomous’ art objects. In place of formalism,
Burnham elaborated a theory of systems aesthetics, heavily inflected by his
reading of systems theory.
In the search for a discursive ground other than
the immanent criteria of taste and subjectivity advanced by formalist
aesthetics, artists as well as theorists seized upon a number of different
approaches from extra-artistic disciplines. As postformalist art emerged, many
different schema were experimented with. Often, explanatory models were drawn
from the sciences rather than the humanities. Systems theory proper was just one
of a number of different models then influential. Norbert Wiener’s
cybernetics and Claude E Shannon and Warren Weaver’s information theory
were key: cybernetic sculpture briefly enjoyed the limelight as a subset of a
broader revival of kinetic art6 and
information theory was formative in Conceptual art’s
self-understanding.7 Yet, as artist
and theorist Michael Corris pertinently reminds us, artists’ and
theorists’ misreading of theory is at least as instructive as any
attempt they might make at faithful translation:
One of the lessons to be drawn from a study of the art of the 1960s and 1970s is that when systems analysis, information theory and the like are utilized as resources for making art, it is generally done so in the spirit of a productive misreading. Similarly, such intellectual resources cannot be applied unproblematically to the practice of art for gaining a deeper understanding.8
Perhaps the most accurate position would be to recognise that scientific theories are never directly translated into art practice or criticism, that there is always a slippage in any interdisciplinary borrowings. Processing systems are never neutral - to use a metaphor from information theory, noise is introduced into any communication at the channel.9
Prior to looking at Burnham’s particular reading of systems theory, it
is important to set out the central tenets of general systems theory as
elaborated by Bertalanffy. General systems theory emerged from science’s
shift away from essentialism and towards the recognition that relationships
between objects, as well as the objects themselves, required study: ‘We
have learned that for an understanding not only the elements but their
interrelations as well are
required.’10 A set of
relationships between objects was considered a ‘system’. Conceptual
focus on the relation of relations thus constitutes the extent of any
given system and, more generally, of systems theory as a discipline. Bertalanffy
stipulates that ‘it turns out that there are general aspects,
correspondences and isomorphisms common to“systems” ... indeed,
such parallelism or isomorphisms appear – sometimes surprisingly –
in otherwise totally different
“systems”.’11
Noting such isomorphism, systems theory’s overarching project was to
perform an integrative function with respect to disparate scientific
disciplines.
Burnham also operated at a crucial intellectual hinge point, one that has
been characterised by Ann Rorimer as, ‘crossing the divide between the
Modernist belief in the self-contained object and Postmodernist attention to
relational, non-autonomous, multifaceted
open-endedness’.12 A shift
in attention from autonomous, closed systems to relational, open systems is
exactly what Bertalanffy announced in systems theory, drawing on his insights
into the study of the biological organism. This new paradigm of open systems,
what Sanford Kwinter has described as the ‘shift in twentieth-century
thought toward a biological
model’13 seems as adequate
an overarching intellectual approach to the logic of cultural production as,
say, the shift from structural to poststructural linguistics. Yet though it has
been widely generalised in other academic discourses - from sociology to
philosophy - art history has been notably resistant to systems theory.
I want to argue that we might think systems theory (as mediated to the art
world by Burnham’s systems aesthetics) as a productive methodological
framework for considering postformalist art as a whole.
14 As Pamela Lee has recently reminded
us: ‘systems theory was applied to emerging forms of digital media ... 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.’15
Although Burnham used concepts drawn from technoscience in his theorisation of
postformalist art, I want to insist that this is not the same thing as
advocating art that simply dramatises scientific or technical development (a
position he has unjustly, but perhaps to some degree understandably, come to be
associated with).16 I am not
interested here in reading Burnham as the proto-theorist of digital media
practice17 nor in dwelling in
detail on the relative merits and demerits of the individual technological
metaphors that he employed (which are admittedly often
over-stretched).18 Nevertheless,
to ignore the impact of science and technology in a reckoning of the art of the
1960s is inadmissible. In his detailed survey of the period,
David Mellor conveys the historical grain of the 1960s in fine detail: ‘A
dream of technical control and of instant information conveyed at unthought-of
velocities haunted Sixties culture. The wired, electronic outlines of a
cybernetic society became apparent to the visual imagination ... It was a
technologically utopian structure of feeling, positivistic and
“scientistic”’19
The
failure of art history to relate scientific models to
‘scientistic’ cultural production arguably has more to do with the
ongoing territory battles of the ‘Two Cultures’ (the traditional
division of intellectual labour between the sciences and the humanities), than
any fully convincing theoretical rationale for the oversight. Encouragingly though,
Hal Foster has recently reflected on his own nuanced relationship to the one
‘science’ so far admissible to mainstream art history, namely
psychoanalysis. He candidly admits that this mode of interpretation might be
both ‘critically insightful’ and ‘ideologically
blinded’, yet nevertheless correctly insists on the power and legitimacy
of holding it in double focus, viewing it ‘historically, in a discursive
field often shared with modernist art’, and applying it
‘theoretically, as a method of understanding aspects of this
art.’20 I want to suggest
that we apply exactly the same evaluative criteria to systems theory. It was
certainly a ‘discursive field’ that many artists of the late 1960s
engaged with and, as a result, serves as a rich ‘method of
understanding’ such art.
Reprising systems aesthetics
Reprising Burnham’s redeployment of systems theory as systems aesthetics requires a brief historical sketch of his intellectual development and its historical context. Burnham trained, and briefly practised, as a sculptor. Giving up his own practice, Burnham subsequently taught others as an Associate Professor of Art at Northwestern University and from 1968-9 was a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT with notable Bauhaus émigré (and art and science advocate) Gyorgy Kepes. Burnham also worked as a curator, organizing Software, Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art (1970), a major early Conceptual Art show, setting vanguard work alongside information technology. He wrote regularly for Artforum and published two major book-length studies, Beyond Modern Sculpture: the Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of this Century (1968) and The Structure of Art (1971). A third title, Great Western Salt Works: Essays on the Meaning of Post-formalist Art (1974), collected many, but not all, of his critical essays.
Burnham’s position in Beyond Modern Sculpture was
technologically deterministic and self-avowedly
teleological,21 anticipating that
modern sculpture would ‘eventually simulate living systems.’ As such
it read awkwardly. The work was heavily criticised by Krauss on its publication
and presents a position that Burnham was to reject in his own later thinking.
Burnt by his critics, Burnham’s second text, The Structure of Art,
was undertaken in order to correct the ‘historical presumptions’ and
‘internal inconsistencies’ of the
first.22 However, its rigid
interpretative framework, derived from an amalgam of structural anthropology and
semiology, collapsed the diversity and specificity of artistic practice into an
inflexible Structuralist schema.
So
far then, so unpromising. It was only in Burnham’s Artforum
articles that he turned to systems theory and produced the insights that
support a rehabilitation of his critical standing today. Burnham’s
elaboration of systems aesthetics is distributed across four key texts, written
between 1968 and 1970. His 1968 article, ‘Systems Esthetics’
[SE], is undoubtedly the most complete exposition of the
theory.23 However, important
extensions of its central ideas are also to be found in, ‘The Aesthetics
of Intelligent Systems’ (1969) [AIS] (delivered as a Guggenheim
talk) and two additional pieces, ‘Real-Time Systems’ (1969)
[RTS]24 and
‘Alice’s Head: Reflections on Conceptual Art’ (1970)
[AH].25
Rather than laboriously summarising each article’s argument, I will
reprise Burnham’s key claims in the light of some of the now canonical
postformalist works shown in Open Systems. In this way we can attempt to
weigh the theory’s explanatory and critical strength in the context of a
representative selection of the art that occasioned it. Obviously, these
exemplary works exhibit a specificity that is not reducible to Burnham’s
theoretical schema – I am not trying to suggest that systems aesthetics
exhausts the work, nor that the works simply exemplify the argument of
Burnham’s systems aesthetics. Rather I will attempt to read the artworks
and the theory through an articulation of their relations.
From
a distance Robert
Smithson’s Four-sided Vortex, 1967 (see Open Systems
catalogue, plate 9, p.93) resembles a specific object after Judd.
Yet, on closer inspection, it becomes evident that Smithson’s stainless
steel cuboid is open at the top, inviting the viewer to peer inside. Four
triangular mirrors angle down inside the volume, meeting at the bottom.
The facets set up a series of multiple internal and external reflections.
The viewer is sheared into a complexity of views, destroying his or her
sense of a coherent self-image. Similarly, the mirrored surfaces reflect
each other, producing an optical confusion of their actual geometric orientation.
Finally, an image of the outside world is also drawn inside the work where
it is distorted and multiplied. Subject, object and world are folded in
on each other in a kaleidoscopic reconfiguration. The individual work
is forced to relinquish its claim to visual autonomy at the same time
as the phenomenological frame of the gallery space is also destabilised.
Here, Smithson foregrounds the relations that exist between subject, object
and world by producing a deformation of them. Like the defamiliarisation
visited on one’s own body image by a hall of mirrors, the artist
makes us think harder about our objects of knowledge. Smithson seems to
crystallise the socio-scientifc paradigm shift that, for Burnham, vanguard
art had to respond to, namely the ‘transition from an object-oriented
to a systems-oriented culture. [SE].
If
Smithson fractures the specific object from within, then Hans Haacke’s
Condensation Cube, 1965 (see Open Systems catalogue, plate 2,
p.83) reveals the permeability of the artwork’s apparently solid
boundaries. As the gallery temperature fluctuates with the time of day, the
number of people in the space and the heat of its lights, water hermetically
sealed inside Haacke’s plexiglass cube is moved through cycles of
evaporation and condensation. Droplets race each other down the inside of the
transparent box, undermining its formal austerity. An entire environmental
ecology is revealed to be operating within the rarefied space of the gallery,
acting on the objects it contains. With a characteristic economy of means,
Haacke demonstrates the literal ways in which the gallery and its visitors
affect the art object. The symbolic extension of this logic is clear. As for
Haacke, so for Burnham: ‘Art does not reside in material entities, but in
relations between people and between people and the components of their
environment.’ [SE]
Taking the measure of the environment
that props up the ideology of the autonomous art object is Mel Bochner’s
strategy in Measurement: Room, 1969 (see Open Systems catalogue,
plate 14, p.99). Utilising whatever space is provided for him, Bochner measures
out the room’s dimensions in black tape and marks up these dimensions in
Letraset on the gallery wall. Taping up the gallery space has the effect of
taping it off, making us acutely aware of its presence, as if at the scene of a
crime. The gallery is revealed aiding and abetting ‘canonical art
forms,’ which, as Burnham also sees it, ‘place a false emphasis on
physical and sensual isolation as prerequisites for aesthetic valuation.’
[AIS]
Taking critique beyond the white cube, Meireles’
infamous intervention into a Latin American Coke franchise, Coca Cola
Project, 1970 (see Open Systems catalogue, plate 53, p.138), is
clearly etched with agitprop politics. Yet it is also important to understand
these recycled and repurposed coke bottles as a democratisation of the art
object, a way of getting art out of the salutary confines of the gallery and
into the messy fabric of everyday life under capitalism. In this way
Meireles’ customised bottles distribute similar claims to Burnham, namely
that ‘Making, promoting and buying art are real time activities ... they
happen within the day-to-day flow of normal experience. Only Art Appreciation
happens in ideal, nonexistential time.’ [AIS]
Burnham’s
insistence on the negation of the art object’s materiality, autonomy
and timelessness all build to his affirmation that: ‘The traditional
notion of consecrated art objects and settings will gradually give way
to the conclusion that art is conceptual focus.’ [AIS]
Dan
Graham’s Homes for America, 1966-7 (see Open Systems
catalogue, plate 35, pp.116-7) enacts exactly this observation. Photographs
of rows of nondescript suburban tract housing along with an accompanying
essay were presented as a magazine spread in Arts Magazine, December
1966. Graham ironically traces the serial logic of Minimalist cultural
production back to the social field that occasioned it and in so doing
successfully re-enunciates the art ‘object’ as direct conceptual
documentation of the social field. The piece’s artistic claim is
made on behalf of its ‘conceptual focus’ rather than its content
or mass cultural form.
Finally for us
here, in The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, 1974-5 (see
Open Systems catalogue, plate 45, pp.126-7), Martha Rosler takes a series
of framed linguistic and photographic representations of the then-deprived New
York locale and runs them in parallel around the gallery. In so doing, she shows
not only the failure of two given representational systems (words and pictures)
to adequate to their object but also suggests the ultimate inadequacy of
any representational system. Despite the thoroughly worked through
character of his own systems aesthetics, Burnham also foresaw his theory’s
limitations, specifically its contingency: ‘The emergence of a
“post-formalist esthetic” may seem to some to embody a kind of
absolute philosophy, something which ... cannot be transcended. Yet ... new
circumstances will with time generate other major paradigms for the arts’
[SE]. Burnham’s systems aesthetics acknowledges in full the
historically vicissitudes that assail any systematic aesthetic theory.
Reassessing systems aesthetics
Even given the self-evidently selective reading I have given here, it is clear that Burnham’s work offers a coherent and rich account of works presented in Open Systems. As we have seen, Burnham’s systems aesthetics comprehends five key insights:
- That there has been a transition from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture.
- That art does not reside in material entities.
- That art is not autonomous.
- That art is conceptual focus.
- That no definition or theory of art can be historically invariant.
Peter Osborne has recently and convincingly aggregated the changes that
occurred in conceptual art practice under four broad headings: namely, the
negation of art’s material objectivity, medium
specificity, visuality and
autonomy.26 In this light,
Burnham’s systems aesthetics represents an earlier and perhaps more
complete theoretical articulation of the changes occurring in art practice
c.1970 than the more well-known narratives of ‘dematerialisation’
(1973) and ‘expanded field’ (1978) that have until recently
dominated discussion of this period.
Yet despite his enthusiasm for ‘systems aesthetics,’
Burnham’s thought eventually moved away from his own theory. His thought
described a similar trajectory to Haacke’s art and for the same reasons:
though initially excited by the artistic possibilities presented by systems
theory and the new cybernetic technology developing out of it, noting the
progressive challenge they offered to traditional media and institutional
contexts,27 Burnham ended up
deeply disillusioned, convinced that, ‘the results have fared from
mediocre to disastrous when artists have tried to use ... the electronic
technology of “postindustrial
culture”.’28
‘Ultimately,’ he concluded, ‘systems theory may be another
attempt by science to resist the emotional pain and ambiguity that remain an
unavoidable aspect of life.’29
However, it was, in fact, Burnham’s own theoretical ambiguity that I
believe compromised his project. I want to conclude by suggesting that Burnham
hinted at, but never comprehensively followed through on, a disarticulation of
systems theory from its techno-industrial deployment. In so doing he only
suggested the conceptual possibilities that systems theory might offer a
critical art practice. Burnham too often carelessly elided systems theory and
cybernetics. Cybernetics’ concern with control and communication in the
animal and machine presupposes relations of direct structural equivalence
between biology and technology, bios and technics, which lend it a
pronounced technological rationality and led it to collude with the command and
control needs of a burgeoning postwar military-industrial complex.
Interestingly, Bertalanffy himself had cautioned against exactly such a
misreading. In General Systems Theory the biologist distinguished the
secondary emergence of ‘Systems Science’ from the original
discipline of systems theory: ‘what may be obscured ... [in Systems
Science] is the fact that systems theory is a broad view which far transcends
technological problems and
demands.’30 He goes on,
‘systems science, centred in computer technology, cybernetics, automation
and systems engineering, appears to make the systems idea another – and
indeed the ultimate – technique to shape man and society ever more into
the
“mega-machine”.’31
Bertalanffy concludes by reaffirming the humanist sentiment that underwrote his
original theorising:
The humanistic concern of general systems theory as I understand it makes it different to mechanistically oriented system theorists speaking solely in terms of mathematics, feedback and technology and so giving rise to the fear that system theory is indeed the ultimate step towards mechanisation and devaluation of man and towards technocratic society.32
Unable or unwilling to hold this crucial distinction in mind, Burnham was to reject systems theory and consequently his own systems aesthetics. His failure to fully differentiate systems theory from cybernetics caused him to swing between a productive, analogical deployment of systems theory and an overly prescriptive stress on its technical application. Burnham declared, with proleptic accuracy: ‘The traditional notion of consecrated art objects and settings will gradually give way to the conclusion that art is conceptual focus.’33 Yet he also regularly lapsed back into naïve technological determinism: ‘it now seems almost inevitable that artists will turn toward information technology as a more direct means of aesthetic activity.’34 Haacke’s politically inspired rejection of cybernetics and information technology was enacted precisely to refuse such a deterministic ‘logic’ of artistic development. Burnham soon followed Haacke’s lead. Disillusioned, he renounced systems aesthetics and retreated into an obscure, cabbalistic mysticism. After publishing a final, dejected essay, ‘Art and Technology: The Panacea that Failed’, Burnham disappeared from the art world altogether.3
Yet need we retire systems aesthetics with Jack Burnham? It is not necessary
to write systems thinking out of art history, nor to denigrate the powerful
methodological purchase of systems aesthetics, simply because of the equivocal
critical standing of the theory’s originator. In Bertalanffy’s
original description, systems are ‘sets of elements standing in
interaction’. More concisely expressed, systems aesthetics tries to think
art as a relation of relations. As such, it perhaps still offers
resources for understanding post-object based art. Recovering the degree to
which postformalist art engaged Burnham’s systems aesthetics allows
historical works to be accounted for in richer terms. Furthermore, future
accounts of the development of twentieth-century art might restore systems
aesthetics to view as an important genealogical precursor to the relational
aesthetics of a more recent generation of artists explicitly indebted to work
produced c.1970.
Notes
1. The works that were included in the show can be found
detailed in its catalogue, Donna De Salvo ed., Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970, London 2005.
2. See Benjamin Buchloh, ‘The
Social History of Art: Models and Concepts’ in Art Since 1900:
Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, London 2005, p.23.
3. Which, as with all
clichés, is not to suggest that there is not a measure of truth in it. As
Grasskamp observes: ‘It is scarcely possible to understand the development
of Haacke’s work in the late 1960s without being aware of the growing
influence of the two failed utopias of this decade, one political, one
technological, both of which promised to bring the bourgeois religion of art to
an end.’ (Walter Grasskamp, Hans Haacke, London 2004, p.42).
4.
Video art being one obvious example.
5. As Haacke himself states:
‘the concept of “systems” is widely used in the natural and
social sciences and especially in various complex technologies. Possibly it was
Jack Burnham, an artist and writer, who first suggested the term (not to be
confused with “systematic”) for the visual arts.’ (Hans
Haacke, ‘Untitled statement’ (1967) in Grasskamp ed., 2004, p.102).
6. See ‘The Cybernetic
Organism as an Art Form’ in Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The
Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of this Century, London
1968, pp.331-59.
7. For a layman’s account of
Cybernetics, see Norbert Wiener’s own The Human Use of Human Beings:
Cybernetics and Society, New York 1950. Or, for a technical account, his
Cybernetics: or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine,
Cambridge, Mass. 1948. For a fairly technical account of information theory, see
Robert Ash, Information Theory, New York 1965.
8. Michael Corris ed.,
Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and Practice, Cambridge 2004, p.197.
9. ‘The channel is the
medium over which the coded message is transmitted. The decoder operates on the
output of the channel and attempts to extract the original message for delivery
to the destination. In general, this cannot be done with complete reliability
because of the effect of “noise,” which is a general term for
anything which tends to produce errors in transmission.’ Ash (1965 p.1).
10. Ludwig von Bertalanffy,
General Systems Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications,
Harmondsworth 1973, p.xviii.
11. Ibid.
12. Ann Rorimer, New Art in
the 60s and 70s: Redefining Reality, London 2001, p.155.
Burnham’s ‘Systems Aesthetics’ are an important yet overlooked
theoretical formulation of this shift. Rorimer herself omits any reference to Burnham’s work.
13.
Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in
Modernist Culture, Cambridge, Mass. 2001, p.ix.
14. It is worth noting that
Haacke preferred to reserve a strict definition for the type of art that could
legitimately be considered in terms of systems theory, preferring to take his
cue from its application in the physical sciences alone: ‘I believe there
are sound reasons for reserving the term ‘system’ for certain
non-static “sculptures,” since only in this category does a
transformation of energy, material or information occur’. ‘Untitled
statement’in Grasskamp ed., 2004, p.102.
15. Pamela Lee,
Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s, Cambridge, Mass. 2004,
p.68.
16. See e.g.
Newman’s inaccurate and somewhat sniffy dismissal of Burnham’s
theoretical position as ‘cultural anthropology’ in Amy Newman,
Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-74, New York, NY, 2000,
p.275.
17. For an account of
this type see Johanna Drucker, ‘Interactive, Algorithmic, Networked:
Aesthetics of New Media Art’ in At a Distance: Precursors to Art and
Activism on the Internet. Annmarie Chandler and Norie Neumark ed.,
Cambridge, Mass. 2005, pp.34-59.
18. For an account of this
nature, see Edward Shanken, ‘The House that Jack Built: Jack
Burnham’s Concept of “Software” as a Metaphor for Art’
retrieved from www.duke.edu/~giftwrap/House.html. 8 May 2005.
19. David Mellor,
The Sixties Art Scene in London, London 1993, p.107.
20. Hal Foster, Prosthetic
Gods, Cambridge, Mass. 2004, p.xiv.
21. See the concluding chapter
of Beyond Modern Sculpture, ‘A Teleological Theory of Modern
Sculpture’, pp.370-6.
22.
Jack Burnham, The Structure of Art, revised edition, New York 1973, p.vi.
23. Jack Burnham, ‘Systems
Esthetics,’ Artforum, September 1968.
24. Jack Burnham,
‘Real Time Systems,’ in Great Western Salt Works: Essays on the
Meaning of Post-Formalist Art. New York 1974.
25. Jack Burnham,
‘Alice’s Head: Reflections on Conceptual Art,’
Artforum, February 1970.
26. Peter Osborne, Conceptual Art, London 2002.
27. ‘With the rash of
“Tek-Art” adventures during the 1960s, substantial numbers of
artists and critics feared that electronics might soon overwhelm the prestige of
the traditional art media as found in painting and sculpture.’ (Jack
Burnham, ‘Art and Technology: The Panacea that Failed’ in Kathleen
Woodward ed., The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture, p.212).
28. Ibid.,
p.214
29. Burnham 1974,
p.11.
30. Bertalanffy 1973,
pp.xi-xii.
31. Ibid., p.xii.
32. Ibid., preface to the
British Edition, p.xxi.
33. Jack Burnham, ‘The
Aesthetics of Intelligent Systems’ retrieved from www.washington.edu/dxarts
23 March 2005.
34. Ibid.
This paper is a revised and expanded version of a talk given by the author at Tate Modern’s Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970 Graduate Symposium 2005.
Luke Skrebowski is a PhD candidate at Middlesex University.
Tate Papers Spring 2006 © Luke Skrebowski
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