Entry to Brooke Alexander Gallery, New York, NY (1984) by Joseph Nechvatal
Cybernetics, Systems Theory, Environmental Art, Op, Pop and the Kinetic/Dynamic Externalism of the Open Arena
BXXII: Cybernetics, Systems
Theory, Environmental Art, Op, Pop and the Kinetic/Dynamic Externalism of the
Open Arena
Excerpted from Immersive Ideals / Critical Distances: A Study of the Affinity Between Artistic Ideologies Based in Virtual Reality and Previous Immersive Idioms
I work with the convention
of the picture plane and framing. The first way of doing this is when the work
is out, away from you, existing simply as a picture. Then you come to enter it
through seeing. The second way involves the “window” of the picture
plane, which is brought forward so that one enters the whole piece. The third
way is when the picture plan is almost pulled over your head like a shirt. The
light from inside then meets the light from outside in such a way that it
becomes insignificant to determine from where exactly the light comes.
-James Turrell, James Turrell, Air
Mass
Use mirrors or reflecting
material to transform the four walls and ceiling of a given room into mirrors.
Then cover the floor, wall to wall, with neon elements of all shapes and colors to a height of sixty centimetres. Install for the
spectator either a transparent gang-plank that crosses the room, or a narrow
passage-way leading to an observation point in the middle of it.
-Martial Raysee, Twelve Environments
The shift in art in the 1960s and 1970s
towards an open, more immersively inviting dominion
of self-attentiveness, with its emphasis on recontextualisation
and release from the framing apparatus of painting, can be seen in retrospect
as an anticipation of and desire for the holonetric omni-directional ambient ideal optic of VR with its ideal
360° bubble-like vista. This optic, which is located radiating out in all
virtual directions at once, can be seen as a further extenuation of the
expanded field which cybernetic-influenced art instigated. (Reichardt)
In this portion we will study the further disappearance of the object d’art (art object), the new role
of the artist, and the newly heightened participation of the spectator (turned viewpant1) in terms of degrees of immersive space.
The disappearance of the object d’art in roughly 1965 marked the emergence indicative of
post-modernist immersive experimentation which was postulated on the assumption
that the art experience needed broadening. Frank Popper’s seminal book Art-Action and Participation is an
important reference to this development as is Jack Burnham’s book Beyond Modern Sculpture. Professor Burnham
arrived at the conclusion that cybernetic sculpture, or rather the cybernetically informed sculptor, is not simply adopting
new materials and new standards of fabrication, but evolving a new aesthetic,
now synchronised with technical ideals. (Burnham, 1968a) Cybernetics had
demonstrated that the configuration of a system is an index of the performance
which may be expected from it (Ashby), hence cybernetics’ extremely
circular-state yields an extended aesthetic consciousness on the basis of
connected self-attentiveness and it is within this elastic self-attentive
aesthetic framework where we will expect to find new immersive attitudes
emerging in art. (Reichardt)
The recontextualisation
of the object d’art into the global
envelopment of the environment (where the viewer is pulled away from the
constraining aperture of the picture frame and more and more from the gallery
frame) is indicative of the immersive qualities of the era under investigation
here. This radically disframing opened up the viewing
cone of the 1950s’ post-cubist/post-war painting space towards a more thorough literalisation of the imagined (or implied) non-partial
field of universal surroundings of Fontana’s Spatialist-type
conceptualisations of abstract space. Here framed areas of space may not be
singled out and be made to represent the totality of the viewer’s holonetric range.
This post-Fontanaesque
immersive space, where partial framed and arranged views may not be cut out of
the total surround, finds a very real literalisation
in the open field of art in the 1960s and 1970s and the broad holonogic gaze which it provokes is a huge step in the
direction of escaping the limits of narrow representation in the interests of omnijective-immersive consciousness. From this point on,
only a technique which fully undermines the proscenium and window-like frame
can stand in for the abstract, all-over, intemperate 360° bubble-vision ideal
which the frame cuts and excludes. In this drift towards anti-representationalism, art begins leaving the orbit of the
framing apparatus and of the tunnel vision that fixed a segment of the
objective world at one end and the viewer at the other. What had enabled that
narrow cone of vision to simulate the entire visual atmospheric field
previously, was possible precisely with the enclosure of that framing cone
(tangent tunnel) but once that framing cone has dissolved through Kant’s
indeterminate supersensible, Fontanaesque
spatial ideals, Pollockesque scale, Kleinesque emptiness, Kusamaesque
dematerialisation through excess or any other number of Op, Cybernetic,
Minimalist or Conceptualist artistic strategies, that narrow cone of
representation is found to be wanting and dissolves, and a much more
encompassing atmospheric scopic organisation is
conceived in its place.
Art in the 1960s’ open arena then, is
generally conceived of as a cluster of optical vectors which suggest a
hyper-total, enveloping, non-vectored space that creates unaccustomed
situations and sensations for the enthusiastic viewpant,
in an attempt to shift the political/social vortex away from outdated symbolic
allegiances and towards sensate dynamic forces of change. As such it stands in
contrast to the standard histories and doctrines and ideas that were being
propagated in the mass media at the time. (Rosen)
Here I will review some pertinent examples
concerning the semi-disappearance of the object
d’art which occurred in the late-1960s (Woods, Thompson & Williams)
which to a great extent set the tone for vanguard art on through to the late-1970s
when a revival of painting occurred under the designation of post-modernist
appropriation/simulation. (Phillips & Heiferman)
Of course artists continued to paint and sculpt throughout the period of the
1960s and 1970s, and still up to this day, but they do so from a derrière-garde position, as traditionalists. This is so because an
immense change in art occurred in the late-1960s when typically art lost its artisanial materiality (as discrete paintings and
sculptures) and became increasingly time-based and ambient as a repercussion
(primarily) of the legacy of painterly abstraction in the early and mid-20th
century. (Rosenthal) In terms of the immersive inclination, this expansion away
from the two-dimensional canvas freed the spectator from stasis and encouraged
an active atmosphere of contemplative reception within the work of art which was attained through essentially the
compliant motion of the immersant in contact with the
strategic liberties exacted in the expanded art. (Rosenberg, 1972) Artists increasingly
aimed in this era to evoke possibilities within the imagination of their
audience and to engage their active participation and to release art from its
previous obligatory fidelities to the hypothetical and material status quo.
(Popper, F., 1975) Underlying this aim is a miasmatic
idea which questions linear and hierarchical structures and seeks to replace
them with atmospheric loose structures, keyed to a penetrable, reciprocal flow
of events. (Deleuze & Guattari,
1983) This inclination might be further characterised as the deposit of an omnijective metaphysics within the immersant
that will manifest at a later date as a personal and private inner art: in
other words the creation of future artists.
Much of the disappearance (Popper, F., 1975),
de-definition (Rosenberg, 1972) and de-materialisation (Lippard,
1973) of the art object that went beyond Modernism (Burnham, 1968a) in search
for a total art (Henri) developed out of the visual spectator’s participation
called for in viewing Op Art: a hard-edge
geometrical movement which flourished in the early-1960s (largely inspired by
various optical experiments of Marcel Duchamp) in the work of Jesus-Rafael
Soto, Bridget Riley, the GRAV group, Yayoi Kusama, Yaacov Agam, Pol
Bury, Josef Albers, Marian Zazeela and Victor Vasarely, among others. Op Art called attention to the
spectator’s individual, constructive, and changing perceptions and thus called
upon the attitude of the spectator to transfer the creative act increasingly
upon him or herself. This ideal, in turn, beckons forth a consideration of the
enlargement of the audience’s normal participation; both in regard to the
spectators ocular aptitude to instigate variations in the perceived optic, as
well as his or her capability to produce kinetic and aggregate exchanges on or
within the work of art itself.
Indeed Kinetic Art also played an important
part in pioneering the unambiguous use of optical movement and in fashioning
links between science, technology and art relating to the notion of the environment.
(Popper, F., 1968) Simply stated, the term kinetic
means the study of the relationship between moving bodies, hence the term Kinetic Art is usually used to describe
either three-dimensional mobiles or constructions which move in either
foreordained or unplanned ways. With Op Art (which is kinetic in that Op
situations employ optical illusion which effect an appearance of motion) and
Kinetic Art (both conceptual descendants of the shifting perceptions initiated
in 20th century painting with Impressionism, Cubism and Futurism) the artwork
under consideration is no longer merely a categorical system but increasingly
an invocation to omnijective
perception. The cognitive encounter that a spectator may undergo in an Op
situation, perhaps best exemplified by Bridget Riley’s projected circular Op
environment done for the 1960 exhibition Situations
in London, was instigated by the certitude that the spectator was obliged
to take up consecutive positions in front of the display, in order to detect
the series of shifting patterns and lines which were offering themselves to the
onlooker from contrary and incompatible angles. Thus the element of personal
choice and physical motion by the beholder is emphasised, resulting in a
decline in the art object’s sequestered, fetishistic
standing as an object d’art. This is
well exemplified too by Jesus-Rafael Soto’s process-based walk-through Op
environments called Penetrables, which incorporated a tactile immersion
(with occasional sonorous elements) notable here for their immersive attributes
(given their realisation on an architectural scale). The work increasingly
becomes a co-operative production of the operation betwixt the former object d’art and the viewpant,
as the viewpant is omnijectively projecting his or her selfhood into the form and is thereby
enabled to sense the various spatial possibilities the shifting work suggests.
Many sensory projects, installations and
environmental events produced by the Brazilian artist Hélio
Oiticica (1937-1980) exemplify this trend
excellently. In Oiticica’s work the once established
correlations between the spectator, the object
d’art and the artist is radically modified. With Oiticica
the emphasis is not anymore on the object
d’art created by the artist, and certainly not alone on the personal fancy
of the viewpant, but on a third dramatising manoeuvre
similar to what Brion Gysin
(1916-1986) and William S. Burroughs call the
third mind. (Burroughs & Gysin) The third
mind is based on Brion Gysin’s
rediscovery of Tristan Tzara’s (1896-1963) Dada
cut-up writing method which he encountered while cutting through a newspaper
upon which he was trimming floor mats. Gysin did
several experiments with cut-ups while living in Tangiers and shared them with
his friend William S. Burroughs. Thereafter Burroughs, used cut-ups in his
books Nova Express, The Ticket That
Exploded, and other books. Gysin too was
responsible for the absolutely immersive and optical Dream Machine which he invented based on the sparkling and
flickering of the sun through the trees on a bus. The principle behind the Dream Machine is that it generates
wave-like patterns which strobe at around 10 Hz, the frequency of the alpha
waves sometimes present in the part of the brainstem responsible for
determining states of creative consciousness. As one sits relaxed in a room
filled with the machine-generated flickering light, spectacular visualisations
may occur due to the optical twinkle.
As the blending between the artist and
spectator took on greater and greater emphasis during the period of the
late-1960s new forms of aesthetic immersion opened up. It is precisely in this
third mind blending that the question of art
as ambience arises. Indeed ambience
as art is a fruitful domain in which to find the immersive aesthetic in all of
its varieties and forms of manifestation.
