At the end of the 1980s through the beginning of the 1990s, photo curators, art and media theorists began to examine the significance of electronic image technology for the status and the practice of photography. [1] The rapid permeation of digitally processed photographs in the commercial and journalistic areas, the introduction of relatively high-performance and reasonably priced PCs, software, scanners, printers, etc., which made electronic image processing accessible to artists and amateurs as well, gave cause to speak of an epoch-making turning point: «From the moment of its sesquincentennial in 1989 photography was dead—or, more precisely, radically and permanently displaced—as was painting 150 years before.» [2]
However, the focus on the difference between analog and digital media, which in the second half of the twentieth century advanced to become the dominant difference in media history and theory, [3] conceals their common starting point in the nineteenth century and the radical turning point associated with the invention of photography: As the first technical imaging method, it ushered in theradical change between ‹old› and ‹new› media. In this sense, the media theorists Marshall McLuhan and Vilém Flusser, both of whom think in terms of generously measured eras, place photography at the beginning of the information age and the telematic society. In his anthology «Understanding Media,» [4] which was first published in 1964, McLuhan writes: «Photography was … decisive in making the break between mere mechanical industrialization and the graphic age of electronic man.» In his work «Ins Universum der technischen Bilder» (Into the universe of technical images), which was published 20 years after McLuhan's, Flusser establishes that «technical images are a completely new type of media, even though in many respects they may be reminiscent of traditional images, and that they have a completely different ‹meaning› than traditional images. In short: they are indeed about a cultural revolution.» [5] Both of them see the age of the computer as a consequence or a continuation of this ‹photographic revolution.› Following McLuhan and Flusser in this respect, this contribution begins with a return to the fundamental qualities of photographic mediality and their manifestation in the various ways photography is used and the discourse surrounding it. It is only from this media-historical perspective that one can comprehend what transformations the photographic dispositive undergoes in the course of technological change and how these transformations affect the media function of photography.
Automatic Recording
Daguerre and Talbot regarded their inventions as a chemical and physical process by which, in Talbot's words, «natural objects may be made to delineate themselves without the aid of the artist's pencil.» [6] What is being stressed is the immediacy of the image, the absence of an artistic rendering. The omission of this rendering, which is ‹prone to errors,› guaranteed truth to reality and objectivity. In writings on photography in the nineteenth century, this objectivity was time and again connected with the indifference and neutrality of photography towards its object, i.e. its referent. The automatic photo is not selective—it depicts all objects with the same care; it does not distinguish between important and unimportant, worthy or unworthy of being taken.There was a slogan used by contemporaries to move the equalizing quality of photography onto a politically progressive horizon: ‹All things are equal under the sun.› The qualities of automatic recording judged as positive became decisive for the use of photography for documentary purposes: in the preservation of historical monuments; in the sciences, criminology, and medicine—to name the central areas of the nineteenth century. However, they stood in the way of the recognition of photography as art. This is the reason that until far into the twentieth century, reference was still made to the creative means of photographers in order to justify their work as art. The intentional inartistic implementation of photography in the Concept Art of the 1960s and 1970s signified a transition in this regard: In order to deconstruct established art values, precisely those ways of using photography were taken up that could not be brought into line with their artistic ennoblement. With books of photographs such as «Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations» or «Every Building n the Sunset Strip » by Ed Ruscha and «Alle Kleider einer Frau» (All of a woman's clothes) by Hans Peter Feldmann, for example, these artists return to the photographic recording in the sense of a simple list or bureaucratic registration. Concept artists ‹mime,› so to speak, different ways of using photography—such as e.g. scientific documentation, chronophotography, crime scene photography, illustration, the photo report, shutter photography— and in this way present—often ironically—critical analyses of these usages.
While Concept artists refer to the superficial banality of photography, conceptional photography, which appeared at about the same time as Concept Art, relies on its documentary quality, i.e. on the reproductive output and objectivity of the photographic medium. Within this context, the return to automatic recording means the greatest possible technical quality combined with the withdrawal of the photographer in favor of the object (this was formulated in the introduction of the exhibition catalogue «New Topographics. Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape » in a way that points the way ahead; [7] because it exemplifies this photographic attitude, the book by Bernd and Hilla Becher is particularly worth mentioning).
The photograph as an index
In the twentieth century, automatic recording was given an emphasis that went beyond the objectivity of photographic depiction. In the photographic theory of the time, the characterization of photography as a ‹copy of nature› was restated using the sign theoretical term of ‹indexicality.› [8] Indexical signs such as the smoke of a fire, footprints in the sand and the like have a physical—one could also say causal (cause and effect)—connection to their referent. In this understanding, the photographic image is a ‹trace› or the ‹effect› of the object that was photographed: a print of the rays of light thrown back from an object onto a carrier material that has been made sensitive to light with silver salt crystals. Thus the photographic depiction of an object is at the same time verification of its existence, even if this applies to a past moment. Roland Barthes' formula for the certification of a past present, which for him constitutes the nature—the ‹noema›—of photography, is: «That's the way it was.» [9] Of course this quality especially predestines photography for its use in investigative surveillance and the securing of criminal evidence—uses that have been adopted by artistic photography in many ways (for instance «On this site» (Crime scenes) by Joel Sternfeld, or «The Shadow» and «l´Hôtel» by Sophie Calle). [10]
Photography's promise of reality, [11] which goes beyond realistic depiction, is based on this physico-chemically based indexicality: because it claims to be capable of verifying reality. In doing so, indexicality relates only to the «photographic act,» [12] the moment of releasing the image; all of the other factors that lend meaning to the photographic image—choice and choreography of the subject, processing the print, material and discursive contextualization—are blended out in the process.
Mechanical Reproduction
In early proto-photographic experiments, the search for a simplified process for duplicating existing masters was equally as important as the goal of fixing the camera obscura's images. As early as the 1820s, Niépce dealt with the transfer of engravings onto lightsensitive carrier material, which was then meant to serve as a printing plate. Talbot, whose positive/negative processprovided the prerequisite for what was in principle the infinite duplicability of photographs, also had in mind the production of «multiplying at small expense copies of rare or unique engravings.» [13] Indeed, the reproduction of works of art and historical monuments from throughout the world advanced to one of the most successful branches of photography in the nineteenth century. In his canonic essay «The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction ,» Walter Benjamin described the resulting consequences for the function of art as the loss of its aura: Outside of their context—released from the here and now—works of art lose their uniqueness as originals and thus their cultural value. Assembled in an «imaginary museum» [14] and disregarding their original function and integration into a cultural context, works of different origins and of different epochs can be compared as purely visual data (surfaces). This kind of comparison was first made possible by form analysis, thus establishing an aesthetics based on the history of style at the end of the nineteenth century. At the same time, however, the photographic ‹parity› of artifacts goes beyond the boundaries of disciplinary aesthetics: Aby Warburg, who arranged photographic reproductions according to subject in the plates of his «Mnemosyne Atlas» [15] , made no distinction between antique relief and contemporary advertisement, and thus already pointed in the direction of visual studies.
The photograph as a multiple
The combination of mechanical reproduction with a mode of production based on the division of labor made the photograph into a mass-produced article in the nineteenth century. At the same time, however, the trouble-free duplicatability of the photograph as a product became a problem: The legal dispute over the copyright of photographs starts out from commercial photography, which needed to protect itself from the exploitation of its products—e.g. portraits of prominent figures or stereoscopic cards. [16]
However, the quality of the photograph as a copy implies more than just the mechanical reproduction of existing images—be it in the form of prints from a negative or rephotographing image masters. In connection with Walter Benjamin's essay on the work of art, the art theorist Rosalind Krauss sets out thatphotography «is a medium that directly produces copies, i.e. a medium in which the copies exist without an original.» [17] According to this understanding of photography, even the negative of a nature scene is already a copy: a reproduction of the depicted subject. [18] For Krauss, the explosive force of this photographic quality for art of the modern age (and of art reproduction in the twentieth century in general) lies in the fact that it undermines the concept of originality itself. [19] It was above all the «photographic activity of postmodernism » [20] that consciously took up this quality in order to deconstruct notions of (creative) authorship and the autonomy of works of art. In this way, the artist Sherrie Levine ‹appropriated› [21] icons from artistic photography simply by taking her own photographs of them (e.g. in the series After Walker Evans ), and in doing so attacked the auralization of photography, which had accompanied its musealization in the 1970s and 1980s. [22]
Mass Medium Avant la Lettre
Mechanical reproduction created the condition for the development of photography into a mass medium, whose hegemony was not forced open until the 1950s and 1960s with the advent of television. [23] It began in the 1850s with the distribution of portraits of prominent figures and stereographs, and experienced a further thrust in the 1880s through the beginnings of shutter photography and the illustrated press.
Facial society
In 1854 the photographer Alphonse-Eugene Disdéri patented a process that allowed taking several portraits in succession on one plate. He rationalized and reduced the cost of portrait photography in this way, which consequently experienced a tremendous boom. [24] The small-format carte de visite, the term for the cut-to-size portrait cards, were used less as a personal keepsake than for communicative exchange. Portraits of prominent figures, whose spectrum ranged from ruling families, writers, musicians, scientists and actors to demimondes, were especially popular. Collecting and looking at the cards became a parlor game that leveled off social hierarchies by juxtapositioning images that had been choreographed in a similar way. The portrait of prominent figuresanticipated the modern portrait of stars and was thus incipient of a «facial society,» in which «the faces of politicians, generals, managers, athletes, artists or products advanced to portraits of stars and brand names, to logos with public appeal.» [25]
Modern observer
In 1851, Sir David Brewster introduced a transportable viewing device at the London World's Fair that allowed merging together slightly displaced paired photographs to create one image, which appeared to be three-dimensional. [26] Brewster's stereoscope became a huge success, and «soon thereafter thousands of greedy pairs of eyes bent over the stereoscope's openings like over the skylight to infinity.» [27] The stereograms [28] mass produced in the period following the stereoscope's introduction for the most part showed historical monuments, landscapes and urban scenes—tourist views from countries near and far that could be quasi ‹virtually› traveled via the stereoscope. In addition, they allowed the middle class a visual appropriation of foreign countries and cultures, which was already taking place through colonization. Contemporary descriptions [29] verify that the ‹visual desire› that arises when viewing stereoscopic photographs lay in the feeling of immersion: [30] The outside world disappears in favor of the space of an image, which is experienced as a real space. In its linking of apparatus and the physiology of sight, stereoscopy is part of a «modernization of vision» [31] that according to the art historian Jonathan Crary is associated with a new concept of the observer. The exploration of the physiology of human vision driven forward in the nineteenth century came to the conclusion that the observer is in no way merely a passive recipient of images of the outside world, rather the images are created in the visual process. Optical toys such as the phenacistiscope, the zootrope, [32] and of course the stereoscope represent the new insight that was being gained into vision (such as the after-image effect or binocularity). Besides their being a form of entertainment, at the same time they trained perception, which was being subjected to new demands in the age of industrialization.
Consumer as producer—Producer as consumer
Photography, however, not only produces the modern consumers of images, but also empowers them to produce their own images. In the beginning, photography as a private pastime was reserved for a small class as it required money and above all time to learn the skills necessary for taking and developing photos. At the end of the 1880s, the creation of the hand camera and roll film created the conditions for shutter photography, which no longer required knowledge of the photographic process. The famous slogan ‹You press the button, we do the rest,› with which the Kodak company advertised its first cameras, is an accurate indication of the dependence of the lay photographer on the photographic industry: S/he had become a producer of photographs only in the sense of being a consumer of its products and services.
An essential part of the practices of private photography is the photograph's quality as an index (refer to the section on «The photograph as an index,» above): Biographical occurrences are recorded and authenticated at the same (‹It actually happened›). Shutter photography, as analyzed by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in the 1960s, became primarily an agent of the cohesion of the family, for which it both produced verification and at the same time created. [33] For this reason, the new practices of shutter photography that arose in the course of digitalization are to be viewed in connection with the dissolution of traditional family structures and the forms of relationships and communication that take their place. [34]
The photograph in the media environment
The history of photographic intermediality—the connection of photo/book, text/image—began with the publication of Talbot's book «The Pencil of Nature.» [35] However, prior to the 1880s this connection was associated with a small number of copies, as photographs were either glued into books or produced using printing processes that required a high degree of craftsmanship. For the mass circulation of illustrated magazines and newspapers, photographs first had to be transferred onto wood engravings— with the arrival inthe 1880s of the screening process of autotypy, they could then be transferred mechanically to a printing plate and printed together with the copy. In the course of the illustrated magazine boom in the first half of the twentieth century, the photo report and the documentary photo essay emerged as specific forms of the combination of photo series with text contributions. The success of the mass press in the 1920s was also accompanied by criticism thereof: Siegfried Kracauer, for instance, implored the danger of substituting the experience of reality with the world of media. In his words: «The public sees the world in magazines, and magazines prevent perception of the world.» [36] This criticism would later be formulated in a whole range of variations. [37] In the media environment of the illustrated press, photographs are assigned meaning through captions and text contributions; text contributions are verified through photos: This intermedial configuration is decisive for the reception of photographic images. The switchover from offset printing to computer-based desktop publishing required the conversion of the photographic image into digital data—digitalization thus represents a logical further development for photography in the media environment. If one looks back at the history of how it was used in the mass media, which was only briefly touched on here, the most recent technological change in photography, i.e. its connection to electronic media, represents nothing more than an extension of precisely these media functions and their being made more effective. It was not until the advent of the Internet that the options aired by the early phototexts of a non-site-specific availability and an unrestricted circulation of images could actually be redeemed. In doing so, this continuation of objectives and applications, which from the beginning were associated with photography, oscillates between democratization and commercialization, between the ideal of a general accessibility of media technology and the problem of its dependence on the mechanisms of the economy and industrial production.
Digitalization
The technological transformation of photography isa natural consequence of its intermediality. In the same way the screening process constituted the condition for its integration into the medium of mass printing, its digitalization is the condition for its implementation into the universal medium of the computer. The substitution of the analog through the digital—or more precisely: analogo- numeric—process took plate in several stages and on different technological levels: that of the recording, the processing, and the transmission of data.
From a media-archeological perspective, the screening of photographic masters for the purpose of their automatic transfer onto printing plates can already be described as a form of digitalization: The continuous tonal values of a photochemical master are broken down into discreet units, i.e. black dots and white blanks. [38] This breaking down is at the same time the condition for coupling photography with electric telegraphy. [39] , on the media historical connection between photography and telegraphy. In order to be able to transmit photographic images per telegraph, the image to be sent is screened into fields, which are then assigned discreet signs according to their various brightness attributes. These signs then travel through the channel, and on the receiving end they are again assigned the corresponding dots, which allows recombination of the image. In their technical arrangement, screening and image-telegraphic scanning anticipate the modern scanning process: however they differ on an essential point: During the modern scanning process, values are stored and can be further processed. By scanning them, analog photos are carried over into the computer and thus made accessible to mathematical operations: The condition for image processing was created. Electronic image recording was not made possible for another 20 years: through the CCD (charged coupled device) chip, which was patented in 1974 and consists of a lattice-like arrangement of light-sensitive elements via which light can be converted into an electrical charge. This, on the other hand, can be measured and subsequently digitalized, i.e. converted into bit patterns. [40] Although photographs are in this way made directly (without going through a scanner) available to processing or transmission by the computer, their creation remains bound to the analog transfer of lightquantities: The actual digitalization occurs only through the measuring out of these light values and their code conversion into numerical values (bits). This distinguishes analogo-numerical photography (mentioned above) from images that have completely generated by a computer and whose ‹look› is only adapted to photographic (or cinematic) aesthetics. [41]
In view of the use of the photograph by the mass media, the advantages of its digitalization are perfectly apparent: It can be delivered immediately (e.g. as a press photo) and made available for prompt processing (e.g. for the layout of a magazine); in addition, it can be directly distributed throughout the world via the Internet.
Digital Montage
Apart from their use in military and scientific contexts, [42] the possibilities of digital image processing and analog-digital image recording (beginning with the so-called ‹video still camera› introduced in 1981) were first used in the areas of magazines and the press. Until way into the 1980s, digital image processing remained a high-tech option only large agencies could afford—the pyramids, for example, were moved closer together by means of Scitex rendering for the February 1982 cover of ‹National Geographic,› who plays an exemplary role in the debate over digitalization. The introduction of the personal computer and the opening of the Internet, however, also shaped the participatory and (inter)active potential of the configuration of photography, the video, and computer processing: Multi-media ‹desktop publishing› is now no longer only available to the mass media, but also political groups, citizens' groups, artists—i.e. anyone who has anything to communicate. It is in this spirit that in the exhibition catalogue «Digital Photography: Captured Images, Volatile Memory, New Montage,» Jim Pomeroy takes up a slogan of the leftwing media avant-garde of the 1930s: Every receiver can become a transmitter. [43] The exhibition, which in 1988 was presumably the first to take up the subject of ‹digital photography› within the context of art, also makes reference to the avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s in another respect. The image/text works by the artists, which were presented primarily in the simple form of computer printouts, are compared in their method with themontage concepts of Dadaism, Surrealism and Constructivism: [44] In the same way the ‹analog› collages consist of fragmentary photos and texts of different origins, the computer works also disclose their construction principles—the contrastive superimposition of heterogeneous material. In doing so, the low-tech optics of coarse, mosaic-like pixel resolution, visible video lines, of saw-tooth distortions and transmission errors (cf. e.g. «The Noise Factor» (1988) by George Legrady) are set against the ‹smooth,› high-tech image manipulation by the large photo agencies. The ‹noise› of the data not only prevents illusionistic effects—it shows, so to speak, the medium ‹computer› at work.
With the introduction of the image processing software ‹Photoshop,› a further form of digital montage appeared. Like the large magazines, artists can now process photographs without their intervention being directly visible in the result. Works such as «Faces #1–12» (1998) by Vibeke Tandberg, «Affaires infinies» by Bettina Hoffmann (1997), or «Le jeu de la règle» (1992ff.) by Alain Fleischer are based on the—still assumed—reception of photographic images as representations of a real (or a staged) occurrence. The irritation begins at second glance or in the course of the series of images; it lifts the ‹naive› perception of the scene and thus opens up a further horizon of meaning. [45]
Digital Trouble
The welcoming of the creative potential and the multi-media ‹connectability› of a digitalized photograph is eclipsed by a critical discourse, which above all points out the potential for manipulation and forgery of all kinds in electronic image processing. For this reason, it is not coincidental that the debate over the loss of the credibility of photographic images ignites in the area of photojournalism. The authority of the classical photo report is particularly bound to photographic indexicality, in which the ‹That's how it was› of the object being shown is substantiated by the photographer's ‹I was there,› and vice versa. Digitalization severs the indexical connection between the photograph and the object of the photograph, and at the same time it expropriates the photographer in that the photo is now accessible to any form ofprocessing. Photographer associations fear that the simplification of the ‹creative› editing of photographic masters will gradually disable the difference between ‹authentic› and ‹manipulated› photos and thus in the end completely undermine the belief in the documentary value of photography. [46] The theoretical contributions that look into this aspect of digitalization necessarily return to the long history of forging images for the specific purpose of deception and to the ‹classical› processes of image/text layout that confer meaning. [47] Above and beyond that, authors such as Martha Rosler, who as an artist examined the conditions of a critical practice of documentary photography, emphasize the fundamental dependence of photography and its documentary function on social, political and discursive contexts. [48] These aspects allow relativizing the meaning of the technological transformation from analog to digital photography and shifting to the more fundamental question of the changes in the use of media by society.
However, the apprehension that the loss of photographic indexicality triggers off goes beyond the suspicion of deception: It is linked to the idea of the fading away of any reference to external reality and, as a result, the individual's power of judgement. [49] This is where the debate over the ‹death of photography› converges with that over the virtualization of human experience, which was conducted in the 1990s in connection with computer games and increasing use of the Internet, but also in conjunction with the media adaptation of the first Gulf War in 1990/1991. The Gulf War gained exemplary meaning in two respects: It stands for a new dimension in the ‹visiontechnological› distancing of the fighter pilot from his or her target and for a particularly restrictive image policy on the part of American warfare. «In this war,» writes Mitchell in «The Reconfigured Eye,» which was published a year after the first Gulf War ended, «satellite imaging systems did much of the spying and scouting. Laser-guided bombs had nose-cone video cameras; pilots and tank commanders became cyborgs inseparable from elaborate visual prostheses that enabled them to see ghostly-green, digitally enhanced images of darkened battlefields. There was no Mathew Brady to show us the bodies on the ground, no RobertCapa to confront us with the human reality of a bullet through the head. Instead, the folks back home were fed carefully selected, electronically captured, sometimes digitally processed images of distant and impersonal destruction. Slaughter became a video game: death imitated art.» [50] This quote is typical for the moral charge that the discussion over the photographic and post-photographic ‹truth› gains through this context: Electronic image technology stands for the view from above—the general's view, who only has his or her sights set on anonymous targets—while ‹classical› photography stands for the view from below—for the suffering and death of the individual as the ‹human› reality of war. In contrast, the photographic work «Martha Rosler,» which Sophie Ristelhuber began after the end of the first Gulf War, relies on a third perspective. The condition of her fragmentary tracking is the conviction that the ‹truth› of a war cannot in principle be mediated through images: neither through photographs of its victims, nor through cockpit displays.
In the exhibition «Photography after Photography» the focus is on a further context of ‹digital trouble.› A number of the works it included tested the new tools (Photoshop, Paintbox and the like) on the human body, on the human face: Bodies were deformed and hybridized (Inez van Lamsweerde), constructed (Keith Cottingham's «Fictitious Portraits» from 1992); faces were ‹folded› (Valie Export's «o.T.» from 1989), robbed of their countenance (Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher's «Dystopia» from 1994), their individuality (Nancy Burson's series «Chimären» since 1982). [51] It is at the interface of the human body that the post-photographic discourse eclipses that on the ‹posthuman,› [52] in which digital processing stands so to speak metaphorically for the ubiquitous variability of the human body through cosmetic surgery and the genetic technology of the future. However, whereas talk of the ‹posthuman› drives forward the imagining of a new design, a new model of the human in more of an affirmative gesture, [53] the artistic works cited above visualize the apprehension triggered off by the feeling of uncertainty with respect to our traditional ideas about the similarity and identity of the subject55 (confirmed by the traditional photographic portrait in its reference to an individual physiognomy, a distinctbody), i.e. they make ‹dystopic› reference to what is possibly a changing ‹human› form.
Unstable Images
«The digital image technologies have literally eliminated a photographic model of representation, the spatial-temporal bond of a light-sensitive carrier material to a spatial-temporal constellation/figuration in front of the camera, and put it up for debate. The very foundation of the ontology of the photographic image as conceived by the likes of Kracauer and Benjamin, and later by Bazin and Barthes, has been shaken. In view of the binary coding of the photographic contingency, even the index theory, which follows Charles S. Pierce, now appears to be obsolete.» [54] As explained above, the indexicality of photography substantiated its credibility as evidence of something that had actually been there in front of the camera. Even the knowledge that a photo does not gain meaning until it has been contextualized has not led us to fundamentally doubt this credibitility. Today, the reception of photographs is beginning to change: We now start off by doubting its promise of reality. The digital/ized photograph is a ‹dubitative› image: [55] ). Its authenticity as a direct photo and the associated evidential value can now only be established through external authorization. [56] For this reason, a society whose communication rests primarily on digital (image) media requires a «well-founded, strictly arranged media policy»59— those who analyze the technological change from analog to digital photography are united in this conclusion.
From a technological point of view, the ‹That's how it was› of analog photography is based on the «irreversibility of the exposed material»; [57] the digital photo, in contrast, is characterized by its «immanent variability»: [58] The digital photograph is fundamentally reversible (it can immediately be deleted); its output as an image is only one of the possible manifestations of the data stored in binary form. [59]
A further factor in the ‹instability› of digital photographs is their dependence on hardware and software. Their visual appearance changes along with the file format, the screen configuration, through compression, conversion, etc. The greatest problem, however, is caused by the continuous furtherdevelopment of computer systems: The change from one system to the next but one can make image data unreadable and thus inaccessible. And so there is a rift between potential ‹digital endurance› and ‹mechanical impermanence,› [60] which can only be bridged through continuous activity: Data stocks have to be adapted to each of the new formats in time with the new developments by the computer industry; they have to be put onto each of the new storage media before they only become interesting to media archeologists. [61]
According to an expert on image databases, «[d]igitalization projects necessitate constant reacting and acting, because what is digital does not rest, just as overall technological development does not rest.» [62] The professional condition for operators of image databases also affects both artists who work with digital media as well as each and every lay photographer: While the best way to slow down the physico-chemical process of the decay of photographs is to protect them from being accessed (by allowing them to be exposed to as little light as possible and storing negatives in underground freezer depots), digital photos are only preserved through their use—if one ignores them, the information stored on them will also be lost for future generations. [63]
It is quite possible that the apprehension about the instability of digital photographs and the efforts to secure their longevity is nothing more than the reflex of a «traditional (Old European) self-conception of culture…. [t]ransatlantic media cultures have long since accentuated the technologies of multi-media and space-seizing transmission—the dataflows in the Internet.» [64] In the sense of an information society, ‹instability› can be regarded as a positive value: It stands for dynamic transmission, unobstructed circulation, and for communication that is not bound to real space; it stands for virtuality as the ability to experience what is possible. In contrast, analog photography hangs on to what is past; its gesture is a clinging—to a state of visible reality, to public and private occurrences, to fleeting moments in everyday life. Its great subjects, the topography of urban and suburban life and the visualization of biography and identity are (or were) being sustained by a concept of remembrance that binds historical tradition andpersonal memory to material evidence. Fifteen years after the beginning of the debate over the ‹end of photography› one can establish that the radical change from analog to digital technology has not invalidated the notions of representation, identity and memory associated with the photographic dispositive—rather it contributes to a destabilization of these notions. In the environment of electronic media, digital photography constitutes a threshold phenomenon: It is located so to speak at the transition from old storage media to new communication media and their paradigms.
[1] Cf. Marnie Gillett/Paul Berger (eds.), Digital Photography: Captured Images, Volatile Memory, New Montage, exhibition catalogue, SF Camerawork, San Francisco, 1988; Fred Ritchin, In Our Own Image. The Coming Revolution in Photography, New York, 1990; William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye. Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, Cambridge, MA/London, 1992; Paul Wombell (ed.), PhotoVideo. Photography in the Age of the Computer, exhibition catalogue, London, 1991; Martin Lister (ed.), The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, London/New York, 1995; Stefan Iglhaut/Hubertus von Amelunxen/Alexis Cassel (eds.), Photography after Photography, Basel/London, 1996.
[2] William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye. Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, Cambridge, MA/London, 1992, p. 20.
[3] Cf. Jens Schröter, «Analog/Digital—Opposition oder Kontinuum?» in Jens Schröter/Alexander Böhnke, Analog/Digital. Opposition oder Kontinuum. Zur Theorie und Geschichte einer Unterscheidung, Bielefeld, 2004, pp. 7–30, here pp. 8f. In his introduction, Schröter deals with the different levels of the difference between analog and digital, which are used with respect to technology and media history as well as symbol theory.
[4] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man, Cambridge, MA, 1964.
[5] Vilém Flusser, Ins Universum der technischen Bilder, Göttingen, 1992, p. 11.
[6] William Henry Fox Talbot, «Some Account of the Art of photogenic Drawing or the Process by which natural objects may be made to delineate themselves without the aid of the artist’s pencil,» in The Athenaeum, London, Feb. 9, 1893.
[7] William Jenkins (ed.), New Topographics. Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, exhibition catalogue, International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, 1975.
[8] According to Charles P. Pierce, sign theory distinguishes three basic forms of the relationship between the sign and its referent: the symbolic, which is produced through convention; the iconic, which is based on a similarity between the sign and its object; and the indexical, which requires a physical connection.
[9] Roland Barthes, La chambre claire. Note sur la photographie, Paris, 1980, English as: Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, New York, 1981.
[10] On the subject of crime scene photography, cf. in particular Christine Karallus, «Staatsanwälte, Kriminalisten und Detektive,» in Kunstforum International, Themenheft: Choreographie der Gewalt, Jan.–Mar. 2001, pp. 132- 143; and Christine Karallus, «Etwas in Augenschein nehmen. Der Tatort und seine fotografische Identifizierung um 1900,» in Charles Grivel et al. (eds.), Die Eroberung der Bilder. Photographie in Buch und Presse 1816– 1914, Munich, 2003, pp. 141–155.
[11] Cf. Wirklich wahr. Realitätsversprechen von Fotografie, exhibition catalogue, Ruhrlandmuseum Essen, Ostfildern, 2004. On the agenda of photography's promise of reality within the context of art cf. Susanne Holschbach, «Die Wiederkehr des Wirklichen? Pop(uläre)-Fotografie im Kunstkontext der 90er Jahre,» in Sigrid Schade/Georg Christoph Tholen (eds.), Konfigurationen zwischen Kunst und Medien, Munich, 1999, pp. 400– 412, and the net discussion initiated by Kathrin Peters on «Wirklichkeitsfotografie»
[12] Philippe Dubois, L’Acte photographique, Paris/Brussels, 1983.
[13] Henry Fox Talbot cited in Helmut Gernsheim, History of Photography. From the Camera Obscura to the Beginning of the Modern Era, London, 1969, p. 78.
[14] This is the term used by André Malraux, French minister for the arts and culture under de Gaulles, to describe his concept of a museum that consists solely of photographic reproductions. Cf. the contribution by Jens Schröter «Archive—post/photographic.»
[15] Cf. Rudolf Frieling's contribution «The Archive, the Media, the Map and the Text,» in the module «Mapping and Text.»
[16] This, on the other hand, could only be achieved through recognizing that photographs are also works produced by a ‹creative subject.› Thus of all people, it was the commercial photographers in the nineteenth century who paved the way for the ennoblement of photography as art. This historical example also shows that it was the industrial producers (in this case commercial studios and photo publishers) and not artists who profited most from copyright. Cf. John Tagg, «A Means of Surveillance. The Photograph as Evidence in Law,» in John Tagg, The Burden of Representation. Essays on Photographies and Histories, Amherst, 1988, pp. 66–102.
[17] Rosalind Krauss, «The Ministry of Fate,» in Denis Hollier (ed.), A New History of French Literature, Cambridge, MA, 1989, pp. 1000–1006. Also refer to Rosalind Krauss, «A Note on Photography and the Simulacral,» October, 31, Winter 1984, pp. 49–68. Krauss cites the «Untitled Film Stills» by Cindy Sherman as an example of copies without an original.
[18] This means that the status of being an original at best befits the ‹real› landscape, the ‹real› object to which the photograph refers.
[19] For Rosalind Krauss' understanding of photography as a dominant medium in art production in the twentieth century, refer to Herta Wolf's introduction to the collection of essays by Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myth, Cambridge, MA, 1986.
[20] Cf. Douglas Crimp, «The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,» in Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins, Cambridge, MA, 1993 and Douglas Crimp, «Pictures,» in Tamara Horáková et al. (eds.), Image:/images. Positionen zur zeitgenössischen Fotografie, Vienna, 2001, pp. 121–138.
[21] Strategies of appropriation such as Sherrie Levine's re-photographs inspired the coinage of term ‹Appropriation Art.›
[22] Richard Prince's re-photographs of advertising photos, which he heightens to images through their isolation and enlargement, function in the reverse direction.
[23] This first gave rise to the term mass media. Cf. Dieter Daniels' text «Television—Art or Anti-art?» in the module «Survey of Media Art.»
[24] Cf. Elizabeth Anne McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph, New Haven/London, 1984, and Elizabeth Anne McCauley, Industrial Madness. Commercial Photography in Paris 1848–1871, New Haven/London, 1993.
[25] Cf. Thomas Macho, «Vision und Visage. Überlegungen zur Faszinationsgeschichte der Medien,» in Wolfgang Müller-Funk/Hans Ulrich Reck (eds.), Inszenierte Imagination. Beiträge zu einer historischen Anthropologie der Medien, Vienna/New York, 1997, pp. 87–108, here pp. 88f.; and Thomas Macho, «Das prominente Gesicht. Vom Face-to-Face zum Interface,» in Manfred Faßler (ed.), Alle möglichen Welten. Virtuelle Realität. Wahrnehmung. Ethik der Kommunikation, Munich, 1999, pp. 121–136.
[26] Brewster developed his stereoscope on the basis of an apparatus that had been constructed by the English physicist to illustrate binocular vision.
[27] Charles Baudelaire made this mocking remark in his famous polemic work «The Modern Public and Photography,» a first criticism of the commonplace taste of the media recipient (in contrast to the art recipient): Charles Baudelaire, «Der Salon von 1859,» in Charles Baudelaire, Der Künstler und das moderne Leben. Essays, ‹Salons,› Intime Tagebücher, Henry Schumann (ed.), Leipzig, 1990, pp. 199–229, here p. 206; cf. Dieter Daniels, Kunst als Sendung. Von der Telegrafie zum Internet, Munich, 2002, in particular the section on «Modernität und Medien» (Modernity and media), pp. 162–176.
[28] Only three years later, the London Stereoscopic Company, which was founded in 1854, had a selection of 100,000 different stereograms. In 1864 approximately five million stereograms were produced in the United States.
[29] For instance that by Oliver Wendell Holmes in his article «The Stereoscope and The Stereograph,» Atlantic Monthly, 3, June 1859, pp. 738–748: «The mind feels its way into the very depths of the picture. The scraggy branches of a tree in the foreground run out at us as if they would scratch our eyes out. The elbow of a figure stands forth so as to make us almost uncomfortable. Then there is such a frightful amount of detail, that we have the same sense of infinite complexity which Nature gives us.»
[30] Cf. the text «Immersion and Interaction» by Oliver Grau in the module «Survey of Media Art.»
[31] Jonathan Crary, «Modernizing Vision,» in Hal Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality. Discussions in Contemporary Culture, Seattle, 1988, pp. 29–44.
[32] The phenacistiscope and the zootrope are first and foremost still known as ‹precursors› to cinematography. They allow individual images to merge together to a single sequence of movement.
[33] Cf. Pierre Bourdieu, Un art moyen, Paris, 1965, German as: Eine illegitime Kunst, Frankfurt/Main, 1981.
[34] Cf. the text «Instant Images» by Kathrin Peters.
[35] William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, London, 1844.
[36] Siegfried Kracauer, «Die Photographie,» Siegfried Kracauer, Der verbotene Blick. Beobachtungen, Analysen, Kritiken, Leipzig, 1992, p. 198.
[37] For instance by Susan Sontag in her book On Photography (New York, 1977), in which she makes reference to Plato's Allegory of the Cave.
[38] This is one of many ways to telegraph images, the so-called ‹statistical method of temporary clichés.› On the methods of image telegraphy from a media-archeological perspective cf. Birgit Schneider/Peter Berz, «Bildtexturen. Punkte Zeilen Spalten; Teil II: Bildtelegraphie,» in: Sabine Flach/Georg Christoph Tholen (eds.), Intervalle 5 Mimetische Differenzen. Der Spielraum der Medien zwischen Abbildung und Nachbildung, Kassel, 2002, pp. 202–220.
[39] Cf. Dieter Daniels, Kunst als Sendung. Von der Telegrafie zum Internet, Munich, 2002, pp. 49– Cf. Hubertus von Amelunxen, «Photography after Photography,» in Stefan Iglhaut/Hubertus von Amelunxen/Alexis Cassel (eds.), Photography after Photography, Basel/London, 1996, pp. 116–123.
[40] The epistemological prerequisites for this technology lie in quantum mechanics, the technological prerequisites in semiconductor physics. Cf. Wolfgang Hagen, «Die Entropie der Fotografie. Skizzen zu einer Genealogie der digital-elektronischen Aufzeichnung,» in Herta Wolf (ed.), Paradigma Fotografie. Fotokritik am Ende des fotografischen Zeitalters, Frankfurt/Main, 2002, pp. 195–235.
[41] Cf. Friedrich Kittler, «Computergrafik. Eine halbtechnische Einführung,» in Herta Wolf (ed.), Paradigma Fotografie. Fotokritik am Ende des fotografischen Zeitalters, Frankfurt/Main, 2002, pp. 178–194, on the process of computer-generated images.
[42] The processes of digital photography were initially developed for these contexts. Before the commercialization of computer technology they could only be implemented there. Cf. Jens Schröter, «Eine kurze Geschichte der digitalen Fotografie,» in Verwandlungen durch Licht. Fotografieren in Museen & Archiven & Bibliotheken, Rundbrief Fotografie, special issue 6, Dresden, 2000, pp. 249–257.
[43] Jim Pomeroy in Marnie Gillett/Paul Berger (eds.), Digital Photography: Captured Images, Volatile Memory, New Montage, exhibition catalogue, SF Camerawork, San Francisco, 1988, p. 2: «Since digital information is easily copied by modem transfer, disk duplification, and other methods, computer images are equally adaptable for mass media publication or tiny, samizdat runs—anyone with a compatible computer can print-out the material. Every receiver becomes a press.»
[44] In this connection also refer to the series «Plakate» (1997) by Thomas Ruff, which is reminiscent of John Heartfield's collages.
[45] On this subject refer to the text by Anette Hüsch «Artistic Concepts at the Crossing from Analog to Digital Photography.»
[46] This would mean the devaluation of their work. Karin E. Becker undertakes a differentiated analysis of the professional examination of new image technologies using the monthly journal News Photographer, the official publication of the National Press Photographer’s Association (NPPA), as an example: Karin E. Becker, «To Control Our Image. Photojournalists Meeting New Technology,» in Media, Culture and Society, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 375–391, reprinted in Paul Wombell (ed.), PhotoVideo. Photography in the Age of the Computer, exhibition catalogue, London, 1991, pp. 16–31.
[47] Cf. Ritchin, op.cit.
[48] Martha Rosler, «Bildsimulation, Computersimulation: einige Überlegungen» (1988, 1995), in Hubertus von Amelunxen (ed.), Theorien der Fotografie Bd. IV, 1980–1995, Munich, 2000, pp. 129–170.
[49] Cf. e.g. Fred Ritchin, «The End of Photography as we have known it,» in Paul Wombell (ed.), PhotoVideo. Photography in the Age of the Computer, exhibition catalogue, London, 1991, pp. 8–15, here p. 15: «There is nothing more real than anything else. Into the societal vacuum comes power, both overt and covert, determining truth. Logic, prediction, and specificity are concepts which are being devalued, replaced by a sense of overwhelming chaos.» The title of Jens Schröter's text, «Das Ende der Welt. Analoge vs. Digitale Bilder—mehr oder weniger ‹Realität›?» (in Jens Schröter/Alexander Böhnke, Analog/Digital. Opposition oder Kontinuum. Zur Theorie und Geschichte einer Unterscheidung, Bielefeld, 2004, pp. 335–354) also plays on the fear of the loss of reality.
[50] William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye. Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, Cambridge, MA/London, 1992, p. 13.
[51] Also refer to the text by Anette Hüsch, «Artistic Concepts Linked to the Transition from Analog to Digital Photography.»
[52] Cf. the exhibition catalogue «PostHuman. Neue Formen der Figuration in der Zeitgenössischen Kunst,» Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, 1993.
[53] Refer to the contribution by Verena Kuni, «Mythical Bodies I,» in particular the section «Stories of creation, revisited» in the module «Cyborg Bodies.»
[54] Hubertus von Amelunxen, «Photography after Photography,» in Stefan Iglhaut/Hubertus von Amelunxen/Alexis Cassel (eds.), Photography after Photography, Basel/London, 1996, p. 117.
[55] Peter Lunenfeld introduced the term dubitative image (Cf. Peter Lunenfeld, «Digital Photography: The Dubitative Image,» in idem, Snap to Grid. A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures, Cambridge, MA, 2000, pp. 55– Cf. Wolfgang Hagen, «Die Entropie der Fotografie. Skizzen zu einer Genealogie der digital-elektronischen Aufzeichnung,» in Herta Wolf (ed.), Paradigma Fotografie. Fotokritik am Ende des fotografischen Zeitalters, Frankfurt/Main, 2002, p. 253.
[56] I.e. through the credibility of the source or through an electronic watermark that seals the state of the photograph before any further processing.
[57] Cf. Wolfgang Hagen, «Die Entropie der Fotografie. Skizzen zu einer Genealogie der digital-elektronischen Aufzeichnung,» in: Herta Wolf (ed.), Paradigma Fotografie. Fotokritik am Ende des fotografischen Zeitalters, Frankfurt/Main, 2002, p. 233.
[58] This is a term used by Peter Lunenfeld, in Herta Wolf (ed.), Paradigma Fotografie. Fotokritik am Ende des fotografischen Zeitalters, Frankfurt/Main, 2002, p. 165.
[59] In the exhibition «Photography after Photography,» a number of works were shown that are based on this principle ability of digital data to be translated. Cf. in particular Andreas Müller-Pohle, «Digitale Partituren (nach Nicéphore Niépce)» (English as: «Digital Scores (after Nicéphore Niépce)» 1995–1998) and George Legrady, «Equivalents II» (1993).
[60] My thanks to Dieter Daniels for this formulation.
[61] Refer to Jeff Rothenberg's «Digital Preservation Summary,» which lists the various factors relating to mechanical impermanence and countermeasures to preserve digital artifacts. Rothenberg sees little reason to be optimistic about the ability to pass on digital archives. (Jeff Rothenberg, «Digital Preservation Summary,» Apr. 4, 2003).
[62] Kathryn Pfenniger, Bildarchiv digital, Rundbrief Fotografie, special issue 7, Esslingen, 2001, p. 10.
[63] The age of digitalization will not leave any forgotten treasures in the attic, rather at most computer scrap.
[64] According to Wolfgang Ernst in a text on the effects of media change on the paradigm of the archive. He predicts that the twenty-first century will be «beyond the archives.» In contrast, holding on to the archive in a traditional sense (for the preservation and safeguarding of cultural assets) would mean «not mobilizing archives in the sense of digital spaces, rather preserving them as a media-conservative counterweight in their simple mechanics in comparison with electronic information.» Wolfgang Ernst, «Archive im Übergang,» in Interarchive. Archivarische Praktiken und Handlungsräume im zeitgenössischen Kunstfeld, Cologne, 2002, pp. 137–146, here p. 137. Refer to the texts «Beyond the Archive: Bitmapping» by Wolfgang Ernst and «The Archive, the Media, the Map and the Text» by Rudolf Frieling in the module «Mapping and Text.»
© Media Art Net 2004
above copied from: http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/photo_byte/photographic_post-photographic/print/
Thursday, December 20, 2007
The unity of the kind artwork, Roberto Casati
(Translated from Italian by Marcel Lieberman)
It is not easy to identify in a precise way the role that works of art play in our cognitive life. Yet, works of art, like all artifacts, are essentially linked to our cognitive life. A study of the relationships between art and cognition is thus a necessary step towards understanding artistic phenomena and artifacts. A variety of possible outcomes can emerge out of the study of this interaction.
1. The study of artistic artifacts considered as cognitive products can give us access to mechanisms of the mind that go unnoticed in normal cognition.
2. The study of cognitive mechanisms that form the background to artistic practices can enable us to bring into focus certain philosophical problems, for example, the question regarding the "definition" of a work of art and its conditions of identity.
In this article I'll examine an additional problem, which is different from, and in some ways more ambitious than the one posed by works of art considered as an object of cognitive and philosophical study: namely, the question that in a certain sense precedes the examination of topics such as 1 and 2:
3. The study of cognitive activities allows one to clarify and eventually solve the problem of the unity of the kind work of art.
I take it for granted that there is a problem regarding the unity of the kind. Or rather, that there is a unity of the kind and, what is more, that it is a problematic one. Besides the clear linguistic indication ("work of art"), our attitudes towards symphonies, architectural works, films, paintings and sculptures are much more similar to one another than are the attitudes towards, say, a painting by Picasso and a family photo. But this is just the problem: what is it that entities as diverse as a Picasso and a symphony have in common that outweighs the numerous and undoubtedly greater resemblances between a painting and a family photo?
We can examine two types of solutions, radically different from one another, that are based on the study of cognitive mechanisms. The first, which won't be discussed in this paper, is a "circumscribed" solution and appeals to the idea that there exists an artistic faculty or pseudo-faculty that is activated every time we encounter objects considered works of art. This would explain why such objects, as dissimilar as they are, end up in a single category. The theory of the "pseudo-module" seems to have a certain explicative power while using a limited hypothesis. I won't examine its validity; I prefer instead to present another theory, one that is completely different and much broader. This hypothesis places artistic artifacts within a social dynamic. It is in virtue of their becoming becoming elements of such a dynamic that artifacts acquire the wholly extrinsic property of being artistic. Up to this point, the "broad" theory does not differ from a sociological study of art. It adds, however, a fundamental question: why is it that not all artifacts become part of a social dynamic that makes them artistic? The explanation of this dynamic is subject to cognitive constraints, and the study of such constraints can enable us to make a prediction regarding the properties of artistic artifacts.
A mistaken but widespread theory of art
In order to characterize the second, broad theory, let us take a brief look at those things that seem obvious and that generate dubious rationalizations. When one speaks of cognitive theories applied to art, often the only thing one has in mind is a diagram: in one box there is the artist's mind, in another the mind of an observer, which are connected by an arrow that splits in the middle to make room for a box containing the work of art. (I could draw the diagram below, but refuse to do so in order to avoid spreading it even further). This diagram rationalizes and perhaps only illustrates common-sense intuitions regarding the function of cognition and the fact that art might be a type of expression. Through the work, the artist supposedly expresses himself or sends a "message" to his audience. An artist has something "to say". And the audience must reconstruct what the artist meant: the audience's task is that of an interpreter who, by observing or listening to the work and on the basis of personal knowledge and other background factors, is able to read the artist's message.
The message theory is surely a cognitive theory. But it is faced with a number of problems.
The main problem that interests us is that it doesn't explain the unity of the kind "work of art" among its diverse manifestations, apart from attributing to architectural works and dance the task of transmitting messages. In connection to the first problem, it doesn't explain why works of art are admired by people who know little about the history of art, why they survive the test of time (how is it possible to admire works by inaccessible cultures, whose message can no longer be reconstructed?), it doesn't explain why artists like talking about their works and why they apply labels to them (what purpose would it serve, given that the works already express what the artists mean?). Moreover, given that the sender of the message might not have in mind any receiver, or not know who the receiver is, one ends up losing sight of the receiver himself. At the same time, the intentions of the majority of senders are inaccessible: whether because the artist is no longer living, or because no one is so transparent to themselves and it isn't clear that artists really know what they intended to say. The result is that the work, rather than transmitting the elusive intentions of an artist, ends up with the responsibility of expressing the "spirit of an age". Lastly, the message theory does not explain why the artist chose such an implausible way of sending "messages". Why hide messages in a medium that requires so much work on the part of the one receiving the message?
There is certainly some cognitive work at play. But it doesn't seem plausible that it's the one required by the message theory.
The theory of conversational prompts
The alternative theory could be called the theory of conversational prompts. The theory claims that artistic artifacts are objects produced with the chief aim of provoking some type of conversation about their production. Artistic products don't serve as a type of "communication" between the artist and the public: they are not bearers of "messages". Rather, they are objects that must attract attention (and thus must not be instrumental, or hide their instrumental side) within a linguistic context in which they are used as objects of discussion. I won't enter into further details, which might seem somewhat definitory: definitions are notoriously useless for understanding common-sense notions. I would like to show how this hypothesis can work by showing how it is set within a series of anthropological observations regarding the use of artistic artifacts.
The theory explains why artistic artifacts are able to survive through time (if one thinks about it, this survival is quite strange, and at any rate hardly compatible with the idea that artistic products contain a message). They pass the test of time because conversation never stops; it is always in need of topics. Even when it is no longer possible to know the terms of the conversation in which the product was initially inserted as a stimulus, it remains possible to recover the product within a new conversation. It must be noted that the theory does not say that the artist must form the intention of seeing his product placed within a specific conversation (which most probably is the general one of his time), but in any conversation. This fact imposes constraints on the structure of works of art. They are objects that must be able to lend themselves to conversation.
Similarly, the theory explains why works of art pass the test of space, or rather why they can be appreciated by communities that are quite distant from the original community of the work's creator.
The theory explains why artistic products have the aspect they have. Artistic products must solve a variety of problems
- maximize novelty
- attract attention (be sufficiently different from instrumental artifacts)
- be sufficiently complex (through their apparent form, or through the history of their origin) to maximize conversational elements
The theory explains the fluctuation in the esthetic and economic values of artistic products. Having good qualities does not suffice for being a good conversational prompt: there must also be a conversation in which such qualities can be noticed. By postulating the existence of conversations, the theory explains why artistic products survive, are fashionable subjects, and die. (Likewise, it is not enough for a metal to have excellent qualities: resistant to acid, malleable, yellow, in order for it to be of great worth. There also needs to be a context of exchange that confers value to the metal). In the same way, the theory explains the difference between great art and popular art, simply by postulating the existence of different conversations with different rules: among a myriad of conversations (that provide the basis for popular art) one proclaims itself "high". Fine art is nothing other than popular art with an army behind it.
The theory thus explains the existence of degrees of artistic quality, and why certain things are considered art by some and not by others. It explains why a local artistic culture finds the works of another culture of little interest, while recognizing that they are artistic artifacts.
The conversational theory explains the origin of art and artistic artifacts. There is no origin! Works of art were discovered: or rather, it was discovered that certain objects entered into circulation within a community and caused people to talk about them.
It explains why instrumental objects can be works of art (as in the case of architecture, which some esthetic purists seek to expunge from the category of art). The possibility of being inserted within a conversation doesn't seem to depend upon the type of object to be inserted.
The theory explains why artists like to talk about their work and adorn it with explanations (this is particularly difficult to explain in a theory of communication or expression). It is a way of launching a conversation that will give life to the product.
The theory explains why paintings have labels and musical pieces have titles: they are points of entry into a conversation. It therefore explains why museum visitors head straight towards the labels, and place great importance on knowing the author and the subject.
It explains why an artist's biography interests us; and it explains why we are satisfied by the fact that the biography is in some way reflected in the work. It enables us to use the work as a narrative prompt.
The theory explains why works of art are acquired with no regard for the artist, like invitations to a conversation that are disconnected from the person of the author.
Finally, the theory's hypothesis that artists produce works with an eye towards possible conversations about their products, allows us to solve almost immediately the problem regarding the unity of the kind work of art. Works of art are objects created with the chief aim of making a conversation possible. The main proviso is meta-representational: the author must have the intention that his work be a conversational prompt. The proviso excludes cases of artifacts that are accidentally, but not essentially, currency for conversational exchange, like mathematical theories or political discourses which are not works of art.
The conversation theory and the time of a work of art
The intention of creating a work of art doesn't focus on the moment of creation, nor the moment of reception, but has a projection into the future; it is focused on the theme of the conversation. The difference between the message theory and the conversational theory concerns a deep metaphysical aspect of works of art: their relation to time. The conversational theory is by nature projective and has an articulation that unfolds in the future. Works of art have an evolution, linked to the exercising of discussions that change in the course of time. The message theory is temporally static and concerns a fixed point in the past. In the message theory time essentially concerns the packaging of the message: the moment at which the author consigns the message to the work. An eventual interpretation constitutes an extrinsic aspect, and therefore does not introduce a new temporal element.
The intuition that guides the message theory is that works of art are like packages, wrappers ("vehicles", a "medium"). One needs to unpack them in order to reach their hidden essence, the message itself. The artist leaves the message in the work just as a castaway does with a message in a bottle. The precise methods of the unpacking process cannot be foreseen a priori by the artist who doesn't know on which beach the bottle will wash up, or whose eyes will read the message. For this reason, one must leave room in the message theory for the notion of an open work: the sender's intention would be to produce a message that is at least partially indeterminate, that partly constrains interpretation, but leaves space for the receiver. The notion of an open work is a clear case of theoretic artifacts generated by the message theory. Only if one thinks that works must necessarily be interpreted in order to extract the artist's intention, must one then give an open structure to such an intention, faced with the mutability of possible interpretive contexts. But the necessity of "recovering" the artist's intention doesn't exist, given the inexistence of such an intention. Naturally, the artist can have intentions, but these concern the use of the work and not its interpretation. Emotions, messages, authors' intentions for communicating a message, substitutions of experience: these are possible, but accidental, ingredients of the dynamic that leads to the production, and assures the circulation, of a work of art. Works of art are not signs. Rather, they are more like toys.
What is a conversation? Empirical hypotheses
The conversational theory makes use of a concept, namely conversation, which is certainly indeterminate. What is a conversation? Can there be inner conversations (meditation)? Which conversation does the artist have in mind, a specific or general conversation? In fact, the theory shifts the indeterminacy of the concept of a work of art to the indeterminacy of the concept of conversation. In itself, this might be an advantage of the theory, to the extent that the concept of artistic artifact has fuzzy borders.
The fact that conversations are different in time and space does not create problems in so far as some conversational elements - the choice of topos, the way of developing it - are subject to cultural universals. Here, the theory makes an empirical prediction that will have to be tested: if what counts are not the conversations actually taking place, but the generic aspects of conversation, a study of the latter should bring to light some elements of works of art that usually go unnoticed. Where does the study of cognition come in regarding the conversational theory? In the fact that not all subjects are good for conversation and assure successful conversations. Studying the normative constraints of conversational success will enable us to make interesting empirical predictions regarding the content and form of artistic artifacts.
copied from: http://www.interdisciplines.org/artcog/papers/4
It is not easy to identify in a precise way the role that works of art play in our cognitive life. Yet, works of art, like all artifacts, are essentially linked to our cognitive life. A study of the relationships between art and cognition is thus a necessary step towards understanding artistic phenomena and artifacts. A variety of possible outcomes can emerge out of the study of this interaction.
1. The study of artistic artifacts considered as cognitive products can give us access to mechanisms of the mind that go unnoticed in normal cognition.
2. The study of cognitive mechanisms that form the background to artistic practices can enable us to bring into focus certain philosophical problems, for example, the question regarding the "definition" of a work of art and its conditions of identity.
In this article I'll examine an additional problem, which is different from, and in some ways more ambitious than the one posed by works of art considered as an object of cognitive and philosophical study: namely, the question that in a certain sense precedes the examination of topics such as 1 and 2:
3. The study of cognitive activities allows one to clarify and eventually solve the problem of the unity of the kind work of art.
I take it for granted that there is a problem regarding the unity of the kind. Or rather, that there is a unity of the kind and, what is more, that it is a problematic one. Besides the clear linguistic indication ("work of art"), our attitudes towards symphonies, architectural works, films, paintings and sculptures are much more similar to one another than are the attitudes towards, say, a painting by Picasso and a family photo. But this is just the problem: what is it that entities as diverse as a Picasso and a symphony have in common that outweighs the numerous and undoubtedly greater resemblances between a painting and a family photo?
We can examine two types of solutions, radically different from one another, that are based on the study of cognitive mechanisms. The first, which won't be discussed in this paper, is a "circumscribed" solution and appeals to the idea that there exists an artistic faculty or pseudo-faculty that is activated every time we encounter objects considered works of art. This would explain why such objects, as dissimilar as they are, end up in a single category. The theory of the "pseudo-module" seems to have a certain explicative power while using a limited hypothesis. I won't examine its validity; I prefer instead to present another theory, one that is completely different and much broader. This hypothesis places artistic artifacts within a social dynamic. It is in virtue of their becoming becoming elements of such a dynamic that artifacts acquire the wholly extrinsic property of being artistic. Up to this point, the "broad" theory does not differ from a sociological study of art. It adds, however, a fundamental question: why is it that not all artifacts become part of a social dynamic that makes them artistic? The explanation of this dynamic is subject to cognitive constraints, and the study of such constraints can enable us to make a prediction regarding the properties of artistic artifacts.
A mistaken but widespread theory of art
In order to characterize the second, broad theory, let us take a brief look at those things that seem obvious and that generate dubious rationalizations. When one speaks of cognitive theories applied to art, often the only thing one has in mind is a diagram: in one box there is the artist's mind, in another the mind of an observer, which are connected by an arrow that splits in the middle to make room for a box containing the work of art. (I could draw the diagram below, but refuse to do so in order to avoid spreading it even further). This diagram rationalizes and perhaps only illustrates common-sense intuitions regarding the function of cognition and the fact that art might be a type of expression. Through the work, the artist supposedly expresses himself or sends a "message" to his audience. An artist has something "to say". And the audience must reconstruct what the artist meant: the audience's task is that of an interpreter who, by observing or listening to the work and on the basis of personal knowledge and other background factors, is able to read the artist's message.
The message theory is surely a cognitive theory. But it is faced with a number of problems.
The main problem that interests us is that it doesn't explain the unity of the kind "work of art" among its diverse manifestations, apart from attributing to architectural works and dance the task of transmitting messages. In connection to the first problem, it doesn't explain why works of art are admired by people who know little about the history of art, why they survive the test of time (how is it possible to admire works by inaccessible cultures, whose message can no longer be reconstructed?), it doesn't explain why artists like talking about their works and why they apply labels to them (what purpose would it serve, given that the works already express what the artists mean?). Moreover, given that the sender of the message might not have in mind any receiver, or not know who the receiver is, one ends up losing sight of the receiver himself. At the same time, the intentions of the majority of senders are inaccessible: whether because the artist is no longer living, or because no one is so transparent to themselves and it isn't clear that artists really know what they intended to say. The result is that the work, rather than transmitting the elusive intentions of an artist, ends up with the responsibility of expressing the "spirit of an age". Lastly, the message theory does not explain why the artist chose such an implausible way of sending "messages". Why hide messages in a medium that requires so much work on the part of the one receiving the message?
There is certainly some cognitive work at play. But it doesn't seem plausible that it's the one required by the message theory.
The theory of conversational prompts
The alternative theory could be called the theory of conversational prompts. The theory claims that artistic artifacts are objects produced with the chief aim of provoking some type of conversation about their production. Artistic products don't serve as a type of "communication" between the artist and the public: they are not bearers of "messages". Rather, they are objects that must attract attention (and thus must not be instrumental, or hide their instrumental side) within a linguistic context in which they are used as objects of discussion. I won't enter into further details, which might seem somewhat definitory: definitions are notoriously useless for understanding common-sense notions. I would like to show how this hypothesis can work by showing how it is set within a series of anthropological observations regarding the use of artistic artifacts.
The theory explains why artistic artifacts are able to survive through time (if one thinks about it, this survival is quite strange, and at any rate hardly compatible with the idea that artistic products contain a message). They pass the test of time because conversation never stops; it is always in need of topics. Even when it is no longer possible to know the terms of the conversation in which the product was initially inserted as a stimulus, it remains possible to recover the product within a new conversation. It must be noted that the theory does not say that the artist must form the intention of seeing his product placed within a specific conversation (which most probably is the general one of his time), but in any conversation. This fact imposes constraints on the structure of works of art. They are objects that must be able to lend themselves to conversation.
Similarly, the theory explains why works of art pass the test of space, or rather why they can be appreciated by communities that are quite distant from the original community of the work's creator.
The theory explains why artistic products have the aspect they have. Artistic products must solve a variety of problems
- maximize novelty
- attract attention (be sufficiently different from instrumental artifacts)
- be sufficiently complex (through their apparent form, or through the history of their origin) to maximize conversational elements
The theory explains the fluctuation in the esthetic and economic values of artistic products. Having good qualities does not suffice for being a good conversational prompt: there must also be a conversation in which such qualities can be noticed. By postulating the existence of conversations, the theory explains why artistic products survive, are fashionable subjects, and die. (Likewise, it is not enough for a metal to have excellent qualities: resistant to acid, malleable, yellow, in order for it to be of great worth. There also needs to be a context of exchange that confers value to the metal). In the same way, the theory explains the difference between great art and popular art, simply by postulating the existence of different conversations with different rules: among a myriad of conversations (that provide the basis for popular art) one proclaims itself "high". Fine art is nothing other than popular art with an army behind it.
The theory thus explains the existence of degrees of artistic quality, and why certain things are considered art by some and not by others. It explains why a local artistic culture finds the works of another culture of little interest, while recognizing that they are artistic artifacts.
The conversational theory explains the origin of art and artistic artifacts. There is no origin! Works of art were discovered: or rather, it was discovered that certain objects entered into circulation within a community and caused people to talk about them.
It explains why instrumental objects can be works of art (as in the case of architecture, which some esthetic purists seek to expunge from the category of art). The possibility of being inserted within a conversation doesn't seem to depend upon the type of object to be inserted.
The theory explains why artists like to talk about their work and adorn it with explanations (this is particularly difficult to explain in a theory of communication or expression). It is a way of launching a conversation that will give life to the product.
The theory explains why paintings have labels and musical pieces have titles: they are points of entry into a conversation. It therefore explains why museum visitors head straight towards the labels, and place great importance on knowing the author and the subject.
It explains why an artist's biography interests us; and it explains why we are satisfied by the fact that the biography is in some way reflected in the work. It enables us to use the work as a narrative prompt.
The theory explains why works of art are acquired with no regard for the artist, like invitations to a conversation that are disconnected from the person of the author.
Finally, the theory's hypothesis that artists produce works with an eye towards possible conversations about their products, allows us to solve almost immediately the problem regarding the unity of the kind work of art. Works of art are objects created with the chief aim of making a conversation possible. The main proviso is meta-representational: the author must have the intention that his work be a conversational prompt. The proviso excludes cases of artifacts that are accidentally, but not essentially, currency for conversational exchange, like mathematical theories or political discourses which are not works of art.
The conversation theory and the time of a work of art
The intention of creating a work of art doesn't focus on the moment of creation, nor the moment of reception, but has a projection into the future; it is focused on the theme of the conversation. The difference between the message theory and the conversational theory concerns a deep metaphysical aspect of works of art: their relation to time. The conversational theory is by nature projective and has an articulation that unfolds in the future. Works of art have an evolution, linked to the exercising of discussions that change in the course of time. The message theory is temporally static and concerns a fixed point in the past. In the message theory time essentially concerns the packaging of the message: the moment at which the author consigns the message to the work. An eventual interpretation constitutes an extrinsic aspect, and therefore does not introduce a new temporal element.
The intuition that guides the message theory is that works of art are like packages, wrappers ("vehicles", a "medium"). One needs to unpack them in order to reach their hidden essence, the message itself. The artist leaves the message in the work just as a castaway does with a message in a bottle. The precise methods of the unpacking process cannot be foreseen a priori by the artist who doesn't know on which beach the bottle will wash up, or whose eyes will read the message. For this reason, one must leave room in the message theory for the notion of an open work: the sender's intention would be to produce a message that is at least partially indeterminate, that partly constrains interpretation, but leaves space for the receiver. The notion of an open work is a clear case of theoretic artifacts generated by the message theory. Only if one thinks that works must necessarily be interpreted in order to extract the artist's intention, must one then give an open structure to such an intention, faced with the mutability of possible interpretive contexts. But the necessity of "recovering" the artist's intention doesn't exist, given the inexistence of such an intention. Naturally, the artist can have intentions, but these concern the use of the work and not its interpretation. Emotions, messages, authors' intentions for communicating a message, substitutions of experience: these are possible, but accidental, ingredients of the dynamic that leads to the production, and assures the circulation, of a work of art. Works of art are not signs. Rather, they are more like toys.
What is a conversation? Empirical hypotheses
The conversational theory makes use of a concept, namely conversation, which is certainly indeterminate. What is a conversation? Can there be inner conversations (meditation)? Which conversation does the artist have in mind, a specific or general conversation? In fact, the theory shifts the indeterminacy of the concept of a work of art to the indeterminacy of the concept of conversation. In itself, this might be an advantage of the theory, to the extent that the concept of artistic artifact has fuzzy borders.
The fact that conversations are different in time and space does not create problems in so far as some conversational elements - the choice of topos, the way of developing it - are subject to cultural universals. Here, the theory makes an empirical prediction that will have to be tested: if what counts are not the conversations actually taking place, but the generic aspects of conversation, a study of the latter should bring to light some elements of works of art that usually go unnoticed. Where does the study of cognition come in regarding the conversational theory? In the fact that not all subjects are good for conversation and assure successful conversations. Studying the normative constraints of conversational success will enable us to make interesting empirical predictions regarding the content and form of artistic artifacts.
copied from: http://www.interdisciplines.org/artcog/papers/4
The Future of Music – Credo, John Cage
I BELIEVE THAT THE USE OF NOISE
Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at 50 m.p.h. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them, not as sound effeets, but as musical instruments. Every film studio has a library of »sound effects» recorded on film. With a film phonograph it is now possible to control the amplitude and frequeney of any one of these sounds and to give to it rhythms within or beyond the reach of anyone's imagination. Given four film phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heart beat, and landslide.
TO MAKE MUSIC
lf this word, music, is sacred and reserved for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.
WILL CONTINUE AND INCREASE UNTIL WE REACH A MUSIC PRODUCED THROUGH THE AID OF ELECTRICAL INSTRUMENTS
Most inventors of electrical musical instruments have attempted to imitate eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instruments, just as early automobile designers copied the carriage. The Novachord and the Solovox are examples of this desire to imitate the past rather than construct the future. When Theremin provided an instrument with genuinely new possibilities, Thereministes did their utmost to make the instrument sound like some old instrument, giving it a sickeningly sweet vibrato, and performing upon it, with difficulty, masterpieces from the past. Although the instrument is capable of a wide variety of sound qualities, obtained by the mere turning of a dial, Thereministes act as censors, giving the public those sounds they think the public will like. We are shielded from new sound experiences.
The special property of electrical instruments will be to provide complete control of the overtone structure of tones (as opposed to noises) and to make these tones available in any frequency, amplitude, and duration.
WHICH WILL MAKE AVAILABLE FOR MUSICAL PURPOSES ANY AND ALL SOUNDS THAT CAN BE HEARD. PHOTOELECTRIC, FILM, AND MECHANICAL MEDIUMS FOR THE SYNTHETIC PRODUCTION OF MUSIC
It is now possible for composers to make music directly, without the assistance of intermediary performers. Any design repeated often enough on a sound track is audible. 280 circles per second on a sound track will produce one sound, whereas a portrait of Beethoven repeated 50 times per second on a sound track will have not only a different pitch but a different sound quality.
WILL BE EXPLORED. WHEREAS, IN THE PAST, THE POINT OF DISAGREEMENT HAS BEEN BETWEEN DISSONANCE AND CONSONANCE, IT WILL BE, IN THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE, BETWEEN NOISE AND SO-CALLED MUSICAL SOUNDS.
THE PRESENT METHODS OF WRITING MUSIC, PRINCIPALLY THOSE WHICH EMPLOY HARMONY AND ITS REFERENCE TO PARTICULAR STEPS IN THE FIELD OF SOUND, WILL BE INADEQUATE FOR TIHE COMPOSER WHO WILL BE FACED WITH THE ENTIRE FIELD OF SOUND.
The composer (organizer of sound) will not only be faced with the entire field of sound but also with the entire field of time. The «frame» or fraction of a second, following established film technique, will probably be the basic unit in the measurement of time. No rhythm will be beyond the composer's reach.
NEW METHODS WILL BE DISCOVERED, BEARING A DEFINITE RELATION TO SCHOENBERG'S TWELVE-TONE SYSTEM
Schoenberg’s method assigns to each material, in a group of equal materials, its function with respect to the group. (Harmony assigned to each material, in a group of unequal materials, its function with respeet to the fundamental or most important material in the group.) Schoenberg's method is analagous to modern society, in which the emphasis is on the group and the integration of the individual in the group.
AND PRESENT METHODS OF WRITING PERCUSSION MUSIC
Percussion music is a contemporary transition from keyboardinfluenced music to the all-sound music of the future. Any sound is acceptable to the composer of percussion music; he explores the academically forbidden «nonmusical» field of sound insofar as is manually possible.
Methods of writing percussion music have as their goal the rhythmic structure of a composition. As soon as these methods are crystallized into one or several widely accepted methods, the means will exist for group improvisations of unwritten but culturally important music. This has already taken place in Oriental cultures and in hot jazz.
AND ANY OTHER METHODS WHICH ARE FREE FROM THE CONCEPT OF A FUNDAMENTAL TONE.
THE PRINCIPLE OF FORM WILL BE OUR ONLY CONSTANT CONNECTION WITH THE PAST. ALTHOUGH THE GREAT FORM OF THE FUTURE WILL NOT BE AS IT WAS IN TI-IE PAST, AT ONE TIME THE FUGUE AND AT ANOTHER TI-IE SONATA, IT WILL BE RELATED TO TI-IESE AS THEY ARE TO EACH OTHER
Before this happens, centers of experimental music must be established. In these centers, the new materials, oscillators, generators, means for amplifying small sounds, film phonographs, etc., available for use. Composers at work using twentieth-century means for making musie. Performances of results. Organization of sound for musical and extramusical purposes (theater, dance, film).
THROUGH THE PRINCIPLE OF ORGANIZATION OR MAN'S COMMON ABILITY TO THINK.
Source: Richard Kostelanetz, John Cage, An Anthology, New York, 1968.
Ed. Note: Perhaps the single most influential of Cage's written texts, this was first delivered as a lecture in 1937 in Seattle, but not published until 1958 in the brochure accompanying George Avakian's recording of Cage's 25-Year Retrospective Concert.
above copied from: http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/source-text/41/
Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at 50 m.p.h. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them, not as sound effeets, but as musical instruments. Every film studio has a library of »sound effects» recorded on film. With a film phonograph it is now possible to control the amplitude and frequeney of any one of these sounds and to give to it rhythms within or beyond the reach of anyone's imagination. Given four film phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heart beat, and landslide.
TO MAKE MUSIC
lf this word, music, is sacred and reserved for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.
WILL CONTINUE AND INCREASE UNTIL WE REACH A MUSIC PRODUCED THROUGH THE AID OF ELECTRICAL INSTRUMENTS
Most inventors of electrical musical instruments have attempted to imitate eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instruments, just as early automobile designers copied the carriage. The Novachord and the Solovox are examples of this desire to imitate the past rather than construct the future. When Theremin provided an instrument with genuinely new possibilities, Thereministes did their utmost to make the instrument sound like some old instrument, giving it a sickeningly sweet vibrato, and performing upon it, with difficulty, masterpieces from the past. Although the instrument is capable of a wide variety of sound qualities, obtained by the mere turning of a dial, Thereministes act as censors, giving the public those sounds they think the public will like. We are shielded from new sound experiences.
The special property of electrical instruments will be to provide complete control of the overtone structure of tones (as opposed to noises) and to make these tones available in any frequency, amplitude, and duration.
WHICH WILL MAKE AVAILABLE FOR MUSICAL PURPOSES ANY AND ALL SOUNDS THAT CAN BE HEARD. PHOTOELECTRIC, FILM, AND MECHANICAL MEDIUMS FOR THE SYNTHETIC PRODUCTION OF MUSIC
It is now possible for composers to make music directly, without the assistance of intermediary performers. Any design repeated often enough on a sound track is audible. 280 circles per second on a sound track will produce one sound, whereas a portrait of Beethoven repeated 50 times per second on a sound track will have not only a different pitch but a different sound quality.
WILL BE EXPLORED. WHEREAS, IN THE PAST, THE POINT OF DISAGREEMENT HAS BEEN BETWEEN DISSONANCE AND CONSONANCE, IT WILL BE, IN THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE, BETWEEN NOISE AND SO-CALLED MUSICAL SOUNDS.
THE PRESENT METHODS OF WRITING MUSIC, PRINCIPALLY THOSE WHICH EMPLOY HARMONY AND ITS REFERENCE TO PARTICULAR STEPS IN THE FIELD OF SOUND, WILL BE INADEQUATE FOR TIHE COMPOSER WHO WILL BE FACED WITH THE ENTIRE FIELD OF SOUND.
The composer (organizer of sound) will not only be faced with the entire field of sound but also with the entire field of time. The «frame» or fraction of a second, following established film technique, will probably be the basic unit in the measurement of time. No rhythm will be beyond the composer's reach.
NEW METHODS WILL BE DISCOVERED, BEARING A DEFINITE RELATION TO SCHOENBERG'S TWELVE-TONE SYSTEM
Schoenberg’s method assigns to each material, in a group of equal materials, its function with respect to the group. (Harmony assigned to each material, in a group of unequal materials, its function with respeet to the fundamental or most important material in the group.) Schoenberg's method is analagous to modern society, in which the emphasis is on the group and the integration of the individual in the group.
AND PRESENT METHODS OF WRITING PERCUSSION MUSIC
Percussion music is a contemporary transition from keyboardinfluenced music to the all-sound music of the future. Any sound is acceptable to the composer of percussion music; he explores the academically forbidden «nonmusical» field of sound insofar as is manually possible.
Methods of writing percussion music have as their goal the rhythmic structure of a composition. As soon as these methods are crystallized into one or several widely accepted methods, the means will exist for group improvisations of unwritten but culturally important music. This has already taken place in Oriental cultures and in hot jazz.
AND ANY OTHER METHODS WHICH ARE FREE FROM THE CONCEPT OF A FUNDAMENTAL TONE.
THE PRINCIPLE OF FORM WILL BE OUR ONLY CONSTANT CONNECTION WITH THE PAST. ALTHOUGH THE GREAT FORM OF THE FUTURE WILL NOT BE AS IT WAS IN TI-IE PAST, AT ONE TIME THE FUGUE AND AT ANOTHER TI-IE SONATA, IT WILL BE RELATED TO TI-IESE AS THEY ARE TO EACH OTHER
Before this happens, centers of experimental music must be established. In these centers, the new materials, oscillators, generators, means for amplifying small sounds, film phonographs, etc., available for use. Composers at work using twentieth-century means for making musie. Performances of results. Organization of sound for musical and extramusical purposes (theater, dance, film).
THROUGH THE PRINCIPLE OF ORGANIZATION OR MAN'S COMMON ABILITY TO THINK.
Source: Richard Kostelanetz, John Cage, An Anthology, New York, 1968.
Ed. Note: Perhaps the single most influential of Cage's written texts, this was first delivered as a lecture in 1937 in Seattle, but not published until 1958 in the brochure accompanying George Avakian's recording of Cage's 25-Year Retrospective Concert.
above copied from: http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/source-text/41/
TV As a Creative Medium: Howard Wise and Video Art, Marita Sturken
May 1984, Afterimage, Vol. 11, No. 10
Ever since Marshall McLuhan has become a household name, people have become aware of the tremendous force, both actual and potential; that TV is having and will have on their lives.
The machine is obsolescent. Magazines, books, newspapers and other publications making use of the written word as we have known it are threatened. The relationships of nations, classes, generations and individuals are deeply affected. Education will be revolutionized, schools transformed if not eliminated (why interrupt your child’s education by sending him to school?). TV is at the cause, or at least at the root of the cause, of all of these changes that are transforming our civilization.
Why has not art been affected by this pervading influence? Perhaps quite simply because, up until now the time was not right. Perhaps it had to await the maturing of the generation who were in their sub-teens in the 1950’s, those who were “brought up” on TV .... As in every generation, some were artists. These have been at work for two, three, five and even more years, scrounging around second hand shops for parts, working with TV because they were fascinated by the results they were able to achieve, and because they sensed the potential of TV as the medium for their expression. (1)
-Howard Wise
Howard Wise is one of the people who is responsible for the idea of an alternative television. (2)
-Frank Gillette
“TV as a Creative Medium” was a catalytic event around which a video art community began to coalesce. New names and faces had appeared on the scene every year since 1965, but until the Spring of ‘69 there had been no center, no real cohesion, no sense of a community of purpose. After the show at the Howard Wise Gallery, it was possible to identify oneself as a video artist, and to recognize other video artists. (3)
-Davidson Gigliotti
The shape and direction of video art’s accelerated growth, since virtual nonexistence in the mid-‘60s up to the present, has been influenced primarily by the priorities of major funders - the New York State Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. It has matured without the bevy of individual collectors who support more established forms such as painting and sculpture. Within video’s media arts centers and funding organizations, there are many advocates, administrators, and curators who provide an infrastructure which enables artists to produce and distribute work, often doing so with little publicity or recognition. In this realm, Howard Wise stands out as an individual benefactor who preceded and has supplemented private foundations and public movies. He has been a central figure in the visibility, production, and acceptance of video art. For almost 20 years, he has been one of the few patrons of video art.
On May 17, 1969, a show which was to become the seminal exhibition of video art in the U.S. opened at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York City. That exhibition, “TV as a Creative Medium,” effectively pointed to the diverse potential of a new art form and social tool. Subsequently, the show became renowned for the inspiration it provided for many artists and future advocates of video. The artists represented in the show, a few of whom are still involved in the medium today, came from varied backgrounds-painting, filmmaking, nuclear physics, avant-garde music and performance, kinetic and light sculpture-and their approaches presented a primer of the directions which video would soon take. Theoretically, they variously saw video as viewer participation, a spiritual and meditative experience, a mirror, an electronic palette, a kinetic sculpture, or a cultural machine to be deconstructed. Ripe with ideas and armed with a heady optimism about the future of communications, these artists used video as an information tool and as a means of gaining understanding and control of television, not solely as an art form. In “TV as a Creative Medium” alternative television was presented as a stepping stone to the promised communications utopia.
Despite such non-aesthetic concerns among first generation videomakers, the exhibition signaled the emergence of a definition of video as an art medium. By 1969, Wise had established himself as a central figure in what has come to be known as the “art and technology” movement. His 57th St. gallery was one of the main showcases for kinetic and light sculpture, and initially Wise looked upon video as a kind of light work, an extension of kineticism. In 1969 he wrote, “Most Americans already have potential kinetic art right in their own living rooms: Television is kinetic art - it needs only to be ‘ordered’ by an artist.”(4) Wise’s step into electronic art, however, was an irreversible one. Within a year and a half after “TV as a Creative Medium” he closed his gallery and began plans for an organization designed to foster the work of video artists and their use of new technologies. That organization eventually became known as Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI).
Howard is a gentleman, which is rare in the art world. To appreciate him you have to be a little old-fashioned. He is the product of another and slightly more gracious age. (5)
-Davidson Gigliotti
Howard was very important because he went against the main stream in his gallery. (6)
-Willoughby Sharp
Howard was lucky to be born in the best time of American capitalism. He is a perfect balance of money and aesthetic. (7)
-Nam June Paik
Howard Wise was born on Nov. 6, 1903, in Cleveland, Ohio. He went to Europe for five years in the ‘20s, studied art at the Louvre and the Sorbonne and French, history, and constitutional law at Cambridge University in England. (8) Upon his return to Cleveland, Wise went to work for his family’s firm, the Arco Company, which manufactured industrial coatings. He successfully ran the company for 25 years, substantially expanding the business.
My father resigned during the Depression, so I had that responsibility at an early age. Like any other business, the Depression had hurt us a lot and we had a tot of labor unrest among the 300-400 employees. I decided that I had better take a good look at the situation, and I got in touch with a labor consultant. He suggested that since we were a relatively small business we could keep an intimate relationship with the employees, so I did that. We had 10-year and 25-year clubs, and when it came my turn to get the gold insignia, or whatever it was, for my 25 years with the company I realized, “My God, 25 years,” and I decided to quit. (9)
Wise sold the company and renewed his interest in painting:
I thought I would combine my artistic experience with my business experience and start a gallery in Cleveland because there really was no gallery of any stature there. I felt that Cleveland was artistically a very closed and ingrown community. The only real modern work that was shown was local work. My objective in opening a gallery in Cleveland was to bring the art from various centers in Europe and America.
In 1957 Wise founded the Howard Wise Gallery of Present Day Painting and Sculpture. For several years he exhibited contemporary painting and sculpture from several European galleries and selections from larger shows at established institutions, such as “8 Painters of the Galerie Arnaud, Paris,” “18 Painters of the 1958 Pittsburgh International,” and “Selections from the 1958-59 Whitney Annual.” The Cleveland gallery operated for five to six years, and, while still running it, Wise opened the Howard Wise Gallery on the second floor at 50 W. 57th St. in early 1960. (10)
It is hard to imagine how different the art world in New York was in the early ‘60s compared to today. With many fewer galleries, any newly established showcase received a significant amount of attention. Wise began operations on 57th St. only three years after Leo Castelli opened his first gallery on 77th St. Soho was still an industrial district, and the bulk of important galleries were on Madison Ave. and E. 57th St. Beyond these commercial, uptown galleries, there existed only a few on 10th St.; several artist cooperatives and small, noncommercial galleries operated and coordinated efforts comprising an alternative exhibition scene similar to the galleries on the Lower East Side today. In 1960 the zenith of Abstract Expressionism was past, and the art world was slowly beginning to decentralize into diverse movements. Frank Gillette describes the arrival of Howard Wise in the art community as signifying “the antithesis of 10th St. Howard was, at first, like a pariah uptown. He was very Midwestern and his gallery had wall-to-wall carpeting.”
Wise inaugurated his New York gallery by showing Expressionist paintings, including work by Milton Resnick and George McNeil, and for about a year and a half, Wise commuted between Cleveland and New York. In January 1961 he presented an exhibit of three kinetic artists-Yaacov Agam, Len Lye, and Jean Tinguely-in the Cleveland gallery, with the title of “Movement in Art.” Coincidentally and almost simultaneously (although unbeknown to Wise until. it opened), Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum held a major survey of 72 artists working in kinetic sculpture, organized by Pontus Hulten, called “Art in Motion,” of which Tinguely’s work was the centerpiece. (11) Like video artists in the early 1970s, artists working with kinetic and light sculpture articulated early ‘60s optimism: the future of art was proclaimed as an alliance between artistic and technical concerns; the machine was paramount.
Kinetic and light sculpture represent two distinct yet overlapping movements, because, quite simply, most light work is inherently kinetic. The genesis of kinetic work can be traced to the ‘20s when Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and U.S. artist Thomas Wilfred began exploring the artistic potential of light. Moholy-Nagy built his Light-Space Modulator between 1922 and 1930. It is a complex piece comprised of various light bulbs and reflective and filtering surfaces, which was rebuilt in the 1960s-and exhibited in 1970 at Howard Wise Gallery. Wilfred is considered by many to be the U.S. pioneer of light sculpture, or what he termed “Lumia.” Wilfred built a Clavilux in the early 1920s, which was described by Howard Wise Gallery as “an organ-like instrument of sliding keys controlling optical elements (lenses, color filters, mirrors, prisms and projectors)” which produced images on a theater-sized screen. Soon after, Wilfred designed a self-contained, automatically operated Clavilux on which he exhibited new compositions. In many ways, the roots of kinetic sculpture date to 1913 when Marcel Duchamp put a bicycle wheel on a stool and named it Bicycle Wheel, and Alexander Calder began constructing his famed mobiles in the ‘30s.
In the late 1950s and early ‘60s, kinetic and light works began to reemerge. Both Wise and Douglas MacAgy, an art historian and curator who worked with Wise when he began to explore these new media, as well as others involved in this movement, saw light sculpture as an extension of impressionism-a movement which took light as its subject matter-and kineticism as an outgrowth of Futurism, which attempted to depict motion on canvas. In Europe, kinetic and light works were produced by several art collectives such as Group Zero in Dusseldorf, the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (of which Julio Le Parc was a member) in Paris, and encouraged by establishments such as the Denise Rend Gallery in Paris, which held an important early exhibition called “Le Mouvement” in 1955. Swiss artist Jean Tinguely received a great deal of attention with his notorious self-destructing sculpture-event “Hommage to New York” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1960, but most kinetic artists were less heralded at the time.
The renewed interest in artistic machines in the early 1960s can be attributed to the proliferation and sophistication of available hardware as well as a renewed fascination with technology. With characteristic aplomb, Wise defined this emergence as also attributable to a specific Manhattan phenomenon:
Two circumstances enabled the artist to use actual natural phenomena in his work, making kinetic light art possible. The first was the development of devices by modem technology that permit the control, transmission, and transformation of energy. Among these are small, geared electric motors; high-intensity light bulbs; proximity switches; polarized light analyzers; diodes; transistors and other miniaturized components. The second was the existence in New York of Canal Street and its many little shops where surplus electronic components, plastics, motors, etc. are plentifully available at far below original costs. (12)
Eventually, the Howard Wise Gallery became a central exhibition space for artists who worked in light, motion, and sound. After several years, Wise made a clear break with painting when he presented “On the Move,” in his words, “the first US survey exhibition of contemporary kinetic art” in 1964. The show included many artists who emerged as important figures in the medium: Agam, Calder, Ivan Chermayeff, Le Parc, George Rickey, Takis, and Tinguely. Later that year Wise exhibited the care members of Group Zero which included Heinz Mack, Otto Piene (now director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Gunther Uecker. (13) Willoughby Sharp, who was involved in the growth of what he terms “kineticism,” describes Group Zero as “the first artist collective concerned with movement after the Second World War . . . Zero quickly arrived at an esthetic sensibility devoted to expressing dynamic, organic relationships through concrete, objective means ....” (14) In the Wise Gallery show, Piene exhibited paintings produced with oil paint and smoke; Mack showed kinetic light pieces using aluminum, mirrors, and water; Uecker presented kinetic sculptures comprised of white canvas and nails.
A number of artists associated with the Howard Wise Gallery could be identified as a central group in the art and technology movement: Wen-Ying Tsai, whose “Cybernetic Sculpture” consisted of graceful steel rods or polished metal plates which vibrated according to the viewer’s proximity, sound, or an eternal light; Le Parc, who caused a stir in 1966 by winning the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale shortly after Wise gave him a large show (15); Lye, who was well-known for his abstract animated films as well as his kinetic sculpture; and Howard Jones, a light and sound sculptor. In February 1967 the gallery exhibited “Lights in Orbit,” a popular survey of light work which included work by Jones, Le Parc, Mack, Piene, Takis, Uecker, USCO, and Wilfred, as well as several artists who soon after began experimentations with television: Jackie Cassen, Rudi Stern, Earl Reiback, Thomas Tadlock, and Nam June Paik, who had been working with television since 1963. David Shirley wrote in Newsweek,
The Howard Wise Gallery ... usually serene, is pulsating, flashing, glowing and vibrating these days like the movies’ old dream of the mad scientist’s laboratory: Strobe lights rake the walls and rotating gel wheels filter gigantic spots in all directions. Sporadically, laser beams, polarized light and polyester films flash projections of weird color patterns. Said one visitor, as he blinked his way out of the gallery: “It was like being inside a kaleidoscope.” (16)
“Lights in Orbit” and other survey exhibitions Wise sponsored sustained and reinforced these art movements, placing the work in contexts which helped viewers understand these media. Certain museums started to pay attention to light and kinetic sculpture, and an expanded version of “Lights in Orbit,” entitled “Light/Motion/Space,” was exhibited later in 1967 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and at the Milwaukee Art Center. In December 1967, Wise opened his last extensive group show of light sculpture, “Festival of Lights,” in which Paik, Serge Boutourline, and Aldo Tambellini exhibited sculptures incorporating television sets. (17) In his review of “Festival of Lights” in the New York Times, Hilton Kramer represented one prevalent critical reaction to kinetic sculpture:
In this particular artistic mode it is machines rather than the artists who have artistic identities. In the darkened gallery we see numerous color-television images tracing a great variety of abstract patterns, and there are constructions of many kinds that reflect, manipulate and project light in predictably unpredictable ways. A great deal of invention and ingenuity has clearly been invested in these works, and as a gallery ensemble they are fun to look at-for a few minutes. (18)
In many ways, Howard Wise was an anomaly in the 1960s New York art world. He did not promote art with the intention of making money; he had already acquired his fortune. Running a gallery for his personal interest and enjoyment, which he supported in part by taking no personal salary, Wise could be described as a patron who could afford to support work which experimented with new technologies, work which ignored current aesthetic fashions. Nam June Paik recalls that when he came to New York in the early ‘60s, he was told that the Howard Wise Gallery “is a very good gallery that never sells.” He characterizes the gallery as an exception to the norm: “Howard was different. He was generous.” However, Howard Wise Gallery did sell; in fact, it sold Paik’s first piece, Participation TV in 1969 to David Bermant, which was the only piece Paik sold for some time thereafter. Wise’s best customers were J. Patrick Lannan, a collector from Palm Beach, Fla.; Malcolm Forbes, the owner of Forbes magazine, who has a large underground gallery filled with kinetic and light sculpture at his estate in Far Hills, N.J. (19) and Bermant, an owner of shopping malls who still collects and commissions art using technology. Bermant describes Wise as “an eminently fair gallery dealer,” (20) and recalls that when he first began buying sculpture to exhibit in his shopping centers, the Wise Gallery was the most important source. According to Bermant, Wise’s prices were reasonable, charging anywhere from $2,000 to $6,000.
Some of Wises reasons for choosing a career as a gallery owner are revealed in various announcements for the gallery; they are playful, eccentric, and personal compared to the usual PR fare. The announcement for a 1965 exhibition of computer-generated pictures by Bela Julesz and Michael Noll consisted of four computer cards. The press release for “Summer Lights” in 1968 begins, “Rarely, but nevertheless now and then, because one does not expect too much, one is pleasantly surprised.” In another 1968 release, after a quote from “Ecclesiastes,” “But time and chance happeneth to them all,” Wise wrote,
A season’s program hangs on the Ecclesiastical ‘but.’ In months ahead time and perhaps chance are bringing light to the Wise Gallery. It was perhaps by chance that many artists on several continents are choosing this time to reintroduce light as a dominant formal component offer the long lapse since Impressionism.
Wises genuine interest in new technologies soon led him to electronics, and in early 1969 he began to explore artists’ television. By 1969, video was gaining a furious if somewhat limited momentum as more artists began to use portapaks. In New York a small interconnected group exchanged ideas and equipment: Paul Ryan, a research assistant with Marshall McLuhan at Fordham University, lent Fordham’s equipment to Frank Gillette, a painter; filmmaker Ira Schneider met Gillette at a party and later taught a video workshop at Antioch College with Gillette. At that time Eric Siegel was working alone, experimenting with television hardware, and Les Levine, Tambellini, and Paik had begun exhibiting video work.
The younger generation has rebelled against its elders in the home. It has stormed the campuses. About the only target remaining in loco parentis is that preoccupier of youth, television. Last week the television generation struck there too, but the rebellion was half in fun . . . Within the confines of two rooms, 25 TV sets glare and blare at one another. The ten artists, all in their 20s or 30s, are sculptors from the Kinetic School, research protégés of Marshall McLuhan or electronics experimenters, united by disgust with usual TV fare. (21)
-Michael Shamberg Time, May 30, 1969
The Moorman-Paik collaboration is obviously the show-stopper of this quite dazzling exhibition in which artists...offer their own TV fare, most of it far more engaging than anything the TV camera records.
-John Gruen New York, June 9, 1969
I think it can be said without too much doubt that this exhibit is as important to the use of the medium as an aesthetic expansion as the 1913 Armory Exhibit was to modern painting and sculpture.
-Joseph Schwartz The Jersey Journal, June 12, 1969
While the point of “TV as a Creative Medium” is to humanize technology, the technology remains the problem. The total effect of the show-the “participation television” contributions notwithstanding is off-putting. It is, from one point of view at least, a collection of technical details wailing for a unifying aesthetic genius.
-Stephanie Harrington The Village Voice, May 29, 1969
In 1968 Siegel had shown his videotape Psychedelevision at Channel One, a video theater in New York City. He remembers that Tadlock told Wise about his work, and the gallery owner came to see it. He showed Wise several pieces, “but only the Einstein piece really turned him on.” (22) Wise asked Siegel if he could do the same piece in color, and gave him $200 to buy a color TV set to build it. Like Siegel, many of the artists in “TV as a Creative Medium” were surprised when Wise paid them to complete their projects included in his show. For some, it was the first time that anyone had paid them for their work.
The work in ‘TV as a Creative Medium” may have appeared to a casual observer as electronic versions of light sculpture, but, in fact, the show represented a broad range of ideas and approaches. Siegel, for instance, ‘was struck by the fact that every individual was doing something different from the next-there were no similarities.” In retrospect, the exhibition was important not only as a first, but also as prototypical of much video made in the following years.
The centerpiece of “TV as a Creative Medium” was Wipe Cycle, by Gillette and Schneider, which greeted viewers upon their entry into the gallery from the elevator. The piece consisted of a grid of nine monitors; a camera hidden amid the monitors fed a live image to the center screen. This image was switched to the outer monitors in eight- and 16-second intervals so that at any given time the viewers could see themselves eight or 16 seconds before. These live images intercut with broadcast images, and at periodic intervals the screens were wiped blank. Wipe Cycle was one of the first video installations to involve the viewer in an active role on the screen (23) it provided an element of surprise and its correlation between the viewer’s image and broadcast imagery emphasized the individual’s relationship to information. Gillette described the piece as
a television mural designed to engage and integrate the viewer’s television “image” at three separate points in time and five exchanging points in space ... The intent of this overloading (something like a play within a play within a play) is to escape the automatic “information” experience of commercial television without totally divesting it of its usual Content. (24)
Wipe Cycle remains a complex and intriguing work. As critic Richard Kostelanetz wrote, “The spectator feels caught in an intelligent, watchful, oblivious system whose incessant ono variable observations remain compelling and mysterious even after their operation is explained.” (25)
Another outstanding work in the exhibition was Paik’s TV Bra for Living Sculpture, an ongoing performance by avantgarde cellist Charlotte Moorman. Wise had followed the work of Moorman and Paik for several years. When the duo was arrested in 1967 at the Film-Maker’s Cinematheque during a performance of Paik’s Opera Sextronique, (26) Wise allowed Moorman to conduct a press conference in his gallery, providing her with the respectable background of the 57th St. art establishment as she stated her case. In “TV as a Creative Medium” Paik premiered both Participation TV, and TV Bra (Moorman still performs the latter). “We were all surprised by the response to that piece,” she says, “it is so popular.” (27) In TV Bra, Moorman wears two small TV sets on her breasts while playing the cello. As she plays, her music alters the imagery on the monitors. Participation TV is an interactive piece with images of viewers generated in different colors on several monitors.
Many of the works in “TV as a Creative Medium” involved restructuring television sets. In John Serry’s TV Time Capsule a TV set was cast in clear plastic so that its insides were made visible. The set played continuously, burning itself out twice during the show. Wrote Seery, “When the TV stops functioning the work is complete.” (28) In Three Experiments within the TV Tube, Earl Reiback, a light sculpture protege of Wilfred, whose background was nuclear engineering, painted the wall of a television tube with color phosphors. Viewers of his Electron Beam could manipulate an external magnet to effect the phosphors’ movements. In Suspension and Thrust this technique was applied to broadcast television.
Other works dealt with the potential to incorporate art into commercial television and the consumer environment. AC/TV (Audio-Controlled Television), by Joe Weintraub, was a device which translated “music into a complex kinetic image on the screen of any color TV.” (29) Tadlock’s Archetron presented a large console consisting of three monitors and an elaborate system of mirrors and filters to create kaleidoscopic imagery from broadcast TV. “It is not possible for this artist, (or any other using the Archetron),” wrote Wise in the exhibition brochure, “in effect to create simultaneously works of art on TV screens in countless homes.” Boutourline’s Telediscretion contained four television sets lined up on a wall, controlled by a switch which allowed viewers to choose among broadcast programs and a videotape by Boutourline and Wynn Chamberlain. The emphasis on the role of the viewer and the viewer’s freedom to choose in all of these works indicates the hands-on, take-control-of-television attitude which informed much early video art.
Several other pieces in the show concentrated on abstract electronic imagery and image/sound relationships. Black Spiral, by Aldo Tambellini, was produced in collaboration with Bell Laboratories. It is a riveting videotape that filmmaker and critic Jud Yalkut has described as “a high-contrast spiralling white light, [which] shimmers, radiates, contracts, twists in orgasmic ecstasy, dwindles to nothing, and blazes forth again on the black video field.” (30) Siegel’s Psychedelevision in Color (31) consisted of three tapes: Einstein, a manipulated image sequence of Albert Einstein’s face, where his features radiate color and abstract imagery; Symphony of the Planets; and Tomorrow Never Knows, accompanied by the Beatles song. Both of the latter tapes display psychedelic imagery in conjunction with music, and Siegel jokingly refers to Tomorrow Never Knows, as “a kind of very early rock video.” Today, however; this work looks like much more. Siegel’s exploration of relationships between abstract imagery and sound entails sophistication not unlike that in the experimental films of Oskar Fischinger.
Completing the variety of work in “TV as a Creative Medium” was Everyman’s Mobius Strip, by Paul Ryan (who, along with Gillette, was soon to become the theoretical mover in the video collective Raindance). Working with McLuhan, Ryan was exploring video as a psychological mirror, a social tool, and a communications device. Yalkut described Ryan’s piece:
You are sitting in a curtained booth on a stool, a TV aperture hangs before you like a surrealistic picture frame, beyond which the portable video camera sits and observes, as you are prodded ever so gently by calculatedly stimulating questions: “React to the following people: Nixon, your mother, Eldridge Cleaver, Teddy Kennedy, you... for the next ten seconds, do what you want... now let your face be sad...” You watch yourself in full audio-picture recap of your “interview,” erasing all but the fewest frames of the previous tape as your tape will be obliterated by the next. (32)
Ryan’s intimate and confessional purposes portended videotapes of the 1970s, in which the artist directly speaks to the audience.
“TV as a Creative Medium” was extremely popular, and Wise extended it beyond the scheduled closing. But it was not a show that was universally lauded in the art press. One dissenter, critic Barbara Rose, wrote that the show was
an apt finale to the 1989 art season, In that it represented the pinnacle of pretension and the nadir of achievement the exhibition managed to illustrate every current art-tivorld cliche from “process art”. . . to the spurious concept of “spectator Involvement”. . . Generally the level of imagination in these works was so low that the tube was merely treated as a kind of animated easel picture. (33)
Even if individual works were uneven, the overall impact remains uncontested. Stories of those who first saw the potential of video at Howard Wise Gallery in 1969 abound. As writer for Time magazine, Michael Shamberg reviewed the show. He was impressed by the work and immediately told Gillette that he wanted to work with him and Raindance, then in the formative stages as a profit-making corporation. Russell Connor, who was working at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. found the exhibit “staggering,” and decided to try to show the work at his institution. The logistics of this move proved complicated, and many of the artists were interested in producing new places, so Connor assembled a new show which opened in January 1970, “Vision & Television.” (34) (Within the year Connor went to direct NYSCA’s newly established media program.) Like many other artists, Steina Vasulka was struck by the sensibilities of video, and the show inspired her first work: “I went in there and saw Einstein blasting out, and it quite blew my mind.” (35)
1969 was a pivotal year for video as well as politics; the Wise show introduced the idea of exhibiting video art in a gallery and WGBH in Boston produced a series of videotapes, broadcast on March 23, The Medium Is the Medium. The artists involved overlapped with the group in the Wise show: Allan Kaprow, Pack, Piene, James Seawright, Tadlock, and Tambelllni. As a result, serious consideration of video as art made its debut in the art press. Critic John Margolies wrote, “Television is dearly ready to be recognized as an educational device and an artistic means of great influence. Analogous to film, which was not considered an ‘art’ until it had been around for many years, television is finally receiving serious recognition.” (36)
In 1969 and 1970, the Wise Gallery sponsored several: shows which added to its reputation as influential and progressive: an exhibition of sculpture by Frederick Kiesler; a group show called “Kinesthetics” which Included Lye; Juan Downey, arid Carson Jeffries, among others; and the reconstructed Light-Space Modulator, by Moholy-Nagy. During the same period, Wise’s concern about the Vietnam War grew. He incorporated these concerns into the gallery’s structure, establishing an “information center” in the outer gallery which, according to a press release, would “be of interest to those who oppose our continued involvement in the Indochina War:” There, information about anti-war groups, congressional primaries, and constitutional issues was available along with videotapes of current events such as demonstrations, shot by the Videofreex and Raindance collectives and edited by Ira Schneider.
Wise also sought new avenues of support for artists he considered to be at the frontier of new technologies. In particular, he regarded Siegel as the “whiz kid” of the small, energetic video community. After his participation in “TV as a Creative Medium’ Siegel traveled to Sweden and began designing a video synthesizer. Upon his return to the U.S., he approached Wise with the idea and Wise “was skeptical but agreed to fund it,” according to Siegel, who then went to San Francisco to build a prototype. He recalls, “I was one of the strongest instigators of the video movement, and I saw that as my role. Both Nam June Paik and I did a lot of promoting to Howard Wise of the idea that video was the next thing.:.. Later when 1 came back to New York [after completing the synthesiser] and there was no more Howard Wise. Gallery, I was surprised and a bit guilty.”
Upon Siegel’s, completion of the synthesizer lit 1970, Wise and he differed on the question of how the device should be marketed. Wise wanted to license a manufacturer to build it. Siegel did not agree:
In retrospect, it was an unfortunate misunderstanding. I was a purist and didn’t want television commercials to be made with the synthesizer. Howard though commercial work would be okay. Looking back now, it would have been better, because at least the synthesizer would have been produced.
Siegel describes his relationship with Wise as symbiotic, and it was similar to the kind of partnership that Wise has established with many artists:
The attitude in those days was “We’re all in this together doing our own thing,” and when that overlapped we worked together. Howard could make use of the things I knew how to do, and in exchange he could provide exposure and funds, which I did not know how to get on my own.
In December 1970, Wise exhibited “Three Sounds,” by Howard Jones, and decided it would be the final show in his gallery. In fact, it was the only show he ever sold out. As Wise remembers,
it was one piece, and orgy person bought it-Malcolm Forties. It consisted of aluminum cases which were activated by various things-if you walked between the light source and the sensor of the piece, it would create a sound. There were different sensors all around the room, so you could play different tunes. It was quite a sight in the gallery to see people, in effect, dancing.
On December 15 Wise wrote a letter explaining his decision to close the gallery:
The most important considerations which have impelled me to make this decision are that many artists, among them some of the most adventuresome, are focusing their energies on works of such scope that these can only be hinted at in the Gallery, and cannot be shown or realized here. These artists are going out of the Gallery into the environment, the sky, the ocean, even into outer space. Others are seeking imaginative ways of utilizing modem technology to humanize people instead of for commercial or destructive purposes, which dehumanize us all . . . .I hope to contribute to the realization of some of these projects, particularly to those which are susceptible of diffusion over television.
Most important of all, I feel I must try to put to maximum social use whatever 1 possess in the way of training, ability and experience . . I cannot stand idly by when the existence of our society and ourselves as individuals is so darkly threatened . . . .
In perceiving the limitations of galleries, Wise was responding to changes in the presentation of art which occurred in the ‘60s. Many of his affiliated artists were involved in projects which, because of size and emphasis on environment, had to be shown in public spaces. For instance, Otto Piene began working with helium and creating large outdoor inflated sculpture. In 1967, five artists produced Kinetic Environment in Central Park which, according to Willoughby Sharp, ‘Tried to activate a quarter-mile cube of nature by using natural kinetic elements like air, fire, fog, ice, smell, smoke, and water.” (37) Sharp concluded, “If one wants to characterize the present stage of the art of light and movement, one could say that due to the rapidly increasing awareness of past accomplishments there is a strong feeling of confidence in the ability of the new art to reconstruct the world kineticly.” But in 1970 artists’ interest in kinetic and light sculpture began to fade. Many of the same artists began making electronic art while others produced large outdoor pieces; few continued to create sculpture. The reasons for this are diverse. David Bermant believes that the technology was still too cumbersome and unsophisticated to be effectively used in art, and that there was too little emphasis on how to maintain these works. For his part, Wise turned to electronic art, and his interest in video went beyond his curiosity about new technology; it was also political:
I wanted to do an anti-Vietnam War show in the late 1960s, and I chose the subject of the constitution. I always felt and still do that we really ought to teach our young people something about our rights and our constitutional heritage. I asked artists to submit ideas which 1 would then plan to help them get into video, but I got so little that seemed worthwhile .... You see, the reason I wanted to move in the direction of video was that I felt it could get a story across without making. It propaganda. I thought the Vietnam War was an obscene thing, and you knew damn well when you were watching Nixon on television that he was lying through his teeth. That’s one of the virtues of television. It does what artists have been trying to do for centuries. It gets inside the exterior of a person and lets you know what he is really thinking.
Howard made a serious effort to find a means of supporting that work. For me, it was important to have someone who said “do it.” Howard was willing to see. (38)
-David Cort
Howard wises activities exemplify a unique sensitivity to, and understanding of, how artists are transforming our perception and understanding of art and technology. Howard is a visionary humanist, and at the basis of his activities is a profound concern for the potential of technology in the hands of artists to contribute to the well-being and health of our daily lives. (39)
-John Hanhardt
Wise spent most of 1971 planning and setting up his not-for-profit organization Intermix, which he soon renamed Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI). His initial motive was to channel funds to individual artists. Several artists’ collectives had incorporated as non-profits in order to be eligible for grants from NYSCA, which established a media program that year. According to Frank Gillette, during the brief period Wise occupied the gallery space after it had closed, the group Perception was formed. The original name and idea were conceived by Siegel, who soon after the group’s inception left for India, and he had little connection thereafter. The other founding member was Gillette, and Steina and Woody Vasulka soon joined. Perception defined itself as “a group which conducts research into methods and equipment through which to make more effective presentation and communication of information by video.” (40) Wise hoped to obtain money for these artists and help them to produce work.
Then Wise moved his company to 2 W. 13th St. The original board members were Wise, his wife Barbara, and Jerald Ordover, the Wises’ attorney. After incorporation, Intermix applied to NYSCA and received funds for Perception; the Eighth Avant-Garde Festival, directed by Charlotte Moorman; and for Open Circuits, a conference which took place in 1974 at the Museum of Modern Art. All together Intermix received $35,000 from NYSCA that first year, and its operating budget was around $42,000. Connor, then media program director at NYSCA, explains “There were four groups applying to NYSCA at the time who were in intense competition: Raindance, Global Village, Videofreex, and People’s Video Theater, and then there was Howard. Of course, it was a great relief to talk to Howard, because he seemed so benevolent and unselfish in comparison.” (41)
Perception initially received funds for equipment, to conduct programs at a space called the Electronic Kitchen at Mercer Arts Center (later, the Kitchen) established by the Vasulkas and Andres Mannik, and to fund individual work, primarily that of Gillette and Siege). As the Vasulkas became more involved in their own work and the Kitchen, (42) other artists in Perception - which soon consisted of Gillette, Siegel (peripherally), Juan Downey, Andy Mann, Ira Schneider, and Beryl Korot - pushed to get editing equipment in 1972. As Wise tells the story:
We got a grant from NYSCA for a deck and a little editing set up in our office. It didn’t work out very well because they were in and out at all hours of the night, and artists are not particularly known for their care of an environment, particularly an office where you have to keep a little order. Andy Mann, who knew a lot about the technology, was willing to keep the equipment in his apartment, but then he was interrupted at all hours of the night. That’s when they came to me and said, “How about getting us an editing facility?” We were notified that we had to move (in 1973), and we came to 84 Fifth Ave. and designed the facility so that it can be used at night, because you can have access to the editing facility without going through the office. (43)
The Avant-Garde Festival was the other major project funded by EAI in the early 1970s. The festivals, begun in 1963 by Charlotte Moorman and several other avant-garde composers, were unconventional gatherings of artists involved in performance, intermedia, dance, music, and sculpture. Each year the event grew in size and notoriety. Moorman supported the festivals with artists’ donations of time and materials and contributions from businesses. She recalls meeting Wise for the first time in the late ‘60s when he and Barbara traveled to Rhode Island to see her and Paik perform. She describes Wise as a father figure immensely supportive of her work. Wise was impressed by Moorman’s ability to surmount all obstacles in producing her events, and he began helping her with the festivals in 1970: getting grants, helping with management, providing legal advice as well as the services of his lawyer, going to meetings with her, and lending till influence. He also helped to brines video into the festival. The 1971 festival was held at the 69th Regiment Infantry Armory, and included premieres of the Paik/Abe and Siegel synthesizers, Video Ferris Wheel, by Shirley Clarke, Video Kinetic Environment, by the Vasulkas, and videotapes by Douglas Davis, Ken Dominick, Ralph Hocking, Tambellini, and the Videofreex. In 1972, the festival was held aboard the Alexander Hamilton Hudson Riverboat at South Street Seaport, and included an even longer list of video artists, including Downey, Gillette, Mann, and Shigeko Kubota.
Wise supported and helped to manage the Avant-Garde Festivals until 1977, when he decided that Moorman should incorporate on her own. Speaking about their collaboration she says,
Mr. Wise has never stopped helping me. For me to make a list of all of the performances that he has made possible is basically the same as my biography. Somewhere, he has done something for almost every performance, and I have done hundreds of performances. He is always such an elegant gentleman and his help isn’t always financial; many times it would be an influential person we needed to reach.
The 1974 Festival-held at Shea Stadium with a 12-hour video program displayed on the new Advent color video projector-was dedicated to Howard Wise.
In 1973 EAI published a brochure called At the Leading Edge of Art which described the video community, possible directions for the medium, and activities of the organization. Outlining the potential of distribution systems such as cable television and cassette distribution as well as the problems of artists’ access to equipment and to the broadcast networks, the booklet appears foresighted and a marker on the timeline of the gradual exploration and establishment of new outlets. Indeed, many of these issues remain current. When this publication appeared, EAI was supporting Perception, Vasulka Video, the Kitchen, the Avant-Garde Festival, the Open Circuits conference, and the Midnight Opera Company (an opera troupe based at the Kitchen which used video extensively as a stage device). Soon after, most of these projects became autonomous, and EAI changed from an organization which managed and supported separate activities to one consisting of two central functions: an editing facility and a distribution service.
By 1973 the video community in New York City had expanded. Organizations such as Downtown Community Television (DCTV) and the Television Laboratory at WNET-TV had sprung up. The Whitney Museum began to include video in its Biennial exhibition, and since 1972 Castelli-Sonnabend Videotapes and Films represented the distribution arm of the gallery. At the same time, many of the artists in Perception who had been using the editing facility at EAI began to pressure Wise to find a means of distributing work, and EAI received funding from the NEA to conduct a feasibility study and establish a pilot distribution operation. Deciding that the only way to find out if distribution was feasible was to try it, Wise initiated the Artists Videotape Distribution Service in 1973.
In 1974 the editing equipment from Perception, which by then had disbanded, was transferred to EAl’s Editing/PostProduction Facility. Editing there was then done on a hands-on basis, with artists paying an hourly rate to use the equipment available around the clock. This system was later upgraded with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1978. Artists now pay $25.00 per hour to edit, assisted by a video tachnician, (44) on a system which includes 1/2 and 314 inch equipment and a time-base corrector; EAI’s editing facility has subsequently been copied by many other post-production houses. While it is still a vital part of the organization, its importance has diminished somewhat as the Distribution Service has gained prominence.
EAI’s circulating video collection is now the most comprehensive in the U.S. Few organizations have leapt on the distribution bandwagon, preferring instead to concentrate on post-production. Castelli-Sonnabend distributes a number of artists’ tapes (including work by ex-EAlers Gillette and Downey), but the gallery tends to represent a specific kind of work - art-world oriented, by artists who also work in other media. Very recently, organizations like the Kitchen, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum (through the American Federation for the Arts) have tentatively begun to distribute tapes, and, outside of New York, Video Data Bank in Chicago, University Community Video in Minneapolis, and the Media Project in Portland, Ore. rent and sell rapes. The collection at EAI, however, remains the most important group of tapes.
Howard has not only done a lot for video-makers in the creating of Electronic Arts Intermix but has spoken out and fought for the rights of video artists when he felt they were being taken advantage of by others. His energy, commitment and passion have been an important factor in the development of video art . (45)
-Ed Emshwiller
Entities like Howard Wises Electronic Arts Intermix have to carry the weight as lonely outposts of support. There should be many, many more places like that in New York City. There are very few places where artists cart go to edit tape at a price they can afford, but at EAI there is also a good, creative ambience. Electronic Arts Intermix is video. Howard’s contribution has been incalculable.
-Willoughby Sharp
When EAI published its first catalogue in 1975, it listed more than 100 videotapes by video artists: Davis, Downey, Emshwiller, Gillette, Kubota, Mann, Paik, Schneider, Siegel, Stan VanDerBeek, the Vasulkas, Bill Viola, the Ant Farm and TVTV collectives, as well as work produced for KQED, WGBH, and WNET. The collection has since grown to include over 350 videotapes in active distribution, with a larger collection of early work available for screening (works in outdated formats and early tapes which, for various reasons, are no longer in distribution). While the distribution service has steadily expanded, in the past five, and especially the past two years rentals have increased significantly, according to Lori Zippay, EAI’s administrator. Artists are contracted by EAI on a non-exclusive basis and receive 50% of rental and sales fees, 60% in the case of sales for cable or broadcast. (46) Zippay notes that approximately one third of EAI’s business is with foreign markets (EAI has representatives in Paris, Berlin, and Tokyo), and that recently many universities have added video to their curricula. As the audience for video widens, EAI increasingly assumes the role of an educational institution, providing historical and descriptive information along with the tapes.
The collection at EAI in its diversity and range, is also very much the product of Wises vision and taste. It has expanded far beyond the initial core artists, adding tapes by Barbara Buckner, Skip Blumberg, Peter D’Agostino, DCTV, Kit Fitzgerald, Shalom Gorewitz, Gary Hill, John Sanborn, Dan Sandin, Edin Velez, and others. Their videotape catalogue also reveals diversity; a history of broadcasting, a portrait of activist Helen Caldicott, a documentary on Agent Orange, an introduction to Haitian art, and a tape on the Pritikin diet hint at a rather eclectic method, not unlike Moorman’s democratic selection of artists participating in the Avant-Garde Festivals. One with the unmistakable stamp of Howard Wise.
Wise established Electronic Arts Intermix as an organization to serve video artists, and to that end he has created a paradigm for media arts organizations. Beyond EAI’s role as one of the first media groups, it is also very much a personal venture. While EAI is now financially viable, receiving regular funds from NYSCA and NEA, with an operating budget of about $250,000, Wise has never taken a salary. Wise also continues to quietly fund other organizations such as MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, events such as the Whitney Museum’s Paik retrospective, and artists’ projects which could not find other patrons.
Wise has still not lost interest in video, although he does acknowledge that it has become less novel and somewhat less political than at the onset. As a humanist and politically conscious person, Wise is now concentrating on an issue which is of wider concern and potentially more devastating than the future of video art-the threat of nuclear war. Recently he wrote,
I propose that we urge and encourage the Media Artists to dedicate their attention, their talents and their sensitivites to promote, through their art, an understanding of the problem posed by the presence of 50,000 nuclear warheads in our midst, poised and set to go (whether by accident or design, it makes no difference) and to avoid if it is humanly possible the final Holocaust which will consume us all, friends and enemies alike. (47)
In addition to encouraging artists to take a political stand on this issue and express it in their art, EAI now circulates several tapes which deal with nuclear war: Erik Barnouw’s Hiroshima-Nagaski, August 1945: The Case of the A-Bomb Footage and Hiroshima: The People’s Legacy, produced by Japan Broadcasting Association (NHK).
Given Wise’s political interest, his history as a supporter of the arts, and his awareness of new technologies and the political nature of art, it is not surprising that he has wholeheartedly directed his energy to an important global movement. His is a persuasive concept of the role of artists in society and the responsibility of artists to technology and social change, which many may not share but might consider.
NOTES
1. TV as a Creative Medium (exhibition brochure), (New York: Howard Wise Gallery, 1969), n.p.
I would like to express my thanks to the many people who contributed information to this article.
2. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes from Frank Gillette are from an interview with the author, Nov. 11, 1983.
3. Davidson Gigliotti, “Video Art in the Sixties,” Abstract Painting 1960-69 (exhibition catalogue), Long Island City, N.Y.: Institute for Art and Urban Resources Inc., 1983), n.p. 43,
4. Howard Wise, “Kinetic Light Art,” American Home (October 44, 1969), p. 32.
5. Unless otherwise noted, quotes from Davidson Gigliotti are from an interview with the author, Aug. 7, 1983.
6. Unless otherwise noted, quotes from Willoughby Sharp are from an interview with the author, Aug. 25, 1983.
7. All quotes from Nam June Paik are from an interview with the author, Aug. 5, 1983.
8. Wise earned a B.A. in history and international law at Cambridge University.
9. Unless otherwise noted, quotes from Howard Wise are from interviews with with the author, October and November 1982.
10. The space is now occupied by the Allan Frumkin Gallery.
11. The Wise Gallery exhibition had, in fact, been scheduled to 1958, but several Agams disappeared from Wise’s basement in Cleveland while he was away for the summer. The Stedelijk exhibition traveled to the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, when Hulten was director.
12. Wise, American Home, p. 28.
13. Otto Piene, who still continues his working relationship with Wise, recalls that prior to the exhibit he received a call in Dusseldorf from Wise after MacAgy had seen Group Zero’s work: “It was a sensational event in 1964 for a New York art dealer to make a transatlantic call to an artist in Germany. Howard was elated on the phone, talking about the exhibition we would have at the gallery. He had just become a father again [Wise’s daughter Juliet was born that year], and he was blossoming through the telephone.”
All quotes from Otto Piene are from an interview with the author, Feb. 8, 1984.
14. Willoughby Sharp, Uecker (New York: Kineticism Press and Howard Wise Gallery, 1966), n.p.
15. Le Parc actually won in the category of painting, since his work fit neatly in none of the categories, and that year the Biennial judges recommended that categories be abolished altogether.
16. David L. Shirey, “Art is Light,” Newsweek, Feb. 20,1967, p. 101.
17. Paik had previously shown Electronic Blues, the first video piece exhibited at the gallery, in “Lights in Orbit:”
18. Hilton Kramer, New York Times, Dec. 16, 1967.
19. The Forbes collection includes artists Jackie Cassen and Rudi Stern, Richard Hogle, Julio Le Parc, Otto Piene, Earl Reiback, and Thomas Tadlock. See: American Home, October 1969.
20. All quotes from David Bermant are from an interview with the author, Sept. 16, 1983.
21. Although this piece was published without a byline, Shamberg and others concur that he reviewed the show for Time.
22. All quotes from Eric Siegel are from an interview with the author, September 1983. See also “Notes Toward a History of Image-Processed Video,” by Lucinda Furlong, Afterimage, Vol. 11, Nos. 1 &2 (Summer 1983), p. 35.
23. Les Levine produced two installations, Iris (1968) and Contact: A Cybernetic Sculpture (1969), which were important predecessors to Wipe Cycle, although less complex. In Iris, six monitors in a grid show imagery of viewers in close-up, mid-range, and wide angle; in Contact, the concept of Iris is extended with similar imagery on 18 monitors (nine on either side), with images switching from screen to screen.
24. TV as a Creative Medium, op. cit.
25. Richard Kostelanetz, “Artistic Machines,” Chicago Review, Vol. 23, No. 1 (1971), p. 124.
26. Moorman was convicted of indecent exposure for performing semi-nude. Paik, as the composer, was acquitted.
27. All quotes from Charlotte Moorman are from an interview with the author, Sept. 17, 1983.
28. TV as a Creative Medium, op. cit.
29. Ibid.
30. Jud Yalkut, “TV as a Creative Medium,” Arts Magazine (September-October t 969), p. 22.
31. Siegel added “in color” to the title of the tape because color videotapes were unusual at the time.
32. Yalkut, p. 20
33. Barbara Rose, “Television as Art, ‘inevitable,’” Vogue (Aug. 15, 1969), p. 36.
34. Additional artists in “Vision & Television” were Ted Kraynik, Les Levine, Eugene Grayson Mattingly, John Reilly, Rudi Stem, Jud Yalkut, USCO/Intermedia, and the Videofreex.
35. Steina Vasulka quoted in Lucinda Furlong, “Notes Toward a History of Image-Processed Video: Steina and Woody Vasulka”, Afterimage, Vol. 11, No. 5 (December 1983), p. 13.
36. John S. Margolies, “TV-The Next Medium,” Art in America, Vol. 57, No. 5 (September/October 1969), p. 48.
37. Willoughby Sharp, “Luminism and Kineticism,” Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, Gregory Battcock, ed. (New York: E. P. button, 1968), p. 358.
38. From an interview with the author, Aug. 15, 1983.
39. From a letter to the author, November 1983.
40. At the Leading Edge of Art (New York: Electronic Arts Intermix, 1973), p. 8.
41. All quotes from Russell Connor are from an interview with the author, Sept. 20, 1983.
42. The Vasulkas received funding through EAI until 1973, when they moved to Buffalo and the Kitchen was incorporated separately.
43. From an unpublished interview with Deidre Boyle, 1981.
44. Non-profit institutions pay $35.00/hour, and profit organizations pay $50.00/hour.
45. From a letter to the author, Aug. 4, 1983.
46. EAI videotapes rent for an average of $50.00 for a 30-minute tape, and $75.00 for a 60-minute tape.
47. Howard Wise, “If We Can Reach the Year 2000,” The Media Arts in Transition, Bill Horrigan, ed. (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1983), p. 17.
Above copied from: http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org/history/people/pview.php3?id=24&page=1
Ever since Marshall McLuhan has become a household name, people have become aware of the tremendous force, both actual and potential; that TV is having and will have on their lives.
The machine is obsolescent. Magazines, books, newspapers and other publications making use of the written word as we have known it are threatened. The relationships of nations, classes, generations and individuals are deeply affected. Education will be revolutionized, schools transformed if not eliminated (why interrupt your child’s education by sending him to school?). TV is at the cause, or at least at the root of the cause, of all of these changes that are transforming our civilization.
Why has not art been affected by this pervading influence? Perhaps quite simply because, up until now the time was not right. Perhaps it had to await the maturing of the generation who were in their sub-teens in the 1950’s, those who were “brought up” on TV .... As in every generation, some were artists. These have been at work for two, three, five and even more years, scrounging around second hand shops for parts, working with TV because they were fascinated by the results they were able to achieve, and because they sensed the potential of TV as the medium for their expression. (1)
-Howard Wise
Howard Wise is one of the people who is responsible for the idea of an alternative television. (2)
-Frank Gillette
“TV as a Creative Medium” was a catalytic event around which a video art community began to coalesce. New names and faces had appeared on the scene every year since 1965, but until the Spring of ‘69 there had been no center, no real cohesion, no sense of a community of purpose. After the show at the Howard Wise Gallery, it was possible to identify oneself as a video artist, and to recognize other video artists. (3)
-Davidson Gigliotti
The shape and direction of video art’s accelerated growth, since virtual nonexistence in the mid-‘60s up to the present, has been influenced primarily by the priorities of major funders - the New York State Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. It has matured without the bevy of individual collectors who support more established forms such as painting and sculpture. Within video’s media arts centers and funding organizations, there are many advocates, administrators, and curators who provide an infrastructure which enables artists to produce and distribute work, often doing so with little publicity or recognition. In this realm, Howard Wise stands out as an individual benefactor who preceded and has supplemented private foundations and public movies. He has been a central figure in the visibility, production, and acceptance of video art. For almost 20 years, he has been one of the few patrons of video art.
On May 17, 1969, a show which was to become the seminal exhibition of video art in the U.S. opened at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York City. That exhibition, “TV as a Creative Medium,” effectively pointed to the diverse potential of a new art form and social tool. Subsequently, the show became renowned for the inspiration it provided for many artists and future advocates of video. The artists represented in the show, a few of whom are still involved in the medium today, came from varied backgrounds-painting, filmmaking, nuclear physics, avant-garde music and performance, kinetic and light sculpture-and their approaches presented a primer of the directions which video would soon take. Theoretically, they variously saw video as viewer participation, a spiritual and meditative experience, a mirror, an electronic palette, a kinetic sculpture, or a cultural machine to be deconstructed. Ripe with ideas and armed with a heady optimism about the future of communications, these artists used video as an information tool and as a means of gaining understanding and control of television, not solely as an art form. In “TV as a Creative Medium” alternative television was presented as a stepping stone to the promised communications utopia.
Despite such non-aesthetic concerns among first generation videomakers, the exhibition signaled the emergence of a definition of video as an art medium. By 1969, Wise had established himself as a central figure in what has come to be known as the “art and technology” movement. His 57th St. gallery was one of the main showcases for kinetic and light sculpture, and initially Wise looked upon video as a kind of light work, an extension of kineticism. In 1969 he wrote, “Most Americans already have potential kinetic art right in their own living rooms: Television is kinetic art - it needs only to be ‘ordered’ by an artist.”(4) Wise’s step into electronic art, however, was an irreversible one. Within a year and a half after “TV as a Creative Medium” he closed his gallery and began plans for an organization designed to foster the work of video artists and their use of new technologies. That organization eventually became known as Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI).
Howard is a gentleman, which is rare in the art world. To appreciate him you have to be a little old-fashioned. He is the product of another and slightly more gracious age. (5)
-Davidson Gigliotti
Howard was very important because he went against the main stream in his gallery. (6)
-Willoughby Sharp
Howard was lucky to be born in the best time of American capitalism. He is a perfect balance of money and aesthetic. (7)
-Nam June Paik
Howard Wise was born on Nov. 6, 1903, in Cleveland, Ohio. He went to Europe for five years in the ‘20s, studied art at the Louvre and the Sorbonne and French, history, and constitutional law at Cambridge University in England. (8) Upon his return to Cleveland, Wise went to work for his family’s firm, the Arco Company, which manufactured industrial coatings. He successfully ran the company for 25 years, substantially expanding the business.
My father resigned during the Depression, so I had that responsibility at an early age. Like any other business, the Depression had hurt us a lot and we had a tot of labor unrest among the 300-400 employees. I decided that I had better take a good look at the situation, and I got in touch with a labor consultant. He suggested that since we were a relatively small business we could keep an intimate relationship with the employees, so I did that. We had 10-year and 25-year clubs, and when it came my turn to get the gold insignia, or whatever it was, for my 25 years with the company I realized, “My God, 25 years,” and I decided to quit. (9)
Wise sold the company and renewed his interest in painting:
I thought I would combine my artistic experience with my business experience and start a gallery in Cleveland because there really was no gallery of any stature there. I felt that Cleveland was artistically a very closed and ingrown community. The only real modern work that was shown was local work. My objective in opening a gallery in Cleveland was to bring the art from various centers in Europe and America.
In 1957 Wise founded the Howard Wise Gallery of Present Day Painting and Sculpture. For several years he exhibited contemporary painting and sculpture from several European galleries and selections from larger shows at established institutions, such as “8 Painters of the Galerie Arnaud, Paris,” “18 Painters of the 1958 Pittsburgh International,” and “Selections from the 1958-59 Whitney Annual.” The Cleveland gallery operated for five to six years, and, while still running it, Wise opened the Howard Wise Gallery on the second floor at 50 W. 57th St. in early 1960. (10)
It is hard to imagine how different the art world in New York was in the early ‘60s compared to today. With many fewer galleries, any newly established showcase received a significant amount of attention. Wise began operations on 57th St. only three years after Leo Castelli opened his first gallery on 77th St. Soho was still an industrial district, and the bulk of important galleries were on Madison Ave. and E. 57th St. Beyond these commercial, uptown galleries, there existed only a few on 10th St.; several artist cooperatives and small, noncommercial galleries operated and coordinated efforts comprising an alternative exhibition scene similar to the galleries on the Lower East Side today. In 1960 the zenith of Abstract Expressionism was past, and the art world was slowly beginning to decentralize into diverse movements. Frank Gillette describes the arrival of Howard Wise in the art community as signifying “the antithesis of 10th St. Howard was, at first, like a pariah uptown. He was very Midwestern and his gallery had wall-to-wall carpeting.”
Wise inaugurated his New York gallery by showing Expressionist paintings, including work by Milton Resnick and George McNeil, and for about a year and a half, Wise commuted between Cleveland and New York. In January 1961 he presented an exhibit of three kinetic artists-Yaacov Agam, Len Lye, and Jean Tinguely-in the Cleveland gallery, with the title of “Movement in Art.” Coincidentally and almost simultaneously (although unbeknown to Wise until. it opened), Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum held a major survey of 72 artists working in kinetic sculpture, organized by Pontus Hulten, called “Art in Motion,” of which Tinguely’s work was the centerpiece. (11) Like video artists in the early 1970s, artists working with kinetic and light sculpture articulated early ‘60s optimism: the future of art was proclaimed as an alliance between artistic and technical concerns; the machine was paramount.
Kinetic and light sculpture represent two distinct yet overlapping movements, because, quite simply, most light work is inherently kinetic. The genesis of kinetic work can be traced to the ‘20s when Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and U.S. artist Thomas Wilfred began exploring the artistic potential of light. Moholy-Nagy built his Light-Space Modulator between 1922 and 1930. It is a complex piece comprised of various light bulbs and reflective and filtering surfaces, which was rebuilt in the 1960s-and exhibited in 1970 at Howard Wise Gallery. Wilfred is considered by many to be the U.S. pioneer of light sculpture, or what he termed “Lumia.” Wilfred built a Clavilux in the early 1920s, which was described by Howard Wise Gallery as “an organ-like instrument of sliding keys controlling optical elements (lenses, color filters, mirrors, prisms and projectors)” which produced images on a theater-sized screen. Soon after, Wilfred designed a self-contained, automatically operated Clavilux on which he exhibited new compositions. In many ways, the roots of kinetic sculpture date to 1913 when Marcel Duchamp put a bicycle wheel on a stool and named it Bicycle Wheel, and Alexander Calder began constructing his famed mobiles in the ‘30s.
In the late 1950s and early ‘60s, kinetic and light works began to reemerge. Both Wise and Douglas MacAgy, an art historian and curator who worked with Wise when he began to explore these new media, as well as others involved in this movement, saw light sculpture as an extension of impressionism-a movement which took light as its subject matter-and kineticism as an outgrowth of Futurism, which attempted to depict motion on canvas. In Europe, kinetic and light works were produced by several art collectives such as Group Zero in Dusseldorf, the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (of which Julio Le Parc was a member) in Paris, and encouraged by establishments such as the Denise Rend Gallery in Paris, which held an important early exhibition called “Le Mouvement” in 1955. Swiss artist Jean Tinguely received a great deal of attention with his notorious self-destructing sculpture-event “Hommage to New York” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1960, but most kinetic artists were less heralded at the time.
The renewed interest in artistic machines in the early 1960s can be attributed to the proliferation and sophistication of available hardware as well as a renewed fascination with technology. With characteristic aplomb, Wise defined this emergence as also attributable to a specific Manhattan phenomenon:
Two circumstances enabled the artist to use actual natural phenomena in his work, making kinetic light art possible. The first was the development of devices by modem technology that permit the control, transmission, and transformation of energy. Among these are small, geared electric motors; high-intensity light bulbs; proximity switches; polarized light analyzers; diodes; transistors and other miniaturized components. The second was the existence in New York of Canal Street and its many little shops where surplus electronic components, plastics, motors, etc. are plentifully available at far below original costs. (12)
Eventually, the Howard Wise Gallery became a central exhibition space for artists who worked in light, motion, and sound. After several years, Wise made a clear break with painting when he presented “On the Move,” in his words, “the first US survey exhibition of contemporary kinetic art” in 1964. The show included many artists who emerged as important figures in the medium: Agam, Calder, Ivan Chermayeff, Le Parc, George Rickey, Takis, and Tinguely. Later that year Wise exhibited the care members of Group Zero which included Heinz Mack, Otto Piene (now director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Gunther Uecker. (13) Willoughby Sharp, who was involved in the growth of what he terms “kineticism,” describes Group Zero as “the first artist collective concerned with movement after the Second World War . . . Zero quickly arrived at an esthetic sensibility devoted to expressing dynamic, organic relationships through concrete, objective means ....” (14) In the Wise Gallery show, Piene exhibited paintings produced with oil paint and smoke; Mack showed kinetic light pieces using aluminum, mirrors, and water; Uecker presented kinetic sculptures comprised of white canvas and nails.
A number of artists associated with the Howard Wise Gallery could be identified as a central group in the art and technology movement: Wen-Ying Tsai, whose “Cybernetic Sculpture” consisted of graceful steel rods or polished metal plates which vibrated according to the viewer’s proximity, sound, or an eternal light; Le Parc, who caused a stir in 1966 by winning the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale shortly after Wise gave him a large show (15); Lye, who was well-known for his abstract animated films as well as his kinetic sculpture; and Howard Jones, a light and sound sculptor. In February 1967 the gallery exhibited “Lights in Orbit,” a popular survey of light work which included work by Jones, Le Parc, Mack, Piene, Takis, Uecker, USCO, and Wilfred, as well as several artists who soon after began experimentations with television: Jackie Cassen, Rudi Stern, Earl Reiback, Thomas Tadlock, and Nam June Paik, who had been working with television since 1963. David Shirley wrote in Newsweek,
The Howard Wise Gallery ... usually serene, is pulsating, flashing, glowing and vibrating these days like the movies’ old dream of the mad scientist’s laboratory: Strobe lights rake the walls and rotating gel wheels filter gigantic spots in all directions. Sporadically, laser beams, polarized light and polyester films flash projections of weird color patterns. Said one visitor, as he blinked his way out of the gallery: “It was like being inside a kaleidoscope.” (16)
“Lights in Orbit” and other survey exhibitions Wise sponsored sustained and reinforced these art movements, placing the work in contexts which helped viewers understand these media. Certain museums started to pay attention to light and kinetic sculpture, and an expanded version of “Lights in Orbit,” entitled “Light/Motion/Space,” was exhibited later in 1967 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and at the Milwaukee Art Center. In December 1967, Wise opened his last extensive group show of light sculpture, “Festival of Lights,” in which Paik, Serge Boutourline, and Aldo Tambellini exhibited sculptures incorporating television sets. (17) In his review of “Festival of Lights” in the New York Times, Hilton Kramer represented one prevalent critical reaction to kinetic sculpture:
In this particular artistic mode it is machines rather than the artists who have artistic identities. In the darkened gallery we see numerous color-television images tracing a great variety of abstract patterns, and there are constructions of many kinds that reflect, manipulate and project light in predictably unpredictable ways. A great deal of invention and ingenuity has clearly been invested in these works, and as a gallery ensemble they are fun to look at-for a few minutes. (18)
In many ways, Howard Wise was an anomaly in the 1960s New York art world. He did not promote art with the intention of making money; he had already acquired his fortune. Running a gallery for his personal interest and enjoyment, which he supported in part by taking no personal salary, Wise could be described as a patron who could afford to support work which experimented with new technologies, work which ignored current aesthetic fashions. Nam June Paik recalls that when he came to New York in the early ‘60s, he was told that the Howard Wise Gallery “is a very good gallery that never sells.” He characterizes the gallery as an exception to the norm: “Howard was different. He was generous.” However, Howard Wise Gallery did sell; in fact, it sold Paik’s first piece, Participation TV in 1969 to David Bermant, which was the only piece Paik sold for some time thereafter. Wise’s best customers were J. Patrick Lannan, a collector from Palm Beach, Fla.; Malcolm Forbes, the owner of Forbes magazine, who has a large underground gallery filled with kinetic and light sculpture at his estate in Far Hills, N.J. (19) and Bermant, an owner of shopping malls who still collects and commissions art using technology. Bermant describes Wise as “an eminently fair gallery dealer,” (20) and recalls that when he first began buying sculpture to exhibit in his shopping centers, the Wise Gallery was the most important source. According to Bermant, Wise’s prices were reasonable, charging anywhere from $2,000 to $6,000.
Some of Wises reasons for choosing a career as a gallery owner are revealed in various announcements for the gallery; they are playful, eccentric, and personal compared to the usual PR fare. The announcement for a 1965 exhibition of computer-generated pictures by Bela Julesz and Michael Noll consisted of four computer cards. The press release for “Summer Lights” in 1968 begins, “Rarely, but nevertheless now and then, because one does not expect too much, one is pleasantly surprised.” In another 1968 release, after a quote from “Ecclesiastes,” “But time and chance happeneth to them all,” Wise wrote,
A season’s program hangs on the Ecclesiastical ‘but.’ In months ahead time and perhaps chance are bringing light to the Wise Gallery. It was perhaps by chance that many artists on several continents are choosing this time to reintroduce light as a dominant formal component offer the long lapse since Impressionism.
Wises genuine interest in new technologies soon led him to electronics, and in early 1969 he began to explore artists’ television. By 1969, video was gaining a furious if somewhat limited momentum as more artists began to use portapaks. In New York a small interconnected group exchanged ideas and equipment: Paul Ryan, a research assistant with Marshall McLuhan at Fordham University, lent Fordham’s equipment to Frank Gillette, a painter; filmmaker Ira Schneider met Gillette at a party and later taught a video workshop at Antioch College with Gillette. At that time Eric Siegel was working alone, experimenting with television hardware, and Les Levine, Tambellini, and Paik had begun exhibiting video work.
The younger generation has rebelled against its elders in the home. It has stormed the campuses. About the only target remaining in loco parentis is that preoccupier of youth, television. Last week the television generation struck there too, but the rebellion was half in fun . . . Within the confines of two rooms, 25 TV sets glare and blare at one another. The ten artists, all in their 20s or 30s, are sculptors from the Kinetic School, research protégés of Marshall McLuhan or electronics experimenters, united by disgust with usual TV fare. (21)
-Michael Shamberg Time, May 30, 1969
The Moorman-Paik collaboration is obviously the show-stopper of this quite dazzling exhibition in which artists...offer their own TV fare, most of it far more engaging than anything the TV camera records.
-John Gruen New York, June 9, 1969
I think it can be said without too much doubt that this exhibit is as important to the use of the medium as an aesthetic expansion as the 1913 Armory Exhibit was to modern painting and sculpture.
-Joseph Schwartz The Jersey Journal, June 12, 1969
While the point of “TV as a Creative Medium” is to humanize technology, the technology remains the problem. The total effect of the show-the “participation television” contributions notwithstanding is off-putting. It is, from one point of view at least, a collection of technical details wailing for a unifying aesthetic genius.
-Stephanie Harrington The Village Voice, May 29, 1969
In 1968 Siegel had shown his videotape Psychedelevision at Channel One, a video theater in New York City. He remembers that Tadlock told Wise about his work, and the gallery owner came to see it. He showed Wise several pieces, “but only the Einstein piece really turned him on.” (22) Wise asked Siegel if he could do the same piece in color, and gave him $200 to buy a color TV set to build it. Like Siegel, many of the artists in “TV as a Creative Medium” were surprised when Wise paid them to complete their projects included in his show. For some, it was the first time that anyone had paid them for their work.
The work in ‘TV as a Creative Medium” may have appeared to a casual observer as electronic versions of light sculpture, but, in fact, the show represented a broad range of ideas and approaches. Siegel, for instance, ‘was struck by the fact that every individual was doing something different from the next-there were no similarities.” In retrospect, the exhibition was important not only as a first, but also as prototypical of much video made in the following years.
The centerpiece of “TV as a Creative Medium” was Wipe Cycle, by Gillette and Schneider, which greeted viewers upon their entry into the gallery from the elevator. The piece consisted of a grid of nine monitors; a camera hidden amid the monitors fed a live image to the center screen. This image was switched to the outer monitors in eight- and 16-second intervals so that at any given time the viewers could see themselves eight or 16 seconds before. These live images intercut with broadcast images, and at periodic intervals the screens were wiped blank. Wipe Cycle was one of the first video installations to involve the viewer in an active role on the screen (23) it provided an element of surprise and its correlation between the viewer’s image and broadcast imagery emphasized the individual’s relationship to information. Gillette described the piece as
a television mural designed to engage and integrate the viewer’s television “image” at three separate points in time and five exchanging points in space ... The intent of this overloading (something like a play within a play within a play) is to escape the automatic “information” experience of commercial television without totally divesting it of its usual Content. (24)
Wipe Cycle remains a complex and intriguing work. As critic Richard Kostelanetz wrote, “The spectator feels caught in an intelligent, watchful, oblivious system whose incessant ono variable observations remain compelling and mysterious even after their operation is explained.” (25)
Another outstanding work in the exhibition was Paik’s TV Bra for Living Sculpture, an ongoing performance by avantgarde cellist Charlotte Moorman. Wise had followed the work of Moorman and Paik for several years. When the duo was arrested in 1967 at the Film-Maker’s Cinematheque during a performance of Paik’s Opera Sextronique, (26) Wise allowed Moorman to conduct a press conference in his gallery, providing her with the respectable background of the 57th St. art establishment as she stated her case. In “TV as a Creative Medium” Paik premiered both Participation TV, and TV Bra (Moorman still performs the latter). “We were all surprised by the response to that piece,” she says, “it is so popular.” (27) In TV Bra, Moorman wears two small TV sets on her breasts while playing the cello. As she plays, her music alters the imagery on the monitors. Participation TV is an interactive piece with images of viewers generated in different colors on several monitors.
Many of the works in “TV as a Creative Medium” involved restructuring television sets. In John Serry’s TV Time Capsule a TV set was cast in clear plastic so that its insides were made visible. The set played continuously, burning itself out twice during the show. Wrote Seery, “When the TV stops functioning the work is complete.” (28) In Three Experiments within the TV Tube, Earl Reiback, a light sculpture protege of Wilfred, whose background was nuclear engineering, painted the wall of a television tube with color phosphors. Viewers of his Electron Beam could manipulate an external magnet to effect the phosphors’ movements. In Suspension and Thrust this technique was applied to broadcast television.
Other works dealt with the potential to incorporate art into commercial television and the consumer environment. AC/TV (Audio-Controlled Television), by Joe Weintraub, was a device which translated “music into a complex kinetic image on the screen of any color TV.” (29) Tadlock’s Archetron presented a large console consisting of three monitors and an elaborate system of mirrors and filters to create kaleidoscopic imagery from broadcast TV. “It is not possible for this artist, (or any other using the Archetron),” wrote Wise in the exhibition brochure, “in effect to create simultaneously works of art on TV screens in countless homes.” Boutourline’s Telediscretion contained four television sets lined up on a wall, controlled by a switch which allowed viewers to choose among broadcast programs and a videotape by Boutourline and Wynn Chamberlain. The emphasis on the role of the viewer and the viewer’s freedom to choose in all of these works indicates the hands-on, take-control-of-television attitude which informed much early video art.
Several other pieces in the show concentrated on abstract electronic imagery and image/sound relationships. Black Spiral, by Aldo Tambellini, was produced in collaboration with Bell Laboratories. It is a riveting videotape that filmmaker and critic Jud Yalkut has described as “a high-contrast spiralling white light, [which] shimmers, radiates, contracts, twists in orgasmic ecstasy, dwindles to nothing, and blazes forth again on the black video field.” (30) Siegel’s Psychedelevision in Color (31) consisted of three tapes: Einstein, a manipulated image sequence of Albert Einstein’s face, where his features radiate color and abstract imagery; Symphony of the Planets; and Tomorrow Never Knows, accompanied by the Beatles song. Both of the latter tapes display psychedelic imagery in conjunction with music, and Siegel jokingly refers to Tomorrow Never Knows, as “a kind of very early rock video.” Today, however; this work looks like much more. Siegel’s exploration of relationships between abstract imagery and sound entails sophistication not unlike that in the experimental films of Oskar Fischinger.
Completing the variety of work in “TV as a Creative Medium” was Everyman’s Mobius Strip, by Paul Ryan (who, along with Gillette, was soon to become the theoretical mover in the video collective Raindance). Working with McLuhan, Ryan was exploring video as a psychological mirror, a social tool, and a communications device. Yalkut described Ryan’s piece:
You are sitting in a curtained booth on a stool, a TV aperture hangs before you like a surrealistic picture frame, beyond which the portable video camera sits and observes, as you are prodded ever so gently by calculatedly stimulating questions: “React to the following people: Nixon, your mother, Eldridge Cleaver, Teddy Kennedy, you... for the next ten seconds, do what you want... now let your face be sad...” You watch yourself in full audio-picture recap of your “interview,” erasing all but the fewest frames of the previous tape as your tape will be obliterated by the next. (32)
Ryan’s intimate and confessional purposes portended videotapes of the 1970s, in which the artist directly speaks to the audience.
“TV as a Creative Medium” was extremely popular, and Wise extended it beyond the scheduled closing. But it was not a show that was universally lauded in the art press. One dissenter, critic Barbara Rose, wrote that the show was
an apt finale to the 1989 art season, In that it represented the pinnacle of pretension and the nadir of achievement the exhibition managed to illustrate every current art-tivorld cliche from “process art”. . . to the spurious concept of “spectator Involvement”. . . Generally the level of imagination in these works was so low that the tube was merely treated as a kind of animated easel picture. (33)
Even if individual works were uneven, the overall impact remains uncontested. Stories of those who first saw the potential of video at Howard Wise Gallery in 1969 abound. As writer for Time magazine, Michael Shamberg reviewed the show. He was impressed by the work and immediately told Gillette that he wanted to work with him and Raindance, then in the formative stages as a profit-making corporation. Russell Connor, who was working at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. found the exhibit “staggering,” and decided to try to show the work at his institution. The logistics of this move proved complicated, and many of the artists were interested in producing new places, so Connor assembled a new show which opened in January 1970, “Vision & Television.” (34) (Within the year Connor went to direct NYSCA’s newly established media program.) Like many other artists, Steina Vasulka was struck by the sensibilities of video, and the show inspired her first work: “I went in there and saw Einstein blasting out, and it quite blew my mind.” (35)
1969 was a pivotal year for video as well as politics; the Wise show introduced the idea of exhibiting video art in a gallery and WGBH in Boston produced a series of videotapes, broadcast on March 23, The Medium Is the Medium. The artists involved overlapped with the group in the Wise show: Allan Kaprow, Pack, Piene, James Seawright, Tadlock, and Tambelllni. As a result, serious consideration of video as art made its debut in the art press. Critic John Margolies wrote, “Television is dearly ready to be recognized as an educational device and an artistic means of great influence. Analogous to film, which was not considered an ‘art’ until it had been around for many years, television is finally receiving serious recognition.” (36)
In 1969 and 1970, the Wise Gallery sponsored several: shows which added to its reputation as influential and progressive: an exhibition of sculpture by Frederick Kiesler; a group show called “Kinesthetics” which Included Lye; Juan Downey, arid Carson Jeffries, among others; and the reconstructed Light-Space Modulator, by Moholy-Nagy. During the same period, Wise’s concern about the Vietnam War grew. He incorporated these concerns into the gallery’s structure, establishing an “information center” in the outer gallery which, according to a press release, would “be of interest to those who oppose our continued involvement in the Indochina War:” There, information about anti-war groups, congressional primaries, and constitutional issues was available along with videotapes of current events such as demonstrations, shot by the Videofreex and Raindance collectives and edited by Ira Schneider.
Wise also sought new avenues of support for artists he considered to be at the frontier of new technologies. In particular, he regarded Siegel as the “whiz kid” of the small, energetic video community. After his participation in “TV as a Creative Medium’ Siegel traveled to Sweden and began designing a video synthesizer. Upon his return to the U.S., he approached Wise with the idea and Wise “was skeptical but agreed to fund it,” according to Siegel, who then went to San Francisco to build a prototype. He recalls, “I was one of the strongest instigators of the video movement, and I saw that as my role. Both Nam June Paik and I did a lot of promoting to Howard Wise of the idea that video was the next thing.:.. Later when 1 came back to New York [after completing the synthesiser] and there was no more Howard Wise. Gallery, I was surprised and a bit guilty.”
Upon Siegel’s, completion of the synthesizer lit 1970, Wise and he differed on the question of how the device should be marketed. Wise wanted to license a manufacturer to build it. Siegel did not agree:
In retrospect, it was an unfortunate misunderstanding. I was a purist and didn’t want television commercials to be made with the synthesizer. Howard though commercial work would be okay. Looking back now, it would have been better, because at least the synthesizer would have been produced.
Siegel describes his relationship with Wise as symbiotic, and it was similar to the kind of partnership that Wise has established with many artists:
The attitude in those days was “We’re all in this together doing our own thing,” and when that overlapped we worked together. Howard could make use of the things I knew how to do, and in exchange he could provide exposure and funds, which I did not know how to get on my own.
In December 1970, Wise exhibited “Three Sounds,” by Howard Jones, and decided it would be the final show in his gallery. In fact, it was the only show he ever sold out. As Wise remembers,
it was one piece, and orgy person bought it-Malcolm Forties. It consisted of aluminum cases which were activated by various things-if you walked between the light source and the sensor of the piece, it would create a sound. There were different sensors all around the room, so you could play different tunes. It was quite a sight in the gallery to see people, in effect, dancing.
On December 15 Wise wrote a letter explaining his decision to close the gallery:
The most important considerations which have impelled me to make this decision are that many artists, among them some of the most adventuresome, are focusing their energies on works of such scope that these can only be hinted at in the Gallery, and cannot be shown or realized here. These artists are going out of the Gallery into the environment, the sky, the ocean, even into outer space. Others are seeking imaginative ways of utilizing modem technology to humanize people instead of for commercial or destructive purposes, which dehumanize us all . . . .I hope to contribute to the realization of some of these projects, particularly to those which are susceptible of diffusion over television.
Most important of all, I feel I must try to put to maximum social use whatever 1 possess in the way of training, ability and experience . . I cannot stand idly by when the existence of our society and ourselves as individuals is so darkly threatened . . . .
In perceiving the limitations of galleries, Wise was responding to changes in the presentation of art which occurred in the ‘60s. Many of his affiliated artists were involved in projects which, because of size and emphasis on environment, had to be shown in public spaces. For instance, Otto Piene began working with helium and creating large outdoor inflated sculpture. In 1967, five artists produced Kinetic Environment in Central Park which, according to Willoughby Sharp, ‘Tried to activate a quarter-mile cube of nature by using natural kinetic elements like air, fire, fog, ice, smell, smoke, and water.” (37) Sharp concluded, “If one wants to characterize the present stage of the art of light and movement, one could say that due to the rapidly increasing awareness of past accomplishments there is a strong feeling of confidence in the ability of the new art to reconstruct the world kineticly.” But in 1970 artists’ interest in kinetic and light sculpture began to fade. Many of the same artists began making electronic art while others produced large outdoor pieces; few continued to create sculpture. The reasons for this are diverse. David Bermant believes that the technology was still too cumbersome and unsophisticated to be effectively used in art, and that there was too little emphasis on how to maintain these works. For his part, Wise turned to electronic art, and his interest in video went beyond his curiosity about new technology; it was also political:
I wanted to do an anti-Vietnam War show in the late 1960s, and I chose the subject of the constitution. I always felt and still do that we really ought to teach our young people something about our rights and our constitutional heritage. I asked artists to submit ideas which 1 would then plan to help them get into video, but I got so little that seemed worthwhile .... You see, the reason I wanted to move in the direction of video was that I felt it could get a story across without making. It propaganda. I thought the Vietnam War was an obscene thing, and you knew damn well when you were watching Nixon on television that he was lying through his teeth. That’s one of the virtues of television. It does what artists have been trying to do for centuries. It gets inside the exterior of a person and lets you know what he is really thinking.
Howard made a serious effort to find a means of supporting that work. For me, it was important to have someone who said “do it.” Howard was willing to see. (38)
-David Cort
Howard wises activities exemplify a unique sensitivity to, and understanding of, how artists are transforming our perception and understanding of art and technology. Howard is a visionary humanist, and at the basis of his activities is a profound concern for the potential of technology in the hands of artists to contribute to the well-being and health of our daily lives. (39)
-John Hanhardt
Wise spent most of 1971 planning and setting up his not-for-profit organization Intermix, which he soon renamed Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI). His initial motive was to channel funds to individual artists. Several artists’ collectives had incorporated as non-profits in order to be eligible for grants from NYSCA, which established a media program that year. According to Frank Gillette, during the brief period Wise occupied the gallery space after it had closed, the group Perception was formed. The original name and idea were conceived by Siegel, who soon after the group’s inception left for India, and he had little connection thereafter. The other founding member was Gillette, and Steina and Woody Vasulka soon joined. Perception defined itself as “a group which conducts research into methods and equipment through which to make more effective presentation and communication of information by video.” (40) Wise hoped to obtain money for these artists and help them to produce work.
Then Wise moved his company to 2 W. 13th St. The original board members were Wise, his wife Barbara, and Jerald Ordover, the Wises’ attorney. After incorporation, Intermix applied to NYSCA and received funds for Perception; the Eighth Avant-Garde Festival, directed by Charlotte Moorman; and for Open Circuits, a conference which took place in 1974 at the Museum of Modern Art. All together Intermix received $35,000 from NYSCA that first year, and its operating budget was around $42,000. Connor, then media program director at NYSCA, explains “There were four groups applying to NYSCA at the time who were in intense competition: Raindance, Global Village, Videofreex, and People’s Video Theater, and then there was Howard. Of course, it was a great relief to talk to Howard, because he seemed so benevolent and unselfish in comparison.” (41)
Perception initially received funds for equipment, to conduct programs at a space called the Electronic Kitchen at Mercer Arts Center (later, the Kitchen) established by the Vasulkas and Andres Mannik, and to fund individual work, primarily that of Gillette and Siege). As the Vasulkas became more involved in their own work and the Kitchen, (42) other artists in Perception - which soon consisted of Gillette, Siegel (peripherally), Juan Downey, Andy Mann, Ira Schneider, and Beryl Korot - pushed to get editing equipment in 1972. As Wise tells the story:
We got a grant from NYSCA for a deck and a little editing set up in our office. It didn’t work out very well because they were in and out at all hours of the night, and artists are not particularly known for their care of an environment, particularly an office where you have to keep a little order. Andy Mann, who knew a lot about the technology, was willing to keep the equipment in his apartment, but then he was interrupted at all hours of the night. That’s when they came to me and said, “How about getting us an editing facility?” We were notified that we had to move (in 1973), and we came to 84 Fifth Ave. and designed the facility so that it can be used at night, because you can have access to the editing facility without going through the office. (43)
The Avant-Garde Festival was the other major project funded by EAI in the early 1970s. The festivals, begun in 1963 by Charlotte Moorman and several other avant-garde composers, were unconventional gatherings of artists involved in performance, intermedia, dance, music, and sculpture. Each year the event grew in size and notoriety. Moorman supported the festivals with artists’ donations of time and materials and contributions from businesses. She recalls meeting Wise for the first time in the late ‘60s when he and Barbara traveled to Rhode Island to see her and Paik perform. She describes Wise as a father figure immensely supportive of her work. Wise was impressed by Moorman’s ability to surmount all obstacles in producing her events, and he began helping her with the festivals in 1970: getting grants, helping with management, providing legal advice as well as the services of his lawyer, going to meetings with her, and lending till influence. He also helped to brines video into the festival. The 1971 festival was held at the 69th Regiment Infantry Armory, and included premieres of the Paik/Abe and Siegel synthesizers, Video Ferris Wheel, by Shirley Clarke, Video Kinetic Environment, by the Vasulkas, and videotapes by Douglas Davis, Ken Dominick, Ralph Hocking, Tambellini, and the Videofreex. In 1972, the festival was held aboard the Alexander Hamilton Hudson Riverboat at South Street Seaport, and included an even longer list of video artists, including Downey, Gillette, Mann, and Shigeko Kubota.
Wise supported and helped to manage the Avant-Garde Festivals until 1977, when he decided that Moorman should incorporate on her own. Speaking about their collaboration she says,
Mr. Wise has never stopped helping me. For me to make a list of all of the performances that he has made possible is basically the same as my biography. Somewhere, he has done something for almost every performance, and I have done hundreds of performances. He is always such an elegant gentleman and his help isn’t always financial; many times it would be an influential person we needed to reach.
The 1974 Festival-held at Shea Stadium with a 12-hour video program displayed on the new Advent color video projector-was dedicated to Howard Wise.
In 1973 EAI published a brochure called At the Leading Edge of Art which described the video community, possible directions for the medium, and activities of the organization. Outlining the potential of distribution systems such as cable television and cassette distribution as well as the problems of artists’ access to equipment and to the broadcast networks, the booklet appears foresighted and a marker on the timeline of the gradual exploration and establishment of new outlets. Indeed, many of these issues remain current. When this publication appeared, EAI was supporting Perception, Vasulka Video, the Kitchen, the Avant-Garde Festival, the Open Circuits conference, and the Midnight Opera Company (an opera troupe based at the Kitchen which used video extensively as a stage device). Soon after, most of these projects became autonomous, and EAI changed from an organization which managed and supported separate activities to one consisting of two central functions: an editing facility and a distribution service.
By 1973 the video community in New York City had expanded. Organizations such as Downtown Community Television (DCTV) and the Television Laboratory at WNET-TV had sprung up. The Whitney Museum began to include video in its Biennial exhibition, and since 1972 Castelli-Sonnabend Videotapes and Films represented the distribution arm of the gallery. At the same time, many of the artists in Perception who had been using the editing facility at EAI began to pressure Wise to find a means of distributing work, and EAI received funding from the NEA to conduct a feasibility study and establish a pilot distribution operation. Deciding that the only way to find out if distribution was feasible was to try it, Wise initiated the Artists Videotape Distribution Service in 1973.
In 1974 the editing equipment from Perception, which by then had disbanded, was transferred to EAl’s Editing/PostProduction Facility. Editing there was then done on a hands-on basis, with artists paying an hourly rate to use the equipment available around the clock. This system was later upgraded with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1978. Artists now pay $25.00 per hour to edit, assisted by a video tachnician, (44) on a system which includes 1/2 and 314 inch equipment and a time-base corrector; EAI’s editing facility has subsequently been copied by many other post-production houses. While it is still a vital part of the organization, its importance has diminished somewhat as the Distribution Service has gained prominence.
EAI’s circulating video collection is now the most comprehensive in the U.S. Few organizations have leapt on the distribution bandwagon, preferring instead to concentrate on post-production. Castelli-Sonnabend distributes a number of artists’ tapes (including work by ex-EAlers Gillette and Downey), but the gallery tends to represent a specific kind of work - art-world oriented, by artists who also work in other media. Very recently, organizations like the Kitchen, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum (through the American Federation for the Arts) have tentatively begun to distribute tapes, and, outside of New York, Video Data Bank in Chicago, University Community Video in Minneapolis, and the Media Project in Portland, Ore. rent and sell rapes. The collection at EAI, however, remains the most important group of tapes.
Howard has not only done a lot for video-makers in the creating of Electronic Arts Intermix but has spoken out and fought for the rights of video artists when he felt they were being taken advantage of by others. His energy, commitment and passion have been an important factor in the development of video art . (45)
-Ed Emshwiller
Entities like Howard Wises Electronic Arts Intermix have to carry the weight as lonely outposts of support. There should be many, many more places like that in New York City. There are very few places where artists cart go to edit tape at a price they can afford, but at EAI there is also a good, creative ambience. Electronic Arts Intermix is video. Howard’s contribution has been incalculable.
-Willoughby Sharp
When EAI published its first catalogue in 1975, it listed more than 100 videotapes by video artists: Davis, Downey, Emshwiller, Gillette, Kubota, Mann, Paik, Schneider, Siegel, Stan VanDerBeek, the Vasulkas, Bill Viola, the Ant Farm and TVTV collectives, as well as work produced for KQED, WGBH, and WNET. The collection has since grown to include over 350 videotapes in active distribution, with a larger collection of early work available for screening (works in outdated formats and early tapes which, for various reasons, are no longer in distribution). While the distribution service has steadily expanded, in the past five, and especially the past two years rentals have increased significantly, according to Lori Zippay, EAI’s administrator. Artists are contracted by EAI on a non-exclusive basis and receive 50% of rental and sales fees, 60% in the case of sales for cable or broadcast. (46) Zippay notes that approximately one third of EAI’s business is with foreign markets (EAI has representatives in Paris, Berlin, and Tokyo), and that recently many universities have added video to their curricula. As the audience for video widens, EAI increasingly assumes the role of an educational institution, providing historical and descriptive information along with the tapes.
The collection at EAI in its diversity and range, is also very much the product of Wises vision and taste. It has expanded far beyond the initial core artists, adding tapes by Barbara Buckner, Skip Blumberg, Peter D’Agostino, DCTV, Kit Fitzgerald, Shalom Gorewitz, Gary Hill, John Sanborn, Dan Sandin, Edin Velez, and others. Their videotape catalogue also reveals diversity; a history of broadcasting, a portrait of activist Helen Caldicott, a documentary on Agent Orange, an introduction to Haitian art, and a tape on the Pritikin diet hint at a rather eclectic method, not unlike Moorman’s democratic selection of artists participating in the Avant-Garde Festivals. One with the unmistakable stamp of Howard Wise.
Wise established Electronic Arts Intermix as an organization to serve video artists, and to that end he has created a paradigm for media arts organizations. Beyond EAI’s role as one of the first media groups, it is also very much a personal venture. While EAI is now financially viable, receiving regular funds from NYSCA and NEA, with an operating budget of about $250,000, Wise has never taken a salary. Wise also continues to quietly fund other organizations such as MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, events such as the Whitney Museum’s Paik retrospective, and artists’ projects which could not find other patrons.
Wise has still not lost interest in video, although he does acknowledge that it has become less novel and somewhat less political than at the onset. As a humanist and politically conscious person, Wise is now concentrating on an issue which is of wider concern and potentially more devastating than the future of video art-the threat of nuclear war. Recently he wrote,
I propose that we urge and encourage the Media Artists to dedicate their attention, their talents and their sensitivites to promote, through their art, an understanding of the problem posed by the presence of 50,000 nuclear warheads in our midst, poised and set to go (whether by accident or design, it makes no difference) and to avoid if it is humanly possible the final Holocaust which will consume us all, friends and enemies alike. (47)
In addition to encouraging artists to take a political stand on this issue and express it in their art, EAI now circulates several tapes which deal with nuclear war: Erik Barnouw’s Hiroshima-Nagaski, August 1945: The Case of the A-Bomb Footage and Hiroshima: The People’s Legacy, produced by Japan Broadcasting Association (NHK).
Given Wise’s political interest, his history as a supporter of the arts, and his awareness of new technologies and the political nature of art, it is not surprising that he has wholeheartedly directed his energy to an important global movement. His is a persuasive concept of the role of artists in society and the responsibility of artists to technology and social change, which many may not share but might consider.
NOTES
1. TV as a Creative Medium (exhibition brochure), (New York: Howard Wise Gallery, 1969), n.p.
I would like to express my thanks to the many people who contributed information to this article.
2. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes from Frank Gillette are from an interview with the author, Nov. 11, 1983.
3. Davidson Gigliotti, “Video Art in the Sixties,” Abstract Painting 1960-69 (exhibition catalogue), Long Island City, N.Y.: Institute for Art and Urban Resources Inc., 1983), n.p. 43,
4. Howard Wise, “Kinetic Light Art,” American Home (October 44, 1969), p. 32.
5. Unless otherwise noted, quotes from Davidson Gigliotti are from an interview with the author, Aug. 7, 1983.
6. Unless otherwise noted, quotes from Willoughby Sharp are from an interview with the author, Aug. 25, 1983.
7. All quotes from Nam June Paik are from an interview with the author, Aug. 5, 1983.
8. Wise earned a B.A. in history and international law at Cambridge University.
9. Unless otherwise noted, quotes from Howard Wise are from interviews with with the author, October and November 1982.
10. The space is now occupied by the Allan Frumkin Gallery.
11. The Wise Gallery exhibition had, in fact, been scheduled to 1958, but several Agams disappeared from Wise’s basement in Cleveland while he was away for the summer. The Stedelijk exhibition traveled to the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, when Hulten was director.
12. Wise, American Home, p. 28.
13. Otto Piene, who still continues his working relationship with Wise, recalls that prior to the exhibit he received a call in Dusseldorf from Wise after MacAgy had seen Group Zero’s work: “It was a sensational event in 1964 for a New York art dealer to make a transatlantic call to an artist in Germany. Howard was elated on the phone, talking about the exhibition we would have at the gallery. He had just become a father again [Wise’s daughter Juliet was born that year], and he was blossoming through the telephone.”
All quotes from Otto Piene are from an interview with the author, Feb. 8, 1984.
14. Willoughby Sharp, Uecker (New York: Kineticism Press and Howard Wise Gallery, 1966), n.p.
15. Le Parc actually won in the category of painting, since his work fit neatly in none of the categories, and that year the Biennial judges recommended that categories be abolished altogether.
16. David L. Shirey, “Art is Light,” Newsweek, Feb. 20,1967, p. 101.
17. Paik had previously shown Electronic Blues, the first video piece exhibited at the gallery, in “Lights in Orbit:”
18. Hilton Kramer, New York Times, Dec. 16, 1967.
19. The Forbes collection includes artists Jackie Cassen and Rudi Stern, Richard Hogle, Julio Le Parc, Otto Piene, Earl Reiback, and Thomas Tadlock. See: American Home, October 1969.
20. All quotes from David Bermant are from an interview with the author, Sept. 16, 1983.
21. Although this piece was published without a byline, Shamberg and others concur that he reviewed the show for Time.
22. All quotes from Eric Siegel are from an interview with the author, September 1983. See also “Notes Toward a History of Image-Processed Video,” by Lucinda Furlong, Afterimage, Vol. 11, Nos. 1 &2 (Summer 1983), p. 35.
23. Les Levine produced two installations, Iris (1968) and Contact: A Cybernetic Sculpture (1969), which were important predecessors to Wipe Cycle, although less complex. In Iris, six monitors in a grid show imagery of viewers in close-up, mid-range, and wide angle; in Contact, the concept of Iris is extended with similar imagery on 18 monitors (nine on either side), with images switching from screen to screen.
24. TV as a Creative Medium, op. cit.
25. Richard Kostelanetz, “Artistic Machines,” Chicago Review, Vol. 23, No. 1 (1971), p. 124.
26. Moorman was convicted of indecent exposure for performing semi-nude. Paik, as the composer, was acquitted.
27. All quotes from Charlotte Moorman are from an interview with the author, Sept. 17, 1983.
28. TV as a Creative Medium, op. cit.
29. Ibid.
30. Jud Yalkut, “TV as a Creative Medium,” Arts Magazine (September-October t 969), p. 22.
31. Siegel added “in color” to the title of the tape because color videotapes were unusual at the time.
32. Yalkut, p. 20
33. Barbara Rose, “Television as Art, ‘inevitable,’” Vogue (Aug. 15, 1969), p. 36.
34. Additional artists in “Vision & Television” were Ted Kraynik, Les Levine, Eugene Grayson Mattingly, John Reilly, Rudi Stem, Jud Yalkut, USCO/Intermedia, and the Videofreex.
35. Steina Vasulka quoted in Lucinda Furlong, “Notes Toward a History of Image-Processed Video: Steina and Woody Vasulka”, Afterimage, Vol. 11, No. 5 (December 1983), p. 13.
36. John S. Margolies, “TV-The Next Medium,” Art in America, Vol. 57, No. 5 (September/October 1969), p. 48.
37. Willoughby Sharp, “Luminism and Kineticism,” Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, Gregory Battcock, ed. (New York: E. P. button, 1968), p. 358.
38. From an interview with the author, Aug. 15, 1983.
39. From a letter to the author, November 1983.
40. At the Leading Edge of Art (New York: Electronic Arts Intermix, 1973), p. 8.
41. All quotes from Russell Connor are from an interview with the author, Sept. 20, 1983.
42. The Vasulkas received funding through EAI until 1973, when they moved to Buffalo and the Kitchen was incorporated separately.
43. From an unpublished interview with Deidre Boyle, 1981.
44. Non-profit institutions pay $35.00/hour, and profit organizations pay $50.00/hour.
45. From a letter to the author, Aug. 4, 1983.
46. EAI videotapes rent for an average of $50.00 for a 30-minute tape, and $75.00 for a 60-minute tape.
47. Howard Wise, “If We Can Reach the Year 2000,” The Media Arts in Transition, Bill Horrigan, ed. (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1983), p. 17.
Above copied from: http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org/history/people/pview.php3?id=24&page=1
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