Man and Machine

Amid the crack of 450-volt xenon strobes, the silent zap of lasers and an unprecedented clicking of turnstiles, the Los Angeles County Museum's exhibition called "Art and Technology" is under way at last. It will run through August, and it affords a revealing spectacle of the stimuli and problems that rise out of a major encounter of art and industry.

The "A. and T." program was conceived five years ago by Maurice Tuchman, the museum's 34-year-old senior curator. His idea was to persuade U.S. firms to place their technical resources and a bit of their cash at the disposal of a group of artists in order to give those artists a chance to construct ambitious works beyond the technological limits of their own studios. A total of 76 artists were introduced to a list of companies that ranged from Kaiser Steel to Ampex, from General Electric to Disneyland. Reactions to the proposed matings ranged from disdain to alarm. But eventually some 20 projects were realized.

New Metaphor. Ever since the Futurists declared a racing car to be more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace, artists have thought about connecting their work to the Faustian energies of 20th century technology. Never has the dream become more urgent than in today's electronically conditioned society. It is a fundamental issue because the very idea of "experiment," endlessly declared to be the founding principle of modern art, is really a metaphor drawn from science and industry. The problem is that industrial experiment radically changes the world, whereas artistic experiment does so only marginally and for a minority. In 1500 an artist like Leonardo could know, and even contribute to, the whole technology of his culture. Not today; the roles of artist and technologist have split, so that art --like kinetic art in the '60s--has had to feed off scientific scraps. One of the revealing ironies of the "A. and T." program was that some artists who moved into areas like aerospace and computers could not even form the necessary questions, let alone use the results, of advanced research. Hence the need for collaboration if art is not to remain in an inefficient relationship with technological culture. This was the rationale of "Art and Technology"--to widen artists' choices and enrich the vocabulary of art.

Many of the initial "A. and T." projects did not jell. Some were enchantingly eccentric, like George Brecht's suggestion that the Rand Corp. help him move the land mass of the British Isles into the Mediterranean. Others, like Iain Baxter's dream of a radio-controlled inflatable cloud patrolling over Los Angeles, never got off the ground. Some business firms became nervous and balked. Claes Oldenburg's collaboration with Disneyland began with his intense curiosity about "what people who have been making animals without genitalia for 30 years are like," and ended with Disneyland abandoning his project for a giant, hydraulically operated icebag;

Oldenburg, it was feared, might impair the playland's image as "a family-oriented operation." Fortunately, the Gemini company (TIME, Jan. 18) stepped in to sponsor the icebag. Puffing and rearing to its full 18-ft. height like some cross between Mount Fuji, a tomato and a dinosaur, it has turned out to be one of the key works in Oldenburg's brilliant career.

Etching on the Eyeball. Those projects that do triumph come out of a real interaction with, not mere use of, industrial facilities. Boyd Mefferd's room (made with the help of Universal Television) is a stunning perceptual experience: a pitch-black chamber lined with strobe lights. When they flash, the effect is engulfing and somewhat unnerving: silhouettes etch themselves on the retina as on film, and afterimage sheets of brilliant color drift and flower across the entire field of vision. Mefferd's piece is unique in that it is wholly objectless art --everything happens on and to the retina without mediation.

Equally remarkable light-pieces were developed by Newton Harrison (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and Rockne Krebs (Hewlett-Packard Co.). Harrison's room is dark, and in it stand five tall plastic cylinders. They are filled with helium, argon and other gases. When an electric current passes through the cylinders, the ionized gas lights up--rose-white, orange, deep blues, greens and purples. By controlling the gas flow, Harrison produces extraordinary changes of form in the light--bubbles, disks, even artificial lightning. The effect is solemn and exquisitely meditative; it is also wholly pictorial, without a hint of gimmickry. The room is Harrison's private homage to Mark Rothko: "I made a very specific reference to him," he says. "This was my way of acknowledging a man who I thought was involved in a kind of magnificent and very lonely vision."

Rockne Krebs' laser room is a sharper affair: intense beams of red, green and blue light slice through the darkness, rebounding from concealed mirrors to form an intricate lattice that almost abolishes any sense of bodily space. Indeed, one of the general effects of the "A. and T." show is to shift the focus from art as object to art as environmental sensation. The visitor is always being encompassed --by gas lighting or lasers or, in the case of Tony Smith's piece, by several thousand cardboard tetrahedrons and octahedrons supplied by the Container Corp. of America. Taped together, they form an immense, gloomy brown cave pierced by Wagnerian shafts of dim yellow light. With its emphasis on internal space and disregard of volume, it is his best sculpture in recent years.

Electronic Mud. One of the most popular exhibits is Robert Rauschenberg's Mud Muse. It is a tank filled with sloppy, coffee-colored drillers' mud supplied from one of Teledyne's offshore oil rigs. Pipes in the floor of the tank emit air bubbles, which plop to the surface at random with a kind of lazy flatulence. The pipes in turn are controlled by an elaborate electronics system, which converts signals from taped music and random noise in the room into a pattern of air release. "I think," says Rauschenberg, "you immediately get involved with Mud Muse on a really physical, basic, sensual level as opposed to its illustrating an interesting idea, because the level of the piece, on the grounds of an idea, is pretty low. It was to exhibit the fact that technology is not for learning lessons but is to be experienced." R.B. Kitaj offered the perverse idea of employing the facilities of Lockheed to produce a historical meditation on the 19th century Industrial Revolution, the aim being to examine the first era in which "a modernist presence has taken shape." Kitaj's room is a bizarre assemblage of model lighthouses, smokestacks, machined bas-reliefs of railway trucks, photographs of "The Father of Aviation" together with "The Mother and Daughter of Aviation." There is even a 6-ft. diorama of a mine tunnel with a mouth that is inscribed with uplifting Victorian mottoes:

THRIFT, DUTY, SELF HELP and so on. Kitaj ended up as a dissenter from the whole concept. His experience at Lockheed, he reported, proved "a confirmation of the utter boredom I always feel when art and science try to meet--the feeling of very slender accomplishment in those forms of art which pretend to operate scientifically."

The Catalyst. It is an honestly stated dilemma, for art is not science and cannot mimic its processes. But one aim of "Art and Technology" was to show that a feedback can occur, and that its very unpredictability can be stimulating. In this, the show is a revelation. And when it closes, it will have left behind one of the key documents in recent American art: the catalogue compiled by Maurice Tuchman in which all the ambitions, negotiations, blocks and frustrations involved in this immense project are set down, without fear or favor. "Art and Technology's" real importance is as a catalyst of a possible future. No Jerusalem has been founded among the white hygienic mills of Southern California, but the practical experience of "Art and Technology" may very well point the way to future, and much-easier collaborations.

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