Love, Hate & the Machine

To the ancients, wind and sun, sea and forest grove seemed to be informed by inscrutable spirits to whom, in awe and propitiation, they gave human personality and shape. To modern man, the mechanized gadgets that his own brain has spawned also seem to have cantankerous lives of their own. What adult American has not swatted a flickering TV set? Or made an uneasy joke about the day when the computer tries to take over?

Last week "The Machine," a ten-week-long exhibit of 220 works detailing the myriad ways in which artists have viewed the mysterious powers that inhabit cogs, gears and transistors, opened at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art.* The exhibit (see color pages) was put together by K. G. Pontus Hulten, 44, who as director of Stockholm's Moderna Museet staged one of the first kinetic art shows back in 1961.

Hulten's exhibit has plenty of jiggling junk sculptures and blithely bleeping electronic marvels. But it also demonstrates that the artist's love-hate relationship with the machine has a long history. Oldest items on display are Leonardo's drawings for a helicopter and a parachute. Newest are nine works selected by Hulten from entries to a contest sponsored by Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), an organization that strives to bring artists and technologists together.

Museumgoers who want to see duplicates of Hulten's selections together with 114 other E.A.T. entries will find them across the river at the Brooklyn Museum in a show called "Some More Beginnings." The Brooklyn exhibit has three prizewinners, chosen by a jury of scientists. Interestingly, their three were among the nine Hulten had independently chosen. The jury's criterion: "That neither the artist nor the engineer alone could have achieved the results. Interaction must have preceded innovation."

Kittenish Ball. As the prizewinners indicate, interaction must both precede and succeed innovation. Each work unites art and technology so successfully that it responds to a human touch or noise almost as though it were alive. Visitors at the Modern could plug themselves --by stethoscope--into Jean Dupuy's Poe-like Heart Beats Dust. The stethoscope is wired to a sensitive diaphragm inside a clear plastic case, and every time the viewer's heart thumps, a tiny telltale mushroom cloud of ruby-red dust boils up under a spooky cone of light. Robin Parkinson's sonically activated Toy-Pet-Plexi-Ball is a sparkling basketball-sized plastic sphere that rolls kittenishly away every time the viewer claps his hands together. Ingeniously combining a blower and a vibrator, Engineer Niels O. Young flings an 80-ft.-long loop of tape soaring out into graceful swirls in his mechanized Fakir in 3/4 Time.

But the marriage of art and technology has only recently begun to produce many lively offspring, having long been hampered by anger, doubt and distrust. For the past 60 years, Hulten admits, "we have gone through a period of dramatic evolution in artists' feeling toward the machine. You will find both fantastic devotion and the greatest hatred." Some of the artists most enamored of the machine betrayed extraordinary naivete about it. The Italian futurists loved the speed, the glamour and the individualism of the early automobile, somehow believing it and other machines would revitalize Italy. "A roaring motor car," proclaimed Filippo Marinetti's 1909 futurist manifesto, "is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace." Yet even the handsomest futurist paintings were little more than superficial attempts to capture the illusion of motion.

No Morals. One kalian artist who abandoned paint and canvas altogether was Ettore Bugatti. Instead, he made an art out of building custom automobiles ("A great sculptor," Hulten calls him). His 1931 Royale cost $40,000 and came, naturally, with a lifetime guarantee. Only seven were ever made. The Dadaists used machines to evoke--and provoke--human feelings. Marcel Duchamp's slim, stylish 1913 bicycle wheel, mounted on a stool so that art lovers could spin it, was his first "readymade." It suggested the revolutionary notion that something machine-produced could be elevated to a work of art.

Francis Picabia, a hedonistic, moody French-Cuban painter, visited Duchamp in New York in 1915. Under the spell of his host and America's highly mechanized culture, he became convinced that "the genius of the modern world is in machinery." He used its imagery in poetic drawings in which machines mostly symbolized women (he was enthralled with the notion that machines have no morals). The Berlin Dadaists admired the architectonic art produced by the Russian constructivists under the leadership of Vladimir Tallin. The constructivist philosophy emphasized the simplicity, impersonality and modernity of machine designs, arguing that these were automatically both beautiful and functional. The philosophy was adopted and further developed during the 1920s by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy at the Weimar Bauhaus.

Heroes and Villains. With the Depression, the machines that had once seemed so heroic to the prosperous '20s were suddenly transformed into villains. As production lines slowed to a crawl and millions were thrown out of work, surrealists depicted nightmarish phantom treadmills and airplanes that were trapped like dragonflies. Alexander Calder, around 1935, rejected his cheerfully jigging motorized mobiles, and started making dreamy ones that shifted with the wind. In the U.S., Cartoonist Rube Goldberg poked good-humored fun at what he considered "the futility of big machines" by devising elaborate contraptions to perform absurdly simple tasks. Hulten sees Goldberg as peculiarly American in that "he takes the machine very lightly, with no hang-ups about it."

The war machines of the 1940s, and particularly the atom bomb, in Hulten's opinion, helped to turn artists away in disgust from technological subject matter. But by the late 1950s, the machine was beginning to attract a new following. This postwar generation could treat a machine with easy familiarity. Claes Oldenburg's liquidly drooping Giant Soft Fan is, among other things, a gently nostalgic evocation of times past --since, after all, air conditioning is more common nowadays. Jean Tinguely's joyous black Rotozaza, No. 1 tosses out colored balls and then sucks them back in again, a mystifying process intended as a sardonic parody of the production-consumption cycle. Baldaccini Cesar took his revenge on a high-powered yellow Buick by crushing it into a monolithic, totally stationary monument with the aid of a commercial hydraulic press. Edward Kienholz makes an irreverent visual joke out of his Friendly Grey Computer. The instructions read: "If you know your computer well, you can tell when it's tired and blue. Turn rocker switch on for ten or 20 minutes. Your computer will love it and work all the harder for you."

Says K. G. Pontus Hulten: "All of us have a rather unclear and not very dignified relation to technology. We put hope in the machine and then get frustrated when it deceives us. How the artist in particular looks upon technology is very important--because it is the freest, the most human way of looking at a nonhuman object. Perhaps the artist will show us the way to a better relationship."

* To be shown subsequently at Houston's University of St. Thomas (March 25-May 18, 1969) and the San Francisco Museum of Art (June 23-August 24).

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