Rebooting the art-and-technology movement: a review of W. Patrick McCray’s Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture

ABSTRACT

In this article, I evaluate historian of science and technology W. Patrick McCray's 2020 publication Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture, a historical account of collaborations between artists and engineers in the ‘long 1960s.' Positioning McCray's work in a broader discourse around art's postwar entanglements with science and technology (one that has unfolded largely within art history), I work to differentiate McCray's approach to this period's ‘art-and-technology movement' and make sense of his historiographic interventions. I discuss McCray's close attention to the engineers and industrial entities involved in art-and-technology collaborations-agents rarely given equal billing with artists in existing histories—and argue that this redistribution of focus both complicates and enriches working understandings of the art-and-technology movement’s rise and fall.

KEYWORDS:

• Art
• technology
• science
• engineering
• collaboration
• interdisciplinary
• cold war
• long 1960s

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 McCray speaks of a discrete ‘art-and-technology movement’ throughout Making Art Work, arguing convincingly for the qualitative difference and historical specificity of the Sixties-era activity he surveys. I find this notion of a consolidated ‘movement’ highly useful as a periodizing tool, and thus employ McCray’s label throughout this review; however, there is not a wholly settled consensus among historians of art, technology, and media as to the boundaries of this ‘movement,’ or indeed, as to the value of this periodization. Grant D. Taylor speaks of a Sixties ‘Art and Technology movement’ in the United States in his computer-art history When the Machine Made Art, roughly aligning with McCray in his understanding of its chronology (Taylor 2014, 42–45). In contrast, Joseph D. Ketner has argued for a longer ‘art and technology tradition’ beginning with the early-twentieth-century activities of the Bauhaus and the Russian Constructivists, and witnessing a postwar revival via the activities of the European arts collectives ZERO and GRAV (Groupe de recherche d’art visuel) (Ketner 2017, 121, 254). Similar to Ketner, Anne Collins Goodyear has problematized the notion of a Sixties art-and-technology movement by emphasizing this activity’s inheritance of much earlier avant-garde ideals (Goodyear 2004). Finally, deviating from the ‘movement’ model, Edward A. Shanken has spoken of ‘art-and-technology’ as a ‘categor[y] of artistic practice’ in the Fifties and Sixties, distinguishing it along stylistic and conceptual as much as historical lines (Shanken 2002).

2 When McCray notes an absence of attention around the art-and-technology movement in art-historical discourse (McCray 2020, 12, 102–103), he is, in fairness, speaking mainly of survey literature and more broadly oriented accounts of the postwar period. I want, simply, to suggest that these developments are far from absent in art-historical (or media-historical) studies of the last twenty years, and have attracted interest among a variety of scholars across fields. In recent years, ‘9 Evenings’ and/or E.A.T. have been broached, variously, in Pamela Lee’s Chronophobia (Lee 2006), an account of Sixties artists’ thematic engagement with time, Frances Dyson’s sound-oriented genealogy of new media (Dyson 2009), Chris Salter’s examination of technology’s role in the history of performance (Salter 2010), Carolyn Kane’s history of computer-generated colour (Kane 2014), and Gloria Sutton’s monograph on artist Stan VanDerBeek (Sutton 2015). Tuchman’s ‘Art and Technology’ initiative has meanwhile been addressed in Charles Green’s The Third Hand, a history of artists as collaborators (Green 2001), in Lee’s Chronophobia, as well as her recent Think Tank Aesthetics (Lee 2006; Lee 2020), and in analyses of a particularly well-known ‘A & T’ project that found NASA scientist Edward Wortz working with artists James Turrell and Robert Irwin (Dalla Villa Adams 2016; Jones 2018b). Of the exhibitions mentioned, ‘Cybernetic Serendipity’ has received special attention (Fernández 2008; Jones 2018a; Usselmann 2003).

3 McCray attributes the term ‘hybrid’ – used with reference to communities, collaborations, and individuals positioned between art, science, and technology – to the 2019 volume Hybrid Practices: Art in Collaboration with Science and Technology in the Long 1960s (edited by David Cateforis, Steven Duval, and Shepherd Steiner), to which he contributed an essay (McCray 2019). It is worth noting that Douglas Davis uses the term in approximately the same spirit in Art and the Future (Davis 1973, 111–112).

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Walker Downey

Walker Downey is a historian of modern and contemporary art and a PhD Candidate in the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Focused on the postwar United States, Walker's research explores the seams between experimental music and the expanded arts, the entry of sound art into the museum, and artistic experimentation with tape, radio, and DIY electronics. Walker is also interested in the history of modern acoustics, and the politics of noise and noise pollution as issues of public health.