A “sculpture” that physically reacts to its environment is no longer to be regarded as an object. The range of outside factors affecting it, as well as its own radius of action, reach beyond the space it materially occupies. It thus merges with the environment in a relationship that is better understood as a “system” of interdependent processes. These processes evolve without the viewer’s empathy. He becomes a witness. A system is not imagined, it is real.
Tangential to this systems approach is Allan Kaprow’s very unique concept of the Happening. In the past ten years Kaprow has moved the Happening from a rather self-conscious and stagy event to a strict and elegant procedure. The Happening now has a sense of internal logic which was lacking before. It seems to arise naturally from those same considerations which have crystalized the systems approach to environmental situations. As described by their chief inventor, the Happenings establish an indivisibility between themselves and everyday affairs; they consciously avoid materials and procedures identified with art; they allow for geographical expansiveness and mobility; they include experience and duration as part of their esthetic format; and they emphasize practical activities as the most meaningful mode of procedure. As structured events the Happenings are usually reversible. Alterations in the environment may be “erased” after the Happening, or as a part of the Happening’s conclusion. While they may involve large areas of space, the format of the Happening is kept relatively simple, with the emphasis on establishing a participatory esthetic.
The emergence of a “post-formalist esthetic” may seem to some to embody a kind of absolute philosophy, something which, through the nature of its concerns cannot be transcended. Yet it is more likely that a “systems esthetic” will become the dominant approach to a maze of socio-technical conditions rooted only in the present. New circumstances will with time generate other major paradigms for the arts.
For some readers these pages will echo feelings of the past. It may be remembered that in the fall of 1920 an ideological schism ruptured two factions of the Moscow Constructivists. The radical Marxists, led by Vladimir Tatlin, proclaimed their rejection of art’s false idealisms. Establishing themselves as “Productivists,” one of their slogans became: “Down with guarding the traditions of art. Long live the constructivist technician.” As a group dedicated to historical materialism and the scientific ethos, most of its members were quickly subsumed by the technological needs of Soviet Russia. As artists they ceased to exist. While the Productivist program might have had some basis as a utilitarian esthetic, it was crushed amid the Stalinist anti-intellectualism that followed.
The reasons are almost self-apparent. Industrially underdeveloped, food and heavy industry remained the prime needs of the Soviet Union for the next forty years. Conditions and structural interdependencies which naturally develop in an advanced industrial state were then only latent. In retrospect it is doubtful if any group of artists had either the knowledge or political strength to meaningfully affect Soviet industrial policies. What emerged was another vein of formalist innovation based on scientific idealism; this manifested itself in the West under the leadership of the Constructivist emigres, Gabo and Pevsner.
But for our time the emerging major paradigm in art is neither an ism nor a collection of styles. Rather than a novel way of rearranging surfaces and spaces, it is fundamentally concerned with the implementation of the art impulse in an advanced technological society. As a culture producer, man has traditionally claimed the title, Homo Faber: man the maker (of tools and images). With continued advances in the industrial revolution, he assumes a new and more critical function. As Homo Arbiter Formae his prime role becomes that of man the maker of esthetic decisions. These decisions –– whether they are made concertedly or not –– control the quality of all future life on the Earth. Moreover these are value judgements dictating the direction of technological endeavor. Quite plainly such a vision extends beyond political realities of the present. This cannot remain the case for long.
¹ Quade, E.S. (November 1964) “Methods and Procedures” in Analysis for Military Decisions (Santa Monica: The Rand Corp.) p. 153.
² Galbraith, John Kenneth (1967) The New Industrial State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.) pp. 343-353.
³ Claudwell, Christopher (pseud.) (1937) Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry (London: MacMillan and Co.) p. 111.
⁴ Peckham, Morse (1965) Man’s Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behavior & the Arts (New York: Schocken Books, 1967) p. 314.
⁵ Fried, Michael (Summer, 1967) “Art and Objecthood” Artforum, p. 15.
⁶ Bertalanffy, Ludwig von (1967) Robots, Men and Minds (New York: George Braziller Inc.) p. 69.
⁷ Anonymous (September 1, 1967) “Ad Reinhardt, Painter, Is Dead, Reduced Color to Bare Minimum” in The New York Times, p.33
⁸ Judd, Donald (1965) “Specific Objects” in Contemporary Sculpture (New York: The Arts Digest, Inc.) p. 78.
⁹ Morris, Robert (April 1968) “Anti Form,” Artforum, p. 35.
¹⁰ Smithson, Robert (Summer 1967) “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site” Artforum, pp. 36-40.
¹¹ Fried, op cit., p. 19.
¹² Jacobs, Jay (March 1968) “More Les” the ART gallery (Ivoryton, Connecticut: Hollycraft Press) p. 27.
¹³ Flavin, Dan (with introduction by) (December 1967) Dan Flavin: Pink and Gold, exhibition catalog, (Chicago: The Museum of Contemporary Art).
¹⁴ Haacke, Hans (with statement by) (January 1968) Hans Haacke, exhibition catalog (New York: Howard Wise Gallery).
¹⁵ Kaprow, Allan (March 1966) “The Happenings are Dead––Long Live Happenings” Artforum, pp. 36-39.
¹⁶ Gabo, Naum (1957) Gabo: Constructions, Sculptures Paintings, Drawings, Engravings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press p. 153.
