Reading List: Matthew Wisnioski's “Why MIT Institutionalized the Avant-Garde"
In the Reading List series, I discuss a book or an article I’ve read recently and how it relates to museums, art, and tech.
CAVS in action: Charlotte Moorman with Jerome Wiesner, Otto Piene and Nam June Paik (source)
In 1967, MIT founded the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, the university’s first major commitment to contemporary art. Over the next decade, CAVS would host a series of artists realizing projects that touch on technological and participatory social practices, often in collaboration with university researchers. In the journal Daedelus, artist György Kepes explained his goals:
New technological tools and materials; new approaches to teamwork among creative individuals in the arts and in the sciences with different backgrounds and training; new awareness of the interplay of visual factors in the dynamic urban scene, these are the challenges to collaborative daring.
His vision gained traction among some scientists and engineers, who believed it was a moral imperative for technology and science to engage with the arts. In a time when MIT’s research was so closely tied to the cold war military agenda, art was seen as a way to humanize technology.
Okay. So what does this have to do with museums?
The last few years have witnessed a surge of art museum initiatives focusing on inviting artists (and amateurs) to experiment with emerging technologies. The narrative surrounding these endeavors is that, with the fusion of art and technology, museums are breaking new ground; but in fact, folks have long been interested in bridging these two seemingly distant fields.
As Matthew Wisnioski explains in “Why MIT Institutionalized the Avant-Garde: Negotiating Aesthetic Virtue in the Postwar Defense Institute,” in the 1960s, the intersection of arts and tech/science was predicated on two qualities: collaboration and creativity.
Collaboration was cast as a means of capitalizing on the integration of different knowledge domains to solve complex sociotechnical problems, and, in so doing, to bridge larger societal divisions. Above all, art was a mark of creativity, and as such was a universal marker of intellectual, professional, and social good that could rehabilitate the image of science and technology through the alteration of the self. (91)
In some ways, art was a way for MIT to manage its public image, especially as escalation in Vietnam led to anti-technology and anti-corporation attitudes from civil rights, antiwar, and student movements. But there was also something more, that which Wisnioski calls aesthetic virtue: art lent technology a higher meaning.
Interdisciplinarity between the arts and sciences, then, came from an ideological place. But as Wisnioski explains, CAVS’s survival was also predicated on the social and economical. Though Kepes had a particular vision of artists, engineers, and scientists working together, his ideals shifted in the 1970s as funding waned and distrust of all things military and industry grew, incorporating “anti-technology rhetoric into his otherwise optimistic message” (110). (Under the leadership of Otto Piene, the Center’s second director, CAVS would shift toward participatory and environmental art.)
Recently, there has been a renewed interest in the intersection of art and technology. Wisnioski points out several contemporary examples: Google holds an employee art contest; a recent National Science Foundation grantee claims to “broaden students’ engineering perspectives” through art (115). Wisnioski explains:
general exuberance for a convergence of art and technology today is similarly built on competing claims to creativity and collaboration, on desires to refashion scientific and engineering selves, on projects to define the creative human in a technological age. (116)
Aesthetic virtue explains why the tech and science sectors are interested in working with the arts: art lends these fields a sense of humanity and good with a capital G. Like CAVS, technology initiatives at art museums today also rely on this art/technology rhetoric. But while Kepes had to convince MIT to bring art into engineering and science, the people spearheading the kinds of programs I’m studying are working in the opposite direction: appealing to science and technology as essential to the future of visual arts.
So if museums, their galleries filled with ostensibly powerful works of art, are already chock-full of aesthetic virtue, why might they want to work with technologists and scientists? There are a couple of reasons I can think of. As non-profit organizations, museums are taking advantage of the prestige and funding currently directed toward STEM fields and organizations. Additionally, by working with scientists, engineers, and technologists, artists gain access to new techniques and tools.
I wonder if, in this sudden trend of museum tech projects, we can find a corollary to the aesthetic virtue of CAVS. Perhaps we find it in the concept of the technological sublime—coined by Perry Miller and developed by Leo Marx—in which “the awe and reverence once reserved for the Deity and later bestowed upon the visible landscape is directed toward technology, or rather, the technological conquest of matter” (Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden, 197). Technology dominates public discourse today: talk of the power of big data, the importance of disruption and innovation, the newest iWhatever release. Just as science and technology institutions like MIT appealed to art as a moral imperative, museums might be looking to tap into the almost religious frenzy around technology.
Wisnioski, Matthew. “Why MIT Institutionalized the Avant-Garde: Negotiating Aesthetic Virtue in the Postwar Defense Institute.” Configurations 21, no. 1 (2013): 85–116.
