Commentary on "Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art"

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Regarding Edward Shanken's essay, "Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art" (Leonardo35, No. 4, pp. 433-438, 2002), I believe that rigid boundaries do little to deepen understanding of the art movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Instead these boundaries express a need for convenience on the part of the art historian, while ignoring the fact that most artists of the time were responding to a complex set of cultural and social relations. In The Structure of Art (1973), Jack Burnham states that the historian's efforts were "directed toward explaining the physical evidences of the art impulse, rather than the conceptual conditions which make art objects possible under vastly different circumstances" [1].

Divisions can be meaningless because of their inherent duality. Even Shanken's proposed artificial boundary between the 19th-century machine age and today's information age is indistinct. Contemporary cars and equipment have been designed, engineered and fabricated with computer assistance, and most have electronic circuitry controlling their mechanical functions. In actuality there has been no succession; instead information is now embedded into pre-digital machines, buildings and bio-organic forms.

In a similar way, conceptual art was embedded in other art expressions during the late 1960s. As Shanken acknowledges, "conceptual art . . . sought to analyze the ideas underlying the creation and reception of art, rather than to elaborate another stylistic convention in the historical succession of modernist avant-garde movements" [2]. Conceptual art was clearly not a style, but an expression of the importance of the conceptualized idea. This belief permeated process art, minimalism and arte povera, as well as art-and-technology.

I am currently conducting research that parallels Shanken's, except that it is directed towards architecture. It is my opinion that during the late 1970s and early 1980s, architectural design went through a significant shift. In an effort to trace the causes, I found that a number of critical architects attributed their conceptual stance to these very same art movements: conceptual art, art-and-technology and process art. To say these expressions were each distinct and separate would be to deny the profound effect that these art movements had on present-day architecture.

And yet what were the forces that created such a significant carryover from the arts to architecture? Swiss architects and Pritzker award winners Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron explained that the economic recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s resulted in a lack of architectural work. In lieu of commissions, they focused their efforts on gallery installations collaborating with artists Joseph Beuys and Remy Zaugg. Similarly, in the United States, Elizabeth Diller and Richard Scofidio designed theatrical sets and developed interactive art-and-technology and performance pieces. Conversely, the slow economic climate benefited architects by providing an opportunity to develop and refine their ideas in different forms of media without conventional budgetary constraints. Other conceptual architects Rem Koolhaus, Daniel Libeskind and Bernard Tschumi continued to pursue their experimental design processes through teaching and writing, consequently influencing architectural pedagogy of today.

Burnham also predicted the current dialogue between computer programs and human participants in art. By the mid-1980s, Diller and Scofidio, acting as "artist-engineers" for the para-site installation at the Museum of Modern Art, had translated this idea. Through the use of surveillance cameras, every nuance of private existence was readily digitized and transmitted for public viewing. The architects continued their investigations regarding culture and technology in homage to Duchamp (The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate or A Delay in Glass, 1986); a video installation at an abandoned porn theatre in Times Square (Soft Sell, 1993); and robots (Master-Slave, Cartier Foundation, 1999), among others. Their latest multimedia work, Blur, located on Lake Neuchatel at the 2002 Swiss exposition, features a steel framework sheathed in an ephemeral mist, a critique on conventional architecture's reliance...