Notes on Jack Burnham’s Concepts of a Software Exhibition

Leonurdo, Vol. 3, pp. 189-190. Pergamon Press 1970. Printed in Great Britain NOTES ON JACK BURNHAM’S CONCEPTS OF A SOFTWARE EXHIBITION Robert Mallary* Jack Burnham has been receiving, in my view, the recognition he deserves for his efforts to draw attention to the impact of cybernetics, general systems theory and computers on contemporary art. My own respect for Burnham is attested to by references to his book, Beyond Modern Sculpture, in my article ‘Computer Sculpture: Six Levels of Cybernetics’, Artforum (May 1969) and by my discussion of his work at a session of the International Cybernetics Congress held in London in September 1969. Recently, in a communication to the New York Review, Burnham defined his central premise as ‘. ..we are moving from an art centered upon objects to one focused upon systems, thus implying that sculptured objects are in eclipse’. In a statement explaining the scope of a ‘Software’exhibition he has proposed for the Jewish Museum in New York (tentatively scheduled for late spring, 1970),he made his point even more explicitly by writing ‘If the “Software” exhibit is to be successful in emphasizing the nature of electronically supported software , it should then remove the traditional hardware props of art from the eye of the viewer,mainly those vestiges of painting and sculpture’. In this same statement he defined electronically supported software as ‘radio, telephone, telephone photocopying , television, microcard library information systems, teletype and teaching machines’. These quotes make clear what Burnham means by software, though, to my knowledge, he has yet to define precisely what he means by ‘systems art’, except in the negative sense of repudiating the sculptural object. One can only surmise that his thinking accords more with what we have come to know as ‘concept art’ and related tendencies, rather than with cybernetics and general systems theory. What he has done in fact, is draw upon the prestige of these disciplines (and some of the vocabulary) to blur the distinction between art as a particular kind of immediate, sensory experience and the process of dealing with it on various levels of abstractionapparently failing to realize that in both cybernetics and generalsystemstheory it isnormal to distinguish between the abstract model and the real-world system it is intended to represent. Burnham’s more puzzling mistake, however, lies in his grossmisunderstanding of the word software, *Artist, Department of Art, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, M a s s .01002, U S A . (Received 27 December 1969.) or at least in his gross misuse of it, and his resort to such a misleading expression as ‘electronically supported software’-as if hardware normally supports software, instead of the other way round [l]. This is a surprising choice because Burnham must have learned enough about computers by this time to know that software refers to programming input for the computer-the term having been derived from the use of punched cards and paper tape for this purpose. It is legitimate to speak of software as output if the program generates another program which in turn becomes a second input of the computer . While Burnham is not alone in his abuse of a perfectly good word such as software (e.g. in audiovisual education, slides and films are sometimes referred to as software and the projectors as hardware ) there is more involved than mere quibbling over terminology. A large computer, supported by appropriate software , is a general, all-purpose device capable of performing a host of diversefunctions. In effect,it is the software that makes the difference. Furthermore , software constitutes roughly half of the overhead costs of the computer industry. Its meaning, therefore, is too specific, too useful and too important to be used in connection with something as distinct and important in its own right asprinted and graphic output.which is normally referred to ashard copy. To use software in describing a television image and the acoustical output from a radio or a telephone, is to drain the word of almost any meaning. It is also puzzling why Burnham, with his almost Manichean antiphysicalism and his bias against hardware, would thus limit the possibilities of cybernetic and systems art. Drawing upon computer terminology, it might even make sense to...