To the ancients, wind and sun, sea and forest grove seemed to be informed by inscrutable spirits to whom, in awe and propitiation, they gave human personality and shape. To modern man, the mechanized gadgets that his own brain has spawned also seem to have cantankerous lives of their own. What adult American has not swatted a flickering TV set? Or made an uneasy joke about the day when the computer tries to take over?
Last week "The Machine," a ten-week-long exhibit of 220 works detailing the myriad ways in which artists have viewed the mysterious powers that inhabit cogs, gears and transistors, opened at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art.* The exhibit (see color pages) was put together by K. G. Pontus Hulten, 44, who as director of Stockholm's Moderna Museet staged one of the first kinetic art shows back in 1961.
Hulten's exhibit has plenty of jiggling junk sculptures and blithely bleeping electronic marvels. But it also demonstrates that the artist's love-hate relationship with the machine has a long history. Oldest items on display are Leonardo's drawings for a helicopter and a parachute. Newest are nine works selected by Hulten from entries to a contest sponsored by Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), an organization that strives to bring artists and technologists together.
Museumgoers who want to see duplicates of Hulten's selections together with 114 other E.A.T. entries will find them across the river at the Brooklyn Museum in a show called "Some More Beginnings." The Brooklyn exhibit has three prizewinners, chosen by a jury of scientists. Interestingly, their three were among the nine Hulten had independently chosen. The jury's criterion: "That neither the artist nor the engineer alone could have achieved the results. Interaction must have preceded innovation."
Kittenish Ball. As the prizewinners indicate, interaction must both precede and succeed innovation. Each work unites art and technology so successfully that it responds to a human touch or noise almost as though it were alive. Visitors at the Modern could plug themselves —by stethoscope—into Jean Dupuy's Poe-like Heart Beats Dust. The stethoscope is wired to a sensitive diaphragm inside a clear plastic case, and every time the viewer's heart thumps, a tiny telltale mushroom cloud of ruby-red dust boils up under a spooky cone of light. Robin Parkinson's sonically activated Toy-Pet-Plexi-Ball is a sparkling basketball-sized plastic sphere that rolls kittenishly away every time the viewer claps his hands together. Ingeniously combining a blower and a vibrator, Engineer Niels O. Young flings an 80-ft.-long loop of tape soaring out into graceful swirls in his mechanized Fakir in 3/4 Time.