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The war machines of the 1940s, and particularly the atom bomb, in Hulten's opinion, helped to turn artists away in disgust from technological subject matter. But by the late 1950s, the machine was beginning to attract a new following. This postwar generation could treat a machine with easy familiarity. Claes Oldenburg's liquidly drooping Giant Soft Fan is, among other things, a gently nostalgic evocation of times past —since, after all, air conditioning is more common nowadays. Jean Tinguely's joyous black Rotozaza, No. 1 tosses out colored balls and then sucks them back in again, a mystifying process intended as a sardonic parody of the production-consumption cycle. Baldaccini Cesar took his revenge on a high-powered yellow Buick by crushing it into a monolithic, totally stationary monument with the aid of a commercial hydraulic press. Edward Kienholz makes an irreverent visual joke out of his Friendly Grey Computer. The instructions read: "If you know your computer well, you can tell when it's tired and blue. Turn rocker switch on for ten or 20 minutes. Your computer will love it and work all the harder for you."
Says K. G. Pontus Hulten: "All of us have a rather unclear and not very dignified relation to technology. We put hope in the machine and then get frustrated when it deceives us. How the artist in particular looks upon technology is very important—because it is the freest, the most human way of looking at a nonhuman object. Perhaps the artist will show us the way to a better relationship."
* To be shown subsequently at Houston's University of St. Thomas (March 25-May 18, 1969) and the San Francisco Museum of Art (June 23-August 24).