Amid the crack of 450-volt xenon strobes, the silent zap of lasers and an unprecedented clicking of turnstiles, the Los Angeles County Museum's exhibition called "Art and Technology" is under way at last. It will run through August, and it affords a revealing spectacle of the stimuli and problems that rise out of a major encounter of art and industry.
The "A. and T." program was conceived five years ago by Maurice Tuchman, the museum's 34-year-old senior curator. His idea was to persuade U.S. firms to place their technical resources and a bit of their cash at the disposal of a group of artists in order to give those artists a chance to construct ambitious works beyond the technological limits of their own studios. A total of 76 artists were introduced to a list of companies that ranged from Kaiser Steel to Ampex, from General Electric to Disneyland. Reactions to the proposed matings ranged from disdain to alarm. But eventually some 20 projects were realized.
New Metaphor. Ever since the Futurists declared a racing car to be more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace, artists have thought about connecting their work to the Faustian energies of 20th century technology. Never has the dream become more urgent than in today's electronically conditioned society. It is a fundamental issue because the very idea of "experiment," endlessly declared to be the founding principle of modern art, is really a metaphor drawn from science and industry. The problem is that industrial experiment radically changes the world, whereas artistic experiment does so only marginally and for a minority. In 1500 an artist like Leonardo could know, and even contribute to, the whole technology of his culture. Not today; the roles of artist and technologist have split, so that art —like kinetic art in the '60s—has had to feed off scientific scraps. One of the revealing ironies of the "A. and T." program was that some artists who moved into areas like aerospace and computers could not even form the necessary questions, let alone use the results, of advanced research. Hence the need for collaboration if art is not to remain in an inefficient relationship with technological culture. This was the rationale of "Art and Technology"—to widen artists' choices and enrich the vocabulary of art.
Many of the initial "A. and T." projects did not jell. Some were enchantingly eccentric, like George Brecht's suggestion that the Rand Corp. help him move the land mass of the British Isles into the Mediterranean. Others, like Iain Baxter's dream of a radio-controlled inflatable cloud patrolling over Los Angeles, never got off the ground. Some business firms became nervous and balked. Claes Oldenburg's collaboration with Disneyland began with his intense curiosity about "what people who have been making animals without genitalia for 30 years are like," and ended with Disneyland abandoning his project for a giant, hydraulically operated icebag;