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Electronic Mud. One of the most popular exhibits is Robert Rauschenberg's Mud Muse. It is a tank filled with sloppy, coffee-colored drillers' mud supplied from one of Teledyne's offshore oil rigs. Pipes in the floor of the tank emit air bubbles, which plop to the surface at random with a kind of lazy flatulence. The pipes in turn are controlled by an elaborate electronics system, which converts signals from taped music and random noise in the room into a pattern of air release. "I think," says Rauschenberg, "you immediately get involved with Mud Muse on a really physical, basic, sensual level as opposed to its illustrating an interesting idea, because the level of the piece, on the grounds of an idea, is pretty low. It was to exhibit the fact that technology is not for learning lessons but is to be experienced." R.B. Kitaj offered the perverse idea of employing the facilities of Lockheed to produce a historical meditation on the 19th century Industrial Revolution, the aim being to examine the first era in which "a modernist presence has taken shape." Kitaj's room is a bizarre assemblage of model lighthouses, smokestacks, machined bas-reliefs of railway trucks, photographs of "The Father of Aviation" together with "The Mother and Daughter of Aviation." There is even a 6-ft. diorama of a mine tunnel with a mouth that is inscribed with uplifting Victorian mottoes:
THRIFT, DUTY, SELF HELP and so on. Kitaj ended up as a dissenter from the whole concept. His experience at Lockheed, he reported, proved "a confirmation of the utter boredom I always feel when art and science try to meet—the feeling of very slender accomplishment in those forms of art which pretend to operate scientifically."
The Catalyst. It is an honestly stated dilemma, for art is not science and cannot mimic its processes. But one aim of "Art and Technology" was to show that a feedback can occur, and that its very unpredictability can be stimulating. In this, the show is a revelation. And when it closes, it will have left behind one of the key documents in recent American art: the catalogue compiled by Maurice Tuchman in which all the ambitions, negotiations, blocks and frustrations involved in this immense project are set down, without fear or favor. "Art and Technology's" real importance is as a catalyst of a possible future. No Jerusalem has been founded among the white hygienic mills of Southern California, but the practical experience of "Art and Technology" may very well point the way to future, and much-easier collaborations.