The Machine at MoMA: Pontus Hultén's 1968 Show, Bound in Tin Can Steel
On November 27, 1968, MoMA opened The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, Pontus Hultén's survey of how artists loved and feared machines, with a catalogue bound in metal and 9 new works made by artists and engineers for E.A.T.
On November 27, 1968, The Museum of Modern Art opened The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, more than 200 works and objects selected by K. G. Pontus Hultén, director of Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Its catalogue was bound in tin can steel, with the museum's own facade printed on the cover. The show ran until February 9, 1969, then travelled to the University of St. Thomas in Houston and the San Francisco Museum of Art.
Hultén's argument was in the title. The mechanical machine, which he defined as an imitation of our muscles, was losing ground to electronic and chemical devices that imitate the brain and the nervous system. The show traced how artists felt about machines, from devotion to despair: a Dürer woodcut of a cogwheel cart, Futurist paintings of speeding cars, Duchamp's Coffee Grinder and a replica of the Large Glass, Picabia's machine portraits, Klee's Twittering Machine and Moholy-Nagy's Light Space Modulator. Tatlin's model for the Monument to the Third International was reconstructed in the sculpture garden. Real machines stood among the art, including a Bugatti Royale, Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Car No. 2, found only that summer, and the Lumière brothers' Cinématographe of 1895. Visitors could make their own watercolours with Tinguely's Metamatic No. 8.
The newest work came out of a competition run by Experiments in Art and Technology to find the most inventive contribution by an engineer to a work made with an artist. 9 of the results were shown at MoMA. First prize went to engineers Harris Hyman and Ralph Martel for Heart Beats Dust, made with Jean Dupuy: red dust on a stretched rubber membrane inside a glass cube, set moving by the sound of heartbeats and lit by a strong beam. Second prizes went to Frank Turner for his part in Wen-Ying Tsai's cybernetic sculpture of stainless steel rods and strobe lights, and to Niels O. Young for Fakir in 3/4 Time, a mechanical fountain made with Lucy Jackson Young that performs the Indian rope trick. All 150 entries went on view as Some More Beginnings at the Brooklyn Museum from November 26.
Evening programs carried the show past the mechanical. Kenneth Knowlton of Bell Labs presented an evening of computer produced film on December 2, Billy Klüver spoke on the artist and industry on December 16, and La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela gave a sound and light program on December 30. Hultén closed his case in plain terms: "In planning for such a world, in helping to bring it into being, artists are more important than politicians, and even than technicians."
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