Jack Burnham.
Beyond Modern
Sculpture: The Effect
of Science and
Technology on the
Sculpture of This
世纪(1968).
Cover.
88
土井:10.1162/GREY_a_00205
Jack Burnham Redux:
The Obsolete in Reverse?
LUKE SKREBOWSKI
The emergence of a “post-formalist esthetic” may seem to
some to embody a kind of absolute philosophy, something
哪个, through the nature of concerns cannot be tran-
scended. Yet it is more likely that a “systems esthetic”
will become the dominant approach to a maze of socio-
technical conditions rooted only in the present. 新的
circumstances will with time generate other major para-
digms for the arts.
—Jack Burnham, “Systems Esthetics” (1968)
在 1969 Robert Morris recommended that Patricia Norvell, 然后
his graduate student in sculpture at Hunter College, interview
the Chicago-based artist, 评论家, and theorist Jack Burnham in
connection with her 1969 master’s thesis on an emergent con-
ceptual art. At the time Burnham was best-known for his
recently published book Beyond Modern Sculpture: 这
Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This
世纪 (1968)—in which he charted the evolution of sculp-
ture’s ontological ground from “object” to “system” on the
model of a Kuhnian paradigm shift—and his Artforum articles
“Systems Esthetics” (1968) and “Real Time Systems” (1969), 在
which he generalized his analysis about the systematic character
of recent sculpture to contemporary “unobject” art as a whole.
Norvell was not in the end able to secure an interview with
Burnham but did raise the question of the significance of his
theory of systems aesthetics with several of the artists she spoke
到, including Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Barry, Sol LeWitt,
Robert Smithson, and Morris himself. Most of these artists
responded favorably to Burnham’s work, with the exception of
Smithson and LeWitt. Smithson’s evaluation was the most
detailed and the most critical:
I don’t see the trace of a system anywhere. That’s a conve-
nient word. It’s like “object.” It’s another abstract entity
that doesn’t exist . . . there are things like structures,
物体, 系统. 但, then again, what are they? 我认为
that art tends to relieve itself of those hopes. Like, 最后的
year we were in an object world and this year we’re in a
system world. . . . Jack Burnham is very interested in
going beyond and that’s a kind of utopian view. 这
future doesn’t exist, or if it does exist, it’s the obsolete in
reverse. . . . I see no point in utilizing technology or indus-
try as an end in itself or as an affirmation of anything.
That has nothing to do with art. They’re just tools. 因此，如果
© 2016 by Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Published under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
89
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you make a system you can be sure that the system is
bound to evade itself. So I see no point in pinning your
hopes on a system. It’s just an expansive object, 乃至-
tually that all contracts back to points.1
Smithson’s critique of Burnham’s work notes its technocratic
technophilia (“I see no point in utilizing technology . . . 作为
end in itself”), teleogical orientation (“Like . . . this year we’re
in a system world”), and utopianism (“Burnham is very interested
in going beyond”). An astute and perceptive critic, Smithson’s
negative assessment of Burnham’s work anticipated both the terms
and the tone of subsequent judgments about the character and
value of Burnham’s theoretical oeuvre by influential art historians.
Rosalind Krauss derogates Burnham’s work as “technocratic”;
Benjamin Buchloh deprecates “the limitations of a systems-
aesthetic viewpoint”; and Thierry De Duve disparages Burnham
as a pot-smoking “utopianist of art’s dissolution into life.”2
什么, 然后, might be gained by reading Burnham’s work,
written almost half a century ago, 今天? Such a question,
while always potentially pertinent from a historiographical
立场, is encouraged by the recent publication of a collec-
tion of Burnham’s writing—Dissolve into Comprehension:
Writings and Interviews, 1964–2004年 (2016)—in MIT’s presti-
gious “Writing Art” series.3 This volume represents an unlikely
canonization of sorts for a figure whose work has long eluded
mainstream art-historical acceptance and whose major works
are no longer in print. Burnham’s theory of systems aesthetics
有, 然而, gained more favorable critical attention in recent
年, being read principally in terms of its pioneering embrace
of systems theory and cybernetics as productive discourses for
the interpretation of art (Sabeth Buchmann, Michael Corris,
Francis Halsall, Pamela M. 李), its anticipation of new media
艺术 (Charlie Gere and Edward Shanken), and in relation to the
influence of Burnham’s systems thinking on Hans Haacke’s
工作 (Caroline Jones, 李, and my own earlier writing).4 然而
Dissolve into Comprehension seeks to argue for the broadly
based significance of Burnham’s work as a whole, arguing that
“his visionary theoretical ideas have only become more rele-
vant in recent years” and that it is important to “restore his
rightful place in art criticism and theory.”5
What then might we make of Burnham’s corpus today? 如何
to assess his “rightful place”? Was his near-term futurology just
an instance of what Smithson, quoting Vladimir Nabokov, 迪斯-
missed as “the obsolete in reverse”?6 Or can a case be made for
reversing its obsolescence?
The True Art Critic Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths?
In order to evaluate Burnham’s work and assess the principle
charges labeled against it—that it is technocratic, utopian, 和
teleological—we need to understand its terms in ways that go
beyond the reception it has hitherto received and what is com-
prehensible from a reading of Dissolve into Comprehension alone.
90 Grey Room 65
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While Burnham (乙. 1931) is still alive, he is in his mid-eight-
是的, long retired, and has for some time lived a reclusive life,
shunning publicity. 因此, new critical work of his own,
or fresh pronouncements about his previous work on his own
behalf, seem unlikely. Burnham’s reputation as a writer thus
rests on his existing body of work, the full breadth of which
is represented in Dissolve into Comprehension. Burnham’s
oeuvre comprises two book-length monographs, 超过
Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on
the Sculpture of This Century (1968) and The Structure of Art
(1971); several catalogue essays (including short monographic
studies on Haacke, Marcel Duchamp, and Komar and Melamid);
a theoretical monograph on Herbert Marcuse published as the
pamphlet Art in the Marcusean Analysis (1969); and numerous
文章, interviews, and reviews published from 1964 到 1990
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(with the great majority appearing from 1964 到 1981) in art
magazines including Artforum, 艺术, The New Art Examiner,
and Art in America, or as chapters in collections (a selection
of these articles, written up to 1973, was anthologized in
Burnham’s 1974 book Great Western Salt Works: Essays on the
Meaning of Post-Formalist Art).7 自从 1973 Burnham has also
been working on a projected monograph interpreting the art
and writings of Duchamp. Although unpublished, its outlines
were set out in a series of articles on Duchamp written from
1971 到 1973 for various art magazines (some of which were
collected in Great Western Salt Works).
The most productive period of Burnham’s career as a
theorist was thus relatively compressed, running from the
mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. This period can be schematized
into four distinct moments involving three significant theoret-
ical turns.
Skrebowski | Jack Burnham Redux: The Obsolete in Reverse?
91
Jack Burnham.
Great Western Salt
Works: Essays on
the Meaning of
Post-Formalist Art
(1974). Cover.
1. A History and Theory of Modern Sculpture (1964–1967)
In Beyond Modern Sculpture (1968) Burnham set out to pro-
vide a materialist, avowedly technologically determinist, 学习
of the development of modern sculpture from the 1870s to the
1960s. His account was teleological, distinguishing between an
earlier and residual conception of “sculpture as object” and a
之后, still-emergent, conception of “sculpture as system.” He
predicted that sculpture would eventually evolve into a living
系统 (thus collapsing the separation between the representa-
tion and the production of life), in concert with the broader
emergence of a posthuman future characterized by the domi-
nance of synthetic over organic life.
2. An Account of Contemporary Art (1967–1970)
In “Systems Esthetics” (1968) and his other essays on the topic
of systems and aesthetics—including “Systems and Art” (1969),
“Real Time Systems” (1969), Art in the Marcusean Analysis
(1969), “The Aesthetics of Intelligent Systems” (1970), and “Notes
on Art and Information Processing” (1970)—Burnham general-
ized his earlier claims about the shift of a single medium from
an object-based to a systems-based ontology to art in general
(hence systems aesthetics) while simultaneously dropping the
teleological aspects of Beyond Modern Sculpture, insisting that
the paradigm shift represented by the emergence of a systems
aesthetics would itself likely be superseded.
3. A Theory of Modern Art (1970–1972)
In The Structure of Art (1972), written as a thoroughgoing
response to criticisms levelled at Beyond Modern Sculpture and
in light of the failure of his exhibition Software: 信息
技术: Its New Meaning for Art (1970) to convincingly
demonstrate systems aesthetics in practice, Burnham converted
to structuralism as a new and more effective way to clarify the
ontology of modern art, now understood as an overarching sig-
nifying system. Here Burnham sought to combine structural
anthropology and semiological analysis (both derived from
Saussurean structural linguistics) to produce an account of the
underlying, synchronic, structural logic of modern art (1840s–
1970s). Burnham modeled his new approach on Claude Lévi-
Strauss’s exploration of the underlying logic of myth in tradi-
tional cultures but translated it to an analysis of “Western art”
(thereby also challenging anthropology’s Eurocentrism).
4. A Hermetic Theory of Art (1972–ongoing)
In his work on the structural logic of modern art, understood to
be in an endgame state, Burnham came to regard Duchamp’s
work as exemplary, finding in the Large Glass and the ready-
mades an exemplification of the logical semiotic structure of all
forms of art. Burnham also became convinced that Duchamp
was a hermeticist who had covered up the true meaning of his
艺术. Burnham consequently sought to reveal the meaning of
Duchamp’s work, and thus of art tout court, by engaging with
various esoteric traditions as interpretative methodologies,
Jack Burnham.
“Voices from the
Gate” (1972), 在
Great Western Salt
Works: Essays on
the Meaning of Post-
Formalist Art(1974).
Page views.
92 Grey Room 65
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principally Kabbalah. Burnham combined these esoteric read-
ings with structuralism in the remainder of his work, 这是
characterized by an arcane mysticism that did not find a ready
观众. Representative texts of this phase include “The
Semiotics of ‘End-Game’ Art” (1972), the three-part “Duchamp’s
Bride Stripped Bare” (1972), “The True Ready-Made” (1972),
and “Voices from the Gate” (1972).
Dissolve into Comprehension is organized in a broadly
chronological order and subdivided into four thematic sec-
系统蒸发散: Sculpture, 系统, Art Worlds, Arcana. The anthology
collects a series of Burnham’s major articles, including all of
the systems essays and one of the Duchamp ones. Burnham’s
book-length monographs Beyond Modern Sculpture and The
Structure of Art are represented by extracts from their introduc-
系统蒸发散. Art in the Marcusean Analysis is included in abridged
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形式. The anthology also breaks new ground by including an
important early draft of “Systems Esthetics” titled “Towards
a Post-Formalist Aesthetics” and helpfully includes an example
teaching syllabus (Burnham’s work as a teacher informed his
theoretical work, which also fed back into his teaching). A cou-
ple of interviews with Burnham and a curriculum vitae circa
1981 round out the picture of Burnham’s oeuvre and intellec-
tual trajectory.
Notwithstanding the fact that the selections from Beyond
Modern Sculpture and The Structure of Art are so short—four
pages and three pages respectively—as to give scant sense of
these books’ stakes and significance, this is a welcome anthol-
ogy that puts the full range of Burnham’s work before us once
more.8 An acute survey essay and section introductions by the
editor of the volume, Melissa Ragain, set out the character of
Skrebowski | Jack Burnham Redux: The Obsolete in Reverse?
93
Burnham’s intellectual trajectory, not shying away from the dif-
ficulties inherent in it.
Yet what Ragain does not thematize is the question of why
Burnham’s work underwent such radical theoretical turns in
such a relatively short space of time. Burnham’s thought was
uneven and mercurial, starting in scientific rationalism and
ending in esoteric irrationalism. Dealing with this issue is a
necessary propaedeutic to any evaluation of the contemporary
value of his work. Burnham discussed a range of issues in his
earlier writing that remain live today and which argue for his
ongoing relevance. These include his attention to the fraught
relationship between art and technology (a major fault line in
contemporary culture, echoing in the highly contested debates
around new media art, Net and post-Internet art, and retro-
technofetishism); his pioneering consideration of the use of
artificial intelligence and biological engineering in and as art
(even if we are no longer persuaded by the idea that these
engagements will define art’s telos); the artistic relevance of
systems theory and cybernetics (both in the historicization
of late modern art and for contemporary art theory); 和
need for a coherent ontology of contemporary art (addressed in
ongoing debates about the emergence of “the contemporary” as
a critical category that can replace postmodernism). 但是
Burnham’s work suffers from an awkward elision of humanistic
and scientific traditions of thought, and his later writing is
characterized by an esotericism that disqualifies it from con-
ventional academic validity.9
By the time of writing the introduction to Great Western
Salt Works in 1974, Burnham openly acknowledged his own
“psychological metamorphosis” and the apparently jarring
contrasts that characterized his theoretical project: “given the
quasi-scientific rationalism implicit in the first few systems
论文, the gradual transition toward high magic in cabalism
and alchemy appears to be a complete inversion.”10 Yet
Burnham explained the links connecting the theoretical turns
in his thought: “the systems view of reality, with its theory of
hierarchies and fusion of living and nonliving structures, 不是
inconsistent with hermetic philosophy.”11 He also clarified
what he took to be the limitations of systems theory for con-
structing a theory of art, noting that its “utilitarianism and
obsession with efficiency leave much about organic relationships
misunderstood. Ultimately systems theory may be another
attempt by science to resist the emotional pain and ambiguity
that remain an unavoidable aspect of life.”12 In Great Western
Salt Works Burnham projected a new iteration of his project,
inspired by his work on Duchamp, that would involve devel-
oping a full-blown “hermetic theory of art.”13
Burnham thus produced a coherent, if not necessarily per-
suasive, rationale for the evolution of his thought. His embrace
of irrationalism should not, 所以, simply be dismissively
pathologized (or passed over in quiet embarrassment) 作为
example of what Michel Foucault describes in Madness and
94 Grey Room 65
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Civilization as “reason dazzled” (Burnham’s writing on non-
mystical topics in articles written after his esoteric turn is per-
fectly lucid).14 Here I am in accord with Ragain, who asserts
that for full comprehension of Burnham’s work “historians
[应该] no longer efface the mystical turn of Burnham’s later
career” (although her claim that the turn can be addressed “as
an extension of the self-organizing and determining nature of
systems and their not-so-distant relation to historical notions
of ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’” is less convincing since Burnham explic-
itly compared systems theory to “hermetic,” rather than Hegelian,
philosophy and the notion of autopoiesis finds little concep-
tual resonance with the dialectic).15
While I will argue that only the second “systems aesthetics”
phase of Burnham’s work proves to be ongoingly productive,
that phase needs to be contextualized in light of the full devel-
opment of his thought, including his later-career embrace of
esotericism. This final phase was not simply a case of New Age
burnout (however unrewarding its artistic readings might
appear to noninitiates). 相当, it resulted from an attempt to
reconcile the tensions that marked his artistic and theoretical
项目, which sought to fuse art and technology and thereby
resist the “disenchantment of the world” effected by modernity
as diagnosed by Max Weber via Friedrich Schiller. Burnham’s
eventual mysticism was a result of the persistent frustration of
his syncretism.
Becoming “Jack Burnham”
Burnham is now best known as a theorist, but he started his
career as an artist. This fact is noted by Ragain in her introduc-
tion to the first section of Dissolve into Comprehension, 在哪里
she comments on his training at the Boston Museum School,
beginning in 1953, where he also struck up an influential
friendship with Naum Gabo, who was then teaching at the
Graduate School of Design at Harvard (Burnham dedicates the
new volume to “my mentor Naum Gabo”). What Ragain does
not mention specifically (the information may be gleaned from
Burnham’s curriculum vitae, which Ragain includes in the vol-
梅), is that Burnham also trained as an engineer, in this
respect explicitly resembling his “mentor.”16 His engineering
training is thus material to a thorough understanding of his
artistic and intellectual formation.
Burnham split his studies at the Boston Museum School of
Fine Arts (majoring in commercial design and silversmithing,
with minors in sculpture and painting) into two phases—
1952–1954 and 1956–1957. During the intervening two years,
he studied for an engineering associate’s degree in architectural
construction at the Wentworth Institute in Boston in 1954–
1956 (然后, as now, a vocationally oriented college). Burnham
subsequently went on to study at the Yale School of Art, 采取
a bachelor’s of fine arts in 1959 and a master’s of fine arts in
1961. Burnham’s training was thus distinctively hybrid, combin-
ing art and the (applied) 科学, the practical and the fine arts.
Skrebowski | Jack Burnham Redux: The Obsolete in Reverse?
95
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Burnham’s work was shaped by his relationship with the
deradicalized Cold War constructivism propagated by Gabo
(to employ Benjamin Buchloh’s insightful coinage) 也
by a broader engagement with the reformulated postwar terms
of the historic avant-gardes as influentially disseminated in the
United States via the New Bauhaus refounded in Chicago.17
Burnham records that “a design course” he had taken in the
early 1950s “under one of Kepes’ and Moholy-Nagy’s protégés
at the Chicago Bauhaus” proved “extremely influential” for
his developing “interest in luminous art and Russian
Constructivism.”18 Later, 在 1957, after he had completed his
studies in architectural engineering at the Wentworth Institute,
Burnham states that he attended a “seminar on emitted light
as an art form” given by György Kepes himself to architectural
students at MIT and that this “gave me things to ponder.”19
Burnham also notes that he went through Josef Albers’s
“Bauhaus pedagogy” at Yale.20
Although Burnham did not take any of his degrees from the
New Bauhaus itself, his formation was very much in the spirit
of its reformed U.S. Vorkurs, incorporating specialized scien-
tific and technical training alongside more traditional instruc-
tion in art and design. Burnham’s bildung was then distinctively
New Bauhausian, in both its Moholy-Nagian design institute
and Albersian liberal arts inflections (albeit with little engage-
ment in the Dada-inflected strand of this tradition that proved
so fertile at Black Mountain and that would later spread to New
约克, inspired by the college’s teaching and summer courses),
and this determined the artistic problems he addressed in his
early practice as a kinetic sculptor.
Burnham worked as an artist from 1954 到 1968 but sup-
ported his practice by a mixture of full- and part-time employ-
ment as an architectural draftsman and designer (1957–1958),
as a corporate sign fabricator and painter (1956–1968), 并作为
an educator (1959–1968). Although Burnham had five one-man
shows from 1965 到 1969 and participated in several group
shows from 1957 到 1978 (with most concentrated from 1965 到
1970), none of his solo shows (and only one of his group shows)
were in New York, and his career as an artist did not take off.
He began teaching as an assistant professor of art at Northwestern
大学在 1964, having also served as an instructor at Yale,
Wesley College, and Northwestern from 1959 到 1964.
Burnham subsequently worked principally as an art educator,
theorist, 和批评家, holding a contributing editorship at Artforum
(1971–1972), an associate editorship at Arts (1972–1976), and a
contributing editorship to New Art Examiner (1976–1983),
while progressing from assistant to associate professor of art at
Northwestern in 1969 and to full professor by 1974 before trans-
ferring to the University of Maryland as chair of the art depart-
ment in the 1980s, where he taught until his retirement.21
What has not been discussed elsewhere in the existing
scholarship on Burnham, as far as I am aware, is the fact that
after graduating from high school in 1949 Burnham spent four
96 Grey Room 65
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years in the U.S. Army at Fort Belvoir (1949–1952) in the draft-
ing school of the Corps of Engineers.22 Although Burnham did
not serve in the Korean War (1950–1953) he nonetheless under-
took military service at the inception of the Cold War, 在下面
the then recently announced, newly interventionist Truman
Doctrine, which promised to provide American economic and
military assistance to any democratic nation threatened by
威权主义 (which at the time, given the collapse of
National Socialism, meant principally Soviet- but also Chinese-
backed Communism).23
Burnham’s professional formation thus began within, 和
proceeded through, a full set of constituent institutions of a
nascent U.S. military-industrial-(educational) 复杂的, 友好的
to radical innovation in the means of production but hostile to
any corresponding innovation in its social relations—and still
more so to its mode. Burnham’s early exposure to, and engage-
ment with the “Bauhaus and related ideals” under the Cold
War pressure of political neutralization profoundly shaped the
subsequent development of his artistic practice and thinking.
Yet although Burnham was manifestly formed in and by the
postwar technocracy, to consider his intellectual work as if it
were completely overdetermined by its context would be a mis-
拿. Just as Jones has adeptly traced the complex processes by
means of which “Clement Greenberg” was constructed, 但
also constructed himself, as a subject in relation to the devel-
opment of a particular version of modernism (understood in
terms of the sensory priority of vision) and modernity (骗局-
ceived in terms of a bureaucratization of the senses), so I want
to pursue a similar, although here necessarily much slighter,
critical history of Burnham’s subjective formation in relation to
modernism (understood in terms of a New Bauhausian attempt
to reconcile scientifico-technical and artistic culture under
我们. 资本主义) and modernity (understood in terms of the
ramifications of technocracy).24
Burnham was subjectivated by technocracy but also sought
to mold his artistic and intellectual subjectivity in complex
forms of negotiation with it, in terms of negation as well as of
affirmation. By the time he undertook a one-year fellowship at
the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at MIT under
Kepes in 1968, Burnham was, by his own retrospective account
从 2004, “trying to get away from the Constructivism of
Naum Gabo” and also “in full revolt against Kepes’ ‘New
Bauhaus’ philosophy.”25 One of the principle points of con-
tention for Burnham was Kepes’s failure to engage with the
先进的, computerized technology of a dawning second
machine age: “[乙]xcept for those areas of scientific research
that produced stunning photographs . . . Kepes had a strange
aversion to direct involvement with sophisticated technology,
particularly anything to do with the computer sciences.”26 In
failing to keep pace with its latest developments, Kepes, 为了
Burnham, automatically sacrificed the possibility of technol-
ogy’s progressive reorientation.
Skrebowski | Jack Burnham Redux: The Obsolete in Reverse?
97
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In direct contrast to Kepes’s stance, Burnham spent his time
at CAVS engaged in conversations with two computer scien-
奶嘴 (Oliver Selfridge and Jack Nolan) and “working on an
essay on the use of computers in art making” (which would
be published as “The Aesthetics of Intelligent Systems”).27
Burnham also focused on his own artistic practice, making a
“light environment involving programmed electronics and
computer components” that employed “electroluminescent
tapes” predominantly used by the military for “instrument
panels, safety lights, and temporary helicopter landing beacons
in Vietnam” that Kepes had secured via an “alliance with
Sylvania Corporation.”28
Burnham’s Sylvania tape works, photographs of which are
reproduced in Dissolve into Comprehension, 是, 然而,
awkward constructions that can plausibly be charged with fail-
ing to gain any meaningful critical purchase on their matériel
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and thus of fetishizing technology and being technocratic in a
reactionary sense. 最后, we may have reason to ques-
tion how successful Burnham’s self-declared “revolt” against
Kepes’s and broader New Bauhaus principles actually was at
the level of his practice.
Yet the significance of these works within Burnham’s oeuvre
inheres precisely in their lack of success as meaningful art and
their failed reception, acknowledged by Burnham himself: “我
could not give the systems works away, much less sell them.”29
实际上, the Sylvania tape constructions that Burnham worked
on at CAVS represent not only the concluding moment of his
electroluminescent work (开始于 1966) but of his artistic
career as a whole.30 After his CAVS placement Burnham
stopped making art.
By considering the failure of Burnham’s own artistic prac-
泰斯, confirmed by its cessation, we can gain deeper insights
98 Grey Room 65
into the stakes of his historical and theoretical writing. 超过
Modern Sculpture, completed in 1967 but not published until
1968, can be and has been read as a pioneering attempt to artic-
ulate a history of the development of modern sculpture in
relation to technological change. Yet the book should also be
read as contextualizing the artistic problems that Burnham
attempted to deal with in his own art practice. This can be
inferred from Burnham’s revealing inclusion of a brief descrip-
tion of his own work within this history, under the heading of
“Recent Use of Light in American Art”:
在 1954 the author began to use incandescent light as back
lighting for various wood and cardboard reliefs. 这
author’s first experiments with neon light were begun in
1955, partly as a result of Kepes’s example. The work
shown is one of a series of hanging constructions using
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Opposite: 杰克
Burnham (左边) 在
马萨诸塞州
Institute of Technology,
Lincoln Laboratory,
列克星敦, 嘛, 1968.
正确的: Jack Burnham.
Atom, 1956.
neon created during the 1950s. . . . Subsequent projects,
beginning in 1959, have included experiments in photo-
kinetics, or light motion phenomena. These include light
walls using the principles of apparent motion, 颜色-
modulating consoles using fiber-optic wires (i.e. 光-
transmitting wires), and programmed constructions using
electroluminescent Tape-Lite.31
This modest, descriptive paragraph is illustrated with a single
image of his 1956 work Atom. 尽管如此, it demonstrates the
coterminous character of Burnham’s artistic and intellectual
work in the early part of his career. After his CAVS fellowship,
and in light of his recognition of the limitations of his own
实践 (as well as in response to criticisms leveled at Beyond
Modern Sculpture that came in from 1968 向前), Burnham
decisively broke with teleological conceptions of advanced art
Skrebowski | Jack Burnham Redux: The Obsolete in Reverse?
99
as well as with what he describes as the “romanticization of
technology” marking the New Bauhausian project.32
尽管如此, Burnham continued to pursue the same artis-
tic problems he had previously directly worked on, only now
by the proxy means of his writing and teaching practice. 后
ceasing to make art of his own, Burnham turned in his “sys-
tems essays” to a concerted attempt to theorize what he took
to be successful contemporary art. In these essays Burnham
attempted to combine systems theory and Marcusean critical
theory in a post-(新的) Bauhausian project to better character-
ize the stakes and achievement of vanguard practice. 这里
Burnham was interested to explain contemporary art that
resisted a reactionary technocracy while not shying away from
the implications he believed the dawn of informational tech-
nology would hold for art.
Systems Aesthetics
Although recent scholarly attention has been addressed to the
“systems” aspect of Burnham’s systems aesthetics, almost
nothing has been made of its specifically aesthetic claims.
Burnham sought to develop systems aesthetics as a general the-
ory of contemporary artistic production, an aesthetics in the
traditional sense, avoiding movement-specific categorization.
As he writes, “The notion of a ‘Systems Esthetics’ appeared to
have validity as momentum built up for Earth Art, Ecological
Art, Body Art, Video Art, and the multitudinous forms of
Conceptualism.”33 Burnham’s notion of a systems aesthetic
involved more than just an investment in then-current forms of
systems thinking (systems theory, cybernetics, and information
理论). 相当, it held an explicitly aesthetic character in the
strong philosophical sense of the term, one derived from
Burnham’s adoption and adaptation of Herbert Marcuse’s
工作, specifically Marcuse’s neo-Schillerian rethinking of the
possible relation between aesthetic and technocratic reason.
While Theodor Adorno refused utopian speculation, Marcuse
proposed an aestheticization of technique as a possible, socially
transformative, response to the dialectic of enlightenment and
the domination of technocratic reason. This argument about an
aestheticization of technique is precisely what Burnham
picked up on in Marcuse’s work. Rejecting Greenberg and
Fried’s postformalist aesthetics, he attempted to produce a
reformulated account of the vanguard art of the late 1960s as
aesthetic, but an aesthetic far removed from Greenberg and
Fried’s formalism.
的确, Burnham had originally planned to give “Systems
Esthetics” a different title—“Towards a Post-formalist Esthetic”—
but was persuaded by Philip Leider, then editor of Artforum
(and also at that point a strong ally of Fried’s), to amend his title
and to cut substantial parts of his opening polemic against for-
malist aesthetics. (Melissa Ragain productively recovers the
facts surrounding the composition and publication of “Systems
Esthetics” in her introduction to Dissolve into Comprehension,
100 Grey Room 65
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and her inclusion of Burnham’s original version of the article
in the new volume, albeit abridged, is particularly valuable.)34
While it is not clear that Burnham’s systems aesthetics fully
succeeded in grounding the ontology of the art that it pur-
ported to specify, the significance of his postformalist move to
embrace systems theory was highly prescient, anticipating the
methodological diversity of the new art history as well as of
postconceptual art. In “Systems Esthetics” Burnham called
upon Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s work to furnish a definition of
art as a system, a “complex of components in interaction.” Even
though this was a relatively loose claim, disqualifying nothing
more than the minimalist “specific object” and art made in the
traditional mediums, it was also highly ambitious, setting out
to grasp the nature of nascent forms of post-object-specific
art in the expanded field (particularly performance and instal-
关系). 的确, Burnham’s systems aesthetics attempted to
define “unobject” art by way of a relational ontology thirty
years before Nicolas Bourriaud’s claims about art exhibiting a
relational aesthetic: “the specific function of modern didactic
art has been to show that art does not reside in material entities,
but in relations between people and between people and com-
ponents of their environment”; “conceptual focus rather than
material limits define the system.”35
Burnham’s theory of systems aesthetics is often read only as
it was set out in his 1968 essay “Systems Esthetics,” but his
project for a postformalist aesthetics was in fact articulated
across all of his systems essays and developed in dialogue with
his artistic practice and teaching.36 “Systems and Art” (1969)
recounts Burnham’s experience giving an Art and Systems
course at Northwestern.37 His course principles derived from
the frustrations he had found when previously trying to teach
students to make kinetic art (his own métier as a luminist
artist). Burnham insisted that “the essential task lies in defin-
ing the aesthetic implications of a technological world” and
noted that the Bauhaus-derived, but politically neutered,
industrial-era pedagogic methods that were then being used in
the United States were not up to the task.38 Burnham instead
seized upon the “systems analysis and design approach to
problem solving” as an alternative methodology that could be
applied to his teaching.39 Although he recognized that systems
analysis was tainted by its association with the military-
industrial complex (he referred to it as being understood to pos-
sess an “icy Pentagon-esque logic”), Burnham was nevertheless
convinced that “the systems approach” seemed to be “the one
technique which can embrace an understanding of the span of
present-day technology and its consequences” and noted its
contemporaneous application in pacific fields, including “con-
servation, pollution control, and human ecology.”40
Burnham’s broader pedagogical aim was, he wrote, 到
achieve a “future rapproachment [原文如此] between art and tech-
nology” but his malapropism here—conflating the opposed
senses of the French rapprocher (“to bring [something] closer”)
Skrebowski | Jack Burnham Redux: The Obsolete in Reverse?
101
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and the English reproach (“to express disapproval”)—func-
tions as a Freudian slip that discloses the tensions that marked
his theoretical project.41 And, 的确, rather than defining art,
Burnham’s systems aesthetics seemed more interested in
pursuing an argument for its dissolution: “In an advanced tech-
nological culture,” Burnham claimed, “the most important
artist best succeeds by liquidating his position as artist vis-à-
vis society.”42
This ambition to dissolve the distinction between art and
technology led Burnham to Marcuse’s work. In Art in the
Marcusean Analysis (1969) Burnham comments in detail on his
reading of Marcusean critical theory, and from this text we can
trace the influence that Marcuse exerted on his work.43 Excepting
Ragain’s relatively brief discussion of Art in the Marcusean
Analysis in Dissolve into Comprehension, Marcuse’s intellec-
tual influence on Burnham has passed almost unremarked in
the existing scholarship.44 Art in the Marcusean Analysis
consists of an extended exegesis and critical commentary on
Marcuse’s thought up to 1968, largely focused on his
aesthetics.45 Burnham not only drew on Marcusean theory but
also attempted to remedy what he considered to be its deficien-
化学系. 为此, Burnham took up Marcuse’s insight about
art’s resistance to technological rationality and its possible role
in effecting an aestheticization of technique, but turned it into
his own stronger and more deterministic claim that “art will
become an important catalyst for remaking industrial society.”46
Burnham correctly observes that “the emergence of an artistic
technology rather than the emphasis on technical art” is “the
essence of Marcuse’s hopes,” yet he also objects that “somehow
Marcuse, a master of the dialectic, never consciously comes to
the conclusion that newer media are the critical instruments of
social liberation.”47
Here Burnham reveals his own hopes, claiming that “a
fusion of artistic and technical reason” was “inevitable” once
art ceased “to function as illusion and ideal appearance.”48 Yet
in making such a claim Burnham misunderstands Marcuse’s
投机的, neo-Schillerian claims for the potential sublation
of technological rationality by aesthetic rationality, mistakenly
arguing for the possibility of “synthesis” between incompatible
rationalities under actually existing postwar capitalism: “His
[Marcuse’s] most subtle speculation is directed towards the tra-
ditional antipathy between art and technology . . . the dialecti-
cal synthesis becomes a technology based on esthetic values.”49
Optimistically venturing the critique that “Marcuse fails to rec-
ognize . . . that cultural forces of assimilation are just as often
assimilated by forces which they have sought to engulf,”
Burnham misses, or chooses to ignore, Marcuse’s clear-eyed
recognition that “‘Art as a form of reality’ means not the
beautification of the given, but the construction of an entirely
different and opposed reality. The aesthetic vision is part of
the revolution.”50
Burnham thus deradicalizes, whether wittingly or not,
102 Grey Room 65
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Marcuse’s political claims and misunderstands his aesthetic
那些. He argues for a process of artistically led social reform,
rather than revolution, and thinks this might be achieved by the
fusion of art and technology. 尽管如此, Burnham’s work
engages an important tradition of Left technocracy, stemming
from Karl Marx’s reading of the fragment on the machines in
the Grundrisse and developed by Marcuse in the United States
(a tradition that has also inspired more recent attempts to
rethink the possibility of a shift to “postcapitalist” produc-
的).51 Thus Burnham’s systems aesthetics, despite its theoret-
ical shortcomings, offers suggestive resources for attempts to
rethink the possible relations between art and technology in a
progressive manner.
Burnham’s misunderstandings were, 然而, compounded
in the exhibition he curated at the Jewish Museum in 1970
sponsored by the American Motors Corporation: 软件:
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信息技术: Its New Meaning for Art. Here he pre-
sented advanced art and advanced technology within the same
institutional and conceptual frame—his curatorial rationale
was inspired by the attempted fusion of Marcuse and systems
theory that also underlay his theory of systems aesthetics. 作为
he wrote in his catalogue essay, “Notes on Art and Information
加工,” “Software makes none of the usual qualitative dis-
tinctions between the artistic and technical subcultures. At a
time when esthetic insight must become a part of technological
决策, does such a division still make sense?”52
Burnham’s attempt to prevent his theory of systems aesthet-
ics from being conflated with the ideology of an increasingly
marginalized tech art was also an undercurrent that informed
the show, in part inflamed by a spat he had entered into in
Artforum in 1969 with the critic Terry Fenton, who had
accused Burnham’s position of amounting to little more than a
Skrebowski | Jack Burnham Redux: The Obsolete in Reverse?
103
Jack Burnham.
Art in the Marcusean
分析, 1969. Cover.
rehash of (postwar) constructivism’s misguided technoscien-
tific enthusiasms.53 Burnham’s response was telling: “Again
and again I have stressed the need not for TekArt—that new
hobgoblin of the critics—but for a technology based on aes-
thetic considerations. Where the latter exists the art impulse
will take care of itself.”54 And Burnham insisted in his cata-
logue essay that “Software is not technological art; rather it
points to the information technologies as a pervasive environ-
ment badly in need of the sensitivity traditionally associated
with art.”55 Burnham, 然而, struggled to convincingly con-
vey the coherence and the validity of his curatorial premise,
and his show met with considerable controversy, being widely
critically panned and accused of complicity with the military-
industrial complex.
Reflecting on the negative reception of Software in an inter-
view with Willoughby Sharp later in 1970, Burnham reserved
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左边: Jack Burnham.
软件: 信息
技术: Its New
Meaning for Art
(1970). Cover.
Opposite: 杰克
Burnham and Roy
Chapin (Chairman
of American Motors)
at the opening of
软件, Jewish
Museum, 纽约,
1970.
some sharp words of his own for the hypocrisy of much of the
New York art world:
在过去的几年中, Maurice Tuchman, Kepes at MIT,
and myself among others have used money from visible
outside sources, electronics companies and such. 所以
artist is put in the compromising position of making pieces
with money whose source he knows. Somehow the fact
that the Guggenheim Foundation’s grant come [原文如此] 从
the copper mines of South America doesn’t bother artists
half so much as openly working with American Motors.56
Yet the major problem with Burnham’s show was not compro-
mised ethics, as many critics charged (Burnham had a valid
rejoinder to make about the art world’s sources of institutional
资金), but rather its voluntarism. He attempted to simply
生产 (或者, on a more charitable interpretation, agitate for) 他的
104 Grey Room 65
hoped-for fusion of aesthetic and technological reason by jux-
taposing cutting-edge art and bleeding-edge technology, 和-
out recognizing the impossibility of his hope for the resolution
of the contradictions between their competing rationalities
under actually existing social conditions.
This fundamental aporia in his thinking shortly led Burnham
to jettison the philosophically inspired project of his systems
aesthetics altogether. 尽管如此, Burnham maintained an inter-
est in systems thinking and turned to structuralism as a method-
ology in his second book, The Structure of Art (1972), 哪个
announced the third phase of his theoretical project, an attempt
at a unified, general theory of modern art (with art’s underlying,
synchronic, structural logic understood by analogy with myth):
Esthetic doctrines once proclaimed that art was “beauty,”
“the search after truth,” or “significant form”; what passes
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for esthetics today —that lingering element which makes
art art—is no more helpful. Like the patient who repeatedly
relocates the cause of his neurosis while being careful
never to divulge its underlying origins, redefinition diverts
us from the structure of art. . . . Our purpose . . . 是 . . .
a structural definition of art.57
Burnham’s second book is an unpersuasive text, beset by its
project to equate modern Western art with myth and hobbled
by an attempt to apply the same unconvincing and inflexible
structural schema across a wide array of sharply divergent case
学习, from J.M.W. Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed (1844) 到
Daniel Buren’s Photographic Souvenir of One of the Pieces
Executed in Kyoto, 日本 (1970). In short order—inspired by
his work on putatively hermetic aspects of Duchamp’s practice
that emerge in his chapter on the artist in the book—Burnham
Skrebowski | Jack Burnham Redux: The Obsolete in Reverse?
105
began to supplement the limited interpretive schema he mobi-
lized in The Structure of Art with categories drawn from Kabbalah
and other esoteric sources.
This final turn inaugurated the fourth and concluding phase
of Burnham’s intellectual project, wherein he set out to pro-
duce a hermetic theory of art via his projected book on Duchamp
as an esoteric key to the logical semiotic structure of all forms
of art. I am not able to comment on the accuracy of Burnham’s
work drawing on esoteric traditions, but the deeply unpersua-
sive readings of particular artists and works that they advance
militate against according them historical value.58 Rather, I pro-
pose that Burnham’s late hermeticism is best understood as
symptomatic; it is a reaction to, and a final attempt to resolve,
the fundamental aporia that marked his work and that he
did not resolve by attempting to mythify modern art in The
Structure of Art.
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Jack Burnham.
The Structure of Art
(1971). Cover.
Support for this argument can be found in Burnham’s impor-
tant late essay “Art and Technology: The Panacea That Failed”
(1980), which qualifies his esoteric turn, revealing it to be an
attempt at a mystical reenchantment of the world, a reenchant-
ment that Burnham had failed to achieve in his earlier
Marcuse-inspired project to reconcile aesthetic and technolog-
ical rationality. In “Art and Technology” (unfortunately not
included in Dissolve into Comprehension) Burnham explores
the reasons why, as he frankly describes it, “science has spawned
a wealth of technical gadgetry, 尽管 . . . modern visual artists
have been notoriously unsuccessful in utilizing much of it in
the making of socially acceptable art.”59 Burnham begins his
argument by reflecting on the limited number of exceptions to
the broad failure of art and technology. These include
Alexander Calder and George Rickey’s kinetic sculpture, 这
“unexotic fluorescent fixtures” of Dan Flavin’s “luminous
106 Grey Room 65
sculpture,” Haacke’s “water boxes,” Takis’s Signals, and Jean
Tingueley’s “fantastic robots and constructions.”60 Burnham
then goes on to assess five major art and technology projects
initiated in the 1960s: Billy Klüver and Robert Rauschenberg’s
“Experiments in Art and Technology,” Jasia Reichardt’s
Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition, Burnham’s own Software
exhibition, CAVS, and the Los Angeles County Museum of
Art’s “Art and Technology” initiative.
Burnham has incisive, local points to make about aspects of
these projects, all of which he considers limited. His conclu-
sion about the overall failure of art and technology-based prac-
泰斯, 然而, is particularly revealing: “Have they failed as art
because of technical or esthetic incompetency, or because they
represent some fundamental dissimilarity as systems of human
semiosis? Although it is clear that technical incompetency is
partly to blame, I would suspect the latter is a more fundamen-
tal explanation.”61 Burnham here reveals the tensions that mark
his own thought as much as any fundamental truth about the
relationship between art and technology (compare, 例如,
the ambiguity of techné, and its entanglement with poiesis, 为了
Martin Heidegger in “The Question Concerning Technology”).62
He then narrates his own consequent turn to myth as an alter-
native explanatory schema adequate to “systems of human semi-
osis” (here glossed with reference to Roland Barthes’s book
Mythologies, orignally published in 1957 but first published in
English translation in 1972). Burnham remarks on the challenges
he found in attempting to transpose Barthes’s semiology to art,
noting that it offered “insufficient insight into the dynamic vicis-
situdes of . . . more complex phenomena.”63 He concludes the
essay by commenting on the metaphysical insights about art that
this recognition of semiology’s limitations led him to:
Western art . . . contradicts Barthes’ everyday mythic
invisibility because art by its very paradoxical nature (它是
near perfect resistance to economic, psychological, 或者
sociological interpretation), openly signifies an apparent
mystery concerning the fusion of spirit and matter. So at
the highest level, secrecy and a code of concealment are
imperative for its cultural survival.64
In “Art and Technology: The Panacea That Failed,” Burnham nar-
rates the way in which the fundamental aporia that characterizes
his artistic and intellectual work—the tension between art and
技术, aesthetic and technological rationality—came to be
“resolved” by his later-career recognition that art was to be under-
stood as a set of secret codes that conceal its “fusion of spirit and
matter.” This mystical understanding of art leads Burnham to
turn to esoteric interpretation, inspired by a new faith in an abil-
ity to reenchant the world by revealing veiled truths.
Modernism’s (其他) Nervous Breakdown
Revisiting the criticisms of Burnham’s work as technocratic,
teleological, and utopian, first leveled by Smithson in 1969
Skrebowski | Jack Burnham Redux: The Obsolete in Reverse?
107
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and echoed by leading art historians since then, we can see that
they hold a measure of truth but also an equal measure of inac-
curacy. Burnham’s technophilia was tempered by his critique
of reactionary technocracy. He produced a teleological account
in Beyond Modern Sculpture in 1968 but had renounced this
aspect of his work by the time he published “Systems
Esthetics” later that same year (thus Smithson’s critique of
Burnham’s teleological thinking was already inaccurate at the
time it was made). The charge of utopianism is perhaps most
apposite—and certainly more forgivable, if not potentially
laudable—but Burnham’s secular political hopes for a fusion of
art and technology were displaced into an otherworldly mysti-
cism and were thus also a passing aspect of his project.
The character, and the associated value, of Burnham’s work
does not come, 所以, from his maintenance or development
of any one coherent methodological approach or theoretical
位置. Rather it issues from his prescient and determined
commitment to produce a postformalist account of the ontology
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Diagram from
Jack Burnham,
“The Purposes of
the ‘Ready-Mades’”
(1974), in Great
Western Salt Works:
Essays on the
Meaning of Post-
Formalist Art(1974).
of art and its associated, highly creative, although often prob-
莱马蒂克, theoretical syncretism. Haacke, a long-standing friend
and interlocutor of Burnham, accurately captures both aspects
of Burnham’s work in his preface to Dissolve into Comprehension:
Jack’s was not the kind of art criticism based exclusively
on an art historical and humanist foundation. 反而, 他的
interdisciplinary approach drew from a wide range of dis-
parate fields that were normally not connected. It opened
a new understanding of that peculiar, socially negotiated
phenomenon referred to as “art,” and it explicitly chal-
lenged the formalist doctrine, which held considerable
sway at that time.65
The legacy value of Burnham’s work comes from the specific
theoretical syncretism, and the innovative postformalist
美学, represented by the second phase of his work;
即, the account of the ontology of contemporary art,
articulated in relationship to technology, offered by his theory
of systems aesthetics.
108 Grey Room 65
Burnham was the first to attempt a substantive critique of
Greenberg and Fried’s formalist position in the U.S. 语境
(innovatively mobilizing methodologies taken from outside the
humanities to do so) as well as the first to venture a comprehen-
sive theoretical alternative to it, anticipating the antiformalism
of artistic postmodernism. His postformalist aesthetics tried to
combine Marcuse’s neo-Schillerianism with systems theory
and cognate disciplines, but the structural contradictions of this
project proved intractable, resulting in a failed syncretism that
exerted its own psychic cost.
Systems aesthetics might thus be historicized as the “nervous
breakdown” of the New Bauhausian modernist tradition that
Burnham failed to extend for an age of advanced technology.66
因此, Burnham might now look like a transitional
figure in the history of ideas. Yet Burnham’s project (if not its
specific methodological articulation) is relevant again today
because of the way in which it throws into relief the narrowly
anti-aesthetic and often technophobic shortcomings of its prin-
ciple successor. Postmodernist accounts of art were deeply
overdetermined by (the breakdown of) Greenberg’s narrow, aes-
thetically formalist conception of modernism, as Jones and
Peter Osborne discuss and Hal Foster himself has recently
acknowledged.67 Artistic postmodernism was constructed for
the most part—notwithstanding the importance of John Cage’s
“minor” (in the Deleuzean sense) aesthetics—as the refutation
of Greenbergian formalist modernism.68 Even when Greenberg
was disavowed, he was affirmed. The postmodern “anti-
aesthetic,” as propounded by Foster in the introductory essay
to his highly influential edited volume of the same name,
was—despite considering the wider “adventures of the aes-
thetic” as “one of the great narratives of modernity” (并在
the process touching on both Walter Benjamin’s and Adorno’s
工作)—ultimately an anti-Greenbergian anti-aesthetic.69 In this
sense it was also, as Foster reflects in retrospect, “parochial.”70
This anti-aesthetic critical conjuncture has been to the detri-
ment of a more sustained and historically self-reflexive engage-
ment with other accounts of modernism—and indeed of the
philosophical critique of (technocratic) modernity more broadly,
such as that elaborated by Adorno and Marcuse, as well as the
longer German aesthetic tradition, beginning with Schiller’s
critique of Immanuel Kant, to which these thinkers belong. 全部
this has begun to become clear with the waning of the post-
modern theory of a French poststructuralist stripe that usurped
Greenberg and the concomitant rise of a renewed attention to
aesthetics in the theoretical humanities (which has sought
to interrogate the philosophical heritage of debates in postmod-
ern theory).71 这里, Burnham’s postformalist, “systems” aes-
thetics—with its ambition to think the relational ontology of
分散式, post-object-specific art in the expanded field and
its associated commitment to accounting for the relations
between art and technology—finds itself once again “rooted in
the present.”
Skrebowski | Jack Burnham Redux: The Obsolete in Reverse?
109
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Notes
1. Patricia Norvell, “Interview with Robert Smithson, 六月 20, 1969,“ 在
Recording Conceptual Art, 编辑. Alexander Alberro and Patricia Norvell
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 133.
2. Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (剑桥, 嘛:
与新闻界, 1981), 212; Benjamin Buchloh, “Hans Haacke: The Entwinement
of Myth and Enlightenment,” in Hans Haacke, “Obra Social” (巴塞罗那:
Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1995), 49; and Thierry De Duve, Kant after
Duchamp (剑桥, 嘛: 与新闻界, 1996), 285–86.
3. The series was initiated by Roger Conover in 1991 and publishes the
writing of major artists. 参见https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/series/writing-art.
4. My list of scholars working on Burnham’s work is indicative rather than
exhaustive and based on those whose work I have engaged with and found
most productive. For a regularly updated record of the scholarship on
Burnham, see Robert Horvitz’s diligently maintained online resource A Node
for Jack Burnham, http://mujweb.cz/horvitz/burnham/homepage.html. 为了
a critical engagement with a selection of the scholarship on Burnham up to
2009, see Edward Shanken, “Reprogramming Systems Aesthetics: A Strategic
Historiography,” in Proceedings of the 2009 Conference on Digital Arts and
Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009),
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/6bv363d4.
5. Jack Burnham, Dissolve into Comprehension: Writings and Interviews,
1964–2004年, 编辑. Melissa Ragain (剑桥, 嘛: 与新闻界, 2015), 正面
覆盖, inside flap.
6. The phrase originates from Nabokov’s 1952 short story “Lance,” a sci-fi
satire, as Brian Dillon notes in “Present Future,” Ruins of the 20th Century
[blog], 六月 18, 2012, https://briangdillon.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/pre-
sent-future/.
7. A list of Burnham’s publications can be found online at Horvitz’s website,
http://mujweb.cz/horvitz/burnham/homepage.html. A list of Burnham’s
publications and papers up to 1981 is also available from his CV in Dissolve
into Comprehension, 290–96.
8. Full disclosure: I happily provided an endorsement for the book.
9. On the relationship of the academy to esoteric traditions of thought, 看
Wouter Hanegraaf, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in
Western Culture (剑桥, 英国: 剑桥大学出版社, 2014).
10. Jack Burnham, Great Western Salt Works: Essays on the Meaning of
Post-Formalist Art (纽约: George Braziller, 1974), 11.
11. Burnham, Great Western Salt Works, 11.
12. Burnham, Great Western Salt Works, 11.
13. Burnham, Great Western Salt Works, 12.
14. 米歇尔·福柯, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the
Age of Reason (伦敦: 劳特利奇, 2001), 101.
15. Melissa Ragain, introduction to Burnham, Dissolve into Comprehension,
xiii.
16. Burnham’s training as an engineer is also noted by Courtney Fiske in
her article in this issue of Grey Room.
17. 看, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Cold War Constructivism,” in Formalism
and Historicity: Models and Methods in Twentieth-Century Art (剑桥,
嘛: 与新闻界, 2015), 375–408.
18. “Joan Brigham Interviews Jack Burnham,” in Dissolve into
Comprehension, 244.
19. “Joan Brigham Interviews Jack Burnham,” 244.
20. “Joan Brigham Interviews Jack Burnham,” 244.
21. Burnham reflects on the fraught editorial politics of the New York
magazines of the period in his article “Criticism in the Provinces” (1978), 在
Dissolve into Comprehension, 237–40.
22. Fort Belvoir, 建立在 1912 as a rifle range and summer camp for
110 Grey Room 65
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engineer troops, was the home of the Army Engineer School and remained
so until the school’s relocation to Fort Leonard Wood in 1980. Whether
Burnham’s military service was as a result of the draft or was voluntary is
unclear, but the latter seems more likely given that few Americans were com-
pulsorily inducted in 1949, despite a new compulsory draft having been
authorized by the Selective Service Act of 1948, because of the number of ser-
vicemen still available following the demobilization after WWII. Burnham
was posted to Okinawa and New York City during his time as a serviceman.
23. The backdrop to this shift in foreign policy was the breakdown of the
uneasy alliance between the USSR and the West after the defeat of the Axis
powers at the conclusion of WWII. For an account of the Truman Doctrine in
its historical context, see Perry Anderson, American Foreign Policy and Its
Thinkers (伦敦: Verso, 2014), 29–32.
24. Caroline A. 琼斯, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism
and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (芝加哥: 芝加哥大学
按, 2005).
25. “Joan Brigham Interviews Jack Burnham,” 241, 244.
26. Jack Burnham, “Art and Technology: The Panacea That Failed,” 在
Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture, 编辑. 凯瑟琳
伍德沃德 (麦迪逊, WI: Coda Press, 1980), 208.
27. “Joan Brigham Interviews Jack Burnham,” 243.
28. “Joan Brigham Interviews Jack Burnham,” 241, 244.
29. “Joan Brigham Interviews Jack Burnham,” 241.
30. Burnham’s artistic career began with incandescent light construction
在 1954, moved on to constructions with neon tubing in 1955, programmed
light environments in 1959, programmed luminous constructions in 1962,
and programmed light boxes with fiber-optic wires and chemical filters in
1964, before first using Sylvania tape in 1966. This schematization of Burnham’s
practice comes from his CV in Burnham, Dissolve into Comprehension, 284.
31. Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and
Technology on the Sculpture of This Century (纽约: George Braziller,
1968), 302.
32. Burnham, “Joan Brigham Interviews Jack Burnham,” 244.
33. Jack Burnham, “Steps in the Formulation of Real-Time Political Art,”
in Hans Haacke, Framing and Being Framed (纽约: 纽约大学
按, 1975), 132–33.
34. Ragain derives this claim from a letter from Philip Leider to Michael
Fried in which Leider relates his editorial intervention, among other matters.
Ragain, xvii–xix.
35. Jack Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” in Great Western Salt Works, 16–17.
36. I discuss Burnham’s systems essays at greater length in Luke
Skrebowski, “The Artist as Homo Arbiter Formae: Art and Interaction in Jack
Burnham’s Systems Essays,” in Practicable: From Participation to Interaction
in Contemporary Art, 编辑. Samuel Bianchini and Erik Verhagen (剑桥,
嘛: 与新闻界, 2016), 39–54. Arguments I make in that text inform my
discussion of Art in the Marcusean Analysis and “Systems and Art” in the
present article.
37. Jack Burnham, “Systems and Art,” Arts in Society 6, 不. 2 (Summer/
落下 1969): 194–203. Ragain includes an earlier version of this piece, origi-
nally delivered as a lecture, titled “‘Systems and Art’: A Post-formalist Design
Aesthetic for the Evolving Technology,” in Dissolve into Comprehension, 99–
108.
38. Burnham, “Systems and Art,” 195. Burnham goes on to assert that he
“came to realize that most educational approaches to this medium degener-
ate into technique courses . . . and that aesthetic development tends largely
to be forgotten” (195).
39. Burnham, “Systems and Art,” 195.
40. Burnham, “Systems and Art,” 196.
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41. Burnham, “Systems and Art,” 197.
42. Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” 16.
43. The text was originally written as a lecture in September 1968 但当时
not presented until January 1969 at Pennsylvania State University. 随后
it was published as a pamphlet, the sixth volume in the Penn State Papers in
Art Education series, 也在 1969.
44. For the only exception I am aware of to this general oversight (其中
my own earlier work is also guilty), see Michael Corris, 编辑。, Conceptual Art:
理论, Myth, 实践 (剑桥, 英国: 剑桥大学出版社, 2004),
195, 271. Burnham himself had effectively encouraged such oversight by not
acknowledging the philosopher’s influence on “Systems Esthetics,” despite
the fact that the article was published in September 1968 and was thus con-
temporaneous with the composition, if not the delivery, of his lecture on
Marcuse and demonstrably indebted to it. Burnham references Marcuse in
“Real Time Systems,” but the reference is to Eros and Civilization: A
Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955) and does not touch on his more sig-
nificant debt to One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced
Industrial Society (1964). Burnham also quotes Marcuse on the back jacket
of Beyond Modern Sculpture, but not inside, suggesting that he began reading
Marcuse after the main text was completed in 1967.
45. Burnham’s interpretation of Marcuse concentrates on his One
Dimensional Man and “Art in the One-Dimensional Society” (1967). Burnham’s
analysis also broaches Marcuse’s earlier works Eros and Civilization and
Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (1961).
46. Jack Burnham, Art in the Marcusean Analysis (宾夕法尼亚州:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969), 3; 添加了强调.
47. Burnham, Art in the Marcusean Analysis, 7–8.
48. Burnham, Art in the Marcusean Analysis, 9.
49. Burnham, Art in the Marcusean Analysis, 8–9.
50. Herbert Marcuse, “Art as a Form of Reality,” in On the Future of Art,
编辑. Edward Fry (纽约: The Viking Press, 1970), 133.
51. J. Jesse Ramirez productively insists on Marcuse’s U.S.-specific devel-
opment of his own “heretical” strand of Frankfurt School thought, elaborated
in dialogue with Left technocracy: “The Left Technocrats’ analysis posited
that the Machine Age had set in motion processes whose logical conclusion
would be a rupture in the economic mode of production. When intellectual
historians and critical theorists overlook Marcuse’s differences with
Horkheimer, Adorno, and Pollock on the issues of automation and economic
生产, they lump them all together in a tale of the ‘Frankfurt School
theorists’ (in the abstract plural) who abandoned Marxian immanent critique
for the dialectic of enlightenment thesis. . . . 然而, it was precisely
Marcuse’s affinities with the discourse of Left Technocracy that opened up
for him a vision of how the dialectic could once again reverse its course. 在
‘Some Social Implications of Modern Technology’ (1941), his first essay in
英语, Marcuse drew on Mumford’s Technics and Civilization (1934) 和
glimpsed the possibility that the very forces that had so thoroughly rational-
ized capitalism could trigger a dialectical switch, leading to full automation,
radically reduced labor time, the elimination of scarcity, and a true break in
the history of civilization and human nature.” J. Jesse Ramirez, “Marcuse
among the Technocrats: 美国, 自动化, and Postcapitalist Utopias,
1900–1941,” Amerikastudien /American Studies 57, 不. 1 (2012): 34–35. 为了
recent attempts to think about the possibility of a postcapitalist mode of pro-
duction against the neoliberal boosterism of the technocrats of the second
machine age, see Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future:
Postcapitalism and a World without Work (伦敦: Verso, 2015); and Paul
石匠, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future (伦敦: 艾伦·莱恩, 2015).
52. Jack Burnham, “Notes on Art and Information Processing,” in Software:
信息技术: Its New Meaning for Art (纽约: Jewish Museum,
112 Grey Room 65
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1970), 14.
53. I discuss this exchange in more detail in Luke Skrebowski, “All Systems
Go: Recovering Hans Haacke’s Systems Art,” Grey Room, 不. 30 (2008): 54–
83.
54. Jack Burnham, “Jack Burnham, Terry Fenton: An Exchange,” Artforum,
四月 1969, 60; 添加了强调.
55. Burnham, “Notes on Art and Information Processing,” 14.
56. Burnham, Dissolve into Comprehension, 255–56.
57. Jack Burnham, The Structure of Art (纽约: George Braziller,
1971), 7.
58. For an example of this genre of his work, see Burnham’s article on
Robert Morris. Jack Burnham, “Voices from the Gate” (1972), in Great Western
Salt Works, 119–24.
59. Burnham, “Art and Technology,” 200.
60. Burnham, “Art and Technology,” 200–201.
61. Burnham, “Art and Technology,” 211–12.
62. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic
Writings of Martin Heidegger, 反式. D.F. Krell (伦敦: 劳特利奇, 1977),
307–42.
63. Burnham, “Art and Technology,” 214.
64. Burnham, “Art and Technology,” 215.
65. Hans Haacke, preface to Dissolve into Comprehension, X.
66. Mel Ramsden, discussing conceptual art’s effect on Greenbergian for-
malism, refers to “Modernism’s nervous breakdown.” Mel Ramsden, 引用于
Charles Harrison, Conceptual Art and Painting: Further Essays on Art and
语言 (剑桥, 嘛: 与新闻界, 2001), 27.
67. See Peter Osborne, “Aesthetic Autonomy and the Crisis of Theory:
Greenberg, Adorno, and the Problem of Postmodernism in the Visual Arts,”
New Formations 9 (冬天 1989): 31–50; and Caroline Jones, “Postmodernism’s
Greenberg,” in Eyesight Alone, 347–86. Foster states, “It’s true: the version of
postmodernism presented by the nefarious October group was an attempt to
break with one model of Modernism, that associated with Greenberg above
all others, but also to recover other models, ones displaced by the prestige of
Greenberg.” See James Elkins and Harper Montgomery, 编辑。, Beyond the
Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic (University Park: Pennsylvania State
大学出版社, 2013), 27.
68. For treatments of Cage’s significance and influence, see Branden W.
约瑟夫, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage:
A “Minor” History (纽约: 区, 2008); and Liz Kotz, “Post-Cagean
Aesthetics and the Event Score,” in Words to Be Looked At: Language in
1960s Art (剑桥, 嘛: 与新闻界, 2007), 59–98.
69. Hal Foster, “介绍,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern
Culture, 编辑. Hal Foster (纽约: 新媒体, 1998), xvii.
70. Elkins and Montgomery, 49.
71. 看, 例如, Elkins and Montgomery’s recent anthology, 还有
as Armen Avanessian and Luke Skrebowski, 编辑。, Aesthetics and Contemporary
Art (柏林: Sternberg, 2011); and Francis Halsall, Julia Jansen, 和托尼
O’Connor, Rediscovering Aesthetics: Transdisciplinary Voices from Art
历史, Philosophy, and Art Practice (斯坦福大学, CA: 斯坦福大学
按, 2009).
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