ON TIME IN THE ART OF THE 1960s

PAMELA M. LEE
ON TIME IN THE ART OF THE 1960s
PAMELA M. LEE

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
©2004 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic
or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and
retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book was set in Bitstream Charter with Kievit display by Graphic Composition, Inc.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lee, Pamela M.
Chronophobia : on time in the art of the 1960s / Pamela M. Lee.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-262-12260-X (hc : alk. paper)
1. Art and technology —History —20th century. 2. Time in art. 3. Nineteen sixties.
I. Title.

N72.T4L43 2004
700'.9'046—dc22
2003061092

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 PART I

PRESENTNESS IS GRACE
INTRODUCTION

EROS AND TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

THE PICTURE
On the evening of July 20, 1969, time stood still. Everything seemed
to stop. A brutal war abroad, civil strife at home, the very earth itself:
all the chaos of that moment appeared to recede into the distance,
contracted to points. Near the end of a decade catalytic in its rate of
change, the future looked endlessly hopeful. It was a future pledged on
the spectacle of technology.
For it was then that Apollo 11 made good on its promise to put a
man on the moon, and the images from that moment are now stock in
trade to our technological imaginary (figure I.1). Buzzed cut and teeth
flashing, the astronauts are proud in their space armor; while the
heroes’ wives clutch handbags and handkerchiefs, fingers nervous in
anticipation of the countdown. Mission Control vibrates with hulking
mainframes; NASA men are brisk in short sleeves, thick glasses, and
headsets. Then there is the moon itself, a pale curve stamped against
the black. Out on the Sea of Tranquility, two would emerge from their
lunar module, make their slow descent down a ladder, and plod
noiselessly across its cold surface. That picture has come to stand as
among the most profound in the history of technology, offering a view
of the 1960s buoyed by the Enlightenment platforms of reason and
progress. A utopian vision, perhaps, it is a vision of unflagging
optimism, of limitless horizons, and the can-do ethos of American
invention.
Yet this is only a partial vision of the technological landscape.
It is partial because, in turning its gaze to the stars, it is blind to the
decidedly worldly technology of everyday life, the mundane stuff
transmitting the image. No account of the mission, after all, would be
complete without the television sets, all those black and white altars in
 7 living rooms or mounted in a corner at the local bar. Millions would
I.1 Apollo 11 landing, July 11, 1969.
Courtesy NASA.
watch this history play out on television, and for many, it was a history
that couldn’t come soon enough. Because in 1961, smarting from the
humiliations of the Soviet lead in the space race, JFK had committed
the country to put a man on the moon before the decade was out.
Hence the picture is partial because it is also ideological, born
of a culture steeped in Cold War values and military proscriptions.
Americans had trained in that culture for close to ten years by then,
watching the most horrific images unfold through the same medium
that broadcast this message of hopefulness. They came fast and furious,
those images, and too often they pictured a state of emergency
technocratic in its violence. Hueys and F–111s descending on a far-
away land; civilians brutalized by national guardsmen and police; men
with dead eyes carried off on gurneys; women and children seared by
napalm: these images remind us that the technological picture in the
1960s is a blurred one, its contours messy and indiscrete. Whether seen
from the sublime heights of Apollo 11 or the abject realities of Vietnam,
it is a deeply shadowed, ambivalent picture. And because such images
lack visual coherence—any gestalt that might inform us about the
actuality of the situation—we grasp the limits of treating such represen-
tations transparently, of facing them head on.

˚
This book takes the oblique view of technology and art in the 1960s and
it does so with a concept introduced at the outset: the matter of time.
Time and technology, I want to argue, are twinned phenomena in that
decade; and works of art provide special insight into this relationship as
much as they model that relationship in turn. Time, we shall see, plays
no small role in the richly diverse practices that constitute sixties art
making. From performance to painting to sculpture to “new media,”
time becomes both a thematic and structural fixture, an obsession, for
INTRODUCTION
critics, artists, and audiences of that moment. It will come to signal
EROS AND TECHNICS AND something about technological change.
CIVILIZATION But not just any kind of time will do here. This is not the time
inscribed by the face of the clock. We know in the 1960s that time takes
on a dread urgency within popular culture. “Time has come today,” “the
times they are a changin’”: it’s the standard refrain of the moment, 8
playing over and over like a television jingle. No doubt, revolution is
an unavoidable trope in the sixties historical record, a cliché even; and
however we treat that revolution with hindsight—whether failed or
hopelessly romantic or marginally successful—the vision of a time
radically changed remains with us. Revolution, however, not only
suggests a confrontation with authority but a peculiar mode of tempo-
rality. For revolution is as much about cycles of change—the repeti-
tion of that change as circular—as it is some vision of establishments
overthrown and repudiated, of Red Guards with their little red books or
students amassed in protest. With that turning comes a sense of prom-
ise and expectation, yes, but also a darker anxiety about what is yet
to come.
In other words, the time we are dealing with is troubled and
undecidable. Often it is accelerated, anticipatory, and repetitive. The
art of the sixties, this book argues, produced an understanding of this
time that I call chronophobic, a neologism that suggests a marked fear
of the temporal. Cutting across movements, mediums, and genres, the
chronophobic impulse names an insistent struggle with time, the will
of both artists and critics either to master its passage, to still its
acceleration, or to give form to its changing conditions. In charting
the consistency as well as diversity of such efforts, this book restitutes
the question of time to the history of sixties art. Just as important, I
argue this preoccupation illuminates the emergence of new information
technologies in the postwar era, offering a historical prelude to our
contemporary fixations on time and speed within digital culture—what
has been called “dromology” by Paul Virilio or described through the
terms of “Nanosecond Culture” by others.1 This book understands the
chronophobic tendency in much of that decade’s work as the projection
of a liminal historical moment, for which there was no clear perspective
on the social and technological horizon yet to come. Time, in other
words, becomes a figuration of uncertainty about the mechanics of
historical change itself.
Before we can begin to address this question, we need turn to the
more standard accounts of art and technology in the sixties. Consulting
one of the better-known records of this relationship, we come away
with the same sense of possibility that marked the Apollo 11 mission.
 9 An unbridled love of technology—we could call it an erotics of
technology—characterized many of these efforts initially. Yet in nar-
rating the history of one such collaboration, we also confront their
shortcomings on a number of levels, describing in the process the
anxiety around the question of technology in the sixties more generally.
Here, then, I briefly treat the Art and Technology Program of the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art against the grain of another local
history, that surrounding Herbert Marcuse’s contemporaneous critique
of postwar technocracy. The comparison, we shall see, introduces the
terms of the debate and opens onto the possibility of considering this
relationship through the seemingly elusive, if no less historical, matter
of time.

˚
Earthbound now. In 1971, just two years after the Apollo landing, and
no doubt basking in its technological afterglow, the Art and Technology
program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is set to
display its efforts to the public. Maurice Tuchman, the museum’s curator
of modern art, launched his ambitious program in 1966, involving some
thirty-seven corporations and seventy-eight artists, many of whom
would not make the final cut for the exhibition. The idea was to bring
industry together with artists in a creative “synergy”—to follow that
moment’s fashionable jargon—so that the technology that was
commonplace to a JPL (Jet Propulsion Lab) or a TRW or an IBM would
become accessible to artists who otherwise had little contact with it.
“The purpose of the enterprise,” a museum brochure distributed to
corporate executives reads, “is to place approximately twenty important
artists ‘in residence’ for up to a twelve week period within leading
technological and industrial corporations in California.”2 That enterprise
would produce a small share of critical successes, mostly outweighed by
artistic failures. Richard Serra’s famous Skullcracker series, massive
INTRODUCTION
cantilevered stacks of cast iron or steel, originated in the yards of Kaiser
EROS AND TECHNICS AND Steel’s Fontana Division, for instance (figure I.2) Tony Smith, Robert
CIVILIZATION Whitman, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Otto Piene,
Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Irwin, and many others were also invited to
participate. As for the corporations, Tuchman designated five descend- 10
ing levels of commitment (Patron Sponsor, Sponsor, Contributing
Sponsor, Service Corporation, and Benefactors) each representing
varying degrees of monetary and technical support for the program. I.2 Richard Serra, from Skullcracker

Primarily located in Southern California, the sponsors would come series, 1971. © 2003 Richard Serra/
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
to include, among others, the Ampex Corporation, IBM, Lockheed
Aircraft, Hewlett-Packard, the RAND Corporation, Rockwell, and
Twentieth Century Fox. From the beginning, both the bureaucratic
and technological complexities of the program were acknowledged
and extensively documented in the exhibition’s fascinating catalog. It is,
as we shall see, an unwitting testament to the late sixties’ technocratic
mindset, in the sardonic words of one critic a “micro-analogue” to the
Pentagon Papers.3 But there was probably no more telling icon for the
program than Claes Oldenburg’s gigantic pneumatic ice bag (figure I.3)
Although relatively simple in form, the work’s lengthy and tortured
 11

I.3 Claes Oldenburg, Giant Ice Bag,

1969–70. Vinyl over steel structure,
with motors and blowers; top: fiberglass
painted with metallic lacquer.
18 ft.(5.5 m) diameter; 7 ft. (2.1 m)
high at resting position; 16 ft. (4.9 m)
maximum height; top: 8 ft. (2.4 m)
diameter. Collection Musée National
d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges
Pompidou, Paris.

history of production would serve as the bluntest allegory for the entire
LACMA affair. It was a monumental headache.
This is not to say that Tuchman was attempting to reinvent the
wheel or stage a show without relevance to the larger context or sixties
art making. His introduction to the Art and Technology catalog is
plainspoken about the local culture that inspired him and the ever-
pressing sense that the project was historically necessary. “In 1966,”
he wrote several years later,

when Art and Technology was first conceived, I had been living in
Southern California for two years. A newcomer to this region is par-
ticularly sensitive to the futuristic character of Los Angeles, especially as
it is manifested in advanced technology. I thought of the typical Coastal
industries as chiefly aerospace oriented (Jet Propulsion Lab, Lockheed
INTRODUCTION
Aircraft); or geared toward scientific research (The RAND Corporation,
EROS AND TECHNICS AND TRW Systems); or connected with the vast cinema and TV industry in
CIVILIZATION Southern California (Universal Film Studios). At a certain point—
it is digcult to construct the precise way in which this notion finally
emerged consciously—I became intrigued by the thought of having
artists brought into these industries to make works of art, moving about 12
in them as they might in their own studios. 4

That move from studio to industry was hardly new to the annals of
modernism: witness the Constructivists, the Bauhaus, the pretensions
of the Futurists, any number of art and technology experiments in
the avant-garde. And though a gargantuan effort—“immensely im-
moderate” to follow some—LACMA’s program was far from unique to
the era as well.5 Art and technology collaborations in the 1960s were
legion, perhaps rivaled only by the utopian practices of the 1920s and
the digital euphoria of more contemporary practice.
Chief among such efforts in the 1960s was the organization
Experiments in Art and Technology, best known as E.A.T. Their history
foreshadowed many of the problems later encountered by LACMA’s
program. In 1966, Billy Klüver, a Swedish engineer working with laser
technology at Bell Labs, collaborated with Robert Rauschenberg in the
production of an infamous series of performances called 9 Evenings:
Theater and Engineering. Prior to this moment, Klüver had provided
technical support for a number of curators and artists: he had assisted
in the making of Jean Tinguely’s self-destructive Homage to New York at
the Museum of Modern Art in 1960 as well as Pontus Hulten’s massive
exhibition of kinetic art that toured Europe in 1959. But 9 Evenings was
intended to place the collaborative efforts between artist and engineer
front and center, granting parties an equal footing on the artistic stage.
Hosted in New York at the sixty-ninth Regimental Armory, the event
included Rauschenberg, David Tudor, Yvonne Rainer, Alex Hay, and
Steve Paxton, as well as numerous dancers and performers associated
with the Judson Memorial Church: forty engineers supplied technical
support. Rauschenberg’s tennis game, Open Score, for instance, saw
performer’s rackets wired for amplified sound throughout the armory so
that the game produced a “musical score” of sorts when the ball was
volleyed across the armory’s makeshift court.
Not long after 9 Evenings, Klüver, Rauschenberg, John Cage, and
others formally established E.A.T. At the first meeting of the group, held
in New York in November 1966, close to 300 artists showed up, through
sheer presence alone demonstrating the need for some institutional
vehicle to mediate the relationship between art and technology. “To
 13 involve the artist with the relevant forces shaping the technological
world,” its bulletin states,

the artist must have access to the people who are creating technology.
Thus it was decided that E.A.T. act as a matching agency . . . through
which an artist with a technical problem, or a technologically com-
plicated and advanced project be in touch with an engineer or scientist
who could collaborate with him. E.A.T. not only matches artists and
engineers to work on collaborative projects but also works to secure
industrial sponsorship for the projects that result from the
collaboration.6

With these words, E.A.T. echoes, as would many technologists in

that decade, the “Two Cultures” rhetoric espoused by the British author,
physicist, and educator C. P. Snow.7 In 1959, Snow delivered his famous
Rede lecture “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution” at
Cambridge, speaking to the virtual divide that separated the sciences
from literary intellectuals in Western educational life. That divide itself
had a far longer genealogy in the nineteenth century, but as Thomas
Pynchon has noted, Snow’s “lecture was originally meant to address
such matters as curriculum reform in the age of Sputnik and the role of
technology in the development of what would soon be known as the
third world.”8 Snow advocated that the two needed to come together in
an active partnership, particularly after the historical catastrophe
of the war. The progressively industrial character of postwar culture
demanded the humanizing influence of the liberal arts. At the
same time, Snow’s background in science led him to make extremely
polemical remarks about the role of the humanities, remarks that
sparked ferocious debate among literary critics.9 “The reasons for the
existence of the two cultures are many, deep and complex,” Snow
observed.

But I want to isolate one which is not so much a reason as a correlative,

INTRODUCTION
something which winds in and out of any of these discussions. . . . It
EROS AND TECHNICS AND can be said simply, and it is this. If we forget scientific culture, then
CIVILIZATION the rest of western intellectuals have never tried, wanted, or been able
to understand the industrial revolution, much less accept it. Intellec-
tuals, in particular literary intellectuals, are natural Luddites.10
That charge—that “literary intellectuals” were Luddites—is thought to 14
have found its motivation in the class politics of postwar England. One
commentator remarks that Snow, of middle-class upbringing, believed
firmly that science was the only true meritocracy—the one hope to
advance in the world—and that the “literary intellectuals,” to the
manor born, were categorically elitist. For all the hostility expressed
toward the humanities, Snow’s position was critical in articulating the
historical confluence of arts and sciences from the sixties forward: the
lecture anticipated, in numerous ways, what would later be described as
the phenomenon of interdisciplinarity within academia. This model of
integration will be subject to criticism in what follows, but at the time
of its historical formulation it seemed to offer a promise to both
“cultures”—that the two might evolve or rather, had to evolve—in
dynamic exchange with one another. Snow’s tone was urgent, even
desperate, about the matter. “Isn’t it time we began?” he asked at the
conclusion of his lecture. “The danger is, we have been brought up to
think as though we had all the time in the world. We have very little
time. So little that I dare not guess it.”11
The mandate was clear, and it was precisely this kind of language
that informed so many art and technology collaborations in the 1960s.
But if Snow’s reading betrayed a barely masked antipathy to the
“natural Luddites” that were literary intellectuals, most collaborations
seized on the possibility of a happy rapprochement between technology
and art. Often enough, these collaborations were characterized as a
love of technology by artists reciprocated by a love of art by tech-
nologists. Groups, programs, and media collectives engaged with such
terms proliferated on the international scene, ranging from Gyorgy
Kepes’s Center for Advanced Visual Study at MIT to WNET’s experi-
mental television lab to the communelike approach to technology used
by USCO (a collaborative community—short for “US Company”), not
to mention European collaborations such as Group Zero and the Groupe
Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV). And then there were numerous influ-
ential and spectacular exhibitions: Jasia Reichardt’s Cybernetic
Serendipity at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London in
1968; Software at the Jewish Museum in 1970; Kynaston McShine’s
Information at the MoMA in 1970; the same institution’s Art as Seen at
the End of the Mechanical Age of one year earlier. As one critic described
the LACMA affair in a suggestive turn of phrase this was “art mating
 15 with technology,” a technophilic coupling imagined to spawn the most
innovative work of the day.12 Typically artists paid lip service to such
exchanges through the belief that technology was little more than a
tool, no better nor worse than a paintbrush or chisel. It was with such
transformative tools in hand, supported by the forces of industry, that
the progress of art was advanced.
From one perspective, it would seem the success story of the
decade: Snow’s challenge was being met in museums and galleries,
lofts and laboratories, television studios and universities. And as the
most visible organization to spearhead this trend, E.A.T. would come to
stand as an icon for later collaborations. With the support of an artist
as famous as Rauschenberg, E.A.T. enjoyed great institutional prestige,
hosting the enormous exhibition Some New Beginnings at the Brooklyn
Museum in 1968, as well as showcasing their wares at a spectacular
pavilion at the Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan.13 So too was E.A.T. an inter-
national affair: it had local chapters in Boston, Chicago, Vancouver,
Seattle, Amsterdam, and Paris, among other cities.14 According to its
own figures, E.A.T. counted nearly 6,000 members nationwide by the
end of the sixties.
In spite of, or perhaps because of, E.A.T.’s popularity, such efforts
courted their own kind of controversy, centering largely on the fruits
of the collaborations themselves. Few art events of the mid–1960s
were as widely reviled as 9 Evenings.15 The popular press called it an
unmitigated disaster, requiring over 8,500 engineering hours and
costing some $150,000 to produce, but to what end? However much
labor, money, and time was invested in the affair, the outcome yielded
little in the way of aesthetic returns. As Clive Barnes, the theater critic
for the New York Times, put it, it was “rather like an elephant going
through two years of gestation and then giving birth to a mouse.” 16
This radically condensed narrative on E.A.T. telegraphs just one
of the risks of the art and technology collaboration during the decade,
problems consistent with the later history and reception of LACMA’s
program. On one level—unconsidered by most involved in the enter-
INTRODUCTION
prise—it posed the larger question as to what actually constituted the
EROS AND TECHNICS AND relationship between art and technology in the mid-sixties: what, for ex-
CIVILIZATION ample, were the philosophical and political stakes that arose out of
this coupling? Technology, as we have described it, was considered by
many simply as a means to an end, a neutral instrument in the service
of producing art. This belief would prove troublesome in ways that ex- 16
ceeded local questions of artistic merit and technical competency.
Regardless, it would seem that LACMA had learned little from
E.A.T.’s example; and the kinds of problems that sabotaged 9 Evenings
were legion to the even grander collaborations envisioned by Tuchman.
Once-enthusiastic corporations bowed out due to lack of both human
and financial resources, not to mention the creeping suspicion that some
artists were having a laugh at their expense. And why shouldn’t they be
suspicious? Why should Disney, after all, see fit to sponsor Oldenburg’s
colossal ice bag, a collaboration that the company would hasten to
terminate? When the artist later suggested the appeal of working with
Disney reduced to wanting “to know what people who have been
making animals without genitalia . . . are like,” their decision was all
but justified.17 In any case, some of the artist’s proposals were simply
unfeasible from the technological standpoint, and numerous partner-
ships between artist and corporation soured considerably in the process
of reaching this conclusion. Both artist and industry appeared to fall
back upon, rather than transcend, their prescribed roles, reconfirming
for the other the worst stereotypes of both professions.
An especially telling case involved John Chamberlain’s residency
at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica. Established in 1948, the
RAND Corporation was the prototypical postwar think tank: a nonprofit
organization devoted “to further and promote scientific, educational
and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare and security of the
United States.” Following its own bulletin, the Corporation

works toward these purposes through an extensive program of research

and original investigation in the physical and social sciences. Although
the program places special emphasis on interdisciplinary, policy-oriented
studies, it includes theoretical research within such diverse fields as
economics, mathematics, geophysics, nuclear physics, electronics, com-
puter science, aeronautics, astronautics, linguistics, sociology, polit-
ical science, medicine, education and many others. In the past this
program has been oriented mainly towards scientific analysis of impor-
tant problems of national defense.18

RAND’s collaboration with Chamberlain was unhappy to say the

least. Chamberlain was approached by Tuchman as late as 1969, but the
 17 artist was eager to participate in the program because, as he reasoned,
“I’m initially interested in anything I don’t know about.”19 Like many
of his peers, Chamberlain’s preliminary meetings with industry proved
unproductive. He discussed the possibilities of a film project, perhaps
with Ampex, RCA or CBS, but when neither these nor other proposals
seemed viable (one of which included an “olfactory-stimulus-response”
multiple), he was ultimately paired with RAND, then already working
with Larry Bell.
Chamberlain’s project for RAND exhibited little of the high-tech
paraphernalia of many other artists involved in LACMA’s program.
Granted office space and secretarial support by RAND, Chamberlain’s
proposals—cutting off the phones for one day, for example, or dis-
solving the corporation itself—were of a rigorously conceptual (that is
to say, unfeasible) bent. Such ideas met with little excitement or, rather,
acceptance, by many of RAND’s denizens, and the distaste was recip-
rocal. As his residency continued, Chamberlain discovered his RAND
colleagues to be impossibly “uptight” and “very 1953” and resistant to
the line of questioning his proposals suggested. As if to interrogate his
own technological sophistication, the artist posed a series of queries
in keeping with the concerns of the corporation itself. “What do I know
about weather modification?” he asked rhetorically. “What do I know
about cloud formations? What do I know about the war in Vietnam?
What do I know about the psychology of reflexes in New York City when
faced with a police car?”20 Instead of pursuing such topics, Chamberlain
saw the use value of exploiting humor in his “collaboration,” tweaking
the rituals of bureaucratic culture in the process. For three days he
screened his film The Secret Life of Hernando Cortez during the com-
pany’s lunch hour. With Warhol “Superstar” Ultraviolet and poet Taylor
Mead romping about in trees in various states of undress, the movie
seemed to confirm for RAND’s employees the worst clichés about artists
in general. Following the screening, Chamberlain distributed a cryptic
memo to all consultants at RAND in a gesture that at once pays tribute
to and lambastes the endless paper trail of the corporate environ-
INTRODUCTION
ment (figure I.4). The mimeographed sheet reads: “I’m searching for
EROS AND TECHNICS AND ANSWERS. Not questions! If you have any, will you please fill in below,
CIVILIZATION and send them to me in Room 1138.”
The answers spoke volumes to the divide between Chamberlain’s
conceptual leanings and RAND’s technological methods. Clearly the
 19
I.4 John Chamberlain, “Memo for
RAND corporation,” Credit: © 2003
John Chamberlain /Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York.
exercise had won Chamberlain no supporters; it fact, it produced the
exact opposite effect. “The answer is to terminate Chamberlain,” one
rejoinder states, and that was the least of it. There was no shortage of
vitriolic responses, a partial list of which reads:
You’re sick! While you were up in the Tree in your love scene, you should
have STAYED.

Quit Wasting RAND Paper and Time. The Air Force needs thinkers—
where do you fit in?

The world has moved up a level. They now call stag movies “ART.” GO TO
HELL MISTER!!

An artist in residence is a waste of money.21

And then there were those responses all the more striking for their
abruptness. “Drop dead,” one reads flatly.
Such replies neatly illustrate the usual batch of prejudices that
obtain between art and industry. Artists were seen to be loopy or
decadent, whereas technologists were considered white-collar squares
stuck in the Eisenhower fifties, clichés that seemed to find visual
confirmation with the cover of the LACMA catalog itself. With the letters
A&T printed discretely in the upper left corner, it presented a grid of
sixty-four black-and-white portraits of its participants, all of whom were
men (apparently technology was irrelevant to women) and all of whom
were white (ditto the case for people of color). One needn’t consult
the book’s legend to determine who fell on the side of technology and
who fell on the side of art. It seemed that the technologist’s sartorial im-
perative was to wear ties or thick glasses or sports coats, hair neatly
dressed with Bryll cream, whereas the artists were almost categorically
dressed down, sporting long hair and open collars.
But there was more to this split than appearance or self-
INTRODUCTION
presentation. If the catalog’s cover represented the superficial distinc-
EROS AND TECHNICS AND tions between artists and industry types, its back pages revealed
CIVILIZATION something far more critical at stake in the collaboration. They
illustrated the progressively spectacular relationship between art and
 21
I.5 Back pages from Maurice Tuchman,
A Report on the Art and Technology
Program of the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, 1967–71 (Los Angeles:
Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
1971), p. 375. Courtesy Los Angeles
County Museum of Art. Norris Trade-
mark courtesy NI Industries;
Rockwell Trademark courtesy Boeing.
INTRODUCTION
EROS AND TECHNICS AND
CIVILIZATION
corporate sponsorship in the 1960s, not to mention the decisive role
that technology played in mediating those exchanges (figure I.5). To
leaf through the last twenty or so pages of the document is to survey
the state of the branding field at the end of the decade and to confront
the necessarily ambivalent partnership between art and advertising.
Here the blank face of modern typography is meshed with the icons of
late capital, whether those of the media or the aerospace industry or the
military. All those corporate logos, so clean and so cold in their graphic
presentation, dramatize the sense that Tuchman’s program was as much
business venture as it was aesthetic experiment, a remark cheerfully
echoed by many of the sponsors themselves. As the president of the
Lockheed Corporation wrote in a press release for the show, “Industry
today is increasingly aware of the importance of relating technology
to human needs. It is good business as well as good citizenship. The
sensitivity of the artist should contribute significantly to these de-
veloping relationships.”22 Such proclamations fed directly into the belief
that A&T was little more than “corporate art” or that the real experi-
ment behind the program had less to do with advanced technology
than advanced capital. It was, to follow some critics, an experiment in
the business of sponsorship.
Perhaps none of this reads as especially shocking to anyone
with even the dimmest grasp of art history and its Byzantine record
of patronage. Art and the market have long been faithful if uneasy
partners; and Tuchman wisely acknowledged such implications at the
beginning of the catalog, glancing as the perspective was. This was as
true for LACMA’s program as it was for organizations such as E.A.T.,
whose reputation for landing substantial grants and corporate support
would prove infamous. As the artist, curator, and critic Jack Burnham
described it, E.A.T.’s
greatest success was its ability to extract relatively large sums of money
from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Arts Coun-
cil, large corporations and various patrons of the arts. . . . If business had
been the business of the United States in the 1920s, surely in the 1960s
the business of the United States was to acquiesce to the mystique
of technology, as epitomized by the uses of the “automated battlefield”
and systems analysis during the Vietnam War.23
 Experiments in Art and Technology was hardly immune to the 22
criticism attached to such associations. Only a year before LACMA’s
program, Klüver’s organization came under attack at Expo 70 in Osaka,
due to the progressively ugly turn in its relationship with the Pepsi-Cola I.6 Lockheed “advertisement” in

Corporation. In attempting to stage its Buckminster Fuller–inspired Newsweek, October 30, 1967, p. 7.
Courtesy Lockheed Martin.
pavilion there and after “many delays and financial fiascoes,” E.A.T.
“presented Pepsi . . . with a maintenance contract for $405,000,”
although “the previously proposed sum had been $185,000.”24 Pepsi
would soon pull out of the deal, but E.A.T. would suffer an even greater
blow in the battle over public opinion. To follow some, this was an
elitist organization, focused more on securing grants for a few blue chip
artists than facilitating genuine dialogue between art and technology.25
The LACMA program, although different in its financial
specifications, was no less problematic, but it was problematic in ways
that went beyond the standard accusations that art was bedding down
with industry. It was perhaps best summed up, however elliptically, by
one of the many charges made against John Chamberlain’s project at
the RAND Corporation. “An artist in residence,” the anonymous
response to Chamberlain’s memo reads, “soothes the conscience of the
management.” That message channeled the profound distrust harbored
by many around the art and technology nexus in the sixties; and it is
that much more acutely felt because delivered from a RAND “insider.”
Because, of course, RAND and Lockheed (not to mention Rockwell,
JPL, and HP) were among the least neutral corporations based in the
West at that moment, their “tools” deeply entangled with the war in
Southeast Asia. The history of RAND, after all, was inseparable from
that of the postwar American military. “The Corporation is sponsored
chiefly by research contracts with agencies of the United States
Government, such as the Air Force, the Advanced Research Projects
Agency and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration” a
RAND bulletin blandly states.26
Lockheed, for their part, was enjoying a windfall in the aerospace
industry with the introduction of their Cheyenne helicopters in 1967.
It is important to stress here that neither RAND’s history nor Lockheed’s
production was privileged information. A Lockheed “advertisement”
from Newsweek from the fall 1967, for instance, pairs a graphic
Cheyenne with a “future” Lockheed invention, a Poseidon ballistic
missile (figure I.6) and a Lockheed press release in the LACMA archives
proudly states its “success” in this endeavor. “Combining the speed and 24
maneuverability features of a fixed-wing airplane and the vertical take-
off and landing capabilities of a helicopter,” it reads, “the new U.S.
Army Cheyenne adds up to the world’s fastest, toughest and most agile
rotorcraft gunship.”27
These observations cut a little too close to the remark that an
“artist in residence soothes the conscience of the management.” For that
comment stops just short of a guilty confession, and its culpability, we
shall see, reduces to the profoundly ambivalent status of technology in
the 1960s. It is as if the management of RAND, deadly aware of its role
in international politics, pressed art into the service of a public relations
coup, as if to render its technology happy and user friendly. Art, in
other words, might be exploited to soften the hardboiled, militaristic
reputation of such corporations in the public sphere, which is not to say
that artists were innocent of such charges themselves. “During the term
of the project,” Max Kozloff wrote in a withering article in Artforum on
the LACMA program,

there occurred the My Lai massacre, the Chicago Democratic Convention

riots, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the
invasion of Cambodia, and the student killings at Kent and Jackson state.
While these convulsions were taking place, inflaming the radicalism of
our youth and polarizing the country, the American artists did not
hesitate to freeload at the trough of that techno-fascism that had in-
spired them.28

Kozloff was clearly outraged, and his words are outrageous.

To his thinking, the artists who participated in LACMA’s program were
wholly complicit with the corporations who sponsored such techno-
logical violence.
Even still, there is a more fundamental level at which the art and
technology relationship might be open to criticism in the 1960s. There
is a deep structure that suggests the collaboration is troubling not only
because of the specific “business” ventures of the industries partici-
pating, “a rogues gallery of the violence industry.”29 Submitting the
relationship to critical analysis reveals something about technology in
excess of its particular hardware or tools—dangerous as those tools
might be—something about the power of its logic, organization, and
 25 control. Attending to one influential reading from the period, we come
to see the limitations of the “Two Cultures” model for treatments of
art and technology at this moment. More and more, in fact, Snow’s
narrative might even read as a red herring. Art and technology, it turns
out, were not just separate fields to be bridged or traversed, although
such institutional distinctions clearly existed and differences in protocol
were unimpeachable. Instead, perhaps technology had long begun to fill
the gap through the force of its reason. Perhaps it had already begun to
colonize art through its administrative logic.

˚
About a two-hour drive south of the RAND Corporation, one response to
this issue was taking shape. Down at the University of San Diego, the
Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse was beginning his tenure as
the “Father of the New Left”—a title foisted upon him by his counter-
cultural acolytes, if a somewhat uncomfortable fit for the old Berliner.
Even still, Marcuse would prove a decisive influence upon a generation
of radicals ranging from Angela Davis to Abbie Hoffman to Kate Millett.
Seventy years old at the time of his arrival, Marcuse first set foot on
San Diego’s campus in May of 1965. Earlier that year his contract at
Brandeis University had failed to be “renewed.” This, as anyone in
academia well knows, is polite speech. Marcuse was effectively fired
from the university due to his increasingly contro-versial (read: politi-
cized) profile within it.
That the Frankfurt School stalwart would wind up in San Diego in
the 1960s is perhaps no less absurd than imagining his former colleague
Theodor Adorno living in Los Angeles in the 1940s. The contradictions
of their respective environments could hardly be ignored by either. The
dialectics of Southern California living seemed especially urgent at the
time, at once calling up the golden pleasures attributed to the state’s
mythic lifestyle and it’s darker entanglements with the military indus-
INTRODUCTION
trial complex of the postwar moment.30 San Diego’s general affluence,
EROS AND TECHNICS AND after all, could hardly be separated from its military—particularly
CIVILIZATION naval history—its ports, and historic airstrips; nor from the conserv-
ative sector of its population, which would mount a challenge to Mar-
cuse’s presence on campus.31 To envision Marcuse taking up residency
there—ambling the gentler trails of Torrey Pines or taking in the refresh- 26
ments of the Pacific—might seem a gross paradox in light of his politics.
And yet his presence, as well as that paradox, would prove critical.
For in 1955, Marcuse published Eros and Civilization, a book of signal
importance for the Counterculture. In it he attempted to read the
history of civilization through the history of repression in what was then
a particularly innovative marriage of Freud and Marx. The goal was to
treat repression and domination as historical and material phenomena
in their own right and to offer prescriptions—of a sort—for a social
therapeutic, even an erotics of liberation. Following Freud, Marcuse
arrived at the conceit that civilization had “progressed” by its
suppression of sexuality.32 Even before “childhood and birth . . .
repression was a matter of the species.”33 The dialectic of civilization
was one in which culture was affirmed and therefore contained with
the sexual drives scientifically managed and rationalized.34
Yet the dialectic was not so neat. Some forms of work, Marcuse
noted, were pleasurable; and however qualified, they granted the
subject some space of the imagination. The making of art, first and
foremost, was that which refused the libidinal economy of advanced
industrial society. “Artistic work, where it is genuine,” Marcuse wrote,
“seems to grow out of a non-repressive instinctual constellation and to
envisage non-repressive aims—so much so that the term sublimation
seems to require considerable modification if applied to this kind of
work.”35 Some eighty pages into Eros and Civilization, Marcuse men-
tioned art for the first time in his book. Less than one page later, he
introduced another concept for the first time: the notion of technics.
If the making of art arose out of the nonrepressive drives for
Marcuse, the evolution of technics represented the partial sublimation
of the aggressive impulses. “The development of technics and tech-
nological rationality absorbs to a great extent the ‘modified’ destructive
instincts,” Marcuse observed, following Freud.36 “Technics provides the
very basis for progress; technological rationality sets the mental and
behaviorist patter for productive performance, and ‘power over nature’
has become practically identical with civilization.”37 Marcuse was at
pains to qualify such developments, acknowledging the catastrophes
of recent technological history: “the fact that the destruction of life
(human and animal) has progressed with the progress of civilization,
that cruelty and hatred and the scientific extermination of men have
 27 increased in relation to the real possibility of the elimination of
oppression.”38 The progress of technics, in other words, had far from
wholly integrated the destructive instincts. In too many dangerous
ways, those instincts found their counterparts in mid-century
technology.
That position set the tone for things to come. In 1964, Marcuse
published One-Dimensional Man, a book described as having “the value
of a portent”—a manifesto of sorts for the U.S. student movement.39
At equal turns indebted to C. Wright Mills, Freud, and Marx, Marcuse
endeavored to speak to the dialectic of rationality and irrationality in
advanced industrial society: the more humanity was enslaved to the
forces of progress and reason, he argued, the more irrational was its
psychic character. One-dimensional man is the product of one-
dimensional society, a wholly integrated society under the sway of
“technological rationality.” A multidimensional society is that in which
the negation of social reality—whether expressed as politics or art or
critique—still retains some possibility. One-dimensional society, by
contrast, is a unification of opposites, a false totality.
Following Marcuse, the rise of One-Dimensional Man was a
function of changing models of control in advanced industrial society—
control of an altogether different cast than earlier forms of historical
oppression. Rather than assert its authority through brute violence and
its visible presence within the public sphere, the new control stems from
“a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom,” which
“prevails in advanced industrial civilization,” as “a token of technical
progress.”40 Notably, this kind of control has a distinctive relationship to
modern temporality. “The apparatus imposes its economic and political
requirements for defense and expansion on labor time and free time on
the material and intellectual culture,” he wrote.41
For Marcuse (and to a different degree, the Adorno and Max
Horkheimer of The Dialectic of Enlightenment) the rational character
of irrationality in advanced industrial society was a partial function of
changed modes of techne. He argued that the “prevailing forms of social
INTRODUCTION
control are technological in a new sense in the contemporary period,”
EROS AND TECHNICS AND for “the technological controls appear to be the very embodiment of
CIVILIZATION Reason for the benefit of all social groups and interests—to such an
extent that all contradiction seems irrational and all counteraction
impossible.”42 Such remarks offer a useful, if highly debated, précis on
the issue of technological rationality in the postwar era.43 This is not 28
simply a matter of technology controlling the subject through physical
dominance—the dystopian vision of humanity enslaved to factory
production. It is, rather, an internalization of these principles at the
level of the unconscious. As in Eros and Civilization, Marcuse articulated
this process through the language of psychoanalysis: social control, as
he put it, has been “introjected.”44
From this perspective we cannot understand technology in the
1960s merely as the stuff of invention—its objects or engineering—nor
can we treat it as operating from the usual bases of political authority.
Technology—and for the purposes of this book, its historical relation-
ship to the art of this moment—is far more formidable because far more
subtle than that, increasingly organized around an administrative logic.
We could put it crudely: postwar technology is organization. Function-
ing at all levels of the social relation, it takes on its own psychic
character and “leads to change in attitude and consciousness of the
laborer.”45 Here, to follow Marcuse, “domination is transfigured into
administration.” This is the dialectic of progress and unfreedom.46
With chapter 3, “The Conquest of the Unhappy Consciousness:
Repressive Desublimation,” Marcuse described the effects of tech-
nological rationality on art and literature and its larger impact on
patterns of cultural behavior.47 Its relevance to our discussion of
LACMA’s program is unavoidable, for it uncovers an especially troubling
aspect of the art and technology relationship and implicitly suggests the
shortcomings of the “Two Cultures” mandate. Here Marcuse echoed
other Frankfurt School critiques in articulating how the objects of high
culture stand as figures of alienation under capital: how works of art, in
expressing some ideal world, represent the negation of social reality. But
in the One-Dimensional society, there occurs “a corresponding inte-
gration of culture with technological society” to the extent that the
“progress of technological rationality is liquidating the oppositional and
transcending elements in the ‘higher culture.’”48 “Higher culture was
always in contradiction with social reality,” Marcuse wrote,

and only a privileged minority enjoyed its blessings and represented its
ideals. The two antagonistic spheres of society have always coexisted. To-
day’s novel feature is the flattening out of the antagonism between cul-
ture and social reality through the obliteration of the oppositional,
 29 alien and transcendent elements of the higher culture by virtue of which
it constituted another dimension of reality.
. . . This liquidation of two-dimensional culture takes place not
through the denial and rejection of the cultural values but through their
wholesale incorporation into the established order, through their re-
production and display on a massive scale.49

Marcuse acknowledged that alienation is not the sole character-

istic of advanced art. Nevertheless, he insisted upon how historically art
had represented “the Great Refusal—the protest against that which is.”50
But technological rationality was now closing the gap between this
“great refusal” and social reality, the result of which is a newly emerging
form of aesthetics under the One-Dimensional Society. It is what he
called the aesthetics and language of “total domination” or “total
administration.” “Domination has its own aesthetics,” Marcuse wrote,

and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics. It is good that

almost everyone can now have the fine arts at his fingertips, by just
turning a knob on his set, or by just stepping into his drugstore. In this
diKusion, however, they become cogs in a culture-machine which
remakes their content.51

It is almost a little too suggestive that Marcuse drew upon the

example of the RAND Corporation to make his argument about art and
technology. In the corporation’s laying claims to the “neutrality” of its
technics, it effectively performs the new forms of social control in the
One-Dimensional Society.52 Speaking to the ways in which such cor-
porations absorb and therefore contain any possibilities of critique—
“soothe the guilty conscience of the management,” as Chamberlain’s
astute interlocutor put it—Marcuse argued that they

arrange games with death and disfiguration in which fun, team work,
and strategic planning important mix in rewarding social harmony.
INTRODUCTION
The RAND Corporation, which unites scholarship, research, the military,
EROS AND TECHNICS AND the climate and the good life, reports such games in a style of absolving
CIVILIZATION cuteness. . . . [I]n this picture, RAND has transfigured the world into an
interesting technological game, and one can relax—the “military
planners can gain valuable synthetic experience without risk.”53
One might as well add art to the list. In doing so, we take measure of 30
the powers of integration constitutive of the One-Dimensional Society.
We see it as a strategy of absorption and containment rather than the
neutral meeting of two cultures, the sciences and humanities on equal
footing.
These remarks shed a cold light on LACMA’s technology project
beyond the already unflattering one cast by the notion of its depen-
dence on corporate sponsorship. For if artists had believed they were
using technology as “tools” in the service of their production, here the
tables have been completely turned: art was now the tool of technology.
This would seem to support, on the one hand, the deeply technophobic
belief of an ultimately autonomous technology, a kind of “technics out
of control,” as Langdon Winner has importantly described it.54 On the
other hand, it represents the most perverse literalization of the phil-
osophical understanding of techne. If all art is a kind of technology, to
follow the Aristotelian formulation of the term, at this historical mo-
ment art has now been fully subsumed under the logic of techno-
logical rationality.
Perhaps the Art and Technology Program was most complicit with
such charges in its failure to acknowledge there was anything to be
complicit about. Helicopters for Vietnam or game theory for Cold War
maneuvering were all to be shrugged off as business as usual. The
language employed throughout the catalog further confirms such ten-
dencies: it suggests the peculiar “closing of the universe of discourse”
constitutive of a society in which radical negation has lost its force.
It is a language of total administration that corresponds seamlessly
with the exhibition’s aesthetics of domination.
For language under technological rationality is functionalized,
rendered pure instrumentality; and its repeated use is also internalized
as social behavior.55 Nowhere is this more evident than in the radical
abridgement of language in postwar corporate culture, as witnessed in
the proliferation of the acronym and the stunted syntax associated with
the rhetoric of advertising. For Marcuse this “syntax of abridgement
proclaims the reconciliation of opposites”; it is a “telescoping and
abridgement of discourse” that “cuts off development of meaning by
creating fixed images.”56 Abridgement of language, in short, signals
abridgment of thought. Grammar becomes technologized. So, for
example, the acronym NATO reads with all the finesse of corporate
 31 branding; and there is a concomitant projection, on the part of the
reader of NATO’s unity as an organization—a monolithic totality that
obscures both the complexity of its political motivations and the cultural
specificity of its historical actors. Flipping through Tuchman’s catalog is
to take stock of this phenomenon as it circles back upon the very
industries that give rise to it. IBM, JPL, TRW, GE, HP, RCA, ICN: all of
these corporations make their way into the Art and Technology pro-
gram, and were it not for the fine print, one would be hard pressed
to identify ICN as the “International Chemical and Nuclear Corporation”
or even “RAND” as standing for “Research and Development.” Nor were
the participants themselves absolved of this technocratic language. The
program is designated throughout the catalog as A&T; whereas Maurice
Tuchman—as if playing the role of corporate entity himself—was
consistently referred to as MT in its pages.
But what was to be done? With what other means might we parse
the relationship between art and technology in the present, or rethink
the ways in which art could productively pursue an understanding of
technology’s terms? The situation, as formulated by Marcuse, was to
varying degrees taken up and disseminated widely by the New Left. One
such preliminary response was Theodore Roszak’s 1968 The Making of
a Counter Culture, a book that grew out of his influential essay first
published in the Nation. His argument seems impossible without
Marcuse’s example, for in using the term the counterculture Roszak
described the emergence of a youth movement (notably, a white,
middle- to upper-class youth movement) as the product of postwar
affluence. The counterculture, he argued, emerged as a reaction to the
technocracy of Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex, and its very
ignorance of history and radical politics was, in some respects, its
strength. “Ironically, it is the American young,” Roszak began,

with their underdeveloped radical background . . . who seem to have

grasped most clearly the fact that, while such immediate emergencies as
the Vietnam war, racial injustice, and hard core poverty demand an ideal
INTRODUCTION
of old-style politiking, the paramount struggle of our day is against a
EROS AND TECHNICS AND far more formidable, because far less obvious opponent, to which I will
CIVILIZATION give the name “technocracy”—a social form more highly developed in
America than in any other society. . . .
 By the technocracy, I mean that social form in which an industrial 32
society reaches the peak of its organizational integration. It is the ideal
men usually have in mind when they speak of modernizing, updating,
rationalizing, planning. Drawing upon such unquestionable imperatives
as the demand for egciency, social security . . . the technocracy works to
knit together the anachronistic gaps and fissures of industrial society.57

Roszak could easily be taken to task for generalizing the degree to

which American youth in the 1960s lacked knowledge about the
“tradition of radical politics,” but his assimilation of Marcuse’s account
struck a deep chord nonetheless. With an argument that pays direct
tribute to the critical theorist (he would devote a chapter to both
Marcuse and Norman O. Brown), he presented his challenge to the
Counterculture. The challenge is how it might mount an affective front
against the technocracy and its larger appeals to scientific authority, for
“the technocracy easily eludes all traditional political categories. . . . [I]t
is characteristic of technocracy to render itself ideologically invisible.”58
The answer, so it would seem, could not simply take the form of polite
or even unruly protest. Opposition, if it were to have any impact at all,
had to recognize that radical negation had been progressively weakened
under technocracy’s regime. “Technocracy’s children,” as Roszak
described them, would need to find other means to challenge its seem-
ingly monolithic force.
To return to Marcuse briefly and finally: one such “mean” might
have revealed itself in the philosopher’s critique of the language and
aesthetics of total administration. We’ve noted that Marcuse’s analysis of
technocratic language cleaves well with the pretensions of LACMA’s
program; and it could just as easily apply to any of the countless other
art and technology collaborations that flourished in the era—E.A.T.,
GRAV, USCO. Writing on the rampant deployment of the acronym in the
1960s, Marcuse attended to the political nature of its grammar,
organized around the temporal logic of its condensation. “I have
alluded to the philosophy of grammar,” he argued, “in order to illumi-
nate the extent to which the linguistic abridgments indicate an
abridgment of thought which they in turn fortify and promote.”59 In
contracting or abridging language, rendering it one-dimensional, so to
speak, something else gets repressed in the technological picture: “The
suppression of this dimension and in the societal universe of operational
 33 rationality is a suppression of history and this is not an academic but a
political affair.”60

The functional language is a radically anti-historical language: opera-

tional rationality has little use for historical reason. . . . Remembrance
of the past may give rise to dangerous insights, and the established
society seems to be apprehensive of the subversive contents of memory.
Remembrance is a mode of dissociation from the given facts, a mode of
‘meditation’ which breaks, for short moments, the omnipresent power
of the given facts. Memory recalls the terror and the hope that passed.61

History, in other words, is obscured by the language of technological

rationality as is the subversive potential of memory along with it. And
memory has an especially important role to play in this scenario. For
memory—and perhaps more critically, its larger relationship to time—
might well counter the ideological force embedded in notions of
progress, technological reason, the fallout of which is the culture of
technocracy. Marcuse cited Adorno on the issue:

The spectre of man without memory . . . is more than an aspect of de-

cline—it is necessarily linked with the principle of progress in bourgeois
society. Economists and sociologists such as Werner Sombart and Max
Weber correlated the principle of tradition to feudal, and that of ra-
tionality to bourgeois, forms of society. This means no less than that the
advancing bourgeois society liquidates Memory, Time, Recollection, as
irrational leftovers of the past (my emphasis).62

To this statement, which opposes bourgeois notions of progress to

“Memory, Time, Recollection,” Marcuse added another layer of critique.
“If the progressing rationality of advanced industrial society tends to
liquidate, as an ‘irrational rest,’ the disturbing elements of Time and
Memory,” he wrote, “it also tends to liquidate the disturbing rationality
contained in this irrational rest.” 63
INTRODUCTION
Time, to follow both Marcuse and Adorno, is a disturbing “ir-
EROS AND TECHNICS AND rational rest.” It disturbs the seamless image of things. Its liquidation
CIVILIZATION reveals dialectically, something of its critical potential, its historical
charge; and so it follows that a provisional “recovery” of time—and the
analysis of how it models our understanding of history—grants insight
into advanced industrial society and the character of its technological 34
reason. As this book wants to demonstrate, this is especially true in the
relationship between art and technology in the 1960s. Time comes to
signify things that the literal image of technology cannot.

˚
Art and technology rarely works, I think, and it has to do with the
element of time, the surprise situation when timing becomes ab-
solutely the most important thing.

—Maurice Tuchman64

Time is political. Like technology, it is not neutral. “The metaphysics of

capital is a technology of time,” Jean-François Lyotard once observed,
an enormously resonant phrase in the context of the 1960s. It was
then—with Apollo 11, with Vietnam, with the historical emergence of
what has come to be known as the Information Age—that the contest
for time assumed a decidedly technological aspect. Whether liquidated
or celebrated, whether sped up or slowed down, time is understood
as an “irrational rest”—an “irrational leftover”—whose movements and
motion in the 1960s some sought endlessly to transform and control.
To track those movements through the work of art, its criticism, and re-
ception is the project of this book.