Word: hulten
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Dates: during 1968-1968
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...Machine," a ten-week-long exhibit of 220 works detailing the myriad ways in which artists have viewed the mysterious powers that inhabit cogs, gears and transistors, opened at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art.* The exhibit (see color pages) was put together by K. G. Pontus Hulten, 44, who as director of Stockholm's Moderna Museet staged one of the first kinetic art shows back...
...Hulten's exhibit has plenty of jiggling junk sculptures and blithely bleeping electronic marvels. But it also demonstrates that the artist's love-hate relationship with the machine has a long history. Oldest items on display are Leonardo's drawings for a helicopter and a parachute. Newest are nine works selected by Hulten from entries to a contest sponsored by Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), an organization that strives to bring artists and technologists together...
Museumgoers who want to see duplicates of Hulten's selections together with 114 other E.A.T. entries will find them across the river at the Brooklyn Museum in a show called "Some More Beginnings." The Brooklyn exhibit has three prizewinners, chosen by a jury of scientists. Interestingly, their three were among the nine Hulten had independently chosen. The jury's criterion: "That neither the artist nor the engineer alone could have achieved the results. Interaction must have preceded innovation...
...machines of the 1940s, and particularly the atom bomb, in Hulten's opinion, helped to turn artists away in disgust from technological subject matter. But by the late 1950s, the machine was beginning to attract a new following. This postwar generation could treat a machine with easy familiarity. Claes Oldenburg's liquidly drooping Giant Soft Fan is, among other things, a gently nostalgic evocation of times past -since, after all, air conditioning is more common nowadays. Jean Tinguely's joyous black Rotozaza, No. 1 tosses out colored balls and then sucks them back in again, a mystifying...
Says K. G. Pontus Hulten: "All of us have a rather unclear and not very dignified relation to technology. We put hope in the machine and then get frustrated when it deceives us. How the artist in particular looks upon technology is very important-because it is the freest, the most human way of looking at a nonhuman object. Perhaps the artist will show us the way to a better relationship...