Ars Ex Machina

...There is also a color organ, the Musiscope, played like a conventional piano, but producing intensely colored Abstract Expressionist compositions on a large screen...

...Certainly, it is committed to values other than the personal and expressive ones which previously informed painting and sculpture...

...For these artists, the new art must be a transmitter of energy rather than the purveyor of ideas and information...

...The scenes described above, however, do in fact represent the state of mechanized art as it now exists...

...The head is curiously cheery, its lips parted in a smile, as a black drill bores down into the skull...

...But the actual productions of Balla or Boccioni were much more akin to traditional painting and sculpture than to today's electronically programmed art...

...The armatures are strung with thin metal discs that spin readily when touched...

...Considering the impact which technology has been making upon society over past decades, it is clearly not a case in which art was in the vanguard of imposing social changes...

...Several of these recent pieces, in fact, appear to have been beneficially influenced by the sculpture of the late David Smith—an influence considerably at variance with the subversive intentions of the machines themselves...

...Piene, a young German artist, is representative of those practitioners for whom the traditional forms of art are as outmoded as the horse and buggy...

...Schoffer was somewhat predictable about current directions in art...

...One doesn't ride a horse to Chicago,' he commented in a mixture of French and English, "one takes a plane...

...Nevertheless, in Paris, his CYSP had walked through the streets...

...The preparations for one of these events remind one, if not of a rocket launching, at least of a busy machine shop...

...His constructions, many of which are electronically operated, are invariably models of formal clarity and precision...

...Even the waltzing robot, CYSP I, was engineered to respond to human commands as well as to material objects in its environment...

...In turning off one or two of the machines, he seemed a bit apologetic, explaining that the machines had been running continuously and that they tended to overheat...

...This anti-traditional attitude is also characteristic of some of Tinguely's earlier devices —machines which were intended to make the artist obsolete by producing abstract paintings and drawings of their own...

...The whirring and the clicks continue as one machine after another starts up, shuts off, lapses into darkness Scene II: A tall, steel, skeletal construction, a maze of right angles, stands on a round pedestal...

...On a number of his pieces, notably the robot and the Musiscope, he has had the assistance of professional engineers...

...His Musiscope, he noted, required a performer...

...There wasn't enough room, Schoffer noted sadly, and with a great many people milling around, there could be difficulties...

...For the present exhibition, Tinguely had planned a special machine, the Rotozaza, which would play catch with the audience, accepting and throwing back rubber balls...

...There is an ominous whirring and a click: The top half of the flower lights up, then the bottom half, then both halves blink out...

...Without an operator, the machine was silent...

...His light demonstrations have been produced in Amsterdam and Dusseldorf, and he has devised a special lighting system for the City Opera House in Bonn...

...What is unusual is not that it has appeared in force, but that it has appeared so belatedly...

...Yet Schoffer's work still derives from geometric and constructivist disciplines, and a good many of Tinguely's new pieces have a formal awareness that goes beyond kinetic function...

...The right angle is the sine qua non of his constructive discipline...

...The Futurists, to be sure, with their dictum that a racing car was more beautiful than the Winged Victory, had laid the ground-work for current practice...

...When asked about his engineering background, Piene explained, rather patiently, that his mechanical devices required no particular engineering skills...

...Currently, he is at work on a play, The Light Auction, to be produced in Frankfurt early next spring...

...Frankenstein's high-voltage laboratory might be the more appropriate image...

...for example, a large mirrored tent...

...This discrepancy between theory and practice in technological art is only one of the ironies connected with its current prominence...

...With a click, the construction begins to shudder and vibrate...

...Unfortunately, its activities had to be curtailed in the current exhibition...

...It is not simply a question of sky-rocketing electric bills for special wiring and the services of electricians, but that the machines are prone to bugs and breakdowns...

...The Electric Rose, the tall bristling piece, had developed a disconcerting grumble somewhere in its interior...

...The machine rotates smoothly on its axis...

...The movement is as gentle as the rocking of a cradle...

...Although the third scene might seem like a home-made reconstruction of some cherished episode from The Perils of Pauline, it, too, is another example of the mechanized art that is now moving into the galleries and museums...

...These scenes are not from an electronic version of Dante's circles of Hell...

...The effect of the kinetic and optical devices included in the present exhibition is thoroughly stunning...

...Then, too, the mobility of these devices is apt to raise the touchy issue of a museum's liability insurance in case of accidents involving spectators...

...So, the contemporary artist must work with the technological instruments and advantages which today's society provides...

...Schoffer, Hungarian-born and Parisian- based, is, by far, the most accomplished artist working at machine- art...

...A further irony is that in being freed of its conventional bonds, the work of mechanized art has become dependent upon its creator...

...Some operators were more proficient than others...

...Schoffer, for instance, maintains that "the work of art must be absolutely separated from the problem of form"—a chilling doctrine which relegates most contemporary art to the ash-heap...

...Meanwhile, the pretty girl's arms and legs are being attacked by saws and cleavers, set in motion by an ingenious train of black gears...

...Museums of the future, no doubt, will construct special arenas for mechanized happenings...

...Another globe, bristling with light bulbs and looking rather like an onion flower, stands erect on a rigid metal stalk...

...Art has, traditionally, been considered a threat to society, but the wariness with which museum directors are forced to treat mechanized art gives new currency to the idea...

...Theoretically, technological art is anti-formal...

...A member of "Zero,' a group of similarly inclined artists formed in Germany during the late '50s, Piene now has an international reputation...

...Lux II, a three dimensional kaleidoscope, which projects broken forms and brilliant colors into an infinity of mirrors...

...Overhead, there are bursts of smoky nebulae that expand outward and mysteriously flicker away...

...Globules of white light wriggle along the ceiling like luminous paramecia...

...They are heir to all the ills of ordinary machines...

...Schoffer, who has the appearance of a shrewd, greying farmer, took some pains to communicate the fact that his machines were not anti-human...

...In the old days, art was content to edify, delight, and occasionally reform its audience...

...Scene in: A nude white mannequin is held fast in the grip of a diabolical black machine...

...If the forms of this art become more complex and elaborate—as, presumably, they might—the old-fashioned museum of the present, built to shelter quiescent forms like painting and sculpture, will no longer be capable of housing an artist's production, much less of staging a retrospective showing of his oeuvre...

...It would be difficult to conceive of any sizable exhibition of these devices that would not require the presence of the artist (and several electricians) in order to insure that the art was assembled and maintained in proper working order...

...There is...

...In the semi-gloom, one perceives a few unlikely shapes: a sphere hanging from the ceiling, a large globe resting on the floor, a black drum-shaped object situated on the floor beneath a glass-topped table...

...Suddenly, it takes off along the polished floor, circling and revolving around the room, its baubles gyrating with beams of reflected light: A robot is performing an awesome and iridescent dance...

...The project had to be abandoned, however, since any unpredictable behavior on the part of the machine might result in injury to one of the spectators...

...And there was still room, apparently, in this cold cybernetic world for individual talent...

...certain musicians of his acquaintance, Schoffer confided, were much more adept at creating beautiful compositions with his machine than he was...

...The art of the future, it appears, may not only move us, but maim, us as well...

...The sphere hanging from the ceiling sends out a fretted light...

...The first scene was from a performance of Otto Piene's Light Ballet, produced last month at the Howard Wise Gallery...

...Or trying to move into the museums, for few developments in art, however radical in theory, seem as likely to tax the conventional facilities of a museum as these new machines do in practice...

...Other flecks rush headlong down the length of a wall, gathering in the dark corners before moving on...

...The second and third scenes took place at the Jewish Museum, where a joint exhibition of the cybernetic sculptures of Nicolas Schoffer and the "meta-matic' machines of Jean Tinguely is currently in progress...

...Many of these machines are like fragile children, requiring surveillance...

...For the most part, they were assembled from standard electrical components, although the filaments in some of the bulbs he uses have had to be specially devised...

...Nor are they mock-ups of a command center for a space project...