Valences of the System: Art in an Era of Control, 1966-1985

Abstract

This dissertation examines how and why artists and critics between 1966 and 1985 turned to postwar theories of cybernetics, information, and systems. These intersecting discourses stressed relations over objects, albeit at the cost of abstraction and instrumentality. Closely associated with corporate, governmental, and military power, systems discourses were widely criticized as a form of metaphysical, economic and political control. I argue that the artistic turn to systems comprised a multi-valenced set of responses to emergent societies of control that bridged the hemispheric divisions of the Cold War.

After reconstructing the scope of systems thinking in the introduction, I draw out its cultural consequences by focusing on four key figures. In Chicago and New York City, the art historian and critic Jack Burnham’s “systems esthetics” foregrounded how material and energetic exchanges destabilize the informational and discursive boundaries of artistic media and advanced technologies. From Buenos Aires, the critic and curator Jorge Glusberg elaborated an "arte de sistemas" that reckoned with the uneven dynamics of the world-system, principally its political environment and cultural hierarchies. Based in London, the artist Stephen Willats introduced cybernetic modes of governance in his participatory projects that sought to examine and alter social relations. In East Berlin, the artist Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt’s typewritten practice constitutes a concrete conceptualism that mediated cybernetic and systemic concepts from the East and West, placing particular stress on the material elements of communication.

This project expands scholarship on postwar art, especially conceptualism, by establishing the extent and variation of systems thinking in artistic practice under varied socio-political conditions. In keeping with its systems of study, this dissertation develops a method that draws on systems theories, as well as cultural studies, critical philosophy, and media theory. This approach provides a novel means for addressing the promises and pitfalls of systems thinking, not only as a framework for artistic practice, but also as a mode of critique in the postwar era.