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Article Excerpt
If recalled at all today in the context of the art world, ecology is often reduced to its affiliation with earthworks. Its broader associations have been written out of most later accounts of the 1960s and 1970s in favor of phenomenology, semiotics, and institutional critique. Circa 1970, ecology was linked with cybernetics and transformed into media ecology, providing a means for recasting the psychology of the self and how it communicates. Ecology became a model for both understanding and producing art, one which allowed for the notion of context to be reinvented, as postwar abstraction gave way to an exploration of the formats of the mass media. Ecology was inaugurated as a science during the nineteenth century with the work of the naturalist Ernst Haeckel and others. By the middle of the twentieth century in the United States, following the development of cybernetics and especially through the work of Gregory Bateson, ecological systems came to be understood not only as natural but also as social and technological. They were extended to include humanity with a particular focus on the problem of communication and communication media.
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The term "media ecology," based on the reception of Bateson's thought, emerged and was developed in the pages of the 1970s media-activist magazine Radical Software. An early issue contained an article defining media ecology as "the study of a medium of communication and its affect upon other media/society," but Bateson's definition of media ecology was far more radical. (1) He argued that when one thinks about mediation ecologically, there are no longer clear separations among technology, communication, affect, and sociability. Bateson's influence on media art has been largely overlooked. His writing and citations of his writing appeared through the run of Radical Software. The artist Dan Graham, who appeared briefly in Radical Software, also counts Bateson among his key influences. And years before Radical Software began publication, Bateson appeared on several panels with leading figures in the arts, from Frank Lloyd Wright and Marcel Duchamp to Meyer Schapiro, promoting an ecological understanding of art in consonance with many ideas of the self and its mediation that would only gain wider currency in the 1960s and 1970s. What emerges from Bateson's position in these conferences, becoming apparent in Radical Software and Graham's work, is a move away from the formalism associated with abstract art through a focus on communicative context. Bateson's media ecology puts on display the ways in which formats limit communication, exposing how the techno-social context of communication is as relevant as any content. In a similar way, in 1964 Marshall McLuhan announced that "the medium is the message." But if McLuhan takes technological formats to be "extensions of man," Bateson goes further. He gives up any notion of man, redefining the self as an expanded mental field in which the subject and its objects are no longer separable. For Bateson, "mind" is no longer bounded by the individual body, becoming a conjunction of self and world produced through communicative ecologies. (2)
Inside the System
In 1966, after his own early experiments with cinema and video, Andy Warhol said, "It took intelligent people years to appreciate the abstract impressionist [sic] school, and I suppose it's hard for intellectuals to think of me as Art. I'm a mass communicator." (3) There is a certain amount of retrospective irony in Warhol's statement, because it was precisely the opposition of Abstract Expressionism to mass communication that led to the movement's acceptance. Critics like Clement Green berg had drawn strict lines between high art and mass-produced art. (4) These boundaries were only reinforced in the postwar rhetoric in which the intersection of fine art and the mass media was taboo and communication was taken to be integrally linked to the evils of mass mediation. This interdiction was readily apparent in a conference on the topic of art and communication held in 1957, especially in the opening paper given by Schapiro. While Schapiro and others equated communication with instrumentalization, a new understanding of ecology was beginning to emerge in papers presented by Duchamp and Bateson. (5)
When the American federation of Arts (AFA) held its annual conference in Houston, April 3-6, 1957, it was expected that the usual four hundred or so people would attend. Instead, over fourteen hundred showed up to hear three days of talks by Schapiro, Duchamp, and Bateson along with Rudolph Arnheim, Stuart Davis, and others. (6) Although the conference was loosely billed as "an investigation of what the twentieth century has contributed to creative thought and expression," the hot topic discussed repeatedly throughout was the connection between communication and the arts. (7) The study of communication was an emerging discipline that had developed before World War II in sociology through an examination of the mass media as a means of propaganda. After the war a hard-science approach to communication had emerged at the Macy Conferences, where cybernetics was born. (8) Broadly, as the name coined by Norbert Wiener etymologically indicates, cybernetics was the study of homeostatic mechanisms governing systematic behavior. In cybernetics, communication meant the transmission of any content whatsoever allowing the maintenance of a discrete system, irrespective of material base or even the meaning of any particular content; thus formulated, it was a means to think about information and the efficiency of its transmission. While useful for the purposes of mathematical formalization, this move necessitated the violence of a double formalism. In the first place, it dealt with meaning only in general, as a process of coding and decoding. Second, it stripped context from meaning, proposing an ideal state of transmission divorced from any particular medium or act of mediation. Despite the host of practical applications the move yielded, it also made communication transcendental, divorcing it from its social, political, and historical contexts. After the founding of cybernetics and with the reception of Wiener's two best-selling books on the topic, communication became a buzzword, often used to promote a world in which more efficient information transmission would utopically transform everyday life. (9)
In the early and mid-1950ss, artists and critics in the Unites States were relatively indifferent to the emergence of communication studies. Those who addressed the role of communication and the arts were generally critical of information theory, especially as applied to the fine arts. (10) Schapiro's keynote paper, "The Place of Painting in Contemporary Culture," epitomized this position. "This term," he writes, referring to communication, "has become for many artists one of the most unpleasant in our language." (11) Schapiro explains why: "The theory and practice of communication today helps to build up a world of social relationships which is impersonal, calculated and controlled in its elements, aiming always at efficiency." He opposed the application of cybernetics to everyday life because he equated the cybernetic model of communication with the overrationalization and administration of the everyday. He believed that fine art--and Abstract Expressionist painting in particular--was the last bastion of personal communication in a world that had become ever more technologized. After World War II, the merger of art and technology in what he called the "arts of communication," the mass media he took to be theorized by communications theory, was designed to insure that the greatest amount of information would be delivered to the largest possible audience as efficiently as possible: the media embodied the debasement of art by cybernetics. In the drive toward maximum communicative efficiency, content was aimed at the lowest common denominator in order to reach as many people as possible; modernist difficulty and individual struggle were erased in favor of behaviorist passivity and group assent.
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Schapiro upheld painting against the arts of communication. He especially supported Abstract Expressionism, for two linked reasons. First, all paintings are inherently opposed to the mass media: they are the last, major hand-made objects in a culture that has begun to mass-produce everything. Second, Abstract Expressionism underscores this claim by emphasizing its hand-made quality, inasmuch as it brings the hand of the artist to the fore, leaving behind content for the very image of artistic craftsmanship inherent in each visible, painterly mark. Furthermore, in abandoning content, Abstract Expressionism produces, he said, a "high degree of non-communication (12)." Through complexity and hermeticism it jams the codes of efficiency. Mass communication, by contrast, opens onto mass control and so demagoguery or middle-brow values, alienation or stultification. Abstract Expressionism was "ultimately opposed to communication as it is now understood." (13) Each painting was unique. It...
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