Blinking Brains, Corporate Spectacle, and the Atom Man
Visual Aspects of Science at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (1962)
Flora Lysen
âHow much more pleasant are conversations [about science] when they are about beauty in science…â [1]
In 2011, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in the Netherlands presented the Beauty in Science (Schoonheid in de Wetenschap) exhibition, a show that aimed to foster interest in the natural sciences among the general public. It did so not by focusing on the economic or social effects of scientific research, but by emphasizing the âpleasingâ aesthetic experience of looking at scientific images. Impressive pictures of cells, fungi, fetuses, and stars were framed as wonderful (by-)products of scientific missions, and as attractive signboards for an important quest to âmake the invisible visible.â[2] Staged within the walls of the white cube, over seven hundred scientific images thus became purged from their individual histories of production and argumentation, and arranged to foreground the formal qualities of the visualizations, some of which could be viewed from lounge chairs, supplemented with ambient sound. The framework of the art museum was understood as the perfect context for the intended discursive emphasis on formal aesthetics. As such, Beauty in Science reminds us that, still today, art museums have not ceased to play a role in the presentation of a particular âimage of scienceâ to large audiences, and that the discursive space of the art museum offers opportunities for constructing, subverting, advertising, and obscuring narratives of science. While the exhibiting of images of science within the walls of art museums has a long history, this article turns to one particular historical exhibit in the Stedelijk Museum to offer insights in the way such presentations are embedded within historically situated ideas about the public understanding of science, exhibition strategies, and the role of art vis-Ă -vis science.
 Will Burtinâs exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum
Half a century before Beauty in Science, in September 1962, the modern wing of the Stedelijk Museum opened its doors to an exhibition of microscopic and macroscopic perspectives entitled Visuele Aspekten van de Wetenschap (Visual Aspects of Science, September 21âOctober 15,1962). Gigantic prints of colorful cell membranes, swirling chromosomes, and hovering uranium atoms were plastered on exhibition walls; pedestals showed minute plastic copies of large scientific models and, at the center of the show, a colossal, illuminated sculpture of a human brain towered over the visitors (fig 1).
Fig. 1. Visual Aspects of Science, 1962, Jaap dâOliveira. Published in Remington, R. Roger, and Robert S.P. Fripp. Design and Science: The Life and Work of Will Burtin. Hampshire: Lund Humphries, 2007, 95. Photographer unknown.
This was science in its most spectacular form: bright, translucent, plastic, three-dimensional, shiny, and blinking. Entirely sponsored by Upjohn, a pharmaceutical company, this expensive traveling exhibition (which continued from Amsterdam to the Royal Academy of Arts in London) showcased the work of German-born American designer Will Burtin, who had been invited by Stedelijk director Willem Sandberg on account of his fame in designing commercial trade shows, world fair exhibitions, and product packaging for American companies such as Kodak, IBM, Upjohn, and Union Carbide.[3] Enclosed by the transparent glass walls of the modern wing of the museum, Visual Aspects of Science focused specifically on the scientific aspects underlying the products of various companies, such as switchboard mechanisms in machines, metabolic processes in the body, and atomic reactions of chemical compounds. As such, the exhibition did not directly promote particular productsâcorporate logos were scarceâbut presented several American companies as experts of a new and important practice of âvisual communication of science,â making complex scientific knowledge comprehensible to lay audiences. Alternating between the miniature and the gigantic, the exhibition aimed to reveal new vistas opened up by the latest visual technologies. Blow-ups of electron micrographs, installation shots of large models, photographs of scale models, time-lapse images of moving installations, and photo negatives of plastic molecular models invited the eye of the visitor to mimic the work of a telescope, microscope, or camera (fig. 2).
Fig. 2. Visual Aspects of Science, 1962, Stedelijk Museum Beeldarchief, Jaap dâOliveira. Photographer unknown.
What was once minute (cells, molecules) now became stretched to gigantic proportions; what once was scaled up (the scientific models) became miniaturized under a glass cover. The exhibition catalog, embossed with an atomic nucleus on the cover, repeated these alternating dimensions of scale. âThe microcosm and the macrocosm, the atom and the universeâ now constituted a new adventure for âthe true artists of this century.â[4]Â (fig. 3)
As an exhibition that showcased promotional strategiesâa displayed displayâit is difficult to fully reconstruct Visual Aspects of Science today. Only a handful of photographs and a few snapshots of cardboard exhibition models survive in archives in Amsterdam and Rochester, New York.[5] This article, by examining and contextualizing Burtinâs exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum for the first time, aims to understand the development of a visual language of science that had come to prominence in the 1950s; a development that was praised in design journals and exhibition catalogs, and advanced as the unique contribution of art to an age of rapid scientific development. Artists, on this account, were viewed as important âintermediariesâ between science and society, and design itself was presented as a powerful visual technology, as a tool that could help to elucidate new technological views. Within the context of the Cold Warâs space and arms races, this bright new design language formed a true âmythologyâ of science and technology in the Barthesian sense: it presented technological advances as natural developments and communicated a spirit of scientific progress, affluence, and the promise of an ever-brighter future.[6] A closer look at Visual Aspects of Science demonstrates the importance of extending exhibition histories beyond disciplinary boundaries, a turn that exhibition historian Bruce Altshuler has advocated, connecting the mythologies of art exhibitions with those developed in other fields, âfrom trade fairs⊠to ethnographic, historical, and scientific exhibitions.â[7]
Fig. 3. Visual Aspects of Science, 1962, Stedelijk Museum Beeldarchief, Jaap dâOliveira. Photographer unknown.
The second aim of this article, by examining a forgotten exhibition of the Stedelijk Museumâs past, is to take up Altshulerâs challenge âto use the existing canon of exhibition history as a âdynamic construct,â as a âspringboard for further conversation and inquiry.ââ[8] Therefore, I intend to turn the forgotten exhibition, Visual Aspects of Science, into a prism, to shed new light on more canonical exhibitions at the Stedelijk and argue that a more careful look at the presence and status of science and technology can alter the interpretation of famous Stedelijk exhibitions in the same period, such as Dylaby (1960) and Bewogen Beweging (1961). The article begins by outlining Sandbergâs discursive approach to questions of science and technology, to understand his invitation to Burtin and the particular embedding of this mythology of science in the Stedelijk Museum. Sandbergâs curatorial preferences effected the reception of Burtinâs work, similar to the way that other Stedelijk exhibitions, such as Bewogen Beweging and Dylaby, were understood within a discursive frame that emphasized ârenewal,â play, and the mediating power of art in society. In turn, I discuss several moments at which Burtinâs design language of science communication found resistance in artistsâ circles and amongst design critics. Such critical voices against the optimistic mythology of science and technology embodied by Burtinâs designs had already been part of exhibitions such as Bewogen Beweging and Dylaby, I argue, but were obscured by Sandbergâs curatorial emphasis on playfulness and experiment. Thus, a closer look at Burtinâs 1962 exhibition, Visual Aspects of Science, offers new insights into the way discourses on technological progress, anxieties of modernization, and visions of prosperity could be negotiated and transformed through institutional discourse and exhibition practices.
Art as technology in the ever-growing scientific universe
In 1959, Willem Sandberg designed and published a colorful pamphlet in which he positioned contemporary art within the forward-looking, science- and technology-driven spirit of the Space Age. NU, midden in de XXe eeuw (NOW, in the center of the 20th century) called for an art that would fit the âcentury of the car, aeroplane, Sputnik, TVâ; an art that opened our eyes, stimulated new thinking. We had become spoiled with âthe soothing light of Vermeer,â Sandberg said, âwhile at this very moment, the atom is splitting.â[9] Yet, at the same time, this was also an era marked with âtension and worry,â as Sandberg pronounced. âWill the latest scientific discoveries bring terror or well-being?â[10] Sandbergâs ambivalence resonated with a more general, conflicted attitude towards technological developments in the Netherlands in the late 1950s and early 1960s. On the one hand, newspapers, magazines, films, and television programs offered visions of playfulness, experiment, infinite leisure time, and increasing wealth, yet on the other, they also echoed and shaped a fear of the mechanization and automation of society, boundless consumerism, and nuclear annihilation.[11] American culture, in particular, broadcasted visions of the future based on technological developments; visions that were both embraced and critiqued in the Dutch cultural landscape.[12] Sandberg, in his pamphlet, ultimately confided in the capacity of art and design to contribute to a positive thrust forward; they could provide alternative visions that would âjoin the future,â not âwork against the current course of events.â[13] On this account, art and design had to live up to the speedy progression of an inevitably technological society, a narrative that was part of what historian James Kennedy has characterized as a broader âideology of renewalâ (vernieuwingsideologie) and a rhetoric of âbeing of its timeâ (bij de tijd zijn) in the Netherlands of the 1950s.[14] Moreover, Sandbergâs ideas show a positioning of art and design as a mediating force between society and science. His exhibition policies of the early 1960s must thus be understood within this rhetorical framework of an art that was necessary for a new, uncertain technological age: art and design that was positioned as a bridging, translational, reconciling power.
Two years after NU, the Visual Aspects of Science exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum reverberated the promissory tone of Sandbergâs pamphlet. Burtin, a German Ă©migrĂ© based in New York, had been influenced by the New Bauhaus in Chicago, which brought together the ideas of European design Ă©migrĂ©s such as Herbert Bayer, LĂĄszlĂł Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Matter, and György Kepes. [15] In textbooks, catalogs, exhibitions, and conferences, these designers shared a wish to develop an art invested in the newest science and technology, to âintegrateâ art and technology with intellectual and emotional life, and to elevate art to the level of scientific analysis.[16] Burtin followed the New Bauhaus discourse of design as a âtoolâ that couldâwith its strategies of juxtaposition, overlays, charts, coloring, and highlightsâtranslate and visualize common patterns of the micro- and macrocosm. âGraphic presentation now provides the visual tools for making coherent a world of steadily enlarging and refining dimensions,â Burtin claimed. It plays an âimportant role in extending human vision by demonstrating a new reality to which the uninitiated as yet have no key.â[17] In the catalog of Visual Aspects of Science, several of Burtinâs corporate clients underlined this bridging aspect. According to the Director of Science communication at IBM, Burtinâs objects and graphs called âfor an increased sensitivity towards the nature and grandeur of new knowledge produced by a an ever-growing scientific universe.â[18] The reception of the exhibition followed this discourse on âintegratingâ disparate fields: Sandberg was quoted in the Dutch press describing the show âas a demonstration of the possibilities of cooperation between artists and scientists,â and Burtin was labeled an âinterpreterâ (tolk) of science, who explained difficult concepts to laymen by adding a dimension of imagination that scientists themselves were lacking. [19]
A new image of science: walking inside cells, brains, and insects
Will Burtinâs fame as an exhibition designer and Willem Sandbergâs decision to invite him to Amsterdam had been particularly sparked by Burtinâs remarkable advertising installation designed for a fair of the American Medical Association (AMA) in 1958. Before television commercials became widespread in the 1960s, American companies spent massive budgets on promotional exhibitions and displays. At the AMA fair, the installations of Salvador Dali and Burtin had spurred international headlines. Time magazine reported on the 100,000-dollar âattention-getterâ designed by Dali to advertise the new psychotropic drug Miltown: an eighteen-meter-long, walk-in sculpture in the shape of a caterpillar that was promoted as a âjourney into the soul.â[20]Â (fig. 4)
Fig. 4. Crisalida, Salvador Daliâs caterpillar installation for Miltown at the AMA meeting, 1959. Copyright 2008 Salvador Dali, Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation/Aritst Rights Society (ARS), New York. Published in Tone, Andrea. The Age of Anxiety: A History of Americaâs Turbulent Affair with Tranquilizers. Basic Books, 2008, 77.
Fig. 5. Will Burtinâs The Cell installation for Upjohn, AMA, 1959, Ezra Stoller. © Ezra Stoller/Esto.
Daliâs gigantic larval insect yielded international press coverage for the drug manufacturer, and was therefore âworth its weight in gold,â according to Time.[21] At the AMA convention, similar attention was drawn by the 75,000-dollar display of Burtinâs three-dimensional representation of a cell, another walk-in experience, designed for the pharmaceutical company Upjohn (fig. 5). An opening in the cellâs wall allowed visitors to enter the spectacular, illuminated half dome and inspect the filigree of translucent plastic elements, speckled with blue and red mitochondria and fat globules. By adding moving lights placed under a mirrored floor, Burtin intended to give the structure an âastral and abstract quality.â[22] The Cell aimed to affect, according to Burtin, ânot just a way of looking, but a way of experiencing. To know what it would feel like to be a cell⊠an emotional kind of contact.â[23] Besides persuading drug-prescribing doctors at the convention, successful commercial exhibitions such as these aimed for an advertorial snowball effect: photographs of Burtinâs cell circulated widely in the international press, and the model was used as a television set for the BBC. In 1960, a one-minute clip of a second Burtin modelâa giant human brainâaired on Dutch television, and NRC newspaper published an extensive article on the scientific sculpture.[24]
Mammoth insects and giant brains did more than merely promote new commercial products. In the United States after World War II, âthe public understanding of scienceâ was framed as top priority to nurture the ideal of a well-informed public in a democratic, science-driven society. [25] Lay perceptions of science, in the view of many scholars and government officials, were seen as predominantly flawed and wrongfully distrustful of science. âThe public understanding of scienceâ was thus conceived as a topical âproblemâ that could be tackled with the proper science communication.[26] As historian Bruce Lewenstein points out, in the United States during the 1950s, the term âpublic understanding of scienceâ de facto meant the âpublic appreciation for the benefits that science provides to societyâ: advocates of popular science were advocates of a society lead by scientific discoveries and technological inventions. [27] Moving away from merely promoting new commercial gadgets and technological marvel, this new public communication of science in the 1950s aimed to focus on âbasic scienceââa topic that was conceived as a deeper, more genuine level of engagement with science and technology.[28] Burtinâs advertising installations helped corporations to associate themselves with this important program of educating basic science by emphasizing the scientific foundation of commercial product development, not its gadgetry. Writing in the international design journal Graphic Design in 1960, Burtin explained, âsuch a method was estimated to have a higher value than direct product promotion since it would relate a more lasting impression of quality with the companyâs research and production program as a whole.â[29]
Corporations, as advocates of the public understanding of basic science, were thus part and parcel of developing a new, impressive âimage of scienceâ in the public sphere. As such, Burtinâs practice of scientific-commercial displays should be understood as part of a wider development in the communication of science in the 1950s, which moved from the modest, colored ball-and-spoke models produced in laboratories, towards massive mediagenic sculptures placed in public squares and broadcasted on television, epitomized by the giant Atomium at the Brussels World Fair in 1958. Attractive science models constituted what historian Edward Yoxen has called a âtelevisual languageâ for scientific research, which aided the mobilization of public support for research funding.[30] In the Netherlands, before Visual Aspects of Science opened at the Stedelijk Museum, spectacular science models had already been on view at the large Eâ55 fair (Nationale Energie Manifestatie 1955) in Rotterdam, for which artist Constant Nieuwenhuijs had designed a giant logo, an installation of colossal abstract orbs, circles, and triangles of metal that symbolized âthe universe, science and productivity.â[31]Â (fig. 6)
Fig. 6. Fair logo for Eâ55 Rotterdam, 1955, Constant Nieuwenhuijs. Published in Winter, Peter de. Ahoyâ, E55, Floriade, C70: Evenementen in Rotterdam. Rotterdam: Uitgeverij 010, 1988. Photographer unknown.
Similarly, at the exhibition Het Atoom (1957), which promoted nuclear energy in the Netherlands, visitors could enter the show by walking through a mammoth atom model, created by designer Wim Crouwel (fig. 7).[32]Â As science in its plastic, colorful, three-dimensional form was becoming increasingly omnipresent, there was a shift in the way this visual language of science was understood: not just as elucidating or embodying specific scientific discoveries, but as a general iconic language, a mythology for the important endeavors of science and technology.[33] As such, visual mythologies of science could also work as powerful instruments of Cold War cultural diplomacy. Burtin was one of the principal American designers for the traveling and corporate-sponsored shows of the United States Information Agency (USIA) that offered an image of America as a democratic nation, brimming with economic and technological progress.[34] Both the form of the displaysâabundant aluminum and plastic, for a âscientific feeling,â according to Burtinâand the content of these promotional exhibits sought to radiate an atmosphere of novelty, ingenuity, and wealth.[35] Visual Aspects of Science was part and parcel of this newly developed Cold War image of science, a visual discourse that transformed publications and design exhibitions into tools for promoting commercial companies, political positions, and the importance of science and technology for society.
Fig. 7. Walk-through entrance at Het Atoom, 1959, Wim Crouwel. Published in âHij betreedt het Atoom,â De Waarheid, June 29, 1957, 5. Photographer unknown.
Joking about machines
How was this new âimage of scienceâ received at the Stedelijk museum, and how did Will Burtinâs mythology of science relate to Willem Sandbergâs wider program of exhibitions? In his 1959 pamphlet, NU, Sandberg had argued that art could particularly take up its intermediating role between society and contemporary technological, social, and economic developments when the art museum functioned as a space of playful experiment and encounter. In this sense, particularly the now-famous Stedelijk exhibitions Bewogen beweging (Art in Motion, 1961) and Dylaby (Dynamic Labyrinth, 1962), with their emphasis on immersive and interactive elements, have come to represent the epitome of Sandbergâs directorship.[36] Both exhibitions have become established as milestones in the history of experimental exhibition-making; they have been canonized as the first shows that turned a museum into a participatory, playful environment for new engagements with a more diverse group of visitors. Dylaby had opened just one month prior to Visual Aspects of Science, and invited the visitor into a pitch-dark room, a shooting gallery, a room turned upside down, and a space filled with air blowers and balloons. One commentator described Dylaby as âone large dynamic thing, a chain reaction of poetic images materialized in three dimensions; not something to look at, but something to go into, to be a part of.â[37]
In the catalog, Sandberg himself portrayed the exhibition as one in which âthe visitor does not regard the objects from the outside/but is continually situated in the middle of things/becomes part of the whole.â[38] It was this similarly immersive and three-dimensional aspect of Burtinâs designs that appealed to Sandberg, who had particularly hoped that Burtinâs big blue walk-in cell could be shipped to the Netherlands.[39] Burtin himself had always underlined aspects of emotional engagement and immersion in his writings on design, highlighting the âflowâ of a graphic print or an exhibition layout and the âintense and flexible learning processâ that three-dimensionality affected.[40] Sandberg valued Burtinâs focus on design as a mediating force for science but, more importantly, Visual Aspects of Science fitted with Sandbergâs curatorial vision of immersive and engaging exhibition strategies, and as such, aligned with Dylaby and Bewogen Beweging. Both envisioned the ideal visitor of their exhibitions as a curious, playful person, who wandered around following a personal course, but would finally arrive at an experience of being part of a purposeful whole.[41] By acknowledging this shared curatorial frame through the prism of Visual Aspects of Science, we can start to see how an emphasis on play and experiment by Sandberg could downplay, obscure, or take for granted particular mythologies of technology and science as they were materialized in exhibitions. The way that Visual Aspects of Science perpetuated a naturalized view of technological progress and a corporate image of science remained invisible, but also unseen was the way that Bewogen Beweging and Dylaby presented critical views of an increasingly techno-scientific culture.
Sandbergâs emphasis on playfulness and engagement dominated and shaped the reception of Dylaby and Bewogen Beweging. Even when various critics dismissed the exhibitions as Luna Parks or funfairs, they reinforced Sandbergâs narrative of the museum as a space of experimentation and play.[42] Few discussed the overt and covert critique of technological mechanization and automation that was visible in several of the works in both shows. Unmentioned in the reception of Dylaby was, for example, the implicit commentary on societyâs wastefulness through the junk aesthetics of Jean Tinguely, and overlooked were the mysterious, caged machines of Robert Rauschenbergâsinister assemblages that seemed to stage the inaccessibility of contemporary technology.[43] Possible critical views of the capitalist mythology of scientific progress were pacified in the catalog of the earlier exhibition, Bewogen Beweging, in which John R. Peirce, research director at the American company Bell Labs and advisor to the exhibition, pleaded for the complete inclusion of technology and machines in manâs world. In his short text, entitled âartist and machines,â he dismissed artists that represented machines as âstrangeâ or âmonstrousâ symbols, as figures with disjointed fragments. [44] Instead, he asked artists to âjoke about machines, incorporate machines in still life, or bend machines to your purposes, but do not fear, worship, hate or even mutilate machines. These are beneath manâs high estate.â[45] Although the catalog of Bewogen Beweging also presented a different voiceâcurator Pontus Hulten described Tinguelyâs work as âantimachinesâ that were an âattack on the established order,â and that questioned our relationship with technologyâin light of Sandbergâs pamphlet and his statements about the status of art, the overall reception of the exhibit was, one of âcheerful protest and modest fervor,â as one Dutch reviewer expressed.[46] The irony of the exhibit was turned into a mild joke; a joyful, harmless, nonsensical âRube Goldberg machine,â just as Peirce had asked for. Hence, the reception of both shows was part and parcel of Sandbergâs forward-looking ârenewalâ rhetoric and his emphasis on artâs playful mediation between scientific developments and society. As such, Sandbergâs discursive frame downplayed the subverted mythologies of techno-scientific progress that were also an important dimension of Dylaby and Bewogen Beweging. Missing, from Sandbergâs perspective, is the recognition of a critical approach to the all-pervasive popular and commercial iconography of science and technology, the subversion of the fun fair-look of blinking lights and moving machines, and the appropriation of interactive walk-in experiences.
Had the curators, visitors and journalists at the Stedelijk Museum overlooked and pacified the artistsâ ambiguous position towards technological progress? Reflecting on the engagement of Dutch artists and intellectuals with technological developments and consumer culture in the 1950s, historians Kees Schuyt and Ed Taverne suggest that artists, writers, and officials fell short in capturing the complex process of modernization in the Netherlands, and that it was a number of filmmakers, television producers and Provos who instead confronted âthe Dutch public with the changed reality of Dutch society.â[47] Exception to the rule was artist Constant Nieuwenhuijs, who noted that the conspicuous craze for âdirect actionââsuch as the exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museumâhad obscured the second industrial revolution based on automation that was taking place at the very same time.â[48] In Constantâs view, few artists had aptly responded to this development. Former revolutionaries, such as Salvador Dali and the surrealists, had retreated to the United States and surrendered to the âkitsch aestheticsâ of a consumer society, âapplied in shopping malls and advertisements.â âThe avant-garde had turned into an arriĂšre-garde of unworldly artists, fluttering like frightened birds in a ever-growing âtechnoidâ world.â[49] Constantâs remarks help us to see the germinate critique of a newly developed commercial image of affluence and technological progressâepitomized by Burtinâs plastic, magnified image of scienceâthat might have been overlooked at the Stedelijk Museum, but not in various other art and design circles. Critique of the Plexiglas worlds offered by trade exhibitions such as those of Burtin came, for example, from American experimental artists, who wished to distance themselves from the mythologies of a consumer culture.
Against the slickness of corporate spectacle
Commenting on the layout of Expo â58 in Brusselsâwhere science and technology was omnipresent in its colorful, expanded formâa reviewer in the prominent design journal Neue Grafik noted that the whole looked more like a commercial international trade fair, with a âbasic conception of the display as a spectacle, a piece of showmanship⊠the outstanding impression was of irrelevance.â[50] For various critics and artists, commercially sponsored exhibitions of spectacular, colorful plastic science models and photographs were quintessentially representations of the corporate language of âirrelevantâ advanced forms of capital, powerfully embodying mythologies of bourgeois consumer society. This critique of the plastic scientific universe offered by trade exhibitions was most powerfully voiced by American experimental artists, who wished to dissociate themselves from commercial display culture. Art historian Branden Joseph notes, for example, how artist Jonas Mekas wished to separate the ideas of expanded cinema from the âslicknessâ of world fair shows, such as those at the 1964 world fair (for which Burtin, too, had designed several displays).[51] Yet it was often hard to ward off the âproximity to corporate spectacleâ in experimental works, because similar to fair trade exhibitions, as Joseph notes, various artists employed multiscreen projections and created interactive, immersive experiences.[52] In a text for art journal Artforum, artist Robert Smithson outlined the difference between genuine artistic engagements with technological developments and shallow commercialism; to do so, he pitted the art of his own generation against an exhibition of Will Burtin.
Smithsonâs dismay was directed towards Burtinâs 1961 promotional exhibit The Atom in Action at the Union Carbide headquarters in New York. The exhibit, similar in its setup to Visual Aspects of Science, was comprised of a sixty-foot animated mural, a scale model of an atomic research reactor, and a huge, illuminated blue model of a uranium atom.
Fig. 9. The Atom in Action, exhibition for Union Carbide, 1961. Photo: Ezra Stoller. © Ezra Stoller/Esto.
Although, as Smithson noted, artists like Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Frank Stella, and Paul Thek worked on an equally monumental scale and with similar industrial materials and techniques (plastic, aluminum, steel, illumination), he emphasized that these artists were not at all âinterested in idealizing technology,â but aimed instead to create âvisible analogsâ for a bleak vision of the future; they shared an âawareness of the ultimate collapse of both mechanical and electrical technology.â[53] Instead, Burtinâs exhibition, Atomic Energy in Action, was a preeminent example of what Smithson defined as âentropy,â the all-encompassing sameness that the energy-consuming technological age was moving towards. Burtinâs exhibit offered, according to Smithson, âpurposeless âeducationalâ displaysâ; this was entropic inertness âfrozen into an array of plastic and neon, and enhanced by the sound of Muzak faintly playing in the background.â[54] To Smithson, Burtinâs work was exemplary of the endless production of pointless things, a world Judd had characterized as âpleasant, bland, and empty.â[55] Things like plastic with leather texture, sheet aluminum, the âcute and modern patterns inside jets and drugstores⊠the stuff just exists, not objectionably to many people, slightly agreeable to many.â[56] For Smithson, Burtinâs Union Carbide exhibition was the epitome of a worrisome visual language that idealized technological society. Similarly, and from the same experimental circles, came the critical comments of experimental filmmaker Ron Rice. In his 1963 film, The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man (a feature-length critique of the industrial world), Rice mockingly appropriated Burtinâs Atom in Action exhibition as a symbol of the nuclear, corporate age he aimed to criticize. The filmâs protagonist, a loony, Chaplin-like figure, the âAtom Man,â wanders around New Yorkâs shopping streets adorned with sci-fi looking public sculptures and Coca-Cola signs, and waddles into Burtinâs Atom in Action exhibit.
Curiously, he licks the plastic white balls of one of the exhibitâs atomic models. By approaching Burtinâs objects through touching and tasting, the Atom Man highlights the alien quality of the models, carnivalizing their covert consumer symbolism. He is as astounded by Burtinâs models as the laughing and bedazzled visitors we see on photographs of Visual Aspects of Science, Bewogen Beweging, and Dylaby, yet the Atom Manâs mad bewilderment is hyperbolicâa mocking gesture of denunciation. Burtinâs exhibitions, from the viewpoint of the American avant-garde in New York, documented the slickness, inertia, and commercialism of a proclaimed era of technological and scientific progress. The antipathy against Burtinâs work exhibited by Smithson and Rice is exemplary of antagonistic forces around 1960âa growing rift, which Sandberg could barely accommodate at the Stedelijk Museum, between a generation of experimental artists that decisively turned away from corporate and Cold War mythologies, and others who continued to work with the technological aspirations of the (New) Bauhaus.
Conclusion: remembering exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum
Situating the 1962 exhibition, Visual Aspects of Science, within the development of a new visual language of communication and a corporate-sponsored âimage of scienceâ in the 1950s gives a new perspective on the presence of mythologies of science and technologies in the Stedelijk Museum. Will Burtinâs science exhibitions presented a visual language of scientific progress that had already become familiar and omnipresent through trade shows, world fairs, and other public manifestations of science. When artists in the contemporaneous Stedelijk exhibitions, Dylaby and Bewogen Beweging, subverted these mythologies of science, such alternative views were not well recognized by reviewers. Instead, Willem Sandbergâs emphasis on experiment and play foregrounded the lighthearted, entertaining dimension of the exhibitions, and partly obscured an ambiguous attitude towards corporate spectacle and science mythologies. At the same time, however, a more antagonistic position was increasingly carved out by American experimental artists, who looked at Burtinâs exhibition designs as the epitome of corporate-sponsored advertisements of techno-scientific society. In the mid-1960s, Burtin himself would become astutely aware of the critique launched at corporate and commercial design, and attempted to formulate a response. Finding himself confronted by the âdevastating and demoralizing effects of⊠commercial communication on all walks of life and at all times,â he argued that the work of âcommercial artistsâ should not be confused with the âintellectual approach of the graphic designer,â who was a âspecialist of artâ equal in status to a âspecialist of science.â[57] Hence, with an intricate rebound movement, a carefully constructed image of science was called upon to the save the status of art in the age of mass production.
Turning back to the present day, the case of Visual Aspects of Science helps us to better understand how art museums provide a space for the coalescence of exhibition strategies and science mythologies to produce or efface politically charged views of the position of scienceâexemplified by the beautiful, âpleasantâ images in the recent Beauty of Science exhibition. Yet, here I must add that, for decades already, scholars and curators of science popularization have moved away from merely showing the polished products of science and technology, and have tried to engage the public with unfinished âscience-in-the-makingâ and scientific controversies, allowing visitors a position of probing the scientific developments on display.[58] Within this turn, artists and art projects are often attributed a special capacity for introducing considerations of authority, contingency, ethics, ambiguity, and fantasy into narratives and displays of science and technology (i.e., one year after Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen staged Beauty in Science, the museum asked artists and designers to reflect on recent controversies in biotechnology, spurred by a heated debate on the possible use by bioterrorists of bird flu research by Dutch scientists). [59] Especially important in the conclusion of this article is to ask what role exhibition histories could play in reconsidering and recontextualizing the position of science and technology in the museum. Here, I would like to follow museum historian Sharon MacDonald, who has argued that exhibitions engaging with science should take a new turn, by not just showing controversial and unfinished science, but by drawing attention to the way exhibitions themselves are vehicles for narratives of science. Hence, she invites exhibition experimentsââreflexive exhibitionsâ or âmeta-exhibitionsââthat allow visitors âto interpret aspects of the content and display strategies of exhibitions themselves,â and to become aware of how mythologies of science are produced within the walls of the (art) museum.[60] Remembering the forgotten Visual Aspects of Science exhibition by using it as a starting point for an exhibition on past and present mediations of science and technology would turn exhibition history itself into a powerful force to demonstrate both the work of science and the work of exhibitions.
Research for this essay was supported by a travel grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art. I would like to thank Dr. Kari Horowicz and Professor Roger Remington for their help in exploring the Will Burtin Papers at the RIT Graphic Design Archive in Rochester.Â
Flora Lysen is a PhD candidate at the Mediastudies department of the University of Amsterdam.
Notes
[1] Hans Galjaard. âSchoonheid in de Wetenschap,â February 12âJune 5, 2011, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, exhibition folder, 5 (https://www.boijmans.nl/upload/File/press/Brochure_Schoonheid_in_de_Wetenschap_NED.pdf). âHow much more pleasant are conversations [about science] when they are about beauty in science, instead of conversations about the search for a reality that is hard to grasp.â
[2] Hans Galjaard. âSchoonheid in de Wetenschap,â February 12âJune 5, 2011, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, exhibition folder, 5 (https://www.boijmans.nl/upload/File/press/Brochure_Schoonheid_in_de_Wetenschap_NED.pdf). Interview with Galjaard, on https://www.arttube.nl/nl/video/Boijmans/Schoonheid_Wetenschap.
[3] After moving to the United States and designing an exhibit for the 1939 World Fair, Burtin had grown into a well-known exhibition maker, graphic designer, and artistic director, working for publications such as Time, Life, The Architectural Forum, and Fortune. It is beyond the scope of this paper to trace the development of Burtinâs career. His work was first exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum in âU.S.A. Reclameâ (1949). For an extensive overview of Burtinâs life and work, see R. Roger Remington and Robert S. P. Fripp. Design and Science: The Life and Work of Will Burtin (Hampshire,: Lund Humphries, 2007).
[4] Garrard Macleod, âKunst en ontdekking,âVisuele Aspekten van de Wetenschap, exh. cat., 1962, 3.
[5] Design historians Frederique Huygen and Hugues Boekraad have noted the scarcity of scholarly research into the history of constructing exhibitions, fair displays, and trade stands, a gap that is partly due to a lack of archival sources. See Frederique Huygen and Hugues C. Boekraad, Wim Crouwel: mode en module (Rotterdam: Uitgeverij 010, 1997), 61. Sources on Visual Aspects of Science are available in the Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology and in the Stedelijk Museum Archive, Amsterdam.
[6] Roland Barthes , Mythologies (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957). Using Barthesâs 1950s term is appropriate in light of his own analysis of, for example, the traveling exhibition Family of Man, a trade exhibition of plastic, images of Einstein and plastic toys.
[7] Bruce Altshuler, âA Canon of exhibitions,â Manifesta Journal, 2010/2011, 12.
[8] Bruce Altshuler, âA Canon of exhibitions,â Manifesta Journal, 2010/2011, 12.
[9] Willem Sandberg, NU: midden in de XXe eeuw (Hilversum: Steendrukkerij de Jong, 1959), 10.
[10] Ibid.
[11] James Kennedy, Nieuw Babylon in aanbouw: Nederland in de jaren zestig (Amsterdam: Boom, 1997), 38.
[12] James Kennedy, âCultural Developments in the Dutch American Relationship,â in Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations: 1609-2009, ed. Giles Scott-Smith, Cornelis A. Van Minnen, Hans Krabbendam (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009), 931â48. Tity de Vries, Complexe consensus: Amerikaanse en Nederlandse intellectuelen in debat over politiek en cultuur 1945â1960 (Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, 1996), 163.
[13] Sandberg, NU, 10.
[14] Kennedy, Nieuw Babylon, 20.
[15] Gyorgy Kepesâs ideas were particularly influential to Burtin; his photographic work had already been exhibited by Willem Sandberg in a small display in 1950, and would later be published in Kepesâs influential textbook, The New Landscape in Art & Science (1956). It is beyond the scope of this paper to situate Burtinâs work within a wider network of art and science thinking in the 1950s, which should include the network around the Aspen Design Conferences (which Burtin chaired in 1955 and 1956) and parallel developments in the United Kingdom around the Festival of Britain and the Growth and Form exhibition by Richard Hamilton and the Independent Group in London (1951).
[16] Anne Collins Goodyear, âGyorgy Kepes, Billy KlĂŒver, and American Art of the 1960s: Defining Attitudes Toward Science and Technology,â Science in Context 17, no. 4 (2004): 617.
[17] Will Burtin and Lawrence Lessing, âInterrelations,â Graphis Magazine 22, vol. 4 (1948): 111. On the way art was proposed as a way of training culture for a new age of science, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, âEditorâs Introduction: I. Writing Modern Art and Science â An Overview; Science in Context 17, no. 04 (December 2004): 423â66.
[18] Bruce MacKenzie, âWetenschap en Visualisatie,â Visuele Aspekten van de Wetenschap, exh. cat., 1962, 18.
[19] âBrein-met-bollen in het Stedelijk Museum,â Leeuwarder Courant, September 28, 1962, 5.
[20] âMedicine: To Nirvana with Miltown,â Time, July 7, 1958, 60.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Will Burtin, âThe Challenge of Science to Visual Design,â Neue Grafik 7 (September 1960): 47.
[23] âSight and Sound, Interview with Will Burtin about a Brain Model in the Hall of Science, 1964 Worldâs Fair,â Worldâs Fair Special, RCA Color Central, August 20, 1964. Will Burtin Archive. Box 149, folder 124.4, Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology.
[24] âElektronisch brein te zien op jaarbijeenkomst van American Medical Association,â European Broadcasting Union, June 22, 1960, Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid, Document 116052. âDe âGeestâ Gevangen in 30.000 Lampjes,â De Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant, November 12, 1960, 7.
[25] Christopher Dornan, âThe âProblemâ of Science and the Media: A Few Seminal Texts in Their Context, 1956-1965,â Journal of Communication Inquiry 12, no. 2 (July 1, 1988): 61.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Bruce V. Lewenstein, âThe Meaning of âpublic Understanding of Scienceâ in the United States after World War II,â Public Understanding of Science 1, no. 1 (January 1, 1992): 46.
[28] Brigitte Schroeder-Gudehus and David Cloutier, âPopularizing Science and Technology during the Cold War: Brussels 1958,â in Fair Representations: Worldâs Fairs and the Modern World, ed. Robert W. Rydell, Nancy E. Gwinn, and James Burkhart Gilbert (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1994), 162.
[29] Burtin, âThe Challenge of Science to Visual Design,â 46.
[30] Edward Yoxen, âThe social impact of molecular biology,â dissertation University of Cambridge (1978), 237, quoted in Soraya De Chadarevian, âModels and the Making of Molecular Culture,â in Models: The Third Dimension of Science, ed. Soraya de de Chadarevian and Nick Hopwood (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 353.
[31] Peter de Winter, Ahoyâ, E55, Floriade, C70: evenementen in Rotterdam (Rotterdam: Uitgeverij 010, 1988), 55.
[32] Dick van Lente, âA Tamed Shrew? Images of the Atomic Age in Dutch Popular Culture, 1945â1957,â in The Culture of Energy (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 136â157.
[33] Design historian Michael Golec has described a parallel development in the use of images in science journals in the 1950s, a gradual change from âthe promotion and public use of scientific research to the promotion of science as such.â See Michael J. Golec, âScienceâs âNew Garbâ: Aesthetic and Cultural Implications of Redesign in a Cold War Context.â Design Issues 25, no. 2 (2009): 33.
[34] For the United States Information Agency (USIA) Burtin produced traveling exhibitions such as Plastics in America (1957) and Kalamazoo⊠and how it grew! (1959).
[35] Will Burtin, draft manuscript, Will Burtin Archive. Box 90.12, Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology. The Stedelijk Museum hosted several American exhibitions, such as Good Design (1950) Jackson Pollock (1958) and The Family of Man (1951), that were created by the United States State Department in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim. Jan van Adrichem, âAmerican Modern Art in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam,â in Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations: 1609â2009, ed. Giles Scott-Smith, Cornelis A. Van Minnen, Hans Krabbendam (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009), 1081â1093.
[36] Caroline Roodenburg-Schadd, Expressie en ordening: het verzamelbeleid van Willem Sandberg voor het Stedelijk Museum, 1945â1962 (Rotterdam: Stedelijk Museum/NAI Rotterdam, 2004), 660.
[37] Gerrit Kouwenaar, âPublic Is Co-Creator of Dylaby at the Stedelijk Museum,â Vrije Volk, September 8, 1962, reprinted in Bruce Altshuler, Biennials and Beyond: Exhibitions That Made Art History: 1962â2002. (London: Phaidon Press, 2013), 35.
[38] Willem Sandberg, Dylaby, dynamisch labyrinth stedelijk museum Amsterdam, exh. cat.,1962, 1.
[39] Willem Sandberg to Will Burtin, February 14, 1962. Map 4079, Stedelijk Museum Archive, Amsterdam.
[40] Will Burtin, âIntegration, the New Discipline in Design,â Graphis 27 (1949): 230â233. Will Burtin, âModelling the Frontiers of Knowledge,â Design 178 (1963).
[41] It is beyond the scope of this paper to compare different visions of exhibition visitors as they were developed in the 1950s. See Fred Turner, âThe Family of Man and the Politics of Attention in Cold War America,â Public Culture 24, no. 1 66 (January 1, 2012): 55â84.
[42] About the reception of both exhibitions, see Roodenburg-Schadd, Expressie and Ordening, 2004, 622, 666.
[43] Patrick Andersson, on the other hand, views Rauschenbergâs contribution as the least rebellious against technology, on account of his correspondence with scientists and his later work in Experiments in Art & Technology. See Patrick Lars Andersson, âEuro-Pop the Mechanical Bride Stripped Bare in Stockholm, Even,â PhD dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2001, 120 (https://hdl.handle.net/2429/12858).
[44] John R. Peirce, âartist and machines,â exh. cat., Bewogen Beweging, 1951, [page ?]
[45] Ibid., [page?].
[46] âVrolijk protest en⊠matige ernst.â âBewogen beweging in Stedelijk Museum,â De Tijd â Maasbode, March 11, 1961, 3. The review also mentions Sandbergâs âpamphlet of some time ago.â [Bewogen Beweging Hulten reference missing]
[47] Schuyt and Taverne, 396. In the case of Bewogen Beweging, for example, filmmaker Louis van Gasteren recorded Tinguelyâs machines as part of a cinematic response to what he saw as the âenslavementâ and âdominationâ of men by machine: âthese big electronic brains⊠terrifying, a nightmare that destroys human thought.â âLouis van Gasteren, opstandig cineast,â Zeeuwsch Dagblad, April 21, 1962, 5.
[48] Constant Nieuwenhuys, âNew Babylon â na tien jaren,â in Mark Wigley, Constantâs New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire. (Rotterdam: Witte de With/010 Publishers, 1998), 282.
[49] Constant Nieuwenhuys, âOpkomst en ondergang van de avant-garde,â Randstad 8, 1964, 25.
[50] Paul Lohse, âExpo 58. Observations on the problems connected with world exhibitionsââ Neue Grafik 2, (July 1959): 12.
[51] Branden W. Joseph, âPlastic Empathy: The Ghost of Robert Whitman,â Grey Room, no. 25 (October 1, 2006), 71.
[52] Ibid., 69.
[53] Robert Smithson, âEntropy and the New Monuments,â Artforum, June 1966, in Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flan (University of California Press, 1996), 12.
[54] Robert Smithson, citing Sol LeWitt, âEntropy and the New Monuments,â Artforum, June 1966, in Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flan (University of California Press, 1996), 12.
[55] Donald Judd, âIn the Galleries,â Arts Magazine 39: 3 (December 1964): 66.
[56] Ibid.
[57] Will Burtin, â2-d or 3-d?,â manuscript, 1964, Will Burtin Archive. Folder 92.5, Will Burtin Papers, RIT Libraries: Graphic Design Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology. The text responds to the publication of the âFirst Things Firstâ manifesto of twenty-two British artists in April 1964. At this point, Burtinâs ideas became much influenced by the techno-utopianism of Marshall McLuhan and Richard Buckminster Fuller, who both participated in two major design conferences Burtin organized at Southern Illinois University, in 1965 and 1967. Willem Sandberg also took part.
[58] Steven Shapin, âWhy the Public Ought to Understand Science-in-the-Making,â Public Understanding of Science, no. 1 (1992): 27â30. John Durant, âThe Challenge and Opportunity of Presenting âUnifinished Science,ââ in Creating Connections: Museums and the Public Understanding of Current Research, ed. David Chittenden (Rowman Altamira, 2004), 47â60.
[59] âMicro Impact â Design Column #1â, June 23âOct. 4, 2012, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (https://www.boijmans.nl/nl/348/kalender/calendaritem/1186/design-column-1-micro-impact). For considerations on the reflective capacities of art and its positions vis-Ă -vis science and technology, see Krzysztof Ziarek, The Force of Art (Stanford University Press, 2004). See also Nina Zschocke, âArt and Science Research Teams? Some Arguments in Favour of a Culture of Dissent,â in Artists-in-Labs Networking in the Margins, ed. Jill Scott (Vienna: Springer Verlag, 2010), 68â81..
[60] Sharon MacDonald, âExhibition Experiments: Publics, Politics and Scientific Controversy,â in Science Exhibitions: Curation and Design, ed. Anastasia Filippoupoliti (Edinburgh: Museums etc, 2010), 138â151. See also Reesa Greenberg, âArchival Remembering Exhibitions,â Journal of Curatorial Studies 1, no. 2 (June 13, 2012): 159â177; and Reesa Greenberg, ââRemembering Exhibitionsâ: From Point to Line to Web,â Tate Papers, no. 12 (2009) (https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/remembering-exhibitions-point-line-web).
[61] âBrein-met-bollen in het Stedelijk Museum,â Leeuwarder Courant, September 28, 1962, 5.
[62] âElektronisch brein te zien op jaarbijeenkomst van American Medical Association,â European Broadcasting Union, June 22, 1960, Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid, Document 116052. After touring the United States, Burtinâs brain travelled to the American Pavilion at Italia â61 in Turinâsponsored by USIA to show Americaâs pioneering position in scienceâand continued to Amsterdam (Stedelijk Museum), London (Royal College of Art), the New York World Fair of 1964, and was planned to appear in Moscow, Kiev, and Leningrad at the USIA-sponsored âMedicine U.S.A.â in 1962.
[63] Burtinâs correspondence with Wilder Penfield and Herbert Jasper, and his use of Penfieldâs anatomical vocabulary, support my supposition that Burtinâs design of the brain was chiefly based on a diagrammatic sketch that represented a âhypothetical outlineâ of the process of human memory, published in Penfield & Jasper, Epilepsy and the Functional Anatomy of the Human Brain (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1954), 145. On the speculative aspects of Penfieldâs cinematic memory theories, see Alison Winter, Memory: Fragments of a Modern History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 75â102.
Flora Lysen, âBlinking brains, corporate spectacle, and the Atom Man,â Stedelijk Studies Journal 2 (2015). DOI: 10.54533/StedStud.vol002.art06. This contribution is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license.