Blinking Brains, Corporate Spectacle, and the Atom Man

Mammoth insects and giant brains did more than merely promote new commercial products. In the United States after World War II, “the public understanding of science” 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. “The public understanding of science” was thus conceived as a topical “problem” 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 “public understanding of science” de facto meant the “public appreciation for the benefits that science provides to society”: 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 “basic science”—a topic that was conceived as a deeper, more genuine level of engagement with science and technology.[28] Burtin’s 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, “such 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 company’s research and production program as a whole.”[29]

Corporations, as advocates of the public understanding of basic science, were thus part and parcel of developing a new, impressive “image of science” in the public sphere. As such, Burtin’s 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 “televisual language” 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 E’55 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 “the universe, science and productivity.”[31] (fig. 6)

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] 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 displays—abundant aluminum and plastic, for a “scientific feeling,” according to Burtin—and 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.

Joking about machines

How was this new “image of science” received at the Stedelijk museum, and how did Will Burtin’s mythology of science relate to Willem Sandberg’s 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 Sandberg’s 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 “one 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.”[37]

In the catalog, Sandberg himself portrayed the exhibition as one in which “the visitor does not regard the objects from the outside/but is continually situated in the middle of things/becomes part of the whole.”[38] It was this similarly immersive and three-dimensional aspect of Burtin’s designs that appealed to Sandberg, who had particularly hoped that Burtin’s 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 “flow” of a graphic print or an exhibition layout and the “intense and flexible learning process” that three-dimensionality affected.[40] Sandberg valued Burtin’s focus on design as a mediating force for science but, more importantly, Visual Aspects of Science fitted with Sandberg’s 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.

Sandberg’s 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 Sandberg’s 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 society’s wastefulness through the junk aesthetics of Jean Tinguely, and overlooked were the mysterious, caged machines of Robert Rauschenberg—sinister 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 man’s world. In his short text, entitled “artist and machines,” he dismissed artists that represented machines as “strange” or “monstrous” symbols, as figures with disjointed fragments. [44] Instead, he asked artists to “joke 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 man’s high estate.”[45] Although the catalog of Bewogen Beweging also presented a different voice—curator Pontus Hulten described Tinguely’s work as “antimachines” that were an “attack on the established order,” and that questioned our relationship with technology—in light of Sandberg’s pamphlet and his statements about the status of art, the overall reception of the exhibit was, one of “cheerful protest and modest fervor,” as one Dutch reviewer expressed.[46] The irony of the exhibit was turned into a mild joke; a joyful, harmless, nonsensical “Rube Goldberg machine,” just as Peirce had asked for. Hence, the reception of both shows was part and parcel of Sandberg’s forward-looking “renewal” rhetoric and his emphasis on art’s playful mediation between scientific developments and society. As such, Sandberg’s discursive frame downplayed the subverted mythologies of techno-scientific progress that were also an important dimension of Dylaby and Bewogen Beweging. Missing, from Sandberg’s 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 artists’ 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 “the Dutch public with the changed reality of Dutch society.”[47] Exception to the rule was artist Constant Nieuwenhuijs, who noted that the conspicuous craze for “direct action”—such as the exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum—had obscured the second industrial revolution based on automation that was taking place at the very same time.”[48] In Constant’s 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 “kitsch aesthetics” of a consumer society, “applied in shopping malls and advertisements.” “The avant-garde had turned into an arrière-garde of unworldly artists, fluttering like frightened birds in a ever-growing “technoid” world.”[49] Constant’s remarks help us to see the germinate critique of a newly developed commercial image of affluence and technological progress—epitomized by Burtin’s plastic, magnified image of science—that 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 ’58 in Brussels—where science and technology was omnipresent in its colorful, expanded form—a reviewer in the prominent design journal Neue Grafik noted that the whole looked more like a commercial international trade fair, with a “basic conception of the display as a spectacle, a piece of showmanship… the outstanding impression was of irrelevance.”[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 “irrelevant” 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 “slickness” 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 “proximity to corporate spectacle” 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.

Smithson’s dismay was directed towards Burtin’s 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.

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 “interested in idealizing technology,” but aimed instead to create “visible analogs” for a bleak vision of the future; they shared an “awareness of the ultimate collapse of both mechanical and electrical technology.”[53] Instead, Burtin’s exhibition, Atomic Energy in Action, was a preeminent example of what Smithson defined as “entropy,” the all-encompassing sameness that the energy-consuming technological age was moving towards. Burtin’s exhibit offered, according to Smithson, “purposeless ‘educational’ displays”; this was entropic inertness “frozen into an array of plastic and neon, and enhanced by the sound of Muzak faintly playing in the background.”[54] To Smithson, Burtin’s work was exemplary of the endless production of pointless things, a world Judd had characterized as “pleasant, bland, and empty.”[55] Things like plastic with leather texture, sheet aluminum, the “cute and modern patterns inside jets and drugstores… the stuff just exists, not objectionably to many people, slightly agreeable to many.”[56] For Smithson, Burtin’s 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 Burtin’s Atom in Action exhibition as a symbol of the nuclear, corporate age he aimed to criticize. The film’s protagonist, a loony, Chaplin-like figure, the “Atom Man,” wanders around New York’s shopping streets adorned with sci-fi looking public sculptures and Coca-Cola signs, and waddles into Burtin’s Atom in Action exhibit.

Curiously, he licks the plastic white balls of one of the exhibit’s atomic models. By approaching Burtin’s 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 Burtin’s models as the laughing and bedazzled visitors we see on photographs of Visual Aspects of Science, Bewogen Beweging, and Dylaby, yet the Atom Man’s mad bewilderment is hyperbolic—a mocking gesture of denunciation. Burtin’s 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 Burtin’s work exhibited by Smithson and Rice is exemplary of antagonistic forces around 1960—a 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 “image of science” in the 1950s gives a new perspective on the presence of mythologies of science and technologies in the Stedelijk Museum. Will Burtin’s 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 Sandberg’s 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 Burtin’s 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 “devastating and demoralizing effects of… commercial communication on all walks of life and at all times,” he argued that the work of “commercial artists” should not be confused with the “intellectual approach of the graphic designer,” who was a “specialist of art” equal in status to a “specialist of science.”[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 science—exemplified by the beautiful, “pleasant” 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 “science-in-the-making” 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 experiments—“reflexive exhibitions” or “meta-exhibitions”—that allow visitors “to interpret aspects of the content and display strategies of exhibitions themselves,” 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. 

Flora Lysen is a PhD candidate at the Mediastudies department of the University of Amsterdam.

Notes

[1] Hans Galjaard. “Schoonheid in de Wetenschap,” February 12–June 5, 2011, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, exhibition folder, 5 (https://www.boijmans.nl/upload/File/press/Brochure_Schoonheid_in_de_Wetenschap_NED.pdf). “How 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.”

[2] Hans Galjaard. “Schoonheid in de Wetenschap,” February 12–June 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 Burtin’s career. His work was first exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum in “U.S.A. Reclame” (1949). For an extensive overview of Burtin’s 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, “Kunst en ontdekking,”Visuele 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 Barthes’s 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, “A Canon of exhibitions,” Manifesta Journal, 2010/2011, 12.

[8] Bruce Altshuler, “A Canon of exhibitions,” 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, “Cultural Developments in the Dutch American Relationship,” in Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations: 1609-2009, ed. Giles Scott-Smith, Cornelis A. Van Minnen, Hans Krabbendam (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009), 931–48. Tity de Vries, Complexe consensus: Amerikaanse en Nederlandse intellectuelen in debat over politiek en cultuur 1945–1960 (Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, 1996), 163.

[13] Sandberg, NU, 10.

[14] Kennedy, Nieuw Babylon, 20.

[15] Gyorgy Kepes’s 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 Kepes’s influential textbook, The New Landscape in Art & Science (1956). It is beyond the scope of this paper to situate Burtin’s 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, “Gyorgy Kepes, Billy Klüver, and American Art of the 1960s: Defining Attitudes Toward Science and Technology,” Science in Context 17, no. 4 (2004): 617.

[17] Will Burtin and Lawrence Lessing, “Interrelations,” 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, “Editor’s Introduction: I. Writing Modern Art and Science – An Overview; Science in Context 17, no. 04 (December 2004): 423–66.

[18] Bruce MacKenzie, “Wetenschap en Visualisatie,” Visuele Aspekten van de Wetenschap, exh. cat., 1962, 18.

[19] “Brein-met-bollen in het Stedelijk Museum,” Leeuwarder Courant, September 28, 1962, 5.

[20] “Medicine: To Nirvana with Miltown,” Time, July 7, 1958, 60.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Will Burtin, “The Challenge of Science to Visual Design,” Neue Grafik 7 (September 1960): 47.

[23] “Sight and Sound, Interview with Will Burtin about a Brain Model in the Hall of Science, 1964 World’s Fair,” World’s 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] “Elektronisch brein te zien op jaarbijeenkomst van American Medical Association,” European Broadcasting Union, June 22, 1960, Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid, Document 116052. “De ‘Geest’ Gevangen in 30.000 Lampjes,” De Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant, November 12, 1960, 7.

[25] Christopher Dornan, “The ‘Problem’ of Science and the Media: A Few Seminal Texts in Their Context, 1956-1965,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 12, no. 2 (July 1, 1988): 61.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Bruce V. Lewenstein, “The Meaning of ‘public Understanding of Science’ in the United States after World War II,” Public Understanding of Science 1, no. 1 (January 1, 1992): 46.

[28] Brigitte Schroeder-Gudehus and David Cloutier, “Popularizing Science and Technology during the Cold War: Brussels 1958,” in Fair Representations: World’s Fairs and the Modern World, ed. Robert W. Rydell, Nancy E. Gwinn, and James Burkhart Gilbert (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1994), 162.

[29] Burtin, “The Challenge of Science to Visual Design,” 46.

[30] Edward Yoxen, “The social impact of molecular biology,” dissertation University of Cambridge (1978), 237, quoted in Soraya De Chadarevian, “Models and the Making of Molecular Culture,” 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, Ahoy’, E55, Floriade, C70: evenementen in Rotterdam (Rotterdam: Uitgeverij 010, 1988), 55.

[32] Dick van Lente, “A Tamed Shrew? Images of the Atomic Age in Dutch Popular Culture, 1945–1957,” in The Culture of Energy (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 136–157.

[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 “the promotion and public use of scientific research to the promotion of science as such.” See Michael J. Golec, “Science’s ‘New Garb’: Aesthetic and Cultural Implications of Redesign in a Cold War Context.” 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, “American Modern Art in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam,” in Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations: 1609–2009, ed. Giles Scott-Smith, Cornelis A. Van Minnen, Hans Krabbendam (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009), 1081–1093.

[36] Caroline Roodenburg-Schadd, Expressie en ordening: het verzamelbeleid van Willem Sandberg voor het Stedelijk Museum, 1945–1962 (Rotterdam: Stedelijk Museum/NAI Rotterdam, 2004), 660.

[37] Gerrit Kouwenaar, “Public Is Co-Creator of Dylaby at the Stedelijk Museum,” Vrije Volk, September 8, 1962, reprinted in Bruce Altshuler, Biennials and Beyond: Exhibitions That Made Art History: 1962–2002. (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, “Integration, the New Discipline in Design,” Graphis 27 (1949): 230–233. Will Burtin, “Modelling the Frontiers of Knowledge,” 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, “The Family of Man and the Politics of Attention in Cold War America,” Public Culture 24, no. 1 66 (January 1, 2012): 55–84.

[42] About the reception of both exhibitions, see Roodenburg-Schadd, Expressie and Ordening, 2004, 622, 666.

[43] Patrick Andersson, on the other hand, views Rauschenberg’s 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, “Euro-Pop the Mechanical Bride Stripped Bare in Stockholm, Even,” PhD dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2001, 120 (https://hdl.handle.net/2429/12858).

[44] John R. Peirce, “artist and machines,” exh. cat., Bewogen Beweging, 1951, [page ?]

[45] Ibid., [page?].

[46] “Vrolijk protest en… matige ernst.” “Bewogen beweging in Stedelijk Museum,” De Tijd – Maasbode, March 11, 1961, 3. The review also mentions Sandberg’s “pamphlet of some time ago.” [Bewogen Beweging Hulten reference missing]

[47] Schuyt and Taverne, 396. In the case of Bewogen Beweging, for example, filmmaker Louis van Gasteren recorded Tinguely’s machines as part of a cinematic response to what he saw as the “enslavement” and “domination” of men by machine: “these big electronic brains… terrifying, a nightmare that destroys human thought.” “Louis van Gasteren, opstandig cineast,” Zeeuwsch Dagblad, April 21, 1962, 5.

[48] Constant Nieuwenhuys, “New Babylon – na tien jaren,” in Mark Wigley, Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire. (Rotterdam: Witte de With/010 Publishers, 1998), 282.

[49] Constant Nieuwenhuys, “Opkomst en ondergang van de avant-garde,” Randstad 8, 1964, 25.

[50] Paul Lohse, “Expo 58. Observations on the problems connected with world exhibitions’” Neue Grafik 2, (July 1959): 12.

[51] Branden W. Joseph, “Plastic Empathy: The Ghost of Robert Whitman,” Grey Room, no. 25 (October 1, 2006), 71.

[52] Ibid., 69.

[53] Robert Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” Artforum, June 1966, in Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flan (University of California Press, 1996), 12.

[54] Robert Smithson, citing Sol LeWitt, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” Artforum, June 1966, in Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flan (University of California Press, 1996), 12.

[55] Donald Judd, “In the Galleries,” Arts Magazine 39: 3 (December 1964): 66.

[56] Ibid.

[57] Will Burtin, “2-d or 3-d?,” 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 “First Things First” manifesto of twenty-two British artists in April 1964. At this point, Burtin’s 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, “Why the Public Ought to Understand Science-in-the-Making,” Public Understanding of Science, no. 1 (1992): 27–30. John Durant, “The Challenge and Opportunity of Presenting ‘Unifinished Science,’” in Creating Connections: Museums and the Public Understanding of Current Research, ed. David Chittenden (Rowman Altamira, 2004), 47–60.

[59] ‘Micro Impact – Design Column #1’, June 23–Oct. 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-à-vis science and technology, see Krzysztof Ziarek, The Force of Art (Stanford University Press, 2004). See also Nina Zschocke, “Art and Science Research Teams? Some Arguments in Favour of a Culture of Dissent,” in Artists-in-Labs Networking in the Margins, ed. Jill Scott (Vienna: Springer Verlag, 2010), 68–81..

[60] Sharon MacDonald, “Exhibition Experiments: Publics, Politics and Scientific Controversy,” in Science Exhibitions: Curation and Design, ed. Anastasia Filippoupoliti (Edinburgh: Museums etc, 2010), 138–151. See also Reesa Greenberg, “Archival Remembering Exhibitions,” Journal of Curatorial Studies 1, no. 2 (June 13, 2012): 159–177; and Reesa Greenberg, “‘Remembering Exhibitions’: From Point to Line to Web,” Tate Papers, no. 12 (2009) (https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/remembering-exhibitions-point-line-web).

[61] “Brein-met-bollen in het Stedelijk Museum,” Leeuwarder Courant, September 28, 1962, 5.

[62] “Elektronisch brein te zien op jaarbijeenkomst van American Medical Association,” European Broadcasting Union, June 22, 1960, Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid, Document 116052. After touring the United States, Burtin’s brain travelled to the American Pavilion at Italia ’61 in Turin—sponsored by USIA to show America’s pioneering position in science—and 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 “Medicine U.S.A.” in 1962.

[63] Burtin’s correspondence with Wilder Penfield and Herbert Jasper, and his use of Penfield’s anatomical vocabulary, support my supposition that Burtin’s design of the brain was chiefly based on a diagrammatic sketch that represented a “hypothetical outline” 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 Penfield’s cinematic memory theories, see Alison Winter, Memory: Fragments of a Modern History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 75–102.