Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture by W. Patrick McCray (review)

Reviewed by: Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture by W. Patrick McCray John A. Tyson (bio) Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture By W. Patrick McCray. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020. Pp. 373. Making Art Work "address[es] the ways in which technologists and artists worked to span divides" and constructed "a new kind of creative sensibility" in the decades of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s (pp. 8, 3). Increasingly, artists began moving away from traditional modes of expression and toward working in new media. Robert Rauschenberg, Hans Haacke, and Yvonne Rainer all collaborated with engineers to create vanguard artworks. Nonetheless, with the notable exception of Billy Klüver, boundary-breaching engineers tend to be relegated to secondary, supporting roles in accounts of the period; W. Patrick McCray's book is an important corrective. [End Page 714] Making Art Work furthers the history of art and technology intersections advanced in such recent publications as the edited volume Hybrid Practices (David Cateforis, Steven Duval, and Shepherd Steiner, eds., 2018; reviewed in the January 2023 issue of this journal) and John Blakinger's Gyorgy Kepes (2019). As McCray notes, art and technology collaborations like Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT), MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Study, and Maurice Tuchman's Art & Technology Program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art remain at the corners of art history—and are excluded from many textbooks and surveys. Hence, on a primary level, Making Art Work expands the field and reads collaborations through a distinct set of lenses from the art historians who have previously dominated the scholarship: it "restor[es] the technologists … to the foreground" (p. 13). McCray proposes that "hybrid practices" (p. 3) are best understood in terms of a "community" of creative exchange (p. 5): thus, chapters with titles related to systems of information and energy transfer—such as "Fluxes," "Transducer," and "Overload"—divide the book. Frank Malina, an overlooked socialist rocket scientist turned kinetic artist and editor, is one of the book's most fascinating subjects. Malina worked in the installations that would become NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (p. 25) before souring on the "military-industrial complex" (p. 47); he then became an "engineer as artist, artist as engineer" (p. 35) who was also "skeptical about the 'gallery museum' complex" (p. 47). McCray's account of Malina's lumidyne system—his mode of combining screens, lights, and rotating colored disks—emphasizes his works' technological aspects, which concerned the creator as much as the aesthetics (p. 37). The chapter also unpacks the actors hailing from the worlds of engineering and art and beyond, from Joan Baez to C. P. Snow (who is himself the subject of chapter 2), with whom Malina interacted or drew inspiration (p. 47). The sixth chapter explores Malina's activities directing the groundbreaking art and science journal Leonardo. McCray compellingly proposes that Leonardo served as a textual space for the forging of a "cybernetic community" of engineers, artists, and scientists with connections to Greater Cambridge, Massachusetts (p. 165). McCray reframes 9 Evenings of Engineering and Theatre (1967) and the various activities of EAT in the late 1960s and early '70s, locating Klüver, as well as other engineers, at the center of a network of art and technology collaborators. The contributions of Klüver's less-discussed Bell Labs colleagues, Fred Waldhauer and Per Biorn, are further fleshed out. McCray weaves together a story that includes contemporaneous criticism as well as visual artists' and performance artists' perspectives. The book begins and concludes with compelling examples of contemporary intersections of art and technology, including the development of STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math), and works like Natalie Jeremijenko's Live Wire (1995), which reacts to internet traffic sent through Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, where it is sited. [End Page 715] Echoing the critic Jack Burnham's "Systems Esthetics," published in Art-forum (September 1968), McCray variously states that collaborators on art and technology projects were interested in "process, not making products" (original emphasis, p. 7). Explaining McCray's punning title, Making Art Work treats the technology and...