Hybrid Practices

In Hybrid Practices, essays by established and emerging scholars investigate the rich ecology of practices that typified the era of the Cold War. The volume showcases three projects at the forefront of unprecedented collaboration between the arts and new sectors of industrial society in the 1960s and 70s—Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), the Art and Technology Project at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (A&T), and the Artist Placement Group (APG) in the UK. The subjects covered include collaborative projects between artists and scientists, commercial ventures and experiments in intermedia, multidisciplinary undertakings, effacing authorship to activate the spectator, suturing gaps between art and government, and remapping the landscape of everyday life in terms of technological mediation. Among the artists discussed in the volume and of interest to a broad public beyond the art world are Bernd and Hilla Becher, John Cage, Hans Haacke, Robert Irwin, John Latham, Fujiko Nakaya, Carolee Schneemann, James Turrell, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, and Robert Whitman. Prominent engineers and scientists appearing in the book’s pages include Elsa Garmire, Billy Klüver, Frank Malina, Stanley Milgram, and Ed Wortz. This valuable collection aims to introduce readers not only to hybrid work in and as depth, but also to work in and as breadth, across disciplinary practices where the real questions of hybridity are determined.

David Cateforis is Professor and Chair of Art History at the University of Kansas. He has published widely on twentieth-century American art and international contemporary art. He is the editor of Rethinking Andrew Wyeth and Decade of Transformation: American Art of the 1960s and coeditor of Albert Bloch: Artistic and Literary Perspectives.
 
Steven Duval is an artist and researcher based in Buffalo, New York, who has shown work in the Gwangju biennale, Nuit Blanche Paris, Apexarts New York, and the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh. He also runs the Independent Arts Research project. 
 
Shepherd Steiner is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at the University of Manitoba. He is the coeditor of Cork Caucus: On Art, Possibility and Democracy and The New Criticism: Formalist Literary Theory in America and Abroad. He is the author of Rodney Graham: Phonokinetoscope and the editor of Mosaic, an Interdisciplinary Critical Journal.

Foreword
Saralyn Reece Hardy and Rebecca Blocksome

Introduction: Reassessing Hybrid Practice
David Cateforis, Steven Duval, and Shepherd Steiner

PART I: FALLOUT: CREATIVITY AND INVENTION IN, AS, OR BETWEEN ART, SCIENCE, AND GOVERNMENT

1. Launching “Hybrid Practices” in the 1960s: On the Perils and Promise of Art and Technology / Anne Collins Goodyear
2. Identity, Rhetoric, and Method in the Collaborations of Experiments in Art and Technology, the Artist Placement Group, and the Art and Technology Program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art / Steven Duval
3. Fallout and Spinoff : Commercializing the Art-Technology Nexus / W. Patrick McCray
4. Beyond Method and without Object: Subject as Inquiry in the Irwin-Wortz Collaboration / Dawna Schuld
5. Monuments to the Period We Live In / Craig Richardson

PART II: AFFECTIVE FEEDBACK: TIME, PLAY, AND CONTAGION AS SYSTEMS OF PARTICIPATION

6. Sounding Snows: Bodily Static and the Politics of Visibility during the Vietnam War / Erica Levin
7. Contagious Creativity: Participatory Engagement in the Magic Theater Exhibition (1968) / Cristina Albu
8. Programming and Reprogramming the Institution: Systems Politics in Hans Haacke’s Photoelectric Viewer-Programmed Coordinate System / John A. Tyson

PART III: THRESHOLDS OF THE VISIBLE: TECHNOLOGIES OF THE EVERYDAY

9. Technologies of Indeterminacy: John Cage Invents / Sandra Skurvida
10. Dramaturgical Devices and Stanley Milgram’s Hybrid Practice / Maya Rae Oppenheimer
11. Prostheses or Technical Extensions: Rereading the Work of Bernd and Hilla Becher / Shepherd Steiner

Supplement: The Hale Experiments: Object-Oriented Ventriloquy during the Cold War
An ESTAR(SER) project by the Prosopopoeia Working Group

Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
List of Illustrations
Index