In 1969, sending art over the telephone seemed far-fetched. It required extensive back and forth coordination, specialized engineers, and a great deal of time. Once all the necessary equipment was in place, an 8-by-10-inch image took six minutes to come through Xerox telecopiers, an early fax machine. To work with these obstacles, an artist needed immense enthusiasm for what a technologically connected future would look like. But Stan VanDerBeek had no shortage of optimism when he devised this project for his 1969–70 artist residency at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies. He wrote in 1966, “It is imperative that we (the world’s artists) invent a new world language … an international picture-language” designed for virtual transmission to connect all of humanity. The product of this telephonically delivered vision, “Panels for the Walls of the World” (1970), is the centerpiece of his three-floor retrospective, Transmissions, at Magenta Plains.
When VanDerBeek initiated his project, telephone art was in the air (literally): John Giorno had launched his Dial-A-Poem project only months before, which allowed callers to tune into a randomized recording of avant-garde poetry for free. Artists dreamed of creating a world in which their expression, as VanDerBeek wrote, could “go and be anywhere — all in the same time.” VanDerBeek has been criticized for his outmoded utopianism, and indeed, the resulting mural (along with many of his collage works on view) embodies the heavy-handed activist aesthetic of the 1960s. Images of the Vietnam War, President Nixon, sexual liberation, and the Black Power movement paper the surface alongside newspaper clippings of the day’s headlines and advertising slogans: “Bus Policy Opposed By Nixon,” “Call Roto-Rooter,” “Marriage means lifelong slavery.” A cacophony of life, death, and perfume ads, transmitted across the same frequency, VanDerBeek’s collage captures the rise of an “international picture language” of an altogether different sort.
But the process by which the artist realized “Panels for the Walls of the World” reaches beyond the well-trodden terrain of 1960s visual soup. To view the mural as a “completed” whole, decades after VanDerBeek’s premature death, is to misunderstand his intention of remaking “the artist as a ‘communicator’ in his community,” someone who initiates “a ‘feedback’ process, or dialogue.” Repeatedly in his letters and notes for the work, he stresses that “the mural is a form of ‘process art,’” where “much of the ‘art’ is in the act of doing it for both the artist and viewer.” “Panels” was meant to be sent piece by piece, in constant communication with receivers who would assemble it on their own walls, photograph it, and send it back with their concepts to be incorporated into the image’s development. Through technology, the work radically reimagines the role of an audience in art.
Like the best of the artist’s work, “Panels for the Walls of the World” is an exercise in self-transcendence, an attempt at vaulting cognition beyond the body’s traditional borders. While this exhibition doesn’t change my belief that, above all, VanDerBeek was a genius of experimental cinema (do not miss his 1957 film “Astral Man” on the gallery’s lower level!), the exhibition reminds viewers that it would be foolish to dismiss his multimedia work as technologically obsolete.
Stan VanDerBeek: Transmissions continues at Magenta Plains (149 Canal Street, Chinatown, Manhattan) through April 20. The exhibition was organized by Sara and Johannes VanDerBeek of the Stan VanDerBeek Archive in collaboration with Chelsea Spengemann, Executive Director of Soft Network, with exhibition design by Darling Green.
