Les Levine, Jack Burnham, and the ‘Disposable Transient Environment'

The story of Jack Burnham’s key essay “Systems Aesthetics” is often credited solely to his encounter with the writing of the theoretical biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy. However, Burnham’s understanding of systems art can be credited to his many interlocutors, including the Constructivist sculptor Naum Gabo, the systems engineer Gustave Rath, and the media artist Les Levine. This talk will focus on Burnham’s encounter with Levine’s approach to designed environments as disposable and transient. Together Levine and Burnham aestheticized the forms that systems science took in the late 1960s and thus commented on the emerging field of creativity management. Perhaps surprisingly to those of us perplexed by the current administrative lust for “creative ideation,” “disruption” and “divergent thinking,” creativity was a vitalist theme. Creativity and adaptability were considered qualities of healthy natural environments and organisms, a quality that might be culturally valued, promoted, and harnessed by institutions, educational and otherwise. Despite Burnham’s later emphasis on the artist as a cultural “deviation amplifier,” I argue that Levine’s media sculpture was key to conceptualizing the new form-type of the system as an ethical, functional, temporary, and most importantly, non-disruptive assembly. As such, the system-as-form overturned modernist ideas about what constitutes a creative act, while systems artists happily blurred the distinction between fine and applied arts.