At the Leading Edge: Alex Kitnick on Howard Wise’s Manifesto for EAI
In 1973, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)’s founder Howard Wise self-published At the Leading Edge, a 14-page prospectus outlining his philosophical approach to electronic art and the services EAI provides. As part of our 50th anniversary, EAI has invited a series of respondents to discuss the contemporary resonances of Wise’s words. In the first, art historian and critic Alex Kitnick considers how Wise’s background in business inflected his utopian vision, reflecting a larger post-’60s moment in which the counterculture and the corporation were making strange bedfellows.
Howard Wise at his desk on 50 West 57th Street, June 1969. Photograph by Thomas Tadlock.
Culture Was Their Business
by Alex Kitnick
One of the many dreams of the 1960s was to get art out of museums and into everyday life. Made of marble and stone, museums functioned as citadels, elitist structures that prevented people from getting as close to art as they might wish. If art were to survive, the thinking went, it would have to be made of new materials (PortaPak, projection, cathode ray) and infiltrate not only the streets, but also the media and the network. Futurist in spirit, this dream was often paired, perhaps paradoxically (though perhaps not), with an idea that “non-Western” people were better at integrating art into everyday life than Western people, precisely because the heavy baggage of autonomy hadn’t infiltrated their artmaking.¹ Rather than parcelling off art, the art spirit infused all their technologies and techniques. “The sculptures of primitive peoples were not just works of art,” businessman-cum-culture impresario Howard Wise wrote in his gentle manifesto, at the leading edge of art, which laid the groundwork for his new non-profit Electronic Arts Intermix. (The “Intermix” is key.) “They possessed powers for good or evil, health or misery; they brought rain, or if offended, caused the crops to wither.” In other words, their art did things; it had effects. It wasn’t made simply to be appreciated. Culture critic-cum-culture impresario Marshall McLuhan made a claim similar to Wise’s a couple years earlier in his best-selling book The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. “We have no art,” he claimed the Balinese say. “We do everything as well as we can.”
Like many artists, thinkers, and “seers” of his generation, Wise operated under the sway of McLuhan’s thought. He believed that humanity stood on the precipice of a new technological paradigm, a shift from the Machine Age to an Electronic Era, and that the television set, seemingly more comfortable in the private home than the public museum, offered a new opportunity to imagine art’s place in society. (Many years later, in his seminal text “Dispersion,” Seth Price hypothesized: “Perhaps an art distributed to the widest possible public closes the circle, becoming a private art, as in the days of commissioned portraits. The analogy will only become more apt as digital distribution techniques allow for increasing customization to individual consumers.”) Such a reconfiguration demanded a reimagining of art’s patronage as well. Bred in the academy, McLuhan increasingly aimed his thinking at the business community, and in 1972 he published a book/management guide with communications consultant Barrington Nevitt, Take Today: The Executive as Dropout. There was much, McLuhan made clear, for the executive to do: Commercial TV, for example, hadn’t explored the medium’s creative potential, and Wise felt that it was his duty—indeed, his responsibility—to fashion a kind of third space, something more like a laboratory than a museum that could help concoct this new art. Both men felt that technology was too powerful to be left in the hands of business people. The job of the artist was, in part, to humanize technology. As McLuhan wrote in the first issue of the artist magazine Location, “The new media, too, are not toys; they should not be in the hands of Mother Goose and Peter Pan executives. They can be entrusted only to new artists.”
Wise imagined EAI as a catalyst for this new art that wasn’t quite art, a kind of updated “primitive” art, which would be simultaneously all-encompassing and electronic. “When a man-made environment circumvents the entire planet, moon, and galaxy, there is no alternative to total knowledge programming of all human enterprise,” McLuhan and Nevitt wrote, and art was to take on more and more of the role of programming. While the etymology of television suggests the superpower of seeing something from a great distance, Wise, following McLuhan, imagined a medium that would be up close and personal, just like business is today. Even YouTube’s early imperative to “Broadcast Yourself” now seems quaint as user information becomes ever more central to corporate objectives.
At the risk of being overly emphatic I want to stress how significant it is that Wise came from the world of business: not only the family business, the Cleveland-based Arco, which dealt in industrial paints, but the eponymous gallery he ran before launching EAI. (He had previously studied art in Paris and constitutional law in Cambridge.) It makes sense, then, that Wise thought that the new art might best be served by a business-like entity, even as it moved away from a profit model. While he left the straight business world behind he stayed in tune with the executive idea that business had to assume new shapes and forms, and make new alliances. Sometimes the executive, like the beatnik, had to drop out in order to be in touch with what was really going on. In other words, he had to act like an artist. (“The dropouts today are those determined to keep in touch with a fast-changing scene,” McLuhan and Nevitt claimed.) Yet despite his countercultural mores, Wise promised to run EAI in what he described as a “managerial,” “administrative,” and “business-like manner.” “Assistance is given in such matters as contracts, accounting procedures, disbursement of funds, assistance in raising funds,” he continued. “Culture is our business,” McLuhan claimed in his 1970 book of the same name, and apparently it had to be run as such, too. If museums could no longer protect or serve art, then art would have to make peace with the market—or at least redirect the market's energies. The corporate model for art—structuring a body of knowledge and administering it effectively—is one of EAI's many legacies. (Wise called EAI a "non-profit corporation.”) Television would be the primary delivery device, but it had to be backed by new, or reimagined, institutions. Certainly, culture, let alone art, is still struggling with these implications today.
¹ While we might look askance at the romantic way that both Wise and McLuhan imagined the “tribal,” it had a powerful impact not only on their shared conception of art, but also on the very society (or “the global village”) in which they lived. For more on this topic, see Ginger Nolan, The Neocolonialism of the Global Village (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
Howard Wise in a letter to Joseph Block, vice president public relations of Pepsi-Cola, 1980. An example of Wise’s business acumen, the letter tries to preempt any accusation of copyright appropriation by assuring that Nam June Paik’s The Selling of New York “reflects well” on the soda company.
Alex Kitnick is Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. His book Distant Early Warning: Marshall McLuhan and the Transformation of the Avant-Garde is out with University of Chicago Press.
2021 marks the 50th anniversary of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), one of the world’s leading resources for video and media art. As we celebrate this milestone, EAI will present a rotating series of video features from across our collection and publish a series of oral histories with key figures. To keep up to date on our anniversary activities, please sign up for our e-mail mailing list.