Howard Wise (curator) — TRENDS — early Howard Wise kinetic exhibition

1966

Artists: Howard Wise (curator) · Year: 1966 · Medium: Gallery exhibition — survey of kinetic, cybernetic, and light-based art · Substrate: Kinetic sculptures, light works, early electronic art from Wise's represented artists · Place: New York, USA · Institution: Howard Wise Gallery Howard Wise's Trends: New Ideas in Art, staged at his 57th Street gallery in New York from April through May 1966, was the first major commercial-gallery group exhibition in the United States to present work built with light, motion, and signal as a coherent movement rather than as curiosities. The show mixed Len Lye's Tangible Motion Sculpture (vibrating thin steel rods driven by hidden mechanical hammers), Wen-Ying Tsai's cybernetic sculptures (tuned reed assemblies that responded to external sound by oscillating), Gerald Oster's moiré interference paintings, George Rhoads's audio-mechanical contraptions, and Otto Piene's light-choreography pieces — at the time, most of these artists were too new and too technically strange to be placed anywhere else on 57th Street. Wise had opened his gallery in 1960 on 57th Street specifically to handle a category of work he felt the major dealers would not: kinetic sculpture, light art, and the first wave of artist-engineers. He had been a commercial gallerist in Cleveland before the move to New York; he was not a critic or a theorist. His curatorial argument was simply that serious artists were working with current technology, and that if established galleries would not show them, he would. Trends was the culmination of that argument — a show that framed the work not as a sideline but as a direction American art was taking. The exhibition mattered for two institutional reasons that reach into this archive. First, it placed moving, signal-driven, electronic work inside the canonical gallery economy: these were saleable, collectible objects. Second, Wise's gallery would, three years later in 1969, stage TV as a Creative Medium — the first American gallery exhibition of video art — and in 1971 would convert itself into Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), the non-profit artist-video distribution organization that still operates today and has preserved, circulated, and licensed the entire 1970s American video-art corpus to museums and schools. Trends is the hinge. Everything EAI would later distribute passed through the argument Wise made with this 1966 show: that electronic-and-kinetic work was not a stunt but a movement. The show got lukewarm reviews. It sold almost nothing. It changed everything. Lore Wise kept the gallery open for eleven years at a steady financial loss. His family wealth — inherited from a Cleveland department-store chain — subsidized the enterprise; he used to joke that if he had sold off the Tsais and Pienes as they arrived rather than storing them, he would have been a rich man. By 1971 the gallery was unsustainable, but Wise was unwilling to simply close, so he converted it into EAI and redirected the operation toward what he had come to believe was the least gallery-friendly and therefore most institutionally vulnerable art form of the moment: artist-produced videotape. EAI's first catalogue, issued in 1972, listed tapes by Peter Campus, Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, and the Vasulkas. Wise died in 1989. The gallery's original Trends checklist and installation photographs are in EAI's archive. Sources • Gallery records — Howard Wise Gallery papers, Electronic Arts Intermix, New York. • Rush, Michael — Video Art (Thames & Hudson, rev. 2007). • MacDonald, Scott — A Critical Cinema 3: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (UC Press, 1998; context on early video distribution).