{"id":4698,"title":"Electronic Arts Intermix: Howard Wise essay","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/howard-wise-essay","version":"015cdf6bf315e6c517da823baaf74529533d13a635c1d0a6db2d964566d5c3f7","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:08.1945956+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Marita Sturken"}],"authorKeys":["Sturken, Marita"],"subjects":["Groups"],"metadata":[{"label":"Contributors","value":"Sturken,Marita","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"1984","url":null},{"label":"Group dates","value":"1971 - present","url":null},{"label":"Group location","value":"New York City, New York","url":null},{"label":"Group","value":"Electronic Arts Intermix","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Howard Wise essay.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/howard-wise-essay.","publication":"Sturken, Marita. Howard Wise essay. 1984.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/4698.ris"},"links":[],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":57991},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":561}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"TV As a Creative Medium: Howard Wise and Video Art Marita Sturken Afterimage, May 1984 Ever since Marshall McLuhan has become a household name, people have become aware of the tremendous force, both actual and potential; that TV is having and will have on their lives. The machine is obsolescent. Magazines, books, newspapers and other publications making use of the written word as we have known it are threatened. The relationships of nations, classes, generations and individuals are deeply affected. Education will be revolutionized, schools transformed if not eliminated (why interrupt your child\u0027s education by sending him to school?). TV is at the cause, or at least at the root of the cause, of all of these changes that are transforming our civilization. Why has not art been affected by this pervading influence? Perhaps quite simply because, up until now the time was not right. Perhaps it had to await the maturing of the generation who were in their sub-teens in the 1950\u0027s, those who were \u0022brought up\u0022 on TV .... As in every generation, some were artists. These have been at work for two, three, five and even more years, scrounging around second hand shops for parts, working with TV because they were fascinated by the results they were able to achieve, and because they sensed the potential of TV as the medium for their expression. (1) -Howard Wise Howard Wise is one of the people who is responsible for the idea of an alternative television. (2) -Frank Gillette \u0022TV as a Creative Medium\u0022 was a catalytic event around which a video art community began to coalesce. New names and faces had appeared on the scene every year since 1965, but until the Spring of \u002769 there had been no center, no real cohesion, no sense of a community of purpose. After the show at the Howard Wise Gallery, it was possible to identify oneself as a video artist, and to recognize other video artists. (3) -Davidson Gigliotti The shape and direction of video art\u0027s accelerated growth, since virtual nonexistence in the mid-\u002760s up to the present, has been influenced primarily by the priorities of major funders - the New York State Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. It has matured without the bevy of individual collectors who support more established forms such as painting and sculpture. Within video\u0027s media arts centers and funding organizations, there are many advocates, administrators, and curators who provide an infrastructure which enables artists to produce and distribute work, often doing so with little publicity or recognition. In this realm, Howard Wise stands out as an individual benefactor who preceded and has supplemented private foundations and public monies. He has been a central figure in the visibility, production, and acceptance of video art. For almost 20 years, he has been one of the few patrons of video art. On May 17, 1969, a show which was to become the seminal exhibition of video art in the U.S. opened at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York City. That exhibition, \u0022TV as a Creative Medium,\u0022 effectively pointed to the diverse potential of a new art form and social tool. Subsequently, the show became renowned for the inspiration it provided for many artists and future advocates of video. The artists represented in the show, a few of whom are still involved in the medium today, came from varied backgrounds-painting, filmmaking, nuclear physics, avant-garde music and performance, kinetic and light sculpture-and their approaches presented a primer of the directions which video would soon take. Theoretically, they variously saw video as viewer participation, a spiritual and meditative experience, a mirror, an electronic palette, a kinetic sculpture, or a cultural machine to be deconstructed. Ripe with ideas and armed with a heady optimism about the future of communications, these artists used video as an information tool and as a means of gaining understanding and control of television, not solely as an art form. In \u0022TV as a Creative Medium\u0022 alternative television was presented as a stepping stone to the promised communications utopia. Despite such non-aesthetic concerns among first generation videomakers, the exhibition signaled the emergence of a definition of video as an art medium. By 1969, Wise had established himself as a central figure in what has come to be known as the \u0022art and technology\u0022 movement. His 57th St. gallery was one of the main showcases for kinetic and light sculpture, and initially Wise looked upon video as a kind of light work, an extension of kineticism. In 1969 he wrote, \u0022Most Americans already have potential kinetic art right in their own living rooms: Television is kinetic art - it needs only to be \u0027ordered\u0027 by an artist.\u0022(4) Wise\u0027s step into electronic art, however, was an irreversible one. Within a year and a half after \u0022TV as a Creative Medium\u0022 he closed his gallery and began plans for an organization designed to foster the work of video artists and their use of new technologies. That organization eventually became known as Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI). Howard is a gentleman, which is rare in the art world. To appreciate him you have to be a little old-fashioned. He is the product of another and slightly more gracious age. (5) -Davidson Gigliotti Howard was very important because he went against the main stream in his gallery. (6) -Willoughby Sharp Howard was lucky to be born in the best time of American capitalism. He is a perfect balance of money and aesthetic. (7) -Nam June Paik Howard Wise was born on Nov. 6, 1903, in Cleveland, Ohio. He went to Europe for five years in the \u002720s, studied art at the Louvre and the Sorbonne and French, history, and constitutional law at Cambridge University in England. (8) Upon his return to Cleveland, Wise went to work for his family\u0027s firm, the Arco Company, which manufactured industrial coatings. He successfully ran the company for 25 years, substantially expanding the business. My father resigned during the Depression, so I had that responsibility at an early age. Like any other business, the Depression had hurt us a lot and we had a tot of labor unrest among the 300-400 employees. I decided that I had better take a good look at the situation, and I got in touch with a labor consultant. He suggested that since we were a relatively small business we could keep an intimate relationship with the employees, so I did that. We had 10-year and 25-year clubs, and when it came my turn to get the gold insignia, or whatever it was, for my 25 years with the company I realized, \u0022My God, 25 years,\u0022 and I decided to quit. (9) Wise sold the company and renewed his interest in painting: I thought I would combine my artistic experience with my business experience and start a gallery in Cleveland because there really was no gallery of any stature there. I felt that Cleveland was artistically a very closed and ingrown community. The only real modern work that was shown was local work. My objective in opening a gallery in Cleveland was to bring the art from various centers in Europe and America. In 1957 Wise founded the Howard Wise Gallery of Present Day Painting and Sculpture. For several years he exhibited contemporary painting and sculpture from several European galleries and selections from larger shows at established institutions, such as \u00228 Painters of the Galerie Arnaud, Paris,\u0022 \u002218 Painters of the 1958 Pittsburgh International,\u0022 and \u0022Selections from the 1958-59 Whitney Annual.\u0022 The Cleveland gallery operated for five to six years, and, while still running it, Wise opened the Howard Wise Gallery on the second floor at 50 W. 57th St. in early 1960. (10) It is hard to imagine how different the art world in New York was in the early \u002760s compared to today. With many fewer galleries, any newly established showcase received a significant amount of attention. Wise began operations on 57th St. only three years after Leo Castelli opened his first gallery on 77th St. Soho was still an industrial district, and the bulk of important galleries were on Madison Ave. and E. 57th St. Beyond these commercial, uptown galleries, there existed only a few on 10th St.; several artist cooperatives and small, noncommercial galleries operated and coordinated efforts comprising an alternative exhibition scene similar to the galleries on the Lower East Side today. In 1960 the zenith of Abstract Expressionism was past, and the art world was slowly beginning to decentralize into diverse movements. Frank Gillette describes the arrival of Howard Wise in the art community as signifying \u0022the antithesis of 10th St. Howard was, at first, like a pariah uptown. He was very Midwestern and his gallery had wall-to-wall carpeting.\u0022 Wise inaugurated his New York gallery by showing Expressionist paintings, including work by Milton Resnick and George McNeil, and for about a year and a half, Wise commuted between Cleveland and New York. In January 1961 he presented an exhibit of three kinetic artists-Yaacov Agam, Len Lye, and Jean Tinguely-in the Cleveland gallery, with the title of \u0022Movement in Art.\u0022 Coincidentally and almost simultaneously (although unbeknown to Wise until. it opened), Amsterdam\u0027s Stedelijk Museum held a major survey of 72 artists working in kinetic sculpture, organized by Pontus Hulten, called \u0022Art in Motion,\u0022 of which Tinguely\u0027s work was the centerpiece. (11) Like video artists in the early 1970s, artists working with kinetic and light sculpture articulated early \u002760s optimism: the future of art was proclaimed as an alliance between artistic and technical concerns; the machine was paramount. Kinetic and light sculpture represent two distinct yet overlapping movements, because, quite simply, most light work is inherently kinetic. The genesis of kinetic work can be traced to the \u002720s when Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and U.S. artist Thomas Wilfred began exploring the artistic potential of light. Moholy-Nagy built his Light-Space Modulator between 1922 and 1930. It is a complex piece comprised of various light bulbs and reflective and filtering surfaces, which was rebuilt in the 1960s-and exhibited in 1970 at Howard Wise Gallery. Wilfred is considered by many to be the U.S. pioneer of light sculpture, or what he termed \u0022Lumia.\u0022 Wilfred built a Clavilux in the early 1920s, which was described by Howard Wise Gallery as \u0022an organ-like instrument of sliding keys controlling optical elements (lenses, color filters, mirrors, prisms and projectors)\u0022 which produced images on a theater-sized screen. Soon after, Wilfred designed a self-contained, automatically operated Clavilux on which he exhibited new compositions. In many ways, the roots of kinetic sculpture date to 1913 when Marcel Duchamp put a bicycle wheel on a stool and named it Bicycle Wheel, and Alexander Calder began constructing his famed mobiles in the \u002730s. In the late 1950s and early \u002760s, kinetic and light works began to reemerge. Both Wise and Douglas MacAgy, an art historian and curator who worked with Wise when he began to explore these new media, as well as others involved in this movement, saw light sculpture as an extension of impressionism-a movement which took light as its subject matter-and kineticism as an outgrowth of Futurism, which attempted to depict motion on canvas. In Europe, kinetic and light works were produced by several art collectives such as Group Zero in Dusseldorf, the Groupe de Recherche d\u0027Art Visuel (of which Julio Le Parc was a member) in Paris, and encouraged by establishments such as the Denise Rend Gallery in Paris, which held an important early exhibition called \u0022Le Mouvement\u0022 in 1955. Swiss artist Jean Tinguely received a great deal of attention with his notorious self-destructing sculpture-event \u0022Hommage to New York\u0022 at the Museum of Modern Art in 1960, but most kinetic artists were less heralded at the time. The renewed interest in artistic machines in the early 1960s can be attributed to the proliferatio","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":57991,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}