1969 / 2019:

“Real” Time Systems

August 26 – September 29, 2019

In the September 1969 issue of Art Forum, artist and art critic Jack Burnham published “Real Time Systems,” in which he asserts that, “There are two kinds of artists: those who work within the art system, and those few who work with the art system.” The article, a follow-up to his 1968 essay “Systems Esthetics,” characterizes art not in terms of a medium or a subject but rather in terms of the artist’s production of artwork relative to the “real time systems” that govern how we see and understand the world. The term “system” gained currency, as evidenced by its reoccurring use in Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson’s 1969 film East Coast, West Coast, wherein the artists playfully perform two seemingly opposed points of view: the intellectualism of a conceptual east coast artist and the pragmatism of a free-thinking west coast artist. Paired here, the ideas outlined in Burnham’s essay and parodied in Holt and Smithson’s film resonate more than ever, a half-century later.