ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on General Systems Theory, structuralism, and semiotics in the work of critic Jack Burnham. The author argues that Burnham’s “systems esthetics” (1968) advances a “nonstop modernism” from which media art emerged and which continues into the present: a species combining techno-scientific materialism with a spiritualism of deep, grammatical structures. Based on the writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes among others, the art myth, for Burnham, was deeply bound up with avant-garde “mediation and transformation,” which “conceptually incorporates the unobtainable into the making and ordering of the art itself.” Burnham developed his theory to describe the then new conceptual art in which physical encounters and analytic structures worked together in the creation of a materialist metaphysics. Drawing on the writings of biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Burnham gleaned a wet take on form that corroborated the structural analysis in the creation of a skeptical ontology of art. Two forces are set in relief from within Burnham’s collective uses of systems, structures, and semiotics: one that is universalizing, deep in structure, and metaphysical, and another that is phenomenological, biological, and a matter of techno-scientific invention. Rather than seeing them as polarizing intensities, the author argues that they exist simultaneously in Burnham’s practice. They are complementary – part of a strain of modernism that is holistic in nature.
