Exhibit of the week: Ghosts in the Machine

New Museum, New York

Through Sept. 30

“There should be more shows like this,” said Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker. A veritable “raid on the attic” of an era not far behind us, this survey of art inspired by machine- and space-age dreams (as well as some nightmares) wisely focuses on art objects that, to my eye, “were true to their moments” but “barely outlasted them.” Don’t look to revisit the futurists and the Bauhaus movement here. The curators prefer to show us century-old drawings by asylum inmates, “retina-jangling” op art from the 1960s, a group of light-emitting sculptures whose arrangement in a darkened room “suggests a disco for angels.” Though the show has dull patches, “there’s much to ponder”—not so much about the machines and technologies of the recent past as about “the foolish, now and then adorable creatures” who made and used them.

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The curators’ strategy leaves the show “a little short on living, breathing artworks,” said Roberta Smith in The New York Times. The bright op art paintings register mostly as mere period pieces—“some feel like precursors to nothing so much as screen savers.” But other rooms contain “just enough” powerful art to keep the mind buzzing. Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome (1963–66) invites viewers to enter a dome whose inner surface is bombarded by “a dense, hallucinatory mix of projected films, slides, and drawings”—like a cross between a Rauschenberg painting and surfing the Internet. Other standouts weren’t intended for mere aesthetic enjoyment. Wilhelm Reich’s notorious Orgone Energy Accumulator, devised by the radical psychoanalyst in 1940 to unblock his patients’ energy flow, appears in a reconstruction. Nearby hangs a series of wire sculptures that outsider artist Emery Blagdon believed could cure physical ills.

A sense of possibility informs most every piece in the show, said Andrew Russeth in GalleristNY.com. For some midcentury artists, technology provided a way to explore the idea that art “could do more than hang on walls”: It could provide a light show, change shape, or even move across the floor. Yet the darker potentialities of technology are ever present here too, conjured by VanDerBeek’s images of nuclear explosions, and by a replica of a torture device described in a 1914 Franz Kafka story. Eventually, viewers will likely discern a common denominator: We humans like to romanticize technology, blame technology, even eroticize technology. Still, “whether we like it or not, the ghost in the machine is always us.”