Making Art Work by W. Patrick McCray

Author:W. Patrick McCray [McCray, W. Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2020-09-25T00:00:00+00:00

A Divinity of Wonders

The art-and-technology movement drew people to it for many reasons. Its focus on experimentation and collaboration attracted some devotees. The possibilities inherent in working with new materials and processes pulled in others. And, for many, merging art and technology offered opportunities for personal growth and professional development. For physicist Elsa M. Garmire, all of these factors enticed her to join the burgeoning art-and-technology community emerging in Southern California.

Born in 1939, Garmire grew up around Buffalo, New York. Her father was a chemical engineer and her mother taught music. The launch of Sputnik in October 1957, during her freshman year at Radcliffe College, brought renewed public attention and lots of federal funding to science and engineering. But Garmire had decided years earlier to pursue a science career, a decision which made her stand out among classmates who tended to gravitate toward the humanities. Garmire remained in Cambridge for graduate work in physics at MIT. Her advisor, Charles H. Townes, was a key figure in the invention of the laser, research which earned him a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964. Garmire’s own research on ruby lasers—chosen partly because of the “fascinatingly beautiful” red light they made and also because the topic itself was so new—required her to design and build clever lab experiments. In August 1965, two weeks after her first child was born, Garmire defended her dissertation. The next year, she and her husband (also a physicist) moved to Caltech where she took up a postdoctoral appointment in electrical engineering.53

Her new academic environment was markedly different from what she had experienced at MIT. When Garmire arrived in Pasadena, the school had only a few women graduate students and no women undergraduates. Just as Caltech’s leaders fretted over how to boost the school’s offerings in the humanities, admitting women was framed primarily in terms of placating the school’s male students. Women, they reasoned, offered potential social partners for male students while their “liberal-arts-mind” could expand the intellectual horizons for Caltech’s “eunuchs of science.”54 Her husband—he was on Caltech’s tenure track, though she wasn’t—worked long hours and Garmire had few friends and no other women scientists at Caltech to provide mentorship. With a marginal and temporary position in an engineering department, Garmire found Caltech unsatisfying. She set up her own laser laboratory but judged her results “not terribly impressive” compared to what she had been used to at MIT. Feeling “stifled and unsuccessful” Garmire started to look for more satisfying outlets for her skills.55

Garmire learned about E.A.T. in 1968 from Barbara T. Smith, an artist from Southern California who was acquainted with members of the Judson Dance Theatre. Smith had recently started making avant-garde art using a Xerox copy machine she had installed in her Pasadena dining room. One of the first American artists to experiment with this new technology, Smith combined images of family photographs, food, household objects, and her own body into a series of handmade books she titled Coffins. Smith was also in

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