Communication as mental touch Jack Burnham and the end of art VERED MAIMON Conceptual art’s ideal medium is telepathy. —Jack Burnham During the exhibition I will try to communicate telepathically a work of art, the nature of which is a series of thoughts that are not applicable to language or image. —Robert Barry Difficult to imagine a theory of what they still call the unconscious without a theory of telepathy. —Jacques Derrida 1 Jack Burnham’s book Great Western Salt Works, published in 1974, contains his well-known essays from the 1960s and early 1970s on what he famously termed “systems aesthetics,” as well as his later, lesser known essays on Marcel Duchamp and performance. In the introduction, he states that the volume traces his “own psychological metamorphosis” from the “quasi-scientific rationalism implicit in the first few systems essays” toward “high-magic in cabalism and alchemy.” 2 This statement seems to enforce a sense of split in Burnham’s thinking, a shift from his early enthusiastic embrace of “systems theory” toward a disillusionment with science and any symbiotic or productive relations between art and technology, which therefore explains his turn to ritual. 3 This shift affected the legacy of Burnham’s extremely rich, provocative, and interdisciplinary writings, as his turn to hermetic philosophy made him a “scholarly outcast.” Yet even before this turn, his enthusiastic embrace of technology and his eventual criticism of linguistic and semiotic theories of art did not quite conform to what became the established canon of postmodernist art theory. Significantly, Burnham’s work has been marginalized because it refused to equate antiformalism with an antiaesthetic and a rigid antihumanist theoretical and philosophical position. While Burnham tried to develop a theory of postformalist art, he never identified formalism or modernism exclusively with Kantian and idealist romantic aesthetic theories or with their reductive account in formalist art criticism. But what became the canon or “dogma” of postmodern art theory was precisely articulated as an “antiaesthetic” position that opposed a generalized notion of “politics” to a highly limited concept of aesthetics. 4 This made Burnham, as Luke Skrebowski has stated, a “transitional figure” in relation to the full-blown emergence of postmodern art theory. 5 It also explains the renewed interest in his writings by scholars such as Caroline Jones and Edward Shanken, which now, with the demise of postmodernism, seem to have “predicted” the current interest in the art world in interactions between human and nonhuman systems as well as networks, ecology, research-based practices, and relational aesthetics. 6 Res: Anthropology and aesthetics, volume 79/80, 2023. © 2023 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. Published by The University of Chicago Press for the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. https://doi.org/10.1086/727618. 1. Jack Burnham, “Alice’s Head” (1970), in his Great Western Salt Works: Essays on the Meaning of Post-formalist Art (New York, 1974), 47; Robert Barry, artist’s statement for Telepathic Piece, 1969; Jacques Derrida, “Telepathy” (1981), trans. Nicholas Royle, Oxford Literary Review 10 (1988): 14. 2. Jack Burnham, “Introduction,” in Great Western Salt Works, 11. 3. This sense of disillusionment is clearly expressed in Jack Burnham, “Art and Technology: The Panacea That Failed,” in The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture, ed. Kathleen Woodward (Bloomington, IN, 1983), 200–215. 4. See the canonical anthology edited by Hal Foster, The Anti- aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle, 1983). The limitations of postmodern theory with regard to the history of aesthetics have already been noted by philosophers and art historians; see, e.g., Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London, 2004); and Beth Hinderliter, William Kaizen, Vered Maimon, and Jaleh Mansoor, eds., Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics (Durham, NC, 2009). 5. Luke Skrebowski, “Jack Burnham Redux: The Obsolete in Reverse?” Grey Room 65 (2016): 109. 6. See Caroline A. Jones, “On Jack Burnham’s ‘Systems Esthetics,’” Artforum 51, no. 1 (2012): 113–16; Edward A. Shanken, “The House That Jack Built: Jack Burnham’s Concept of ‘Software’ as a Metaphor for Art,” Leonardo Electronic Almanac 6, no. 10 (1998). On Burnham in relation to relational aesthetics, see Luke Skrebowski, “All Systems