Max Kozloff went so hard after Maurice Tuchman’s Art & Technology show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. From “The Multimillion Dollar Art Boondoggle” in the October 1971 issue of Artforum:
Some of the companies involved by the museum are as follows (quotes are from the Report itself): the Garrett Corporation (“has been designing high-performance jet engines for military aircraft”); General Electric (“has its own think tank, called TEMPO, which runs seminars on nuclear weapons”); Hewlett-Packard Company (“radar, guided-missile control”); Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Litton Industries (“builds submarines, amphibious assault ships, and advanced guidance and fire control systems”); Lockhead Norris Industries (“a major ordnance manufacturer since World War II”); North American Rockwell, and The Rand Corporation. In short, it is a rogue’s gallery of the violence industries. Subsidized decisively by the American government, they had grown to their present bulk through the business of slaying. The show epitomizes the fact that our most prominent visual artists had been offered an extremely direct contract to be of service to the prestige of these industries (in return for various hard and software) and had accepted. During the term of the project, there occurred the My Lai massacre, the Chicago Democratic Convention riots, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the invasion of Cambodia, and the student killings at Kent and Jackson State. While these convulsions were taking place, inflaming the radicalism of our youth and polarizing the country, the American artists did not hesitate to freeload at the trough of that techno-fascism that had inspired them.
Kozloff ends by comparing LACMA’s A&T report/catalogue to the Pentagon Papers. He makes no mention in his takedown of the Cowles Corporation, one of the major sponsors of the A&T Project, and the family company of Artforum publisher Charles Cowles. And until 2012, when he reflected on the essay anew, he gave artists no credit for either the critical statements they made in the report, or the “derisive” works they produced.
Previously, related: Art & Technology & Serra & Steel Mills