Untitled
9 x 12 inchesUntitled, 1973
paper: 9 x 12 inches
frame: 10 x 13 1/2 inches
Edition of 300
Numbered by the artist in pencil on the verso
Stamped in black ink on the verso "Hard Core 28 Mins., 16 mm Sound/Color WALTER DE MARIA"
Printed by Modern Age Photographics Services, Inc., NY
Published by Experiments in Art & Technology
Museum Collections
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
In the early 1970s the New York–based group Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) put together a collection of some of the most important American art of the 1960s, including Pop, Minimal and conceptual practices, with the aim of donating it to a public museum. They chose thirty works by thirty artists in a variety of mediums and selected the Moderna Museet in Stockholm as the recipient due to its strong history of support for American contemporary art.
WALTER DE MARIA HARD CORE
Walter de Maria is a Post-War artist, mainly working with Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Land Art. Walter de Maria’s first exhibition was Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculpture at The Jewish Museum in New York City, NY in 1966and the most recent exhibition was Works On Paper at Michael Werner East Hampton in New York City, NY in 2020. Walter de Maria has mostly exhibited in United States, but also had exhibitions in Germany, France and elsewhere. de Maria has had 26 solo shows and 191 group shows over the last 54 years. Walter de Maria's work was featured in the Biennale di Venezia - 55th International Art Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia in Venice in 2013. Other important shows were at Centre Pompidou in Paris and Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin. Walter de Maria has been exhibited alongside Bruce Nauman and Sol LeWitt. Walter de Maria’s art is in 18 museum collections, at Museum of Modern Art ( and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum among others.
In the early 1970s the New York–based group Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) put together a collection of some of the most important American art of the 1960s, including Pop, Minimal and conceptual practices, with the aim of donating it to a public museum. They chose thirty works by thirty artists in a variety of mediums and selected the Moderna Museet in Stockholm as the recipient due to its strong history of support for American contemporary art. To help raise the funds necessary to build the collection, E.A.T. asked each of the selected artists to create a work as part of a portfolio consisting primarily of lithographs and screen prints. Thus The New York Collection for Stockholm portfolio was created. This exhibition presents all thirty prints from the portfolio.
E.A.T. was founded in 1966 by the engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer along with the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman.1 As a not-for- profit organization intended to promote technological advances in the arts, E.A.T. initiated programs and projects that paired artists and engineers or scientists for one-to-one collaborations. The organization’s aims, as formulated by Klüver and Rauschenberg, were to: • Maintain a constructive climate for the recognition of the new technology and the arts by a civilized collaboration between groups unrealistically developing in isolation. • Eliminate the separation of the individual from technological change and expand and enrich technology to give the individual variety, pleasure and avenues for exploration and involvement in contemporary life. • Encourage industrial initiative in generating original forethought, instead of a compromise in aftermathand precipitate a mutual agreement in order to avoid the waste of a cultural revolution.
The catalyzing event for E.A.T. was an exhibition titled 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering. Held in October 1966 at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City, the project brought together nearly forty engineers from the nearby Bell Laboratories and ten contemporary artists to create a series of performances. These cutting-edge collaborations involved rethinking the use of many of the technologies of the time, including radio control, doppler radarand light sensors. Following this first large-scale experimentation, E.A.T. was officially formed.
To pursue their goal of donating a significant collection of contemporary art to a public museum, in the early 1970s E.A.T. approached Pontus Hultén, director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and a strong supporter of American art. E.A.T. had originally intended to assemble the collection using a grant from the United States Department of the Treasury and donate it to an American museum, but that plan fell through. Rather than let the project dissolve, they chose the Moderna Museet as the recipient. Klüver and Hultén, in consultation with dealers, art historiansand other museum professionals, selected thirty artists and artworks across mediums for what became a preeminent collection of American art by an illustrious roster of participants. Many of the artists and their dealers were generous in the outright donation of their works to the collection. The Swedish government also participated by contributing half of the money necessary to acquire the works. To help raise the remainder of the funds, each of the artists agreed to make a print for a portfolio that could be sold to support the project.
To realize this plan, E.A.T. enlisted the help of Adolph Rischner, the master printer at Styria Studioand the master woodworker and sculptor Peter Ballantine. The prints were to be small in scale—nine by twelve inches—and "one strike," meaning simple, single-run screen prints or lithographs, although many of the artists broke with these rules and created prints of greater complexity with multiple runs. The edition size for each of the hand- pulled prints was 300, an impressive feat for Styria Studioand each portfolio was meant to be housed in a Honduran mahogany box built by Ballantine. In the end, however, only a few wooden boxed sets were made, as mahogany was added to the endangered species list and export was banned. The project was completed in 1973.
