The Big Bang of Art and Tech in New York
What happens when you put artists and technologists together? Forty-nine years ago last month, Robert Rauschenberg and a Bell Telephone Laboratories engineer named Billy Kluver answered that question with a tennis match.
The game pitted the tennis pro Mimi Kanarek against Frank Stella,
already one of America’s most radical and celebrated painters.
Surrounded by some 1,200 viewers on bleachers, the two strode into the
drill hall of the 69th Regiment Armory in New York and faced off across
the net. Each time one of them hit the ball, a miniature radio
transmitter inside the racket broadcast a loud “bong” and sent a signal
extinguishing one of the hall’s 48 overhead lights. When the vast space
had gone completely dark, the match was over. But the performance
continued: Without a word, several hundred people walked in and went
through a sequence of motions in total darkness, invisible to the
audience except on giant television screens displaying a ghostly
infrared projection. With Kluver’s help, Rauschenberg had transformed a
familiar sport into something vaguely threatening and more than a little
disturbing.
Rauschenberg’s “Open Score” was part of “9 Evenings: Theater & Engineering,” a landmark series of performance-art pieces presented at the armory in October 1966. By pairing artists like John Cage and Lucinda Childs with engineers from Bell Labs, Rauschenberg and Kluver hoped to meld the “two cultures” C.P. Snow had described in his 1959 book of that title. Today their efforts are at the center of “Silicon City: Computer History Made in New York,”
an exhibition at the New-York Historical Society that charts the area’s
rise as a technology hub from the 19th century to the 1980s.
“Silicon
City,” opening Friday, Nov. 13, begins with Samuel Morse’s telegraph
and the many wonders that sprang from Thomas Edison’s New Jersey
laboratories. In contrast to Silicon Valley (which was still largely
made up of fruit orchards as late as the 1960s), such early inventions
did not lead to wave after wave of entrepreneurial innovation. Instead
they gave rise to vast, monopolistic or quasimonopolistic enterprises
that helped define 20th-century America — chief among them IBM
and AT&T. But during the ’60s, improbably enough, this spawned a
fusion of art and technology that could only have begun in New York.
IBM is represented in “Silicon City” by such artifacts as a System/360 computer, from a line of mainframes that revolutionized the industry in the ’60s, and the groundbreaking film “THINK” that Charles and Ray Eames produced for the IBM pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. AT&T is represented by, among other things, its Picturephone,
a product that epitomized everything wrongheaded about Ma Bell: At a
time when the Pentagon was financing the development of the robust and
open-ended system that would eventually become the Internet, AT&T
was trying to figure out how much data could be squeezed out of an image
so it could be transmitted on low-bandwidth copper wires.
But there was another side to AT&T, one represented by Bell Labs,
the scientific and technological playground that produced the
transistor, the laser — and information theory, the breakthrough idea
that underlies much of the computer age. It was at Bell Labs that art
and technology converged, setting a tone that reverberates today in the
digitally inflected work of artists like Josh Kline and Ryan Trecartin.
In
truth, the mid-’60s partnership between artists and engineers was less
bizarre than it might seem. “Bell Labs was a very open place in those
days,” Julie Martin, Kluver’s widow, recalled recently. “You almost had
to chase down your boss in the hall and tell him what you were doing.”
Kluver
was the catalyst for the art-technology collaboration. A Swedish
engineer, he came to America because he liked the way it looked in the
movies. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley,
in 1957 and joined Bell Labs the following year to work on lasers, still
an experimental technology. Pontus Hulten, a friend who had become
director of Stockholm’s Moderna Museet,
introduced him to Jean Tinguely, the Swiss sculptor, who needed help
with a sculpture he planned to show at the Museum of Modern Art. Kluver
scavenged bicycle wheels and other spare parts with him, then worked
with his colleagues at Bell Labs to build timers and triggering
mechanisms. The result was “Homage to New York,” a self-destructing assemblage that went on view in MoMA’s garden for a single evening in March 1960. In 27 minutes, it managed to set itself on fire, blow itself up and collapse into the pool.
More
collaborations followed. When Jasper Johns wanted a neon letter for his
“Field Painting” that wouldn’t have to be plugged into the wall, Kluver
and his co-workers designed a battery-driven power supply. When
Rauschenberg was trying to put together “Oracle,” an interactive sound
assemblage that required cordless radios,
Kluver helped make it work. When Andy Warhol asked for a light bulb
that would float in space, Kluver and his team concluded it couldn’t be
done. Instead he suggested a heat-sealable metallic plastic, 3M
Scotchpak. Warhol used it to make “Silver Clouds,” a dreamy assemblage of floating pillows that playfully nudged gallerygoers in the spring of 1966.
In
part, these partnerships were encouraged by proximity: As the epicenter
of the art world, New York was well-positioned to take advantage of
technology that otherwise might have remained locked up in corporate
labs. Idealism was a factor as well. “He thought the artist could be a
revolutionary factor that could inspire the engineers,” Ms. Martin said
of her husband.
But
most of all, the moment was right. When the ’60s began, young artists
like Rauschenberg were in rebellion against abstract expressionism, with
its insistence on art as a vehicle for personal feeling and existential
angst. They countered with a raw, anything-goes sensibility that
brought in not only engineers but also dancers, choreographers and
poets, not to mention bits of scrap metal. Rauschenberg’s “9 Evenings”
was the culmination of years of raucous “happenings” in tiny downtown
storefronts and the basement of Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square.
As they set about redefining art (or “de-defining” it, as the critic
Harold Rosenberg maintained), avant-garde artists needed people who
could not just wield a screwdriver but design a Doppler sonar system,
set up directional photocells to generate sound from movement or make
artificial snowflakes fall up rather than down.
“9
Evenings” turned out to be an inflection point. Viewers and critics
were alternately irritated, bewildered or infuriated by the goings-on.
Only later did it become clear that what they were viewing was not an
artwork but an art system, a process of feedback and control that
techies knew as cybernetics. The event was made up of people following a
set of instructions — an algorithm.
Even as they were staging “9 Evenings,” Rauschenberg and Kluver formed Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.),
an outfit devoted to pairing engineers with artists. “If you don’t
accept technology, you better go to another place, because no place here
is safe,” Rauschenberg declared at a 1967 news conference. “Nobody
wants to paint rotten oranges any more.”
The idea spread. In 1968, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art started Art & Technology,
a program that paired artists including Warhol, Claes Oldenburg,
Richard Serra, John Chamberlain, Robert Irwin and James Turrell with
locally based groups like Lockheed Martin, Walt Disney and the RAND
Corporation. Some RAND employees thought Chamberlain was there to
redecorate their offices, but Mr. Turrell and Mr. Irwin were paired with
a psychologist who worked on NASA missions. Ultimately Mr. Turrell
walked out, but the relationship still provided the genesis for his
signature works — his “Ganzfelds,” disorienting environments that
suggest the experience of flying blind into a snowstorm.
By
the end of the ’70s, however, artists’ fascination with technology was
fading with the rise of neo-expressionism, which signaled an ebbing of
interest in performance art, conceptualism and anything that smacked of
cybernetics. “I’m painting again!” David Byrne squawked in the Talking
Heads song “Artists Only” — and that’s exactly what people were doing.
Coincidentally
— or perhaps not — the center of gravity in the tech world was shifting
from Armonk, N.Y., and Murray Hill, N.J., where IBM and Bell Labs had
headquarters, to Silicon Valley, home of Intel and Apple. But just as
New York has re-emerged as a tech hotbed in the Internet era — a
development documented at the end of the “Silicon City” show — tech has
re-emerged as a major theme in art.
“What
was gestured to in the ’60s is now coming to fruition in really
interesting ways,” said Zachary Kaplan, the executive director of
Rhizome, an organization set up in 1996 to support digital and Internet-related art.
Now affiliated with the New Museum, Rhizome hosts an annual conference,
Seven on Seven, that pairs artists with technologists and challenges
them to create something new together. “E.A.T. is a foundational
reference for something like that,” Mr. Kaplan added.
Similarly,
“9 Evenings” can be seen as the progenitor for the fixation on digital
culture that’s characteristic of the work of so many young artists today
— people like Mr. Trecartin, the video and installation artist who, as
noted in The New Yorker, “is being hailed as the magus of the Internet
century,” and Cory Arcangel, who arrived on the scene in 2002 with “Super Mario Clouds,” a version of the popular Nintendo video games that he had hacked to delete everything but the blue sky and clouds.
Still,
Lauren Cornell, Rhizome’s former director, now a curator and associate
director of technology initiatives at the New Museum, noted, “the
moments are really different. With ‘9 Evenings,’ technologists worked in
service to the artists.”
In contrast, in the current wave of shows — like the New Museum’s 2015 Triennial,
which Ms. Cornell and Mr. Trecartin organized — technology has become
so ubiquitous that the technologist and the artist are often the same
person. “Artists are coders, and coders are artists,” she said — which
suggests that in some sense at least, Rauschenberg and Kluver were more
successful than they’d ever dreamed.
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