Experiments in Art and Technology: Robert Rauschenberg

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Robert Rauschenberg: It couldn’t be done today. It was done before its time, and it’s too late now. That’s a rare moment.

Ahmed Best: That’s artist Robert Rauschenberg. He was a major figure in 20^th century art, an exuberant maverick whose multimedia work paved the way for Pop Art and much that followed. But he’s talking here about a part of his career that is less well known: his work with the art/science group called Experiments in Art and Technology.

Welcome to Season 3 of Recording Artists, a Getty podcast dedicated to exploring the lives of artists through its archives. I’m your host, artist and futurist Ahmed Best. In this season, we look at Experiments in Art and Technology, or E.A.T. This groundbreaking organization of artists and scientists formed in 1966 to facilitate collaboration and explore the creative potential of new technologies.

In this first episode we focus on one of the key founders of E.A.T.: artist Robert Rauschenberg. I’ll talk with curator and art historian Michelle Kuo and cognitive-studies scientist Xiadong Lin Siegler about Rauschenberg. We’ll unpack how artists and scientists approach experimentation, perseverance, and failure in similar ways.

If you grew up in New York City and had artists in your family as I did, you’d have heard of Robert Rauschenberg. I knew of his mixed media pieces using mud and dirt, stuff he found on the street. But I didn’t know all that much about his time with E.A.T. before starting this project.

As a nerdy kid in the South Bronx, I was fascinated by the intersection of art and science. Comic books and sci-fi movies captured my imagination. I saw my first computer in the 5th grade. It was the Commodore PET. I wrote my first line of code on that computer, and I was hooked on figuring out how to smash together art and technology. Since then, I’ve worked on some of the first motion-capture technology with Star Wars and taught college students a class called Inventing the Future. So when Getty invited me to talk about artists and scientists who came together in the 1960s to figure out new ways to collaborate, I jumped at the chance.

Nancy Perloff: So basically, what we have on the table is, I guess I could call them constellations around the themes that you’re particularly interested in. So…

Best: Getty curator Nancy Perloff has been organizing an exhibition about the group. I met her in the Special Collections Room at the Getty Research Institute to look at documents, schematic diagrams, and photographs showing the early years of E.A.T. and some of their notable projects.

Perloff: It was a fascinating idea, to bring artists and engineers together. No one had done this before in an organized way. The idea was that each of them could bring something different to the table. And out of this collaboration could come something that neither one of them could create on their own.

Best: Looking at black and white photos of E.A.T.’s engineers, with their short hair and crisp white shirts and ties, I’m reminded of NASA scientists from the same period. The 1960s were a time when science and engineering were advancing faster than people could figure out how to use them. New technologies were coming out of the military and the space program. Lasers, L.E.D.s, even the ATM were developed during this time. It was almost scary how fast things were changing and advancing, and no one really knew where it would lead. Here’s art historian Michelle Kuo.

Society as a whole was incredibly, let’s say, on the cusp of crisis. Ranging from everything, like nuclear winter and the threat of mutually assured destruction to ecological devastation to the threat of automation and the fear that machines would replace humans. So that sounds pretty familiar, I would imagine.

Best: For Robert Rauschenberg, the ‘60s were a period of constant reinvention artistically. He moved from making what he called “combines,” which mixed painting and sculpture, to crafting large canvases that he silkscreened with images from art history and American pop culture. In 1964, he became the first American to win the top prize at the Venice Biennale, where he showed a collection of Pop Art screen paintings.

But Rauschenberg didn’t just push the boundaries of visual art. He also worked with the experimental Judson Dance Theater group, as a choreographer and performer. In 1963, he put on roller skates and danced with a giant parachute-shaped sail strapped to his back for a piece called Pelican. He was always hungry for new inspiration, new media, and new collaborations. Again, Michelle Kuo:

Kuo: In the early 60s, he starts to really think about technology as something that’s become part of everyday life but that is a bit wondrous. Like suddenly we can communicate with people halfway around the world. Suddenly humans are launching satellites into space that can transmit beams over thousands and thousands of miles. And he became fascinated. Just like he was fascinated with nature, he became fascinated with technology as something that’s all around us, but that we don’t necessarily take time to understand.

Best: Milton Ernest Rauschenberg was born in 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas, a backwater oil industry town. He changed his name later because he thought “Robert Rauschenberg” sounded better. He studied pharmacology at the University of Texas in Austin before dropping out, probably due to dyslexia. In 1944, he was drafted into the Navy, and he was working at a Navy hospital in San Diego when he took a day trip to the Huntington Museum and Gardens in San Marino, near Los Angeles. He talked about it later with art historian Barbara Rose.

Rauschenberg: I went to the cactus garden that they had there, and walked into this big building, which turned out to be the museum. Pinky and Blue Boy and Sarah Siddons by Reynolds, and that was a total overdose. That was the first time I realized that you can be an artist.

Best: It’s funny to think that a few formal portraits by 18^th century British society painters could inspire a wildly innovative and experimental art career, but you never know what can change your life. For me, it was reading Shakespeare’s Othello in high school. Most of my classmates looked at the text and might as well have been looking at hieroglyphics. But I understood every word. It was like I uncovered a superpower, and I realized that this acting thing could be my career. It must have been similar for Robert Rauschenberg. Something just clicked.

After the war, he studied art, first in Kansas City, then in Paris, and then at Black Mountain College, the North Carolina school known for daring collaborations between artists of different genres. At Black Mountain he met some of his long-term friends and colleagues, like choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage. The restless, collaborative, experimental model of Black Mountain was one he would stick to throughout his career.

Some of Rauschenberg’s earliest paintings were large canvases that he covered with white paint. Just all-white paintings. They were ridiculed at his first show in 1953. But he didn’t let it deter him. He moved on to create his combines, widely regarded as his most groundbreaking and significant works.

Cognitive researcher Xiaodong Lin Siegler has studied the thinking and attitudes of Nobel Prize winning scientists and professional athletes. I asked her about Rauschenberg’s ability to shrug off criticism and keep going.

When you’re talking to these people, specifically, like, people who are high achievers, what is it that makes those people actually want to try?

Xiaodong Lin Siegler: I think several factors that impact them from, you know, you failed, and then why are you still keep going or decided to keep going? And one major factor I saw is very strong, uncontrollable passion and an interest in what they want to find out. And that’s for the scientist part. For the athlete part, is that uncontrollable desire to improve themselves and to push themselves to the highest potential they could reach. So I think the desire to test for themselves what I really can do and what I’m really interested in, I haven’t found the satisfying answers, I want to find out. That’s the major drive.

Best: Rauschenberg’s explanation to Barbara Rose about why he makes art feels similar:

Barbara Rose: What, what was it about painting that made you excited or what, I mean, what—why did you become an artist?

Rauschenberg: Okay. I think I couldn’t help it.

Best: Rauschenberg needed to make art. And part of what shielded him from any feeling of failure was his belief that art making wasn’t really about an end product—a painting, a sculpture, a performance. The art was in the process, the creative passion and the energy that went into that piece. He describes a lecture he gave to a group of students:

Rauschenberg: So I ended up by saying that art is nothing that you can measure. It depends on the time, the look, the intensity, the devotion that’s placed in it. And, of course, all that comes with sacrifices because the rewards are not immediate.

I said, if you can avoid being an artist, do so.

Best: Everybody in the arts has heard that at some point—if you can do anything other than art, you should. I know I’ve had my share of devastating rejection. The ups and downs come with the territory. But you do it because you can’t not do it.

If there’s a seminal moment for E.A.T., one of those events that doesn’t seem like much at the time but in retrospect has real significance, it has to be the meeting of Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver. Klüver was a Swedish physicist who was working for Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. Michelle Kuo:

Kuo: Bell Labs was, at the time, from the 30s onward, for about 40 to 50 years, the kind of global apex of scientific research. They invented the laser. They discovered the evidence of the Big Bang. They created the first sort of computer graphics and digital sound mechanism. So, Klüver was in the seat of scientific and engineering discovery. At the same time, he had been involved with artists and filmmakers actually, and performance, and theater professionals in Sweden. And through just connections, like social connections, became friendly with a number of artists.

Best: It was through his collaboration with Swiss artist Jean Tinguely that Klüver met Rauschenberg.

Kuo: Tinguely worked with Klüver to create in 1960 a work called Homage to New York, in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in a early spring, March evening, they set off this gigantic contraption that had wheels and whistles and basically, it was a sculpture that Tinguely said was supposed to destroy itself and that it would actually explode at the end of this performance. Rauschenberg was there. And so Rauschenberg himself had created a little contraption that he called Money Thrower that was sort of in response to this big autodestructive sculpture, as Tinguely called it. And that’s where Rauschenberg met Klüver on that rainy evening in New York.

Best: The two of them hit it off, and started working together on sculptures and installations. For Rauschenberg, Klüver was a gateway to science and technology. Rauschenberg later said, “Billy Klüver gave me the suggestion that the possibilities in technology were endless.”

Michelle Kuo:

Kuo: I think Rauschenberg and Klüver and these other artists thought, well, what if we could take these technologies that are in development, technologies that 99.999 percent of ordinary people have no access to, let alone knowledge of, and what if we could think about them differently and maybe make them do something else and maybe make them sort of experimental in the artistic sense rather than only in the technological research and development sense.

Best: Rauschenberg and Klüver started to conceptualize a series of performances that would involve a large group of artists and engineers, working together using new technology to create live performances that had never been seen or experienced before. They started pulling in collaborators: Rauschenberg’s circle of artists, dancers, and choreographers like Deborah Hay and Yvonne Rainer, along with experimental musicians and composers like John Cage and David Tudor. And Klüver’s contacts, scientists and engineers from Bell Labs in New Jersey. Ultimately, they enlisted ten artists and about 30 engineers in a months-long process to develop a slate of performances.

Kuo: They would meet, this kind of amoeba-like, shapeshifting group of people, and they would have all these ideas. So the artist would throw out all these ideas. And the thing that everyone remembers from that time is that the engineers would say, whoa, whoa, like these things that you’re throwing out, like, there is no way we can realize that.

Best: Initially, the group planned to stage these performances at an arts festival in Klüver’s native Sweden. When that fell through, they chose instead a New York venue: a huge hangar-like space with an art history pedigree. It was the 69^th Regiment Armory building in Manhattan, where the 1913 Armory Show that introduced Duchamp, the surrealists, and other avant-garde artists to Americans had taken place. They were hoping to be equally groundbreaking.

The show was scheduled for nine nights in October 1966. And it wasn’t some fringe happening. It was a buzzy art world event, called 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering. In total, an estimated 10,000 people attended. And it was indeed like nothing anyone had seen before.

Kuo: 9 Evenings entailed everything from live sound transmission, experimental music, experimental choreography with lasers, infrared cameras, transistor radios, walkie talkies, kinetic sculptures, gigantic inflatable plastic tunnels, oscilloscopes. And they created these very, very interesting events.

Best: What kind of “interesting events?” Choreographer Steve Paxton created a labyrinth made of clear plastic tubes that audiences had to walk through. Dancer Alex Hay performed choreographed movements while the sounds of his body—heart, muscles, eyelids—were amplified via sensors on his back. John Cage had the audience wandering past illuminated radios, telephones, and kitchen appliances which he had fitted with contact microphones. Multimedia artist Öyvind Fahlström devised a theater piece with live actors, a singing pillow, snowflakes that fell upwards, a woman in a plastic swimming pool of Jell-O, and a triptych of slide, movie, and television projection screens.

The film footage of 9 Evenings is kind of fascinating. Along with performance excerpts, you see the engineers, still in their white shirts and ties. There are switchboards and transmitters and miles of cables. There’s a large audience of people sitting on bleachers or milling around in the dark. The women are in coats and dresses, the men in jackets and ties. It’s a very white crowd.

Perloff: And then finally the last group, I guess I would call 9 Evenings. [Best: Yes.]

Best: I looked at some of the ephemera from 9 Evenings at the Getty Research Institute archive with curator Nancy Perloff, including a hand-written description Rauschenberg made of his 9 Evenings piece.

Perloff: Let’s take a look at what Rauschenberg says here because I think this is helpful. “Tennis is movement put in the context of theater.” Rauschenberg was really interested in theater, as you were saying, happenings, things like that. “It is a formal dance improvisation.” So now we’ve got theater and then improvisation. “The unlikely use of the game to control the lights and to perform as an orchestra interests me. The conflict of not being able to see an event that is taking place right in front of one, except through reproduction is the sort of double exposure of action, a screen of light and a screen of darkness.”

Best: Rauschenberg’s contribution to 9 Evenings was a piece called Open Score, which took the form of a tennis game between tennis pro Mimi Kanarek and painter Frank Stella. They played on a makeshift court lit from high above by 48 individual spotlights, using tennis rackets that were fitted with contact microphones, transmitters, and antennas. Each time one of the players hit the ball, the sound of the vibrating strings was transmitted to speakers around the Armory. Picture a live action version of the Atari video game, PONG.

Perloff: What happened was every time Mimi Kanarek, and she was the tennis pro, and then Frank Stella, who was the other performer, hit the ball, a light would go off. [Best: Right.] So with each rally of hitting the ball, the light goes off. Just one light.

Best: So the light turns off completely. [Perloff: Yeah, yeah.] And so as they go, it just gets consecutively darker and darker until there’s no light left.

Perloff: Exactly. And that’s what he’s referring to at the end. [Best: Right.] Because at the end he uses infrared cameras, which capture a cast of 500, reflected on screens. So the audience is able to see on the screen this cast of 500 people. [Best: Wow.] But the armory itself is completely dark. So this was a very early use of infrared [Best: Yes.] technology by Rauschenberg, and that’s what he’s saying in terms of double exposure, a screen of light and a screen of darkness.

Best: All of these performance pieces are fun to talk about, and in the archival footage they look compelling. But for the spectators there in the Armory, 9 Evenings was a disappointment. Many came expecting something spectacular and mind-blowing, something theatrical. Maybe the promotion was to blame.

Kuo: When you see the ads for 9 Evenings, it says things like, “you will see people float in the air. You will have this, you know, transformative experience of wonders.” And so it’s very much billed in this kind of P. T. Barnum way. And so I think that also, in a way that probably the artist did not intend, drummed up expectations for kinda, some kind of spectacular fireworks extravaganza. And then of course it wasn’t that. Even if the tech had worked seamlessly, they would get like a weird drone sound from John Cage.

Best: But the tech did not work seamlessly. It was intermittent and erratic. Sometimes it didn’t work at all. For Rauschenberg’s Open Score, each time they hit the ball, another spotlight was supposed to switch off automatically. At the first performance, though, engineers had to rush to unplug one light at a time as the game progressed. When the infrared cameras wouldn’t turn on, an engineer eventually fixed the problem by doing what we all do now when we’re faced with a mysterious tech failure—he unplugged everything and then plugged it back in.

If you’ve ever worked on a play, even a high school play, you might remember a tech rehearsal, where they figure out the lights and the sound. There’s a lot of stops and starts, a lot of waiting around. It was a bit like that. Except in front of a paying audience.

Kuo: So they’re frantically trying to get this to work. And the audience has to wait in some cases for hours, and they’re getting really angry and impatient. Imagine an angry audience at a theater. It’s not the most fun experience. So it was a real experiment in every sense of the word.

Best: “Disharmony at the Armory” was how New York Times critic Grace Glueck titled her summary of the show. She quoted one spectator, who said the show was, “Brave, experimental, inventive, uncompromising. And I yawned all the way through it.” New Yorker Magazine art critic Peter Schjeldahl had one of my favorite summaries of the performances: “They were malfunctioning, formless, benumbing ordeals…To appreciate 9 Evenings, you had to have not been there.”

As someone who’s performed in some pretty edgy and experimental shows, I give a lot of credit to the artists, engineers and performers who staged 9 Evenings. It takes courage to get up and do something when you don’t know how it’s going to go over. There’s already a lot of insecurity involved in being an artist—to put something out there can be terrifying. So it’s interesting to see that the artists and engineers weren’t crushed by the bad reviews. All the evidence suggests that they felt just fine. Because in this case, their goal wasn’t really to entertain an audience; it was all about creating something new.

Here’s how Rauschenberg described it more than 25 years later:

Rauschenberg: If it’s the first time, that it’s never been done, there’s no preparation for any sense of being there. And I think that’s why so many people who did brave coming, probably most of their experience afterwards thinking I shouldn’t have, but now are so proud. It’s a very small club of people who brag about, “I saw 9 Evenings.” That’s really neat.

It couldn’t be done today. It was done before its time and it’s too late now. That’s a rare moment.

Best: Both science and art are experimental. They’re iterative, and failure is a part of the process. You don’t just wake up and create something perfect. You keep trying and keep failing until you get it right. Here’s Xiodong Lin Siegler again.

Lin Siegler: I firmly believe there is a strong correlation between high expectations, high achievement, high desire to achieve, and a high level of failures.

Best: And Michelle Kuo:

Kuo: Billy Klüver, who would go on to found E.A.T., famously said, “If you are not failing 96 percent of the time, then you’re not a good engineer.”

Best: Making art, like science, means giving yourself permission to fail—which is a hard thing to do. Xiaodong Lin Siegler tells the story of an artist she saw drawing a street scene near her home. Day after day she saw him working and reworking the same painting. She says she brought her young daughter, who was constrained by a fear of making mistakes, to meet him.

Lin Siegler: I just started by saying you know, this kid believes that you got everything right the first time. So can you tell us, is it the case? And that guy said, hell no! And I can tell you, this painting has been going on for months and I’m still doing it because I’m constantly making mistakes. I constantly revise it. And I think that really had an impact on her by going back there to try things. I do think art played a very important role in helping kids understand the journey of human development.

Best: And for Rauschenberg, the process was just as important as the outcome.

Rauschenberg: Well, the artist’s business is contact. I don’t think it matters whether the art made is interesting. Making the art is one of the weakest aspects of the show. It’s the changes in different people’s lives for having to be forced into areas that they are unfamiliar with.

Best: I’m sure it also helped that despite the critical reaction, the actual process of putting the show together, all the hard work, was exciting. Here’s E.A.T. co-founder Billy Klüver:

Billy Klüver: The 9 Evenings had something like 4,000 engineering hours in it. And, as far as the possibilities of collaborating, it proved the point. It was as chaotic as must have been the first makings of cinema in 1905 or something like that. It probably had much the same spirit to it.

Best: And here’s Robert Rauschenberg:

Rauschenberg: I think the engineers like the spirit and I think the artists like the mind. And the guys were working for nothing. We were working for nothing. What a way to run a business, huh?

Best: A month after 9 Evenings, the participants called a meeting at a New York hotel to assess the level of interest in an ongoing art-science collaborative. Three hundred people showed up. Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) became a formalized, non-profit organization, with Rauschenberg and Klüver—alongside artist Robert Whitman and engineer Fred Waldhaur—as officers. They had a board of directors, a permanent staff, and an office on East 16^th Street. E.A.T would be a connector, a network for artists and engineers around the world to collaborate just as the participants of 9 Evenings did. There was a newsletter, a lecture series, and a conference. At its peak, it numbered around 5,000 members.

But just as E.A.T. was being formalized, Robert Rauschenberg began to drift away from the group.

Kuo: I think for Rauschenberg, he felt as E.A.T. was growing in that way that he wasn’t needed as much, to be part of this organization because he didn’t want to become a, you know, administrative, centralized bureaucrat. That’s really the opposite of what he wanted to do.

Best: The politics of the 60s and 70s also made this continued collaboration less appealing. With the Vietnam War raging, the growth of the military industrial complex, ecological disasters, and the looming threat of automation, “Big Science” was becoming a more controversial partner for artists.

As he did throughout his career, Rauschenberg moved on to new collaborators and new media—though he didn’t lose his interest in using art to push the boundaries of technology, and vice versa. He collaborated with engineering behemoth Teledyne to create Mud-Muse, a tank of driller’s mud that bubbled in response to audio stimuli. He worked with manufacturers in Japan on new processes to print on ceramic tiles. In fact, he never stopped experimenting with new technologies and new mediums and collaborating with new people, both in the arts and sciences.

I’ll end with this clip from his interview with Barbara Rose explaining this compulsion to always seek out the new.

Rauschenberg: I enjoy the urgency and the emergency of like working in a strange place with new materials.

Rose: And new people.

Rauschenberg: And new people. Because that’s where the possibilities are.

Rose: But why do you think that’s true? I know that you’re, you know, you like to have people around you.

Rauschenberg: I don’t want to be safe. That’s where I get my energy, is not knowing what’s going to happen next. The worst thing that can happen to me is I’m bored.

Best: In the next episode, we explore the organization from the point of view of the Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver. We’ll learn what artists and engineers gain by working together, but also why collaboration like this is so hard. And we’ll look at an even more ambitious E.A.T. project, the Pepsi Pavilion at the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka, Japan.

Promotional Film: The visitor is virtually inside a mirror of sound.

Best: That’s in episode two of Recording Artists.

This podcast is sponsored by the Getty Patron Program.

This season was produced by Zoe Goldman with audio production by Gideon Brower. Episode script by Zoe Goldman and Gideon Brower. Our theme music is by Bryn Bliska. Mixing, additional music, and sound design by Myke Dodge Weiskopf. Christopher Sprinkle is the executive producer. Gina White managed rights with Joohee Lee.

Additional audio in this episode comes from footage of Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York; 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering; a series of 10 documentary films, copyright Experiments in Art and Technology; and The Great Big Mirror Dome, copyright PepsiCo Inc.

Thanks to Nancy Perloff and Megan Mastrionni for their research.

Special thanks in this episode to Michelle Kuo, Xiaodong Lin Siegler, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

To see Robert Rauschenberg’s handwritten description of Open Score or a picture of the first infrared camera being tested in his studio, along with more images and transcripts, visit getty dot edu slash recording artists.

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