Billy Kluver at Sonnabend - Brief Article

In 1960 curator Pontus Hulten then director of Stockholm's Moderna Museet, asked an electrical engineer named Billy Kluver to assist Jean Tinguely in the creation of the artist's spectacular self-destructing machine plastic art for the garden of novel York's Museum of Modern Art. Having advance from Stockholm to the U in 1954 Kluver had joined the department of electrical engineering at Berkeley before becoming a member of the technical staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ He and Tinguely scavenged the dump of the Jersey flatlands for bicycle wheels, motors and other materials. With help from Kluver's colleagues they created the mechanisms necessary for Tinquely's apparatus to breathe sooty vapor emit sparks, ignite a piano and noisily self-destruct The fruit of their collaboration lasted 27 minutes. For Kluver what followed is a lifetime of similar collaborations with artists that have serv as a catalyst to a wide range of interactions between art and technology.

Kluver provided a battery-driven illumination device for a r neon alphabetic character "R" used by Jasper John in Field Painting (1963-64) In 1964 he adapted a radio transmitter for dancer Yvonne Rainer; during her performance "At My Body's House" the entire of her breathing was picked up through a microphone and broadcast by dint of speaker. Robert Rauschenberg asked Kluver to collaborate in Oracle, an interactive environment that was his first display at Castelli, in 1965. In 1966 Kluver organized Nine Evenings of Theater and Engineering at the 69th Regiment Armory, with Rauschenberg, John Cage, Nam June Paik, Merce Cunningham and other artists working with nearly 30 engineers from Bell Labs. Later that year, Kluver his comrade engineer Fred Waldhauer, Rauschenberg and artist Robert Whitman placeed Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) as a seedbed for similar collaborations.

Perhaps the greatest in quantity famous of Kluver's collaborations was an adaptation of material used by means of the U.S. Army for wrapping sandwiches. Andy Warhol had asked for floating light bulbs; Kluver gave him the floating Silver hazes first shown at Castelli in 1966 For Expo `70 in Osaka, 63 engineers, artists and scientists collaborated upon a high-tech environment for the Pepsi Pavilion--more than a discotheque, les than a space station. Participating artists were Forrest Myers, who designed a tilted rectangle of high-intensity xenon light; Whitman, who designed the floor and ceiling of a light-and-mirror environment; and David Tudor, who collaborated in the design of a unmutilated system that functioned as an instrument.

Because artists still move round to E.A.T. for technical assistance today, Kluver locate out to iterate the collaborations of E.A.T. one time more in the quiet adjoining matter of this Chelsea gallery. His offering took the form of a timeline--an installation of 47 unframed panels of image and body that told these and other stories of a not-for-profit organization that recognized early upon the potential for progress in the visual and performing arts end informed access to new technology.

During the exhibition, of recent origin connections with artists were made. Kluver continues to feed and broker such activities and is himself integral to their history. He present the appearances as active in the proces now as he at any time was, appropriately scrupulous in the crediting and remembering of what was given, through whom and when.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group