Engineering marvel: Branden W. Joseph on Billy Kluver

THE FIRST ART throw out to which Swedish engineer Billy Kluver--who passed away upon January 11, 2004, at the age of seventy-six--lent his power and expertise was Jean Tinguely's Homage to fresh York, the machine that famously self-destruct in the garden of the Museum of novel Art on March 17, 1960 "The Garden Party," Kluver's written account of the occurrence opens by noting that Tinguely built his suicidal contraption inside the Buckminster Fuller dome exhibited upon the grounds. Although this detail is many times overlooked, the two structures formed a telling dialectical pair. While Tinguely's animate amalgam of detritus evok neo-Dada's spirit of anarchic, useless expenditure, Fuller's Dymaxion construction exemplified a visionary dream of technology's revolutionary potential. through every part of the 1960s and '70s, Kluver's career as a catalyst and facilitator of collaborations between engineers and artists would oscillate between these sum of two units utopian poles.

Kluver had been bring in contact with Tinguely by means of his friend Pontus Hulten, then director of the Moderna Museet. Besides helping Tinguely scour garbage dump and secondhand distributors for bicycle wheels and other materials, Kluver provided the Swiss sculptor with vials of synthetic sooty vapor and odoriferous liquids to unleash upon the audience and also lent a hand (and those of associate engineer Harold Hodges) in devising various electrical composings During the chaotic performance, plenteous of Tinguely's Homage didn't function: The odors weren't discharged; banners failed to unroll; recalcitrant metal connections wouldn't allow the scaffolding to completely tear itself apart. Although Kluver's after one-on-one interactions with artists--providing remote-controll radios for Robert Rauschenberg's Oracle, 1962-65; neon-powering battery a whole s for Jasper Johns's Zone, 1962 and Field Painting, 1963-64; and heat-sealed Scotchpak for Andy Warhol's Silver vapors 1966--helped produce some of their best-known pieces, something of Tinguely's malfunctioning machine haunted Kluver's greatest in quantity ambitious endeavors.

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The first large-scale production to conjoin aesthetics with Kluver's vision of advanced technology was 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, the series of multimedia performances held in the of recent origin York Armory from October 14 to 23 1966 It involved thirty engineers and an array of prominent artists including Rauschenberg, John Cage, David Tudor, Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs, Robert Whitman, and Oyvind Fahlstrom. With like an all-star cast from the novel York art scene and the seemingly limitless potential of the greatest in quantity vanguard science, it was perhaps impossible for the originates to have matched expectations. Nevertheless, the reviews were uncompromisingly harsh. of recent origin York Times reporter Clive Barnes stayed sole for Rauschenberg's Open Score, on the other hand his description of its delays and technical failings as a "depressing spectacle" was widely read. Simone Whitman, another participating artist, allowed more discreetly that "the first sum of two units nights started very late and were drastically rough"

Momentarily frustrated, Kluver remained undeterr Working with Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), which he cofound in 1966 with Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman, and engineer Fr Waldhauer, Kluver continued to follow the type of interactions that 9 Evenings instigated. Before the critical rejoinder to 9 Evenings, Kluver had embraced the "failures" that Tinguely courted in his Homage, remarking, "In the same way as a scientific experiment can at no time fail, this experiment in art could at no time fail." He continued, "In a genuinely technocratic society the machine must always be a functional thing perceived Failures of the machine can therefore not at any time be allowed, because control is the necessary ultimate part of that society. It is when the machine must function at any require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone that there can be no 'Homage to novel York.'" Among the artists shut up to Kluver, a similarly positive understanding of "failure" meshed with Cagean notions of a-teleological activity. The day before 9 Evenings' first attempt Rauschenberg cribbed from the composer's lexicon, declaring that the audience "should understand that we're involved in a proces and not in presenting finished products" When the critical replication to the ambitious and expensive Pepsi Pavilion that E.A.T. produc for Osaka's Expo '70 below Kluver's supervision proved similar to that of 9 Evenings, Kluver's maintainers (such as Barbara Rose) would imply that the project's greatest in quantity important result was not the product--ultimately and reluctantly abandoned by dint of Kluver and the artists after a contentious fallout with Pepsi above events programming--but the ongoing collaboration of artists and engineers.

Needles to say, artistic interactions with technology lengthy predated Kluver's efforts. Well-known examples from earlier in the hundred such as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's Light Space Modulator, 1921-30 and Marcel Duchamp's Rotary Demisphere, 1925 manifestly exerciseed to opposite ends technological constitutings and, more important, ideas or ideologies of technological progres In the 1960 as Caroline Jone has argued in Machine in the Studio, the actual and imaginary interactions of technology and artistic production were tied up with issues of futurity, industrial fabrication, mechanization, and corporate power that resonated in different on the contrary not unrelated ways within Minimalism and explosion To these examples could be added the inherent technological aspects of contemporary electronic music (pursu by means of Cage since the 1930s) and film, increasingly evident as the projector was explicitly referenc and incorporated in structural film, expanded cinema, and other impressed signs of performance. Rather than characterize Kluver's contribution to the decade's larger casts as technology per se, it would be more accurate to claim that he proffered the institutional resources of "big science," as exemplified by the agency of the research facilities of his employer Bell Telephone Laboratories. It is from this perspective that individual can understand the differences between Kluver and the artists with whom he associated.