Robert Rauschenberg’s Radical Project to Bring Together Artists and Engineers Gets the Getty Spotlight E.A.T is revisited in a new exhibition
By Min Chen
One fall evening in 1966, an audience crowded the 69th Regiment Armory in New York for a curious art happening titled “9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering.”
Over the course of the night, a series of performances unfolded. Visitors watched Yvonne Rainer direct a group of participants via walkie-talkie to move large objects around a stage; they saw John Cage orchestrate a choir of telephones and radios; and they observed as Frank Stella played tennis with Mimi Kanarek using rackets wired with transmitters. They wound their way through a billowy maze Steve Paxton created with polyethylene sheets. More than 10,000 people attended the 10-day run; critics savaged it.
The event was staged by 10 artists in collaboration with 30 engineers from Bell Labs, intended to showcase the possibilities of marrying their skills. As planning committee member Simone Forti reflected, it was less an art presentation than “a step towards the creation of a situation that will later be important to the making of art.” It’s a prescient observation, as “9 Evenings” would come to serve as a proof-of-concept for the initiative behind it, one that sought to inject technology into art-making.
Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) was in nascent form when “9 Evenings” took place—a cross-disciplinary concept sketched out by artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman in collaboration with Bell Labs engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer. Its New York debut spurred its cementing into an organization with the goal of helping artists “achiev[e] new art through new technology,” as Rauschenberg and Klüver wrote in the first E.A.T. newsletter. The group was soon inundated with dozens upon dozens of requests from creatives eager to expand their practices.
“E.A.T. was a phenomenon,” curator Nancy Perloff told me. “Unlike today, it was a resource with a capital R that would allow artists to experiment.”
Perloff is one of the masterminds behind “Sensing the Future,” an exhibition at Los Angeles’ Getty Research Institute that revisits E.A.T.’s brief yet meaningful existence. The show, part of PST Art, unfolds across two galleries, with artifacts surfaced from the institute’s archives.
The organization’s early days fill the first room. Detailed here are its founding members’ early art-tech experiments (Rauschenberg’s Dry Cell, for example), as well as E.A.T.’s 1967 collaboration with New York’s Museum of Modern Art on an open call for artworks created with technology (nine works from which were included in the 1968 show, “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age“).
