Engineering marvel: Branden W. Joseph on Billy Kluver

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

Kluver had been put in contact with Tinguely by his friend Pontus Hulten, then director of the Moderna Museet. Besides helping Tinguely scour garbage dumps and secondhand distributors for bicycle wheels and other materials, Kluver provided the Swiss sculptor with vials of synthetic smoke and odoriferous liquids to unleash on the audience and also lent a hand (and those of fellow engineer Harold Hodges) in devising various electrical components. During the chaotic performance, much 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 subsequent one-on-one interactions with artists--providing remote-controlled radios for Robert Rauschenberg's Oracle, 1962-65; neon-powering battery systems for Jasper Johns's Zone, 1962, and Field Painting, 1963-64; and heat-sealed Scotchpak for Andy Warhol's Silver Clouds, 1966--helped produce some of their best-known pieces, something of Tinguely's malfunctioning machine haunted Kluver's most 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 New 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 such an all-star cast from the New York art scene and the seemingly limitless potential of the most vanguard science, it was perhaps impossible for the results to have matched expectations. Nevertheless, the reviews were uncompromisingly harsh. New York Times reporter Clive Barnes stayed only for Rauschenberg's Open Score, but 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 two nights started very late and were drastically rough."

Momentarily frustrated, Kluver remained undeterred. Working with Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), which he cofounded in 1966 with Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman, and engineer Fred Waldhauer, Kluver continued to pursue the type of interactions that 9 Evenings instigated. Before the critical response to 9 Evenings, Kluver had embraced the "failures" that Tinguely courted in his Homage, remarking, "In the same way as a scientific experiment can never fail, this experiment in art could never fail." He continued, "In a purely technocratic society the machine must always be a functional object. Failures of the machine can therefore never be allowed, because control is the necessary element of that society. It is when the machine must function at any cost that there can be no 'Homage to New York.'" Among the artists close to Kluver, a similarly positive understanding of "failure" meshed with Cagean notions of a-teleological activity. The day before 9 Evenings' debut, Rauschenberg cribbed from the composer's lexicon, declaring that the audience "should understand that we're involved in a process and not in presenting finished products." When the critical response to the ambitious and expensive Pepsi Pavilion that E.A.T. produced for Osaka's Expo '70 under Kluver's supervision proved similar to that of 9 Evenings, Kluver's defenders (such as Barbara Rose) would imply that the project's most important result was not the product--ultimately and reluctantly abandoned by Kluver and the artists after a contentious fallout with Pepsi over events programming--but the ongoing collaboration of artists and engineers.

Needless to say, artistic interactions with technology long predated Kluver's efforts. Well-known examples from earlier in the century, such as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's Light Space Modulator, 1921-30, and Marcel Duchamp's Rotary Demisphere, 1925, manifestly employed to opposite ends technological components and, more important, ideas or ideologies of technological progress. In the 1960s, as Caroline Jones 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 but not unrelated ways within Minimalism and Pop. To these examples could be added the inherent technological aspects of contemporary electronic music (pursued by Cage since the 1930s) and film, increasingly evident as the projector was explicitly referenced and incorporated in structural film, expanded cinema, and other types of performance. Rather than characterize Kluver's contribution to the decade's larger projects as technology per se, it would be more accurate to claim that he offered the institutional resources of "big science," as exemplified by the research facilities of his employer, Bell Telephone Laboratories. It is from this perspective that one can understand the differences between Kluver and the artists with whom he associated.