75th Birthday Tribute to Billy Kluver

On the occasion of Billy Kluver's 75th Birthday (November 13th), I am
posting the following tribute that I gave at Postmaster's Gallery in
New York City on March 15th, 2000, organized by the Kitchen. The
tribute was originally written to celebrate the 30th anniversary of
the opening of the Pepsi Pavilion, created by E.A.T (Experiments in
Art & Technology).

- Randall Packer

Thirty years ago today, the Pepsi Pavilion opened at Expo 1970 in
Osaka, Japan. This extraordinary work, the most ambitious undertaking
of Billy Kluver and E.A.T., involved the collaboration of over 75
artists and engineers from the US and Japan. More than an artwork, it
was, like the Pyramids, a cultural force in the sheer scope and
audacity of its conception. Bob Whitman, one of the collaborating
artists, claimed it was the largest art project of the second half of
the 20th Century.

At a conference I attended recently, an art historian remarked that
the Pepsi Pavilion hovers like a "ghost" over the contemporary art
world. This is a work that in one form or another has "touched" every
artist working today with technology, yet few ever experienced it
first hand. Hardly anyone who has read about the Pavilion, referenced
in numerous books on art and technology, has witnessed its fog
sculpture designed by Fujiko Nakaya, carved from fine mist sprayed
high above its geodesic structure; or the 800 pound kinetic
sculptures by Robert Whitman that he affectionately called "Floats",
slowly and mischievously roaming the terrace; or Lowell Cross and
David Tudor's laser projections that engulfed viewers as they entered
the lower level of the Pavilion, in a multi-colored electronic
baptism; or the surround-sound system designed by Tudor and Gordon
Mumma that immersed the listener in the Pavilion's dome, trajectories
of electronic sounds and cries of whales moving across the space; or
the giant spherical mirror conceived by Robert Whitman, larger than
any other in the world - not even NASA has attempted this - which
projected upside down, three dimensional holographic-like "real"
images into the performance space for the mostly Japanese visitors
who were mesmerized, delighted, terrified, intrigued, baffled,
entranced and bewildered by this other-worldly creation.

The Pepsi Pavilion was the culmination of ten, incredible years of
creative work by Billy Kluver and his collaborators during the decade
of the 1960s, that forever altered the course of art history. It was
the birth of a movement that united the sister disciplines of art and
science, once and for all, into a unified medium - more decisively,
perhaps, than any period in history since Aristotle and the ancient
Greeks.

It all began in the spring of 1960 when Jean Tinguely asked Billy if
he would assist him with the construction of an outdoor sculpture
commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art for the Museum's sculpture
garden. Billy, who was working on laser systems at Bell Laboratories
in Murray Hill, New Jersey, couldn't resist the offer. Hardly
satisfied by purely scientific pursuits, he was eager to become a
part of the artistic milieu that was then giving birth to pop art,
minimalism, and Happenings a short drive away in New York City. He
was, as you can imagine, probably the only engineer on the planet
even aware of this activity.

Jean Tinguely's infamous self-destructing kinetic sculpture was
appropriately titled "Homage to New York." Kluver's participation in
this work, with its paint bombs, chemical stinks, noisemakers, and
fragments of scrap metal, inspired a generation of artists to imagine
the possibilities of technology, as the machine destroyed itself, in
Kluver's words, "in one glorious act of mechanical suicide." As
Calvin Tomkins colorfully narrates in his book "Off the Wall:" "The
great white machine rattles and shivers in all its members. Smoke
pours from its interior, temporarily blanketing the audience. The
piano catches fire and burns, accompanying its own demise with three
mournful notes repeated over and over. Parts of the structure break
loose and scuttle off to die elsewhere. Crossbeams sag as electric
charges melt the previously weakened joints. A Rauschenberg
"money-thrower" goes off with a blinding flash, scattering silver
dollars… a fireman, summoned by Tinguely, comes out to extinguish
the blaze in the piano; he is angrily booed by the spectators. After
about twenty minutes it becomes clear that the machine will not
perish unaided; firemen's axes finish the job, and 'Homage to New
York' returns to the junk piles from which it was born. The nineteen
sixties have begun."

After this blazing entrance into the New York art scene, Billy
enthusiastically joined in the revelry that continued through the
1960s, participating in the myriad of performances, Happenings and
uncategorizable events staged in lofts and storefronts by the likes
of Claus Oldenburg, Bob Whitman, Jim Dine, and others. Clearly the
performance art of the early 1960s made a strong impression on Billy,
heightening his interest in exploring open forms, unconventional
materials, and the process of interdisciplinary collaboration that
was his trademark.

Chief among his many collaborators was Robert Rauschenberg.
Rauschenberg had been in the audience the fateful day the "Homage to
New York" self-destructed, and asked Billy if he would work with him.
This was the beginning of a close relationship - today they are still
like brothers - a collaboration that produced some of the most
groundbreaking art and technology works of the 20th Century. Such
works as "Dry Cell" (1963), "Oracle" (1962-65), "Soundings" (1968)
and "Solstice" (1968) were among the first artworks ever to explore
the cybernetic exchange between the viewer and the machine.
Rauschenberg was interested in using technology to engage the
audience in an interactive relationship to the world around them,
bringing about an intimacy with the technological interactions that
have become ubiquitous in everyday life. This notion also underscored
Billy's objective, which was to bring the artist closer to the
concerns of the engineer and the materials of technology, and
reciprocally, for the artist to engage the engineer, typically
beholden to the corporate establishment, in meaningful cultural
dialogue.

Billy not only introduced new ways of incorporating technology to
Jean Tinguely and Robert Rauschenberg, but countless other artists
and performers including Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, John Cage, Merce
Cunningham, David Tudor, Lucinda Childs, Yvonne Rainer and Robert
Whitman. The list goes on. In 1966, Kluver and Rauschenberg organized
one of the defining events of the decade. It was the "9 Evenings:
Theater and Engineering" held at the cavernous 69th Regiment Armory
in New York, in which ten artists created new performance works, each
working with one or more engineers recruited by Billy Kluver from
Bell Laboratories. It is important to note for the record books, that
these projects were not funded by Bell Labs, and that the engineers
who worked on them did so under their own initiative and on more or
less their own time.

Although "9 Evenings" was never an overwhelming "critical" success,
criticism has never slowed Billy down. These performances proved
above all that the artist imagination and his understanding of the
social condition, united with the engineer's practical instincts and
knowledge of technology, would yield works of "art and technology"
that opened up new opportunities for artistic expression.
Furthermore, the embrace of technology promised a new central role
for the artist in an increasingly technological society.

And so, following "9 Evenings," Billy Kluver, together with Robert
Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman and engineer Fred Waldhauer, formalized
the idea of uniting artists and engineers by founding the now
legendary E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) - designed in
their words, "to catalyze the inevitable active involvement of
industry, technology and the arts." At their first meeting, held at
the Central Plaza Hotel in the fall of 1966, over 300 artists showed
up, eighty of whom made requests for engineers and technical support.
E.A.T. recruited engineers, published a newsletter, and held open
house wherever artists and engineers could meet informally. The
momentum that resulted from this effort led to the formation of
chapters all over the country with thousands of members. E.A.T. has
since become a model for countless organizations and institutions
worldwide, including museums, universities, research laboratories,
non-profit groups, even such corporate think tanks as Xerox PARC in
Palo Alto, California, where the personal computer was born.

In the first edition of their newsletter Techne, E.A.T's mission
statement was published. The visionary nature of this "call to
action" addressed critical issues foreshadowing current efforts to
galvanize collaboration between artists and engineers, promote the
importance of technology in the contemporary arts and society at
large, and to funnel corporate support into new media efforts. It
reads: "Maintain a constructive climate for the recognition of the
new technology and the arts by a civilized collaboration between
groups unrealistically developing in isolation. Eliminate the
separation of the individual from technological change and expand and
enrich technology to give the individual variety, pleasure, and
avenues for exploration and involvement in contemporary life.
Encourage industrial initiative in generating original forethought,
instead of a compromise in aftermath, and precipitate a mutual
agreement in order to avoid the waste of a cultural revolution."
But it was not until 1968 that E.A.T. and the emerging art and
technology movement was embraced and legitimized by the mainstream
art world. That was when curator Pontus Hulten organized the "Machine
as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age" exhibition at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York. Hulten boldly articulated the importance of
new forms of technology-based art by staging a sweeping historical
overview that began with Leonardo da Vinci and continued into the
20th Century. Hulten asked his old friend Billy Kluver to organize an
exhibition of contemporary art and technology works in order to bring
the exhibition up to the present. Kluver put out a call for
participation under the auspices of E.A.T., and presented the show
"Some More Beginnings" at the Brooklyn Museum. The judges were,
appropriately, all engineers.

The impact of Billy Kluver's work, born from his desire to engage
with the artist, to be a resource for artists, has resulted in a
lifelong dedication to artists and their art, including their
relentless need to break new ground. This effort has been a primary
catalyst leading to the widespread assimilation of technology into
the mainstream contemporary arts, not just in New York, but around
the world. Billy's role has always been to give, and despite this
total, uncompromising dedication, his approach as an engineer was
never to be servile, but rather to "serve" the artist as an active
and equal partner in the creation of the artwork. This simple, but
powerful idea is, I believe, his most important contribution, and its
effect can be felt as more than a ghostly presence in our
increasingly interdisciplinary times. For as Marshall McLuhan said,
"the artist tends now to move from the ivory to the control tower of
society." And Nam June Paik added, "cybernated art is very important,
but art for cybernated life is more important." Or in Billy's own
words, "…the artist is a visionary about life. Only he can create
disorder and still get away with it. Only he can use technology to
its fullest capacity… the artists have to use technology because
technology is becoming inseparable from our lives."

Billy Kluver has revealed to us how the artist might be a force of
renewal in a cybernated society, not by withdrawing from the
terrifying speed of social and technological change, but by closing
the gap between art and life, joining forces with the scientist to
re-engineer the cultural condition.

I would like to close with these words of Billy Kluver describing the
Pepsi Pavilion, words that were written thirty years ago but still
resonate today, words that should be remembered as computers, the
Internet, and the variety of interactive media permeate and begin to
dominate our contemporary life:

"The initial concern of the artists who designed the Pavilion was
that the quality of the experience of the visitor should involve
choice, responsibility, freedom, and participation. The Pavilion
would not tell a story or guide the visitor through a didactic,
authoritarian experience. The visitor would be encouraged as an
individual to explore the environment and compose his own experience."

Thank you, Billy.