What Happens After Artists Fail?
Recording Artists dives into the history of a historical event that dreamed big but fell short
Photograph by Herbert Migdoll. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (94003)
Body Content
The New York Times review for 9 Evenings: “Brave, experimental, inventive, uncompromising. And I yawned all the way through it.”
1966's 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering was an unprecedented crossover event.
The series of performances brought together groundbreaking artists (both the father of electronic music and the first American winner of the Venice Biennale participated) and the top engineers from Bell Labs (home to the folks who invented the laser and discovered the Big Bang) to combine performance art and cutting-edge technology into "a transformative experience of wonders," or so the advertising went.
Over 10,000 visitors arrived at the storied 69th Regiment Armory in New York to see the nine nights of performance art. And most of them left disappointed.
So what went wrong?
That's part of the focus of the newest season of Recording Artists, the Getty podcast that tells stories about art history through audio and video recordings in the Getty Library’s archives.
Host Ahmed Best with GRI curator Nancy Perloff, researcher Megan Mastroianni, and producer Gideon Brower looking at materials from the Experiments in Art and Technology records
Photo: Cassia Davis
Host Ahmed Best visited the Special Collections Reading Room of the Getty Library to see the dozens of photos, videos, and other ephemera from 9 Evenings pulled from its archives. The large, glossy photographs captured many moments from that series of performances.
And they don't look yawn-inducing at all. Says Best, “in the archival footage they look compelling.”
Take a look:
John Cage, Variations VII, 1966, performance still. Photograph by Peter Moore (American, 1932–1993): © Northwestern University. Getty Research Institute, 940003. © J. Paul Getty Trust
A live-action remix
Remember when we mentioned the father of electronic music? That's him above remixing ambient sounds from New York City in his performance piece Variations VII.
He had 10 telephone lines installed and connected to, amongst other places:
- the kitchen of Lüchow’s (a popular local restaurant)
- the local Department of Sanitation
- his friend Terry Riley’s turtle tank
- the New York Times’ press room
The “DJs” above remixed the sounds using specially-engineered light panels. Artist Nam June Paik described it as “just sound from everywhere like Niagara Falls of sound, and maybe one of the best electronic music performances of all time.”
Robert Whitman’s Two Holes of Water-3 (9 Evenings). © Elliott Landy. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (94003)
A reverse drive in
Two Holes of Water, the performance pictured above, was a drive-in where the movies drove in instead of the people.
The cars pictured above were wrapped in plastic and drove onto the stage. Through their windshields and onto the white screen surrounding the space, they projected (amongst other things) some of the first CCTV using newly-invented fiberoptic cable.
Mimi Kanarek and Frank Stella play tennis (Bell Labs), Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (94003)
And night vision
In 1966, no one had video baby monitors, night vision goggles, or really any experience with video taken in the dark.
So, when Robert Rauschenberg’s Open Score turned all of the lights out in a kind of live-action game of PONG—every time a tennis player hit the ball a light in the theater was extinguished—surely it must have been cool to look up at the white panels and see people projected there, captured clearly despite the darkness with the first civilian use of infrared camera.
Photograph by Peter Moore; © Northwestern University. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (94003)
Rauschenberg giving performance instructions to members of the cast of Open Score from the Downtown Community School
So What Went Wrong?
Cars drove indoors; there was remixed audio from the sanitation department; people saw things filmed in the dark for the first time. But it bombed. The reviews were biting, and the audience was reportedly bored.
In the first episode of Recording Artists, Best teams up with historian Michelle Kuo and cognitive science researcher Xiaodong Lin Siegler to take a look at why 9 Evenings failed, and how its co-founder Robert Rauschenberg dealt with the bad press.
Join Best on his fascinating journey through the archival record from 9 Evenings and the groundbreaking art exhibitions, experiments, and discoveries that came out of it in Season 3 of Recording Artists, available in its entirety here.
