Experiments in Art and Technology: I Thought It Was a Jewish Delicatessen (Bonus)

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Announcer: This is a Getty Podcast.

Zoe Goldman: Hi I’m Zoe, the producer of Recording Artists. Welcome back for another bonus clip from the archive.

This season, season three, featured the stories of three members of the group Experiments in Art and Technology. We focused on Robert Rauschenberg, Billy Kluver, and Fujiko Nakaya to tell a bigger story of the group’s development and major projects—from the early ad-hoc collaborations to organizing 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering in 1966 to programming the pavilion at Expo ‘70 in Osaka and beyond.

But the E.A.T. archive contains materials from many, many other artists and engineers. We listened to these other interviews and recorded lectures in the archive to understand the dynamics of this group and its members, even if we didn’t end up using the actual clips in the episodes—I think of these kind of like interviews done “on background.”

This month, I wanted to move one of these tapes of other E.A.T. members to the forefront. This next clip comes from a panel discussion of artists and engineers held shortly after the 9 Evenings performances which spurred the formation of E.A.T. The panel was organized to help figure out what exactly artists and engineers might want from an organization like E.A.T.—and of course to recruit more members.

In this clip, E.A.T. co-founding engineer Fred Waldhauer and fellow engineer Robby Robinson are answering a question from the audience about how they plan to attract engineers to the group and whether the engineers will be interested in making art themselves. Here’s Fred Waldhauer starting the response:

Fred Waldhauer: I’d like Robby [Robinson] to answer that, and he will, but my experience has been that engineers are aesthetic primitives. And we don’t need to worry about the competition.

Robby Robinson: Well to that I’d say amen Fred. The first time I heard the word ‘Rauschenberg’ they said they were going to Rauschenberg’s last May and I thought it was a Jewish delicatessen. That’s how much I knew about artists and art. [laughter]

From that sort of lowly status, I had to grow with the artists, and I had to take on something that was totally foreign to me. My idea of avant garde was probably Rubens or Cezanne, somebody like that. I will admit I was kind of stunned in my first approach. But then the work becomes so fascinatingly exciting and stimulating, that my family thought I was somewhat of a psychopath. And I wasn’t too much interested in talking in terms of art or meaningful art, I wasn’t too concerned with understanding art, but I was very concerned with the problems that the artists had and what we were doing in the 9 Evenings. And I found that these were different kinds of problems than I had met in the laboratory. And I found that all the other technicians that were involved in this were just as excited as I was. And I didn’t have any notion at that time of what the virus would really turn out to be. It’s really a very kind of a saturating thing when it finally hits you.

I don’t suspect that there will be any dearth of, or any famine, when it comes to engineers, because the exposure does— I remember one particular engineer back at the labs who was invited to do a particular project. They mentioned, he said well I’ll do it, but I don’t want to go near the artists though. Art schmart. I don’t want to know nothing about that, just let me do my job. But before he was over, he was hanging around the 9 Evenings and he wouldn’t go home and his wife wanted to know where he was. He’s a candidate now, you see.

This is the thing: I’m not saying this is some kind of universal religion or it takes hold of you. There are still people back at the labs who think it’s all nonsense. I’ve been told it’s nonsense. The rapport establishes easily, the communication process is almost charming, and there— I don’t think it ever gets to the point where engineers are trying to be hip or travel with an arty crowd.

It’s just that, right now, my feeling is certainly, and Fred indicated the same thing, I don’t think the problem of getting engineers interested is going to be a difficult one. There’s no real resistance to it. I came here tonight feeling that resistance would lay with the artists, you see, and that’s kind of dispelled when you see a nice group like this.

Goldman: My first response after hearing this was that these guys seem pretty fun for a bunch of engineers. I’d get dinner with them at Rauschenberg’s Deli.

I love Robby Robinson’s answer because it gives a sense of how far apart the world of the engineers was from that of the artists, and how novel and fun it must’ve been for everyone involved in these early collaborations.

I also love how open they seem to be to new experiences and experiments. Sure, 9 Evenings involved a lot of long, unpaid hours of frustrating work—and if you want to hear more about that check out the episode on Robert Ruaschenberg—but at least they were having a good time!

That’s it for this episode. I’ll be back with more clips again soon.

This episode was produced by me, Zoe Goldman, with audio mixing by Jaime Roque. Theme music by Bryn Bliska. Christopher Sprinkle is executive producer. Learn more about this podcast and all our Getty podcasts at Getty dot edu slash podcasts.