Open Score by Robert Rauschenberg, 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering (review)

“It was done before its time and it’s too late now,” Robert Rauschenberg says in the newly released DVD chronicling his 1966 performance piece, Open Score. Rauschenberg is referring to the seminal multimedia series 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, which included Open Score and took place in October 1966 at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York. But he might as well have been speaking of the larger moment during which 9 Evenings was produced—a moment when artists and engineers began to share collaborative aspirations that now seem both prescient and belated. As the DVD’s fascinating combination of archival footage and recent interviews makes clear, the participants in 9 Evenings hoped that art and industrial technology would radically inflect each other. They aimed to introduce unexpected possibilities, to disturb teleological narratives of modernist progress in both disciplines. If such ambitions were utopian and forward-looking, they were also very much of their time. 9 Evenings and Open Score were attempts to work with existing systems and institutions of the late 1960s, to repurpose materials and processes developed with other uses in mind.

The DVD is a remarkable and riveting account of these dynamics in Open Score. It opens with an overview of 9 Evenings, which recounts the project’s origins as a proposal for an arts festival in Stockholm. When plans fell through, the Armory in New York (site of the famous 1913 Armory Show of international modern art) was selected as an alternate venue. Billy Klüver, an engineer at Bell Laboratories at the time, had previously worked with Rauschenberg, most significantly on the sonic sculpture Oracle, 1965. Together they assembled a group of engineers and artists—including Robert Whitman, John Cage, Yvonne Rainer, Öyvind Fahlström, David Tudor, Lucinda Childs, Deborah Hay, Alex Hay, and Steve Paxton—to collaborate on a series of works in which technological and artistic knowledge interfaced throughout the entire production, from concept to implementation. As Klüver relates in voice-over narration on the DVD, the participants had a little over two months to devise and stage what was to be a mammoth enterprise.

For Open Score, Klüver assembled a team of his colleagues at Bell Labs (including Bill Kaminski, Harold Hodges, Jim McGee, and Larry Heilos) to engage with Rauschenberg and develop technical solutions for the artist’s abstract ideas, often with startling results. The DVD slowly reveals this behind-the-scenes process to great effect. An introductory montage of photographs of the control booth, technical equipment, and stage props for 9 Evenings gestures toward the massive and chaotic activity surrounding the project. Open Score itself is represented by black-and-white and color film footage that conveys the careful pacing of the event—even though the piece was performed twice, footage from each night is spliced together into a linear whole. The work begins with a tennis match between Frank Stella and Mimi Kanarek, a tennis pro at Stella’s athletic club. The rackets are wired for both the transmission and amplification of sound and the remote control of stage lights. With each volley, a resonant “Bong!” erupts and lights are progressively turned off until the Armory is completely dark. Multiple meanings of “open score” emerge: there is the scoreless game, but also the improvisational quality of the performance (“Tennis is movement [. . .] in the context of theatre, it is a formal dance improvisation,” Rauschenberg wrote in the program notes; as Stella says in an interview on the DVD, “I was nervous. [. . .T]he idea was to have a rally as long as you could”). There is also the sense of a competitive or adversarial relation between the engineers and the technical devices. As Klüver subsequently narrates, on the first night the racket-activated lights did not work, so participants were forced to manually unplug a cord...