March 9 – April 21, 2007
Curator: Catherine Morris
John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Öyvind Fahlström, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, David Tudor and Robert Whitman
Organized by the MIT List Visual Arts Center
This exhibition brings together an important collection of documents including drawings, films, photographs, interviews, sound recordings and objects of the controversial 1966 performance series 9 evenings: Theatre and Engineering, held at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York from October 13-23, 1966. Organized by Billy Klüver, a Bell Laboratories engineer, this event was remarkable in that it represented a significant turning point in the process of art making at the time, through the introduction of collaborative processes between contemporary visual art, dance, music, film, theatre and engineering. With the goal of creating new, innovative works, Billy Klüver brought together these important actors (artists, dancers, choreographers and composers) of the American avant-garde with a team of engineers. By working solely with original documents and archival material American curator Catherine Morris makes us follow the thread of these singular exercises in experimentation and inventiveness.
This exhibition is an apt reflection on current interdisciplinary crossovers in art and the role technology plays in these. Its presentation at Concordia University is particularly relevant given the recent inauguration of the Integrated Engineering, Computer Science and Visual Arts Pavillion within the downtown Concordia campus and the recent creation by Concordia University and UQAM of the Hexagram Institute for Research/Creation in Media Arts and Technologies.
This exhibition was organized by the MIT List Visual Arts Center and generously sponsored by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Robert Rauschenberg, Martin E. Zimmerman, Dedalus Foundation, the Council for the Arts at MIT, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Presented at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery with the support of the Daniel Langlois Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science, Concordia University.