Open Score was the performance presented by Robert Rauschenberg as part of Experiments in Art and Technology’s (E.A.T.) legendary 9 Evenings series of performances.
The series took place at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York in 1966, and featured collaborations between ten artists and 30 engineers from the Bell Laboratories. In Open Score, two participants played a game of tennis using racquets with FM radio transmitters in the handles.
As the ball hit one of the racquets, the noise of a gong was played through the loudspeakers. At each sound of the gong, one of the lights went out, until eventually the whole space was in darkness. At this point a crowd of 300 people entered the auditorium, live images of which were then projected onto three large screens using infra-red cameras.
9 Evenings is now recognized as a seminal moment in the history of new media art, with works that prefigured and anticipated many of the developments in the art form. Open Score was one of the most memorable and probably most successful of the performances and confirmed Rauschenberg’s status as a highly innovative artist, unafraid to experiment with new means of thinking about and making art.
Robert Rauschenberg is a leading contemporary US artist, whose work has been extensively exhibited around the world. After serving in the Armed Forces, he studied at the Kansas City Art Institute, at Académie Julian in Paris, and later at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and the Art Student’s League in New York.
His first one person exhibition was at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1951. Since 1958 he showed regularly in New York at Leo Castelli Gallery. In 1964 he was the first US artist to win first prize for painting at the Venice Biennale. He has been an innovative artist working in many mediums, painting, sculpture, printmaking, dance and performance, and has won international recognition in all these fields.
Rauschenberg was one of the first artists to incorporate technology into his work and in 1966—together with Billy Klüver, Fred Waldhauer, and Robert Whitman—he founded Experiments in Art and Technology to facilitate the collaboration between artists and engineers. Major retrospectives of his work have been held at The Jewish Museum (New York, 1963), the National Collection of Fine Arts (Washington, 1976), and most recently Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective organized by the Guggenheim Museum (New York, 1997), which is travelling internationally.
His work is included in virtually every important museum and international collection of contemporary art.
