Kuo: Rauschenberg's 1966 performance featured wired tennis rackets that extinguished lights
Michelle Kuo · Experiments in Art and Technology with Artforum Editor Michelle Kuo · Y Combinator · Oct 20, 2017 · at 11:33
Artforum editor Michelle Kuo describes the technical and artistic structure of Robert Rauschenberg's iconic 1966 performance piece 'Open Score' at the 9 Evenings event.
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“Rauschenberg's piece basically set up, in this huge cavernous expanse of the armory, a tennis match. But it wasn't a regular tennis match. He set up a tennis court. He had the artist Frank Stella, who at the time was actually taking tennis lessons from a tennis instructor named Mimi Konarek. So the tennis instructor and Frank Stella are on the tennis court and they play a game of tennis. But it so happens that the rackets, the tennis rackets, are actually hot wired. So each time you hit the ball a resounding, amplified, a microphone would pick up an amplified sound that would resonate throughout The armory. And it triggered a huge bank of lights to be turned off. So with every volley, a successive set of lights would be turned off. So by the end of the game, which has no winner or loser, the armory is in complete darkness. And then that's when these infrared cameras were turned on.”
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