Alex Hay, Grass Field

« Grass Field » fut présenté les 13 et 22 octobre 1966 à l’Arsenal du 69e Régiment de New York. Cette performance d’Alex Hay relève à la fois du dispositif scénographique et de l’expérience scientifique.

Grass Field was presented on October 13th and 22nd 1966. This performance by Alex Hay is both a scenographic arrangement and a scientific experiment. Covered with electrodes that amplify the most intimate sounds of his body, seated in front of a large screen on which his face appears, the artist stretches the perceptible boundaries of the individual.

A Grass Field, this is undoubtedly what the 24 numbered fabric squares are meant to represent, placed by Alex Hay on the stage for the opening. A territory that will then be unravelled by two agents equipped with poles, Robert Rauschenberg and Steve Paxton, while the performer sits motionless in the middle of the stage. Without doubt by virtue of a play on words on the actor’s last name “Hay”, this grass field refers to the artist’s intimate territory, first delimited, then unravelled, as the frequencies of his body fill the room and the details of his hallucinated face pervade the spectators’ vision. To expose himself in this way, to be confronted with the sounds filtering through his skin while remaining motionless for such a long time was a real ordeal for the visual artist and dancer. Technology, used in playful manner in the other performances, is here the instrument of a disturbing experiment. A form of science fiction where the artist is the guinea pig. 

Source : Sylvain Maestraggi

We owe 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, a series of performances presented in the large building of the Arsenal of the 69th Regiment of New York, in October 1966, to the complicity between the visual artist Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver, an engineer with the telephone company Bell. The concept was simple: allow a dozen artists to achieve the performance of their dreams thanks to the technology of the Bell laboratories.

Born from the experimentations of the members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the Judson Dance Theatre, the 9 Evenings mark a decisive step in the changing relationship between art and technology. Evening after evening, projectors, video cameras, transistors, amplifiers, electrodes and oscilloscopes entered the stage at the service of ambitious, futuristic, iconoclastic or poetic visions – all filmed in black and white and in colour. When these films were rediscovered in 1995, Billy Klüver decided, in partnership with Julie Martin and the director Barbro Schultz Lundestam, to produce a series of documentaries reconstructing what had taken place on the stage and during the preparation of the performances. The original material was thus completed by interviews with the protagonists of each performance (artists and engineers) and a few famous guests. The 9 Evenings would thereby be restored to their place in the history of art. 

Source : Sylvain Maestreggi