Robert Rauschenberg, Open Score

Open Score is the happening of Robert Rauschenberg which was given on 14 and 23 October 1966. It starts with a tennis match between a man and a woman, the sound of a ball hitting the racket is amplified.

Open Score is the performance by Robert Rauschenberg given on October 14th and 23rd 1966. It opens with a tennis match between a man and a woman, where the sound of the balls hitting the rackets is amplified. Little by little the couple is plunged into darkness, leaving a ghostly crowd projected on three screens suspended above the public. 

Out of the ten performances given as part of 9 Evenings, that by Robert Rauschenberg is one of the most refined. Like Kisses Sweeter than Wine by Öyvind Falhström, it does not emphasise the technological paraphernalia placed at the artists’ disposal by the engineers from Bell but rather proposes a stage set-up in which technique disappears behind the composition of enigmatic tableaux. Nothing suggests the transmitters tucked away in the rackets’ handles, or the infra-red camera, the first of its kind, that reconstructs the image of a crowd hidden in darkness while enveloping it in a strange pale light. The fact that the technique is invisible bestows on Open Score, an open metaphor left to the interpretation of the public, a magical and even a fantasy or mystical dimension. On the second evening Rauschenberg was to add a coda to it: the wrapped body of a woman (Simone Forti) singing an Italian lament, whom the artist moves in his arms to various places on the stage. 

Source : Sylvain Maestreggi