Like the grandeur and gigantism of Apollo, the bigness of 9 Evenings fed into critics' suspicion. In her diary notes about 9 Evenings, artist Simone Forti wrote that, “The artists decided to go big because it was more exciting and dangerous.” Their decision, she observed, was made “on an intuition that the work the artists will eventually want to have come out of this relationship will be big in scale, making full use of mass media and industrial resources.” This quest for scale and funding was redolent of 1960s-era Big Science projects, a style of activity artists were supposedly expected to steer clear of.Just as the American space program was never about “science” or even “engineering,” 9 Evenings was never about art per se. The corporate funding, defense-derived technology, and market strategizing that enabled it made it less of an ensemble of artists’ performances and more of what historian Daniel Boorstin called a “pseudo-event”. Audience members who came to witness 9 Evenings arrived already enmeshed in 1960s spectacle culture shaped by mass advertising, marketing, and public relations firms.While delays and technical problems diminished the impact of the performances at the Armory, it’s also reasonable to conclude that marketing of American technology in general, and 9 Evenings in particular, elevated audience and critics imaginings of what technology could do – Technology could win the war in Vietnam, cure Cancer, merge seamlessly with Art – to unrealizable heights. In the mid-1960s, the real marriage of art and engineering, as The New Yorker noted with the snide erudition one expects, was instead happening in the television studios where commercials were made. Like a primetime space shot, to its critics 9 Evenings was a media event that crashed and burned on the launch pad.Ironically, despite the harsh and perhaps premature judgment from art critics, audience members did get to see what was promised to them. Alex Hay broadcasted his body’s sounds, Robert Rauschenberg’s Open Score showed audience members what images made via infrared cameras looked like, and Lucinda Child’s piece Vehicle created the impression of dancers moving about while suspended on air. God bless American science.
“God Help American Science”: Engineering Theatre and Spectacle
When an event promises you will "hear the body broadcast its sounds," "see without light," and "see dancers float on air,” there’s bound to be disappointment.