Artists in their own words from the Getty Research Institute archives
Artists in their own words from the Getty Research Institute archives
What do engineers get out of working with artists? In a series of talks designed to attract new engineers and artists to the group Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), engineers Fred Waldhauer and Robby Robbinson discuss how working with artists turned them from “aesthetic primitives” to true collaborators, even if they never quite fit in with the “arty crowd.” Hear how they approached their work in this bonus episode, featuring a longer clip from the archival tape.
What makes good art good and what makes that experience stick with you? Engineer Billy Klüver, who co-founded the nonprofit group Experiments in Art and Technology, has a great answer to that question—but we couldn’t fit it in our third season. In this bonus episode, we’ll hear Klüver talk about discomfort, threats, and the power of good art.
Stay tuned for more bonus episodes.
Did you know Robert Rauschenberg was fired by John Cage? Us either—until we heard Rauschenberg telling his side of the story to Barbara Rose in one of the interviews in Getty’s archives. We’re sharing clips from the archive as bonus episodes while you’re waiting on season four. In this first episode, you’ll hear Robert Rauschenberg explain how he stopped designing stage sets for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company all while gaining a better sense of his brusque yet charming personality.
Stay tuned for more bonus episodes every other month.
Check out Getty’s newest podcast, ReCurrent, a series about what we gain by keeping the past present. In this inaugural episode, host and producer Jaime Roque shares a heartfelt journey through his family’s history and the role of food in preserving cultural heritage.
Hear the rest of the series and learn more at getty.edu/recurrent. Look for it and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Laser physicist Billy Klüver had always been interested in art. So when he started working at Bell Labs in New Jersey in the late 1950s, he began going into Manhattan and meeting artists—and in short order he was collaborating with them. He co-founded Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) to facilitate these partnerships and worked to find corporate sponsors, with mixed success.
In this second episode of the season, we get to know Klüver’s role as a kind of translator and middleman between artists and engineers, and learn about E.A.T.’s partnership with PepsiCo at the 1970 World Expo in Osaka, Japan. Archival lectures by Klüver and commentary from communications professor Fred Turner and composer and musician Evan Ziporyn, who runs the Center for Art, Science and Technology at MIT, help tell this story.
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Robert Rauschenberg is one of the best-known artists of the 20th century, in part because he never stopped exploring new mediums and styles. His work with new technology, however, is often overlooked. In 1960, a chance meeting with Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver led them to eventually co-found Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a nonprofit that paired artists with scientists and engineers to use the most cutting-edge new technologies. But E.A.T.’s projects were not always a critical success.
In this first episode of the season, we explore how artists and scientists approach experimentation, failure, and perseverance in similar ways and hear about a watershed event, 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering. Alongside archival interviews with Rauschenberg, MoMA chief curator at large and publisher Michelle Kuo and cognitive-studies scientist Xiaodong Lin-Siegler weigh in.
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Additional music from “Variations VII” written by John Cage courtesy of Henmar Press, Inc.
Artist Fujiko Nakaya is best known for her ethereal sculptures made with fog. But her very first fog sculpture, which kicked off decades of working with this unusual and highly technical material, came about almost by chance—and thanks to her ties to Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). At 91, Nakaya is still making fog sculptures that compel audiences to consider the environment and our impact on it in new ways.
In this third and final episode, we trace the development of Nakaya’s iconic sculpture and explore what it can teach us about environmental and social justice. We also investigate E.A.T.’s relevance and legacy, from the 1960s to Silicon Valley. Archival interviews with Nakaya and commentary from art historian Eva Díaz and contemporary artist Tomás Saraceno round out the episode.
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In season three of Recording Artists, artist and futurist Ahmed Best examines the groundbreaking art-science organization Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). Through the stories of E.A.T.’s co-founders, artist Robert Rauschenberg and Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver, as well as artist Fujiko Nakaya, who continues to make technology-inflected artworks, this season investigates how artists and engineers collaborated to explore the creative potential of new technologies. Learn about this innovative group through audio from Getty’s archives and commentary by contemporary artists, scientists, and art historians. Coming October 8, 2024.
In this special live episode of Recording Artists, season two host Tess Taylor speaks with Getty Research Institute curator Pietro Rigolo about the making of the series, what she discovered through the letters, and artists’ stories and letters that didn’t make the cut. Author Maya Binyam joins them to bring the letters to life via dramatic readings.
This program is co-presented with the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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In 1975, Meret Oppenheim’s small painting Würgeengel, or Angel of Death, is included in a sprawling exhibition organized by famous curator Harald Szeemann. She had painted it over 40 years earlier, when she was only 16 years old. The only problem now is that the curator has totally misunderstood her artwork—and placed it in a sexist context in the show. Rather than meekly accept this, Oppenheim writes Szeemann a deeply personal letter. Across five pages, she details the challenges she faced as a young woman who didn’t want children and was trying to make it as an artist in a heavily male sphere. Writing at age 63, Oppenheim speaks to burgeoning feminist ideals after decades of fighting back against sexist stereotypes.
In this episode of Recording Artists: Intimate Addresses, you’ll hear Oppenheim’s little-told story: an artist best known for lining a teacup in fur but who never stopped innovating, who socialized with the Surrealists as a teenager and kept a pistol in her studio to fight Nazis, and who took up the feminist cause towards the end of her career. Anna Deavere Smith reads the letter. Curator Bice Curiger, Oppenheim’s biographer, shares stories of Oppenheim’s life while artist Barbara T. Smith provides insight into the challenges facing women artists, particularly in the mid-20th century.
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In the mid-1960s, Nam June Paik is living in a run-down studio in SoHo, struggling to make ends meet. But even as he jokes about his ongoing battle against cockroaches, he is building his network, seeking out support for his artist friends, and always experimenting with form. Paik’s vibrant personality is on full display in a letter from this period to musician David Tudor. Partially typewritten, partially handwritten, and full of wild punctuation and inside jokes, the letter’s main purpose is to help find work for his friend, Japanese musician Takehisa Kosugi.
In this episode of Recording Artists: Intimate Addresses, you’ll meet the wildly charming artist whose theories on technology and our relationship to it remain eerily prescient today; the man who coined the phrase “electronic superhighway” and advocated for artists to be at the vanguard of using the newest tech; and the person who tirelessly looked out for his friends. Host Tess Taylor unpacks some of Paik’s best-known artworks and traces his evolving thinking about art and tech. Anna Deavere Smith reads the letter. Korean American artist Sueyeun Juliette Lee and art historian and conservator Hanna Hölling help you make sense of Paik’s networks—both personal and electronic—and his legacy.
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On May 20, 1962, the morning after his first child is born, Benjamin Patterson writes a touching birth announcement to his own parents. The letter covers all the usual details—the baby’s weight and height, how the birth went, what the hospital is like—but its form is totally unique. Most of the letter is written in the voice of his newborn son, Ennis. Patterson, then a young, struggling musician and composer living as an American expat in Paris, shows off his creativity and experimental writing in this letter. He has been honing these skills making unusual musical scores for instruments, for paper, for bodies moving through a city.
In addition to marking a personal milestone, this moment coincides with a turning point in his career: four months after his son’s birth, Patterson will help launch the first festival of Fluxus, a loose collective of avant-garde artists. And shortly after that, he will move back to the US as he tries to find ways to support his family as an artist.
In this episode of Recording Artists: Intimate Addresses, you’ll trace Patterson’s move from classical bassist to Fluxus composer, and from his retirement from art at the height of his career to his return to music 20 years later. Host Tess Taylor unpacks the challenges Patterson faced as an artist, a father (the only parent featured this season), and a Black man in a largely white art world. Anna Deavere Smith reads the letter. Art historian julia elizabeth neal and musicologist, composer, and historian George Lewis contextualize the work, unusual career trajectory, and importance of this understudied artist.
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By 1956, M. C. Richards has earned a PhD in English, taught poetry at Black Mountain College, gotten married (and divorced) twice, dedicated herself to pottery, helped found an artists’ cooperative alongside creators like John Cage, and become deeply romantically involved with avant-garde musician David Tudor. Tudor is often on the road, but luckily Richards is an incredible letter-writer. In her notes to him, she plays with language and sends messages of love, all while keeping Tudor up to date on his business as a touring musician, which she often seems to be managing, and on life back home.
Although Richards is relatively unknown today, she was a key connector in a circle of some of the most impressive artists, dancers, and musicians of her day. Her letters paint a picture of a lively and magnetic artist. She would go on to write a groundbreaking book on her philosophy of craft that continues to deeply influence contemporary artists.
In this episode of Recording Artists: Intimate Addresses, host Tess Taylor illuminates this vibrant and underrecognized artist, highlighting the many ways in which she was a woman ahead of her time. Anna Deavere Smith voices the letter. Art historian Jenni Sorkin and potter and dancer Ashwini Bhat, both of whom have been inspired by Richards’ philosophies of craft and approach to life, share their insights into her life and work.
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In 1944, Frida Kahlo is at a crossroads, both in terms of her health and her career. In April of that year, with World War II dragging on, she writes to her gallerist—and former lover—Julien Levy. In this tender and personal letter, she moves from the logistical challenges of sending art across national borders during wartime, to describing her painful new steel corsets, to asking after her many friends in New York, where Levy lives. Unpacking this letter and exploring Kahlo’s words written in her own hand provides a new understanding of an artist who has become larger than life in the years since her death at age 47.
In this episode of Recording Artists: Intimate Addresses, host Tess Taylor highlights Kahlo’s vibrant personality, tracing how her artistic career developed alongside her long-running health struggles and her now-iconic style and persona. Anna Deavere Smith voices the letter. Photographer and poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, whose work often addresses pain and the body, provides her artist’s insight while historian Circe Henestrosa, who co-curated the Kahlo exhibition Making Herself Up at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2018, shares charming anecdotes and important details of Kahlo’s life.
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It’s July 1942, and the artist Marcel Duchamp has recently arrived in New York City after fleeing the Nazis in Vichy France. As he settles in, he writes to his longtime friend and fellow artist Man Ray, who is living in California. In this casual letter, Duchamp asks Man Ray for help. He needs buyers for his latest artwork: a suitcase containing miniatures of many of his most famous pieces, from the mass-produced urinal he signed his name to and called art to his mustachioed Mona Lisa. He ends with a short, cryptic note about his romantic partner, Mary, who has stayed behind in France to join the resistance.
In this episode of Recording Artists: Intimate Addresses, you’ll meet the man behind some of the most controversial and influential artworks of the 20th century. Anna Deavere Smith voices the letter. Host Tess Taylor unpacks Duchamp’s wit, his decades-long friendship with Man Ray, and how he used his own archive to create new works of art. Photographer Dayanita Singh shares her experiences mining her own archive and art historian T. J. Demos weighs in on the artist’s life and legacy.
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In season two of Recording Artists, titled Intimate Addresses, host Tess Taylor dives into the lives of six artists. From personal letters pulled from Getty’s archives, discover more about artists you’ve probably heard of like Frida Kahlo and meet some who might be less familiar like Benjamin Patterson. Listen as they collaborate, fight for justice, ask for money, work through pain, and affirm their resilience. Anna Deavere Smith reads the letters, and contemporary artists and art historians join the conversation. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.
This episode focuses on Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011). Joining host Helen Molesworth are artist Rodney McMillian and art historian Alexander Nemerov. Frankenthaler made large abstract paintings by pouring thinned paint directly onto the horizontal canvas. In interviews from 1969 and 1971, she discusses the inspiration for this radical innovation as well as other early influences.
This episode focuses on Eva Hesse (1936–1970). Joining host Helen Molesworth are artist Mary Weatherford and art historian Darby English. Hesse is one of the most influential artists of her generation, despite having a career that lasted only 10 years. In a rare 1970 recording, made only a few months before her death, Hesse discusses the trajectory of her practice, her distinctive materials, and the meaning of art and life.
This episode focuses on Yoko Ono (b. 1933). Joining host Helen Molesworth are artists Catherine Lord and Sanford Biggers. In an interview from 1990, Ono reflects on her influences, her years on the international avant-garde scene, and the impact of her marriage on the reception of her work.
This episode focuses on Lee Krasner (1908–1984). Joining host Helen Molesworth are artists Lari Pittman and Amy Sillman. In interviews from 1972, 1975, and 1978, the first-generation abstract expressionist discusses her formation as a painter, the progression of her work, her relationships with fellow artists, and her role as guardian of Jackson Pollock’s legacy.
