Internationellt symposium: Om Robert Rauschenberg

I samband med Moderna Museets utställning Robert Rauschenberg: Combines anordnades ett internationellt symposium som fokuserade på Rauschenbergs så kallade Combines, hans intresse för performancekonst och hans livslånga relation till museets forne chef, Pontus Hultén. Symposiet, och senare ett dubbelnummer av Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History presenterade delar av den nya forskning som museets arbete med Rauschenberg genererat. Internationella och svenska forskare och curatorer bidrog här med sin specialkompetens på området och dagen avslutades med en konsert med musik av John Cage och Mats Lindström.

Lördagen 31 Mars, 2007
Auditoriet, Moderna Museet

Program
10.30–10.45 Välkommen: John Peter Nilsson and Anna Tellgren
10.45–11.00 Anna Tellgren: Robert Rauschenberg and Moderna Museet
11.00–11.45 Branden W. Joseph: Bob Rauschenberg in Swedish Bird Call: On Robert Rauschenberg and Öyvind Fahlström
11.45–12.30 Jaimey Hamilton: Rauschenberg's Material Attachments
12.30–13.00 Diskussion
13.00–14.00 Lunch
14.00–14.45 Jean-Paul Ameline: How Rauschenberg’s Combines Conquered Europe
14.45–15.30 Julie Martin: Collaborations: Robert Rauschenberg, Billy Klüver and Pontus Hultén
15.30–16.00 Kaffe
16.00–16.30 Annika Öhrner: Five New York Evenings in Stockholm – The Stories
16.30–17.00 Diskussion
17.00–18.00 Konsert
Music for Piano 4-19 John Cage (1953) 20’ performed by Kristine Scholz One (for David Tudor) Mats Lindström (2007) 20’, World Premiere! 18.00–19.00 Förfriskningar

Moderator: John Peter Nilsson

Moderna Museet i samarbete med Konstvetenskapliga institutionen vid Stockholms universitet och Konstvetenskapliga institutionen vid Uppsala universitet, samt Elektronmusikstudion EMS och Franska Ambassaden i Stockholm.

Deltagare:
Jean-Paul Ameline is Chief Curator at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France, working with the department of Historical Collections, particularly with art from the 50’s and 60’s. Some of Ameline’s most important exhibitions include: Daniel Spoerri, a retrospective (1990); Face à l'Histoire, 1933-1996 (1996); Robert Delaunay: from Impressionism to Abstract Art, 1900-1914 (in collaboration with Pascal Rousseau, 1999); Denise René (2001); Nicolas de Staël, a retrospective (2003); Robert Rauschenberg: Combines (2006) and Paris du Monde Entier (2007).

Jaimey Hamilton is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. Her research relates to the intersection of subjectivity, commodity culture, mass media, and the visual arts in a global context. She has written and lectured on film, video, installation, and performance art, as well as on the recent historical origins of contemporary multi-media art. Her current book project, Strategies of Excess, examines various uses of commodity excess in the post-war assemblage practices of Alberto Burri, Robert Rauschenberg, and Arman. Hamilton is also working on a project about the recent history of appropriation, as it becomes a widespread strategy for artists concerned with globalization. Jaimey Hamilton holds a Ph.D. in Art History from Boston University.

Branden W. Joseph is Visiting Associate Professor at Columbia University and a founding editor of Grey Room, a quarterly journal of architecture, art, media, and politics. He is the author of Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (2003), Anthony McCall: The Solid Light Films and Related Works (2005) and Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (in press). His writings have also appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, Art Journal, October, Critical Inquiry, Texte zur Kunst, and Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne. Branden W. Joseph holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Mats Lindström is the Executive/Artistic Director of EMS (Institute for Electroacoustic Music in Sweden). He has worked with electro-acoustic music and live electronics since the 1980s. Formerly an engineer in the electronics industry, Lindström has designed and constructed a number of unique electronic musical instruments and apparatuses. He has worked with intermedia art and music for theatre and dance as well as improvised music. In 1993 he worked as a producer for David Tudors last concerts in Sweden at the Fylkingen 60-years anniversary festival.

Julie Martin is the Director of E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology), a non-profit organization established to promote collaborations between artists and engineers; she joined E.A.T. in 1968 and worked with Billy Klüver on most of E.A.T.'s major projects. She is executive producer of a series of films of the legendary 1966 artist’ performances, initiated in part by Klüver and Rauschenberg, 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering. Martin co-edited Pavilion, witch documented E.A.T.'s building of the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo '70 in Osaka, Japan. She has written, among other work, Kiki's Paris, about the art community in Montparnasse between 1880 and 1930. Julie Martin was born in Nashville, Tennessee; she received a B.A. from Radcliffe College and an M.A. from the Russian Institute at Columbia University.

John Peter Nilsson is curator at Moderna Museet.

Kristine Scholz has been active as pianist in several of Merce Cunningham’s Dance Company’s tours in Europe, such as the Suite for five. Scholz is one of the most experienced interpreters of new music and has an extensive knowledge in record- and radio productions. Throughout her career, as soloist and together with Mats Persson, she devoted herself with great enthusiasm to the interpretations of the New York School Composers that consisted of John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and Christian Wolff. Scholz was born in Germany where she studied under Aloys Kontarsky before moving to Sweden in the seventies.

Anna Tellgren is curator at Moderna Museet. She is responsible curator for the edition of Robert Rauschenberg: Combines at Moderna Museet.

Annika Öhrner is an art historian and curator based in Stockholm. She has curated several shows and written extensively, often with a feminist perspective, on modernism and contemporary art. In 2004 she curated the Meret Oppenheim Retrospective at Moderna Museet. Öhrner is completing her Ph.D. in art history at Uppsala University. The working title of her thesis, which will be published as a book, is Barbro Östlihn and the New York Avant Garde.

Additional information about the Concert
Music for piano 4-19, performed by Kristine Scholz, was composed and applied to an entire series of choreographies by Merce Cunningham. In the choreography Suite for five, from 1956, suits made by Robert Rauschenberg were used for the performance.

Mats Lindström:
“One (for David Tudor) is not an attempt to achieve a reconstruction of Tudors legendary Fluorescent Sound*. Using my own aesthetic values as a reference, I am merely attempting to accomplish a tribute to the person who is ultimately responsibility for the work I am doing today. One is essentially a summary of some of Tudor’s most distinctive features as a composer; the technical level of ambition, the methodology and the aesthetic attitude. The piece is played outside the auditorium; inviting you to create your own choreographies while maintaining a relaxed attitude, enjoying a strengthening light therapy or simply having a drink.”

*Fluorescent Sound was David Tudor’s debut as a composer and was performed at the Modern Museum in connection with Rauschenberg’s performance Elgin Tie, on the 13th of September 1964. The piece was composed while switching on and off the Museum’s existing fluorescent light banks. The so created popping and pinging sounds where then amplified with the help of contact microphones.