Billy Kluver; engineer who helped artists
Hyfler/Rosner
Billy Kluver, 76, an Engineer Who Collaborated With Artists,
Dies
By KAY LARSON NY Times
Billy Kluver, a scientist and engineer whose collaborations
with artists helped give birth to the multimedia art forms
of the 1960's, died on Sunday at his home in Berkeley
Heights, N.J. He was 76.
The cause was melanoma, said his wife, Julie Martin.
In 1966 Mr. Kluver teamed up with Robert Rauschenberg to
solve the knotty engineering problems posed by 10 artists
(Mr. Rauschenberg among them) who wanted to stage their art
as spectacle. Mr. Kluver invited some 30 scientists and
engineers, most of them his colleagues at Bell Labs, to
realize dreamy ideas like snowflakes that fell upward and
tennis rackets that gave out sounds like huge temple bells.
The outcome was "Nine Evenings: Theater and Engineering," a
performance series that drew 14,000 visitors when it opened
at the 69th Regiment Armory in Manhattan on Oct. 13, 1966,
attracting worldwide attention and inaugurating a fusion of
art and technology that prefigured the arrival of countless
new art forms.
Experiments in Art and Technology - the organization devised
in September 1966 by Mr. Rauschenberg, Mr. Kluver, the
artist Bob Whitman and a Bell Labs engineer, Fred
Waldhauer - quickly became an instrument of ongoing
collaborations. E.A.T., as the organization is known, earned
Mr. Kluver a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from France
and the Royal Order of Vasa from Sweden. Mr. Kluver
continued to match up artists and scientists as recently as
last summer.
Johan Wilhelm Kluver was born in Monaco on Nov. 13, 1927,
and grew up in Salen, Sweden. He graduated with a degree in
electrical engineering from the Royal Institute of
Technology, Stockholm. A physicist by training, he fell in
love with film in the 1930's. He kept a set of college
notebooks listing in an obsessively neat hand every film he
saw between 1942 and 1950, plus the stars, studios,
directors and his comments and ratings of them. For his
graduate thesis in physics, he created a Walt Disney-style
animated film of electrons in streaming motion and attempted
to sell it in Hollywood.
Film drew him to art. He served as president of the
Stockholm University Film Society and was a co-founder of
the Swedish Alliance of Film Societies, in the course of
which he became friends with Pontus Hulten, at that time the
director of the Moderna Museet, the modern art museum.
Mr. Hulten recommended Mr. Kluver to the artist Jean
Tinguely, who was looking for engineering help in designing
his self-destroying machine, which tore itself apart in a
spray of smoke and fire in the garden of the Museum of
Modern Art in New York in 1960. One of the other
contributors to Tinguely's machine was Mr. Rauschenberg, who
struck up a friendship with Mr. Kluver.
Mr. Kluver was a staff scientist at Bell Telephone
Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., from 1958 to 1968. He
published numerous technical and scientific papers and holds
10 patents. Around the time of Tinguely's event, Mr. Kluver
began making trips into Manhattan to go to happenings and
art openings, where he met Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, John
Cage, David Tudor, Robert Whitman, Andy Warhol and other
rising stars of the New York art scene.
Mr. Kluver had a role in developing iconic works like Mr.
Rauschenberg's sound sculpture "Oracle," Mr. Cage's
electronic performances "Variations V" and "Variations VII,"
and Warhol's floating "Silver Clouds." The results of these
and other collaborations gave public shape to what had been
a private movement, a merging of art and technology that has
not yet exhausted itself.
Besides his wife, he is survived by a daughter, Maja Kluver,
of Brooklyn; a son, Kristian Patrik Kluver, of Boulder,
Colo.; and two half-brothers, Bjorn Tarras-Wahlberg and
Lorentz Lyttkens, and a half-sister, Ase Lyttkens, all of
Stockholm.
DGH
This is the first appearance of the name Kluver on alt.obituaries.