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Frances Dyson, And then it was now

The Pavilion

Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, Expo 70, Osaka
David Tudor, Anima Pepsi, 1970 (video)
David Tudor, Anima Pepsi, 1970 (video)
David Tudor, Anima Pepsi, 1970 (video)
David Tudor, Anima Pepsi, 1970 (video) Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, Expo 70, Osaka
A Proto-Immersive and Organic Environment

The concept of the Pavilion as an environment came originally from Robert Whitman: “We all wanted to get away from the Walt Disney type of thing — taking people through a building and pointing out what they should look at, and then ejecting them at the other end.” His suggestion was very much in keeping, of course, with the insistence of many artists at the time that the spectator participate in the art process, experience the work of art actively and make of it whatever he or she chooses. (1)

In all the press releases, reviews and public statements relating to it, the Pavilion is described less as an artwork than as an experience within an immersive environment, Barbara Rose (a contributing editor to the Pavilion anthology she published, along with Billy Klüver and Julie Martin, in 1971) summed up its impact as follows:

"Because the Pavilion is not an exclusively visual work, it demands an integrated sensory response. [...] The Pavilion is not an object; it is a unique experience [...] The evolution of its form was thought of as a creative process, a group effort analogous to the community projects of pre-industrial societies. [...] Its aesthetic impact is secondary." (2)

As an environment, the Pavilion represented — for Rose at least — a new form of community; it heralded a new civilization characterized by a new system of values, erasure of the line separating art from life, and the active participation of the audience. It would ultimately culminate in the destruction of traditional, post-Renaissance culture: “The kind of culture it presupposes is very different in every respect from post-Renaissance culture. It accepts art as part of life, as an experience as ephemeral and changing in its form as life itself.” (3)

Immersion and Cybernetics

Writing in 1972, Barbara Rose describes both the Pavilion and the artistic sensibilities behind E.A.T.-related events in terms that would reappear, some three decades later, in discussions of the “new” era of art and technology. The Pavilion is multisensory; it is an experience rather than an object. Its form “evolves”; its creation re-introduces an aspect of the communal past of pre-industrial societies; it represents the rejection of post-Renaissance art practice and the development of a new system of values. From these values and this new aesthetic, the buildings housing art are transformed into something organic, “symbolic of an organism constantly in a state of subtle change and flux.” (4) These values and this aesthetic would also eliminate the divisions between artist and spectator, artwork and audience, art and life; and they would call into question the very possibility of “art” itself. It was these dissolutions that Gene Youngblood described in 1970 as "the Open Empire of the Cybernetic Age":

"Through aesthetic decisions as to the uses of technology, the differences between art and life, the real and the unreal, are being utterly and finally obscured. The Cybernetic Age is the new Romantic Age. Nature once again has become an open empire as it was in the days when man thought of the earth as flat and extending on to infinity. When science revealed the earth as spherical, and thus a closed system, we were able to speak of parameters and romance was demystified into existentialism. But we’ve escaped the boundaries of earth and again have entered an open empire in which all manner of mysteries are possible. We are children embarking on a journey of discovery." (5)

Youngblood’s use of metaphors is insightful: the idea of a new “empire,” of a new age, is blended with a sense of discovery and innocence associated with “children.” How different Youngblood’s framing of “empire” is from Klüver’s metaphor of the castle! Whereas Klüver, perhaps as a result of his pragmatism, sees technology in terms of resources and wants to facilitate access to them, Youngblood characterizes technology (cybernetics) as an age and a paradigm that have revealed a new — albeit virtual — territory. Meanwhile Rose, for her part, frames the Pavilion and all it represents in terms of community, organism and even life itself.

Frances Dyson © 2006 FDL

(1) Calvin Tomkins, “Outside Art” in Pavilion, edited by Billy Klüver, Julie Martin and Barbara Rose (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972), p. 8.

(2) Barbara Rose, “Art as Experience, Environment, Process” in Pavilion, edited by Billy Klüver, Julie Martin and Barbara Rose (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972), p. 60.

(3) Ibid., p 61.

(4) Barbara Rose, “Art as Experience, Environment, Process” in Pavilion, edited by Billy Klüver, Julie Martin and Barbara Rose (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972), p. 61.

(5) Gene Youngblood, “The Open Empire,” Studio International, vol. 179, no. 921 (Apr. 1970), p. 177-178.