Oral history interview with Julie B. Martin, 2018 Nov. 7-8

Transcript

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a recorded interview with Julie Martin on November 7 and 8, 2018. The interview took place at the Archives of American Art offices in New York, NY and at Martin's home in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, and was conducted by Liza Zapol for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Julie Martin and Liza Zapol have reviewed the transcript. Selected corrections and emendations appear below in brackets. This transcript has been lightly edited for readability by the Archives of American Art. The reader should bear in mind that they are reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose.

Interview

[TRACK martin18_1of1_track01 is a sound check.]

LIZA ZAPOL:  This is Liza Zapol, interviewing for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution's Oral History Program. It's November 7, 2018 and we are at the Archives of American Art's New York office on Park Avenue South and 22nd Street, and I'm here with Julie Martin. If I can ask you to introduce yourself, please.

JULIE MARTIN: My name is Julie Martin and currently I'm officially a director of Experiments in Art and Technology, which in fact is a virtual organization, I say, and doing mostly history, the history of Experiments in Art and Technology to answering requests really, for exhibitions and other things.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Wonderful. And I'm excited to get into Experiments in Art and Technology's rich and wonderful history and your relationship to it, your history beyond, and before and after and within E.A.T. So, as we talked about before, maybe we should begin at the beginning.

JULIE MARTIN: Sure.

LIZA ZAPOL:  If you can tell me where and when you were born and a little bit about your early childhood.

JULIE MARTIN: I was born December 25, 1938, in Nashville, Tennessee. I'm the oldest of seven kids, who came along after me. My parents, they ran a jelly factory that actually had belonged to my mother's family, and my father and mother worked together there. It's called American Syrup and Preserving Company, started making syrup and then began to make preserves, and the brand was called "Delited," D-E-L-I-T-E-D, Delited Jams, Jellies and Preserves. [00:02:06] They got the name from, the story was, from Teddy Roosevelt, who visited Nashville and stayed at a hotel called the Maxwell House, which was one of the fancy hotels at the beginning of the century, and he left two legacies. He said about the coffee; "Oh, this is good to the last drop," which became their slogan, and then he also used the word "delight", I'm delighted about this, that and the other. And so somehow that became the brand name for the preserves, and it kind of took off after the war, in the '40s, when you began to have frozen fruit. Before, it was very—jelly as an industry was regional, you had to be there when the strawberries were ripe, or this or that, but after the war, you have the development of frozen food, so you can make preserves and jellies from anything shipped in. And so for a number of years it flourished, these regional things flourished, until finally, they were taken over by larger—Kraft and Smucker's took it over, and then my father discovered expanded polystyrene, and so he began to make insulation and other things out of expanded polystyrene, in the same factory.

I worked in the jelly factory some summers when I was younger. What happened once, a whole batch came out liquid, became blackberry liquid, and so Daddy decided that I could have a job testing it, which was mainly each batch that came out, I would see the pH of it, to see that it would solidify, and mainly, I just sat around with some other people who worked there and "tested" the preserves. [00:04:00] So I grew up in Nashville.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So tell me, was it your father's grandparents' company rather, or your mother's?

JULIE MARTIN: I think my father actually, his family owned something called the May Hosiery Mill, which was right next door to where the jelly factory was. So there's the May Hosiery Mill, there's the jelly factory, and then upstairs was a tobacco, making cigars, so you never quite got the pure smell of the jelly, which is very sad. So Daddy was working for May Hosiery Mill, and I think when he and mother married—

LIZA ZAPOL:  I see.

JULIE MARTIN: She actually, she went to Vanderbilt, and then when she graduated, she came to New York and worked at Macy's. She was in the hat department and she sold hats, and developed a very good sense of color and this kind of thing, but then I think her father died and she came back to Nashville, and at that point she met my father and they got married. He, I think then took over the—they worked together, they took over the American Syrup, to keep it going.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And how soon after their marriage did you come along?

JULIE MARTIN: Very, I think. [Laughs.]

LIZA ZAPOL:  And so in '35.

JULIE MARTIN: Thirty-eight.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Thirty-eight, I'm sorry.

JULIE MARTIN: That's okay.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So, and then yes, so where were they at that time in terms of the industry? What was your understanding of their relationship at the time when you came along?

JULIE MARTIN: No, as I grew up, it was very clear that mother and Daddy worked together, so I think that's always been a model for me, in the same sense that Billy [Klüver] and I worked together. I think I always had that model, because many people say "Oh, I couldn't possibly work with my–" but I think I did have that model, that they really complimented each other. [00:06:08] Mother did most of the bookkeeping and this kind of thing and Daddy ran it, but also had these ideas for promotions and funny things like that. At one point, they advertised on the Grand Ole Opry, which was in Nashville. Every Saturday, you know hordes of people would come and stand in front of the Ryman Auditorium, named for the family. It's Robert Ryman, right?

LIZA ZAPOL:  Mm-hmm.

JULIE MARTIN: The artist. I think his family, it was his—maybe not his, but the family name, the Ryman Auditorium, which had been a revival hall, so it was set up sort of like a church. There weren't theater seats, there were like church seats. People stood in line, they came from everywhere, stood in line, and it went from seven to midnight and there were two shows. At about ten-thirty, everybody would be ushered out, other people would be ushered in, and it was 15-minute segments. So I think Delited Jams, Jellies and Preserves was between Martha White flour and hog worm pills or something, you know it was one of these funny things. I went a couple of times but not that much.

LIZA ZAPOL:  What do you remember of that show, like what was it like?

JULIE MARTIN: It's pretty interesting because it was on a stage and although it was on a stage, it was really focused on the microphone, and so people from Roy Acuff to Minnie Pearl the comedian, groups would come up, "come on, come on up," and then they would be performing. But they did have, on one side of the stage they had a group that would do square dances, but not just swinging a partner but very intricate feet things. [00:08:02] So they would be doing square dances over here and people would be performing, and they'd say, "Where's Roy?" And they'd get him up to the [microphone to perform –JM]—this kind of thing.

But then later in life, what became very peculiar was I went later and you had all this going on, and you had two innovations. One was the camera. So a star would come up and half the audience would come down with their little Instamatics and pop, pop, pop, you'd see [flashbulbs going off and –JM] all of them taking pictures. Then, a lot of the ads were national, so there would be this very almost surreal thing about it. You have this country music and then there would be an ad for Coca-Cola, would come over the sound [system], and very sophisticated New York advertising with still, the country. So it was really—this kind of thing was really interesting, you saw the progression of it.

My father, the best was my father decided to do a contest. He was going to give away a puppy. So my dad says we're giving away a puppy and you just had to write in, and so then I was in charge of charting where the answers came from. So I was looking at the letters, which of course you know, close, closer, you know it was a concentric circle of people writing in. And then he decided wherever he wanted the marketing to be, he would give the puppy. But I've always remembered one thing, which resonated later, with actually the Rolling Stones. There was one—people would write these pathetic letters about their child, et cetera, but one person wrote, "You know we listen to the Grand Ole Opry every Saturday, except when it's storming, and then we can't get no satisfaction." Wow. So then when the Rolling Stones came out about can't get no satisfaction, you realized it was this real southern expression. [00:10:04]

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yes, right.

JULIE MARTIN: These southernisms. I've always remembered that, because I liked the expression, and then they came up with it.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yeah, I didn't realize that.

JULIE MARTIN: I know, it's cultural history.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yes, right, there you go, and the colloquialisms.

JULIE MARTIN: My father was quite radical politically.

LIZA ZAPOL:  In what ways?

JULIE MARTIN: Well, he said he always wanted to join the Socialist Party, but they were meeting in Chattanooga and his father wouldn't let him go, like he was going to leave town or something. So he was frustrated from becoming—but he was quite liberal, as most people in the South were those days, it was Democratic.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yeah.

JULIE MARTIN: You know the great story about being the yellow dog Democrat, which is if a Republican was running against a yellow dog, that's who you'd vote for, and so that expression came about. But they were quite liberal and you know, for Nashville, I think sophisticated. They got the New Yorker. I don't know if they got the New York Times on Sunday but certainly, I remember reading the New Yorker. Actually, I started out just reading the jokes at the end of the stories, and then you graduate to reading the whole thing.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Right. What radicalized your father and what was the difference between him and his father in that way?

JULIE MARTIN: I don't know. I never knew his father. Both of my grandfathers died before I was born. Both grandmothers were still alive, and so I knew the grandmothers, but I don't—you know, there's things you don't ask.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And how did that affect your home? In what way were you exposed to his politics?

JULIE MARTIN: I think it was just because you'd have discussions at the dinner table. [00:12:00] I mean in those days, mostly it was taken for granted that you were a Democrat. It's only with Nixon and that whole Southern Strategy, that most intelligent people were. I do remember, unfortunately, my poor brother, he went away to—this was the Stevenson/Eisenhower [election], and of course we were all for Stevenson. My brother went away to school, kind of a southern [boarding school, Webb School was the name, and he came back and he was "I like Ike", and the whole family jumped on him –JM]. But actually, I have to admit, oh God—you're never going to get E.A.T. if I keep going. [They laugh.] But this is southern history, why not?

I remember going to Europe in the summer of '52. My mother's mother had five sisters, unmarried sisters, who lived in a house near us. My parents, at a certain point, moved into mother's mother's house, 2134 Acklen Avenue, which actually had been the farmer's house for the Belmont Estate. That was a big plantation there, which became Belmont College for Women and later Belmont College, or Baptist College. So this house, it wasn't grand but it was bigger [than other houses in the neighborhood –JM], and there was a lot of stuff that grew up around it, and the [great aunts] lived in a house nearby [1922 Convent Place] and they were quite accomplished women. One was a dentist, one was a lab technician who worked for the city [as a] lab technician, one ran their family business, they had properties and things. So the aunt [Celia Rich] who was a dentist took me and my cousin Mary Breyer to Europe in 1952. [00:14:00] That apparently had been part of the family tradition, that the aunts would take their nieces, and so the great aunt took the great nieces. She was going to a dentists' convention in London, and so we started in Italy and worked our way through Europe, to London. At that point, I was wearing, "I Like Ike" buttons, and it took about ten minutes, from getting home, and my family, to drop that, and of course then I was you know, [for] Adlai Stevenson. I do remember this, I was how old? Fifty-two. I was beginning to be a freshman in high school.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Fourteen or so, yeah.

JULIE MARTIN: So the indoctrination comes at home obviously.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yeah, I mean that's interesting, you described that you have these aunts who also took you under their wing, also very accomplished. Tell me more about what—

JULIE MARTIN: And my mother, it was—mother, among her circle of—it was Jewish, reformed Jewish, not religious at all, but mother did send us to—whether it was on Sunday and then it was on Saturday, [to temple, the Vine Street Temple, for –JM] religious school, an hour in the morning, because she said you needed a religion, in Tennessee, you needed to have a religion. So we went, but we were not very religious at all.

LIZA ZAPOL:  More secular.

JULIE MARTIN: Secular. You learned all this stuff. And we were confirmed in Reform Judaism, and in those days Reform was as close as you could get to being Episcopalian and still be Jewish, kind of. I mean, I think it's changed a lot now, the interest in ritual and other things is stronger now than back then, if you were Reform. There was a Reform, a Conservative and there was a shul, Orthodox, particularly after the war, I think, a lot of refugees from Europe, Jewish refugees that survived, came to Nashville, or maybe they came earlier, I don't know, but there was the three grades of Judaism, there was a temple for each of them. [00:16:24]

LIZA ZAPOL:  And what was your family's relationship to the refugees, to the war?

JULIE MARTIN: Well, actually, one thing is one of the people that came was a photographer, so in the family there are these formal photos of myself. The kids came, the first four came pretty quickly, and then the last three were more spaced out, and so there are these kind of formal portraits [of the four eldest children]. I forget, I can't remember his name now, but Mother asked him to [take these formal photos of us –JM]—you know, gave him work. And then we did have family in Hungary. My father's—there was, as far as I know, there was no contact with—, but mother's family, there were people in Hungary. And actually, one of them became a communist and was kind of a well-known communist after the war, and then I had an aunt who was a psychoanalyst, who ended up in California. And I think mother sent packages and money during this time. I mean, I wasn't really aware of it, it's only later that I see that there was communication, and asking for things, and they were trying to help, I guess particularly after the war, if you survived. Nobody went to Israel, my parents were not Zionists, they had no support there, but they were very much part of the Jewish community in Nashville. [00:18:08]

Mother was quite unique because she worked, and these women [in her circle], it was kind of upper middle class and they didn't work, but mother worked and we had what you call help, Lizzie and Ophelia Hayes , and they kind of brought us up because mother was working most of the time, but that was very different. Our family was a little bit different in that sense, that she worked.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And right, as you said, she was also this example of being an involved woman, like your aunts. It's interesting, you talk about Lizzie and Ophelia, you're seven, you have [six] siblings, you're the oldest. I'm curious what your home was like. Can you describe a particular meal, maybe a special meal?

JULIE MARTIN: Totally chaotic, of course. No.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Was there a particular holiday that was special in your family, and what would it be like in your house?

JULIE MARTIN: Guess what? Christmas. Not only because I was born on Christmas, but mother said it's a national holiday. So we had a Christmas tree, you know and we had stockings and we had—and the aunts would come for dinner, you know typical, "Come on, finish" so we could get our presents, we'd get the presents afterwards. I think there was a lot of—we talked a lot at dinner sometimes, or sometimes it was kind of chaotic, you know with all the different—then I had one of the great aunts who came, who lived longer than the others, came and lived—we built a little extension on the house and so she came and lived with us toward the end of her life. [00:20:05]

LIZA ZAPOL:  Were you closest to that aunt?

JULIE MARTIN: No, not particularly, not really. I didn't really have—when my grandmother died, I don't know at some point, I don't remember being particularly—okay, hold on. Let me think for a minute. We always sat down to dinner, which I think mother always kind of insisted on that, and they [Lizzie and Ophelia] wouldn't serve, but they would be doing the cooking and putting stuff on the table. But on into our teenage years, where usually you don't do that, we sat down to dinner. I don't remember much about breakfast. I do remember that we would take our brown bags to lunch and for some reason, the sandwich of choice was something called meat paste, which has God knows what was in it, but meat paste with mayonnaise and lettuce. That was the sandwich for many years, because Lizzie and Ophelia would make it, that was their—so we got a lot of, we got you know, Eastern European, some Eastern European cooking, but also really good Southern cooking; fried chicken and you know. I never realized you didn't cook green beans for four hours until I came north, you know the sort of Southern cooking where you cook them to death, with ham, and quite delicious.

Oh, so my other grandmother [my father's mother, Jeanette Martin] whom we call "Ba," I don't know why, I think because that's what I called her. She lived close by, but she lived with another cousin, Mary Lee, [Martin] who worked at a family insurance company on their side of the family, the Loventhals. [00:22:07] Mary Lee Martin, she lived with my grandmother and I used to like to go there because it was quiet and you could—you know, so on Saturdays or something, I would go there because it was really quiet. My grandmother liked to play Scrabble, so we would play Scrabble, and she could quote a line of—she'd say, "Let's quote a line of poetry for every word," and damn, she could do it, but I don't think she got any more modern than Swinburne, so she was not into any of the, T.S. Eliot, any of that, but all the 19th century poets she knew, that I remember.

LIZA ZAPOL:  What was it like to be the eldest of these [seven] children? You would escape to your grandmother's but would you have responsibilities at home?

JULIE MARTIN: Only when I was 16 and learned to drive. For my 16th birthday, my mother gave me a chauffer's hat as a joke, just a joke. But then, you could drive at 16 in Nashville, so I could drive them around, but not really.

I'm trying—there's something I was thinking about. Actually no, mother said, mother did say that it was good for me to go away for college. Because she did put more responsibilities on me—I don't remember it, not really. Because my father, actually, when I was a freshman in high school, he got lung cancer and had, for that day and still, a very radical operation, lost a lung and almost died of course. And so from then on he was somewhat incapacitated, although he lived for 20 more years; he was 45, he died when he was 65. [00:24:11] So I think mother was very focused on him. They were very—you know, a great love story. They really were focused on each other and she was very concerned about him after that, so it's possible that there was more responsibility to me. I don't remember it. I mean, I remember maybe driving them or something, but I really don't remember, but she said it was good for me to get away. I mean, I wanted to anyway, when I came to college, I didn't want to stay there.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And tell me about then, your relationship to school. You know, you talked about how you were testing the jelly. Yes.

JULIE MARTIN: What happened was we lived very close to the local [with grades] one to six, called Eakin School, and so we all went there, it was a block away, so we all went there. Then, right next to it was something called Calvert, I think, and that was [grades] seven to nine, and so I went there. And then for some reason, mother decided the high schools weren't good enough or something and she put us into private school—and then after that, my other brothers and sisters, called Peabody Demonstration School, which was supposedly—I mean it was attached to Peabody College for Teachers, and it was supposed to be testing new ways of teaching and a lot of the practice teachers would practice there. In effect, after '54, it became refuge from the attempts to—

LIZA ZAPOL:  To integration.

JULIE MARTIN: To integration. However, it didn't really happen for me. I was there, I graduated in '56, so I had a very small class, like there were 30 of us, I think afterward. [00:26:03] And it was one to twelve, so a lot of kids, particularly college professor's kids, so we had a really good class, it was really smart. I think after that it grew and now it's a [called University School in Nashville and it's high class, raising money, with better art facilities than most colleges. So then in ninth grade I went there.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And what were you like as a student? What were you compelled by, what did you enjoy?

JULIE MARTIN: Just to do the work. I was a good student and I got into Radcliffe, come on. But from Nashville, so. What we know about Harvard now, diversity, but actually and another friend of mine, Liz Werthan, both got into Radcliffe that year. Her sister had gone there four years before, but both of us got in. I liked my English teacher, I liked my math teacher, you know I really enjoyed school. I don't remember studying very hard, and it wasn't rigorous. Like you know, you got to Radcliffe and all of a sudden these girls had gone to Mrs. Brown's or this or that, had been writing papers, you know, really advanced work. I think in high school, I wrote one paper. So you studied and you read, you know, but it wasn't this kind of rigorous high school education that I think real private, or Northern, Eastern private schools got.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And in your home life, it sounds like you had these examples of, you know, many people who were very strong women.

JULIE MARTIN: Very strong women. [00:28:00] Yes.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So did you feel pressure, or you wanted to perform?

JULIE MARTIN: No. Unconscious for the first 50 years. You know you just went along. No, I don't think—certainly, the women's movement wasn't around, there wasn't talk about it. I guess maybe family expected you to do well and expected you to go to college. Daddy, I remember went on a trip to the West Coast, he went out and he saw Reed College, he thought it was great. He really wanted me to go to Reed because it was more progressive. Me, I was a snob, I wanted to go to Radcliffe, to me that was the school. I remember I interviewed at Barnard and I was like, I'm so smart ass. So the woman said, "Well do you want a country school or a city school?" I said, "I want a good school." I mean so to me, some of these things that people make decisions on were not in my head. I didn't think I wanted to be on a campus, I mean I liked Radcliffe because—maybe for May Werthan, who had been there, had this idea it was this really good school, so you know that's what I wanted. I would have been happy to go to Barnard too, but I didn't—there wasn't this pressure, it's just what you did.

I think what's really interesting sociologically, I was born before the war, in '38, and my sister, two brothers after that, in '40, '41, Terry is four years younger, she was born during. Something happened. I really think the kids just a few years younger than me had a much harder time. My two brothers, none of them finished college. [00:30:00] Terry went, dropped out, et cetera, et cetera, and then finally went back and finished. The next sister who is again four years younger, she dropped out, she went back, in her 20s or 30s or later. Something happened in the society that made things—it wasn't clear, you know the path became much more unclear. My brother Tim, he went to work for Daddy and then Jackie ended up kind of—he died of an overdose at some point later. I mean he knocked around, was going to be an actor. You know, something happened I think. When I'm looking back, our family was in the forefront of you know, Jackie arrested for—he was arrested by a federal agent for peddling marijuana so it was probably the first, you know, in mother's circle, that she had to deal with this. It became more and more [common] I think, in the whole society as the '60s developed and things became much more chaotic. I think I escaped that partly because of being born a little bit earlier, I think, that's the way I look at it.

LIZA ZAPOL:  By that time you were in college.

JULIE MARTIN: I was already in college and I wasn't very radical, I mean I was liberal. I had a friend who was in my high school class, [Tommy Giddings] who got involved in the sit-ins and began to do that. I sort of didn't, I kind of just went to college and then I went to graduate school at the Russian Institute.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yes, and I'd love to talk about that. [00:32:00] Before we go forward, I am curious—I think you've said before that your parents collected [art] a bit.

JULIE MARTIN: Oh yes.

LIZA ZAPOL:  In Nashville or locally. I'm curious to hear about your own history and relationship to art in particular.

JULIE MARTIN:  Art. My parents, as I said, I don't know when they collected but I do remember—so '56, my parents, they took me—they used to go once a year to New York in the summer, this was their thing. I think they were members of the Museum of Modern Art so we got the catalogs. They did, maybe a little bit later, collected, I mean there were pictures all over the house, and very much locally. I think [my younger sister and brother] Terry and Rick knew a lot of people in Nashville but there was one drawing that I think mother bought at the local framer, Lyzon [Lyzon Frames and Fine Art] was a framer, and it was a mother and child signed Charles Grooms, so it was before he became "Red" Grooms, when he was in Nashville. I do remember that. I remember coming to New York with them and we went—we saw the Pollock show. We went to the MoMA, maybe just when he died, and I don't know if they did it in '56 or '57, but I remember going, not knowing what I was looking at. Another time when they did the—when MoMA had wall-to-wall Picasso, and other places, so we went to the Picasso show and they bought a Picasso print, so there was a Picasso print at home. So there was some of that kind of art, but they were always interested in encouraging younger people, but mostly as I remember after I left. [00:34:00]

LIZA ZAPOL:  They became more engaged after you left.

JULIE MARTIN: More engaged, I think, through Ricky, and Terry who stayed in Nashville and had friends that were artists, local, and then Terry actually started an art gallery down the street, Martin Wiley, with Gene, [Wiley Gene Sizemore]—oh God was his last name Wiley? They called him Coyote, because it was Wiley, but it was Gene somebody. He had come to New York, this is later, and worked for Annina Nosei, and helped Basquiat in the basement, when Annina Nosei had him in the basement painting. So he came back to Nashville and he and Terry opened a gallery where they showed New York people, they connected to New York, prints and things, but that didn't last that long. So there was always this interest.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And what about you, did you ever study art when you were growing up?

JULIE MARTIN: You know, I can't remember if I did or not but I do have a memory of someone teaching art, maybe going to classes, oh God, but I didn't take art. I do remember actually, I do remember once in grammar school, like having an idea of something I wanted to draw and I couldn't do it, so I was like forget that. I knew very early, I mean I didn't have any aspirations to be an artist or to do art. I do remember very specifically realizing I couldn't. And you took art classes [at school] but if you weren't motivated that way, it didn't become anything.

Later, actually, while I was in New York, I was living with Robert Fagan, who was—well actually, he was the boyfriend of Priscilla Brown, who was in my dorm at college, and senior year he got one of the last cases of polio and was completely paralyzed. It happened at Christmas. She dropped out and sort of took care of him for a while and then they broke up. And so when I came to New York to go to Columbia I met him, and then somehow we hooked up, and so I was living with him. We took classes at—the Museum of Modern Art gave art classes back in the day, and it was [Lucia Salemme] the wife of Salemme, Attilio Salemme, I don't know if that's the right—how you pronounce it, but she gave art classes and then she gave also painting classes in her loft which was on Sixth Avenue. A lot of artists lived in that area, people like Rudy Burckhardt lived in that kind of Sixth Avenue, west of Sixth Avenue or west of Fifth Avenue, and I remember for a little while going to classes there. I don't know why we did it. Robert, that was my real education in art, although I'm sure I would come to New York, I can't think, but when I was living with him he was at the point where he couldn't move around.

He was in a wheelchair at this point, but he would go to things, go to art galleries, museums. I remember his thing was there's no difference between contemporary and old art, it's all on a spectrum. So this whole idea of not valuing older art more was I think one of the most valuable things. We went to Europe one year he was in a wheelchair, I think we traveled sometimes, but we went to every museum in France, start at the Louvre and work your way down [to the provincial ones –JM], and he just, he wrote a lot, he was a poet as well, and he wrote about art. [00:38:06] So that was my real [art] education.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Was talking with him.

JULIE MARTIN: Talking and going to galleries, I mean he knew to go to Castelli [Gallery]. And then actually he grew up in Englewood, New Jersey, and he was friends with a man named Hugh Mitchell who was friends with Bob Whitman. I think Robert [Whitman] knew [Robert's brother, –JM] Peter Fagan, again the Fagans were this very large Catholic family. The father had run the Jersey Journal but died quite young and so they were brought up by the mother, who was in those days kind of a nonentity, married but then to be on her own, she wasn't a strong, dynamic woman, but they were a large family too. So Hugh Mitchell, Hugh told Robert [Fagan] that Bob Whitman was doing a show, and it was the American Moon, so he went to the American Moon in 1960. I had no idea what I was looking at to be perfectly honest, I don't remember, but we became friends with the Whitmans, with Bob, and he was with Simone [Forti] at the time, and so they would come to Robert Fagan's house. I remember some dinners, and we would go to his performances. I didn't really know what was going on. You didn't in those days if you weren't really part of it, so I didn't know anything about the Judson, I never went to the Judson.

I remember seeing, actually—I was living up in—I was at Columbia, not going to school very much, not getting a masters, it took me five years, but never mind. [00:40:00] I remember having a card for Car Crash, Jim Dine, but I don't think I saw it, I mean I've seen pictures. It's very hard to know now, because I've seen pictures so I know, but I'm pretty sure. We followed Whitman, so I saw Flower, I saw Mouth, and not really knowing what other people were doing. Although by '65 when I saw Prune Flat and the incredible evening at the Film-Makers Cinematheque downstairs on 41st Street, and it's [Whitman's] Prune Flat, [Rauschenberg's] Map Room II, or one of the map—Map Room II, I think, and Moveyhouse, the Claes Oldenburg piece. And there was an incredible party afterwards when we went the last night. There was this incredible party afterwards where Claes and Patty did one of the things where you open the curtain and they were in one pose, and they open [the curtain again –JM] , there was another pose. I also remember, and this is what Bob did later, Bob Rauschenberg, he put Simone in a sack and he was carrying her over his shoulder and she was singing, and he later incorporated that as a third part into Open Score.

LIZA ZAPOL:  In 9 Evenings, right here, yeah.

JULIE MARTIN: In 9 Evenings, but this, was it December '65? I think so, but it was spontaneous. I remember that, and I remember where it came from that he then asked her to do it in Open Score.

LIZA ZAPOL:  It sounds like that '65 performance was sort of a turning point in your engagement in seeing as well, but before we go there, I think we've gone, sort of quickly over Radcliffe into Columbia.

JULIE MARTIN: Also, just to finish that. I do remember going—I think the first New York Theater Rally [May 1965] was also one that I went to. [00:42:03]

LIZA ZAPOL:  And you were there, okay.

JULIE MARTIN: I went to that and I saw the Whitman and Rauschenberg, and then I think Claes did a piece in a gym, was that the—downtown? Al Rooney's in a swimming pool, I remember seeing that. Then by the—and then just to finish it, by the next summer I was—that was '65. Did I? Yeah, and then I finally graduated, because Columbia started charging more money per semester. You couldn't do 50 dollars a semester so I said well I'd better get out, so I managed to write my thesis. Oh sure, go back if you like.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yes. I want to go over those performances a little more, in a little more detail. At Radcliffe, what were you studying and what was your—you studied philosophy, right?

JULIE MARTIN: Right.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Were some of your main mentors there?

JULIE MARTIN: Well, not really.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Okay.

JULIE MARTIN: Actually one of the things I did when I was at Radcliffe, I saw a lot of theater because at Harvard the student productions were very high quality and really interesting. And then in Boston, and I can't really remember, but there was one—there must be a theater company that's famous that did stuff like that. So I did see a lot of theater and I think I went to the Fogg and I remember going to the Busch-Reisinger and seeing Käthe Kollwitz, and of course you fall in love with Käthe Kollwitz as an undergraduate, those incredible drawings.

One more thing. When I was applying to colleges, I didn't know the story until later but apparently, the auditors came in to audit American Syrup and Daddy wanted to get out of town, so he said—and at the same time, there had been the thing in the New York Times. [00:44:08] Yeah, they did get the New York Times, because it said, "Wanted, 50,000 Intellectuals for Waiting for Godot." So he said, "We're going to New York to see if we're intellectuals," and I interviewed for Barnard at that point, and so we went and just fell in love. First we were "Ah, should we go?" But then we went and just were bowled over, and I think saw it twice there and then we bought the record and that whole summer we spent listening to Waiting for Godot. I mean it was this incredible, existential, Beckett was amazing, you know the death of God, and just this whole introduction to this kind of European intellectual [thinking]. I don't know if I did it then or later, but I began to read a lot of that theater stuff, Giraudoux, Anouilh. It was beginning to be translated, and so you could—and Yale I think was publishing it, so I read Sartre, No Exit. It might have been at this point or it might have been later, I don't know, but I read a lot of that stuff and what's interesting of course at Harvard is there was nothing about Existentialism, I mean forget it, it did not exist, and there were no courses.

LIZA ZAPOL:  As you were studying philosophy there wasn't—

JULIE MARTIN: Studying philosophy, that wasn't—it was too new, I think. So, I took a lot. I loved Plato, and one of the really good teachers I had, was it Robert Wolff? He gave the course on Kant, so the whole thing of Kant and the whole idea of the noumena and the phenomena and the whole idea, I really liked that. I wrote my thesis on Marx and Feuerbach and the theory of alienation, because the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, which is Marx's philosophical, less political [early work]—had just been published by the Soviets in English. And so the whole thing on man being alienated by work, you're alienated from the fruits of your labor, it's kind of these ideas. [00:46:32] And Feuerbach, the idea that man was alienated from God, that God became everything and man nothing and so the whole alienation, so that's what I wrote about, that was my thesis. Then, in my last years at Radcliffe, number one, I was not very good in philosophy, because—I figured it out. I really was interested in what people were saying. I really wasn't interested in criticizing, and the way you're supposed to study philosophy is that you read somebody and then you criticize it, which is how philosophy develops obviously, but I was not very good at that.

I remember one of the things I was not good at. At Harvard, you had to take one full length course the first two years, in science, literature and sociology, so I took Samuel Beer's course in sociology, in which you read people like Max Weber and Marx, and it ended with the whole thing about Nazi Germany and looking at, I remember looking at films of going into the camps, oh and then they also showed Triumph of the Will, and I remember some people laughed at how silly it was, and I remember Beer saying, "You know it's so interesting, you all can laugh at some of these, our generation can't." [00:48:07] So I thought you know, the things you remember.

And it was very chic to take—oh, I didn't want to read Dante, I was totally intimidated by Dante, why I don't know, don't ask, and so I took the course on close reading of text. Well, I was lousy, I was terrible at it, and my section man was actually Paul de Man, you know Paul de Man. He went on to be a really hotshot close reading of text guy and then later outed, some of early stuff was fascist, in—this is, I'm doing a span of 50 years, but some of his early writings were kind of fascist, so he was somewhat disgraced. He was, you know for close reading, and so I remember having a session with him and he was trying to show me how to do these things and he said, "What are you majoring in, Ms. Martin?" I said, "Philosophy," he said, "Thank goodness it's not English." I mean he did it in a nice way because I just, I didn't get it for some reason, I just didn't get how they would do things. Like how in Great Expectations, the language, the way he used for Pip and the convict, they were the same, you know this kind of—for some reason, it just went over my head. I read for the story, I mean it just went over my head, and so I remember that, that I was not going to do literature. Then toward the end I got more interested in the Soviet Union.

Actually, what happened is when the Allies marched into, I think it's Minsk, I think it's Smolensk Under Soviet Rule, something under Soviet rule, they got—the Soviets didn't have a chance to burn things and so they got a huge trove of local, archives of local—I think it's Smolensk Under Soviet Rule, Merle Fainsod—of local governance, and that went to Harvard. [00:50:20] And so a lot of the Harvard Institute, Russian Institute, wrote books about that, Merle Fainsod, somebody else. I can't remember right now but they were still teaching there, and so it was a really pretty exciting time, and actually Brzezinski gave the course, the Fainsod course. I don't think I took it but I audited it, you could audit stuff, and so he was very exciting, and he actually went to Columbia the same time I did. So it got really interesting and Dostoevsky and the Russian soul, you got kind of entranced with that. So I got more and more interested in that, and so then, one summer—oh no, I did the whole thing.

Oh, I forgot, I did the whole thing. USIA was doing an exhibition in Kiev, in Tbilisi, you know this cultural interchange, and a friend of mine had gone to the—the first one was in '59, the big exhibition, and a lot of people went. She was hired by Pepsi Cola and you had to be able to drink this much Pepsi and not burp so that you could be a representative of Pepsi, talking to the Russians. I swear, that was a thing, you know carbonated beverage. But I didn't know enough about it, so she went and then when she came back, the next year— It was after maybe my first year at Columbia. [00:52:00]

LIZA ZAPOL:  I have here, in '60, you did the Experiment in International Living.

JULIE MARTIN: Oh right, okay, oh yeah, I forgot about that. So I graduated from Radcliffe and I guess because I was going to Columbia, but I applied for that and got it, and it was very interesting because a lot of the people on it were CIA obviously, they spoke Russian perfectly. Me, I think I was more an experiment for USIA, that I didn't speak that well so I couldn't be thought of as a spy and it was kind of cute that you couldn't speak that well. The Experiments in International Living, maybe it wasn't so much. I can't remember, but I guess there were guys that really, you know they were like a little bit older and they spoke Russian perfectly, but we had a great time. Usually, you had to live with a family. Well, you couldn't live with a family in the Soviet Union, so we went to a youth camp, and I remember, I was very—well, I decided we would do a barbecue so somehow, they had an icebox about as big as your Xerox machine, but I decided I would go into—it was near Tbilisi I think, and so I decided we would go to buy meat, and then we would cook it on the beach, and damn, I did it. I mean we went in and we went to this incredible market where there were heads of animals for sale, bought meat, and then we organized a barbecue at the place. I just kind of remember that. And we traveled around.

LIZA ZAPOL:  I mean obviously, you traveled a bit in Europe when you were in high school, or when you were with your aunt.

JULIE MARTIN: Yeah, with my aunt, and then with Robert, I went to Europe with Robert at one point also. [00:54:04]

LIZA ZAPOL:  But this was before you went with Robert, was when you went to Russia? I mean, I'm just sort of imagining you.

JULIE MARTIN: I don't really remember. And then—

LIZA ZAPOL:  I guess I'm just imagining how your sense of the world is expanding as you go to these—as you spend time on the Black Sea.

JULIE MARTIN: One would think, one would think.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And kind of what that effect is.

JULIE MARTIN: Oh yeah. Later, later when we were USIA, we started in—

LIZA ZAPOL:  Which was in '61.

JULIE MARTIN: Right, so I went one year to Columbia, and then I had this opportunity to apply for the USIA, and I guess, as I say, it was cute that you didn't speak that well. I do remember something about, at the interview they said "Are you this or that, upper class or lower class?" No, so I'm at class and I said "I'm middle class," and they thought it was funny.

LIZA ZAPOL:  They ask you—they're testing your Russian and then asking you. You're talking about class.

JULIE MARTIN: Right, and I said something about, I was middle, we were all middle class or something. Obviously we were propagandists, who knew, but we were propagandists. I was actually in the section of plastics, it was Plasmacci USA, and so there was a kitchen and there was a this and that, and I was in the Plastics in Art [section], so there was a Moholy-Nagy and there was a Karl Zerbe, and it was a way of getting abstract art into the Soviet Union. Well in Moscow, of course they were totally sophisticated and you could have real kind of conversations and they knew what you were doing. By the time you got to Kiev and Tbilisi, not so much, you know they were like "Why is that?" [00:56:01] They were not quite as sophisticated about the artwork, but they all asked me why I wore my watch on my right arm and I said, "Because I'm left handed," but in the Soviet Union still, many people change to right hand, but they noticed. So it's so interesting the things that—they noticed watches and stuff, or if you were different.

LIZA ZAPOL:  What was the art that was on—yeah, what was the abstract art?

JULIE MARTIN: As I said, a Moholy-Nagy sculpture.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Right.

JULIE MARTIN: I don't really remember at this point. Oh, Archipenko, there was an Archipenko, because I remember I went to see Archipenko, he was still alive so in preparation I did go to see him in New York. I don't remember very much about it, but I remember I was preparing. Pretty active, right? I mean if you think about it.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yes.

JULIE MARTIN: He was still alive, if Moholy-Nagy was. So you know, trying to be able to talk about the art. But I don't think there were other well-known people, it was mostly abstract and used plastics as a material.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And what do you remember, any details about the conversations about the art, or the encounters that you had with people around Moscow or Tbilisi?

JULIE MARTIN: Not really. One of the things I do remember though, in Tbilisi at the Ethnographic Museum I remember an incredibly beautiful show of artifacts. The art was terrible, the stores were—I mean, everything was run down, there was no beauty on the street, in the stores, anywhere, but this exhibition with the colored burlap and the objects, it was gorgeous. [00:58:01] I heard later—we met people you know—that it was an artist who was not allowed to do his art but he was allowed to install this, and he'd done it, this was his artwork. And it stood out as being this amazing exhibition, I remember, and it was safe because it was ethnographic and he could do the installation the way he wanted. And I did buy some works, I bought a few small works which I still have, I guess in Georgia because you were further away from the Soviet Union, and of course it was Stalin had—Georgia had gotten a lot of, you know, stuff. So we met people. My friend, which I'm now blocking on her name, oh, Sarah, she went to work for the—Sarah Collins. [ph] She'd been in [the Fair in Moscow in] '59, and then she went to work for the State Department later, but she was quite attractive, so all these guys—and so we had some adventures like that.

I do remember one conversation, talking to some guy, maybe this was in Kiev, I don't remember where, and I was defending the United States, freedom, blah-blah, and he was questioning it and it was clear that I thought he was defending the Soviet Union. It became clear that if he was a true believer he never would have even engaged in the conversation, so the very fact of engaging in the conversation, he wanted to hear this side and he wanted to be part of it, that was a real revelation when he said, "No, I'm not a part," you know it became clear that he wasn't, and so that was interesting.

LIZA ZAPOL:  He's not speaking the party line.

JULIE MARTIN: No, but he was questioning because he wanted to hear the other side in a way, he wanted to hear these idealist ideas. [01:00:04]

LIZA ZAPOL:  And as you say, it was later that you discovered that it [the exhibition] was really propaganda stuff.

JULIE MARTIN: Yeah, I mean I just kind of realized it, you know I was a little naïve. But I did, I was very active because we had a time between Kiev and Tbilisi, so I organized a trip. We left from Yalta, took a Soviet boat and went to Istanbul for a week and we stopped in [Constancia] Romania, and what's that other—Romania and [Varna, Bulgaria –JM]—I don't think Albania, but the other one along the coast, and saw these ports with these amazing old hotels that used to be 19th century, because this is where you went, the rich went to the seaside. And these amazing buildings in Constancia in Romania, and Bulgaria, I guess is on the sea, so we stopped there and then to Istanbul. We spent a week in Istanbul, which is like this culture shock, where all of a sudden the [huge –JM] bazaar and everybody is selling everything and there's stuff to look at, you know. When you came to the Soviet Union, where at that point it was extraordinarily poor and extraordinarily, you know you'd go into stores and they really didn't have very much. The only thing you could buy were things like military tchotchkes and books, I bought books, and the books were amazing. You could buy books from China, beautiful, and these Chinese cutouts, you know this incredible—so those were available, and art books. The bookstores were amazing, but other than that it was very, very poor.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And it's interesting that you organized this trip. [01:02:00]

JULIE MARTIN: I did. I decided we're down here, let's do it, and I can't remember.

[END OF TRACK martin18_1of1_track02.]

JULIE MARTIN: Three people, I don't remember who came. It was a Soviet boat, you know, and to leave from Yalta, Yalta was amazing, because that staircase that Eisenstein used. Did I know about that? I'm trying to think. It's possible I did, because I think at Columbia, and it may have been before I went to the Soviet Union, I decided I wanted to see all those films, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and so I organized the films that were showing, so we could see October and see those films. I remember probably seeing them before I went to the Soviet Union.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So then you're actually going to that landscape.

JULIE MARTIN: Yeah, and I remember the steps, my God, you know, and we went from Yalta and came back another port I don't—I can't remember right now. But of course Yalta you knew because of Roosevelt and the whole Yalta—that was very fresh.

LIZA ZAPOL:  The agreement, yeah. Mm-hmm.

JULIE MARTIN: Exactly. So the history was quite fresh. I don't remember the port we came back to, but one of the other ports.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So then, Robert Fagan is your boyfriend, you come back to—

JULIE MARTIN: Well actually, I was going out with somebody else, and the only reason I didn't—Sarah [Collins], I remember stayed for another term, and like an idiot I came back to this boyfriend who had already gone off to medical school in Cincinnati and was not interested. But at least I finished Columbia, I came back because I was being a good girl. And you know, there was a lot of money available, there were grants to study the Soviet Union. Plus, I realized that when we were in the Soviet Union, you got hardship pay, so you made enormous amounts of money, I mean for me, and so I was able to fund two or three years in New York from just working this one summer in the Soviet Union.

LIZA ZAPOL:  I see. [00:02:00]

JULIE MARTIN: Because you got hardship pay, X amount per day. You didn't spend, there was nothing to spend it on.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So yeah, what was your life like in New York, where did you live?

JULIE MARTIN: We got an apartment uptown, it's 130 Morningside Drive, right at Amsterdam and 122nd Street, and it was six rooms. I shared it with a friend from college, Kate Woodbridge, who was working for the Carnegie Corporation at the time and somehow we got two other roommates; Melynda Albrecht and Jackie Leavitt, both of them were working at Columbia. Jackie Leavitt went on to—while we were there, she went back to architecture school and became a city planner, so she became a radical feminist city planner. She actually spent the summer that Newark blew up, she was living with one of the organizers and so she was quite radical and quite progressive. Melynda ultimately joined the cult, she joined the Maharishi and has like been there for 40 years, rose in the hierarchy.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Wow.

JULIE MARTIN: So it was interesting. So we had, it was one of those apartments you walked in and then walked down the hall and there were bedrooms off the hall and it opened up into a living room. Our rent was $130 a month, except all of a sudden one day—there had been a fire in the building, and so one day the landlord said, "I'll offer you a small discount." We got scared, what's this about, and so we found out that we were supposed to be paying a dollar a month until he finished, so for I don't know, almost a year, we paid a dollar a month, so we said two bedrooms for a quarter. [00:04:00]

LIZA ZAPOL:  No wonder you can get by on it, right?

JULIE MARTIN: Exactly, we did very well. And so that's where I lived.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And how would you describe yourself at that time? You described these other women.

JULIE MARTIN: As I said, I was very busy not getting a masters, living in New York, taking courses. Ultimately, although as a graduate student I majored in political science, I realize looking back, that that was really pretty stupid because I never had taken any of the basic political science courses. So although I was taking courses and doing all right and it was fine, I really didn't have the grounding, and my thesis, which was Economism, Khrushchev versus the Chinese, and the theory of Economism, was a philosophy thesis essentially. Or thought, because the Soviets, at that point Khrushchev was pulling back from his radical transformation of society and saying, you know we have to develop the economy and Communism will develop from that, which was kind of what Marx was saying. Although what's his name, Lenin, turned it on its head and said we take political power and build communism. Marx, the basic Marxist idea, although you do revolution, was that as the economy develops, the superstructure of politics will change. And so Khrushchev was beginning to go that direction and the Chinese, who had just taken power in '49 and they were going to build Communism and accused him of Economism, which was heresy from their [Marxist Leninist perspective –JM]. And most all this stuff was in English, you know everything was being translated. What was it called? It came out, a weekly translation, so a survey of the Soviet press, a lot was in English. [00:06:03] I didn't have to do that much work, and certainly not Chinese, but they were of course, their stuff was in English too so I was able to do this thesis on—

LIZA ZAPOL:  Their ideologies essentially.

JULIE MARTIN: Essentially ideologies and the clash of ideologies. Looking back, I realize it was a philosophy thesis and I didn't really have a grounding in political science.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And it's taking you five years, so there's the enjoying New York. So tell me, yeah.

JULIE MARTIN: When was it that I went to live with Robert? Oh, it was the blackout, I forget when the blackout was.

LIZA ZAPOL:  We can look it up but I can't tell you right now. [The Northeast blackout was November 9, 1965.]

JULIE MARTIN: At one point. There was a family servant so to speak, an elder man who worked for the mother and I remember he came in his car and I went to live with Robert and I never left. And some other people lived in our apartment. You know we probably could still have it, but Columbia kind of took it or pushed people out, was going to a pharmacy school there. I went by the other day actually just because I was up there, and it's still there, but Columbia owns it and I think they pushed everybody out ultimately.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So that was moving to New Jersey?

JULIE MARTIN: No, no, he lived in Washington Square Village.

LIZA ZAPOL:  I see, I see.

JULIE MARTIN: Two Washington Square Village, so I was still living in the city. And then I got my masters in '65, at which point I went to—so then Whitman, that summer of '66, Bob, Bob—so, with Robert, I was going to art—doing art stuff.

LIZA ZAPOL:  You talked to me about how you saw American Moon, you saw these early pieces and you didn't really get it, you didn't really know what you were seeing.

JULIE MARTIN: [00:08:07] Increasingly, by the time I saw Prune Flat, I was you know, my God.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Describe to me your experience seeing Prune Flat.

JULIE MARTIN: Well just, I mean the point about it was that Whitman's images just grab you from the beginning. It's not intellectual in any way, but you see that opening with the fruit and you cut it open and glitter falls out, and another piece of fruit, and he absolutely [gets you –JM], to me, you're in his world, this world of images. And then it was so smart, with the film on the girl, and she changed costumes, and of course you realize that it could only be done with film, and the repetition, the way there would be film and then it would happen on the stage; just all these elements that you loved about it. With Whitman, I can't intellectualize what he does and he won't talk. Good luck talking to him about the work, he'll resist, but if you get him to tell stories, factual stuff, but he will not talk about the work and he really wants you to experience it. So it was just, you began to be grabbed by his imagery and the strength of the imagery, and you saw the trajectory of the pieces opening and closing. There's a narrative but it's not a linear narrative, it's not a literary narrative, but I think he does take from traditions of theater, or images developing over time, repeating, talking to each other. [00:10:00]

LIZA ZAPOL:  So you talked about the New York Theater rally and going into the Cinematheque.

JULIE MARTIN: That was December, and then I got my masters. No, I didn't go to Canada until '67. Okay, so then that summer, Bob was asked by Paul Libin, he was given the theater, and so on weekends he presented Prune Flat and another piece called Untitled.

LIZA ZAPOL:  At Circle in the Square.

JULIE MARTIN: Circle in the Square. At which point I started working for him as the production manager. I ran the projectors and it wasn't that easy. You had to not only run two projectors, but there was a little piece of cardboard and wherever the projector was projected on the woman, you blocked out the background projector, so you would have a clear view of that film of the dresses and of her smoking, et cetera. You didn't want what was going on in the back of the forest, and so that was my job, was to follow her and block out. The other job, the main job was—well, there's a sweeping—

LIZA ZAPOL:  So that it's not directly projecting on her per se?

JULIE MARTIN: Well, so the background film doesn't project on her, and so you had the background film of a forest and people running and stuff, and then you had the smaller film of herself, projected on her.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And how did your relationship with Bob Whitman develop at that time, so that he would, you know, so that he wanted—that you both wanted to work together in that way?

JULIE MARTIN: I think I volunteered at that point. I didn't have to work. I was looking for a job more or less, not that hard. At that point, I really wanted to work in television, that was an idea that I really wanted, and so it wasn't that easy, obviously. [00:12:02] So I don't know, I was around and he was around, and I said "Yeah, I can—do you want somebody to help?' I guess that's how it developed. I swept up the broken glass from Prune Flat, where Simone was fearless. Either the last thing is this light comes down, and if it's hot enough when she throws the water it bursts, and if it doesn't, she just would go like that, [and hit it] she was amazing.

LIZA ZAPOL:  She would just hit it.

JULIE MARTIN: Hit it, yeah. And so I swept up the glass. Then there was another—in the second piece, at the end, Steve Paxton comes out in a white suit and in the suit were embedded, a hole and then a tube, and so you filled the top of the tube with colored pigment and there's a piece of—it didn't go all the way down. There was a piece of Kleenex and you filled it to the top, and then toward the end, he came out and stood in this suit and Bob, backstage, would just blow into the tube and a cloud of colored smoke would come out. That happened two or three times as he stood there, that was the, I think—

LIZA ZAPOL:  Magic.

JULIE MARTIN: The magic last image of the piece, and I used to have to fill it. I remember, oh God, it was a white suit and you'd get it cleaned, but sometimes I would spill it [some of the powder –JM], so I would have to get white shoe polish, and so the suit was like he couldn't move because it was full of white shoe polish, to keep it white.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So it was stiff.

JULIE MARTIN: It was very stiff. But he didn't have to move in this piece. I was working with him, and so then when 9 Evenings started, and I wasn't involved in that at all, until he was invited by Christophe de Menil to do a piece in Easthampton, and she called it Midsummer. [00:14:00] She had Twyla Tharp, she had Tony Conrad. She's amazing, she had Tony Conrad's show Flicker, I mean it was probably made ten minutes before or something, and so she had these different things. Bob, he did this piece called Two Holes of Water, which was literally off of Two Holes of Water Road, in a swamp, and a lot of the engineers that he was working with for 9 Evenings also helped him. I wasn't working for Christophe, I worked for them next year. So I remember helping and one of the things he did, walking down from the road he had these paper bags with a candle in it that lit the way, and this is what was done every Christmas in Berkeley Heights. It must be some—I think Berkeley Heights is very Catholic so maybe, but people would line their street with it, and so I was very familiar with that, and people would walk down and then sat. One of the things that I did, I had a video camera and Steve Paxton was walking in the swamps on this video camera. With a light, the path was here, we were kind of over here, and I was filming his feet, and that was being shown on two screens, people walked through two screens, seeing this image from the mud, and then there were other images. I don't remember doing much of anything else.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So that was a live feed.

JULIE MARTIN: Of his feet.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Of like a closed circuit?

JULIE MARTIN: Closed, yeah, yeah.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So how—was that new technology? How did that come to be?

JULIE MARTIN: I don't think it was new but that was what the engineers were working with for 9 Evenings, I mean there's a lot of closed circuit television. As everybody said, there was one VHS machine and somebody dropped it from a table and broke it, so everything was live, and Whitman used that, other people used it. [00:16:07] So they helped him do this piece and one of the things was this closed circuit TV.

LIZA ZAPOL:  I see. And were you aware of that relationship to the engineers at this point, or you were just told to take a camera?

JULIE MARTIN: I guess I must have been, I must have known, because then, just—well two things happened. Then, in September, he was invited to do a piece at Lincoln Center. You know, you go into the library off of Amsterdam Avenue and I don't know if they still have it, but there was a little theater there.

LIZA ZAPOL:  I'm not sure.

JULIE MARTIN: They may not have had it, but it was this tiny little theater, and so he was doing a version of this piece. I don't know how much I did, because I was in the audience, and it was incredible. I remember it, because he had video on people walking in, so you saw people walking in in black and white, I think on the stage as they walked in. There was this huge inflatable thing that blew up with video on it, but it was one of those storms, this incredible rain, and the place started filling up with water. I mean, he was doing water, but I think finally he had to stop, and I've always been so sad because you know, sometimes things work, like the images really work, and it just was gorgeous. Whatever it was, was so—I remember this just working, and then he had to stop. So then, he used parts of that piece for his Two Holes of Water-3, that's why it's Two Holes of Water-3, in the Armory. And I know he asked me to find films, and in those days a lot of schools were de-accessioning 16 millimeter films, and I found a place on 57th Street that sold them. [00:18:07] Actually, I got that for the summer, this operation, there was a spleen operation that he showed in Untitled, and I remember it, because he kept using it. He wanted penguins and I did find penguins finally, and eagles and things. So in addition to what he shot himself, he played for Two Holes of Water-3, he played these films.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Found footage.

JULIE MARTIN: Found footage, exactly.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Okay, so here we are and you're at 9 Evenings.

JULIE MARTIN: Right. And so you sort of got sucked in to do—I mean, I was soldering tiny plugs. When they got there, they realized that they needed—although a lot of things were wireless, ultimately they needed—the speakers couldn't be wireless, I don't think so. They had to attach audio wires to the speakers in the balcony, so miles and miles of audio wire, and we were all sitting, soldering connectors, what you call tiny plugs, and there are pictures of John Cage having to do it, and Deborah [Hay], and Simone [Forti] and me, and the engineers, so everybody was. [I have learned that this actually is wrong .We were attaching tiny pugs onto wires for the AMP patchboard control system. The technical requirements for each work could be plugged into a patchboard and the board inserted into a piece of equipment that sent the commands to the different elements of the performance. –JM] And I think I also helped Pontus [Hultén] with the catalog. I remember going down to the printer maybe, because I would always say I could spell and edit, so I was—I wasn't involved in any of the putting it together, but I think by the time it was ready to be printed, maybe I was helping out.

LIZA ZAPOL:  What do you remember of, let's say, the lead-up to the 9 Evenings and just being there? [00:20:00]

JULIE MARTIN: I don't remember, I mean I don't think I was part of it until they moved into the Armory, because I was working with Bob and in September, he did that piece at Lincoln Center.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Right.

JULIE MARTIN: And then like October 5th, they moved in. So I really wasn't part of any of the—but you got caught up in it, and I could be there all the time. I wasn't working and could be there. So I just got, you know, you worked, you did what you could. I can't say I remember that much now, because I worked so much with the film.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Right.

JULIE MARTIN: I get confused about what I actually saw and what I've seen the film of, so it's not fair. I remember hearing Cage and thinking that's not so crazy, or that's not—I was up in the balcony and it was really beautiful. I mean, I didn't know anything about music, nothing about any music, I really missed that completely, but I'm thinking how really wonderful it was and not crazy, I remember, not cacophonous. But I really didn't—other than that, I really don't, I just don't remember.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So yeah, where were you standing when you say up in the balcony? The audience was down in the bleachers?

JULIE MARTIN: The bleachers, but you could go up in the balcony. Whitman had those little scenes; the video came from the balcony. I don't know why, for Cage, I was up there, I just don't remember, maybe Whitman was the next. I don't remember, but that's really one of the few things. One of the people that remembers really well is Mimi Gross, I mean she saw everything and she has this amazing memory.

So then, right after that, I went to—right after 9 Evenings I went to Canada. [00:22:05] Sixty-seven was the 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, and Moses Znaimer, who had been at Harvard actually, I think, but he knew people. My friend Connie Beezer at Columbia, somehow [heard that –JM] he needed a research assistant and I was at loose ends, so I went to Canada for that winter and worked with him on the show. Then, I actually came back. I missed meeting McLuhan, because the last taping was going to be 50 years plus, and he was going to interview McLuhan from Canada. But for some reason I wanted to get back, maybe because then I worked for Christophe and so maybe she wanted—maybe I already knew that she wanted somebody for Midsummer. I don't quite remember. And so that summer I worked for her, on Midsummer, so naïve, I remember. I remember sending out the announcements and trying to save money, so I did this whole thing about, you know how you did zip codes and it could go third class? You know meanwhile she was flying by helicopter out to Easthampton, I was so naïve about the whole situation. But then she did—Bob did the second summer, he also did a piece.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So yeah, so you had worked with her on the Midsummer, the first summer, and then this is a second?

JULIE MARTIN: I don't know, did I? I don't remember.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Well, so I have '66, you worked on the performance series Midsummer. Two Holes of Water was '66. [00:24:00] So then I wonder if you came back.

JULIE MARTIN: I don't think I worked on it. I think I just was with Bob. I think I'm wrong, I think I'm wrong there. No, it was the next summer, which was '67, that I really worked on it, I helped.

LIZA ZAPOL:  I see.

JULIE MARTIN: That's when she did Twyla Tharp and she did, I think—and she did it at the Nivola's house, Bob did it in the woods, and that's when he—I was working with Sandy Daley, was my assistant, who was this artist, hooked up with a gorgeous 16 year-old who was MIA a lot.

LIZA ZAPOL:  That's not very helpful.

JULIE MARTIN: It was a crazy summer, it was a little bit crazy. I think during that time, I also then sat in on some things. Billy [Klüver] came out and Bob [Rauschenberg] was out there, and so there were some meetings on the beach about E.A.T. This was the summer of '67, yeah, and so there was some talk.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Had you met Billy before, at that time, at 9 Evenings?

JULIE MARTIN: Not. He was just a character. No, I didn't, I don't remember. Oh, and then that December right after [9 Evenings], I worked with Simone [Forti] on the article [for ArtForum], and Billy did the engineer's view and Simone used her notes, and so I worked with her on shaping that article, I remember.

LIZA ZAPOL:  About 9 Evenings?

JULIE MARTIN: About 9 Evenings, that was in Art Forum in January of '67. Then I left and then I came back and did Midsummer, and then I went to PBS for a little while, to do their version of Revolution plus 50, coming in from—I remember I didn't really fit in. [00:26:06] I was wearing really short skirts and really long hair, a little while, because I had been on Long Island all summer. Who is this strange person? So they did the program.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Because PBS was more conservative.

JULIE MARTIN: More conservative I think, yeah.

LIZA ZAPOL:  I mean, because it's interesting you say that was a wild summer, in '67.

JULIE MARTIN: Well not wild, but it was you know, producing Twyla Tharp, and her dancers had to have the right kind of food, and this and that. Whitman's piece was a little chaotic. Simone was very upset because they were kind of splitting up. He had met Sylvia. He needed to cast somebody and somebody suggested Sylvia, so they had met. Whether they were, I don't know, but I think that he and Simone were—because she'd been trying to have a child and had a real tragic miscarriage in '65. So that was not great. A lot was going on that summer and then in the fall, I went to PBS. Then, maybe after PBS, Billy and Fred [Waldhauer] invited me to join E.A.T., but it may not have been—I was looking, when the first newsletter that I was part of, that I was the editor. Was it June?

LIZA ZAPOL:  I see here, November of '67 was the one that you were first listed as the editor.

JULIE MARTIN: Really? [00:28:00]

LIZA ZAPOL:  Do you think it was earlier?

JULIE MARTIN: No.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Their first newsletter was January of '67, right?

JULIE MARTIN: Yeah. But anyway, what I did, also I was part of the—I must have been around because when they did the press conference, I was one of the "hostesses" and was wearing one of the—the hostesses wore paper dresses, which Bob Rauschenberg screened clouds onto, because E.A.T., the aims, you know the three aims that Billy and Bob wrote was printed on cloud paper, blue paper with clouds on it. And so that theme carried over, and so the women, two, three or four women, I don't know what we did as hostesses, I can't really remember but we had dresses that were silkscreened with clouds. That October Billy had met—I think I went to work, I must have been, maybe I was working for E.A.T., because I remember picking Billy up at the airport after he went to meet John Powers in Aspen, before or after the press conference, I'm just not sure, but I must have been around because October 5th was the, I think, press conference. So if it was the November 1st Newsletter, I was working on it and working on that issue of the E.A.T. News, with all of the speeches and stuff.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So what was it about E.A.T. that you wanted to be involved in that way?

JULIE MARTIN: Well, I remember really, really, I remember—and I don't know. I was living in my sister's apartment on Thompson Street, I guess Robert and I were no longer together, and I was going out with this guy named Danny Goldman, who was an actor. [00:30:14] So I guess Bob Fagan and I, I don't know when I—and then, so I remember a conversation with Billy, and I remember coming back and talking to Danny about it, just extraordinarily excited about the idea that not only would engineers help artists, but artists would help engineering and make a change in society. So it was this totally idealistic, now I realize totally utopian, but that's what did it. I mean I really believed and I was excited about the possibility of not just making art with technology, but effecting change, the artist as individual being able to effect change, and I was hooked. I think it came from a conversation with Billy, maybe I came out there and we talked about E.A.T. and the ideas, because I think one of the first—or one of the newsletters, is a real statement of the ideas and ideology and I mean I loved it, a sucker for philosophy, right? Once a philosopher, always, even if you're a flawed philosopher. But anyway.

LIZA ZAPOL:  But these strong ideologies.

JULIE MARTIN: Strong ideas really were what absolutely attracted me, and we were articulating them at that point. Billy and Bob had written the aims and a lot of the ideas were embodied in these early newsletters.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So when you say we were articulating them, do you feel like—did you have a hand in figuring out, yeah, in the language? [00:32:04]

JULIE MARTIN: Just making it more clear probably. If I'd be working with Billy, he really, he had—well later too, had an incredible sense of structure, like these three things have to go in. But sometimes what I could contribute would be to make them clearer. You know I always wanted to make things clear, not dumb down but make it clear, how things are. So I think in that collaboration maybe—I mean it wasn't my ideas, but it was being able to get them down. Bob Rauschenberg was just this incredible—I mean, he would be a poet if he weren't a painter—he is a poet. I worked with him once on this proposal for parks and just, his language, the way he weaves two or three things at the same time, I mean totally dyslexic right, but wonderfully so. He's amazing, his language. Billy was more, I mean not pedestrian, but more straightforward, and because he wasn't a native speaker, it was—we would work together on the language.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Sort of the grammatical structure?

JULIE MARTIN: Grammar, how things flowed or where you put the "buts" or whatever.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yeah, and I mean I'm curious, so specifically, were there certain ideas that you discussed or that you were trying to be particularly clear about in communicating?

JULIE MARTIN: I'm not sure. He and Fred, they were always trying to articulate what E.A.T. would do, and somebody talks about how there's a lot of philosophy and philosophical stuff in the early writings, and of course it developed in a certain way. [00:34:01] But I think just to try to articulate what you're doing and then communicate those ideas to other people. I can't remember specifically, but just the value of the artist, and I think one of the things which Billy had always, it was he believed in the artist. I've said this before but you know, his early collaborations with artists, it was how can I help them, how can I bring this about. He talks about in the beginning, he saw technology as his palette, a new palette, he offered them new opportunities, but that when he began to work with Rauschenberg and he talked about collaboration. Bob talked about collaborating with his materials, from a very early age, and this kind of working together, that his idea that the relationship could expand into this idea that they could influence each other. So the idea that the engineer influenced the artist, but the artist could also influence the engineer. I mean, I think we tried to articulate that, and this was an idea that people didn't have. I've also said that in the beginning, using the word collaboration for me was very strange, because you know, I'd been studying the Soviet Union and World War II, and so the whole thing about collaborators, it was a negative word. And then to see it being used, at first it was to me a little bit of a shock seeing it used in this context, but the further you got from World War II, the more it took on its own meaning. But it really was strange, for me it was very strange to use it.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yeah, in sort of a re-contextualization.

JULIE MARTIN: Right, in a positive way.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yeah, right. [00:36:00]

JULIE MARTIN: That you're wanting to collaborate.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And what did it come to mean for you?

JULIE MARTIN: Well just you know, that you realized what they were saying is that they—there was a mutual thing. Obviously, you started from the artist's idea so that was paramount, but the work could change. The engineer would make a suggestion, the work could change, they could work together on it, and something would come out that neither one had thought of in the beginning which then would lead to more possibilities. So it really was, I mean you know the whole, just this whole idea of opening up possibilities, I mean very Cage-ian in a sense. It's [Cage's ideas –JM] about randomness, but it wasn't. It was about freeing yourself, but it was about that you use that, you use this, Cage used this method of chance or randomness, to free himself from his prejudices, other people's prejudices, and make work that opened up a lot more possibilities and explored more possibilities and went to the future. That Cage-ian idea was embedded in this thinking, I think, that you really want to expand people's worlds and the possible changes.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yes, in terms of expansion, I mean it's interesting, and I think this was sort of an accident that it became "Experiments in Art and Technologies."

JULIE MARTIN: Oh, totally.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yes. Can you tell that story?

JULIE MARTIN: I mean the story that I heard is that well first, 9 Evenings was 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering, so they really liked that idea, and they worked with a man named Franklin Konigsberg who was a lawyer, who donated his time, and I think you have to register the name. The foundation was started actually, in September, September 26th, partly the idea I think to maybe raise money, they thought it could become nonprofit quite quickly and they wouldn't have to rely on Jasper and Cage's foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art. [00:38:15] Also, the people working on it, certainly Fred and Billy and Bob [Rauschenberg], and Bob [Whitman], the idea that this equipment would be made available to the artists, that the fruit of the collaboration on 9 Evenings would be made available. So I think that, if you look at the early writings, that was very important, that this stuff, you would expand it. And then the idea that getting engineers involved, more engineers, so that you could answer the requests of other artists, developed as the foundation developed. So where was I going?

Oh, and so I think they wanted to be the Foundation of Art and Engineering, something like that, and apparently, Konigsberg found out that if you weren't going to do engineering, you couldn't call yourself engineering, so he made up the title, Experiments in Art and Technology. Billy said, when they were sitting, I think at Alex's, and when they heard it they all went "Oh!" They just thought, "Well we can change it, we'll go with it now to get started," and of course nothing ever changes. But he, as an engineer and a scientist, a research engineer, thought that artists don't experiment in the same way. For scientists, sometimes negative results can have information, and if you know what the result is going to be, it's not very interesting. You know, John Pierce would say, "If you know how your experiment is going to come out, why do it?" [00:40:07] So really you could argue now, and people do, that the artist is doing the same thing, but you know it's very complicated obviously. I'm thinking about four different things at the same time. Billy's idea was the artist doesn't experiment in that way. I mean they'll try new paints, new this, new that, they're pushing themselves, but they don't experiment.

LIZA ZAPOL:  It's not like the scientific experimentation process.

JULIE MARTIN: Not like the scientific experiment. What's interesting of course, and you could argue all these different things, the artist, it's a little bit about disruption of what's gone before, where the scientist really follows [earlier experiments –JM], although they go into the unknown. They have to follow very specific proofs, very specific ways, where the artist can make this leap, you know Rauschenberg can use a car to make a tire print or Andy can make sculpture that floats, you know, you can do these things.

LIZA ZAPOL:  That isn't so clearly built on these people who [went before]—

JULIE MARTIN: Doesn't seem to be, right.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Even though it may be, right, yeah.

JULIE MARTIN: It is when you look back maybe but I don't know, I'm just making that up. I think more Billy, just the idea that experimentation, scientific, which is so different from the way artists work, but they accept, you know once you accept the title, you just go from there. They thought we can change it but you never do.

LIZA ZAPOL:  I mean it's interesting in terms of this, Experiments in Art and Technology is quite open. [00:42:00]

JULIE MARTIN: Right.

LIZA ZAPOL:  You know, this possibility of there being unexpected collaborations.

JULIE MARTIN: I think in the, not generic, but what's the word, everyday use of experiments? People experiment, an artist experiments, he gets a new thing it's an experiment. So in the nonscientific sense, it kind of works.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Right.

JULIE MARTIN: I think Billy was being very punkt, punkt, punkt about it, you know that it's not the same, in the same way that he really, nothing has changed I think, over the years is that he really felt it's about art and engineering. We would say artists and engineers and scientists, and of course there's some science obviously, but he felt pretty strongly that it's really about physical things and the engineers are the ones that solve these problems in the real world and that scientists are doing something very different, and that What do scientists and artists have to talk About? Kind of. Part of what's changed, I think is some of the sciences that are interesting have impacted on human beings more. Genome, genetics, things, you know the environment, certain things that physics in those days was about defining the atom, now it's about how are we going to save the planet.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Right, right.

JULIE MARTIN: So the interest of artists and science kind of has developed naturally, I think. It's just Billy really felt the other thing, the physical, the solving problems, making work. The whole digital revolution made a whole difference too.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Changed, yes. Yeah, so I mean here we are in '67, you were talking about the press conference, you're wearing the cloud dress. [00:44:04]

JULIE MARTIN: Right.

LIZA ZAPOL:  What's the public reception to Experiments in Art and Technology?

JULIE MARTIN: Well, in the first place, they were very proud they got an article in the New York Times, above the fold, apparently that was a very big deal, above the fold in the New York Times. What happened, one of the things that happened is Billy met Ted Keel, [Theodore W. Kheel] through John Powers, and Ted, another idealist, he had his Foundation for Automation in Employment, and he immediately got it, he got E.A.T. He adored Bob, I mean for him Bob was this just amazing brain resource.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Bob Rauschenberg.

JULIE MARTIN: Bob Rauschenberg, sorry, Bob Rauschenberg. He [Kheel] was starting this place called Automation House. He bought, from the Russian Embassy, you know the Russian Embassy is on 68th and [. . . Park Avenue], where Khrushchev banged with his shoe, and they sold the building behind, which had been a residence. So he bought that building and he was going to house his foundation and ultimately, E.A.T. moved there. But he wanted to do these, these projects about automation and the future, et cetera, and so he got it, about E.A.T., and the importance of it, and then he, Ted loved to organize press conferences, that was his big deal. [So the press conference was bringing labor, manufacturing, science, engineering, et cetera, together, to talk about the beginning of E.A.T. –JM] So it was in a way, a PR event. I don't think it in itself particularly impacted what we were doing.

The basic thing of matching artists and engineers was there throughout the history and in the beginning, we had to find engineers. [00:46:07] At the first meeting, that first meeting at Broadway Central Hotel, there were like 300 artists, they say 70 of which already had things they wanted to do, so the first few months, years, were attracting engineers. How do you reach out to the engineering community? So that's why, when we did the Brooklyn show and we had the competition, the prize went to the engineer, as opposed to the artist. We did different things like that.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Because you were trying to bring more engineers, yeah.

JULIE MARTIN: We had a booth at the IEEE, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. They had their yearly confab in New York, and so we took a booth, and people like Hans Haacke and Tom Gormley talked to the engineers and tried to recruit them to sign up, so just sign up, it didn't mean anything. We worked out a system that if somebody asked for an engineer, needed an electrical engineer, you could find them.

LIZA ZAPOL:  How do you recruit an engineer?

JULIE MARTIN: You just say, "Do you want to sign up, do you want to work with the artist? Sign here."

LIZA ZAPOL:  Is there a particular angle that gets them?

JULIE MARTIN: I don't know. What's so interesting actually, about it, is that it was an idea whose time had come. It spread across the United States amazingly. I mean part of it was people Billy and Rauschenberg knew in different cities, but they wanted to form local groups, they wanted to do this. This idea of engineers and artists working together just, it resonated at that time and it did become across the United States, and then we encouraged local chapters. [00:48:00] If somebody wanted to start something we'd say sure, go ahead, give them some advice, but what did we know, you know, is what we did. So they became quite local and did projects in their communities.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yeah, I think what we haven't talked about yet really, is the relationship to Bell Labs, to that industry in particular.

JULIE MARTIN: Well, essentially, Billy did it on his own time, although there were clubs. [Side conversation about the microphone.]

Although there were clubs at Bell Labs, you know the chess club or the this or that, and Billy may have thought about doing one, but it never happened and although he did have an idea early on, to do a section of the IEEE, art and engineering, again it didn't—E.A.T. just began and there just wasn't time or the focus. For the 9 Evenings, the engineers volunteered, they did it on—toward the end, when they were really getting ready to move into the armory, they did it on vacation time, sick time, took time. Later, in the '90s, we interviewed John Pierce and Billy said, you know "Why did you let this happen? You know you saw all this attention was being turned away from it?" And Pierce said "It was so positive, I realized it's such a positive thing, that if I'd stopped it, there would have—you know, the reaction of the engineers themselves would have been very negative on their own." So it was, as we called it, midnight requisitions, which you would get stuff, some stuff, and the engineers volunteered their time. Bell Labs, [actually AT&T –JM] they had a crew that shot some footage, but they didn't give money, they didn't sponsor it. It's only later that they kind of—which is fine. [00:50:03] Management was sympathetic and most of the engineers came from Bell Labs. Billy found the guys at Bell Labs. There were some others we reached out to when we needed them, but that was really the involvement at that point, was informal.

LIZA ZAPOL:  I'm curious, because I think I remember you saying something like it wasn't so much that the technology was cutting edge, but it was making the technology available to the artists?

JULIE MARTIN: Right.

LIZA ZAPOL:  What's your feeling about that, because there's also been some patents and so on, that have come out of some of this. No, not so much?

JULIE MARTIN: Well, not really.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Okay.

JULIE MARTIN: One patent, it was something about using liquid crystals to show lasers that were in the infrared spectrum, that you couldn't see. There were inventions, I mean in other words, the engineers used their knowledge to make equipment that had never been used in the theater before. I don't think that was one of the innovations, the T.E.E.M [Theatrical Electronic Electrical Modular]system. It made it possible to have sensors going from, for example, Alex Hay's brain, it went into amplifiers, pre-amplifiers, and then [an FM] transmitter that transmitted that sound to a pickup offstage, and then sent to a speaker. I mean now wireless mikes are everywhere, but in those days they weren't, and so they [the engineers] invented them, in the sense, using the knowledge they had, they designed, I should say, equipment that would do that. So that was the first time that wireless transmission had ever been used on stage, so from that sense. [00:52:04] But it wasn't like this is the technology that's going to get us to the moon.

LIZA ZAPOL:  It's innovation.

JULIE MARTIN: It's innovation, exactly, and so like Fred could design, what do you call it, the Proportional Control System, which is using light sensors, by going closer and further away with a light pen, he could raise or lower the volume, and also move sound from speaker to speaker, like it would go from one channel to another, he could change the channels of sound. Things like that, that the artist wanted, they made equipment that could do that, so in that sense. And so the artists were able to use closed circuit television, which is probably one of the first times it was used on stage. Bob Whitman had not an LED, a fiber optic setup [camera] with a lens, and he could video what was in someone's pocket and then send that to a projector. So in that sense, it was really, the technology at the service of creating and transmitting imagery, and sound, sound and imagery.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Right.

JULIE MARTIN: Yeah, because the sound with David Tudor, he had these constructions, and they were on the carts, and he had a transducer on like a metal plate, and he could feed sound into that transducer, and then with a pickup mike, pick up that sound [the metal plate made –JM], which was then fed back into his composition. That thing was moving around the floor, so the audience could hear the sound coming from these makeshift loudspeakers coming closer and further away. [00:54:00] And then also they [David and the performers] could use the sound as a control mechanism. The carts used FM channels to move the cart backward and forward, left and right. So the sound would actually be heard as sound or act as control, so all these different—

LIZA ZAPOL:  That triggers something else.

JULIE MARTIN: Triggers the movement of the cart.

LIZA ZAPOL:  I see, I see. I mean, I'm mindful of time.

JULIE MARTIN: I'm fine if you're fine, I'm okay.

LIZA ZAPOL:  I have one more question and then maybe we'll take a little break. I'm just curious, you know, though you were involved in some ways in the factory growing up, or understanding some of the new technology it sounds like in the USAID, your own background wasn't necessarily engineering. How did you acquire all of you know, the aptitude to talk—you know it sounds like yes, so what happened in these initial conversations here? Are you just absorbing all this information?

JULIE MARTIN: I think I really learned about it in the '90s, when we began to do the films [on 9 Evenings, and document what was going on in those performances –JM]. There was no need to before.

LIZA ZAPOL:  At 9 Evenings in particular?

JULIE MARTIN: No, no, in the 1990s, when we—Billy found the film, the film that he had ordered to be shot, and the Rauschenberg Foundation agreed to digitize it for us, and we began to make films.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Of?

JULIE MARTIN: Of each of the [9 Evenings] pieces. And of course, the technology, understanding the technology was just as important as the art so as we began to work on it, Billy would explain it or an engineer would talk about what he'd done, and I began to just, absorb it by osmosis. I think it really didn't happen at the 9 Evenings, I mean there was no time for anybody to do anything, I mean looking back it was a totally insane project. [00:56:08] So I think learning it came afterwards.

LIZA ZAPOL:  But even you know, as you're engaged in the Journal, at the office near here, at 9 East 16th Street, right?

JULIE MARTIN: And then, our office during the Pavilion, was at 235 Park Avenue South, just down the street.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So right here in this neighborhood. So I just, you know I'm wondering if you're coming to understand the equipment that's being borrowed and how it works.

JULIE MARTIN: No. Really, working at E.A.T., I really had nothing to do with the technical. Ralph Flynn, who had been at Bell Labs and then joined E.A.T., he was in charge of the equipment and in loaning it out. As we began to work on the Pavilion, you know usually it was when the book came out, when we began to do the Pavilion book and I was involved in editing the different people's things that I learned about it.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Because the creation is happening so quickly, it's just about, it's about facilitation.

JULIE MARTIN: Exactly. And each group was kind of doing its own, although, I mean I remember—no, I really wasn't involved. I would get it with glances, but I really wasn't that involved in the technology at that point.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So I'm going to pause now for a moment. I'm excited to talk more about other experiments, or E.A.T. work, as well as Pavilion in particular, but for now, I'll take a break.

[END OF TRACK martin18_1of1_track03.]

LIZA ZAPOL:  Okay, so just to continue recording, it's still Wednesday, November 7th, and Julie, you said you wanted to share something.

JULIE MARTIN: We were talking about 9 Evenings and when I looked at recently, the schedule, it was insane. I mean we moved in on October 5th and the first performance was the 13th, and in that time, you had not only bleachers come in, you had to install loudspeakers, you had to install the lights, you had to install the speakers. As I say, we realized there had to be wires to the speakers, and in the—they built a control booth and then this system, this AMP system where things were wired to a board and you put in a board in the control mechanism, and then everything was hooked up. This was the idea that the engineers had at the last minute but it worked. And then rehearsals, people working with unfamiliar equipment. It was really crazy and we actually didn't even get a stage manager, Judith Doty, until already in the—

LIZA ZAPOL:  In the space?

JULIE MARTIN: In the Armory space. I guess it was Beverly—oh, who was the really great lighting person? [Jennifer Tipton] But I think her assistant was Beverly Emmons, who did a lot of the lighting, but the other woman whose name I can't remember. I'll think of it in a minute. So I think there was a real naiveté about production. Bob had done Judson Church, et cetera, and all of the experience of the artists. Cage, of course had traveled more, in music, so this incredible naiveté about what it takes.

LIZA ZAPOL:  To do one performance and let alone nine. [00:02:00]

JULIE MARTIN: And then the idea to do different ones each evening, I mean to do two different ones on an evening was also insane, so the whole thing was an extraordinary strain on people.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yeah. So tell me about what that—we just walked by the Armory on our way to lunch, so it was a really special experience, and I think that may have been in part what brought up some of these memories [for you. –LZ]

JULIE MARTIN: Right.

LIZA ZAPOL:  You mentioned that the engineers were staying down the street.

JULIE MARTIN: I guess once we moved in on the 5th, people were working around the clock, and so Billy or whoever was just kind of running stuff, got rooms at the Gramercy, I think it's the Gramercy Park Hotel, and so the engineers could stay overnight, they didn't drive back and forth to New Jersey.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And what was the schedule like really?

JULIE MARTIN: I don't remember, but there's a schedule of rehearsals, which probably was followed less than to the letter. I mean the films [that we made in the 1990s –JM], what's interesting of course, it made Billy crazy, that Calvin Tomkins wrote about what didn't work, and he's such a brilliant writer it's very hard to edit him. What's interesting with the films is just how strong the images were that the artists created. Each one is very different, very true to themselves, and the few minutes of film, the ten to fifteen minutes we have, of the performances, show how strong the work was, and individual, and each one had a very different idea about how to use the space, the technology, et cetera. [00:04:00]

LIZA ZAPOL:  Do you want to, because we're here, it has been said before, but would you like to go through the nine performances?

JULIE MARTIN: I can. Actually, one other thing I want to say which is very interesting, I have a beef with the Modern at this point, that you know, the show that they have now, Judson [Dance Theater:] The Work is Never Done, and they have on the outside wall, posters from the very first Judson. And then they continue it and it goes to '64, '65, they have the first New York Theater rally, and they have something that I think Yvonne and Bob Morris did in Sweden in '65. And so I said, you really should have put up the 9 Evenings [poster]. I know it points to a new direction, but the people who were there, Bob Rauschenberg, Alex Hay, Debbie Hay, Yvonne, Lucinda, and then Cage and Tudor and then Whitman and Öyvind Fahlström, it was a Judson group and it was really the last time I think these people were on the same bill, until you got Grand Union, but that's another thing. So it's funny, they balked at that, and I mean it's not anything, but I think intellectually it was part of the Judson, and somebody like Steve Paxton, his piece, he expanded some of his Judson ideas to the point that they got out of hand, or huge, but he definitely, his work was in a trajectory from work he had been doing. So it's just a small beef I have with the curatorial decision.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yeah, and we don't need to go through each of them. There are so many questions to ask about this too, I mean I'm curious. [00:06:00] There are many different lineages that are related to E.A.T., I think, but you know, I'm curious—yes.

JULIE MARTIN: How do you mean?

LIZA ZAPOL:  Well, I mean I think about later, your work, in terms of Inventing Downtown, [at the Grey Art Gallery] and the interviews you did with Billy, [about artists] from 1945 to '65, that those may be a way of kind of thinking about what were the precedents that led to that work [of 9 Evenings]—but you tell me. You know, as we do a little bit of a look back, now you talk about Judson being directly in that lineage.

JULIE MARTIN: Well I mean I'd never thought of that, because strictly speaking, Judson, it was '62, '63, they did obviously into '64, when Merce Cunningham went on tour. Bob organized these Bastard Theater kind of, or whatever they called it, they did their own performances at some of the places. So it continued, but I think the major [period] was '62, '63, and my argument was if you're going to go on, you might as well go to the very end.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Right, right.  

JULIE MARTIN: That's all.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Right, I see, I see.

JULIE MARTIN: And I think, you know talking about doing the pieces, each of the artists really used the system very differently, and somehow the engineers had made a system that was that flexible. Maybe if it had been different kind of engineers, not electrical engineers, the pieces would have been different, but essentially, sound was a very important component of everybody's work, and either to create sound, or as I said, to use sound to control other aspects of the performance. In David Tudor [piece], he worked with a bandoneon, and David Tudor is very interesting because originally, he was going to play—he didn't do his own work, and he was going to play a piece by Mauricio Kagel, but as he studied the system that the engineers had built and saw the possibilities, he decided to do his own piece, Bandoneon Factorial, which is the different ways—factorial means one times two times three times four, so how he could expand, I guess this idea of how you could expand the bandoneon, and he did. He put contact mikes on the bandoneon, and some of the sounds went to the speaker or went through the sound processing system and to the speakers, and others were used [as control signals –JM]. [00:08:41] It moved sound from speaker to speaker using Fred's Proportional Control System, or he worked with Lowell Cross, who was deflecting TV signals, creating images with TV signals, and that was being run by the sound, two of the sound channels went to Lowell Cross's setup. They had hoped that they could send the sound directly to the projectors, but it turned out that by doing that, you burned up the phosphorous on the projector. So ultimately, what they had to do was send the sound to [an oscilloscope] X-Y, what it's called?  The monitor, the sine wave, sine whatever. Sorry, I'm blocking. And so then that made the pattern [on a small screen] and then there was a video camera on it, that then sent the image to the projector.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So it had to go through something before it could translate.

JULIE MARTIN: Right. It couldn't go direct to the projector.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Right, right.

JULIE MARTIN: That was not the right idea.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Right, right, right. No, that is interesting, about this kind of the relationship from movement, image and sound, kind of all happening in these particular ways, with each of these artists. [00:10:11] As we're thinking more—I was asking you before, about what was your kind of understanding of the engineering and the art. Where did you identify in relationship to the artists and the engineers here, where are you?

JULIE MARTIN: Totally outside. No, I was a worker bee essentially, doing whatever needed to be done, I think.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yeah.

JULIE MARTIN: Because I didn't know engineering and I wasn't any kind of sound person. You know, I was just there. There were a lot of people who volunteered and did work and I was one of them. But as I say, over the years, and actually studying the 9 Evenings for the films, I obviously learned, you know learned the technology and tried to be really clear about it.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And as we were walking, you were talking about some of the other artists that collaborated with E.A.T. I think this is a window of time kind of after 9 Evenings, before the Pavilion piece, where there's a lot of work that's being made. So maybe we can talk about a couple of those?

JULIE MARTIN: The two that I know the best of course and have done really extraordinarily beautiful work, is Bob Whitman and Bob Rauschenberg, both of them, in the sense that they collaborated. They didn't learn the technology, they didn't feel they needed to learn the technology, Whitman in particular, he says, "I find the guy who can do it." [00:12:06] Bob also would [collaborate with an engineer], for instance—Oracle was before 9 Evenings, but it's the idea of E.A.T. But Billy began to work with Bob Rauschenberg, and the first idea of course was Bob's. Bob had done the piece, Broadcast, in 1959, in which he put two radios behind the canvas, and little knobs that you could move the station and the volume, so, when he started talking to Billy—

Actually, there's—and I think the Foundation may find it, something I saw several years ago; a notebook that Bob had done, that I think was from '62, with some ideas that used technology. And I think when he first began to talk to Billy, these are some of the ideas he had. I don't remember what was in it, but I know Francine [Snyder, Director of Archives at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation] said, "There's one more that got taken away, and it's up in storage," and I think I said that's probably it, because I saw it. I was doing some work in the late '90s and I saw this notebook. And of course as they worked together, Dry Cell came out of it, and that's the piece, I think it's probably one of the first interactive pieces in history, but you never know. It's a piece where you talk to it and a little metal piece goes around, so it knows you're talking, it reacts to you. I'm sure that came out of Bob's working with Billy and Harold Hodges, working toward Oracle, but at that point, the technology just wasn't up to—oh, and the other thing of course, that Bob said, he said when they first started talking, he wanted a whole environment that would change, that as you walked in, the temperature, the light. [00:14:07]

He didn't know what, but he wanted the individual to be able to effect everything in the environment. Impossible of course, so they ended up focusing on sound. Bob had this idea of a very large, five part painting, with a radio behind each piece, and then with controls on the front, in front of the painting, where you could control the speed of scanning the spectrum and the volume. Well of course to do that wirelessly in those days, it just was beyond what was available to consumers, I would say. Bob wanted it to be AM, because that's where all the action was. So the idea of coming in AM, and then using FM or AM to transmit control signals, the interference was so great it just became almost—it was not possible. So, at the end of '62, Bob just gave that up, and out went the painting called Ace, this very large painting called Ace. Then he began to focus on sculpture and he began to build his sculptures, and so ultimately, you had five pieces of sculpture, most of them from things he picked up, as he called them, "gifts from the street," one of his great lines. And one of them was a staircase that he asked Billy to build for him, the idea was that a person could sit on the staircase and work the knobs. So he saw it as the individual being able to effect the piece and change the piece, I think he even said "like an orchestra." As they were working, Edmund Scientific came out with an FM system, so the AM signals would come in, and then they could use FM to transmit from the sound of the radios, which were in the staircase, to receivers and speakers in each piece, so that by '65, they were able to make the piece; and it opened at Castelli the same day that Billy's daughter Maja was born. [00:16:21] [Laughs.] He said he went from the hospital to the opening, Maja was born.

What's interesting is over the years, it's been updated. So Bob's ideas about updating or renovating technology are very specific. For him, it was okay if you changed radios, it was okay if you went from FM transmitter to infrared transmission. He didn't want wires, that was the real issue. He wanted the sculptures to be able to move around in relation to each other, but almost anything else was okay. And I think they've kept the same speakers [in each sculpture], he liked that quality of sound, and in Europe, where it's now at the Beaubourg [Centre Georges Pompidou , it's using FM radio because in Europe, FM became the channel where everything was happening. So he [Rauschenberg] was extraordinarily flexible in terms of any changes, so long as the general idea [stayed the same –JM]. For instance, for Soundings, which is a 36-foot-long piece, made up of nine four-by-six, I guess, sheets of Plexiglas that are mirrored. So if you walk in, you see yourself. If you talk, there are microphones that pick up—different microphones pick up different frequencies of the voice, and those sounds trigger lights, and the lights illuminate two rows of Plexiglas, on which Bob silkscreened just an ordinary wooden chair. [00:18:08] I think it's still at the Foundation, this wooden chair, but he photographed and silkscreened it in different angles, so as the lights go on, it looks as if they're tumbling.

So again in the '90s, when I think it's at Ludwig [Museum in Cologne, they wanted to install it, they wanted to renovate it. And for him it was fine, you could change the sensitivity of the microphones or you could change the lights to make them maybe less hot, I'm not sure, but then Billy said, "Well you know Bob, the front, it's gotten all gold and it's not as good, can we get new mirrors?" No. So he liked what time had done to that image. so well again, you're back to it's great to talk to the artist, so you know what is the image, but for Bob, that was what was—it was the fact that the mirror aged.

LIZA ZAPOL:  He was interested in the quality of change over time.

JULIE MARTIN: Yeah, or he didn't mind that they changed. He didn't mind if the microphones could change or if the lights, you know you put in LEDs instead of just incandescent, that kind of thing.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yeah, and as these artists and engineers are coming to E.A.T., to the space, there's these pairings that are happening, where people are getting linked up. What is your sense of the volume of people who are getting linked? Some of the people who are coming through, who are exciting, but you don't know what happened?

JULIE MARTIN: Absolutely don't know. Unfortunately, we didn't have the staff to follow it up. What happened at a certain point, and I don't remember exactly when, I mean in the beginning it was Billy and Fred. They would read something— [00:20:07] It's so funny, Billy would—in the newsletter, there's a thing, "Please fill out your form and your request completely, notes on scraps of paper are very hard for the engineer to understand." So a lot of people would write in or call if it was in the beginning, Billy and Fred whom they knew. But as we began to get "members," it was membership and you became a member by filling out a form.

We discovered a data management system called McBee Keysort and it was used by industry for timecards and things. But essentially, you can code it in such a way, before computers could handle it, you could code a lot of different information [by opening up holes that were arranged along the edges of the cards]. So if you wanted an engineer from Seattle who did aquatic biology, you could put in the knitting needles and then the guy would fall out if there was one. So, we did a whole series, they're at the Getty now, all engineers, were put on these yellow cards.

Ralph Flynn from Bell Labs was in charge of it for a while and then he left. And Peter Poole, who again, I mean how these things happen, he was British and Canadian, and was getting his PhD in environmental something, at Columbia, and he was a friend of Sue Hartnett, who was this secretary working there. And so he came in as janitor, very quickly rose to be in charge of matchings. [And so when someone would write or something, and he'd give them the name of an engineer, and he wrote on the back of the engineer's yellow card, the name of the artist who was given this engineer, and the date. So there is a record of the number of matchings, and the number of artists that you've never heard of, it's staggering, it's amazing, the variety of people who called and were given names of engineers—but we just, we did not have the staff to follow up on any. We'd give the artists the names and say "Go!" You know. –JM] [00:22:10]

We had open houses on Sunday, where artists and engineers would come and meet each other. That was another way that we tried to put people in touch. Actually, in the early '70s, we made a proposal to the Ford Foundation, to fund this [matching service] and to follow up, but they didn't fund it. So it was always kind of—I mean that was one of the activities that continued throughout, was pairing and matching people.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And I interrupted you before, because I know you wanted to also talk a bit about Whitman and Billy's relationship.

JULIE MARTIN: Bob's [Whitman] piece, sorry, the piece that he did was for a show with Pace. He worked with Eric Rawson and they developed a laser piece and essentially the laser, a red laser, was on a stand in the middle of the space and it was turning all the time. So if there was nothing there, there would be a line around the wall, and then there was a tube around the laser for the line, with a [helical] mask, so as the tube went down, the laser [line] got longer around the wall and as the tube went up, it retracted. So essentially, the sculpture was drawing a line around the wall; again, Whitman's idea about performance, so he made the line. The line is very important in his work actually, you see in the performances, the line, but here the line performed. He did another one called Wavy Red Line, in which the mask was glass, with lenses in different places on the tube, and so as it went down and intersected here, the line stayed stable, but as the lens intersected the line, you'd get [distortion from the embedded lens –JM]—it would bloom. [00:24:04] You saw the piece.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yes. I see.

JULIE MARTIN: And it would distort and go back to a straight line again, this kind of elegant, quiet, elegant.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yes, but now it makes sense in another way, as you explain how that bloom happened. Yeah, no that's interesting.

JULIE MARTIN: And then Bob got very interested in optics. This wasn't an E.A.T. project but just a few years later, same time, depending on who you talk to, Maurice or who, but Maurice Tuchman began to do the Art and Technology Program, or exhibition idea, at LACMA. And he essentially chose artists and then he got industries in that area to say that an artist could come in and work. So Bob [Whitman] was at, where was it? Philco-Ford, I think. He said first they took him to all the guys with the beards, but he did meet our—and I think Bob Rauschenberg said they took him to the guy with the bullfight poster on the wall, and they didn't quite know how to match people. Bob R. went to Teledyne, and Whitman, I think it was Ford, Philco-Ford or something. Anyway, he met John Forkner, who was an optics scientist, and they hit it off immediately, and so he worked with John to do an installation for the Art and Technology show that also went to—

LIZA ZAPOL:  That was at LACMA, right?

JULIE MARTIN: Well first, his piece was at the U.S. Pavilion.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Oh, I see.

JULIE MARTIN: Some of those pieces went to the U.S. Pavilion, and then the LACMA show was done the next year, the show finally came about the next year [1971]. [00:26:01]

LIZA ZAPOL:  I see.

JULIE MARTIN: So you can talk to Bob about John Forkner and some of the ideas they had, he was an extraordinary guy. And then Forkner redesigned—they'd fallen into disrepair, so he redesigned the laser pieces, which originally stood on the floor, at about chest height, but the health department didn't like that because you could bend down and look into the laser and it could burn the retina, and so actually [when it was first shown in 1967 –JM] it was closed until it could be redone. Bob did another piece, with a very bright light, as I remember, where the shadows—you'll have to ask him about that. It was a piece called Dark, so he did the laser pieces and then this very bright light, which is sort of interesting. And then of course the next iteration of his optics was the Pepsi Pavilion.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Right.

JULIE MARTIN: Segue.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Segue. [Laughs.]

JULIE MARTIN: No, I'm joking.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Perfect. No, I think that's great.

JULIE MARTIN: And Bob was very clear about collaborating, that he didn't—he feels very strongly that too many artists, at a certain point, if they learn the technology or buy the technology [or equipment], they get invested in that particular technology and feel they have to keep going with it, or want to. Different artists are different, but for him, the freedom of collaborating meant that you could then go to someone else or have another idea, and you're not wedded to one way of doing something or one way of making the art.

LIZA ZAPOL:  This is Whitman who felt that way.

JULIE MARTIN: Whitman, Whitman. Bob [Rauschenberg] just kept moving on. I mean he did the series of works incorporating technology; Mud Muse. [00:28:04] He did Revolver, which is you know, they move. He did the clocks, Carnal Clocks, and then he started working with cardboard, [laughs] you know just exactly the opposite, because he has an incredibly restless, wonderful mind that worked in series, and I think the involvement with technology was—he did the series of works. I was saying, on the way over, I think that what Rauschenberg found was that this was a way to make work that you can't remember. I love his quote, that if you can remember a work, it becomes dead to you, you know if you pass the same work every day. So the technology that he was offered, offered him the possibility of making an infinitely changing work, with the Revolvers. There are five Plexiglas disks and they can move independently, in different directions, so essentially, you can't reach the end of the new painting every day.

LIZA ZAPOL:  It's constantly new impressions.

JULIE MARTIN: Constantly new. And the other thing, of course for Rauschenberg, is a sense of responsibility. So from his very early pieces, where he had grass that you had to water, the idea of Soundings and Oracle and Solstice, [and Revolvers] is that you [the viewer compose make the piece. It's the Duchampian idea that, you the viewer finishes the piece, but more than that, you're responsible. If in Soundings you don't do anything, you see yourself, there's no work. –JM] If you talk, if you sing, you know then you create the work. So this sense of individual responsibility for the work, it becomes very interesting I think.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Response ability, really directly.

JULIE MARTIN: Right, exactly. All levels of the word, exactly.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yeah, so can you describe Rauschenberg? [00:30:04] You know, do you have a particular image in mind when you talk about him, about how he looks, about a particular way in the world that was Rauschenberg.

JULIE MARTIN: Oh, I think he was aware of everything going on in the world, incredibly receptive, incredibly sharp, incredibly honest about what was going on, I think he had that sense of morality. He'd never let you get away with anything. You know what I mean, if you were—you didn't stray. I mean, that's why I think he and Billy got along, this kind of focus on E.A.T. and changing the world. I mean I've said, since I realized, I starting writing about it now, that it was an extraordinarily utopian enterprise and I think everybody in the '60s had that germ, but the idea that the individual could effect change, and that we were going to change society, until Vietnam, et cetera. But I think this whole sense of individual agency and the artist is the supreme individual, and I think that Bob [Rauschenberg] was moving through the world super aware and super sensitive to that, and how to move through the world.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So when you say, I realize now that it was a utopic sort of—

JULIE MARTIN: Utopian, idealistic.

LIZA ZAPOL:  —enterprise, idealistic.

JULIE MARTIN: Well, back in the day you believed it so you don't—you can't step outside and say well this is a little bit naïve. [00:32:04] It's like come on, this is what we're going to do, this is what we're doing. I mean you knew that this is what motivated you or this is what you were aiming for, and of course it didn't—There would be artists that just wanted lights in their sculptures of birds or whatever, or were not—didn't have this larger idea. But you just, you believed in it. And of course with both Whitman and Rauschenberg, there were these amazing examples of practicing this idea, kind of morality, art as morality, kind of a moral stance. You saw it all the time. And Cage, I think, maybe Tudor, and people we worked with, that we felt that way.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Did that extend to the way they treated people?

JULIE MARTIN: I think so. I think Bob Whitman, the people who worked for him and worked on his performances, he wouldn't tell you what to do. Actually, sometimes people, some people would get very frustrated, because he wouldn't tell them enough what to do. So it was a little bit to be on the same wavelength, but it was not the Robert Wilson, move two inches to the right and make the light—no. Whitman was courting disaster sometimes, but it was—there was a freedom. You know if you caught on to what he was wanting to do and went forward, he gave you latitude in a lot of the things you did. And his pieces weren't virtuoso, which came from the—I mean Judson was the same way, it was task based. [00:34:08]

LIZA ZAPOL:  Right. I'm thinking about scores, you know like how are each of these pieces task based, or scores?

JULIE MARTIN: I mean he had scores but they weren't down to the minute or the second. Sometimes one or two of them, because he was working with film, he said "Oh yeah, have that, yeah, the two films are cued to each other"—like he was amazed that he'd actually done it that way or something. It's much more this whole, as I said, this sense of individual responsibility. Individual—these words commitment, responsibility, I think are really strong with these artists and artists of that period. Claes had the same trust. Claes Oldenburg would—Billy said he was in one of the pieces and he said Claes would choose people for who they were and how they—beside Patty, who was this incredible actress, but you know what I mean. So the sense of the individual would do right by you, that other people would do right, they would know, which comes from a small community as well, a small community of shared experience and goals in a sense. The art world was very small in those days, right? You kind of knew everybody.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Which performances did you participate in? You were in some performances, is that right? Was that Whitman or Rauschenberg?

JULIE MARTIN: I was in, but this was a little bit later, I was in a Rauschenberg piece called Urban Round, that was later. They just found some photos of that, that was '72, '73, at the School of Visual Arts. There's a picture actually, that documents it. At a certain point, we were around, and so there was a Deborah Hay piece, where you walked on a—and I think I was in that; Hollis Frampton filmed it. [00:36:07] But you know everybody was kind of around in those days and you, my sister did it, and so I went, or whatever. I went, my sister, [Kate Woodbridge, a roommate –JM], you know, but I didn't really perform in any of Whitman's pieces. The Rauschenberg, Urban Round, again that was, you read something, poetry, backwards, and then there was this thing, where a board, and you lay on the board or carried somebody. I remember that.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Which was these set sort of actions that you would do?

JULIE MARTIN: Well no, you could choose. There were two people, three, and then you'd be on the board or you'd carry it. Then that summer, whenever the hell it was, I went with Bob to help Bob Rauschenberg when he did, oh what's the piece? Linoleum. Somehow, we drove to someplace in Massachusetts and performed it, so you were kind of around doing things.

LIZA ZAPOL:  I'm curious, I think elsewhere, you've talked about the differences between happenings and performances, theater.

JULIE MARTIN: Oh yeah, I feel very strongly about that.

LIZA ZAPOL:  I'm curious, I want to hear a little more about that.

JULIE MARTIN: Actually, the one—I don't—I haven't read it, but a critic, art historian who really gets it is Julia Robinson, in her book, it's either her Cage or the other one, New Realisms, but she gets it. I mean the point about it was that Whitman, he studied playwriting in college.

LIZA ZAPOL:  At Rutgers.

JULIE MARTIN: At Rutgers. And then he did do some art history at Columbia. [00:38:02] Just this new book, you should get the catalog, it's kind of interesting, that really, he did a lot of early shows at Rutgers and things when he was a kid, a student. Then he was at Hansa, he did some pieces, but he comes out of a theater tradition. [Allan] Kaprow expanded this idea of Pollock, it [painting] comes out into the world and you make environments and then you have people move within the environments. But Kaprow increasingly went to interactive [situations], or getting people to perform in them, you know taking a body and leaving it wrapped up in Grand Central Station. One that he talked about much later, taking spit and moving it from spoon to spoon. I mean, you know, these participatory [works].

None of Whitman, Grooms—whom people forget about—Dine, or Oldenburg, it was never participatory. There was an audience and there was a performance. Now with Whitman, in Nighttime Sky, you could be enveloped in the set, but you were the audience. And so somehow Kaprow went on his trajectory, and it was called Happenings, and then Whitman and Oldenburg were doing something different. It was called Happenings because it was at the—the story is at the Reuben. Allan did 16 Happenings in 3 Parts, or 18 Happenings in 3 Parts? Eighteen, I think, 18 and 3 Parts. [18 Happenings in 6 Parts] And then people would call up [the gallery] and say. "When is the next happening?" And so Max Baker, who was married, or about to be married [to Anita Reuben who ran –JM] the Reuben, they started using the name, and so it was kind of. [00:40:02] But if you look, Whitman talks about theater works, Claes is Ray Gun Theater. I think Dine talks about Artists Theater, and Grooms is a play called Fire. I mean, they really were quite clear that they were in a different lineage from this kind of Happenings, and the Happenings, in a way, went more toward the set—I'm making this up now. More in the '70s, performance art, the individual. People are now talking about performance art in the '60s, but that was not a word, it was not a—

LIZA ZAPOL:  A concept in that way.

JULIE MARTIN: A concept. But by the '70s, when you had [Eric] Bogosian and other people, individuals who began to perform, then this kind of idea of performance art came into the vocabulary of people.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So yes, [this terms was] sort of overarching within the art world, but [was about] also having performance and not necessarily in theater.

JULIE MARTIN: Exactly. So with the dancers, it's interesting, Simone [Forti] of course has everything, I mean she—you know, the Dance Constructions are really—she called them Dance Constructions. But then, she began to, when she went to Italy and then she came back, and that beautiful piece, Cloths, where three people are behind three screens with cloths hanging, and I think each one is singing their favorite song, and then they throw a cloth over it and so it's a different color, and then another one. You know, so it's performance, it's a piece. And so she, I don't know where she fits, but well, except it was the '70s, so it begins to be performance in that sense. [00:42:04] So that's my rant about it.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Thank you.

JULIE MARTIN: It's theater, it's not happenings, and then unfortunately, Milly Glimcher gave in when she did her show a couple years ago, she called it Happenings.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Where she lumps in some of his—

JULIE MARTIN: Well, I mean Bob kept saying no, no, no, and she said get over it, that's what everybody calls it. [Liza laughs.] But I think it's important to change the [conversation]—because Kaprow went in his own direction very clearly and people who followed, it is different.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Though they were—though Whitman and Kaprow and others were at Rutgers together, kind of with the proto-ideas of this there.

JULIE MARTIN: I think so, I mean I haven't—I never saw E.G. or any of Bob's early pieces. I don't know, but I think he was different from Kaprow from the very beginning.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And I'm interested, you know we talked before, I'm thinking that probably tomorrow, we'll talk about Pavilion.

JULIE MARTIN: And Projects Outside Art.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And Projects Outside Art.

JULIE MARTIN: I think that's really important.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yeah. Does that make sense for you?

JULIE MARTIN: Sure, sure.

LIZA ZAPOL:  I'm curious, what it felt, or what it meant to you, to be a woman involved in E.A.T., in the art world, overlapping with these engineers.

JULIE MARTIN: I'm sorry, in those days, there was no consciousness about that.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yes.

JULIE MARTIN: I missed a hell of a lot, I mean I missed all of the consciousness raising. We were too busy. We were doing the Pavilion, and then after the Pavilion, we did the New York Collection for Stockholm for two years, this is '73, and then there was very hard times. [00:44:05] We were too advanced to get funding for E.A.T., and it was just very difficult, and then we started, toward the end of the '70s, we started the Kiki project. So it just, it passed me by.

LIZA ZAPOL:  It sounds like you're focusing very much on the work itself.

JULIE MARTIN: What we were doing.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yeah, what you were doing. You had talked about E.A.T. being utopic in this way and proceeding the, or part of the utopian fervor of the political, social, civil rights.

JULIE MARTIN: But civil rights was not women.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yeah.

JULIE MARTIN: I mean they talk about how badly women were treated. Yeah, we're going to march, go make food, you know? I remember, I had a friend, Jane Kramer, who, she was at the Village Voice and then she was at the New Yorker, and she went to some of the first consciousness raising groups, and I think wrote about it really early, but for some reason that was something that, from what I was doing, it didn't penetrate. I was too young, I mean too old, I mean too old in a sense, although it's kind of my generation. It's like not knowing about the Happenings if you're not part of it, until with Whitman, and then it all began to come together. Somehow, if you weren't part of that sort of consciousness raising women who were doing it, you really didn't know about it.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yeah, it's interesting.

JULIE MARTIN: And I was probably very backward. I was living with Billy and working together, and Billy was very much not chauvinist in the sense of working with women. Maybe other things, but you didn't get a sense that he would only give things to the man, for example. [00:46:02] He really—so, that wasn't something, I didn't, I wasn't feeling a kind of "I'm being oppressed." Maybe I was, who knows?

LIZA ZAPOL:  Not for me to f—

JULIE MARTIN: Not for us to say.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Not for us to say, right.

JULIE MARTIN: You're asking me how I felt.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yes, I'm asking you how you felt. It's interesting right, because now, like the Art and Technology show at LACMA, where it was solely men, and that sort of—

JULIE MARTIN: That was real.

LIZA ZAPOL:  I mean I know that that wasn't E.A.T., but yeah—

JULIE MARTIN: No but it's interesting, why Maurice Tuchman didn't choose women. I know for example, this is silly, but when Pontus did Art in Motion, and they did it at Stedelijk and then it came to Moderna Museet, Billy added two women. Now they were kind of lost because there's no pictures, but he added Marisol and a woman named Gloria Graves, and their pieces were added to the show. So I mean you know, he wasn't a crusader for women's rights by any means, but I think he was sort of gender neutral somewhat, in looking at the world.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And sort of aware.

JULIE MARTIN: He liked women, that's not the point, but gender neutral in the sense of who you choose, as opposed to someone like Maurice Tuchman, who probably didn't see the women at all, just went down the list of all the men. I think when you look at the people we invited to come to the Pavilion, again there were women there, Pauline Oliveros. I don't remember even, but I think it was again, sort of gender neutral.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yeah, yeah. I mean it's interesting, how things—

JULIE MARTIN: As much as you could be in those days.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yeah. I mean it's interesting, how things maybe get translated over time, like in this catalog on Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done, Ana Janevski, quoting [Carolee] Schneemann, says that, "Judson was effectively a group of women working together, subverting the dominant authority of their male colleagues, practicing anti-patriarchal politics within their personal daily lives." [00:48:28] That also preceded these social upheavals.

JULIE MARTIN: Oh, please, please. [Brief side conversation]

That quote, she's re-imposing insights from later, onto that. The dance, the tradition of dance for women, Katherine Dunham, Martha Graham, immersed, but you know these great dancers were Carolyn Brown. You know there's a huge tradition of women dancers, so I think she's re-imposing later insights onto Judson. You see Steve [Paxton] and Yvonne working together, started it, and because there were so many women, you know I just don't—sorry, Carolee, I don't really agree with that, but I don't know Judson, so it's not fair.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Right, right. But yes, you worked—at 9 Evenings, there were so many of the [same] people who have been in it.

JULIE MARTIN: Right, it was the people, but it was a few years later.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Right, not the same space, right. Yeah, and I mean as we're on the topic of gender, and of course here we are in 2018, these are things that are much more in the fore than they were then. You also were working with a lot of gay artists, people who had these relationships, and I'm just curious what—how open people were, what the understanding was. [00:50:15]

JULIE MARTIN: I don't know. People knew that Bob [Rauschenberg] had boyfriends, that they were his boyfriends, but it was very much an insider thing in the art world I think. You know, you knew but it wasn't—nobody was coming out, hugely public. I remember within living memory, there was a show, a symposium at the Whitney about gay something, and one kid said, you know "Why would Jasper Johns be my role model? You know, he was closeted, you know these guys that were closeted, effectively, they're not a role model." So I think it was known that Merce and John were together, Bob and Jasper were together, but it was within the art world and very few people. Barbara Rose, in an interview with Bob, he talks about an affectionate relationship, I think. It was a communal closet, [laughs] maybe you can say, I think, and it was only with—I mean, I guess after Stonewall. It was known but not broadcast, maybe that's the sense you've gotten from other people too, I don't know.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yes. I mean I'm curious also, particularly within—you know, we're talking kind of about a countercultural space at the same time as we're talking about, you know—

JULIE MARTIN: [00:52:10] A super industrial space.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yes, exactly. So I'm curious about it within that.

JULIE MARTIN: I think just because it was part of the subtext, it really was. So if you were an engineer working with an artist, it wasn't thrown in your—it wasn't thrown in your face to make you say "Oh God, I can't stand this." It was focused on the work and focused on the individual and focused on that kind of relationship, and you didn't have people like Jack Smith, necessarily working with intimately, you know he's doing his own thing. It wasn't.

LIZA ZAPOL:  No one is being shut down for obscenity.

JULIE MARTIN: At that point.

LIZA ZAPOL:  At that point, yeah.

JULIE MARTIN: Right. So many of those culture wars came just after, right? And the whole Stonewall and whatever it was, it was building up to it, but it hadn't penetrated into that, into that community yet, from my point of view. Maybe it was retrograde too. But no, I think if you think about it, it's like everybody knew, but the point was everybody was within the art world, for example.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yeah, and I think the reason I'm talking about this now is you know, we're about to talk about Pavilion, that's '70. We're going into a new decade, things start to shift in another way. Before I end for today, you know and we'll prepare, tomorrow we'll talk about Pavilion and your work after that, is there anything else about this period in the '60s that you'd like to talk about today? [00:54:14]

JULIE MARTIN: Oh Lord.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And we can come back too.

JULIE MARTIN: Yeah. Or do you have any questions? Why don't you—throw it in your court.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Well of course, but you know, I'm thinking—

JULIE MARTIN: It's okay, go for it.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yeah, I'm thinking more when we go—I'm thinking more about your developing and changing relationship to E.A.T., to Billy, to technology, and that's such a big, big space, in Osaka. So yeah, what were you going to say?

JULIE MARTIN: Well, yeah, but I mean I think the Pavilion felt—I don't—hmm. I mean the implications of what it was came after. It was the first—it was a Project Outside Art. I mean what really happened, we might as well start it right there, was during the Pavilion, and then after, Bob Whitman became very involved, and Bob Rauschenberg less so. I mean he was totally supportive, but at some point he dropped out of being the chairman, I can't remember when. As I say, he worked in series and he was beginning—I don't know when. Yeah, he started in the early '70s, again, to work with cardboard, work with other things, go back into it, and maybe there was pressure on him to do that. [00:56:00] But, as Billy and Bob Whitman worked together, because this idea of the Projects Outside Art as an exhibition was actually developed in late '69, I mean it was incredible.

When I look at the things that we turned out, and the proposals, there was an incredible energy there, and I think part of it was Whitman and then this whole idea of the artist as valuable in other areas of society, valuable as you go from collaboration to sort of multidisciplinary collaboration, and the value of the artist in projects on education or projects on development. We began to develop it. The first idea was as an exhibition and asked the artists and people to send ideas for an exhibition, and then we got involved in the Pavilion. And then of course, looking at the Pavilion, [it was a project outside art], I mean it's not your normal art venue, and although some of the artists, [Robert] Breer, Frosty [Myers] in particular, did works of art. The whole idea was you were operating, you had an idea you were operating in a very different environment, you were operating in a World's Fair environment, and what was the quality of the relationship you wanted the visitor to have. So the whole thing started from a kind of philosophical, not a "Let's build a dome," we were given a dome. It started from a philosophical idea, what's the relation? What are you offering to this audience? It's a completely different audience. So that was the beginning of what you could call Projects Outside Art.

Although now, you [writers and art historians] talk about Whitman and the mirror dome, and probably that's true, but it kind of developed more organically that you had this dome, and then there was going to be a mirror around, you were going to have a rock band suspended and then a mirror around them that would maybe show—do some visual effects, but then slowly, it's clear, let's do a full mirror. [00:58:25] Nobody knew what it was going to look like, and that's when Billy found Elsa Garmire, who was a physicist at Cal Tech, to help us figure out the optics of a spherical dome, and then the other elements developed. It was the idea that you [the artists] wanted to create a very rich environment for the individual to explore, an anti-Disney idea, as we've said. You don't want people in a little cart, running around, and so then it developed from the mirror in which you saw yourself and you saw these amazing visuals. David Tudor did his thing, which was a sound modulation system that you could play or you could [pre-program] . Tony Martin tried to figure out about the lights, and then we came up with the idea that we were going to do live programming [inviting artists during the course of Expo –JM]. Pepsi was dying [taken aback by the idea –JM], of course, but the idea that you've got this incredible space and artists should use it, and I'm sure part of that is Whitman's idea of theater, so you in a sense, built this incredible theater space, theater sound space.

And so then we had this idea of live programming, that you'd bring an artist to learn the system and then make pieces. That was the idea of the Pavilion, and it expanded beyond what Pepsi wanted to do, so ultimately, they didn't—although they put up with the live programming for a while. I think what happened is apparently one of the Japanese, Hijikata, who was this very far- out Japanese performance artist, he did a performance with either funeral clothes and wedding music, or wedding clothes and funeral music, and it just was too much for the [Japanese] Pepsi people. So they connived with the guy who did the mirror [Sig Stenlund] and with Larry Owens, the engineer who had built a lot of stuff [in the control console] and they said they'd stay, and so then they [Pepsi] asked us to leave. [01:00:31] And then they instituted a repeated program, which of course the tourists had no idea, it was fine you know, but it wasn't the idea that we had for this incredibly creative space.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So yeah, I think tomorrow, I would love to actually think about as an audience member, as a member of the public, what it would be like to walk through that space. Maybe we can talk through it.

JULIE MARTIN: But the other thing that's interesting is of course, Bob Breer said this. He said that Billy had [organized the work so]—the people [artist and engineers who were involved in a project were in charge of it, and it never would have worked if you hadn't done it that way –JM]. I mean obviously, the engineer and the architect were overarching, but Frosty cared about his tilted art, so he was in charge of finding that. So this idea, again, these teams of people who were committed to what they were doing, and a kind of non-hierarchical, but horizontal [structure]. So some of those ideas were really interesting about the Pavilion too.

LIZA ZAPOL:  The kinds of collaborations.

JULIE MARTIN: The kinds and the organization of this project, that people had responsibility for what they were doing with the architect, incredible architect, John Pearce and Larry Owens was okay until he turned on us, you know to make the sound system, and then David—[01:02:06]

[END OF TRACK martin18_1of1_track04.]

JULIE MARTIN: We recorded all these sounds, you know this kind of thing, so every person was doing—and then it all could come together.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And I'm curious, when you're facilitating and working with all these massive amounts of things being shipped to Osaka, and all these people who are working in a non-hierarchical way, how that actually works?

JULIE MARTIN: God knows. [They laugh.] Miraculously. I think Billy knew, kept his finger on most—and John Pearce, the incredible architect, was extraordinary. He'd been with the Davis and Brody for the American Pavilion, and his part was over. So he was extraordinary in terms of keeping it all together, and making the suggestion that it could be a negative pressure dome, so that we didn't have to have airlocks. So that's kind of his contribution to the—

LIZA ZAPOL:  Because the mirror, the idea of the mirror dome sort of—?

JULIE MARTIN: Well, the idea started out, that we would do this 90-foot diameter [spherical] mirror, and first the idea was you would have curved [hard mirrored] panels, 2,500 of them, and position them so they would make an image. It would have been a disaster.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Like actually hard mirrors.

JULIE MARTIN: Hard mirrors, curved. Elsa was there, she was going to figure out how you could align them. But we went to Japan, I remember the meeting, and sat with the people at the factory where they were making and polishing the mirrors, and it just became clear that no way [they could produce them –JM]. Meanwhile, the people who were E.A.T. in L.A., had been really interested in inflated domes, and so they had been doing some of the preparatory work, so when we realized this won't work, we could—that [idea of an inflated mirror dome] had been started. [00:02:04] Then, that would have been you blow it up, so you have to have airlocks and things, but then John Pearce got this idea that you build—you have the outer dome, and then you build an airtight dome inside that, and then you pull a vacuum, so as the mirror goes up, it's held [by the negative pressure behind the Mylar mirror –JM]. You don't need very much, because the air is pushing it this way, you don't need very much, and it's held up by negative pressure. So you know these things developed.

LIZA ZAPOL:  A much simpler idea in a sense but not.

JULIE MARTIN: Right, no then you had to make it, that was their problem.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Amazing. Well, I'm going to, I think for now—

JULIE MARTIN: Okay, I'm sorry, I'll shut up.

LIZA ZAPOL:  No, no, no, I think it's—I love that there is so much more. I know that we have the fog environment and then really kind of getting into what it was to be in that space.

JULIE MARTIN: You know, Fujiko just won the Emperor's Prize [for Sculpture].

LIZA ZAPOL:  I didn't know that, that's amazing.

JULIE MARTIN: This year, the Imperial Prize for Sculpture.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Incredible.

JULIE MARTIN: Isn't that fantastic?

LIZA ZAPOL:  That is so fantastic. Well, let's pause for today.

JULIE MARTIN: I will be quiet.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Well, to be continued tomorrow.

JULIE MARTIN: Okay.

[END OF TRACK martin18_1of1_track05.]

[Continued conversation, same day.]

JULIE MARTIN: [As we are looking at the] Catalogue of [9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering], what Pontus did for the cover was he just took all of Herb Schneider's diagrams and just superimposed them on the cover, that was Pontus. So when we came to—the Brooklyn [Museum] exhibition, the Some More Beginnings[: Experiments in Art and Technology] began with Pontus. Billy was very close to him and continued to work with him. But Pontus was doing The Machine: As Seen as the End of the Mechanical Age, at MoMA, and so he said to Billy, does E.A.T. want to help choose contemporary works, with the technology? And so Billy saw this as an opportunity to attract engineers. So we announced in the New York Times and other places, technical journals, a competition for the best contribution by an engineer, to a work of art, made in collaboration with an artist, and you could submit works to the MoMA show, the Machine show. So we got about 160 submissions, everything from a computer based, computer designed flute, to an automatic watering system, but also real works of art. And so the prize was given to the three works and Pontus chose works to go into the Modern. And then we said look, we've got all these works, let's do a show. We talked to the Brooklyn Museum and amazingly, this was in July, they had space, and so it opened in November. So we said we'll do an exhibition. Bob Rauschenberg came up with the idea of calling it, Some More Beginnings: Experiments in Art and Technology, and so we just asked the artists to participate, and the artists helped a lot, sending works. The cover is a computer-generated image by Manfred Schroeder, of the façade, the old façade of the Brooklyn Museum, with the information about the show are the different pixels and the different levels of white and gray.

[00:02:15] So it's Some More Beginnings: Experiments in Art and Technology, with the dates, and then Billy had the idea that to make it completely non-hierarchical, so each piece is in it twice. one time is the photo of the work, and then underneath is all the usual art world information, who did it, what it is, et cetera. The second time, there's a photo of the piece, grayed down, with the technical description of what it is on top of it, so that there are two. Billy and I just went to this printing plant that had this huge long press, and laid out the long piece of paper and just randomly put down these two different images of the pieces on this long piece of paper, and then cut every 11 inches. So images of some people's things were cut and others weren't. I think people got a little upset, but so in other words, it was completely un-hierarchical. And then down at the bottom, Billy listed the different categories of technical work. And then we had of course, we had of course an index at the end, we had how you can find the work, I think by—oh, by category, but more important by artist. And then of course, because it was done in two parts, we could have a picture of the guys at the press—where was it? I forget the name of the press right now, but anyway, we could have a picture of them reading the first run, so the whole process is there. [00:04:08]

LIZA ZAPOL:  Right.

JULIE MARTIN: And then the back is the negative of the same image as on the front.

LIZA ZAPOL:  It's wonderful.

JULIE MARTIN: It's quite neat. Someday I'd like to take two of them and just recut, reconstruct the whole thing.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Oh, as of one line.

JULIE MARTIN: Yes.

LIZA ZAPOL:  The role of the entire thing. Thank you for going through that too, because I know we didn't really get a chance to talk about the MoMA [show], into the Brooklyn Museum.

JULIE MARTIN: Billy and Pontus really collaborated a lot, they respected each other, and that's how the New York Collection—

LIZA ZAPOL:  And that relationship goes back, Pontus and Billy.

JULIE MARTIN: It goes back, they knew each other. I think Billy, when he was in Technical University, he says he went across town and joined the Film Society at the humanities part of the university. And so he was in the Film Society and ran it the last year, and that's where he met Öyvind [Fahlström] and Pontus, and so he knew Pontus from Sweden. Then, when in '59, Pontus went to the Sao Paulo biennale, and on his way back he stopped in New York for the first time, and so Billy was his host and they drove around. Billy remembers that they saw the poster for 18 Happenings in 6 Parts and said what's this? He says they didn't go. There is a guest list that has Pontus's name on it, so I'm not sure, but essentially, Pontus knew Sam Francis and then met Al Leslie because they lived in the same building. And so then Pontus asked Billy to help gather works for the Art in Motion show that he did in '61, and that's when Billy went and asked Rauschenberg to do a piece, which he did Black Market, and Jasper [loaned] the piece with the thermometer, an older piece. [00:06:11] So Bob and Jasper he—and then [Richard] Stankiewicz and Alfred Leslie, who became the four people in the next show Pontus did [in 1962], of the Four Americans, the four Americans.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So Billy became more connected to that group through Pontus.

JULIE MARTIN: I don't know if Pontus knew about Bob, or told Billy to reach out. The things you don't know. Oh I know, I actually know, Billy had met Bob when Tinguely did Homage to New York, Bob showed up and contributed Money Thrower, and there is one photo of Tinguely withBilly and Bob, talking in the background. So I think Billy knew about Bob, so when Pontus came, maybe Pontus also.

LIZA ZAPOL:  I see, so it preceded Pontus's visit.

JULIE MARTIN: A little bit, but Pontus may also—you know, being in the art world, and Bob was somewhat known in Europe or had, I think he'd done some—And then Billy was courier for some other shows. He and Pontus went to see, what's his name, Naum Gabo to get pieces, and I think they went to—I don't know if Billy went with him and Pontus—went to see Calder. And then he helped with the shipping, and then he helped Pontus during the '60s, he bought the Dali for Pontus, the William Tell, and he convinced Pontus to buy Monogram, I think. So they were really collaborating pretty much and that continued on through the New York Collection for Stockholm.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Gotcha. Okay.

JULIE MARTIN: Stop, Julie, stop! [They laugh.]

[END OF TRACK martin18_1of1_track06.]

[TRACK martin18_1of1_track07 is 33 seconds of room tone.]

LIZA ZAPOL:  Okay, so this is Liza Zapol, interviewing for the Archives of American Art Oral History Program. It is November 8, 2018, and we're here in Short Hills.

JULIE MARTIN: No, no, Berkeley Heights.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Berkeley Heights.

JULIE MARTIN: [. . . ] Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, and where it is a community, it's called Free Acres.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Free Acres.

JULIE MARTIN: It's a Henry George community where the land is held in common, and you own your house on the land. Billy moved here, he rented down the street in '63, '64, and then he bought this house in '64, '65, where he and Olga, his second wife actually, moved in.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And again, this is—I'm here with Julie Martin.

JULIE MARTIN: Right. [They laugh.]

LIZA ZAPOL:  This is day number two of our interview.

JULIE MARTIN: Liza wanted me—Liza?

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yeah, absolutely.

JULIE MARTIN: Liza wanted me to describe the room. Well, it's the largest, it's the living room of the house, and actually, it was an annex, built on in 1945 by the original owners, the Hotsons, and the bedroom is upstairs. The very funny story about Free Acres is when they built this in the '40s, they wanted to put in a second bathroom and the Free Acres building person said no you can't, because that means two families could live here. So you get the sense of change. So, I think when Billy moved in they painted it white, and I think the walls are what now House and Garden calls shiplap, you know boards, and it's pretty much taken over by work. [00:02:00] On the wall behind the door there's a poster, Bob Whitman's poster for his performances; the Xerox of fruit and on the door is a printout of a piece by Irina Nakhova, a Russian artist that we met; and below are all the photos that Jean Cocteau took August 12, 1916, of Picasso, that were the basis of the book A Day With Picasso, that Billy did, where he used the shadows in the photos to time and date the photos. And then moving across, there's a flames [sculpture] from Mimi Gross, she gave me these flames from one of the performances that she and Red did. There's a printed out painting of Irina wearing a jacket, on which she had silkscreened a statue, a nude Greek statue. And she had done a series of these pieces, and Billy and Per Biorn helped her with the technology. She had these coats hanging on dummies and if you got too close and touched it, they would say things like, "Mama!" or "Don't!" You know, sort of rude things in a very subdued room. So this was a piece that Billy helped her with in the '90s.

Moving around, on the other wall there are windows framing a fireplace and on each side of the fireplace, there are actually works by Hedi Sorger, who is my colleague and works with me. I think it's gouache and then, oh what is it, encaustic images. [00:04:00] Above the fireplace is a blown-up photo of the Pavilion by Shunk-Kender. Then if you turn further around, there are also bookcases on both sides of the fireplace and a lot of stuff on the bookcases; rocks from Greenland, when we went with Fujiko [Nakaya], and other works of art by different people, Becky Howland I see, and Debbie Davis. Anyway, and then on the wall is a drawing by Bob Whitman; a piece by Larry Rivers from the New York Collection for Stockholm [Portfolio], of Lenin; and then hanging are semi, half globes, they're silver, they're like the Pavilion globe, and I had a whole bunch of them and I was hanging them up so you could see the real image.

Then on the table is where I'm digitizing cassettes of interviews that Billy and I made in the '90s, of artists, for this idea of a book, Art and Artists, '45 to '65, the next great period after Montparnasse, and an angel by Finster, outsider artist, Reverend Finster, announcing the coming of the apocalypse maybe. That actually belongs to my sister Terry, I have to say. Then, the doors leading out, and it's so interesting, when the Hotsons built this, that on both ends of the living room are floor to ceiling windows, but they're actually doors, so if there were no furniture you could open the room on both sides. Then hanging is a bust of me, by George Segal, that he did as a thank you, because Billy and I posed for the Appalachian Couple when he was doing the sculpture for the FDR Memorial. [00:06:12] So he did a full length sculpture of us and then as a thank you, he did busts.

And then there's a whole wall, and then there's my desk with a computer, and there's a whole wall of all sorts of different things from Kiki [de Montparnasse]; some work by Becky Howland and Charlie Yoder; and a picture of Billy's father's hotel in Salen, Sweden; a compulsory group picture of Fujiko and the Danish workers in the Air Force at Thule Air Base [when we went with Fujiko in 1994 to gather stones for her father's museum in Japan –JM]. And above that interestingly, is a photo, the way you do 3-D photos, of Étant Donnés, that Pontus, when he did the Duchamp show back in the '70s, he asked Billy to organize, to , take a photo of Étant Donnés, and everybody said no, no, you're not supposed to do the photo, and then they looked in Duchamp's notes and he gives exact instructions how to do it. So, it's a stereopticon [taken by Babette Mangolte –JM]. And then there's photos of Rauschenberg's Carnal Clocks, which is a piece which is a clock, and that lights light up to tell the time, and only at midnight and twelve o'clock, the whole thing lights up, so there's an image of it lit up. And then more of Billy's father's hotels, the one in Ed and the ski hotel in Salen; and then Mimi Gross's drawings that she did after 9/11, where she stood down next to the newsmen actually, and did a lot of drawings. [00:08:00] Then on the other wall, there's a huge bookshelf with basically Billy's books, Swedish literature, and on the top are his technical library, and then just a lot of photos propped up and a lot of video cameras and boxes and storage.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Thank you. I must say, I'm also hearing some chimes behind us as well, which are a part of the soundscape.

JULIE MARTIN: Right, exactly.

LIZA ZAPOL:  No, it's beautiful.

JULIE MARTIN: I think it's one of those things with those slices of seashells, and it's because the furnace is on, and so every once in a while, the furnace blows and then you hear it. You're right. You have very good ears.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Well, they're magnified at this point [pointing to headphones].

JULIE MARTIN: Do you want me to—?

LIZA ZAPOL:  Don't worry about it.

JULIE MARTIN: It's okay?

LIZA ZAPOL:  No, it's fine. So, thank you for taking me on the tour, and I think both in this, we hear, in sort of the tour here, some echoes of some of the topics we've already talked about, and hopefully, some which we will and some which we may not and we might just nod to them right now.

JULIE MARTIN: Okay, sure, sure.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Because there are many things. I'm getting the feeling, from having these conversations with you yesterday and today, that there are so many conversations that we could have with you and I look forward to the conversation today. We left off yesterday, we were just coming into Pavilion.

JULIE MARTIN: What happened was yeah, in—I was talking about the Some More Beginnings, and the fact that the exhibition took place at the Brooklyn Museum, the artists were very, very helpful setting up things, working with us. About that time, Robert Breer, who was a very good friend of Billy's, Billy was one of the first people he met when he came back from—he had gone to Paris after the war, stayed in Paris until—it must have been, if he met Billy, into the late '50s. [00:10:14] And so when he came back, I think Pontus Hultén had told Breer to get in touch with Billy, and so they became friends and they were friends from then on. Breer always said Billy would call him and say, "There's an opening, you have to come into the city." He was already married to Frannie and had kids but he would come in. He lived in the Sneedens Landing, and I don't know if you know this place but it's like Exit 4 on the Palisades Parkway, and essentially, it's a community. The road winds down to the river from above, you know where the cliffs are, and there are houses there. I don't think it's officially a community, but a lot of people, Tad [Calvin] Tomkins, with his first wife, lived there, this wonderful chef Joe Hyde, et cetera. So there was an interesting community and Robert Breer lived in one of the houses. He lived at the top of the hill and one of his neighbors was David Thomas, who worked for Pepsi. David Thomas had been given, or was one of the people given, the task of figuring out what Pepsi Cola International should do for the Expo 70, which was going to be in Osaka, Japan. There are only three U.S. commercial businesses that were allowed to have pavilions, I think Pepsi, IBM, and I forget the third. But of course there was the official [US] Pavilion.

Breer said he started thinking about Japan, and he was making—Breer was a filmmaker, but he also made sculptures that moved very, very slowly, geometric shapes that moved very, very slowly. [00:12:07] His father had been an engineer for Chrysler and had actually designed the Airflow, the first kind of aerodynamic car, so he was interested in things like that. So he said he began to think about the Zen gardens and having the rocks move very slowly. So he said you know, he said to David Thomas, "This could be interesting, to Billy Klüver, E.A.T." and so he came to Billy and said, "Are you interested in making a proposal?" Billy said yes. So he and Breer kind of put together the core group of artists who had different interests, so it would cover kind of different aspects of what could happen [in a pavilion;] and it was: Breer; Robert Whitman, who did theater performances and worked the images; Frosty Myers, who had done—was a sculptor but also had done these very large sculptures with light, using searchlights; and David Tudor, who of course did the sound. So the four of them began to meet and talk about a Pavilion. I think I said yesterday, that the idea really was kind of anti-Disney in the sense that they didn't want anything that people were—you know a little car driven through to see things. It really was the idea they began to talk about, building a rich environment that people could explore. I think Bob Rauschenberg talked to them at one point about sort of an invisible environment of sound, and different ideas started coming up. Billy had this idea about something called the Delphi method, where everybody would have an idea, you come together and you look at [the four ideas], and then you go back. Bob Breer used to make fun of it, who knows whether it really worked, but essentially, they worked together. [00:14:02]

Then early on, Billy realized we needed an architect, and he talked to Jack Masey, who was with the USIA, had done all the Pavilions, from, I think. since the '60s, well it was barely '70s, but he was head of Pavilions. Jack recommended John Pearce, who had worked with Davis and Brody on the American one, so John Pearce came onboard to kind of wrangle these ideas. We made the proposals to Pepsi and they said yes, and we got started. Some of the ideas from the beginning were Breer wanted to have his sculptures, so there are these Floats, six-foot high white domes that would move very, very slowly around the plaza, and actually he also put sound in them, so if you got very close you would hear [for example] someone describing a view. I don't remember what the six things were, but different sounds, and he worked with an engineer, John Ryde, who actually had known his father, and so they worked to develop the chassis and the [movement mechanicals]. Frosty had the idea of a tilted frame of light that would surround the Pavilion at night, and so there were these four towers at the edges of what property we were given, at different heights, and then lights would face each other.

Billy found Pichel Industries, who began to work with Frosty on developing what kind of lights, you know how they should be. And we were given the dome. [00:16:00] Takanaka, the construction firm, had gotten that far and we were given the dome. Actually, the artists hated it, they decided they really didn't like it. Breer called it a Buckley Fuller dome, and so they had this idea to, let's cover it in ivy. Well, that would take too long to grow, and so they thought about fog. So we began to research making fog, and I think it was Breer who had a friend, or someone had a friend who was a chemist, and we went up to visit him, and he made it with urea, so some urine, was something that Pepsi would not like, we decided that was not the way to go. Dry ice would have—every mosquito in the area would have been drawn to the carbon dioxide. So we really were a little bit at a standstill with that, and they planned the first trip to Japan. It's interesting, Billy—they were beginning to go, Billy was going to go, and maybe Fred and some of the engineers, and then Billy, all of a sudden it was, "No, all the artists have to go." So he went to Pepsi and said the four artists have to go on this trip, and so they went, the four artists, and maybe Fred and Billy went, and John Pearce, were the first, when it was still a hole in the ground, Pavilion was a mud pit. But they could begin to fashion some of the ideas.

Just to continue on the outside, I think it was Bob Rauschenberg who said to Billy, "Get in touch with Fujiko Nakaya," because Fujiko had been very helpful when Merce Cunningham, the Merce Cunningham tour, when they went to Japan [in 1964]. She spoke English. She had been to Northwestern [University], so she spoke English. She was a quite respected among the young artists in Japan and knew people, knew how to move around, and so they met Fujiko. [00:18:03] Then, in talking to her, and she was helping with arrangements and in talking, he said she was working with little fog sculptures on her—like desktop fog, she was interested in decay and change in her work, and so Billy immediately said, "Do you want to do the fog for the Pavilion?" Fujiko tells the story that she thought "It's impossible," and of course she said "Yes." So she began to do research and contact scientists in Japan about how much you need, the certain parameters, and put up a mini weather station to see what the conditions were. , And then either she or Billy, maybe Billy, again doing research in L.A., we—because you usually had to stop in L.A. before you went on to Japan, and we began to meet some artists there. There was an E.A.T. L.A. and they were very interested, so they were helping us with some things. They met Tom Mee, Mee Industries, M-E-E, and he had developed a nozzle that if you pushed water through it at high pressure, like 400, 600 PSI, there's a tiny hole and then a pin above it, and it broke the water up, broke the droplets up into fog. But he had abandoned it because he couldn't think of any use for it. So Fujiko came, and E.A.T. commissioned him to work together to develop the system for the fog for the Pavilion, which was strands of pipe with nozzles, they were put at different places on the roof of the Pavilion and then could be activated differently, depending on the weather conditions. [00:20:04] So that was the outside.

There was actually another piece of Frosty's that was a sun track machine, a sculpture, he worked with Neils Young on that, and it was going to track the sun, have the sunbeam reflected into the fog, which would have been quite beautiful. When they came to put it up, someone had misread centimeters for inches and it buckled, and Pepsi refused to undertake rebuilding it, so that didn't happen. It would have been gorgeous. So the idea you'd have something during the day and something during the night, something else activating the outside.

Essentially, you went into a tunnel, down to a room, sort of a basement room that's quite dark, shaped like a clam [shell –JM]. We called it the Clam Room, and that was to sort of get people adjusted to the darkness. Although there was a play of laser light coming from above, that people walked through, this shower of laser light that was activated by sound. It was a project of David Tudor and Lowell Cross; and sound activated the movement of mirrors and it made these patterns on the floor. People were given a listening device, a handset, and they walked through, and then up into the main floor of the building, the Mmirror Dome of the Pavilion. And this developed through, again, talks. Bob Whitman was interested in optics and so knew something about optics and was interested.Sso at first, the idea was going to have a rock band and maybe it would be suspended, and then there could be a band of a mirror [around this suspended platform] that would reflect the rock band, but as they talked, it got much more refined and ultimately, the idea was that you would build—the whole dome would be a spherical mirror. [00:22:18] Nobody had [ever seen one that large]—you knew Billy knew and that it makes real images, which are images [in front of] the mirror, not behind it. When you look in a [flat] real mirror, the image is actually behind it, but nobody quite knew what [images in a mirror dome] it would be, and so he [Billy] got in touch with Elsa Garmire, who was a physicist at Cal Tech [California Institute of Technology]. She was interested in optics, and so she was going to help with the optics of the dome.

Tony Martin was asked to do lighting, he was also brought on. The first idea was to do a hard [mirror]—was to do 2,500 panels, insane, that would be—[phone rings] Sorry. So it didn't work. Actually, what's interesting is the way the World's Fair was just as Japan was beginning to move out of, you know its 19th, early 20th century industrial self, and into the modern world. We went to a furniture factory to build the mirror, which was a little bit crazy. Anyway, what finally happened was we said No to that; and the people, as I said, in [E.A.T.] L.A., they actually I have to give them credit. They really thought it should be an air structure from the beginning. There were some architects that had actually worked with John Pearce too. The American Pavilion was a modified air structure. It was a berm, it was not tall, but the roof was an air structure. [00:24:03] So these people knew about it and so we went and decided to do an air structure, and we did a model to convince Pepsi, at Santa Ana Air Force Base, where they used to house dirigibles, we set up a dome. And we had a party and a press conference, and you could see that these [real] images were pretty amazing. Then a company that had done the Echo—Billy knew about dome structures because the Echo satellite was a Mylar globe, which AT&T had put up as a communications satellite, that was one of the first ideas for a communications satellite, that Billy's boss, also named John Pierce, was in charge of it. As Billy said, "No one ever looked inside." So that was the interior.

Then, to add to the thing, the floor was made up of different materials; AstroTurf, wood, metal, stone, and under each of those sections was a sound loop with corresponding sound; horses' hoofs for the stone, I remember, and birds for the grass. The visitors had this quite primitive now, handset, and they could walk around and listen to the sounds [from] the floor, which you know, it was really taken from Steve Paxton's idea from 9 Evenings, if you think about it, but it's in every museum in the world now.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Right.

JULIE MARTIN: And then David Tudor was in charge of the sound system and devising the sound system, and so he worked with Gordon Mumma, to do a sound modulation system, eight channels of sound modulation, that were in a console on the floor of the Pavilion, that could either be programmed or performed live. [00:26:10] And actually, John Driscoll now is—John Driscoll and Phil Edelstein, are working with a kid named Michael Johnson, to rebuild the eight channels, hopefully to redo some of the pieces that David did in the Pavilion. Bringing you up to date. Also then, there were 35 tape recorders, or 37 tape recorders, that went into eight channels, and then that could be either played or [pre-programmed and controlled, and then the lights could also be played or pre-programmed and controlled –JM]. Behind the mirror, in a rhombic grid, were the 37 speakers, the output, so you could move sound around, you could focus sound at one spot, et cetera.

So, given this place, and I think certainly [given] Whitman's idea about theater and maybe some of the other artists, we decided there should be live programming. You [we] just didn't want something that played over and over again, and we invited artists to make proposals. I think there were—eight Japanese artists and eight American artists were chosen to come at two-week or three-week intervals, learn the system and then perform their works. And that was kind of a fight with Pepsi, because that was not their experience [to have changing program over the course of the Expo –JM], and so Billy did two proposals. He did one in a black binder, one in a red binder, dead programming and live programming, so he tilted the scales a little bit, and they went along with it, at least at the beginning.

LIZA ZAPOL:  At the beginning. Mm-hmm.

JULIE MARTIN: And then, so we all went over for the final building of it. [00:28:02] Engineers from Bell Labs took leaves of absence, all the artists came, we had a house in Senriyama Grand Heights, we had different apartments, and Fujiko got her mother to come down and cook for the engineers, so she would be making Kobe beef to feed them. It was quite a—you know, it opened and it was a wonderful space to be in, just extraordinary, and got better over the summer. Billy and I went back in July, it was amazing, the images were even stronger. I think what happened is—we're not quite sure, but a Japanese artist, Hijikata, did a kind of transgressive performance with funeral, mixing funeral clothes and wedding music, or vice versa. And so the local Pepsi people got very nervous and they just canceled E.A.T. and asked us to leave, and then they ran it with a repeating program for the rest of the summer.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Now you also mentioned, just sort of in passing, that this was an interesting time in Japan.

JULIE MARTIN: Well actually, two things. I'm making that up about the economy, but what was really going on in Japan was enormous protests about Okinawa, and I think the American presence on Okinawa, and so there was protests of that. It was kind of the continuation of '68 in the West, and so the people were very—the fair people were, I think very scared. Interestingly, there were certain areas that were just narrow bridges, from one area to the other, which probably could be sealed, but nothing ever happened. [00:30:08] By the time the fair opened, everybody was yay, Japan, yay the future, bringing—I mean they bussed in these rice farmers, it was sort of amazing, and you'd have a leader with a flag and you would have all their people in their kimonos, following the leader with a flag. Ardisan [Phillips] remembers one day he saw a whole group having lunch on the grass floor inside the Pavilion, and Lowell Cross said that he could stop people at the door, with sound, they would be on their way out and he would do some kind of sound thing.

One of the first programs was actually whales. One of the programmers was Roger Payne, who worked with the people who had been recording whales. He was one of the first people, so there was a whole program of whale sounds in the Pavilion, and Lowell said he could blast that and people would stop in their tracks. It was very much the audience, a lot of the audience didn't know what they were seeing, it was like oh my God, it was the future, because of course all the other Pavilions were amazing. The American Pavilion [had] the moon rock, so that was the big draw at the American Pavilion, was the moon rock. And some of the art works came from the A&T program at LACMA, the ones that were finished, Oldenburg, Whitman's was there, and some others, Tony Smith, I think. Rauschenberg did his last [large technology] piece, Mud Muse, its size was determined by what would fit in the cargo doors of a 747, but it wasn't finished so it didn't go, it was only for th show [at LACMA] then, in '71. [00:32:00] And I do think also, in terms of industrial development, Japan was just—it was really the beginning, because to do the mirror, we ended up at a furniture factory and they were kind of gluing the back on by hand and trying to lap the curved plastic by hand. So it really wasn't advanced in the way that I'm sure just a few years later it was.

LIZA ZAPOL:  I'm also interested in this—I've seen a writing about Pavilion bringing an interest to the environment, or Pavilion as an invisible city or invisible movement. This is from the 1972 book, On the Pavilion.

JULIE MARTIN: Oh yeah.

LIZA ZAPOL:  I wonder if you can elaborate on what you think was meant by "environment" at that time, or about "invisible city or invisible monument."

JULIE MARTIN: I think—I'd have to go back—I really think it was Rauschenberg who said an "invisible environment," and I don't think anybody knew what that meant, and certainly not environment the way [we think today]—environment meant your surroundings. It wasn't the environment, I don't think, looking back. I think environment, it was what was around you. Kaprow's book, isn't it Happenings, Environments, and something? [Assemblage, Environments & Happenings, 1966] You know, it was a work of art that came off the wall, and I think it was still—there wasn't an environmental movement. Later actually, Tom Mee used fog in greenhouses and it could block the sun if there was too much sun, you could have fog and not only have a humid environment, but you would block the sun, or the idea that it [fog] could be [generated] outdoor, because you trade temperature for humidity. [00:34:08] So in desert places, if you had an outdoor fog, it could be air conditioning. "Invisible city" I don't quite understand, because it wasn't a city, but an invisible environment. I don't think that really was an activating [idea]. I think that once you had the mirror, you had these incredible—this idea of the imagery, that you had the whole environment upside down hanging above your head, and you could see yourself, so you became—you could stand here and a visitor could see themselves. And there were all sorts of other, I remember just incredible [optical] effects; not funhouse, very gentle effects, but it was always changing and always moving, and you would see different—one day, I remember seeing the image of what was hanging above reflected below the floor, because the center of the floor was glass. So you could actually, my God you could see it reflected underneath. So there were all these [visual effects]—you know, if you had the time to—which most of the visitors didn't, unfortunately, you would see these amazing things would appear to you.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Talk about the crowd flow.

JULIE MARTIN: We also thought this was going to be a problem, so we made a very elaborate counting crowd flow system, which I think ultimately, because you had these groups coming in, and then the leader of the group wouldn't see anything or would be more interested in going to the next one, that maybe people were listening, but you didn't have [a problem with people staying too long]—people who came on their own spent a lot of time. I think Artdsan said that he clocked [visitors and]—that people tended to stay longer [in the Pepsi Pavilion] than in other Pavilions, as much as 20 minutes. [00:36:09] He realized that people who were on their own really did stay and explore or be explored. But I think because of this thing with the groups, it [crowd control] never was a problem. But what was nice, I remember watching one day and there would be a line to get in, and the floats would kind of come up and kind of nudge people and the [shape of the] line would kind of change as the Floats [moved around]—so [there was] this kind of very gentle interaction.

LIZA ZAPOL:  The white sculptures would—

JULIE MARTIN: —Would come toward the line [of people], and so the line would kind of make room for it to go through. And then when it reached  [a raised edge of the Plaza] edge or if you touched it [or stood in its way], it would change direction. By the way, there's one operating in the Museum of Modern Art garden now. I was there and saw some kids, "Look, it's moving!" And they ran over and were very excited about it.

What's so interesting is how gentle [the Mirror Dome room] it was. It was rich, a rich visual environment, but there wasn't a cacophony, and I think the sound was the same way, you weren't bombarded with it, it surrounded you. People now talk about an immersive environment. We didn't use that word, I mean that wasn't a word in those days, and whether it was immersive, you can—it was more that—I guess it was, but not completely in the sense when you put on the VR glasses. You still are very much aware of the whole thing around you.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And seeing yourself.

JULIE MARTIN: And seeing yourself and other people.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Aware of yourself within it, yeah. That's interesting. We talked yesterday a little bit about the complexities of art in somewhat of a commercial environment.

JULIE MARTIN: [00:38:03] I think—I mean, what's interesting is looking back, the whole of '69 was involved with preparations for the Pavilion, and a lot of trips back and forth, et cetera, but back at home ground, we were still doing matchings [of artists and engineers], et cetera, and then actually, [developing] the idea of Projects Outside Art. I don't know, it wasn't consciously saying, you know the World's Fair is not an art environment, but maybe it was. I mean if you could ever get Bob Whitman to talk about it, it would be interesting, because he and Billy were quite active collaborating on this. I realized that the poster and the call for proposals [for Projects outside Art] was during 1969, so this whole idea of projects in which the artist could be part of a team that didn't necessarily make art, but the artist could be another professional with qualities that other professionals didn't have. That was being developed as we were developing the Pavilion, and it's possible, this idea that we were operating in a non-art environment, and some of it was not art, I mean Frosty and Breer really wanted their pieces [as part of the Pavilion], but the whole thing and the whole project was not art, per se, although Billy later said, "I declare the whole thing a work of art." But [if] you think about it, it wasn't, and Whitman wasn't doing a mirror as an art piece in the same way that Breer was doing his Floats as his work. [00:40:05]

LIZA ZAPOL:  I think, not to split hairs, but I think there is a question, and I think I saw this in the '72 book, Pavilion, that there were legal issues or questions about whether the work of the artists could be considered commercial art or art.

JULIE MARTIN: I think that's in Billy's article, I don't know why. I'm not sure. I don't think that was—thinking about it and maybe it was a reaction to the fact that we were asked to leave, and then [the queston arises] who owns the work, and it kind of got destroyed. I don't know, those things came up, but when we negotiated, I mean you know it turned out that when we were asked to leave, it turned out we still hadn't signed the contract for building the Pavilion. So we'd been doing all this work and they'd been dispersing all this money and there was no contract. Ted Kheel [Theodore Kheel] helped us negotiate, and we had meetings with Pepsi, and then they reimbursed us for money we'd put out, et cetera, et cetera, and we signed a contract. It's kind of amazing in fact.

I also said, I think I said yesterday, this idea that Breer later was talking about it and he said you know the fact that each team, so to speak, was not completely autonomous, but they were given—they were told to develop their part, in this kind of horizontal structure. He said it wouldn't have worked with the artist if he had somebody second guessing them all the time. [00:42:00] So that was interesting, I mean as a study in organization, that fact that these different groups—and in fact, one of the sad things that happened, and Fred always felt bad about this, is that Larry Owens, who was the engineer working with David, was much more kind of uptight. And David always wanted more; more channels, more this. At one point, Larry just said no, eight is enough. So of course he [David] lived with that, but he would have done even more, and Fred said, when he realized—Fred was kind of supervising, but he had a full-time job, et cetera. When he realized it, he said he felt bad that he didn't give David everything he wanted. You know, that's one of the problems with collaboration. Sometimes, if the engineer makes an "engineering decision." It's actually an aesthetic decision, but not recognized as such, so that in these collaborations… I mean one of the things that Billy and Fred were so good at is they could appreciate the aesthetics, believe the artist when he said he wanted 12 or 16 channels, that this was important to him or her, as opposed to somebody [for whom] the equipment was more important.

There's a great story that David, he loved the resonant frequency of things, you know resonant frequency, because later, his Rainforest, you know the piece where he would put transducers onto objects and then feed in the right frequency to get it to vibrate and to make sound. So, he found the resonant frequency of the dome, of the mirror, and one day he was shaking it you know, and Sig Stenlund, who was from Shjeldahl Industries, who oversaw the making of the mirror, he said [to Billy], "Make that man stop shaking my mirror," and Billy just walked away. He was not going to stop David, so he just walked away and didn't do anything. [00:44:01] So he really, both he [Billy] and Fred had this extraordinary sensitivity to respect the artist and try to [give them what they wanted]—but so you see all the different possibilities in the collaboration in the Pavilion, in doing it.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yeah, and it sounds like sort of challenges of various personalities.

JULIE MARTIN: Exactly.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And balancing the overarching PepsiCo as well.

JULIE MARTIN: Yeah. I don't know, Billy just was very good at getting what he wanted, up to the end, or not what he wanted, but you know, in getting what the artist wanted.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Can you imagine a particular conversation, how he did that, or remember a particular conversation with this negotiation?

JULIE MARTIN: Not really. This wasn't Billy, but see the angle of the tunnel? Breer wanted that angle, he wanted the idea that this is a tube [stuck directly] into the ground, and at one of the drawing meetings, he realized that the Japanese architect had extended the tunnel and made the line like vertical, completely vertical, and so Breer talks about having a meeting with the architect and drawing, making the drawing and insisting—I can't remember, but he did some drawing, the way the architect had done it, and crossed it out and then he did his, insisting that it be like that. But that was the artist talking. Billy allowed the artist, or asked the artist to defend the idea, which Breer did, and so there had to be a little step up because it was like that. Things like that, that was very tiny. [00:46:01]

LIZA ZAPOL:  Right, but not interfering with the artist's vision.

JULIE MARTIN: Exactly, or trying to make it possible.

LIZA ZAPOL:  To facilitate that.

JULIE MARTIN: I mean just you know, insisting on Shunk-Kender [Harry Shunk and Jean Kender, as official photographers for the Pavilion] so he didn't insist, but in the sense that he introduced them, took Shunk-Kender [very much downtown types] down to the Pepsi offices and said these are the best—who knows how he did he, just persistence, just persistence and knowing what [he wanted]—or the [presentation of Live Programming versus Dead Programming, [he argued] just this is really great, look at all these artists that will come.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yes, that's a great example.

JULIE MARTIN: The fair was featuring artists, Tinguely was there. They had Festival Plaza that had a large sculpture by Taro Okamoto]— We tried to, one of the projects we tried to do that didn't work, we wanted to do HPSCHD, the John Cage piece, for like 48 harpsichords, and so we proposed that to the Festival Plaza, which would have been extraordinary but they didn't buy it, that didn't happen. We made very good contact with the Japanese artists, you know the Gutai group, which had started in the '40s but was still kind of active; and by asking Japanese artists to perform. Toshi Ichiyanagi was around and helped us out, so that was an important part of it too, was making contacts with the Japanese art community.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yes, can you—do you have any particular memories of those relationships or even meetings?

JULIE MARTIN: No, I wasn't—I didn't go on some of the trips to Japan, but I remember that Billy did meet with the Gutai people, because Fujiko knew everybody and everybody knew her and respected her, and so I know they met with the Gutai. Then, if you look in the Pavilion book, half of the proposals are from Japanese artists. [00:48:03] And then we used young Japanese engineering students to be assistants during the fair and they stayed on and helped. So there was an effort to involve the Japanese art community.

LIZA ZAPOL:  You mentioned Shunk-Kender, but I think that was a conversation that we had on the car ride over, so I wonder if you can talk about how Shunk-Kender became involved in this piece and even, we can even speak more broadly about that relationship.

JULIE MARTIN: Sure. Shunk-Kender, I don't know how Billy knew about them, but they, the duo, the photographic duo, were operating in Paris actually, and did all of the [photos of] the Nouveaux Réalistes [group], and [Pierre] Restany, and Yves Klein. They followed Yves Klein and did amazing photos of Yves Klein's activities, and I think they were one of the photographers for one of Christo's first projects—maybe Australia. He then went to someone else, but one of the early Christo projects, they were the photographers for, so they're known in Paris. The story I heard was that they—and they [photographed] Tinguely's work, Jean Tinguely too. They came to the Montreal World's Fair, which was in 1967, I think, with Jean, to photograph, and then kind of got stuck. They didn't have the money to get back and came to New York, or maybe they were attracted to New York, and so stayed working here. And then Billy knew—you know, knowing about Paris, et cetera, knew them and so again, asked them to photograph E.A.T. stuff, and Some More Beginnings was the first project that they took photos of, the opening at the Brooklyn Museum. [00:50:08] And then when the Pavilion came up, Billy decided he wanted them to be the official photographers and introduced them to the Pepsi people. I can just imagine, you know these kind of very bohemian, not really speaking very good English, photographers, but Pepsi accepted that they could be the official photographers, and as I said, nobody knew their names, it was Shunk-Kender, and so they became Harry Shunk and Jean Kender when we got them visas, and they came and did this extraordinary job of photographing.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And as you say, the negatives, there weren't really that many photographs.

JULIE MARTIN: What's interesting was the Lichtenstein, Roy Lichtenstein Foundation acquired the estate when [Harry Shunk died –JM]. What happened, I think, was some time in the early '70s they split up and as I remember, the Christos negotiated a deal that the copyright and the negatives stayed with Shunk, and Jean Kender, perhaps there was money involved I don't know, but that Jean signed away the rights and disappeared actually. So it was Shunk from then on, doing the work, but then—[ when they worked together] you never knew who took what, they never, it was never Kender took this, Shunk took that. There was never any indication of who did what. Aand when I started looking at the negatives—we had many prints, because they provided us with prints—I realized that there are a lot of photos but not a huge amount, that they really were very—

[END OF TRACK martin18_1of1_track08.]

JULIE MARTIN: —clear about what they were photographing. And they'd take the iconic photo, like this, the one hanging above the mantelpiece, of the plaza, and one of the guides walking across it. So there were a lot, but they're not huge amounts. There's one of the Pavilion at night, for example, and I never found any others, so it's really interesting, that they knew what they were doing. They were working in film, so you don't, you know, you don't take millions. It was really interesting, how they worked, to see how they worked.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And can you describe them as people? You described them as bohemian, but you know what did they—

JULIE MARTIN: Oh, I don't mean bohemian, but very quiet, both of them quite quiet really, and unassuming. I don't have any—

LIZA ZAPOL:  Later, you interviewed Harry Shunk.

JULIE MARTIN: We interviewed Shunk and I think he mythologized a lot of things, so I'm not sure, but what's great is that I think it's Andrea Theil, who worked for the Lichtenstein Foundation, really did a lot of research and discovered that Harry, he was German I think, and also discovered [his and] Kender's family, and I think he was Hungarian, was Jánus Kender, something like that, but she discovered who they were and the family, and the story, whereas I think Shunk told us a lot of myths. [Laughs.]

LIZA ZAPOL:  All right.

JULIE MARTIN: But the last I saw him, he showed up, he's amazing. He lived in Westbeth.And then Billy did an exhibition called the Story of E.A.T., he was invited to do it, Achille Bonito Oliva, or whatever his name is. Anyway, for a show in Italy called Tribes of Art, in 2001. [00:02:04] Billy did a photo story of E.A.T., [panels with] big photos, [with captions in] big type, that was his thing, people should [be able to easily] read it and they just kind of hung in a row on the wall. We did it at Sonnabend Gallery the next year. And Shunk showed up all of a sudden, at the opening and he said, "Yeah, I'm working in Holland and I'm going back," and so he just kept working, he was just really intense about working, and that was the last [time we saw him]—I think he died not long after that.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Thank you for going into that. Those images are so iconic, and of course Shunk-Kender, with the Piers projects and everything, are so interesting.

JULIE MARTIN: Exactly. But enormous. Just, I think the Lichtenstein, this young kid, Evan Ryder, who is an artist, catalogued it [the archive of photographs], et cetera, and then I think they gave all of the negatives to the Getty. There were a lot of prints. A great story, I think, about Shunk is that Menil asked to have prints of all of his Yves Klein work, because I think they own a bunch of Yves Klein, and collected Yves Klein. So, I remember Shunk saying this is so wonderful, and I don't even have to make new prints. So he had all these things he had done from the '60s and '70s, to pull out of his archives. I think they've also done collections, like a lot of the prints, and maybe scans as well, of the Nouveaux Réalistes artists went to Beaubourg and then other things. MoMA got a trove of things, as I remember, so well distributed.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So you've come out of Pavilion, and then out of that, what happened?

JULIE MARTIN: We came back.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Did you write the book? [00:04:00]

JULIE MARTIN: The book came out in '72, so that was one of the projects, I guess, was writing the book. As I said, following the Pavilion, and again following up on the Projects Outside Art, I think we began to see whether we could do those exhibitions, and then Billy and Bob [Whitman –JM], working together, they really reinforced this idea of the artist being active in other areas. Actually, one of the projects took place before the Pavilion, which was the Buffalo project, because what happened? The Sarabhai family. The Sarabhais, again back to Merce Cunningham and the world tour, this family, Gita, one of the aunts, had known John Cage, because she was interested in music, and I think early on, and I don't know exactly, but she had been in touch with Cage and there had been correspondence—one would have to check this—even before the tour. So I think, as they were trying to have places to go around the world, the Sarabhais agreed to host or to try to set up performances in India, and they did go there. Bob must have met the Sarabhais at this time and Gautam. Anyway, people knew who the Sarabhais were. And I think the daughter—I can't remember when Mana, who is the daughter of Gautam, she was in New York and she came to work for E.A.T. at a certain point, I can't quite remember when, if it was after the Pavilion or before. So there were these contexts.

Then, at a certain point, Billy met Vikram Sarabhai, he was one of the brothers. He was a physicist, a quite well known physicist, and head of the Atomic Energy Commission in India. [00:06:07] Billy had written about the use of technology in the environment or in the technical environment, or again, [in the urban environment using the word] the "ghetto"—using that word, it's so horrible now but that was the word that was used—about how you could use technology and bring about development, and the importance of the phone. He met Vikram and I remember he and Vikram went to Washington, to try to—Billy's idea was that phones were really important and if you could begin to do networks of telephones, you could bring development faster. And so this is one of the things they went to talk to the World Bank about. Both of them were very disappointed in the guy at the World Bank, who kept saying "Balderdash" or something, some weird, you know. So [Billy] knew Vikram.

Then, the U.S. was going to put a satellite, the ATS-6 satellite over India, and was offering them video, to use video from the satellite. So Vikram had the idea that you could do education, but he didn't really want the BBC to sit in London and make programs for farmers in Gujarat. So he asked E.A.T. if you wanted to make a proposal for developing [educational] software for satellite transmission in India. Billy of course said yes, and we put together a team of people, which included Bob Whitman, included an artist, Fred Waldhauer, Ernie [Ernst] Rothkopf, who was a learning specialist at Bell Labs, a great guy, someone from Xerox learning, David Beckman to work with their Indian counterparts. [00:08:04] So in December of '69, we went to India and decided to focus on a dairy in the area of Gujarat, around Anand. There's a dairy that the Danes had set up, a very modern dairy, but every day, twice a day from 1,500 different places, they would gather less than a pint of milk from each of the buffalos, weigh it, and measure the fat content, and then send it to the dairy. So the idea you could use this system to also maybe swap [1/2 inch video tapes and gather] educational ideas or something. So we focused on that area and had the idea of—and wrote a proposal—which started using half-inch video to do visual research notes. You would go into the villages, you would see how they used teaching, how they used visual things, how you could work with the [visual idioms] of the village to make programming that would then teach these things like artificial insemination, nutrition, this kind of thing. So that was the proposal which we came up with and unfortunately, the next year, Vikram died under mysterious circumstances on a train to Bombay, which people talk about the fact that he was against nuclear—making a bomb. He was nuclear for peace and so I don't know, it was a little bit suspicious but maybe not. So we weren't involved but actually, in '74, '75, a version of this project was undertaken, called S-I-T-E, SITE project, to use the satellite for education, so Billy was always very pleased and proud of that. That [project] really launched or sort of evolved, it launched Projects Outside Art, because of course Whitman was a really vital part of the thinking about the idea that you could use half-inch video, and you would make it, and you would send it to different villages and then have people comment, and refine your teaching from the people, not just imposing it. [00:10:22]

Then, we began to—we did Children and Communication with [Marcia Newfield and other people,] researchers at Bell Labs, and also working with Martin Deutsch at, NYU, and interestingly enough, the first year of the Internet when at Stanford, the first [communications] things were sent back and forth, but we had no idea. Billy was not in the technical world anymore, so you weren't at the leading edge of the technology. This idea [was] that we set up two centers that were linked by phone lines and [had different equipment that the kids could use and the] the kids could communicate, the idea that in a school in East Harlem, they could be connected with schools around the city and begin to know other kids, without having to travel, or then they could travel. So we did that project and City Agriculture, the same idea, before people were using rooftop gardening. We worked with the University of Arizona, to do actually enclosed pods of organic gardening that could go on rooftops, and actually the only person that was kind of interested was—I've forgotten his name, but he was the GM heir. Stewart Mott, Stewart Mott, I think, and he was very interested in rooftop gardening, and we made contact with him. So these projects, where the artist would be part of planning and thinking about it. [And in those years we made a lot of proposals for projects in different areas], one for vocational training, that the artists would be involved in making modules for how do you present different professions, that the artist would have an idea about telling you about how, what it was like to be a welder or what it would be like to be a building inspector. [00:12:16] I don't know, but the idea that vocational training, kids would get a better idea of what it involved, some ideas like that.

The other one that was quite great, it was called USA Presents. We made a proposal, so it was in '91, '92, for the Bicentennial, to give out Super 8 cameras around the country and let different groups make three minute films about themselves, from Boy Scouts to Rotary to whoever, and then those could be sent to a central uplink or to a couple of central uplinks, and then using a lot of different channels, you would broadcast on a just random basis, America's picture of itself. So that was again, the Internet kind of idea without knowing. Of course, we never heard from them. So, a lot of the involvement was with this kind of idea of the artist active in society, and I think that was a direction that E.A.T. was going. We were still doing artist projects and we were still doing matchings.

Of course we got involved in the New York Collection for Stockholm, which was supposed to be a fundraising idea, which actually just took over. We put together a collection of [works by] New York artists, that was donated to Moderna Museet, because Pontus ,of course, he chose the collection and then he said "I want it!" And so we said "Okay," because he'd been so supportive [of American art] in the early days, and this collection went to Sweden. [00:14:00]

It was increasingly hard [to find] funding [for E.A.T. proposals]. I think we did make a huge proposal to the Ford Foundation, to support the artist matching system, and to be able to not only refine it but follow up and be able to know results of it; and that was not funded. I think for a lot of these other proposals in other areas, you were up against a bureaucracy that already existed, so it was very hard to convince people that an artist had something to say or that interdisciplinary teams had. So really, we became less and less active because there was not a response to these ideas. Also, it's possible, with the coming of the Vietnam War, that society itself became more conservative, and here we were being not conservative, we were trying not to be conservative at all, and so it ran into difficulties.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yes, and I'm glad that you mentioned that. I was wondering, I was thinking about the overall economy as well, and the other things that were dovetailing with funding.

JULIE MARTIN: It was interesting, because actually, the idea of doing a collection with the artists was that there had been a downturn and some of these artists were having trouble. So the idea that you could put together a collection was helping them, and buy the collection, we were going to pay them—the dealer would forfeit his half, and so we could pay the artists half of whatever the value was, so it was to the help of the artist as well, and then somehow, we were supposed to raise money, who knows. [Laughs.]

LIZA ZAPOL:  The original conception, was it actually for works of art, and then it became prints? [00:16:02]

JULIE MARTIN: No. Well, it's a funny idea. Bob Whitman, one day in the office, saw this thing for the National Endowment, or for something called Treasury Funds, and apparently if you gave the government something of value, they would give you money. And so the idea started, is we would put together a collection, give it to an American museum, and then the value of that, they would then give to E.A.T. So that was the fundraising idea, and so I think we asked a couple of American curators would they do it, and that fell through. So when then Pontus said he would do it, and I guess the Treasury Fund idea fell through too, maybe we were turned down, and so it was okay to raise money, to give it to a foreign museum, if your board [decided to do it]did it. So it changed from being like an American project, to going to Sweden, and then the collection of prints were to be sold to raise money to buy the works, but we didn't sell that many.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Can you describe some of the prints in that project?

JULIE MARTIN: Well it's interesting, we decided to make them small. We decided we'd do a portfolio of prints, ask the artists if they'd donate a print to help raise money, and the idea would be they'd be small, 11 by 14, and one color. Some artists took to that, others didn't, and so it didn't matter, you know you let the artist do what he or she wants. Walter de Maria did a still photo from one of the films. Some of the artists did things that referred to the work they had in the collection and other artists just did their own work, it varied. Rauschenberg did a print of a drawing that he made where he had the dimensions of Monogram, which is the piece with the goat, that was bought by Moderna Museet in Sweden in '64. [00:18:12] Jim Dine did a drawing of his piece. George Segal did a record in which he talked about seeing Duchamp's Etant Donnés, and then on the cover of the record cover was an image of his piece, and on the record, where the label is, we had again, an image of the piece; a dry-cleaning store, that he gave. Larry Rivers did the [image of] Lenin. We worked with Styria Studio, which had worked with Bob Rauschenberg a lot and had done the big project Currents, and worked with artists to do silk-screens. Lichtenstein's image was the image he used on the poster when the museum had the Pop Art show, at Moderna Museet. Bob Whitman did a double sided print with just a line, he was working with a line, a double sided print. Andy wanted to Xerox, so he said here's a drawing of Mao, make a Xerox of that, take that copy, use that as the original and just keep it going like that. So that each print was going to be individual, which of course you know, Warhol is so brilliant and amazing. But then I was doing it. I was the printer and all of a sudden I noticed that the image was expanding, and apparently in those days, not so much now, well with scanners and things, they had set it so that every image was a tenth of a percent or a hundredth of a percent bigger, so you couldn't do money, as if you could do money anyway, who knows? [00:20:07] Or maybe securities, I don't know, but that was a security thing, and I went to Andy and I said, "Andy, it's going off the page," and he said, "That's okay." So, by the end, the last image—it was an edition of 300—and by the end, all you saw was kind of the drawing, of the lines that would be around the mouth, and it's totally abstract, so it shows you from real to abstract and each one is different, so it was pretty amazing. This very simple idea.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Right, and of course two of those prints are in the Whitney Museum exhibition right now. [Andy Warhol – From A to B and Back Again, 2018-19]

JULIE MARTIN: Oh yeah, they borrowed them, I think there are eight. So you go from a very low number realistic [image], down to number 220, which shows the progression. But I remember just being so dismayed and not being able to figure out what was happening, until finally I did realize that there was no way I was going to stop this.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Amazing. Yeah, and tell me, so all of those works sound so interesting, and also just an insight into relationships with many different artists as well.

JULIE MARTIN: Yeah. I mean the point is, you just said to the artist would you do a print, and we can do it in Styria Studio, what would you like to do, and so whatever they wanted to do. Actually, Tony Roos, who was a Swedish artist, was in New York, and she worked with us and sort of oversaw the production of the prints with Styria Studio, and helped out.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So as the funding—yeah, go ahead.

JULIE MARTIN: Oh and then, just also, another part of the New York Collection was Billy was a real tour guide at heart. [00:22:00] Right after the war, when he was in Sweden, he organized—he was head of the Film Society and he organized a trip to the major film archives in Europe. And he borrowed the bus from his father that took people from the train station to his father's hotel, and a whole group of them went to Berlin and to Austria and Paris, and then they barely fitted onto the boat, to England. He had taken this whole group to see the films they hadn't been able to see during the war, and so for the New York Collection from Stockholm, we had a group of patrons and artists, and we organized a trip. I think you could charter a plane at that time, or we took over, and he showed movies, Pontus's movie, Day in Town, and another movie,Renoir's Les Millionsand we had our own dinner, and Larry Rivers made—no, Red Grooms made a menu. So we had our own trip to the opening, so the artists could be there.

LIZA ZAPOL:  That must have been pretty amazing.

JULIE MARTIN: It was pretty amazing.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yeah. So yeah, how was—was that project successful in the way that it was desired?

JULIE MARTIN: Well actually, it's pretty interesting actually. There were a group of Swedish artists that were very against it, and they kind of—they were very much against it because [they asked,] "Why aren't you doing Vietnamese art?" They were quite radical, Sweden was quite radicalized by the [Vietnam] war. So there was a debate in the papers, which the [American] artists [travelling to the opening] knew nothing about, Billy didn't say a word and Pontus didn't say a word; but apparently, there was a debate and Öyvind Fahlström was defending [the Collection], et cetera, et cetera, and there was quite a debate in the paper about "Why are you doing this with the Americans?" [00:24:10] Pontus knew and he wasn't about to be bullied, and we didn't know anything about it going on, so. It's really quite interesting that, looking back on it, all of a sudden at the dinner, which was held at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Nancy Hanks showed up and she was head of the National Endowment for the Arts. The senator didn't show up, but she showed up and looking back, it might have been an attempt by the American government, to sort of softly reach out to the Swedes. I think that there was a lot of tension diplomatically because of the war, but the fact that she came and represented America, and represented this American collection, it was quite amazing and quite wonderful. It was somehow used again, unbeknownst to us, these artists were floating in, and I don't think Billy was part of that. I think that somehow, we had a PR firm that was based in Washington, that was doing PR [for the Collection, and they recruited] Mrs. Armand Erpf [to be] head of the committee to raise money and didn't really do very much, and the Princess, Christina, was a patron of the collection, and the Swedish government did give money to it as well. So there were these quasi, official quasi, but the fact that she [Nancy Hanks] showed up at the dinner was quite interesting.

LIZA ZAPOL:  A gesture of support and also outreach.

JULIE MARTIN: Yeah, and also probably a reaching out diplomatically to the Swedes.

LIZA ZAPOL:  [00:26:00] Right, definitely. So what was your own relationship to the Vietnam War, you and Billy? What was happening?

JULIE MARTIN: I think we were, again, very focused on what we were doing, I think. Obviously, the artists were [coughs, drinks water] very interesting. Jim Rosenquist's print for the New York Collection, was I think two sets of marks. You know how you do mark four and then cross five? One was hairpins and one was something else [nails], and it was based on the fact that when he was—male/female I think. I can't remember the male image. He was arrested during one of the marches [against the war] and he remembers when he was in the jail overnight, he saw how prisoners had scratched on the wall, counting the days before they'd get out I guess, and so his image was actually based on his experience marching. I just was not very active. I didn't like meetings. I tried to get involved politically but meetings made me very nervous. [Coughs.] I'm sorry.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Would you like some water?

JULIE MARTIN: Yeah, I'd better. Because you knew what should be said and you had to listen to everybody else. That's terrible. [Liza laughs.] Basically, just over those years, you know you—I just didn't march, and Billy being, I guess Swedish, also not really part of the American environment, milieu, you know, and we were just really busy doing kind of what we were doing, which I guess was, you felt was—[00:28:24] I'm trying to think. Anyway, but I think E.A.T. was partly a victim of that, of the change in the early '70s, and the kind of—I don't think necessarily the economic downturn, but maybe the change in being more active socially and politically really, or making change. I think maybe things with Nixon, things became much more conservative anyway, or at least the directions we were going were not being supported. I do remember, Billy tells a story that early on, we were supported by the JDR 3rd Fund, I think they gave E.A.T. some money in the '60s, but one of the people said well, "Why are you working with everybody, why aren't you just working with the really good artists?"

LIZA ZAPOL:  From the Rockefeller Fund.

JULIE MARTIN: From the Rockefeller Fund, or maybe JDR, somebody, just this idea of why are you servicing everybody. I think that was one of the criticisms, why aren't you just working with—and of course in our projects, where we chose to develop projects, you would do [choose] people that you thought were good for it, but if you ever look at the—I have some that I photographed at the Getty. [00:30:00] If you look at the names [of artists who were referred to engineers] on the yellow cards [that had information on the engineer on it], on the eight-inch, nine-inch cards, it really was everybody and not that many people that you knew or heard of, which is fine, you know? So there was this idea that you help everybody, and so for art funders, that wasn't as interesting.Another project that we did do with India, and actually, I guess we went to Porter McCray, he was this fabulous guy. He ran the JDR 3rd Fund, but he'd been at MoMA and run the international program where they sent art all over the world. And then I guess you know, he was part of this, everybody was part of this, Rockefeller orbit. Rockefeller, they kind of trained people in philanthropy really, and of course David Rockefeller is the Modern. Anyway, so he was at JDR 3rd, and their thing was always bringing Asian artists here, and I think Billy talked to him and said why don't we do a project to send American artists to India and he said yes. That was a project in which we asked—La Monte Young wanted to go because he was beginning to work at [with] Pandit Pran Nath. Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Terry Riley, I think again, his interest was to work with Pandit Pran Nath, but Trisha and Yvonne Rainer not, and they went with partners. Is there somebody? Oh, oh yeah, Jeffrey Lew, but he went with Yvonne, [Jed Bark with Trisha]. So we sent artists and organized loosely, what they could do, and they could do anything they wanted, but they can experience the Indian environment, and so that was again, another project that we did early on, in the '70s. [00:32:02]

LIZA ZAPOL:  Do you remember, what did they do?

JULIE MARTIN: Yvonne is very interesting I think, because—and we interviewed them afterwards, so there's some interviews, there's some photos she took. She performed some of her works and they said, "Well what does it mean, what's the story?" And so the whole idea that the Indian dance, you're telling a story, and the hand gestures mean something. And I think that this was kind of a revelation to her. And then of course she went on to make movies, but she may have started that earlier, so I'm not saying this—but it may have been this whole idea of narrative. We met a wonderful dancer Chandralekha, when Billy and I traveled in India, and she came here and so we made some proposals there. The Bhai women, were kind of high class courtesans, who actually were the power behind the throne way back, and Chandralekha suggested doing a documentary about the Bhai women. You know, so we made these proposals for cultural advance but apparently didn't send them to the right people. But there was all this interest in India and interest in education, and Chandraleha's hand is—we did a fundraiser, to try to raise money, to raise more money to send artists to India, and we made a poster. Shunk took a beautiful picture of one of her hand gestures and we printed it, and Tom Gormley designed the silver poster, it's quite beautiful. These were all these activities, we were extraordinarily active. So I guess we were just so active that you didn't have time to go to Washington. [00:34:04] No that's not fair.

LIZA ZAPOL:  One thing I just—a detail, but it might be an important one. We didn't quite say yesterday and maybe not today, but when did Billy leave Bell Labs, and what was the effect of that on his own life?

JULIE MARTIN: What happened was he went to the Labs in '58 and then when E.A.T. started, he and Bob [Rauschenberg] in particular were the most active, Whitman not as much in the early days. You know, plotting things out, or meetings, or writing stuff. The idea was that they both go back to their respective professions. And so Billy was back at Bell Labs and we hired a director, Francis Mason, who came from USIA, and I just think [for] Billy, he wasn't radical enough. He went on to work for Steuben Glass and do philanthropy and things for Steuben, and later he was on the boards of something. You know, he had a quite distinguished life in cultural affairs, but he just wasn't quite radical enough for, I think, Billy's vision, and Billy he just couldn't quite leave it. Also, I think there was not that much money, so I think Francis, he wasn't fired, but I think he did resign. I think it wasn't the right fit for him; [he is] much more elegant and intellectual, you know what I mean, it just wasn't the right fit, for this kind of scrappy organization that had no money. [00:36:01] So then Billy decided that he would become head, and so he left Bell Labs and took over, and that was '68, so he left Bell Labs , I guess, I'm not quite sure, but in the fall of '68. Well, in time to do, maybe in time to do the, what do you call it?

LIZA ZAPOL:  Was it Some More Beginnings?

JULIE MARTIN: Some More Beginnings, right, the competition and Some More Beginnings. He was still at Bell Labs when we did the press conference, but maybe soon after that, he did resign from Bell Labs and took over E.A.T.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Because you did mention that at a certain point, then he wasn't as aware of what was happening in the field.

JULIE MARTIN: Right.

LIZA ZAPOL:  In engineering.

JULIE MARTIN: Yeah, and so from '68—I mean obviously he could—he still got the IEEE bulletins, he still got his technical journals for a long time, but he just wasn't in that world, so that probably things like the Internet, I mentioned the fact that, Who knew? But not that many people knew, because it was an Army project, it was DARPA, so it probably was somewhat secret, even until it was launched.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And do you think for him, did he ever look back, or was he in the right place when he was at E.A.T.?

JULIE MARTIN: I think he was in the right place. I remember once, we were interviewing Joan Mitchell, and she kind of turned on him, it was really very weird. She just got very aggressive and "Why did you leave?" [00:38:00] Billy said something about it just was very lonely, that doing research was lonely, and he liked interacting with people more. I mean that's the only time, I just remember him saying that. She kind of made fun of him, it was weird. Anyway, that's Joan Mitchell. And I think he, more and more, wanted to work with artists, he saw that he really was interested in that. You know, E.A.T. was probably his baby, so, and he believed in it.

He never wanted to go back to doing research. I mean if you look at the [technical] things he's written, the research is really technical and really limited, you know 3.5 micron line in a laser, and you measure noise. There was a funny story actually though. He was measuring noise, or he figured out something and its traveling wave, to figure out how he could amplify the signal somehow or do something with it, and he wrote this up. And the next thing you know it's published, the next thing you know the Air Force came to him and wanted to know all about it, et cetera, et cetera. Bell Labs didn't—some of the labs had direct contact with the Army [at Sandia division], but actually I think Billy had—one of his fellowships was from the Air Force, so the Air Force and the Army was funding a lot of different research. Then it turns out that they realized they could use tubes to deflect radar. Oh, he figured out how you could slow down the signal in a tube, and the radar signal would come in, be picked up in this tube, slowed down, and when they sent it back out, whoever was listening would think the airplane was here, but the airplane had moved on. [00:40:10] Before that, they'd have to have miles of cable, or a huge amount of cable in the plane, for the signal to go through the cable to be delayed. So it was a delay, he figured out how to do delay the line in a traveling wave tube, so that it was used by the—he talks about that you know, it was used by the Navy.

But essentially, it was very narrow, and so he didn't really miss it, but he knew enough so if someone asked a question, he could do the research or he could find out who was doing it.

LIZA ZAPOL:  He maintained all these connections with engineers.

JULIE MARTIN: Exactly, exactly.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So you had these ongoing relationships with people who continued to be abreast. I'm also curious about, and this is also going back to our conversation yesterday and your family. You're leading this very exciting life. What is their impression of your travel, what is your thinking about what's happening in your life at this point? We're talking about the early '70s.

JULIE MARTIN: What's very funny, at one point both of my sisters were working in E.A.T. They came to New York and they went to work for E.A.T. briefly, we put them to work. My mother, did she come? No it was later. She came to Paris for one of the openings. Oh I can't, I don't remember. I don't remember. No, I mean some of my brothers and sisters also did leave home and were traveling as well, and as I said, Terry and Amy, at one point in '68, were—maybe at the time of the New York Collection, I think Amy was working for E.A.T., and Terry briefly did when she was in New York, so they were aware of what we were doing. [00:42:16]

Mother and Daddy came up when we did the—oh, another fundraiser was a casino night, we were raising money for things. I don't think they let them do it anymore, but you could rent gambling games, and so we did a casino night and half the galleries in New York donated works, and so we had an exhibition of prints, and then you could win money. That's when we made the ArtCash, we asked artists to make ArtCash, and they designed bills; a one, twelve, twenty-four, Whitman's was three, fifty-one, Red did fifty-one, Marisol did eighty-eight. Öyvind did 108, but the people wouldn't print it because it looked too much like a dollar bill. Ted Kheel helped us print them at the American Banknote Company, and so we have all this ArtCash , and so people bought ArtCash and gambled with it. So my parents came up for that, so no they would be involved if it was something interesting, they would, and they took it in their stride.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So, what's happening now as the funding is drying up?

JULIE MARTIN: No, I mean actually, in the late '70s, Billy and I got involved in doing Kiki—research for a television series on Kiki. What happened was Billy, although he—you know, he would talk to Bob Whitman about projects he was doing, or if anybody called, he would help them, and you know it was on a one-to-one basis, we didn't have an office. [00:44:05] In the late '70s, he said television is the hardest thing, and he got very interested in series, miniseries, you know Shogun, and he really felt the American people, they really liked information. So he first worked with Prince Michael of Greece, we met Prince Michael, who moved to this country briefly, his wife was a Greek artist, [Marian Karella] and I can't remember her name right now. But anyway, they were friends of Larry Rivers and Clarice Rivers, and we met them, and Prince Michael had written a book about all of the monarchs, obviously, of Europe, who fought Napoleon, who despised Napoleon. So we had this idea about, you could do a miniseries where you tell the story of each country and how they fought Napoleon. We worked with a—did a treatment. Lucy Jarvis was helping us, a filmmaker, who is also very interesting actually, I don't know if you've interviewed her.

LIZA ZAPOL:  I don't, no.

JULIE MARTIN: She did, one of the first NBC programs at the Kremlin, she shot the—not the Kremlin, was it the Kremlin, or the Hermitage, one of them, she did a lot of cultural programming and she's quite old but she's still around, very interesting, a real New York woman, a really powerful woman doing a lot of things. Anyway, but the first script was so horrible, we got a scriptwriter who did a prison break and it was just awful. [00:46:00] So Billy got this—he was in Paris and he also realized the Paris artists' community. He first thought Anaïs Nin maybe, because he knew her, he'd met her in California, et cetera, but no, and then he remembered Kiki de Montparnasse. So he got this idea, let's do a miniseries on that, and so we began to do the research and began to try to get the French interested, so you could actually do a French version. You'd work with Americans but you'd have French input and you wouldn't have painters with berets and paint all over their—you know, you would try to do something real, which didn't work, the French always wanted the Americans to come in. So we tried a lot of trying to get this going, and then at a certain point said "Well why don't we just do a book and then the book could be the basis for the miniseries." That's when we began to work on Kiki's Paris, and turned all the research that we'd done into a book.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So tell me about what that collaboration was with you and Billy. It sounds like it has a different kind of—

JULIE MARTIN: What happened, so we began to—one of the things Billy did is every time we saw an image, a photograph, we would take a picture of it. So we made these albums of three by five pictures of the story of Montparnasse, and the artists Modigliani, Kisling, Foujita, Per Krohg. In other words, you began to see that there was an international group, but not necessarily the really famous ones. You know Matisse appears and Picasso appears, but the story was more of a community of artists around Kiki. Man Ray, of course, Duchamp, but everybody making entrances. [00:48:00] So, we had these albums which told the story, first of the people, and then Billy made a whole album of streets where they lived, so then when we began to do the book, we started working with a designer. But what happened was she would go for the beautiful picture, and this would be the biggest one on a page, and Billy realized that no, you really want to tell the story with pictures. And then at the same time he realized that it was all math, that layout was mathematical. —Fred [Waldhauer] had been working with the HP Hewlett Packard hand-held programmable calculator, so he showed it to Billy. Billy learned to program it, and he made a program, a tiling program essentially, which is how you fit rectangles within a given rectangle, so that he could do the layout. So we did our own, we chose our photos and we did the layout, and then we would write—it had to fit, the column had to be 66 lines, et cetera. The way we would work, Billy, you know as we researched—oh, we also made edge notch cards. We read books, wrote things—I can show you the cards. No I can't, they have been given away. I gave all of the Montparnasse stuff to Beaubourg,[Bibliotheque Kandinski] at Centre Pompidou. I think Billy would have—he wanted it to go back to Paris.

Anyway, we had these eight inch, nine inch cards, and so we entered information from them, the monographs and the memoirs, and then you could search Kiki sitting at the [Café du] Dôme wearing designer clothes, and then the cards would come out, and then you could write that story. A and we coded the stories as well. [00:50:08] So we did a lot of preparatory research, but Billy was very good at structure, like he could—a page, you know Kiki meets Man Ray or Man Ray comes to Paris. He said, "Well there are three things on that." He would know the structure and then I could kind of write—I knew English a little bit better, so I could write to size, and then everything that wouldn't fit in that column, we'd put in notes in the back, and then the sad part was when there was no room on the notes, it didn't get into the book. So we worked together like that very much, I mean I really admired his ability to see structure or see the three points that you needed to do. I tended to do, and most people, you have it all around you and you kind of extract something from all the research, but somehow, he had this ability to see structure or to see the main points, and then I could refine the writing to sort of how it would work.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And was that happening here, were you here at that point?

JULIE MARTIN: Yeah, yeah, he was on the couch, I was at the computer. Apple and Adobe didn't exist but there was a layout program that was like the front end of a typesetting machine, called PagePlanner, and you couldn't see it [the text]. Later you had "What you see is what you get," [but with PagePlanner] it was numbers, so he did all the layout, all the photos by numbers. And then we would use a Xerox machine to reduce it to 63.2 percent, to do the layout, and I would know that I had to write, with this margin, I had to write 66 lines. And then, we actually went to Seton Hall, they had [a machine that could output layout pages in the right size]—

[END OF TRACK martin18_1of1_track09.]

JULIE MARTIN: —[Seton Hall had a kind of a publishing set up—I don't know, maybe it was to help the kids, but they outputted the pages for us, which then—with a column, the captions and the outline for the pictures, and then that went to Abrams. We did the layout. I think the only reason Abrams agreed to do the book is that we said we'd do the layout, but we wanted to because we really wanted to control what it was.

LIZA ZAPOL:  In some ways, the way you're describing it, is it's a similar project in terms of either the way of the categorization of information and in a way, sort of collaborating with the photographs themselves, with the information.

JULIE MARTIN: I think Billy felt very strongly and I agree, that there is information in the photos. So often, there will be a book about an artist and they'll just throw in any photo to show, whereas for us, you know,[for example the painter] Kisling is young and he's standing in this photo, and at the edge [of the photo] there might be something, and that was really important. So you really wanted to do [use] the photo that had the information, and you wanted to make it clear that it was about the information. I think that's one of the strengths of the book, is that it's the words, but it's also the images reinforce the words, they're not random images the way it sometimes happens.

LIZA ZAPOL:  It's also interesting, like you've just described this incredible artist community around E.A.T. and now you're researching this other time in history, around this other artist community. Obviously, we can see that now, but at the time, was that something that was clear to you?

JULIE MARTIN: No.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Sort of like understanding various artist—you know, kind of jumping into various artist communities.

JULIE MARTIN: No, not until we finished, when Billy finished, when we finished Kiki's Paris and we started thinking about what do you do next, then Billy said oh, you know the next great period is the one I know, well toward the end of it, but he said it's New York, or the period '45 to '65. [00:02:09] And so that's how the idea for the second book came, to do '45 to '65. It started out being New York and then somehow along the way, we decided well, everybody was coming to New York and you can't really tell a New York story unless you tell other stories, so we kind of sidetracked by going many more tracks, and so we began to include what's known as [the] free world, so to speak, or Europe and Japan essentially, I mean the myopia of not including South America, for example. You couldn't do Eastern Europe yet, it was [cut off behind the Iron Curtain]—we started it in the—well, '90, I mean the [Berlin] Wall just came down. We were actually in Paris when the Wall came down.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Tell me that story.

JULIE MARTIN: I don't remember, I mean we were there, and friends were traveling to Berlin, and you heard that the Berlin Wall was down, and several of our friends just immediately went to Berlin to be part of it or to see it, I just remember. And for me, who had studied the Soviet Union, you know got a masters in Soviet Union [studies], you thought it was going to be forever. The idea that it could actually collapse was amazing, really amazing that it could collapse of its own weight and without bloodshed, was something that had absolutely not been anticipated. Maybe the scholars around the '80s and '90s had some [idea of this]—but for me, studying it in the '60s, it was like there forever. So that was interesting, it was very exciting and just extraordinary, but we still didn't really have access to do it as part of what we were doing.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Of this research, yeah.

JULIE MARTIN: We did interview a couple, because we met this woman, Irina Nakhova, and what happened was another—you know every early on, Sotheby's did an auction of contemporary Russian work in Moscow, I think in '88 or something, really early. [00:04:17] Was it '88 or '98? Anyway, early, and so a woman that we knew in New York did a film about it, and so they invited us to the opening and Billy was talking to her and he said, "Is there any artists around," and he said, "Yeah, Irina." So we met Irina and invited her to come [visit us]. She was going to be in New York, have a show, come stay at our house, work, whatever. So, we had a friendship with her and we did an interview with her and with one other Russian, but really, that wasn't part of what we were thinking at that point. They were too cut off, the East was just too cut off at that—up to '65, so it really wasn't part of the story.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Billy had done interviews with artists before that point, is that right?

JULIE MARTIN: Right.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So tell me a bit about that.

JULIE MARTIN: That's funny, yeah. Let's see, the story is he—oh, okay. It kind of began with the fact that he was in New York, and he had a friend named Hans Nordenström who became an architect but he was a cartoonist, and he did these very peculiar cartoons for the Swedish newspapers, kind of with an edge, and so Billy talked to the Village Voice and the Village Voice began to run them. A woman in Philadelphia,] [. . . Audrey Sabol –JM] saw the cartoon, and her son was a weight lifter, and I think one of the cartoons is a weight lifter and he, he—something about lifting this over his head did something with his pants, I don't know. [00:06:08]

LIZA ZAPOL:  Lifting the weights over his head made his pants—

JULIE MARTIN: Or maybe he lifted his, his outfit too, I don't quite remember, but there were things like that. She wanted to buy it for her son who was a weight lifter, and so Billy met her and she, - Joan Kron, Acey Wolgin he went there, came here? Oh no, he met them at the [Carlyle]—oh, what's that hotel across from the Met? Anyway, that hotel, he remembers. They started talking and they were part of the Arts Council of the Young Men, Young Women's Hebrew Association in Philadelphia, and they had a gallery and they were going to do a show. And I think they were talking about doing some Abstract Expressionists, and he said "No, you've got to do the young people." This was only '62, but by this time he'd done the thing with Pontus, Pontus had done the 4 Americans, and he'd [Billy had] begun to meet artists. So they listened to him and they did the show called—in the fall of '62, Art 1963: A New Vocabulary. It's really a proto-Pop Art show and a lot of people—Breer was in it, Fahlström was in it, Oldenburg, Rauschenberg, Johns, I think Lichtenstein, but no Andy for example. Billy hadn't met Andy. Andy wasn't known outside certain circles, although what's his name, Walter Hopps did the show just a few months before, the one in [. . . Pasadena –JM], with the Pop Artists and Andy was in that. [00:08:02] Anyway, just it's interesting, the whole trajectory.

So they did this show called Art 1963: A New Vocabulary, and actually Billy did the [catalogue] program: [it] was galleys of a newspaper, and there were definitions, and Billy wrote some and Allan Kaprow wrote some, and it was supposed to be[signed] B.K. and A.K. And Billy's were a little bit—he's not humorous, but he was in a mood that time when he wrote them and they're quite funny. Allan Kaprow took umbrage at not being serious. And so he took his name off of his, which are very serious, but they're still in there and there are quotes from artists, et cetera.

But then Billy, during the show, he was at a scientific conference in Washington and maybe someone had told him to look up Alice Denney because she was running the Gallery of Modern Art at the time, and she was thinking—I don't know if she was thinking about a show, maybe of Renoir, something, and Billy said no, come with me, and he got in his car, he had a convertible, and they drove to Philadelphia and she saw the show. So she then decided to do Popular Image, which when she did it in [March]'63, already there was more knowledge about it. She knew Leo [Castelli], so I think she worked with Leo to get—so it was much more focused on Pop Art. Somehow Billy decided he was going to do interviews, so he took his reel-to-reel tape recorder and he went to different—there were 11 artists in the show and he went and he interviewed them, some were quite serious. Actually, I think Jasper and Bob were still in the show, Popular Image, you know with flags, whatever. So the whole Pop Art [movement] had not quite split off by that time, it was still, you still had this overlap, which is interesting, I think. [00:10:03] And then he did some with Andy that are very funny, where Andy wouldn't talk. And so he made a [vinyl 331/3] record and Andy did the cover, they silkscreened the cover, and Jim Dine did the sleeve. [phone rings, brief interruption]

LIZA ZAPOL:  Okay.

JULIE MARTIN: As I said, Billy talked her into doing the show, so he took this around and he made the record, so he did these interviews. It turns out, they're some of the first interviews on tape of these people, and in '81, we made a little booklet of the transcript and [now] we're selling it at the Warhol exhibition. I said to the Whitney, "Do you want the booklets?"

LIZA ZAPOL:  Oh, wonderful.

JULIE MARTIN: The booklet with Andy. Andy did this cover, "Giant Size 1.57." Billy remembers helping him silkscreen them.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Because I think the Archives have the record.

JULIE MARTIN: Oh good.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yes. But yes, it will be wonderful to see the transcripts as well.

JULIE MARTIN: Right, so that was fun. And then at the time that he did that, he was at Claes Oldenburg's studio and The Druds which is a group of artists that were going to be a band, I think it was [Andy Warhol] Walter de Maria and Larry Poons, and were going to be a band. And Patty was going to sing, and they sang us a song called "No More Apologies, No More Regrets," that Jasper had written the words for, so he has that on tape.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Amazing.

JULIE MARTIN: But I don't think he—after that, I don't think there was—until we began to do them [in 1990], I don't think he was going around interviewing people. Well actually, for the 9 Evenings, he didn't do it, but there were a lot of interviews afterwards. [00:12:00] After the 9 Evenings, we were going to do a book and MIT [Press] was going to publish it, and so Harriet DeLong, who was working for us at the time, put together this incredible documentation of the 9 Evenings, and we sent it off to MIT. And they said no, and they lost part of the manuscript coming back, and we didn't look because we just put the boxes away. Not a huge part, so not too bad. And so that's one of the things I would love to do, would be a book on the 9 Evenings. And so Billy didn't do the interviews but Simone, actually Simone Whitman, she was Simone Whitman at the time, Simone Forti now, did a lot of interviews, and the tapes are at the Getty. And then I remember helping her use her interviews to write—Art Forum published in January '67, I think, an article, Billy's view, an engineer's view and an artist's view, and so Simone used a lot of her tapes and her memories of it, and she wrote the article, helped by me, about the artist's point of view. [Whitman, Simone. "Theatre and Engineering: AnExperiment, Notes by a Participant," February 1967, p. 26;

Klüver, Billy. "Theater and Engineering: An Experiment, Notes by an

Engineer," Artforum February 1967, p. 31 –JM.]

LIZA ZAPOL:  So who was the first interview that you did together, in this '45—

JULIE MARTIN: I was looking at it, I think it was Jill Johnston. I have a list, I have a little list.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Okay, one second.

[END OF TRACK martin18_1of1_track10.]

[TRACK martin18_1of1_track11 is blank.]

LIZA ZAPOL:  Okay, so to go back to the interviews, the first interview, we double checked.

JULIE MARTIN: Was Jill Johnston, and then we just did randomly, people we knew and could get to, Bob Breer and some of the people, and then just expanded from there. And then at a certain point we just decided that you had to do other places, that people came to New York and it wasn't just enough to do New York, which probably was a fatal decision in terms of getting it finished. Billy's idea really, with the interviews was what events were important to people then, because with the Montparnasse book, it was very much centered on certain shows, certain events in their lives, so I think his idea was you let the people say what's important and then in different interviews, you would—certain things would come out. Say like the Ninth Street show would probably come out as—and in Europe, when we would interview the curators, the Museum of Modern Art, that traveling show of Abstract Expressionism in '57 was very important. It was like the pros rolled into town, and I remember MoMA had the catalogs ready and the PR was ready and the hanging was ready, and so you know it was just like this—and I also remember, in another interview Bob Breer said when he saw that show he said "It's over." He'd been in Europe since, I don't know, maybe '50, '51, he didn't come immediately but whenever he graduated from college, he said he saw it and he said it's over in Europe. He saw the power of the Abstract Expressionists, the Europeans couldn't. I mean it did in a way but they didn't—the dealers that we talked to, they didn't see that. [00:02:06] It was the next generation, that they began to pick up on it and began to show in Europe. They were too poor also. It was fascinating, the whole thing, just seeing Europe recover from the war. Billy's idea for the cover, for the image for what was happening, this is mostly in Europe of course, was like a field where the sprouts are just coming up, the spring growth of weed or whatever it was going to be, was just coming up, and he had that image of Europe recovering from the war, and so you had the stories of people talking about how right after the war, some went immediately to Paris, because that was the place you went, and just what began to happen. So I think those interviews were quite fascinating.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So it's snowballing. So how do you decide who's next and who to interview next?

JULIE MARTIN: I don't remember. I think once you decide to do Europe, then you got in touch with the people we knew. Paris, Billy knew people, you know from Niki [de Saint Phalle] to, I'm sure he knew, what's his name, the Nouveaux Réalistes,leader [Pierre] Restany. But you'd start and you'd interview Restany, and then you would ask who else. In Germany, we stayed with Mary Bauermeister, who had been married to that awful guy, the composer who did Originale, came here, did Originale. [00:04:00] I'm blocking. [Karlheinz Stockhausen]

LIZA ZAPOL:  We can look it up.

JULIE MARTIN: The composer. So she was very active in Cologne and Dusseldorf at that time, and the people that were around her, and so she made—and people would just make suggestions. In Amsterdam, I think Ad Petersen, who had been [Willem] Sandberg's assistant at the Stedelijk and he began to tell us people, and of course Stockholm, Billy knew the people. In Italy, I think it was Gino Di Maggio, [who had] worked with Kaprow and some of the people, and he began to tell us. So it just built in that way, it would be recommendations of who. So it was pretty random actually, if you think about it, we really didn't do very much research, we would just go places and really didn't know. It's not necessarily the approved way of doing it.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So how many interviews did you do overall and what determined when, or about how many and what determined when it ended?

JULIE MARTIN: What is it, 300, 350?

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yes.

JULIE MARTIN: It may not be that many because—

LIZA ZAPOL:  There are duplicates of certain people.

JULIE MARTIN: Well, if we did two, if we went over one cassette that would be two numbers.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Like three sessions with Al[fred] Leslie.

JULIE MARTIN: Yes, exactly, so maybe between 200 and 300 people, I guess. I don't know, Billy just got tired or he decided we had enough.

LIZA ZAPOL:  That was over about three or four years.

JULIE MARTIN: Exactly. So we began to do the layout, we started doing research. One of the things he did, I don't know if I have a copy of it here, but he decided you were going to see how important different artists were, so you were looking at all the monographs and the books about art in this period, and we were going through the index and we were saying who was mentioned in the index. [00:06:10] So I was sitting there [at the computer, entering information], you know he would read me Rauschenberg, Johns, you know, so and so, and so and so, and looking back on it, obviously—but it was interesting, and then we printed it out, and I have it somewhere, the "Importance by mentions in the indexes of art history books." It was sort of crazy, but you know he was a scientist, so he applied some of these scientific ideas. And then we did, we began to do an artist biography, born and where they moved, where they studied, where they moved and maybe the first show, so that we began to do that for everybody, and that's something that Melissa and Susan are filling in, they think this is a great idea if we do a book of the interviews, it would be great to show the scope of the project, because you could write about the project as well as the results.

LIZA ZAPOL:  When you say Melissa and Susan?

JULIE MARTIN: Oh, I'm sorry, Melissa Rachleff Burtt, who did this—she did a show called Inventing Downtown, which was artist run spaces from '51 to '65. And somebody told her to look me up at a certain point and we met, and she took one look at the interviews and started listening. And she excerpted artist's comments about the different galleries, to kind of give a personalized view of each of these, from the Tanager, to the Ninth Street show, ending with Bellamy's the Green Gallery, which although it was commercial, was very much Bellamy's gallery. That was part of her book and then after that she said let's try to do a book encompassing all of the interviews, and so this Sisyphean task. [00:08:08] And that's Susan Rosenberg, who is a curator and also has written about Trisha Brown and her art, Trisha Brown's visual art as well as her dance. So as I say, this Sisyphean task of trying to figure out what you can do with all this stuff. They like the idea of the biographies, so they're beginning to try to flesh in what we didn't do. Then we also did an events chronology, which we tried to list all the different events in the different towns, to then begin to see what to write about.

LIZA ZAPOL:  What do you mean events?

JULIE MARTIN: Shows. I haven't looked at it in a long time.

LIZA ZAPOL:  From the time period that you're discussing?

JULIE MARTIN: From that time period, '45 to—

LIZA ZAPOL:  Or the ones that actually came up in the interviews?

JULIE MARTIN: No, from that period, using again—there have been some good chronologies, the Germans did a really great one. So just, you know, an important show, like when Cage first went to Darmstadt, would be one. [Remembering] Stockhausen. Mary was married to Karlheinz Stockhausen. So you know, when Cage first came, and then the Europeans found out about Cage, is pretty amazing, and then when the Nouveaux Réalistes had their first meeting. So all of these kind of events, again for this kind of social art history, we did that as well.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And then you started to put it together into a book.

JULIE MARTIN: And then Billy did a layout, he wrote a new layout program, which was more streamlined, and we were also collecting photos and the Xeroxes of photos at the same time. Then, starting with the liberation of Paris, we thought the book would start with the liberation of Paris, and then Picasso and the people that met Picasso, and Matisse. So the greats, the masters that everybody in New York had to deal with, [laughs] the artists anyway, or at least that generation. [00:10:11] We didn't, in our—what we focused on was not that generation, not the Abstract Expressionists, or the coming, although we say '45, I mean by '45, they were pretty well formed, I mean you know, and they were all born turn of the century. I think Rauschenberg was kind of the idea of a cutoff, born in '25. So anybody born we'll say between '25 and '35, say between Rauschenberg and Whitman, I mean the people but also that timespan. And then those people were the ones who were coming of age in the late '40s and early '50s, and that was the focus. And then after the war, and in Europe of course it was the decades after the war, was more relevant than say in New York, '45 to '50. You know I think we started, maybe we did the Ninth Street show, I can't remember, but probably did the Ninth Street show because that was looking forward, and then early Rauschenberg shows, which were in the early '50s, and then moving into the '60s. So it's really '50s and then up to '65, probably. I don't think we finally did the layout of the final pages, but I think maybe Rauschenberg getting the prize in Venice is one of the stopping points, but there was some stuff in '65 that maybe I don't know, we didn't quite figure out how to end it. I think Billy was anxious to get on with it, so he wasn't as interested in keeping on doing interviews. I would have done it [make interviews] forever. [00:12:00]

And then he, at that same time he got Kiki, and we were working on the new one in the '90s, he realized that—he saw these photos from Kiki's Paris that were of Picasso, and he began to look at them and realize they were wearing the same clothes and they were carrying the same things, and collected them and realized they were all taken the same day. So he set himself the task of When was this happening, When did this happen, and Can I figure this out? So partially by the shadows on the building, because the buildings are still there and you can measure the ledges and you could get—from the Observatory, he got printouts of sun angles and maps of that corner, where the people were and what they were doing, so that research. He finally, he had a timeframe from the sun information, but then using archives of Henri-Pierre Roché, who was in the picture, who wrote the thing that became Jules and Jim. He kept a diary, I mean this unbelievable diary, and so he [wrote on] August 16th, "Had lunch with Cocteau and Picasso in Montparnasse, you know Cocteau is too witty by half." And then we also found letters, and then after that we found a letter that Cocteau had written to his—he wrote his mother. No, to Valentine Hugo, and "had lunch with Picasso yesterday." That, actually, letter, was quoted in Steegmuller's biography of Cocteau, but he left out the thing about "had lunch with Picasso." He just did part of the letter so it wasn't until, I don't know, I think Anne de Margeriee had the Cocteau correspondence with Valentine Hugo, because she was doing a book on her, that we saw the full letter and there it was. [00:14:12] So then from there, Billy could use the sun angles to time the photos, and so he wrote a book, A Day With Picasso, based on those photos, that was one of the activities in the '90s.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yes. So, and then what happened after that?

JULIE MARTIN: Did we do anything? Well, in 2001, also then, we began to do E.A.T. history and people—you know, I have this thing [idea], this 40year rule, that things come back every 40 years, or people get rediscovered 40 [years later], you know, not exactly. So, there began to be an interest in the history of E.A.T., I mean essentially [by the 1990s] E.A.T. was Billy and essentially now it's me. I call it a virtual organization, I'll admit it on tape, might as well for history. But there began to be interest in What did you do? What was going on? So there was this request to do a show in [Rome titled] Tribes of Art, in Italy, and so Billy did this documentary exhibition, the Storyt of E.A.T. Actually in '83, the book that you all have in the Archives comes from an earlier, PS-1 exhibition., Alanna Heiss asked Billy to do a room, and I don't know what was going in around other [places in the building]—but there was just one room, and so he did this, What Are You Working on Now? and the title came from the fact that whenever he met people they'd say to him, "What are you working on now?" Or you would say to somebody, "What are you working on now?" [00:16:00] So it was essentially the same idea, the story of E.A.T., and then so he refined it for Italy. Irina Nakhova's husband, John Tormey, works for Applied Image, where they do large graphics, and he took these and did printouts and put it on Sintra board, so they could travel, and so when they came back from Italy, [Billy] thought of doing the show somewhere else and Ileana Sonnabend agreed to do it, we did it at Sonnabend Gallery. And then over the years, we've liked to do it at universities and schools, and people have requested it, and so we did it in [. . . Tokyo] in 2003, Billy was still alive.

Fujiko did a show on E.A.T. in Tokyo, at the ITT Building, and she incorporated the story of E.A.T. in Japanese, they reprinted the panels and then she did other—Solstice was revived because that went to the museum in Osaka and they revived that, we did the [Warhol] Silver Clouds. They built a couple of Breer's Floats. The first E.A.T. retrospective show took place after Billy died in February of 2004, or January to February, 2004. And then Marianne Hultman, who had worked with us—Billy was in Sweden at one point and he met Marianne, and he invited her to come and be an assistant, and so she came and worked with us on different projects and then went back. And she was at the museum in Norrkoping, and she organized very quickly the E.A.T. show, again based on the—part of it was what were the panels, and then other works of art that she could borrow. So that was the first of—

LIZA ZAPOL:  Of that. [00:18:03]

JULIE MARTIN: Of the E.A.T. retrospectives, so to speak.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Retrospective. And had Billy been sick?

JULIE MARTIN: Actually, he had—he'd had you know, something on his face and it was taken off in 2001, and it was malignant, but they looked in the lymph glands around it, and there was no indication. So we weren't very proactive, he just went about his life, but then in actually, it was the summer of 2004, a tumor reappeared and when they looked, his lungs were infected, and so he died quite quickly and quite easily, I mean you know calmly. Olivia, our friend, actually I just talked to her, she was here and he was planning her wedding to her current boyfriend, in our backyard, like a couple of days before he died. And so you know, it was a quite peaceful exit, so to speak, so he wasn't sick for very long. I think he was more and more not well in those years, but we traveled to Sweden and we did all sorts of stuff, and to Tokyo, so we were doing stuff.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And so you talk about the retrospective of E.A.T. happening and what else then, was happening?

JULIE MARTIN: Mainly that's what we were working on. Also, actually Billy was working on, the project we were working on together, he was—which I haven't published and I feel very guilty, but not guilty enough to do it, he was collecting his writings and he had the idea of publishing his writings. [00:20:00] Actually, I have a contract with the University of California Berkeley. I'm not sure I still have it, I haven't heard from them in about ten years but never mind. It took ten years to do Kiki, so I'm still—so, what we were doing is the Swedish stuff, we were translating, and he was writing what he called bridges, which is short introductions to—and he started out. It's so interesting, the first article is something he wrote for Al[fred] Leslie. Did you do the Al[fred] Leslie interviews?

LIZA ZAPOL:  You mean have we interviewed him?

JULIE MARTIN: No, but you didn't do them.

LIZA ZAPOL:  No.

JULIE MARTIN: He did the Hasty Papers, he did a one shot publication, and he published—Pontus Hultén wrote t "Three Great Painters", Churchill, Stalin and Hitler. No, not Stalin, Churchill and Hitler, and Eisenhower , a play on the fact that these [three were great historical figures. –JM] Billy wrote an article for it called Fragment on the Systems ["Fragment on Man and the System"], which was kind of a philosophical thing about, really about the individual's responsibility for the system. There was an individual who you know, the system exists but you can change it, which in a way was the basis of his whole philosophy. Then in the '60s, he wrote articles on art, on the artists. He wrote about Pop Art and he wrote—called the Factualist. Apparently, when they first came around, I think the Janis's called them the Factualists, because they dealt with facts, and so he wrote an article for when the Pop Art show was Pop Kunst [at Moderna Museet]. I think he wrote it, called the "Factualists.' [00:22:08] And then he wrote, just about—he wrote an article about Öyvind Fahlström, and he wrote—and then, when he worked with Rauschenberg on, Oracle, he wrote an article about that called—oh, I'm sorry, I'm blocking. Oh, [Teknologi för livet] Technology for Life. And so he had done these articles and then, as he began to get more interested in E.A.T. or working with engineers and artists working with engineers, he began to write articles about that. So we were putting together those articles and he was writing what he called Bridges, which were introductions to why and how he got from one article to the other, and I'm supposed to be editing it. I think what's holding me up is just so much of what he then wrote was about E.A.T., so how much of that do you include? I keep saying I'm going to do it. But that's what we were working on in the last days of his life, really on his kind of memoir in a sense, or written memoir, through what he wrote.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So in your decisions about what to do about and with E.A.T. after Billy died, what was your thinking at that time?

JULIE MARTIN: I just continued doing what was there. There weren't as many people asking for technical advice obviously. You had a whole new generation of artists who grew up with the technology. Now, I still think, and it's probably true when you have a collaboration with an engineer, the artist can go further obviously, but you didn't have—they weren't as cut off from it, they somehow know how to get the help perhaps, they know how to reach out, which is what actually Billy and Rauschenberg wrote in some of the first newsletters, that if we're successful, the organization can disappear. [00:24:11] And now you have universities giving art and technology courses, you have industries beginning to want to work with artists, and Nokia, Bell Labs is doing a whole program, and other places. So in a sense, some of that social progress has happened and encourage it. So after Billy died, I just continued at whatever level people wanted to engage with E.A.T., which I still do but I make no—you know it's not what it was, I mean I don't try to do a board of directors. I don't try to do it, I just let it be what people are interested in.

LIZA ZAPOL:  I'm interested, you know it's interesting that you say in some ways the mission of E.A.T. has been sort of accomplished.

JULIE MARTIN: Accomplished.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Or fulfilled.

JULIE MARTIN: And I think the other thing of course, first the artists' access the technology, and also then that other direction that we began to go in, with the Projects Outside Art. With the rise in social practice you see artists themselves beginning to be interested in engaging with others. Agnes Gund selling a Lichtenstein, and putting that money into a foundation for social justice, or artists' involvement in social injustice. I was just reading about Theaster Gates, who is this incredible, absolutely incredible person, and then other projects, and other women, I can't remember the names. There's a woman who does wonderful—Betsy Damon, who did stuff in China with water, and then another. [00:26:04] I mean but you know, you see it everywhere, so that strain of E.A.T., also has developed and I think is one of the things that E.A.T. was pushing into an area that really could go forward.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yeah. I mean, can you describe other maybe particular artists or artist communities that you see as being highly influenced or at least potentially influenced by E.A.T.

JULIE MARTIN: I don't know if they're influenced, I can't say that, I can't. I mean, I think the influence is the art historian can say it's influenced. Maybe, but I'm not saying somebody looked at Projects Outside Art and said I'm going to go work with—in the same way it kind of developed naturally with E.A.T., then it developed naturally with these artists, with their involvement with their own art and looking around them and wanting to be more involved in the society. You just had someone like Whitman and Billy, who were especially attuned to some of these things and standing outside of just the art world, somewhat outside of the art world, and maybe able to see it, or just were idealistic. With Rauschenberg too, I mean he had an idealism and a vision that takes longer for other people to get to. Why not. In that sense, I think—[phone rings.]

[END OF TRACK martin18_1of1_track12.]

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yeah, so you were saying about the ideas, this idealism.

JULIE MARTIN: Also, in the 40 years. I think you know, I told you yesterday that I just, I mean it's kind of silly in a way, but when I start writing about E.A.T. and thinking about it now, X number of years later, 40 to 50 years later, I realize that it was extraordinarily utopian. You read some of the early writings, not only the aims that Billy and Bob [Rauschenberg] wrote, but some of the early stuff in the newsletter, it was extraordinarily utopian and extraordinarily intellectual in a way that's not necessarily just about art. It's interesting, I was reading some academic was like criticizing us, saying that the aims were too highfalutin kind of thing, as opposed to what you were doing—may be true. But I think it was propelled by this—at least I was, and I think Billy, Bob [R], and Bob [W] and Fred were, and others, and Per Biorn, who continued to work with artists, were propelled by these ideas and wanting to change things.

And I think the shock of what's going on now is the fact that if you lived through the '60s, not just us but other people who were active in the '60s, the idea that for me, the individual having agency and the individual and individuals getting together to make change, and change in the society, was something you really believed in. And to see it perverted at this point, or not perverted or diverted, hopefully temporarily, at this point, is shocking and depressing, I think not only for the young people but for those of us who lived through an age which you thought was leading to not a golden age, but that you could solve problems and you could make the society better. [00:02:18] To see what's happening now is very dispiriting.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yes. We're [just a day] post-midterm elections now.

JULIE MARTIN: At least we got the House and we can stop him somewhat.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yes. So we see what hopefully there's, or perhaps there's some shift in terms of the politics of Trump and the Republicans. I wonder—

JULIE MARTIN: But as I was saying, I mean in a way E.A.T. predicted its, not demise but—well demise too, but also I think it was ahead of its time. Maybe if we'd stuck to just art and technology, and just artists, and did more and more projects, that would have, you know? But this idea that it went into a more engaging with the society and pushing, or encouraging the artist to engage with society, and met this kind of resistance, I think is relevant for the fact that it just was not as active by the mid-'70s. Also, we didn't really build up a board, we didn't build a money board. You know, it was somewhat anarchic on one level and horizontal, the way Breer talked about the Pavilion. [00:04:08] You just kept doing what you wanted to do and you went for what you wanted to do, although we did try to, as I say, get grants and things, but it just, it just, it wasn't to be.

LIZA ZAPOL:  You've said there's the 40 years [cycle]. Do you see a renewed interest in E.A.T. itself? I know you said the ideas around E.A.T. seem to be returning.

JULIE MARTIN: I think so, I don't know. You meet young people, you talk about artists working with technology, oh that's great, you know I think it's what they do, when you see the work, kids do work and they do it themselves, or they find engineers. So E.A.T., they see it as a predecessor and sort of a neat predecessor, and in the universities. Actually, what's interesting in E.A.T. is it's analog and it's physical things, and so when I talk—actually, I'm going to RISD Monday, to give "the talk." It's a little bit exciting because it is this kind of—you know, Steve Paxton called his 9 Evenings piece "Physical Things," and I really think that's so—it encompasses the work that was going on at the time. Billy, I remember when everybody was talking about digital, oh wow we're going to digitize this, and he was very skeptical and he would say, "It's just another form of modulation," and then he'd say, "And the human being is analog." So I mean he didn't see this—I mean people, in the beginning, now you all are realizing oh my God, what are we doing, but everybody thought this was going to be the savior of archives, everything, and he had a skepticism about it, that he realized that he didn't see it as the total future. [00:06:11] He didn't criticize it in the way people are beginning to understand and criticize it now, but he just had this skepticism about it, saving the world.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And how would you like E.A.T. to be viewed in the future, what is your hope for the legacy of E.A.T.?

JULIE MARTIN: I just think this concept of the positive role of the artist in society, the positive role of the artist in collaborations with other people, with engineers. That not only would you make works of art that were interesting, but you could inspire engineers to maybe make better engineering within their—maybe save the world one individual at a time. But I think the idealism, you know, which is the strength and the weakness right? But that, and the fact that just trying to let the artists do what they want and be relevant in the present. So the artists who felt they wanted to work with a new technology, engage with it, so they made works that were more relevant than oil paint on canvas, although oil paint and canvas is still very—is so powerful. But you know, it was what the artist wanted to do. So empowering the artist, I think is part of the legacy of E.A.T., and not only empowering them in working with technology but then empowering them within the society, to be able to use their skills. [00:08:03] I mean we always talked about what it was the artist had to offer, and it was the idea first, the sense of scale. You know, you wouldn't necessarily have that horrible thing in Jersey City that's 50 times taller than any other building, for example. Sense of scale, sense of personal responsibility is really important, and an artist can't say well, my painting would be better if—whereas an engineer could say well my boss made me do it, or I couldn't afford it. So this whole thing of the artist taking responsibility for his work and doing work that is for her or him, making that commitment. Those things that the artist could bring to the table, not necessarily that they could draw better than somebody else, but that they had this certain sense of material, how to use materials, economic use of materials or the best materials. So all these things that were, what do you call it, strengths of the artist, bringing into a collaboration, that's how you would like to be remembered as the legacy, I think.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Thank you. I'm also just noticing, as I'm here and you're getting phone calls from friends, and you have an incredibly social schedule where you're just incredibly involved. I wonder if you can describe for me your community.

JULIE MARTIN: Actually, after Billy died, so here, I had worked my first job out of getting my masters, or before I got my masters, with Bob Whitman, I had helped him and stayed friends with him, and so I was available and I could help in production of pieces he did, and the opportunity came about through—[00:10:22] Right after Billy died, I remember going—Bob Whitman had a show at Pace, a beautiful show, one piece was so gorgeous, the one that's still there, Line in the Sand, it just was, it spoke [to me]. Well, all his pieces do, but that was just extraordinary.

LIZA ZAPOL:  That's at Pace now, yeah.

JULIE MARTIN: An extraordinary piece, where this image of a pen is drawing a line on a cone of sand, and the video makes the sand sparkle. Incredible piece. But at that dinner or something, I met an architect, Roger Duffy at SOM, and another architect, Walter Smith, and both of them were committed to working with artists and incorporating art into the architectural projects they did. Walter in particular, was a more hands-on architect, and he worked with Bob on a project for Camden, art in high school, for art students, and some ideas about how you could do projections and things. He also was working with a developer called Richard Baker, who had malls, but also was interested in art. Maybe through one of—James Turrell did lighting for a library that Walter did, and so through Walter, Whitman met Richard Baker, and he wanted something on his—he lives in Connecticut, actually near Peter Brant, the Artforum, ex-Artforum guy. [00:12:10] He has a collection and he invites people to come see it. Richard lives in the same gated community. So they met and Bob Whitman started developing a piece for Richard Baker, of a moon, it's up in a tree and there's a projection of the moon, and then he did a series of those for Pace. And then Richard said let's—Bob, performance is what he wants to do, and so it turned out, let's do a performance, and Bob got this idea to do Local Report from—in five different malls, where he set up in empty stores in malls that Richard owned around New York City. And people went out with video phones and we programmed the video phone—Shawn Van Every at NYU ITP [New York University Interactive Telecommunications Program], again, bringing in engineers, which Whitman does all the time, programmed the phone so it would send 20 [. . . seconds] of video to the Internet site, and then would call. And Bob would answer the phone and the person would describe something they were seeing, not necessarily what they had videoed. The videos were playing one at a time and he was answering the calls, and so you had sound and picture different. This was recorded, and so we did it at five [places]—so I helped Bob, actually Anne-Olivia [Le Cornec]from France, was here, and so she was my assistant and we would pack the car and go to these different places. I was working with Bob and there were a couple of other—actually, we had been in Leeds in 2003 and he did a cell phone piece, and Billy gave a talk and we were there. [00:14:08] Then in '04, he did another piece called Antenna, in Leeds, this is after Billy had died, and so I went to that and helped him out.

And so for the few years, I was helping—helped produce Whitman's stuff, which is fun, I love doing the production. And then more recently, I've been working with Sylvia Palacios Whitman, who had not been performing for a number of years, but then there was a show at the Whitney [in 2013] that dragged her back into being an artist. Babette Mangolte's photos [of the 1980s,] and she showed them to Jay Sanders, and Jay got in touch with Sylvia and she said okay. And so she's been doing performances, so I've been working with her and still working with her. I mean I go and manage her ,but not really, because it's not a company, it's like Sylvia and me figuring out what to do. In an upcoming event, she has friends in Chile, who are inviting her to Chile to perform, and then some KunstFestSpiele in Germany wants her in May [2019], so we'll do that, we're figuring how to do that. So I've been having fun working on production again, which I really enjoy.

LIZA ZAPOL:  What are the new—what are the performances that she's creating now?

JULIE MARTIN: Well she's been reviving things she did in the '70s and early '80s, but she's doing a new piece for this, for Germany, called Origami Tango. She has these incredible ideas, I mean she's just—you know the things she did in the '70s, she does very short pieces, very clear images. The green hands, she has a piece called Green Hands, where she has these oversized flat green glove hands that she just very simply comes out and manipulates them. [00:16:10] Cup and Tail, she puts a fox tail that she attaches to herself and she has a cup, and we put dry ice and [water to make] steam, and she just walks out with steaming water. So it's very clear, a lot of things are very short but very clear imagery. The Origami Tango, she wants people—she wants a crane and a dragon that does a very—then they'll be wearing the costumes and do a very slow tango. She's working with a Chilean composer, Diego Las Heras, to do the [music for the] tango. So that's a new piece and she just keeps having new ideas, so she wants to do some stuff here, so we'll see.

LIZA ZAPOL:  That sounds fun. What is the collaboration like with her, with Whitman, what is that like at this point?

JULIE MARTIN: Just helping, making it possible, helping with the writing. With Bob?

LIZA ZAPOL:  With Bob Whitman, yes.

JULIE MARTIN: With Bob, for the—he did a Local Report in Paris, the last one was for a show at the Louvre, and so we found, Anne-Olivia found, students who would go out. We had a meeting, told them what to do, they went out and did 20 second videos of places around Paris, and then there would be a piece of clothing that they would focus on, and then Bob, at the Louvre, played the four channels of their videos and then two people wearing the clothes came in and just kind of watched it. Quite simple, and so we arranged, find the people, got them to download the app that would do the 20 seconds, and I think they also call, did they call and talk? [00:18:09] I think so, I think there was sound, I can't quite remember, but so just production. With Sylvia, mainly because she knows what she's doing, these are pieces she's done before, it's a matter of the scheduling, the shipping of stuff, just details, and then when you get there, you help her figure out how to do it and the order of things and where people should stand, and how to come in and out, that kind of thing, just very mundane things that make it work.

LIZA ZAPOL:  That sounds like fun too.

JULIE MARTIN: It is, it really is. That's the thing, it's so much fun, it's hard to stay home and write. [They laugh.]

LIZA ZAPOL:  So as we're nearing the end here, you know I had mentioned your community and I know that just from talking to you, that you have an expansive, expanded community.

JULIE MARTIN: What did happen in the '80s, when the East Village, the artists began to—it's sort of interesting. Mimi Gross did—when they did the Times Square show, you know they took over the building in Times Square and that was one of the public beginnings, there was stuff before. So she did a series of ceramics of the soldiers who died when they were trying to take people out of Iraq, I think. One of them, I'm not sure which one, but one of the—this is what, eight or ten people died, so she did—and so through her, I guess I found out about the show, so we went to the show and it was again, it was the next generation that was becoming socially active and political, and that appealed to Billy and me, and to me also. [00:20:03] So I got to know some of those people. Becky Howland, Christy Rupp, Kiki Smith, the women, and just began to go to some of those shows. Then, I've stayed friends with Becky and when Billy and I got married, we didn't get married until '85, I asked Becky to do souvenirs for the wedding and she made the diamond and a pentagon out of plaster and that was Mr. and Mrs. Reagan. The diamond was Nancy Reagan and the Pentagon was Reagan and his GE—I think it says GE on it or something, and then we were married in Nashville and you can imagine, giving people these things as souvenirs, but that's okay.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Tell me more about your wedding.

JULIE MARTIN: Oh, Lord, it was 110 in the shade, and some friends came down, and Bob Rauschenberg was the best man, yeah, was Billy's best man, he came. It was in the backyard of our house and then Billy wanted to dance outside, it was 104, we did not dance outside, we came inside in the air conditioning. No, that was it, but I decided that it would be nice to have souvenirs.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So who were the guests?

JULIE MARTIN: Beside a lot of Nashville people, Bob Breer came, Mimi, I think. God I can't, I really, I just don't remember.

LIZA ZAPOL:  But you remember the heat.

JULIE MARTIN: I remember the heat. And then, I remember Bob Breer was wonderful, and Mimi, and I think Ritty Burchfield. [00:22:02] Anyway, I remember when taking the vows and Billy misheard the—it was a southern justice of the peace and I think he sad "" so as long as you both shall live," and Billy heard "as long as I want to." [They laugh.] And Breer said he broke up, and so that was one of the foolishnesses of the wedding. And actually, my sister decided she was going to do it as a surprise wedding, and so she set it—I don't know what happened, and so then I had to scramble at the end to sort of invite other people. I don't remember. That's why we got the van and people came down, six or seven people came down, friends of mine, and a lot of friends of mother's, because you know she still lived in—not people I knew necessarily but you know it was friends of mother's who would be interested in her daughter finally getting married. They kept coming up to me saying "Well, he made an honest woman out of you." These old southern guys, because we'd been together since, I don't know the mid-'70s or something, but it was very funny.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yeah, so we got into it. That is funny and it is funny just kind of circling back—

JULIE MARTIN: Right, exactly.

LIZA ZAPOL:  —to your family and your upbringing in that way.

JULIE MARTIN: Yeah, and I'm still close to one sister, to Terry, and so I've stayed friends with these younger artists. Actually, one of the projects I did recently, speaking of interviews, James Fuentes did a show commemorating the Real Estate Show, and ABC No Rio, and Becky helped put all this together. That's the new generation you've got to start talking to, Becky Howland, Kiki Smith, well Kiki, probably you've done, but Becky Howland and Bobby G., and Cara Pearlman, I mean that whole group, Christy Rupp, maybe you already have, but the East Village. [00:24:18]

LIZA ZAPOL:  Some of them, yes.

JULIE MARTIN: But anyway, he did the show and then Becky got the idea we should interview these people, so she and I did a whole project and I interviewed a lot of those people, video interviews of people who were in the Real Estate Show, and so I have that material that nothing has been done with, but we did do those interviewed a couple of years ago, kept going and got them, got people who had been in the Real Estate Show, and got that whole story, so that's sort of neat.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yeah, so you were saying like you started to get very interested in those artists as well.

JULIE MARTIN: Yeah, and friends with them and going to the shows and following it. Then, you know there's a lapse, although mainly stayed friends with Becky more than—but then she had this idea of doing interviews. We haven't done anything with it yet but you know. Listen, you get the material, that's the main thing.

LIZA ZAPOL:  That is the main thing.

JULIE MARTIN: The main thing is to get it.

LIZA ZAPOL:  You know I agree with you.

JULIE MARTIN: I'd forgotten that that was a project that I did with her.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Well, I'm mindful of time and that you've really been so generous.

JULIE MARTIN: Listen, I keep thinking of things.

LIZA ZAPOL:  I know you do.

JULIE MARTIN: It's crazy.

LIZA ZAPOL:  So yes, I mean perhaps we should stop for today.

JULIE MARTIN: Sure.

LIZA ZAPOL:  But I wonder if there are any other things that you want to make sure that you say or share today, before we wrap up.

JULIE MARTIN: I can't think. It's better to—I mean I do think of things but Billy did continue this interest in—or we did continue this interest in underdeveloped countries. [00:26:13] We were invited to not Costa Rica, not Guatemala. He went to Guatemala on a USIA group of people, about television, and he discovered the first thing people buy after shoes and a bed is a TV, and radio, and how you could use TV and radio to do that. And then we went to El Salvador.

LIZA ZAPOL:  How you could use TV and radio to?

JULIE MARTIN: To do education, spread education. Someone we met, and I can't remember how we met him, who was connected with the Ministry of Culture in El Salvador, a young kid, invited Billy and me to come down and we talked about recording indigenous culture that was disappearing, and how you could do that, and how you could do a TV station that would begin to send out people to record indigenous culture. I just remember these projects, and so that interest in developing countries and in the culture continued.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Continued from also, your work in India.

JULIE MARTIN: I mean under the aegis of E.A.T. probably, but it was very much you know, Billy's bringing other people in if he could, or did. So that was something I was trying to think of. I can't—that's—

LIZA ZAPOL:  That makes me think of, you know also, I think you said there are many projects, sometimes there's much to learn from the projects that didn't happen as much as the ones that did. [00:28:08]

JULIE MARTIN: Right, yes, exactly. I say it because architects, sometimes their best buildings or good buildings, are the ones that didn't get built, and sometimes buildings that don't get built get prizes actually. So you know, like I think the USA Presents, it's really a neat project that didn't get done, and some of the other proposals that we made that didn't get funded or get done, or are interesting just for the intellectual content, and looking forward.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yeah, and as we've talked about with the interviews and research that you've done, that is so valuable.

JULIE MARTIN: Oh yeah, I've been an archivist, I really have, exactly, interviews that people can use in the future, I think that's really important. You have to figure out how to have them not disappear of course.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Exactly.

JULIE MARTIN: Print them out. Paper has a much longer chance of—

LIZA ZAPOL:  Doesn't it, yeah, that's right.

JULIE MARTIN: It's very sad.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Well here we are, we're marking this interview for the future, so thank you.

JULIE MARTIN: Thank you, I'm honored to do it, I am indeed, to be part of it.

LIZA ZAPOL:  And I'm honored to have been listening to your stories, so thank you, Julie, and we're signing off.

JULIE MARTIN: Okay.

[END OF TRACK martin18_1of1_track13.]

LIZA ZAPOL:  Okay, so continuing the conversation. Of course, we thought of five things, but we'll talk about a few things that we both wanted to discuss.

JULIE MARTIN: One of the things that we started in the '90s was to—we were cleaning out the basement and Billy discovered 60-millimeter footage of 9 Evenings that he had asked Alfons Schilling to shoot. Alfons was an Austrian artist who was here in New York, and he helped Öyvind on some of his props, building the props for Kisses Sweeter Than Wine, and was around. I don't know if he was a filmmaker or not, but Billy asked him to shoot and he did an amazing job, considering he had no idea what was going on and it was dark a lot of the time. So we had this footage, it was all cut up because right after the performances, they made a film. I think Billy, Bob R. and Bob W. helped Alfons edit two and a half minutes of each performance, so the outtakes were all in little pieces, et cetera. Billy asked Bob and the Rauschenberg Foundation sponsored the digitizing, or at least putting it onto one-inch video, you didn't put it into the computer at the time, you put it onto video. Maybe then it was the computer, yeah but anyway, whatever. And then, but first to do that, Barbro Schultz Lundestam, Billy asked her—she had—she was a publisher in Sweden [she published Kiis paris in Swedish] but she was also a television person and a filmmaker. And Billy had met her, and he asked her if she wanted to work on the 9 Evenings films, and so she came here and we rented a portable, oh what's the one, the editing that nobody does any more? [00:02:22] Portable Steenbeck, and reassembled each of the [artists'] pieces, at least into—every artist had a role of the footage of his or her piece, not necessarily in order, we had it digitized, and then we worked to recreate the performances.

There also were recordings of each of the performance, separate from the video, so we had the sound as well, and so we started the process of making the films. Barbro, the first one, she got a grant from the Swedish Cultural—somebody in Sweden, and so we started with Öyvind, which was the most complicated, but we were able to make that film, which is like 50 minutes reconstructed, from his script, et cetera. And then Billy's idea was to do the performance and then a documentation afterwards, so there was performance and then we interviewed Rauschenberg and some of the other people, Billy and Rauschenberg, and did a short documentary, and this is the format for all the others. And so throughout the '90s, we tried to raise money, et cetera, et cetera, to make—so we made the Rauschenberg, and then in the 2000s, we made Cage and Tudor, and we worked with—Fredericka Hunter had a label [Artpix], to publish DVDs, art on DVD, and she agreed to issue the DVD,s so we have DVDs of Tudor, Rauschenberg and Cage. Unfortunately, the wife of Öyvind Fahlström didn't give permission to release the film, so it's never been released on DVD, and we've slowly tried to finish up the others. [00:04:12] So that was an activity of the '90s and into the 2000s.

Then, at some point, and I do not even remember when, I worked with Simone, maybe it was in California, somewhere where she did some of her other—well a piece called Cloths, where she has three, there are three stands, with a piece of cloth maybe four by six feet, or four by five feet, hanging, and people are behind these stands and they sing a song of their own choice and they flip over the cloth, and so the cloths. I worked with her, maybe it was in New York, I can't remember, but I did work with her on choosing and building that piece, and I do not remember where it was performed. That was at some point, I don't know when, but we can look it up maybe. But then in 2004 the museum MOCA, I think it was MOCA, not LACMA, I don't remember, was doing a show and then Simone performed the dance constructions that she had done, at Yoko [Ono's] loft. Well actually some were at Yoko's Loft, and two she also did at Reuben Gallery 60, 61.  Pooh Kaye was in the midst of making a documentary about Simone, herself, and a third person, so three generations of artists that were aligned with each other. [00:06:00] And so we got the idea that we'd go out and we'd film Simone's performances, and so I went out with Pooh, and we were able to get good cameramen and good sound, and filmed it, and then ArtPix, , Fredericka Hunter's organization, released the DVD, so it's great because it's really extraordinary documentation of Simone's early work, which by the way, has been acquired by MoMA, and MoMA is now working out, how do you keep it alive and how do you keep bringing new people in to learn it so they can transmit it. For a museum it's a first, except that much earlier Beaubourg together with Dia acquired Bob Whitman's, American Moon, the American Moon, and they have not done a lot about keeping the props, because we tried—we did it at Fridman Gallery about a year ago and the projectors didn't work, so we digitized [the films] it and this kind of thing. So this whole issue of keeping performance alive, even if a museum owns it, becomes a very—it's being addressed now but it's not easy.

LIZA ZAPOL:  How did you address it in that show at the Fridman Gallery?

JULIE MARTIN: Well, talking to Bob. No, they had—Bob agreed to let us do video, although now he doesn't like the idea, and when we did it in France at the Louvre, he wanted film projectors, one of which, oh God, right in the middle [of the piece] the reel came off, and the guys were amazing, they just kind of made it possible for the film to go, not be heard, and they just let it continue. [00:08:04] There's no guarantee, even with mechanical things, so I don't know, probably at a certain point you should do a really high res [digital]version. I think I did just, I went to the local DuArt, and so it wasn't that high res, just to get it done, but some of the props were there and then Bob was able to—the white shoes, women had to wear white heels and things like that, you could reconstruct, we had to because the feet are different. There doesn't seem to be an effort to really make sure there are people who could teach it, but MoMA has been extraordinarily careful about that, and long interviews with Simone and designated somebody to be the one who teaches other people. You know, so it's—they're really doing—

LIZA ZAPOL:  The transmission of physical memory in some way.

JULIE MARTIN: The transmission, exactly, you have to do it, do it that way probably. You can't just work from video.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Yeah. That's an interesting question, again in terms of archiving and stewarding these works.

JULIE MARTIN: Exactly. The Merce Cunningham people, they still have people around who can set dances on new people, and I think they've decided that's the way to do it. Trisha Brown, they're still performing, but I don't know what, they're going to have to work out something like that for some of the iconic pieces. It's not easy. Yvonne, I don't know, Yvonne Rainer, what do you do? So that generation has really reached that critical stage.

LIZA ZAPOL:  You said Bob doesn't want to have, in terms of the documentation, what does he want? [00:10:00]

JULIE MARTIN: Oh actually, this thing for Prune Flat, I'm not sure, it's his daughter who said it didn't look that good, and so he went along with Pilar. But in his film pieces, he's perfectly happy to have it—the film is now video, so in the Shower and the Window, and the other pieces, it's video, and he really, he goes along with upgrading. Although he said about using the Nokia cell phones in 2005, that he likes the fact that it will never look that bad again. We did video in 2012 and it looks completely different, and the video even in 2015.

LIZA ZAPOL:  From phones, right, exactly.

JULIE MARTIN: From the early phones.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Two thousand five was like the beginning of video phone.

JULIE MARTIN: The very beginning, Nokia gave us the phones, it was the first video phone. The standard wasn't set and sometimes it would go faster, slower, different frame rates. But you know he accepts that, he accepts what the technology will give you, and he liked the idea that it's unique and that you won't be able to—but, and I think if it was absolutely necessary and no film projector in the world, he would be okay to digitize, and particularly now, since things can be 4K, it can be almost better than film. He hadn't addressed it lately but we did, in France, we did have to do it with projectors and oh, those poor guys. One kind of failed, but they didn't miss a beat, it was most professional, and I was in the audience too, so I kind of knew something was happening over there, but they were very quiet about it.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Well that's, I guess with performance it just keeps going, right?

JULIE MARTIN: You try, exactly.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Right.

JULIE MARTIN: Exactly.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Except when it floods, right? [00:12:03]

JULIE MARTIN: Water. I was just thinking that, exactly, there are certain times that you don't want to kill people. [Reference to Two Holes of Water -2 at Lincoln Center in 1966. –JM]

LIZA ZAPOL:  All right.

JULIE MARTIN: I think Bob finally realized that it was dangerous, and something could short.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Even if the performance is fantastic, sometimes it had to end. Well, and this performance is fantastic, but is there anything else that's come to mind as we're talking?

JULIE MARTIN: I'm trying to think, I'll look at my pictures. I can't think. I don't see anything.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Well, I'm sure there are more.

JULIE MARTIN: I'm sure there are.

LIZA ZAPOL:  We'll continue the correspondence.

JULIE MARTIN: Okay. I don't think there's anything.

LIZA ZAPOL:  Okay.

[END OF TRACK martin18_1of1_track14.]

[END OF INTERVIEW.]