Tearing Down the Walls of Their World: MoMA’s ‘Looking at Music’

Robert Rauschenberg’s goal of operating “in the gap between life and art,” famously uttered in 1959, anticipates the less polite mantra of the ’60s: Tear down the walls. For artists, the walls in question were the divisions between aesthetic conventions and empirical experience, between the museum space and the world at large, and, not least, the barriers among the various media. In the mid-’60s, new electronic-music technologies and the invention of the Portapak (a handheld video camera) opened up new musical possibilities for artists — and not just formally trained musicians such as Laurie Anderson and Nam June Paik, but others caught up in the blossoming rock culture of the time.