In a Summer Frenzy

The painters' hall in the Art for Art workshops in Vienna's Arsenal is filled with a glow: Half the surface of the gigantic hall is covered by a recreation of a work of art by Robert Rauschenberg. In 1958, Rauschenberg designed the summer landscape shimmering with thousands of colored dots - a frenzy of colors sprayed onto a gigantic canvas that congenially underlines the atmosphere of the choreography that can be seen from 9 April as part of the Vienna State Ballet premiere Pathétique: Merce Cunningham's Summerspace .

The piece for six dancers to a composition by Morton Feldman is one of the outstanding testimonies to a collaboration that Rauschenberg described as "the rare experience" of working with "extraordinary people under unique conditions and in completely unpredictable places (all acceptable because of the mutual obsessive desire to create and share)". The working method that united the artists was inspired by the aleatoric principles of chance, developed primarily by John Cage - also a partner of Cunningham, not only in art but also in life. In chance, Cage and Cunningham saw the possibility of cultivating an attitude of neutrality instead of the artist's ego and of gaining strong, independent partners for works that were not characterized by the shared experience of creative processes, but by the freedom of complete independence. Everything that came into being - spatially separated from each other - flowed into the work. It was not the power of musical inspiration that set Cunningham's dancers in motion, but the act of a complete liberation from Feldman's composition. And Rauschenberg also provided Cunningham with only one idea for a stage design: "One thing I can say with certainty about the piece is that it has no center."

How it came about that in the case of Summerspace , at the premiere on August 17, 1958 at the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College New London, everything came together wonderfully. How everything came together wonderfully in the case of Summerspace at the premiere on August 17, 1958 as part of the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College New London - the airy movements of the dancers in space, with their leaps and turns reminiscent of birds in flight, the almost casually dabbed sounds of Feldman and the pointillist landscape, which Rauschenberg, thinking of the effect of camouflage, also transferred to the costumes - remains the secret of art and its artists.

Today, Summerspace is one of those works from the fertile period of the New York avant-garde of the 1950s that have a firm place in the dance canon of the 20th century. The work was regularly performed not only in the repertoire of the Cunningham Dance Company, but also in productions by many renowned companies worldwide. The Vienna State Ballet has now joined their ranks and - following the premiere of Cunningham's Duets 2022 at the Volksoper Wien - will present Summerspace , the first work by the choreographer, at the Vienna State Opera. In addition to studying Cunningham's special technique and the dancers' learning of the choreography, a major theme of this rehearsal is the reproduction of Rauschenberg's design - an unusual task for Domenico Mühle, who works for Art for Art.

Trained at the Zurich Vocational School of Design and the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the Swiss artist, who also works as a freelance visual artist and shows his work in exhibitions, is one of the very special masters among theater painters - a discipline full of special challenges, as the tasks not only consist of creating designs in various styles for the stages of the federal theaters on often huge surfaces, but also of thinking about which colors, which application techniques and which color densities are necessary to create a brochure, The task is not only to implement designs in a wide variety of styles for the stages of the Bundestheater on often huge surfaces, but also to think about which colors, which application technique and which color intensities and densities are necessary so that a brochure or a painted wall appears in the artificial theater light as the stage designer has imagined it.

Domenico Mühle's creativity and research were also initially required for the re-creation of Rauschenberg's Summerspace : Which of the circulating templates came closest to Rauschenberg's original design? Which colors should be used? How does the pointillist color frenzy retain the serial character of a picture composed of thousands of dots and still show a dynamic?

Rauschenberg's original, located in New York's Walker Arts Center, and templates provided by the Merce Cunningham Trust served Mühle as a guide for the implementation of the design, for which he developed a 3 x 3 meter stencil with punched perforations in two sizes. If you watch him as he applies the specified fluorescent fluorescent paints layer by layer to the huge 20-metre wide and 12.50-metre high canvas using a special spray gun known as an "air brush", this painterly act is already a choreography. After around four weeks of intensive work, Domenico Mühle estimates that this "summer frenzy" will leave the Art for Art workshops and unfold its magic on the stage of the Vienna State Opera for the first time. "It was a very special experience for me to be able to immerse myself so intensively in the spirit of an artist like Robert Rauschenberg with my theater painting," he reveals with shining eyes.

Summerspace is one of the most beautiful and brightest testimonies to Rauschenberg's and Cunningham's collaboration on the stage of the Vienna State Opera. At the same time, however, Summerspace is only one aspect of this connection, which encompasses over twenty joint projects. The freedom of collaboration means that Rauschenberg's stage designs always reflect his purely artistic work at the same time. For Cunningham's Minutiae (1954), for example, he used his so-called "Combines", in which he collaged the two-dimensionality of painting with the three-dimensionality of sculpture. In Aeon (1961), the combination of a kinetic machine made of scrap metal and stroboscopic light demonstrates his interest in the relationship between art and technology. The monumental stage set for Cunningham and Cage's Travelogue (1977), entitled Tantric Geography, with its row of chairs, a bicycle wheel and colorful silk fans, is reminiscent of the recurring color wheels in Rauschenberg's oeuvre and his Jammer series (1975/76). Robert Rauschenberg would have been one hundred years old on October 22, 2025.

"When I talked to Bob Rauschenberg about the set, I said: 'One thing I can say for sure about the piece is that it has no center ...'. And so he designed a pointillist background and equally pointillist costumes."