Robert Rutman
| Robert Rutman | |
|---|---|
| Born |
15 May 1931 Berlin, Germany |
| Known for | sculpture, music, painting, etching |
| Movement | sound art, contemporary classical music, industrial music, minimalism |
| Website | http://www.rutman.de/flash5.html |
Robert "Bob" Rutman (born 15 May 1931) is a German-American visual artist, musician, composer, and instrument builder. Best known for his work with homemade idiophones in his Steel Cello Ensemble, Rutman is regarded as a pioneer of multimedia performance in his mixing of music, sculpture, film, and visual art.
Born in 1931 Berlin, Rutman's mother was a Jewish actress and his father a Bulgarian brownshirt who died in 1933. When the Third Reich came to power, he and his mother fled Germany, moving to Warsaw in 1938 and then to Finland just before Hitler invaded Poland. By way of Sweden, Rutman arrived in England in 1939 where he attended refugee schools throughout the Second World War. After completing his studies in 1950, Rutman moved to New York City in 1950, then had to return to West Germany for military service in 1951.
In 1952 Rutman returned to the U.S. and worked as a traveling salesman in Dallas, Texas, before moving to Mexico City to enroll in art school. He married in Mexico and had a son, Eric. In 1962 Rutman returned to New York where he opened a gallery on Charles Street called "A Fly Can't Bird But A Bird Can Fly", which presented poetry, theater, music, and visual art as multimedia events. Rutman's collaborators included beat poet Philip Lamantia, who mentions Rutman in his poem, "The night is a space of white marble", and sculptor Constance Demby, with whom he made his first sound sculptures in 1966.
In 1967 Demby and Rutman held several happening-style events that mixed sonic, visual, and performance art centered around big sheets of metal that the artists had found. In one piece called "The Thing", Rutman wore a white cardboard box and banged on Demby's sheet-metal creation with "a rock in a sock." In another piece entitled "Space Mass", Rutman projected film upon a piece of curved sheetmetal onto which Demby had welded several steel rods that she played as a percussion instrument. Rutman later remarked, "We thought it would sound good as a xylophone, but it didn't." Rutman would later make adjustments to the sheet metal-and-rod contraption, converting it into a fully playable and tunable idiophone.
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