A study of human behaviour through a somnambulist’s eye.
Like figurines of a fashionable making
I sit on the parapet of a window on high.
Looking down, a sight towered by my comprehension,
and through crevices in the sky’s clods –
I see mankind.
Legacies of urban realms –
Artisan memories carved on landscapes.
Debauched skylines of tonight, commuting with the last fragments of a day’s lusts.
Who are these novices in life’s monastery?
Who bred their vulturous beauties and serpentine consorts with manes blown in the derelict winds of suburbia?
But Mind says:
Life goes down this road, and it flows towards weird places and painted avenues where lies can drive you by. Yet
Whistles and mused kisses from below this city’s pride can’t make men of us.
And it is here that dreams scandalised by ghosts bear fruit.
You can bed any wench and still cower from profanity’s smite.
The here-after and silhouettes that seem gorgeous are paling now.
Radio-active sunsets of the Cosmopolis gleam like stars on windscreens.
And I am at ease with pain’s reverie driven by, where others cross and die.
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Stan Brakhage
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Brian Frye is a filmmaker, curator and writer living in Washington DC.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If Maya Deren invented the American avant-garde cinema, Stan Brakhage realized its potential. Unquestionably the most important living avant-garde filmmaker, Brakhage single-handedly transformed the schism separating the avant-garde from classical filmmaking into a chasm. And the ultimate consequences have yet to be resolved; his films appear nearly as radical today as the day he made them.
Brakhage was born in 1933, and made his first film, Interim (1952), at 19. Notably prolific, he has completed several films most years since. To date, his filmography lists over 300 titles, ranging in length from a few seconds to several hours.
Born in Kansas City, Missouri, attended high school in Central City, Colorado. He briefly attended Dartmouth College then left for San Francisco, where he enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). He had hoped to study under Sidney Peterson., but unfortunately, Peterson had left the school and the film program was no more, so Brakhage moved on.
Like Deren, Brakhage came to understand film through poetry, and his earliest films do resemble those of Deren and her contemporaries. The early American avant-garde filmmakers tended to borrow liberally from the German Expressionists and Surrealists: mannered acting, symbolism/non sequitur, non-naturalistic lighting and psychosexual themes were common. Still fundamentally story-oriented, these films tend to use a loose, non-linear narrative and dramatic situations to establish metaphorical relationships between images. Deren's films are closest to those of the Surrealists: though she rejects their often cynical nihilism, her films are steeped in portentous Freudian symbolism.
Brakhage's early films are more primal. There is no evidence of the Expressionist-inspired preciousness of the pre-WWII American avant-garde filmmakers, and his invocation of Freudian ideas, while omnipresent, is much blunter than Deren's. For Deren's cerebral idealism, Brakhage substitutes a rawer, psychologized version of reality. Many of Brakhage's films from this period are very good, but they are overshadowed today by the films they begat.
While Brakhage's early films stress psychological themes--the conflict between wish-dream and reality, for example--and retain a strongly dramatic element, they provide frequent glimpses of the formal leap that soon followed.
Despite a rapidly deepening reservoir of ideas, avant-garde film retained a strong connection to the commercial cinema. European avant-garde filmmakers had long made liberal use of photographic effects and trick photography. But nothing they did formally was at all unfamiliar to the commercial cinema, which was quick to pick up on their ideas. But if strange photographic effects are one thing, turning celluloid into a plastic medium was something else altogether.
Brakhage was among the first filmmakers to physically alter the filmstrip itself for metaphorical effect. The most striking example of this technique in his early films occurs in Reflections on Black (1955), which imagines the dream-vision of a blind man as he walks through a city, climbs the stairs of his apartment building and arrives home. Brakhage signals the blindness of his protagonist by physically scratching out his eyes, and splices in bits of film negative to convey the sense of experience the world as a blind man might, not as something seen, but something pictured.
Shortly before making Reflections of Black, Brakhage moved to New York City. That same year, the film critic Parker Tyler introduced Brakhage to Joseph Cornell, who commissioned him to shoot a film of the soon to be dismantled Third Avenue El. Working for the first time without actors or plot, Brakhage began to focus on the expressive qualities of the medium itself. The film which resulted, Wonder Ring (1955), represents Brakhage's first step toward his radical reconception of the cinema. There is no story, no protagonist, no linear narrative other than the train itself, traveling endlessly along its track. It is a perfect expression of the world defined by the train, and a peculiarly apposite metaphor for the bare logic of narrative itself.
Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, and eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the 'beginning was the word.'
With this opening paragraph to his seminal manifesto Metaphors on Vision, Brakhage called into being an entirely new kind of cinema, where none had existed previously. Suddenly, an epistemological question loomed where none had before: What is the nature of the relationship between the moving image and the world, and how might it be represented? Brakhage intended to film not the world itself, but the act of seeing the world. The vast majority of Brakhage's films are entirely silent. When you watch his films, you are asked to look, and look closely. Where his predecessors used metaphor as a means of relating images to one another, Brakhage's films were themselves expressions of a single, great metaphor: visual perception.
These questions were by no means unique to Brakhage--they were in fact the catalyst for modern art--but he was the first to realize their implications for the cinema in a body of truly great works of art. In Anticipation of the Night (1958), one sees Brakhage's first clearly articulated expression of his concept of the vision of the 'untutored eye.' While retaining the barest elements of narrative, in this work Brakhage entirely dispenses with the drama, in order to better capture raw experience. The 'shooting script' for the 40 minute film consists of a list of 16 concepts, rather than specific shots. Where his earlier films approximated dreams, Anticipation of the Night captures the dreamlike quality of raw experience, the world as it happens and is taken in and understood, willy-nilly.
While making Anticipation of the Night, Brakhage married Jane Collum, who was to become his muse, and the primary subject of his films for many years. Easily the best known of these is Window, Water, Baby, Moving (1959), a document of Jane's pregnancy and the birth of their first child. Family, and the rituals of family life, became the predominant themes of Brakhage's films for many years. Birth, sex, and death are the three touchstones of all of his films. In Thigh, Line, Lyre, Triangular (1961), Brakhage again documents the birth of one of his children, and their passage through infancy and childhood is a consistent theme. Several of Brakhage's films focus on sexual relations, not only between a man and wife, but among friends, and the proto-sexual aspects of childhood. In other films he examines the rituals surrounding death and the body which remains after the being has departed. Sirius Remembered (1959), which documents the gradual dissolution of the corpse of the family dog, and The Dead (1960), made in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, prefigure several later films which return to this same theme.
Brakhage's most ambitious projects of the early '60s were Dog Star Man (1961-64) and The Art of Vision (1961-64), essentially one film articulated two different ways. Dog Star Man definitively marks the transition from a lyrical style, centered on individual experience, to a more epic style, with a focus on broad metaphysical themes. Roughly speaking, the film expresses a mythic conception of the struggle and fall of Man. Made in four parts, with a prelude, Dog Star Man incorporates many layers of superimposition and a dense, rapid editing pattern. The Art of Vision consists of exactly the same material as Dog Star Man, but separates the superimposed reels of film in various combinations. As the elements of the film gradually build and cascade into one another, one begins to see the connections between the elements more and more clearly, how and why certain themes are repeated, and the simultaneously epic and analytic quality of the film itself.
Since completing The Art of Vision, Brakhage's films have become consistently more metaphysical. Even his celebrated Pittsburgh trilogy, completed in 1971, which purported to document three city institutions, at its core deals with metaphysical questions of Being. The three films: Eyes, Deus Ex, and The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes, document the police, a hospital and a morgue, respectively. All focus on the mechanics of the body: how it is ordered in life, how it is repaired when broken, and what remains when the person who animates it has perished. The key image of The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes is quite likely the bluntest statement on the human condition ever filmed. In the course of an autopsy, the skin around the scalp is slit with a scalpel, and in preparation for exposing and examining the brain, the face of each cadaver is literally peeled off, like a mask, revealing the raw meat beneath. That image, once seen, will never leave you.
The feature-length The Text of Light (1974) consists entirely of abstracted patterns of light photographed through a thick, deep-green ashtray. Anticipating his non-photographic abstract films of the '80s and '90s, it reduces photography to its ratio ultima, the influence of light on photographic emulsion.
...in photographing this ashtray for instance, I'm sitting for hours to get 30 seconds of film. I'm sitting watching what's happening and clicking a frame, and sitting and watching, and further than that, I had shot several hundred feet and they seemed dead. They didn't reflect at all my excitement and emotion and feeling. They had no anima in them, except for two or three shots where the lens which was on a tripod, pressed against the desk, had jerked. Those were just random, but what gave me the clue. What I began doing was always holding the camera in hand. For hours. Clicking. Waiting. Seeing what the sun did to the scene. As I saw what was happening in the frame to these little particles of light, changing, I would shoot the camera very slightly.
In recent years, Brakhage has focused largely on painting, scratching and drawing directly on the surface of the film strip itself. In eschewing photography altogether he focuses more directly on the bare act of perception. These films recall the paintings of abstract expressionists like Pollock, Klein, Motherwell and Rothko, and pack the same visceral punch. If you've ever stood in front of a great Rothko, and felt yourself falling in, the experience of watching the best of Brakhage's hand-painted films is very similar.
I now no longer photograph, but rather paint upon clear strips of film – essentially freeing myself from the dilemmas of re-presentation. I aspire to a visual music, a 'music' for the eyes (as my films are entirely without sound-tracks these days). Just as a composer can be said to work primarily with 'musical ideas,' I can be said to work with the ideas intrinsic to film, which is the only medium capable of making paradigmatic 'closure' apropos Primal Sight. A composer most usually creates parallels to the surroundings of the inner ear--the primary thoughts of sounds. I, similarly, now work with the electric synapses of thought to achieve overall cathexis paradigms separate from but 'at one' with the inner lights, the Light, at source, of being human.
Stan Brakhage died of cancer on March 8, 2003, in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City is in the process of preserving all of his films. His last finished film, Stan's Window, is a photographed self-portrait. Brakhage left behind the beginning of another film, The Chinese Series, composed of 35mm black leader he had scratched with his fingernails. The film was to end wherever he stopped scratching.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
© Brian Frye, Spetember 2002
Brian Frye is a filmmaker, curator and writer living in Washington DC.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If Maya Deren invented the American avant-garde cinema, Stan Brakhage realized its potential. Unquestionably the most important living avant-garde filmmaker, Brakhage single-handedly transformed the schism separating the avant-garde from classical filmmaking into a chasm. And the ultimate consequences have yet to be resolved; his films appear nearly as radical today as the day he made them.
Brakhage was born in 1933, and made his first film, Interim (1952), at 19. Notably prolific, he has completed several films most years since. To date, his filmography lists over 300 titles, ranging in length from a few seconds to several hours.
Born in Kansas City, Missouri, attended high school in Central City, Colorado. He briefly attended Dartmouth College then left for San Francisco, where he enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). He had hoped to study under Sidney Peterson., but unfortunately, Peterson had left the school and the film program was no more, so Brakhage moved on.
Like Deren, Brakhage came to understand film through poetry, and his earliest films do resemble those of Deren and her contemporaries. The early American avant-garde filmmakers tended to borrow liberally from the German Expressionists and Surrealists: mannered acting, symbolism/non sequitur, non-naturalistic lighting and psychosexual themes were common. Still fundamentally story-oriented, these films tend to use a loose, non-linear narrative and dramatic situations to establish metaphorical relationships between images. Deren's films are closest to those of the Surrealists: though she rejects their often cynical nihilism, her films are steeped in portentous Freudian symbolism.
Brakhage's early films are more primal. There is no evidence of the Expressionist-inspired preciousness of the pre-WWII American avant-garde filmmakers, and his invocation of Freudian ideas, while omnipresent, is much blunter than Deren's. For Deren's cerebral idealism, Brakhage substitutes a rawer, psychologized version of reality. Many of Brakhage's films from this period are very good, but they are overshadowed today by the films they begat.
While Brakhage's early films stress psychological themes--the conflict between wish-dream and reality, for example--and retain a strongly dramatic element, they provide frequent glimpses of the formal leap that soon followed.
Despite a rapidly deepening reservoir of ideas, avant-garde film retained a strong connection to the commercial cinema. European avant-garde filmmakers had long made liberal use of photographic effects and trick photography. But nothing they did formally was at all unfamiliar to the commercial cinema, which was quick to pick up on their ideas. But if strange photographic effects are one thing, turning celluloid into a plastic medium was something else altogether.
Brakhage was among the first filmmakers to physically alter the filmstrip itself for metaphorical effect. The most striking example of this technique in his early films occurs in Reflections on Black (1955), which imagines the dream-vision of a blind man as he walks through a city, climbs the stairs of his apartment building and arrives home. Brakhage signals the blindness of his protagonist by physically scratching out his eyes, and splices in bits of film negative to convey the sense of experience the world as a blind man might, not as something seen, but something pictured.
Shortly before making Reflections of Black, Brakhage moved to New York City. That same year, the film critic Parker Tyler introduced Brakhage to Joseph Cornell, who commissioned him to shoot a film of the soon to be dismantled Third Avenue El. Working for the first time without actors or plot, Brakhage began to focus on the expressive qualities of the medium itself. The film which resulted, Wonder Ring (1955), represents Brakhage's first step toward his radical reconception of the cinema. There is no story, no protagonist, no linear narrative other than the train itself, traveling endlessly along its track. It is a perfect expression of the world defined by the train, and a peculiarly apposite metaphor for the bare logic of narrative itself.
Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, and eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the 'beginning was the word.'
With this opening paragraph to his seminal manifesto Metaphors on Vision, Brakhage called into being an entirely new kind of cinema, where none had existed previously. Suddenly, an epistemological question loomed where none had before: What is the nature of the relationship between the moving image and the world, and how might it be represented? Brakhage intended to film not the world itself, but the act of seeing the world. The vast majority of Brakhage's films are entirely silent. When you watch his films, you are asked to look, and look closely. Where his predecessors used metaphor as a means of relating images to one another, Brakhage's films were themselves expressions of a single, great metaphor: visual perception.
These questions were by no means unique to Brakhage--they were in fact the catalyst for modern art--but he was the first to realize their implications for the cinema in a body of truly great works of art. In Anticipation of the Night (1958), one sees Brakhage's first clearly articulated expression of his concept of the vision of the 'untutored eye.' While retaining the barest elements of narrative, in this work Brakhage entirely dispenses with the drama, in order to better capture raw experience. The 'shooting script' for the 40 minute film consists of a list of 16 concepts, rather than specific shots. Where his earlier films approximated dreams, Anticipation of the Night captures the dreamlike quality of raw experience, the world as it happens and is taken in and understood, willy-nilly.
While making Anticipation of the Night, Brakhage married Jane Collum, who was to become his muse, and the primary subject of his films for many years. Easily the best known of these is Window, Water, Baby, Moving (1959), a document of Jane's pregnancy and the birth of their first child. Family, and the rituals of family life, became the predominant themes of Brakhage's films for many years. Birth, sex, and death are the three touchstones of all of his films. In Thigh, Line, Lyre, Triangular (1961), Brakhage again documents the birth of one of his children, and their passage through infancy and childhood is a consistent theme. Several of Brakhage's films focus on sexual relations, not only between a man and wife, but among friends, and the proto-sexual aspects of childhood. In other films he examines the rituals surrounding death and the body which remains after the being has departed. Sirius Remembered (1959), which documents the gradual dissolution of the corpse of the family dog, and The Dead (1960), made in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, prefigure several later films which return to this same theme.
Brakhage's most ambitious projects of the early '60s were Dog Star Man (1961-64) and The Art of Vision (1961-64), essentially one film articulated two different ways. Dog Star Man definitively marks the transition from a lyrical style, centered on individual experience, to a more epic style, with a focus on broad metaphysical themes. Roughly speaking, the film expresses a mythic conception of the struggle and fall of Man. Made in four parts, with a prelude, Dog Star Man incorporates many layers of superimposition and a dense, rapid editing pattern. The Art of Vision consists of exactly the same material as Dog Star Man, but separates the superimposed reels of film in various combinations. As the elements of the film gradually build and cascade into one another, one begins to see the connections between the elements more and more clearly, how and why certain themes are repeated, and the simultaneously epic and analytic quality of the film itself.
Since completing The Art of Vision, Brakhage's films have become consistently more metaphysical. Even his celebrated Pittsburgh trilogy, completed in 1971, which purported to document three city institutions, at its core deals with metaphysical questions of Being. The three films: Eyes, Deus Ex, and The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes, document the police, a hospital and a morgue, respectively. All focus on the mechanics of the body: how it is ordered in life, how it is repaired when broken, and what remains when the person who animates it has perished. The key image of The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes is quite likely the bluntest statement on the human condition ever filmed. In the course of an autopsy, the skin around the scalp is slit with a scalpel, and in preparation for exposing and examining the brain, the face of each cadaver is literally peeled off, like a mask, revealing the raw meat beneath. That image, once seen, will never leave you.
The feature-length The Text of Light (1974) consists entirely of abstracted patterns of light photographed through a thick, deep-green ashtray. Anticipating his non-photographic abstract films of the '80s and '90s, it reduces photography to its ratio ultima, the influence of light on photographic emulsion.
...in photographing this ashtray for instance, I'm sitting for hours to get 30 seconds of film. I'm sitting watching what's happening and clicking a frame, and sitting and watching, and further than that, I had shot several hundred feet and they seemed dead. They didn't reflect at all my excitement and emotion and feeling. They had no anima in them, except for two or three shots where the lens which was on a tripod, pressed against the desk, had jerked. Those were just random, but what gave me the clue. What I began doing was always holding the camera in hand. For hours. Clicking. Waiting. Seeing what the sun did to the scene. As I saw what was happening in the frame to these little particles of light, changing, I would shoot the camera very slightly.
In recent years, Brakhage has focused largely on painting, scratching and drawing directly on the surface of the film strip itself. In eschewing photography altogether he focuses more directly on the bare act of perception. These films recall the paintings of abstract expressionists like Pollock, Klein, Motherwell and Rothko, and pack the same visceral punch. If you've ever stood in front of a great Rothko, and felt yourself falling in, the experience of watching the best of Brakhage's hand-painted films is very similar.
I now no longer photograph, but rather paint upon clear strips of film – essentially freeing myself from the dilemmas of re-presentation. I aspire to a visual music, a 'music' for the eyes (as my films are entirely without sound-tracks these days). Just as a composer can be said to work primarily with 'musical ideas,' I can be said to work with the ideas intrinsic to film, which is the only medium capable of making paradigmatic 'closure' apropos Primal Sight. A composer most usually creates parallels to the surroundings of the inner ear--the primary thoughts of sounds. I, similarly, now work with the electric synapses of thought to achieve overall cathexis paradigms separate from but 'at one' with the inner lights, the Light, at source, of being human.
Stan Brakhage died of cancer on March 8, 2003, in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City is in the process of preserving all of his films. His last finished film, Stan's Window, is a photographed self-portrait. Brakhage left behind the beginning of another film, The Chinese Series, composed of 35mm black leader he had scratched with his fingernails. The film was to end wherever he stopped scratching.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
© Brian Frye, Spetember 2002
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
An Anthology: The Education of Mr. Fluxus
The well-publicized angst of the Abstract Expressionist painters, laid bare on canvas and by in-fighting among themselves, rose from inner demons and newfound success. John Cage and colleagues, just as fiercely focused on their art as the Ab Ex’ers, labored unheralded during this same period, feeling besieged, misunderstood, and as a result, banded together for mutual support.
Many of these artists, including George Brecht, Dick Higgins and Alan Kaprow, came together at the New School for Social Research in 1956, where Cage began teaching a class on Composition. In a 1988 interview I did with Kaprow, I asked him about John Cage and the class he took with him at the New School.
“He was a kind of train station. People would sort of gather there and wait for the next train. I actually was a student of his. That was not the case with all of them. Many of them were occasional visitors. But I was already teaching at Rutgers by then. That was 1957, and I knew him slightly. Knew his work, of course. But at that point, I was trying to introduce a richer range of sound into the environmental stuff that I was doing parallel with the early happenings that were done. So I went to the class – I had been on a mushroom hunt with him, that’s what it was, with George Brecht, who was a neighbor of mine at that time in New Jersey – and I asked John at that time about the problems I was having with the sounds. There were mechanical gadgets that I had gimmicked up as best I could, you know, those wonderful toys the Japanese made – gorillas that growl, cows that moo, and things like that – and these were interesting, but after awhile they got boring, rather mechanical and expected, so I asked him what to do. And he said, ‘Why don’t you come to the class next week.’
I drove in for the class, and he explained rather quickly that I could use tape decks, a half dozen cheap tape decks, make all the sounds in advance, and put them on in some sort of random order, or program them as I wanted, and then distribute loud speakers around the room, and these things would have a much greater richness, done in a collage fashion, which I could understand readily, having done that, then any of the mechanical toys I had done. So I thought that was – he explained it in five minutes. You just take sticky tape and stick all these things together which you’ve previously recorded and put into envelopes. And he said, ‘Why don’t you stay for the class?’ Fine, I said.
At the end of the class, I was so fascinated with what was going on I asked him if I could attend it regularly, and he said, ‘Sure.’ And that’s where I actually did the first proto-happenings with the participation of the rest of the class members. Everyone was given homework every week and came in with a piece. And that’s where I began doing that sort of work.”
Kaprow’s happenings defined the era, serving up the first serious salvo against the sovereignty of the Abstract Expressionists. It took painting out of the studio and into an environment mixed with sound, dance, concept, sculpture, paving the way for the inter-medial decade to come, host to a multitude of new movements including Pop Art, Minimal Art, Earth Art, Conceptual Art, Op Art, Video Art, Visual Poetry, Mail Art, et al.
By the beginning of the sixties, experiments with old and new creative mediums exploded. In Cage’s wake, music became sound and sound reduced to silence. Lou Harrison, La Monte Young and others were incorporating Eastern influences into their compositions. Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell began investigating the new medium of television, trailblazing the development of Video Art. Poetry was turned on its head by the concrete experiments of Emmett Williams, Bern Porter and Jackson Mac Low. Henry Flynt was talking about something called Concept Art. Dick Higgins invigorated the term “intermedia.” Yoko Ono and George Brecht were touting “events” and “instructions” as art.
With the waning of Abstract Expressionism as a dominate decade long American Art movement, it seemed as if the center would not hold, and something new was slouching to be born. Kaprow’s happenings became a mainstream hit, part of the “crazy beatnik” art scene. Pop Art, with Warhol as superstar, became the darling of media, society and investment firms, alike. Little noticed at the time was the development of Fluxus, an attempt to link the disparate radical underground of cultural New York and beyond.
It’s renovation nearly killed him, certainly hastened his death, but in 1962 George Macunias, a Lithuanian immigrant, renovated and opened the AG Gallery with his friend Almus Salcius. Maciunas had attended a class in 1959 taught by the composer Richard Maxwell at the New School for Social Research, who had taken over the composition course taught by John Cage. He consulted on the gallery’s programming with the assistant teacher of the class, La Monte Young, who had already staged a series of performances at Yoko Ono’s loft.
“He was just a great guy, but as far as art was concerned I had to teach him everything he knew practically. He didn’t know what to present. I remember Henry Flynt and I were telling him one day, he was saying to Henry and me, ‘I want to present (Otto) Luening and (Vladimir) Ussachevsky.’ He said, ‘Why I can’t present something that represents the way I feel?’ I would say, ‘I don’t want to be lost back there in the past with these guys, I want to present the kind of work that I understand is going on today and is the cutting edge of the avant-garde.’
I published Henry’s first essay on concept art in An Anthology, which was a collection of scores, poetry, dance constructions, and other avant-garde work that I had collected on my desk in Berkeley for performances. When I came to New York I continued to collect.”
(An Interview with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela By Gabrielle Zuckerman, American Public Media, July 2002.)
Macunias used the collection that La Monte Young had gathered as a foundation on which to bond the international avant-garde, one of whom was the American poet Emmett Williams, then living in Germany.
“La Monte Young had seen some of my concrete poems in a book called Movens published by Limes Verlag in Wiesbaden in 1960, an anthology of avant garde writers, artists and composers. La Monte wrote to me for permission to reprint some of this work in an anthology he was editing in New York. His An Anthology, a source-book of early Fluxus classics, was designed by George Maciunas. And George Maciunas, the Lithuanian-born father of Fluxus, invited me to join Fluxus at the world’s first Fluxus festival in Wiesbaden in 1962. I love the way all these things are interrelated! What networking – even way back then!” (interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2004)
When the poet Chester Anderson, publisher of Beatitude, exited New York for California in 1959, he asked La Monte Young to edit Beatitude East, knowing that the radical musician had been collecting performance scores from friends in Berkeley and New York. In this he was aided by Jackson Mac Low, who had attended Cage’s composition course at the New School for Social Research, and worked at the Living Theater with Julian Beck and Judith Malina.
When Beatitude East failed to materialize, Maciunas stepped into the void.
Mac Low and Young provided Maciunas with connections to a new ideology rising from the ashes of the “beat generation”, encouraging him not only to present radical programming at AG Gallery, but to design An Anthology, composed of the materials co and prompting him to organize the 1962 Fluxus Festival in Wiesbaden, Germany, to present some of the performative works found in An Anthology.
Maciunas supplied the paper, design and some money for the publishing of An Anthology, according to Henry Flynt, and had it ready for printing by October 1961. It was finally published by Young and Mac Low in 1963 as:
AN ANTHOLOGY of chance operations concept art anti-art indeterminacy improvisation meaningless work natural disasters plans of action stories diagrams Music poetry essays dance constructions mathematics compositions, BY GEORGE BRECHT, CLAUS BREMER, EARLE BROWN, JOSEPH BYRD, JOHN CAGE, DAVID DEGENER, WALTER DE MARIA, HENRY FLYNT, YOKO ONO, DICK HIGGINS, TOSHI ICHIYANAGI, TERRY JENNINGS, DENNIS, DING DONG, RAY JOHNSON, JACKSON MAC LOW, RICHARD MAXFIELD, ROBERT MORRIS, SIMONE MORRIS, NAM JUNE PAIK, TERRY RILEY, DITER ROT, JAMES WARING, EMMETT WILLIAMS, CHRISTIAN WOLFF, LA MONTE YOUNG/LA MONTE YOUNG – EDITOR/GEORGE MACIUNAS – DESIGNER.
The first edition (A second edition was reprinted in 1970 by Heiner Friedrich) contained 67 leaves and three inserts. It included multicolored and onionskin paper, card stock and two envelopes. The text was printed in offset with a heavy paper cover, collated manually with a staple and perfect binding.
The very first work contained in An Anthology, “Motor Vehicle Sundown (Event),”by George Brecht, is dedicated to John Cage. Cage himself contributes the work, “Excerpt from 45’ for a Speaker,” which contains the line, “The thing to do is keep the head alert but empty.” Being alert to ones surrounding and culture without preconceived expectation, best summarizes an approach furthering appreciation of An Antholgy.
What other way than to approach the poem by Diter Rot (aka Dieter Roth), “White Page with Holes,” composed of irregularly sized punched circles into an insert of heavier paper than the bound pages? The inserts of Rot, La Monte Young’s, “Composition 1960 #9,” printed on an envelope attached to the book’s endpaper, and an uncredited musical score, fall out of the world of bookworks and into that of the artist multiple, which Maciunas was to develop after publication of An Anthology.
Maciunas had fully assimilated lessons learned through Young’s research material, contacting many of the artists, taking their ideas on the road with him to Wiesbaden and planning for a follow-up publication to be called “Fluxus.”
Maciunas edited from a new generation of experimental artists in New York and beyond to create a functioning cadre of cultural workers. Maciunas gathered them under the banner of Fluxus, more attitude then movement, with a revolving cast of characters allowing Maciunas to present and promote performances, publications, film screenings, street actions, multiples and exhibitions both nationally and abroad.
Designing An Anthology was an education for Maciunas. It not only brought him into contact with the most challenging artists of his era, but by absorbing their new visionary art, helped him to conjure “the most radical and experimental art movement of the sixties.”
John Held, Jr.
San Francisco
2010
Many of these artists, including George Brecht, Dick Higgins and Alan Kaprow, came together at the New School for Social Research in 1956, where Cage began teaching a class on Composition. In a 1988 interview I did with Kaprow, I asked him about John Cage and the class he took with him at the New School.
“He was a kind of train station. People would sort of gather there and wait for the next train. I actually was a student of his. That was not the case with all of them. Many of them were occasional visitors. But I was already teaching at Rutgers by then. That was 1957, and I knew him slightly. Knew his work, of course. But at that point, I was trying to introduce a richer range of sound into the environmental stuff that I was doing parallel with the early happenings that were done. So I went to the class – I had been on a mushroom hunt with him, that’s what it was, with George Brecht, who was a neighbor of mine at that time in New Jersey – and I asked John at that time about the problems I was having with the sounds. There were mechanical gadgets that I had gimmicked up as best I could, you know, those wonderful toys the Japanese made – gorillas that growl, cows that moo, and things like that – and these were interesting, but after awhile they got boring, rather mechanical and expected, so I asked him what to do. And he said, ‘Why don’t you come to the class next week.’
I drove in for the class, and he explained rather quickly that I could use tape decks, a half dozen cheap tape decks, make all the sounds in advance, and put them on in some sort of random order, or program them as I wanted, and then distribute loud speakers around the room, and these things would have a much greater richness, done in a collage fashion, which I could understand readily, having done that, then any of the mechanical toys I had done. So I thought that was – he explained it in five minutes. You just take sticky tape and stick all these things together which you’ve previously recorded and put into envelopes. And he said, ‘Why don’t you stay for the class?’ Fine, I said.
At the end of the class, I was so fascinated with what was going on I asked him if I could attend it regularly, and he said, ‘Sure.’ And that’s where I actually did the first proto-happenings with the participation of the rest of the class members. Everyone was given homework every week and came in with a piece. And that’s where I began doing that sort of work.”
Kaprow’s happenings defined the era, serving up the first serious salvo against the sovereignty of the Abstract Expressionists. It took painting out of the studio and into an environment mixed with sound, dance, concept, sculpture, paving the way for the inter-medial decade to come, host to a multitude of new movements including Pop Art, Minimal Art, Earth Art, Conceptual Art, Op Art, Video Art, Visual Poetry, Mail Art, et al.
By the beginning of the sixties, experiments with old and new creative mediums exploded. In Cage’s wake, music became sound and sound reduced to silence. Lou Harrison, La Monte Young and others were incorporating Eastern influences into their compositions. Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell began investigating the new medium of television, trailblazing the development of Video Art. Poetry was turned on its head by the concrete experiments of Emmett Williams, Bern Porter and Jackson Mac Low. Henry Flynt was talking about something called Concept Art. Dick Higgins invigorated the term “intermedia.” Yoko Ono and George Brecht were touting “events” and “instructions” as art.
With the waning of Abstract Expressionism as a dominate decade long American Art movement, it seemed as if the center would not hold, and something new was slouching to be born. Kaprow’s happenings became a mainstream hit, part of the “crazy beatnik” art scene. Pop Art, with Warhol as superstar, became the darling of media, society and investment firms, alike. Little noticed at the time was the development of Fluxus, an attempt to link the disparate radical underground of cultural New York and beyond.
It’s renovation nearly killed him, certainly hastened his death, but in 1962 George Macunias, a Lithuanian immigrant, renovated and opened the AG Gallery with his friend Almus Salcius. Maciunas had attended a class in 1959 taught by the composer Richard Maxwell at the New School for Social Research, who had taken over the composition course taught by John Cage. He consulted on the gallery’s programming with the assistant teacher of the class, La Monte Young, who had already staged a series of performances at Yoko Ono’s loft.
“He was just a great guy, but as far as art was concerned I had to teach him everything he knew practically. He didn’t know what to present. I remember Henry Flynt and I were telling him one day, he was saying to Henry and me, ‘I want to present (Otto) Luening and (Vladimir) Ussachevsky.’ He said, ‘Why I can’t present something that represents the way I feel?’ I would say, ‘I don’t want to be lost back there in the past with these guys, I want to present the kind of work that I understand is going on today and is the cutting edge of the avant-garde.’
I published Henry’s first essay on concept art in An Anthology, which was a collection of scores, poetry, dance constructions, and other avant-garde work that I had collected on my desk in Berkeley for performances. When I came to New York I continued to collect.”
(An Interview with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela By Gabrielle Zuckerman, American Public Media, July 2002.)
Macunias used the collection that La Monte Young had gathered as a foundation on which to bond the international avant-garde, one of whom was the American poet Emmett Williams, then living in Germany.
“La Monte Young had seen some of my concrete poems in a book called Movens published by Limes Verlag in Wiesbaden in 1960, an anthology of avant garde writers, artists and composers. La Monte wrote to me for permission to reprint some of this work in an anthology he was editing in New York. His An Anthology, a source-book of early Fluxus classics, was designed by George Maciunas. And George Maciunas, the Lithuanian-born father of Fluxus, invited me to join Fluxus at the world’s first Fluxus festival in Wiesbaden in 1962. I love the way all these things are interrelated! What networking – even way back then!” (interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2004)
When the poet Chester Anderson, publisher of Beatitude, exited New York for California in 1959, he asked La Monte Young to edit Beatitude East, knowing that the radical musician had been collecting performance scores from friends in Berkeley and New York. In this he was aided by Jackson Mac Low, who had attended Cage’s composition course at the New School for Social Research, and worked at the Living Theater with Julian Beck and Judith Malina.
When Beatitude East failed to materialize, Maciunas stepped into the void.
Mac Low and Young provided Maciunas with connections to a new ideology rising from the ashes of the “beat generation”, encouraging him not only to present radical programming at AG Gallery, but to design An Anthology, composed of the materials co and prompting him to organize the 1962 Fluxus Festival in Wiesbaden, Germany, to present some of the performative works found in An Anthology.
Maciunas supplied the paper, design and some money for the publishing of An Anthology, according to Henry Flynt, and had it ready for printing by October 1961. It was finally published by Young and Mac Low in 1963 as:
AN ANTHOLOGY of chance operations concept art anti-art indeterminacy improvisation meaningless work natural disasters plans of action stories diagrams Music poetry essays dance constructions mathematics compositions, BY GEORGE BRECHT, CLAUS BREMER, EARLE BROWN, JOSEPH BYRD, JOHN CAGE, DAVID DEGENER, WALTER DE MARIA, HENRY FLYNT, YOKO ONO, DICK HIGGINS, TOSHI ICHIYANAGI, TERRY JENNINGS, DENNIS, DING DONG, RAY JOHNSON, JACKSON MAC LOW, RICHARD MAXFIELD, ROBERT MORRIS, SIMONE MORRIS, NAM JUNE PAIK, TERRY RILEY, DITER ROT, JAMES WARING, EMMETT WILLIAMS, CHRISTIAN WOLFF, LA MONTE YOUNG/LA MONTE YOUNG – EDITOR/GEORGE MACIUNAS – DESIGNER.
The first edition (A second edition was reprinted in 1970 by Heiner Friedrich) contained 67 leaves and three inserts. It included multicolored and onionskin paper, card stock and two envelopes. The text was printed in offset with a heavy paper cover, collated manually with a staple and perfect binding.
The very first work contained in An Anthology, “Motor Vehicle Sundown (Event),”by George Brecht, is dedicated to John Cage. Cage himself contributes the work, “Excerpt from 45’ for a Speaker,” which contains the line, “The thing to do is keep the head alert but empty.” Being alert to ones surrounding and culture without preconceived expectation, best summarizes an approach furthering appreciation of An Antholgy.
What other way than to approach the poem by Diter Rot (aka Dieter Roth), “White Page with Holes,” composed of irregularly sized punched circles into an insert of heavier paper than the bound pages? The inserts of Rot, La Monte Young’s, “Composition 1960 #9,” printed on an envelope attached to the book’s endpaper, and an uncredited musical score, fall out of the world of bookworks and into that of the artist multiple, which Maciunas was to develop after publication of An Anthology.
Maciunas had fully assimilated lessons learned through Young’s research material, contacting many of the artists, taking their ideas on the road with him to Wiesbaden and planning for a follow-up publication to be called “Fluxus.”
Maciunas edited from a new generation of experimental artists in New York and beyond to create a functioning cadre of cultural workers. Maciunas gathered them under the banner of Fluxus, more attitude then movement, with a revolving cast of characters allowing Maciunas to present and promote performances, publications, film screenings, street actions, multiples and exhibitions both nationally and abroad.
Designing An Anthology was an education for Maciunas. It not only brought him into contact with the most challenging artists of his era, but by absorbing their new visionary art, helped him to conjure “the most radical and experimental art movement of the sixties.”
John Held, Jr.
San Francisco
2010
Monday, October 18, 2010
Mr. Fluxus
Essay: Julia E. Robinson
Julia E. Robinson
George Maciunas: Desigen on Fluxus George Maciunas is best known today as the “impresario” of Fluxus: an international group of artists whose first members came together in 1962 for an inaugural concert series at Wiesbaden, Germany (not far from the epicenter of New Music in Darmstadt). Hardly a regular “concert,” the “Fluxus Festspiele Neuester Musik” – as Maciunas called it, upping the stakes of New Music, by claiming this to be the “Newest” Music – introduced an extensive array of the most radical scoring practices of the day, enacted by a group of young artists from the United States, Korea, Germany and Lithuania. The Fluxus group would come to include more nationalities and more women than any avant-garde since Dada. The first concert series happened at Wiesbaden because Maciunas was based there and he set about to organize it; he gathered the scores to be presented, rallied the artists, arranged the venue, designed the poster, promoted the event and performed in it. In fact, the word “impresario” does little to explain the work the Lithuanian émigré did for Fluxus. Rather, it has mostly been a way for scholars to avoid the difficult territory of how and with what to credit George Maciunas. The unorthodox range of tasks Maciunas undertook to organize Fluxus has generated debate between Fluxus artists as well as historians about his proper title and whether or not he warrants the description of “founder” or “leader.” For simplicity’s sake, Maciunas is often called an artist, but the role he adopted among artists resists this classification. As a trained graphic designer with broad political ambitions, Maciunas’ Fluxus work – designing posters, flyers and labels, compiling editions and multiples, drawing up calendars of activities, writing and circulating “news (policy) letters,” and planning and directing concerts – suggests a complex and hybrid “authorial” model that would suspend the term “artist” or reveal it to be beside the point. Rather than imposing conventional terms onto the figure of Maciunas, as debates about his proper title in Fluxus would do, it is perhaps more useful to examine this hybrid role he devised for himself, its fundamental motivations and its legacy. Re-Presenting History To appreciate what Maciunas brought to Fluxus and how he positioned it at all levels, it is essential to look back briefly at his training and early ideas about the role of history and its (re)presentation. A postwar émigré from Kaunas, Lithuania, Maciunas came to the United States in 1948 settling in New York.1 Over the course of a decade, beginning in 1949, Maciunas studied graphic design at New York’s Cooper Union, architecture at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, and finally, art history at New York University’sInstitute of Fine Arts. During this time, he developed a passionate interest in genealogical charts. Producing them became a monumental project running parallel to his studies and informing them.
The charts were a magnum opus for the young Maciunas, a feat of utter commitment, diligence and exhaustive attempts to master a vast body of information. The scale of some of the early charts is breathtaking. The final dimensions of his “Atlas of Russian History,” tracking the major changes in the Russian state up to the Revolution, were six by nine feet, and his “History of Art” chart, from the Visigoths to Modernity, came in slightly larger at six by twelve feet. These were great fields of pasted paper, which projected the information laterally while also extending into three dimensions in towers and accordion structures filled with gridded text (the precursors of the formats for his Fluxus compendia). As movable, architectonic, genealogical models, Maciunas’ charts emancipated the student of history, placing the structuring of knowledge in his own hands and those of every future reader. Through the charts Maciunas acquired a thorough grounding in Art History, which undoubtedly emboldened him to judge the status of art in his own historical moment. He called the charts “Learning Machines” and ultimately considered them among the most important work of his life.2 Some years later, Maciunas brought his passion for charting history to his work on Fluxus, giving Fluxus a genealogy of its own. In addition to drawing up a number of charts positioning Fluxus within a trajectory of 20th century avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes, he continued to use the chart structure for his overall organization of the group’s activities. The rigor with which Maciunas crafted the Fluxus charts framed this seemingly cryptic and ephemeral project in terms of its historical relevance as well as giving it a kind of “readymade” place in history. In an important late interview with Fluxus artist Larry Miller, Maciunas explained one of these charts, acknowledging the central position of John Cage:
So, you see, this chart is just a culmination of other charts I’ve done in the past for other histories…. In the vertical line is shown the years and the horizontal layout shows the style. So you can point on the chart to any activity, pinpoint it exactly with this grid of time and style. Now it could also be… I’ve done charts which… vertically is shown time and horizontally geographical location. This way you could say any activity of the past, you could locate exactly on the chart where it happened and when. Now for this chart I chose rather style than location because the style is so unlocalized… mainly because of the travels of John Cage. So you could call the whole chart … “Travels of John Cage” like you could say “travels of St. Paul,” you know? Wherever John Cage went he left a little John Cage group, which some admit, some not admit his influence. But the fact is there, that those groups formed after his visits. It shows up very clearly on the charts.3 After this, he goes on to fill in the picture at the prompt of Miller’s questions, situating first Cage and then Fluxus with reference to Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, and the relevant postwar movements: from the first Happenings (in Japan in the 1950s – the Gutai Group), to French Nouveau Réalisme and then back to the U.S. with figures surrounding Cage such as La Monte Young and many artists who would ultimately join Fluxus. Designs for Radical Practice In October 1960, Maciunas was meeting with a group of compatriots at the gallery of his friend Almus Salcius in Long Island to discuss prospects for a Lithuanian cultural club. In the end, the group decided to make a magazine and “Fluxus” was the name George (Jurgis) proposed for it.4 Maciunas went on to start an exhibition space with his friend Almus, called the AG Gallery (Avant-Garde? Almus & George?) at 925 Madison Avenue in New York City. The idea of presenting Lithuanian culture did not last long and Maciunas took over the programming of the gallery (albeit conservatively at first). After attending composer Richard Maxfield’s electronic composition class of 1960 at The New School for Social Research, and meeting La Monte Young, the program for the gallery changed radically and Maciunas started showing future Fluxus artists and having Young program concerts there. Young not only exposed Maciunas to a whole range of new and exciting work – Yoko Ono, Henry Flynt, George Brecht, Dick Higgins and others – he also gave him a chance to see how these radical scoring practices might figure as an object of graphic design, asking him to be the designer for a new collection of scores he was editing, which came to be called An Anthology. Out of this collaboration, Maciunas discovered much of the work he would gather together under the banner of Fluxus the following year. He kept the idea of a publication called Fluxus for a long time, though the proposed content changed as much as Maciunas’ ideas about art did in this period. “Ever since he had become friends with three Lithuanian colleagues, namely Jonas Mekas, Almus Salcius and Stanley Buetens… he had wanted to become the editor of a journal of his own.”5 The first chance at this was in the designing of An Anthology. Maciunas approached this work with zealous commitment to economy, insisting “contributions were to be copied on colored, almost square copy paper, pasted together and sold as a low cost book.”6 He typed the entire book on his IBM Executive typewriter but within its pages there were many innovative approaches to presentation, including little envelopes containing scores, loose pages with cut-outs, etc. This would be the beginning of many more adventurous design projects for Fluxus, which were part book, part poster, part object. As Maciunas explained to Miller:
We couldn’t include everything that we had collected by then, like it didn’t have Bob Watts and … had very little things by George Brecht and so I thought I would go ahead and make another publication with all the pieces that were not included in Anthology. More or less newer pieces. But La Monte wasn’t interested in doing a second Anthology book. So the initial plan was just do another, like a second Anthology book except graphically it would have been a little… less conventional than the first one, which means it would have had objects and… a different kind of packaging. So really then the idea germinated to use the whole book as bound envelopes with objects in the envelopes. See, we had a couple objects already in the first Anthology, you know, like the loose Diter Roth machine holes, things like that. A little envelope with [the] card of La Monte Young [Composition # 10, 1960 To Bob Morris – draw a straight line and follow it.], another envelope with a letter in it, you know, so things like that. Card that have to be cut up ….7 This format came to inspire the first compilations of the collective works of Fluxus: Fluxus I and the Fluxus Yearboxes. Fluxus I consists of envelopes containing contributions from the artists with foldout parts. It was bolted together and encased in a wooden box. In an amusingly self-deprecating comment on the innovative format, Maciunas stated that the contents were “like an accordion, it just keeps falling out and being in your way.”8 After the prototypes were complete, Maciunas assembled subsequent copies on demand (from 1964-mid-1970s). Maciunas conceived and worked on these first Fluxus publications and others, such as the complete collection of George Brecht scores, called Water Yam [1963] while he was in Germany. Since they were so complex to make, and he did not always have the funds to proceed, he decided to organize concerts of Fluxus scores and contextual work as publicity for the immanent arrival of the published material. This concept initiated the performance practice of concerts and festivals that has animated and defined the Fluxus group from 1962 to the present.9
The first events explicitly called “Fluxus” (at Wiesbaden) ranas a series of fourteen concerts (September 1-23, 1962) and others followed at Amsterdam, Dusseldorf and Paris. With the a number of artists there to perform the scores of both present and absent authors – Nam June Paik, Alison Knowles, Emmett Williams, Benjamin Patterson, Dick Higgins and Maciunas – the spectrum of activity was broad enough that the scope for Fluxus was glimpsed. As previously mentioned, Maciunas’ strategy on this occasion, to draw attention to the concert, was to connect it with New Music. This was highlighted in the poster he designed, which read “Fluxus Festspiele Neuester Musik,” with white text on a black ground naming all the scores to be performed and listing their composers. More than mere “publicity” for the forthcoming publications, which ultimately did not come out in these first months, the performances drew scandalous attention and a number of misunderstood impressions from audiences and the press. This may have been due to the selection of scores, which themselves were rather extreme and often performed in somewhat hyperbolic ways. Paik’s Zen for Head, for example, involved dipping his head, hands and tie into a bucket of paint and tracking it along a long scroll of paper, which he did manically, sending the audience into fits of laughter. And the finale, Phillip Corner’s Piano Activities, which called for performers to “play,” “scratch or rub,” “pluck or tap,” “drop objects” on, “act on strings,” “strike soundboard, pins, lid or drag various kinds of objects across” and “act in any way on underside of piano,” ended by an excess of enthusiasm, with the total destruction of the piano. There were undoubtedly aspects of many of the pieces, performed here for the first time, which might have superficially conjured Dada (as the press observed). But Fluxus had almost nothing to do with Dada, and ways were found to clarify this important distinction as the concerts were repeated. The “problem” of Dada, had been identified just one year earlier in Darmstadt, when Theodor Adorno gave his lecture “Vers une musique informelle,” enumerating the contemporary reasons for its critical disqualification. As Adorno saw the situation, any anti-art sentiment expressed, in the postwar period, as a direct action “in contrast to its Dadaist grandparents… degenerates at once into culture…”.10 He explained that “this is dictated by the impossibility today of the politics on which Dadaism still relied. Action Painting and Action Composing,” said Adorno, “are cryptograms of the direct action that has now been ruled out; they have arisen in an age in which every such action is either forestalled by technology or recuperated by an administered world.”11
In Fluxus, however, the intervention of the score was the crucial agent of mediation, the marker of the enactment as indirect action. It was important that the line Paik painted in his animated performance was indeed not a direct action he had spontaneously devised, but rather, an interpretation of La Monte Young’s Composition #10, 1960 To Bob Morris, which instructed the interpreter to “draw a straight line and follow it.”12 Changes in the enactment of Maciunas’ own newly penned score, In Memoriam To Adriano Olivetti, between the Wiesbaden and Dusseldorf performances showed that he had gleaned a great deal from the interaction with his colleagues. In November 1962 he actually rewrote parts of it.13 In Maciunas’ Olivetti score, and in the performances that have departed from it (with Maciunas always as a performer), the influences of Cage and Duchamp seem to meet up with the “administered” conditions to which Adorno referred. The performers stand on stage in suits, which can be military uniforms, business attire, and conduct simple everyday actions based on the numerical cues from “any used tape from an Olivetti adding machine,” their timing dictated by a metronome.14 They may be prompted to stand or sit for several seconds, bow, raise their hat, or put an umbrella up and down.15 If the performance comes off well, it seems less like the anarchic, “direct actions” associated with early Dada, than like the frozen gestures of the “malic molds” in Duchamp’s Large Glass thrown into the context of performance, their subjection projected into the living matrix of scored mechanical action.
In between the early concerts in the different European cities, subtler deviations from the approach of absent authors also occurred. Maciunas showed how all approaches were equally valid in his performances of George Brecht’s score Drip Music (1959-62), which changed several times in the first few months of Fluxus. Once he exaggerated the piece by doing it from atop a tall ladder in Dusseldorf. Another time he realized the piece a little closer to how Brecht might have approached it, standing calmly on stage and relocating the water from jug to bucket with a degree of reverence in Amsterdam.16 The Fluxus Manifesto For Dusseldorf, Maciunas produced the now-famous Fluxus Manifesto (1963). This was prompted by a request from Joseph Beuys, who was based in Dusseldorf and who Maciunas had enlisted to help out with the organization. Beuys felt the group needed some formal statement to declare the stakes of their project.17 Maciunas’ first response was to mail Beuys a clipping of the dictionary definition of the word Fluxus. By the time the concert took place, he had amended it, cutting and pasting the dictionary text and interspersing it with his own handwriting: the format in which it is now known. This manifesto entered Fluxus performance literally, as hundreds of copies of it were thrown to the Dusseldorf audience. The 1963 “manifesto” has been reproduced and discussed many times but it has rarely been analyzed beyond its overt content. As an intervention into language and representation, it remains one of the earliest and most important documents Maciunas used to initiate and define Fluxus. It did not matter that no one added his or her signature to satisfy the conventional definition of a manifesto. The important thing for Maciunas was that being defined and presented as such, he could project manifesto-like energy onto Fluxus. New York: Designs on Fluxus During Maciunas’ final months in Europe in 1963 as he was working on Fluxus I and Brecht’s Water Yam, he began to set his sights on a much more ambitious project of Fluxus production. At this time, he wrote a letter to Robert Watts saying, “Now… how about… boxes. I mean we could publish a 100 [sic.] boxes each containing objects which you would ‘mass produce’ like in a factory.” Later in the letter he reiterates his idea to “start a factory!”18
When he returned to the United States in late 1963 he did just that. He established what he called the “Fluxshop” as a site for the production of Fluxus objects and the performance of the scores at 359 Canal Street in New York City. Here he once again drew from the most sophisticated aspects of the projects of the historical avant-gardes, deploying his considerable skills at design and typography to frame the politics of Fluxus. Acknowledging the distant realm of the utopian ideals in the formats of the Soviet avant-garde or Dada, Maciunas’ use of design constituted instead an astute intervention into the burgeoning commodity culture of the 1960s contemporaneous with the rise of Pop Art. If Pop Art turned commodity culture into “art” – “representing” it as painting or sculpture – Maciunas used impressive and exuberant design to generate “anti-commodities.” He continued calling for ideas, games and scores from the Fluxus artists, which he then “packaged” and “marketed” under the collectivist authorship of “Fluxus.” As Benjamin Buchloh has argued: “Fluxus artists gave a dialectical answer to Pop Art’s inherent traditionalism and its implicit aestheticization of reification by dissolving both the artistic genre’s and the readymade object’s centrality.”19 The individual labels Maciunas developed turned each artist’s name into a kind of brand. Generated with scrupulous economy, he variegated letters, changing their scale by photostatic enlargement and printed them in black and white. These Fluxus labels thrived on being cryptic, on forcing the “consumer” to have to think and work out their meaning. One example among many is the particularly efficient logo for Yoko Ono, which began as a line drawing of every letter in the alphabet, and ended as a finite set of axial lines superimposed to spell out the letters of the artist’s name. In a manner related to the function of a score, which must be read and enacted, even if only in the mind, this ambiguous lettering addressed Maciunas’ concern to generate an active rather than a passive subject of design. Discussing the effect of Maciunas’ label design, Buchloh notes:
In the typographical design of these name cards, individual subjectivity hovers somewhere between allegorical ornament and corporate trademark, between Fluxus’ utopian abolition of the exceptional artist and the existing rule of corporate culture, which dismantles any form of subjective experience. To have brought out the precariousness of this historical dialectic is one of the movement’s many achievements.20 The impact of Maciunas’ labeling, as the design meets the Fluxus object, is dramatically demonstrated in the before and after views of Ay-O’s Finger Box (1964). Playing upon the subject’s irresistible desire to “touch,” Ay-O’s box features a finger-sized hole with various hidden materials placed inside (different in each, like nylon stocking, rubber or nails) to challenge tactile perception. In its raw state, Ay-O’s Finger Box might ultimately have been dismissed as an eccentric and largely illegible item of Fluxus pranksterism; its unassuming form, proposing an action that seems like a futile one-liner. However, with the addition of Maciunas’ label the object becomes a more complex challenge to the subject. The 1964 label and packaging design for Mieko Shiomi’s score, Water Music adopts the classic consumer culture strategy of combining the esoteric and the mundane (the score for Water Music and bottled water) while introducing a degree of mystification into the prospect of consumption. Buchloh has explained that for Maciunas (hence for Fluxus) “both framing and presentational devices… typography and graphic design [were considered] as languages in their own right, not just separate and lesser carriers of a language that takes the higher form of “art.” [He] thereby equated work and frame, object and container.”21 Fluxus scores and instructions, prescriptions for “art experience,” as Maciunas called it, clearly anticipated the linguistic strategies of Conceptual and Post-Conceptual Art.22 Maciunas’ brilliance was to recognize the conceptual implications of the work and to elaborate upon them through his own “conceptual” design.
The organization through design that was Maciunas’ lifelong project for Fluxus constituted a model of quasi-mimetic resistance to the regime of design culture. His mode of design acknowledged design as a code, one that is accepted by the masses and even enjoyed as entertainment, but a code that can nonetheless be scrambled by oppositional codes that are able to act in similar ways. By putting this insight to work for Fluxus he underscored the politics of the art and made his own powerful political contribution. In his 1992 documentary film on Maciunas, Zefiro Torno, Jonas Mekas makes a connection between Fluxus and Pop Art, stating that “Pop art took a look at the daily banality too – but it seemed to embrace it – Fluxus brought it into critical awareness – in that sense Fluxus is political art.” To this he adds a somewhat more enigmatic statement “Andy/George … George/Andy,” which he leaves hovering. The connection between Maciunas and Warhol is still almost entirely unexplored in the scholarship on Maciunas. It is hardly a coincidence that Maciunas and Warhol conceived of the site of their production as “factories.” Likewise the fact that both trained and worked as graphic designers, bringing this expertise to the context of art. Maciunas’ “performance” of the left wing zealot, proclaiming socialist values and being obsessed with converting art into factory production, can hardly be seen as more eccentric than Warhol’s factory production championed by the statement, “I want to be a machine.” If Warhol’s wellknown “performance” as he redefined the role of artist/author (and art itself), can be characterized as that of the “author as consumer,” Maciunas’ choice, equally as poignantly, was the author as producer. Though Maciunas’ obsessive and idiosyncratic work has still not been adequately recognized for what it was, namely, one of the most incisive critiques of art and consumer culture of the 1960s, some of his contemporaries had understood this: above all, his oldest friend, Jonas Mekas. Echoing the model of Maciunas’ beloved Soviet avant-garde, the full title Mekas gave to this film was Zefiro Torno: Scenes From the Life of George Maciunas. In case we were to think this a coincidence, interspersed with amusing and playful images of all Maciunas’ activities comes the flash card: “This is a political film.
1. A new biography on Maciunas gives an extensive account of previously unpublished information about his background, see Thomas Kellein, The Dream of Fluxus: George Maciunas-An Artist’s Biography, (London and Bangkok, Edition Hansjörg Mayer, 2007).
2. For further information on Maciunas’ charts see Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Maciunas’ Learning Machines: From Art History to A Chronology of Fluxus, The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection (Berlin: Vice Versa Verlag, 2003). Schmidt-Burkhardt’s path-breaking scholarship and the Berlin exhibition for which this catalogue was made (mounted with the support of Jon Hendricks, curator of the Gilbert & Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Foundation), are an invaluable contribution to the Maciunas literature.
3. Maciunas, interview with Larry Miller, March 24, 1978. Reproduced in Jon Hendricks, Fluxus, etc. Addenda I (New York, The Gilbert & Lila Silverman Collection, 1983), 11.
4. For a detailed account of this story see Mr. Fluxus: A Collective Portrait of George Maciunas, edited by Emmett Williams and Ann Noël (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1998), 33-35.
5. Thomas Kellein, The Dream of Fluxus: George Maciunas – An Artist’s Biography, op. cit., p. 37-38.
6. Ibid, p. 38.
7. Maciunas, interview with Larry Miller, March 24, 1978, op. cit., p. 15.
8. Interview with Larry Miller, op. cit., p. 17.
9. A rich compilation of Fluxus performance over more than two decades can be seen in the 1991 film Some Fluxus, by Larry Miller (distributed by EAI-Electronic Arts Intermix).
10. Theodor Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle” [1961] in Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, Rodney Livingstone transl. (New York: Verso, 1998), 316.
11. Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” op. cit., 316.
12. The La Monte Young score is reproduced in An Anthology, op. cit., (unpaginated).
13. At the time of the third Fluxus festival Maciunas revised the score for In Memoriam Adriano Olivetti. For the sequence of these early festivals see my chronology in Julia Robinson, George Brecht Events: A Heterospective(Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2005), 312. The date of the revision is November 8, 1962; in other words, before the key festivals of Paris (December, 1962) and Düsseldorf (February, 1963). The revision date appears on the score, reproduced in see Susan Hapgood, Neo-Dada: Redefining Art 1958-1962, (New York: American Federation of Arts, 1994), 88-89. 164 165
14. The score calls for “performers to be formally dressed,” later mentioning the use of a “bowler hat,” with one performer “No. 9 in military uniform.” See reproduction in Susan Hapgood, Neo-Dada, ibid.
15. These details are taken directly from the score, see Hapgood, op. cit., 88.
16. I have discussed in greater detail the implications attending the gap between score and performance, with particular reference to Paik and Brecht, elsewhere; see Julia Robinson, “The Brechtian Event Score: A Structure in Fluxus,” Performance Research, Vol. 7.4, (U.K., Routledge, Fall 2002). For photographs of Maciunas in the two different approaches to Brecht’s Drip Music, see George Brecht Events: A Heterospective, op. cit.,134-135.
17. I thank Joan Rothfuss for informing me about the details of this and sharing the associated documentation (email exchange, April 2007). See also, Rothfuss, “FluxBeuys,” in What’s Fluxus? What’s Not! Why, Jon Hendricks ed., (Brazil: Centro Cultural Banco de Brasil/Gilbert & Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Foundation, 2002), 57-65.
18. Letter reproduced in Jon Hendricks, Fluxus Addenda II, op. cit., 149.
19. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “1962” (Fluxus chapter), in Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh, Art Since 1900, Vol. 2 (New York and London, Thames & Hudson, 2004, 456-463.
20. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ibid. 166 167
21. Buchloh, Art Since 1900, op. cit., p. 458.
22. The first entry in Lucy Lippard’s foundational Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (1973), (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 11, is George Brecht. Lippard states that: “Independently, and in association with the Fluxus group, Brecht has been making “events” that anticipate a stricter “conceptual art” since around 1960.” For a more recent discussion of this topic see Liz Kotz’s articles, “Post- Cagean Aesthetics and the ‘Event’ Score,” October 95, Winter 2002, and “Language Between Performance and Photography,” October 111, Winter 2005. Speaking of the effect of Maciunas’ work, particularly the ubiquity of the recognizable font from his IBM typewriter, Buchloh show what Maciunas added to Fluxus’ proto-Conceptualism: “This machine imbued all Maciunas’ typographic designs – from La Monte Young’s An Anthology … onward – with an administrative rationalism and immediacy that would become compulsory under the reign of Conceptualism.” Buchloh, ibid.
Julia E. Robinson
George Maciunas: Desigen on Fluxus George Maciunas is best known today as the “impresario” of Fluxus: an international group of artists whose first members came together in 1962 for an inaugural concert series at Wiesbaden, Germany (not far from the epicenter of New Music in Darmstadt). Hardly a regular “concert,” the “Fluxus Festspiele Neuester Musik” – as Maciunas called it, upping the stakes of New Music, by claiming this to be the “Newest” Music – introduced an extensive array of the most radical scoring practices of the day, enacted by a group of young artists from the United States, Korea, Germany and Lithuania. The Fluxus group would come to include more nationalities and more women than any avant-garde since Dada. The first concert series happened at Wiesbaden because Maciunas was based there and he set about to organize it; he gathered the scores to be presented, rallied the artists, arranged the venue, designed the poster, promoted the event and performed in it. In fact, the word “impresario” does little to explain the work the Lithuanian émigré did for Fluxus. Rather, it has mostly been a way for scholars to avoid the difficult territory of how and with what to credit George Maciunas. The unorthodox range of tasks Maciunas undertook to organize Fluxus has generated debate between Fluxus artists as well as historians about his proper title and whether or not he warrants the description of “founder” or “leader.” For simplicity’s sake, Maciunas is often called an artist, but the role he adopted among artists resists this classification. As a trained graphic designer with broad political ambitions, Maciunas’ Fluxus work – designing posters, flyers and labels, compiling editions and multiples, drawing up calendars of activities, writing and circulating “news (policy) letters,” and planning and directing concerts – suggests a complex and hybrid “authorial” model that would suspend the term “artist” or reveal it to be beside the point. Rather than imposing conventional terms onto the figure of Maciunas, as debates about his proper title in Fluxus would do, it is perhaps more useful to examine this hybrid role he devised for himself, its fundamental motivations and its legacy. Re-Presenting History To appreciate what Maciunas brought to Fluxus and how he positioned it at all levels, it is essential to look back briefly at his training and early ideas about the role of history and its (re)presentation. A postwar émigré from Kaunas, Lithuania, Maciunas came to the United States in 1948 settling in New York.1 Over the course of a decade, beginning in 1949, Maciunas studied graphic design at New York’s Cooper Union, architecture at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, and finally, art history at New York University’sInstitute of Fine Arts. During this time, he developed a passionate interest in genealogical charts. Producing them became a monumental project running parallel to his studies and informing them.
The charts were a magnum opus for the young Maciunas, a feat of utter commitment, diligence and exhaustive attempts to master a vast body of information. The scale of some of the early charts is breathtaking. The final dimensions of his “Atlas of Russian History,” tracking the major changes in the Russian state up to the Revolution, were six by nine feet, and his “History of Art” chart, from the Visigoths to Modernity, came in slightly larger at six by twelve feet. These were great fields of pasted paper, which projected the information laterally while also extending into three dimensions in towers and accordion structures filled with gridded text (the precursors of the formats for his Fluxus compendia). As movable, architectonic, genealogical models, Maciunas’ charts emancipated the student of history, placing the structuring of knowledge in his own hands and those of every future reader. Through the charts Maciunas acquired a thorough grounding in Art History, which undoubtedly emboldened him to judge the status of art in his own historical moment. He called the charts “Learning Machines” and ultimately considered them among the most important work of his life.2 Some years later, Maciunas brought his passion for charting history to his work on Fluxus, giving Fluxus a genealogy of its own. In addition to drawing up a number of charts positioning Fluxus within a trajectory of 20th century avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes, he continued to use the chart structure for his overall organization of the group’s activities. The rigor with which Maciunas crafted the Fluxus charts framed this seemingly cryptic and ephemeral project in terms of its historical relevance as well as giving it a kind of “readymade” place in history. In an important late interview with Fluxus artist Larry Miller, Maciunas explained one of these charts, acknowledging the central position of John Cage:
So, you see, this chart is just a culmination of other charts I’ve done in the past for other histories…. In the vertical line is shown the years and the horizontal layout shows the style. So you can point on the chart to any activity, pinpoint it exactly with this grid of time and style. Now it could also be… I’ve done charts which… vertically is shown time and horizontally geographical location. This way you could say any activity of the past, you could locate exactly on the chart where it happened and when. Now for this chart I chose rather style than location because the style is so unlocalized… mainly because of the travels of John Cage. So you could call the whole chart … “Travels of John Cage” like you could say “travels of St. Paul,” you know? Wherever John Cage went he left a little John Cage group, which some admit, some not admit his influence. But the fact is there, that those groups formed after his visits. It shows up very clearly on the charts.3 After this, he goes on to fill in the picture at the prompt of Miller’s questions, situating first Cage and then Fluxus with reference to Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, and the relevant postwar movements: from the first Happenings (in Japan in the 1950s – the Gutai Group), to French Nouveau Réalisme and then back to the U.S. with figures surrounding Cage such as La Monte Young and many artists who would ultimately join Fluxus. Designs for Radical Practice In October 1960, Maciunas was meeting with a group of compatriots at the gallery of his friend Almus Salcius in Long Island to discuss prospects for a Lithuanian cultural club. In the end, the group decided to make a magazine and “Fluxus” was the name George (Jurgis) proposed for it.4 Maciunas went on to start an exhibition space with his friend Almus, called the AG Gallery (Avant-Garde? Almus & George?) at 925 Madison Avenue in New York City. The idea of presenting Lithuanian culture did not last long and Maciunas took over the programming of the gallery (albeit conservatively at first). After attending composer Richard Maxfield’s electronic composition class of 1960 at The New School for Social Research, and meeting La Monte Young, the program for the gallery changed radically and Maciunas started showing future Fluxus artists and having Young program concerts there. Young not only exposed Maciunas to a whole range of new and exciting work – Yoko Ono, Henry Flynt, George Brecht, Dick Higgins and others – he also gave him a chance to see how these radical scoring practices might figure as an object of graphic design, asking him to be the designer for a new collection of scores he was editing, which came to be called An Anthology. Out of this collaboration, Maciunas discovered much of the work he would gather together under the banner of Fluxus the following year. He kept the idea of a publication called Fluxus for a long time, though the proposed content changed as much as Maciunas’ ideas about art did in this period. “Ever since he had become friends with three Lithuanian colleagues, namely Jonas Mekas, Almus Salcius and Stanley Buetens… he had wanted to become the editor of a journal of his own.”5 The first chance at this was in the designing of An Anthology. Maciunas approached this work with zealous commitment to economy, insisting “contributions were to be copied on colored, almost square copy paper, pasted together and sold as a low cost book.”6 He typed the entire book on his IBM Executive typewriter but within its pages there were many innovative approaches to presentation, including little envelopes containing scores, loose pages with cut-outs, etc. This would be the beginning of many more adventurous design projects for Fluxus, which were part book, part poster, part object. As Maciunas explained to Miller:
We couldn’t include everything that we had collected by then, like it didn’t have Bob Watts and … had very little things by George Brecht and so I thought I would go ahead and make another publication with all the pieces that were not included in Anthology. More or less newer pieces. But La Monte wasn’t interested in doing a second Anthology book. So the initial plan was just do another, like a second Anthology book except graphically it would have been a little… less conventional than the first one, which means it would have had objects and… a different kind of packaging. So really then the idea germinated to use the whole book as bound envelopes with objects in the envelopes. See, we had a couple objects already in the first Anthology, you know, like the loose Diter Roth machine holes, things like that. A little envelope with [the] card of La Monte Young [Composition # 10, 1960 To Bob Morris – draw a straight line and follow it.], another envelope with a letter in it, you know, so things like that. Card that have to be cut up ….7 This format came to inspire the first compilations of the collective works of Fluxus: Fluxus I and the Fluxus Yearboxes. Fluxus I consists of envelopes containing contributions from the artists with foldout parts. It was bolted together and encased in a wooden box. In an amusingly self-deprecating comment on the innovative format, Maciunas stated that the contents were “like an accordion, it just keeps falling out and being in your way.”8 After the prototypes were complete, Maciunas assembled subsequent copies on demand (from 1964-mid-1970s). Maciunas conceived and worked on these first Fluxus publications and others, such as the complete collection of George Brecht scores, called Water Yam [1963] while he was in Germany. Since they were so complex to make, and he did not always have the funds to proceed, he decided to organize concerts of Fluxus scores and contextual work as publicity for the immanent arrival of the published material. This concept initiated the performance practice of concerts and festivals that has animated and defined the Fluxus group from 1962 to the present.9
The first events explicitly called “Fluxus” (at Wiesbaden) ranas a series of fourteen concerts (September 1-23, 1962) and others followed at Amsterdam, Dusseldorf and Paris. With the a number of artists there to perform the scores of both present and absent authors – Nam June Paik, Alison Knowles, Emmett Williams, Benjamin Patterson, Dick Higgins and Maciunas – the spectrum of activity was broad enough that the scope for Fluxus was glimpsed. As previously mentioned, Maciunas’ strategy on this occasion, to draw attention to the concert, was to connect it with New Music. This was highlighted in the poster he designed, which read “Fluxus Festspiele Neuester Musik,” with white text on a black ground naming all the scores to be performed and listing their composers. More than mere “publicity” for the forthcoming publications, which ultimately did not come out in these first months, the performances drew scandalous attention and a number of misunderstood impressions from audiences and the press. This may have been due to the selection of scores, which themselves were rather extreme and often performed in somewhat hyperbolic ways. Paik’s Zen for Head, for example, involved dipping his head, hands and tie into a bucket of paint and tracking it along a long scroll of paper, which he did manically, sending the audience into fits of laughter. And the finale, Phillip Corner’s Piano Activities, which called for performers to “play,” “scratch or rub,” “pluck or tap,” “drop objects” on, “act on strings,” “strike soundboard, pins, lid or drag various kinds of objects across” and “act in any way on underside of piano,” ended by an excess of enthusiasm, with the total destruction of the piano. There were undoubtedly aspects of many of the pieces, performed here for the first time, which might have superficially conjured Dada (as the press observed). But Fluxus had almost nothing to do with Dada, and ways were found to clarify this important distinction as the concerts were repeated. The “problem” of Dada, had been identified just one year earlier in Darmstadt, when Theodor Adorno gave his lecture “Vers une musique informelle,” enumerating the contemporary reasons for its critical disqualification. As Adorno saw the situation, any anti-art sentiment expressed, in the postwar period, as a direct action “in contrast to its Dadaist grandparents… degenerates at once into culture…”.10 He explained that “this is dictated by the impossibility today of the politics on which Dadaism still relied. Action Painting and Action Composing,” said Adorno, “are cryptograms of the direct action that has now been ruled out; they have arisen in an age in which every such action is either forestalled by technology or recuperated by an administered world.”11
In Fluxus, however, the intervention of the score was the crucial agent of mediation, the marker of the enactment as indirect action. It was important that the line Paik painted in his animated performance was indeed not a direct action he had spontaneously devised, but rather, an interpretation of La Monte Young’s Composition #10, 1960 To Bob Morris, which instructed the interpreter to “draw a straight line and follow it.”12 Changes in the enactment of Maciunas’ own newly penned score, In Memoriam To Adriano Olivetti, between the Wiesbaden and Dusseldorf performances showed that he had gleaned a great deal from the interaction with his colleagues. In November 1962 he actually rewrote parts of it.13 In Maciunas’ Olivetti score, and in the performances that have departed from it (with Maciunas always as a performer), the influences of Cage and Duchamp seem to meet up with the “administered” conditions to which Adorno referred. The performers stand on stage in suits, which can be military uniforms, business attire, and conduct simple everyday actions based on the numerical cues from “any used tape from an Olivetti adding machine,” their timing dictated by a metronome.14 They may be prompted to stand or sit for several seconds, bow, raise their hat, or put an umbrella up and down.15 If the performance comes off well, it seems less like the anarchic, “direct actions” associated with early Dada, than like the frozen gestures of the “malic molds” in Duchamp’s Large Glass thrown into the context of performance, their subjection projected into the living matrix of scored mechanical action.
In between the early concerts in the different European cities, subtler deviations from the approach of absent authors also occurred. Maciunas showed how all approaches were equally valid in his performances of George Brecht’s score Drip Music (1959-62), which changed several times in the first few months of Fluxus. Once he exaggerated the piece by doing it from atop a tall ladder in Dusseldorf. Another time he realized the piece a little closer to how Brecht might have approached it, standing calmly on stage and relocating the water from jug to bucket with a degree of reverence in Amsterdam.16 The Fluxus Manifesto For Dusseldorf, Maciunas produced the now-famous Fluxus Manifesto (1963). This was prompted by a request from Joseph Beuys, who was based in Dusseldorf and who Maciunas had enlisted to help out with the organization. Beuys felt the group needed some formal statement to declare the stakes of their project.17 Maciunas’ first response was to mail Beuys a clipping of the dictionary definition of the word Fluxus. By the time the concert took place, he had amended it, cutting and pasting the dictionary text and interspersing it with his own handwriting: the format in which it is now known. This manifesto entered Fluxus performance literally, as hundreds of copies of it were thrown to the Dusseldorf audience. The 1963 “manifesto” has been reproduced and discussed many times but it has rarely been analyzed beyond its overt content. As an intervention into language and representation, it remains one of the earliest and most important documents Maciunas used to initiate and define Fluxus. It did not matter that no one added his or her signature to satisfy the conventional definition of a manifesto. The important thing for Maciunas was that being defined and presented as such, he could project manifesto-like energy onto Fluxus. New York: Designs on Fluxus During Maciunas’ final months in Europe in 1963 as he was working on Fluxus I and Brecht’s Water Yam, he began to set his sights on a much more ambitious project of Fluxus production. At this time, he wrote a letter to Robert Watts saying, “Now… how about… boxes. I mean we could publish a 100 [sic.] boxes each containing objects which you would ‘mass produce’ like in a factory.” Later in the letter he reiterates his idea to “start a factory!”18
When he returned to the United States in late 1963 he did just that. He established what he called the “Fluxshop” as a site for the production of Fluxus objects and the performance of the scores at 359 Canal Street in New York City. Here he once again drew from the most sophisticated aspects of the projects of the historical avant-gardes, deploying his considerable skills at design and typography to frame the politics of Fluxus. Acknowledging the distant realm of the utopian ideals in the formats of the Soviet avant-garde or Dada, Maciunas’ use of design constituted instead an astute intervention into the burgeoning commodity culture of the 1960s contemporaneous with the rise of Pop Art. If Pop Art turned commodity culture into “art” – “representing” it as painting or sculpture – Maciunas used impressive and exuberant design to generate “anti-commodities.” He continued calling for ideas, games and scores from the Fluxus artists, which he then “packaged” and “marketed” under the collectivist authorship of “Fluxus.” As Benjamin Buchloh has argued: “Fluxus artists gave a dialectical answer to Pop Art’s inherent traditionalism and its implicit aestheticization of reification by dissolving both the artistic genre’s and the readymade object’s centrality.”19 The individual labels Maciunas developed turned each artist’s name into a kind of brand. Generated with scrupulous economy, he variegated letters, changing their scale by photostatic enlargement and printed them in black and white. These Fluxus labels thrived on being cryptic, on forcing the “consumer” to have to think and work out their meaning. One example among many is the particularly efficient logo for Yoko Ono, which began as a line drawing of every letter in the alphabet, and ended as a finite set of axial lines superimposed to spell out the letters of the artist’s name. In a manner related to the function of a score, which must be read and enacted, even if only in the mind, this ambiguous lettering addressed Maciunas’ concern to generate an active rather than a passive subject of design. Discussing the effect of Maciunas’ label design, Buchloh notes:
In the typographical design of these name cards, individual subjectivity hovers somewhere between allegorical ornament and corporate trademark, between Fluxus’ utopian abolition of the exceptional artist and the existing rule of corporate culture, which dismantles any form of subjective experience. To have brought out the precariousness of this historical dialectic is one of the movement’s many achievements.20 The impact of Maciunas’ labeling, as the design meets the Fluxus object, is dramatically demonstrated in the before and after views of Ay-O’s Finger Box (1964). Playing upon the subject’s irresistible desire to “touch,” Ay-O’s box features a finger-sized hole with various hidden materials placed inside (different in each, like nylon stocking, rubber or nails) to challenge tactile perception. In its raw state, Ay-O’s Finger Box might ultimately have been dismissed as an eccentric and largely illegible item of Fluxus pranksterism; its unassuming form, proposing an action that seems like a futile one-liner. However, with the addition of Maciunas’ label the object becomes a more complex challenge to the subject. The 1964 label and packaging design for Mieko Shiomi’s score, Water Music adopts the classic consumer culture strategy of combining the esoteric and the mundane (the score for Water Music and bottled water) while introducing a degree of mystification into the prospect of consumption. Buchloh has explained that for Maciunas (hence for Fluxus) “both framing and presentational devices… typography and graphic design [were considered] as languages in their own right, not just separate and lesser carriers of a language that takes the higher form of “art.” [He] thereby equated work and frame, object and container.”21 Fluxus scores and instructions, prescriptions for “art experience,” as Maciunas called it, clearly anticipated the linguistic strategies of Conceptual and Post-Conceptual Art.22 Maciunas’ brilliance was to recognize the conceptual implications of the work and to elaborate upon them through his own “conceptual” design.
The organization through design that was Maciunas’ lifelong project for Fluxus constituted a model of quasi-mimetic resistance to the regime of design culture. His mode of design acknowledged design as a code, one that is accepted by the masses and even enjoyed as entertainment, but a code that can nonetheless be scrambled by oppositional codes that are able to act in similar ways. By putting this insight to work for Fluxus he underscored the politics of the art and made his own powerful political contribution. In his 1992 documentary film on Maciunas, Zefiro Torno, Jonas Mekas makes a connection between Fluxus and Pop Art, stating that “Pop art took a look at the daily banality too – but it seemed to embrace it – Fluxus brought it into critical awareness – in that sense Fluxus is political art.” To this he adds a somewhat more enigmatic statement “Andy/George … George/Andy,” which he leaves hovering. The connection between Maciunas and Warhol is still almost entirely unexplored in the scholarship on Maciunas. It is hardly a coincidence that Maciunas and Warhol conceived of the site of their production as “factories.” Likewise the fact that both trained and worked as graphic designers, bringing this expertise to the context of art. Maciunas’ “performance” of the left wing zealot, proclaiming socialist values and being obsessed with converting art into factory production, can hardly be seen as more eccentric than Warhol’s factory production championed by the statement, “I want to be a machine.” If Warhol’s wellknown “performance” as he redefined the role of artist/author (and art itself), can be characterized as that of the “author as consumer,” Maciunas’ choice, equally as poignantly, was the author as producer. Though Maciunas’ obsessive and idiosyncratic work has still not been adequately recognized for what it was, namely, one of the most incisive critiques of art and consumer culture of the 1960s, some of his contemporaries had understood this: above all, his oldest friend, Jonas Mekas. Echoing the model of Maciunas’ beloved Soviet avant-garde, the full title Mekas gave to this film was Zefiro Torno: Scenes From the Life of George Maciunas. In case we were to think this a coincidence, interspersed with amusing and playful images of all Maciunas’ activities comes the flash card: “This is a political film.
1. A new biography on Maciunas gives an extensive account of previously unpublished information about his background, see Thomas Kellein, The Dream of Fluxus: George Maciunas-An Artist’s Biography, (London and Bangkok, Edition Hansjörg Mayer, 2007).
2. For further information on Maciunas’ charts see Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Maciunas’ Learning Machines: From Art History to A Chronology of Fluxus, The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection (Berlin: Vice Versa Verlag, 2003). Schmidt-Burkhardt’s path-breaking scholarship and the Berlin exhibition for which this catalogue was made (mounted with the support of Jon Hendricks, curator of the Gilbert & Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Foundation), are an invaluable contribution to the Maciunas literature.
3. Maciunas, interview with Larry Miller, March 24, 1978. Reproduced in Jon Hendricks, Fluxus, etc. Addenda I (New York, The Gilbert & Lila Silverman Collection, 1983), 11.
4. For a detailed account of this story see Mr. Fluxus: A Collective Portrait of George Maciunas, edited by Emmett Williams and Ann Noël (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1998), 33-35.
5. Thomas Kellein, The Dream of Fluxus: George Maciunas – An Artist’s Biography, op. cit., p. 37-38.
6. Ibid, p. 38.
7. Maciunas, interview with Larry Miller, March 24, 1978, op. cit., p. 15.
8. Interview with Larry Miller, op. cit., p. 17.
9. A rich compilation of Fluxus performance over more than two decades can be seen in the 1991 film Some Fluxus, by Larry Miller (distributed by EAI-Electronic Arts Intermix).
10. Theodor Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle” [1961] in Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, Rodney Livingstone transl. (New York: Verso, 1998), 316.
11. Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” op. cit., 316.
12. The La Monte Young score is reproduced in An Anthology, op. cit., (unpaginated).
13. At the time of the third Fluxus festival Maciunas revised the score for In Memoriam Adriano Olivetti. For the sequence of these early festivals see my chronology in Julia Robinson, George Brecht Events: A Heterospective(Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2005), 312. The date of the revision is November 8, 1962; in other words, before the key festivals of Paris (December, 1962) and Düsseldorf (February, 1963). The revision date appears on the score, reproduced in see Susan Hapgood, Neo-Dada: Redefining Art 1958-1962, (New York: American Federation of Arts, 1994), 88-89. 164 165
14. The score calls for “performers to be formally dressed,” later mentioning the use of a “bowler hat,” with one performer “No. 9 in military uniform.” See reproduction in Susan Hapgood, Neo-Dada, ibid.
15. These details are taken directly from the score, see Hapgood, op. cit., 88.
16. I have discussed in greater detail the implications attending the gap between score and performance, with particular reference to Paik and Brecht, elsewhere; see Julia Robinson, “The Brechtian Event Score: A Structure in Fluxus,” Performance Research, Vol. 7.4, (U.K., Routledge, Fall 2002). For photographs of Maciunas in the two different approaches to Brecht’s Drip Music, see George Brecht Events: A Heterospective, op. cit.,134-135.
17. I thank Joan Rothfuss for informing me about the details of this and sharing the associated documentation (email exchange, April 2007). See also, Rothfuss, “FluxBeuys,” in What’s Fluxus? What’s Not! Why, Jon Hendricks ed., (Brazil: Centro Cultural Banco de Brasil/Gilbert & Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Foundation, 2002), 57-65.
18. Letter reproduced in Jon Hendricks, Fluxus Addenda II, op. cit., 149.
19. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “1962” (Fluxus chapter), in Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh, Art Since 1900, Vol. 2 (New York and London, Thames & Hudson, 2004, 456-463.
20. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ibid. 166 167
21. Buchloh, Art Since 1900, op. cit., p. 458.
22. The first entry in Lucy Lippard’s foundational Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (1973), (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 11, is George Brecht. Lippard states that: “Independently, and in association with the Fluxus group, Brecht has been making “events” that anticipate a stricter “conceptual art” since around 1960.” For a more recent discussion of this topic see Liz Kotz’s articles, “Post- Cagean Aesthetics and the ‘Event’ Score,” October 95, Winter 2002, and “Language Between Performance and Photography,” October 111, Winter 2005. Speaking of the effect of Maciunas’ work, particularly the ubiquity of the recognizable font from his IBM typewriter, Buchloh show what Maciunas added to Fluxus’ proto-Conceptualism: “This machine imbued all Maciunas’ typographic designs – from La Monte Young’s An Anthology … onward – with an administrative rationalism and immediacy that would become compulsory under the reign of Conceptualism.” Buchloh, ibid.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Monday, October 4, 2010
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
A Tale of Twin Towers
Imagining the carnage, can you begin digging through the entrails of the SABC twin towers without uncovering countless victims of the collapse, lying gagged by mouthfuls of slurs (even stories) piled at the entranceway? I can’t, I am writing merely to attempt a diagnosis of the infectious debacle and thus ask: ‘Who the fuck did the stuffing and where do they come from?’
Scarcely half a decade has passed and research has separated various pesky viral degradations of local content at the broadcaster’s headquarters. Like HIV wrecking havoc on the STD scene, the SABC has seen moments of optimism and others of utter dispair. The pestilence is racking producer body count of the death tsunami proportion, with factionalism to blame together with shit-storms of financial mismanagement consequential of dis-organization now evident. Solutions evangelized by new boards have attempted to alleviate the tensions and offer a glimpse of optimism but to the worst of ends. How will there be room for commissions when the debt includes previous unfinished business? Will the industry practitioners have to wait for another cycle to end before they can receive briefs for new content?
First, ‘get rid of the Black Diamonds’ keeping the tower’s cash coffers under siege instead of brandishing promises of re-organization – I say. But is the SABC truly aiming at empowering the deluge of disgruntled film practitioners it holds at stake? I suspect the answer would be an adamant NO. With the new board ordained, the resultant sentiments border on a premise not unlike humanitarian aid quitting a war-zone when a dictatorship is being inaugurated. No sensible person seems to give 3 shits for the collective reconstruction of the ruins, and audiences are the least considered when bands of do-gooders commissions seem rather chewed up and spat out as black pulp family viewing productions. The corporation’s obsession with mediocrity has furnished our monitors with re-runs, cloned international couch-potato TV-Dinner shows – and that’s the buffet; the tales from the twin towers.
The predominant grub and bark menu of local shows has left murmurs of dissent amongst the perpetually bickering critics of the broadcaster – 40 day fasting protests, talk-shop forums and a thoroughfare of disenfranchised aspirants seem the sole discharge of piety gunned at the new board’s dream machine. But what do I think of twin towers looming in the midst of the radioactive skyline of Auckland Park? Indeed, various commentators have been mouth pieces for the promises uttered since the Mpofu/Zikalala cabal; but are they still blowing the corporation’s horn of digital migration and developmental mandate for its consumer base, now that the garbage in drawn from under the carpets? Will their sense of honor force yet another wave of cover-ups, doctored audits and payment backlogs?
‘They need Al-qaeda style dispensation that would give our shit-fed minds a holiday,’ I say. A total recall of operations and authority is of essence. The nation needs to boycott television for a week through non-viewership, and just flock cinemas and popcorn stands and binge on Western Cinema and slush puppies.
OK, maybe a single plane through Radio Park and a truck crammed with canisters of Ebola driven through the basement of Henley Studios would do the trick – to the extreme. Or, while black suited vigilante groups crowd Artillery Road, a media Hezbollah should have strapped grenades to SUV’s - the SABC Executives’ models of choice.
Forget the alternative channels which are likely to be following the same trend though in secret. Let them bling out the mainly student populace of the country – become cathode-ray tube universities advocating vicarious sensationalism and crude morale when talking anything ‘African’.
And what Koranic justification would suffice the proposed institutional destruction?
The maxims: ‘Don’t violate your neighbor’s nerves,’ or ‘Thou shalt not prostitute they children’ come to mind, though being not entirely certain that such commandments feature in the big book.
Or rather lets throw in the towel when protests are facing the hornet’s nest, billboards reading: ‘Do not disturb, transmission in progress,’ keep us mesmerized. And we all know you can’t disturb or JIKA MAJIKA when SA’s got Talent and billing Top Executives. Besides the corporation’s vengefulness has reached an infernal level, with production crews given pauper’s regard when puffing and huffing for pay cheques.
‘But’ you’d be saying, ‘the SABC is the wolf here.’
Then the question becomes: “Who is in the pig sty?’ The Executives who have learned methods of managing guilt, the producers or the license paying audiences?
Photographs by: Khahliso Matela
Scarcely half a decade has passed and research has separated various pesky viral degradations of local content at the broadcaster’s headquarters. Like HIV wrecking havoc on the STD scene, the SABC has seen moments of optimism and others of utter dispair. The pestilence is racking producer body count of the death tsunami proportion, with factionalism to blame together with shit-storms of financial mismanagement consequential of dis-organization now evident. Solutions evangelized by new boards have attempted to alleviate the tensions and offer a glimpse of optimism but to the worst of ends. How will there be room for commissions when the debt includes previous unfinished business? Will the industry practitioners have to wait for another cycle to end before they can receive briefs for new content?
First, ‘get rid of the Black Diamonds’ keeping the tower’s cash coffers under siege instead of brandishing promises of re-organization – I say. But is the SABC truly aiming at empowering the deluge of disgruntled film practitioners it holds at stake? I suspect the answer would be an adamant NO. With the new board ordained, the resultant sentiments border on a premise not unlike humanitarian aid quitting a war-zone when a dictatorship is being inaugurated. No sensible person seems to give 3 shits for the collective reconstruction of the ruins, and audiences are the least considered when bands of do-gooders commissions seem rather chewed up and spat out as black pulp family viewing productions. The corporation’s obsession with mediocrity has furnished our monitors with re-runs, cloned international couch-potato TV-Dinner shows – and that’s the buffet; the tales from the twin towers.
The predominant grub and bark menu of local shows has left murmurs of dissent amongst the perpetually bickering critics of the broadcaster – 40 day fasting protests, talk-shop forums and a thoroughfare of disenfranchised aspirants seem the sole discharge of piety gunned at the new board’s dream machine. But what do I think of twin towers looming in the midst of the radioactive skyline of Auckland Park? Indeed, various commentators have been mouth pieces for the promises uttered since the Mpofu/Zikalala cabal; but are they still blowing the corporation’s horn of digital migration and developmental mandate for its consumer base, now that the garbage in drawn from under the carpets? Will their sense of honor force yet another wave of cover-ups, doctored audits and payment backlogs?
‘They need Al-qaeda style dispensation that would give our shit-fed minds a holiday,’ I say. A total recall of operations and authority is of essence. The nation needs to boycott television for a week through non-viewership, and just flock cinemas and popcorn stands and binge on Western Cinema and slush puppies.
OK, maybe a single plane through Radio Park and a truck crammed with canisters of Ebola driven through the basement of Henley Studios would do the trick – to the extreme. Or, while black suited vigilante groups crowd Artillery Road, a media Hezbollah should have strapped grenades to SUV’s - the SABC Executives’ models of choice.
Forget the alternative channels which are likely to be following the same trend though in secret. Let them bling out the mainly student populace of the country – become cathode-ray tube universities advocating vicarious sensationalism and crude morale when talking anything ‘African’.
And what Koranic justification would suffice the proposed institutional destruction?
The maxims: ‘Don’t violate your neighbor’s nerves,’ or ‘Thou shalt not prostitute they children’ come to mind, though being not entirely certain that such commandments feature in the big book.
Or rather lets throw in the towel when protests are facing the hornet’s nest, billboards reading: ‘Do not disturb, transmission in progress,’ keep us mesmerized. And we all know you can’t disturb or JIKA MAJIKA when SA’s got Talent and billing Top Executives. Besides the corporation’s vengefulness has reached an infernal level, with production crews given pauper’s regard when puffing and huffing for pay cheques.
‘But’ you’d be saying, ‘the SABC is the wolf here.’
Then the question becomes: “Who is in the pig sty?’ The Executives who have learned methods of managing guilt, the producers or the license paying audiences?
Monday, September 13, 2010
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
A Broken Scholar...
rancid sighs of a broken scholar,
brandished mockery as a crown -
nerves mined for tributes,
in stale anthologies of frowns.
this soul's a dead man's photograph,
a band of lesser angels in frame.
chose a body to die with and
rode the subtle wood with immortal ones.
wrote a book named 'My Tombstone',
moled furrows in my bones, saying:
'Marry at your prime the follies of yester-years, and
squander your excess peers with all trapped gains and fears'.
brandished mockery as a crown -
nerves mined for tributes,
in stale anthologies of frowns.
this soul's a dead man's photograph,
a band of lesser angels in frame.
chose a body to die with and
rode the subtle wood with immortal ones.
wrote a book named 'My Tombstone',
moled furrows in my bones, saying:
'Marry at your prime the follies of yester-years, and
squander your excess peers with all trapped gains and fears'.
Theorem #76
My heart's pillars glow at the threshold to my mind's arena, and
leaves dance a sizzle on branches.
A fellow ignites the machine rage of a fork lift, and
the stench of tarmac glazes the distant shimmer at noon.
The splendour of a winter's sky hovers,
bludgeons shadows into pores of concrete slabs;
and a slim wind dries up its flight, what mud on my soles, we ask?
Last rains of night's mist fold my shell for warmth -
and the night's bed is warmed by the day's fiery pulse.
leaves dance a sizzle on branches.
A fellow ignites the machine rage of a fork lift, and
the stench of tarmac glazes the distant shimmer at noon.
The splendour of a winter's sky hovers,
bludgeons shadows into pores of concrete slabs;
and a slim wind dries up its flight, what mud on my soles, we ask?
Last rains of night's mist fold my shell for warmth -
and the night's bed is warmed by the day's fiery pulse.
A Poem Fogged by Reminiscence
when ghosts laugh
showing molars of brass;
clouds scatter
and Dracula's scream crawls fungal in our vase.
let your clown cry for a change,
and when adolescents burn bushes in their minds,
shoot a pie and never miss the homeless
when downpours get the traffic into a frenzy.
another pillow fight with a dream -
we will harvest these raindrops once;
the sky's manure roots the crops, and
lets their rainbow's leaves in the sunlight gleam.
showing molars of brass;
clouds scatter
and Dracula's scream crawls fungal in our vase.
let your clown cry for a change,
and when adolescents burn bushes in their minds,
shoot a pie and never miss the homeless
when downpours get the traffic into a frenzy.
another pillow fight with a dream -
we will harvest these raindrops once;
the sky's manure roots the crops, and
lets their rainbow's leaves in the sunlight gleam.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Another returned road...
" The Constitution is so stiff,
it can't be used for toilet paper.
So don't tell me about
Constitutional Rights for Black Folks."
it can't be used for toilet paper.
So don't tell me about
Constitutional Rights for Black Folks."
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