Digital Fluxus Performance - Something I can't Explain

The card that Nico van Hoorn (Netherlands) sent to me has inspired me to send him the results of a Digital Fluxus performance that I did for him. The digital recording is published before the mail actually is sent.

Genres collide with help of change, time, concept

source:The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s premier independent student newspaper

Art, music, theater combine to create captivating pieces

By Sarah Witman
Sunday, October 25, 2009 8:29 p.m

Many artists consider themselves to be scientists of beauty, using precise structure and methods to find the perfect balance, symmetry and chroma of their pieces. However, artists of the Fluxus movement from the 1960s leave these conventions by the wayside, instead choosing to construct an artistic method that relies completely on chance, simplicity and fun. Coined by artist George Maciunas — from the Latin word “flux,” meaning in motion with constant change — Fluxus was a challenge to artists to bring together all aspects of the arts including choreography, music, theatrical performances and visual art.

Composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham were among the first founders of Fluxus, and it is their work, the work of their contemporaries and followers that bring this era-expounding exhibit to life. A strong linear theme manifests itself in much of the artwork behind widely varied media, from color photo etching to spit bite and sugar lift aquatint to arrangements of everyday objects. Many of the pieces in this particular exhibit are bestowed by the estate of ellsworth snyder — non-capitalization intentional — another Fluxus artist whose own work is also in the gallery. A friend and colleague of Cage, snyder wrote a doctoral dissertation of the style and times of Cage’s life for UW-Madison, the first ever written about the experimental artist.

For those who have seen the gallery just upstairs, “Robert Rauschenberg’s America,” which opened last month, there is one piece that will be all too familiar. It turns out that Rauschenberg had a hand in the Fluxus scene, and thus “Cage and Cunningham: Chance, Time and Concept in the Visual Arts” contains one of his works as well. The placard flanking the piece informs viewers that during the Fluxus years it was not unusual to see the trio of Cage, Cunningham and Rauschenberg working together on a project, as “Cunningham choreographed the dances, Cage composed the music, and Rauschenberg designed the theatrical sets.”

While smaller than other galleries within MMoCA, the exhibit is not short on creativity by any means — something that one would expect from artists who created their own style of artistry.

An inspirational piece by Stan Shellabarger demonstrates an inspired artistic method using wood, paint and boots. The artist painted over a length of boards with multiple layers of brightly colored paints and then walked across the boards over and over again until the layers of paint wore off at each end, revealing the unique hues beneath. Shellabarger completed the piece by leaving behind his well-used boots at one end of the work. MMoCA cleverly highlights how the process of creating this piece is the real work of art by posting framed professional photos next to the work depicting Shellabarger walking over the boards. The title of one of Cage’s own works also invokes a distinct sense of the spontaneity of the movement, meshing the word decor with the name of transcendentalist poet Thoreau to entitle “Déreau.”

Fluxus was a way for artists such as Yoko Ono, Dick Higgins and Ay-O to polarize established artistic practices and the alternative way they pictured art. What better place to appreciate the motives of these visionaries than within the innovative glass walls of MMoCA.
http://badgerherald.com/artsetc/2009/10/25/genres_collide_with_.php

From The Times October 24, 2009 Yoko Ono's life of love, war and Lennon

From The Times October 24, 2009
Have Beatles fans finally learnt to love Yoko Ono? She talks about building a tower of light for Lennon
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article6887223.ece#

99 EVENTS

Ken Friedman
99 Events
1956 – 2009

Stendhal Gallery

At http://www.fluxusheidelberg.org/publications.html you can find the digital version of Ken Friedman's latest show. 99 Events is the catalog of an exhibition of Ken Friedman’s event scores presented at The Stendhal Gallery , New York , September 10 - October 10, 2009

99 Events Copyright © 1966-1978 Fluxus

99 Events Copyright © 1956-2009 Ken Friedman

Notes to 99 Events Copyright © 2009 Ken Friedman

Ken Friedman: Event, Idea and Inquiry

Copyright © 2009 Carolyn Barnes.

31 Secret Truths - Fluxus Poetry by Litsa Spathi

31 Secret Truths - 2009 by Litsa Spathi - Germany/Netherlands

Lock box containing 31 wine corks and wine opener hidden inside of a box resembling a cloth bound book. Front and back covers open independently. The box is part of the Fluxmuseum Collection in Texas - USA. The box was created as a contribution to the Fluxhibition #3: Thinking Inside of the Box - Boxes, Cases, Kits and Containers.

Article by Charles Dreyfus - FLUXUS

AT THE BEGINNING OF December 1961, John Cage explained a passage from his book Silence starting with La Monte Young’s concerns (repetition of or playing a single sound over and over again); he concluded the interview hoping that Europeans become more American.
“My opinion is, not that it does something to me, but that I am able to feel in a different way, like I never felt before.”1

La Monte Young discovered Cage during summer 1959, at the Stockhausen Seminar in Darmstadt (“The Composition as a Process” in which Cage developed his ideas on indeterminate music in relation to its execution); at that time, Young worked on the West Coast where Cage was practically unknown.

The following summer, back in California, he took part along with Terry Riley, Warner Jepson and Bill Spencer in the creative workshop of choreographer Ann Halprin, at Kentfield. From the interview by Yvonne Rainer with Ann Halprin one can outline better the meaning of the use of doors and windows, as well as of the walls’ and floors’ resonance in the room in which she works.
“We utilized objects and accessories, we made use of the space in a definite way. I wanted to isolate these elements. I began to work by means of a system, thanks to which all those things became independent from the phenomenon of cause and effect; to make the music do THIS, one shouldn’t have to do THAT.”2 In the mid ’50s, George Brecht and Jackson Mac Low had also explored the diverse possibilities of the indeterminate; then John Cage invited them to present their works in his class which began in the summer of 1958 at New York’s 12th Street West. This New School for Social Research seminar was attended by Al Hansen, Dick Higgins, Allan Kaprow, composers Maxfield and Toshi Ichiyanagi (Yoko Ono’s first husband), etc., and by irregular visitors: Jim Dine, Larry Poons, George Segal. As yet, a study had not been made on the many performances derived from Cage’s classes (New York Audiovisual Group, etc.); individuals coming from the San Francisco area made their works of that period known in New York: Simone Forti, Robert Morris, Walter de Maria, Terry Jennings, Terry Riley, Dennis Johnson, Joseph Byrd. George Maciunas attended Maxfield’s classes, where he met Young; thanks to him, Maciunas, who has a degree in the History of Art and Musicology, plunged into the avant-garde. This man of Lithuanian origin, though, was certainly not inactive. He funded an orchestra of Renaissance music, playing on copies of ancient instruments he imported from East Europe along with stocks of food preserves; plus a full-time job as a designer at Knoll and in a gallery on the first floor of 925 Madison Avenue; this gallery, A/G — A for Almius (Salcius, his partner), and G for George — exhibited, according to Higgins, “terrible modern art.”3 Two series of performances most particularly attract our attention: those in Yoko Ono’s Studio at 112 Chambers Street, with La Monte Young as the organizer, which took place episodically from December 18, 1960, to June 30, 1961; and those by George Maciunas in his own gallery from
March 14 to June 30, 1961.
The name Fluxus appeared for the first time on an invitation card to three conferences by Maciunas, “Musica Antiqua et Nova,” from April 25 to May 16, 1961: “a three-dollar contribution will help to publish Fluxus magazine”). Such publication projects would come to occupy just as important a place as performance within the history of Fluxus.
When the poet Chester Anderson left New York for California in 1959, his magazine
Beatitude split in two; he asked Young to take care of an issue of Beatitude East. The magazine disappeared, and along with Anderson, the documents as well; their reappearance, and the joint efforts of Young and Mac Low allowed Maciunas to compose the layout of this book An Anthology before his departure for Wiesbaden in November 1961. Ready for printing in October 1961, An Anthology, of which certain documents had already been published in 1959, were finally printed by Young and Mac Low in 1963. Among the contributors to An Anthology living in Europe, we find the names of Claus Bremer, Nam June Paik, Dieter Roth and Emmett Williams.
Daniel Spoerri met Bremer and between 1957 and 1959 became the assistant of playwright Gustav-Rudolf Seller, the Director of the Landestheater of Darmstadt, where Bremer himself was Stage Director; in collaboration with Bremer he published Beispiele für das dynamische Theater,4 and on his own, Über das Autotheater (1959)5; he initiated Emmett Williams to concrete poetry; Roth, who was passing through Paris, joined Spoerri’s selection Art et Mouvement of the Festival d’Avant-Garde (1951) at Porte de Versailles (November 18 - December 14, 1960). Thus, in November 1961, George Maciunas arrived in Germany and immediately got in touch with Nam June Paik, the ‘European from Korea,’ already famous on the other side of the Atlantic for having cut off John Cage’s tie. At the beginning of 1958, Paik’s teacher in Freiburg, 12-tone composer Wolfgang Fortner, decided there was nothing more he could teach him, and found him a job at the Electronic Music Studio (Radio Cologne) founded by
Herbert Eimert and subsequently entrusted to Stockhausen. But before going to Cologne, Paik saw Cage’s Music Walk (October 14, 1958) at Gallery 22 by Jean Pierre Wilhelm in Düsseldorf, and fell in love with the indeterminate; he decided to meet Cage in his hotel room in Darmstadt and of Cage he retained the “sound collage” and “his sense of things which are out of order.” He also saw “Dada, Dokumente einer Bewegung” at Düsseldorf Kunsthalle (1958), and one assumes that that was the determining shock, and not for Paik alone, who started making a few tapes before he felt a need for action whose violence is “the effect more than the cause;” he is aggressive, but only toward himself, as on November 13, 1959, again at Gallery 22, where his concert lasted six minutes: electronic music for three tape-recorders and a sheet of glass to be shattered; he turned a piano upside down in front of an audience of ‘connoisseurs,’ among whom several artists from Düsseldorf, like Joseph Beuys, Winfred Gaul, Richard Goetz, Hoem. The concert was titled Homage to John Cage. Then, Mary Bauermeister’s studio (she was Stockhausen’s wife) in Cologne became the “anti-Radio Cologne” site, and starting in 1960 it presented works by George Brecht and La Monte Young; here began Paik’s fame in the United States. On the other hand, Wolf Vostell seldom attended Mary Bauermeister’s studio, since action music did not satisfy him completely; he declared that the action per se was a work of art. Beginning in 1958, following the Studio’s indifference towards his idea of ‘electronic vision,’ he made the “TV décoll/ages” whose first score, “TV décoll/ages for millions of spectators” is dated 1959. George Maciunas visited Vostell for the first time in his Cologne studio in April 1962; on his table, there was the project for the first Décoll/ages, which came out for the Neo-Dada in der Musik concert (June 16, 1962). November-April: more than five months had passed since Maciunas arrived in Germany.
Maciunas thought big. To begin with, he had planned a year and a half of concerts, from June 1962 (Berlin) to January 1964 (Tokyo), passing through Moscow etc. Everything had been planned: a big city or capital a month, and Fluxus magazine gathering all local information into a large United Front. The Neo-Dada in der Musik concert managed to take place thanks to Jean Pierre Wilhelm, but was organized by Paik. Had this concert been organized by Maciunas, “He was kind of mad, and of course he understood that this new art would be known before he made Fluxus; above all because of the concert organized by Paik and then, the same evening, because of the first issue of Décoll/ages.” (Interview by C.D. with Vostell). “Vostell always tried to be in competition; one never gets to do anything if we compete with the same thing, but he needed competition, and sometimes collaboration… (unintelligible tape) — so that Vostell never really belonged to Fluxus.” (Interview by C.D. with Maciunas).
Then why did Vostell follow this horrible tyrant, who dared to fire some virtuoso violinists from Vienna because they did not go to sleep at 10 P.M.? And what about Maciunas who got ridof Vostell? What was the magic power which enabled Maciunas to reject Paik’s personal concert in the name of the collective? To make the situation more complicated, before the Neo-Dada in der Musik concert, on June 9, in the Parnass Gallery, presented by Rolf Jährling, the concert Neo-Dada in New York took place (that is also the title of Maciunas’s exposé); Vostell and Paik were absent. Can one speak of sabotage? Ben Patterson and Maciunas (the two Americans!) presented works by Higgins, Riley, Jed Curtis, without forgetting their own. And on the very same day of Maciunas’s fast passage through the streets and at the Girardon Gallery in Paris, along with Patterson and Robert Filliou, Vostell made his happening Petite Ceinture, Cityrama II in the same city (July 3, 1962).
Festa Fluxorum, then, began its tour throughout Europe: 14 concerts in Wiesbaden in
September 1962, interpreted by Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins (arrived from New York), Paik, Patterson, Maciunas, Williams, Pierre Mercure, Karl Eric Welin, Vostell.
Maciunas, Paik, Williams, Addi Koepke, Filliou, Vostell, Higgins, Knowles, performed six concerts in Copenhagen, in November, while in Paris, the following month, Tomas Schmit and Daniel Spoerri joined the company with Domaine Poétique staged by Jean-Loup Philippe (Filliou, Gherasim Luca, Jean-Clarence Lambert, François Dufréne, Brion Gysin).
In February 1963, the experiment with Joseph Beuys took place in Düsseldorf; Alison
Knowles and Dick Higgins spread the good news by themselves in Stockholm and Oslo in March, followed once more by Copenhagen and Amsterdam in June; finally Nice, where Maciunas was received by Ben Vautier (from July 25 to August 3, before going back to New York in September).
The performers traveled with their own means, to free spaces they themselves discovered; no fees and, for the composers, no royalties (besides their own work, they played compositions by Cage, George Brecht, Robert/Bob Watts, La Monte Young, Jackson Mac Low, etc.); Maciunas, the coordinator, in spite of his poor health, spent all his nights making poster-programs, whose contents were often far removed from the actual possibilities of the executions; in a specially made suitcase, he carried the smaller accessories. In September 1963, Maciunas went back to New York, where, during the Spring, the Yam Festival by George Brecht and Robert Watts had somehow kept the American scene busy. A totally theoretical group, then, could form itself around the Fluxus-Maciunas publications, performances, objects and films.
Of the projects, 10% were carried out and realized; 70% of that 10% was distributed free to the idea-givers; Maciunas had in fact produced all the projects (except, in recent years, the ones produced by Giancarlo Politi, Gino Di Maggio, etc.); he announced them and depending on the demand he made them by hand one by one; no bookkeeping and no problems of distribution (three collectors in 1975), which was carried out by the artists themselves. Certain works, like those by Ann Halprin (remainders not used for An Anthology) reappear 15 years later. Dick Higgins founded Something Else Press (1963) and recuperated his manuscript Jefferson’s Birthday/Postface (1964) from one of Maciunas’s forgotten zones. In 1964, under Henry Flynt’s impetus, Maciunas became the executive director of a bureau for Action Against Imperialistic Culture (A.A.I.C.); their second action consisted of picketing, on September 8, 1964, in front of New York’s Judson Hall, where Originale by Stockhausen was to be performed. Henry Flynt (who introduced the concept of Concept Art back in 1961) blamed Stockhausen and his magazine Die Reihe for being a decorative element of West German ownership, but above all, he blamed him for a conference held at Harvard in 1958, in which Stockhausen had denigrated jazz; himself an exviolinist with La Monte Young, he composed and defended hillbilly music from North Carolina where he was born. Flux-schism: Paik and Higgins participated in Originale, while Flynt, Maciunas, Ay-O, Takako Saito, Tony Conrad and Ben remained outside.
A pioneer of SoHo, Maciunas set up seven real estate cooperatives between 1967 and 1968; because of his commitment to this project he came close to dying, and in fact he lost an eye. There was endless fighting with hidden forces and local authorities. Maciunas managed to renovate these cast iron buildings, some of which are architectural masterpieces; this made speculation impossible, while communal arrangements assured for the future minimum overhead expenses which were managed democratically. Thus, beginning in 1967, Jonas Mekas started his film library on the ground floor of 80 Wooster Street (The Filmmaker’s Film Library); as a matter of fact, this was SoHo’s first public place, except for Flux-Hall, a tiny space at 359 Canal Street which housed performances as well as the Fluxus shop after Maciunas’s return (1963). Eighty Wooster Street presented for the first time in the U.S. Hermann Nitsch’s Origien Mysterien Theater in March 1968, as well as Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater. Then in 1969-70, Maciunas tried to establish a 60-member cooperative on Ginger Island in the British Virgin Island; of its 230 acres, 11 were reserved for a Fluxus settlement; the day before the signing of the contract, the owner died. For the last two years, a 17-building village once more gave Maciunas the opportunity to express himself: a ‘new Bauhaus’ in the countryside of Massachusetts. But the latest news from my friend is very bad. He had to go back to New York wasted by illness where, on the 9th of last May, 1978, he died.

Charles Dreyfus is a performance artist and an art critic. He lives and works in Paris.

Notes:
1. Interview by Roger Reynolds, at Ann Arbor, beginning of December
1961, in John Cage, C.F. Peters Editions, Frankfurt 1962, p. 52.
2. Tulane Drama Review, volume 10 n. 2, New Orleans, Winter 1965, p.145.
3. Dick Higgins, Jefferson’s Birthday/Postface, Something Else Press, New York 1964, p. 66.
4. In Movens, Wiesbaden 1960.
5. In Zero n. 3, Düsseldorf 1960.

source: http://www.flashartonline.com/interno.php?pagina=articolo_det&id_art=206&det=ok&title=FLUXUS

Something Else Press: Exploring the Ways and Means of Communication

By Steve Clay

Designed, edited and produced by Dick Higgins, Something Else Press books contain offbeat and avant-garde writing in a neat and tidy yet quirky and distinctive form. The Press began in 1964 following Higgins’s break with Fluxus founder George Maciunas, and embodied the many of the concerns which identified the then nascent art movement.

Early titles include Jefferson’s Birthday/Postface (1964), Higgins’s collection of performance scores about which the jacket copy reads: ‘Jefferson’s Birthday consists of all the things Dick Higgins wrote, composed or invented between April 13th, 1962 and April 13th 1963 inclusive, on the assumption that the bad work one does is just as valid as the interesting work. So some is lousy. So? Some is terrific. Hurrah for the Irish! And hurrah for Thomas Jefferson! And Daniel Webster too!’ Jefferson’s Birthday was produced back-to-back with Postface, Higgins’s account of the background and beginning of Fluxus. He thus connects theory to practice a theme that would be pursued and enacted throughout his career.

Other early publications include New York Correspondance School of Art pioneer Ray Johnson’s The Paper Snake (1965). Here is a bit of Higgins’s somewhat polemical jacket copy description: ‘The meaning in Ray Johnson’s work is not logical, like an Aristotelian syllogism, but counter logical, like a psalm. All art… ‘Al Hansen’s A Primer of Happenings &Time/Space Art (1965) was another early title, as was Rumanian born nouveau realiste artist Daniel Spoerri’s 1966 classic, An Anecdoted Topography of Chance (re- Anecdoted Version) ‘Done with the help of his very dear friend Robert Filliou and translated from the French, and further re-anecdoted at random by their very dear friend Emmett Williams, with one hundred reflective illustrations by Topor’.
Dick Higgins’s 1969 collection foewaomwhnw (disguised as a prayer book) contains his defining essay ‘Intermedia” in which he first describes and elaborates artworks which ‘fall between media’ arguing that the social conditions of the time (early to mid 1960’s) no longer allowed for a ‘compartmentalised approach’ to either art or life. Indeed the range of works published by Something Else exemplify a very diverse approach: first American editions of several of Gertrude Stein’s works including The Making of Americans (1966); a reprint of Henry Cowell's New Musical Resources (1969); Merce Cunningham’s Changes: Notes on Choreography (1968); John Cage’s anthology of radial musical scores Notations (compiled and produced with Alison
Knowles and published in 1969); A Sailors Calendar by Ian Hamilton Finlay and Gordon Huntly(1971); Jackson MacLow’s aleotoric and systematic composition Stanzas for Iris Lezak; Richard Meltzer’s The Aesthetics of Rock (1970); One Thousand American Fungi by Charles Mcilvaine and Robert K MacAdam(1973); and Emmett Williams’s Anthology of Concrete Poetry (1967) which still stands, along with Mary Anne Solt’s Concrete Poetry: A World View (Indiana University Press, 1970) as one of the defining gatherings of the subject. Artist’s books, critical theory, early Modernism, concrete poetry, amusement, Fluxus, back to the land hippie culture
– through the use of conventional production and marketing strategies, Dick Higgins was able to place unconventional works into the hands of new and often unsuspecting readers.

In Two Sides of a Coin: Fluxus and Something Else Press, Higgins notes his style of publishing (large edition books in a ‘trade’ format) in contrast to that of Maciunas, who stressed the original, the hand-made or hand-assembled book/object that was necessarily produced in relatively small editions. Both Manciunas and Higgins rejected the ‘Helvetica look’ which dominated commercial design at the time (early to mid sixties); Maciunas, in Higgins’s words ‘…favoured a tight energetic look, which he achieved by using sans serif types, especially News Gothic, which he then juxtaposed with old-fashioned and florid display faces…’ Higgins describes some of his own ways around the ‘Helvetica look’ thus: ‘…I set poems and short chapters flush bottom on the type pages (usually they are set in the middle). I used larger and bolder running heads at the tops of pages than is customary in order to tie the page together and because I liked the legibility it gave to a sometimes rather scattered or unorthodox page. Since I did not wish to develop favouratism among type faces, I used whatever faces a particular supplier had, often making my selections by means of chance operations, using dice … [this] gave the Something Else Press books their look of old but new.

In addition to pamphlets, cards, newsletters, posters and other ephemera, Something Else Press had published over sixty book titles when it ended due to personal health and departmental problems in 1974. Peter Frank’s Something Else Press an annotated Biography (MacPherson and Co, 1983, now out of print) is a generally excellent source of information about the publications and the aesthetic and intellectual curiosity which drove them. Other useful sources include The Something Else Press – Notes for a History to be Written Someday published in The New Lazarus Review (Vol.2, n,I, 1979; ¾, 1980) as well as the essay Two Sides of a Coin: Fluxus and Something Else Press (published in Higgins’s Modernism Since Postmodernism: Essays on Intermedia (SDSU Press, 1997) Modernism Since Postmodernism is the final volume in Higgins’s critical trilogy which also includes A Dialectic of Centuries: Notes Towards a Theory of the New Arts (Printed Editions, 1979) and Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia (Southern Illinois University Press, 1984). Higgins’s scholarly projects include Pattern Poetry: Guide to an
Unknown Literature (State University of New York Press, 1978) and On the Composition of Images Signs and Ideas (De Imaginum Signorm et Idearum Compositione) by Giordano Bruno, edited and annotated by Dick Higgins, translated by Charles Doria and with a foreword by Manfredi Piccolomini (Willis, Locker & Owens publishing, 1991).

Toward the end of his career, Dick Higgins voraciously collected the works of American commercial trade book designer Merle Armitage (1893-1975) and authored the yet-to-be published Merle Armitage and the Modern Book. One of the projects sadly left unfinished at the time of Higgins early death was A Theory of the Book, which was to be published by Granary Books. The concept for this book had been developing in Higgins’s mind for years; he’d even compiled an extensive bibliography, which was later found in his computer files. A lovely obituary for Dick Higgins (1938-1998), written by Ken Friedman, appears in Judith Hoffberg’s
Umbrella (Vol. 21, n. ¾, 1998) and is reprinted in Umbrella: The Anthology (Umbrella Editions, 1999).

Steven Clay is co-author (with Rodney Phillips) of A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing 1960-1980. He is also an editor, curator, archivist and publisher of Granary Books. He lives with his wife and their two daughters in New York City.

FLUXUS chapter in AUSSAULT ON CULTURE by Stewart Home (UK)

THE ASSAULT ON CULTURE CHAPTER 9 (pages 50-55)

THE ORIGINS OF FLUXUS AND THE MOVEMENT IN ITS 'HEROIC' PERIOD

In the summer of 1958 John Cage (born Los Angeles, 1912) began teaching a course in musical composition at the New School For Social Research, New York. This course brought together, as guest lecturers and pupils, a number of personalities who would be crucial to the development of what would later become known as Fluxus. Apart from Cage, those in attendance included George Brecht (born Halfway, Oregon, 1925), Jackson Mac Low (born Chicago, 1922), Dick Higgins (born 1938), Allan Kaprow and Toshi Ichijanagi (Yoko Ono's fIrst husband).
A couple of years later, George Maciunas (born Kaunas, Lithuania, 1931) attended classes in electronic music run by Richard MaxfIeld at the same venue. La Monte Young also attended these classes. Young was simultaneously organising a series of performances and concerts in Yoko Ono's New York studio (December '60 to June 61) which featured a number of the future 'fluxus' personalities. Meanwhile, Maciunas held three lecture/demonstrations, entitled 'Musica Antiqua et Nova', at his own AG Gallery between March and June '61. On the invitation card to these conferences appeared the message "a 3-dollar contribution will help to publish Fluxus magazine". This is the fIrst recorded appearance of the name.

Sometime before this, the poet Chester Anderson had asked La Monte Young to edit an issue of "Beatitude East". Various documents which were to have gone into "Beatitude East" disappeared, along with Anderson. When they eventually reappeared, Young got Jackson Mac Low to assist him in assembling a selection of material representing the new trends in musical and poetic composition. As well as those connected with the group which had met at the New School For Social Research (Henry Flynt and Ray Johnson are among those not already mentioned), works by composers living in Europe (such as Nam June Paik, Dieter Rot and Emmett Williams) were collected. Maciunas did the layout and design for what had by this time been retitled "An Anthology". The paste-up was completed by October '61, but due to delays and financial difficulties the book didn't actually appear for another two years.

Debt forced Maciunas to take a graphic artists job with the US Air Force, and so, in November '61, the government sent him to West Germany to design lettering for military aircraft. The work was not only highly paid, it also enabled Maciunas to use the government resources placed at his disposal to promote fluxus. He became particularly adept at abusing the subsidised postal system which was intended to keep up morale among military personnel by minimising the cost of communication between them and their loved ones. Once in Europe, Maciunas made contact with Nam June Paik (born Seoul, Korea, 1932, and already infamous for cutting John Cage's necktie in two). Paik, in his turn, introduced Maciunas to a number of other avant-gardists resident in Europe, most notable among whom was Wolf Vostell (born Leverkusen, Germany, 1932).

Maciunas was still planning Fluxus magazine, but by this time he was also working on a series of concerts to promote it. Because he believed the avant-garde should present the public with a unified front, Maciunas asked Paik to delay his event "Neo-Dada in der Musik", and Vostell to put off publication of his "De-coll/age" magazine, until plans for all Fluxus events and publications were finalised. Paik and Vostell ignored this request; "Neo-Dada in der Musik" took place in Dusseldorf in June 1962, and the first issue of "De-coll/age" was published to coincide with this event.

Maciunas's plan was for a world tour of fluxus concerts taking in one large city a month. These were to have begun in June '62 in Berlin and ended in New York in December '63. The scheme was only very partially realised. Initially scheduled as the fourth festival in the series, "The Fluxus International Festival Of Very New Music" at the Horsaal des Stadtischen Museums, Wiesbaden, West Germany (fourteen concerts staged over the four weekends of September 1962), turned out to be the first and most ambitious of a series of performances that later became known as the "Festum Fluxorum". During the course of organising the Wiesbaden event, Maciunas fell out with a number of those billed as taking part (most notably the composers grouped together under the New Stylists label); and as a result, this and future fluxus manifestations would consist chiefly of action music verbally scripted compositions which tended to receive attention from those interested in performance art, rather than music critics.
The composers present at Wiesbaden (including Alison Knowles and her artist husband Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik, Robert Filliou, Arthur Koepcke, Wolf Vostell, Emmett Williams, Thomas Schmit, Ben Patterson and George Maciunas) performed not only their own works, but also many pieces by the likes of Yoko Ono, John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, Robert Watts and La Monte Young. Sometimes the audience became the performers, as with Terry Riley's "Ear Piece For Audience":

"The performer takes any object(s) such as a piece of paper, cardboard, plastic etc. and places it on his ear(s). He then produces the sound by rubbing, scratching, tapping or tearing it or simply dragging it across his ear, he also may just hold it there, it may be placed in counterpoint with any other piece of sound source."

This, like many other pieces performed during the festival, was included in the - at that time - unpublished "An Anthology", the paste-up of which Maciunas had brought with him to Europe.
The bizarre and destructive nature of some performances - which included the destruction of musical instruments, shaving exercises, and a leap into a bathtub filled with water - attracted a certain amount of media coverage. The festival as a whole highlighted the difference between what Maciunas would later label the 'monomorphic neo-haiku flux-event' and the 'mixed media neo-baroque happening'. That is to say that although the fluxus performances were intermedial, in the sense that they fell between various disciplines such as music and visual arts, each composition focused on a single event isolated from any other action and was presented as an iconoclastic insight into the nature of reality itself. Thus the emphasis in flux-work was on structural simplicity, and its protagonists placed it in the tradition of the natural event, Marcel Duchamp, jokes, gags, Dada, John Cage and Bauhaus Functionalism. The scores on which performances were based were invariably short, even if the actual pieces were often indeterminate in duration. For example, Maciunas's "In Memoriam To Adriano Olivetti";
"Each performer chooses any number from a used adding machine paper roll.Performer performs whenever his number appears in a row. Each row indicates the beat of metronome. Possible actions to perform on each appearance of the number:1) bowler hats lifted or lowered.2) mouth, lip, tongue sounds.3) opening, closing umbrellas etc."

Theoretically, by using these scores anyone was able to perform fluxus works with little need for practice, skill, or preparation.(1) Chieko Shiomi's "Disappearing Music For Face" is one of the best known and most popular examples of this:

"Change gradually from smile to no smile."

Maciunas was unable to attend the 'Festival Of Misfits' in London (Gallery One and Institute of Contemporary Arts, 23rd October to 8th November '62) and critics are divided over whether it should count as an official fluxus event The participants were Arthur Koepcke, Gustav Metzger, Robin Page, Ben Patterson, Daniel Spoerri, Ben Vautier and Emmett Williams. Ben Vautier (born Naples, Italy, 1935) lived in the window of Gallery One for much of the festival. Many considered Robin Page's "Guitar Piece" to be the highlight at the evening of action music held at the ICA. Victor Musgrave describes the performance in "The Unknown Art Movement" (Art and Artists, October '72):

"Wearing a shining silver crash helmet and holding his guitar ready to play, Robin waited a few moments before flinging it onto the stage and kicking it into the audience, along the aisle and down the steps into Dover Street. The effect was dramatic, the spectators arose and rushed after him as he ran round the block aiming frenetic kicks at the disintegrating guitar. The night sky was lurid with flashes of lightning; it was also the very day when the world stood poised in trepidation at the crucial point of the Kennedy-Kruschev confrontation over Cuba."
The "Festival of Misfits" was followed by concerts in Copenhagen (November '62), Paris (December '62), Dusseldorf (February '63), Amsterdam (June '63), the Hague (June '63) and Nice (August '63). It was at the Dusseldorf event that Joseph Beuys (born Cleve, Germany 1921) first involved himself with the fluxus movement. After the "Fluxus Festival Of Total Art" organised by Ben Vautier, Maciunas returned to New York where he concentrated on publishing activities rather than the organisation of concerts and other performances.

This first period of Fluxus activity coincided with a split within the movement over the question of disrupting high cultural activities and plans to harass middle class commuters as they travelled to and from work. In the "Fluxus New-Policy Letter No.6" (dated 6/4/63) Maciunas outlined his 'proposed propaganda action' for Fluxus in New York. The use of propaganda was broken down into four main areas:

a) Pickets and demonstrations.

b) Sabotage and disruption.

c) Compositions.

d) Sale of Fluxus publications.

These were to serve a dual purpose, "action against what H. Flynt describes as 'serious culture' & action for fluxus". Flynt, despite his bizarre and unorthodox Leninist leanings (for an example of these see the pamphlet "Communists Must Give Revolutionary Leadership In Culture" - World View Publishers, New York, 1965), had already established himself as the most politically committed of the Fluxus circle. In February '63, under the auspices of 'Action Against Cultural Imperialism', he'd held public demonstrations outside the Lincoln Center and the Museum Of Modem Art, New York, to protest against serious culture. Flynt (born Greensboro, North Carolina, USA, 1940) was one of the first white political activists to perceive that American high culture - due to its bourgeois European ancestry - was both racist and classist, and that its falsely assumed superiority was simply one aspect of its imperialistic nature.

The Fluxus aesthetic of unpretentious simplicity was by implication an assault on serious culture. It is therefore not surprising that Maciunas believed those adhering to his 'movement' would welcome some no less bizarre, but somewhat more practical, attacks on class society. In "News-Policy Letter No.6", Maciunas uses Flynt's example as a role model for organising pickets and demonstrations.

The next set of suggestions dealt with ideas for 'propaganda through sabotage and disruption'. These were divided into nine sections, with three main headings. The transportation system was to be disrupted with pre-arranged break-downs at strategic points on the city road system during the rush hour. The communication system was to be disrupted by the dissemination of false information and, most ingeniously of all, "stuffing postal boxes with thousands of packages (containing heavy bricks etc) addressed to various newspapers, galleries, artists etc, bearing no stamps & bearing as return address various galleries, concert halls, museums". Although Maciunas was being over optimistic in assuming that either the 'sender' or 'receiver' would be bound to pay for these, there is no doubt that the plan could have caused a good deal of disruption. Since any given postal worker can only carry a limited weight when delivering mail, if enough packages had been sent simultaneously to a single district this could have caused considerable delay in the distribution of mail. If the district selected was a business district the tactic would have been particularly effective with virtually no adverse effect on ordinary workers. Finally, there were plans to disrupt cultural life through the use of stink and sneeze bombs, the mailing of fake announcements, and using telephones to direct emergency and delivery services to museums (&c) on opening nights.

In a letter to Maciunas dated 25th April '63, Jackson Mac Low describes these tactics as approaching the "unprincipled, unethical and immoral". Mac Low, who had edited the anarcho-pacifist magazine "Resistance" from 1945-54, came out on the side of reaction by declaring that he was not concerned with demolishing the edifices of his enjoyment of the past. For similar reasons Brecht, Knowles (born New York, 1933) and Higgins sided with Mac Low, - while Flynt criticised Maciunas' s plan as being over artistic.

The dichotomy between those with a pan-disciplinary perspective and those who were unable to perceive anything beyond minor aesthetic concerns reached a head in August '64. Allan Kaprow (who had already disassociated himself from fluxus) organised and directed a performance of Stockhausen's "Originale" at the Judson Hall, as a part of the 2nd Annual New York Avant-Garde Festival. Maciunas and other fluxists (A-Yo, Takako Saito and Ben Vautier) who agreed with Flynt and Tony Conrad's condemnation of Stockhausen as an active supporter of Amerika's white racist elite, picketed the concert under the auspices of Action Against Cultural Imperialism. Other members of the fluxus movement decided to cross the picket line. Dick Higgins angered both pickets and scabs by joining the protest before going into the concert hall.
After this incident, Maciunas eventually gave way to the demands of the scabs and removed political issues from the fluxus agenda. Flynt distanced and disassociated himself from the movement Fluxus, like the Situationist International before it, proved incapable of sustaining itself as simultaneously a political and cultural movement The heroic period was over, fluxus could do no more than slowly degenerate.

Footnotes

1. Fluxus never dealt with the problem of exactly who the audience should be for these performances. Perhaps the performer acted out the script for their own, rather than anyone else's, amusement. However, the fact that Fluxus staged public performances of these events would indicate that the intended audience was wider than the individual performer(s).

source: http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/ass/fluxone.htm