Fluxus Heidelberg Center BLOG

This BLOG is maintained by the FLUXUS HEIDELBERG CENTER. See: WWW.FLUXUSHEIDELBERG.ORG.

This FHC BLOG will contain an overview of all news we find and get in connection to Fluxus. Articles, publications, events, celebrations, Biographies, you name it. Every month the collection of the blog will be published on the FHC website as a digital archive

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Merry Christmas and Happy 2009!

Saturday, December 20, 2008

News from Graphic Design Museum Breda

PERSBERICHT
by Bogaert, mw. F. van den
Officiële installatie Mieke Gerritzen in het Graphic Design Museum

Vandaag (20 December 2008) is onder grote belangstelling Mieke Gerritzen officieel geïnstalleerd als directeur van het Graphic Design Museum. In het hart van het museum, het auditorium, gaf Gerritzen een video presentatie waarin ze haar visie voor het komende jaar presenteerde.

“Het museum moet iedereen gaan bedienen en dat kan omdat het vak heel breed is geworden. Iedereen heeft, in toenemende mate, te maken met grafisch ontwerpen. Steeds meer mensen zijn er mee bezig, kijk maar naar al die foto’s en filmpjes op Flickr en YouTube. De hele wereld is afhankelijk geworden van technologie. Mensen communiceren steeds meer via beeldschermen. Mijn doel is om historie en actualiteit met elkaar te verbinden. Ik zal zorgen dat we elke keer met goede onderwerpen en tentoonstellingen nieuwe mensen trekken.’’

Ook maakte Gerritzen bekend dat de befaamde jonge ontwerpster Luna Maurer een tentoonstelling zal krijgen volgend jaar en dat het museum een digitale interactieve banier zal ontwikkelen voor het gebouw.
Mieke Gerritzen wil allereerst de website opnieuw inrichten.
Die website moet zich ontwikkelen tot een platform voor iedere dag met filmpjes en online tentoonstellingen.

" Websites bouwen is immers de core business voor grafisch ontwerpers. Ook de winkel moet winstgevend worden, ik wil daar een grafisch warenhuis van maken met bijzondere producten."

Mieke Gerritzen (1962) volgde haar opleiding aan de Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Ze werkte begin jaren negentig mee aan de allereerste Nederlandse websites, waaronder die van de VPRO. De laatste jaren maakte Gerritzen films, publiceerde boeken en organiseerde publieke evenementen zoals The Biggest Visual Power Show in Nederland, Duitsland en Los Angeles.
Van 2002 tot december 2008 was Mieke Gerritzen hoofd van de afdeling Grafisch Ontwerpen van het Sandberg instituut, de master opleiding die is verbonden aan de Gerrit Rietveld Academie.

Tijdens de bijeenkomst werd ook afscheid genomen van Directeur a.i.Peter Rijntjes. Voorzitter van de Raad van Toezicht, Hedy D’Ancona, bood een exclusief ontworpen beeldcolumn van het ontwerpduo de DesignPolitie aan.
D’ancona bedankte Peter Rijntjes voor hetgeen hij binnen een korte tijd voor het museum heeft weten te realiseren.
In minder dan een jaar tijd wist hij de nieuwbouw, organisatie en het tentoonstellingsprogramma van het museum succesvol gestalte te geven. Vanaf januari 2009 gaat Rijntjes zich als kwartiermaker inzetten voor
de nominatie van Brabantstad als Europese Culturele Hoofdstad in 2018.

Babel Fish--> Englisch
Press BULLETIn Official installation Mieke Gerritzen in the Graphic design museum Today(20 December 2008) under large interest Mieke Gerritzen it has been installed officially as a director of the Graphic design museum. In the heart of the museum, the auditorium, Gerritzen gave a video presentation in which presented its vision for the coming year them. The museum must will everyone serve and that is possible because the profession has become very broad. Everyone is, more and more, make with graphic devises. More and more people are, look but to all that photograph and small films on Flickr and YouTube. The complete world has become dependent on technology. People communicate more and more by means of display devices. My aim is chronicle and link topicality with each other. I will ensure that we each time with good subjects and exhibitions draws new people. Also Gerritzen made confessed that famous young for the Luna Maurer will get the exhibition to next year and that the museum will develop a digital interactive banner for the bldg. Mieke Gerritzen want arrange first of all the Internet site again. That Internet site must develop to a platform for every day with small films and online exhibitions. " Internet sites build the core business for graphic designers are. Also the shop must become profitable, I want make of it a graphic products house with particular producten." Mieke Gerritzen (1962) followed its training to the cane-plantation academy in Amsterdam. She cooperated beginning years ninety in the very first Dutch Internet sites, among which that of the VPRO. The last years made Gerritzen films, published books and organised public events such as The Biggest Visual Power show in the Netherlands, Germany and loose Angeles. From 2002 up to December 2008 Mieke Gerritzen head of the department graphic designs of the Sandberg institute were, the master training which has been linked to the Gerrit cane-plantation academy. During the meeting farewell of director a.i.Peter was also taken Rijntjes. President of the Supervisory Board, Hedy D'Ancona, offered the design police force to exclusively devised beeldcolumn of the design two-high rolling mill. D'ancona thanked godfather Rijntjes for what he has within a short time for the museum can realise. In than a year time less could he the nieuwbouw, organisation and the exhibition programme of the museum shape successfully. As from January 2009 will use itself Rijntjes as a quarter maker for the nominatie of Brabantstad as European cultural capital in 2018.

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Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Cage-Schüler George Brecht †

Veröffentlicht auf kultur-online (http://kultur-online.net/)
Cage-Schüler George Brecht †
erstellt am 2008-12-17 01:05

George Brecht, einer der eigenwilligsten Schüler des Komponisten John Cage und Mitglied der Künstlergruppe Fluxus, ist in einem Altersheim in Köln im Alter von 82 Jahren verstorben. Brecht, der eigentlich George MacDiarmid hiess, galt als einer der einflussreichsten Künstler seiner Zeit und hatte ursprünglich Chemie studiert. Er bestand unter anderem darauf, die Erfindung des Tampons in seinem Kunstkatalog zu listen.

Im Jahre 1958 wird Brecht Schüler des Avantgarde-Komponisten John Cage, worauf er seine Geige mit Zitronenöl einreibt und unter grossem Tamtam Wasser verschüttet. Laut Georges Maciunas, dem Urvater der Fluxus-Bewegung, hat sich Brecht in der Kunstgeschichte vor allem dadurch ein Denkmal gesetzt, dass er die Idee der «Readymade», die erstmals mit Marcel Duchamps zum Kunstwerk erklärten Urinoir zur Kunstform geworden sind, ins Reich der Aktion erweitert hat. So erklärte er alltägliche Handlungen wie das Betätigen eines Lichtschalters zur Kunst.


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Source URL:
http://kultur-online.net/?q=node/6554
© artCore 2007 Alle Rechte vorbehalten.Nutzung ausschließlich für den privaten Eigenbedarf.Eine Weiterverwendung und Reproduktion über den persönlichen Gebrauch hinaus ist nicht gestattet.

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Tuesday, December 16, 2008

George Brecht - Water Yam


Water Yam (1959-1966) by George Brecht

In a series of classes given at the New School for Social Research between 1956 and 1960, John Cage influenced a generation of artists who would develop the performance script into an art form, and lay the ground for Happenings and Fluxus. Having earlier embraced chance compositional procedures as a means of effacing his own likes and dislikes (and, as he put it, " imitating nature in her manner of operation"), Cage encouraged students who already were using chance in their work - such as George Brecht and Jackson Mac Low - and prompted others - such as Allan Karpow, Dick Higgins and Al Hanson - to do so. And his classroom assignments led to instructions for events and performances that yielded some of the most important intermedia activity of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Out of the Cage class came the kind of event cards for which Fluxus would become well-known, an evocative form whose power is best appreciated in the 1959-66 works of George Brecht published by the movement's impresario George Maciunas in a box called Water Yam . While most Fluxus event cards are performance scripts, Water Yam also includes instructions for the creation of objects or tableaux - obscure directions whose realization left almost everything to the realizer. In such works as Six Exhibits ("ceiling, first wall, second wall, third wall, fourth wall, floor") (fig.2) and Egg ("at least one egg"), Brecht applied to objects and physical situations the freedom of execution and openness to serendipity that is the hallmark of a Fluxus performance.

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Drip Music - George Brecht (Fluxus)

Monday, December 15, 2008

George Brecht's Funeral

Sueddeutsche.de Zum Tod des Fluxus-Künstlers George Brecht

06.12.2008 05:00 Uhr

Inkognito als Erfolg
Zum Tod des Fluxus-Künstlers George Brecht

"Here lives G. Brecht since 1972' - das Präsens verrät, dass es sich bei dem Schild, das der amerikanische Fluxus-Künstler Allan Kaprow Anfang der achtziger Jahre am Haus seines Freundes anbrachte, um eine "Gedenktafel zu Lebzeiten" handelte. Der Geehrte hatte allerdings weder die Zeremonie im Kreis geladener Freunde vor dem Mehrfamilienhaus im Kölner Stadtteil Sülz bemerkt, noch die Tafel. Etwas später zog er fort, in eine Straße, die nicht einmal im Stadtplan eingetragen war. Das Inkognito verzeichnete der Kunsthistoriker Dieter Daniels als Erfolg: "George Brecht hat es geschafft, trotz seiner einstigen Berühmtheit vergessen zu werden."

Als das Kölner Museum Ludwig ihm vor drei Jahren eine Werkschau ausrichtete, waren auch Kenner erstaunt, dass der Amerikaner seit mehr als zwei Jahrzehnten im Deutschland wohnte; für die Kunstgeschichte ist sein Name mehr als eine Fußnote. Spätestens seit die Fluxus-Bewegung hoch geschätzt wird, gilt sein Werk als herausragende Position, die radikale Ansätze von Marcel Duchamp und John Cage gleichermaßen fortschreibt. George Brecht habe "eine Menge Anerkennung dafür verdient, dass er das Readymade ins Reich der Aktion erweitert hat", postulierte George Maciunas, der Gralshüter der Bewegung.

Und wenn sich schon seine Verdienste um die Kunst nicht leicht auf den Punkt bringen ließen, dann war auch die Person nicht zu greifen - das Unterlaufen von Kategorien wie Werk und Vita gehörte zum Konzept. Künstler, die erfolgreich sein möchten, dürfen sich nicht verhalten wie Literaten, sagte ein Museumsdirektor über George Brecht: Wie konnte der die New Yorker Galerien verlassen, um Mitte der sechziger Jahre irgendeiner Frau nach Europa zu folgen und dort auch noch permanent die Adresse wechseln - wo schon die Namenszeile das unbekümmerte Spiel mit den Verbindlichkeiten der eigenen Existenz andeutet. Brecht wurde nämlich als George MacDiarmid am 27. August 1926 in New York City geboren, den Namen Brecht las er im Schwarzwald auf, wo er als Freiwilliger stationiert war.

Nach seiner Rückkehr in die USA beginnt er eine Doppelkarriere als Wissenschaftler und Maler, indem er am College in Philadelphia Chemie studiert und sich gleichzeitig an der Kunstschule in den Fächern Zeichnen, Ölmalerei und Bildhauerei fortbildet. Als Chemiker bei Johnson & Johnson erfindet er den Tampon, als Maler experimentiert er mit Bildern, die vollkommen zufällig entstehen, bekleckert Stoffbahnen mit Tinte und lässt Murmeln im Wäschetrockner das Werk vollenden. Mit "Chance-Imagery" schreibt er eine Geschichte des Zufalls in der Kunst, entdeckt Marcel Duchamp und Robert Rauschenberg und sucht die Bekanntschaft mit dem Komponisten John Cage, dessen Schüler er wird.

Bald komponiert er erste "Partituren" für Aktionen - ausdauernd poliert er eine Geige mit Zitronenöl, leise verschüttet er Wasser oder orchestriert einen Parkplatz voller Autos: Scheinwerferblinken, Hupgeräusche, Motorlärm und das Schleifen der Scheibenwischer werden im "Motor Vehicle Sundown (Event)" zum Ereignis. Mit dem "Event" hat George Brecht das Readymade auch in die Koordinaten der Zeit eingeschrieben - fortan kann das Bedienen des Lichtschalters zur Aufführung werden. "Toward events: an arrangement" heißt seine erste Ausstellung im Jahr 1959 in der New Yorker Reuben Gallery. Die Festivals, die Anfang der sechziger Jahre unter dem Kunstbegriff "Fluxus" in Köln, Kopenhagen, Amsterdam, Wiesbaden oder Düsseldorf stattfinden, versorgt Brecht mit Partituren. Gleichzeitig baut er Objektkästen, die er als "Seiten" eines Buches versteht, als das er sein Oeuvre fortan begreift: "The Book of the Tumbler on Fire", wer sich die Titelzeile als Bild des "brennenden Bechers" vorstellt, spürt, wie Brechts Sprache das Objekt attackiert.

Die Wortschöpfung "Heterospektive" überschrieb im Jahr 2005 die Kölner Schau, die sich dieser Vielheit stellte. Die Kuratoren fächerten Spielkarten auf, reihten Objektkästen neben Landkarten und Vitrinen voll langsam wachsender Kristalle. Ein Abgleich zwischen "Event"-Karten und Arrangement zeigte, dass George Brecht, der das Spiel als zentrale Metapher seiner Arbeit verstand, offensichtlich jede Variation als neue Partie (gegen das Museum) angelegt hat: Wenn das "Chair Event" verlangt, dass auf einem Stuhl neben Reibe, Maßband und Spektralfarben auch das Alphabet ausgelegt wird, dann können das Buchstabenplättchen sein, aber auch eine Kugel voller Versalien.

George Brecht ist in der Nacht zum Freitag in einem Kölner Pflegeheim gestorben. Sein Werk wird in seiner vorsätzlichen Unabgeschlossenheit eine Herausforderung bleiben, die nicht nur die Kunstgeschichte, sondern auch Wortgewandtheit und Spielgeist von Kuratorengenerationen auf die Probe stellen wird. CATRIN LORCH

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Fluxus-Gründer (George Brecht) tot

FRANKFURTER RUNDSCHAU
FR-online.de Kultur & Medien

Feuilleton

Fluxus-Gründer tot
"Gas geben, Motor beschleunigen"
VON SANDRA DANICKE

Er wolle sicherstellen, so hat es George Brecht einst formuliert, dass "die Details des täglichen Lebens, die zufälligen Konstellationen von Objekten, die uns umgeben, endlich aufhören, unbemerkt zu bleiben". Was klingt, wie das Konzept eines zeitgenössischen Künstlers, hat George Brecht bereits in den fünfziger Jahren entwickelt. Der Künstler stellte etwa einen Garderobenständer mit Damenmantel und Schirm aus, präsentierte Stühle oder Tische im Ausstellungsraum. Gegenstände, wie sie zuvor bereits als Ready Mades bei Marcel Duchamp oder als Assemblagen bei Robert Rauschenberg aufgetaucht waren, doch Brecht fügte noch einen entscheidenden Aspekt hinzu. Mit Ausstellungstiteln wie "Toward Events: An Arrangement" (so hieß 1959 seine erste Schau in der New Yorker Reuben Gallery) brachte George Brecht Elemente wie Vergänglichkeit und Partizipation ins Spiel, und wurde so mit Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell und Yoko Ono zum Begründer der Fluxus-Bewegung.

Patentierte Tampon-Produkte

Geboren wurde Brecht 1926 in New York als George MacDiarmid; seinen Künstlernamen legte er sich 1945 während seiner Stationierung als US-Soldat im Schwarzwald zu. Nach dem Krieg verfolgte Brecht zunächst eine Doppelstrategie, studierte in Philadelphia Chemie und nahm gleichzeitig Zeichen- und Bildhauerunterricht. Bis 1965 arbeitete er in New Jersey als Pharma-Ingenieur, entwickelte und patentierte Tampon-Produkte, und knüpfte gleichzeitig Kontakte zu David Tudor, Robert Watts und Allan Kaprow. 1958-59 besuchte George Brecht den Kurs "Experimental Composition" von John Cage an der New York School for Social Research und entwickelte in den folgenden Jahren die Konzeption des "Events". Für George Maciunas, den Fluxus-Chef-Organisator, waren jene Events ein zentraler Bestandteil der Absichten von Fluxus.

Von Cage beeinflusst, schrieb Brecht ab 1961 eigene Partituren, in denen der Zufall sowie die Geräusche der Umgebung eine zentrale Rolle spielen. Etwa "Motor Vehicle Sundown", eine Aktion, bei der einer Gruppe von Autofahrern Handlungsanweisungen wie "Gas geben, Motor beschleunigen" oder "Kofferraum öffnen und schließen" ausgehändigt wurden. Gemeinsam mit Robert Watts gründete Brecht 1962 in New York das "Yam Festival", zog 1965 nach Villefranche-sur-Mer bei Nizza, wo er bis 1968 mit Robert Filliou "La cédille qui sourit" (Die lächelnde Cedille) betrieb, eine Art Ideenfabrik für Kunstprojekte, Mail-Order-Events und Poesie, und zog sich schließlich weitgehend aus dem Ausstellungsbetrieb zurück. Stattdessen züchtete er Kristalle, lernte Chinesisch und gab eine dreisprachige Übersetzung des "Hsin Hsin Ming" von Seng Ts'an heraus, ein Zen-Text aus dem 6. Jahrhundert.

Als das Kölner Museum Ludwig 2005 eine Brecht-Retrospektive zeigte, waren selbst Fachleute erstaunt, dass der Künstler bereits seit mehr als drei Jahrzehnten im Rheinland wohnte, 1970 zog er zunächst nach Düsseldorf, zwei Jahre später nach Köln und produzierte Hörspiele im WDR-Studio.

Noch bis 1999 sammelte Brecht für sein Projekt "Audio Recordings of Great Works of Art" Tonaufnahmen der Geräuschkulissen vor zentralen Werken der europäischen Kunstgeschichte, etwa der "Mona Lisa" im Pariser Louvre.

Am Freitag ist George Brecht im Alter von 82 Jahren in einem Kölner Altenheim gestorben.

Fluxus-Gründer tot: "Gas geben, Motor beschleunigen" [ document info ]
Copyright © FR-online.de 2008
Dokument erstellt am 07.12.2008 um 16:36:02 Uhr
Letzte Änderung am 07.12.2008 um 22:09:30 Uhr
Erscheinungsdatum 08.12.2008

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Henning Christiansen gestorben


Henning Christiansen bei einer Fluxus-Performance, Kopenhagen 2007

Henning Christiansen ist tot. Nur wenige Tage nach George Brecht starb am 10. Dezember ein weiterer Künstler der Fluxus-Bewegung. Mit dem Tod dieser Vertreter geht nun eine wichtige Epoche der Nachkriegskunst langsam zu Ende. Der dänische Komponist und Künstler kam am 28. Mai 1932 in Kopenhagen zur Welt. Von 1950 bis 1955 studierte Henning Christiansen am dortigen Königlichen Dänischen Musikkonservatorium Komposition, Klarinette und Klavier, obwohl ihn nach eigener Aussage Musik nicht interessierte. Bald schon wandte er sich von traditionellen Gestaltungsbahnen ab und nahm 1961 Kontakt zu den Mitgliedern der Gruppe „Eks-Skole“ in Kopenhagen auf, die als unkonventionelle Alternative zur althergebrachten Kopenhagener Kunstakademie von Paul Genres und Troels Andersen gegründet worden war. Ab 1962 organisierte Henning Christiansen mit ihnen Aktionen, die sich an den amerikanischen Happenings orientierten.

Henning Christiansen gilt als Fluxus-Komponist der ersten Stunde. In Deutschland wurde er Mitte der 1960er Jahre weitgehend durch die Zusammenarbeit mit Joseph Beuys bekannt, zu dessen Aktionen er häufig die Musik beisteuerte, etwa bei den Fluxus-Events „Manresa“ 1966 in der Düsseldorfer Galerie Schmela oder „Eurasienstab“ 1967 in der Wiener Galerie Nächst St. Stephan. Zusammen mit Bazon Brock, Robert Filliou, Arthur Köpcke, Wolf Vostell oder Emmett Williams nahm Christiansen 1964 an der großen Fluxus-Veranstaltung „Actions, Agit-Pop, De-Collage“ in der Technischen Hochschule in Aachen teil.

Seine Werke instrumentierte er nur selten auf gewohnte Weise. Inspiriert durch die musique concrète setzte Christiansen Geräusche der Natur wie blökende Schafe und bellende Hunde ein. Bezeichnend ist hier der Titel einer seiner Kompositionen: „Schafe statt Geigen“. Die Natur als Gegenpol zur technisierten Welt, das Archaische im Gegensatz zum modernen Gestalteten spielt eine wichtige Rolle in seinem Schaffen. 1985 nahm er eine Professur im Fach Multimedia an der Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg an. Bis zuletzt war Henning Christiansen, der auf der dänischen Insel Møn lebte, künstlerisch tätig. So vertrat er gemeinsam mit seiner Frau Ursula Reuter Christiansen 2002 Dänemark auf der Biennale in Venedig, organisierte vergangenen Jahres eine Retrospektive seines Werks in Kopenhagen und nahm dort noch im letzten Monat am Musikfestival „Wundergrund“ teil. Bis zum 31. Januar 2009 zeigt die Galerie Gelbe Musik in Berlin eine Ausstellung mit Arbeiten von Henning Christiansen unter dem Titel „perceptive construction – next point“.

Die Galerie Gelbe Musik hat dienstags bis freitags von 13 bis 18 Uhr, samstags von 11 bis 14 Uhr geöffnet.

Galerie Gelbe Musik
Schaperstraße 11
D-10719 Berlin

Telefon: +49 (0)30 – 211 39 62


Quelle: Kunstmarkt.com/Ulrich Raphael Firsching
12.12.2008

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The New York Times - George Brecht died

George Brecht, 82, Fluxus Conceptual Artist, Is Dead
By KEN JOHNSON
Published: December 15, 2008

George Brecht, a core member of Fluxus, the loosely affiliated international group of playful Conceptual artists that emerged in the early 1960s, died on Dec. 5 in Cologne, Germany. He was 82 and lived in Cologne.


George Brecht performing his “Incidental Music” in Amsterdam in 1961. Many of his “pieces” consisted just of instructions.

He died in his sleep, said Geoffrey Hendricks, a friend, who was also a Fluxus member. He had been in failing health for several years.

Mr. Brecht came of age as an artist in the late 1950s, when Abstract Expressionism and the cult of the heroic creative genius were ascendant. Inspired by the Conceptual art of Marcel Duchamp and the experimental music of John Cage, he began to imagine a more modest, slyly provocative kind of art that would focus attention on the perceptual and cognitive experience of the viewer.

American, European and Asian artists who were thinking along similar lines included Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Ben Vautier, Nam June Paik and George Maciunas, who in 1962 came up with the name Fluxus for this confederation of like-minded Conceptualists.

Like many other Fluxus artists, Mr. Brecht created assemblages consisting of ordinary objects in boxes and cabinets, as well as arrangements that often included chairs. He also made paintings and sculptures that played with language, like a piece with white plastic letters spelling “sign of the times.”

His most important and original contribution was a form he called the “event score,” which typically was printed on a small white card that he would mail to friends. The event score consisted of a title followed by eccentric instructions. The directive for “String Quartet,” for example, read simply, “Shaking hands.” The musicians would perform it by doing just that.

One of his most famous pieces was “Drip Music,” in which “a source of water and an empty vessel are arranged so that the water falls into the vessel.” Performances of “Drip Music” can be seen on Youtube.com.

He created event scores for sculptures as well. Instructions for “Three Arrangements,” for example, read, “on a shelf/on a clothes tree/black object white chair.”

Mr. Brecht said that he did not care if any of his event scores were realized and that he did not think that there was a correct way to perform one. He once wrote that his events were “like little enlightenments I wanted to communicate to my friends who would know what to do with them.”

Mr. Brecht was born George MacDiarmid on Aug. 27, 1926, in New York. His father, a flutist who played in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and the NBC Radio Orchestra, died when his son was 8. Mr. Brecht changed his last name to Brecht — not in reference to Bertolt Brecht, but because he liked the sound of the name — around 1945 while serving in the United States Army in Germany.

After the war Mr. Brecht studied chemistry at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science in Philadelphia, and he supported himself as a research chemist from 1950 to 1965.

In the mid-1950s, following the lead of Jackson Pollock, Mr. Brecht produced paintings using chance operations and materials like bed sheets, ink and marbles. In 1958-59, he attended a class in experimental music composition taught by John Cage at what was then the New School for Social Research in New York. Soon he was producing compositions even more radical than those of Mr. Cage.

In the early 1960s, Mr. Brecht taught in what was then the unusually progressive art department of Rutgers University, along with Mr. Hendricks, Allan Kaprow (who became known as an inventor of the “happening”) and Robert Watts, who also became a Fluxus artist.

Mr. Brecht’s first solo exhibition, “Toward Events: An Arrangement,” was at Reuben Gallery in New York in 1959. During the next five years, he participated in many group exhibitions and performances in New York. His work “Repository” (1961), a wall cabinet containing a pocket watch, a thermometer, rubber balls, toothbrushes and other objects, was included in “The Art of Assemblage,” the famous 1961 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and the museum later bought it. Nine years later, Mr. Brecht was included in “Information,” another landmark show at the Modern.

In 1965, Mr. Brecht left New York. He lived in Rome, the South of France, London and Düsseldorf, Germany, before settling in Cologne in 1972.

He is survived by his wife, Hertha, and a son, Eric, who lives in Southern California.

Mr. Brecht’s work was especially appreciated in Europe. He was included in Documenta, the giant exhibition in Kassel, Germany, in 1972 and 1977. In 2005 the Museum Ludwig in Cologne organized a comprehensive career retrospective, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona.

Mr. Brecht once described his art as a way of “ensuring that the details of everyday life, the random constellations of objects that surround us, stop going unnoticed.”

More Articles in Arts » A version of this article appeared in print on December 15, 2008, on page A33 of the New York edition.

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Sunday, December 14, 2008

Internet Suche

George Brecht
Brecht [brekt], George, amerikanischer Künstler, * Blomkest (Minnesota) 7. 3. 1924, † Köln 5. 12. 2008.

Wissensnetz (computergeneriert)Berliner Ensemble (Sachartikel) Fluxus episches Theater (Sachartikel) Wolf Vostell (Personen) Happening Brecht (Sachartikel) Alberto Burri (Personen) Paul Dessau (Personen) John M. Armleder (Personen) Robert Watts (Personen) Lehrstück (Sachartikel) moderne Kunst (Sachartikel) Assemblage (Sachartikel) Malerei, Grafik Helene Weigel (Personen) Giorgio Strehler (Personen) Albrecht (Sachartikel) Sprache, Schriften Max Frisch Angelika Hurwicz (Personen) Erich Engel (Personen) Kutscher_605685 (Personen) Paik Nam June_16042913 (Personen) Musiktheater (Sachartikel)



KategorienKunstgeschichte
Medienkunst

Stichwörterobjektassemblage, fluxus-bewegung, fluxus, assemblage, neodadaistisch, unaufwendig, unaufwändig, dadaistisch

George Brecht in art DAS KUNSTMAGAZIN

George Brecht gestorben

Eines der letzten Urgesteine der internationalen Fluxus-Bewegung

Einer der letzten großen Künstler der internationalen Fluxus-Bewegung, der 1926 in Amerika geborene George Brecht, ist am Wochenende in Köln gestorben. Brecht, der mit bürgerlichem Namen George MacDonald hieß, war ein Urgestein des Fluxus, das sich aus den Kursen für "Experimentele Komposition" des Amerikaners John Cage entwickelt hatte und als eine Form der Aktionskunst in die Geschichte einging. Bereits 1959 nahm George Brecht an ersten Fluxus-Aktionen teil, 1962/63 veranstaltete er gemeinsam mit Robert Watts das ein Jahr lang dauernde New Yorker "Yam Festival". 1965 siedelte Brecht nach Frankreich über.

Wie das große Vorbild für viele Fluxus-Künstler, Marcel Duchamp, verwendete George Brecht für seine Kunstobjekte vorgefundene Teile, so genannte Ready-Mades. In den siebziger Jahren zog George Brecht ins Rheinland, erst nach Düsseldorf, dann nach Köln. 2007 erhielt er den "Berliner Kunstpreis – Jubiläumsstiftung 1848/1948" der Akademie der Künste.

In der Begründung hieß es unter anderem: "Brecht ist einer der einflussreichsten Künstler der Fluxus-Bewegung. Bekannt ist er unter anderem für seine "Event-Objekte’, zufällig angeordnete Alltagsgegenstände, die durch den Blick oder den möglichen Gebrauch des Betrachters zum Ereignis werden. Brecht verwendet "Event-Partituren’, beschäftigt sich mit Mail-Order-Events und Poesie, initiiert Landvermessungsverlagerungen, baut "Kristall-Objektkästen’, übersetzt Hsin-Hsin-Ming von Seng-Ts’an, produziert im elektroakustischen Studio des WDR Hörspiele." 08.12.2008 pb

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Saturday, December 13, 2008

ZKM Artikel Silent Music

: ZKM :: Artikel :: ZKM Exhibitions :: George Brecht 80.

Silent Music
Exhibitions 10 2006

28 October–3 December 06
Silent Music. George Brecht 80. Radio plays
ZKM Media Museum, Ars Acustica in the Project Space
Opening Fr, 27 October 7 p.m. at the ZKM Media Museum

In the time from 1983 to 1995, George Brecht realized three radio plays for West German Radio’s studio of acoustic art. They are a productive part of his intermedial, artistic output, his scientific research as well as a connection, that appears therein, to the thoughts and aesthetics of the Far East, to Taoism, and to Zen. »Silent music. Musik der Stille« is a poetic compendium about listening, music, and silence. »Supreme Music: Silence – Supreme Silence: Music« is a meditative voice game by George Brecht and John Cage of spoken reflections on their own texts as well as quotations of Chinese writings recited from two further voices. »Unterwegs notiert,« a third, short radio play, consists of ready-made observations and quotations. His radio play »Das Hsin-hsinming des Seng Ts'an« is based on a piece of writing left behind by the Chinese sage Seng Ts'an who died in 606. George Brecht translates this 73-verse text from Chinese into English for a publication that he arranged in four languages, including a French translation by Robert Filliou and a German translation by the poet Albrecht Fabri. For the radio play, each translator recited the text of their translation and another voice read the Chinese original. The recordings were layered together by chance. The constant noise from drops of water—a recollection of Brecht’s event »Drip Music« from the 1950s—accompanies this acoustic mobile of multilingual voices. These pieces will be presented as a non-stop performance in a specially designed listening booth. Also available for listening will be the »Beansequences« by the Fluxus artist Alison Knowles as well as the théâtre imaginaire of Dada and Zen, »An Alphabet« by John Cage, with George Brecht in the role of Marcel Duchamp. Additionally, a conversation »Über Fluxus und Zen« (on Fluxus and Zen) with George Brecht, inter-media artist Jackson MacLow, and Klaus Schöning, the former head of the »Studio of Acoustic Art« and co-director of these five radio plays. George Brecht, born in New York, has lived in Cologne since 1972. On 27 August 2006 he celebrated his eightieth birthday. Maintaining a buoyant reserve with regard to the Fluxus movement, he is one of its most fascinating personalities and is honored with this listening booth at the ZKM Media Museum.

Curated by Klaus Schöning with Nadja Schöning.


© 2008 ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe ::


Silent Music
Ausstellungen 102006

28.10.–03.12.06
Silent Music. George Brecht 80. Hörstücke
ZKM Medienmuseum, Ars Acustica im Projektraum
Eröffnung Fr 27.10. 19 Uhr im ZKM Medienmuseum

[=> Information in English]

In der Zeit von 1983 bis1995 hat George Brecht drei Hörstücke für das Studio Akustische Kunst des WDR realisiert. Sie sind produktiver Teil seines intermedialen, künstlerischen Schaffens, seiner wissenschaftlichen Forschungen sowie einer darin zur Erscheinung kommenden Verbindung zur fernöstlichen Gedankenwelt und Ästhetik, zum Taoismus und zum Zen. »Silent music. Musik der Stille« ist ein poetisches Kompendium über das Hören, die Musik und die Stille. »Supreme Music: Silence – Supreme Silence: Music«. Ein meditatives Stimmenspiel aus von George Brecht und John Cage gesprochenen eigenen Reflexionen sowie von zwei weiteren Stimmen rezitierte Texte chinesischer Schriften. »Unterwegs notiert«, ein kurzes, drittes Hörspiel besteht aus ready-made-Beobachtungen und Zitaten. Sein Hörstück »Das Hsin-hsinming des Seng Ts'an« basiert auf einer Schrift, den der chinesische Weise (gestorben 606) hinterlassen hat. George Brecht übersetzte diesen Text aus 73 Versen für eine, von ihm veranlasste, viersprachige Publikation aus dem Chinesischen ins Englische, Robert Filliou ins Französische und der Poet Albrecht Fabri ins Deutsche. Für das Hörstück sprach jeder den Text seiner Übersetzung und eine weitere Stimme zitierte das chinesische Original. Dem Zufall folgend wurden die Aufnahmen übereinandergeschichtet. Das ständige Geräusch von Wassertropfen – eine Erinnerung an Brechts Event »Drip Music« aus den 1950erJahren – begleitet dieses akustische Mobile multilingualer Stimmen. In einem eigens eingerichteten Hörkabinett werden diese Stücke in einer Nonstop-Performance vorgestellt. Darüber hinaus werden die »Beansequences« der Fluxus-Künstlerin Alison Knowles sowie das théâtre imaginaire aus Dada und Zen »Ein Alphabet« von John Cage, mit George Brecht in der Rolle des Marcel Duchamp, zu hören sein. Als Ergänzung ein Gespräch »Über Fluxus und Zen« mit George Brecht, dem Intermedia-Künstler Jackson MacLow und Klaus Schöning, dem vormaligen Leiter des »Studio Akustische Kunst« und Co- Regisseurs dieser fünf Hörstücke. Der in New York geborene, seit 1972 in Köln lebende Künstler George Brecht ist am 27.08. 2006 achtzig Jahre alt geworden. In heiterer Zurückhaltung heute gegenüber der Fluxus-Bewegung ist er eine ihrer faszinierendsten Persönlichkeiten, die mit diesem Hörkabinett im ZKM Medienmuseum geehrt wird.

Kuratiert von Klaus Schöning mit Nadja Schöning.

© 2008 ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe ::

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George Brecht, Fluxus artist and provocateur, dies at 82

Herald Tribune/Europe
George Brecht, Fluxus artist and provocateur, dies at 82
By Ken Johnson Published: December 15, 2008

George Brecht, a core member of Fluxus, the loosely affiliated international group of playful Conceptual artists that emerged in the early 1960s, died on Dec. 5 in Cologne, where he had lived since 1972. He was 82.

He died in his sleep, said Geoffrey Hendricks, a friend, who was also a Fluxus member. He had been in failing health for several years.

Brecht came of age as an artist in the late 1950s, when Abstract Expressionism and the cult of the heroic creative genius were ascendant. Inspired by the Conceptual art of Marcel Duchamp and the experimental music of John Cage, he began to imagine a more modest, slyly provocative kind of art that would focus attention on the perceptual and cognitive experience of the viewer.

American, European and Asian artists who were thinking along similar lines included Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Ben Vautier, Nam June Paik and George Maciunas, who in 1962 came up with the name Fluxus for this confederation of like-minded Conceptualists.

Like many other Fluxus artists, Brecht created assemblages consisting of ordinary objects in boxes and cabinets, as well as arrangements that often included chairs. He also made paintings and sculptures that played with language, like a piece with white plastic letters spelling "sign of the times."

Today in Europe
University in Athens, epicenter of riots, is drawing a potent mix of radicalsAfter a day of quiet, riots resume in AthensA Portuguese tradition faces a frozen futureHis most important and original contribution was a form he called the "event score," which typically was printed on a small white card that he would mail to friends. The event score consisted of a title followed by eccentric instructions. The directive for "String Quartet," for example, read simply, "Shaking hands." The musicians would perform it by doing just that.

One of his most famous pieces was "Drip Music," in which "a source of water and an empty vessel are arranged so that the water falls into the vessel." Performances of "Drip Music" can be seen on Youtube.com.

He created event scores for sculptures as well. Instructions for "Three Arrangements," for example, read, "on a shelf/on a clothes tree/black object white chair."

Brecht said that he did not care if any of his event scores were realized. He once wrote that his events were "like little enlightenments I wanted to communicate to my friends who would know what to do with them."

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Friday, December 12, 2008

George Brecht in art-in.de

George Brecht - Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe (28.10.–03.12.06)
(Eingabedatum: George Brecht, Karlsruhe, 17.10.2006)


In der Zeit von 1983 bis 1995 hat George Brecht drei Hörstücke für das »Studio Akustische Kunst« des WDR realisiert. Sie sind produktiver Teil seines intermedialen, künstlerischen Schaffens, seiner wissenschaftlichen Forschungen sowie einer darin zur Erscheinung kommenden Verbindung zur fernöstlichen Gedankenwelt und Ästhetik, zum Taoismus und zum Zen. »Silent music. Musik der Stille« ist ein poetisches Kompendium über das Hören, die Musik und die Stille. »Supreme Music: Silence - Supreme Silence: Music«. Ein meditatives Stimmenspiel aus von George Brecht und John Cage gesprochenen eigenen Reflexionen, sowie von zwei weiteren Stimmen rezitierte Texte chinesischer Schriften. »Unterwegs notiert«, ein kurzes, drittes Hörspiel besteht aus ready-made-Beobachtungen und Zitaten.
Sein Hörstück »Das Hsin HSin Ming des Seng Ts'an« basiert auf einer Schrift, den der chinesische Weise (gestorben 606) hinterlassen hat. George Brecht übersetzte diesen Text aus 73 Versen für eine - von ihm veranlasste - viersprachige Publikation aus dem Chinesischen ins Englische, Robert Filliou ins Französische und der Poet Albrecht Fabri ins Deutsche. Für das Hörstück sprach jeder den Text seiner Übersetzung und eine weitere Stimme zitierte das chinesische Original. Dem Zufall folgend wurden die Aufnahmen übereinandergeschichtet. Das ständige Geräusch von Wassertropfen - eine Erinnerung an Brechts Event »Drip Music« aus den 1950erJahren - begleitet dieses akustische Mobile multilingualer Stimmen. In einem eigens eingerichteten Hörkabinett werden diese Stücke in einer Nonstop-Performance vorgestellt. Darüber hinaus werden die »Bean Sequences« der Fluxus-Künstlerin Alison Knowles sowie das théâtre imaginaire aus Dada und Zen »James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: Ein Alphabet« von John Cage, mit George Brecht in der Rolle des Marcel Duchamp, zu hören sein. Als Ergänzung ein Gespräch »Über Fluxus und Zen« mit George Brecht, dem Intermedia-Künstler Jackson MacLow und Klaus Schöning, dem vormaligen Leiter des »Studio Akustische Kunst« und Co- Regisseurs dieser fünf Hörstücke.

Der in New York geborene, seit 1972 in Köln lebende Künstler George Brecht ist am 27.08.2006 achtzig Jahre alt geworden. In heiterer Zurückhaltung heute gegenüber der Fluxus-Bewegung ist er eine ihrer faszinierendsten Persönlichkeiten, die mit diesem Hörkabinett im ZKM Medienmuseum geehrt wird.

Kuratiert von Klaus Schöning mit Nadja Schöning. (Presse / ZKM)


ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe
Lorenzstrasse 19
76135 Karlsruhe
Fon: 0721 / 8100 – 1220
zkm.de

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George Brecht, 1987, Three VOID-Stones

George Brecht
1925 in Halfway, Oregon, U.S.A. geboren lebt(e) in Köln


Titel: Three VOID-Stones3 Findlinge mit eingemeißelter Schrift
Standort: Edith-Stein-Straße / Am Schloßgraben; Bispinghof / Pädagogisches Zentrum; Bogenstraße / Neubrückenstraße
Status: 1987 Ankauf durch das Westfälische Landesmuseum
George Brecht gehörte wie Paik zu den maßgeblichen Fluxus-Künstlern und hat eine vergleichbare Hinwendung vollzogen zum stillen Paradox, das zur Meditation auffordert. Wobei er stets mit den sparsamsten Mitteln arbeitet. Die sparsamste Methode, einen überraschenden Gedankenanstoß zu geben, ist oft nur ein Wort.
Worte aber haben in jeder Sprache ein anderes Gewicht. "Void" steht eingemeißelt auf einem Findling. Je jünger eine Sprache ist, desto einfacher die Grammatik, desto globaler die Begriffe. Die deutsche Sprache, älter als das Englische und daher genauer (Ausländer sagen: komplizierter, was auch stimmt), unterscheidet Leere, leer, leeren; "void" umfaßt alle drei Bedeutungen.
Getragen wird diese Bedeutung von der dichtesten Masse, die wir im Alltagsleben kennen (sofern wir nicht Naturwissenschaftler sind), einem Stein. Einem mächtigen und doch verlorenen Stein, auf einer Spielwiese für sich allein, einem Findling, den ein Gletscherstrom der Eiszeit aus seinem Zusammenhang riß. Die knappe, paradoxe Umkehrung läßt jäh (dies eben die Methode des Zen) zwischen spielenden Kindern über kosmische Gesetze von Dichte und Leere nachdenken, über Erdenschwere und Geistesfreiheit.
Wem es leid tut um die Prägung des Findlings: in der Nähe Münsters importiert ein Unternehmer Findlinge aus aller Welt für Grabsteine ...
Text von Georg Jappe aus "Rundgang / Guide", Kurzführer 1987
Like Nam June Paik, George Brecht was one of the influential artists of the Fluxus movement and has likewise turned to the quiet paradox which calls for meditation. He always works with highest economy, and often just a single word is the most economical method to provoke an impetus in ideas.
Words, though, have different values in different languages. »Void« has been chiselled into a boulder. The younger a language, the more simple its grammar, the more universal its terms. The German language, older than the English and therefore more precise (foreigners say: more complicated, which is also true), makes the distinction between »Leere« (noun), »leer« (adjective), and »leeren« (verb); »void« encompasses all three forms.
The realisation of these forms/meanings is borne by the densest mass which we know in OUT everyday lives (unlese we are natural scientists): a stone. An enormous, although lost stone, all by itself on a green play area, a findling, separated from its original environment by an ice-age glacier stream. The concise, paradoxical reversal abruptly provokes (this is exactly the method of Zen) while lying amongst playing children - a reflection about the cosmic laws of density and void, about gravity and freedom of the mind.
Whoever feels sorry because of the chiselling into the findling: an entrepreneur near Münster imports such boulders from all over the world for gravestones ...
Text by Georg Jappe from "Rundgang / Guide", 1987



Status 97


Standort / Location 1


Standort / Location 2
,img src = "http://www.lwl.org/skulptur-projekte-download/muenster/orte/images/d87_c2.gif>

Standort / Location 3


Konzept / Proposal
Tree projects for Münster are proposed:
1. The word >VOID<>VOID<>VOID< (Leer/Leere) ist in einen Findling eingemeißelt, der bereits in dem Park zwischen Schloßgraben und Edith-Stein-Straße liegt. 2. Das Wort >VOID<>VOID-stones<>VOID-stone<, eine Art Dreieck, ungefähr zehn cm lang, fünf cm oder so hoch und drei cm dick, der auf meinem Schreibtisch liegt und den ich ansehe, während ich schreibe. Ich entdecke, daß er sehr wirkungsvoll bei der Leerung der meisten Gedanken ist, die ich über >VOID-stones<>VOID-stone<>VOID stone<, den ich vor mir habe, abhängen. Ein >VOID-stone<>VOID-stone< von der Größe eines Findlings in einem Park oder auf dem offenen Feld in Münster ist aber wohl doch anders: man trifft mehr oder weniger zufällig auf ihn, höchstwahrscheinlich in größeren Zeitabständen, und der Stein, das Wort, und all die möglichen Fragen, zu denen sie sich verschwören, sind draußen im Freien und Teil einer größeren Sinfonie; Gras und Sonnenschein, umstehende Bäume und Regen, Schnee und Winterkälte, der Frühling, der die Natur wieder aufweckt, der Herbst, der sie rot färbt, das unterschiedliche Licht zu verschiedenen Tageszeiten, wechselnde Schatten, die Stimmungen eines beliebigen Spaziergangs. Nach einer Weile werden auf ihm sicher an einigen Stellen Flechten und Moos gewachsen sein, und vielleicht werden Farne und Krokusse und Feldnarzissen in der Feuchtigkeit sprießen, die sich in der Vertiefung sammelt, wo er leicht in der Erde versinkt. Von Zeit zu Zeit werden Leute auf ihm sitzen; Leute und halbzahme Stadtvögel und gelegentlich ein Eichhörnchen, und was gibt er für einen feinen Anschlag ab für Kinder, die Verstecken spielen. Und irgendwann, früher oder später, wird ihn sicher irgend jemand auch bei Mondlicht sehen.

Henry Martin

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George Brecht. Events

George Brecht. Events

05/07/2006 - 15/10/2006 MACBA=Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona

This exhibition presents the art of George Brecht (New York, 1926) from his early works in 1957 to the present. It is the first major retrospective of this artist in almost thirty years, largely due to his reluctance to make a formal presentation of what is essentially the collection of an ephemeral and conceptual work. His art is a project of investigation in which he explores the nature and essence of experience. More than a creator of objects, Brecht is a producer of entities, materialisations of events which encompass chance, space and time. Originally, the audience was invited to interact with his works – to modify them and move their components. The inclusion of collaborative work in his practice highlights the profoundly expansive dimension of Brecht’s focus, one of opening barriers and “authorship” that initially defined the “event score”, which he would go on to expand almost indefinitely.

The exhibition is a chance to appreciate how, throughout his extensive career, Brecht never favoured one medium over another and how every project functions as a microcosm integrated into his work as an overall whole. It also reveals Brecht’s lifelong concern regarding the practice of a “meta-creation” that could take place in the chinks and crevices between creation and its representation. As a critical extension to the event, Brecht’s most recent projects converge with all the other facets of his work, demonstrating a permanent conceptual unity in the midst of such vast, insistent diversity.

Brecht’s artistic career began in the late fifties, while he was working as a research chemist in New Jersey. This dual situation enabled him to employ scientific models of the time to reflect upon experience, and to use art a means to represent his thoughts. In 1956-1957, he wrote a reference work entitled Chance Imagery, a systematic investigation of the role of chance in the 20th century in the fields of science and avant-garde art. The piece revealed his respect for Dadaist and surrealist projects as well as for the more complex aspects of the work of Marcel Duchamp, whom he considered the embodiment of the “artist-researcher”. At the same time he initiated a series of experiments he called “Chance Paintings”, randomly staining bed sheets with a clearly anti-pictorial, anti-representative intent. Brecht referred to these early attempts to convert time and chance into the basis of his work as a kind of “corrected abstract expressionism”. In this period, which coincided with the death of Jackson Pollock, he struck up relationships with artists imparting classes at Rutgers University, in particular Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts with whom he co-signed a text (A multi-dimension project, 1957). The piece was an attempt overcome and go beyond the huge influence exerted at that time by abstract expressionism, in pursuit of a form of advanced art, radical conceptual practices and multimedia.

Brecht’s closeness to John Cage, with whom he shared an interest for Oriental thinking, led him to attend the classes on “Experimental Composition” Cage was giving in New York. He encouraged Brecht to look for new mediums for his creative practice, such as the generation of a new (musical) score by means of procedures involving chance and the use of surrounding noise employed as sound ready-mades. Brecht was convinced that “experience in every dimension” could be highlighted and encapsulated in the shape of verbal scores and, from there, developed the concept of “event scores” with which he structured the space and time of his work, at the same time inviting the audience to participate in the piece.

This is precisely what happened in his first exhibition Toward Events: An Arrangement (1959) in New York’s Reuben Gallery. These works brought together objects similar in shape to the vocabulary emerging from Robert Rauschenberg’s assemblage and combination, and from the “collection” in the work by Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp. One radical difference however lay in the insistent emphasis on the temporary and participatory nature inherent in the words “event” and “arrangement”. This quality alone reveals Cage’s impact and the originality with which Brecht had been able to broaden his sources. All of the objects made in the years immediately following this group of works included a variety of different types of scores. In some cases they would arise out of the creation of the object, while in others the object was discovered and Brecht subsequently wrote a score for it, thus highlighting the relationship between language and perception. Or, in the words of the artist, “ensuring that the details of everyday life, the random constellations of objects that surround us, stop going unnoticed.” The event-score was as much a critique of conventional artistic representation as it was a gesture of firm resistance against individual alienation, as may be appreciated in his last long-format score Motor Vehicle Sundown (Event) 1960 to John Cage. The score idea evolved between 1959 and 1962, until reaching the form of a simple white card bearing a few typed lines intended to propose an object, thought or action.

The early sixties was also a period in which Brecht developed his own critique of the institutional framework and mechanisms employed in the distribution of art. His first “Chair Events” in 1961, in which he placed a real score beside an unaltered everyday object, constituted an expression of resistance to the galleries’ demands to present his work in a more formal way. From that moment on, the design of models distinct from conventional channels would become an integral part of his work. His “Contingent Publications” were a postal address in New Jersey from which he distributed his scores and event objects. The “Yam Festival”, planned in conjunction with Robert Watts, was created as an alternative to the gallery system in that it produced art which could not be bought, spreading the notion of non-material artistic practice and at the same time organising representations or concerts of his most recent work, alongside that of other like-minded fellow artists.

This conceptual base was highly significant in the Fluxus context on the other side of the Atlantic, in which Brecht’s event scores were widely known and performed. Fluxus began, in fact, in Wiesbaden (Germany) with a series of “new music” concerts organised by George Maciunas using the radical scores created by Brecht and other artists in his circle, including Dick Higgins, Emmett Williams, Robert Filliou, Eric Andersen, Alison Knowles and Ben Vautier, among others. Maciunas published the scores and a series of transient works by this group of artists in the cheapest, most accessible form possible. The first of these multiple packages was a boxed collection of some 70 scores by Brecht, entitled Water Yam.

In 1964, shortly before travelling to Europe, Brecht proposed a new format for his work, that of the book in construction, which he called The Book of the Tumbler on Fire. According to Brecht, the title captured his perception of all his work as an “investigation into the continuity of different things”. The core of the book is made up of an important series of events in the form of satin-covered boxes. Brecht continued producing these boxes until fairly recently and they make up, along with the chairs, paintings, scores and all kinds of diverse formats, chapters of his unending volume.

The second part of the exhibition encompasses all of the main phases of Brecht’s career from the moment of his departure to the United States in 1965. He first travelled to Rome, and a little later to Villefranche-sur-mer to meet up with his friend and fellow Fluxus member, the artist Robert Filliou, and to found a “permanent creation workshop”, which they named “The Cedilla that Smiles”. This fertile period of joint activity may be explored in a separate section, which includes a little-known film made by the two artists.

Finally, the exhibition presents three projects that Brecht called “meta-creations”. The first, from 1968, is a slide-based lecture under the title The Chemistry of Music, which offers a critique of the lecture format as the predominating method of teaching. The second, The San Antonio Installation, is based on extracts from a popular series of French detective novels by the author San Antonio. The excerpts consist in an eccentric collection of articles (many of them found in French flea markets) which materialise details of the narrations and which present a kind of antidote against passive experience – in this case, the mechanical absorption of cheap literature. The third project is The Brunch Museum, an ingenious “exhibited object” of the life and work of W. E. Brunch, an imaginary figure of “great historical importance” invented by Brecht and the artist Stephen Kukowski. As in the case of the lecture model and novel, this project challenges institutionalised forms of representation and dissemination of information.


Curators: Julia Robinson and Alfred Fischer
Production: Organised the Ludwig Museum, Cologne, in association with the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA).

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George Brecht, the philosopher of Fluxus

George Brecht, the philosopher of Fluxus: a master of self-effacement who has spent the past three decades in "accelerated creative inactivity," George Brecht, one of the core members of the Fluxus group, is reintroduced to a wide public in a comprehensive retrospective traveling in Europe
Art in America, April, 2006 by Jill Johnston
The whole universe interests me.--George Brecht Not one sound fears the silence that extinguishes it.--John Cage I don't believe in art, I believe in artists.--Marcel Duchamp

Call me a Fluxus artist. On four different occasions I have partnered with one. And one has been George Brecht, the great Fluxmaster, now 79, subject of a recent comprehensive retrospective at Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Partnering has been a salient feature of Fluxus since its origins in the early 1960s. In both partnering and grouping, Fluxus artists have subsumed their individuality, distinguishing themselves from the lone innovative geniuses of modernism. Lineages of skilled craftsmen in established mediums were disdained by Fluxmen and the scarce women in their ranks. Hallowed mediums themselves disappeared in the vortex called Intermedia.

But George Brecht was a genius! In his creation known as the EventScore, he invented a whole new genre. At the heart of the Fluxconcert--that most delectable of group Fluxus enterprises worldwide (chiefly America, Europe and Japan)--was the Brechtian Event, a minimal action derived from the reading of a "score" consisting often of just a single word. Solo for Violin Viola Cello or Contrabass, a classic Brecht score ever popular with Fluxus artists, carries the one-word notation, "polishing." Judging from photos in Fluxus compendiums, and from the Fluxconcert of Brecht scores that preceded the September '05 opening of his retrospective in Cologne, the preferred enactment of this score in any performance setting has been sitting on a chair or stool and polishing a violin. (1) Between 1960 and 1963, Brecht's peak inspirational years, he wrote around 150 scores. Titles in black type appeared on small white stock cards, with bullet points underneath signaling the notations. It seems doubtful that Brecht thought he was doing anything new himself, or if he did, that he was the author of it. The "death of the author" was epitomized in his Event-Score. He often said the score didn't exist without the attention of a witness, a viewer who might interpret and perform it, or simply take mental note of it, perhaps imagining some relevant (or irrelevant) action. Simply to read a score is to perform it. Obviously we could all be a part of this; we were all potential partners.

A number of Brecht's Event-Scores first appeared in a fellow artist's mailbox. Composer La Monte Young was a favorite mark, with early Brecht pieces, like Solo for Wind Instrument ("putting it down"), or String Quartet ("shaking hands"), referencing music or musical instruments. Mail Art, a chief alternative means of getting the word out and of creating an international network, was rampant among Fluxus artists in the early '60s. My own partnering with Brecht actually started in 1961-63 when first we corresponded, but he was addressing me at that time as a critic, explaining his points of view--most strikingly, as I can see now, his position on John Cage.

Cage, the godhead at that time of new ideas in art, became Brecht's teacher and mentor beginning in 1958 when Brecht enrolled in his famous course in experimental composition at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. Brecht would soon begin to outdistance Cage. After Cage, and Cage's hero Marcel Duchamp, came Brecht. Here was a lineage indeed, with its source in Duchamp's renunciation of painting and launch of the Readymade as far back as 1912; its continuation in Cage's own apostasy in music and wayward introduction of chance methodology, together with his "musical" version of the Readymade in "found" sound, conceived as either noise or silence; and its logical conclusion in Brecht's disappearing act through the Event-Score.

With the Event-Score, any author-agency, such as Cage's structural notations for "indeterminate" outcomes, was virtually abandoned. Cage was still making music. Brecht posed a world without it--or one permeated by it. "No matter what you do," he said, "you're always hearing something." One of his cards bears the ironic title Virtuoso Listener, with the score "can hear music at any time." Life itself is music. You don't need "music" to experience it. "After the stream is crossed," Brecht wrote in one of his letters to me, "the raft must be abandoned." By "raft" he meant any organizational system, such as Cage's chance methods, widely adopted by composers, poets and others whom he influenced, to keep generating music or art--albeit of a radically alternative kind. Brecht's interest was in "demonstrating the urgency of crossing the stream (mindlessly, and with no purpose)."

Event-Scores became the rage with Fluxus, providing countless tiny scenarios for performances that could be strung together in Fluxconcerts, with Flux artists acting in pieces by each other. Countless more were never performed, though many have been published. Early scores by Brecht, conceived in Cage's class, are as instructional in their way as Cage's own notations. Brecht's 1960 Motor Vehicle Sundown (Event), dedicated to Cage, has "any number" of performers, each manning a motor vehicle, and provided with a set of instruction cards listing 22 actions to be performed consecutively--all the things you can imagine doing in a car, like turning headlights off and on, or opening and closing doors and trunks. For the Museum Ludwig retrospective, the score was performed on Cologne's Dom Plaza in front of the cathedral on Sept. 17, 2005.

During 1961 Brecht moved from the directive to the elective and discretionary. Notations under titles would at first seem related, as with "at least one egg," under Egg. Then quite unrelated, such as "turning," under Symphony No. 2. All notations, related or not to their titles, were reduced to nouns, or purely suggestive descriptions of actions that left out any verb, as in "from a suitcase," the score for Suitcase. In another early 1960s collection of Event-Scores, original and often poetic, by Yoko Ono, the notations under all her titles begin with command verbs like "Observe" or "Count" or 'Write" or "Throw." (2) An Ono title, Painting to be Watered (1961), has a typical imperative: "Water every day." Pronouns here are understood. It's all in the grammar. Scores by Alison Knowles (often produced in conjunction with her prolifically active husband, Dick Higgins) are generally also prescriptive or advisory. (3) Knowles, Higgins and Ono were all part of the earliest Fluxus core group. Knowles's Street Piece (1963) says, "Make something in the street and give it away." Shuffle (1961) goes: "The performer or performers shuffle into the performance area and away from it, above, behind, around, or through the audience. They perform as a group or solo: but quietly." (4) In 1965, Ben Vautier, the French Fluxman, wrote "Fifty-Eight Propositions" that read like Event-Scores--sans titles, however (5) Practically every Vautier proposition includes the words "this page." Almost all begin with command verbs. One that doesn't reads, "this page is a work of art." In others, Vautier playfully undercut the peremptory moxie of his instructions: "swallow this page" or "set fire to this page" or "look everywhere else."

The leap that Brecht made under Cage, passing him by, was a career-changing one. It took him into a conceptual never-never-land, where he disavowed his authorship and the relevance of any particular response. In an anarchic group of artists like Fluxus, this position made him very attractive indeed. And while "everybody could do it," "it" was not something everybody could understand by any means--always an appealing situation to hothouse artists operating far from the mainstream. In his haiku-like scores, Brecht found a form for driving home such isolated, smart Dada sayings as Tristan Tzara's "Art is not the most precious manifestation of life. Art has not the celestial and universal value that people like to attribute to it. Life is far more interesting." (6) Still, it's impossible to say that Brecht, the philosopher of Fluxus, didn't invent an "art form" to illustrate the preeminence of life. The paradox is everything.

And what kind of life did George Brecht favor? One thing he liked was chairs. Writing in these pages three decades ago, Jan van der Marck observed, "Brecht takes the world sitting down. The chair, just barely pried loose from domesticity and always ready to be reused, is a prominent object of his affection." (7) On view at the exhibition in Cologne were a large number of Brechtian chairs, found objects far more common than Ouchamp's urinal or stool-mounted bicycle wheel. Brecht's chairs may stand alone or have objects on or near them. The first and perhaps most interesting was titled Chair with a History (1966). Brecht told an interviewer:

In Rome I bought a very simple wooden chair and a very beautiful book bound in red leather. I began to note down in the book where I'd bought the chair, how much I'd paid for it and where I'd found the pen I was writing with and the kind of ink I was using and so forth. Then I exhibited the chair and the book and everyone was invited to add to the book whatever was happening while he was sitting on the chair. (8)

Alas, the chair and book are now the stuff of history. At Museum Ludwig, you were not, naturally, allowed to sit on the chair, much less write in the book. Brecht's ideal of participation, once possible in settings like the Reuben Gallery in downtown Manhattan, site of Brecht's first solo exhibition in 1959, has given way to an incipient canonization.

Along with the chairs at Museum Ludwig were a number of Brecht's boxes and cabinets, also originally made for interaction, with play elements and open compartments containing common objects (a.k.a. Readymades) that viewers could move around. Repository (1961) is a tall white cabinet that has 16 compartments of different sizes, two with narrow doors, and two drawers at the bottom. One section consists of nine identical square compartments in a tic-tac-toe configuration; eight of these each holds a unique ball (e.g., twine, Xmas bulb, baseball ...), leaving one space empty--a suggestive invitation to move the objects around (if not to oust and replace them). The very year Repository was made, the Museum of Modern Art in New York not only included the cabinet in its trailblazing "Art of Assemblage" show, but bought it. As early as that, the collectivist spirit of Brecht's offerings was denied. But to this viewer, anyway, none of Brecht's boxes and cabinets, or Fluxkits (those briefcases of assembled objects and literature, after Duchamp's Boite-en-Valise, so favored by Fluxus artists), ever looked approachable for some divinely populist intervention. While far from the intimate, untouchably mysterious, allusively narrative, ultra-esthetic box creations of Joseph Cornell (a Fluxus influence at a distance), they are beautiful--clearly "art"--nonetheless. And buyable--unlike the Event-Scores, which as concepts are the purest, most generous giveaway imaginable by an artist to people at large. Here we want to put quotes around "artist," expressing the paradox that was Fluxus at its best. And we should, I think, want to know more about how such a deviant and subversive tradition in art developed.

Why, for instance, did Duchamp renounce painting and deploy found objects in art contexts? And why did Cage abandon music and inaugurate "noise"? Why did they both react against the universally well-formed artist's ego? Did any significant failures figure in their histories? While I was writing to Brecht in 1989 in Cologne (where he had been living more and more reclusively as an American ex-pat since 1972), in a correspondence that had long since morphed from the polarized artist-and-critic pairing to something a lot friendlier, I told him about my interest in "Fluxlives." I thought that bio-histories of Fluxus artists and performers, along with foundational dates, names and places, could shed light on how so many diverse individuals ended up together in an international community. Among the typical Fluxfestivals which often appropriated an entire city for days on end, with street performances and concerts in odd places like train stations, there was the classic "Festival of Misfits" in London in 1962, the year George Maciunas gave Fluxus its name. If Fluxartists were Misfits, and surely they were, I wanted their credentials. Brecht wrote back saying he was "retired from Fluxus," and asked, "What do you mean that Fluxlives interest you?"

Somewhere in a subsequent letter I mentioned the fathers. "The fathers of these guys especially interest me." And in the flotsam of exchanges, I would regale George with reports of meetings I was having with his historic mentor Cage, whom I knew socially fairly well at that time. In a surprise move, with a letter George wrote Sept. 26, 1991, he turned me into a more active Flux partner. By then he knew a thing or two about my own father (never a subject I kept hidden from anyone), though I knew nothing whatever concerning his, and had never asked. Proposing a "Father-project" between us, he said, "For every item of your father-research, I'll give you one of mine." And he started it off: "My father gave up music-making in the mid'30s by lying down and not breathing any more on the couch at 165 W. 82nd Street [New York], where we were living at the time." In his next letter, he repeated the news of the death: "My father breathed his last around 1936." But added the promised new item that his father was a flutist. (9) Ah! And he included a large Xerox of an impressively striking photo of his father seated in a wicker armchair, in formal concert tux, flute held in left hand, looking up at a fellow musician, a clarinetist, standing next to him. Now I wanted to know his name, and his age at death, but George never told me, and I pulled back, being engaged in the matter as a friend, not as a writer. By the late 1990s our correspondence had dropped off. Then in March 2005, when the Museum Ludwig asked me to contribute to the Brecht retrospective catalogue, the forgotten "Father-Project" rose up like an Excalibur in my head. I would write a kind of "realization" of it, something Event-Scores are said to achieve when anyone decides to perform them, or think about them or do anything at all about them.

It was evident right away that Brecht's father, and John Cage--his "liberator," as he would call him--were linked in the field of music, and that both men were performers. As a professional flutist, Brecht's father had played in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski, the NBC Radio Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini, at Radio City Music Hall, and in the John Philip Sousa Band.

He was born George Ellis MacDiarmid in 1894, in Little Rock, Ark., and died, just as Brecht told me, in 1936. So he was 42, and son George, also George Ellis MacDiarmid and an only child, was just ten at the time. In the world of Fluxus it's been common knowledge that Brecht had long ago changed his name, though nobody seemed to know from what exactly, or when or why, and he has said Bertolt was not his reference, that he picked the name more or less out of a hat. For the Ludwig catalogue, he provided more information. He left MacDiarmid behind and became Brecht in his late teens, around 1945, while serving in the army and stationed in Germany. (10) It's a serious breach to make such a change. Succession in the paternal name is a mark of pride and serf-respect, even necessity, in any patriarchal culture. By changing his name, he broke not just with his father but a grandfather and a great-grandfather who were also George MacDiarmids. (11) Brecht clearly intended to re-invent himself somehow. During his 20s, as he prepared himself for a career in chemistry, he was also involved with art. He became a successful research chemist, and was awarded various patents; in art, he developed his painting by chance methods, using statistics and random numbers. He also married and had a son, Eric, in 1953. By the mid-'50s he was well aware of the work of both John Cage and Marcel Duchamp.
In 1993, while I was visiting Brecht in Cologne, he added to his father lore for me, providing two details that would later help me form a view of this artist's work through the agency or legacy of his progenitor. He said his father had a "nervous breakdown" when he had to play the lengthy flute passage that opens Ravers Bolero. And that he "died from alcohol ... one morning he just didn't wake up." Of the 144 Event-Scores listed in the Ludwig catalogue, made by Brecht between 1959 and 1963, at least 27 have obvious musical citations, and of these there is one, titled Flute Solo (1962), with a notation reading "disassembling assembling," that Brecht, in an unusual revelation of a source, has linked directly to his father. In the 1970s, Brecht told the British composer and musicologist Michael Nyman about an incident when his father was playing for the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra:

A soprano was bugging everybody with temper tantrums during rehearsal. At a certain point the orchestra crashed onto a major seventh and there was silence for the soprano and flute cadenza. Nothing happened. The soprano looked down into the orchestra pit and saw that my father had completely taken apart his flute, down to the last screw. I used this idea in my 1962 Flute Solo. (12)

Brecht has himself done a precise "realization" of Flute Solo, taking a flute apart "down to the last screw" and putting it back together again. Nyman smartly pointed out to Brecht in his interview that his "sound-producing instruments [in the Event-Scores] have been made mute (the violin, in Solo for Violin Viola Cello or Contrabass, is polished, not played), and non-sounding instruments, or non-instruments, for instance a comb (Comb Music, 1962), are made sounding." Flute Solo is one of many in the former category.

One Fluxus favorite of Brecht's that foils or circumvents an instrument's traditional use has been Piano Piece (1962), with the notation "a vase of flowers/on(to) a piano." In a review I wrote in 1964, titled "Fluxus Fuxus," of a flawlessly entertaining Fluxconcert at Carnegie Recital Hall, I described Brecht's performance of it, "placing a vase of flowers ... on the grand piano." (13) In Cologne, on Sept. 16, 2005, in an unfortunately lengthy and disorganized pre-opening concert of Brecht scores, it was performed the same way. (14)

Brecht doesn't distinguish between the event-as-performance and the event-as-object. And he conflates what you see and what you hear. Writer Henry Martin asked him, "You mean to say that all the accidental environmental sounds that surround the piece become a part of the realization of the score?"

GB: Yes, that's right.

HM: In that case even the chairs are musical?

GB: Yes, in fact, there is perhaps nothing that is not musical. Perhaps there's no moment in life that's not musical.... All instruments, musical or not, become instruments. (15)

And he meant the chairs, suitcases, dressers, clothes trees, tables, lamps, hooks and keyholes, motor vehicles, eggs, clocks, mirrors, sinks, ladders and many other "things" to be found in his titles, or to be found standing alone, on display, or dwelling multiply in his boxes, cabinets and Fluxkits.
I can see the whole kit and caboodle--furniture and fixtures and music and musical instruments and word-scores and games and puzzles--as belonging in some imaginary home that Brecht built during his career, inviting us to visit him in it, sit in a chair or at a table, hang a coat on a clothes tree, turn on a lamp, turn it off, move things around, listen to the atmosphere, play solitaire with cards of his design, eat an egg, and so on. There are no beds in Brecht's galaxy of objects, so I suppose staying overnight was never an option.

If music is Brecht's touchstone, its historical particularities are references made only for subversion. In Cage's famed invention, the Prepared Piano, the traditional use of piano keys to make music was transferred to the engine or strings of the piano to perform "noise." Music, however perverted, was still being made. Brecht, purely by concept, through word-forms, separates the sounds instruments emit from their sources, or converts all the world's objects into instruments worthy of making sounds. In Flute Solo, Brecht separates his father from his flute (as we understand the use of flutes), which had apparently caused him so much trouble, even to the extent of killing him. The way Brecht has told it, when his father toured with the Sousa Band, he was "introduced to strong drink, which later did him in." (16) With Flute Solo, he transformed the instrument his father dismantled in the Metropolitan Opera orchestra pit into an object of interest in itself, lifting a funny insurrectionary story out of its original setting, isolating it in a benign, unassailable context--a Fluxus performance.

In a touching work titled The Chemistry of Music, a slide-lecture Brecht first delivered in London in 1968, he partnered his dead father, as can be deduced in drawings uniting musical properties like clefs and notes and instrument parts with chemical tubes and processes, the latter the paraphernalia of Brecht's career as a research chemist (which he had abandoned upon leaving the U.S. in 1965). As I wrote at the time, "To an accompaniment of drum music by Walter De Maria, Brecht projected slides taken from drawings on a 6-by-6-foot fiberboard.... He stood by the board, miming a lecture, pointing out aspects of the slides and occasionally setting off small fireworks." (17)

In the drawings, chemical processes are producing notes, and music is creating chemistry. One drawing shows a man playing a flute, a bent straw attached to the flute's end, a drop of liquid falling from the straw into a test tube. He's "playing" Brecht's kind of music. Instead of sounds meant for ears, the flute is issuing fluid that falls into a deaf lab receptacle. In a more complex drawing, a process ends up--through a series of arrows pointing the way from a slot machine, a collection of drums and a mediating test tube--in a bunch of sharps and one clef held in a man's open hand. Two very different careers, father's and son's, functionally compromised, meet in a fantasy of the absurd.

In Brecht's postmortem rescues of his father, if you want to call them that, he made good on his father's failure, not as a musician--Brecht has said, "I guess he got pretty good ... as a joke he used to play Chopin's Minute Waltz in a minute"--but as a father. (18) George Ellis MacDiarmid had a career that took him on the road a lot, making him even more absent than traditionally absent fathers. He died when his son and only child was much too young, in an ending attributed to drink. The whole world (which is music, as Brecht has repeatedly said) is a world encompassed metonymically by his father. A world-map drawing in The Chemistry of Music project, with musical signs posted on all the continents of the globe, very graphically puts his father everywhere. Such brilliant translations or conversions are the stuff of the "failures" that preceded Brecht in art, leading to the two postmodernist revolutions--in music and painting--awaiting him in the late 1950s.

Brecht was lucky to find the cheerful and inspiring John Cage, whose own teacher back in the 1930s, Arnold Schoenberg, had been witheringly discouraging, showing a supreme lack of interest in Cage's work. "It became clear to both of us," Cage has said, "that I had no feeling for harmony." Without this feeling, Schoenberg warned Cage, he would always be thwarted in his efforts to write music, coming to a wall through which he couldn't pass. Cage's famous response was, "In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall." (19) Much later, when Cage was well known, Schoenberg would say of him, "Of course he's not a composer, but an inventor--of genius." (20) Curiously, Cage's father and paternal grandfather had both been inventors, and while he struck out on his own, first in painting, then music, he ended up in their footsteps anyway.

It was Cage, of course, who championed the once-failed French painter Marcel Duchamp in America after World War II, becoming the main channel of Duchamp's influence in the postmodernist realm of life-affirming "non-art," transmitted to a whole new generation. Said Duchamp of his crucible experience in March 1912 when he submitted his Nude Descending a Staircase to the Salon des Independants in Paris, then was forced to withdraw the painting, "It was really a turning point in my life, I can assure you." (21) The alignment of Duchamp's "failure" with the failure of modernism became one of the absorbing allegorical conflations of 20th-century art.

Duchamp's interests and influence are everywhere in Brecht's work. In the Ludwig exhibition was a little library of Brecht-owned books by the French mystery writer San-Antonio, a pen name for Frederic Dard, to whom Duchamp apparently paid homage with his 1951 phallic readymade, punningly titled Objet Dard. From a paragraph in a 2000 obituary for Dard in the International Herald Tribune, it's easy to see what made him attractive to both Brecht and Duchamp. "By the time Mr. Dard died, he was recognized as a genius with words, a man who created so many extraordinary--and untranslatable--word games and neologisms, that he invented a language, an argot, all his own." The obituary goes on to say that Dard was a writer who "suffered from the condescending attitudes of traditional critics." (22) In the mid-1970s Brecht, with a surprising piece of fiction of his own, invented a misunderstood genius reflecting Dard and Duchamp, as well as Brecht himself. "The Brunch Museum" (1976), with 20 exhibits of objects accompanied by comical descriptive texts, is about a man called "W.E. Brunch" who died in 1974 at the age of 85. As a coincidence, or not, Duchamp, who died in 1968 at age 81, would have been close to 85 in 1974.
Unmistakably autobiographical (Brnnch/Brecht, to begin with), it tells us something about how Brecht must have felt in the mid-1970s when he retreated to Cologne, left Fluxus art circuits behind, and began enjoying a withdrawal, or hermitage, that his Event-Scores had long predicted. One, titled Two Signs (1963), with notations "Silence" and "No Vacancy," sounds fairly portentous. He seemed destined to personify his disappearing act in the Event-Scores. But it could not have been easy. The death of (the fictional) W.E. Brunch, says Brecht in an introductory text, "came as a terrible blow to all those who knew him." The purpose of the Brunch Museum exhibits was to inspire a "more widespread appreciation of the great man," and for "the world to know about the life and work of this visionary genius, most of whose work is still relatively unknown."

The general view of Brecht as an unambitious recluse, a status often attributed to Duchamp as well, seems belied in the Brunch Museum project. Brecht, though a modest, unassuming man, no doubt had had normal hopes for recognition, however complicated by Zen aspirations for acquiescence. We might guess that he was able gradually to embrace such resignation through three successive decades of accelerated creative inactive inactivity. If that's the case, in an uncanny fulfillment of the Brunch Museum work, Brecht has ironically been granted a belated appreciation and discovery by the Museum Ludwig. As its director Kasper Konig says, "It's time George Brecht was given the recognition he deserves as the major modern artist he undoubtedly is." (23)

Special thanks to Jon Hendricks, Alison Knowles, Geoff Hendricks and Julia Robinson.

"George Brecht, Events: A Heterospective," curated by Julia Robinson and Alfred M. Fischer, opened at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Sept. 17, 2005-Jan. 8, 2006. It travels to the Museu d'Art Cantemporani de Barcelona, May 25-Sept. 3. The show is accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue with a principal text by Julia Robinson.

(1.) George Brecht, Events: A Heterospective, Cologne, Museum Ludwig, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Khnig, 2005, p. 133.

(2.) Yoko Ono, Grapefruit, London, Sphere Books Ltd., 1971.

(3.) Alison Knowles, A Great Bear Pamphlet, New York, 1965.

(4.) Ibid.

(5.) Fluxus Etc., catalogue for exhibition at Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum of the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, 1981, curator Jon Hendricks, p. 202.

(6.) Lecture on Dada by Tristan Tzara, 1922, reprinted in Robert Motherwell's Dada Painters and Poets, 1989 (originally published in 1951), p. 92.

(7.) Jan van der Marek, "George Brecht: An Art of Multiple Implications," Art in America, July-August 1974, p. 51.

(8.) Interview with George Brecht by Irmeline Lebeer, in Henry Martin, An Introduction to George Brecht's "Book of the Tumbler on Fire," Milan, Multipla, 1978, p. 87.

(9.) Letter from George Brecht to Jill Johnston, Dec. 19, 1991.

(10.) George Brecht, Events, p. 306.

(11.) U.S. censuses, Ancestry.com.

(12.) Interview with Brecht by Michael Nyman, in Henry Martin, p. 120, footnote 19; see also George Brecht, Events, p. 238.

(13.) Village Voice, July 2, 1964; reprinted in Jill Johnston, Marmalade Me, New York, Dutton, 1971, pp. 73-75.

(14.) Performance arranged by Larry Miller with Alison Knowles and Eric Andersen and guest performers Geoff Hendricks, Ben Patterson and Ben Vautier.

(15.) Interview with Brecht by Henry Martin, in Henry Martin, p. 82.

(16.) George Brecht, Events, p. 238.

(17.) Jill Johnston, Wive George," Village Voice, Aug. 22, 1968.

(18.) George Brecht, Events, p. 238.

(19.) David Revill, The Roaring Silence, New York, Arcade, 1992, p. 53.

(20.) Ibid. p. 47.

(21.) Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors, New York, Viking, 1965, p. 22.

(22.) An image of the obituary as printed in the International Herald Tribune, June 10-11, 2000, is reproduced in George Brecht, Events, p. 211.

(23.) George Brecht, Eyelets, p. 8.

Jill Johnston's most recent book is At Sea on Land: Extreme Politics (Print Means Inc., 2005).

COPYRIGHT 2006 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
Jill Johnston "George Brecht, the philosopher of Fluxus: a master of self-effacement who has spent the past three decades in "accelerated creative inactivity," George Brecht, one of the core members of the Fluxus group, is reintroduced to a wide public in a co". Art in America. . FindArticles.com. 16 Dec. 2008. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_4_94/ai_n26823700

Continued from page 9. Previous - 9 - 10

Articles in April 2006 issue of Art in America

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Saturday, December 06, 2008

Natural Born Fluxus



Printed: 278 pages, 15.24 cm x 22.86 cm, perfect binding, black and white interior ink

Paperback book €18.15

Description:

Natural Born Fluxus is that tendency among artists to engage in Fluxus-like behaviors even if they never heard of Fluxus. Or possibly we could say that Fluxus ideas come out of a naturally occurring tendency in all artists that we now think of as Fluxus. It could be that the free wheeling nature of Fluxus allows artists to enjoy their creative, or at least peculiar, tendencies in an unfettered way that other forms of organized artistic activities do not. The sorts of things that delight a Fluxus artist tend to be of an ephemeral nature, contain a humorous element and refer to that mysterious some-thing that makes one laugh at a joke; call it irony or the unexpected twist, Fluxus artists enjoy a good surprise and a cleaver turn of phrase. They are willing to remain innocent enough to be easily amused and fall for a good trick. It is this adherence to a child-like sense of wonder that this book hopes to illustrate.

for ordering book: http://www.lulu.com/content/5234639

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George Brecht died today.


George Brecht auf einem Archivbild aus dem Jahr 1959

Obit: George Brecht

6 December 2008

The Fluxus artist just died in a retirement home in Cologne at the age of 82 years, according to this short article from the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger.

Fluxus-Künstler George Brecht ist tot

Von Frank Frangenberg, 05.12.08, 13:11h, aktualisiert 05.12.08, 21:37h

Der in New York geborene Künstler, der eigentlich George MacDiarmid hieß, starb am Freitagmorgen im Alter von 82 Jahren in einem Kölner Altersheim. Er lebte seit vielen Jahren im Rheinland.

George Brecht auf einem Archivbild aus dem Jahr 1959.

George Brecht auf einem Archivbild aus dem Jahr 1959.Die weltweit gefragtesten Künstler listet regelmäßig der „Kunstkompass“ auf. Die vorderen Plätze belegen seit Jahren die Kölner Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke und Rosemarie Trockel. Einer der einflussreichsten Künstler unserer Zeit, dazu noch Kölner, ist nie auf dieser Liste aufgetaucht. Er lehne jegliche Form von Wettbewerb in den Künsten ab, hielt der Wahlkölner George Brecht im Gespräch mit dieser Zeitung zu seinem 80. Geburtstag im Jahr 2006 fest. Er lebte seit Jahrzehnten unter uns und kaum jemand wusste davon. Lediglich eine unscheinbare Plakette kündete an seinem Haus von seiner Gegenwart. Doch am Freitag hat uns George Brecht, der letzte der großen Fluxuskünstler, im Alter von 82 Jahren verlassen. Künstler könne man nicht vergleichen, meinte er. Er zumindest war unvergleichlich.

In seiner Arbeit „The Brunch Museum“ aus dem Jahr 1974 betrauert George Brecht den tragischen Tod seines Alter Ego W. E. Brunch, es sei ein großer Verlust für „Brecht & Macdiarmid Research Assodates“. Brecht versammelt einige kleine Objekte - „diese Handschuhe erhielt Brunch von seiner Mutter im Jahr 1909“, eine Haarlocke und Steine, „die von Brunch für ein selbst erfundenes Spiel benutzt wurden“ - und feiert in eloquenter Brillanz dessen beste Eigenschaften. Es werden seine eigenen gewesen sein: Brunch habe die „aktive Teilnahme des Betrachters“ verlangt um die Wesensart der Kunst zu erforschen und „die Wirklichkeit vom Standpunkt der Wissenschaft, des Glaubens und der Intuition aus wahrgenommen“.

Fluxus heißt die künstlerische Bewegung, der sein Freund George Maciunas zu Beginn der 1960er Jahre den Namen gibt. Sie verspricht nicht still stehen zu wollen, Fluxus ist Spaß und Fluxus ist einfach. Fluxus lebt im Augenblick. Im Jahr 1956, in New York hängt das erste MAD-Magazin mit dem Kindergesicht von Alfred E. Neumann an den Kiosken, und in Köln bringt Karlheinz Stockhausen seine „Jünglinge im Feuerofen“ zur Uraufführung, arbeitet George Brecht an seinem grundlegenden Text „Chance-Imagery“, einer Geschichte des Zufalls in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts vom Dadaismus und Surrealismus bis hin zu John Cage und Jackson Pollock und entwickelt eine Methode zur Produktion tatsächlich zufallsbestimmter Gemälde: Er spritzt Tinte auf Leinen und bearbeitet die Tücher im Trockner.

George MacDiarmid studiert zunächst Chemie, seinen Nom de Guerre „Brecht“, eine Referenz an den deutschen Dichter Bertolt Brecht, legt er sich zu als er im Schwarzwald als Soldat stationiert ist, und arbeitet als Wissenschaftler erfolgreich für die Industrie. Die Erfindung des Tampons, darauf besteht er, wird in seinem Kunstkatalog gelistet. 1958 nimmt George Brecht an John Cages Unterricht teil und verbindet in der Folge Musik und Visuelles, reibt seine Geige mit Zitronenöl ein, verschüttet lautstark Wasser und schickt seine „Partituren“ um die Welt, die in Köln im Atelier von Mary Bauermeister aufgeführt werden. In seiner ersten Einzelausstellung in New York 1959 zeigt er mit „The Case (Suit Case)“ eines der ersten „Event-Objekte“, mit denen er in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren bekannt wird. Sie enthalten Alltagsgegenstände, die der Betrachter entnehmen und benutzen soll, um anschließend den Koffer wieder zu füllen.

Die schöne Retrospektive, die ihm das Museum Ludwig vor drei Jahren einrichtete, stellte die „Event-Objekte“ in den Mittelpunkt, wohl wissend, dass nicht das „wirkliche“ Werk George Brechts ausgestellt werden kann, das im Ereignis und der Erfahrung gründet, sondern eine tote, musealisierte Fassung, die keinen Austausch mehr erlaubt. Die Schau verzauberte trotzdem, mehr als das, strich sie die Bedeutung von George Brecht für die Kunstgeschichte heraus: Er hat Marcel Duchamps zufällig gefundenen Objekten, den Readymades wie Urinoir und Flaschentrockner Beine gemacht. Georges Maciunas, merkte an, dass George Brecht „eine Menge Anerkennung dafür verdient habe, dass er das Readymade ins Reich der Aktion erweitert“ und damit ebenso in der Zeit wie im Raum verankert hat.

Fluxus fließt, zwischen Kunst und Leben, und George Brecht schwingt immer mit. Sein ihm vorangegangener Kollege George Maciunas bewies dies gerne mit dem Hinweis auf ein Stück von ihm, in dem er ein Licht an- und wieder ausschaltete: „Nun, Sie machen das jeden Tag, richtig? Ohne es zu wissen, führen Sie einen George Brecht auf.“ Kaum etwas vermag den großzügigen Menschen und Künstler George Brecht besser charakterisieren, als dass jeder, wenn er will, heute an ihn denken kann, einfach, indem er einmal den Lichtschalter umlegt.

Friday, December 05, 2008

Yoko Ono in Japan


Press Conference for "Dream Power Super Live" in Tokyo, Japan on 12/
Posted by: "mickeyono2005" mickeyono2005@yahoo.com mickeyono2005
Thu Dec 4, 2008 6:20 pm (PST)

Yoko Ono, who is in Japan now, attended the press conference
for "Dream Power John Lennon Super Live" with BONNIE PINK, singer,
at "imagine studio" by Nippon Broadcasting System, Inc. in Yurakucho,
Tokyo, on December 2nd, '08.

"Dream Power John Lennon Super Live" will be held at Nippon Budokan,
Tokyo, Japan, with all-star Japanese musicians.on December 8th, '08,
the 28th anniversary of John Lennon's death.

The following news written in Japanese reports on the press
conference and the performance Yoko presented at the site. I
translated it from Japanese into English.

http://natalie.mu/news/show/id/11382

-- Translation from Japanese into English

Yoko Ono and BONNIE PINK spoke with fervor about the wish for peace

December 2nd, 2008

The press conference of the charity concert, "Dream Power John Lennon
Super Live", which will be held on December 8th, was held today on
December 2nd, '08.

Yoko Ono and BONNIE PINK attended the conference and spoke about the
results of the charities by the same concerts and their enthusiasm
about this year's concert.

At the beginning of the conference, Yoko Ono conveyed her
appreciation for the people who produced the concerts by
saying, "This concert is going to be the 8th anniversary this year,
thanks to the many Japanese rockers, staff and people who support
this. Thank you very much." Also, as to the reasons why she started
the concert, she pointed out three things: that she wanted to give
education which will be the treasure through the lives for children
in developing countries; that she wanted to convey to the world that
Japanese people are assisting developing countries through the
charity concerts like this on individual levels; and that she wanted
to give encouragement to Japanese children who believe "I cannot do
anything."

This year commemorates the 40th year since John and Yoko started
their first peace activity. As to the activities so far, Yoko, who
continued the peace activities even after John's passing, recalled
the road for many years by saying, "I came to realize that I had to
continue what both of us had done even after his passing and that I
had to offer the love I'd given to John to the world. And then, by
continuing the project, I realized that many people started giving me
help."

In the meantime, BONNIE PINK, who will perform at the concert for the
third time this year, spoke of her enthusiasm with a smile, "I look
forward to this because this live concert gives me overwhelming
excitement every year. This live concert is a very happy concert
through which not only can you fully enjoy the songs by John, but
also you can help many new schools to be built by your
participation. I look forward to listening to the songs each
musician will sing. I will also sing the songs I chose with my heart
for this year."

At the end of the conference, an art performance by Yoko Ono was
presented. In this performance, Yoko displayed the fragments of an
urn broken into pieces and the photograph of its original shape. To
the press reporters, she asked for their cooperation by
saying, "Please send this message to those who will receive the
fragments: we will gather together at this place in 10 years and mend
the pieces back to one original shape."

In this performance, Yoko's message asks people who will receive each
fragment (piece) to think about "peace" until they get together in 10
years. The press conference ended by assuring the ideology of "Dream
Power", which is when people's dreams become one, they become a huge
power to change the world.

http://natalie.mu/gallery/show/news_id/11382/image_id/4572

"Dream Power John Lennon Super Live" will be held at Nihon Budokan on
December 8th, the anniversary of death of John Lennon. In addition
to Yoko Ono and BONNIE PINK, Tamio Okuda, Kazuyoshi Saito, Salyu,
Tortoise Matsumoto, Fujifablic, Kazuya Yoshii, etc., will perform.

http://natalie.mu/gallery/show/news_id/11382/image_id/4566

BONNIE PINK who comments (right) and Yoko Ono who looks at her
(left).

http://natalie.mu/gallery/show/news_id/11382/image_id/4569

The fragments of a base which contain wishes.

http://natalie.mu/gallery/show/news_id/11382/image_id/4571

Yoko Ono who displays a peace sign.

http://natalie.mu/gallery/show/news_id/11382/image_id/4568

http://natalie.mu/gallery/show/news_id/11382/image_id/4565

http://natalie.mu/gallery/show/news_id/11382/image_id/4567

Mikihiko Hori

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