John Cage : Notations AGAIN

I had a chance to get to the library and check out the text first hand, and was so impressed that I felt inclined to scan some pages for you. Voila.

RECOMMENDED READING: An Anthology by La Monte Young

An Anthology

In 1960, La Monte Young had been asked to guest-edit an issue of a literary journal, Beatitude East, and it was to include ‘concept art’ and anything else he thought was important. One thing lead to another and the collection became AN ANTHOLOGY of chance operations concept art anti-art indeterminacy improvisation meaningless work natural disasters plans of action stories diagrams Music poetry essays dance constructions mathematics compositions, BY GEORGE BRECHT, CLAUS BREMER, EARLE BROWN, JOSEPH BYRD, JOHN CAGE, DAVID DEGENER, WALTER DE MARIA, HENRY FLYNT, YOKO ONO, DICK HIGGINS, TOSHI ICHIYANAGI, TERRY JENNINGS, DENNIS, DING DONG, RAY JOHNSON, JACKSON MAC LOW, RICHARD MAXFIELD, ROBERT MORRIS, SIMONE MORRIS, NAM JUNE PAIK, TERRY RILEY, DITER ROT, JAMES WARING, EMMETT WILLIAMS, CHRISTIAN WOLFF, LA MONTE YOUNG/LA MONTE YOUNG – EDITOR/GEORGE MACIUNAS – DESIGNER.

Dick Higgins – “Metadramas”

Statement about my “metadramas”

by Dick Higgins

One of the main genres of Fluxus pieces of the 1960s is and was “events.” These were first done before Fluxus, and came to be conceptually framed as a sort of cognate of happenings, which were new at the time-that is, intermedial, free-form pieces which lay conceptually among the bounds of music, theater and visual art. Events differed from happenings in that they were always as compressed as possible, minimal statements that would provide a mental or emotional impact. But, of course, they were highly abstract. I did them, George Brecht did them, and others of the Fluxus artists did them also though, for the most part, somewhat later than 1958 when George, I, AI Hansen and others studied with John Cage in his class at the New School for Social Research in New York, a story which has been told, more or less, to death.

However, events made their point and the genre became well defined over the years, through Fluxus concerts and individual performances and works by, quite literally, hundreds of artists. In the sixties, when purely formal explorations seemed essential to sweep away the overly personal baggage of the 1960s, this was a positive thing. However, in the 1980s, when personal expression has been minimized, and when art performances, the heirs in some respect of happenings, often celebrate boredom and almost always deal essentially with technical and formal concerns, it seems more desirable to do pieces which are mainly minimal emotional statements or narrative ones, complete with characterizations in most cases. I had done a few such pieces previously, but not so consciously as now. I call them “metadramas” because they must be dramatic in order to satisfy the criterion, and, the “meta-” part suggests that they are “next to” or “about” what they relate to-that is, some are dramas about the drama, while others simply don’t pretend to be dramas but do point in that direction. I wrote about sixty of them in the summer of 1985, destroyed most of them, and then noticed that they seemed to define a genre to which the earlier events belong, though not vice versa.

Barrytown, New York

18 September, 1985

via Dick Higgins – “Metadramas”.

RECOMMEND READING MATERIAL: The Great Bear Pamphlets

U B U W E B :: The Great Bear Pamphlets.

Published by Dick Higgins, Something Else Press books contain offbeat and avant-garde material in a neat and tidy, yet quirky form. In 1962 Fluxus founder George Maciunas proposed to publish Higgins’s first major collection–a cross-section of his writing for a year following April 13, 1962, the date Higgins had composed one of his favorite works from the “Danger Music” series and, coincidently, the birthday of Thomas Jefferson. Maciunas’s notion of publishing revolved around the hand-assembled small-edition art multiple that proved an impossible format for Higgins’s four hundred-page manuscript. Maciunas informed Dick that he couldn’t have the book ready until “a year from next spring” at which point he retrieved the scripts, had a few drinks–and, in Higgins’s own words “went reeling home to Alison Knowles, with whom I was living at the time. I said we’d founded a press and she said, ‘Really? What’s it called?’ ‘Shirtsleeves Press.’ ‘That’s no good. Why don’t you call it something else?’” And so he did. Higgins’s editorial idea was innovative, pragmatic and utopian all at once–the plan was to compose a series of “Variations on a Theme of Book.” He described this project as the opportunity “to publish source materials in a format which could encourage their distribution through traditional channels, however untraditional their contents or implications&to introduce European materials and always to have a balance between European/American, famous, infamous and unfamous, past and present.” He wanted to present the work in a trade book format rather than in the small press style per se (often strange and beautiful rough-hewn miracles). This idea was picked up by a great many small press editors fifteen years later in an attempt to make the books look more like “real books” and therefore to function more efficiently within the real world.

RESEARCH/INSPIRATION: FLUXUS, What is it?

For the sake of our readers who don’t have personal memories of Fluxus, how would you synopsize it?

You want the two-sentence version of Fluxus?

It resists definition; we both know that. But can we come up with a short way of defining it?

I would say that Fluxus is justifiably defined in very different ways, depending on when, where, and how people learn about it. That would be one non-answer–the Flux answer. Most Fluxus artists all over the world were doing Fluxus-like work before there was something called Fluxus. So if you were in Denmark, you learned this through Eric Andersen and his experience of Bewogen Beweging, or “Moving Movement,” which was an historic kinetic art show from the 1960s. If you were in Germany, you found it among the students of Karlheinz Stockhausen and the Darmstadt circle–who were talking about serialism and experimental musical structure in a way that a student of Cage never would. If you’re talking to one of the Japanese Fluxus artists, there’s a good chance they met at the University of Tokyo, and had some relationship to Group Ongaku, which was another experimental musical group. Most of these scenes had some connection to music: some of the artists were training to be involved in music professionally, although most of them were actually discovering music as an “other”–a structure or practice distinct from forms more traditional to the art world, such as painting. Now, I’m the daughter of two New York Fluxus artists; Dick was in the historic John Cage composition class of 1958 at the New School for Social Research, which included most of the future practitioners of Fluxus in New York. For me, Fluxus is predominantly a social entity–it marked the need of a group of experimental artists to have a context, and they found each other in the Cage class. The “event,” which is this Minimalist performance form where you have a simple instruction like “dripping” or “polishing”–some very reduced action–was invented in that class by George Brecht. George Maciunas first engaged with this group of artists in 1961 through his gallery, AG, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan; he later invented the Fluxus Kit, which were these objects for handling and using, and which I think of as a materialization of the event. He also gave concerts to La Monte Young and many key figures in the avant-garde, and began publishing Fluxus scores and objects. So my definition comes from that New York context, which actually allows one to say quite a lot about Fluxus. But a definition of Fluxus should always hinge on the position from which your practitioner, writer, or thinker speaks about it.

That’s a good definition.

Although a lot falls outside it.

And later….

Yes, I wanted to ask about that. In your book, you talk about how Fluxus was influenced by John Dewey–someone typically read these days only by art educators–and his whole notion of art as experience, which is also out of fashion at the moment.

Yeah. I feel like I walk through conferences in some sort of Victorian neckline, you know? And I hope it’s not because I’m intensely repressed! I don’t think it is, but you can’t quite be sure. Anyway, Dewey was someone who went out of style with poststructuralism, but he was very important for many of the artists of the 1960s, at the time they were making their work. Allan Kaprow was reading Dewey, and making Happenings, and studying with Cage. Daisetz Suzuki, when he was teaching at Columbia University, kept a picture of Dewey over his desk. And Suzuki is crucial for Cage. So Dewey was at the center of how these artists understood their relationship to materials. He was also on the board of Black Mountain College, where Cage and Merce Cunningham taught and became sort of grandfathers to Fluxus. Many of the people who were experimenting with materials in that ’60s way–this sensual way that I’m interested in–had a connection to Dewey, although it was completely obscured when the challenges this work brings to verbal discourse became exploited by poststructuralism and political discourse. So Dewey is written out as some sort of crazy idea the artists were into, and then we get this poststructuralist balloon of theory telling us what the artists were really doing. Now, I love to read a lot of that theory, but I read it like a drug, because in understanding it, my brain is literally so stimulated it’s like firecrackers going off. I enter some sort of ether that has nothing to do with–

The real world?

Or the world that artists inhabit, which is a dumber world. And I mean that in the most flattering way. My mother’s always saying, “I’m so dumb.” And she doesn’t mean it to be a putdown to herself; she means it in the sense that, at some level, things really are that simple. And it’s true: it’s our excess intelligence that generates this sort of frothy foam on top of our coffee of life.

via hannah higgins.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED VIEWING: Fluxus Performance Workbook and Related Scores

Fluxus Performance Workbook and Related Scores.

HIGHLY RELEVANT ARTIST: Alison Knowles

Alison Knowles.

Alison Knowles was born in New York City in 1933. She is a visual artist known for her soundworks, installations, performances, publications and association with Fluxus, the experimental avant-garde group formally founded in 1962.

“Alison Knowles is an artist who stands for life. Her message is direct and in some ways, oblique. Yet it is through this obliqueness, this archeological measure where art becomes an investigation of the world through the most intimate recesses, that gives the “Bread and Water” prints their power. The fact is that we have been seduced into thinking that power is outside of us not within us; and this is precisely where work of Alison Knowles comes into play and where it offers itself to us.”