student notes seminar 2

Notes for students

Context Responsive Curating: The organisation of dirt


http://www.ubu.com/film/fluxfilm.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUJagb7hL0E&NR=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HypmW4Yd7SY

http://www.strano.net/town/music/fluxus.htm#Registrazioni%20sonore%20di%20happening%20Fluxus

http://www.strano.net/town/music/fluxus.htm#Registrazioni%20sonore%20di%20happening%20Fluxus

http://imaginepeace.com/archives/3966

http://members.chello.nl/j.seegers1/situationist/constant.html

http://www.ubu.com/film/leckey_hardcore.html

http://www.artnotart.com/fluxus/index2.html

http://www.ubu.com/film/debord.html

http://www.ubu.com/film/debord.html

http://www.ben-vautier.com/

http://www.ubu.com/film/debord_spectacle.html

http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/fluxus_box/Fluxus-Anthology-30th_01_George_Maciunas.mp3

http://www.artnotart.com/fluxus/dhiggins-childshistory.html

http://www.ubu.com/

http://www.bopsecrets.org/

http://www.cinestatic.com/infinitethought/

http://www.wearebad.net/

http://savagemessiahzine.com/

http://www.lust-for-life.org/Lust-For-Life/Lettrist/Lettrist.htm

http://www.classic.archined.nl/news/9812/Babylon_e.html

http://www.barbelith.com/cgi-bin/articles/00000011.shtml

http://www.ubu.com/film/brecht.html




Seminar 2 Fluxus, Situationism and its discontents (notes paraphrased from talk)

This seminar presented a brief and albeit personal account of Fluxus and Situationism and looked at certain other related formations of art movements before and beyond, and their combined significance to contemporary debates. Commencing with John Cage’s 4’33” [please refer to recordings of performance on youtube] the seminar aimed to alert to a different kind of evolving aesthetic, also linked to certain Eastern ideas of composition, and beauty, [Zen], [wabi sabi]. At first presenting some publications available [there are many] to show that these movements, producing a kind of art and politics incommensurable at first glance in fact share many salient features of practice in their time, their homological relation effecting a new generation of conceptual artists, and parallel social activism. The inquiry would need a lot of time to fully contextualise these distinct occurrences in the history of modern movements. There were similar kinds of articulations [The Manifesto form, lists of instructions, impromptu actions, poetic slogans, public interventions, anti -cinema films, provocation texts, underground publications, a general disordering of social behaviour, detournement cartoons, the practice of the everyday, [from Dada’s iconoclast polemic] and an applied nomadic principle to urban space – the radical act of ‘detour’ of movement that derived from the idea of the ‘flaneur’ [Baudelaire’s characterisation of modern life and its sensibility, of getting lost in the crowd. The importance of establishing an architectural critique, in the earlier work of Lettrism [established in 1942 by Isadore Isou and also involving Guy Debord] was amplified by the architect Constant, [see New Babylon] and complemented by the method of ‘detournement’ by the painter Asger Jorn who attacked traditional painting by painting over them. These advances on the perceived corruption of Surrealism’s anti-establishment original provocations to rational organisation of life, of ‘unreason’, were accompanied by both groups’ dismissal of an art for its own sake, critical of the ‘aristocratic’ institution, ‘belle ecriture’ still in concord with the avant garde principle and battle cry ‘epater le bourgeois!’ even if Debord writes of the bourgeois as being an origin of revolution against hegemony and privilege. In Debord it is political theory that takes first place concerning the spectacularisation of the society, to be re-inscribed in the 2nd international as a general politics of the image, which must include an attack on the market of commerce ‘art’ and celebrity culture. Debord’s films were key to this understanding as a breaking up of values invisibly distributed as ‘spectacle’. The 1st International is characterised by the importance placed on art and politics, as mutual platforms, yet acknowledging that two directions might not co-incide, yet whose agreements forged politics and aesthetics, might also be claimed as resulting in the successes, and failures of the May 68 protests and riots of Paris. The rise of a subsequent reaction in attitude - the New Philosophy, the Mediology of Debray, to the ideas of Debord, and in turn Deleuze and Foucault and many others, were targeted to the restitution of conservative politics / governance; a return, as Alain Badiou terms it a ‘second restoration’ to an ideology of late ‘capital’ which virtually killed the spirit of the republican city, forever changed. Capital itself absorbs its antagonism and becomes stronger. The same could also be said of the state policing of USA since the concurrent student insurgencies, the campus 60s riots, and the Black Power movement of Malcolm X; in Germany the Baader Meinhof RAF arrests, which culminated in their conspired deaths in prison cells. Joseph Beuys performed in Documenta 1972 ‘ “Durer, I walk here personally with Baader and Meinhof through Documenta’. This piece bridged, and made complicit many national prejudices to the universal movement, although Beuys is himself attacked for advancing a ‘mythology’ of the collective, and ‘Urgrund’, by Benjamin Buchloch and others, as is Debord accused of naïve young Hegelianism.



Gerhard Richter’s paintings commemorated the ‘suicides’ as a collective shame ten years after. These events were echoed in the criticisms of Adorno and Frankfurt School’s analysis of the oppressive state culture industry, totalitarianism and those vested interests of industries allied to governments; in Italy, the Red Brigade brought these ‘mutualities’ to an end, after the arrests in Bologna in 77, and the Fiat strikes’ cultural revolt against work. Fluxus and Situationsim mobilised the ‘passion of the real’ in student movements, which perhaps naively allied intellectuals and workers solidarity in post Marxist activisim. In collective street interventions against ‘control space’, by applying a subject’s ‘psycho-geography’ both Fluxus and Situationism released pleasurable and impassioned expressions.




Fluxus Shock Theatre and the Event.

Bandaged Orchestra during the Fluxus Festival arranged by Yoko Ono at
Carnegie Recital Hall in 1965. Photograph: Getty Images


In George Maciunas’ Fluxus it was staged in a benign form, a playful revolution, a carnivalesque [Bahktin] up-turning of codes of behaviour and a gentle attack on the status of the immobile museum [as an eccentric ‘box’ of paraphernalia] –works were made by the group deriving from Joseph Cornell, and Marcel Duchamp’s portable museum – a comedy of objects, disclosing an empty box of tricks [anti-archives] without interest in interpretation. In Debord, the ‘fun’ is translated as seeking a pleasure or desire against governmental will and authority. The term ‘situation’ originates from existential thought. One makes one’s own unique situations, dismantling the logic of Marxist scientific historicism regarding the proletariat. The ‘situation’ of haptic space and its deformation the affects stable structures of power from a point of contact with existential being or ‘becoming’, has some origin in Cage’s introduction of non western thought as practiced in art / music.

The seminar used a slide presentation to look at a more personal involvement with urban space, fluxus inspired projects such as performing outside the Musee D’Art Moderne in Paris, after the ‘alternative’ art survey of London spaces ‘Live/Life’ [a ‘drinking sculpture’ called ‘Itch God’ with pictures of a referential work of auto-destructive art by Gustav Metzger [using hot irons to burn mdf wood]. We looked at the work of Catalyst Arts Belfast as an example of an independent space and presented slides of a performative installation by Peter Lewis and Runa Islam with Peter Fillingham and Gustav Metzger [a reconstruction of a hypothetical auto-destructive work] at Catalyst arts. Transmission Gallery was also cited as of importance in the history of alternative practice, as an artist-run space. There were pictures from Redux [Reza Aramesh presented Arab men on plinths serving wine] , more suit cut-ups, Simon Ford’s take on 80s pop stars with situationist slogans, and another dinner party. The bar was integral. When entering the space the bar announces the event – which takes place in a large open space, an unexpected arena that lies beyond it.

BOWLING ALLEY performance with Makiko Nagaya 2010-02-13

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


examples of actions / scripted

the artist

a metadrama

artist: "i'm hungry."
someone else: "here are twenty two ounces of honor."
artist: "i'm still hungry."
someone else: "here are twenty two more ounces of honor."





buddhism

a metadrama

buddhist monk: "peace!"
sound of gunfire.

couic!

a metadrama

enters in a suit of medieval armor.
trips.
falls.

erotic

a metadrama

she giggles then sighs.
she giggles then sighs.
ad lib a couple of minutes.

flexible lumbar

a metadrama

nude, profile to audince.
demonstrates flexible lumbars.
two minutes.
words: optional

follow the leader

a metadrama

two people nude and smiling one leads other follows.
after a while follower no longer follows leader does not change roles.
they look at each other.
leader does something follower does something different.
follower does something
leader does that thing.
leader follows the other away.


Reference 2

Adrian Searle on FluxusSnapshots of a revolution

Fluxus was a daring movement that spread art anarchy around the globe.
Can its spirit really be captured in an exhibition?
By Adrian Searle, The Guardian.
Bandaged Orchestra during the Fluxus Festival arranged by Yoko Ono at Carnegie Recital Hall in 1965

Bandaged Orchestra during the Fluxus Festival arranged by Yoko Ono at
Carnegie Recital Hall in 1965. Photograph: Getty Images

In the gloom of the Baltic gallery, there are things preserved under
glass: odds and ends in an upturned beret; a cabinet whose opened
drawers are filled with stones; a plastic American breakfast (plastic
fried eggs, plastic bacon); phials of liquid; stacks of money. I peer at
a chromed tooth-brush, at bars of wooden soap, at a pair of spectacles
with spikes that poke the wearer in the eyes, at trays of carefully
sorted animal droppings.

All these little boxes – the spoof games, the surreal gags, the
manifestos, the political placards and unplayable musical scores – are
the sad reliquary of a dream. The dream was fluxus, a revolutionary
movement that, during the 1960s and 70s, encompassed Europe, America,
Japan and beyond. It hovered between art and anti-art, neo-dada and
nouveau realism; it embraced artists, composers, poets, philosophers,
amateurs, cranks, enthusiasts and passersby. Yoko Ono filmed a parade of
naked bottoms. A man festooned in string did things to a violin, as a
free piece of street theatre. Pianos were ritually abused. Pavements
were scrubbed and “mystery boxes” filled with rubbish – both as art and
as a way of getting rid of garbage.

For a while, fluxus was everywhere. There were festivals no one
attended, performances no one saw, promises of money that never came,
revolutions that never happened. When Ono and John Lennon held their
bed-ins, that was the nearest fluxus got to worldwide fame. The
photographs and films, the anecdotes and stories that record these
perplexing events cannot do them justice. Fluxus never went down well
either with the public or with collectors. For the former, it was
baffling, regarded at best as yet one more joke at their expense – those
crazy artists, at it again. Never mind that fluxus work rarely cost
anything to make, and not much more to buy, and its single laudable
aesthetic premise was to avoid wasting resources. The problem for most
art collectors was that fluxus was too cheap and too ephemeral. Take Ben
Vautier’s God, an empty wine bottle. “If God is everywhere, he is also
in this bottle,” Vautier claimed, in an accompanying note. Not even the
Vatican could argue with that.

Fluxus was resolutely against skill, artiness, expression, form and
pomposity. Fluxus was a mystery probably even to some of those who
espoused its restless ideals. Paradox was at the heart of the movement -
just as it is at the heart of The Dream of Fluxus, an exhibition at the
Baltic in Gateshead. It is also the title of a biography of George
Maciunas, the architect, graphic designer, amateur art historian and
photographer who founded the movement, if movement it was.

The exhibition and accompanying book by its curator, Thomas Kellein,
somehow fail in their tasks. Both fluxus and Maciunas slip away from us
the more we look and read. Fluxus itself is ill-represented by its
objects, and needs a living context, while Maciunas and his
complications burst the seams of Kellein’s book. A second show, of work
by Ono, has also just opened at Baltic.

Maciunas was fascinating, talented, and by all accounts a nightmare.
Like André Breton, godfather of the surrealist movement, Maciunas would
invite artists, composers and even philosophers to take part in
activities. He would charm them, boss them around for years, then
perform summary excommunications, banishing those who displeased him.
Other artists, such as Joseph Beuys, would claim fluxus as their own.
Maciunas would take against individuals for no good reason – composer
Karlheinz Stockhausen was one – and damn by association those who had
anything to do with them. All this was wearying.

One fluxus artist said that Maciunas “walked a tightrope extended
between the two poles of avant garde anti-art and mass entertainment”.
One might say the same of much art today. Interestingly, the show opens
with shelf upon shelf of all the medications Maciunas used in one year,
all his light bulbs, all the fruit juice he drank.

Inert and under glass, fluxus appears as dead matter in this exhibition.
Yet – as one peers at its museological corpse, the remains of so many
empty gestures – the spirit of fluxus, its playfulness, zest and
anarchy, fitfully reasserts itself, if only by association. Here’s a
scrunched-up piece of paper that makes us think of a work by Martin
Creed. There’s a musical score that takes us back to John Cage and Kurt
Schwitters. Here are placards, protesting the Vietnam war, just as
apposite as arguments against American and British activities in Iraq.

All the objects in the show have stories to tell, or demand to be played
with. One wants to get up and play Joe Lones’s adapted Flux Harpsichord
and his mechanical bells, or Takako Saito’s Sound Chess Set for John
Cage. But you can’t. I’d stay away from the Flux Toilet and the Human
Flux Trap, inoffensive though they probably are. It’s hard to tell. You
can’t actually reach out and touch anything, and almost nothing is
explained. The Flux Mystery Boxes remain mysterious, the adapted musical
instruments unplayed. All the life’s been sucked out of everything. It’s
a shame.

Richard Long’s walks, Gilbert and George posing as living sculptures,
Sarah Lucas’s early work and a million other small gestures, actions and
ephemeral objects can trace their origins back to fluxus. It was a
conduit through which ideas and personalities flowed, and still flow
today. Fluxus inevitably failed, and came to be seen as old hat. It was
partly a problem of packaging – though Maciunas was a very good graphic
designer, for whom no detail was too small to be worried over. Fluxus’s
aim to eliminate music, theatre, poetry, fiction and all the rest of the
fine arts combined was doomed. Only the mass entertainment industry
might achieve such a thing.

If anything and everything could be art, and everyone was an artist, the
whole system would collapse, fluxus thought had it. If only things were
so simple. There were even complaints from hardcore fluxus artists that
people with too strong a personality left too much of a trace of
themselves in their work. These are the aesthetics of the Khmer Rouge.



















A contemporary exhibition ‘Unmonumental’ represents a kind of influence on a young generation’s [ through punk] absorption of Situation and Fluxus. Curated by Robert Storr at the New Museum, New York this year. It seems to present an antagonism or critique to the market driven ‘spectacularisation’ of art by reducing scale and industrialised ‘perfection’ in material hand-made or poorly constructed emphemera, bricollage et cetera.. Although made of trash elements, these ‘works of art’ are in fact ostensibly confirmation of their own redundant avant -gardist ideals. The works gladly betray their origins by a double bind, of the ‘new’ as obsolescence, and therefore lay victim to use as commodity/ status signs ready for the auction house.

The origin of Fluxus resides in 1961 influenced directly by John Cage, whose New York based school in 1958 Dick Higgins, George Brecht, Jackson McClough attended. Anti-art statements of Vladimir Mayakowsky, the vaudeville of Spike Jones, Futurist theatre and their manifestos, and Duchamp, and Paris Dada events. Ben Vautier made theatre ‘shock pieces’ where the audience is challenged in expectations. Maciunas describes many pieces of transgressing the ‘4th wall’, which originated in the ideas of Brecht and Paris Dada.

We can identify the various performative work of Yves Klein, Joseph Beuys, with Allan Kaprow’s first happening [‘concerted action’ 1952 at Black Mountain college with John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham] informally swapped ideas with also Japanese ‘Gutai’ group in 1957. The magazine ‘Fluxus’ was published later in 1961. In 1962 a whole series of concerts and events were staged in Europe, linking the ‘nouvelle realiste’ also of Nice such as Armann. . The destruction of the piano was memorable – the newspapers called the Fluxus people ‘cultural bolsheviks’...

The second part of the seminar attempted to articulate the group’s ideas about how to construct its own ‘situation’. It was suggested that the assessment was designed with text as its main weight, and a gallery show seemed an impossible outcome given the size of the group. Other suggestions and criticisms began to democratise the group’s discussion with conflicting opinions – it became necessary to confront the problems by offering an adaption through negotiation to the draft syllabus [since the group was being taught by another it was felt appropriate to change certain conditions to make it work]. The solution was to make a three part assessment with outcome in keeping with the brief of a website [who was to design this site?] that would act as a project linking all teh individual responses. [something like slashseconds does as a curated work comprising a lot of different material. How a group of this size works together remains a problem.

Some solutions were offered. If everyone in the group provide firstly a proposal [this could be a fantastic or pragmatic or a theoretical one] depending on the subject and the author / artists’ orientation.] Art historians could provide texts as everyone – which could also be made into films / readings / performances. The catalogue essay seems academic in regard from fluxus and situationist viewpoint. Mobile phone videos would be perhaps uploaded to website of readings....there should be a group decision made as to how free the options are in presenting material.

The website could be templated upon /seconds which would then offer the group the chance to launch it, and to produce an exhibition at a later time from its contents.




text as placard
text as situation
text as spoken word
text as video
An info center could be hosted in the seminar room – or a 3rd International...fluxus version –

Performance artists could be invited to stage work within an info-center environment.


Deadlines: to be clarified in 3rd session.