Interview with Shigeko Kubota

By Shigeko Kubota, Oral History Archives of Japanese Art Posted on January 2, 2014
Japanese artists Shigeko Kubota and Shiomi Mieko arrived in New York in 1964 at the invitation of George Maciunas. Working in sculpture, performance, and video, Kubota was active in the avant-garde art community of Tokyo in the early 1960s, and then, after her move to the U.S., among the Fluxus artists in New York. In the interview with Miwako Tezuka, below, conducted for the Oral History Archives of Japanese Art and edited by post, she describes what it was like working with artists such as Kosugi Takehisa, the members of Hi Red Center and Group Ongaku (Group music), George Maciunas, and Marcel Duchamp. http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/344-interview-with-shigeko-kubota

Oral History Interview with Shigeko Kubota, conducted by Miwako Tezuka, October 11, 2009, at Kubota’s residence in New York City

Oral History Archives of Japanese Art (www.oralarthistory.org) Transcribed by Kanaoka Naoko Translated by Reiko Tomii

The Japanese version of the interview can be found on the website of the Oral History Archives of Japanese Art. In accordance with Japanese practice, Japanese names are generally written surname first. Exceptions are made for Japanese-born individuals who reside permanently abroad, or are well-known in the West. Tezuka: You came to New York in 1964. What was Tokyo’s art scene like before that? Kubota: I was friendly with Hi Red Center. When Naiqua Gallery in Shinjuku offered me an exhibition, I scattered love letters I had received on the floor. I bought [plenty of] old newspaper from a junkman and lined the floor. I have a photo of it. When you opened the door, you could immediately see the mountain of paper. I covered it with a white sheet and climbed to the top. I was also working on a welded-iron sculpture, and so I put it there, too. It’s a sculptural space in which you experience mountain climbing. But I got no reviews. Critics like Tōno [Yoshiaki] and Nakahara [Yūsuke] came to see my show, but they said nothing. It was 1963. I thought, “I will have no chance in Japan.” At any rate, I wanted to be famous. Tezuka: At the time, how did Hi Red Center members respond to your work? Kubota: They were very gentle. They were friends with Kosugi Takehisa1, and I came to know Group Ongaku (Group music). Kuni Chiya2 was my aunt. She practiced creative dance (sosaku buyō). She had a studio and needed the participation of musicians, and so she brought in Group Ongaku. When she held a dance participation event with light and moving images, I first met them. I learned from Kosugi that Yoko Ono was back in Japan. I also learned about Fluxus at that time. Tezuka: That was 1962? Kubota: It was 1963. Nam June Paik was back from Germany at the time. I was a junior high school teacher. [. . .] I went to school every day. When I came home, I made sculpture in my studio. I had an exhibition at Naiqua, and I showed my work at the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition. But no reviews whatsoever were written. “I will have no chance at all,” I thought. Then I heard of Fluxus. George Maciunas invited us. “Won’t you come to New York and join Fluxus?” he said. “We will have a concert at Carnegie Hall. If you come here on your own, I will take care of you here.” And so I said to Kosugi, “Let’s go.” He said, “Hmm . . . I’ll go,” and so I bought an airplane ticket and resigned from the school. But then Kosugi said, “I won’t go. You go ahead.” I had already quit teaching, and so I could not survive even if I were to stay. [. . .] Then Shiomi Mieko said, “I will go,” and so I said, “Let’s go together.” [. . .] We both came to New York in 1964. George Maciunas was so pleased that he came to meet us at JFK airport. Then he took us to Fluxus’s office on Canal Street. It was fun. Ay-O lived next door. Takako Saitō was there, too. [. . .] The address was 349 Canal Street. I had my start there after meeting Fluxus, and I have hung around this area ever since. [Laughs.] [. . .] Tezuka: Let me backtrack a little bit. You came to know Group Ongaku members through your aunt. Were you interested in their music, in their experimentalism? Kubota: Theirs were Happenings. It was not so much music as events. [. . .] They didn’t use scores. They improvised. That was good. I thought they were new. I thought what they did could somehow be related to sculpture. Performance and Happenings concern destruction, after all. They destroyed or threw something to destroy. They acted. Action. Action painting was popular then. Tezuka: Did you do any performance at that time? Kubota: I am not the type. [Laughs.] Tezuka: No? Kubota: I was in the audience, just cheering for them. [Laughs.] Tezuka: But in 1965, at Fluxus’s summer festival, you performed Vagina Painting. Was this your first performance work? Kubota: That was just a play. I defined myself as a sculptor. I thought I was different from them. Tezuka: Then where did that performance work come from? Kubota: Where did it come from? It was an action painting. I participated [in the festival] because they asked me to. Fluxus is about destruction, and their work disappears. Their work vanishes after the fact. I didn’t like that. Destruction is fine. In sculpture, too, I can smash a work, and it’s destruction results in a kind of form. From it, I can make my own renaissance, so to speak, and a new thing may be constructed. So destruction is fine, but I thought [what they did] was so ephemeral. [. . .] Sculpture requires a certain presence. Destruction still must leave something. Fluxus did something and it’s gone. They were musical in that sense. Their work was fleeting. Even if I worked with time, I wanted to have some sense of permanence. I wanted to have some sort of form. I wanted to envision some shape. With video, then, I thought of the unity of moving images and non-moving images. Tezuka: So, that was your only performance? Kubota: Yes. I was not so interested in performance. I did that piece because I was begged to do it. [. . .] Begged by Maciunas and Nam June. [. . .] Tezuka: Your work developed simultaneously with Nam June Paik’s experimentation. Kubota: We have done kind of similar things. People saw me do a similar thing and said, “You, too, are doing it.” To begin with, I was indeed interested in Nam June’s work. He conceived Happenings from music and experimented with sound. He studied with John Cage and destroyed sound. His composition was close to Dada, very avant-garde. If you translate that type of work to the visual field of sculpture, it leads to the world of Marcel Duchamp. Art exists in a flow of time. In video, time flows frame by frame. If I combine it with a still object, the resulting space will be like a museum, like a pantheon. If it is brought to a public space, it can heal people’s minds—even, say, at a busy airport. It contains many possibilities. I grew up in a Buddhist temple, and so I like Buddhist sculpture. It stimulates the imagination. I saw paintings of hell and paradise unfolding on the walls like a film script. I think that’s video. A mural. If a Buddhist mural moves here and there, then that’s video. To accompany that, I can make a Buddha statue or some object. Tezuka: Indeed, a hand scroll does have movement in space and time. And so it can develop into video. Kubota: Yes, like that, like traditional art. Insertion of traditional art into video involves analog time. We were born at the right time. Tezuka: You mean equipment became available when you began your career. Kubota: Yes. If it were today, it would have been too late. [Today] everything has been done. We came of age in between analog and digital. Nam June had a superb sense of timing. You know, he studied electronic music with John Cage. The next thing was video, which he said “you can do easily if you know physics.” And he had such a good tutor in Abe [Shūya]. [Laughs.] Tezuka: So he knew technology would progress in that direction? Kubota: Yes, indeed. I was watching him. Tezuka: Changing the way you see things by changing a context. That’s the art of Duchamp. Is that why you were attracted to him? Kubota: I was attracted to him because I met him. Tezuka: In 1968? [. . .] Kubota: When John Cage and Duchamp had a concert called Chess with Duchamp’s wife, Teeny, [. . .] I flew to Buffalo with my cheap Canon camera. It was winter. Duchamp and Teeny were on the same airplane with me. I thought, “Oh my.” Due to the severe snow and wind, the plane was unable to land in Buffalo and so it headed to Rochester. I thought, “It’s good.” I happened to have a copy of Bijutsu techō [the Japanese art magazine Art notebook], which carried a feature on Duchamp [the March 1968 issue]. Tezuka: You were an occasional reporter for the art magazine at the time. Kubota: Yes. I needed money. Miyazawa Takeyoshi was the editor of Bijutsu techō. He was a very good man and asked me to “gather information and put together some photographs, too.” I showed Duchamp the feature and told him, “I did this.” It’s in Japanese, and I read the Duchamp feature. After landing in Rochester, we went to Buffalo by bus in the snow. The concert was held that night. At the concert, Duchamp’s bride’s clothes were ripped off until she was naked. I think Jasper Johns did the stage design.3 Tezuka: I see. The Large Glass [The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)]. Kubota: And Merce Cunningham danced. Tezuka: You mean, he danced with [the stage design after] The Large Glass. Kubota: Yes. The stage design was The Large Glass, and Merce Cunningham danced. In the following week, from Buffalo, they were invited to Toronto.4 I took a photograph in Toronto. It shows Duchamp playing chess with John Cage.5 I totally forgot that I took this photo. It was in February or March—it was winter and very cold. In September of that year, Duchamp passed away. [. . .] Tezuka: Did you know of Duchamp while in Japan? Kubota: Yes, at school I studied about him in [art] history. But Pop art was the main topic, very fashionable. Of course, if we trace back, Duchamp was at the beginning of Pop. [. . .] Kubota: When I went to Paris for Europe on 1/2 Inch a Day [1972], I thought, “Let’s drop by Rouen; Duchamp's grave is there.” I called Teeny Duchamp, who told me to “take a taxi to the grave after getting off the train.” I was still young then, and so I hauled a heavy Portapak to his family grave. The grounds were so huge I didn’t know where to go. His epitaph reads, “It’s always been the others who died.”6 Tezuka: Duchamp’s epitaph. Kubota: Very, very witty. I was so glad to go there and see it. It was worth braving the fierce wind. I was so scared. I couldn’t speak a word of French. [. . .] Tezuka: Some people keep travel diaries. For you, is video your diary? Kubota: No. As a child, I wanted to be a novelist. When I began carrying a Portapak, I realized writing is something that I can do with the camera. [. . .] Tezuka: I heard that Nam June Paik said you discovered the death of video through your video work. [. . .] Kubota: Yes. It was very kind of him to say that, but video is like that to begin with. So I said, “Video is a ghost of yourself.” It’s like your shadow. It reveals your interior. It still exists after you die. Tezuka: How many monitors did you use for Marcel Duchamp’s Grave [1972–75], twelve or eleven? Kubota: Any number will do, from the floor to the ceiling. Tezuka: If they can connect [the floor and the ceiling]? Kubota: Yes. It happened to be like that. I just wanted to encase televisions. With that work, Nam June was furious. When I came home, he said [about the footage of the visit to Duchamp’s grave], “Your camera is moving.” I was carrying the heavy Portapak, I was exhausted after walking around looking for his grave, and I was shaken with emotion, and so the camera was shaking, too. Tezuka: That means, you shot handheld? Kubota: He [Nam June Paik] would shoot in his studio, using a tripod and a much sturdier camera. Mine was handheld and the image trembled. When I showed it at the Kitchen, Jonas Mekas said, “Shigeko’s camera is wonderful. The camera moves in the way the eye moves.” Tezuka: I feel your handheld method is related to writing. [. . .] Another thing about you is that you were a collaborator, or a partner, of Nam June. Kubota: Well, not a partner. I was his comrade. Tezuka: Comrade. Kubota: I never collaborated with him. We are very different, like water and oil. Even when I did my own stuff, people said, “She imitates Nam June.” I found it infuriating. So I headed further in the direction of Duchamp. When Nam June went populist, I went for high art. I couldn’t have done the same thing as Nam June. We were comrades in Fluxus. We were both Fluxus artists. However, with video, Nam June was experimental and dirty. Wires were sticking out from his early machine works. That’s why I went toward Duchamp. My work was very conceptual. I made boxes and put everything in them. Nam June encouraged me a lot. When I made Duchampiana: Nude Descending a Staircase [1975–76],7 he asked, “What’s that?” Do you know the film in which the actress Takamine Hideko8 descended a staircase? I told him, “I connected that film and Duchamp’s staircase.” [. . .] He said, “Americans are too simple to understand it. Don’t do it.” But I did it. Then it became a sensation at Documenta [in 1977]. Barbara London was the first to visit me at home and said, “I would like to buy your stairs for The Museum of Modern Art.” Nam June was stunned. It was I who had earned cash money. Tezuka: Yes, it was the first video sculpture that MoMA acquired. [. . . ] Tezuka: You first saw John Cage perform his music at the Sogetsu Kaikan hall. Kubota: Yes, when he came to Tokyo. Tezuka: What about Cage was such a big influence on you? Kubota: His conducting. For example, when he used clocks, [I was very impressed by] his action, certainly. Tezuka: His action? Kubota: Not the regular conducting of an orchestra. Like clock hands moving, or cooking. Or that portable radio, you know? Tezuka: A transistor radio, you mean? Kubota: Yes, radio was popular back then. He turned it on for music and also cooked in the background. Tezuka: So you mean, it was part of the action? Kubota: His action was beyond the idea of music. He turned everyday life into art. With Fluxus, I, too, wanted to turn everyday life into art. And so, my video is about everyday images, like my own diary, but I make it into art. Narrative makes a dialogue. [. . .] Tezuka: When you came to New York in 1964, [you arrived] on July 4. Was there any significance to that date? Kubota: It was just an accident. I was surprised, too, for I didn’t know anything about the Fourth of July. Tezuka: So you didn’t know it was Independence Day? Kubota: That's right. I went to a YMCA on Lexington and Fifty-something Street. George put Shiomi and me there. The cleaners who were there went home after greeting us: “Hello. Have a nice weekend. Happy holiday!” There were fireworks, too. I finally realized, “It’s Independence Day.” That’s how little I knew about America. All I knew was Pop art in New York. That’s it. I came to New York because of Fluxus and Pop art. I didn’t know much about American history. Tezuka: Exactly one year after that, you performed your Vagina Painting. Was there any meaning to that? Or was it a performance just for the festival? Kubota: That was because George organized a Fluxus event in Washington Square Park called “Washington Visiting Fluxus.” Fluxus organized several festivals. Tezuka: The summer festival. Kubota: Charlotte Moorman had done the New York Avant-Garde Festival, and so George was competing with her. It was George who did the first Fluxus events, but Charlotte Moorman got a budget from the city and began her Avant-Garde Festival. The two fought, and George began doing his own festivals. Tezuka: So he happened to organize that event on that day, and so you performed on that day. Kubota: He said, “Do it.” I didn’t want to do it, to tell you the truth. How to explain this . . . as a child, I studied the piano. My mother played the piano. Tezuka: Yes, of course. Kubota: But I could not play the piano onstage no matter how hard I practiced beforehand. I had stage fright. That’s what I had. And so I decided it would be better to paint or sculpt, for either one I could do alone. I didn’t like doing something while other people were watching me. Onstage, I froze while playing the piano. Even during the rehearsal. Tezuka: Despite [your stage-fright problem], you gave a shocking performance. Kubota: Not really. Other people’s works were as shocking. Tezuka: How did the audience react? Kubota: The audience was only ten or so people. The photography of the event made it look powerful. George took that photograph. No more than thirty people saw it. Tezuka: Were they all artists or friends of Fluxus? Kubota: They were all friends of friends, most of them related to Fluxus. There was no other audience. It was summer, it was hot. There was no air conditioning. Very few came to Fluxus’s events. Nowadays, Fluxus can fill the whole house. After George’s death, Fluxus became famous, but back then, it wasn't at all. Tezuka: Then, how about other radical performances, like Nam June Paik’s body-based works? Kubota: Claes Oldenburg did something like that. Tezuka: Did you know these body-based performances and actions? Kubota: Yes, but I was not so much . . . Tezuka: Not so much interested? Kubota: No, not at all. I was so disappointed. I thought Fluxus was too concerned about small things. Tezuka: Rather, you wanted to make objects as your work? Kubota: Yes, I did, but I was interested in George’s life. He had a strange personality. He would later buy a farm, saying, “I will make a Fluxus Farm.” He bought that horrible run-down house in Connecticut. Tezuka: That’s right. Kubota: I followed him there. I thought nobody would follow him. Nam June also said, “Then let's buy a chicken house,” a dirty place with chickens. George’s house was like a haunted house. The previous owner killed himself. It wasn't a suicide. You know, he was a stunt pilot; he flew a propeller plane. He made an error and his plane crashed. Then he died. All his clothing was left there. Pilot suits and business suits and gun belts and such. They all fit George perfectly. Even the shoes. The house was surrounded by a vast farm. I was born in Niigata, and so I was good at farming. I went there to plant beans and flowers, and I enjoyed it. That’s what George bought to “create a Fluxus Farm.” Tezuka: So the idea was to live and survive on the land? Kubota: Yes. He bought an old car and drove it super fast on the highway. I was always seated next to him, and I was scared to death. His driving was terrible. Barbara Moore, who has a lot of Fluxus material, and Peter Moore also came. We ate together. At that time, George was married to a woman named Billie [Hutching]. And so she was there, too. We cooked all together. And the meals we cooked were masterpieces. George cooked something totally inedible. [Laughs.] Tezuka: Did he have any special recipes? Kubota: A lot of funny stuff. He would get half-spoiled yogurt from a store for free. Many hippies lived in that area, and so yogurt was popular. But yogurt tends to spoil quickly if you don’t eat it immediately. He would get spoiled yogurt. He would slap it onto chicken to make an Indian dish. Tezuka: That sounds rather dangerous. Kubota: Yes, indeed. We frequently suffered from diarrhea. But Fluxus was like diarrhea. Fluxus slapped diarrhea in your face. I am so happy that I got to know him while he was alive. Thanks to George, I came to know Jonas Mekas. Thanks to Jonas, I became a video curator at Anthology Film Archives. Thanks to Nam June, I came to do video and sculpture at museums. Everything began with George; everything began when I came to New York. I still keep George’s photo over there. I put some water every morning in front of it [a Japanese custom of commemoration for a family member]. I give him French water. [Laughs.] Tezuka: Special water? Kubota: No, the kind I drink. [Laughs.] Evian. Tezuka: Thank you for talking to me today.

above copied from: http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/344-interview-with-shigeko-kubota

VIKING DADA: The Life and Works of Al Hansen, Simon Anderson

“I always did art. I was always a performer. I acted out movies, I was the stand-up comic, the Skandinavian standard storyteller”[1]

Al Hansen was a restless and tireless creator—of live art, found-object art, of situations. Active for nearly forty years in the marginal and experimental arts, his articulate energy and the ephemeral nature of his particular aesthetic combined with a peripatetic life-style to construct an almost mythic character.

Alfred Earl Hansen was born in 1927 and grew up in New York, from Norwegian stock, part of a close family living under modest circumstances. His metropolitan neighborhood inculcated in him an abiding fondness for both city bustle and local community. As a boy he drew constantly and without reason. Intellectually—and otherwise—precocious, he was bored by school, and his drawings seem to have acted as voluminous notes to himself about life in the world, in which he was acutely interested. At a tender age he collaborated with his brother Gordon and another friend Jimmy Breslin [later to become a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and author] to produce a hand-hewn newspaper The Daily Flash, for which he provided comic-cuts. A voracious reader, a prodigious talker, and an endless joker all his life, his anecdotes reveal boyish traits such as delight in destruction, hilarious pranks, exploring the locale for hide-outs—from which to watch and adore women: all elements which he acknowledged found their way into his later work.

As a soldier in Europe after WWII, he was struck by the surreal contrast between domesticity and devastation and his taste for gratuitous destruction developed. In bombed-out Frankfurt, billeted amidst the ruin, he became obsessed with a piano he saw in a fourth-floor apartment standing close to a gaping hole in the building. “I thought about that piano…while drinking and eating. I thought about it while fucking. I thought about it while jumping out of airplanes, while shooting machine guns, while on guard duty.” Finally finding courage and opportunity to push the piano off the edge, the spectacle of its fall and the sound of impact—“Tschwauuuuunnnngha! —It was wonderful” stayed with him and became a 1970 happening [Yoko Ono Piano Drop] and part of the growing legend of Al Hansen[2].

For nearly a decade after the war, Hansen worked an apparently endless series of jobs and took advantage of the G.I.Bill’s guarantee of college tuition fees to study Art at Tulane University in New Orleans, the Art Students League and other places. A father by the mid-1950s, to help support his wife and daughter he re-enlisted in the military—this time as a paratrooper giving daredevil public displays of parachute expertise.

In the summer of 1958, almost on a whim, he signed up for a course in experimental composition to be given by composer John Cage at the New School for Social Research. This famous class was a springboard for fluxus and for happenings, and Hansen made life-long connections with many of the well-known artists who dropped in. Although classmate Dick Higgins has described Hansen as dozing off through a discussion of one of his own pieces, according to George Brecht, [whose course notes have subsequently been published in facsimile] Hansen wrote down every word Cage said during the lessons. These notes were later lost, but for thirty years Hansen never ceased to paraphrase and proselytize the ideas of his greatest teacher. As part of his plea to get into this course on composition—for he had no musical training—he told Cage he wanted to make music for films, and quoted Russian film-maker Sergei Eisenstein’s dictum that ‘all the arts meet in the film frame’—although by the end of the summer session he realised rather that all the art forms meet “in the head of the observer, for better or worse”[3]. This idea served as the formal inspiration for many of his subsequent happenings.

There is no coherent theory of Happenings. From the first rumblings of neo-dada and expanded theatre in the 1950s, live art has been contingent upon individual understandings and attitudes, which vary as much as the makers. Happenings for Hansen encompassed the spectrum of human endeavor; closely connected to primal urges yet inescapably bound to present sensation, they were a celebration of freedom as well as an opportunity to act responsibly, a way to create chaos and also to find form in the formless. Hansen, in a conversational style that may belie his sincerity and depth of knowledge, sought to define and explain the new medium in his 1965 book “A Primer of Happenings and Space/Time Art”[4]. In this text, laced with humour and unapologetic opinion, he laid out his own ideas, described the art and aesthetics of his fellow happeners, and gave some hint of the variety of approaches it is possible to take with regard to this rediscovered form of expression.

Al was prone to naming his every venture, whether it was Panic Button Gallery Maintenance—[a service crew for the Leo Castelli gallery—among others, whose Ivan Karp dealt Hansen’s collages out of the back room], The New York Audio-Visual Group, the Octopus All-Stars, the Third Rail Gallery [a pun on the concept of ‘current’, which was any space that Hansen happened to use to exhibit or happen in] or The First World Congress of Happenings. Heralded by printed announcements, this latter, with Higgins, Alison Knowles and Eric Andersen as co-conspirators, took place in the summer of 1965, occupying the bars and streets, squares, and beaches of the bourgeois sea-side Provincetown[5]. It typified the mix of careful preparation and casual performance that Hansen specialized in, and, as a ‘World Congress’ also pointed to the international nature of the happening movement, spurred, perhaps by the worldwide mix within Fluxus. Hansen’s thoughts on Fluxus were acerbic, hilarious and accurate; he once described it as ‘like a chicken bone the world art dog cannot cough up’ [6]. Notwithstanding differences with designer George Maciunas, Hansen is central to any reading of this shifting alliance, and successfully collaborated with most Fluxus artists from Wolf Vostell to Joe Jones to Yoko Ono, before, after, and in spite of Maciunas’ administrative efforts.

In 1966 Hansen traveled to London to participate in Gustav Metzger’s Destruction in Art Symposium, and here again he worked and played with artists of many nationalities, helping to define and spread this radically fresh approach to creativity. He introduced Raphael Montanez Ortiz [a fellow student at Pratt, where Hansen was studying Art Education] to the scene, and collaborated with Jon Hendricks and Jean Toche to carry an ongoing festival of Destruction in Art to the US—later abandoned on the assassination of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King.

It seems like Al knew everyone, and everyone seemed to like Al, even those who found him on occasion ‘challenging’. He hung out with the abstract expressionists at the Cedar Street Tavern, discussing painting and fluxus with Franz Kline among others; he encouraged many of the younger pop artists—Red Grooms, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg etc.—to push their work into performance. He was concrete in his views, positive, highly articulate, even goofy—in a good way, and when accidents occurred and blood was spilled, or violence threatened in his happenings, most people forgave him because his commitment shone through.

In the mid-60s a relationship with Valerie Herouvis drew him closer to Andy Warhol’s crowd, and his daughter Bibbe became the littlest of Warhol’s movie Superstars. Warhol had been a subject of Hansen’s since 1963, in a happening titled ‘Silver City for Andy Warhol’ and twenty years later, he returned to him in a 1985 exhibition ANDY WARHOL ATTENDAT including an action, artists’ book and sound recording. The piece mixes memories of the day in 1968 when Warhol was shot and severely wounded by Valerie Solanas; muses on murder, mystery and the marvelous beauty of co-incidence; and also revisits the classic Hansen stream-of-collage technique, even using the name of his 1950s New York City Audio/Visual Group.

To celebrate the first decade of Happenings—at a time when the novelty had dissolved and few of the original happeners continued to work in the medium—Hansen staged a number of new pieces under the guise of Viking Dada, including his version of Gertrude Stein’s Hamlet.

Happenings as a medium churn up a wealth and variety of physical material in the form of notes, plans or sketches; printed ephemera such as announcements, directions or scores; props, set fragments, costume, or similar detritus resulting from activity. Hansen’s spontaneity demanded an unconventional, even laissez-faire attitude to this material, resulting in hand-lettered announcements and unusual choices of talent and materials, including the employment of sometimes ill-prepared performers and frequent use of toilet-paper, neither of which is easy to control. His informal aesthetic should not, however, be considered as merely expedient: utterly pragmatic, Hansen nevertheless decided deliberately to mix chaos and the casual as the tint and hue of his palette. In addition to being a highly gifted draughtsman Hansen was at one time or another a professional graphic designer and a painter of geometric abstractions [this despite being color-blind!]: he lacked neither skill nor discipline and indubitably applied these with rigor in his happenings as much as in his collages.

Who could imagine that a candy bar—one often better known for nostalgia rather than flavour—could contain such a wealth of linguistic potential; could map the body and its desires; could describe the ambiguity of our fears and emotions? In the early 1960’s, Hansen began a series of collages using the wrappers of Hershey Bar chocolate. Beginning as a simple but brilliant exercise in anagram, Hansen rapidly developed the possibilities inherent in the ubiquitous label to create shapely paeans to women: She, her, eyes, yes, hey. He cut and pasted a curvaceous caricature of female form in the familiar colors of kid’s candy; the wrapping transformed into skin, and the elementary graphics into an increasingly complex investigation and adoration of the goddess. Once again, as with the primal urge of his happenings, Hansen reached back to man’s earliest impulses—the Venus of Willendorf was an initial template—to reveal their continuing and contemporary power.

Of course there were also practical aspects to the collages: Hershey Bars are cheap, easily available, and both he and daughter Bibbe ate them habitually. Large numbers of the wrappers fit into the plastic bags he always seemed to carry, and he was able to—and did—cut and paste wherever he could sit down. Inevitably, these considerations led to other collage materials, most notably cigarette-butts [free and omnipresent], but also disposable lighters, toilet roll tubes, the detritus of his every-day life. Hansen made hundreds of these collages, many portraying pre-historic fertility symbols, but occasionally featuring guns, fractured narratives or abstract compositions.

Throughout the 1970s, he taught part-time at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey [where fellow happeners, fluxists and performers like Kaprow, Robert Watts and Geoff Hendricks had, or still were, working] and the academic calendar allowed him to travel widely through Europe; “From 1974 till 1982 I was…living for months in different European capitols learning the art world there by bar life, osmosis, and, for an American, overexposure. Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oslo, Trondheim, Bergen, Haderslav in Jutland, Berlin, Vienna…”[7]. Like many of his American friends he found a wider welcome and better market for his ideas and work in Europe than the States, and, although he found regular support elusive, he felt at home and was able to flourish in foreign climes. Settling in Cologne in the 80s, he searched in vain for a professorship that would insult neither his principles, his talents, nor the young people who everywhere adored him. Although he studied at Pratt towards a degree in Art Education, he was forced to leave when someone took offense at spray-painted blasphemy that appeared during one of the many happenings he organized there. He was able to apply his strong principles and clear ideas about teaching art in later years, particularly with Lisa Cieslik in the Ultimate Akademie.

It requires cool nerves to set oneself free in performance, and even more to set others free with friendly encouragement. Perhaps the sense of panic that overtakes many folk in the presence of chaos is somehow similar to the free-fall feeling, which Hansen clearly enjoyed and had experienced innumerable times. He also relished the piquancy delivered by risk, averring; “I think an important part of success is to be a little defect. A great work of art for me is one that gives me butterflies in the stomach and hackles on the neck at the same time. Nothing verbal needed. Feeling. You feel it. To me a great work of art is not sure whether it is great or not.”[8]

Where chaos for most brings fear and uncertainty, for him it was a productive and thrilling circumstance; where empty wrappings and smoked cigarettes are normally the abject detritus of consumption, for him they marked the beginning of his art; where people and places are the recipients and markers of progress, for him they were the process and material of his life’s work.

Whether avoiding the law, looking for a job or delving as deep as he could into foreign cultures, Hansen kept moving until the last years of his life. Many think of him as a drifter—homeless for the thrill of it, but actually his travels were deliberate and purposeful. Likewise his status as ‘outsider’ is belied by years in art education; decades completely connected to various art-worlds; and thousands of works performed, constructed or conceived in the conscious context of a deep historical and intellectual knowledge-base.

Al Hansen understood the psycho-social nature of art as clearly as he saw the contemporary emphasis on experiment; he relished both, and sought to capitalize on his abilities—to be articulate, funny and persuasive; to network, and to take risks. As he said of himself; “Al Hansen is a phantom always a bit beyond.”[9]



1. Al Hansen text “I have always been in search of the goddess” reprinted in “Al Hansen: An Introspektiv” Kolnisches Stadt Museum, 1996 [p.101]

2. Al Hansen text ‘Al Hansen on Fluxus’ reprinted in “Beck & Al Hansen: Playing with matches”. Plug-In Editions/Smart Art Press [Vol.IV, No.40] 1998 [p.84]

3. Al Hansen, ‘A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art’ Something Else Press, NY. 1965 [p94]

4. ibid

5. I am grateful to Eric Andersen for this tid-bit of under-researched history.

6. ‘Al Hansen on Fluxus’ reprinted in “Beck & Al Hansen: Playing with matches” op.cit.

7. ‘Cologne Rap by Al Hansen’’ reprinted in “Al Hansen: An Introspektiv” op.cit. [p23]

8. ‘The famous Dennis Hopper Interview’ 1990 reprinted in “Beck & Al Hansen: Playing with matches” op.cit. [p115]

9. Al Hansen text ‘Makers and Lookers’1990 reprinted in “Beck & Al Hansen: Playing with matches” op.cit. [p124]

I would like to express my grateful thanks to Sally Alatalo, Eric Andersen, and Hannah Higgins for their help in the production of this text.

Simon Anderson May 2008

above copied from: http://calothrix.com/viking.html

Arhus at the Centre of the World: reflections on Mail-art and William Louis Sorensen, Simon Anderson

The art of WLS is interactive, portable, and open to interpretation or manipulation by its recipients, and so offers a model of the art of the period. Beginning in the late nineteen-sixties, WLS created a body of artworks which both relied on the international postal system for distribution, and which used language to organize the work. These elements synchronize with broader trends in experimental art, particularly with conceptual art, with art through the post, or Mail-art, and with visual poetry. This was a time when the modalities of correspondence art began to spread worldwide, when numerous international connections formed and grew, and when some of the tenets and practices of the ‘eternal network’ [a phrase coined by Robert Filliou] were developed. The subsequent three decades saw these uses of the mail become a complex and multi-faceted medium of art. Mail-art is perhaps too recent a phenomenon to be understood historically, but there is growing agreement that art using the mail constituted a vital part of the experimental, conceptual, post-pop art world, one that linked a novel assembly of pertinent and on-going issues for artists such as WLS, in creative and amusing ways.

Correspondence art blossomed in the nineteen-sixties as part of the more general development of conceptual art. The art of concepts, attached as it is to language, was bound, sooner or later, to investigate and use an international postal system founded to transmit written and printed material. Artists as varied as Carl Andre, On Kawara, or Gilbert and George informed their audience of progress in works which could not be exhibited in conventional ways. These ranged from pattern poetry to an itinerary documented, to the construction of a persona. Some realized that there was a step beyond the simple act of sending fellow artists samples of work through the mail, into the creation of active networks.

Visual poetry is one name among many used to describe a parallel development which focuses on the structures, rather than the meaning of language. Again, a wide range of artists, from Eugen Gomringer to Isidore Isou dissected syntax and inverted, invented, re-invented language, both speech and writing, for a variety of reasons: personal, aesthetic or political – perhaps all three. As with Mail-art, this expanded poetry re-emerged early in the nineteen-sixties, and taking advantage of easy and cheap reprographics, became widely disseminated through the nineteen-seventies. Perhaps WLS may not think of himself as a poet, yet his I’ll seduce you all my life combines a nod towards nineteen-eighties-style self-disclosure, an elegant, if rather unstable exercise in verticality, and also exhibits an array of poetic devices including rhyme and rhythm, to say nothing of the alphabet.

These barely discrete worlds of Mail-art and language experiment are and have been connected through individuals and ideas. Any attempts to categorize must provide context for comprehension, rather than items on an agenda, therefore some basic history is required. There are many and various sub-divisions within the world of mail art; too many to be pertinent here. I will not address the iconography of rubberstamps or artistamps, nor will I enlarge on the arrests of so-called subversives, or the legal adventures of pranksters and provocateurs. Likewise I cannot offer a survey of visual or sound poetry. I am forced to bypass the multiple issues raised by the term ‘concrete’ and the aesthetics of the photocopy or the tape-recording. I shall instead focus on certain exhibitions to which WLS contributed, and some examples of his mailed and text pieces. Although his work may not follow the aggressive collage aesthetic of much later correspondence art, the avenues that led him to use the mail, and a number of issues his projects and comments raise, offer glimpses into the development of contemporary conceptual art.

There is general agreement about the beginnings of Mail-art, which comes at the price of precision. Certainly since the organization of official, national postal services, there have been those who used them imaginatively, but Mail-art is a mainly western phenomena, infected with the irony of the avant-garde. Marcel Duchamp’s LHOOQ was attached to a postcard, Kurt Schwitters made use of postage stamps, Bern Porter claims he began in November, 1914, but none of these can be identified as the first Mail-art. A nod is given to FT Marinetti, and the dadas embody the right spirit; surrealists collaborated at a distance on marvelous projects and the College of ‘Pataphysics built a network around a ludic concept; but accurate history demands stricter definitions than Mail-art currently allows.

In the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties, the mail as a medium was enlivened by members of the group defined by Pierre Restany as Nouveau Realistes. Signatories to the manifesto included Arman, and Daniel Spoerri, both of whom used the post and its accoutrements; postcards, postage stamps, rubberstamps etc. as constituents of their art. More memorable, perhaps, was fellow signatory Yves Klein, who used a miniature blue monochrome instead of an official stamp on invitations to his 1959 Parisian exhibition ‘La Vide’.

The most famous individual originator of Mail-art in the late twentieth century was Ray Johnson, whose ‘New York Correspondance School’ [sic] provided not only a hilarious model for many subsequent pseudo-institutions, but also showed how active and autonomous a postal network can be: how the mail can become a generative medium. Johnson’s ever widening correspondence circle began as a small coterie of friends and acquaintances from the hippest fringes of art, business or bohemia, whom he linked and stayed connected with through the post. His art for the mail is quite indistinguishable from his wider output, which varied in form from artists’ books to constructions he called ‘moticos’. Dealing with media stars, minor personalities – he initiated numerous faux fan clubs – and including bizarre news items or local gossip, he would mail collages, typed notes, drawings, sometimes asking that the recipient add to the piece and return it, or alternatively send it on to a third person in the chain. Occasionally he would name a yet different person as the sender, with address, to further feed the network. His name, his humor, his methods dominated areas of the correspondence world up to his suicide in 1995.

Ray Johnson’s associations in the New York art world of the very early ‘sixties included several founder members of the international, intermedia collaboration named Fluxus. These artists had a fundamental impact on Mail-art, although the relationship is far from simple to characterize. Mail-artists need have no connection to Fluxus – and WLS puts himself in this category – but probably Mail-art exists, as such, because of Fluxus. Artists such as George Brecht and Yoko Ono took an imaginative approach to the mail, and the group promoted its use in a number of ways; first, the structure and formation of Fluxus was shaped by correspondence; second, individuals and subsets within Fluxus produced and published Mail-art projects. At times, Fluxus existed only through an elaborate – albeit largely imaginary – mail-order catalogue system, and furthermore the earliest impulses of Fluxus as a group – that of collecting and anthologizing individual and themed activities among experimental artists is an essential element of conceptual art as a whole, and of Mail-art in particular. More prosaically, mailing-lists were an economic life-line for small publishing ventures such as Fluxus and its more scholarly counterpart, Dick Higgins’ ‘Something Else Press’. These lists quickly mutated from business subscription or information tools into creative resources for exhibitions, projects and centers such as in Canada’s “Image Bank”.

WLS received his initiation to art through the mail via one of Fluxus’ early and original practitioners, Ben Vautier. A prolific artist, Ben was included in numerous Fluxus publications, individually and as part of topical sets. One of these was a ‘FluxPost Kit’ with postage stamps, rubberstamps, and postcards by Robert Watts, Ken Friedman and Jim Riddle, including the most quoted and venerable example of Mail-art, ‘The Postman’s Choice’, in which a postcard has been doubled, and bears title, plus space for stamps and an address on both sides. By making the back into the front – and vice versa – Ben’s minimalist gesture illuminated the enormous mechanics of the international postal network but then left it up to some human appendage of the system to decide which addressee gets the card. And the lucky recipient is so by the grace of some miraculous life – intelligence, even – in the system: the sender’s contribution was complete at drop-off.

Ben Vautier has the dubious distinction of having been described by the notoriously fickle George Maciunas as a ‘100% Fluxman’, yet despite this, he has never ceased his active involvement in publishing and performing outside the Fluxus remit, with fellow artists based in the south of France. Typical of such was the ‘Festival of Non Art, Anti Art, Truth Art – How to Change Art and Mankind’, which, from a base in Monte Carlo, took place ‘everywhere in the world from the 1st to the 15th June, 1969’. This festival sought to highlight artistic activities that valued ‘ideas and attitudes more than physical or commercial esthetic objects’, and although the festival was avowedly non-political, being more of a search for new ideas, participants were encouraged to organize manifestations at their own responsibility, in their local regions, and to invite further participation from others. Fluxus was invited, along with a wide array of artists which included Walter de Maria and Marcel Duchamp. Posters were put up in Arhus as part of Vautier’s universal effort for change, the contact to WLS being Eric Andersen, who, like Ben, had been part of Fluxus since its formative first tour. To examine and re-examine perceptions of the world has been a constant thrust of WLS’ ideas, sometimes expressed both bluntly and gradually, with a sharpness amid the blur – as in his typographically manipulated poster of 1981; “To change a reality is the reality”.

WLS participated in postal communication through a growth period. Until the mid-nineteen-sixties, there were reckoned to be less than a hundred artists using the post-office as medium, whereas by 1995, Italian artist Vittore Baroni claimed to have corresponded with at least three thousand people, out of a pool, he suggested, of up to 20,000 Mail-artists. The International Post Office facilitated this by its own progress - and its ability to apparently permeate political barriers. Mail delivery continued to automate through this period and spread to a point where one might mail almost anything, almost anywhere. Challenging postal regulations became the theme of several international exhibitions, but the large scale adoption of a global system had at least two greater effects on the development of the art: it forfeited a simple hierarchical system of taste and distinction, and it celebrated provinciality. The mail equalized everyone into participants, and geographically everywhere had a similar mail service; deliveries being pretty much as reliable in Firenze as Manhattan. In the realms of Mail-art, the centre is difficult to pin down and really less important than the sector exhibiting the greatest activity, where the network is hottest. It is perhaps no accident that historically the most active sectors have been provincial or from states and nations perceived as being on the margins of cultural advance. The machinery of the post office ensured the connection between Wroclaw, Calgary or Liverpool. Monte Alban is as far as Monte Carlo – which in turn is as far as the local Post Office: Arhus might be the centre of the world.

One project in which WLS participated exemplifies some of these shifts in Mail-art from semi-private communication to quasi-public art events. Ken Friedman – onetime director of Fluxus West – said his ‘Omaha Flow System’ was an attempt to regenerate of public interest in the arts, as well as being a pleasurable experiment involving many on an individual basis. As part of his exhibition at the Joslyn Art Museum, Friedman encouraged exchange between artists and between artist and public: the gallery became a staging post for a myriad of creative communications, involving several thousand correspondents. Omaha Flow, and similar experiments, such as “An International Cyclopedia of Plans and Occurrences”, to which WLS also contributed, added new dimensions to Mail-art by extending the dialogue into the public sphere, and by generating massive mailing lists which themselves acted as springboards for further outreach.

The energy and optimism generated by such exchanges must soon diminish. By 1979, WLS began to express frustrations with his involvement with Mail-art. “SO WHAT?”, he wrote, in his text “8 Points on meeting through correspondence”; complaining of “contributions from the same persons from the same sort of material, including that of your own”, and in his dissatisfaction he was not alone. Ken Friedman, in his attempt to give shape to the history of Mail-art, admits his own irritation with what he felt was an explosion of self-serving ‘junk’ mail after the network became popular. Believing, as they did, that mail-art constituted genuine communication between individuals, many on the circuit found the limitations of cheap reprographics and the physical restrictions of the postal system led at some point to ennui. Uniformity meant conformity, and such a situation was anathema to many correspondence artists, who valued conceptual difference, geographical distance, and the freedom of content, as much as the aesthetics of the stamped envelope. WLS had also realized that the universe of Mail-art had been unable to extend beyond – if as far as – the modernist culture it sprang from. There have been few, if any, Mail-artists in Africa or the Middle East, and although the geopolitics of the time allowed Warsaw Pact countries to be represented, there was little communication with the then USSR. It was also becoming apparent that the much vaunted democracy of Mail-art as a movement, with its credo of ‘no jury, no returns, no fee’ did not protect the eternal network from ‘more or less traditional exhibitions’.

However, the positive aspects of Mail-art, which included ‘breaking the isolation of people/nations/ideas in art’, encouraged WLS to continue and even increase his postal activities. Some of his mailed work from this period seems to presume upon a familiarity with certain basic structures – arithmetic, say, or syntax - and gently undermines them, at the same time as they are exposed. A story “…almost too good to be told” reveals itself as a sequence of contexts given coherence “to a conclusion”. WLS chose structures which put viewers in a position to act, interact, decide, or at least acknowledge the possibility of decision, of the innumerable choices and decisions which we weave to construct our daily reality. Reading is made difficult all over again by devices within the system of language: ninety alphabets in two dense columns camouflage a sentence picked out in diacritical marks, to the effect that each letter’s position in the ninety-lettered sentence is decisive. Here, WLS arguably enters the realm of what has been called ‘eyear’ poetry, ‘typoetry’, visual poetry or language art, whose heritage includes Apollinaire, Italian Futurism, Raoul Hausmann and his friends; reawakening in the nineteen-sixties to include artists as diverse as Eugenio Miccini, Augusto da Campos, Emmett Williams; and still more recently Tom Phillips and Michael Gibbs, to pick a few from an enormous reservoir of artists. Although each has a different method and intent, most artist-poets in this field deconstruct and recombine elements of language – as a reminder that before the words are read, they are looked at. Writing is a visual art and speech is a sonic one: WLS has experimented with both, an early example being his 1968 sound poem; ‘Produce a sound that is placed before/after the letter…’, performed at the Museet i Molleparken in Arhus, and later distributed internationally by mail. Again, in a work designed for mailing, “IFTHEREISAPOSSIBILITY…”, the act of reading grinds to a halt by the absence of punctuation – the silent sentinel of syntax – and its replacement by uniformly spaced upper-case type. An almost impenetrable grid of letters forms a phalanx around his photograph, the block cantilevered on his mailing address. Aside from offering interaction, the text itself mentions life as performance and performance as product - once readers have learned this new art of reading.

Through several works, the visual impact of the texts competes with the ascribed meaning of the words for paramount significance. WLS contorted and distorted the rules of language – among other systems which include technology and science – and offered opportunity for further distortion, politely opening the door to deviance from the norm, or for what ever the system might generate. In a case such as the recent book T.O.W.C. [The One Way Correspondence], the presentation of the text in six languages in itself offers a neat paradox: its potential audience would appear to have grown sixfold, but those that are able to read the entire 1002 pages must be a fairly select group. As with the experience of Mail-art, widening the structure can bring unexpected results. Here again is one aspect of the close affiliation between experiments in language and conceptual art: the propositions of the latter tend to need language, yet WLS reveals language as just another proposition, juggling concepts of its own. Even ‘Project 14’, which used a computer to calculate 14 to the 14th power, and would seem not to need words, is still expressed through the language of mathematics.

Project 14 also offers an insight into idiosyncratic scientific interests long pursued by WLS: few artists were considering the computer in 1969. A number of his mail and conceptual pieces used the rules and modalities of science, and numerous experiments in sound and vision continued alongside his mailed work, including film and video proposals beginning in the late nineteen-sixties, and a telex project hosted by the Archive of experimental and marginal art in Lund, Sweden, in 1977. This label ‘marginal’ had been widely applied to Mail-art since it was promulgated in Herve Fischer’s 1974 book “Art and Marginal Communication”, where the term was meant to empower the activity of unknown Mail- and rubber-stamp artists. For WLS, according to the 1979 statement, his use of the postal system was contingent on its efficiency rather than any inherent political potential. The mail transferred information further and more affordably than any other medium, and while this was the case “it will have to do”. However, once the utility of the postal system was surpassed, WLS inevitably moved on to technologies more favorable to his conceptual art.

Simon Anderson 2006

Do It Yourself, Ken Friedman

MAY 7, 2009

To be is to do – Heidegger
To do is to be – Sartre
Do be do be do – Sinatra
Do it yourself – Paik

Sometime around 1960 or so, a popular graffito examined the states of being and doing, attributing the answers to two great philosophers and a musician. Nam June Paik went one better when he wrote, “Read music: do it yourself.”,1

This was the essential element of a new poetic economy.

The idea of music was one crucial element of doing it you, and the concept of the event was at its heart. The tradition of the event was an idea that emerged from the musical philosophy of composer Henry Cowell. Cowell proposed an approach to composing based on breaking the activity of sound into minimal, basic elements. John Cage, who had studied with Cowell, introduced the term to the composers and artists who took his courses in new musical composition at the New School for Social Research in the late 1950s. Both Cage and social theorist Theodore Adorno used the term “event,”2 to speak of music in an ontological sense as a form of work performed in time and realized as time unfolds.

In the early 1960s, this circle of artists and composers adapted the idea of the event to describe terse, minimal instructions exemplified in the work of George Brecht, Yoko Ono, and La Monte Young.3

Events began as a way to explore music composition and performative works. The musical origin of events gave rise to the custom of using the term “score” for the concise, verbal instructions used to notate events. Scores transmit instructions that allow a performer to realize an event work in the same way that a music score transmits instructions that enable performers to realize a musical work. While the concept of events began in music, it soon migrated to visual art and intermedia. It took hold there to develop as significant intermedia from in its own right.

The musical origin of events means that realizing or performing the score brings the event into final embodied existence. As with music, anyone may perform the score. Like all kinds of music, a score opens possibility that anyone can adopt a piece in the “do-it-yourself” tradition, realizing the work, interpreting it, and bringing it to life. One need not be an artist, composer, or musician to do so. It is not even necessary to be a professional practitioner of the arts.

The quality of events is “musicality,” the fact that anyone may realize work from a score. This distinguishes events from performance art, most painting, some forms of improvisational music, and any art forms that we only see as authentic when an author-creator realizes them. On one hand, we have a conception of compose performer as both the creator of the work and the locus of artistic energy. On the other, the artist or composer of an event creates it relinquishing performance and interpretation to an individual who can do it in his or her own way.

The concept of the event in art, music and intermedia has many meanings and nuances. An event can exist in at least four forms: as idea, as score, as process, and as artifact. The realized even is typically visible in five kinds of artifact: behavioral artifacts as sound. In many cases, an event may exist in more that one form, leaving a wake with several kinds of artifacts.

From a musical origin, events moved into performance, intermedia, and other domains. Some of us who worked with events developed a form of artistic practice in which events constituted instructions for the realization of social situations and even physical artifacts.

Whatever form of realization events may take, event scores tend to be compressed and minimal. They engage such ideas as intermedia, playfulness, simplicity, implicativeness, exemplativism, specificity, and presence in time, as well as musicality. Many event scores emerge from life situations. We can realize them in everyday situations as well as in performance, emphasizing the unity of art and life.

Doing it Yourself: Communities of Practice and Folk Traditions

The fluid nature of events transmitted through concise verbal instructions made them easy to describe and develop. This gave rise to a form of artistic and musical practice in which artists shared concepts in an emerging laboratory.

The practices that typify events resemble the social processes that develop and transmit ideas in other kinds of productive communities. One is the “community of practice” that typifies a guild or profession. One is the cultural community that generates a folk tradition with memory practices and transmission practices of folklore.

The concept of community of practice took shape in information science, design studies, and knowledge management. The term “communities of practice” is new, but the concept is ancient, rooted in the way that ancient and medieval craft guilds generate and transmit knowledge.67

Folklorist and Fluxus artist Bengt af Klintberg emphasizes the similarities between the events tradition and fold traditions as “simple pieces filled with energy and humor, pieces without any personal stylistic features, pieces that could be transmitted orally just like folklore and performed by everyone who wanted to.”8 9 It is here that the unity of art and life remains unbroken in the folk culture of traditional societies.
The parlor game tradition was similar enough to events that Something Else Press published a classic nineteenth century collection of games by reprinting William Brisbane Dick’s 1897 anthology, Dick’s One Hundred Amusements.10 This is also true of the relation between folk traditions and events, as Klinberg notes in his 1993 article on Fluxus games and folklore. 11

Games arise from, reflect, and generate community as well as competition. The English word “game” goes back to Old Swedish, old Norse, and Old High German words meaning “game, sport, merriment, joy, glee.” These, in turn, trace their roots to a Gothic word meaning “participation, communion.” Far beyond the element of competition, games bind communities together, and an important aspect of the concept of a game is the concept of rule-bound competition among members of a commonality.

Communities of practice generate rich cycles of interaction within groups that shape cultures through behavior, enactment, and shared social patterns. Despite many projects and systems that mirrored the functions and structures of formal organizations, networks of artists advocating the “do-it-yourself” ethos never functioned as formal organizations with a prescribed structure, rules or explicitly enrolled members. Nevertheless, they did work in an ongoing community of artists, composers, and designers. Some of these have now worked together for nearly half a century in different but overlapping theorists describe as organized culture and organizational learning. Many of the cultural practices of this community coalesced around the shared work of the event. They Did It Themselves

In the early 1960s, a rich series of performance concerts emerged with the New York Audiovisual Group and Yoko Ono’s loft on Chambers Street in York City. Performers or conductors chose the program using an approach anchored in classical music tradition. This it became the traditional way of organizing event concerts. It remains the most common way of creating and performing events.

George Maciunas created boxed editions of many important suites of event scores. George Brecht’s Water Yam was the Magna Carta of boxed event structures. Several artists also realized editions of their own pieces. The best know and most influential of these was Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, a milestone in the evolution of conceptual art and performance art, and without doubt the best known and most widely distributed publication in this genre. A number of us followed Yoko’s example in creating our own editions of scores. Dick Higgins, Bengt af Klintberg, Milan Knixak and all took this path. Like Grapefruit was, these compilations were later expanded and issued by other publication that developed an interest in the work.



The difficulty of the do-it-yourself aesthetic is the problem of modern society. To speak of a “do-it-yourself” aesthetic implies a society where individuals have time for play, and a society where those who play have time- time for engagement and delight, time for accomplishment and mastery.

The allocation for time and resources- the ability to make a living while having the ability to ear enough to buy time- depends very much on the society we live in and it depends on the resources of the world around us. Because time and livelihood are linked, it also involves such social goods as education, health care, and insurance. While theses issues range far beyond the scope of a short note on the do-it-yourself aesthetic, they are vital to resolving the issues that the do-it-yourself ethos bring to light.

The Problem of Poetic Economics

At the start of this note, I mentioned the notation of poetic economy at the heart of the do-it-yourself ethos. This poetic economy centered on three crucial issues.

The first crucial issues were that everyone could make art and music. This entailed a radical democratization or at least a radical reconception of art and music away from standard markets to new models of exchange.

The second crucial issue was recognition of the arts from a context of consumer culture and passive reception to an active culture of engagement.

The third crucial issue was a transformation of society from the two great materialist cultures of predatory capitalism and command-and-control communism to something different. The nature of what those difference might be differs according to the approach or visionary impulses of earth, artist, composer, or designer active in proposing or theorizing a do-it-yourself approach. In nearly every case, however, it was clear that people recognized the difficulty in adopting a do-it-yourself ethos in the general context of the current economies. This was the case in the 1950s and 1960s. it remains a problem to this day.

To understand what happened to the concept of doing-it-yourself, it will help to step away from events to examine the work of Robert Filliou, an artist who studied economics at the University of California Los Angeles before going on to work as an oil economist for the United Nations. Later, he became an artist as one step in his slow transformation toward Buddhism. Toward the end of his career in economics and early in his art career, Filliou lost interest – or hope- in standard approaches to knowledge and knowledge production of an increasingly technocratic society. He wrote a manifesto offering an alternative.

Filliou’s manifesto effective declares social science, natural science, and he humanities obsolete. Instead, he approaches knowledge and knowledge production from what seems to be an optimistic perspective anchored in art.

Filliou himself addressed this problem in his manifest, “A Proposition, a Problem, a Danger, and Hunch.” He wrote,
“A refusal to be colonized culturally by a self-styled race of specialists in painting, sculpture, poetry, music, etc…, this is what ‘la revolte des Mediocres’ is about. With wonderful results in modern art, so far. Tomorrow could everybody revolt? How? Investigate.

“A problem, the one and only, but massive: money, which creating does not necessarily create.”

“A danger: soon, and for thousands and thousands of years, the only right granted to individuals may be that of saying ‘yes, sir’. So that the memory of art (as freedom) is not lost, its age-old institutions can be put in simple, easily learned esoteric mathematical formulae, of the type a/b = c/d (for instance, if a is taken as hand, b as foot, d as table, hand over head can equal foot on table for purposes of recognition and passive resistance. Study the problem. Call the study: Theory and Practice of A/B”

“A hunch: works can be created as fast as the conceiving brain, You say aloud ‘blue,’ blue paint, or light, appears on canvas, etc… This is already done to light rooms and open doors. Eventually no more handicraft: Winged Art, like winged imagination. Alone or with others work this out, this further illustrating the 1962 action-manifesto l’Autrisme, during the performance of which performers ask one another, then each member of the audience.

What are you doing?
What are you thinking?

And, whatever the answer, add:

Do something else.
Think something else” 12

Considering the developments of the past half century, it is no longer as clear as it once seemed that the situation is as hopeless as Filliou believed it to be. The history of the past fifty years gives as much evidence for home as for despair.

One thing is clear: artists have not solved the problems Filliou addressed. Since no one else seems to have solved these problems, either, inviting artists to make an effort were technocrats had failed was not a bad idea. Nevertheless, this involves a second difficulty,

the problem of an art world that is as inappropriate to large-scale social creativity as the financial markets or military markets that Filliou saw as the threat.

Robert Filliou used the terms art and artist in a different way that the normative art world does. However, he used the normative art world as the forum of his ideas. In return, the art world seized on Filliou’s work, mediating his ideas in a narrow channel rather than a larger world of public discourse in open conversation.

As a result, the specialists who dominate the normative art took control of Filliou’s work, colonizing it and adapting it to the art markets. This included the “self-styled race of specialists in painting, sculpture, poetry, music, etc.”13 This race of specialists includes the critics, curators, dealers, directors, and collectors that control the economy of buying and selling art, and these specialists dominate the attention economy for thinking about it. In this world, Filliou’s proposition made little difference.

This short note is no place to address the broad range of issues embedded in Filliou’s manifesto. The situation now – as then – is that resolving these issues is difficult. The difficulties are not Filliou’s fault. Rather, these difficulties are embedded in a series of challenges we are only coming to understand. These challenges lie at the heart of the do-it-yourself concept.

The idea of a poetical economics emerged during an era of contest, inquiry, and debate that affected all research fields and most fields of professional practice. People like Nam Jun Paik, Robert Filliou, George Maciunas, and Dick Higgins understood this. They sought ways to link thought to productive inaction.
Attempting this through art suggested a new kind of research. It also suggested what Dick Higgins called “an art that clucks and fills our guts.” 14

The grand irony of Filliou’s work is that the art world transformed him from a public thinker into an artist, a transformation that limited and constrained his influence.

As a thinker, Filliou opposed the notion of art as a new form of specialization, subject to the control of dealers, critics, collectors, and highly specialized institutions that serve them. Filliou the thinker worked in the productive border zone between art and public life.

In contrast, Filliou the artist worked in the art world, and his ideas were ultimately constrained by mercantile interests. This was not Filliou’s fault. Much like specialists and technocrats in any field, the specialists who manage art world institutions also have a difficult time understanding and working with the productive poetic economies that emerge in the border zone.

Research in economies turned out to be far more productive in this dimension that Filliou realized. It is interesting to reflect on the work of economists who considered the problem in different ways. One stream of this work began in the 1940s when Australian economist Colin Clark laid the foundation for work that Daniel Bell would explore in his discussion of post-industrial society. Others also addressed these issues in terms of patterns and flows in trade, information, and communications. The Canadian economist Harold Innes exemplified this approach. Innis was Marshall McLuhan’s predecessor and mentor. McLuhan in his turn influence Paik and Higgins. The economist Fritz Machup was another case in point. The work of these economists helped give birth to a slowly evolving public conversation that is open to all, generating political dialogue in the larger arena of analysis, critique, and proposition.

Today, some of these ideas are bearing fruit to make a difference. Such distinguished economists as Marty Sen. Joseph Stiglitz, Muhammed Yunus, or Paul Krugman, as well as thinkers and scholars such as Thomas Friedman. Their work does not address the challenge of the do-it-yourself those, but it does address the challenges of creating a world with the preconditions of general prosperity and education that allows to each of us the opportunity for a “do-it-yourself” approach to art and music. The work of some thinkers, such as sociologist or Richard Sennet moves toward a robust understanding of what it means to do it yourself: locating the issues of time and mastery in the context of contemporary capitalism. Sennett asks what it would be like to show a world in which we do things well of their own sake. We see this as well in the culture of the Amish and the other plain people that prefer making things to buying them, locating craft industry in local communities with anchors in tradition.

The vision of do-it-yourself culture takes art out of commercial markets. At least it takes them out of the large-scale commercial art market of the circuit comprised of biannual exhibitions, art fairs, advertising-driven magazines, and auctions. It maintains a market of sorts, but that market resembles the agora of ancient Greek democracies. This is the city market where citizens assemble to talk as well as trade. The agora is a small-scale market, large enough for the needs of the city, but small by contemporary standards, but sufficient to the needs of the citizens, the people that inhibit a community.

It is here that the craft artisans sell the products of their workshops. Artists come here to sell the artifacts they make, though in this context, one can hardly label them artists as we use the term today. Philosophers and rectors come here to talk and trade ideas. Merchants buy and sell them.

The agora, of course, does not represent an ideal world. For all their greatness, the ancient Greek democracies would not resemble democracies today: if the citizen had time for philosophy and rhetoric, it was often because a slave worked his fields and household. While the Greek landowner did not think of farming as an agribusiness with an eye to maximizing profit, neither did he care much if others starved. The agora and the people

who built were embedded in a time and place, as all markets and all people are embedded in their times. Nevertheless, the thought of a different kind of art market to the market of today’s art world offers room for revision.

Progenitors of the do-it-yourself ethos proposed several systems over the years to develop new markets in art. George Maciunas developed an industrial system of multiples of Fluxus. The multiples contained event scores, games, puzzles and projects by Fluxus artists enabling any individual who owned a Fluxbox to perform or activated the work. George sold the boxes as low unit prices, much as music publishers sell sheet music or game producers sell games. Dick Higgins published scores, projects, and intermedia instructions in books that he manufactured for the general book market, selling them at standard book prices. I tried several systems, including a system that allowed art buyers to set their own prices. I also developed several kinds of exchange systems and flow systems designed to remove the flow of art from the constraints of specialists. Yet another time, I explored the possibility of registering my scores with the Norwegian music rights organization, Tono, so that people could perform work or construct objects for a modest royalty payment. None of these systems worked as we hoped, though we learned something from each experiment.

Neither did these systems or proposals actually resolve the challenges of doing it yourself.

What can we do to shape a world that has room for the do-it-yourself ethos? I have some ideas, but that’s a conversation for another day.

About the Author

Ken Friedman is Professor of Design Theory and Strategy and Dean of the Faculty of Design at Swinburne University of Technology.

Friedman is also an artist and designer who had his first solo exhibition in New York in 1966. For over 40 years, he has been active in the international experimental laboratory for art, design and architecture known as Fluxus, working with closely with such artists and composers as George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, and Nam June Paik. His work is respected in major museums and galleries around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and Stadtsgalerie Stuttgart.



1 Nam June Paik, quoted in Owen Smith. 1998. Fluxus: The Histtory of an Attituede. Sand Diego, CA: Sandiego State University Press, p. 63.

2 Julia Robinson 2002, “ The Brechtian Event Score: A Structure in Fluxus.” Performance Research, vol. 7, no 3. p. 122.

3 Dick Higgins. 1997. Modernism since Postmodernism Essays on Intermedia. San Diego: San Diego State University Press. pp. 163 –164. See also: Higgins Dick 1998. “Fluxus: Theory and Reception” The Fluxus Reader, Ken Friedman, editor Christopher West Sussex Academy Edition, pp, 217 – 236.

4 Ken Friedman. 1991 “The Belgrade Text.” Ballade, No. 1, 1991, Oslo: Universitesforlaget, 52-57; Friedman, Ken, 2002. “Working with Event Scores: A Personal History.” In Performance Research: On Fluxus, Ric Allsopp, ken Friendman, and Owen Smith, editors, Performance Research, 124-128; Ken Friedman, 2002. “52 Events. A Participatory Artwork.” PDC 2002. Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference, Malmo, Sweden, 23-25 June 2002. Thomas Binder. Judith Gregory, and Ina Wagner, editors. Palo A lot, California. Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, 396-400.

5 Friedman, Ken. 1998. “Fluxus and Company.” The Fluxus Reader. Ken Friedman, editor. Chichester, West Sussex: Academy Editions, pp. 244-251.

6 For the development and transmission of knowledge within guilds, see ken Friedman. 1997. “Design Science and Design Education. “The College of Complexity.” Peter McGrory, editor. Helsinki: University of Art and Design, Helsinki UIAH, pp. 55, 61-63’ For more guild training see also: Catharina Bloomberg. 1994. The Heart of the Warrior. Sandgate, Kent: The Japan Library; David Lowrly. 1985. Autumn Lighting. Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc.: Miyamoto Musashi. 1982. The Book of Five Rings. (With Family Traditions on the Art of War by Yagya Munenori.) Translated by Thomas Cleary. Boston and London: Shambhala.

7 For more on the concept of communities of practice, see Etienne Wegner. 1998. Communities of practice. Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press; Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott, and William Snyder. 2002. Cultivating communities of practice. A guide to managing knowledge. Harvard Business School Press; Jean Lave and Etienne Wegner. 1991. Situated learning, Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press. For more on organizational learning and knowledge management, see Ken Friedman and Johan Olaisen. 1999. “Knowledge Management,” Underveis til frdmttiden, Kunnskapsledelse I teori og praksis. Ken Friedman and Johan Olaisen, eds. Oslo: Fagbokforlaget, 14- 29; Ikukiro Nokaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi. 1995. The knowledge-creating company: how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation. New York Oxford University Press; Meinolf Dierkes, Ariane Bertthoine Antal, John Child, and Ikujiro Nonaka. 2001. Handbook of Organizattional Learning and Knowledge, Oxforn: Oxford University Press.

8 Bengt at Klintberg, quoted in Sellem, Jean. 1991. “The Fluxus Outpost in Sweden. An Interview with Bengt af Klintbert.” Lund Art Press, vol. 2, no. 2, p. 69; see also Bengt af Klintberg . 1993. “Fluxus Games and Contemporary Folklore: On the Non- Individual Character of Fluxus Art.” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift LXII:2, 1993, 115-125; Bengt af Klintberg. 2006. Svensk Fluxus/Swedish Fluxus. Stockholm: Ronnells Antikvariat.

9 For more on traditional folk games and activities, see: Richard Chase. 1956. American Folk Tales and Songs, and Other Examples of English-American Tradition as Preserved in the Appalachian Mountains and Elsewhere in the United States. New York: New American Library World Literature; Richard Chase, 1967. Singing Games and Playparty Games, New York: Dover.

10 Dick, William Brisbane. 1967. Dick’s 100 Amusements. One Hundred Amusements For Evening Parties, Picnics, And Social Gatherings. New York: Something Else Press. Many games in this collection bore a striking resemblance to event scores and Fluxus activities.

11 Klintberg, “Fluxus Games and Contemporary Folklore.”

12 Filliou, Robert. 1966. “A Proposition, a Problem, a Danger and a Hunch.” Manifestoes. New York: Something Else Press. p. 16: reprinted 1971 in Art Folio, [ Religious Arts Guild Circular/Packet: 2.] Ken Friedman editor. Boston: Religious Arts Guild; reprinted 2004 in Manifestoes. New York: Ubu Classiscs, p.16 [Free copy of the Something Else Press Great Bear Pamphlet in PDF format.) URL:
http://www.ubu.com/historical/gb/index/html
Date Accessed 2009 April 28.

13 Filliou, in Manifestoes. p.16.

14 Higgins, Dick. 1966. “A Something Else Manifesto.” Manifestoes. New York: Something Else Press, p.21; reprinted 2004 in Manifestoes. New York: Ubu Classics, p.21. [Free copy of the Something Else Press Great Bear Pamphlet in PDF format.) URL: http;//www.ubu.com/historical/gb/index.html
Date Accessed 2009 April 28.

15 While I tried all the other proposals, I never moved forward on this proposal because it would have worked in a way different to my plans. Tono is like ASCAP and BMI in North America. Rather than allowing everyone to perform works simply, the system requires payment from all, with no leeway for schools, museums, or non-profit organizations.

above copied from: http://www.liino.com/?p=830

The Fluxhouse Cooperatives, Charles R. Simpson

In 1966 George Maciunas, an artist working in the dadaist tradition of anarchistic and irreverent art, became entranced with the idea of artist cooperatives as a vehicle for the emancipation of artists. Beyond residences and studios, Maciunas hoped to establish collective workshops, food-buying cooperatives, and theaters to link the strengths of various media together and bridges the gap between the artist community and the surrounding society. Maciunas concretized his utopian planning impulses with endless and minutely detailed projections of renovation costs and the advantages of wholesale purchases. He had the conviction, essential in a social catalyst, that legal prohibitions and entanglements could be overcomes, and that the first priority was to get on with the living experiment. Maciunas established himself as the president of Fluxhouse Cooperatives, Inc., in order to “perform all the organizational work” involved in “forming cooperatives, purchasing buildings, obtaining mortgages, obtaining legal and architectural services, conducting work as a general contractor for all renovation and [handling the] future management if so desired by the members.”

With preliminary buying agreements with several SoHo building owners and with speculatively based bust convincingly detailed renovation estimates, Maciunas approached Kaplan for backing. Kaplan had formed a joint venture financed by the J. M. Kaplan Fund and the National Foundation for the Arts. Not only did this provide a source of capital, but it enlisted new and important interest groups to back Kaplan’s experiments in artists’ housing. According to a foundation consultant, Henry Geldzahler, the joing venture with Kaplan was designed to break through the city’s M-1 zoning designation, which excluded residential occupancy in areas of light manufacturing. “The M-1 zone, now forbidden to artists-in-residence, embraces areas of downtown Manhattan where light manufacturing has declined and many buildings now stand empty,” said Geldzahler. The Foundation and the Kaplan Fund, with a contribution of $100,000 each, were looking for a test case where artists could challenge the M-1 restriction. Maciunas appeared at the opportune moment, and Kaplan agreed to fund his Fluxhouse program.

By the end of 1966 Maciunas had picked out the first of the SoHo buildings that he was to promote as artist cooperatives, 80-82 Wooster Street, and was taking deposits from buyers of floors and half-floors. In the summer of 1967, with $20,00 from the Kaplan Fund and the Foundation, Maciunas was able to make the cash down payment on this $105,000 building. As was to be the pattern with other SoHo cooperatives, the former owner assumed the mortgage for the balance owed. With $20,000 in grants, Maciunas was able to offer spaces for only $2,000 cash down per shareholder, using the money for renovations and charging initially only $205 per month maintenance for 3,300 square feet. By August 1967, 80 Wooster Street was fully subscribed and undergoing basic renovations, and Maciunas was lining up buyers for a second building, 16-18 Greene Street. This time he had $5,000 from Kaplan and the National Foundation to hold the building. But serious setbacks had occurred in the Fluxhouse program. The Federal Housing Administration, which Maciunas had counted on to take over the mortgages as buildings were established, in order to free the Kaplan seed money for new purchases, had refused to become involved, citing fire hazards in the area, referred to by a series of city fire commissioners as “Hell’s Hundred Acres.” In addition, the National Foundation for the Arts and the Kaplan Fund has embarked on a project of their own, the sponsorship of a conversion of the old Bell Telephone Laboratories in Greenwich Village into a huge artist housing complex, and had therefore lost interest in the Fluxhouse venture. With the withdrawal of the legitimating momentum of philanthropic and governmental sponsorship, Fluxhouse residents were acutely conscious that they were occupying buildings that had been illegally purchased and illegally renovated. Without philanthropic sponsorship, they had no leverage to get required zoning variances from the Board of Standards and Appeals or the occupancy permits form the Department of Buildings.

Maciunas, however, relied upon a different basis of legitimacy for the occupants, a pattern of building purchases and conversions that involved enough people to make the city hesitant to enforce its own residency codes. In September 1967 he advertised shares in three buildings at Grand and Wooster streets at prices ranging from $2,200 to $5,000, or roughly $1 a square foot. Within three days the buildings were 60 percent subscribed, and by December Maciunas had the $50,000 necessary for the down payment.

Maciunas moved from block to block throughout SoHo, tracking down owners who were closing their businesses and anxious to sell their buildings. His method was to hold buildings with deposits, then to line up shareholders to provide the down payments. Maciunas balanced his increasingly complex financial arrangements with a continuous flow of new cash deposits. By June of 9168 he had sponsored cooperatives on Prince Street, Broome Street, and along West Broadway, a total of eleven cooperative units involving seventeen buildings.

The city’s planning policies indirectly aided Maciunas. By casting the depressing shadow of the Lower Manhattan Expressway over the area for so long, the city planners had driven down the building values and undermined the real-estate market. As early as 1963, local real-estate interests whose properties had been rendered unacceptable as loan collateral had filed suit in fruitless effort to force the city to either buy their buildings or abandon the expressway. Maciunas was operating in a buyer’s market, purchasing in an area many feared would become an industrial slum. Shael Shapiro, an architect-resident in one of the first Maciunas buildings, and later a consultant for many cooperatives and an active civic leader, agreed that the city had inadvertently aided Maciunas. “The Lower Manhattan Expressway made this [Fluxhouse project] possible. It depressed values throughout this area. The day after Lindsay announced the end of the expressway, real estate along Broome Street went up 50 percent.”

The Emergence of Vested Housing Interests

The cooperatives, which Maciunas envisioned as a numbered series of affiliated “Fluxhouses,” quickly became autonomous and resident controlled. The shareholders had become restive under Maciunas’s single-handed directorship, and they felt fully competent to take over building management themselves. All residents were artists under the broad definition (which included writers and composers along with visual artists, “events” artists, architects, and in one case, a flower arranger), but many, especially the writers, college art teachers, and architects, were experienced with legal and financial matters and were comfortable dealing with the city bureaucracies. These co-opers were not bohemians desirous of protection from the harsher realities of their situation.

The cooperative food-buying schemes were the first to collapse “I can remember sitting in my loft surrounded by dozens of loaves of Russian black bread,” said an early resident. “George thought this kind of buying would save us all money, and he just went out and bought what he liked. We ate it for weeks.” Another time it was oranges, and then toilet paper. Cooperative buying soon ended.

Residents faced the chronic problem of undercapitalization stemming from the fact that Maciunas’s coast estimates were always too low, and because the shares had been sold at prices that attracted artists with very little money. Residents repeatedly found themselves having to pay special assessments for unforeseen plumbing costs or to make up a low fuel bill estimate. For a time, this condition was not attributed to deception on Maciunas’s part, but rather to his alleged warmhearted incompetence. “We were all smart enough to know that George was totally unrealistic in his expense estimates,” said one resident, “and we allowed for it.” But as the levies continued, many found they were financially overcommitted. Their access to capital, largely through modest loans form their middle-class families, had been exhausted, and more assessments were due. Individual buildings had to resort to independent action to save themselves from default. In some cases only the exceptional connections of one or two residents saved their buildings from bankruptcy. One resident, a painter and his building’s first president explained,

I have a Harvard education, and so I have connections that way. We brought this building with a mortgage almost due [one of three], and it was immediately called. We were really about to lose the building. I had been to every bank in the city and had been laughed at. You couldn’t get a mortgage on anything. At nine in the morning of the day the mortgage was due, I had the idea of calling the father of a girl I used to date at Radcliffe. By one P.M. I had the money.

I knew he was in real estate, but it also turned out he was a chairman of the board of the [N] Bank. Uncle Jim, we used to call him. He simply directed the head of the branch bank to make the new mortgage. He said that had it not been for him, we would not have been able to get an appointment with the secretary to the branch manager, with the kind of building we had…. [B] was another dear friend. I just happened to be mentioning the building’s situation one day, and she offered five thousand dollars. She said it was probably made by exploiting someone anyway, and she had no doubt clipped a coupon to get it. But she offered it interest free to us for five years.

Residents solved their financial problems as a unit, giving some members grace periods on debts, taking loans from others, and using the borrowing ability of a select few. But they could not assume responsibility for the financial problems of cooperatives other than their own.

At first, however, George Maciunas handled the deposits and bank transactions of the cooperatives on a different basis. One cooperative in the formational stage found that he had lent $26,000 in members’ deposits to four other cooperatives also being established, all without the depositors’ knowledge. Maciunas was unable to calm the irate shareholders with this explanation of his accounting methods, published in his Fluxhouse Newsletter.

The reason for such disposition of monies is my principle of collectivism- running the cooperatives not necessarily in a legalistically correct way, but in a way to benefit the collective good. When a particular cooperative is in danger of losing a building to foreclosure of lien, every effort-0all the funds, go to the rescue. This has worked well without detriment to anybody. Not one of the 4 closings we had so far was delayed by this principle of a “collective chest.” It would not have delayed the closing of 465 West Broadway either had it not been for the interference of the “shadow kitchen.”

The “shadow kitchen” consisted of shareholders who did not trust Maciunas and who were eager to take over their building affairs. They believed that his financial control and manipulation of deposit accounts enabled him to speculate at their expense. The president of one early Maciunas cooperative pointed out,

George sold the garage on the ground floor of our building for a ridiculously low price to a friend of his. It’s now a theater, and a very valuable space. We saw collusion, with his friend working behind the scenes in partnership with George. When we protested, this guy rented the space to a company that parked garbage trucks there, just to spite us. Maciunas was dishonest from the very beginning.

Cooperatives found, contrary to Maciunas’s reassurances, that they could not get their deposit money back from other co-ops when their own closing date for purchase arrived. One cooperative reported having to pay an interest rate of 25 percent a month to borrow two thousand dollars from another Fluxhouse in order to forestall the foreclosure of their mortgage. In another instance, a cooperative found itself sued by the bank which handled its deposits because of Maciunas’s policy of shifting money from account to account. Individual cooperatives quickly discovered that if they were to survive, they had to fend for themselves in financial matter. Maciunas was hurt by this turn toward economic self-interest on the part of the cooperatives and by the criticism of his leadership which he felt had inspired it. In a letter in which he relinquished all managerial connections with two Fluxhouse units, Maciunas explained the dispute from his side.

I did not mind doing all this [managerial work] free of charge if it was going to advance the selfless spirit of collectivism. Unfortunately, it did nothing of the sort. As soon as opportunity presented itself, the collective spirit fell apart- members selfishly promoting their own interests at the expense of the cooperative and separate cooperatives promoting their interests at the expense of the entire collective. More specifically,… the Grand St. directors saw no reason why their temporarily excessive funds should have been used to save Wooster St. from disaster and Wooster Street’s treasurer saw no reason to reciprocate this good will by returning this borrowed money or part to save Grand Street from disaster. Members showed their distrust in me, or envying better spaces of other members, actually entered those spaces to remeasure and recalculate the spaces as to increase other’s and decrease their own monthly rents. Etc., etc., ad nauseam… Furthermore, since several members expressed dissatisfaction with my methods of management and accounting, a few even suspecting me of making a fortune (!), I decided to stop wasting my selfless interest which is unappreciated anyway and become just as selfish as everybody else.

THUS: … I will stop giving free time and advice on all matters relating to architecture, electrical engineering, management, accounting, carpentry, building code, contractors, supplies, etc…. I will charge… for my past work in management, general contracting and accounting at the low rate of $40 per week…. Any further time spent by me on any of the above matters will be charged to you at the rate of $10 per hours (which is the rate I received at the time I quit my job).

Maciunas continued to sponsor cooperatives, but only as individual ventures and for a fixed fee The Fluxhouse phase in SoHo was over by late 1968. In the absence of any overall financial resources, the problem of survival had individuated each cooperative. Financial anxiety and the recourse to purely personal resources available to the individual; shareholders made self-management for each cooperative a necessity. A secularizing monetary fear had washed away any illusions about the bonds of a gemeinschaft between cooperative. Nevertheless, it soon was to become apparent that the larger problem of resolving the artists’ illegal residential status would require an area-wide organizational approach. The territorial district itself evolved as the basis for a functionally important form of community in the next phase of development.

Charles R. Simpson, “The Achievement of Territorial Community” in SoHo: The Artist in the City (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981) pp. 153-188.

Above copied from: http://www.liino.com/?page_id=857

Still Making a Salad: Ecology, Yoko Ono and the Fluxus Score, David Berridge

In 1964 Yoko Ono self-published Grapefruit, a collection of short texts she called “instructions.” In an exhibition currently at the BALTIC in Newcastle, Ono has made objects and performances that interpret some of those instructions, as often in the last forty years she has written new instructions, or re-interpreted old ones in a variety of forms. But if the “instruction pieces” - or scores as they are often known - have been a valuable medium for Ono throughout her career, is there a broader contemporary relevance for the form itself? In the context here, is there something ecological about scores, or something of use when it comes to approaching ecological issues?
Art that speaks directly about ecological issues is clear about its intent, even whilst its structures and methods of production might be decidedly un-ecological. If we shift “the ecological” onto the level of thought and attitude then we run the risk of becoming general and vague. But something about the form of the score suggests the connection with ecology each time I encounter it, on the page or in the gallery, and it is this intuitive connection that this essay will explore.
So what were scores and why do I claim there is something ecological about them? Here is a score by Ono, dated Spring 1964:
PIECE FOR NAM JUNE PAIK NO.1
Water.
What strikes me immediately is how the score focusses on the environment, our relationship to it and ourselves, as well as addressing issues of distribution, resources, and invention. But there are broader issues of what such a piece of writing is, and how to read and respond to its puzzling form.
Ono’s scores were only one example of a whole range of work often known as “event-scores”, whose practitioners included LaMonte Young, Dick Higgins, Emmett Williams, George Brecht, Alison Knowles and Ben Vautier. Ono’s relationship with John Lennon and ensuing super-celebrity gave her work a prominence not experienced by other Fluxus artists - the initially self-published GRAPEFRUIT was later reissued by Pantheon. But the last few years has seen a range of other score-practitioners getting their book and exhibition dues.
For example, parallel to the Ono show, BALTIC also has a show of Fluxus impresario George Macunias, whilst a self-styled “heterospective” of George Brecht filled the galleries of MACBA in 2007. Last summer Alison Knowles performed her score MAKE A SALAD at the Tate Modern when she, yes, you guessed it. There was also a somewhat riotous night of fluxus films and scores at the Rio Cinema in London’s Dalston and, most comprehensively, FLUXUS SCORES AND INSTRUCTION was exhibited at Roskilde in Denmark, and has been made into an excellent catalogue by Jon Hendricks, who is compiling a catalogue raisonée of scores in the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection archive in Detroit.
It is to the various essays in this catalogue that we can turn for some basic definition of the score form, all the time remembering that different artists often had varying definitions of the score - even about what to call it - and that the act of definition was itself an anathema to many fluxus practitioners. From the following descriptions what do you imagine scores to be?
Alison Knowles: Event Scores involve simple actions, ideas, and objects from everyday life recontextualized as performance. Event Scores are texts that can be seen as proposal pieces or instructions for actions. The idea of the score suggests musicality. Like a musical score, Event Scores can be realized by artists other than the original creator and are open to variation and interpretation... [p9]
Jon Hendricks: There are sound scores and graphic scores (which might or might not involve sound). There are recipes for trouble and recipes for solutions. There are in-structures, and event scores. There are propositions, and compositions. There are examinations, reading works, and commands. There are instructions for set-ups, or just a thing to do in your mind. In fact, some scores are not possible to actually do, but are easy to do conceptually. [p15]
Eric Anderson: Somewhat roughly you can divide Scores into 3 sets: the ones that instruct you to do something, Event Scores that are both an object and an activity ,and the ones that carry a maximum of implications. The first ones are pretty conventional, relying on established notation, interpretation and perception. The Event Scores still to some extent carry the orthodox apprehension of the oeuvre while the third set rather tells you nothing. A fine point of departure. [p22]
Robert Watts: Some events are just things to think about. Others are actions that can be carried out, sometimes before an audience or persons. Some are actions to be performed in private. Some are instructions for actions, for attitudes, positions, or stances. Some are impossible, some inconsequential. [p34]
The scores by George Brecht, for example, are minimal texts that Brecht often hand wrote on blank postcards and mailed to friends who might perform them. A few examples:
SIX EXHIBITS
• ceiling
• first wall
• second wall
• third wall
• fourth wall
• floor

WORD EVENT
• EXIT

FIVE EVENTS
• eating with
• between two breaths
• sleep
• wet hand
• several words
Ono’s scores were also often minimal and postcard- fitting, but tended to unfold into a series of actions that comprised a small narrative. The catalogue for Ono’s BALTIC show reprints scores from the painting section of Grapefruit. Two examples will give a flavor of how Ono used the score to utilise, disrupt and expand existing categories of art, such as painting, often hoping to instigate new social encounters, thoughts, and objects:
PAINTING TO BE CONSTRUCTED IN YOUR HEAD
Look through a phone book from the
beginning to end thoroughly.
List all combinations of figures
you remember right after that.
1961 winter

PAINTING TO SEE THE SKIES
Drill two holes into a canvas.
Hang it where you can see the sky.
(Change the place of hanging.
Try both the front and the rear
windows, to see if the skies are
different.)
1961 summer
Ono’s scores could also deal explicitly with the connections of violence, the body, anxiety and trauma that recurred elsewhere in her work. The score offered a way of working with strong emotions, containing them within the neutral, objective appearance of the score form itself:
BLOOD PIECE
Use your blood to paint.
Keep painting until you faint. (a)
Keep painting until you die. (b)
1960 spring
Fluxus Scores and Instructions - both exhibition and catalogue - sought to broaden the understanding of scores beyond such tiny, postcard-fitting texts. Some scores were more maximal than minimal, as in the detailed, temporal specificity of Robert Filliou’s Poi-Poi Symphony No.1, France Drawn and Quartered (ca. 1962), one movement of which reads:
5th Movement:
The three musicians slowly shake their containers that are now almost empty, and finally, completely empty. The diminishing noise is soon followed by silence.
1- (alone) 1 minute
2- (alone) 1 minute
3- (alone) 1 minute
Then:
The musicians, at least dead tired after handling such a weight (53 kg.?) for 20 minutes fall to the ground;
don’t move. [p77]
Scores, of course, were intended to be realised as performances or sculptures. Ono’s BALTIC catalogue shows a variety of responses to her own scores. So a recent score Wish Tree for Bielefeld (2008) - “Write your wish/ Hang it on a tree” - appears alongside a black and white photo of Ono doing exactly that. Visitors to the BALTIC will also be able to experience a somewhat abbreviated version of 1962’s Riding Piece: “Ride a coffin car all over the city.” Scores such as Sky Event for John Lennon, meanwhile, gain poignancy from the way their initial proposals for social events - where people gathered to look at the sky - have become silent, static, peopleless agglomerations of ladders in the gallery.
So why do I think there is a connection of all this to ecology? It is because of what scores do to our understanding of activities such as writing, reading, responding, and performing: collapsing the divisions between different activities and setting up a web of ever-changing relationships and interdependencies that position the self as both constituted by and constituting the environment.
Take the act of writing a score such Ono’s Piece for Nam June Paik No.1 and its one word “Water.” Such a piece embodies a host of contradictions. It’s a written text, and a visual art work; a performance in itself and a script for a performance that will follow. It is precise, but not prescriptive; a gift for a friend that also asserts an ecological dependency transcending the particular.
A similar web of possibilities effects the reader of the score. The text is self-contained and complete, yet such cryptic minimalism seems to invite a response to complete it. That response is subjective, yet also seems an objective response both to a word - water - and a substance. Here a text seems to be becoming its own organism, both word, nature and not.
All of which, I suggest, parallels the kind of expanded relationships and identities proposed by, say, a whole range of eco- disciplines in economics, literature, economics and philosophy. Furthermore, a history of the context in which fluxus originally emerged would have to touch on ideas and figures central to an emerging (American) environmental consciousness, be it systems theory and cybernetics, the writings of Gregory Bateson, early American naturalists, Thoreau, Buddhism, the Whole Earth Catalogue, or, even, Marshall McCluhan.
Of course, a far more direct connection is the environmental focus of many of the scores themselves. Ono’s work, for example, as in Sky Event for John Lennon, often playfully returns to human relationships to the heavens. For forty years, Alison Knowles has written and performed scores as a way of researching beans, outlining a suggestive model of how scores can be part of an artist’s method of researching the natural world.
Knowles’ 1983 artists book A Bean Concordance presents the most comprehensive collection of this work, by herself and others, drawing connections between the score, beans, and a variety of other forms including recipes, shopping lists, nursery rhymes, newspaper cuttings, and folklore. Take, for example, her bean-derived Mantra for Jessie (some help in sleeping) which begins:
Brown, brown, brown
Red, green, green, green, green
Green, green, white, white

White, green, red, red, red
White, green, brown, brown, brown
White, white, brown, brown, brown
Or compare Ono and Brecht’s short, somewhat gnomic scores with some of the short folklore fragments Knowles collages into Bean Concordance, such as:
On Ryuku Island the Shamen are all women called “Miko.” They study ecstasy for the benefit of the community.
Some travel some don’t.
Or, too, the found text poem of Knowles’ Bean-see also Bein for George Macunias, with its careful listing of the all the Beans in the 1978 New York City phone book.
Or the four lines of arabic calligraphy, contributed by Patria Ramsey, with its accompanying poem-translation:
he knows beans
full of beans
full of beans
music
Knowles’ wonderful book is a collection of scores; of sources for scores; of performances; and a performance in itself. Ongoing bean-fascination found another form when friends and family sat around a table laden with just such slips of scores and folklore - as well as homemade musical instruments comprising bean filled rain sticks and shakers - to improvise her 1982 radio piece Bean Sequences.
These, then, are some examples why scores, on the page and performed, always suggest to me their ecological relevance. And yet... and yet... there’s always the risk of forcing a link, or making the connection too tidy. Unlike the slick art world professionalism of Ono’s BALTIC show, events like Flux Night at the Rio Cinema make clear that, forty years after its appearance, Fluxus retains a strange, awkward, troubling presence through its combination of Dada vaudeville and the neo-monastic. Attempts to claim for it a contemporary relevance should prioritise this awkwardness to avoid turning scores into a bland form of workshop exercise.
Two other points are worth highlighting. Whilst the score has not been written about in precisely ecological terms, it has been thought about in terms of its radical pedagogy, and this, too, links into ecology. Hannah Higgins, for example, concludes her 2002 study Fluxus Experience by focussing on the experiential qualities of Fluxus works as a model for a particular kind of pedagogy. Higgins quotes Howard Gardner and his model of multiple intelligences - linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, interpersonal and intrapersonal - seeing the score, and Fluxus work more broadly, as engaging all of these. As Higgins concludes:
The pedagogical model offered by Fluxus... includes direct experience, conversations, collaborations, and a liberation of means. Fluxus encourages us to look at, to listen to, and feel the environment, to learn from that experience and to remain open to new perception.[p206-7]
More broadly, the current re-assessment of fluxus, along with a broad range of other sixties art practices, has prompted a desire to connect the methods and assumptions of avant-garde art to the those of radical educationalists such as Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich, thinkers often connected to environmental education.
In their 2008 book Spectacle Pedagogy: Art, Politics and Visual Culture, Charles Garoian and Yvonne M.Gaudelius suggest that using avant-garde methods and techniques can be a way of critically engaging with the environment around us:
Because the postmodern condition is pervasively mediated by visual culture, our awareness of its dominating assumptions and our ability to expose, examine, and critique the spectacle of visual culture make the critical pedagogy of collage, montage, assemblage, installation, and performance art all the more imperative. When students understand the critical and paradoxical relationships between their art-making activities and the habitus of institutionalized schooling, between the images and the ideas that they create through art, and the spectacle pedagogy of visual culture, then a liminal in-between space opens that enables the potential of art-making for transgressive and transformative experiences.[p1]
But can the score really obtain contemporary relevance? One recent project that answers in the affirmative is Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Formulas For Now (2008). Obrist asked a range of contributers to “contribute an equation for the twenty-first century.” The resulting Thames and Hudson book is very much like what a catalogue raisonée of scores would look like: a rag bag of short gnomic phrases on postcards, diagrams, texts scribbled on napkins, mathematical formula, cartoons, detailed prescriptions, instructions, and comic asides.
Take a few examples of the most score-like: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster contributes a photo of a gallery wall on which she has roughly scrawled the phrase "TROPICALISATION!" Liam Gillick, meanwhile, provides a bare white page at the foot of which is a text that reads:
Seven tons of industrial production divided by eight weeks of management stasis multiplied by two days of complete stagnation added to twelve months of reduced demand
...whilst Carsten Höller contributes a cryptic, funny note that reads:
Dear Habil,
I don’t think doubt has a formula.
Ever,
habil
Whilst sharing many techniques and forms with fluxus scores, Formulas for Now highlights some of the differences between 1968 and 2008. Firstly, the idea of culture has transformed with Obrist’s contributers no longer impoverished, largely Manhattan-based experimental artists but a more globe-spanning mix of high profile architects, scientists, mathematicians, and artists. The texts they create resemble scores, but, partly because of the nature of Obrist’s invitation, no longer have the same simple sense of being for performance, and perhaps this tells us something about our historical moment.
Many texts, too, are both prescriptive and descriptive, and who is being addressed is deliberately ambivalent. Scrawling “TROPICALISATION!” on a wall, for example, is a direct form of address, but who or what is supposed to be tropicalising, and how and when and where? Perhaps it already happened. Perhaps it only happens in the gallery. Perhaps it is supposed to be impossible.
Nonetheless, like their sixties counterparts, the work here is “ecological” in the way it asks us to re-think relationships of writing, reading, self and environment.
It suggests the score as a contemporary practice, a way of processing information, embracing not removing contradiction, and a cottage industry of sometime-romantic philosophers re-buffing learning outcomes amidst a blizzard of policy documents.
None of Formulas for Now contributers would be identified directly with environmental issues. It’s noticeable, however, that in their grapplings with the contemporary, many use the score/formula to explore knotty interconnections of science, urbanism, language, and the environment. Many align with what Sanford Kwinter - in his book of essays Far From Equilibrium - has written of as an urgent contemporary imperative:
... to conceive of human subjectivity, the body it is formed in, the ecstasy it is capable of, and the trajectory it is moving along, within a broad ecological model still sensitive to the untapped revolutionary possibilities that remain enfolded within past worlds and objects.
If nothing else, such a model would at least permit us better to see and to judge the unprecedented mediocrity of our present aspirations, and indeed as well, the possibly dire importance of what we currently seem all too willing to give up. [p19]

So where does all this leave us? This essay proposes the score as a form appropriate for the exploration of such possibilities. This might involve instructions on postcards, text messages, or “formulas for now.” It might be a private or public form; argument or doodle. It might, like Emmett Williams, prefer the term “language happenings” to “score,” although it will likely not be that bothered about using either term. Whatever, it will be a way of re-configuring relationships of reading, writing, thought and action; self, environment and community; in ways playful, urgent, trivial, and perhaps also slightly crazy and incoherent.
Ono, meanwhile, continues to offer her own brand of scores for our consideration. This New Year she provided an opinion piece for The New York Times, comprising some white space in the middle of which was a single handwritten word:
DREAM

Above copied from: http://www.artsandecology.org.uk/magazine/features/david-berridge--fluxus