An interview with controversial performance artist Karen Finley, Emile Ferris

A wide-ranging conversation with performance artist, Chicago native, and Jesse Helms nemesis | Sex, politics, Martha, Dubya and Wicker Park’s Busy Bee Restaurant


“What a dump!”
I drop my paisley suitcase onto the shag carpeting and keep my arms up in the air, giving the hotel room a once-over. The room has a dirty window view of a neon sign that reads COLOR TV and AIR CONDITIONED. The king-size bed has a turquoise and aqua woven bedspread that must know semen as a spray starch. I try not to think about it. On the side of the room is a mirrored bar with a small fridge and a microwave. Above the bar is an iridescent cityscape of New York with the Twin Towers that looks like it glows in the dark.

“Oh, Martha. It’s not that bad.” George always insists everything is nice. He is such a goddamn Girl Scout at times.

“It smells.” I whiff. “For God's sake, George, it smells like a wet dog.”

—Excerpt from George & Martha


The night before interviewing renowned performance artist Karen Finley, I stayed up late and read her new book, George and Martha. The walls of my apartment are thin, and if my laughter kept the neighbors up, it’s all Karen’s fault.

Described by writer Jerry Stahl as a “weirdly plausible bitch-slap of a book,” George and Martha has the U.S. President meeting homemaking maven Martha Stewart in a seedy hotel room for an evening of antagonism, psychotic psychoanalysis and episodes of kinky sex. The pithy dialogue between the two celebrity archetypes is liberally interspersed with images by Finley.

Emile Ferris [EF]: I enjoyed your drawings, they were such a different space from the writing and there was something genuine and connected about them that touched me. I think that was one of the really remarkable qualities of the book.

Karen Finley [KF]: Well, what I’m doing with the drawings is that I am appropriating or considering the text to be a postmodern text and also the drawings to be postmodern, and that they’re commenting or speaking about modernism.... I am considering Warhol and his drawings. He started as an illustrator, he used to draw for cookbooks, Amy Vanderbilt’s cookbooks, and he did fashion illustration, too. So, I’m taking that sensibility. It’s supposed to be Martha doing the drawings, really, like a first-person account from Martha. It’s from her point of view.

I’m also considering the New Yorker. The way I've done the cover art, it’s the sort of image you would see used for the cover…I used the font from the New Yorker, and also I placed the drawings within the text like the New Yorker. I’m commenting on the way that the New Yorker places images or cartoons within a text...so one could be reading a New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh writing about the horrors of Abu Ghraib, and then there’s a cartoon, or a drawing within the text. The psychotic breaks that we have within serious journalism... and how that’s been allowed and how that’s deconstructed within the format. It's allowed so that our brain can take in the article.

EF: George and Martha collapses all these layers. Tell me about that.

KF: I’m commenting on various levels at the same time, modernism, George and Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe?” It was 1963 when that play came out, the Kennedy era.... It was the post-war generation at that time; my generation was at its youth, at its peak, and was feeling hope for the future. This was before ’68 and before the assassinations. The Civil Rights Movement was active and there was hope that there was going to be a change in leadership. And so I’m appropriating, within a collective mindset or an audience, that play. Although I’m not really using it, I just have those same sort of characters. I start the text with the same language as Albee starts, “What a dump!” I have an imaginary child, I have the fight, so I’m commenting on it in that way as well.

EF: One of the things that was really striking to me in a literary sense was one of the lines that Martha says, referencing Abu Ghraib: “I have the solution, George, I can transform the horror of the hooded prison garb into the perfect black dress.” You’ve been quoted in the past as saying that you’ve felt that your voice was being staunched because creative problem-solvers present a threat to consumerist problem-solving. In light of that, it’s a pretty amazing accomplishment, that although we’re brought to see Martha as this representative of that consumerist problem-solving, we also feel genuine compassion for her. Can you speak to that?

KF: That’s true. Martha is the protagonist and is the first voice, and I select her as the neurotic, but also I’m looking at Martha Stewart, or the relationship of Martha and George, and going beyond Democrat or the Republican. There are various levels to Martha. She comes from Polish immigrants and [George] makes fun of her for that... . I have a relationship to that, just from growing up in Chicago, which has a very strong Polish and Ukrainian background. I remember when Hillary Clinton was at that restaurant called the Busy Bee, which is no longer there, at North and Milwaukee, which was where she said her famous line, “I don’t stay home and make cookies.”

This is why Martha is catapulted into our imagination as a female with power. We allow her to be on a pedestal, because she only makes decisions in the safety of the home, where females can make the decisions. And, she is hyper-domestic, hyper-vigilant, as a mother and in her domestic duties. I think that in the sense of crisis and comfort, because we're at war, we find comfort in her control over grapefruits or linens or whatever. Her dynamic is that she’s the “mean mom”—when they’re having their sexual romp, she’s the mean mom. She wants to be a better mother than her own mother, and that’s her crime. She wants to outdo her own mother, which I think is very Oedipal. I think everyone understands that. Then what happens, when the woman becomes the mother? As I said, everyone hates their mother, so you can’t win. George wins by losing, Martha loses by winning.

EF: That’s a great line. You’ve done a lot of work about oppression, abuse, and victimization and what it is to be female in a culture that really makes that very difficult. What was it like to give birth to a daughter…and to know that you were going to be raising her here?

KF: I was happy just...to be having a child; at that moment I wasn’t considering the gender. I think for me, seeing her experiences and seeing the fact that there are more opportunities for girls than when I was growing up, makes me very happy. Even in simple situations—when I first started going to school, you had to wear a dress. You know, [we had] home ec. When I went to college there were very few female professors. When I went to the Art Institute of Chicago and I looked through the collection, I thought Joan Miro was a woman. So, there really were very few mentors for me. The only one was Georgia O’Keeffe. I remember going past [her painting of] the clouds every day, every Saturday when I would go to the Young Artists’ Studio. I remember seeing the Jean DuBuffet, who I decided was a woman as well.

EF: At that time were there strong women in performance whom you admired?

KF: Yes, there certainly were at Chicago's Art Institute. There were women performing, I think, at that time. Laurie Anderson for one.

EF: Were there other artists whom you remember being impressed by?

KF: I remember that Yves Klein came to the Museum of Contemporary Art. I think Joseph Beuys came to Chicago and I was aware of it. I was very young, but I was aware of thinking about creating without necessarily [making] an object. That was important to me, because of coming from more of a working-class background, and wanting to infiltrate capitalism and the relationship to the art world, which I still have, I still struggle with.

EF: What was your first taste of performance? When did you just get bitten and say, “This is it. I’m doing this”?

KF: I think I was always just interested in doing it but I was trained in the visual arts, so I didn’t look at it as being different. I mean I was doing conceptual work starting in seventh and eighth grade.... I was at the Young Artists’ Studio at the Art Institute of Chicago and I was reading all the time because I was a nerd. I would go to the library and just read everything I could on art, art history, and poetry. I was also watching what was going on in terms of political theater or political activism…it would be Abby Hoffman levitating the Pentagon. That looks like a performance, you know really, when thinking about it. So those things were happening in the outside world, where there would be a meeting of rock ’n roll or politics and guerilla actions which would be performances.

The first performance I did was actually in the cafeteria of the Art Institute of Chicago.

EF: Oh, that’s really amazing.

KF: I was performing, I think with some students.... I also did a performance in a class as a freshman or something like that. I was doing things very early and it wasn’t considered weird or strange. Unfortunately, I think our culture or educational system hasn’t progressed much. I had the privilege of being considered an artist and having that considered normal... really, it was a different time. At twelve, I was going downtown by myself. I was going to the museum, seeing the exhibitions, and it had a big impact on me. I was a participant in culture as an audience member from very early on.

EF: Do you remember when you realized that art could have the power to change things?

KF: I never looked at art as being able to change things. I look at art, or being an artist, as being a historical recorder.

EF: Why did you dedicate your book to Finley Peter Dunne?

KF: That is a relative of mine. His parents were Irish immigrants and at the turn of the century he was one of the most popular journalists...maybe like the Mike Royko of his day. He was a syndicated journalist, but he was the first...political humorist/satirist to write about politics but with an Irish brogue. It would be an Irish immigrant, Tom Dooley, who came to a bar... and would be speaking about politics, that was [Dunne’s] column. He also wrote many books. I thought it was interesting, that I do something similar, and I have a history of doing political satire.

EF: So it’s hardwired in your genes?

KF: Yeah, that could be. He was the first person to actually write in the language using the [Irish] dialect. That hadn’t really been done in that way.

EF: I've read that you are of Native American, Gypsy and, of course, of Irish heritage. How much do these people who have experienced tremendous voicelessness and oppression “speak” to you and tell you, “This is what we want you to talk about?”

KF: On my father’s side the idea of people who can’t speak is about mental illness and depression, which is something that I speak to in my family. My father committed suicide. Mental illness is something that we don’t understand. Also, I think that within the Irish part of my family, language is really important. Knowing that the language had been taken away and the sense that you had to use humor and to act like the child, the self-abusing humor. That oppressed people, whether it’s Jewish or Irish or African-American, using humor. You have to be laughed at...I learned that from my father’s side of the family. Also, I have different religions in my family. People in my family all married different people with different nationalities.

My mother was taken as brown, her whole life. I do remember going to Wisconsin and at the restaurant my mother would have to enter and sit at the back. I remember once going to Lincoln Park Zoo and my mother was sitting on the steps, nursing, and there were people calling her an animal. She would be looked at sometimes as being our domestic, rather than as my mother.

EF: She was substantially darker than you?

KF: Yes. When I look back now on living in a mixed neighborhood, that’s the term that they would use. I didn’t understand, it was sort of unspoken in a way. (People) were always wondering about her. That was painful and her last words to me when she died were, “When I see God I’m going to ask him what this race thing is all about.” I feel that is one of the most important issues going. I mean…I don’t have that appearance, but I saw it with the eyes of my mother, that she was always looked at every day when she went out. She had the gaze put upon her.

EF: Very early on, you describe a childhood of looking at these power dynamics and they’re intimately associated with your family. So you experienced this empathy with your mother, but also this sense of being different and being privileged, maybe, even in her company?

KF: That’s a good point, probably. I had a different access than my mother.

EF: And that foments a sort of a guilt that you have to deal with in your life?

KF: When I was a child, I think that at certain times I didn’t necessarily speak about it, my appearance. I didn’t think that I would be able to speak about it, because I didn’t experience it within my soul. But I did experience it in terms of my relationship with my mother, and seeing another story, if you want...whether it’s the shame, the feeling, the class. Knowing my mother and what she felt...is [knowing] that whenever she would be going out, she would have to endure the gaze. It’s being looked at in a certain way.

EF: It’s a very strange thing, because there is such a thing as not being white enough. Perhaps this is in part the source of your amazing empathic capacity. It’s in your work. I think people who have never even considered another person’s state of existence have to address it in your work.

KF: I don’t think I’ve done enough about race, though. And I think that now, at least, within my teaching I can address it...I love teaching so much. I love education.... I teach theory, history, identity, art and public policy. I teach the relationship of art to culture and society. I love doing that.

EF: Do you feel that there are parallels between this time and another time in history?

KF: Yes, the 1970s, at the time of Watergate. The Vietnam War and Watergate. I think there are some similarities.

EF: Martha says at one point, something about George’s intense yearnings and passionate feelings for Iraq being perverse, that it’s sexual tension. There’s this sense during the ’70s that so much of what we’re doing with Vietnam is a way of sexualizing…and eroticizing it.

KF: Thailand came out of Vietnam. The whole sex industry of Thailand really was developed out of Vietnam.

EF: I didn't know that but the book got me thinking about war and eroticism and the psychosexual component of conquest and conflict. Can you talk about that, about the way sex works in George and Martha?

KF: I am using the sexuality on various levels. The levels I’m speaking of aren’t necessarily in terms of the relationship. The value of sexuality now is about not having intimacy, and I think early in my career I was using the body, which would then be looked at as being sexual. Now, with so much of the interest in porn and in Paris Hilton, there’s an emptiness about it. There’s an addiction, a neurotic sense of not having enough. It isn’t romantic, or there isn’t an emotional component. It could just be like filling the dishwasher or something—it’s just everywhere. I wanted to use the current trend of looking, with porn or sex within it.... I think what’s strange is now with this guy from Homeland Security, where you know a 14-year-old girl is involved or whatever…it’s the thinking or humanizing of celebrities within their own ways. Some of it I just find very, very funny.

My favorite one is Martha on her knees, and George is just saying, “Fluck, fluck, fluck Clinton.” I just think it’s hysterical. He’s saying, “Jesus!” as he’s orgasming. it’s just funny...I think it’s funny.

EF: I found myself saying, “This is plausible.”

KF: Diapering Bush, or infantizing him…I think that's what he is involved in. I was trying to figure out; I mean, you can read The Bush Dyslexicon. I think another interpretation of his inability to form words is at the level of infants who are starting with language. It’s that level of development, in that he stays close to mom, or stays close to the womb, to the baby level. She facilitates his need or comfort level. On another level, in terms of a feminist discourse, which is what I think this book can give, or is meant to give, is anxiety—a castration anxiety. The fact that Martha is manipulating George’s maleness. That the symbol of the female, the mother holding his genitals, while he’s saying “Mommy’s a ball-buster.” That the mother is able to take away her son’s potency, that is the fear. I think that’s a very powerful image…I think that that should be in the Whitney Biennial. She’s just holding the penis and it says “Mommy’s a ball-buster.” I know it’s crude but I think it’s just speaking about a castration anxiety. [What with] dealing with the potency of war and what he’s also involved in, but then also how we as a nation, how are we living through, in the national narrative, these particular individuals.

EF: You went through this amazing time in your life, when you were at the vanguard of all of these censorship issues. When you go through something like that, is there a part of you that you have to force to drag along and do the hard things, a part that would have preferred everyone to like and understand what you did?

KF: I think that it isn’t about what I’m doing, that people don’t understand. People don’t understand themselves, and so they project their fears and their anxieties onto me.

EF: That’s an amazingly powerful statement.

KF: That happens to the artist. I think the question is “why do the projections happen to me?” I think it’s because the empathy that I have with others. My center isn’t necessarily in myself. I have the ability to put my center basically out of my body. Therefore, the projections can come onto me. At the time I was young, in my youth and in idealism, but I was an entity to put the projections on. I attracted that energy. I still do. I mean, it still happens. That’s really what I think I’m about, not necessarily what I’m doing but what other people are doing or not doing, or their fear of their own souls.

EF: So essentially...you exist in a liminal space. You’re not what you are, but you are what you’re perceived as being, and that makes you the thing that you're perceived to be. How do you deal with the stress of that? How do you handle that, because you are Karen Finley, and you have a real life?

KF: I think Karen Finley, or what people consider Karen Finley, is what Karen Finley is. I think that...it becomes an imagined place. Maybe that imagination is what creativity is about; maybe there is some meeting place. I haven’t become advanced enough about that. I think I need to study quantum physics more. I think the imagined person, the imagined self, might have something to do with physics or with a different reality. How do I deal with it? The opportunity that I had with studying was wondering why this was happening so much to me. I think it was with my education and my patience and my education as an artist to take things, take a picture and turn it upside-down. Because of creative problem-solving, I was able to come to some of these conclusions, just the composition that I was given, to try to make it work by turning it around, inside out. It was in my training as an artist and in problem solving, that I was able to deal, and grow from the situation.

EF: Some of the best artists that I know have incorporated and interpreted social dysfunction into their work. Can you talk about that?

KF: Some of these problems I’m thinking about, like Jesse Helms and his projections and his sexuality and his desire for me, or maybe even the female body, when I’m covering my body with chocolate. I think the horror or the rage and the desire might really be about…transferred rage onto the black female body, on my body. I have a lecture I do on that.

EF: You need to do it here, this is very current. This is exactly what we need to be talking about.

KF: I was a safe place to transfer that emotion onto. People look at Strom Thurmond, the original piece was about wanting the young woman, young African-American woman, that was the symbol…by covering my body, I’m transforming my body. That’s what I’ve been considering. When I’ve talked to women about that, women of color, I get a positive response.

EF: So all that empathy that you had with your mother really allowed you to plug into and understand that?

KF: Unfortunately, I don’t think that has come out enough. It comes out unconsciously, but it doesn’t come out where people are speaking about it.

EF: Considering the political climate, do you ever regret not accepting the offers Finland and other countries made to you during the NEA Four days, to move there?

KF: I think that would have been the easy way out. There were artists I know that went into exile, whether it was Beckett, or Josephine Baker. I felt I had to work the process, and I felt that my work that I particularly did, was always about a comment on American culture. I just never considered it.

EF: But working the process, for you, must have required some sort of spiritual discipline or commitment, because it was such an arduous thing to have gone through.

KF: Yes, it was. It took probably about ten years. I had a solo exhibition at the Whitney and I lost that exhibition five days after losing the case. It was suggested to me that I…restart the process, because we would be having proof of the damage, and I thought that I didn’t have the strength, but also I felt that I would be looked at as just being a litigator. I didn’t think that that would help the cause. I think that they would have to have sort of a fresh face or a fresh start. I think that…in the history of the courts, whether it’s going to be eminent domain or stronger issues, which are even more important issues, I look at what I was involved in as a step on the staircase.

****sidebar****
Karen Finley was born in 1956 and grew up in the Chicago area. In 1982, she received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and moved to New York City, where she became part of the city’s performance scene.

Inspired by news reports of Tawana Brawley, a 15-year-old girl who was reportedly raped and found smeared with excrement in a garbage bag, Finley performed her controversial “We Keep Our Victims Ready” in 1989. As part of her performance, Finley covered her naked body in chocolate, then festooned herself with tinsel, stating that “no matter how bad a woman is treated, she still knows how to get dressed for dinner.”

As a result of the performance, Finley drew the attention of Senator Jesse Helms, who claimed that the work was offensive. Finley became known as one of the NEA Four, four performance artists whose NEA grants were declined in 1990 after vocal criticism by the senator. Although the artists won their court case for reinstatement, they ended up ultimately losing their appeal to the Supreme Court. Hence the U.S. government is allowed to withhold funding predicated on whether it is deemed that “standards of decency” have been violated.

Finley, a recipient of an Obie Award as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship, has performed and exhibited around the world. Among her published works are: Shock Treatment (1990), Weekly Meditations for Living Dysfunctionally (1993), Pooh Unplugged (1999), A Different Kind of Intimacy (2000), and George and Martha (2006).

She is presently a professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she teaches Art and Public Policy.

May 2006

above copied form: http://www.fnewsmagazine.com/2006-may/interviews_1.html

Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art, Signed: Andre Breton and Diego Rivera

Source: greg adargo kga1917@msn.com;

It is believed that the Manifesto was written by Trotsky and André Breton, although it was signed by Rivera and Breton.

We can say without exaggeration that never has civilization been menaced so seriously as today. The Vandals, with instruments which were barbarous and comparatively ineffective, blotted out the culture of antiquity in one corner of Europe. But today we see world civilization, united in its historic destiny, reeling under the blows of reactionary forces armed with the entire arsenal of modern technology. We are by no means thinking only of the world war that draws near. Even in times of ‘peace’ the position of art and science has become absolutely intolerable.

In so far as it originates with an individual, in so far as it brings into play subjective talents to create something which brings about an objective enriching of culture, any philosophical, sociological, scientific or artistic discovery seems to be the fruit of a precious chance; that is to say, the manifestation, more or less spontaneous, of necessity. Such creations cannot be slighted, whether from the standpoint of general knowledge (which interprets the existing world) or of revolutionary knowledge (which, the better to change the world, requires an exact analysis of the laws which govern its movement). Specifically, we cannot remain indifferent to the intellectual conditions under which creative activity takes place; nor should we fail to pay all respect to those particular laws which govern intellectual creation.

In the contemporary world we must recognize the ever more widespread destruction of those conditions under which intellectual creation is possible. From this follows of necessity an increasingly manifest degradation not only of the work of art but also of the specifically ‘artistic’ personality. The regime of Hitler, now that it has rid Germany of all those artists whose work expressed the slightest sympathy for liberty, however superficial, has reduced those who still consent to take up pen or brush to the status of domestic servants of the regime, whose task it is to glorify it on order, according to the worst possible aesthetic conventions. If reports may be believed, it is the same in the Soviet Union, where Thermidorian reaction is now reaching its climax.

It goes without saying that we do not identify ourselves with the currently fashionable catchword, ‘Neither fascism nor communism!’ –a shibboleth which suits the temperament of the philistine, conservative and frightened, clinging to the tattered remnants of the ‘democratic’ past. True art, which is not content to play variations on ready-made models but rather insists on expressing the inner needs of man and of mankind in its time –true art is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society. This it must do, were it only to deliver intellectual creation from the chains which bind it, and to allow all mankind to raise itself to those heights which only isolated geniuses have achieved in the past. We recognize that only the social revolution can sweep clean the path for a new culture. If, however, we reject all solidarity with the bureaucracy now in control of the Soviet Union, it is precisely because, in our eyes, it represents not communism but its most treacherous and dangerous enemy.

The totalitarian regime of the USSR, working through the so-called cultural organizations it controls in other countries, has spread over the entire world a deep twilight hostile to every sort of spiritual value; a twilight of filth and blood in which, disguised as intellectuals and artists, those men steep themselves who have made of servility a career, of lying-for-pay a custom, and of the palliation of crime a source of pleasure. The official art of Stalinism, with a blatancy unexampled in history, mirrors their efforts to put a good face on their mercenary profession.

The repugnance which this shameful negation of principles of art inspires in the artistic world –a negation which even slave states have never dared to carry so far –should give rise to an active, uncompromising condemnation. The opposition of writers and artists is one of the forces which can usefully contribute to the discrediting and overthrow of regimes that are destroying, along with the right of the proletariat to aspire to a better world, every sentiment of nobility and even of human dignity.

The communist revolution is not afraid of art. It realises that the role of the artist in a decadent capitalist society is determined by the conflict between the individual and various social forms which are hostile to him. This fact alone, in so far as he is conscious of it, makes the artist the natural ally of revolution. The process of sublimation, which here comes into play and which psychoanalysis has analysed, tries to restore the broken equilibrium between the integral ‘ego’ and the outside elements it rejects. This restoration works to the advantage of the ‘ideal of self’, which marshals against the unbearable present reality all those powers of the interior world, of the ‘id’, which are common to all men and which are constantly flowering and developing. The need for emancipation felt by the individual spirit has only to follow its natural course to be led to mingle its stream with this primeval necessity –the need for the emancipation of man.

The conception of the writer’s function which the young Marx worked out is worth recalling. ‘The writer’, he said, ‘naturally must make money in order to live and write, but he should not under any circumstances live and write in order to make money…The writer by no means looks on his work as a means. It is an end in itself and so little a means in the eyes of himself and of others that if necessary he sacrifices his existence to the existence of his work…The first condition of freedom of the press is that it is not a business activity.’

It is more than ever fitting to use this statement against those who would regiment intellectual activity in the direction of ends foreign to itself and prescribe, in the guise of so-called reasons of state, the themes of art. The free choice of these themes and the absence of all restrictions on the range of his exploitations –these are possessions which the artist has a right to claim as inalienable. In the realm of artistic creation, the imagination must escape from all constraint and must under no pretext allow itself to be placed under bonds. To those who urge us, whether for today or for tomorrow, to consent that art should submit to a discipline which we hold to be radically incompatible with its nature, we give a flat refusal and we repeat our deliberate intention of standing by the formula complete freedom for art.

We recognize, of course, that the revolutionary state has the right to defend itself against the counterattack of the bourgeoisie, even when this drapes itself in the flag of science or art. But there is an abyss between these enforced and temporary measures of revolutionary self-defense and the pretension to lay commands on intellectual creation. If, for the better development of the forces of material production, the revolution must build a socialist regime with centralized control, to develop intellectual creation an anarchist regime of individual liberty should from the first be established. No authority, no dictation, not the least trace of orders from above! Only on a base of friendly cooperation, without constraint from outside, will it be possible for scholars and artists to carry out their tasks, which will be more far-reaching than ever before in history.

It should be clear by now that in defending freedom of thought we have no intention of justifying political indifference, and that it is far from our wish to revive a so-called pure art which generally serves the extremely impure ends of reaction. No, our conception of the role of art is too high to refuse it an influence on the fate of society. We believe that the supreme task of art in our epoch is to take part actively and consciously in the preparation of the revolution. But the artist cannot serve the struggle for freedom unless he subjectively assimilates its social content, unless he feels in his very nerves its meaning and drama and freely seeks to give his own inner world incarnation in his art.

In the present period of the death agony of capitalism, democratic as well as fascist, the artist sees himself threatened with the loss of his right to live and continue working. He sees all avenues of communication choked with the debris of capitalist collapse. It is only natural that he should turn to the Stalinist organisations which hold out the possibility of escaping from his isolation. But if he is to avoid complete demoralisation he cannot remain there, because of the impossibility of delivering his own message and the degrading servility which these organisations exact from him in exchange for certain material advantages. He must understand that his place is elsewhere, not among those who betray the cause of the revolution, and of mankind, but among those who with unshaken fidelity bear witness to the revolution; among those who, for this reason, are alone able to bring it to fruition, and along with it the ultimate free expression of all forms of human genius .

The aim of this appeal is to find a common ground on which all revolutionary writers and artists may be reunited, the better to serve the revolution by their art and to defend the liberty of that art itself against the usurpers of the revolution. We believe that aesthetic, philosophical and political tendencies of the most varied sort can find here a common ground. Marxists can march here together with anarchists, provided both parties uncompromisingly reject the reactionary police patrol spirit represented by Joseph Stalin and his henchman Garcia Oliver.

We know very well that thousands on thousands of isolated thinkers and artists are today scattered throughout the world, their voices drowned out by the loud choruses of well-disciplined liars. Hundreds of small local magazines are trying to gather youthful forces about them, seeking new paths and not subsidies. Every progressive tendency in art is destroyed by fascism as ‘degenerate’. Every free creation is called ‘fascist’ by the Stalinists. Independent revolutionary art must now gather its forces for the struggle against reactionary persecution. It must proclaim aloud the right to exist. Such a union of forces is the aim of the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art which we believe it is now necessary to form.

We by no means insist on every idea put forth in this manifesto, which we ourselves consider only a first step in the direction. We urge every friend and defender of art, who cannot but realise the necessity for this appeal, to make himself heard at once. We address the same appeal to all those publications of the left which are ready to participate in the creation of the International Federation and to consider its task and its methods of action.

When a preliminary international contact has been established through the press and by correspondence, we will proceed to the organization of local and national congresses on a modest scale. The final step will be the assembly of a world congress which will officially mark the foundation of the International Federation.

Our aims:

The independence of art — for the revolution.

The revolution — for the complete liberation of art!

Andre Breton
Diego Rivera

above copied from: http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/lit_crit/works/rivera/manifesto.htm

INTERVIEW WITH EMMETT WILLIAMS: FLUXUS ARTIST EXTRAORDINAIRE, Judeth Hofffberg

On the occasion of an extraordinary exhibition curated by Paul Schimmel over the past eight years at the Museum of Contemporary Art entitled "Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979" and the ancillary event called "Beyond the Pink" which brought performance artists from all over the world to Los Angeles, I had the great privilege of escorting Emmett Williams, the pre-eminent poet-performer known to many through Fluxus, but who has distinguished himself throughout Europe as a visionary poet, visual artist and performance artist for a week in February. During that time, I asked him if he would be willing to sit down and have a chat, and here it is on the eve of the publication of his book: Mr. Fluxus: A Collective Portrait of George Maciunas to be published in the U.S. by Thames & Hudson in May 1998.

I told him that he has been in my vocabulary for at least 25 years, but we never sat down and talked before this very day of Friday the 13th of February.

I asked him how he got involved in Fluxus.

It was because of receiving a letter one day in Darmstadt, where I was living, from La Monte Young and he was saying he had seen some of my writings and drawings in a German book called Movens (1959) and he wanted to know if he could use some of this material for a magazine they were preparing called Beatitude, and I said yes, and all things developed from there. I did have a letter from La Monte that there was this strange guy named Maciunas who was coming to Europe, trying to escape some bad debts, and that he would look me up and talk about performance and things like that. His letters to me are all in the Getty now because of the Jean Brown Collection. Suddenly, there came George Maciunas, and he had heard about my work, and the work of Robert Filliou, Daniel Spoerri, and Dieter Roth, who were all good friends of mine, and Jean Tingueley and so on and so on. Eventually, in September 1962, that was Wiesbaden and that was the beginning of Fluxus as performance festival. It was simply performance. And of course, there were 14 concerts in Wiesbaden and then Paris, and then Copenhagen (1962) and in early 1963 we went to Dusseldorf for a series of concerts and that was when Joseph Beuys joined the club.

What distinguished me was that I belonged to the European faction, because my friends were Europeans, and soon after Dusseldorf, George Maciunas went back to the United States and started the Fluxus thing in the United States. Alison and Dick had been visiting from Turkey and so that's how I got to know them in Wiesbaden. I remained in Europe, and Fluxus became something very important in Europe, much more so than in America, thanks to Beuys, Vostell, Ren≠ Block and other people who believed in Fluxus in a much more serious way than in the United States. These were very accomplished artists, and they were involved in Fluxus and people took note. They explained what Fluxus was, different from what I thought or what Dick thought, and it remains a very very European phenomenon. George was Lithuanian-born himself and had spent the first part of his life in Europe, shaped by these things. He was the "immigrant boy".

Was the transition in New York, in the heart of AbEx and Pop Art, the reason that Fluxus could not grab on with such competition.

No, no one called himself or herself a Fluxus artist in New York who could match a Vostell or a Beuys or a Kopke or others who remained in Europe and had an entirely different approach. People who made Fluxus created a glorious scene in Europe--Eric Anderson, Kopke, and we did not come out of nowhere, because we had been doing things. My Opera was first done in the 1950s, and so much of my work was done before Fluxus. I knew Vostell, Spoerri, Beuys, Filliou, Ben Patterson and Nam June before there was a Fluxus. I remember meeting in Milano before Fluxus went to the Biennale in the early 1990s and Gino di Maggio asked, "How did Fluxus change your work and your life?" Oh, Ben Vautier said this happened and this happened, and I just said, I saw you Ben Vautier in London before Fluxus and you were doing the same things before Fluxus and after Fluxus. When George said, Let there be Fluxus, we didn't change our ways and do something else. He gave us a forum so that we could come together and do things.

Did you come together before Fluxus?

I was very close to Spoerri and Filliou. The first performance of Opera in 1959 was with Spoerri and Klaus Bremen and myself in the Keller Club in the Castle in Darmstadt. Daniel was very active in theater at the time, he comes from ballet--the poetry that has come to be identified with me as Fluxus was all there before. It was my work that many people regard as Fluxus work that La Monte saw and that caused Maciunas to phone me and say that I'm coming over to talk about Fluxus. So many of the Americans allegedly came out of John Cage's class. The only comparable thing in Europe was the summer courses in music outside of Darmstadt where I first met these Americans like Earl Brown and John Cage. I was more interested in those days in Karlheinz Stockhausen, Bruno Maderna and Pierre Boulez-- whose ideas of notation changed the nature of my poetic work and gave me ideas of structuring my performances.

I was in Europe from 1949 - 1966 when I went to New York to become the Editor-in-Chief of the Something Else Press. My closest friendship there was with Ay-O, and we are more than brothers to this day. And there were others. And during the years when I taught at Cal Arts, Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, and the Sabitas Girl's School in Massachusetts and at Mt. Holyoke and then the culminating teaching experience in the United States was at Harvard. Ann Noel and I had the finest time at Harvard. We had marvelous students, many friends, and we did not want to stay there forever, because it was far too comfortable. In 1980, I was invited to be a guest artist in the DAAD program in Berlin, and we went to Berlin and have been there ever since. Gary, our son, is now a composer studying in Canada, and Annie and I see our old friends who are still alive and with whom I collaborate: Spoerri, Hamilton and Roth. Al Hansen finally came to Europe, but he dropped dead recently. My friends and collaborators remain European. It is significant that the only prize I ever won was the first Hannah H ch prize, given to me by Berlin, and it was so funny for an American to get this. It made me feel very comfortable. This year, Vostell got the prize. It's very interesting that this marvelous award should go first to an American, and the next year to Vostell and it is for lifetime achievement in the Arts. I'd like to think that it was given to me in Berlin by Germans.

Berlin has been very good to you, recognized your merits, given you a great studio. It's very unusual for an American to be embraced so much by this German city.

It is really very nice, and I do this not as a Fluxus artist. When I have exhibitions, I do not say I am a Fluxus artist, I say it is my work. And that makes me very comfortable. And it's nice to outlive descriptive titles like that. There are not too many people who know about my background. They come to my shows and buy the work, because they like it.

The 30th year anniversary of Fluxus seemed to stimulate the interest in Fluxus with students, curators, and art historians. It was not only in history, but with actual performances, objects, and installations.

The beginning of the anniversary in 1982, and then in 1992 had international repercussions. But many people misunderstand what Fluxus artists complain about--that is, that the museums had ignored their work, but in the beginning there was no work, there was nothing to put on the wall and nothing to look at, so it wasn't until there came to be things by Fluxus artists to put on the wall that they came to see things on the wall. In fact, what distinguishes the US Fluxus from the European is that Fluxus USA began to make boxes, and we in Europe continued in the tradition of performance. We did participate in the box program, but we didn't do boxes exclusively.

But coming to the States in 1966 to become Editor-in-Chief of Something Else Press obviously attracted you.

Well, I would never have done it on my own, but the fact is that Dick Higgins knew the French edition of Anecdoted Topography of Chance of Daniel Spoerri, and I translated and re-anecdoted that book and Dick Higgins published it as a Something Else Press book and invited me to the United States to be his editor-in-chief, and passage was paid for this translation, and there is that connection. I had no intention to come to the US for a signing party. I came because to it was to help pay for the translation.

Two years ago, in London, Atlas Press brought out an absolutely staggering new version of The Anecdoted Topography of Chance, all reworked, so that except for Robert, and Topor presented a little introduction, and we all went to work and re-anecdoted the thing again--it is much thicker and more beautiful--and the British press just raved over it. They liked the first thing I had translated, but the Times Literary Supplement said this is the classic of its time--etc. And this time around, of course, the publisher used Fluxus. He said he personally felt that this was the most important Fluxus document ever published--From my point of view, I don't think so at all. And Daniel would certainly disagree with that, since he wasn't so hot about Fluxus when he first did that book, and the word doesn't even appear in the original book. Now it does, because it is inevitable and in the book, we debate that. Dieter Roth translated for the German edition of the book my anecdoted notation in German and re-anecdoted that, so the Dieter Roth German appears for the first time translated into English. Dieter didn't like Fluxus and didn't like George (from the Mr. Fluxus book) and Dieter has always been considered a Fluxus artist, and George Maciunas hoped and believed that he might be, but Dieter thoroughly rejected George's ideas of design, etc.

How did you pick up artists?

George said, we have this museum in Wiesbaden, let's do something. We have this church in Copenhagen and let's do something. Mind you, we paid our own way. Why did we pay our own way? Because nobody had a dime. George had a job and I had a job, but I was raising a family and we had real jobs in Germany working for the government. He was supporting Fluxus and his mother, and I was supporting my family. He paid for all of his boxes out of his own pocket. He didn't have a work ethic, because he didn't have a play ethic. It was all work.

Is Fluxus a movement?

It was enough of a movement so that Spoerri and Tingueley had a big argument about it, because Daniel and Tingueley and Yves Klein were Nouveau Realistes. When Daniel got involved in Fluxus, Tingueley, his best friend, told him to leave it alone--it's no good. You have to go in a straight line--that was Tingueley's warning. But Daniel said, I never go in a straight line, and participated in it. It didn't mean he was the great champion of Fluxus, but he joined it. As far as Christo and Jean-Claude, they were very friendly to Fluxus and proposed a thing for George, and their contribution to Mr. Fluxus was very sweet in the book. They remember him very kindly.

Then there are embarrassing things. Nam June talks about how Maciunas knew so and so and worked at Cooper Union, and George knew Oldenburg--so I wrote to Claes and asked him to tell me about his relationship with George. He answered that it wasn't like that. I have documentary proof that George and Claes didn't work together. I worked with Claes about the Store Days book in 1966, and I don't think we ever talked about Fluxus. Claes was teaching me all about Pop Art and the American scene which I had missed while I was in Europe. He did not talk about Fluxus at all.

When you were with Something Else Press, what was the distribution problems?

Dick and I tried to get a campus bookshop to get interested in the product, but they said they never got involved in the "vanity press" publications. Dick joined up with Aperture and the Small Press thing Michael Hoffman directed--and there was a meeting with the salesmen. I remember that I was so proud of the international success of a book I did with Hansjorg Mayer, Sweethearts, which Richard Hamilton loved and Duchamp loved it, and eventually Dick decided to publish it. He published it, and Duchamp was very happy to put the coeur volant on the cover. So I had to listen to a salesman, who said, well there was one book, Sweethearts, by Emmett Williams, you know it's printed back to front--how are you going to sell a book like that to a bookstore, you ought to burn the whole edition. This very thing of considering it printed back to front has generated an essay about that, placing me in a class with Jewish mystics by Jean Sellem at Lund He sent me the outline of his essay and I told him that he was convincing me! It's nice to know that the ambiguities are there to allow critics to re-interpret the book far from the intentions of the author.

What about your Anthology of Concrete Poetry?

I supposed I was the ideal person to do it, because I was doing that before I came to New York in 1966. I had published my first book of concrete poetry with Daniel Spoerri in 1958, and published quite widely, and I knew all the poets and they had my work and I had theirs. I had brought most of it to become the core of this book (1966-67) and this was seen in America widespread for the first time in that book. With 18,000 copies sold--quite an achievement for a small press. And in Budapest, so many people there had a copy of my book. I consider some of my best work is in the German language now which is not known to those who do not have the language facility.

For those you know you only as a "concrete poet", doesn't that seem a limited view of Emmett Williams?

I am a poet, visual artist and performer--and those objects are what sells. What I'm involved in now and for the next couple of years is a project of tongue- in- cheek history of post-studio art from 1960 to the present day (there are going to be 100 of them, and I've already done 75)--and 12 ceramic pieces in Verona--learning how to do ceramics--and two of those things are going to be made into tapestries in Pakistan. It was not my decision.

I did some fascinating prints a year ago with a genius in Hanover who does these extraordinary special effects things--and people said it's some of the best work I've ever done, but it's not really me, since he did them--but I hardly take credit for them. Annie and Gary always want to bring me up to date with these machines, but I do it my way.

We've made some trips to Africa, and I've made designs of the little people I make--and decided they should go on large wheels and shields--and so these were carved by natives in Kenya (not artists) and they are large and in such bad shape (transport, etc.) and it takes weeks and weeks to get them in shape in order to paint them, and so Annie and I are working on 25 of them. And it will be smashing when they're all done. The wood has to be dried, and then we have to plane it down.

When did you think about Mr. Fluxus? Was it a long-term project?

When I was in New York--after the death of George--I had been in Harvard and came down for a weekend. And Ay-o and I decided that wouldn't it be fun to do a book about George--the dozen important people in Fluxus who had been there--called The Book of George-because we saw that after the death of George, funny things were happening. Someone released a story that "I will be in charge of Fluxus"--others said, he was nothing. Two of my friends said well there is not very much to say about George--he's an overblown figure.

So I asked certain people to give five anecdotes about George Maciunas so that we could get to know him through the anecdotes that people remember him by--from Watts, Shiomi, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Ay-o, myself, about a dozen. We thought how to do this--Ay-o went to Japan and I to Europe, and we forgot the whole thing. I mentioned occasionally that Ay-o and I had been planning to do this, and Michele Verges said I'd publish it if you gave it to me.

I started working on it again 10 years later,trying to find people. It took about 10 years to get letters, manuscripts to me to get them all together--and then to bring it together. I wanted to do a book "from womb to tomb" in the words of other people--sometimes with anecdotes--the story of his life, of his death and how he was loved, hated and feared by all these people and their assessment of what he was--great or terrible. Out of the most devastating is that of Allan Kaprow, who zeroes in on the feud with Stockhausen.

And what about this Love-Hate situation with George Maciunas?

We were all kicked out--only two were not kicked out: Ken Friedman and Ben Vautier. We were all prima donnas--all kicked out. Vostell was never let in; George hated his guts. Beuys was never let in. George absolutely despised him, but Beuys loved him. George not only kicked me out--Kopke, Anderson our of Fluxus, but he denounced us to the Soviet press and to the world as fascist thugs--and this was a joke that Eric did: Eric was making a trip through Eastern countries and started to send letters and postcards from Moscow, etc. how we were performing Fluxus in various cities and George believed it, and we were dismissed.

Bici (Hendricks) has one of the most beautiful accounts of the dying. But it was only after he had died that we knew that it was "gossip" . We only renewed our friendship when Jean Brown brought George to an exhibition of mine at Mt. Holyoke-- and George said that maybe we can be friends again and gave me a beautiful name box--but I told him we had always been friends, but "you didn't believe it". But he never forgave Dick Higgins for Something Else Press.

There are those books which dictate Fluxus as defined only by George Maciunas. What is Mr. Fluxus about?

George does not have the last word in this book. There are some 70 people pro and con telling what they think Fluxus is and what Fluxus is not. This is not hero worship. 75% ended up in the garbage, and they could save it for their books, but not this one. And I told some contributors that I was returning stuff asking whether they could try again?

Ken ended by saying he hardly knew him. Ben Vautier loved George very much showing a maximal amount of respect for George with a poem that he wrote. Catalogs have served as amazing new data about Fluxus. Ren≠ Block's 1962 Wiesbaden Fluxus 1982 is still one of the best. The Fluxus in Germany catalog I believe is the best documentation and it's too bad it has not been translated.

Do you think that art history books in the future will give Fluxus its due?

I don't see how they can avoid Fluxus. the time hasn't quite come yet, but you have some first-rate historians such as Thomas Kellein whose small book on Fluxus published by Thames & Hudson has been translated into German, Japanese and English, and the English edition is now reprinted in a second edition.

And now that Mr. Fluxus is almost here?

Well, the jacket by Ay-O is definitely eye-catching. And I was very happy how the critics treated My Life in Fluxus with great seriousness. It was not a history of Fluxus at all, but was an attempt to show what one member of Fluxus did, what it was like to be part of Fluxus. In this regard, I had many arguments with Jon Hendricks, because he was basing the history of Fluxus on a collection that Gil Silverman was able to buy, which is not complete and not comprehensive.

Let's talk about Hanns Sohm for a minute.

Well, no Sohm, no Fluxus. The Hanns Sohm Archive was before Fluxus, and it's all there. Fluxus fits into a large and important archive. If you want Concrete Poetry, go there; if you want Ginsberg, Beats, go there. If you want Wallace Berman, go there. The Sohm Archive gives context to all movements. I used to enjoy going to Sohms' and staying there before the collection was sold to the Stuttgart Museum. He looks at the material first, then puts it into context. I send all my material to him at his home, before it ever gets to the museum. I had my Opera performed last summer in a Castle outside Stuttgart and it lasted four hours. Sohm was there. And he's there when you're short of cash; he'll buy something to keep you going. And the museum of Stuttgart is one of the jewels of Europe, and it's wonderful that the archive is there. My letters to George and to Daniel Spoerri are at the Getty now, and it's too bad they're not in Stuttgart.

And tell us what plans you have now.

Well, Mr. Fluxus has been translated into German, Lithuanian, Japanese and English. The German translation came out first, and it was from the English original. The English edition is larger, since it has more new material in it. And we have several Fluxus books by this one publishing house in England, Thames & Hudson , including the Fluxus show at the Tate. Ben Vautier and I have done a tape of our ICA performances in London. In March, I have been invited to Australia as President of the Museum in Lodz, Poland and I plan to work with the Aborigines, as well as doing performances in Melbourne. Perhaps I will also visit the Fluxus Collection in Queensland.

above copied from: http://colophon.com/umbrella/emmet.html

BIOLOGICAL MODELS, C. John Holcombe

Overview
Living organisms may provide better models for artworks than current philosophical concepts or the reductionist approaches of the physical sciences. Living models display two important characteristics. One is a nonlinear nature: their structures are not fixed but continually build on previous states. The other is structural discontinuities: organisms operate on different levels (cell chemistry and interaction with environment) that are not directly linked.

Comparisons
Because they evolve and influence later artists, we sometimes talk about the 'life' of a work of art or art movement. Before dismissing this as a figure of speech, we might compare the two: {1}

characteristic poem living cell
autonomy artistic autonomy discrete entity
reproduction multiplies through reading and printing multiplies by breeding
respiration controls reader expectations controls energy transfer
nutrition converts reader interest into fascination converts food into energy
excretion suppresses inappropriate meanings ejects waste products
growth understanding of reader shifts in time grows into maturity
responsiveness changes with appraisal and context reacts to changes in its surroundings
movement expands in consciousness of reader exhibits motion at some level
interaction interacts with and modifies social environment interacts with and modifies environment
evolution movement evolves with new writings population evolves over time
information content increases local organization/information content forms local centre of negative entropy


Detailed Comparisons

The analogies go deeper. To look at a few processes:

:Modus Operandi
How do cells carry out their complex processes? Although extraordinarily complicated in detail {1}, the molecular processes have simple strategies. They employ chemical interactions and goodness of molecular fit to create their necessary constituents.{2} When, for example, an enzyme creates a compound from two constituents, A and B, it does so in specific steps. Through its shape and the attraction of surrounding weak forces, the enzyme first induces two molecules to 'dock' on its surface. One is the constituent A; the other is an ATP (adenosine triphosphate) molecule. By careful positioning, the enzyme transfers one of ATP's phosphates to the A constituent, and then discards what remains of the ATP molecule. The enzyme then takes the second constituent B into a nearby docking site, breaks off the phosphate joined to the A molecule, and transfers the energy created to a bond between constituent A and B. The spent phosphate is then discarded (to form another ATP molecule in time), and the new compound, A-B, is released by the enzyme. The process repeats with another AB creation, conducted mindlessly but efficiently by the laws of physics.

Communication between cells proceeds in much the same way, involving interactions between compounds that obey the laws of game theory, and which are governed by flow of information considerations. There is no 'invisible hand' operating at cell level: molecules have simply 'learned' to operate together through trial and error over the eons of geological time. Success on the molecular level is explained by the laws of physics. Success on the species level is explained by the theory of evolution. No other process is needed.

Essentially, we don't know how poetry makes its appeal, or why we find certain things beautiful. We can name certain characteristics that make a poem successful — originality, deep feeling, masterful expression, etc. — but we can only frame these characteristics in words than are used more generally than their deployment in poetry.

Moreover, we cannot by logic convince a skeptical reader that they apply in a particular case, nor use these characteristics to directly build a poem. Composition is invariably by trial and error, the 'rules' of prosody, rhyme, stanza shape, imagination, freshness etc. being applied later to understand why the piece is not fulfilling its potential. As is said in poetry workshops: ' what works, works.'

We respond mentally to poems, through brains that operate through loosely connected units with multiple feedback {3}. Brains evolved like other organs, and natural selection no doubt played its part. It is therefore very unlikely on principle that reductive laws will provide the appropriate model for consciousness, aesthetics and social interaction, living organisms in fact providing closer parallels. Life accepts discontinuities, partial interactions, diversity in representation and chaotic behaviour.

This indeed is what close textural readings of poems disclose. They don't entirely exhibit the organic unity that the New Criticism wanted. Too much can be made of difficulties, but some elements are often discordant, or can only be made harmonious by following cultural expectations. It's at least to the credit of deconstructive critics that we realize how poems can be misunderstood if the social or cultural contexts are removed, or we are willfully perverse in our readings. Appreciation of poetry comes slowly, moreover, and the enthusiasms of youth have to give way to a more measured and generous assessment that gradually involves our whole social being.

:Organization

Living things are marvellously organized. Hormones, for example, secreted by specific glands, carry instructions to all parts of the body through the blood stream. The pituitary gland receives signals from the brain, and in response sends out its own hormones, which turn on or off the hormone production in other glands. In the growing foetus, compounds called morphogens affect cells over a wide area, directing the preferential growth of limb, nerve or skin cells in accordance with the concentration of those morphogens. These different cells then migrate to their various sites by following chemical pathways, just as ants do to reach a food source. Organization indeed operates at all levels, but is not centrally directed according to some prepared blueprint. The DNA in chromosomes carries detailed instructions, certainly, but these are codes that create proteins, which then cooperate mechanically.

Crucially, DNA also controls what is not produced. Much of the coding produces proteins that switch off other production processes, either altogether or when the right level is reached.

So it is in poetry. No one supposes that even the perfect lyric has an equal organization, but poems do carry instructions for appropriate reading. We see short lines on a page, and do not read them as prose. We hear the rhymes that mark the line endings, and expect the line entity to bear some relationship to the poem as a whole. Many of the instructions use social and cultural codes, but poets often have to attend readings and workshops to ensure that the piece is performing as planned. Proof is in the eating.

:Energy Considerations
Life is a local exception to the Second Law of Thermodynamics {2}, which states that the entropy (disorder or uncertainty) {3} of a system can never decrease. {4} But if life creates local knots of greater organization, the Second Law ensures by way of compensation that byproducts are dissipated more widely. Animals and plants are eaten, their living matter broken down into simpler constituents, which are then absorbed as food, the unwanted parts excreted.

In this connection we note that poetry, and great art generally, is often a wasteful process produced in times of great personal and social upheaval. Chaucer lived through murderous court intrigues. Shakespeare wrote against the deep divisions in the religious and political fabric of his age. In contrast, tutors at adult education classes have learned not to expect masterpieces from law-abiding folk retired on comfortable pensions. Good work usually draws on dangerous matters and entails a high personal investment.

:Information Considerations
Information theory is a branch of mathematics that deals with the problems of transmitting information efficiently. Shannon's famous entropy function {5} represents the least number of symbols required to code for the outcome of an event regardless of the method of coding. It is therefore a unique measure of the quantity of 'information', this 'information' being a decrease in entropy.

Originally developed at the Bell laboratories for electronic transmission, the function has been widely applied to computer science, linguistics, cryptography, cognitive psychology, the biological sciences and sociology. Information approaches can be used to solve hermeneutic problems of manuscript authorship {6}, for example, and to provide measures of the surprising precision of molecular events.

Seen through information theory, living things incorporate an enormous amount of 'information' into their tiny cells. Life seems one of the most information-laden forms in the universe, and it would be laughable to claim the same for poetry. But if poems are seen as knots of higher 'information' content in the web of language then many of the troublesome issues of aesthetics can be sidestepped. We don't have to arbitrate between intellectual content and emotion in a poem, or assess the shaping power of metre and imagery, etc. True, 'information' in this sense is hardly useful to the literary critic, particularly as information theory has nothing to say on the meaning or interpretation of the message transmitted, but the approach does open the door to the questions mathematicians like to ask of life processes — e.g. how is the 'information' content of cells to be measured? why is the metabolism so efficient?

Shannon's key entropy function is fairly straightforward. The entropy is proportional to the negative product of p and log p, where p is the probability that the event observed is purely a matter of chance. How that applies in individual cases can be immensely complicated, but for our purposes we see that lines written in tight rhyme and metre are far less likely to arise by chance than lines of simple prose. Vocabulary is also important. Something like I was at the President's this afternoon is less common in everyday conversation than I was at the drugstore this afternoon. And being less likely, it conveys more 'information'.

Looked at this way, the unexpected vocabulary and fractured syntax of Modernist poetry may be trying to push more 'information' into poetry. When successful, Modernist poems made sense as words on a page, and as references to a wider and more contemporary world. (Green ideas sleep furiously, for example, makes sense in one way but not the other.) They organized on both levels, a difficult undertaking that we applaud with such approbations as freshness, convincing originality, and telling authenticity.

But only on one level do strict verse forms convey more 'information', and allow the better poetry to be written. We have also to consider a second level, that of vocabulary and contemporary relevance. If the besetting sin of free verse is the prosaic, poetry in strict forms tends continually to lapse into verse. Free verse may convey less 'information' on the rhythmic level, but its aims are larger at the level of context. Accordingly, it is judged not on its craftsmanship (which is often elementary, despite protestations to the contrary) but on its organization of everyday language. Tone, naturalness, aptness to the occasion, expression of emotion and motive — traditional aspects of the novelist's and the playwright's craft — become more vital. Done well, free verse comes over better in readings, particularly in our informal age.

Postmodernism is a natural progression. To repair free verse's deficit of 'information' at the rhythmic level, Postmodernist poems may be using a richer rich bric-a-brac of contemporary images. A larger vocabulary, therefore, even if the information' concept requires that vocabulary to say something relevant. When it doesn't — and that is often the case in amateur work — then the poet is forgetting that originality is only a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Is 'information' a valid concept in literature? Probably, and for this reason. Seen as biological entities, human beings are animals that use language as guides to action. Information is essential to us, and we dislike lies and misrepresentation. Poetry is not exempt from 'Information' demands, though we may look for a tighter fusion of text and context.

: Operation Levels
Is evolution purely blind, just random mutations filtered over time by breeding advantage? Reductionists believe so, but must allow a caveat. At the molecular level (the blind watchmaker view {7}), the process is purely mechanical. Thousands of processes take place every minute in and around the cell, with only the rarest mistake benefiting the organism and so being retained by evolution. But at higher levels the process is a different one, with natural selection applying to the interaction of organism with environment. The two processes operate independently — a point worth emphasizing because current thinking in the humanities has blurred the distinction.

Consider literary theory. Prior to Saussure, linguistics could not account for the random nature of linguistic change, in which there seemed no pattern or purpose. After Saussure, the puzzles remained, but the emphasis was on how languages actually functioned in practice. Like pieces on a chess board, words simply fulfilled certain rules and functions. A language may well have mutated by chance, such random changes being retained because they served useful purposes, but that was beside the point: linguistics did not need to speculate on matters for which the evidence was largely missing.

Unfortunately, Structuralism then applied the reductionist approach, and tried to subsume language under extended binary codes, lumping together the very different modes of communication between human beings as 'texts'. Predictably, Poststructuralism overreacted, still keeping the simplification to texts, but denying that words could have any referential function at all. They argued that Saussure had shown that words fulfilled certain rules and opportunities, and these rules and opportunities were the only reality. But Saussure had not shown this. Like the molecular biologist focusing on cell operations, he had simply concerned himself with how language operates on the level of language. That he had largely left out account the social purposes of language does not mean that those purposes do not exist, and indeed the games that deconstruction can play with meaning shows how truly important they are.

Perhaps it wasn't science that inspired the radicals. The Russian formalists (whose concepts were adopted by Jakobson and Structuralism) studied the ways in which literary language differed from speech and normal prose, but it suited the polemics of the Poststructuralists to ignore those differences. Once flattened into texts, literature belonged to the people and could be removed from privileged groups. From the rules governing all texts could be deduced ways of detecting social, racial and gender discrimination in individual cases, allowing guidelines to be established for political correctness in publishing and the media.

Consider a less contentious example: rhythmic analysis. The aim of Cureton and others is to distinguish between what is acceptable and what is not acceptable as verse. The approach derives from Chomsky's universal grammar, and the end product is rules: the elegant and comprehensive rules that science requires, mathematically expressed if possible. Yet the science here is again reductionist. The life sciences are not exempt from the laws of physical science, but the laws operate differently — over time, with elements of randomness and selection by distinct levels of criteria. Cureton's approach may or may not be successful, but is of limited use to the practising poet. Good lines are not created by rules, but out of the auditory imagination, the rules serving later to check what the ear discerns.

:Feedback and Interaction
Viewed as populations, organisms do not simply occupy an environment, but operate as complex systems that interact with and modify their surroundings {7}. Nowhere is this obvious than with human beings {8}. And unlike other animals, humans have language and consciousness: they create concepts that modify their behaviour.{9}

That is the view of biologists like David Sloan Wilson, {10} who have criticized the 'tough-minded' approaches of recent years that would make genes, and genes only, the determining factors. Even the simplest organisms, bacteria, can cooperate so closely that the colony is the only meaningful unit. Altruistic behaviour in groups is also well documented — the lookout animal that gives the warning cry though putting itself at risk by attracting the predator's attention. Reductionist theories provide neat solutions, but life is not so tidy.

It was for this reason that Edwardian literary critics studied poems in the contemporary setting. To judge a particular work, something had to be known of the poet's life, circumstances, and aims. Understandably, perhaps, given the science of the day, the New Critics wanted sharper rules, and appealed to psychology to remove the larger considerations. But whatever the justification, the analyses were not wholly successful, becoming only more ingenuous and artificial. Poems grow in the interconnecting web of words used by living people, and that must always involve issues beyond the mere complexities of language itself.

If poems resemble living organisms, where's the evidence that poems do indeed interact with and modify their environment? First there is the phenomenon of artistic movements: formality in eighteenth century poetry, reflected in architecture, painting and private correspondence, a twentieth century preoccupation with the common man, seen in the debunking of idealism and the preference for the demotic voice in literature. Today we find an eclecticism in architecture, collages of received images in contemporary painting, the abrupt juxtaposition of styles and unliterary elements in Postmodernist poetry.

But if broad artistic movements need no amplification, interaction of those movements with other events is harder to document. Contemporary poetry has become a coterie interest, and we have to go back to Tennyson to see how his Idylls of the King influenced the Pre-Raphaelites, and through them not only styles in interior design but the high-mindedness in civic life brutally extinguished by the First World War.

:Community Considerations
Limited space and food supplies ensures that only a few species will occupy any given ecological niche, and in fact evolution often proceeds by fits and starts. For millions of years species remain unchanged, but then suddenly evolve to take advantage of changed conditions. But though life may repeat itself in general (insects, bats, pterodactyls, and birds all developed flight) the exact same forms do not reappear. New species face new types of competition, and have inevitably to be slightly different.

Literary genres and examples also have their ecological niche. The public has limited time to appreciate an incessant supply of artwork, and the artwork itself must also join a community of interests: what doesn't illuminate that community's beliefs is not accepted. Poems written in outmoded forms may be aired in workshops but are not easily published. There may be nothing intrinsically wrong with them, and it's unhelpful to call them passé or pastiches, but they simply don't draw on the communality of interests and expectations that make up the contemporary literary scene. The literary community is every bit as conservative as the scientific, moreover, and for the same reason. To accept the aberrant poem risks undermining the paradigm of 'right thinking' that presently holds sway, and so weaken the standing of work in which authors, critics and the reading public have invested a good part of their lives.

:Rate of Change
But why are there shifts in taste at all? Why do we value the poetry of Góngora, say, or César Vallejo, far more highly than did their contemporaries? What causes such an evolution in taste?

From a reductionist perspective, no foresight enters into evolution. Populations evolve as genetic variations appear and the ecological niches to be exploited. Nothing more is needed. Each individual of a particular species has its own set of genes, moreover, which permit variety within the general need for interbreeding. The sum of all genes in a population is the gene pool, and it is the change over time of the gene pool that constitutes evolution.

Now the key point. Small gene pools are more readily influenced by genetic change than are large ones — obviously, as the changes are not so easily swamped by others. And since it is overall change in the gene pool that counts, evolution naturally proceeds faster in small populations, which is a theoretical deduction supported by the facts.

That may explain the dizzy rate of change in the twentieth-century. By rejecting the conventional, avant garde artists forced the pace. They restricted what could be accepted, and what sectors of society could be served. Most importantly, they restricted membership, thereby diminishing still further the 'gene pool' of beliefs or practices. It was the very thinness of the work, and its limited appeal, that fostered novelty, therefore, not simply a 'necessary response to a changing world'. Sometimes the movements espoused change for change's sake, when they rapidly burned themselves out. Sometimes they found a congenial niche — generally helped by the media and consumerism — when they became a dominant style, ruthlessly destroying the remnants of earlier standards. In the visual arts the process is much clearer, of course, and critics developed a plethora of labels to protect movements from 'unenlightened' criticism. The work was insubstantial? — minimalism. Only raw daubs of emotion? — expressionism. No focus or seriousness — all over art or Postmodernism. Modernism's aristocracy of taste was extended to the informed gallery-going public, provided that public was ready with its cheque-books.

Philosophical Dimensions
The above is a straightforward reductionist account — though we should note many different views on entropy. Nonetheless, the sheer scale of complexity in metabolism has encouraged the search for alternative outlooks. Some biologists, influenced by complexity theory, see life as an emergent form. Others, usually Catholic philosophers building on the work of Thomas Aquinas, go back to Aristotle's notion of 'substantial form'. {11} The notion is difficult for the modern mind to grasp, but 'substantial form' is the primary actualization of a substance, which combines with 'primary matter' to give the 'unified actual substance'. Substantial form is what makes the substance the kind of thing it is and so act the way it does. And where the reductionist method breaks a substance into simple parts that can be represented mechanically, 'substantial form' takes the complex operating substance (e.g. cell, organism, community) as the primary, irreducible entity.

Of course that helps a rapprochement between religion and science, and there is indeed some awareness that cell operations cannot be understood in isolation. {12} Their individual processes depend on the processes surrounding them, and so on the unified operation of their enclosing cell. The DNA of a dinosaur could be unravelled, for example, but a dinosaur couldn't be grown by inserting manufactured DNA into the cell of a living animal, but only into the cell of a living dinosaur. More prosaically, genome studies have learnt that genes operate in tandem with each other, requiring cells to be studied in their life operations, and computer models built to capture the cyphered text that genes follow. Nonetheless, the individual components, structures and dynamics of genes have also to be identified, so that genomics is not adopting substantial form exactly.

The importance for poetry? Perhaps that the approach of the New Criticism was not essentially wrong, but only much too simple. Living cells are not harmonious structures throughout, but have time-dependent elements that operate in odd ways that can be disruptive. We need to appreciate how and why exactly the various elements of a poem pull together, and for this we need a better understanding of brain physiology, human communication and social behaviour. Nonetheless, until then, we can still grant autonomy to a poem, and perhaps be more cautious in believing that quality is the sole reason for a poem's survival.

Conclusions
These are speculative suggestions, but important ones. As noted in complex systems, sociology, metaphor research, and brain functioning, literature needs to understand the sciences better if it wishes to borrow its methods and kudos.

References
1. Any elementary biology textbook, e.g. Michael Roberts, Michael Reiss and Grace Monger's Biology Principles and Processes. (1993), Mahlon Hoagland and Bert Dodson's The Way Life Works. (1995), and Alan Cornwell and Ruth Miller's Biology: A-Level and AS-Level. (1997).
2. Werner R. Loewenstein's The Touchstone of Life: Molecular Information, Cell Communication and the Foundations of Life. (1999).
3. See Chapter 7 of Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart's The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World. 1994.
4. Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart give some (speculative) reasons why the Second Law is not as usually stated, arguing for a more contextual approach in science.
5. A helpful introduction to Shannon's work, entropy and information measures looked at from the gambler's point of view is given in P. Fraundorf's Gambling Theory Origins of the 0th Law: http://www.umsl.edu/~fraundor/gamblaw0 /sld001.htm (10/1/2002). A simple mathematical treatment is provided by Tom Schneider's Information Theory Primer at http://www.lechb.ncifcrf.gov/toms/ paper/primer. (Jan. 2002).
6. Chris Hillman's Entropy in the Humanities and Social Sciences. http://www.math.psu.edu.gunesch/Entropy/soc.html. (5/7/2001).
7. R. Dawkin's The Selfish Gene. O.U.P. London. (1976) and The Blind Watchmaker. (1986).
8. Niles Eldrege's Reinventing Darwin: The Great Evolutionary Debate. Weidenfeld and Nicolson (1995).
9. Walter Truett Anderson's Evolution Isn't What It Used To Be: The Augmented Animal and the Whole Wired World. (1996).
10. Richard Sloan Wilson and and Elliot Sober's Unto Others. Harvard University Press (1999).
11. Michael J. Dodds' Top Down, Bottom Up or Inside Out? Retrieving Aristotelian Causality in Contemporary Science. http://www.nd.edu/Departments/Maritain/ti/dodds.htm (Jul. 1997)
12. Our Vision: Genome Studies as a Change of Paradigm in Biology http://www.hkupasteur.hku.hk/hkuip/vision.html and Cohen and Stewart.

Internet Resources
1. Cell Biology. http://www.surfnetkids.com/cells.htm. Very fully-featured section with articles and flash demonstrations on all aspects of cell biology.
2. BioMedia Teacher. http://ebiomedia.com/teach/vizlinks.html. Not systematic, but excellent listings for cell physiology and related matters.
3. Biology Links. http://www.scienceman.com/pgs/links_biol.html#anchor2. Another good listing for cell biology sites.
4. Second Law of Thermodynamics. Brig Klyce. http://www.panspermia.org/seconlaw.htm. Extended article on common misunderstandings, with extended references.
5. The Second Law of Thermodynamics, Evolution, and Probability. Frank Steiger. 1997. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/thermo/probability.html. A more mathematical treatment of entropy and probability.
6. Second law broken: Small-scale energy fluctuations could limit minaturization. Ed. Gerstner. Jul. 2002. http://www.nature.com/nsu/020722/020722-2.html. Exceptions to the second law at the cell level.
7. Maximum Power. Jay Hanson. Jan 2001. http://www.dieoff.com/page193.htm. Evolution applied to competitive human societies.
8. Visiting Darwin's Cathedral. Varadaraja V. Raman. Sep. 2002. http://www.metanexus.net/metanexus_online/show_article.asp?7175. Review of David Sloane Wilson's book on religion and evolution.
9. Claude Shannon. http://www.nyu.edu/pages/linguistics/courses/
v610003/shan.html. Introduction to Shanon and his work.
10. Biological Information Theory and Chowder Society. Tom Schneider. Aug. 2001. http://www-lmmb.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/bionet.info-theory.faq.html. Forum for information theory in biology: listings and faqs.
11. A Short Course in Information Theory. David J.C. MacKay Jan. 1995. http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/info-theory/course.html. Mathematical treatmement in pdf files.
12. Information Theory and Creationism: Classical Information Theory (Shannon). Rich Baldwin. http://home.mira.net/~reynella/debate/shannon.htm. Extended series of articles on informationa theory: technical.
13. Introduction to Evolutionary Biology: Version 2. Chris Colby. 1996. http://www.empowermentzone.com/evol_bio.txt A standard but clear account.
14. Evidence for Evolution: An Eclectic Survey. Chris Colby. 1997. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-research.html A linked series of postings.
15. Saint Thomas Aquinas. Ralph McInerny. 1999. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas/. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry mentioning substantial form.
16. Form. K. Knight. Sep. 2003. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06137b.htm New Advent entry on substantial form.
17. Meme. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme. Wikipedia entry on memes, cultural information transferable from one mind to another: an analogous concept.


© C. John Holcombe 2007. Material can be freely used for non-commercial purposes if cited in the usual way.


above copied from: http://www.textetc.com/theory/biological-models.html

Dada to DiY, Part II, John Held, Jr.

Cage's influence broadened, when he lead a class in musical composition at the New School for Social Research in 1956. Among those attending were Allan Kaprow, Dick Higgins, Jackson MacLow, George Brecht and Al Hansen. Higgins relates that the structure of the class, "would be that, before the class began, Cage and George Brecht would get into a conversation, usually about 'spiritual virtuosity', instead of the virtuosity of technique, physique, etc. This would continue as the people arrived, then gradually expand, until the subject matter became hard to follow." (Kostelanetz, John Cage: an anthology, New York, 1970/1991, p.122-123

Maciunas did not attend the Cage class, but participated in the electronic music class the following year taught by Richard Maxfield, which attracted many of the same students from Cages' class. Nearing his death in 1978 in an interview with Larry Miller, Maciunas described 1959 as a pivotal year. So 1959 is a very influential year. We have Nam June Paik, playing [his] first piece. Vostell doing [his] first piece, Alan Kaprow doing [the] first Happenings, Dick Higgins and Yves Klein. Well, he was already before that, but he culminated, let's say, by then. Ben Vautier doing his first piece by signing... everything: continents, peace, famine, war, noise, end of the world and especially human sculptures. That's something important to know because later Manzoni copied it.

Gestures... he had first gestures appearing then in 1959 and not in 1968 with Acconci and people like that. And we have first postage stamps of Bob Watts, a lot of card music that is written on cards like of George Brecht and [the] first concept art of Henry Flynt. Then that goes on to 1960. And Fluxus comes in 1961, late in '61. Actually, you could say officially early in '62. Because in '61 I had a gallery which did everything that later Fluxus did but did not use that name. (Ubi Fluxus, Page 228)

Through the connections made at the New School, he recruited post-Cagian downtown artists for a series of evenings at his AG Gallery in 1961. This was a continuation of similar evenings organized LaMonte Young and Yoko Ono at Ono's Chambers Street studio. Maciunas also undertook the publication of Young and Jackson MacLows' Anthology, and the Wiesbaden, Germany, September 1962 Fluxus Festival, which included performances by Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Robert Filliou, Nam June Paik, Emmett Williams, Wolf Vostell and Arthur Koepcke.

In an essay by Maciunas, read in the same year (1962), titled, Neo-Dada in Music,Theater, Poetry, Art, Maciunas states that,The anti-art" forms are directed primarily against art as a profession, against the artificial separation of a performer from (the) audience, or creator and spectator, or life and art; it is against the artificial forms or patterns or methods of art itself; it is against the purposefulness, formfulness and meaningfulness of art; anti-art is life, is nature, is true reality - it is one and all. Rainfall in anti-art, a babble of a crowd is anti-art, a sneeze is anti-art, a flight of a butterfly, or movements of microbes are anti-art. They are as beautiful and as worth to be aware of as art itself. If man could experience the world, the concrete world surrounding him (from mathematical ideas to physical matter) in the same way he experiences art, there would be no need for art, artists and similar "nonproductive" elements.

The following year, Maciunas drafted a Manifesto, interspersed with dictionary definitions of the world flux, which summed up the aims of Fluxus:

Manifesto:
Purge the world of bourgeois sickness, "intellectual," professional & commercialized culture, PURGE the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract art, illusionistic art, mathematical art, - PURGE THE WORLD OF "EUROPANISM"!
PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART, Promote living art, anti-art, promote NON ART REALITY to be grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals.
FUSE the cadres of cultural social & political revolutionaries into united front & action.

These three principles: the purging of commercialized, intellectualized culture; the promotion of a new art; and the fusion of revolutionaries of every stripe, were at the heart of Maciunas' agenda.

Maciunas elaborated upon the these points in 1965, constrasting the traditional aims of art with those of Fluxus Art-Amusement.

ART
To justify artists's professional, parasitic and elite status in society,
he must demonstrate artist's indispensability and exclusiveness,
he must demonstrate the dependability of audience upon him,
he must demonstrate that no one but the artist can do art.

Therefore, art must appear to be complex, pretentious, profound,
serious, intellectual, inspired, skillfull, significant, theatrical,
it must appear to be valuable as commodity so as to provide the
artist with an income.
To raise its value (artist's income and patrons profit), art is made
to appear rare, limited in quantity and therefore obtainable and
accessible only to the social elite and institutions.

FLUXUS ART-AMUSEMENT
To establish artist's nonprofessional status in society,
he must demonstrate artist's dispensability and inclusiveness,
he must demonstrate the selfsufficiency of the audience,
he must demonstrate that anything can be art and anyone can do it.

Therefore, art-amusement must be simple, amusing, unpretentious,
concerned with insignificances, require no skill or countless
rehearsals, have no commodity or institutional value.

The value of art-amusement must be lowered by making it unlimited,
massproduced, obtainable by all and eventually produced by all.

Fluxus art-amusement is the rear-guard without any pretention to urge to participate in the competition of "one upmanship with the avant-garde. it strives for the monostructural and nontheatrical qualities of simple natural event, a game or a gag. It is the fusion of Spike Jones, Vaudeville, gag, children's games and Duchamp.

In practicality, it was a rough road, marked by expulsions in a vein similar to the Surrealists and Situationists. Utopian in concept, in reality there were conflicts that arose and defeated Maciunas' vision. One of the major splits to occur in the ranks of Fluxus, was the protest of a concert by Karl Stockhausen, the electronic composer and a former professor of Cage, on September 8, 1964. Henry Flynt, the originator of concept art, joined Maciunas in the protest, along with Ay-O, Ben Vautier and Allen Ginsberg, the lone performer in Stockhausen's Originale, who joined the picket line. Other performers, such as Higgins, MacLow and Paik were expelled by Maciunas. Later, Flynt was told that Maciunas' action was based on his jealousy of Charlotte Moorman's New York Avant-Garde Festival, which attempted to coalesce the post-Cagian artists in competition with Maciunas. Fluxus continued, but without the radical social and political content that Maciunas first envisioned.

Despite the inter-factional splints of Fluxus, it's influence on contemporary art has been substantial. Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell practically invented a new artistic medium - video art. The artist book movement of the seventies was spurred on in great part by Dick Higgins' Something Else Press. Mail art developed out of the proto-Fluxus Yam Festival of George Brecht and Robert Watts, and by the activities of occasional Fluxus participant Ray Johnson. Robert Watt's postage stamps, postcard series by various members, including Filliou's Monsters are Inoffensive, Ben's Postman's Choice (in which the two sides of a postcard are addressed to different correspondents), and Maciunas Flux Post Kit 7, in which work by Watts, Filliou, Ken Friedman, and James Riddle contain the seeds that would germinate the international mail art movement. Cheaply produced multiples, and their international self-distribution, have also influenced the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) ethos.

There are many points of departure from which alternative cultural workers can depart and expand upon Fluxus. Maciunas was one of the leading pioneers of cooperative loft living in Soho, along with others like fellow Lithuanian Jonas Mekas, influential independent filmmaker and distributor. The Fluxus effect on independent film is considerable, with Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Paul Sharits, and Robert Breer, all having made significant contributions to the medium. Ono had one of the most significant impacts on popular culture, with her marriage to Beatle John Lennon, staging events like Bed In, and exposing an unprepared and often uncomfortable public to avant-garde music. Ono is a good example of how the Spectacle convulses in reaction to uncontaminated strains of avant-garde thought.

Ken Friedman was instrumental in the circulation of artist address lists, stimulating the spread of mail art. He was the founding editor of the New York Correspondence School Weekly Breeder, a zine from the late sixties, passed on to several other mail art participants, including Bill Gaglione and Tim Mancusi of the Bay Area Dada group in San Francisco. The title referred to the circle of correspondents that formed around Ray Johnson, a former Black Mountain student, and named by E. M. Plunkett in 1962.Johnson had been sending letters of an artistic nature since his childhood. Fascinated by both popular culture and artistic intelligentsia, by the mid-fifties Johnson's mailing list included artists, pop icons and socialites. By 1962, he was admonishing his correspondents to "add and send on" enclosed works to third parties, either known or unknown to his correspondents. In this way, the circles of mail art rippled outwards, gaining considerable momentum when the Canadian art collective General Idea began the publication of FILE "megazine," and popularized the concept of art through the mail.

This was art not in the traditional sense, but a mirroring of the Lettrist Internationals potlatch gifting. It was a direct response to the commercialization of the artworld, and an attempt to find an alternative method of distribution. Johnsons' circle of friends included Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol, but he avoided the pomp and circumstance of recognition. His collage works of the fifties, incorporating aspects of popular culture such as portraits of Elvis and Lucky Strike logos, pre-dated Warhol. Johnson neither sought or embraced the spotlight of mainstream attention cast on the emerging Pop movement. Like Duchamp, he would participate with, but never join artistic movements. While others in his set were staging happenings, Johnson was performing nothings. While friendly with many of the Fluxus artists, Johnson held himself aloof from consistent association.

Yet Ray Johnson was not immune from the compulsion of Breton, Isou, Debord and Maciunas to excommunicate those unable to follow the purist line. "You have been dropped from the New York Correspondence School" became a disgrace to some, a badge of honor to others participating in the growing mail art medium. Despite his strong stamp on the movement, mail art grew exponentially. FILE spread the concept internationally, and mail art became an important means of ommunication between Western and Eastern bloc artists. Bolstered by international treaties, the postal system was one of the only available means of communication between artists separated by divergent political systems. Eastern European and Latin American artists embraced the medium to circumvent governmental suppression of individual freedoms,including the exchange of information with cultural colleagues.

In 1972, Jerry Bowles, the author of the article, "Out of the Gallery, into the Mailbox" appearing in the March-April issue of Art in America, wrote: In all of its various manifestations, the new movement might best be served by the label "community" art-because its real aim is to provide a system through which artists can communicate with each other, learn of joint interests, and promote the development of ideas. It is more than an anti-gallery stance (although the activity was ertainly precipitated by gallery elitism, unavailability, and the notion that the art scene is necessarily centered where the art business is). The informality of community matter what form the activity takes (notebooks, postcards, video exchange), the "product" remains simply the transmission process and is more "art-related" than art.

Mail art not only stimulated indirect communication with artists, but brought them into direct contact. One thinks immediately of Dana Atchely, who in the same year as the Bowles article appeared, toured North America showing the results of his Notebook (1969) and Space Atlas (1971), which had been assembled by inviting contributors to submit work. Over three hundred artists responded.

This in turn inspired similar assembled works, such as Bowles own Art Work, No Commercial Value, and Richard Kostelanetz and Henry Korn's Assembling editions. Today, the assembling is a mail art tradition, carried on by M. B. Corbett and his Tensetendoned, Pascal Lenoir's Mani Art (France), the ubiquitous Gaglione's Stampzine (composed of rubber stamp contributions), Claudia Pütz's Pips Dada and others, many of which have been researched by mail art historian Stephen Perkins in his recent catalog, Assembling Magazines: International networking collaborations from Hungary to Japan.

Atchely's journey of discovery inspired other mail art congregations, including the Deccadance, which took place in Hollywood in 1974, summing up the first wave of mail art activity. Artists from New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Toronto and Vancouver participated in the event, inspired in part by Fluxus artist Robert Filliou's 1963 concept of an Eternal Network of collaborating artists. Mail artists' use of the term networking, which began appearing frequently in the eighties, is rooted in this concept of a community of artists in "permanent creation."

Another mail art concept, Tourism, proposed by the Swiss artist H. R. Fricker, prompted a series of Worldwide Decentralized Mail Art Congresses in 1986. Wherever two or more mail artists met throughout the year, there a Congress would take place, the results of which were forwarded to Congress documentarians Fricker and Günther Ruch. This was followed in 1992 by a similar string of Networker Congresses, which attempted to bring together similar DIY cultures, such as my own Dallas congress, keynoted by the Rev.. Ivan Stang, from the Church of the Sub-Genius. Other participatory networks, such as zine, fax, flyposter, performance, rubber stamp, artist postage stamp and emerging telecommunication cultures, were also involved in the year's activities.

The most ambitious networkers were German networkers Peter Küstermann and his pARTner Angela Pahler, who traveled to five continents in a series of 173 congress meetings. Uniformed in the garb of antique postal workers, Küstermann and Pahler (later self-renamed the Netmails), hand-delivered messages from one networker to another in the course of their travels. Of the experience, Küstermann wrote :When our fathers travelled in uniform to other countries, that meant disaster. Who knows if our children will have to stay home because immense travelling costs due to the exhaustion of our natural resources will make such a journey a privilege of the rich? So: for us the chance of a longtime travel on a shoestring is also an obligation, to promote and intensify the network idea as a peace-creating force against mass society, racism, and commercialized art markets in a capitalist world...How shall we keep the network open if not by integrating more of them regularly? Their
unprecedented ideas means progress and development, if the network does not want to petrify alive.
This intermingling of various alternative cultures is a gradual process taking place over time as the various networks become aware of one another.

It was not until the mid-80's that Mike Gunderloy's Factsheet 5 brought the community of zine publishers into consciousness of one another. Previous to that, science fiction fanzines flourished as a result of letter columns in 1930 pulp magazines; small press literary and poetry chapbooks abounded; mail art publications experimented with new speedprint and photocopy technologies; anarchist and political journals shared a long history; pop culture fanzines centered on various fixations; the Amateur Press Association (APAs) was conducted in a codified manner; and punk zines were an ongoing international concern.

While these foundations of zinedom were reactions to a spectacular society, unwilling to voice the concerns of anything but consumer driven mass culture, other forces shaping the emerging network were at play in repressive societies, such as the Soviet Union, where self-publishing was a necessity in light of institutionalized disenfranchisment. In the forward to his 1974 book, Samizdat: Voices of the Soviet Opposition, George Saunders writes: Samizdat is a Soviet term coined by post-Stalin dissidents for the old Russian revolutionary practice, from the days of the czarist censorship of circulating uncensored material privately, usually in manuscript form nonconformist poetry and fiction, memoirs, historical documents, protest statements, trial records, etc. The name "Samizat" -Self-Publishers- is an ironic arody of such official acronyms as "Gosizdat," meaning State Publishers (short for Gosudarstvennoe Izdatelstvo). More colloquially, one might translate samizdat as the Do-It-Yourself Press. The message is clear: "If the bureaucrats won't print it, we'll get it around ourselves." (quoted in Fred Wright's Personality of Parade: A Psychoanalytic Analysis of the Zine Revolution, Kent State thesis, December, 1995, Page 5)

It was a short hop from the Do-It-Yourself Press to Book Your Own Fucking Life. Punk erupted in the mid-seventies in reaction to a stale musical climate, and the pent-up fury of a new youth culture. Like all explosions, there were rumblings preceding it. Greil Marcus has written of the Situationist connection to punk at some length in Lipstick Traces. There was also a Fluxus connection. Before the Velvet Underground formed in 1965, John Cale was playing in a group, the Dream Syndicate, fronted by La Monte Young, who had organized a series of musical events at Yoko Ono's loft. A warning appeared on the announcement for the programs: THE PURPOSE OF THIS SERIES IS NOT ENTERTAINMENT. (Please Kill Me, 4)

Punk wasn't entertainment either. It had more to do with youth seizing control of their own lives, participating at their own party by doing-it-themselves. Punk zines became the samizat of a culture that wanted nothing to do with the mainstream. Mainstream fascination with the punk phenomena accelerated the avant-garde dream of an authentic community of creators in contrast to a passive society of consumers, by infiltrating society at it's very foundation - it's youth. And although youth spins off a new flavor of the week, as is the want of the unending thirst spectacle, punk survives: flourishing as a result of structures, such as bands (TAZs), zines, and independent distros, that link the community. Cabaret Voltaire, if it existed today, couldn't accommodate the gate-crashers at its door. Those looking for the cutting edge of culture in music, the visual and performing arts, are legion. They need to look no farther then the flickering screens of their computer monitors to find a community sharing their concerns on the internet and world wide web. The Bohemian Diaspora has spread electronically, superseding the need for a Cabaret Voltaire or Black Mountain College that gathers the avant-garde in a specific time and place. A wired world carries the message of the avant-garde to a new generation with the means of sharing interests and knowledge across arbitrary barriers. The dung-heap of Dada has been fertilized by successive groups of avant-gardists into a flourishing mix of alternatives.

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