Ghosts of Premodernity: Butoh and the Avant-Garde, Shannon C. Moore

Introduction

Japan was in a state of ideological crisis following the Second World War. Japan’s political structure radically altered and newly forming concepts of “democracy” and “freedom” were on the rise. One difficult question in this environment was the question of identity; how could one be “Japanese” without evoking the baggage of nationalism? While the majority of Japanese promoted Western technological advances promising to bring Japan out of economic despair, scholars and artists worried that such progress would come at a terrible cost. Studying the impact of Japan’s first experience of modernisation in the Meiji era, they wondered what would be left behind, suppressed and forgotten in the changing postwar landscape.

Concerned with the effects of mass production and ‘cookie-cutter’ conformity, many artists and writers sought alternative visions for postwar modernity. This led some to a reexamination of Japanese premodernity, traces of which were buried during the Meiji period of Westernisation, and were examples of Japanese subjectivity unspoiled by wartime militarism. It is argued, that artists and thinkers believed these traces lingered like ghosts in the modern day, hidden under polite surfaces, within the margins of society, and in the dreams and nightmares of Japanese people. Like modern-day shamans reviving their community by embodying spirits, it was up to the artists to confront the demons haunting postwar Japan. One of the most famous of such ‘shamans’ was butoh founder Hijikata Tatsumi.

David Goodman described the theatre, art and literature to emerge from Japan at this time as a ‘return of the gods’ (Goodman, 1988: 23). This was a vigorous attempt to reclaim what Tanizaki (1977: 61) called ‘this world of shadows’ that was becoming lost to modernity. For Mori Joji (1973: 23-27) these traces were ‘ghosts’ found haunting the creative fictions of modern Japan. Hijikata Tatsumi and his dance theatre ankoku butoh sought to invoke these ghosts—this resurfacing abjected past—in flesh form.

After the war, Japan was devastated physically, economically and morally. A Western reporter described the destruction of Yokohama as ‘a man-made desert, ugly, desolate and hazy in the dust that rose from crushed brick and mortar’ (Duus, 1998: 254). Art critic Toro Yoshiaki writes about some of the anti-art (han-geijutsu) artists of the group Neo-Dada Organizers: ‘The blasted city had been their playground: their first toys had been bottles melted into distortion from fire bombs, pieces of roof-beams found in the ashes. Now, their shows were full of these junk flowers’ (Cited in Munroe, 1994: 157).

In 1960, the US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty, or Ampo, was up for renewal giving way in the 1960s to ‘the most creative outburst of anarchistic, subversive and riotous tendencies in the history of modern Japan’ (Munroe, 1994: 149). Underground theatre (angura), new wave (noberu bagu) cinema, avant-garde photography and transgressive literature all resonated with a sense of violent exploration, grim introspection, aggressive, erotic action and a desperate search for identity and cultural continuity. Hijikata’s presence expressed a ‘return of the primitive.’ Finding inspiration in both the native premodern and the European avant-garde arts, he helped create an art form that would reconnect with and unleash the power of a ‘premodern’ body.

Hijikata Tatsumi

Hijikata was born in 1928 in the rural village of Akita. He was the youngest of a large family and grew up being told tales of demons and magic. He also experienced the physical hardship of agrarian labour. He experienced a certain level of abuse as a child. The shock of this caused a sense of disassociation…he began to see his home life as a dark theatre where he would be forced to play a role. Rather than be a victim he would transfer his experience to dance: ‘life is dance, dance must be as real as life’ (Kurihara, 1996: 25). When asked about whether or not his dance was influenced by traditional art forms such as kabuki or noh, he discussed how as a child he would listen to his father recite gidayu, and make violent advances upon his mother, as if ‘measuring his steps.’ He would witness his mother run out of the house, the neighbours commenting on the pattern of her kimono. All this, he explained, was theatre (in Shibusawa, 2000: 54).

Hijikata was exposed to modern dance in Akita and studied with Matsumoto Katsuko, the disciple of Eguchi Takaya who had studied with Mary Wigman (one of the key figures in the development of German expressionist dance). Eguchi and his wife were Ôno Kazuo’s teachers and their work was considered orthodox neue tanz (German expressionist dance). The German expressionist dance of Mary Wigman consisted of: ‘dancing barefoot, exploring primitive rhythms and motifs, and experimenting with costumes, props and masks. Largely abstract, frequently dark and angst-ridden, focused on fundamental forms and essential emotions’ (Kostelanetz, 1993: 235).

Discontented and unable to commit to touring villages with Matsumoto, Hijikata moved to Tokyo to study Western dance. Dabbling in ballet, modern dance, jazz dance and flamenco, he soon learned that certain physical limitations would bar him from serious study. One teacher described him as being ‘clumsy but eager’ and mentioned that students would avoid him when he was practicing spins because he would ‘violently crash into them’ (Kurihara, 1996: 17). Hijikata also experienced alienation—his inaka (or ‘country-bumpkin’) upbringing clashing with hip, cosmopolitan Tokyo.

Kurihara writes of how Hijikata fell-in with a disaffected crowd and began living a ‘bohemian’ life. Working odd jobs and sleeping in flophouses, he had befriended artists On Kawara and Ushio Shinohara. They exchanged ideas about art, philosophy and literature and were exposed to the translated works of many European writers of the avant-garde. Hijikata spent his time living on the edge, mingling with people whose lifestyles involved art, crime and drugs. He was fascinated with the marginal lives of male prostitutes and, though heterosexual himself, he found personal relevance in their passionate and estranged lifestyle. As alienated as Hijikata felt in Tokyo, he did not return to Akita; he ‘literally clung to the margins of urban Japan’ (Kurihara, 1996: 17).

Hijikata drank heavily, was nocturnal and would wear his hair in a wild manner. Despite one leg being shorter than the other, he was filled with the need to dance and to create a physical reality mirroring the one in his mind. And with this desire he created butoh, a ‘dance of ritualistic quality that would transform body and mind’ (Kurihara, 1996: 2). He felt a ‘compulsive desire to alter reality, to create an imaginary world out of reality’ (Kurihara, 1996: 25). Munroe writes that the performances ‘aimed to uncage a primal energy at the core of man’s (sic) physical being, an energy long suppressed and forgotten he believed, in modern society’ (Munroe, 1994: 190). Hijikata sought to use the body as an agent of transformation, invoking the memories and trauma of the Japanese psyche. He used the body and the face to articulate what could not seem to be spoken. He and his dancers created a new language by which to unleash the hidden, taboo sides of Japanese consciousness: what some avant-garde Japanese artists felt was the ‘real’ Japan, and what critic Ishikawa Miyabi called ‘the body that has been robbed’ (in Stein, 1988: 69).

Performances

Hijikata’s first piece in 1959 was based on the Mishima Yukio novel Kinjiki (Forbidden Colours). His debut was a tremendous shock to audiences that were more accustomed to the reserved stylisation of kabuki, noh or ballet. In this performance, a young man (Ôno Yoshito) feigned intercourse with a chicken by attempting to smother it between his thighs. He was then threatened by an older man’s sexual advances (Hijikata). There was no music and the piece concluded in darkness. Kinjiki aroused anger among the audience and Hijikata was exiled from the Association for Contemporary Performing Arts. Butoh has since enjoyed a reputation of being considered dangerous and marginal.

Widely recognised as Hijikata’s masterpiece was his 1968’s performance Revolt of the Flesh (or Hijikata Tatsumi and the Japanese). In the first act, Hijikata emerged wearing a white bridal kimono (worn backwards). He was carried in a wooden container supported by several men who were followed by two noisy terrified animals: a pig in a baby crib and a rabbit on a metal platter held precariously on the end of a pole. This surreal train weaved its way through the audience, thus symbolically throwing the viewer into Hijikata’s universe of confusion. This transgression of the boundary separating the spectator and the performer exemplified the violent and aesthetically invasive quality found in all of Hijikata’s butoh. It also brings to mind the environment of a native Shinto ritual. One cannot be a passive observer, unaffected by such a performance.

Once on stage he disrobed to reveal that he was wearing nothing but a golden phallus. This references fertility rituals where performers would wear or carry a giant phallus, while at the same time Hijikata was mocking the Victorian propriety of modern Japan. He danced spasmodically and savagely, his body emaciated from fasting, his hair long and wild and his face unshaven. Again, parallels can be drawn to many native shamanic rites such as fertility rites and acts of fasting, exorcism and possession. He then jumped onto suspended metal plates that reflect light in such a manner that it intensified the implied violence of the chaotic performance. The final act climaxed with Hijikata tearing off a rooster’s head with his bare hands. Overall, the act was very primal, sexual and fierce. It used a reversal of accepted social imagery (a woman’s bridal gown on backwards and on a man; a pig stands in for a baby). Dressed in a ball gown he derisively ‘danced’ around, mocking Western forms and aesthetics. His body contorted, his face grimaced, he dragged the dress around, thrashing it, lifting it off the ground in a Flamenco manner, fighting with it. As Mark Holborn describes: ‘he writhed like a possessed Shaman—it was a dance from neither East nor West’ (Holborn, 1991:101).

Revolt of the Flesh concluded with Hijikata’s form being pulled and raised, spread out in the form of a crucifix, stretched over the audience by ropes in a manner suggesting the Ascension, sexual bondage, and that of a body being torn in two. With these violent, confusing, contradictory symbols he helped capture the ideological and emotional environment of Japan as expressed by the young artists and students in Tokyo.

In addition to his performance works on stage and in the streets, Hijikata collaborated with other artists such as photographer Hosoe Eikô. Hosoe was only twelve in 1945 when he returned to Tokyo after spending the war at a remote northern town. He acquired his own camera two years later. As a student in the 1950s, Hosoe—like Hijikata—was drawn to capturing the ‘underbelly’ of Tokyo. Upon witnessing Kinjiki, he persuaded Hijikata to work with him on a film. The resulting Navel and the Atomic Bomb (1960) was a dance-drama set along the seashore and filled with mythic and demonic elements.

Later Hijikata and Hosoe travelled to Hijikata’s northern home. Here they worked on a work based upon the myth of the kamaitachi: ‘a weasel-like demon who haunted the rice fields and would slash you if you encountered him’ (Holborn, 1999: 8). An encyclopaedia defines kamaitachi as ‘a lacerated wound caused by a state of vacuum which is produced partially in the air, owing to a great whirlwind’ (Holborn, 1999: 8). Mark Holborn who has written on both Hosoe and Hijikata’s work interprets the kamaitachi as the ‘breeze of the nuclear age’ (Holborn, 1999: 8). In this series of images, Hosoe captures Hijikata as the ‘fool,’ possessed, dangerous but innocent. Poet and critic Takiguchi Shuzo writes of this collaboration:

The villagers are the witnesses of the strange visitor, finding in him a lost image of the magician-priest forgotten in a remote past, wearing an innocent and broad smile at the visit of a ‘fool’ (oko in the old term) quite lost too. This is the very smile to be worn on the footpath of the rice fields, often enough of a smile next to terror. (Takeguchi, in Munroe, 1994: 190)

This combination of amusement, awe and fear, as well as the dual identity within the travelling stranger of both magician-priest and ‘fool,’ can be seen in the premodern, itinerant performers whose heritage played a key role in Hijikata’s philosophy. Yoshida Teigo writes of these migratory strangers as representative not only of the mystical ‘”other world”, but as ‘marginal “liminal” figure(s) … (who) mediate between the world of uchi (inside) and the world of yoso (outside), between man and gods, between the ke (secular) and the hare (sacred), or between “this world” and the “other world”‘ (Yoshida, 1981: 96).

Transgressive European Influence

Through Hijikata’s friendships with writers including Shibusawa Tastuhiko and Mishima Yukio, he became familiar with the European literary works of de Sade, Rimbaud, Lautremont, Bataille, Genet and Artaud. These writers informed Hijikata’s evolving and transgressive exploration of the conceptual boundaries of notions of beauty, gender and sexuality. Hijikata was especially struck by the writings of Antonin Artaud who ‘imagined a western theatre that would neglect realism and narrative for kinetic images, ritual and even magic. Such theatre could surround the audience, even enticing it to participate’ (Kostelanetz, 1993: 11). The idea of this ritual mode for a theatre, that would engulf spectators, eliminating the separation between spectator and performer, came to Artaud after witnessing Balinese theatre at the Paris Colonial Exposition in 1931.

Hijikata explored these notions in ankoku butoh. His butoh represents a modern synthesis of native, premodern roots and twentieth century confrontations with modernity through the avant-garde. It is this confrontation that Artaud described as ‘cruelty’: he advocated an ‘attack’ on the audience’s sensibilities. Kurihara writes that Hijikata’s dance had just such a palpable physical effect on the audience (1996: 3). Both Artaud and Hijikata, worked to create a theatre motivated by the inner workings of the unconscious, of dream states and mythology. Yet they wanted to avoid expression that would be easily analysed psychologically. Like the surrealists, they sought liberation from the confines of analytical logic and rationality. Butoh wanted to dig up repressed memories, traumas, images of deformity and insanity. Butoh critic Goda Nario writes of this liberation of the ‘darker side, connected with the vulgar and possibly orgiastic growth processes in the depths’ as a move towards the integration of both ‘high’ and ‘low,’ bringing humanity back into balance with nature (in Klein, 1988: 79). To Hijikata, butoh gets its energy from resurrecting that which is lost at birth and he believed the ‘body was overly domesticated and only by de-domesticating it—could one attain a state of latent chaos’ (Kurihara, 1996: 3).

‘The concealed world’—Shamanism and the roots of Japanese theatre

The postwar strategy in the arts of drawing upon Japan’s premodern culture included a process Susan Klein describes as the appropriation of marginality (Klein 1988). Avant-garde artists did not look to the formal, fully developed traditions of noh or kabuki, but rather took inspiration from rural folk dances, popular theatre and agricultural ritual dances known as kagura, often performed by ‘sacred outcasts.’

Kagura comes from the word kamigakari or divine inspiration/divine possession and are part of a larger genre of rituals called minzoku geino consisting of magico-religious dances, semi-dramatic pieces, puppet shows, festivals and parades. Benito Ortolani defines the purpose of kagura as ‘to pray for an infusion of life-force, for the prolongation or revitalization of life’ (Ortolani, 1990: 15). But, kagura is also seen as performance, it is literally a performance for the gods. This performance became one of the sources for Japanese folk dances, later infusing the theatres of noh and kabuki.

Japanese anthropologists such as Amino Yoshihiko conducted research into historically marginal classes of magico-religious practitioners and performers. Such groups were divided according to their levels of ‘pollution’ (kegare), a notion associated with Shinto. Postwar artists, like Hijikata, began reading the works of folk theorists and took inspiration from their descriptions of underclass mediums (miko/itako), prostitutes, itinerant monks, acrobats and actors. These people would wander from village to village, performing rituals, musical performances and magical rites and were seen as mediators between this world and the ‘other’ world of the gods.

Gradually, as Japanese society became more urbanised, the value and focus of these arts shifted from religion to entertainment. Early kabuki performers consisted of beggars and prostitutes (kawaramono) who both lived and performed in riverbeds and on the edges of town. Writing about the connections between theatre, ritual arts and marginality, Yamaguchi Masao observes that these early kabuki performers, like itinerant monks, ‘were gods and sacrificial victims, sacred and polluted, visitors from a greater world and at the same time bearers of the sins of the community’ (Yamaguchi, 1977: 173). With the emergent wealth of the merchant class in Edo, kabuki became housed in halls built for the purpose of theatre. The postwar prevalence of street theatre in the 1960’s shows an attempt to return to the time before these physical theatre halls. Postwar street theatre expressed a desire to go back to an age when performances were held in the streets, open spaces and shrines. These postwar performers sought to reawaken the ritualistic energy and purpose of those early minzoku geino within their own works.

Mary Douglas writes about the dangers and powers posed by boundaries and margins in her work Purity and Danger. This marginality, she writes, ‘may be interpreted as having sacred power or negative power of pollution, or both, but in either case is found disturbing’ (Douglas, 1970: 37). Hinin (outcasts or ‘non-humans’) not only purified death pollution, but also pollution from crimes, and were involved in knocking down buildings and dealing with afterbirth. They were a diverse group involved in begging and performance arts, and were employed for funerary services. While crucial to the spiritual maintenance of the community hinin were discriminated against and excluded from any position of real status. As both an outsider and a performer drawn to the mystical and ‘criminal’ depths of Tokyo’s underground, Hijikata felt an imaginary kinship to the kawara kojiki. He began to appropriate this tradition and explored a sense of premodern abjection within his dance troupe.

Premodern imagination

As noted above, Goodman chronicles the exploration of the premodern in the postwar avant-garde theatre, discussing the ‘shared need to re-inject the gods into modern Japanese theatre’ (Goodman, 1988: 15). What Goodman calls the post-shingeki movement broke with the socialist realism of shingeki in order to return to the irrationality found in Japan’s premodern folkloric imagination. Post-shingeki proposes a ‘dialectical return to the Japanese popular imagination,’ and the ‘resurgence of interest in Tokugawa folk culture’ (Goodman, 1988: 16). The post-shingeki helped revive certain late Edo theatre traditions of manipulating and utilising folklore to voice political critique, and resistance. Performers wanted to return to the mythical roots of Japanese theatre, ‘the noh and kabuki which grew out of the magical carnival chaos of folk art’ (Tsuno, 1969: 68). As critic Ozasa Yoshio wrote, post-shingeki calls on ‘grotesque abstractions of the subliminal impulses of the modern Japanese imagination’ (in Goodman, 1988: 15).

Eguchi reads butoh in a postmodern light that also relates to Goodman’s model and utilises what Jameson calls the ‘nostalgia mode,’ longing to return to a ‘world of darkness that our modern age has lost, where the gap between words and things disappears and where existence unfolds before us’ (in Klein, 1988: 89-91). Klein develops this analysis in Freudian terms as the ‘postmodern nostalgia for the ‘privileged lost object of desire’: a desire to regress to the period of pre-oedipal childhood’ (Klein, 1988: 22). She sees within butoh three forms of nostalgia: the carnivalesque popular culture, kitsch vulgarity and longings for primal childhood (Klein, 1988: 23). She sees butoh as utilising strategies of metamorphosis and grotesque imagery in this process. To relate this to Goodman, such ‘grotesque abstractions of subliminal impulses’ resemble what Freud termed the uncanny; what was once familiar, but which has become unfamiliar through alienation.

Conclusion

Following Japan’s defeat many Japanese artists and intellectuals longed for cultural definition and identity that would not be deemed ‘nationalistic.’ This led many to re-explore Meiji folklore and the work of Yanagita Kunio, whose theories offered ideological alternatives offering new visions of Japanese subjectivity. Hijikata Tatsumi found importance and meaning in the culture and folklore of rural and marginal traces of premodern Japan. He delved into a world beyond the rational. In this essay, I have argued that avant-garde artists, including Hijikata, believed that there was a power in premodern culture that was suppressed during the Meiji period. Hijikata sought to explore spaces in postwar Japan where such a memory remained; spaces deemed eccentric, magical, sexualised and ambiguous. Hijikata and his avant-garde peers were interested in how marginality and the premodern uncanny stood in contrast to manufactured, idealised, clean and official images of Japan. The resurfacing of ghosts in postwar avant-garde arts helped to retrieve Japan’s prewar and premodern cultural identity. This reclamation and reintegration made possible an articulation of Japanese subjectivity and identity that went beyond wartime rhetoric. This was a critique of modernity and a return to the premodern world that was something more than nostalgia. Postwar avant-garde art such as Hijikata’s butoh helped establish a new point of reference for expressing Japanese authenticity.

References

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: an analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo (London : Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970).

Duus, Peter. Modern Japan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). Freud, Sigmund. ‘The Uncanny,’ trans. Alix Strachley, in Studies in Parapsychology, ed. Philip Rieff. New York: Collier Books, 1977.

Goodman, David, ‘New Japanese Theater,’ The Drama Review 15 (Spring 1971): 154-168. Goodman, David G. Japanese Drama and Culture in the 1960’s: Return of the Gods (London: East Gate Books, 1988).

Goodman, David G. Angura: Posters of the Japanese Avant-Garde (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999). Hijikata Tatsumi, ‘From Being Jealous of a Dog’s Vein.’ The Drama Review, 44:1 T165 (2000): 56-79.

Hijikata Tatsumi. ‘Wind Daruma.’ The Drama Review, 44:1 T165 (2000): 71-79. Hijikata, Tatsumi. ‘Inner Material/Material.’ The Drama Review, 44:1 T165, (2000): 36-42.

Holborn, Mark. ‘Eikoh Hosoe’ in Aperture: Masters of Photography Eikoh Hosoe (New York: Aperture, 1999). Holborn, Mark. Beyond Japan (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991).

Ivy, Marilyn. Discourses of the Vanishing. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Mori Joji in ‘The Liberation of Japanese Ghosts’ in Jackson Bailey ed. Listening to Japan: A Japanese Anthology (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973): 23-27.

Klein, Susan Blakeley. Ankoku Buto: The Premodern and Postmodern Influences on the Dance of Utter Darkness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). Kostelanetz, Richard. Dictionary of the Avant-gardes (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1993).

Kurihara, Nanako. The Most Remote Thing in the Universe: Critical Analysis of Hijikata Tatsumi’s Butoh Dance (New York: New York University, 1996). Kurihara, Nanako. ‘Hijikata Tatsumi: The Words of Butoh,’ The Drama Review, 44:1 T165, (2000): 12-26.

Munroe, Alexandra (ed). Scream Against the Sky: Japanese Art After 1945 (New York: Abrams, 1994). Ortolani, Benito. The Japanese Theatre: From Shamanistic Ritual to Contemporary Pluralism (New Jersey: Princeton University, 1990).

Shibusawa, Tatsuhiko. ‘Hijikata Tatsumi: Plucking off the Darkness of the Flesh,’ The Drama Review, 44:1 T165 (2000): 49-55. Stein, Bonnie-Sue. ‘Celebrating Hijikata,’ Dance Magazine, 62. 5 (1988).

Tanizaki, Junichiro. In Praise of Shadows, trans. Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Tsuno Kaitaro, ‘Biwa and Beatles: An Invitation to Modern Japanese Theatre,’ Concerned Theatre Japan Special Introductory Issue (Oct. 1969.): 6-32.

Yamaguchi, Masao. ‘Kingship, Theatricality, and Marginal Reality in Japan,’ Text & Context. (1977): 151-179. Yoshida, Teigo. ‘The Stranger as God: The Place of the Outsider in Japanese Folk Religion.’ Ethnology, 20. 2 (1981): 87-99.

Yoshida, Teigo. ‘The Stranger as God: The Place of the Outsider in Japanese Folk Religion.’ Ethnology, 20. 2 (1981): 87-99.

above copied from: http://www.foraysforyou.com/public/performanceparadigm/journal/issue-2/articles/ghosts-of-premodernity-butoh-and-the-avant-garde/

YOKO ONO, michele Robecchi

MICHELE ROBECCHI: You’ve been based in New York since the late 1950s, and have had a unique opportunity to witness very different times and swings – from the Fluxus days through the East Village boom of the 80s and the consequent crisis of the 90s. Do you think that your work has somehow been influenced by these changes through the years? Obviously the audience in the 60s was very different to the audience of the 90s. Do you feel people have perceived your art differently?

YOKO ONO: Well, in a very strange way, I saw Pop Art happening and then Op Art and all that, but I wasn’t affected by it so much, you know. Before that was Abstract Expressionism… When Pop Art was very fashionable – I use the word fashionable which is maybe not fair to them, but it was – people expected Pop Art to be the only thing that you should be doing. If you were not doing that then you weren’t a good artist. But there were still some cult followers of my work; there were always some people who liked this kind of art side of work.

MR: I was especially thinking about the 80s because it is normally assumed that it was a very joyful, if not slightly hedonistic time. I’m talking about the pre-AIDS days, when all of a sudden there was a lot of money involved and many social concerns seemed to be brushed aside.

YO: Well, I was never on that boat. [laughs] I always missed the boat, and that’s fine. It was probably better that I missed it.

MR: Absolutely. I think it’s good to miss the boat sometimes. Were you annoyed by the reaction to My Mummy was Beautiful (2004) at the Liverpool Biennial? (1)

YO: Yeah, I didn’t understand that at all. I was very shocked, because when I thought of the idea, I thought of covering the city of Liverpool with all those beautiful elements of my mother, or motherhood, and I thought it was my way of saying thank you to Liverpool. I wanted to say thank you by giving something. And I thought they would love it, I thought they would love the experience of it. I never thought it was going to create controversy.

MR: Especially for such an image. I mean, Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde is over a century old and one would expect society to have covered some ground after that.





YO: You see, that’s another very interesting thing. You were all born from a woman’s body but you don’t want to think about it, you want to always sweep that under the rug. You don’t want to face a woman’s body on that level. But why? That’s where you came from. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that that’s where the perversion of society starts. In other words, you are debasing women. You have received a lot from women but would like to ignore that. You would like to ignore the power of women in a way, and of course the female sex feels that and their position is one of resentment and anger. It’s not healthy. It’s almost like you’re ignoring or abusing half the world and their energy. If you allow that energy to blossom then it’s better for the world, the world that you live in.

MR: You have a piece here in the exhibition, We are all Water. Is it the same piece you showed in London in 1966?

YO: I think that I first showed it in 1971. It’s basically the same one but here it’s in a different form.

MR: You also did a song called We are all Water at about the same time, which I gather was another evolution of the same concept.

YO: Yes. It was very interesting. I was just inspired to do that. The idea was the fact that we are all the same, just water. So it should be easy for us to communicate. But then Dr Moto discovered not an idea, but the fact that water can understand words and it changes quality when we put certain energies through it. It’s just fantastic – I really like the fact that it was almost like what I was doing was proven by science [laughter], and that gave more legitimacy to it.

MR: Don’t you think it’s crazy that people buy water?

YO: Yeah. Isn’t it amazing? Water is such a basic element. You and I are the same element. Only the container is different. So that’s why I understand you and you understand me. Of course sometimes we are fearful of understanding each other, so we pretend that we don’t. It’s just pretending, you know.

MR: The association of a visual artist like Matthew Barney with a pop star like Björk doesn’t seem to create a stir like it did in your days. Quite the contrary, the art world now seems more receptive to these ‘stardom intrusions’ than in the past.

YO: Yeah, I think it’s great, because we have more freedom that way. Why were we limiting ourselves to one field? I think it had a lot to do with practicality, in the sense that you have to limit yourself to one job and have a name card saying ‘I am an artist’, no, ‘I am a musician’, ‘please hire me’. Especially in the art world, somebody was saying – I don’t think I should actually quote the person’s name, but a pretty important artist was saying that once you establish yourself as an artist in a certain form, then you are known for that, and if you change your ways of expressing yourself you may become less popular and you lose your job in effect. It doesn’t sell anymore. You know how to do this type of painting and you suddenly say, ‘No, I’m going to just do photography’ or something like that, nobody’s going to buy it. So, in a way, it’s establishing yourself as a monetary value.

MR: Where do you think this need to categorise people in this way comes from?

YO: It’s because you want to make sure that you can support yourself and you can make money by your art, and for that you have to say, well, ‘I’m like this, and if you buy my work in five years it might become more expensive.’ It’s like a name card. And, of course, I don’t have a name card.

MR: One of my favourite pieces of yours is the all-white chess set Play It By Trust (1966). I assumed it was about showing that we are all equals, right?

YO: Yes. It’s very much like the We are all Water piece.

MR: But there are different dynamics involved in chess. There is a battle; there is competition.

YO: It immediately dispenses with the idea of war and a battle, because if you are the same, you don’t have a war. Who are we fighting? And why?

MR: Your work for peace in the late 60s left a deep mark. Today war is still a big issue but the majority of artists seem to be dealing with the subject in a different way from the artists of your generation, and you especially.

YO: In what sense?

MR: Well, I get the impression that you were sending a global message in a more propositional and positive way, whereas today artists’ works tend to be more documentary oriented. And I was wondering if this change is more the result of our society growing more cynical, or becoming part of an ‘it didn’t work out that way, so let’s try it this other way’ attitude.

YO: I think both. I really think that many people in the young generation feel that what we did didn’t work. But I say that it did work. I say that if it didn’t work, we wouldn’t have the world now. It helped to keep the world going and also it probably made the world into a more complex and interesting society. Some, in their minds, only focus on the destruction of society. But let’s focus on what we have achieved. We have achieved an incredible, sophisticated civilisation and the ideas in our heads are very, very interesting and wise. I think that when you watch the TV you will see that some of the things talked about by ordinary people could be the words of somebody very special like a philosopher, a guru or a priest in the 16th or 17th centuries. And nowadays it’s just normal for all of us to be just talking like that. Even on TV they are expressing ideas that are very interesting, considering what it was like three or four centuries ago.

MR: So do you think that the media and the evolution of the media have played a role in this?

YO: Well, the evolution of the media has to do with meeting the demand of the people. There is an incredibly strong desire to communicate, and of course communication is everything that we have. I think that exchange and communication, and especially the exchange of information, gives us more and more power.

MR: But at the same time don’t you think it’s overwhelming?

YO: Well, I don’t know, of course we need pause, some time to rest and some time for entertainment. And that’s what I think artists are doing. Artists are doing something that’s two-fold: one is to wake people up, the other is to entertain them. And when I say entertain people it sounds like it’s less of a thing than the effort to wake people up, but it’s not really. Entertainment can be extremely wise and intelligent.

MR: And educational too.

YO: Right – game playing on the level of an exercise for your brain. So I really think in that sense the only hope we have is to try to change society through science and art.


MICHELE ROBECCHI IS SENIOR EDITOR AT CONTEMPORARY


YOKO ONO’S WORK WILL BE FEATURED NEXT NOVEMBER AT RIFLEMAKER, LONDON, ON THE OCCASION OF THE RECREATION OF JOHN DUNBAR AND MILES’ INDICA GALLERY, WHERE ONO ORIGINALLY SHOWED HER WORK IN 1966.


(1) My Mummy was Beautiful consisted of a series of banners, posters and stickers, posted all over the city of Liverpool, depicting a woman’s naked breast and vagina. A BBC poll and a Times inflammatory editorial described the work as offensive, and the fracas eventually resulted in the work being removed from the St Luke War Memorial. Paul Domela, deputy chief executive of Liverpool Biennial, declared that ‘We were aware that some would object to it. But, at the same time, we realised that a great many would love it as well […] In the campaign for the election in the European Union, there was an image of a woman breast-feeding. The campaign was aired across Europe, including some very Catholic countries. Over here, the difference was that the nipple was removed. This baby had its mouth open into nothingness. What does that say about the relationship we have in this country to motherhood? To begin to think about that and talk about it is very important.’

above copied from: http://contemporary-magazines.com/music84.htm

INTERVIEW: PIPILOTTI RIST, Michele Robecchi

MICHELE ROBECCHI: You came up with a very challenging statement during your talk at Tate Modern last December. You said you make art because you feel guilty.

PIPILOTTI RIST: Yes.

MR: What did you mean?

PR: I think that I should have probably moved a step further by now and I haven’t done it. I cannot analyse the feeling completely but you’re right, that’s the best question. I haven’t sorted it out yet. I think it comes from my Protestant education and the whole idea that when you’re born you inherit the sin or the guilt of your ancestors. I’m also afraid that if I find out why, I would stop making art.

MR: Do you think that this sense of guilt affects your work?

PR: It certainly does. I feel responsible for what I deliver. I don’t want to steal time from the viewer. I want to be as precise as I can. I never shared the underground notion that not being understandable is a quality. Being misunderstood is a fundamental problem that we have. My Japanese teacher said that problems or misunderstandings come from a lack of information – but on the other hand you cannot blow things up. When you write a one-page-text and are afraid that people will misunderstand you, it means that you would need 20 pages to make sure that your point is clear. But you don’t have that space or the concentration, so the question is how to be simple without being simplistic?

MR: I guess at the end of the day it is about making a selection of the few things that you think will best come across.

PR: And leave out the most problematic stuff. Do you think it’s the same for you?

MR: Absolutely. But writing exists within different formats. You can afford to be a different person to different people. And having a context probably helps you to narrow down what you want to say, although… well…

PR: Keep going. I like interviews where the interviewer paragraphs are longer than mine.

MR: (Laughs) It shouldn’t work like that. I think it’s boring when the interviewer tries to outdo the interviewed.





PR: No, it isn’t. All the writers and journalists try to restrain what they say and it’s a bad thing. I think they should be as subjective and as personal as possible. That’s why I like Hunter S. Thompson’s style. There is no such thing as objective journalism but all the newspapers try to make us believe that there is. Journalists always claim that their bosses don’t want them to be too present because people don’t want that. If this is true, then I think chief editors are completely wrong. I think people are interested in who’s writing. Restraint is often a form of self-protection.

MR: In the same way people might be interested in who’s behind the artwork. Do you have any curiosity to meet the artist when you see an artwork that you like?

PR: I’m interested in hearing stories about the work and the person behind it but I am also afraid that I might not like the artist. I found out that there are some good works from artists I don’t like personally because they are bluffers or gamers or Machiavellis. Though I prefer good works by lovely people.

MR: How about horrible works made by great people?

PR: That’s even more painful. And when you have personal contact, you try not to talk about art. It’s a psychological thing. But I don’t think that the artwork and the artist have to be so congruent.

MR: You turned down the opportunity to meet Yoko Ono once.

PR: Yes. She was with a gallerist I know and he called me and asked if I wanted to meet her. I was afraid so I declined but I don’t regret it. I was actually in direct contact with her once, when she was collecting vessels for one of her projects, We’re all Water (2006). I did send her something but never met her personally. I don’t want to have a negative impression of her, and the risk is there. You don’t want to meet your heroes and be disappointed. Being afraid of being disappointed is already a little critical in itself, isn’t it?

MR: When did you get into Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s work?

PR: I was 13/14. I was a fan and then I heard there was another guy one class above me in my village who was also a fan, I think he was 15/16, and so I made contact. It was a few years too late for our generation to be Lennon fans, but we copied a lot of things from them although we didn’t read them as art, we just thought they were super romantic and cool things to do. We did some writings and we ‘drowned’ them into the Rhine. We were like true fans.

MR: So, since you like questions longer than answers, I’ve got something long to say. What you said about being interested in John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s work but not being aware that it was contemporary art at the time is interesting for me because all the Beatles literature I read when I was a kid always depicted Lennon as the great artist and Yoko Ono as the train-wreck, and how after they met he started doing odd things like sleeping in bags or recording silence. And I started questioning what I was reading because I thought this stuff was actually great. It sort of pushed me towards art school but when I got there I failed to see the connection because they were teaching something completely different.

PR: What were they teaching?

MR: Things like straight painting or clay-modelling. Anything remotely conceptual was out of the window. This long preamble is just to ask if you experienced something similar when you started studying art in Vienna.

PR: Yes, although I started in 1981, when that kind of conceptual art was more established in a way. It used to be a more underground style but by that time it became accepted. It was already a part of history. But of course, even now there is still a very small group of people interested in conceptual art. We think it’s a huge group but the art world is so small. In the 60s all these expanding definitions of art arose – the dream was that one day it would really reach the masses and totally dissolve in society. Then later it became a kind of academic, researched field and was accepted as something for a very elitist, small group of people. But on the other hand it was influencing everything, like commercial art, films, graphic design. It had an influence on society through other areas but it never became a lived part of it. The groove was different then. Just think of all these openings etc. It seems to me that the society is completely segregated and that’s an accepted fact. So many styles and interests and rituals changed brutally since the 60s.

MR: Do you think that the 60s were actually like that or have we developed a romantic notion of them?





PR: I think it was actually like that. I read an interview with the editor of Purple about fashion and art where he says that being anti-fashion was possible in the 60s before the very same attitude itself became fashionable. You had the possibility to distance yourself from norms and to find an identity but when that became the hippest thing, there were no possibilities to be anti something anymore. Also we lost innocence with the knowledge of environmental destruction, you can feel it in many artworks in the 60s. They were free to protest without a lot of self-doubts.

MR: There was more freedom of expression.

PR: Technically, there was less freedom but it was easier to distance yourself from the rules. Today it looks like freedom, but the rules have become subtler. If you behave wrong, if you talk wrong, it’s not so obvious anymore like it used to be in the 60s. Every statement you make automatically pushes you out of a group and into another.

MR: But then it’s possible that the temporal distance between that period and the present are contributing factors as to how we look at the 60s now. For example, there was an immense feeling of 50s nostalgia in the 70s. Pretty much as you just said, it was revisited as an age of innocence – Grease (1978), American Graffiti (1973) or a TV series like Happy Days. But if you look at these films now, you can tell that what we are actually looking at are the 50s from a 70s perspective.

PR: And you would like to take a step back and see how we now watch things that are clearly filtered through the spectacles of the 2000s. But we don’t have the distance to see that. We are completely immersed. It’s true, it is a matter of perspective and where you stand. That’s half of the thing you’re looking at because our brain can only take in very little information and then 90 per cent of what we experience is what the brain fills in or what the brain makes of this 10 per cent. But I think that things today are extremely complex and to be subversive in our time is almost impossible. When subversion is in fashion, you can hardly call these subversive days.

MR: Well, they used to say that your work was subversive. There was this big thing about MTV and how you were commenting on the media culture, when, as a matter of fact, I think you were actually more influenced by experimental cinema.

PR: When I started I didn’t know about MTV. Music films were already there. They weren’t invented by MTV. MTV just created a market by putting them on TV 24/7. But that was in the 80s. Now there are so many shows you’re lucky if you see a music video at all. I don’t know why they do it. Did they really find out that people prefer that to music clips? Maybe I should write them a letter. I read that the chief of MTV Europe likes my work. I didn’t expect that she would know me.

MR: I think you should. It’s also way too compartmentalised now.

PR: It is. It was completely mixed before. It shows you again the paradox of keeping completely separated those trends that are supposed to group people together. Each has its own codes, its own development, its own history, in a way. This is also because they are so brutally everywhere, that they are accessible all the time. Not to mention that people are very well educated in symbols, styles, and movements now. You wanted to know something else, though…

MR: Experimental cinema. If it was one of your early influences.

PR: I liked animation films a lot. I used to go to these crazy experimental film festivals. But there aren’t that many anymore. Where are all these people who did experimental film now? They became old, they died and then the so-called younger experimental filmmakers just found other areas to work.

MR: I understand you are a John Waters fan. What do you like about him?

PR: He can talk as well as he can make films – unlike me! (Laughs) Do you know his books? They’re short stories, they’re very good. Pink Flamingo (1972), is actually close to the subject I’m also dealing with: conventions and rules, the image of a woman and a man and how he turns them upside down to take a different viewpoint. What they do in his film could probably be true but not with that intensity. It often looks like things have been this way forever but that’s not true. They always make us believe that the way men are today is down to natural development, but it could have been slightly different and that’s what I like about Waters, that he gives these perspectives.

MR: Tell me about your feature film.

PR: My subject is a girl or a woman or a human being if you like, who inherits a dream from her grandmother to free herself and the world from unnecessary fears. Not only to overcome unnecessary fears but to propose new rituals. Today we also have the luck that so many conventions have gone away, but we don’t fill them with new ones so on the one hand we feel too restricted and on the other hand we are lost. And she tries to bring about new rituals and also to overcome the fears of being laughed at or excluded from a group. Sometimes she succeeds, sometimes she doesn’t. She then goes looking for friends to spread ‘health’ in the world. She’s completely fearless.

MR: What’s her name in the film?

PR: Pepperminta. Like the character in Homo Sapiens Sapiens (2005). It’s also the same main actor and performer – Ewelina Guzik from Krakau in Poland.

MR: You said you see this as a step forward. Is it because you are bringing your view to a different audience?

PR: It’s both a different audience and a different ritual to watch. Prior to every installation I have to know everything about the space where it will be shown – the size of the room, the history of that institution… the whole package. I see a movie theatre exactly in the same way. You go to the pictures, you sit, you pay, quite a lot, and you and all the other people in the room focus in one direction and you are not supposed to leave until the end. In an installation I cannot decide when people come in and when they leave. This gives it a completely different choreography. I’m also very interested in TV. But if you want to get film funding you cannot stress this point because film people take this ritual for granted. The challenging thing is to make a story that holds up for more than an hour. You follow the actor and you identify with him or her and say ‘I would do it differently’… You go on a longer journey.

MR: While you were talking about TV I was thinking of Achterbahn/das Tram ist noch nicht voll (1998), the work you made in collaboration with Thomas Rhyner and Ian Krohn. Have you ever had the opportunity of doing something with TV?

PR: To do a show or something? No. I had a small connection with TV twice. My single channel videos were shown on national TV once and then I worked on a show for teenagers about menstruation. The footage I later used for Blutclip (1993) was made for that show. I feel myself more on the side of the viewer and TV is more like a magazine or a newspaper – they think to know what people want. It’s a powerful institution. I work with similar materials but I am completely free. I have no chiefs, no rules, nobody to tell me what goes or doesn’t go on and as long as I have such good freedom, I never fight with them. Of course there is the possibility to subvert the system from inside. But it is funny as in Zurich many people working in TV come from the 80s, from this youth demonstration culture. The loudest ones, the most political people from that time are now working with TV. They said they were giving too much money for opera and not getting anything for themselves. Over the last 20 years this has changed a lot because of the battles in the 80s. They were fighting for more concert places, fringe theatres, and spaces for expression. And the people who fought for this, the most radical ones, now are in TV. I thought they would become politicians and instead they’re mainly on TV. When I watch them, it looks like they are little cogs of a big gear.

MR: Cable TV is a bit more experimental in this sense. You can decide what to watch and there seems to be a bit more independence.

PR: On demand, yes. It will be seen as a huge change in the next 20 years or so as to how we consumed TV. We once had plans to do alternative shows. We thought about it but the whole thing would take so many people. It’s a little bit similar to the difference between experimental video and 35 mm films. Everything is dependent on the moment and it has to work. And the more are working, the more you’re under pressure to make it work. And the more people you have, the more money you need, and all TV institutions are like heavy, slow machines. There’s a lot of administration. It’s a power game – who sits the longest until everybody else falls down. I just don’t feel like being part of it. From 1986 to 1994 I worked in different video studios. I know the structures and how it works.

MR: What were you doing then, were you an editor?

PR: I was doing computer graphics. We made educational films. One I can remember was about explaining to bank employees how their clients would soon have to use plastic cards to get money. We made films where we proved that Ciba Geigy invented environmental protection. (laughs) I wasn’t the director, I was just doing 2D animations, things like the flashing arrows, backgrounds for touch-screens, dissolving sequences, obstructions, labels…

MR: Are you a hard-boiled TV consumer?

PR: No, not at all. I have the feeling that I have wasted my time afterwards. You spend four hours in front of the screen and what’s left? But I have a sister who watches a lot of TV and she gives me tips. I have seen Desperate Housewives and Monk now. I have seen CSI. It’s really good. The special effects are amazing. There was a dead lady, she was murdered and the camera went through the wound inside her with the bullet. I thought it was quite experimental.

MR: The exhibition in Stockholm is partially a retrospective. What was it like for you to select your work and put it together and take this trip down memory lane?

PR: There’s too little distance on one side and too much distance on the other side. It’s a bit like when you do a concert and you play your hits. You already know that they work and how they work together. It’s a little bit professional, maybe too professional. We showed my blockbusters in a way. The show wasn’t a big risk. I’m now interested in hearing what the professionals have to say but the audience reaction is the most important to me and it was very positive. Anders [Guggisberg] always says: ‘Pipi you should caress your stomach more…’ I don’t bask in good reactions. When I was there we did it as well as we could, but my heart and brain were somewhere else…

MR: Your new work?

PR: Yes.

MR: Homo Sapiens Sapiens in Venice, the show at Hauser & Wirth in London (2005), and now the new piece in Stockholm. Is this like some sort of trilogy?

PR: Yes. At least from the viewer’s position. But that’s partly because gravity is a central issue in these works. The difference in Stockholm is that the screen is dissolved. The shape of the screen wasn’t dictated by historical rooms like the church in Venice or the bank in London. What is similar to the first two is that you can look at it both this way and that. Each viewer will have a different idea of where the bottom of the image is.

MR: You must have been very disappointed in Venice when that bishop protested that your installation be shut down on the ground that it was blasphemous.

PR: Yes. I wanted to react but then the Kunstkommission told me to wait because they wanted to solve the problem diplomatically. It was fine with me, as I certainly didn’t want to go out, start babbling and take advantage of censorship. Censorship is often used like an advertisement tool. I didn’t do anything but then almost two months elapsed and I felt I should have at least given my statement and then they said, yes, okay, we’ll give out your statement and we’ll put ours with it. And then there was a power game, I just don’t know what happened, but they went out with their statement without putting in mine. I went to the press the very next day, but they couldn’t put it in anymore because every newspaper had already published the statement of the commission. But they collected signatures in the Portuguese Pavilion. Very kind people, some Italian students who were working there, made a petition. They collected more than 2,000 signatures to re-show the work and about 40, I think, against it. They took the petition to the bishop emphasising that 2,000 people wanted it and he closed it for 40 signatures! I liked it a lot.

MR: Is there anything we won’t see in your film?

PR: Cigarettes. Although they’re often used in films. They were a very prominent thing in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990), when they smoke while talking about their parents that died from lung cancer. It’s where Chris Isaak’s song Wicked Game comes from.

MR: You covered Wicked Game in Sip My Ocean (1996). A lot of people talk about feminism when they discuss that work. Rochelle Steiner wrote that I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much (1986) and Sip My Ocean were a response to these very macho songs with a female perspective. Do you agree with that?

PR: Both try to show hysteria in a positive light. Maybe they overlap a bit. Hysteria is associated with the idea of falling apart – it’s got a very negative connotation. Trying to put it in another light, not with words but with actions, songs or pictures, helps more than if you say, ‘we should not read hysteria so negatively’. That doesn’t help so much but if you exorcise it, I think it does. As for feminism, I think the most feminist piece I did recently is the monument to Emily Kempin-Spyri at the Zurich University. Do you know her? She was the first jurist woman in Switzerland. She decided to study law because her husband wasn’t able to support the family anymore but her male colleagues wouldn’t let her work. She spent most of her life fighting for the accreditation as a lawyer, and eventually they locked her up in a psychiatric hospital where she died. My piece was originally intended to be a room-installation but then we decided to make it look more like a classic monument.

MR: Is dreaming important in your work?

PR: Yes, very much.

MICHELE ROBECCHI IS AN EDITOR AT PHAIDON PRESS IN LONDON AND INTERVIEWS EDITOR FOR CONTEMPORARY

above copied from:http://contemporary-magazines.com/interview92.htm

Zen Vaudeville: A Medi(t)ation in the Margins of Fluxus., David Doris

David Doris, Zen Vaudeville: A Medi(t)ation in the Margins of Fluxus.
(A slightly shorter version of the text was first published in: The Fluxus Reader, edited by Ken Friedman,
Academy Editions, 1998) [1]


Now I am going to make a statement here. I don't know whether it fits into the category of other people's statements or not. But whether it fits into their category or whether it doesn't, it obviously fits into some category. So in that respect it is no different from their statements. However, let me try making my statement.

There is a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is being. There is nonbeing. There is not yet beginning to be nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. Suddenly there is nonbeing. But I do not know, when it comes to nonbeing, which is really being and which is nonbeing. Now I have just said something. But I don't know whether what I have said has really said something or whether it hasn't said something.

- Chuang Tzu

Danger Music Number Six (February 1962)

There is nothing here.


- Dick Higgins

� Pre-Face.
In the history of the arts of the twentieth century, Fluxus stands as a singularly strange phenomenon. It resembled an art movement, and was inadvertently named as such in 1962. [2] Yet unlike other art movements, Fluxus produced no signed manifestos indicating the intentions of its participants, who, indeed, could rarely agree on just what it was that constituted the Fluxus program. And, unlike other movements, Fluxus was not bound to a specific geographical location. On the contrary, Fluxus could well be seen as the first truly global avant-garde; the artists, composers, poets and others who contributed to the corpus of Fluxus work hailed from France, West Germany, Japan, Korea, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, and the United States, and quite a few lived their lives as expatriates or nomads.

Originally intended by George Maciunas (who is acknowledged as the principal organizer and disseminator of Fluxus) to be the title of a magazine for Lithuanians living in New York City, [3] "Fluxus" soon became something quite radically different, coming to signify an astonishingly broad range of practices in virtually every field of human communicative endeavor. The work produced under, or in proximity of, the flag of Fluxus includes films, newspapers, books, performances, symphonies, sculptures, sound poetry, dances, feasts, one- line jokes, insoluble puzzles, games - the list continues. However, it should be noted early on, these descriptive categories are, more often than not, inadequate to the task of containing Fluxus works, which, as I hope to demonstrate, operate in the margins between such categories. A single score, for example Ken Friedman's 1965 work, Zen is When:


A placement.
A fragment of time identified.
Brief choreography.

might be realized as a painting, an assemblage, a poem, a private or public performance, a thought, or even a thesis for a master's degree - perhaps all at once. As such, Fluxus works were some of the most important manifestations in the development of intermedia; the term itself (also applicable in part to the concurrent phenomenon of happenings) was coined by Fluxus participant Dick Higgins, denoting work whose structures determined the textures of the spaces between media. Indeed, it is this very between-ness, this marginality, that makes Fluxus, even thirty-some-odd years after its first European performances, so difficult to coax with words into stability.
The Fluxus phenomenon began at a unique moment in time, a period of relative artistic freedom and economic growth in the United States, Europe and Japan - only a decade and a half after the most destructive war in the history of humanity. The early 1960s saw the first humans in outer space, the inauguration and assassination of the youngest president in American history, the establishment of a U.S. military presence in Vietnam, the assembly of the Berlin Wall, and the rapid proliferation of television and thermonuclear weapons. It was a strange and dangerous time.

On 16 June 1962, at a concert entitled "Neo-Dada in der Musik," Nam June Paik, a Korean composer living in West Germany, slowly raised a violin above his head and, in a single furious blow, smashed the instrument against a tabletop. He called this gesture a violin solo. [4]

In the midst of all the extraordinary institutional spending and material surplus that characterized the late 1950s and early 1960s, Fluxus created a space for itself outside the structures that fostered the economic consumption of aesthetic practices, outside the established gallery and theater circuits. At a period marked by the production of massive, eminently saleable works, principally in the field of visual art, the artists of Fluxus produced works of little inherent economic value: pieces of printed paper, small plastic boxes filled with cheap, simple objects (sometimes they were filled with nothing at all) and, particularly in the first few years, performances. Fluxus produced virtually nothing to hang over the family piano, nothing that could reasonably be considered an "investment" by a potential buyer. Indeed, the artists of Fluxus seem to have waged a battle against the economic and spiritual aggrandizement of both art and artist so rampant during the period. In place of the grandiose, Fluxus took the position of a sort of aesthetic Everyman, doing many small things in many small ways. In place of the supposed timelessness and permanence of the art object, Fluxus loosed a prolific flow of seemingly inconsequential amusements and ephemera, most of which, at the time, went largely unheeded. Fluxus challenged notions of representation, offering instead simple presentations which could provoke awe, laughter, disgust, dread-the entire range of human response. In the midst of an increasingly mediated world, the artists of Fluxus attempted to wake up to the experience of simply being human, a supremely strange enterprise indeed. This essay is an inquiry into just a few aspects of that strangeness.


� Long long ago�
Long long ago, back when the world was young - that is, sometime around the year 1958�a lot of artists and composers and other people who wanted to do beautiful things began to look around them in a new way (for them).
They said: "Hey! - coffee cups can be more beautiful than fancy sculptures. A kiss in the morning can be more dramatic than a drama by Mr. Fancypants. The sloshing of my foot in my wet boot sounds more beautiful than fancy organ music."

And when they saw that, it turned their minds on. And they began to ask questions. One question was: "Why does everything I see that's beautiful like cups and kisses and sloshing feet have to be made into just a part of something fancier and bigger? Why can't I just use it for its own sake?"

When they asked questions like that, they were inventing fluxus; but this they didn't know yet, because fluxus was like a baby whose mother and father couldn't agree on what to call it - they knew it was there, but it didn't have a name.

� � �

They did "concerts" of everyday living; and they gave exhibitions of what they found, where they shared the things that they liked best with whoever would come. Everything was itself, it wasn't part of something bigger and fancier. And the fancy people didn't like this, because it was all cheap and simple, and nobody could make much money out of it.


- Dick Higgins [5]

Every voice is the voice of Buddha, every form is the Buddha form.

�from the Zenrin Kushu, A Zen Phrase Anthology [6]

In 1957, George Brecht, a chemist at the personal products division of Johnson & Johnson in East Brunswick, New Jersey, wrote an extraordinary essay entitled "Chance- Imagery." In it, he develops an outline of historical sources, methods and theories involved in the practical application of the forces of chance in the arts. Illustrating his text with examples drawn from the realms of physics and statistics, Brecht denotes "two aspects of chance, one where the origin of images is unknown because it lies in deeper-than-conscious levels of the mind, and the second where images derive from mechanical processes not under the artist's control." [7]

After a discussion of automatism in surrealist production (certainly one of this century's boldest adventures in the exploration of the unconscious) Brecht admits that he is "more interested� in the mechanically chance process." [8] He cites Marcel Duchamp as the pioneer worker in this field, noting the techniques employed in the construction of his 3 stoppages �talon (3 Standard Stoppages), in which the "standard" measurement created by the fall of a piece of string was determined by "wind, gravity and aim;" and in his La Mariée mise � nu par ses c�libataires, m�me (le Grand Verre) [The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)], for which Duchamp employed a toy cannon to shoot paint-dipped matches at the glass to determine the positions of the nine malic molds.

Yet Brecht suggests that Duchamp's use of chance in his work was "not exhaustive," and so acknowledges the importance of other modernist applications of chance: Jean Arp's chance collages, Max Ernst's "decalcomania of chance" as well as his techniques of frottage, the Surrealist cadavre exquis, and Tristan Tzara's chance poetry. In each of these cases, the artist relinquishes, to a greater or lesser degree, the power to determine the form of a work, serving instead as a functionary, a facilitator of natural processes within a specific, limiting context (a poem, a drawing, a collage). In this strain of practice, in the denial of artistic choice and determinism in favor of the potency of apparently arbitrary natural processes, Brecht perceives profound spiritual implications. These implications, Brecht points out, were noted by the Dadaists themselves: "The almost incredibly incisive mind of Tristan Tzara, as early as 1922, even recognized the relationship of all this to Oriental philosophy (in one of the most convincing of Dada documents, the 'Lecture on Dada'): 'Dada is not at all modern. It is more in the nature of a return to an almost Buddhist religion of indifference."' [9]

Tzara aspired to indifference, of course, and so he perceived a kinship in Buddhism's evident coolness, its detachment from the world. I would suggest, however, that the Buddhist "condition" is not one of indifference, but rather of a radical involvement with the world. This condition, according to Buddhist texts, demands first that one's own preconceptions be consciously cast aside - no easy task - in order that the things of this world be allowed to manifest themselves as such, as they present themselves in their fullness of being. Neither overwhelming nor unknowable, nature is thus revealed through simple, direct engagement in its processes. Further, the operations of the individual are themselves revealed through engagement in this unfolding; one becomes an actively perceiving, infinitely mutable organ of response, not differentiated from nature. Brecht quotes Daisetz Suzuki's discussion of the role of nature as a paradigm for human action in Zen Buddhism: "Nature never deliberates; it acts directly out of its own heart, whatever this may mean. In this respect Nature is divine. Its 'irrationality' transcends human doubts or ambiguities, and in our submitting to it, or rather accepting it, we transcend ourselves." [10] This acceptance, notes Suzuki in his original text, is itself a matter of choice:


We accept nature's 'irrationality' or its 'musts' deliberately, quietly, and whole-heartedly. It is not a deed of blind and slavish submission to the inevitable. It is an active acceptance, a personal willingness with no thought of resistance. In this there is no force implied, no resignation, but rather participation, assimilation, and perhaps in some cases even identification. [11]

The artists of Fluxus were committed to the acceptance and the investigation of nature's "musts," choosing in many cases to relinquish artistic control in favor of participation in, assimilation of, and identification with the processes of nature. Both Zen and Fluxus embody principles that entail a restructuring, and even ultimately an elimination, of the supposed boundaries between "life" and "art," between "I" and "other." In this paper I will examine certain aspects of Zen that resonate within some Fluxus performance, and which offer an alternative critical vocabulary, a provisional framework within which one can allow some aspects of Fluxus to be revealed.

� � � � �

Maybe you think that whatever Fluxus may be is contained in some postmodernist phenomenon�would it be any less wiser to look upon it as East-West protestism, catharticism, hinderism, buddyism, or confusionism? [12]

�Larry Miller

This paper came about, as many do, in an attempt to satisfy a curiosity. After establishing an initial connection with Fluxus material, I noticed that critics and even Fluxus artists would make the observation, now and again�quite frequently, in fact�that Fluxus was somehow like Zen, that Fluxus works were similar in some respects to Zen works or Zen koans. Unfortunately, no one has ever chosen to examine this observation in any significant detail. How and why is it the case that Fluxus works so often bring Zen to mind? On the one hand, there is Fluxus: the name of a loosely organized group of contemporary artists (and non-artists) who were examining, in the most radical ways, the limits of what constitutes "art." On the other hand, there is Zen: the name of a centuries-old, non-theistic religion whose practitioners examine, in the most radical ways, the limits of what constitutes "consciousness." Two distinctly different explorations of the limits of what defines us as human, true, but why even mention them in the same breath?
And supposing there is some connection between the two, why the attendant critical silence?

At the first pass, it seemed to me that both Zen and Fluxus were excruciatingly difficult to explain: somehow, no matter what words came to mind, they never appeared to be adequate to the task at hand; important details of the experience - including my experience - of both Zen and Fluxus invariably escaped exposition. Contradictions arose within each set of practices which systematically frustrated attempts to say anything definitive about either. After some time, and considerably more frustration, it became clear that my own difficulties in bringing about some sort of closure, some sort of totalizing definition, were the result of the very pretensions which Fluxus and Zen perpetually mock. Words, to paraphrase a Zen adage, are so many fingers pointing to the Flux-moon, and are not to be confused with the Flux-moon itself. Or as Dick Higgins points out: "We can talk about a thing, but we cannot talk a thing. It is always something else." [13]

This "something else" is what the artists of Fluxus, like the practitioners of Zen, have sought to interrogate. What the two hold in common is an insistent attitude of questioning: a revelation of the codes by which we come to frame the world, by which we come to receive the world as given and immutable. This questioning, unfolding through demonstration rather than discourse, indicates a cognitive shift away from the modernist understanding of the self as the inviolate center of being. Both Fluxus and Zen investigate the nebulous realms between conceptual categories: between subject and object, between vision and hearing, between high and low:


The reason intermedia is called intermedia and not multimedia is that it falls between categories� Every time it seems to take a direction or form a shape, something happens that just takes it out of it again. And Zen is doing the same number. It is falling between categories. This is one of the basic secrets of Zen. [14]

�Eric Andersen

In this discussion of a relationship between Fluxus and Zen, it is not my concern to determine a linear, causal relationship between the two - to research how and why specific artists at specific times took specific "inspiration" from Zen. Fluxus artists were, and remain, proudly omnivorous in their approaches to alternative modes of living and art- making, and so it would be an error to assert that any single artist found his or her philosophical base in the ways and means of Zen - and a graver error to imply that there was a universal interest in eastern philosophies amongst the participants of Fluxus. [15] Fluxus is too slippery for that; too slippery, indeed, for one to assert anything that will not fall short of presenting an accurate, comprehensive picture. With this in mind, it should be noted that this paper�like any paper that that claims to speak about Fluxus (or Zen, for that matter)�is tentative, provisional, and according to some, entirely off the mark. "Fluxus encompasses opposites," says George Brecht; no matter what one might think about it, "there is someone associated with Fluxus who agrees with you." [16] The contrary of this statement is also true: there is someone associated with Fluxus who disagrees with you. From a broader standpoint, however:

Every word I say contributes to the lie of art.

�LaMonte Young, "Lecture 1960"

All the scriptures are only paper good for wiping off shit.

�Hakuin Ekaku (1685-1768)

� The Event.
event 'i-vent' n [MF or L; MF, fr. L eventus, fr. eventus, pp. of evenire to happen, fr. e- + venire to come - more at COME] 1 a : something that happens : OCCURRENCE b : a noteworthy happening c : a social occasion or activity 2 a archaic : OUTCOME b: the issue of a legal action as finally determined c : an outcome, condition, or event that is postulated < in the ~ that I am not there, call my house > 3 : any of the contests in a program of sports 4 : the fundamental entity of observed physical reality represented by a point designated by three coordinates of place and one of time in the space-time continuum postulated by the theory of relativity 5 : a subset of the possible outcomes of an experiment < 7 is an ~ in the throwing of two dice> syn see EFFECT, OCCURRENCE - event-less / -les / adj - at all events : in any case � in any event : in any case � in the event Brit : as it turns out [17]

The group, with few exceptions, that associates itself with Fluxus is irresponsible. It is my impression that many people just simply goof-off and pretend in a kind of very very nasty way, socially speaking, and certainly socially with respect to other artists, that they have certain superiority in their seemingly indifferent little activities such as a sneeze tomorrow or a finger is as good as a hole in the wall, or any of these little directives which if acted out are somehow to me important rather than unimportant so far as its effect is to say to me and others - 'You guys are doing important things, but look, we are even more important doing unimportant things.


- Allan Kaprow [18]

Throughout this century there has been a strain of art which has sought to eliminate the perceived boundaries between art and life. Contemporary chroniclers of the art scene of the early 1960s, as well as the artists themselves, were well aware of their predecessors in similar pursuits. Unlike, say, the Futurists of an earlier era, who saw themselves as a new breed, determined to liberate themselves from the weight of history and inherited cultural baggage, intermedia artists of the early 1960s were only too happy to point out antecedents for their work, as if to stake out their own place within an alternative lineage of artistic production, a marginalized history that stood outside and against the mainstream.
Fluxus was a group of nominally kindred spirits who together and separately surveyed the peripheral territories of their respective disciplines, or rather the margins between those disciplines. The new structures that resulted from these explorations tested received notions of the limits of the arts, as well as the limits of our ability to perceive those structures as art.

George Maciunas staked out the historical parameters of these territorial researches with a zeal bordering on the maniacal. Trained in architecture, graphic design and art history, Maciunas had a considerable attraction to structure and order; he has been described as "an obsessive/compulsive personality that accumulated, hoarded, classified, and dissected." [19] He was also a fan of film comedian Buster Keaton (1895-1966), and of Spike Jones (1911- 1965), the bandleader whose parodies of popular and classical music - incorporating in his orchestrations the sounds of pots and pans, car-horns, gunshots and kazoos - fused the boundaries between music and slapstick comedy. Maciunas's art historical essays took the form of charts: painstakingly drawn evolutionary diagrams of the newest occurrences in the arts (those new occurrences, that is, that were of interest to Maciunas). Perhaps the largest of these charts is his Diagram of Historical Development of Fluxus and Other 4 Dimentional, Aural, Optic, Olfactory, Epithelial and Tactile Art Forms (Incomplete), in which kudos are paid to Futurist Theater, Marcel Duchamp, Surrealism, Dada, Walt Disney Spectacles, Byzantine Iconoclasm, the Japanese Gutai Group, Vaudeville, Joseph Cornell, and many more�in short, a fairly broad spectrum of historical traditions and isolated phenomena which have in common a re-evaluation of accepted notions of structure, both aesthetic and ontological.

Zen is not mentioned on this chart. Nor would one necessarily expect to find it there. John Cage, however, is. Indeed, the chart, says Maciunas, "starts with what influenced Cage. Cage is definitely the central figure in the chart." In fact, he continues, "you could call the whole chart like 'Travels of John Cage' like you could say 'Travels of St. Paul,' you know? Wherever John Cage went he left a little John Cage group, which some admit, some not admit his influence. But the fact is there, that those groups formed after his visits. It shows up very clearly on the chart." [20]

"The argument goes like this," says the poet Emmett Williams, who is justifiably critical of the notion of a "direct influence" of Zen on Fluxus:


John Cage was a student of Daisetsu T. Suzuki, the Japanese religious philosopher who helped to make the Western world aware of the nature and importance of Zen. In turn, many of the activists on the American Fluxus scene studied with Cage, who opened a few of the Doors of Perception for them. Ergo: Fluxus has a direct connection with Zen.
It would be more accurate to say: Ergo: Fluxus has a direct connection with John Cage. But Cage is an artist and a teacher, not a Zen missionary, who also "studied" with Sch�nberg, Duchamp and Buckminster Fuller. Besides, there has been for many years a worldwide interest in Zen and other sects of Buddhism, and it would be surprising if Fluxus artists, generally a well-informed and well-travelled lot, were not aware of these disciplines, and of the value of meditation. [21]


John Cage, though certainly "not a Zen missionary," was one of the most important conduits of Eastern thought to the Western world. As if directly addressing Williams' concerns about Cage's own role in the foundation of Fluxthought (but speaking of Dada rather than Fluxus), Cage notes: "It is possible to make a connection between the two, but neither Dada nor Zen is a fixed tangible. They change; and in quite different ways in different places and times, they invigorate action." [22]
It was in large part through the activities and pedagogy of John Cage that both Dada and Zen came to invigorate action during the late 1950s. As Williams points out, Cage studied chess with Duchamp for a time, and was attracted in no small measure by the utopian thought of Fuller and the formal purity of Sch�nberg's music. And indeed, Cage attended lectures by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki at Columbia University from 1949 to 1951. Suzuki's thought played a great role in the formation of Cage's own production; Suzuki's teachings, he felt, enabled him to regard music "not as a communication from the artist to an audience, but rather as an activity of sounds in which the artist found a way to let sounds be themselves." [23] As a vehicle of signification, this approach could "open the minds of the people who made them or listened to them to other possibilities than they had previously considered�To widen their experience; particularly to undermine the making of value-judgements." [24]

In 1952, Cage had explored the opening of the mind to other possibilities in a piece entitled 4'33", in which the pianist, David Tudor, sat at a piano and did nothing except indicate the beginning and end of each of the three movements by shutting and lifting the piano's lid. During the piece itself, no sound is intentionally produced by the pianist on the instrument. Four minutes and thirty-three seconds of distinctly musical silence: Cage, a composer of music, has imposed as a framework a measure of time, and declared that whatever incidental sound occurs within this framework is a piece of music. With Cage came the notion that duration, sound and silence, rather than harmony, rhythm and melody, are the foundation blocks upon which musical experience is structured. With no melodic or harmonic passages to lead the listener through time, Cage's music ceases to function as narrative, but rather places the listener in the vertically structured space of synchrony - this moment in time. And time, as we have come to know it in this century, is interdependent with space.

It was the notion of opening to possibilities that Cage brought with him to the International Summer Course for New Music in Darmstadt (1958), and which he shared with his classes in "Experimental Composition" at the New School for Social Research (1956- 1960). Numbered among the participants at Darmstadt were La Monte Young and Nam June Paik (Emmett Williams was also living in Darmstadt at this time). Among those who attended the New School classes, with varying degrees of regularity, were Dick Higgins, Al Hansen, Allan Kaprow, Toshi Ichiyanagi, George Brecht and Jackson Mac Low (Brecht and Mac Low had been invited to sit in by Cage), all of whom were to play pivotal roles in the development of intermedia. [25]

Cage's students were introduced to his understanding of music as time-space, and formulated their own methods for exploring these uncharted waters. On the one hand, students like Allan Kaprow and Al Hansen were impressed by the Cage/Dada notion of the "simultaneous presentation of unrelated events," and went on to create happenings, complex, multi-sensory constructions�what Fluxus artist Tomas Schmit called "the expressionistic, symbolistic, voluminous opera-type-of-thing" [26] �such as Kaprow's 1959 18 Happenings in 6 Parts.

George Brecht�for whom the Cage class was in part "a kind of confirmation" of "the thought of Suzuki that I'd already discovered on my own" [27] - was not so inclined to construct as to notice: "Composers, performers and auditors of music permit sound- experiences by arranging situations having sound as an aspect. But the theater is well lit. I cough; the seat cracks, and I can feel the vibration. Since there is no distraction, why choose sound as a common aspect?" [28] Brecht claimed to be "increasingly dissatisfied with an emphasis on the purely aural qualities of a situation," and so began to call his work, even his object-oriented work, "events." This word, he claims, "seemed closer to describing the total, multi-sensory experience I was interested in than any other�" [29] Rather than examining the extravagance and multi-sensory barrage that constituted many happenings, Brecht's work was "very private, like little enlightenments I wanted to communicate to my friends who would know what to do with them." [30]


THREE TELEPHONE EVENTS
� When the telephone rings, it is
allowed to continue ringing, until it stops.

� When the telephone rings, the receiver
is lifted, then replaced.

� When the telephone rings, it is answered.


Performance note: Each event
comprises all occurrences
within its duration.
Spring, 1961

"I don't take any credit for having written a score like telephone events," said Brecht in a radio program of May 1964. His role as "writer," in this instance, is that of the scripting of possibilities implicit in one's engagement with a ringing telephone. Brecht's addendum, noting that "Each event comprises all occurrences within its duration," informs the reader that the three performance possibilities listed may in fact be three individual perceptions of a single phenomenon. In contrast to the constructivist tendencies of the happenings, in which the ringing of a telephone becomes an aspect of a larger composition, Brecht isolates and focuses on the single phenomenon, revealing the multiplicity within that singularity. For Brecht, the "act of imagination or perception is in itself an arrangement, so there is no avoiding anyone making arrangements." It is therefore also seen as unnecessary to develop complex, polymorphic structures for presentation: a single telephone ringing provides sufficiently fertile ground for performance possibilities. It is the interaction between the percipient/performer and the object perceived that provides richness and diversity. Brecht's "little enlightenments" are acts of quotidian simplicity which are presented and noticed, or vice versa; indeed, Brecht declares, "the occurrence that would be of most interest to me would be the little occurrences in the street�" [31]
While Brecht may have coined the term "event" to refer to his "private little enlightenments," he was by no means the only individual investigating the realm of monostructural presentation. In 1960, La Monte Young produced a series of "Compositions" which built upon the ground of questioning opened up by John Cage's 4'33".


Composition #3 1960
Announce to the audience when the piece will
begin and end if there is a limit on duration.
It may be of any duration.

Then announce that everyone may do whatever
he wishes for the duration of the composition.


Similar in some respects to Cage's piece, principally in the use of duration as its limiting aspect, Young's work, a musical "composition," stretches the conception of performance by eliminating the need for a specifically musical instrument and performer, employing instead an "announcer" to simply indicate the boundaries of the event. The audience thus become the performers, and are given complete freedom to act within the established confines of the piece. While the work can still be understood as music, it is raw action and perception which themselves become the stuff of the performance, outside the limitations of our understanding of music as sound, silence and duration. In the following piece, Young questions the necessity of determining duration within a work, and examines the notion of synaesthesia, of a structured reversal or combination of perceptual acts, asking, "Isn't it wonderful if someone listens to something he is ordinarily supposed to look at?" [32]

Composition #5 1960
Turn a butterfly (or any number of butterflies) loose in the performance area. When the composition is over, be sure to allow the butterfly to fly away outside. The composition may be any length, but if an unlimited amount of time is available, the doors and windows may be opened before the butterfly is turned loose and the composition may be considered finished when the butterfly flies away.


The beating wings of a butterfly surely do produce sound - and can thus, by traditional standards, be appreciated as music - but this sound is certainly beyond the range of normal human perception. In such an extreme state, one becomes aware of the inability of a single mode of perception, in this case hearing, to reveal the totality of an object as it presents itself. The notion of a categorization or isolation of the senses, and consequently of the specific arts which are addressed to those isolated senses, comes under question. In order to understand an object in its totality, the perceiver must herself be perceiving as a totality. In a commentary to the sixteenth case of the Wumenguan (in Japanese, Mumonkan), a thirteenth century collection of koans, Wumen asks his reader:

Does sound come to the ear, or does the ear go to sound? Even if echoes and silence are both forgotten, when you reach this, how do you understand verbally? If you use your ears to listen, it will be hard to understand; only when you hear sound through your eyes will you be close. [33]

This is where matters begin to get interesting.

� The Big Problem of Naming Little Things.

A monk saw a cat and asked, "I call it a cat. Master, what do you call it?" Joshu said, "You calling it a cat." [34]

if naming: decided

- Ben Patterson [35]

Prof. Quincey Adams Wagstaff: Say, I used to know a fellow looked exactly like you, by the name of Emanuel Ravelli. Are you his brother?
Emanuel Ravelli: I am Emanuel Ravelli.
Wagstaff: You're Emanuel Ravelli?
Ravelli: I am Emanuel Ravelli.
Wagstaff: Well, no wonder you look like him. But I still insist, there is a resemblance.
Ravelli: Ha ha ha ha. Hey, he thinks I look alike.

- The Marx Brothers, from Horsefeathers

"There is, of course, one important thing that the masters of Zen and the masters of Fluxus have in common," notes Emmett Williams in his 1992 telling of the Fluxus story: "the extreme difficulty of explaining, to the outside world, exactly what it is that they are masters of." [36] While I disagree with Williams that this is the one important moment of commonality between Zen and Fluxus, William brings to light an important issue. Indeed, both Fluxus and Zen evade attempts to concretize them in language, attempts to effect their permanence, their stability.
Fluxus treads a strange terrain, a liminal space somewhere between words and silence. One of its key products are event scores, taut little propositions, exercises, or word- objects, usually printed on small, often disposable cards or sheets of paper.

DISAPPEARING MUSIC FOR FACE

smile ���������� stop to smile

C. Shiomi Feb. 1964 [37]


Hundreds of these event scores have been published over the past thirty years, and in many cases, they are all that remain of the events for which they served as the original impetus. The events themselves - elegant, ephemeral monostructural gestures which may be performed before an audience, alone or in a group, or in the mind - and the objects which are revealed within their structures, unfold in a space to which words have limited access: this space is not the space of language, nor of silence, but of being, or rather, becoming. [38]
Like Zen, Fluxus uses language to force a confrontation with the inadequacies of language, and posits instead a field of direct experience that eludes systematization.

The earliest moment of Buddhist performance and its critical reception is the stuff of legend. Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha (c. 560-480 B.C.E.), after attaining enlightenment, stood atop the Mount of the Vultures to offer a sermon to his disciples. Saying nothing, Shakyamuni held up a single golden lotus blossom before all those in attendance. His disciples were baffled by this gesture, save for one Mahakasyapa, who simply smiled in understanding. This circle of act and reception, the "transmission of the lamp" of enlightenment outside the constructs of the language of scripture, direct action with "no dependence on words and letters," came to constitute an essential paradigm of Zen's method and self-perception: Here it is; what is there to say?

The argument behind this method of disclosure, says Daisetz Suzuki, is simple, and quite beautiful:


The idea of direct method appealed to by the masters is to get hold of this fleeting life as it flees and not after it has flown. While it is fleeing, there is no time to recall memory or to build ideas. No reasoning avails here. Language may be used, but this has been associated too long with ideation, and has lost direction or being by itself. As soon as words are used, they express meaning, reasoning; they represent something not belonging to themselves; they have no direct connection with life, except being a faint echo or image of something that is no longer here. [39]

There's nothing mystical about this, really: a communication of what is true can certainly be expressed or contained in words - words themselves are dharmas, manifestations of reality - but it also suggests that transmission of understanding is independent of language, indeed, that language is something of a hindrance to genuine understanding. Zen Buddhism ultimately attempts to foster a direct, unmediated relationship between the mind and reality, an immediate experience of the world as such. This is no easy goal to achieve, given the preponderance of language in the structuring of our day-to-day experience of the world, and in the structuring of our own consciousness. It is language, after all, which comprises scripture and koan, as it is language which names the "butter" and "eggs" featured in Dick Higgins' May 1962 Danger Music Number Fifteen (For the Dance):

Work with butter and eggs for a time.

Yet the words which constitute this language are not themselves the beliefs contained within scripture, nor are they the eggs that were tossed about during the performance, and which I'm still rinsing out of my hair. A paradox thus presents itself. Language constitutes our subjective experience of the world, yet this very subjectivity simultaneously prevents us from experiencing the world in its suchness. Do we then discard language in order to gain access to an authentic experience of the world?
Yes and no. Chuang-tzu, one of the founders of philosophical Taoism, an important influence on the development of Zen in China, suggests that words be regarded as a net which is employed to catch fish; this net (known in Japanese as sengyo) is required to perform a task, but it is the fish themselves which are consumed: "Words," says Chuang-tzu, "are there to convey a profound meaning; we should keep the meaning and forget the words." [40]

One must cast one's net if one is to catch any fish at all. One must also be wary of becoming entangled in the net. Language must by necessity be employed as a tool, but in such a way that it will create the conditions in which it is no longer useful, a void in which its own absence can be filled by unmediated perception and direct action. The principal tool used by Rinzai Zen (one of the two major schools of Zen) to accomplish this end is the technique of kanna Zen - literally "Zen of the contemplation of words." The form of this contemplation is embodied in the koan.

The term koan is derived from the Chinese kung-an, which originally signified "a legal case constituting a precedent." [41] Koans have been used as a systematic medium of training since the 11th century, when the students of Lin-Chi (Rinzai in Japanese) compiled the discourses and sayings of their master into a single volume, the Rinzairoku. [42] A koan may take the form of a portion of a sutra, an episode from the life of one of the great masters of the tradition, a mondo (a baffling dialogue between master and student), or a paradox; in short, any form that will, through the use of words, ultimately engage the student in a direct relationship with reality. Rather than being theoretical or discursive in nature, the constitutive form of a given koan (question or statement and response) is an example of its own teaching, codified in language. Ruth Fuller Sasaki points out:


The koan is not a conundrum to be solved by a nimble wit. It is not a verbal psychiatric device for shocking the disintegrated ego of a student into some kind of stability. Nor, in my opinion, is it ever a paradoxical statement except to those who view it from the outside. When the koan is resolved it is realized to be a simple and clear statement made from the state of consciousness which it has helped awaken. [43]

The beginning student, however, has no notion of this, and struggles to seek an answer founded in the codes of language itself; after all, it is language which constitutes her very subjectivity. But how does one respond in language to a problem such as the familiar, classic koan: "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" Sitting on her solitary meditation cushion - legs locked in the lotus position, spine straight, hands folded in mudra, eyes half-open, breathing normally - the student begins to focus on the problem: One hand, the student may think, makes no noise at all; indeed, two hands are required for clapping. Tentatively, she will go to her roshi, or master, perhaps offering as a solution: "The one hand makes no sound at all." The roshi will deny the validity of this answer in some fashion (he might even strike the student, if this seems necessary, in order to bring the student into an immediate, incontestable appreciation of this moment), and the student will return to her problem. Time and again, she confronts the roshi with a solution, and time and again she is turned away. This state of affairs breeds a considerable and mounting tension. After some time, the problem becomes the single thought contained within the student's mind; there is room for nothing else. Finally, the tension has to break. [44]
The traditionally "correct" response to the problem of the one hand is this: the student thrusts her hand out toward the roshi, and says nothing. Effectively, this is something akin to saying, "Here is the sound. Listen." (In response to certain koans, the roshi may himself be slapped by the student, an appropriate gesture signifying, in part, the transcendence by the student of the master-student power relationship). Here then is a severing of the hand, if you would, and of the perceiving subject, from their linguistic correlatives. What is being presented is not "one" hand clapping, and not "two" (that is, not "not-one"), but the sound itself as such, beyond such a dualistic notion as "one"/"not-one": just this act presencing, a fact unfolding here before you. In short, an answer to a koan must be revealed experientially, as a demonstration or an example of the very principle it embodies.

What do koans have to do with Fluxus? Victor Musgrave, whose Gallery One hosted the 1962 Festival of Misfits, notes: "some of the Fluxus artists have�produced significant equivalents" to "the bandaged, all-seeing ambiguities of [Zen's] marvelous koan." He asserts that this is "the most formidable task that Fluxus artists have attempted." [45] I agree. But how do the artists of Fluxus engage this "formidable task"? How are Fluxus works the "significant equivalents" of koans?

It is important to note that, according to Musgrave, an equivalence is seen not between Fluxus work and Zen painting or haiku verse, but between Fluxus work and koans. Rather than compare the work of Fluxus artists to the expressions of the specific sensibility that accompanies Zen practice, Musgrave likens Fluxus events to the principal pedagogical tool of Zen, the koan. The Fluxus work is not an index of the performer's relationship with his or her materials, as the exquisite brushwork of a Zen painting traces the path of the scribe's hand and presence of "no-mind." Rather, the Fluxus work, like the koan, is the exposition of the path itself, the restructuring and presentation of a process of meaning-production. The form a work takes is the demonstration of the unfolding processes of its own presentation and reception. Like the circular, stimulus/response form of the koan, Fluxus "presentation," to quote Dick Higgins, "would always have to do somehow with the general principle that ideas could be displayed or demonstrated rather than argued for or against." [46]


� No-Hand.
No-Play #1.
This is a play nobody must come and see. That is, the not-coming
of anyone makes the play. Together with very extensive advertising of the spectacle through newspapers, radio, T.V., private invitations, etc.�
No one must be told not to come.
No one should be told that he really shouldn't come.
No one must be prevented from coming in any way whatsoever!!!
But nobody must come, or there is no play.
That is, if the spectators come, there is no play. And if no
spectators come, there is no play either�
I mean, one way or the other, there is a play, but it is a No-Play.


- Robert Filliou (1964)

In 1976, Higgins formulated his "Exemplativist Manifesto," in which he outlines the mutable structures of what he terms exemplative work; that is, work in which "the idea is developed through its embodiment in the actual work, and thus the work is an instrument for conveying a thought-and-feeling complex by implying a set of examples of it." [47] George Brecht describes this notion as "an expression of maximum meaning with a minimal image, that is, the achievement of an art of multiple implications, through simple, even austere, means." [48] Exemplative work offers the audience/percipient/participant a construct of notation and performance, "an image of the set of possibilities intended by the artist." [49] The following snippet of conversation between George Brecht and Irmeline Lebeer gives an indication of how one might respond to a specific work:


PIANO PIECE Center
GB How would you realize this?
IL Me? Oh� for example by pushing the piano into the center of the room.
GB And how would you choose the center of the room?
IL The center of the room? You can feel where that is, can't you?
GB You mean intuitively?
IL You could also strike a note in the middle of a piano. Or drop something on the strings in the middle of the piano.
GB Yes. There are lots of possibilities, aren't there?
IL And you? What did you do? You've already realized it yourself, no?
GB Yes. With my two index fingers I began to play the notes of the piano starting from the two ends until I found the note in the center.
IL Oh, of course. That's fantastic. In that case, that's the piece?
GB No, no�it's completely open. The realizations you've just made up are as good as any other. [50]


Event scores such as "Piano Piece" mark a culminating moment of what Umberto Eco described in 1959 as the "open work." Such works, notes Eco, "tend to encourage 'acts of conscious freedom' on the part of the performer and place him at the focal point of a network of limitless interrelations, among which he chooses to set up his own form without being influenced by any external necessity which definitively prescribes the organization of the work in hand." [51] Rather than presenting the conditions of an ideal performance�e.g., tempi, musical cues, specific notes to be played on specific instruments, colors, lighting, materials, etc. - the Fluxus event score suggests certain parameters in which the performer is free to determine his own form.
This suggestiveness, notes Eco, is the ability of the event score text to stimulate in a performer/reader the capacity to adapt his own inner life to that of the work being performed, "some deeper response that mirrors the subtler resonances underlying the text." [52] But where does one look for the "subtler resonances" in a text such as this one by Robert Watts, which simply reads:


winter event
snow


Indeed, the performer of this work is faced with an object that is nearly tautological in its apparent simplicity. Such a work can not be regarded on its own merits - there's almost nothing here to be regarded. This is a work with virtually no intrinsic merit, no form of its own, no qualities of which to speak. Rather, as Eco says, it is "the focal point of a network of limitless interrelations," and as such, has an infinite potential number of possible realizations.
Now, rather than argue for or against this (we will return to this notion later in the paper), here's something the reader can do on his or her own that might help make the issue clearer. It's a piece by Fluxus artist Takehisa Kosugi called Chironomy 1 (Chironomy, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is "the art or science of moving the hands according to rule, as in pantomime or oratory"). The text of the piece reads:


Put out a hand from a window for a long time.

According to this text, the only tools needed to perform the piece are a hand, a window, and time (how much time constitutes "long time" is up to the performer). So choose a window, choose a hand, decide on a length of time, and perform the piece. The discussion will continue afterwards.

� � � � �
Like Watts' "winter event," the written text of Kosugi's piece, enjoining the performer to "Put out a hand from a window for a long time," says very little: it presents a simple image which offers nothing more than itself as proof, as baffling an injunction as it is apparently meaningless. What does it mean to "put out a hand from a window for a long time?" To search for meaning in the written text as a closed, autonomous form is futile; there's simply nothing there to explain, and no clue to understanding. One must look elsewhere for direction: Kosugi's text is a musical score; like any written musical score, one must perform the piece, follow its instruction in real-time, in order that it may reveal itself as meaningful.
The hand serves as the focusing element, a meditative stasis around which the world unfolds. During my own private performance of Chironomy 1, [53] I heard some yelling across the way, and the cry of a baby. Cars passed on the street below, there was a rich aroma of frying meat floating on the wind, and the soft hum of my computer on the desk nearby. After quite a few minutes of maintaining the gesture, I felt a slight pain in my forearm, a slow throb which worked its way up to my shoulder and the base of my neck. In the face of this pain, I became more determined to maintain the gesture, and soon it seemed clear that the piece, for me, was no longer one of formal duration - that is, was no longer concerned with the simple passing of time - but of endurance, of a body situated within a shifting, temporal network of physical and mental phenomena; this network in turn was brought to light by the body's situation within its structure, simultaneously inside and outside, revealed by the act of a single gesture presencing. In my performance of Chironomy 1, the gesturing hand - the distinct object named in Kosugi's text and thus initially the primary focus of my own consciousness - could not be located as an object independent of its context.

Kosugi described his own experience of Chironomy 1 as follows:

I did one performance related to this piece in an outdoor space in Kyoto. There was an outdoor stage, and there was an auditorium, and at the rear of the stage was a backdrop, a wall and a door. I just slightly opened the door and put my hand out. The audience could only see my hand. The opening in the door was very narrow, so I couldn't see the audience. So the outside space was so different; the hand was exposed to the audience, and this part, my body, was behind the wall, so I was very isolated. Psychologically very strange.
Window, door, the same thing. It is the passage between in and out, so one can shut the door, and make an inside and outside. Putting one part of the body through the window, it becomes part of the outside - but the body is the inside - psychologically, it's very unusual, very affecting to the consciousness. So this is a part of mine, and I'm exposing a part of the inside into a part of the outside. A kind of feedback. This part of my body, the hand, is very much a part of me. But if you expose it to the outside, and if there's a barrier between the hand and the body, then the hand could be independent - a little bit.

This side, my inside, and the outside, are so different, but still they are the same. So from the audience side, they can only see my hand. I can not see my hand. But as a total reality, they are the same thing. I have my hand with me, but I can not see it. The audience can see only my hand, but they can not see my body. So, take this chair as an example. Maybe it has another part and it is exposed to another dimension, but we can not see it. But everything is together. On the physical stage, it's just a chair.

A tactile experience, this piece. Eyes and ears are open; perhaps this makes the eyes and ears more sensitive. But most important is the hand: the hand is an antenna. [54]


What Kosugi has succeeded in creating is a wholly liminal state, a condition in which the notions of "interior" and "exterior" have been reversed, and finally revealed as inappropriate.
"In exemplative art," says Dick Higgins, "the action is always between: it cannot take place at any one pole without the conception of another. It is therefore:


between the heart and the mind,
between the personal and the objective,
between the unitary and the general,
between the warm and the cold,
(as af Klintberg put it) between the water and the stone." [55]

If an open window serves as a frame, it also functions as a space of transit and becoming, neither solely inside nor outside. When a body part, such as a hand - Kosugi also experimented with other body parts during his career - is positioned within that marginal space, our ability to locate the space, or to name the "isolated" body part within that space, is put into question. The body, as it enters the space of the margin, is neither inside nor outside - and it is both inside and outside. The apparent opposition of terms is unified - and nullified - through direct action. Both one and zero. Neither one nor zero. The sound of one hand clapping.
From a Buddhist perspective, there is no hand, no object, but for that act which enables the world to come to presence, and there is no world but for that context in which this hand reveals itself. Likewise, there can be no "subject" and no "object," but rather a relationship between the two which exists beyond one's ability to name them, or even perceive them, as isolated entities. Each is the cause of the other, each implies the existence of the other. It is thus conceptually inaccurate to distinguish between the two: they are one and the same thing. [56]

George Brecht examines the complexity of this mutual causation and the attendant problem of naming in this event score from Fall 1961:

TWO EXERCISES
Consider an object. Call what is not the object "other."

EXERCISE: Add to the object, from the "other," another
object, to form a new object and a new "other."
Repeat until there is no more "other."

EXERCISE: Take a part from the object and add it to the
"other," to form a new object and a new "other."
Repeat until there is no more object.


In attempting to create a "new object" from an "object" and an "other," it becomes clear that the "object" constitutes the "other," and vice versa. "What is 'it,"' says Chuang- tzu, "is also the 'other,' what is the 'other' is also 'it.'� Are there really It and Other? Or really no It and Other?" This question is ultimately unanswerable. "Therefore," says Chuang-tzu, "the glitter of glib debate is despised by the sage. The contrived "that's it' he does not use, but finds things in their places as usual. It is this I call 'throwing things open to the light."' [57]
This notion of "finding things in their places as usual" proved attractive for many of the artists involved in Fluxus. For Brecht, it came as something of a "surprise" when he "learned that George Maciunas in Germany and France, Cornelius Cardew and Robin Page in England, Kosugi, Kubota, Shiomi in Japan, and others had made public realizations of the pieces I had always waited to notice occurring" [my emphasis]. [58] Brecht's event scores�some of them, that is�can be seen as little exercises in concentrated attention, indices of phenomena yet to occur, virtual events waiting to be perceived or enacted. The participant in such exercises himself resides in a condition of relaxed awareness, attentive to shifting details in the noetic field - or perhaps he doesn't. Either way, Brecht's event scores serve to describe the parameters in which this attention - or distraction - is practiced.

Notes for David Doris's "Zen Vaudeville":
1. Portions of this essay first appeared in Fluxus Virus (Ken Friedman, ed. K�ln: Galerie Sch�ppenhauer, 1992), under the title "Fluxus and Zen? Shut My Mouth, Quick!"

2. Dick Higgins: ".in the autumn of 1962, fluxus became FLUXUS, and the press decided to call us the 'Fluxus-Leute' (Fluxus-people)." "In einem Minensuchboot um die Welt," in Ren� Block, 1962 Wiesbaden FLUXUS 1982 (Wiesbaden: Harlekin Art, Berliner K�nstlerprogramm des DAAD, 1982), p. 127.

3. Mats B., "Birth of Fluxus: The Ultimate Version," Kalejdoskop (Lhus), no. 3. (1979), quoted in Clive Phillpot and Jon Hendricks, Fluxus: Selections from the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1988), p. 9.

4. The title of the piece is One for Violin Solo.

5. Dick Higgins, "A Child's History of Fluxus," in Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of Intermedia (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1984), p. 87.

6. Isshu Miura and Ruth Fuller Sasaki, The Zen Koan: Its History and Use in Rinzai Zen (New York: Harcourt Brace & World), p. 103.

7. George Brecht, Chance-Imagery, (New York: Something Else Press, 1964), p. 3.

8. Ibid, p. 4.

9. Ibid, p. 5.

10. Ibid, p. 7.

11. D.T. Suzuki, Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D.T. Suzuki, (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1956), p. 234.

12. Larry Miller, "Maybe Fluxus (a para-interrogative guide for the neoteric transmuter, tinder, tinker and totalist.)," (New York: Larry Miller, 1991).

13. Dick Higgins, "A Something Else Manifesto," in A Dialectic of Centuries (Printed Editions: New York, 1978), pp. 102-103.

14. Personal interview with Eric Andersen, New York, 3 October 1992.

15. Robert Filliou, however, remarks in a letter to the editor of the Berlingske Tidende dated 21 December 1963 that "many of us have been influenced by Zen Buddhism." In Harald Szeeman & Hans Sohm, Happening & Fluxus.

16. George Brecht, "Something About Fluxus," in FLuxus cc fiVe ThReE, June 1964.

17. Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, MA: G&C Merriam Company, 1974).

18. "Excerpts from a Discussion Between George Brecht and Allan Kaprow Entitled 'Happenings and Events' Broadcast by WBAI Sometimes During May." In FLuxus cc fiVe ThReE (June 1964).

19. Barbara Moore, "George Maciunas: A Finger in Fluxus," Artforum 21 (October 1982), p.40.

20. Larry Miller, "Videotaped Interview with George Maciunas," March 24, 1978.

21. Emmett Williams, My Life in Flux-and Vice Versa (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992), p. 163.

22. John Cage, Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), p. xi.

23. Cage: "This testing of art against life was the result of my attending the lectures of [D.T.] Suzuki for three years. I think it was from 1949 to 1951." In Richard Kostelanetz, The Theatre of Mixed Means (New York: RK Editions, 1980), p. 52.

24. Quoted in Rick Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake, p. 196.

25. Rather than discuss these classes-particularly the New School classes-in detail here, I direct the reader to the following sources: Al Hansen, A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art (New York: Something Else Press, 1965), pp. 93-102; Dick Higgins, Postface (New York: Something Else Press, 1964), reprinted in The Word and Beyond: Four Literary Cosmologists (New York: The Smith, 1982), pp. 47-49; essays by Cage, Hansen and Higgins in Richard Kostelanetz, ed., John Cage (New York: Da Capo Press, 1991), pp. 118-124; George Brecht's interviews with Irmeline Lebeer and Michael Nyman in Henry Martin, An Introduction to George Brecht's Book of the Tumbler on Fire (Milan: Multhipla Edizioni, 1978), pp. 83-84 and 114-115; a catalogue essay by Bruce Altshuler, "The Cage Class," in FluxAttitudes (Ghent: Imschoot Uitgevers, 1991), pp. 17-23. Additionally, facsimiles of some of George Brecht's notebooks from these classes have been published over the last few years.

26. Tomas Schmit, "If I Remember Rightly," Art and Artists, vol. 7, no. 7 (1972), p. 39.

27. "An Interview With George Brecht by Irmeline Lebeer," in Michael Nyman, An Introduction to George Brecht's Book of the Tumbler on Fire, p. 83.

28. In cc V TRE, January 1964.

29. Brecht, "The Origin of Events," in Sohm and Szeeman, Happening & Fluxus.

30. Ibid.

31. "Excerpts from a Discussion Between George Brecht and Allan Kaprow." In FLuxus cc fiVe ThReE (June 1964).

32. La Monte Young, "Lecture 1960," in Ubi Fluxus ibi Motus, Ubi Fluxus ibi motus.. Edited by Achille Bonito Oliva (Venice: Fondazione Mudima, 1990), p. 203.

33. Thomas Cleary, No Barrier: Unlocking of the Zen Koan (New York: Bantam Books, 1993), p. 80.

34. Yoel Hoffman, trans., Radical Zen: The Sayings of Joshu (Brookline, MA: Autumn Press, 1978), p. 149.

35. Ben Patterson, from "Notes on PETS," in Benjamin Patterson, Philip Corner, Alison Knowles and Tomas Schmit, The Four Suits (New York: Something Else Press, 1965).

36. Emmett Williams, My Life in Flux-and Vice Versa (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992), p.163.

37. "Stop to smile" might be better-or differently-translated as "stop smiling." Disappearing Music For Face was realized as a film in 1966. Shot at 2000 frames per second, the image is an extreme close-up of a smiling mouth (that of Yoko Ono); imperceptibly over the course of the ten-minute film, the smile fades. The score has also been realized as a live performance.

38. The corpus of Fluxus work was not wholly constituted by such gestures-but my own sense is that the most emblematically "Fluxus" pieces have these attributes, as well as a number of others, in common. Dick Higgins and Ken Friedman have each tried their hand at naming and examining the attributes that properly differentiate Fluxus work from other intermedia work. Dick Higgins, in his 1985 essay, "Fluxus: Theory and Reception," Lund Art Press, Fluxus Research Issue, Vol. II, no. 2 (1991), p. 33, lists these attributes as: internationalism, experimentalism and iconoclasm, intermedia, minimalism or concentration, an attempted resolution of the art/life dichotomy, implicativeness, play or gags, ephemerality, and specificity. Friedman, in his essay, "Fluxus & Co." (New York: Emily Harvey Gallery, 1989), p. 4, expands upon Higgins' list of criteria to include: globalism, unity of art and life, intermedia, experimentalism (research orientation), chance, playfulness, simplicity/parsimony, implicativeness, exemplativism, specificity, presence in time, and musicality. It is considered by each of these Fluxus artists/authors that a work, if it to be considered authentically "Fluxus," must meet the criteria listed- the more criteria met, the more "Fluxus" is the work. This notion is contested by some. While I am not of the opinion that all genuinely Fluxus work meets these criteria, I also don't believe that a work needs to do so; indeed, one of the remarkable aspects (criteria?) of a Fluxus work is that is escapes such channelization. But to date, these two essays stand as the boldest attempts to create a working definition of Fluxus, and as such, have elaborated some excellent and eminently useful terms.

39. D.T. Suzuki, Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D.T. Suzuki (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1956), p. 130.

40. The Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion (Boston: Shambhala, 1989), p. 311.

41. Ibid., p 182. An alternate translation: "a controversial or mysterious case" (Thanks to Matthew Miller for translation from Chinese).

42. Heinrich Dumoulin, Zen Buddhism: A History, Volume 1 (New York: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 201-202.

43. Ruth Fuller Sasaki and Isshu Miura, The Zen Koan (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), pp.xi-xii.

44. Ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! Ho ho! Ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha!!! (This will be discussed later.)

45. Victor Musgrave, "The Unknown Art Movement," Art and Artists, vol. 7, no. 7 (1972), pp. 12-14.

46. Dick Higgins, "Something Else About Fluxus," Art and Artists, vol. 7, no. 7 (1972), pp. 16-21.

47. Dick Higgins, A Dialectic of Centuries, (New York: Printed Editions, 1978), p. 157.

48. George Brecht, From "Project in Multiple Dimensions," 1957/58, in Henry Martin, Book of the Tumbler on Fire, pp. 126-127

49. Dick Higgins, A Dialectic of Centuries, p. 156.

50. "An Interview with George Brecht by Irmeline Lebeer," in Henry Martin, Introduction to George Brecht's Book of the Tumbler on Fire, p. 85.

51. Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), p. 51.

52. Ibid., p. 53.

53. The following brief description is written in the first person, with the understanding that the phenomena described are personal, referring to a specific performance at a specific time by a specific person (the author).

54. Personal interview with Takehisa Kosugi, 10 November 1993.

55. Dick Higgins, A Dialectic of Centuries, p. 157. Reference to Bengt af Klintberg, Swedish folklorist affiliated with Fluxus.

56. This paradigm of mutual engagement, known in Mahayana ("Great Vehicle") Buddhism as the doctrine of Interdependent Origination, is also an important precept in both Zen and Taoism.

57. This translation is from Ben-Ami Scharfstein's Introduction to Yoel Hoffmann, The Sound of the One Hand (New York: Basic Books, 1975), p. 18.

58. George Brecht, "The Origin of Events," (dated August 1970), in Happening & Fluxus.


The remainder of the piece can be read at: http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/koppany/doris-e.htm