In 1966, the Lithuanian emigrant to New York,
and Fluxus 'chairman', George Maciunas, constructed the Expanded Arts Diagram (fig. 1). The diagram sought to provide a
lineage for the movement, offering a narrative of the context in which the
Fluxus practice grew. In form, it lies somewhere between a graph and a
timeline, with Fluxus as its centre point. It arranges direct influences and
separates parallel movements, meticulously acknowledging the role of each
individual who played a part in its formation.
In the section marked 'PAST' (bottom left) the
experimental composer John Cage (1912 - 92), and the author of the
revolutionary ‘readymade’ strategy, artist Marcel Duchamp (1887 –1968), take
honorary positions. Both artists were crucial predecessors in their
appropriation, translation and transformation of the everyday into the ‘art’
situation: Duchamp dealing with industrially produced objects or other items
traditionally thought to bear no trace of aesthetic value, Cage,
rediscovering, among others ‘environmental sound’ as a positive factor with
which to work, isolating everyday incidents and re-contextualising them within
the framework of a musical event.
Zen Buddhism influenced Cage's ideas about what
constitutes music and led him to subvert its traditional conventions by
transforming everyday tasks and events, however trivial, into art. He states:
'wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs
us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at 50
mph. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these
sounds, to use them, not as sound effects, but as musical instruments'[1].
All conceivable actions and events became sounds waiting to be organised into a
part of this music. Consequently, Cage broke away from the traditional Western
scoring system and created graphic notations for interpretation, designed to
inspire creativity in the performer, with abstract pictures and sketches
representing the movement of note pitches and strength of dynamics.
A prominent example of this is Cage's Water Music of 1952 (fig. 2). The
performer is free to interpret the scattered instructions for playing actions,
with only timing indications for the length of their duration. For many of the
actions, the performer is left to choose their own instrument. Through this he
encouraged the individual to interact with the composition process as this
allowed a connection between piece and performer. Water Music embraces the element of chance in each of the
activities scored; even the radio is tuned to a random frequency. The sounds of
static during the tuning process are equally important in this composition, as
the sound of a melodic series of notes played on a traditional instrument in another music of the day.
First performed by the renowned pianist David
Tudor, at the New School for Social Research in New York during the spring of
that year, Tudor shuffled cards to determine the order of the performance
actions, and used a stopwatch to keep within the very quick but precise timing
regulations. The piece was exceptional at that time as Cage utilizes simple
household objects to explore the wide variety of different sounds it is
possible to make with water. So novel and unusual was this idea, that the piece was renamed Water
Walk, and was performed by Cage in 1960 on the popular television panel game
show I've got a Secret, during a
celebrity guest round, where guests typically demonstrated a new product or
technology (fig. 3)[2].
The
concept of a musical performance consisting of everyday sounds was clearly a
revolutionary idea, and a bold movement to demonstrate on a program designed
for mass entertainment rather than modern art. Members of the studio audience
laughed loudly and frequently as the curtains on stage were drawn back to
reveal Cage’s instruments: a water pitcher, an iron pipe, a goose call, a
bottle of wine, an electric mixer, a whistle, a sprinkling can, ice cubes, two
cymbals, a mechanical fish, a quail call, a rubber duck, a tape recorder, a
vase of roses, a seltzer siphon, five radios and a bathtub. A grand piano was
also present, but used more like an item of furniture rather than for any
conventional purpose.
The piano lid was opened, and Cage placed a children’s bath toy – the mechanical fish, wired so that it vibrated, on to the strings inside the piano, causing these strings to oscillate. Water was poured from one receptacle to the next,
ice cubes made a grinding sound when placed inside the blender, a whistle was
blown above and below the surface of the water in a can, the sound of the cymbals colliding and vibrating under water when hit immersed in the bath, the wide flat surface of the cymbal
puncturing the tension of the water surface producing waves. This performance
was a demonstration of the new musical concepts, which were soon to be known as
the Fluxus attitude.
Cage arranged a series of classes in the field
of experimental composition from autumn 1956 until the summer of 1960 at the
New School for Social Research in New York[3].
The class was open to students with or without a musical background, and
therefore attracted people from a wide variety of disciplines. The
communications and ideas exchanged at the Cage class, as it is now referred to,
was hugely influential in the work and ideals of its students, and brought
together some of the Fluxus movements earliest founders. In attendance were
Jackson MacLow, an avant-garde poet, George Brecht, a scientist and visual
artist interested in chance proceedings, Al Hansen, whose work fused sound with
experimental film, Dick Higgins, who theorised the growth of what he called
'intermedia' approaches. Allan Kaprow was also a visitor, and the Cage class
was influential in the development of his 'Happenings', which went
beyond assemblages and environments to become spontaneous, but structured, complex
performative events. Kaprow’s Happenings forced the audience to become
performers, or at least participants, thus questioning the boundaries between
theatre and life. Happenings were scenarios, which enhanced the interactor’s
exploration of their environment, focusing on the experiential value of art. In
his Essays on the Blurring of Art and
Life[4]
he describes a Happening where the encounterer is simply placed before a
mirror, causing them to reflect on their own person and behaviour in
interaction with the other audience members. The diversity of
the specialisations of those who had attended the Cage class resulted in the
unusual fusions of media practices that were so striking in Fluxus.
During this
time, artists from the Cage class met weekly at a New York coffee house to
discuss their influences. Of crucial importance as an influence was not
only the work of Duchamp, the Parisian artist who had arrived in New York in
1915 and was to become the key New York Dadaist, but also the European Dadaists
he had left behind. The ‘anti-art’ of the international Dadaists had been
initiated in Zurich with Hugo Ball’s ‘Cabaret Voltaire’, in 1916. The Dadaists
protested against the absurdity of the rationality that had led to mechanized
warfare, against the bourgeoisie, and against ‘civilisation’ in general. They
declared their commitment to ‘disgust’, rejecting the entire social and
political order. Dada waged war on the aesthetic, and declared its commitment
to an alternative, if unarticulated anarchistic reality - abstract, crude, and
devoid of logic. Later, the Dadaists were
persecuted by the Nazi authorities, threatened by Dada works that
refused to adhere to the cultural censorship of their autocratic regime.
In New York, Marcel Duchamp submitted his
notorious urinal, signed "R. Mutt" to the Society of Independent
Artists as a work of art under the title The
Fountain in 1917. The Fountain
was rejected, but Duchamp, under a pseudonym, published a summary of the ‘R.
Mutt Case’ in the magazine The Blind Man[5],
with a photograph by the influential photographer Arthur Steiglitz,
successfully infiltrating the press in a self-advertising manoeuvre that earned
him enormous historical weight, and led his work to be called proto-conceptual
for having shifted the site of meaning from the persona of the artist and the
‘work of art’, to the institutional and discursive frameworks within which
artist and object function.
Following
the rediscovery of Duchamp, when a retrospective of his work was held at the
Pasadena Museum of Art in 1963, and editions of the long overlooked readymades
were produced, the early Fluxists were quick to adopt the readymade strategy,
and to follow up some of its implications. They embraced the performative and
interactive dimensions of the readymade by inviting the audience to interact
with their objects, emphasizing that art should be an experience, and not only
a commodity. Fluxus artists, like Kaprow, called for art to
be removed from the limitations of museums and galleries, which were frequented only by people already involved in the art scene
of the day.
Fluxus brought a new dynamic to the art world by allowing its
audience contact with the artwork. Undermining the Modernist commitment to
‘retinal’ or ‘visual’ art, they made objects that were not only to be admired
but were also to be touched. An early example of this is the Fluxkit (fig. 5):
a wooden box with separate compartments containing a variety of readymades
linked by a conceptual motif, that was often a pun, and performance scores called Fluxus Event cards.
The interactor is free to pick it up, remove the contents of and explore as
they wish, this emphasis on a lack of constriction encouraging the audience to
connect with the artwork.
The concept of the Fluxkit, an interactive
miniature gallery, originates with Maciunas who dedicated his skills as an engineer,
architect, graphic designer and artist, devoutly to Fluxus. He named the movement and
constructed a manifesto (fig. 6) expanding what was formerly an ideology into a
radical social protest. Maciunas proclaimed himself chairman of the movement and worked tirelessly to promote
its thesis despite virtually non-existent funds[6].
He cherished values of efficiency and economy to comic proportions[7]:
this is clear in his graphic designs for Fluxus newsletters, pamphlets and
diagrams, where every inch of space is covered with minute graphics. Maciunas devoted himself to the
construction of Fluxkits and Fluxus year boxes and, together with La Monte
Young and Jackson Mac Low, An Anthology,
each handmade, unique in form and content in accordance with the motif. Fluxus
used materials that are mass produced or at least widely accessible and inexpensive
in the creation of their visual and sonic works, to negate the exclusivity of
an artwork. Event cards were typed onto plain paper and sold cheaply to anyone
wishing to purchase one or simply flung from rooftops into the street below; in the Fluxus Newspaper No. 5, 1965, Maciunas set up a
Fluxshop and Mail order Warehouse (fig. 7). The way the artists disposed of
their work without ceremony showed their disregard for the concept of an artwork
as something precious and unrepeatable. In 1964 Robert Watts produced an ironic
Event card, which simply reads 'To be destroyed'.
Fluxus
artists disregarded all conventional concepts of a musical score as a firm set
of musical instructions with limited scope for interpretation. Instead they
introduced the Event score, which consisted of words or phrases and sentences
hand typed onto plain paper, distributed cheaply to make the work accessible to
as diverse an audience as possible. The Event card made a series of
propositions about what might produce an interesting outcome, to be performed
or experimented with by the receiver.
During one session of the Cage class the only
instruments played were musical toys designed for children. This meant that
everyone began with the same level of skill, rendering all persons equally
qualified to perform. This became an important motif to many Fluxus artists:
George Maciunas’ Music for Everyman, Do It Yourself Music of 1961 used
everyday objects and an excessive range of sounds possible to produce with the
body, from the more obvious actions such as clap and stamp to the more abstract
- splutter, gargle, wail[8].
Through this alternative method of musical scoring Fluxus artists engaged the
audience in the compositional process, dismissing the idea that music is the
artist’s soliloquy to be conveyed to a passive listener, and instead
transforming music into a communication between composer and interactor.
Fluxus declared its
audience fully equal to the artist and the composer.
Sound and music
performances were renamed Events, so as to set them apart from the connotations
of ‘concert’ – an artist or group of artists repeating a production to a silent and still audience. Some exponents decided to remove their audience from this
form of listening so entirely as to encourage the individual to let their focus roam freely. ‘MusiCircus’
was a form of exhibiting a mix of media, with multiple performances, films and
chance generated games, happening simultaneously to promote this model of
active listening. The first instance of this happening was organised by John
Cage at the Stock Pavilion at the University of Illinois on November 17, 1967.
The audience moved amongst actors, mime artists and dancers performing
concurrently with free form poetry readings and live music, and were invited to
interact and produce their own art work with the materials scattered around,
and play on the musical sculptures suspended from the ceiling, whilst festively
eating doughnuts and popcorn and drinking cider.
Some Fluxus works suggest that the focus of the
listener need not be on the performer at all. Advocating the attitude that all
sound has musically value, Fluxus declared that an equally fruitful experience could
be focusing attention on sounds produced by nature or a neighbour, and other chance sounds in the surroundings during the performance. Some pieces relied solely on these
sounds. This was instigated by Cage's 4'33''
(fig. 8), composed in 1952, where the performer is invited to be silent
during the three separate movements of the piece, which are divided only by the
passing of time. The unexpected lack of action in the performer heightens the
senses to action elsewhere: movements of audience, atmospheric surroundings. Its
interpretation has been diverse; the first to perform 4'33'' was, again, David Tudor, at a recital of contemporary
music in Woodstock,
New York. Tudor chose to seat himself at a piano with a
stopwatch, close the lid, then reopen and close the piano lid at timed
intervals to mark the three movements. There was a very strong reaction to this
piece, and the audience were at first perplexed, and then outraged by Cage's
bold move. The sounds heard in this rendition were those of the wind and rain,
which were subsequently accompanied by the disgruntled mutterings of the
audience. Whilst this piece is a clear reaction to the constrictions of the
prevalent avant-garde experiments, it was also the start of a new mode of
listening - the valuation of everyday sounds such as the rustling of clothing,
creaking of furniture, wind and weather, traffic and wildlife amongst the
innumerable other noises which surround us in everyday life.
The advent of more complex recording technologies allowed artists to capture organic sounds in good quality onto tape, however, Fluxus practitioners were in general opposed to
recording the sounds of nature and relocating these environments. By rejecting all means of reproducing what is around you, they strove to alert the
listener to sound as it happens in the moment, not as it is later portrayed and
manipulated. Some felt that by recording and repeating sounds in playback they
would be conveying a false image of ever-changing nature.
Consequently, the Event performance became a time frame for the reception of
sound.
The
inclusion of these ‘indeterminate’ sounds generated further interest in the exploration
of aleatoric composition. Many Fluxus scores invite the performer to use chance
procedures to structure the order of sonic events, or to determine the source
of the sound on which to focus attention; since the variations of the outcome
are limitless, this method is informative as it investigates each element of
the situation in which sound is framed as music. Moreover, it is intriguing as
it retracts the control of the composer and performer, over the music. Dick
Higgins sees the value of this in the placing of ‘material at one remove from
the composer by allowing it to be determined by a system he determined. And the
real innovation lies in the emphasis on the creation of the system’[9].
A dramatic instance of aleatory composition is
in the performance of Dick Higgins' Event score Danger Music No. 12, which reads 'Write a thousand symphonies'. In
1968, Higgins and his partner, Fluxus artist Alison Knowles, set out to South
Brunswick Police Riffle Range with a thousand pieces of manuscript paper for
standard orchestra ensemble and, whilst Knowles filmed to document the Event,
Higgins shot holes through the music paper with the machine gun. Higgins then wrote out a list
of instructions for a conductor, to aid the orchestra who were to attempt to interpret
and perform the punctured and partially destroyed pieces of score paper. An
example of the nature of these instructions is 'the straighter the rip, the
simpler the timbre'[10]. The Fluxus
artist Philip Corner prepared an orchestra to perform the resulting
composition later that year in the Hickman Auditorium at Rutgers University.
The triumphant execution of an Event score so unfeasible illustrates the
endlessly enthusiastic spirit of Fluxus.
The Event scores compiled by Alison Knowles
(the sole female representative amongst the Fluxus founders) predominantly
focus on minimalistic, simple and routine tasks, which in their contemplation,
offer a wider insight into human behaviour and the relationships between person on and material. In
the Identical Lunch, which she began to
document in 1967, the repetition and meticulous notation of its performers
provided a vibrant narrative, offering great insight into the temperaments of
the early Fluxists. Thirty-five years later, her daughter, Hannah Higgins
encompasses the experience of the Event: 'The meals, like the films and
Fluxkits - whether they presented users with art based on sound, touch, smell
or taste - frame art as experience'[11].
To share their radical new approach to art and invite participants, the founding Fluxus practitioners staged Events in open public spaces. Figure 9 shows artists sitting under a slogan painted directly onto a
wall advertising Fluxus street Events. Fluxus demonstrations happened in
unlikely spaces, for example Street
Cleaning Event, took place on a busy New York pavement in 1966. The
Japanese Fluxus artist Hi Red Center marked his designated area with chalk and,
dressed in a full length laboratory coat, proceeded to thoroughly scrub the
pavement using solvents, sponges, scourers and toothbrushes. In 1964 Nam June Paik
tied a long piece of string to the neck of a violin, as though collaring an
animal, and proceeded to drag it through the streets behind him on its ‘leash’
with an air of nonchalance, as though merely exercising a pet. Paik walked his
violin all over New York - in the subways, and through shops, implementing the Fluxus
practice into all aspects of life.
[1] The Future of
Music: Credo, (1937), from John Cage:
Documentary Monographs in Modern Art, Richard Kostelanetz (ed), (Praeger
Publishers, 1970).
[3] Cage also taught mushroom identification, showing his affinity with
nature. For a full list of the classes he taught see FluxAttitudes, Cornelia Lauf and Susan Hapgood (eds), (Imschoot
Uitgevers, Gant, 1991).
[4] Allan Kaprow, Essays on the
Blurring of Art and Life, (University of California Press, 1993) pages
15-16.
[5] The Blind Man 2, eds. Marcel Duchamp, Beatrice Wood, and
Henri-Pierre Roché (New York, May 1917), pages 2–3.
[6] On a postcard regarding organisation of Fluxus concerts (1962) to La
Monte Young, Maciunas asks Young to use a magnifying glass to read his
communications, which consume every possible space with minute lettering, as 'I
am saving on postage'. This is catalogued in Happenings, Fluxus, Pop Art, Nouveau Réalisme. Eine Dokumentation,
(Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg, 1965).
[7] Maciunas employed these values in all aspects of his life. In the mid
1960's Maciunas attempted to eat for an average of a dollar a day. His success
is described in Barbara Moore, George
Maciunas: A Finger in Fluxus, (Artforum, 1982).
[8] Maciunas suffered with very bad health from the days of his early
childhood; far from letting his daily injections and medicine routines subdue
him, he collected his empty pill bottles and vials for use in his artworks and
poked fun of his ailments in a sequel to Music
for Everyman entitled Solo for Sick
Man (1962), which uses objects like nose drops and noises such as sneeze
and spit. For more on Maciunas: Mr.
Fluxus: A collective portrait of George Maciunas 1931-1978, Emmett Williams
and Ann Noël, (Thames and Hudson, London, 1997).
[9] Quote
taken from page 6 of Experimental
Music - Cage and beyond, Michael Nyman, (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
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