PLAY WHAT YOU LIKE: FLUXUS, MUSIC AND MORE… Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project
Howl! Happening takes its name from the unpredictable, free-form happenings of the 60s and 70s, where active participation of the
audience blurred the boundary between the art and the viewer. More to be experienced than described, Happening will curate exhibitions and stage live events that combine elements of art, poetry, music, dance, vaudeville, and theater——a cultural stew that defies easy definition.
For more than a decade, Howl! Festival has been an annual community event—— a free summer happening in and around Tompkins Square Park, dedicated to celebrating the past and future of contemporary culture in the East Village and the Lower East Side.
The history and contemporary culture of the East Village are still being written. The mix of rock and roll, social justice, art and performance, community activism, gay rights and culture, immigrants, fashion, and nightlife are even more relevant now. While gentrification continues apace and money is king, Howl! Happening declares itself a spontaneous autonomous zone: a place where people simultaneously experience and become the work of art. As Alan Kaprow, the “father” of the happening, said: “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid and indistinct as possible.”
PLAY WHAT YOU LIKE: FLUXUS, MUSIC AND MORE… Curated by Jade Dellinger Published on the occasion of the exhibition June 18–July 31, 2016 at Howl! Happening An Arturo Vega Project Howl! A/P/E Volume 1, No. 12
INSTRUCTIONS: Place musical score over photography on pages: 7, 11, 13, 15, 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25 and 27.
PLAY WHAT YOU LIKE: FLUXUS, MUSIC & MORE… Jade Dellinger Drawing its title from an early work (included here) by Italian Fluxus artist Giuseppe Chiari and celebrating the profound impact and enduring legacy of John Cage, Play What You Like: Fluxus Music & More is a chance-based and interactive installation featuring visual art by the pioneering composer, his circle of friends, collaborators and other notable artists influenced by the movement Cage helped to inspire. Often relying on chance to shape the outcome and actively engaging the viewer, Fluxus art, events and scores for performances involved simple actions, ideas, and objects from everyday life. Incorporating concrete poetry, visual art, and writing, Fluxus performances were the embodiment of Dick Higgins’ idea of “intermedia”—a dialogue between two or more disciplines to create a third, entirely new art form. Yet, as many of the Fluxus artists had formal training in music, musical composition and performance—frequently involving the alteration, misuse or abuse of traditional instruments—became central to their activity. Beginning with a series of festivals featuring concerts of experimental music and other avant-garde performance, Fluxus artists reacted against the commodification of art, its commercialization in the gallery system, and its static presentation in museums. A primary goal of most Fluxus artists was to destroy any boundary between art and life. Founder George Maciunas stated that Fluxus was “anti-art,” to underscore the revolutionary mode of thinking about the practice and process of art while using humor to mock the elitist world of “high art” and bring art to the widest possible audience. Featuring original Fluxus participants Philip Corner, Dick Higgins, Giuseppe Chiari, Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman, Joe Jones, Yoko Ono and Milan Knížák, as well as Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Glenn Branca, Dave Muller, Stephen Vitiello and Christian Marclay, among others, the exhibition Play What You Like: Fluxus Music & More also includes the New York premiere of a special variation on John Cage’s much-celebrated 33 1/3. Conceived in 1969 as a visitor participation piece, Cage’s 33 1/3 encourages gallerygoers to interact freely with a room full of record players and stacks of vinyl Lps. However, as the composer never
specified Lp titles for use in the installation, a prominent group of “guest curators,” including Iggy Pop, Richie Ramone, Lee Ranaldo, Pauline Oliveros, Meredith Monk, John Baldessari, William Wegman, Bryan Ferry (Roxy Music), Joan La Barbara, David Harrington (Kronos Quartet), Graham Nash, Terry Allen, Vito Acconci, Matthew Barney, Jim Rosenquist, Ed Ruscha and others have been invited to submit Top 10 picks to fill record bins at Howl! Happening. Each “guest curator” for John Cage’s 33 1/3 – Performed by Audience was given the freedom to determine their own approach for making selections. Many included records to which they had contributed, while others (like Mike Kelley, The Residents, and Alex James from Blur) were resolute about not including their own recordings. Some approached the challenge with the potential blend of music and voice foremost in mind, like David Byrne in committing entirely to obscure spoken word Lps (from Alfred Wolfsohn’s Vox Humana: Experiments in the Extension of The Human Vocal Range on Folkways Records to the recordings of Frank Zappa protégé Wild Man Fischer, and the poet T.S. Eliot). Blixa Bargeld of the industrial noise band Einstürzende Neubauten reverently dedicated his entire Top 10 to a wide array of John Cage records, while Yoko Ono focused wholly on her own recordings (and those of her late husband John Lennon and son Sean Ono Lennon). Jack White (The White Stripes) provided special pressings from his Third Man Records label, and Emil Schult from the Teutonic electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk contributed vintage vinyl from his personal record collection. As artist/participant Lee Ranaldo recently recalled: “I remember John talking about how he didn’t like to listen to a record more than once. What was the point? If one gave oneself over to the experience the first time, then why repeat? He didn’t really care for the idea of music as ‘fixed in time’ on a black platter. He said he’d rather open the window and listen to the trucks rolling by, or whatever else was coming in—the constantly changing music of ‘NOW’ rather than a packaged simulacra of ‘then.’” The duration of 33 1/3 is indeterminate. When first performed at the University of California, Davis, the audience interacted with John Cage’s
record installation for nearly four hours. However, 33 1/3 – Performed by Audience at Howl! Happening is accessible on a daily basis—during regular gallery hours (and for the occasional special event). As Cage would have expected, the work remains “silent” when there are no visitors to interact with it—and cacophonous (or perhaps most musical) when fully occupied by audience-performers. As John Cage famously surmised: “Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.” An intimate friend and collaborator of Bob Rauschenberg’s, the composer once noted: “I am very happy to have known Marcel Duchamp and to be living still in the time of Rauschenberg…I am not interested in the names of movements but rather in seeing and making things not seen before.” As Director of the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Florida Southwestern State College and guest curator of this exhibition, it is my hope that Play What You Like: Fluxus Music & More satisfies that simple objective. —Jade Dellinger, 2016
PLAY WHAT YOU LIKE: FLUXUS, MUSIC & MORE… Colby Chamberlain In September 1962, George Maciunas organized the Fluxus International Festival of the Newest Music in Wiesbaden, Germany. There, compositions such as Nam June Paik’s human-paintbrush performance, Zen for Head; Dick Higgins’s haircut duet, Danger Music Number Two, and Maciunas’ office supplies opera, In Memoriam to Adriano Olivetti, were presented together for the first time. The most memorable account of the concerts comes from someone who wasn’t actually there, Maciunas’s mother. In an autobiographical essay, she wrote: This extraordinary performance was even going to be shown on television. The evening arrived and I, fortunately, didn’t see the program (we didn’t have a television). The next day I met the former landlady of our hotel on the street and I was grieved by her sympathy, as if some kind of terrible grief had come to me. They had seen the previous evening’s program and had been horrified. It showed how several young people, including my son, had destroyed a piano with hammers and axes. Even if the instrument was old and useless, it was noble, someone had once played on it, had evoked beautiful sounds, it had served talented hands which had given the public joy and rapture. It was painful and terrible to watch how the chips flew, to hear the complaining twanging of the severed strings. This willful destruction of a dilapidated piano was in fact a composition, Philip Corner’s Piano Activities. Footage from the concert shows Maciunas and his Fluxus cohort dismantling the piano with calm determination. The audience giggles, then applauds. Maciunas’ mother seems to have understood better than most the implications of the action. Hacking at a piano was tantamount to assaulting Western music’s whole inherited tradition. Without a doubt, John Cage inspired this assault the most. Whenever he could, Cage made half-serious swipes at Beethoven to convey his disdain for classical music’s codified conventions: the hushed decorum of the concert hall, the subordination of musicians to a conductor’s cues, the whole hackneyed notion of a composer’s tormented genius washing over the audience. Cage’s long career amounted to a sustained effort to dismantle the legacy that Beethoven (as well as the piano) had
come to represent. He systematically broke down the divisions between music and noise, sound and silence, audio and visual. Perhaps most of all, he sought to eliminate intention, to excise his own taste and personality from the process of composition. For this, he employed chance techniques, introduced indeterminacy into his scores, and treated magnetic tape, vinyl records, and radio transmissions as sonic material that could be randomly selected and distorted. Play What You Like surveys how Cage’s assault has been taken up, renewed and reworked by subsequent generations. In Cage’s own 33 1/3, indeterminate composition and audio technology converge in bins of Lps that the audience is free to play on twelve amplified record players, generating an aural environment of unanticipated juxtapositions. For his Destroyed Music series, Milan Knížák willfully damaged the surface of Lps to yield a music structured around error and anomaly. Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman tinkered with the conventions of the concert hall by retrofitting Moorman’s Southern belle comportment and classical cello training with the electronic exhibitionism of their TV Bra for Living Sculpture. The likes of Christian Marclay, Laurie Anderson, and David Byrne have experimented with how Cage’s legacy might contaminate the commercialized trappings of pop, rock, and punk— drawing a line between the footage of the Fluxus Festival and the music videos on MTV. Needless to say, dismantling a piano in a concert hall is a markedly different gesture than smashing a guitar in an arena, where rebellion is ritual. In Play What You Like, these instruments are smashed together. Watch the chips fly. Hear the sounds of severed strings.
ITALIAN REPORT Caterina Gualco My first encounter with John Cage was during a concert at the Teatro Margherita in Genova on July 4, 1978. The concert was improperly announced and the hall was full of guys waiting for a rock concert. Grete Sultan performed Etudes Australes, Paul Zukofsky did Freeman Etudes, and Demetrio Stratos performed Sixty-Two Mesostics Re Merce Cunningham. Cage was in the audience listening like any spectator, and finally went onstage without making the slightest gesture. Pandemonium broke out during Etudes Australes, which subsided under the calm authority of Stratos and his incredible singing. The evening ended at a restaurant, and Cage was in a horrible mood, not because of how his work had been received, but because his luggage and microbiotic food had been lost! I met Philip Corner for the first time back in 1986, in the studio of renowned publisher Francesco Conz in Verona, where he was signing editions of CarrotChewPerformance, which I edited several times. We were acquaintances who quickly developed a friendship that grew through personal and group exhibitions in galleries and public spaces, performances, concerts, music, and Philip’s dance duets with his wife Phoebe Neville. (Above all, I like to remember The Fluxus Constellation show at the Museum of Villa Croce in Genova for the 40th anniversary of Fluxus, and his recent retrospective that I curated for La Fondation du doute in Blois, France.) I could also mention travel, participation in festivals, concerts and collaborations for exhibitions and events. I could speak about the many emotions we have shared, some of them dramatic, like when we learned about the tragedy of September 11, and were together in Odense, Denmark, for a performance festival. It would be a very long story, one that would take pages and pages to write down. Instead, I want to conclude with a statement that may seem a bit strong but absolutely matches my feelings: Philip, for me, is all about the music, his music as well as that of the many composers I have discovered through him. Others would agree with me that Philip is one of the best examples of the connection that can exist between music and visual art, something I am still quite passionate about.
During Milan Poetry in 1989, I met Joe Jones, sweet Zen monk, perpetually hung on his cigarette. Joe, with his incredible “music machines” was going to start a fire during his performance and looked very scared. He died shortly thereafter, too soon, and I wasn’t able to curate a solo exhibit of his works as I would have liked to do. In 1996, I met Milan Knížák at the opening of the exhibition Neo Knížák at the Mudima Foundation in Milan. I especially remember a wall covered with broken vinyl, burned and arranged in different ways, which featured a large sculpture of Christ painted in red (definitely a political reference to the Eastern and Western worlds). I recently saw this installation again in Blois. For 10 days in 1997, Dick Higgins was my guest in Genova on the occasion of his exhibition Buster Keaton Enters into Paradise, which was shown at my space UnimediaModern. At the opening, Dick presented the performance Danger Music Number Seventeen and Constellation. Culture, culture and…more culture! Dick knew everything, even the recipe for Pesto Genovese. Later in the 90s, I met Charlotte Moorman in Reggio Emilia, where she was part of Nam June Paik’s exhibition. Despite being quite ill and at the end of her days, Charlotte gathered the strength to fully immerse herself in a transparent cube filled with water and play the cello! And, finally, Giuseppe Chiari, whose work (Play What You Like) provides the title to this exhibition and who was also Italian, like me. He has always been present in my long history as gallery owner; paradoxically I have never curated a solo exhibition for him. There was a friendship between us, slightly veiled from my distrust of his Florentine “savagery.” In any case, I have always admired the value of his work, his dialectical play between image and sound in continuous contamination. For Chiari, there were four types of music: for the road, for the fortress, for the church, and for the palace. Anonymous music, made of sounds, of gestures, “spoken” rather than “sung,” and for which there is no need to go to the conservatory. I remember him like this—always smiling and a little aloof, a resident of his own planet in the Fluxus galaxy. —Genova, 28 May 2016.
Original Klytemnestra Press Release, 1987. Private Collection.
PLAY AT YOUR OWN RISK Carlo McCormick There is a space within art, not certain and never set, where the orthodoxies do not apply, an interstice hidden within, or other place beyond the constructed history and received chronology of movements, manifestos and meanings; somewhere no less serious but a lot more fun, where the rigors of process unfold as a game. This exhibition capably situates this mode of participatory and playful art within the international and interdisciplinary movement of Fluxus as it extended through the 60s and 70s, and continued to inform latter generations of artists. It also gives due deference to the cross-generational figure of John Cage, who from his tenure at Black Mountain College through his decades of radical experimentation pioneering New York’s downtown music and performance scene has been a most influential progenitor of this sensibility. But the whole point of this wonderfully transgressive lineage is that it is neither definite in its methodologies nor fixable to any one time or place. It is rather a strategy that comes to the fore at different times and in very different ways that artists deploy to get around the dead end certainties and ossified mannerisms that inevitably occur when styles and ideas become established. So let’s not put a real date on it—but since this is the centenary of Cabaret Voltaire, let’s say this type of highly engaged and purposeful play has at least been around for the hundred years since Dada. So hybrid are the forms of this show, pieces that fall between objects, artifacts, documentations and scores, it’s kind of an exhibition about art and music, but maybe far more: Perhaps it’s music with a rich undertow of trans harmonic resonances that take us someplace far past the limits of a song, or it is visual art with a backbeat that rocks your body and lets your mind run free. What makes the art here so magical and mysterious is precisely its in-between status, like something discovered along the way, a sum of differences brought from abstraction to some kind of materialization. It reminds us of Emma Goldman’s response when she was called out for her reckless abandon on the dance floor, told that her position as an anarchist agitator was diminished by her undignified frivolity: “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution… A revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having.” This then is the kind of art that allows us to dance, and for that it is all the more revolutionary.
There is of course another condition in which the experiences of music and art converge, one that is more a psychological or physiological diagnosis than an aesthetic scheme. Synesthesia is the medical term used to describe what happens when a secondary sensation attaches itself to a primary perception such that one stimulus evokes the sensation of another. The most example common (of this admittedly rare phenomenon) of synesthesia is how hearing a sound can make us visualize a color—what is called chromesthesia—but it can apply to any other combination of crossed sense impressions involving taste, smell or touch. In this way, we may say that the visualization of music evident in the recombinant instruments, altered record covers, instructional or scored art and performance compositions, and other compound mixtures baked into this show are deliberately synesthetic. But further, we must note here it is not simply the work itself that effects this cross-pollination of terms, it is our experience of this work that is also synesthetic, a simultaneous impression of sight and sound. An art that does not shy away from its role in a collaborative investigation of recreation, amusement, entertainment and diversion with its audience, while at the same time possessing a level gravitas we associate with the archest experimentalisms of the avant-garde, Play What You Wish is part invitation, part permission. If it addresses us with mixed signals and across mixed media it does so because it comes from deeper conversations within the creative community that occur in those brief but brilliant periods in which artists of all sorts—writers, painters, musicians, filmmakers, designers, sculptors and more—all work, live and love in such dense proximity that the isolations of different media are broken down completely. Many are artists we might as well encounter on a stage or in a gallery, creating in a nightclub, a street corner or, yes, a studio. Here is a manner of work that does indeed make a call to play, to perform and to make a game of it, to (as Cage made a oeuvre of doing) limn the rules of a game without any real rules, to find the informal within the bounds of formalism and to demand participation from an audience that has long been accustomed to passivity; to say that art can only take risks if we too take a chance on it.
HOWL! COMMUNITY Arturo Vega Foundation Lalo Quiñones Jane Friedman Donovan Welsh BG Hacker
Play What You Like: Fluxus, Music & More… Curated by Jade Dellinger Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project June 18–July 31, 2016
BOARD OF ADVISORS Curt Hoppe Marc H. Miller Dan Cameron Carlo McCormick
© 2016 Howl Arts, Inc. Howl! Archive Publishing Editions (Howl! A/P/E) Volume 1, No. 12
James Rubio Anthony Cardillo Debora Tripodi Lisa Brownlee Howl! Board of Directors Bob Perl, President Bob Holman, Vice President BG Hacker, Treasurer Nathaniel Siegel, Secretary Brian (Hattie Hathaway) Butterick Riki Colon Jane Friedman Chi Chi Valenti Marguerite Van Cook, President Emeritus Gallery Director: Ted Riederer Program Director: Carter Edwards Assistant Director: Liz Cvitan Creative Consultant: Susan Martin Social Networks Manager: Michelle Halabura Videographers: Darian Brenner, Jasmine Hirst and Stephanie Twyford Baldwin Gallery designed by Ted Kofman
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of Howl! A/P/E. Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project 6 East 1st St. NY, NY 10003 www.HowlArts.org 917 475 1294 Art Photography © 2016 Ted Riederer Title Page © Giuseppe Chiari, Play What You Like, (1971). Serigraph on paper. 50 x 70 cm. Published by Edizioni Exempla, Florence, Italy. (A publishing firm founded and directed by Maurizio Nannucci). Edition of 100. Essays © 2016 © 2016 © 2016 © 2016
Jade Dellinger Coby Chamberlain Caterina Gualco Carlo McCormick
Editor: Ted Riederer Copy Editor: Jorge Clar Design: Jeff Streeper The Arturo Vega Project: Jane Friedman
Nam June Paik, Satellite Duo John Cage/Joseph Beuys, (1985) Litograph on artboard. Published by Klaus Staeck/Edition Staeck, Heidleberg, Germany.
Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project www.howlarts.org / info@howlarts.org
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