What do you think?
Rate this book
My Life In FluxAnd Vice Versa
This is an endlessly stimulating memoir, by a figure who was involved in some of the most astounding art of the post-war era, and a fresh, spontaneous account of the ideals and happenings that first burst into view in the 1960s.
- GenresArt
496 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1992
29 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
April 17, 2025
review of
Emmett Williams's My Life in Flux – – and Vice Versa
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - April 12, 2025
The complete review will be here:
http://idioideopleintekst.nl/CriticWi...
once I get around to the tedious task of making the webpage.
I reckon it's accurate to say that I love all people & things FLUXUS. In my life I've had the good fortune to meet, usually briefly, such FLUXUS people as Dick Higgins, Jackson Mac Low, Alison Knowles, Davi Det Hompson, John Cage, Ken Friedman, Stan VanDerBeek, & Carolee Schnemann. Emmett Williams has always been of particular interest to me b/c he was the editor of An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (Something Else Press, 1967), probably the most important poetry collection in my personal experience of such things. I've read one other Williams bk, after that anthology & before this one to be reviewed, called Schemes & Variations (Nationalgalerie Berlin, 1982) wch is absolutely fantastic & wch I had the good fortune to acquire in what appeared to be mostly a FLUXUS bkstore in Berlin in 1994. I suspect that that store no longer exists so I feel doubly fortunate to have visited it & come away w/ a sample of their wares.
Having been heavily involved w/ international mvmts other than FLUXUS & having observed the way they've started & grown it was interesting for me to read Williams's acct of FLUXUS's birth & growth. Sure, there was a zeitgeist. Yes, there were people who worked w/ each other in a 'fellow traveller' sort of way under the FLUXUS umbrella. Yes, George Maciunas, FLUXUS's primer mover & shaker, prime impressario, who organized things in such a way that there appeared to be a mvmt w/ a common cause.. but reading this bk made it clearer to me that FLUXUS was somewhat fragile & that it barely existed - despite how many events & publications occurred in its name.
It's possible that the same thing cd be sd about NEOISM, one of the main Cultural Conspiracies I've been involved w/. NEOISM's George Maciunas, Monty Cantsin (Istvan Kantor), has dedicated a similar amt of fervent energy as Maciunas did in creating the appearance of a mvmt called "NEOISM", something that he recruits for tirelessly, bringing in new participants under its umbrella, participants who often don't last more than a few yrs at most before they move on to something else.
Hence, Williams's bk is ostensibly about "his life in flux"(us) but is more about his life as a poet/performance-artist whose association is w/ FLUXUS but whose work just as often, if not more often, seems to've just appeared in less specific art contexts.
"I wrote an essay about Fluxus for the programme although Genesis was never a part of Fluxus repertoire – unless you believe, with so many of my old colleagues – that everything a Fluxus artist does is Fluxus. This attitude has certainly made it more difficult to understand what Fluxus was or is, and for many people Genesis is regarded as 'typical Fluxus.' Let it be." - p 348
In the beginning he provides this dedication:
"in tribute
to the legendary Sylvester Schaffer,
an almost forgotten precursor of Fluxus,
whose one-man vaudeville show
at the 44th Street Theater in New York
in 1914
included sharopshooting,
a tumbling turn with five dogs,
Japanese juggling,
trained horses,
card tricks and coin palming,
magic acts,
sketching in oil paints,
heavyweight juggling,
a violin solo
and other performance pieces
all in 80 minutes
(including costume changes)" - p 7
That got me interested in Schaffer so I searched for footage of him online & found "16mm Film - Fahrendes Volk - Teil 1 - D 1934" ( https://youtu.be/eWI9Yqm-0f8?si=SzGnt... ) & "16mm Film - Fahrendes Volk - Teil 2 - D 1934" ( https://youtu.be/gm2gZWvjyi4?si=d2_lR... ). "Fahrendes Volk" translates to "nomadic people" or "traveling people" in English - for me a rather strange choice of words given that what distinguishes the people presented is their fantastic athletic ability more than their travelling - wch, obviously, many people w/o the skills shown also do. These films include what is, to me, very impressive acrobatics, juggling, trapese artistry, & horse training, amongst other things. One trapese artist flies thru the air w/ a burlap sack over his head!
Williams recounts his experiences as a child performer:
"Popeye? Popeye is something I must have picked up at the movies, probably at the Warwick Theatre, where I used to sing on the stage at the Kiddy Klub every Saturday morning before the picture-show started. I can almost hear myself now in some of my best numbers, such as "Palsy-walsy, my little sugar cup, if you get much sweeter, I'm gonna eatchew up" and another song that I really threw myself into, "I Faw Down and Go Boom." (This vast repertory of Lieder comes back to me occasionally, afert sufficient wine; and I recreated twenty-six of such childhood renditions at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, and at the Sommerakademie in Salzburg, several years ago.)" - p 16
My own experience as a child performer was much more humble: I played single piano pieces in group recitals & recited satirical poetry about my sister in costume behind my house. Nonetheless, I've sometimes thought about recreating a least one of the piano tunes in performance as an adult.
"I'm Popeye the Sailor Man
"finishing off with an improvised dance, the flexing of my nonexistent muscles, lots of "Ahoy there, mates!" and "Avast, ye landlubbers" with a "Toot! Toot" here and a "Toot! Toot!" there plus ad libs thrown out to anyone in the audience that I recognized. I did it at American Legion dinners, Elks Club banquets, Women's Benefit Association brunches, Women's Club soirées, and Holy Name Society breakfasts, at the Colony Inn, the Tideater Hotel, Hotel Warwick, the Chamberlain, the Acheson-Dietrich Seafood Restaurant, and a Chinese restaurant on Washington Avenue, not to forget Radio Station WGH, the voice of "the World's Greates Harbour." And, at Christmastime, for the disabled veterans of World War One – of course we didn't call it One in those days because no one knew there would be a Two – at the Old Soldiers' Home." - p 17
!!!!! Is that quantity of fantastic venues just due to growing up in NYC (as opposed to Baltimore) or were the times less paranoid about child abuse or What?! Whatever the case, to me, that's an astounding list of places for a child to perform.
One of the earliest participants in FLUXUS was Ben Patterson, originally from Pittsburgh. I live in Pittsburgh & perk up as response to such history. Williams was friends & collaborators w/ Patterson.
"Here, then, is the text of this tongue-in-cheek, sometimes foot-in-mouth, interview, the world's first reportage that called Fluxus Fluxus." - p 22
"Get one thing straight at the beginning. This isn't "new music. "New Music" is old hat to these people. This is very new music. In fact, some of it is anti-music, according to American impresario George Maciunas, who will take the Fluxus festival lock, stock, barrel, plastic butterflies, stomach pump, etc., etc., to Paris in December, then to Holland, Luxembourg, Italy, Austria, East Europe, Japan,and eventually the United States." - p 23
""Are there scores for this sort of music, Mr,Patterson?"
""Certainly. I myself use texts which explain the action in detail, how to produce such and such an effect, and so forth. Others use ticker tape, string, telephone books, the imperfections in cheap paper, photographs of ants, things that look more or less like traditional scores, the footprints of wild beasts . . .""
[..]
""You seem to be concentrating on 'odd' things. If that's the task you want to emply, then there are some 'odd' things, from your point of view, of course. You might mentions John Cage's 31'57.9864 for piano, or La Monte Young's Poems for Chairs, Tables, Benches, etc., or Toshi Ichiyanagi's Music for Electric Metronome and IBM Music, or Richard Maxfield's Cough Music, or Emmett Williams' Four Directional Song of Doubt for Five Voices, or Terry Riley'sEar Piece for Audience, or Yogi Kuri's Human Zoo, or Dieter Schnebel's Visible Music for One Conductor and One Pianist, or George Brecht's Candle Piece for Radios."" - p 24
&, indeed, FLUXUS seen/heard as a musical mvmt was very new &, for me, still ahead of even new music of today. Hence, my love.
& who or what was FLUXUS? As of the 1990 Venice Biennial?
"In fact, there were more "Fluxus artists" than some of us clannish oldtimers had ever dreamed existed. I eremember a tender moment, when Wolf Vostell and I were examining the giant poster. He put his arm around my shoulder, and said, "Emmett, do you remember in Weisbaden in 1962 there were only seven of us? Now there are one hundred and twenty."" - p 28
On Wikipedia, there're 72 listed ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluxus ). I wonder how the "clannish oldtimers" wd react to all the "Fluxus" records put out by retired German senior police detective Kommissar Hjuler?
On p 31, there's a chart w/ a heading explaining the 4 categories of Fluxus people:
"Within Fluxus group there are 4 categories indicated:"
[..]
"4) individuals active within fluxus since the formation of fluxus but having since then detached themselves on following motivations:
a) anticollective attitude, excessive individualism, desire for personal glory, prima dona complex
(Mac Low, Schmit, Williams, Nam June Paik, Dick Higgins, Kosugi)," - p 31
The chart is by George Maciunas. Those "excessive individualists" are some of the ones I feel closest to. I've made a movie of me reading Mac Low's Asymmetries 1-260 (3 versions: "tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE reading Jackson Mac Low's "Asymmetries 1-260"" - 10:08:00 - on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/0Zn9rl8PBqc ; "Susie reads to Neoists - attn expandex version" - 10:25:59 - on my onesownthoughts YouYube channel here: https://youtu.be/Ug4ajUv4rqk ; "Susie reads to Neoists - shorter version" - 4:54:46 - on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/mTJEn9OCkrA ). I've made a movie of etta cetera realizing a Schmit piece ("typewriter poem - tomas schmit - march 63" - on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/XprYK4V5ZhQ ). I've read Williams's bks, seen a fantastic installation by Paik at the Wood Street Gallery, heard Dick Higgins read his work, & witnessed Takehisa Kosugi perform music for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.
"George Brecht's "events" present a good example of some of these performance problems. These "events", born in an American setting, were for him "very private, like little enlightenments I wantsd to communicate to my friends, who would know what to do with them", and he had never thought of them as elaborate public performances. Well, in the European Fluxus festivals the[y] became exactly that, much to George's surprise, public realizations of simple events that he wanted to ntoice naturally in real life.
"Sometimes there were more performers than spectators at these "public performances." And sometimes, when the audience outnumbered the performers, the spectators took advantage of the situation. One night, students climbed up onto the stage, harried the performers, and tried to set fire to the score of my Opera. And once, during a performance in Amsterdam, a girl tried to set Dick Higgins on fire." - p 32
To 'performers' such as myself, Williams's recounting of misattributions, non-paying gigs, & other manifestations of stupidity & unfriendliness are reassurances that even 'top dogs' get treated like 'low-lifes', something that's happened to me all too often.
"I am seated at my desk, opening a package that the postman had just delivered, DM 2,30 postage due. Inside the package is a book. A brand new anthology of Fluxus performance pieces. Naturally, I flip through the book to the W section, to see how well I am represented. Ah, not bad. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Eight pieces!
"My joy is short-lived. Three of these eight pieces, Expedition (1964), Supper (1965), and Concerto for Paik No. 2 (1965) I have never heard of before in my life. If there exists a Concerto for Paik No. 2 (1965), then there ought to be a Concerto for Paik No. 1, but even if there is, it certainly wasn't written by me." - p 45
George Brecht's "On-Off" is misattributed to Williams. I imagine that these days most people interested in Fluxus wd recognize such a mistake immediately.
"But wait! Does the historian have any proof that I am, after all, the composer of On-Off? I hope not. For I have no proof that I did not write it.
"Will the real composer of On-Off please stand up?" - p 46
People interested in a filmed performance of this piece cd do worse than to witness Florian Cramer's realization now ensconced in my super-8 feature entitled Satanic Liposcution, Neoasm?!, and YOU!! here: https://youtu.be/PpyNO5UHmr0?si=7ywyn... .
But what about:
"Voice Piece for La Monte Youg (1962)
"Ask if La Monte Young is in the audience, then exit. If the performance is televised or broadcast, ask if La Monte Young is watching or listening to the program." - p 48
It's exactly this flair for the unexpected that makes FLUXUS work so great, it's so simple &, yet, so utterly different from performances that present the usual full frontal.
"The Goft of Tongues (1962)
"Sing meaningfully in a language made up on the spot." - p 52
"The Alphabet Symphony
"This is a symphony in which you can spell "love" by smoking a cigar, blowing a silent dog whistle, eating a chocolate éclair off the floor on all fours doggy-fashion, and tooting a little ditty on the flute. That's the way it was spelled during the first performance in London in 1962.
"In Paris, the same year, I acted it out by blowing a toy horn, gazing at the audience through the hole of a cored apple, ripping a piece of cloth, and eating a hard-boiled egg extracted from the womb of a medical school model of a pregnant woman.
"A symphony? Well, that is what Daniel Spoerri advertised that I would perform – an Alphabet Symphony – at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Since there was none, I got to work and composed one." - p 58
There're posters throughout the bk that give an idea of who was performing what at the FLUXUS festivals. Here's an example of hat was presented on December 3, 1962 at Fluxus Festorum III:
"Concert No. 1, Musique Evénenementelle. Raoul Hausman: Poesie Phonetique / Joesph Byrd: Piece for R. Maxfield / Jackson Mac Low: Thanks II /Robert Watts: News & Two Inches / Emmett Williams: Alphabet Symphony /G.Brecht: Drip Music & Direction / George Maciunas: In Memoriam to Adriano Olivetti / Dick Higgins: Constellation No.7 & 4 / Benjamin Patterson:Septet from"Lemons" and Solo for Dancer / La Monte Young: Composition 1961 Number 29 / Nam June Paik: One for Violin Solo & Serenade for Alison / Wolf Vostell:Décollage Musique"Kleenex" / Alison Knowles: Proposition / Terry Riley: Earpiece / G.Brecht: Word Event." - p 67
I was 9 at the time. Imagine having parents who wd take you to such a thing. My mom might've been playing "South Pacific" on the turntable.
I met Alison Knowles at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh in 2016 (or thereabouts). She had transformed a Hall of Architecture by putting a grid of red tape on the floor into wch red objects were placed. I was wearing red pants & a red fake fur. I gave Alison a red "Frame of Reference" shape cut out of fabric. Someone from the museum photographed us together & I got a copy of the photo that I put in one of my bks. Alison had lost her short-term memory so when I walked away for a few minutes & came back she didn't remember me. However, she knew about her memory problem so she sd something like: 'We probably just talked with each other a few minutes ago, didn't we?' This show at the CMoA was possibly the only show there that's ever interested me.
"Alison Knowles starred in the New York première of the Alphabet Symphony, the composer in absentia somewhere in Paris. She was assisted by Ben Patterson, Shieko Shiomi (now known as Mieko Shiomi, for astrological reasons), and Joe Jones. The occasion was the presentation of an evening of my work during the Monday Night Letter series at the Café au Gogo.
"Alison felt very much at home with the piece. She had witnessed the London première as well as several other performances at Fluxus festivals in Paris, Copenhagen and Düsseldorf. Her actions included one that I would never have dreamed up, jumping rope disguised as Adolf Hitler." - p 80
Remember the days when avant-garde work by the likes of John Cage, Frank Zappa, & Yoko Ono & John Lennon was presented on mainstream TV? Is there anything equivalent to that today?!
"The first line of each couplet is the male voice, the second the female. Although written in 1964, I read it for the first time for John Giorno's Dial-a-Poem service in 1969. When Merv Griffin decided to feature Dial-A-Poem on his television show, he selected Duet, and it was read magnificently well by Garry Moore and a beuatiful lady guest, and telecast to family audiences from coast to coast – which made me wonder whether the erotic imagery came across as well as I once thought it did." - p 98
Once a person is associated w/ a mvmt everything they've done tends to become associated w/ that mvmt regardless of how appropriate or inappropriate that is. Williams gives a history that begins before FLUXUS existed. E.G.: he provides a photo w/ the caption: "Darmstadt 1960: Performing An Opera for the first time, in pre-Fluxus days." (p 100)
Not getting pd. How many people realize that even 'famous' people don't necessarily get pd - even by prestigious monied institutions. When I was on the phone w/ a Manhattan MoMA employee about my attending a screening of my work the person at the other end started to offer me plane fare but was cut off by someone who had her switch mid-word to bus fare. That's one of many examples of how things really work.
"1962 Simultaneous Operas for One-eyed Poet and Millionaire
Amsterdam, Singel Canal bridge
Moving Theater No. 1
Performed October 2
"It was first performed as a street piece during an afternoon and evening of events arranged by Wolf
Emmett Williams's My Life in Flux – – and Vice Versa
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - April 12, 2025
The complete review will be here:
http://idioideopleintekst.nl/CriticWi...
once I get around to the tedious task of making the webpage.
I reckon it's accurate to say that I love all people & things FLUXUS. In my life I've had the good fortune to meet, usually briefly, such FLUXUS people as Dick Higgins, Jackson Mac Low, Alison Knowles, Davi Det Hompson, John Cage, Ken Friedman, Stan VanDerBeek, & Carolee Schnemann. Emmett Williams has always been of particular interest to me b/c he was the editor of An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (Something Else Press, 1967), probably the most important poetry collection in my personal experience of such things. I've read one other Williams bk, after that anthology & before this one to be reviewed, called Schemes & Variations (Nationalgalerie Berlin, 1982) wch is absolutely fantastic & wch I had the good fortune to acquire in what appeared to be mostly a FLUXUS bkstore in Berlin in 1994. I suspect that that store no longer exists so I feel doubly fortunate to have visited it & come away w/ a sample of their wares.
Having been heavily involved w/ international mvmts other than FLUXUS & having observed the way they've started & grown it was interesting for me to read Williams's acct of FLUXUS's birth & growth. Sure, there was a zeitgeist. Yes, there were people who worked w/ each other in a 'fellow traveller' sort of way under the FLUXUS umbrella. Yes, George Maciunas, FLUXUS's primer mover & shaker, prime impressario, who organized things in such a way that there appeared to be a mvmt w/ a common cause.. but reading this bk made it clearer to me that FLUXUS was somewhat fragile & that it barely existed - despite how many events & publications occurred in its name.
It's possible that the same thing cd be sd about NEOISM, one of the main Cultural Conspiracies I've been involved w/. NEOISM's George Maciunas, Monty Cantsin (Istvan Kantor), has dedicated a similar amt of fervent energy as Maciunas did in creating the appearance of a mvmt called "NEOISM", something that he recruits for tirelessly, bringing in new participants under its umbrella, participants who often don't last more than a few yrs at most before they move on to something else.
Hence, Williams's bk is ostensibly about "his life in flux"(us) but is more about his life as a poet/performance-artist whose association is w/ FLUXUS but whose work just as often, if not more often, seems to've just appeared in less specific art contexts.
"I wrote an essay about Fluxus for the programme although Genesis was never a part of Fluxus repertoire – unless you believe, with so many of my old colleagues – that everything a Fluxus artist does is Fluxus. This attitude has certainly made it more difficult to understand what Fluxus was or is, and for many people Genesis is regarded as 'typical Fluxus.' Let it be." - p 348
In the beginning he provides this dedication:
"in tribute
to the legendary Sylvester Schaffer,
an almost forgotten precursor of Fluxus,
whose one-man vaudeville show
at the 44th Street Theater in New York
in 1914
included sharopshooting,
a tumbling turn with five dogs,
Japanese juggling,
trained horses,
card tricks and coin palming,
magic acts,
sketching in oil paints,
heavyweight juggling,
a violin solo
and other performance pieces
all in 80 minutes
(including costume changes)" - p 7
That got me interested in Schaffer so I searched for footage of him online & found "16mm Film - Fahrendes Volk - Teil 1 - D 1934" ( https://youtu.be/eWI9Yqm-0f8?si=SzGnt... ) & "16mm Film - Fahrendes Volk - Teil 2 - D 1934" ( https://youtu.be/gm2gZWvjyi4?si=d2_lR... ). "Fahrendes Volk" translates to "nomadic people" or "traveling people" in English - for me a rather strange choice of words given that what distinguishes the people presented is their fantastic athletic ability more than their travelling - wch, obviously, many people w/o the skills shown also do. These films include what is, to me, very impressive acrobatics, juggling, trapese artistry, & horse training, amongst other things. One trapese artist flies thru the air w/ a burlap sack over his head!
Williams recounts his experiences as a child performer:
"Popeye? Popeye is something I must have picked up at the movies, probably at the Warwick Theatre, where I used to sing on the stage at the Kiddy Klub every Saturday morning before the picture-show started. I can almost hear myself now in some of my best numbers, such as "Palsy-walsy, my little sugar cup, if you get much sweeter, I'm gonna eatchew up" and another song that I really threw myself into, "I Faw Down and Go Boom." (This vast repertory of Lieder comes back to me occasionally, afert sufficient wine; and I recreated twenty-six of such childhood renditions at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, and at the Sommerakademie in Salzburg, several years ago.)" - p 16
My own experience as a child performer was much more humble: I played single piano pieces in group recitals & recited satirical poetry about my sister in costume behind my house. Nonetheless, I've sometimes thought about recreating a least one of the piano tunes in performance as an adult.
"I'm Popeye the Sailor Man
"finishing off with an improvised dance, the flexing of my nonexistent muscles, lots of "Ahoy there, mates!" and "Avast, ye landlubbers" with a "Toot! Toot" here and a "Toot! Toot!" there plus ad libs thrown out to anyone in the audience that I recognized. I did it at American Legion dinners, Elks Club banquets, Women's Benefit Association brunches, Women's Club soirées, and Holy Name Society breakfasts, at the Colony Inn, the Tideater Hotel, Hotel Warwick, the Chamberlain, the Acheson-Dietrich Seafood Restaurant, and a Chinese restaurant on Washington Avenue, not to forget Radio Station WGH, the voice of "the World's Greates Harbour." And, at Christmastime, for the disabled veterans of World War One – of course we didn't call it One in those days because no one knew there would be a Two – at the Old Soldiers' Home." - p 17
!!!!! Is that quantity of fantastic venues just due to growing up in NYC (as opposed to Baltimore) or were the times less paranoid about child abuse or What?! Whatever the case, to me, that's an astounding list of places for a child to perform.
One of the earliest participants in FLUXUS was Ben Patterson, originally from Pittsburgh. I live in Pittsburgh & perk up as response to such history. Williams was friends & collaborators w/ Patterson.
"Here, then, is the text of this tongue-in-cheek, sometimes foot-in-mouth, interview, the world's first reportage that called Fluxus Fluxus." - p 22
"Get one thing straight at the beginning. This isn't "new music. "New Music" is old hat to these people. This is very new music. In fact, some of it is anti-music, according to American impresario George Maciunas, who will take the Fluxus festival lock, stock, barrel, plastic butterflies, stomach pump, etc., etc., to Paris in December, then to Holland, Luxembourg, Italy, Austria, East Europe, Japan,and eventually the United States." - p 23
""Are there scores for this sort of music, Mr,Patterson?"
""Certainly. I myself use texts which explain the action in detail, how to produce such and such an effect, and so forth. Others use ticker tape, string, telephone books, the imperfections in cheap paper, photographs of ants, things that look more or less like traditional scores, the footprints of wild beasts . . .""
[..]
""You seem to be concentrating on 'odd' things. If that's the task you want to emply, then there are some 'odd' things, from your point of view, of course. You might mentions John Cage's 31'57.9864 for piano, or La Monte Young's Poems for Chairs, Tables, Benches, etc., or Toshi Ichiyanagi's Music for Electric Metronome and IBM Music, or Richard Maxfield's Cough Music, or Emmett Williams' Four Directional Song of Doubt for Five Voices, or Terry Riley'sEar Piece for Audience, or Yogi Kuri's Human Zoo, or Dieter Schnebel's Visible Music for One Conductor and One Pianist, or George Brecht's Candle Piece for Radios."" - p 24
&, indeed, FLUXUS seen/heard as a musical mvmt was very new &, for me, still ahead of even new music of today. Hence, my love.
& who or what was FLUXUS? As of the 1990 Venice Biennial?
"In fact, there were more "Fluxus artists" than some of us clannish oldtimers had ever dreamed existed. I eremember a tender moment, when Wolf Vostell and I were examining the giant poster. He put his arm around my shoulder, and said, "Emmett, do you remember in Weisbaden in 1962 there were only seven of us? Now there are one hundred and twenty."" - p 28
On Wikipedia, there're 72 listed ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluxus ). I wonder how the "clannish oldtimers" wd react to all the "Fluxus" records put out by retired German senior police detective Kommissar Hjuler?
On p 31, there's a chart w/ a heading explaining the 4 categories of Fluxus people:
"Within Fluxus group there are 4 categories indicated:"
[..]
"4) individuals active within fluxus since the formation of fluxus but having since then detached themselves on following motivations:
a) anticollective attitude, excessive individualism, desire for personal glory, prima dona complex
(Mac Low, Schmit, Williams, Nam June Paik, Dick Higgins, Kosugi)," - p 31
The chart is by George Maciunas. Those "excessive individualists" are some of the ones I feel closest to. I've made a movie of me reading Mac Low's Asymmetries 1-260 (3 versions: "tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE reading Jackson Mac Low's "Asymmetries 1-260"" - 10:08:00 - on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/0Zn9rl8PBqc ; "Susie reads to Neoists - attn expandex version" - 10:25:59 - on my onesownthoughts YouYube channel here: https://youtu.be/Ug4ajUv4rqk ; "Susie reads to Neoists - shorter version" - 4:54:46 - on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/mTJEn9OCkrA ). I've made a movie of etta cetera realizing a Schmit piece ("typewriter poem - tomas schmit - march 63" - on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/XprYK4V5ZhQ ). I've read Williams's bks, seen a fantastic installation by Paik at the Wood Street Gallery, heard Dick Higgins read his work, & witnessed Takehisa Kosugi perform music for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.
"George Brecht's "events" present a good example of some of these performance problems. These "events", born in an American setting, were for him "very private, like little enlightenments I wantsd to communicate to my friends, who would know what to do with them", and he had never thought of them as elaborate public performances. Well, in the European Fluxus festivals the[y] became exactly that, much to George's surprise, public realizations of simple events that he wanted to ntoice naturally in real life.
"Sometimes there were more performers than spectators at these "public performances." And sometimes, when the audience outnumbered the performers, the spectators took advantage of the situation. One night, students climbed up onto the stage, harried the performers, and tried to set fire to the score of my Opera. And once, during a performance in Amsterdam, a girl tried to set Dick Higgins on fire." - p 32
To 'performers' such as myself, Williams's recounting of misattributions, non-paying gigs, & other manifestations of stupidity & unfriendliness are reassurances that even 'top dogs' get treated like 'low-lifes', something that's happened to me all too often.
"I am seated at my desk, opening a package that the postman had just delivered, DM 2,30 postage due. Inside the package is a book. A brand new anthology of Fluxus performance pieces. Naturally, I flip through the book to the W section, to see how well I am represented. Ah, not bad. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Eight pieces!
"My joy is short-lived. Three of these eight pieces, Expedition (1964), Supper (1965), and Concerto for Paik No. 2 (1965) I have never heard of before in my life. If there exists a Concerto for Paik No. 2 (1965), then there ought to be a Concerto for Paik No. 1, but even if there is, it certainly wasn't written by me." - p 45
George Brecht's "On-Off" is misattributed to Williams. I imagine that these days most people interested in Fluxus wd recognize such a mistake immediately.
"But wait! Does the historian have any proof that I am, after all, the composer of On-Off? I hope not. For I have no proof that I did not write it.
"Will the real composer of On-Off please stand up?" - p 46
People interested in a filmed performance of this piece cd do worse than to witness Florian Cramer's realization now ensconced in my super-8 feature entitled Satanic Liposcution, Neoasm?!, and YOU!! here: https://youtu.be/PpyNO5UHmr0?si=7ywyn... .
But what about:
"Voice Piece for La Monte Youg (1962)
"Ask if La Monte Young is in the audience, then exit. If the performance is televised or broadcast, ask if La Monte Young is watching or listening to the program." - p 48
It's exactly this flair for the unexpected that makes FLUXUS work so great, it's so simple &, yet, so utterly different from performances that present the usual full frontal.
"The Goft of Tongues (1962)
"Sing meaningfully in a language made up on the spot." - p 52
"The Alphabet Symphony
"This is a symphony in which you can spell "love" by smoking a cigar, blowing a silent dog whistle, eating a chocolate éclair off the floor on all fours doggy-fashion, and tooting a little ditty on the flute. That's the way it was spelled during the first performance in London in 1962.
"In Paris, the same year, I acted it out by blowing a toy horn, gazing at the audience through the hole of a cored apple, ripping a piece of cloth, and eating a hard-boiled egg extracted from the womb of a medical school model of a pregnant woman.
"A symphony? Well, that is what Daniel Spoerri advertised that I would perform – an Alphabet Symphony – at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Since there was none, I got to work and composed one." - p 58
There're posters throughout the bk that give an idea of who was performing what at the FLUXUS festivals. Here's an example of hat was presented on December 3, 1962 at Fluxus Festorum III:
"Concert No. 1, Musique Evénenementelle. Raoul Hausman: Poesie Phonetique / Joesph Byrd: Piece for R. Maxfield / Jackson Mac Low: Thanks II /Robert Watts: News & Two Inches / Emmett Williams: Alphabet Symphony /G.Brecht: Drip Music & Direction / George Maciunas: In Memoriam to Adriano Olivetti / Dick Higgins: Constellation No.7 & 4 / Benjamin Patterson:Septet from"Lemons" and Solo for Dancer / La Monte Young: Composition 1961 Number 29 / Nam June Paik: One for Violin Solo & Serenade for Alison / Wolf Vostell:Décollage Musique"Kleenex" / Alison Knowles: Proposition / Terry Riley: Earpiece / G.Brecht: Word Event." - p 67
I was 9 at the time. Imagine having parents who wd take you to such a thing. My mom might've been playing "South Pacific" on the turntable.
I met Alison Knowles at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh in 2016 (or thereabouts). She had transformed a Hall of Architecture by putting a grid of red tape on the floor into wch red objects were placed. I was wearing red pants & a red fake fur. I gave Alison a red "Frame of Reference" shape cut out of fabric. Someone from the museum photographed us together & I got a copy of the photo that I put in one of my bks. Alison had lost her short-term memory so when I walked away for a few minutes & came back she didn't remember me. However, she knew about her memory problem so she sd something like: 'We probably just talked with each other a few minutes ago, didn't we?' This show at the CMoA was possibly the only show there that's ever interested me.
"Alison Knowles starred in the New York première of the Alphabet Symphony, the composer in absentia somewhere in Paris. She was assisted by Ben Patterson, Shieko Shiomi (now known as Mieko Shiomi, for astrological reasons), and Joe Jones. The occasion was the presentation of an evening of my work during the Monday Night Letter series at the Café au Gogo.
"Alison felt very much at home with the piece. She had witnessed the London première as well as several other performances at Fluxus festivals in Paris, Copenhagen and Düsseldorf. Her actions included one that I would never have dreamed up, jumping rope disguised as Adolf Hitler." - p 80
Remember the days when avant-garde work by the likes of John Cage, Frank Zappa, & Yoko Ono & John Lennon was presented on mainstream TV? Is there anything equivalent to that today?!
"The first line of each couplet is the male voice, the second the female. Although written in 1964, I read it for the first time for John Giorno's Dial-a-Poem service in 1969. When Merv Griffin decided to feature Dial-A-Poem on his television show, he selected Duet, and it was read magnificently well by Garry Moore and a beuatiful lady guest, and telecast to family audiences from coast to coast – which made me wonder whether the erotic imagery came across as well as I once thought it did." - p 98
Once a person is associated w/ a mvmt everything they've done tends to become associated w/ that mvmt regardless of how appropriate or inappropriate that is. Williams gives a history that begins before FLUXUS existed. E.G.: he provides a photo w/ the caption: "Darmstadt 1960: Performing An Opera for the first time, in pre-Fluxus days." (p 100)
Not getting pd. How many people realize that even 'famous' people don't necessarily get pd - even by prestigious monied institutions. When I was on the phone w/ a Manhattan MoMA employee about my attending a screening of my work the person at the other end started to offer me plane fare but was cut off by someone who had her switch mid-word to bus fare. That's one of many examples of how things really work.
"1962 Simultaneous Operas for One-eyed Poet and Millionaire
Amsterdam, Singel Canal bridge
Moving Theater No. 1
Performed October 2
"It was first performed as a street piece during an afternoon and evening of events arranged by Wolf
Displaying 1 of 1 review