Robert Smithson: Corner Mirror with Coral, 1969. At P.S.1, the sculpture is displayed on a low platform, instead of directly on the floor as originally.

 

 

 

 

 

Upon the Arbitrary Nature of Posterity

 

 

A yellowed clipping from the Village Voice is included in one of the display cases in  the exhibition "1969" at P.S. 1 (Queens, to April 10, 2010). It is my Village Voice report concerning the Takis Fracas at MoMA in '69. The Greek kinetic-artist Takis, objecting to the inclusion of his work, physically removed it from the exceedingly dull exhibition "The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age" and had a one-man sit-in in the MoMA garden. The deep question, as far as I know still not resolved in the U.S.A., is one of "moral rights." Does an artist have any claim on an artwork after it has been sold? In Artopia, we say, yes; a thousand times, yes. But as we shall see, in 1969 one thing lead to another. And another....

"1969" (which does not include an artwork by Takis) is a fill-in exhibition in these hard times drawn from the MoMA permanent collection and archives, all works and ephemera dating from that year. If it were not for some contemporary "interventions," this curiosity would be a waste of time, since no new or serious interpretations are offered. Much of the art is familiar.

Mel Bochner's room, Theory of Painting (paper and paint on the floor, words on the wall)  is, however, a pleasant surprise, balanced (I suppose) by the disappointing Fluxus multiples. I have to remember what used to put me off about  Fluxus - George Macunias' little Fluxus boxes. The Events and the ideas and not the multiples are what's worth thinking about.

How I hate the once-cool term "interventions." Now it just reminds me of the Italian euphemism for surgery.

Nevertheless,  multi-media "interventions" (the term used in the press release) by The Bruce High Quality Foundation add zing, ping, and zap to this otherwise curiously forlorn array of once-powerful minimalist and conceptual artworks drained of all energy. I liked a lot of the work way back when and said so, moved on to other things, and now value the work again.

At least until last week.

It may be that these artworks were once effective because of what they were not. They were not Abstract Expressionism, they were not Pop Art, they were not Academic Realism -- but became the latter, in a manner of speaking. Stranded in the unhallowed halls and former classrooms of P.S.1, they are texts without a context.

Designated "museum portals", the BHQF grimy rock-concert speaker (The Creative Society - After Ronald Reagan), the funky BHQF refrigerator (Hell Freezes Over) and the high-use industrial vacuum (We Didn't Start the Fire), through video and sound add the context that the Wikipedia (I kid-you-not) timeline in the hallway does not. 

                                                *  *  *

By the way,  the BHQF collective is -- according to Roberta Smith in the Times --- made up of former Cooper Union students of Hans Haacke.They also recently offered a presentation as part of RoseLee Goldberg's month-long Performa 09. The festival,  supposedly focusing on performance art, includes film, dance (Anna Halprin, Debora Hay, Yvonne Rainer) and what have you, in honor of the 100^th anniversary of F. T. Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto. If you are not motivated to follow this link, here, let me offer a sample and a reminder:

We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.

I assume that one or another of the lectures or Performa panel discussions will bring up Marinetti's friendship with and affection for Mussolini. Goldberg does not in her textbook Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. Michael Kirby does in his 1971 Futurist Performance, but explains it away by stating that the value of art has nothing to do with the political beliefs of the artist: "Great art is not necessarily produced by heroes, nor are 'villains' unable to create major works." Sounds a bit like a defense of all those Commie artists during the McCarthy period, but applied to a Fascist.

Can we be inspired by Futurism and close our eyes to Marinetti's active support of Fascism? In France, during the Occupation, Jean Cocteau collaborated with the Nazis by, among other activities, writing a laudatory catalog essay about Hitler's favorite Nazi sculptor, Arno Breker. Although Breker had once been Cocteau's lover, can we look at  Beauty and the Beast in the same way again?

  

 

                                         Arno Breker: Predestination, 1940-41

 

Can we subscribe to Martin Heidegger's Being and Time knowing he became a member of the Nazi Party in 1933? Do we more than wince when we are reminded that our revered Henri Matisse sold paintings to Gestapo officers?

 

 

In the meantime, The BHQF presented, in the former Dia Foundation lobby, a slide lecture about sex and art patronage, down through the ages. Those in the know, know that the Dia - planning  to return, its absence from Chelsea long lamented -- was founded by Schlumberger (pronounced Schlum-bear-jzhay) oil-equipment heiress Phillippa de Menil and her husband the German art dealer Heiner Friedrich.

 

The three anonymous young men of The Bruce  --  wearing aviator sunglasses, and two out of three clad in leather jackets -- sat at a table in front of the audience, taking turns reading items concerning the relationship between sex and art patronage, down through the ages. Slide projections above them were illustrative or sarcastic.

Just when I thought I had had quite enough, they stopped dead. Pause. The images were repeated and began melting together, and there was the thump of a dance rhythm. Without missing a beat and without getting up from their seats, they began singing a kind of Po-Mo-Town ditty. Writing in my notebook in the dark, the words I caught were: I will be your husband; I will be your wife; I will take care of you the rest of your life.

 

                          

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hans Haacke: News, 1969. Not in MoMA collection; not in exhibition. See note at the end of this essay.

 

 

Back at School

 

The curators of "1969" do not claim their offering of mostly minimal and conceptual art is the be-all, end-all survey of late '60s art, but  the naïve might take it as such. It certainly displays what is now a rather safe taste. There's a new game called The Curatorial  Detective; you have to guess what graduate art history program any curator in question attended and what old issues of Artforum were memorized.

 

The artworks indeed were all made in 1969 but were not necessarily accessioned in 1969. Accession dates are not included on wall labels, but if you go to the MoMA website and click on "collections" with the knowledge that accession numbers end with the date of accession, you can find that Richard Serra's Cutting Device was garnered (from Philip Johnson) in 1979; Smithson's Corner Mirror with Coral in 1991;   Mel Bochner's Theory of Painting in 1997; Bruce Nauman's Pacing Upside Down and Manipulation of a Fluorescent Tube only in 2008. And, all the Fluxus material only arrived this year. MoMA, it turns out, was not particularly prescient; in fact, it was sluggish in those ancient times when William Rubin was head of the painting and sculpture department and Bates Lowry was the director. Hopeful this exhibition is only the first step in catching up and catching up fast. MoMA in 1969 was not only rude to artists, it was asleep.

 

Curiously enough, Carl Andre's lead floor-piece made in 1969 was added to the collection that year -- when his name was one of three on theTakis Fracas, anti-MoMA list of  demands. For the current foray into "art history", the curators had to substitute a similar piece, borrowed from the Paula Cooper Gallery. Is MoMA's Andre damaged? On loan? Or is this because P.S.1 is not climate controlled and lead is affected by steam heat?

 

The secret is out. The lack of climate control  precludes the MoMA loan of certain fragile works, even to its own affiliate. Thus newcomer Stephanie Syjuco was able to offer amusing versions ("resuscitations" she calls them ) of a Joseph Beuys sled and a Robert Morris anti-form, felt wall-hanging, the originals too fragile or fugitive to face the unfiltered, humid air in Queens. Back in Alanna Heiss days, when I curated "Pattern Painting" for P.S.1, we didn't give a thought to climate control. Of course, there was nothing in my exhibition made of felt. Or fat.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leon Golub: Napalm I, 1969. Not in MoMA Collection; not in exhibition. 

 

 

Mysteries of "1969"

 

A video played on a monitor placed directly on the floor of one of the main rooms will stop you in your tracks. In contrast to Andy Warhol's Blue Movie, in  a room to itself with a sign warning that it might not be suitable for children, East/West has no warning that it might not be suitable for adults. It is a 20 minute conversation between Robert Smithson and his wife Nancy Holt.

 

The interrogation by Holt could cause you to conclude she was the most irritating woman alive and Smithson a cowboy poseur, which I can testify he was not. In fact he was rather serious and certainly intelligent. Were these two satirizing Warhol's movies?

 

Along with the inclusion of this unfortunate tape, there are other mysteries.

 

It is very mysterious to me why a Helen Frankenthaler painting is included. In the present company it looks like a cloud of expensive perfume. It does not even provide adequate contrast to the severity that is otherwise here in such abundance but serves to remind this viewer that Frankenthaler - daughter of a Supreme Court judge, wife of  Robert Motherwell, and darling of Clement Greenberg --- was one of the N.E.A. committee members dead set against grants for individual artists, which were then forbidden.

 

Puzzling in a lesser way is the inclusion of four West Coast pseudo-minimalist artworks by Larry Bell, Ron Davis, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, and John McCracken. Pretty is good, but not here.

 

But the biggest mystery of all is why 1969 is the year of choice, rather than 1968 or 1970........So below you will find my 1969, an indication of what I was writing about in my art columns for the Village Voice in that year

 

 

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Hannah Weiner, Scott Burton, Anne Waldman, Vito Acconi, Berndette Mayer, Eduardo Costa, John Perreault Theater Works, Hunter College, 1969. Not in MoMA collection; not in exhibition. John Perreault Archive

 

Walking Backwards Into The Future

When I first heard of the "1969" show, I wondered if it would include attacks on MoMA made during those heavy-duty times. Past mistakes and stupidities are part of history, right?

 

There are Art Workers Coalition materials, and, yes, my Voice column about the Takis Fracas is on display. Housed in one of the several library cases, it is suitably difficult to read.

 

Curious, I later searched out my file of Xeroxes (!) of old Voice pages to see what I had written. Kind of jazzy, and, of course, on the right side--the artist's side. This lead me to look at all the 1969 columns.

 

Guess what? For the would-be time-traveler or the art historian or for any interested party these pages offer a better picture of art in 1969 than the exhibition at P.S.1./MoMA.

 

In this regard, I remember at the time being introduced to an extremely pretentious and inordinately pompous art critic (no, not Rosalind Krauss) when said writer returned from Paris "for the first time since the war," said my sarcastic friend, "the first World War."

 

Her first and only question to me was: "Well, Jean Perreau" (calling me by my father's first name and giving my last name the French pronunciation, "How does it feel to be the most read art critic in New York?"

 

I corrected her. I said that Hilton Kramer in the Times was the most read art critic in New York, but I was the most trusted and the most influential.

 

She simply could not understand this, and thereafter I was ignored.

 

 

 

How I Became Famous

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

John Perreault: Alphabetical T-Shirts, "Street Works IV", Architectural League, 1969. Not in MoMA collection; not in exhibition. John Perreault Archive.

 

 

The Village Voice, January 9, 1969:  Whose Art?

 

Report of the Takis 'action' at MoMA. Dissatisfied with the selection and placement of his sculpture (owned by MoMA) in the "Machine Art" exhibition, Greek artist Takis, after receiving no response from the curator or the director, physically removed his piece from the exhibition and sat down with it in the Museum garden in protest......[ I did not report that Hans Haacke was also put off by the treatment of his condensation piece in the MoMA exhibition. His request that the museum  leave his artwork plugged in overnight, was ignored. Consequently, the element that was supposed to build up ice never did so. Or rather, what ice had built up from the steam during the day, melted at night. He  also had no response from curators, staff, or even the director of the museum.]

 

The Takis  action raised the issue of artists' rights in regard to sold artworks --as far as I know, not yet resolved -- and started a series of artists meetings that lead to more general demands: minority representation, a free day at MoMA, etc. And then the founding of the Art Workers Coalition, itself leading to the Art Moratorium in May 1970.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alice Neel, Ginny in Striped Shirt, 1969. Not in MoMA collection, not in exhibition.

 

 

The Village Voice, February 20, 1969: Lies that Are True.

 

New paintings by Alan D'Arcangelo.

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Philip Pearlstein: Nude on Couch, 1969. Not in MoMA collection; not in exhibition.

 

 

The Village Voice,  February 27, 1968: Earth Show

 

Detailed report of junket to opening of "Earth Art" at Cornell University. On the plane: Hans Haacke, Les Levine, Neil Jenney, gallerists John Gibson and John Weber, Willoughby Sharp (curator of the exhibition), Lucy Lippard, Dore Ashton (Arts Magazine), John Margolies (Architectural League), Dan Graham, David Bourdon (Life), Max Kozloff (The Nation), Howard Junker (Time) And, of course, yours truly (Village Voice, Paris Match). Praise and description of works by Richard Long, David Medella, Michael Heizer, Robert Morris, Gunther Uecker, Robert Smithson, Hans Haacke, Neil Jenney,  Dennis Oppenheim, Jan Dibbits.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alan Saret, Untitled, 1969. Not in MoMA collection; not in exhibition.

 

 

The Village Voice,  March 6, 1969: Outside the Museum

 

Richard Long at John Gibson; Malcolm Morley at Kornblee; Hairy Who at SVA..

 

MoMA's response to artists' demands: a committee on artists relations to receive complaints and make recommendations. Rejected. Takis supporters increase to 30.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Kawara: One Million Years, 1969. Not in MoMA Collection; not in exhibition.

 

 

The Village Voice, March 13, 1969: Off The Wall

 

Seth Siegelaub's One Month (publication-as-exhibition): Joseph Barry, James Lee Byars, Douglas Heuber, Dennis Oppenheim, etc. Also: Robert Morris at Castelli Warehouse---Continuous Project Altered Daily.

 

 

The Village Voice, April 3, 1969: Back Indoors.

 

Barnett Newman's first exhibition in 12 years.  Charles Sheeler. Nancy Graves. Paul Thek's Fishman.

 

 

The Village Voice, April 19, 1969: MoMA and the Workers

 

"The Museum of Modern Art seems to have been playing a waiting game...."

Art Worker's Coalition formed....."The initial negotiations and confrontations were handled very badly, so much so that I that I felt it necessary to withdraw my de Kooning lecture as a protest...." Two anti-MoMA demonstrations....Director Bates Lowry to the New York Times: the public hearing and free admissions "were absolutely impossible and can't be considered"....Art Workers Coalition has an open hearing at the School of Visual Arts. Lowry, after less than a year as director, resigned in May 1969.

 

Philip Pearlstein at Frumkin..."perhaps the most radical of all the new representational painters." .....Robert Huot at Paula Cooper...installation and luminactive tape; Richard Long at Bowling Green.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hannah Weiner: Weiner's Wieners, 1969. Street Works IV. Recreated in 2008 for "In Plain Sight: Street Works and Performances 1968 -1971," The Laboratory for Art and Ideas, Belmar, Colorado. Courtesy: John Perreault Archive. 

 

 

The Village Voice, May 1, 1969: Free Art

 

Street Works I. Initial group (Hannah Weiner, Marjorie Strider, and John Perreault) expanded to include: Vito Acconci, Eduardo Costa, Bernadette Mayer. Twenty artists actualized streetworks on March 15. Founders, plus Scott Burton, Arakawa, John Giorno, James Lee Byars, Bernar Venet, Gregory Battcock etc. [Three Streetworks announcements are included in the "1969" exhibition ]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marjorie Strider: Street Work, 1969. Not in MoMa collection; not in exhibition.

 

 

The Village Voice, May 8, 1969: Visual Pleasure

 

Nicholas Krushenick paintings. David Hockney. Robert Ryman.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Village Voice, May 29, 1969: A Sort of Sacrifice.

 

"The Disintegration of a Critic: An Analysis of Jill Johnston," a panel discussion at N.Y.U. David Bourdon (moderator), Charlotte Moorman, Gregory Battcock, Ultra Violet, Bridget Polk, Walter Gutman, John de Menil, Lil Picard and Andy Warhol. With an appearance of Ms Johnston in rage mode protesting how her Village Voice column had been cut and then reading the very long discarded section, finally to much applause...Also: Discussion of Anti-Illusion: Procedures Materials at the Whitney. Description of and praise for works by: Richard Serra (lead splash piece), Carl Andre, Bruce Nauman, Neil Jenny but "he should have eliminated those hideous acrylic paintings and just shown the bowls of dog food."), Robert Morris, Bill Bollinger, Eva Hesse, Rafael Ferrer, Michael Snow...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

John Perreault: Hair Veil (fromFashion Show Poetry Event),1969. Center for Inter-American Relations. Artist and model (Anne Waleman). Not in MoMA collection; not in exhibition.

John Perreault Archive.

 

 

The Village Voice,  May 22, 1969: Invisible Dancers

 

Spring Gallery '69 @ Paula Cooper Gallery. Performances by Marjorie Strider by Tom Gormly, Hannah Weiner plus a dance piece by Deborah Hay ["Performances" first used by Pop artist Strider, who had been in some Oldenburg Happenings and had been married to Michael Kirby, author of the first book on Happenings}.......Mentions of shows by Lowell Nesbitt at the Stable Gallery; Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg at Castelli, Jack Kruger's 100 piece sculpture at Castelli Warehouse, a show of erotic drawings called "Censored" at Cannabis. Also Aesthetic Realists Chaim and Dorothy Koppelman: "Their petition to gain a review from the Times quotes Hilton Kramer as saying he'd 'puke'  if he got another telephone call from them. I know what he means." Also:  "my apologies to Abraham Lubelski: I erroneously reported that his patch of grass in Street Works II was fake. It was real grass."                                                                         

 

  

                                                                                 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Chck Close: Frank, 1969. Not in MoMA collection; not in exhibition.

 

 

The Village Voice, June 5, 1969: Para-Visual

 

"Language III" at Dwan Gallery. Lucy Lippard's Art Workers Coalition Benefit at Paula Cooper. Hans Haacke, Bernar Venet, Richard Artswager (Blips), Carl Andre, Lawrence Weiner, Sol LeWitt, Bill Bollinger, Robert Smithson, Mel Bochner, Michael Kirby, Joseph Kosuth, Adrian Piper, On Kawara, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman. Kosuth's instruction piece was to go to the Dwan show and separate the art from the poetry.....Street Works III: Soho at Night: 500 participants.... "New Works" by Acconci, Arakawa, Perreault, and Venet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eva Hesse: Expanded Expansion, 1969. Not in MoMA collection; not in exhibition.

 

  

The Village Voice,  April 24, 1969: I Never Saw a Purple Plane

 

Trip to Ohio: "Before my departure from Ohio, I remember sitting in the Zane Gray Room of the Zanesville Ohio Holiday Inn near the Zane Line, eating my Zanesville Steak, joyfully contemplating my return to New York and the resumption of my quest for the perfect painting on velvet (preferably of a kitten), the perfect clown portrait, the most voluptuous Abstract Expressionist smudge or splatter, the tackiest vanity gallery, and the rudest and/or pushiest artist."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

James Lee Byars: The World Question Center, 1969. Not in MoMA collection; not in exhibition.

 

 

The Village Voice,  October 2, 1969: Other Things and Lichtenstein

 

Roy Lichtenstein; Iowa City teaching gig; Smithson "Urination Piece."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Robert Bechtle: 1961 Pontiac, 1969. Not in MoMA collection. Not in exhibition. 

 

  

The Village Voice,  October 9, 1969: Looking For Art

 

"...although I did manage to see a few interesting things in the galleries, the things that really stick in my mind are Godard's  Le Gai Savoir at the Film Festival--it was more visually stimulating and 'plastic' than most of the gunk I see in the galleries....Wednesday I trekked up to Charlotte Moorman's [avant-garde] festival, but didn't see very much. Missed Lil Picard wrapping people up in bedsheets.....

 

 

 

 

 

The Village Voice,  October 16, 1969: Taking to the Streets.

 

"Street Works IV," sponsored by the Architectural League: Vito Acconci, Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Scott Burton, Eduardo Costa, John Giorno, Stephen Kaltenbach, Les Levine, Abraham Lubelski, Bernadette Mayer, John Perreault, Marjorie Strider, Hannah Weiner.

 

 

The Village Voice, October 23, 1969: The Monet of Minimalism

 

Sol LeWitt wall drawings.

 

 

The Village Voice, November 6, 1969: Treasure Hunt

 

Art junket to Andy Warhol's "Raid the Ice Box" exhibition  in Houston. Details of shenanigans in the de Menil private jet: "We even took turns reading aloud Annette Michelson's review of John Russell and Suzi Gablik's Pop Art Redefined.  ....Miss [sic] Michaelson's piece, which appeared in the New York Times Book Review, was not exactly easy going and was full of affectations, quirks, and oblique references."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Village Voice,  November 20, 1969: Systems.

 

Hans Haacke at Howard Wise; Deborah Remington at Bykert; Mon Levinson at Kornblee; Les Levine's "Your Worst Work" at the Architectural League; Peter Hutchinson and Dennis Oppenheim at MoMA; Jean Dubuffet at Pace; Lucy Lippard's "Groups" at SVA Gallery; Gary Kuehn at Fischbach; Peter Saul at Frumkin.

 

 

 

 

Keith Sonnier: BA-OH-BA, 1969. Not in MoMA collection. Not in exhibition.

 

 

The Village Voice, December 4, 1969: Plastic Very Present

 

"Plastic Presence" at the Jewish Museum. Pan, but praise for Eva Hesse and Frank Lincoln Viner, and Richard Van Buren......Burgeoning of Soho galleries....Meeting with Lygia Clark during her first visit from Brazil: "...now almost totally concerned with touch...For one work, I had to blow up a plastic baggie. She then closed it with a rubber band and placed the bag inflated with my own breath, in my hands, dropping a smooth onto the top of it. The stone, which could be made to move by manipulating the plastic bag as I squeezed it, seemed to be floating within the clear plastic bag. I was holding my breath and my breath was holding up a stone...."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lygia Clark: Untitled (participation piece), 1969. Not in MoMA collection. Not in exhibitiom.

 

 

 

The Village Voice, December 18, 1969: Get The Picture?

 

Discussion of photography and art. "Painting from the Photo" at the Riverside Museum. Artists discussed: Richard Estes, Malcolm Morley, Joseph Raffael, Harold Bruder, Audrey Flack,  Howard Kanovitz. [Louis Meisel had not yet invented the term Photo-Realism.]

 

Also: "I have been receiving the Wall Street Journal every morning courtesy of Bernar Venet. Stock market figures and weather reports have been Venet's special thing for awhile now, so I guess this is a work of art....." 

 

Penultimately: "At the ICA panel discussion in Philadelphia called "What Happened to the '60s?" Les Levine took James Lee Byars' edible paper man that we were supposed to [give] to the audience to eat and dissolved it in a  pitcher of water. Jill Johnston read from her memoirs [about being a lesbian dance critic and the illegitimate daughter of the poet Apollinaire], Warhol sent  critics Gregory Battcock and David Bourdon to Paris for a Thanksgiving dinner."....

 

Finally: "In a recent program at the Emanu-el Midtown Y, Vito Acconci sat in front of the audience and stared at each person for 13 seconds. He then climbed up and down off a box for one half hour, repeating this three times in his apartment, with the end result, as expected, that he cold not walk at all the next day."

 

Note: Most of the images I have used, as indicated, are of artworks not in the MoMA collection and not in the exhibition. This is to illustrate (1.) the near-absurdity of the theme; (2.) the possibilities of other samples from 1969, particularly outside the MoMA collection; (3.)  to give a richer picture of that year which was no less chaotic and no less aesthetically diverse than any other year;  (4.) and, more personally, to indicate my Village Voice columns were hardly every illustrated with art mentioned in the text; the photographer chose the pictures, for whatever purpose.

 

Also, I first tried formulating an alternative exhibition by going to the online version of the MoMA collection on their website, learning that, given the material, the curators probably did the best they could. My "Googled 1969" had other problems. You have to know in advance what artists you are looking for and most images, alas, do not include dates or titles. Many artists have simply disappeared or only exist outside of cyberspace, perhaps because they have sold every piece they ever made and did not retain reproduction rights or fear appropriation for commercial purposes.You should be so lucky. Artists, get over it. The virtual museum is already here. As they used to say in 1969, go with the flow,  

 

FOR AN AUTOMATIC ARTOPIA ALERT: perreault@aol.com

 

 

What do these images have in common?

 

 

 

Top left is from "Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya"

at the Grey Art Gallery, N.Y.U., 100 Washington Square East, to Dec.5.

 

Top right is from "Mandala: The Perfect Circle: at The Rubin Museum, 150 W. 17, to Jan. 11.

 

Lower middle is from "The Red Book of C. G. Jung" at The Rubin Museum, to Jan. 25.

 

 

Codes, Maps, and Building Plans

 

Some images and objects we can only see as art by separating them from use, and, therefore, since use is meaning, separating them from meaning. This is not necessarily to fulfill some dubious agenda that defines art as form alone. It may be because we do not understand or want to understand the use intended or have no way of experiencing the belief required.

 

We are expected to appreciate cathedral décor whether or not we subscribe to Christianity. So if we forgive da Vinci (and, let's face it, Chagall --  whose work has some relationship to Judaism or Kandinsky who was Theosophical) then why shouldn't we make allowances for Australian Aboriginal paintings,

The Red Book of Carl Jung, and Tibetan mandalas.  Most of us do. But should we?

 

In ancient times -- you know, like the Sixties --I was accused of at least three sins. "John," said one artist friend, "I love your writings, but you are always solving problems I didn't know I had." And then, from another: "You are always arguing with yourself." Finally, proclaimed another artist friend: "You are always writing about yourself," meaning, I still think, instead of writing about me.

 

The first is the critic's duty, which is to see what the artist is not aware of and to say what the artist cannot say. The second objection is also based on ignorance, but ignorance of the dialectical mode of expression. The third objection can only be answered in terms of the rhetorical disclosure of the personal as a sign of the instability of any statement. Unlike the royal "we," the first person in criticism reveals the possibility of bias in all writings, which is why it is usually forbidden. The author is not hidden. It is also an easy way to

include a wide range of material

 

Teaser: I am thinking of the Sixties because of  "1969" at P.S. 1, but I hope to get to that exhibition, if only briefly, next time around. After all, I am in it, right?

 

In the meantime, I hope I am still solving problems you didn't know you had. The problems you know you have are most likely already solved. And nothing has changed, has it?

 

In regard to the second objection, I wonder what that artist would now think of my current writings, since herein the dialectical has been superceded by the braided.

 

In regard to the third objection, the only thing I would add now is the clarification that the first person is as much a fiction as the third.

 

 

 

But Is It Art?

 

Here I want to make the case that we should not look at Australian Aboriginal paintings, Jung's visionary drawings (1902-1913), or Tibetan mandalas as art, for to do so is reductive.

 

Yet so much depends upon Marcel Duchamp. Both The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1925-23) -- see above illustration -- and Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas... (1946-1966) are so opaque they seem to be resultants of alien equations, obscure investigations, secret rituals, maps of other states of consciousness.

 

This too is the charm of the Aboriginal paintings now at the Grey Gallery, the Tibetan Buddhist mandalas at the Rubin Museum, and the images from Carl Jung's long-suppressed record of his possibly transcendent ego-trip.

 

Because the forms in each of these exhibitions are determined by extra-aesthetic motivations and/or content is why they are so vital. They really are derived from alien equations, obscure investigations, secret rituals, maps of other states of consciousness.  The forms, splendidly anti-compositional, could not be arrived at any other way. They were generated by other than aesthetic means.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Down Under

 

I knew of the Aboriginal  paintings much before I visited Australia, but once there as Guest Professor of Something or Another in the capitol city of Canberra, I could not avoid them. They are even depicted on postage stamps. There are now as many Aboriginal artists as there are Euro-Australian ones, which means there is a higher percentage of Aboriginal artists within the indigenous population than the percentage of artists among the Euro-Australians. This does not mean that the art market has solved the poverty problem for indigenous peoples of the sub-continent. Art projects rarely solve economic problems, particularly ones based on colonialism and racism. Nor does it explain why some "dot paintings" go for more than any white Australian equivalent. The latter, however, explains why there are so many fakes.

 

After my teaching stint - punctuated by several trips to beautiful Sydney and a quick visit to my hero "Such is life" Ned Kelly's jail cell in Melbourne - I felt I had to visit sacred Uluru, dead center of the Australian desert. I needed something to balance Kelly's gallows irony and the fact that he, as the Australian Robin Hood, arranged that the mobs of well-wishers at his public hanging receive free press-photos of his Irish bandit-visage.

  

We flew to Alice Springs and then drove along that same straight-edge, one-lane, unpaved highway we had seen from the air, all the way to the Aboriginal sacred rock, once briefly known as Ayers Rock by the white guys.  Although now surrounded with three rings of tourism, Uluru mysteriously still glows purple at sunset. There are three-tiered accommodations: Luxury Hotel, Mid-Range, and Camp Ground. And yet....I still felt I was on another planet. The indigenous peoples are right: this is a sacred place. I circumambulated the rock, or at least dreamed I did.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I didn't realize it at the time, but 150 miles from Alice springs on the Papunya reservation was where the dot-paintings began. They were sparked by the non-Aboriginal schoolteacher Geoffrey Bardon in 1971.

 

Mick Namararri Tjapaltjarri (1927-1998), Uta Uta Tjangala (1926-1990), Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula (1918-2001) and other talented "artists" took to using acrylic,  on boards and then on canvas. Herded together from different tribes, they embraced both the opportunity of giving voice to their 30,000-year-old (!) cultural traditions and the possibility of some ready cash.

 

Although at least once-removed from their origins in the story-telling, ground painting,  body painting of the ineffable Dreamings, the paintings now at the Grey Gallery possess some of that numinous, unearthly aura that spooked me out at Uluru.  Dreamings, after all,  are one-part deed-keeping, one-part mapping, one-part conjuring, one-part creation myth. 

 

The credentials of the works at the Grey Gallery are impeccable. They are from the first 1000 Aboriginal dot paintings ever made. All were painted at the beginning of the art movement and pretty much before tribal elders grew increasingly insistent that secret, sacred imagery be fully disguised  by dots. It is ironic, therefore, that the works are sometimes known as "dot paintings" - i.e. paintings that feature imagery that has been erased.

 

Some of these diagrams or maps, like the illustration above, are still taboo for aboriginal women and children and are so-designated at the Grey Gallery, where such are grouped in the lower gallery. The images are ports of entry for ancient entities.  The gendered nature of the Dreamings --- a bad translation of an Aboriginal term for timelessness --  suggests their initiatory character.

 

Tibetan mandalas can take the form of temporary sand paintings. Surprisingly far from Tibet, the Aboriginal paintings are inspired by indigenous sand-paintings, which, in turn, relate to mandala-like Native American ground-works.

 

 

 

Aboriginal ground-painting being made for opening of "Icons of the Desert," Johnson Museum, Cornell Univeresity. Earth, dye, dried flower petals.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finished ground painting...image courtesy Ithica Journal.

 

 

Carl Jung would have been pleased by these synchronicities, but he would also have been pleased by more evidence of gender-divisions in the realm of the spirit, the perpetuation of which was one of his personal, very deep flaws. The man, as you shall see, had problems.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Too Jung, Too Foolish

 

C. G. Jung's The Red Book  (1913-1916) has been suppressed until now. An expensive facsimile edition is now available from Simon and Schuster. Pages from this facsimile and other documents make up an exhibition at the Rubin Museum. At first one might wonder why a museum devoted to the art of the Himalayas would have an exhibition center around an early hand-calligraphed notebook by Carl Jung. But, don't worry, this too shall be clarified.

 

Apparently Jung's family and other interested parties thought The Red Book would put him and his discoveries in clinical psychology or depth psychology in a bad light. And yet Jung himself said it was during the strange, inward-looking period of The Red Book that he came across all the ideas we know think of as Jungian. Everything can be traced back to his scary experiment, probing or yielding to his own troubled depths. His idea of scientific research was to turn in on himself. 

 

Some related material now on display at the Rubin are pencil-drawings of mandalas he made in 1917,  when, as he himself later wrote, he found his anima, or, to simplify, his feminine side. "She" was not all sweetness and light. She - everyman's Lilith - never is. To some she may be Beatrice, but to Jung she was -- although he did not call her that -- Kalachata's Vishvamatr, but not so much as an embodiment of bliss, but rather as the personification of Kalachata's wrath. And yet the anima is also supposed to be the embodiment of every male's repressed spirituality. Who said Jung indulged in simplifications?

 

 About his own mandalas he wrote:

 

"My mandalas were cryptograms concerning the state of the self which was presented to me anew each day...I guarded them like precious pearls....It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the center. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the center, to individuation...."

 

Jung's journey was the Orphic descent. If he had been more cognizant of Islam, one wonders if he would have had a Mohammedan ascent instead.

 

 

 

 

Are these pages art? Oh, no. In spite of the careful, obsessive calligraphy and the tidy pictures in the he Red Book were not intended as art.

 

In Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961), based on extensive interviews, Jung recounts his encounter with his anima and her insistence that what he was doing in his notebooks was art. "I said very emphatically to this voice [that of his anima] that my fantasies had nothing to do with art...No, it is not art! On the contrary, it is nature."

 

Further:

 

The anima might then have easily seduced me into believing that I was a misunderstood artist, and that my so-called artistic nature gave me the right to neglect reality. If I had followed her voice, she would in all probability have said to me one day, 'Do you imagine the nonsense you're engaged in is really art? Not a bit.'  Thus the insinuations of the anima, the mouthpiece of the unconscious, can utterly destroy a man.

 

Now, I must admit, that unless you are attuned to Jungian prerogatives, to the tempting revelations of the Gnostic heresies, to Sixties New-Age ways of thinking, and to non-western spiritual traditions, you may find this material, if not extremely iffy, then totally insane.

 

I quarrel  with Jung's quaint insistence upon radically different male and female souls. Excuse me. In my experience, women simply are not more spiritual than men, nor are men more logical than women. Jungian individuation may involve a symbolic androgyny, but this in Jung's theology is built upon a sexual dualism that is untenable.

 

Nevertheless, in Artopia we understand that Jungian therapy - and it's world-view - leaves more room for art than does Freudian psychoanalysis. Jung opened up new paths of inquiry and almost became the magus he thought he was. After personalizing and getting his anima under control, Jung delved into alchemy and the Kabbalah, as well as the I Ching and the Taoist Secrets of the Golden Flower. The woman who owned the gallery I showed with in the early Sixties never made a move without consulting the I Ching.

 

An exhibition such as this quiet display honoring The Red Book - the Jungian Holy Grail -- could force you to delve a bit deeper into Jung, which, I know, you have probably been avoiding. But just try to forget that not only Herman Hesse but also Jackson Pollock underwent Jungian therapy.  

 

Peeling back the layers of time, you had also better be careful when you read about the Buber/Jung controversy.  Nowadays perhaps better known as a champion of Hasidic mysticism and the simplifier of the Hasidic teaching-tales then as an Existentialist philosopher, Martin Buber in full philosophical fury accused Jung of being --  surprise! --- a Gnostic. In other words, a dangerous, polytheistic, dualistic heretic out to destroy monotheism. Briefly, Jung was "mystically deifying the instincts instead of hallowing them in faith" and thus promoting "a modern manifestation of Gnosis." 

 

Jung gave empiricism as his self-defense. And then Buber responded to that  disengenious claim. 

 

Of course, Buber was right, although he himself seemed to have forgotten that Hasidism is rooted in the Kabbalah, with its suspicious Little Man and Big Man. And, yes, all those emanations and broken vessels. And is the Shekinah not God's partner? Oops.

 

We have had more than hints of Jung's shamanistic plunge before the publication of The Red Book. Jung's  The Seven Sermons to the Dead,  written in 1916, has been available in English since 1961 as an appendix to Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

 

This high-strangeness purports to be a text written by the real-life Basilides, a second-century Gnostic. Although much of it is pompous paradox -- Jung unlike Freud was never a stranger to pomposity --- the effect is hair-raising. It may have been automatic writing and/or dictated by whatever foot-loose and meddlesome spirits were hiding out in Zurich at the time or it may have been pieced together from texts of medieval heresy trials, but Jung was on the same wave-length as the Gnostic texts found at Nag Hammadi, much later. Basilides/Jung even claims Abraxas as the god of this world. Thus this creepy little hymn to dualism begins:

 

The dead came back from Jerusalem, where they found not what they sought. They prayed me let them in and besought my word, and thus I began my teaching. Harken: I begin with nothingness. Nothingness is the same as fullness. In infinity full is no better than empty. Nothingness is both empty and full....

 

Well, yes, sort of. 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gemstone with image of Abraxas, one of the Archons, n.d.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Inside A Tibetan Mandala                                  

 

Onward and upward to the 5^th Floor of the Rubin Museum, for a breath of fresh air: The Five-Deity Mandala of Amoghapasha (8-9^th Century), The Kalachakra Mandala (c. 1650-1700), and many others plus a pixilated projection of a sand mandala being made, projected horizontally, but minus hands, monks, funnels. 

 

Many years ago I watched a Tibetan sand-mandala being made, and saw it, as is the custom, then destroyed. I also interviewed the Dalai Lama.

 

  

 

As a kid, having read James Hilton's Lost Horizon, I identified with Tibet. An important character in that fantasy is a priest named Father Perrault, obviously a great-uncle of mine. My last name has been spelled both with and without the second "e." My imagined cousin, movie-star Gigi Perreau, dropped the last two letters. Here is a clip from the wretched 1937 movie version of Lost Horizon that features buildings in Shangri-La obviously, designed by one of Frank Lloyd Wright's lesser students. 

 

 

 

Both Father Perrault and Gigi (and soccer stars too numerous to mention) were obviously all descended like myself from Charles Perrault of the court of Louis XIV, first secretary of the French Academy and, more importantly, the transcriber of the Tales of Mother Goose, which include Cinderella, Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast, and Little Red Riding Hood.There is also the notorious Perreault Gang of Canadian highwaymen, but let's not go there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Charles Perrault (1628-1703)

 

 

Years after my brief encounter with the Dalai Lama, I visited Beatrice Wood - she who had been a cohort of Marcel Duchamp --  at her ceramics studio in Ojai, California. It was and is on land owned by the Krishnamurti Foundation. The woman sometimes referred to as the Dada Mama pointed out the view from her terrace. She was 100 years old. The distance hills, she claimed, had been filmed as the foothills of the Himalayas for the Frank Capra movie version of Lost Horizon ( 937). No wonder I felt at home. 

 

To make a long story short, I have written about Tibetan mandalas before, and, although surprised by several aspects of the current exhibition, I was not planning to write again. Until I realized I had a triple-header on my hands.

 

The exhibition is, of course, a glorious array, showing some of the earliest mandalas now extant.  But what impressed me this time was not so much the paintings on cloth, but the three-dimensional manifestations. 

 

Briefly, the Tibetan mandalas in the Tantric Kalachakra tradition, whether painted on cloth or actualized as ephemeral sand-paintings, are air-views of temples. But these are no ordinary temples. Properly instructed and in the right frame of mind, as you wind your way around the corridors and up the stairways -- circumambulating the center and the pinnacle--  you will get closer and closer to Buddha-hood. Various "deities" will materialize, bur fear not, like everything else in this world, they are only illusions.

 

Kalachakra and his consort, bright-yellow Vishvamatr are at the center of the labyrinth, male and female united. At this center, which is also the peak of the temple, you will become the Buddha. All of this used to be top secret. However, unlike Aboriginal elders, Tibetan Buddhists have realized that nothing is so secret as what is readily available.

 

Two three-dimensional mandalas made of metal are at hand. They could be architectural models, but they are much more: aids to helping you visualize your path through flat versions of themselves.  If finding your way through the pathways of the mandala is in order to increase your powers of visualization, then isn't a 3-D model cheating? Probably not. As far as I know you are not punished for being a few counts off in your required number of repetitions of the Jesus Prayer --- or any given mantra. Stories too are told of seekers repeating the wrong section of the Talmud or the wrong quotation from the Koran, but still attaining results.

 

In any case, through these metal "sculptures", you are led to really see that Tibetan mandala "paintings" are not only diagrams of the world, but temples you are supposed to enter. The digital version - which may be cheating to the third degree -- was made as a collaboration between some Tibetan monks and the computer department of Cornell University. It's part of the exhibition. Here is a  a version: 

 

 

Now do you understand it when I say that Tibetan mandalas -- like Aboriginal Dreamings and Jung's illustrations in The Red Book -  are not art works? They are spiritual tools.                                       

 

 

 

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Refluxions

 

A recent exhibition at the Stendhal Gallery in Chelsea gave pause for thought. And another chance to play catch-up with Fluxus, during what might be a Neo-Fluxus period. Solidified just before Conceptual Art per se, Fluxus was truly international. To the accusation that Fluxus is just Dada in sheep's clothing, Fluxians would reply that unlike Dada, their religion accentuates the positive rather than the negative. Fluxus is often humorous, but humor in art is no laughing matter. Fluxus humor is not what the Surrealists called "black humor." It doesn't go for the jugular. Nevertheless, unlike a great deal of current art, the Fluxus institutional critique is structural rather than rhetorical and not just a barely disguised plea for membership in the club.

 

"Ken Friedman: 99 Events" presented that number of the artist's scores, plus 38  handwritten "drawings" (some with collage elements) documenting Events from 1982 to 1990, but executed in this format last year. In total, the 137 pieces (1956-2009) cover a wide range of Fluxus genres:

  

1. Instructions for activities in front of an audience.

 

Stage Reversal

 

 

Go on stage naked, covered with paint.

 

Wash

 

Dress and leave stage.

 

 

1966

 

First performed at the Avenue C FluxusRoom in New York in October, 1966.

 

 

2. Instructions for activities without an audience.

 

 

Hat

 

Mail a hat.

 

 

1966

 

 

 

3.  Instructions for making exhibitions

 

Place things on the floor.

 

1970

 

Herewith, because it is so revealing about his approach to art, I append a slightly edited note about the piece, published in the online catalog.

 

In 1970, I had a conversation with the director of the art gallery at University of California at Santa Barbara about the possibility of an exhibition at the university. He invited me to visit him, asking me to bring examples of my work and some of the pieces I might like to exhibit...

 

I made an appointment to see him. The day that I left, I grabbed a selection of objects and projects from my stucio, threw them into a box, and took them with me. When I got to Santa Barbara, we spoke together for a while. Then he asked me to bring in my work...

 

I brought the box into his office, opened it, and unpacked the objects, placing them on the floor, along the length of a wall. He looked at the objects for a while. Perhaps it was a long while. I am not sure, but it seemed that way to me.

 

Finally, he looked at me and said, "But these are just ordinary objects."

 

At first, I thought he understood my work quite well.

 

Later, I realized that he saw these objects in a very different way than I did. 

 

 

 

4. Instructions for making a nuisance of yourself.

 

 

Fast Food Event

 

Go into a fast food restaurant.

 

Order one example

of every item on the menu.

 

Line everything up

in a row on the table.

 

Eat the items one at a time,

starting at one end of the row

and moving systematically

from each to the next.

 

Finish each item before

moving on to the next.

 

Eat rapidly and methodically

until all the food is finished.

 

Eat as fast as possible

without eating too fast.

 

Eat neatly.

Do not make a mess.

 

1964

                                                            

 

But that's not all. There are examples of Mail Art, Radio Art, Street Works, Earth Art, and much more.

 

Furthermore, the future is here:

 

The 99 "scores" can be perused in the free-to-download online catalog, here and there replete with very, very interesting, longish notes by Friedman. This, by the way, is the wave of the future. All gallery and museum catalogs will be available for free online. Think of all the trees that will be spared and all of the storage space now used for unsold tomes that will be released. Think of all the shelf-space that will be liberated.  Think of those who will be able to see and read about a show who wouldn't have been able to do that before.

 

 

 

 

Prefluxification

                                       

Friedman (b. 1945), operating under Dick Higgins' advice that one should  earn one's living outside of artmaking, after a long teaching stint at the Norwegian School of Management in Oslo is now the Dean of the Design Faculty of Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.

 

"99 Events" fully reveals Friedman as an important Fluxist. He has been consciously making Fluxist art since 1965, so he can have no Fluxus founder-claims. It is still between George Brecht, who inaugurated the terms for and practices of Events and Event Scores around 1961, and George Maciunas, who invented the Fluxus rubric in1962, which for all practical purposes subsumed Events.

 

Question: Which takes precedence, the form or the term?

 

But Friedman does have some bragging rights.

 

When Maciunas initiated him, our upstart had achieved the ripe old age of 16, making him the youngest Fluxian ever; not first, but youngest, and making Fluxus the first art movement to engender a second generation in the record time of three years.

 

However, in the online catalog, Friedman claims he was making Fluxian events before he knew the term and before Dick Higgins (first-generation Fluxist and publisher of the Fluxarian Something Else Press) convinced him he was an artist, sending him over to George Maciunas with one of his pieces in hand. Here are the Fluxus prodigy's instructions for said Pre-Fluxus work:

 

 

Open and Shut Case

 

Make a box.

 

On the outside,

print the word "Open".

 

On the inside,

print the words "Shut quick".

 

1965

 

A further description of the anointment:

 

Maciunas peppered me with questions. What did I do? What did I think? What was I planning? At that time, I was planning to become a Unitarian minister. I did all sorts of things, things without names, things that jumped over the boundaries between ideas and actions, between the manufacture of objects and books, between philosophy and literature. Maciunas listened for a while and invited me to join Fluxus. I said yes.

 

A short while later, George asked me what kind of artist I was. Until that moment, I had never thought of myself as an artist. George thought about this for a minute, and said, "You're a concept artist."

 

It always pleased me that I became part of Fluxus before I became an artist. 

 

Friedman had made other Fluxus Events -- although he did not know enough to think of them as art works -- even earlier. Here is one the precocious lad from New London, Connecticut, made when he was 11 years old and the first to be documented in "99 Events":

 

Scrub Piece

 

Go to a public monument  on the first day of spring.

 

Clean it thoroughly.

 

No announcement is necessary.

 

1956 

 

This is amazingly pre-Fluxian. The assumption is that an activity, even if it is not conceived of as or presented as an artwork, can still be classified as belonging to an art category that has not yet been invented.

Both the Dadaist and Surrealists claimed certain artists and writers as their own ... retroactively. Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) was a favorite. But as far as I know, Jarry did not deem himself a Dadaist or Surrealist before the fact.

 

 

                                                      

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

                      

 

Fluxality: The End of the Game

 

Paradoxically, the only way we know the little we know about Fluxus is because of the object-based, ego-based, profit-based art system it taunted. Still, Fluxian questions are still relevant.

 

Can we have art without galleries and museums, art without art criticism, art

without investors, art without professionalized artists?

 

How many variations on a Fluxus score can you make? Are there gaps? Are there any possibilities left for "invention"? And for connoisseurs and marketeers here is the all-important question: stripped of signature and tell-tale context, can you tell whose work you are reading? Can you tell one Fluxus score from another?

 

If you can't, maybe that's the point.

 

Fluxus at its purest, like Dada, is a way of life. In other words -- please don't be shocked -- it's a spiritual practice.

 

I will let Ken Friedman have the last word:

 

 

Centre Piece

 

Imagine a life.

 

Live it.

 

2003

 

 

 

                                                 *   *   *

 

Well, not quite the last word.

 

An exhibition examining the work of George Maciunas is at the Stendhal Gallery (545 West 20th Street), opening Oct.31.

 

Many other Fluxians also need a second look. I am thinking about:

 

Geoff Hendricks (b. 1935) whose cloud paintings (!) stick in the mind.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Geoff Hendricks: Sky Pillow Cases, 1965

 

 

Fluxusatrix Alison Knowles (b. 1933) who is still actively creating Fluxus events, particularly abroad. Here is her re-flux (2008) of her earlier version (1962).

 

 

 

 

 

And shouldn't we look at Robert Filliou (1926-1987), who joined the French Resistance in 1943, was a trained economist, and invented: Homophonic Translation,Telepathic Music,  Art's Birthday*, and (see Friedman's note on p. 25 of "99 Events") Poetic Economics..... Who was Filliou? He proclaimed about himself "nationality = poet/ profession = French."

 

 

 

*also: Art's Birthday Event, 2009. 

 

 

In 1962, determined to remain outside the exhibition circuit, Robert Filliou carried his gallery in his hat. He became his own exhibition space: "La Galerie Légitime" [The Legitimate Gallery]. His works, gathered together in his beret and stamped "Galerie Légitime Couvre Chef ''Oeuvre" [Legitimate Gallery Masterpiece Hat], circulated in the streets with him (the idea is reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp's suitcase). He then met George Maciunas, the centralizer of the activities of Fluxus. "La Galerie Légitime" invited several artists to exhibit in it. This was an art made up of attitudes and gestures, rather than saleable works.

 

                                                            

                                                           Catherine Ouy, NewMedia.org

 

 

FOR AN AUTOMATIC ARTOPIA ALERT, E-MAIL: Perreault@aol.com

  

  

 

William Pope.L,YARD (To Harrow), 2009; "reinvention" of Allan Kaprow'sYARD, 1961

 

Part One: Art By the Yard

Allan Kaprow's Yard, now in its 15^th reincarnation, celebrates the new quarters (32 E. 69^th St.) of Hauser & Wirth, formerly only of Zurich and London. From beyond the grave, Kaprow (1927-2006) is still posing questions of authority, authorization, and notions of the artist as author rather than maker.

 

The Hauser & Wirth exhibition (to Oct. 24) is by our esteemed forebearer because the gallery has commissioned three celebratory reinventions of his historic environment. There is also an entire room of documents. This is the kind of exhibition that in a better world we might expect a museum to launch. But a gallery can turn on a dime; museums take years to come up with their usually boring, unimaginative exhibitions.

 

If we delve a bit into Kaprow's post-Happenings oeuvre, we see that the inauguration of what he called "reinventions" was both a solution and an ongoing problematic. He allowed and perhaps required the reinvention rather than the re-creation of his "activities" and his ephemeral sculptures such as Yard (1961) or Fluids (1967), the outdoor structure made of -- and to be remade of --  blocks of ice.

 

 

 

What is important about Kaprow is that he actually accomplished what the wimpy postmodernist academics of the past three decades never actually did -- or did in word only. He de-centered art. And I don't mean he decentered it by moving to California to take advantage of teaching opportunities.

 

Which he did do. Which he could do, because he was famous, even only as the inventor of Happenings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Allan Kaprow:18 Happenings in 6 Parts (detail), 1959.

Kaprow playing musical instrument.

 

 

Part Two: California, Here I Come

 

In the past I have found fault with the "activities" because they suggest the therapeutic, and to this day I am wary of Kaprow's exploitation of participation and collaboration.

 

For instance, here is a short section of an activities score for Match, 1975:

 

(in light)       A and B. silently exchanging

                    each other' others clothes

 

                    continuing exchanging

    

                    until clocked signals

                    15 minutes have passed

 

(in dark)       A. and B. lying on floor

              on opposites side of room

             

              A.     occasionally saying

                     "It's a perfect fit."

 

              B. precisely copying A.

 

                     until clock signals

                     30 minutes have passed

 

I am, however, relieved that his papers have ended up in the archives of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. That, not some museum, is the major repository of his work. A 2008 traveling exhibition called "Allan Kaprow: Art and Life" seems to have been mostly drawn from the Archive, and indeed the accompanying tome weaves together ephemera, media manifestations, photos and scripts; it is an invaluable resource.

   

Provisos notwithstanding, Kaprow is, as he hoped to be, Jackson Pollock's true successor -- not those painters of merely pleasing paintings that critic Clement Greenberg pushed. In Kaprow's hands (sic), theater became a positive value once again. He is also the legitimate successor to de Kooning, whether he would have liked that or not. Without Action Painting and de Kooning's violent expressionism there would not be messy Happenings, messy Environments.

 

Now, however, Kaprow seems merely the heir of Futurist and Dada "theater" and even Surrealist games and installations. It was not that these precedents were off his radar, but at the time they weren't a well-considered aspect of the art discourse. Happenings and other time-based inventions have nowadays made them essential.

 

Kaprow accomplished this antiformalist but not necessarily antimodernist coup by finding new heroes, such as composer John Cage, and in spite of his friendships with Pop artists, by going against the grain of received art-world wisdom.

 

That is why he had little or no critical support. How could he? He was not yet even indirectly tied to the art market.

 

Painter Fairfield Porter, then a critic, wrote in the Nation about Kaprow's first  Happening, called 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, staged at the artist-run Reuben Gallery in 1959:

 

If he wants to prove that certain things can't be done again because they have already been done, he couldn't be more convincing...The "Eighteen Happenings" devalue all art by a meaningless and deliberate surgery. And the final totality is without character; it never takes off from the sidewalk.

 

In retrospect, one might think the painter Porter, who came to specialize in sunny porches and tidy domestic scenes, might have found some kinship with Kaprow's valorization of the quotidian. Porter was a better writer than a painter. At his best he managed the startling plainness of dance critic Edwin Denby.  But he was, unlike Denby, a better writer than a critic.

 

With a reception like Porter's (who in person was a kindly man), it is no wonder Kaprow took pen to hand, not only to issue essays, now collected, but also in one case to write his own notice.

 

On Jan. 12, 1961, the Village Voice published an over-the-transom piece by a certain Theodore Tucker headlined "An Apple Shrine at the Judson Gallery." It was a review of Kaprow's labyrinthine environment of chicken-wire and newspaper -- written by the artist himself:

 

Beneath the surface of each confrontation with the work is the doubt that it is art at all. There is a distrust and fear of an expression that is short-lived by intention. As though this were subtly calling upon death itself.... Far beyond the "Apple Shrine's" actual content and humanity stands Kaprow's inadvertent quarrel with all the vapid glories, qualities and eternities which we think are history.

 

 

Part Three: Re-Tiring

 

The most direct reinvention of Yard is at Hauser & Wirth itself and is a lookalike  reenactment by William Pope.L, who titles his version YARD (To Harrow). In this case, rented tires are jammed into the basement level of the building and not in the small courtyard out back, which had been the original site.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Allan Kaprow:Yard, 1961

 

 

 

          Opening Reception, YARD, 1961. Kaprow second from right.

 

Yes, it is entirely fitting that this is the H.&W. inaugural Big Apple foray. At this very same address, the first Yard was the most attention-getting component of the Martha Jackson Gallery 1961 exhibition "Environments -- Situations --Spaces." There were also works by George Brecht, Jim Dine, Walter Gaudnek, AI, Claes Oldenburg, and Robert Whitman. Brecht's piece, probably the only other work of lasting significance, was nearly the opposite of Yard: the presentation of a single chair. Here is dance critic Jill Johnston's description in her Village Voice summation:

 

George Brecht is always clean as a clipped wing, airy, cheerful and self-disappearing. He had a little white room just off the yard with a nice, white chair in it, comfortable for a Cape Cod porch...his first two statements [in the accompanying brochure] are A. nothing special; b. no theory.

 

But more about Brecht later.

 

 

FOUR: Yard Art

 

Vis-à-vis the original Yard, I remember that a few statues were concealed by tarpaper and you could look down upon the entire tire pile from a gallery window on the second floor.

 

Now, deep inside the building in William Pope.L's reinvention, black plastic covers a desk and all accoutrements. And there is a rack of very un-Kaprow body bags concealing manikins (according to the gallerina I spoke to) or ooze (according to the New York Times). Sound and on/off lighting have been added, but to no effect. Visitors may sit on the tires, which is historically correct and shows Kaprow's incorporation of audience participation. That the tires are not from 1961 is of no import. As we all know, used tires are eternal.

 

Pope.L's redo is darker then the earlier, plainer version. Suffice it to say, aside from constructing ecological Earthship homes out of old tires -- for a million plus -- we have still not figured out what to do with all those rubber tires filling up dumps around the globe.

 

 

 

Earthship (Biotexture) ecological house made of used tires and other recycled materials.

 

 

Further afield, the second Hauser & Wirth commission was offered by Sharon Hayes. Referencing Kaprow's image for an ancient Martha Jackson poster, an accumulation of handmade yard-sale signs were installed at the N.Y. Marble Cemetery on lower Second Avenue during the weekend of October 3 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The third reinvention was by Josiah McElheny. Offered at the Queens Museum of Art, YARD (Junk Yard) was a gigantic projection of an aerial photo of the Iron Triangle junkyards of Queens, projected on the outside of the N.Y. Panorama (unfortunately only until Oct. 4). It was a breathtaking image, perfectly presented, and I searched for tires amid the wreckage. And found them.

 

 

 

 

Josiah McElheny: YARD (Junk Yard), 2009

 

 

                                         

 

 

 

 

\

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                 McElheney: YARD (Junk Yard), detail

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Allan Kaprow preparing 18 Happenings in 6 Parts.

Part Five: Some Thoughts on Kaprow and Art History

 

 

Allan Kaprow, justly acclaimed as the inventor of Happenings, certainly did not operate outside of art history. A professor of art history at Rutgers (when there were still such jobs to be had), he had studied under the great Meyer Schapiro at Columbia. So he knew where art had been, all the way up to Pollock and de Kooning. And as an artist he knew where he wanted it to go. Basically, his collages became assemblage (influenced by Robert Rauschenberg's early Combines.) The assemblage grew and grew and without even a polite nod to Kurt Schwitters became walk-ins or what he began calling "environments." another term he invented.

 

Under the influence of classes taken with our hero John Cage at the New School for Social Research, Environments became Happenings. Although anti-establishment, Kaprow did show in galleries when they were co-ops, like the Hansen, the Reuben, and the nonprofit Judson Gallery in the basement of Judson Church. Otherwise he steered clear (I first typed: "seered clear") of the blue-chip art market, which usually controls art history in subtle and not so subtle ways. Until recently, there was little of his work to sell besides pamphlets and posters.

 

Nevertheless, Kaprow is in most surveys of art. I shall hypothesize that his late-career entries into the museum milieu helped. Sequestered in various California art departments, he had time to reinvent himself and  to re-deploy his time-based, virtually unsalable art.

 

How did he manage this feat?

 

He was not a cultural icon like Marcel Duchamp or Andy Warhol. Aphorisms were not his métier. Aside from a few bright  students, he had no entourage. The very nature of his work emphasized the banalities of everyday life. There was no mystique. He was never shot down by Russian gunfire, to be rescued by peasants wrapping him in wool and fat. He did not wear a silver wig. He hadn't climbed along a ceiling dressed in only a jock-strap. He never painted himself wearing adult diapers. He never had plastic surgery to turn himself into a perpetually grinning 28-year-old corporate stand-in.

 

He did, however, have a peculiar cross to bear.

 

The term "Happenings" is pretty much his fault, but as his works became leaner, moved outdoors, and his scripts got boiled down to mere sentences, he began to call what he was doing "Activities." I imagine he was annoyed by the appropriation of his term to refer to raucous parties, love-ins, and sales events in department stores. There's even a Supreme's song called The Happening. The packaging ate what was packaged. But it also gave him a tag.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Supremes

 

The reinventions reinvented his career. Key pieces were replicated, more or less, throughout the art world. The reinventions were intended to have the aura of the participatory, but some very strict rules applied.

 

Near the end, when contemporary curator Stephanie Rosenthal of the Haus der Kunst, Munich, was working on "Allan Kaprow: Art as Life" retrospective, she reports in the Getty catalogue/book that the artist offered the following:

Kaprow stipulated that wherever possible, responsibility should be given to a single leader. The form of the new version would be dependent upon the leader, the time, the place, and the participants...Kaprow's guidelines [for individual works] gave the new leader a point of reference to work with and against, so that he or she could avoid being overwhelmed by possibilities. Kaprow's only request was that he not be personally involved or asked for advice, although he wanted to be kept informed of events.

                                                                                                                                                              Part Six:  Happening v. Events; Kaprow v. Brecht

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 George Brecht: Chair Event, 1966

 

And what of Kaprow's contemporary, George Brecht? Brecht (1926-2008) was a New Jersey neighbor and also a friend of Kaprow's Pop Art pal George Segal. Segal was a chicken farmer; Brecht, a chemist. Kaprow was teaching at Rutgers. In the last Artopia entry, focused on the Neo-Fluxus trend, I stated: "With the exception of works by the truly original George Brecht, Fluxus was pretty much an outgrowth and a minimalization of Happenings and/or a music phenomenon."

 

I have been gently called to task by a latter-day Fluxian who thinks that Fluxus was independent of Happenings and developed simultaneously. However, a little research will show that Kaprow and Brecht attended Cage's New School classes together. Yet Kaprow's first Happening is thought to be the 1959 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, which was slightly before Brecht's proto-Fluxus Event Scores. Brecht's earlier works had complicated scripts, like Kaprow's  Happenings. The term "Fluxus," however, was invented later by facilitator George Maciunas in 1962. I am right! If only by a hair.

 

And here is something else to consider.

 

Whereas Brecht had no doubts about joining up with or fears of being subsumed by Fluxus, Kaprow himself wanted no part of it: 

  
George and I couldn't get along. Indeed, he approached me as he did everybody else to sign my entire career away to him, and I thought this was a Fluxus joke. So I said, "Up yours." And he took it seriously. But he was a marvelous man. I mean the energy and cohesion that he gave to a disparate number of artists around the world was extraordinary. So I don't say this unpleasant part [of] history with any kind of rancor. It was like oil and water.

                                         

                                              Interview with Allan Kaprow, Dallas Library, 1988.

 

And here's a sample of Maciunas-iana:

HE MUST DEMONSTRATE OWN DISPENSABILITY, HE MUST DEMONSTRATE

SELFSUFFICIENCY OF THE AUDIENCE, HE MUST DEMONSTRATE THAT ANYTHING

CAN SUBSITUTE ART AND ANYONE CAN DO IT. THEREFORE THIS SUBSTITUTE

ART AMUSEMENT MUST BE SIMPLE,AMUSING, CONCERNED WITH INSIGNIFICANCES.

HAVE NO COMMODITY OR INSTITUTIONAL VALUE. IT MUST BE UNLIMITED, OBTAINABLE BY ALL AND EVENTUALLY PRODUCED BY ALL. THE ARIST DOING ART MEANWHILE,TO JUSTIFY HIS INCOME, MUST DEMONSTRATE THAT ONLY HE CAN DO ART. ART THEREFORE MUST APPEAR TO BE COMPLEX, INTELLECTUAL, EXCLUSIVE, INDISPENSABLE, INSPIRED. TO RAISE ITS COMMODITY VALUE IT IS MADE TO BE

RARE, LIMITED IN QUANTITY AND THEREFORE ACCESSIBLE NOT TO THE MASSES BUT TO THE SOCIAL ELITE.

 

FLUXMANIFEST ON ART AMUSEMENT

 

                                 by GEORGE MACIUNAS, 1965. Available at artnotart.com

 

Actually, looking through the Getty compendium, it is clear that as Kaprow began to call his works "Activities," he was becoming more and more Fluxian, in terms of the simplicity -- and sometimes the ambiguity -- of his instructions for pieces.

Here is an early example:

 

LEVEL (1970)

A block of ice and a bale of straw are

placed near on another somewhere.

 

The ice melts slowly.

 

The bale is reduced straw by straw

until nothing remains.

 

 

Compare this to Brecht's: Three Dances (1961)

 

     1.

     Saliva

 

     2.

     Pause

Urination

Pause

 

    3.

    Perspiration

 

Or the undated Air Conditioning

 

         (move through the place)

 

Am I splitting hairs? The very process of trying to make distinctions, even if they are only temporary, can help us see. Although Brecht was, I think, as thought-provoking an artist as Kaprow, he made the following horrible mistakes:

 

He was a research chemist and not a professor of art history. He participated in Fluxus. He did not invent any new art terms. He issued fewer art products than even Kaprow. And worst of all, unmindful of John Cage's advice, he moved to Europe.

 

The N.Y. Times obituary for cult-figure Brecht, by Times art critic Ken Johnson, ran and still runs under the Music category, which is more than odd. His piece consisting of  dismantling a violin, might be an homage to his musician father, who committed suicide. And his Drip Music might be considered music. Nevertheless, whatever fame Brecht has is art-world fame.

 

 

 

FOR AN AUTOMATIC ATROPIA ALERT CONTACT perreault@aol.com.

 Fluxconcert Performance   

The End of The Art World, Again

Art galleries are closing down. Well, perhaps not enough of them. And, let's face it, museums are dull. As an exercise in nostalgia, we now have O'Keeffe, Kandinsky, and are looking forward to  Man Ray, and (in Philadelphia) Gorky. But only Man Ray at the Jewish Museum promises revelations -- concerning his hidden identity. Wait a minute, we all knew he was Jewish, didn't we?

 

Oh, we are on to those museums, peddling proven pleasers. And then the new penny-saving trick is to offer fake exhibitions of single artworks or stuff from storage. The public is not fooled. In fact, if this is all museums can come up with, why offer special exhibitions at all? You know why: catalogs, posters, pencils, notebooks and other themed items might bring in some cash to our over-extended, cash-hungry institutions, now abandoned by those who once coveted the tax benefits of charitable donations.

 

Yet again, the art world has had its day and is withering away, right before our eyes.

 

So everyone is anxiously awaiting the success of The Bruce High Quality Foundation University. The apparently all-male Foundation is an anonymous collective founded to honor the fictional, dead artist Bruce High Quality.  The Foundation's art world zombie movie (Isle of the Dead) was a summer hit on Governors Island, as was its art-education slide lecture last July, called Explaining Pictures to a Dead Bull, which refers to the classic Joseph Beuys 1965 performance How To Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. 
 

The awful truth is that although an MFA seems to be required for artists showing at the New Museum and other once avant-garde venues, very few art majors graduate to self-sustaining art careers or, in fact, teaching gigs; actually, they never have. The numbers don't add up. Just compare the number of artists who make their livings from their art and/or the number of available teaching jobs to the number of MFAs, year after year. Well, dear art students, the odds are against you. And unless you duped your parents into funding your whole adventure, what you will reap is not art-world stardom, but debts beyond belief. That is why when one now eats out in New York, the waitperson is likely to have an MFA. Critics and curators have long known that they must watch what they say in restaurants. Loose lips sink art-world ships.

 

Otherwise on the mark, The Bruce does not point out that most art critics now depend upon the largesse of academia to survive. Not everyone can achieve a staff position at the New York Times, has a private income, or is amoral enough to function as a private art dealer. This is why art critics are silent about the MFA scam. Most of them teach and cannot afford to give away the show.

 

What then should be the function of art education? What are the proper goals? What should be taught?

 

Classes at The Bruce High Quality University:

OCCULT SHENANIGANS IN 20TH/21ST CENTURY ART

 

WHAT'S A METAPHOR?
 

BUILD YOUR OWN UNIVERSITY

PHILOSOPHY OF MOTION PICTURES

ART HISTORY WITH BENEFITS

ENVIRONMENTAL MUSIC PERFORMANCE

LIBRARY AS DETECTIVE AGENCY

EDIFYING

 

FUTUROLOGICAL POETRY

 

 

                                         *   *   *

 

Fluxus Redux

 

Given the current art-market flux and the loss of faith, an art movement that was anti-object, cross-media, anti-establishment, and didn't have anything to sell -- a generation before Conceptual Art, which, after, all did manage to sell out -- is going to be instructive. When the auction houses lose half their sales, panic ensues, and dangerously insouciant, aggressively idealistic art looms.

 

But no, the '60s will not return. The Republicans, as long as they have a shred of power, will never allow that to happen. And the Democrats, because they are insanely committed to bipartisanship even when they have a majority, will always placate the Elephants as well as Elephants in Donkey drag.

 

The point is that you do not need a top-heavy, investment-driven art market for art to thrive.

 

With the exception of works by the truly original George Brecht, Fluxus was pretty much an outgrowth and a minimalization of Happenings and/or a music phenomenon. The latter has not been owned up to by music historians, who somehow have always preferred the charming Ned Rorem to John Cage, that total Zen Buddhist maniac.

 

Since many Fluxus practitioners came from music backgrounds and/or were influenced by Cage, it is not surprising that the koan-like instructions for those lean, mostly solo performances are referred to as "scores."

 

Some important artists and/or composers sometimes associated with Fluxus: Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik,  LaMonte Young, Yoko Ono. 

 

                                                         

      

       Joseph Beuys                         John Cage                                LaMonte Young 

                          

 

           

                      Yoko Ono

                                                        *   *   *

 

 

Fluxus Among Us                             

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Item: MoMA Accepts Gigantic Fluxus Collection,

 

The Museum of Modern Art in New York recently accepted a gift of over 3,000 scores and other Fluxus items from collectors Gilbert and Lila Silverman. Insiders await the decisions that will determine which little slips of paper, which words, which sentences, which blurry photos and disintegrating films will be part of the permanent collection and which will be stored in the archive. But never fear. According to the MoMA Press Release, the Silvermans' curator, Jon Hendricks, will work with MoMA staff "to integrate the Fluxus collections with the Museum's holdings."

 

                                                   *   *   * 

 

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lana Z. Caplan: Painting to Hammer a Nail, 2006.

Series of photographs based on Yoko Ono instruction pieces..

 

 

Item: Seattle Museum Artist/Guard Fired for Interpreting Yoko Ono Artwork.

 

Yoko Ono's Painting to Hammer Nail includes the instruction to "pound a nail into the painting." On display as part of  "Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-1978" at the Seattle Museum of Art, visitors complied, nailing announcements to the wall. Guard/artist Amanda Mae decided to add her own interpretation -- removing and cataloguing the various announcements -- and was fired for her efforts. Read the gruesome and surprising details on Artnet. Curator of Yoko Ono Exhibitions, Jon Hendricks (!), according to Artnet,  wrote to Mae, urging her to have  "greater respect for the artist ... you have to consider art in a much deeper, more profound sense than you do." 

  

                                               *   *   * 

  

 

<

   Perry Garvin: Floor Covering

 

 

Item:  Director of Fluxconcert Goes Out on a Limb.

 

Fluxconcert, an Instruction-Based Performance Ensemble, presents programs of re-creations of historical Fluxus pieces and newly created Neo-Fluxian instruction-works. You can access to YouTube snippets and full-length programs on Vimeo on the informative Fluxconcert website.

 

Last Friday, artistic director of Fluxconcert Perry Garvin and two other young men -- all wearing disposable white coveralls and shoe-protectors -- performed  one of Garvin's Floor Coverings. At Fluxconcert concerts, the "scores" are often readily available, as this was here. A sign read: "Cover the floor of a room in blue painter's tape."

 

The piece was performed in an empty gallery at the 111 High Street building in DUMBO. during Friday's monthly art crawl.

 

For non-New Yorkers and those outside the art-world loop, Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass is a swanky real estate development on the Brooklyn shoreline that features spectacular views of Manhattan and the Brooklyn as well as the Manhattan Bridge. Here, owners of fancy condos are served by design stores and high-end food purveyors. There are empty bars galore; inhabitants, wearing proper outfits, prefer to jog after work rather than drink. This tiny "neighborhood," however, has not yet discovered noodles. In Manhattan's East Village, noodles are the new pizza. In DUMBO., pizza is the new pizza.

 

 

 

You could watch Garvin and his two-man crew neatly laying blue painter's-tape on the floor by looking through the hallway window or stepping inside for a better view. The presentation was elegant indeed.

 

Even more uplifting was what Garvin decided to do when, after an hour, he used up all the blue tape. He ran out, but the local paint store, curiously enough, did not carry blue tape. On the spot, Garvin reinterpreted his own score by deciding that "covering the floor" did not mean that he had to end up with a totally taped floor. Instead, the performers began to peel off the already laid-down tape and applied it, piece-by-piece, to the previously untouched sectors. Later, Garvin confessed that he had  "seriously misjudged the amount of tape we would need."

 

Here I need to add that there were two other excellent performances nearby.

 

 

1. Kata Mejia at the Randall Scott Gallery performed Castigo -- "a performance-installation in which a space is created that allows for the artist to express her

anger and symbolically punish the criminals who three years ago in Colombia kidnapped and killed her brother." At intervals, the artist belt-whipped a targetlike wall piece for 30 minutes at a time, shouting with each stroke, leaving a decimated emblem.

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. In another 111 High Street gallery, Illegal Art handed out sharpened pencils to visitors, who were instructed to make continuous lines across all the gallery walls. Founded in 2001, Illegal Art is "a collaborative of artists whose goal is to create interactive public art to inspire self-reflection, thought and human connection. Each piece is then presented or distributed in a method in which    

participation is simple and

encouraged." 

 

 

                                                         

 

 

                                          *   *   *

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pierog's The Boiler, Brooklyn 

 

 

Item:  Fluxfest Waves the Fluxist Flag

 

Fluxfest at Pierogi's The Boiler (on Sept. 11, with not a mention of 9/11) had the genuine Fluxus offhandedness and the historically correct disregard for ceremony or performance-niceties such as a printed program. The latter would have allowed the patient audience -- outnumbered by the performers, as is also traditionally Fluxian -- to ascertain authorship, date of creation, and performer.

 

Thus, 13  or so friendly Fluxians from here and abroad, most of whom had not met before, presented an hour-and-a-half of Fluxus pieces, old and new. For the record, they were listed in WAGMAG, the Brooklyn Art Guide (which I had picked up at 111 High Street) in anti-alphabetical order: Allan Revich, Reid Wood, Mark Bloch, Christine Tarantino, Carol Starr, Reed Altemus, Tamara Wyndham, Don E. Boyd, Melissa McCarthy, Keith A. Buchholz, Bibiana Padilla Maltos, Bradstifter, Mary Campbell, Pronoblem and more!!

 

Balloons were inflated, water poured from one plastic cup into another in a circle of plastic cups, jellybeans dispersed, toy instruments given out -- as were miniature versions of U.S. tender. Various classic Dada texts were read, including a poem by Louis Aragon called Suicide, which consisted of reciting the alphabet. (It is one of my all-time favorites.) But in another rather anti-Fluxian demonstration, a woman asked if anyone could love her as much as she loved herself. Obviously not. So shopping bag in hand, she stormed out, never to return.

 

The best was saved for last. The interlocutor, one of five participants wearing black hats, tacked a piece of paper on the wall behind him, then left. Other Fluxians got up, read what was on the piece of paper, and also left. Then members of the audience, myself included, did likewise. I copied what was on the piece of paper: "Word Event/Exit/ George Brecht, 1961."

 

 

 

 

 

                                       *    *   *

 

 

Recreations

 

Questions raised by the reenactment of historical performance art -- as in Fluxconcerts and pertaining to half the pieces in Fluxfest -- are challenging. In Artopia, we subscribe to the ancient principle promulgated by our favorite Greek philosopher, Heraclitus: "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river, and he is not the same man." I think this dictum also applies to women.

 

Last year in Colorado, I recreated my 1971 Whitney Museum performance called  Critical Mass. This time, I did not make the large black "A" myself, as I had originally; the Laboratory for Art and Ideas (where Critical Mass 2008 was performed) saw to that, saving a lot of money on shipping and insurance. Also, I let the Lab staff choose the 25 remaining objects, one for each letter of the alphabet. As in 1971, I sat on the floor and tied all the objects to myself using black string, crawling off the performance space with the objects trailing behind me in a jumble.  

  

But: The performance space was not the fourth floor of the Whitney. The Colorado audience stood around with their wine glasses, whereas originally an audience of 200 or so sat on bleachers. Critical Mass 2008 took all of 20 minutes -- then was reduced to less than five minutes for YouTube. Critical Mass 1971 took over an hour and had a sound component, now lost.

 

But: The performance space was not the fourth floor of the Whitney. The Colorado audience stood around with their wine glasses, whereas originally an audience of 200 or so sat on bleachers. Critical Mass 2008 took all of 20 minutes -- then was reduced to less than five minutes for YouTube. Critical Mass 1971 took over an hour and had a sound component, now lost.

 

The artist in 2008 has short hair and a nicely groomed beard and wears a Brooks Brothers suit. Is Critical Mass 2008 a new piece? For the same survey exhibition -- In Plain Sight: Streetworks and Performances, 1968-1971 -- did moving the hot- dog stand of Hannah Weiner's Wieners from outside to inside make it a new work too?

 

What we must decide is whether reenactments are inevitably something new because their social, cultural, and artistic contexts are different. And, if performed by the artist, we have to remember that he or she is different, too.

 

Is Bach always Bach, no matter when or where or played by whom? In Artopia, we prefer period instruments and historical performance-practice. But does something similar apply to performance art? What would happen if I decided to act out a piece called How To Explain Art to a Dead Elephant?

 

Then there is the question of interpretation of instructions. Ancient  but still surviving Fluxians, I am told, have become quite academic. They do not look kindly upon loose improvisations or contextual shifts, whereas by their very brevity, Fluxus scores are often ambiguous or -- the term I prefer -- "open."

 

Soon we will see a restaging of Allan Kaprow's famous 1961 Yard tire piece at the new Hauser and Wirth Gallery (opening Sept. 24). Yard is bound to be much more precious and artistic than it was the first time around. I hope the tires used will be vintage 1961. Also,  "re-inventions" of Yard will be proffered  by William Pope.L., Marion Hayes, and Josiah McElheny.

 

 

 

Recreations

 

When Japanese ceramists centuries ago tried to recreate a certain kind of expensive, very flashy Korean folk pottery, they created something all their own, now thought of as quintessentially Japanese. Keep in mind that when an elite group of late-16^th century Florentine aesthetes who called themselves the Camerata thought they were recreating Greek theater -- which was, yes,  sung -- they accidentally created what we now call opera.

 

Surely, whether it is Dada, Fluxus or Conceptual, anti-object art is irritatingly perennial. Art, in any case, is an unbearable paradox since it is material and yet cosmic -- vestment and in vesture, too easily turned into investment.

 

Artopia hopes that Neo-Fluxus does not usher in just another turn of the wheel, wherein art rebels become blue-chip stars, forever producing meaningless commodities for the art racket. To become an art success, scandal is the first step, again and again. Rumor has it that The Bruce High Quality Foundation is already being offered a museum retrospective.

 

One reason the art world is still mostly for males is that it all runs on Oedipal steam. Killing Daddy results in new Daddies. The art world is still more Freudian than Jungian and denies Electra. How can we break the cycle?

 

 

FOR AN AUTOMATIC ARTOPIA ALERT CONTACT perreault@aol.com

 

 

   

 

 

 

The Plot

 

Site-specific art has subjects. Content needs to be parsed. In the best examples, the artworks initiate a kind of dialogue between place and viewers, illuminating where we are. Dreary forms of personal expression are at least once removed. Furthermore, it gets art out of galleries, museums and penthouses.

 

What I have never said before is that site-specific art harkens back to a time before easel paintings and the tchotchkas and mementos that now pretend to be sculpture. Unlike murals and monuments, however, the site-specific artworks of our times are usually temporary, so artists are free to experiment and take risks; here today, gone tomorrow. Does this then make such artworks a subset of theater? Well, if so, who cares? Artopia does not celebrate categorical purity; if anything, we enjoy and encourage the reverse. Or, as Walt Whitman once wrote: "Unscrew the locks from the doors!/Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!"

 

Not all of the works in Creative Times' "PLOT/09: This World & Nearer Ones" are site-specific, although the best ones are. All of them, however, are what the curator, ex-Londoner Mark Beasley, calls "site-sensitive," thus giving himself and the artists a bit more leeway. Perhaps.

 

Much more of the Artopian point of view will be revealed as I go through the various artworks that make up "This World," now spread over the 172 acres of mysterious Governors Island in New York Harbor. I say "mysterious" because New Yorkers have seen the island from a distance, but most of us have never visited -- unless we were stationed there during one war or another. Sold back to New York State by the federal government for one dollar in 2003, it is now ours to enjoy, at least on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays (until Oct. 11). The boat that leaves every hour on the hour (but check here because "schedule will vary") from the Battery Maritime Building to the left of the Staten Island Ferry Terminal is unequivocally, absolutely, mysteriously free.

 

But I also use "mysterious" because even curator Beasley proposes in his preface to A Guide to This World/ Nearer Ones that a number of his invited artists came up with works of a decidedly supernatural cast because they staked out their sites in the gloomy winter.

 

Of course, the old buildings left behind by the various military and government operations stationed on the island are bound to be haunted by history and long-gone events. Old structures are like that. Even in the harsh sunlight of July, there is something creepy about this island. We do not associate military sites with peace and joy, do we? Beyond the vale, dead soldiers linger.

 

Located between Brooklyn and Manhattan at the mouth of the East River,  Governors Island is the perfect site for preventing any invasion launched from Jersey City or Bayonne, on the other side of the Statue of Liberty.

 

At the tip is Castle Williams, fortress then barracks then military prison,  built between 1807 and 1811; its curved stone wall is visible from Lower Manhattan. Star-shaped Fort Jay at the island's highest point dates to 1776. It was thought to be impenetrable and even has a moat.

 

Now there are lawns galore. No cars. Bikes can be rented and picnicking is allowed. And there's art.

 

More interesting than the two forts -- although you can't beat an old fort for little-boy fun -- are the ordinary buildings, many of which have not been open to the public: the Officers' Houses along Nolan Park and on Colonels' Row, and a movie theater forgotten by time, as they used to say, that time being what, 1965? To enter the movie house, you have to sign a release, because who knows what lurks behind those moldy wall-coverings. The same is true for the much less interesting Liggett Hall gym.

 

  

Maps and What They Allow

 

 

Two artworks are visible even before you hit Mystery Island. I found Mark Wallinger's piece less than audience-friendly: One side of the ferry is labeled GOATS and the other SHEEP. Who is separating the sheep from the goats? Which group do you, dear visitor, belong to?

 

Pulling out from the slip, one may also notice Lawrence Weiner's work on the  wooden fender-rack: AT THE SAME MOMENT in red-enamel letters. The relationship of this phrase to Governors Island, to the ferry, and/or to the fender rack is elusive. It could be placed anywhere and still have the same meanings.

 

There is a third artwork that involves the ferry and the passage across the waters, but I will save that till last because I did not find out about it until I was heading home.

 

Special bright blue flags designate "This World" sites on the island itself, but the artworks are so spread out -- as they should be if one of the goals is to give art-worlders a taste of Mystery Island -- that a map is really necessary. However, finding the Creative Times visitor center, which is House No. 20 in Nolan Park. requires asking a guide stationed at the top of the hill from the dock.

 

Why, I asked, are there no art maps available when you first arrive? The Parks Department does not allow the distribution of handbills or any single sheets of paper, was the answer. The only solution is to buy the $5 A Guide to This World/Nearer Ones at the hard-to-find center; it's mysteriously not available at the book and gift shop right off the ferry landing. You need a map to find the maps.

 

There are two maps you can look at online before you go. One from Governors Island does not indicate the art sites. The other is a Google map from Creative Time with signature pushpins. These when clicked give you art descriptions. If you click on the satellite view, you will get  a good idea of the lay of the land, but that is of little use when you are on the island at ground level.   

 

Furthermore, the maps in the Guide are not as clear as they should be. The numbering is curiously erratic. Thank goodness for the volunteers stationed at each art site. They were all very helpful at pointing out the direction I should take for whatever numbered site I pointed to in my Guide. Next time when Creative Time returns with what promises to be an important quadrennial, I am sure the mapping will be better. But this year perhaps there could be a trail of breadcrumbs from site to site.

 

Just kidding.

 

Also note that you should be prepared for quite a hike. You can rent a bike near the dock -- on Fridays bikes are free. My investigation on foot, including watching several films, took about four hours! This is nothing like a museum survey that you can breeze through in under an hour.

 

 

At House No. 20 you can also gain the temporary use of an iPod-like device containing a Patti Smith "tour" with piano music by her daughter, Jesse. It's free, but they hold your i.d. captive until the device is returned. This not a real audio tour. Instead, alas, it's a sentimental text called Message in a Bottle, and it neither illuminates nor amuses. Smith was more poetic when she hung out with Robert Mapplethorpe and was everyone's favorite punk star. Have a listen on the porch -- it's only 20 minutes, but one of the longest 20 minutes I have ever experienced -- and then return it as soon as you can.

 

Noted on my way to the Info Center but not seen close-up was Teresa Margolles' Shot-Up Wall, lifted cinderblock by cinderblock from the site of an organized-crime shooting in Mexico.  Reconstructed, the wall is placed in the middle of Nolan Park and is pocked by bullet holes and flecked with what could be dried blood. I suppose it is a kind of anti-monument, the negative of heroic statues that might be found in a park, except that it is a markedly different kind of war that is being commemorated.

 

Margolles sounds like an interesting artist indeed. The Guide informs us she is one of the founders of the Mexico City collective called Forensic Medical Service (SEMEFO is the Spanish acronym). The group  "uses cadavers, the clothing of the deceased, and morgue paraphernalia in works spanning from videos to public interventions."  A 2003 work of her own called Papeles (Papers) involved creating portraits of the dead by "letting watercolor paper absorb blood and other organic fluids left behind."

 

 

 

Near by, in House No. 15, is Judi Wertheim's double video called La Tierra de los Libres/Land of the Free. Wertheim gave a Spanish translation of the U.S. national anthem to a group of dispossessed Columbian farmers trying to make a living as musicians and asked them to sing the lyrics with their own improvised music. Because the site is close to Ellis Island, the U.S. port of entry, the project makes sense here. What's really clever is that when you enter the bare living room of the house, you see a straight-on video projection of the group performing and then, when you circle the screen, you see another projection of them performing from the rear, with captions in English.

 

I next saw Anthony McCall's fog and light-beam moving sculpture called Between You and I in the pitch black Saint Cornelius Chapel. It was elegant but, on the whole, I am not fond of walking blindly into an unknown space. I would have rather seen the Chapel.

 

In another dark room, the assembly hall of the Officers' Club, I was able to see my way to the single bench available to watch Adam Chodzko's 13-minute video Echo. As sort of a cross between The Blair Witch Project and The 13^th Victim (plus Joseph Cornell's home movies), the fiction (?) here is that military brats once had a game of "loser wins." In other words, the winner would be whoever gave away the most valuable things for something of hardly any value at all. In 1624, the Dutch Governor of New Netherlands traded "two axe heads, a string of beads, and a few nail heads" with Native American owners Cakapeteyno and Pehiwas for all of Noten Eylant (Governors Island). And of course you can't help but think of the 2003 deal between the feds and N.Y. State, right?

 

A further fiction is that the archive of the "game" has recently been discovered.

Found footage and ominous music make the whole thing work.

 

I had 10 minutes to kill before the next showing of The Bruce High Quality Foundation's Isle of the Dead in the Fort Jay Theater. So I scooted ahead to take a look at Tue Greenfort's Project for the New American Century in the Brick Village, formerly Coast Guard housing. Following a path through the site demarcated by chain-link fencing, one sees the oppressive housing, derelict playground equipment, and other poignant debris.

 

 

 

 

 

Time for the Isle of the Dead screening. "Is this the zombie movie?" I ask. "Yes," says the volunteer.

 

There are only four of us in the audience. Why so few?

"Well, you know, ordinary people are afraid of art," one out-of-town visitor volunteers before the movie starts.

 

"Afraid of art? This is New York City," I answer. "People are afraid of their neighbors, not art."

 

The 19-minute film by the Brooklyn-based Bruce High Quality Foundation collective is terrific. We see the art world die at various locations: MoMA, Chelsea, the Whitney. Serious-looking people are dropping dead everywhere. The corpses are intercut with montage sequences of found material showing JFK, the Art Workers Coalition, The Guerrilla Girls, and much, much more. The steps of the Met are strewn with corpses. And then....

 

Spoiler ahead!

 

Guess what? The cast of hundreds, most of whom look like art students, comes back to "life" and begins to walk like zombies toward Governors Island, then on Governors Island, then they are sitting in the Fort Jay Movie Theater watching the same movie you are watching. The art world made up of zombies has now moved to Governors Island. When I leave the musty theater and reenter the blinding, leafy daylight, I affect a zombie gait.

 

The volunteers, who seem not to have seen the film, don't really notice. Or at least they don't let on. That is how real zombies behave; they're cool. And, in the video, they wear a lot of black eye-shadow. 

 

                                      

As fate would have it, across the lawn, Klaus Weber's gigantic wind chime was tuned to the devil's tritone: "the mysterious diabolus in musica tritone, a musical interval that spans three whole tones, to dissonant and melancholic effect." See here (rather, hear here) Giuseppe Tartini's Devil's Trill Sonatas, one of my favorites. The tones indeed are kind of a downer, but the happy picnickers stationed below seem not to mind. Was this tree a hanging tree? Was the field a potter's field?

 

 

 

Then on to another haunting: Edgar Arceneux's Sound Cannon Double Projection, in Building 404A on Colonels' Row. We get to explore an empty house. But there are eerie sounds, mostly on the second floor. I hear a low rumble. The Guide reveals: "Researcher have suggested that infrasound ... might be present in certain allegedly haunted locations, and cause a feeling of uneasiness. Infrasound can induce bizarre feelings such as anxiety, extreme sorrow, paranoia, or even the chills."

 

Two houses down in 406A was the documentation for one of my favorite pieces: Insular Act by the Mexico City collective Tercerunquinto. One member, after much calculation and negotiation, threw a rock at a window in an historic building across the way, breaking the glass. The glass was immediately replaced. Again the question: why are certain building preserved and other not?

 

 

 

Readers may wish to know that having been the Visual Arts Director of Snug Harbor Cultural Center in Staten Island, I have a particular interest in historic preservation. My office had been Thomas Melville's office when he was president of Snug Harbor, founded in 1821 to house "ancient, decrepit and worn-out sailors." When Herman Melville's ghost came to visit his brother Thomas' ghost, as Herman had visited Thomas in real life, I would see them both out of the corner of my eye while I was filling out loan forms and grant applications, which must have been a puzzle to them. Furthermore, I am now trying to save an old lodge in Brookhaven Hamlet on Long Island. The house, which has 14 bedrooms, was once the summer home of one G., or George, Washington, the inventor of instant coffee. We want to turn it into a cultural center ... with a coffee bar, of course.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More ghosts: In 407A we can peek through what could be glory holes and see the remains of Invocation of the Queer Spirits (Governors Island) by Canadians AABronson (formerly of General Idea) and Peter Hobbs: candles, flowers, empty bottles, dirty dishes. Hmm. No doubt Native American medicine men displaced by the Dutch gay soldiers and sailors once stationed on the island, and certainly the ghosts of all those shamanistic closeted members of the Coast Guards, came to visit during the séance.

 

Back across the way, however, Guido van der Werve's two interminable videos, I don't want to get involved in this; I don't want to be part of this; talk me out of it and The clouds are more beautiful, are not even site-sensitive, never mind site-specific. They would bore viewers anywhere, although some might thrill at the artist falling from the sky after playing Chopin in one and failing to get a rocket to work in the other, the humor of which escapes me.

 

 

Then I hiked to Nils Norman's tent city called Temporary Permanent Monument to the Occupation of Pseudo Public Space.

 

For good luck and to chase away the evil spirits, it was time for one of my interventions. I twice circumambulated the nearby Castle Williams and did a single spin inside.

.

 

 

Still had three more artworks to go.

 

I should have checked out Tris Vonna-Michell's No Deviation Possible: Folded in That Precise Triangular Fashion at the beginning of my tour, if for no other reason than to get inside Pershing Hall. Alas, in spite of the blue flag, it was locked up tight, and I then found out No Deviation had been a lecture-like performance that left no residue.

 

 

 

Exhausted, on to Krzysztof Wodieczko's Veterans' Flame, a video projection of a single candle, accompanied by taped interviews with veterans, deep in one of the Fort Jay "magazines" where ammunition was once stored. Fort Jay definitely needs to be circumambulated.

 

I missed Susan Philipsz' sound piece called By My Side, all the way at the end of the island. Will have to hear it some other time, since I was counting on a 5:30 ferry, the last back to Manhattan. This is what all the signs proclaimed. However, I noticed a huge line at the dock. It seemed that the last ferry for visitors was actually 4:30. The 5:30 trip was for staff only! It was four o'clock, but it would have taken me 40 minutes back and forth to Philipsz' piece.

 

Off the Map

 

And then, last but not least, as promised, another artwork inspired by the ferry. Jill Magid -- not Maggid, which means a Kaballah spirit guide. Magid prides herself on collaborations with nonartists (having shadowed a New York cop on his rounds and once been hired by the Dutch Secret Service to interview personnel to "humanize" them), began her project by talking with the Governors Island ferry captain, who wished he could make passengers aware of  "the peaceful intrigue of the space between the islands." Magid's artwork, which you can discover, as I did, by carefully reading The Guide, was developed from this conversation. The idea became to stop the ferry at midpoint to allow the passengers to contemplate the unassisted movement of the boat on the waves, which of course could not be done. Instead, we are to imagine such a halt.

 

 

Ghostbusters                                           

 

So why this spook show on Mystery Island? I think it is much more than the buildings that generated these hauntings. Other factors to consider might be the death of the art world, the death of the economy, the death of poetry, the death of the novel, and all the other endings that have been proliferating. Everyone has a favorite funeral to attend: print journalism, serious cinema, higher education, broadcast television, cheap energy, rock-n-roll, avant-garde music, jazz. For though we have long passed the turn or the century, we are at a turning point. It is at periods of great change that people, even artists, turn to the supernatural. Continuing to channel Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol may no longer be enough.

 

 

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