CAGE 100, FLUXUS 50

By an amazing stroke of luck, the centennial for John Cage and the semicentennial for Fluxus coincide. And what is even more lucky is that Cage is now an org. This means that one only has to visit his homepage in order to get an overview of all the activities that are organised around the globe in connection with his 100th birthday. In fact, our very own digital interactive Fluxus extravaganza, "Die Irren sind los"/"The Lunatics ar on the Loose" is one of them. The version of the show that was on view at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in July and August this year, was presented within the framework of a programme called "A Year from Monday. 365 Tage Cage".

It is such an amazing stroke of luck, such an amazing coincidence, because Fluxus and Cage are so intimately connected. If you listen to some of the people from the inner core of Fluxus, Cage was virtually the only source of inspiration, perhaps aided somewhat by Marcel Duchamp. Of course, entirely in the spirit of Fluxus, others make equally vociferous attempts to downplay or even deny Cage's role. So what is it with Fluxus and Cage? The standard story always mentions the course on experimental composition and notation that Cage taught at the New School for Social Research in New York in 1958-1959. Several of the absolutely central American Fluxus associates - George Brecht, Dick Higgins - participated, and the course undeniably had a profound effect on them. However, to claim that they could not have achieved what they have achieved without Cage, would be to underestimate these artists' own considerable genius. Moreover, it should be remembered that Fluxus had its roots in other art forms than music. Other core members had a background in poetry, theatre or the visual arts, and while they were aware of Cage and appreciated his work, they got their inspiration from other places as well.

However, the most important thing to remember when talking about Cage and Fluxus is that one of Fluxus' most recognisable contributions is the invention of intermedia. The word was coined by Higgins in 1966, but Fluxus works have been intermedial right from the start. Intermedia should not be confused with multimedia. The happening that John Cage so famously organised together with Robert Rauschenberg and Merce Cunningham at Black Mountain College in 1952 was multimedial. Cage wrote the music, Cunningham choreographed the movements and Rauschenberg painted. Intermedia as Higgins described it, inhabits the no-man's land between the media. It makes use of various media but is not reducible to any one of them. There is a considerable number of Fluxus works that can manifest themselves in different media. George Brecht's work is famous for it. His "Word Event", for example, can just as well take the shape of an EXIT sign as that of a performance in which the attention of the audience is drawn towards an EXIT sign or that of an EXIT sign observed in daily life.

In short, the connection between Cage and Fluxus is as misleading as it is significant. In the circles that originated the European contribution to Fluxus, Karlheinz Stockhausen played a role similar to that of Cage, but Stockhausen's serialism could never have given the same impetus to Fluxus that Cage's amazing inclusiveness did. Although it remained musical, Cage's redefinition of musical composition as a mere time frame, his willingness to embrace all sound and his development of the idea of indeterminacy is hugely sympathetic to the artistic agenda of Fluxus. And sympathy is something different than influence. It bridges the 50 years between Cage and Fluxus, or the 25-30 years between Cage and the first generation of Fluxus artists, by means of a shared interest rather than the authoritarianism of a master-pupil relationship. An interest, it needs to be added, that has the same roots but focuses entirely differently and leads to entirely different results.

COUNTDOWN TO FLUXUS

What a summer! Hard slog around the clock to get the catalogue finished, feverish last minute brush-ups of the cards that are the backbone of the show, the grand opening of our Fluxus extravaganza at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin… what a season it has been, and the new one is shaping up to be exactly the same. Forty days until the opening of our interactive digital Fluxus archive at Kunsthallen Nikolaj in Copenhagen and counting. A performance festival (hopefully) to think about, talks, plans to give extra attention to the Danish Fluxus events, et cetera, et cetera. Because I have so much time on my hands I will try to publish a small entry on a subject to do with Fluxus every day until 2 November, as a way of counting down. You can consider this the first one: a formal announcement of the fact that der Irre ist los – the Lunatic is on the Loose – Den gale er løs - de gek op vrije voeten is. From today on, the Fluxus nut will rave about Fluxus every single day. See you tomorrow!

BACK SOON (hopefully)

No blog entries since July 2011, what a shame. It is not as if I do not have anything to say, either. I have started several entries, but have simply never had the time to finish them. I have been much too busy teaching (museum studies and contemporary art at the University of Copenhagen) and preparing a digital archive documenting European Fluxus events during the 1960s and 1970s (see the project website here). The archive opens at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin on 12 July and will also be on display in Paris, Copenhagen, Budapest, Krakow and Vilnius. After the opening, I count on being Back with new fluxes of the mouth. Lots of them, both in connection with my work on Fluxus and with an upcoming project to do with Danish artist Niels Lomholt's mail art archive (see the web site devoted to a recent publication on the archive here, including a statement by my own hand). Talk to you soon!

A STAPLE AND ITS MEANINGS

While writing about Fluxus and the archive (see the previous three blog entries), a work that sprung to my mind was Arthur Køpcke’s Reading/Work Piece No. 15. It is one of those works that seems to want to generate an archive of its own. It consists of a single staple, accompanied by a text to the effect that it ”will fit the following staplers: alpha – baby – brynce – bykama – cito – citopress – citofix – criterion – cometa – el casco – electric – erasit – ergo – everstrong – express – folle – frog – fafnir – floris – focus – fox – ideal – jilliot – jimco – king – knirps – kuki – longdon – mana – mosda – novus – rex – rexel – senator – sentamani – servo – servo 15 – servo 90 – servo plier – sigma – skre – skrema – stabil – stigma – three-in-one – trioh – universal – vélos – zenith”. The list is followed by a couple of empty lines, marked “place for supplements”, and that is all.

Of course the work is first and foremost an excellent example of the care and attention given to small, disregarded everyday objects and events by Fluxus artists. George Maciunas called Køpcke an “independent”, and none of his works were ever published as Fluxus multiples, but he was an early and important member of the Fluxus network, so it is justified to call him a “Fluxus artist”. But there is more to the piece. Like all Køpcke’s Reading/Work Pieces (128 or 129, depending on the version you are reading), it is both a logical conundrum and an invitation to act.

To start with the first: the staple no longer “fits” any staplers at all, because it is used, and therefore the text does not connect to the object. It is clear what Køpcke meant, but strictly speaking, either the object is wrong or the statement that is made in the text is false. The best that can be said is that the staple now fits the paper, not the stapler. Moreover, it is used in a way that denies its function. It could have been used to hold the pages of a Manuscript of Reading/Work Pieces together, but it holds on to nothing.  It becomes a model instead – a model of what a staple can do. The text is not about the staple next to it, but about an ideal staple that the reader mentally distills from the example on the page.

The way Køpcke uses the staple reminds forcefully of paragraph 2.011 of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:  “Things are independent in so far as they can occur in all possible situations, but this form of independence is a form of connection with states of affairs, a form of dependence”.  “Things” should here be read as “objects” and “states of affairs” as “combinations of objects”. The paragraph is a part of section 2 of the Tractatus, where Wittgenstein defines things as always belonging to a situation – what characterizes a thing, he says, is its ability to connect, or more precisely, its ability to connect with other things in situations. The independence of an object is defined by the way it is dependent upon other objects to create situations. A staple is a staple as long as it can perforate a sheet of paper.

Moving to the other side of Køpcke’s artistic project, the invitation to act that is extended by this particular piece is the one to “add supplements”. If one had done so consistently since the publication of the Manuscript of Reading/Work Pieces (sometime after 1963, we do not quite know when it was finished), one would have had to try the staple on any stapler one came across and added the name of all staplers that fitted. However, the task would necessitate a lot of crossing-out as well. Out of all the brand names Køpcke lists, I can only find evidence of the continued existence of El Casco, Ergo, Folle, Focus, Ideal, Jimco, Novus, Rexel, Skre, Stabil, Universal and Zenith. The simple instruction to “add supplements” generates a map of closures, bankruptcies and takeovers in the office supplies industry.

What it does as well is illustrate the way an object acquires value. Some of the staplers Køpcke mentions –Skrema, Trioh and Velos, for example – have become collector’s items and fetch many times the price of a simple stapler for everyday use. By including brand names, Køpcke goes far beyond a simple invitation to take a closer look at an everyday object. He leads the reader’s attention out into the world of commodities and confronts him/her gently but firmly with the rules that govern that world. Moreover, it does so in a way that invokes Western society’s preferred ways of organizing data: the list, the map and the archive. In this manner, the used and useless staple gets a function after all, and even a double one: on the one hand, that of conjuring up thoughts of the archive and on the other, that of metaphorically connecting data.

This also means that Køpcke goes way beyond Wittgenstein. The Tractatus is about dependence and independence in a narrow sense, ultimately a linguistic one. Reading/Work Piece No. 15, on the other hand, is about dependence and independence in an extended, social sense. At the point where Køpcke comes closest to Wittgenstein, he confronts the reader with certain material qualities of the objects he uses, in this case the staple, the stapler and the piece of paper, and the ways in which they (the staple and the stapler and/or the staple and the piece of paper) connect, in a purely material sense. However, he also underlines their function and their value and ultimately the way in which we deal with all these data.

But then, his aim was not to create a system of thought that would enable everyone to come to grips with language and reality. His aim was to enable his readers to work out new ways of interacting with the world around them as individuals, without taking recourse to pre-existing systems of thought. He needed complexity, but not in order to make sense of it. He needed it as unmapped territory that everyone can wander through as they please. In Deleuzian terms, he sought a nomadic way of interacting with the world, not an imperial one; a system of thought that shapes itself from the inside, not a system that forces a shape upon thought from the outside. Therefore his archive is totally different from the ones we are used to. He gives us the terms, but not the structure. He gives us the dynamics, but not the desired result. Which is worth keeping in mind when thinking about art and the archive.

FLUXUS AND THE ARCHIVE #3: TWO DIRECTIONS

And here is the third part and last part of my trilogy on Fluxus and the archive. In part one, I introduced two forms of being in the world, the ecological and the economical. In part two, I applied these notions to two works of art, Mieko Shiomi’s Spatial Poem No. 1, subtitled Word Event, and George Brecht’s Word Event and suggested that even though one of the works appears archival and the other anti-archival, they both carry elements of the archive, if displaced. This part specifies my claim and translates it in terms of directionality.

In an article about Gerhard Richter’ Atlas (in October, of course), Benjamin Buchloh experimented with the idea of an “a-nomic” archive, an archive without laws. He equated the word a-nomic with “heterogeneity, random order and arbitrary juxtapositions” and described it as governed by the “principle of random accumulation”. All his terms apply to the two Word Events I describe in my previous blog entry. Brecht’s Word Event collects all sorts of materials, from thoughts to photographs to signs. Shiomi’s Word Event juxtaposes words on the basis of an ordering principle that is completely extraneous to the words themselves. Both works accumulate and juxtapose material in a way that appears lawless. But Buchloh also speaks of “the archival organisation of materials according to the principles of an as yet unidentifiable discipline”. He wants appearances of the archive in art to be radically different from existing real world archives; and here, I think, my two Word Events behave differently from the archives Buchloh describes. They are hetero-nomic rather than a-nomic; they formulate and obey different laws, but evoke existing archives nevertheless.

According to Derrida, the archive domesticates: it locks events inside documents and collects those documents in one place. That place is the centre of two movements, one of them outwards, one of them inwards. The element of the archive that Derrida associates with the word “commencement”, beginning, claims that society begins with the archive; things are pulled into the archive from a projected originary point. The element he associates with the word “commandment”, law, on the other hand, projects outwards; it casts the net of archival law over everything out there. The archive is both a long way away, at an imaginary beginning, and everywhere around us; it is active both as an ideal and as its countless imperfect embodiments. These elements are also present in the two Word Events. Brecht’s Word Event has the word “EXIT” as its starting point, but because it only acquires an existence when people undertake action in relation to it, be it thought action or actual physical action, the work as such is always beyond reach. It reaches out to all real and imagined exits but is itself forever impossible to grasp. Shiomi’s Word Event first spread itself out to all corners of the world and then returned in the shape of documentary evidence. Unlike Brecht’s work it is tangible and finite, but a change occurs at the far point of the work’s boomerang movement that carries it from the world of possibilities and realisations to the world of impossibilities and sensations.

What this amounts to, is that although this type of work generates ecological knowledge, it shares certain features with the archive as well. I do not mean material features; even Shiomi’s Spatial Poem No. 1, that explicitly calls for the documentation of an event, is not an archival work of art in the sense in which Buchloh understands it, as the archival organisation of materials according to principles that are valid for a discipline outside the art world. What it does instead is explore the way the archive files, actively; not the materials but the act it performs; not the archive and the document, but the two directions it moves in, the outwards of commandment and the inwards of commencement. Works such as the ones I have discussed here understand the archive as performance and performance as archival. What we tend to notice about the archive is its solidity, its tangibility, but these works destabilise it and reveal its lack of balance by allowing you to experience what it cannot do, and therewith what it does, instead of what is and what it is not. They are both ecological and economical. They point the mind – the mind of the curator as well – in the direction of the archive because they make use of the mechanics of the archive even as they generate experiential knowledge. Their heteronomical character is indeed heterotopian, but not in the sense in which Foucault understands the term. It is not the evocation of different times and places that makes them heterotopian, but the way in which they activate the here and the now and the self of the spectator.

FLUXUS AND THE ARCHIVE #2: TWO WORD EVENTS

In my previous blog entry, I formulated the apparent incompatibility of Fluxus and the archive in terms of the opposition between ecology and economy. Ecological Fluxus works, I argued with the help of Fluxus scholar Hannah Higgins, situate the individual in his/her here and now, while the archive disconnects objects from their own time and place and hoards them. This sums up the problem, but it brings us no closer to an answer to the question, why the archive is such a natural form for a Fluxus display.

In order to start closing the gap, I will here introduce two works of art and a third (imaginary) discipline besides economy and ecology: eco-topology, the study of the place of the house. The first work I want to draw into the discussion is Japanese artist Mieko Shiomi’s Spatial Poem No. 1, subtitled “Word Event”. The work was accompanied by the following introductory text: “This event was done through March, April and May, 1965. Some of the words already might not be in the place described, some might change its place in the near future, some might stay there for a long time from now... some flags being movements... some still indicating the real place”. The work is based on an instruction that reads “Write a word or words on the enclosed card and place it somewhere”. The words and sentences she received in response were printed on small flags that could be stuck into a map of the world. The work is a very early example of mail art – but it is also one of the few works produced in the context of Fluxus that not only disperses itself, but comes back together again as well. In fact, it is almost archival.

By contrast, American Fluxus artist George Brecht’s Word Event is purely dissipative. The instruction that lies at the basis of this work only consists of one word, “Exit”. At one level, it plays on the grammatical ambiguity of the word: it can be an exit, a door, that is meant, but it can also refer to the act of leaving. As such, it is related to a work like “Drip Music (Drip Event)”, which consists of the equally ambiguous word “Dripping”. At another level, it is related to works such as “Direction” and “No Smoking Event”, which read, respectively, “Arrange to observe a sign indicating direction of travel. Travel in the indicated direction. Travel in another direction” and “Arrange to observe a no smoking sign. Smoking. Not smoking”. These works are part of a group of works in which Brecht focuses on barely noticed fittings such as hooks, hinges and in this case, signs. Brecht’s aim was to create what he called “borderline art”, an art precariously balanced on the brink between art and non-art. To obtain such a result, he took the Duchampian ready-made one step further, to the point where it is enough to observe an object, a situation or an act in daily life. The Duchampian act of selection, whether dictated by aesthetic delectation or not (Duchamp in a talk at the MoMA, 19 October 1961), is replaced with a casual noticing. The actual physical shape of the work is no longer important.

Both works imply a certain conception of space and place; it is this aspect of them that is studied in an eco-topological analysis. Now I have to say from the outset that my comments are only relevant if one is willing to accept the work on its own premises, just as one has to be interested in archiving it in a way that suits it for my argument to be relevant at all. Both works are extremely open and rely on the collaboration of the viewer or recipient, so they are easily sabotaged. Shiomi’s Spatial Poem no. 1 appears to operate in the same way as Derrida’s archive does. The recipients were supposed to write their word, the place where they had put it and their name on an enclosed response card. In Derridean terms, the card functioned as a material substrate for a living memory. The moment when the card is filled out is the archival moment, another one of Derrida’s expressions, after which living memory is written proof and the act is marked as having taken place at a different time and in a different place. Moreover, the responses were numbered, ready for the map to receive them as a material substrate for the material substrate: it carries numbers to indicate where each flag needs to be stuck. The flags are documents, the map is an archive – different, but powered by the same logic.

However, the work seems to have invited subversion of that same logic. No less than three words were thrown into the sea, two were kept in the recipient’s pocket and composer György Ligeti – see my blog entry called “100 Metronomes” – flushed his word down the toilet. What is even more important is that the map with all the flags stuck on it makes it very clear that the human brain cannot capture so many things going on at the same time. The “word event” it embodies is also the event of experiencing your own inability to grasp so many words at one time; it is that, at least as much as it is the event of collecting and localising the words. In Brecht’s Word Event something similar happens, but along a different route. Upon first glance, the instruction, “EXIT”, appears to be an authorative, generative text. It seems to have the authority to turn everyday objects or events into art and to generate documentary material of itself. But the work is never complete without you, the spectator, thinking about it. Even when looking at the score you are realising the work – which means that no-one can ever see the actual work. The original disappears and the work is dispersed across a million living substrates, namely, living, thinking, feeling people. Their eco-topology, the place of their house, is different from that of the archive as we know it. All the ingredients – the substrate, the archive, the law it establishes and perpetuates – are there, but they are displaced.

To be continued.

FLUXUS AND THE ARCHIVE #1: TWO HOUSES



Bird house courtesy Dansk Ornithologisk Forening.
The money-box was once my uncle's

This blog entry, and the two that follow it, are an adapted version of the paper I read at the 17^th annual conference of the association Performance Studies international (PSi) in Utrecht, on 25-29 May 2011. In its turn, my paper is an altered and expanded version of a tiny snippet of a longer text on Fluxus and its relation with the archive. The choice of snippet was determined by the theme of the conference, “Technology, Memory, Experience”. It is about the experiential nature of Fluxus works, the way they activate and affect our memories and their relationship with our sanctioned ways of remembering as embodied by the archive. The paper consisted of three sections, entitled “Two Houses”, “Two Word Events” and “Two Directions”. Today’s blog entry is a modified version of the first part.

There are as many accounts of Fluxus as there are Fluxus scholars, but one thing most of them seem to agree upon is the idea that Fluxus works offer nothing but themselves. I will here refer to only one of them, Hannah Higgins, and the way she phrased that particular idea. In her book Fluxus Experience (University of California Press, 2002), she writes that Fluxus works offer “an ecological form of knowledge that (...) allows us to understand ‘our place in the world’” (p. 34). I am especially interested in the word “ecological” here. Ecological knowledge, and another term Higgins uses, “primary experience”, refer to a direct bodily experience that tells you something about who you are in relation to the objects you handle and the temporal and spatial situation you find yourself in. Such knowledge is always personal. You can compare it with others, but others can never have the exact same experience. Applied to art, this means that everyone creates his or her own work of art. Such a work is always with you; it is never elsewhere; and that, of course, is the diametrical opposite of the archive as we know it, because one of the characteristics of the archive is that it accumulates things from elsewhere and from other times. In fact, it is exactly this aspect of the archive that prompted the philosopher Michel Foucault to characterise it as a “un espace autre”, a “different space”, a heterotopia, “a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted” (in “Of Other Spaces”, 1967/1984). 

I will return to this quote in section 3 of this text, but actually I am not really concerned with Foucault here. What I want to do here, is contrast Higgins’ understanding of the word “ecological” with the word “economical” as Jacques Derrida uses it in his theory of the archive as formulated in the essay “Archive Fever, a Freudian Impression” (Diacritics, vol. 25, no. 2, Summer 1995, pp. 9-63. Derrida starts his account of the archive with the etymology of the word. He points out that it has a double root, both derived from the Greek word “arkhē”: commencement and commandment, beginning and law. The word is connected with the arkheion, the place where the records were kept, and the arkhons, the people who did the keeping. The archive, Derrida writes, “shelters” and “domesticates” its contents; it “places them under house arrest” (p. 10). That is why he speaks of an “eco-nomy” (p. 12), from the Greek words “oikos”, house, and “nomos”, law. He also speaks of the topo-nomology of the archive (p. 10), his way of saying that the archive is twice determined, by and as location and by and as law. The word “ecology”, by contrast, derives from the Greek word “oikos”, house, and “logia”, study of. The study of the house and the law of the house are apparently mutually exclusive.

When explaining his use of the word “economical”, Derrida writes about the archive that “it keeps, it puts in reserve, it saves, but in an unnatural fashion, that is to say in making the law (...) or in making people respect the law” (p. 12). What it collects is signs; written proof, but also, in Derrida’s words “that which it presupposes”. The archive “coordinates a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration”. Proof presupposes a distance between sign and signifier and that distance, in turn, presupposes an ideal that all signs point towards but give an imperfect rendition of. Hannah Higgins, by contrast, claims that Fluxus works never signify anything. They are carriers of primary, ecological knowledge, and any meaning that is found in them is secondary knowledge. An archive collects signs, a Fluxus work disperses primary knowledge. An archive imposes a law upon others and it regiments experience, a Fluxus work leaves you free to experience things for yourself and takes pride in the endless variety this produces. An archive collects things in a particular place – Derrida means the document and the archive at the same time –, a Fluxus work emanates from one place and wanders off from there with all the people it connects with. The two houses, the house of the law and the house of study, could not be more different.

And yet Fluxus exhibitions nearly always take the shape of archives. How come?