During this time, Maciunas was assembling Fluxus boxes and Flux-Kits, small boxes containing cards and objects designed and assembled by artists such as Christo, Yoko Ono, and George Brecht. The first one to be planned was Fluxus 1, a wooden box filled with artworks by most of Maciunas' colleagues. Production difficulties meant that the publication date was pushed back to 1964; Brecht's Water Yam, 1963, became the first Flux box to actually be published. It was quickly followed by similar collected works of other affiliated artists, such as Ben and Robert Watts;
'Perhaps most important of all of Maciunas's publishing activities remain the object multiples, conceived as inexpensive, mass-produced unlimited editions. These were either works made by individual Fluxus artists, sometimes in collaboration with Maciunas, or, most controversially, Maciunas's own interpretations of an artist's concept or score. Their purpose was to erode the cultural status of art and to help to eliminate the artist's ego.'[17]. According to Maciunas, Fluxus was epitomized by the work of George Brecht, particularly his word event, "Exit." The artwork consists solely of a card on which is printed the words: "Word Event" and then the word "Exit" below. Maciunas said of "Exit":
______________________________________________________________________________"The best Fluxus ‘Composition’ is a most non-personal, ‘readymade’ one like Brecht's ‘Exit’—it does not require and of us to perform it since it happens daily without any ‘special’ performance of it. Thus our festivals will eliminate themselves (and our need to participate) when they become total readymades (like Brecht's exit)" (see [1])
"Maciunas was fascinating, talented, and by all accounts a nightmare. Like André Breton, godfather of the surrealist movement, Maciunas would invite artists, composers and even philosophers to take part in activities. He would charm them, boss them around for years, then perform summary excommunications, banishing those who displeased him..... Maciunas would take against individuals for no good reason - composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was one - and damn by association those who had anything to do with them. All this was wearying."
"Richard Long's walks, Gilbert and George posing as living sculptures, Sarah Lucas's early work and a million other small gestures, actions and ephemeral objects can trace their origins back to fluxus. It was a conduit through which ideas and personalities flowed, and still flow today. Fluxus inevitably failed, and came to be seen as old hat. It was partly a problem of packaging - though Maciunas was a very good graphic designer, for whom no detail was too small to be worried over. Fluxus's aim to eliminate music, theatre, poetry, fiction and all the rest of the fine arts combined was doomed. Only the mass entertainment industry might achieve such a thing." Adrian Searle [27]The view that his death liberated Fluxus is also widespread;
"I do believe that Fluxus not only survived George, but now that it is finally free to be Fluxus, it is becoming that something/nothing with which George should be happy." Ben Patterson______________________________________________________________________--
37 short fluxus films
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The two had originally met in 1957 when Brecht heard that Cage was planning to hunt mushrooms in the New Jersey area; he rang him up and invited him to 'stop by and say hello'. Cage accepted, and returned the invitation; it was whilst Brecht, Kaprow and their families were visiting his house in Stony Point on the Hudson, that Cage invited them to attend his classes in New York. Ironically, musicians found the course far harder than the visual artists who had enrolled;
"Cage... was very keenly a philosophical mind, not just an artist's mind; his sense of aesthetics was secondary and thought was primary. He impressed me immediately. So I thought, well, who cares if he's a musician and I'm a painter. This is unimportant. It's the mind that transcends any medium.....
"The rate of attrition was something fierce. The end result was that there were very few musician types and the event nature of the class became apparent. George Brecht's understanding of an intimate situation was far greater than mine. I needed more space to really work. But George really came to life in that situation..... He became a leader; and immediately he influenced not only me, but everybody else: Jackson Maclow, Higgins, Hansen. George Segal stopped by, and so did Dine, Whitman and Oldenburg." Allan Kaprow [16]Initially writing theatrical scores similar to Kaprow's earliest Happenings, Brecht grew increasingly dissatisfied with the didactic nature of these performances. After performing in one such piece, Cage quipped that he'd "never felt so controlled before."[17] prompting Brecht to pare the scores down to haiku-like statements, leaving space for radically different interpretations each time the piece was performed. Brecht would later refer to Cage as his 'liberator' [1], whilst, in the opinion of some critics [1][18], moving beyond Cage's notion of music; Cage was still writing scores to be performed. Brecht had replaced this with a world permeated with music. "No matter what you do," he said, "you're always hearing something." [1]
In October 1959, fresh from studying with Cage, Brecht organised his first one-man show at the Reuben Gallery, New York. Called Towards Events: An Arrangement, it was neither an exhibition of objects or a performance, but somewhere in between [19]. Comprising of works that emphasised time, the works could be manipulated by the viewer in various ways, revealing sounds, smells and tactile textures. One, Case, instructed viewers to unpack the contents and to use them 'in ways appropriate to their nature.' This work would become Valoche (see [3]), the last Fluxus multiple that George Maciunas, the 'Chairman' of Fluxus, would work on before his death 19 years later.[20]
As Brecht's interest in Event Scores began to dominate his output, he started to mail small cards bearing the scores to various friends "like little enlightenments I wanted to communicate to my friends who would know what to do with them___________
Three Chair Events
• Sitting on a black chair. Occurrence.
• Yellow Chair. (Occurrence.)
• On (or near) a white chair. Occurrence,
Spring 1961
___Other works completed in this period include a series of Crystal Boxes, containing constantly transforming crystals
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Intonarumori youtube video
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Found sound
In the same period the utilisation of found sound as a musical resource was starting to be explored. An early example is Parade, a performance produced at the Chatelet Theatre, Paris, on May 18, 1917, that was conceived by Jean Cocteau, with design by Pablo Picasso, choreography by Leonid Massine, and music by Eric Satie. The extra-musical materials used in the production were referred to as trompe l'oreille sounds by Coctueau and included a dynamo, Morse code machine, sirens, steam engine, airplane motor, and typewriters.[19] Arseny Avraamov's composition Symphony of Factory Sirens involved navy ship sirens and whistles, bus and car horns, factory sirens, cannons, foghorns, artillery guns, machine guns, hydro-airplanes, a specially designed steam-whistle machine creating noisy renderings of Internationale and Marseillaise for a piece conducted by a team using flags and pistols when performed in the city of Baku in 1922.[20] In 1923 Arthur Honegger created Pacific 231, a modernist musical composition that imitates the sound of a steam locomotive.[21] Another example is Ottorino Respighi's 1924 orchestral piece Pines of Rome, which included the phonographic playback of a nightingale recording.[19] Also in 1924 George Antheil created a work entitled Ballet Mécanique with instrumentation that included 16 pianos, 3 airplane propellers, and 7 electric bells. The work was originally conceived as music for the Dada film of the same name, by Dudley Murphy and Fernand Léger, but in 1926 it premiered independently as a concert piece.[22][23]In 1930 Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch recycled records to create sound montages and in 1936 Edgard Varese experimented with records, playing them backwards, and at varying speeds.[24] Varese had earlier used sirens to create what he called a "continuous flowing curve" of sound that he could not achieve with acoustic instruments. In 1931 Varese's Ionisation for 13 players featured 2 sirens, a lions's roar, and used 37 percussion instruments to create a repertoire of unpitched sounds making it the first musical work to be organized solely on the basis of noise.[25][26] In remarking on Varese's contributions the American composer John Cage stated that Varese had "established the present nature of music" and that he had "moved into the field of sound itself while others were still discriminating 'musical tones' from noises
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artaud, haven't seen that yet
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Experimental music
In the 1940s, Pierre Boulez (who made his name with violently expressive scores and opinionated polemics) embodied a strict sound style shorn of Romantic nostalgia and the detritus of a defunct tradition.[31] Boulez moved on to the rigorously organized technique of total serialism, which organized various aspects of sound—pitch, duration, volume, and attack—into series of twelve, in line with the twelve-tone system.[32] Under the influence of Henry Cowell in San Francisco,[33] Lou Harrison and John Cage began composing music for "junk" percussion ensembles, scouring junkyards and Chinatown antique shops for appropriately-tuned brake drums, flower pots, gongs, and more.In Europe, during the late 1940s, Pierre Schaeffer coined the term musique concrète to refer to the peculiar nature of sounds on tape, separated from the source that generated them initially.[34] The first of Schaeffer's Cinq Études de bruits, or Five Noise Etudes, consisted of transformed locomotive sounds.[35] Following this, both in Europe and America, other modernist art music composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, G.M. Koenig, Pierre Henry, Iannis Xenakis, La Monte Young, and David Tudor, explored sound-based composition.[citation needed] In late 1947 Antonin Artaud recorded Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de dieu (To Have Done with the Judgment of god), an audio piece full of the seemingly random cacophony of xylophonic sounds mixed with various percussive elements, mixed with the noise of alarming human cries, screams, grunts, onomatopoeia, and glossolalia.[36][37] In 1949, Nouveau Réalisme artist Yves Klein wrote The Monotone Symphony (formally The Monotone-Silence Symphony, conceived 1947–1948), a 40-minute orchestral piece that consisted of a single 20-minute sustained chord (followed by a 20-minute silence)[38] – showing how the sound of one drone could make music. Also in 1949, Boulez befriended John Cage, who was visiting Paris to do research on the music of Erik Satie. John Cage had been pushing music in even more startling directions during the war years, writing for prepared piano, junkyard percussion, and electronic gadgetry.[39]
In 1951 Cage's Imaginary Landscape #4, a work for twelve radio receivers, was premiered in New York. Performance of the composition necessitated the use of a score that contained indications for various wavelengths, durations, and dynamic levels, all of which had been determined using chance operations.[40][41] A year later in 1952, Cage applied his aleatoric methods to tape based composition. This resulted in the work Williams Mix, which was made up of some six hundred tape fragments arranged according to the demands of the I Ching. Cage's early radical phase reached its height that summer of 1952, when he unveiled the first art "happening" at Black Mountain College, and 4'33", the so-called controversial "silent piece". The premiere of 4'33" was performed by David Tudor. The audience saw him sit at the piano, and close the lid of the piano. Some time later, without having played any notes, he opened the lid. A while after that, again having played nothing, he closed the lid. And after a period of time, he opened the lid once more and rose from the piano. The piece had passed without a note being played, in fact without Tudor or anyone else on stage having made any deliberate sound, although he timed the lengths on a stopwatch while turning the pages of the score. Only then could the audience recognize what Cage insisted upon: that there is no such thing as silence. Noise is always happening that makes musical sound.[42] In 1957 Edgard Varèse created on tape an extended piece of electronic music using noises created by scraping, thumping and blowing entitled Poème électronique.[43][44]
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In the 1970s and 1980s, industrial noise groups like Current 93, Hafler Trio, Throbbing Gristle, Coil, Laibach, Steven Stapleton, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, Smegma, Nurse with Wound, Einstürzende Neubauten, The Haters, and The New Blockaders, then Test Dept, Clock DVA, Factrix, Autopsia, Nocturnal Emissions, Whitehouse, Severed Heads, Sutcliffe Jügend, and SPK soon followed. nre is Sonic Youth who took inspiration from the No Wave composers Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham (himself a student of LaMonte Young).[61] Marc Masters, in his book on the no wave, points out that aggressively innovative early dark noise groups like Mars and DNA drew on punk rock, avant-garde minimalism and performance art.[62] Imbeing Merzbow (pseudonym for the Japanese noise artist Masami Akita who himself was inspired by the Dada artist Kurt Schwitters's Merz art project of psychological collage).[67][68] Other key Japanese noise artists include Hijokaidan, Boredoms, C.C.C.C., Incapacitants, KK Null, Yamazaki Maso’s Masonna, Solmania, K2, The Gerogerigegege and Hanatarash.[68][69] noise musicians whose ambient, microsound, or glitch-based work is often subtler to the ear.[70] Kim Cascone refers to this development as a postdigital movement and describes it as an "aesthetic of failure."[71] Some of this music has seen wide distribution thanks to peer-to-peer file sharing services and netlabels offering free releases. Goodman characterizes this widespread outpouring of free noise based media as a "noise virus."[72]
Post-industrial noise artists from the late 20th and early 21st centuries include Nicolas Collins, William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops, The Haters, Boyd Rice, Pole, Stephen Vitiello, If, Bwana, PBK, Howard Stelzer, Chris Douglas a.k.a. O.S.T., Aube, Andrew Deutsch, Leif Elggren, Robin Rimbaud, Alva Noto, Oval, Boards of Canada, DJ Spooky, Florian Hecker, Farmers Manual, Solypsis, Thanasis Kaproulias, Fennesz, Pan Sonic, Yasunao Tone, Arcane Device, Francisco López, and others.[47][73] In 2009 noise was said to be trending heavily with "shit-fi" acts such as Wavves and Times New Viking.[74]
Richie Hawtin, Jan Jelinek, Ricardo Villalobos, Decomposed Subsonic, Trentemøller, and other Minimal techno and Microhouse DJs have been using noise elements such as buzz, hum, and clicks as sonic flavor since the early 1990
Noise and Capitalism
...They listened attentively and politely applauded the music of John Cage et al. ‘The
bourgeoisie have learnt to take their medicine’ he said. What does the avant-garde
have to do to shock now? Well, nothing. As Chris Cutler suggests with convincing
illumination – the avant-garde is dead. Many audiences have learned to applaud
politely at almost any occasion, just as long as they have been persuaded that their
acquiescence serves some fashionable cause and there is always the after concert
drink and dinner to look forward to.
...Many of the musics referred to above are marginal and completely outside of the
experience of the majority of the population. Yet they are the sites of cultural debate
and in some cases the recipients of huge state funding. For where capitalism has
not found the arts to be a source of financial profit and doctrinal comfort, it is quite
prepared to mobilise the use of public resources for ideological purposes
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Fluxus encouraged a "do-it-yourself" aesthetic, and valued simplicity over complexity. Like Dada before it, Fluxus included a strong current of anti-commercialism and an anti-art sensibility, disparaging the conventional market-driven art world in favor of an artist-centered creative practice. As Fluxus artist Robert Filliou wrote, however, Fluxus differed from Dada in its richer set of aspirations, and the positive social and communitarian aspirations of Fluxus far outweighed the anti-art tendency that also marked the group
The idea of the event ("the smallest unit of a situation") began in Henry Cowell's philosophy of music. Cowell, a teacher to John Cage and later to Dick Higgins, coined the term that Higgins and others later applied to short, terse descriptions of performable work. The term "score" is used in exactly the sense that one uses the term to describe a music score: a series of notes that allow anyone to perform the work, an idea linked both to what Nam June Paik labeled the "do it yourself" approach and to what Ken Friedman termed "musicality." While much is made of the do it yourself approach to art, it is vital to recognize that this idea emerges in music, and such important Fluxus artists as Paik, Higgins, or Corner began as composers, bringing to art the idea that each person can create the work by "doing it."
defined as
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The Fluxus artistic philosophy can be expressed as a synthesis of four key factors that define the majority of Fluxus work:
- Fluxus is an attitude. It is not a movement or a style.[12]
- Fluxus is intermedia.[13] Fluxus creators like to see what happens when different media intersect. They use found and everyday objects, sounds, images, and texts to create new combinations of objects, sounds, images, and texts.
- Fluxus works are simple. The art is small, the texts are short, and the performances are brief.
- Fluxus is fun. Humour has always been an important element in Fluxus.
Vol. 1, No. 1.es & Huds nt of Ge ember 5, 20ol. 15, No. 2, pp. 1–30.p. 43–ell, 1997, p. 43 Retrieved PDF; 1,9 e[hide]
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