Archive for the 'Fluxus' Category

archive sohm - stuttgart

Published
by
Lucas
on January 14, 2004
in Fluxus, performance art and re-enactment
. 0 Comments
In November 2003, Jane and I went to Stuttgart and look at the Archive Sohm (which was bloody amazing)…
 
Dr Sohm was a dentist who tended to the teeth of many of the Fluxus/Happenings/Vienna Aktionists artists. There are letters to him from George Maciunas, for example, begging him to accept a bunch of flux objects in exchange for 1000 US dollars so he can look after the health of his mother (I hope i have that story right). Or maybe it was so that George himself could pay his medical costs after he was beaten by thugs who broke into his house (he was having problems with the city authorities). Anyway, Sohm always accepted these objects and sent the money. He now has the largest collection of Fluxus stuff in the world. He died a few years ago.
 
[If anyone intends to visit the archive in Stuttgart, I recommend calling to arrange an appointment a few weeks in advance. We emailed but got no reply, and just showed up. Luckily they accomodated us, but we were told to book ahead next time.]
 
My interest in fluxus was ignited when I went to Adelaide's Experimental Art Foundation in 2002, looking through their fab fab artist book archive. I think that the old Irish fella Noel Sheridon who helped to set up the EAF must have collected it, either him or Donald Brook.
 
In the EAF I found a beautiful flux-event-score by Albert M Fine called Flux Orchestra for 24 Performers, and I conducted its "re-enactment" in the small cinema attatched to the Mercury, the Iris Cinema. I became fascinated with the legacy they had left, which was - very little tangible documentation of actual events, but indeed the recipes for the events themselves, which you, I, anyone, could recreate - thus experiencing DIRECTLY the "original" work for ourselves! This is why I was so interested to embark on the expanded cinema stuff.
 
…and also why i was excited to find out about the Carolee Schneeman
re-performance, and indeed all the Whitechapel Gallery pieces I looked at and wrote about on my blog.

Biennales of a Fluxy Kind and Creative Citizenship

Published
by
Lucas
on September 20, 2003
in Fluxus and odds and ends
. 0 Comments

In Newcastle (NSW), October 2003, there is a proposed project, The Empty Show Biennale (ESB)… It will be the 4th Empty Show, the first 2 taking place in Melbourne, the 3rd Canberra, and the 4th in Sydney. It is a growing phenomenon, with artists taking over an empty building, “interior decorating it”, and then launching a clandestine opening party, some of which have been shut down by police. The ESB in Newcastle is designed to be “self organising” - anyone can be involved, groups of artists are encouraged to find their own venues and make their show happen, without worrying about where and what others are up to. The autonomous shows are connected by a publicity website. Nobody`s in charge, nobody can be held responsible, right?

Reminds me of when I was in London in 2000. There was a great “spoof” biennale called “The London Biennale” (LB) which sounds very impressive, London being a big city and all.

The LB was initiated by David Medalla, an ole Filipino-English Fluxus artist, so, being Fluxy, of course anyone who wanted to could be involved. This would definitely cause some anxiety in the parallel universe of Important Biennales, which are all about exclusivity and prestige.

We would meet each monday night in a bookstore, sometimes upwards of 60 bodies, all bristling with ideas for projects, exhibitions, and, mainly, performances somewhere in public space. info would be shared as to good locations, labour exchange, “i wanna get involved”.

The biennale ran for 4 months, may june july aug of 2000. A calendar was updated daily on a website and the readymade rent-a-crowd of biennale participants was always on hand for events.

For me, the best LB projects were those which actually used the sociability of those meetings to develop contacts and make work, rather than just advertise an event. in one of these, a german artist, Andreas Uhl, claimed a piece of antarctica which had broken off (due to global warming) as a sovereign nation, called “Fadeland”, which had an open citizenship policy. The project grew as more and more people signed up as citizens and ambassadors of Fadeland, a nation which, as its icebulk drifted north, was gradually melting and “fading”. Its borders were designed to shrink. Somebody wrote a national anthem (”our land is made of water” was my favourite line) and a choir was assembled to sing it in a proud ceremony, in which a huge block of ice was shipped up the london canals, melting all the while. It was a hoot. And in the context of the LB, which included dozens and dozens of non-english artists (who, like me, were hanging out in London because the place, while cold and grey, is so damn interesting), we already HAD our Fadeland - an association of individuals supporting each other, which transcended national borders. (ps, in case anyone needs to know, I am the official Australian ambassador to Fadeland).

I guess what I`m sayin is that autonomously “organised” projects (like the proposed Empty Show Biennale) can work. Ya dont need curators. Just energy and somebody who`s clever with websites. Which I see is already taken care of…at www.anonart.org. [postscript: this website is no longer there].

ps…just noticed another artist who has worked with passports, Tom Muller. His project, World Passport, has a different idea - to issue passports so that you are registered as a “World Citizen”. See http://www.worldpassport.biz/history.asp It seems his production values are very high, and a passport costs $150 too (Fadeland citizenship registration, from memory, cost five pounds). Strangely, there is a site with a very similar idea (World Passports) which doesn’t seem to have any “art content” whatsoever (i could be wrong!)…http://www.worldservice.org

Nicolas Bourriaud

Published
by
Lucas
on June 11, 2003
in Fluxus and Relational Aesthetics
. 0 Comments

wow have just started reading a conversation with nicholas baurriard and karen moss… here’s an extract:

NB: Avant gardes were about utopias. How is it possible to transform the world from scratch and rebuild a society which would be totally different. I think that is totally impossible and what artists are trying to do now is to create micro-utopias, neighborhood utopias, like talking to your neighbor, just what’s happening when you shake hands with somebody. This is all super political when you think about it. That’s micro-politics.

Stretcher: It’s very demanding of the artist.

NB: What’s an artwork? Any artwork materializes a relation to the world; if you see a Vermeer or a Mondrian, it’s concretized, materialized, visible in relation to the world that they had. You can decode and interpret for yourself and use it for your own life. Or for your work if you’re an artist. It’s a chain of relations. History of art is about that — a chain of relations to the world. So, any artwork is a relation to the world made visible.

Stretcher: About this new relationship between the artist and their audience, Christine Hill, one of the artists in TOUCH, said the other night. “I really wanted to be there to hear what my audience had to say.” I know so many artists who are working in their studios who feel that after they put their work out there they’re completely removed from it. They never hear anything back. It’s as if you throw it into the void ….

KM: It’s true for curators as well. You do have a certain voyeuristic opportunity when you are in a space and you can watch spectators viewing the work, or you receive response back if there’s a publication. But often you don’t get feedback. That’s why having the artist present [Ed. note: three of the artists in TOUCH spent time in the gallery as part of their work] is so intriguing. It’s not an artist shipping a work, you have people actually here. This was also true with some other exhibitions I’ve personally been involved with like In the Spirit of Fluxus at the Walker. Or the John Cage exhibition at MOCA in LA. The live action becomes really important to the beginning of the exhibition. It is also interesting how few of the artists in this exhibition are involved with technology. While their work may somehow comment on the technological, they are not much involved with technology, which is refreshing.

…so interesting, its amazing to find people who think in the same ways…what he is saying about technology, about Post-Production, is so what i am into at the moment.

Last year at the EAF, among other activities, I dug up an old score for a performance by Albert M Fine called “event for fluxorchestra for 24 performers”. each participant has a card with his/her score, a set of numbers from 1 to 15 down the left hand side of the card. these numbers refer to the passing of minutes. maybe on your card there is nothing listed until minute 4, when you have to stand up, declare loudly “i cant take it any more!” and storm out of the room. and so on. there is plenty of muttering, balloon popping, theorising and local referencing. nobody in the room knows anything about what anybody else has to do. each just takes care of his/her own role. in sum, the piece is like a big, rambunctious orchestra of chaos. hilarious. he wrote it in 1965.

the next “re-contextualisations” i am thinking of doing are from “expanded cinema”, a “movement” from early 1970s in london (and vienna too), where filmmakers began to think about the ways that their pieces were presented in space, not just experimenting with the content of the film. there were cool things like billows of smoke in the cinema to illuminate the cone of light, physical presence of performers, spaces set up in a particular way. kind of a pre-decessor of video-installation stuff., but hardly anyone knows of it. hopefully later in the year i will get to london to do some reseach, then bring a programme of this stuff out here mid next year, also to perth (peter mudie obviously very supportive). the important thing for me is that the films come with sets of instructions about how to “re-stage” them, specific, but always relying on the local resources and enthusiasts to bring it off…there is stuff in this project to do with technology, sure, and its partly about going back to that obselete tech and checking out how you dont need all this whizz bang digital shit, in fact, much of what is happening today is a kinda techno-fetishism,,,the “relational” part of “relational aesthetics” is fairly impoverished…