2 actions for a monday morning (or any other)...

"open a new book
and put some flowers on the page
and just smell them"

---

"open any big magazine on top of
a transistor radio and turn the pages"


from a beautiful little xerox & rubber stamp booklet:
yukio tsuchiya, 1972-73, works in progress

what is seen and heard through windows...

close eyes - open window

open eyes - if daylight is not satisfactory: close eyes again

and close window

and try another window

image and text by the fluxus artist arthur koepcke / addi kopke as an insert in the danish furniture/design magazine mobilia, 1970.

the text and image recalls the work of peter hutchinson whom i've posted on in the past. thinking about the notion of closing eyes and opening another window i was reminded of a morning a month or so ago when i was awakened by a strange sound while still having my eyes closed. it was very early but the sun was bright and even with eyes closed i could see that reddish glow of bright light falling on eyelids. i grabbed my phone and opened the window to discover a woodpecker in the tree in front of the house. such a thing i've never heard, nor seen, living here now almost 11 years. fortunately, and this is why i grabbed my phone, i was able to record a tiny bit of the uncanny sound on my phone, before the cars beginning their morning commute enveloped it.

i hadn't heard nor seen wing nor tapping until yesterday when the bird appeared just outside the window in the afternoon in a tree. he was not tapping at all, but standing still as a statue. the first time i'd only heard him, and this time he was completely visible - a red tufted head, black and white body - standing in complete silence as seen through a window that doesn't open. each view a different window, a different direction, different time of day...

somehow all seeming to make sense with the flipping through the pages of this old mobilia magazine this morning in the studio and happening upon koepke's piece. a reminder that with eyes closed, ears are perhaps a bit more open...or perhaps ears themselves can be that other window.

click here to hear the low fidelity recording of a woodpecker in the city...

the poetry of raining...

raining

black highway painted black
rain washes away

paper men made in bare orchard branches
rain washes away

sheets of writing spread over a field
rain washes away

little gray boats painted along a gutter
rain washes away

naked bodies painted gray
rain washes away

bare trees painted red
rain washes away

allan kaprow, raining, from some recent happenings, something else press, 1966

for the last day of poetry month, as kaprow is evaporating from my head just before i step into a project in philadelphia next week; it seemed fitting to end it all with kaprow's beautiful score for raining. the piece involves a number of activities where personal experiences and intimate artifacts are slowly washed away. while i'm clearly a gatherer of objects (as well as a maker of them), kaprow always manages to re-enforce the idea that it is not the objects themselves that have value, but our experiences with them, and the emotional residue, inspiration, and echoes they leave behind.

the great bear pamphlet series, published by dick higgins something else press, is one of my favorite little series of books, particularly as they are printed in different colors on cheap construction type paper. the titles run from scores by alison knowles, to russolo's art of noise, to some early happening scores of claes oldenburg. the entire set has recently been re-printed in facsimile form, which is nice, but doesn't come close to the feel of the originals - one approaches printing differently when a book sells for 60 - 80 cents, and $150...

kaprow's raining suggests that the content doesn't simply exist, as much as it is made through the activity one goes through to engage with or create it. the experience of buying (and reading) a new copy of an old book is generally to seek information. the experience of discovering a copy of a book printed in its time is an expanded experience that allows touch and smell to have an impact on how one reads the words. as national poetry month ends, please continue to seek needles in haystacks.

p.s. if you want to read the entire series, you can click here

the poetry of making and giving...

#5 - street piece (october, 1962 to march 1963)
make something in the street and give it away.

#16 giveaway construction (1963?)
find something in the street and give it away. or find a variety of things, make something of them, and give it away.

alison knowles, great bear pamphlet, 1965

can you hear me now...

"to all members of the eternal network in canadada
and the united states: greetings. sound. manluck.
womanluck. weatherluck. today after years of practicing
and reflecting upon the subject i propose to you all the
composing and performing of telepathic music to
compliment, butress, and - if need be - replace all
other marvelous loving correspondences. - day or night,
day and night, send waves of greetings sound
manluck womanluck weatherluck to members
of the eternal network all over the world. no proof of
reaching and benefitting is necessary - knowing oneself
expecting others to be a performer of telepathic day and
night music is sufficient.

your robert filliou"

from source, music of the avant garde # 11, 1972

two tiny singing activities for a coffeebreak...

song of uncertain length:

performer, with bottle balanced on his head, walks around singing or speaking until the bottle falls off.

the gift of tongues:

sing meaningfully in a language made up on the spot.

emmett williams, 1960, from selected shorter poems 1978

music for dancing...

"both visual poetry and sound poetry incorporate elements of rhythm. one can move inwardly to a sound poem or interpret it in outward movement or dance. one can, by empathy, enter into the spatial rhythms of a visual poem, or can give it full muscular response. so both sound and visual poetry are steps into the arena. visual poetry is the plan, sound poetry the impulse; visual poetry the score and sound poetry your actual music for dancing."

bob cobbing, music for dancing, stereo headphones magazine, 1971

fluxmusic friday...

some suggested activities for the weekend:

rainbow no. 1 for orchestra: soap bubbles are blown out of various wind instruments. the conductor breaks the bubbles with his baton.
ay-o, no date

drip music: for single or multiple performance. a source of dripping water and an empty vessel are arranged so that the water falls into the vessel.
george brecht, 1959

piece for ben patterson: construct a piano with the treble on left ascending to the bass on the right. play all the old favorite classics.
albert m fine, 1966

music for piano no. 5 (flux variation): an upright piano is poitioned at center stage with its profile toward the audience. the pedal is fixed in a depressed position. a performer, hidden from view in the wings, throws darts into the back of the piano according to the time pattern indicated in the score.
toshi ichiyanagi, no date

south no. 2 (for nam june paik): pronounce "south" during a duration of more than fifteen minutes. pause for breath is permitted but transition from pronunciation of one letter to another should be smooth and slow.
takehisa kosugi, 1965

all texts from the fluxus performance workbook, edited by ken friedman.

three views...

bordsobjekt (table piece) by bjorn norgaard, 1967. a combination simple / complex grouping of basically three element arrangements - the thing, a white shadow of the thing messy, a white shadow of the thing geometric and crisp. if you look at it from the front you see all three,while from each of the two sides you only see one.

part fluxus table scraps, part architectural model, part constant's new babylon, and part skateboard ramps for the mind; norgaard's seminal work is seemingly junk thrown together until you start to deal with it as sculpture - objects defined by the space they inhabit and how one moves around them within that space - clearly there is some expanding complexity lurking beneath the apparent simplicity and misleading sense of arbitrariness.

each of the trash forms are vessels, and each looks like it might have held the same amount of plaster that ended up as the forms on the right and left of the objects... if these empty vessels once contained the foodstuffs of nourishment, then what is one to make of the ramps and lumps beside them? these white forms have no pockets, nor room in their interiors for existing matter to be stored or held. do they contain ideas? or a different kind of nourishment? or can they relieve a different kind of hunger...?

brian's song...

there are some artworks that i simply can't get out of my mind, and one of them is this work by brian lane. lane ran a small press and an artist space in the mid 1960's, and eventually published many "distilled performances in print" in the early 70's under his "editions brian lane" imprint. his own works included performance, publications, and object/ephemera in small editions.

these images are from a 1975 performance and the edition that came out of it. the activity, a kind of combination of yves klien dropping gold leaf into a river, and a fluxus/cage chance operation; involved 150 red and 150 yellow polystyrene balls dropped from a bridge onto a river. lane took photographs of the shifting arrangements of red and yellow drifts. the title of the activity was "quiet yellow sounds on the river / red with menace".

the balls were retrieved by the people who had come to witness the event; and they became the beautiful little edition in the second photo as relics of the activity.

i love the idea of a temporal moving painting of colored dots in a landscape being arranged by river flow. (makes me think of cage's comments about using nature's manner of operation literally.) and for some reason the little box always tugs at me, no idea, but it seems poetically perfect.

with a title like "quiet yellow sounds...", i can't help but think of this work as a score for a potential sound work. i've often thought about a kind of re-working of the piece, dropping all the balls in the river at once and then collecting them in sequence down river a bit and using that sequence to determine next compositional moves... maybe someday...

what's happening...

text and images of stone ceremony, by milan knizak, from source magazine issue 11, 1971:

on a bottom of an abandoned rock-quarry stone circles are compiling. everybody works on his own circle. after finishing it people get into their circles and silently stand there, sit there and finally draw on the ground inside their magic sighns. after that they leave stone circles and with a monothony buzzing climb up to the rock cliff above the quarry from where they watch their stone circles left alone down on the bottom.

been thinking a lot about happenings and how such things could exist more on the side of ritual than theatre. a group of people simply and quietly making circles of stones, all in the pit of a landscape and then all at different paces making their way up to a ridge until everyone is out of the pit, and the circles are quiet and distant - like small drops of rain hitting the surface of water.

it reminds me a little of improvised music, being in kind of a mental listening space together, and coming out of it though various pauses individually.

as an alternative to the fussy sculpture in nature photo ops of andy goldsworthy, knizak's work feels less calculated, and more genuine (i.e. it doesn't smell like art.). it's more communal, and it somehow feels distanced from the irreverent actions of most fluxus activities, as well as knizak's more well known works. it's introverted, more poetic, and potentially quite beautiful.