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Inside, there are interviews, essays, conversations, diagrams and reviews of plays, performances and a variety of other works. The list of contributors for this issue include: Michael Kirby, Robert Ashley, John Cage, Ken Dewey, Letty Eisenhauer, Ann Halprin, Dick Higgins, Theodore Hoffman, George Maciunas, Jackson Mac Low, Robert Morris, Claes Oldenburg, Yvonne Rainer, Ramon Sender, Paul Sills, Kelly Yeaton and La Monte Young.

Allan Kaprow’s Eat

fig.1 fig.2

fig.1: view toward entrance, with entrace bridge in center. Girl with white wine glass at left; 
girl with red wine at right.

fig.2: performer in small cave with boiled potatoes

“Eat, an Environment by Allan Kaprow, was presented during the mornings and afternoons of the two last weekends in January, 1964….Only twenty reservations were made for each one-hour period…to forestall overcrowding and keep free circulation in the space…At the far end of the bay on the right, which contained many charred wooden beams, a girl sat at a small electric hot plate frying sliced bananas in brown sugar. If a spectator asked for some, she gave them to him, but she did not speak…The only way to get inside the structure—to get at most of the food—was to climb a tall ladder propped against the side…The visitors were free to wander about through the cave. Some ate and drank; others did not. At the end of the hour the remaining people were ushered out, the “performers” were replaced by fresh volunteers, and new visitors were allowed to enter.” —Michael Kirby

Interspersed between the pages were two fold-outs, breaking the continuity of the review with a beautiful surprise. These inserts are what make this issue of tdr special.

FLUXUS HQ P.O.BOX 180 NEW YORK 10013
FLUXUSHOPS AND FLUXFESTS IN NEW YORK
AMSTERDAM NICE ROME MONTREAL TOKYO
V TRE-FLUXMACHINES-FLUXMUSICBOXES
FLUXKITS – FLUXAUTOMOBILES – FLUXPOST
FLUXMEDICINES – FLUXFILMS – FLUXMENUS
FLUXRADIOS – FLUXCARDS – FLUXPUZZLES
FLUXCLOTHES – FLUXORCHESTRA – FLUXJOKES
FLUXGAMES – FLUXHOLES – FLUXHARDWARE
FLUXSUITCASES – FLUXCHESS – FLUXFLAGS
FLUXTOURS – FLUXWATER – FLUXCONCERTS
FLUXMYSTERIES – FLUXBOOKS – FLUXSIGNS
FLUXCLOCKS – FLUXCIRCUS – FLUXANIMALS
FLUXQUIZZES – FLUXROCKS – FLUXMEDALS
FLUXDUST – FLUXCANS – FLUXTABLECLOTH
FLUXVAUDEVILLE – FLUXTAPE – FLUXSPORT
BY ERIC ANDERSEN – AYO – JEFF BERNER
GEORGE BRECHT – GIUSEPPE CHIARI- ANT -
HONY COX – CHRISTO – WALTER DE MARIA
WILLEM DE RIDDER – ROBERT FILLIOU
ALBERT FINE – HI RED CENTER – JOE JONES
H. KAPPLOW – ALISON KNOWLES – JIRI KOLAR
ARTHUR KOPCKE – TAKEHISA KOSUGI-SHIGE-
KO KUBOTA – FREDRIC LIEBERMAN – GYORGI
LIGETI – GEORGE MACIUNAS – YOKO ONO – BEN-
JAMIN PATTERSON – JAMES RIDDLE – DITER
ROT-TAKAKO SAITO – TOMAS SCHMIT-CHIEKO
SHIOMI – DANIEL SPOERRI – STAN VANDER-
BEEK – BEN VAUTIER – ROBERT M. WATTS
EMMETT O. WILLIAMS – LA MONTE YOUNG
FLUX – ART – NONART – AMUSEMENT FORGOES
DISTINCTION BETWEEN ART AND NONART,
FORGOES ARTIST’S INDISPENSABILITY,
EXCLUSIVENESS, INDIVIDUALITY, AMBITION,
FORGOES ALL PRETENSION TOWARDS SIG-
NIFICANCE, RARITY, INSPIRATION, SKILL,
COMPLEXITY, PROFUNDITY, GREATNESS,
INSTITUTIONAL AND COMMODITY VALUE.
IT STRIVES FOR MONOSTRUCTURAL, NON-
THEATRICAL, NONBAROQUE, IMPERSONAL
QUALITIES OF A SIMPLE NATURAL EVENT,
AN OBJECT, A GAME, A PUZZLE OR A GAG.
IT IS A FUSION OF SPIKES JONES, GAGS,
GAMES, VAUDEVILLE, CAGE AND DUCHAMP

The first fold-out, printed front and back with bright orange ink on a thin uncoated stock, spans about 35 inches. It is comprised of a collection of events by Fluxus artists George Brecht, Joe Jones, Alison Knowles, George Maciunas, Benjamin Patterson and Robert Watts.

 fig.3

 fig.4

fig.3: George Brecht: Drip Music (Drip Event); Joe Jones: Predictions 1963;
Duet for Two Brass Instruments; Alison Knowles: Child Art Piece; Proposition Make a Salad,
Variation - Make a Soup.

fig.4: Alison Knowles: String Piece; George Maciunas: In Memoriam to Adriano Olivetti;
Benjamin Patterson: Seminar 1; Robert Watts: Rain Event; Two Inches.

CITY SCALE

The second fold-out, printed black, one sided, on a thin newsprint, is also about 35 inches. It is a diagram of City Scale, the exploration of performer-audience relationships through a series of predetermined and spontaneous events within the city.

City Scale was the culminating event of a season devoted to exploring performer-audience relationships. We decided to use the city environment as totally as possible, to create a trip out of which more or less controlled elements would emerge. Many of the events were purposely ambiguous so that audience members would not have the certainty of knowing whether a given incident had been planned or was happening anyway.

The most meaningful events of the evening were those which impinged upon the life of the city, interacted with it, transformed it, or absorbed it into the structure of the work. The arrival of the audience in two trucks at a small park perched high on a hill overlooking the Mission coincided with a collision between two teenage gangs in the park. I had arrived early to inflate four seventeen-foot weather balloons, and noticed the kids collecting. Just as the two groups started toward each other, our trucks full of excited participants roared up. Sixty people started running across the park towards the balloons, and the teenagers scattered to the periphery. I don’t know what went through their minds in the minutes that followed, as adults chased balloons and each other through the park.

City Scale was a natural extension of sound experiments with which Tape Music Center members were involved—group improvisation, or tape pieces unfolding on many simultaneous levels of control. Out of it developed our present interest in environmental works—sound and light events controlling as much of a given space as possible.

—Ramon Sender

My intention was to externalize visually the world in ourselves by providing a maze of the manmade, a sequence of events in the city.

—Anthony Marti

Tulane Drama Review is still being published today quarterly by Tulane University under the auspices of its Department of Theatre and Speech. However, I wonder how many of them are as special as this one.

I was first seduced by the cover, then the images.

“During these last days of the administration, what is the point of protest, satire or any other sort of rabble-rousing? In assembling this collection of pictures I’ve made over the last eight years, I’m not really trying to accomplish much at all. But as President Bush once said, ‘One of the great things about books is, sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.’” – Alec Soth

Photo: CITYDESKSTUDIO

Local architects CITYDESKSTUDIO placed an interesting ad up on Craigslist yesterday: they’re selling a (used) 1978 skyway. (Wait hold up…has anyone tried to sell a bridge on Craigslist yet?). The skyway, which used to connect the JC Penny’s with the Power department stores over S. 5th street, was retired to make way for Minneapolis’ light rail project. Through the years millions of people have passed through it and the rest of our network in the sky, which covers an area of 69 city blocks. If you’re interested, check out Catherine Opie’s photographs and documentation of our relationships with these transient spaces in her Skyways & Ice Houses project from 2002. And I assume this was unrealized, but CITYDESKSTUDIO visualized one potential use for this iconic structure–which has seen such frenzied activity–as an almost rustic (rusty?) lake retreat.

It seems too good to be true, but SF author Samuel R. Delany is speaking at the Walker on November 15th, in conjunction with the exhibition Tetsumi Kudo: Garden of Metamorphosis. Of his mind-bending masterpiece Dhalgren, critic Kate McKinney Maddalena writes  “… [it] ranks Delany with Samuel Beckett; I would teach it as a Nouveau Roman alongside the work of Duras and Borges.” If you’re new to Delany, I might start with Babel-17, in which he manages to extend the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to it’s unnatural and delirious conclusion.

It seemed as good a time as any to post some of my favorite science fiction book covers. Many designers unconsciously scan bookstore shelves for the work of Fred Troller, or Penguin paperbacks in general (omg Penguin Books has an online dating service?), or maybe now it’s Jon Gray, but for me it’s this series of Bantam science fiction covers from the ’70s and ’80s. I’ve found maybe 10 of these guys and a whole slew of rip-offs from other publishers. (Don’t ask me why I assume this series is the original and not itself a ripoff—I just know it. In my heart. They’re better.) The combination of the retro-futuristic illustrations, the bastardized Futura Black, and the sobriety of the layout is a beautiful example of restraint in a genre that relies on the fantastic. ***One detail you can’t see here is that the titles are all printed in metallic ink. ***I also threw in the cover for A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter Miller, Jr., which is another amazing post-apocalyptic novel.

They weren’t sure, but Bantam publishing thinks that Leonard Leone was most likely the art director for these books. I managed to talk to him on the phone a few months ago, but that’s a story for another day . . . (he seemed more interested in talking about some books he designed in the basement of the White House than these science fiction paperbacks, go figure).

And if you want to see a more recent interpretation of Delany’s science fiction novels, look here. Otherwise, make sure to check out the lecture!

On my way out of the Walker Library the other day a little red spine caught my attention. I grabbed the hardback book off the shelf and started paging through and was immediately charmed by what I was seeing and reading. What was bound between those two red covers was a small sampling of the Great Bear Pamphlet series. Each pamphlet is simply produced with black printing on colored sheets of paper (each pamphlet a different color) except for Cage’s poem DIARY: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) Continued Part Three (1967) [fig. 1, and 4] which uses multicolored, and shifting type-faces to help realize his idea. The overall affect is a beautiful stack of reading.

fig. 4 fig. 5 fig. 6

The Great Bear Pamphlet series was published by Dick Higgins, Something Else Press, from 1965–67. Numbering 20 in total the thin-little pamphlets represent some of the seminal themes of the avant-garde and cultural scene of the times. Each pamphlet, except the Manifestos issue [fig. 2, 5, and 6], features a single author, with some notables being John Cage, Allan Kaprow, Dieter Roth, Claes Oldenburg, George Brecht, Jerome Rothenberg, and Jackson Mac Low. The pamphlets represent a sampling of artforms from concrete poems, and plays to happenings/events, and collages.

Higgins himself was a composer, poet, and early Fluxus artist. He studied under John Cage at the New School for Social Research in New York City, and was married to artist Alison Knowles (who also contributed a pamphlet). Many other students of Cage’s ‘Experimental Composition’ classes  would later contribute to Great Bear. In describing the aesthetic of publications from Something Else Press Higgins seemed to make some decisions based on themes of chance learned from Cage:

“I set poems and short chapters flush bottom on the type pages (usually they are set in the middle). I used larger and bolder running heads at the tops of pages than is customary in order to tie the page together and because I liked the legibility it gave to a sometimes rather scattered or unorthodox page. Since I did not wish to develop favoritism among typefaces, I used whatever faces a particular supplier had, often making my selections by means of chance operations, using dice… [this] gave the Something Else Press books their look of old-but-new.”

fig. 7 fig. 8 fig. 9 fig. 10 fig. 11 fig. 12

fig. 1–3: Sampling of covers from Great Bear Pamphlets, 1965–67

fig. 4: Spread from John Cage’s pamphlet DIARY, 1967

fig. 5–6: Spreads from the Manifestos issue, 1966

fig. 7: Spread from Allan Kaprow’s pamphlet Untitled Essay and other works, 1967

fig. 8: Spread from Robert Filliou’s pamphlet A Filliou Sampler, 1967

fig. 9: Spread from Dieter Roth’s pamphlet a LOOK into the blue tide part 2, 1967

fig. 10: Spread from Luigi Russolo’s pamphlet The Art of Noise (futurist manifesto, 1913), 1967

fig. 11–12: Spread and back cover from Philip Corner’s pamphlet Popular Entertainments, 1967

We’re sweetening the deal this time. If you take the survey, you can enter your name into the pool and we’ll select one person to win a 1GB iPod Shuffle.

Take the survey.

Photo by bluetsunami.

Expecting to open the envelope to find a fits-in-your-palm-sized catalogue, I was instead delighted to find the unexpected: 138 unbound index cards representing one of the most important avant garde art exhibitions of its time, titled 955,000. Taking place at the Vancouver Art Gallery from January 13 to February 8, 1970, this exhibition—containing conceptual art, process art and land art—was organized by Lucy R. Lippard.

Prior to the 955,000 exhibition (the number 955,000 was derived from the approximate population of Vancouver in 1970), Lippard curated and organized 557,087 (the approximate population of Seattle in 1969) for the Contemporary Art Council of the Seattle Art Museum at the Seattle Art Museum Pavilion from September 5 to October 5, 1969. This catalogue originated with the 557,087 exhibition in Seattle, consisting of 95 10cm x 15cm index cards, and in light of its continuation into the 955,000 exhibition in Vancouver, 42 new index cards were added to the collection.

Despite its unbound, randomly ordered and aesthetically uniform (hand and typewritten text printed in black on index cards) characteristics, this catalogue is peculiar because each artist in the exhibition was not only asked to contribute their artwork but they were also encouraged to make/design their own index card(s) for the catalogue. In theory this publication still functions, despite these abnormalities, as an exhibition catalogue because it represents the artists and their ideas. And while it’s not a rarity for an artist to make and submit his or her own text, image or artwork for a catalogue, it does seem rare that their contributions would not be collected and placed into the context of a book page.

Although this catalogue is far from revolutionary in terms of materials and format, I was simply drawn to the concept it presents because it completely surpasses the need for a designer and the processes so inherently paired with designing art-related catalogues (such as developing typographic systems and grids, sequencing, pacing, templating and even the process of preparing images and illustrations for high-end reproduction).

In essence, it could be argued that this catalogue (and the model it represents) comes closer to communicating the ideas of each artist and their raw proposals and is more authentic than traditional art catalogues that tend to remove or filter out certain nuances by way of such restrictions as page sizes and counts, the process of editing available content and even designer preference. And regardless of the fact that this catalogue is void of the parts and systems that many of us enjoy and expect from more traditional approaches, it reveals itself in an equally as intriguing way as catalogues that are defined by comprehensive and thoughtful orderliness.

According to The Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art (www.ccca.ca):

“ The catalog consists of… index cards in random order including [101] cards compiled by the artists themselves, [21] text cards by [Lucy R. Lippard], [3] title page cards, 1 acknowledgements card, 2 lists of the council members and officers, 1 forward by the council president, [2] list of artists, [5] selective bibliographies, 1 list of films shown, [and] 1 addenda to [the] artists.”

There were 71 artists from North America and Europe participating in 955,000:

Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, Keith Arnatt, Richard Artschwager, Terry Atkinson, John Baldessari, Michael Baldwin, Robert Barry, Rick Barthelme, Gene Beery, Mel Bochner, Bill Bollinger, Jon Borofsky, Daniel Buren, Donald Burgy, Rosemarie Castoro, Greg Curnoe, Hanne Darboven, Walter de Maria, Jan Dibbets, Christos Dikeakos, Rafael Ferrer, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Alex Hay, Michael Heizer, Eva Hesse, Douglas Huebler, Robert Huot, Stephen Kaltenbach, On Kawara, Edward Kienholz, Robert Kinmont, Joseph Kosuth, Christine Kozlov, John Latham, Barry Le Va, Sol LeWitt, Roelof Louw, Duane Lundon, Bruce McLean, Robert Morris, N. Y. Graphic Workshop, N.E. Thing Co., Bruce Nauman, George Nikoliadis, Dennis Oppenheim, John Perreault, Adrian Piper, Robert Rohm, Alan Ruppersberg, Ed Ruscha, Robert Ryman, Fred Sandback, George Sawchuk, Richard Serra, Randy Sims, Richard Sladden, Robert Smithson, Keith Sonnier, Jeff Wall, Lawrence Weiner and Ian Wilson

—

I recently stumbled upon this amazing Flick’r set of archival photography from the Library of Congress and felt compelled to share … it’s a nice change from the knee-deep waters of riff-raff I typically find myself wading through. Outside of the aesthetic beauty, images are also meticulously captioned and the collection frequently updated. You can read more about the motivations behind the project here.