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Postwar Performance: Mixing Means and Metiers
'Peter Frank
Peter Frank
One of the most marked changes in art during this century has been the shift in ideas and approaches favored by those working in "intermedia", "multimedia" and other advanced artistic disciplines. Before World War II such artwork – for which I shall adopt the overall term (proposed by Richard Kostelanetz) of "mixed-means" (1) fulfilled a very different role in artistic discourse than it has since. Such work was not often seen as autonomous from traditional creative disciplines; but, since the War, it has increasingly been viewed as such. Further, the models for mixed-means practice – specifically, for the mixed-means work that engages time as well as (or instead of) space – have changed as well.
What we now understand as the "performance art" of the first half of this century – the staged events of various forms and natures associated with the artistic avantgardes of the time (including formally unorthodox work done in the context of the traditional stage) – relied on rhetorical, recitative, theatrical and pictorial paradigms. Symbolist and Expressionist theater pieces, for example, clearly paralleled their counterpart works in visual art, not least when penned by artists like Oskar Kokoschka. The sintesi of the Italian Futurists consisted either of brief, incandescent mise-en-scènes presented for their picturesque qualities or of verbal bombast formulated to agitate a directly-addressed audience – i.e., a manifesto in action. Surrealist presentations as diverse as the plays of Jacques Vaché and the mock "trials" of writers they disfavored followed the classic formal delineations of ballet and stage drama (no matter how close to real life processes). In all these cases, the effective paradigms were verbal, even literary, rooted in the conveyance not just of experience, but of account and/or of discourse.
A few pre-World War II presentations suggested an alternate paradigm to the literary and rhetorical. In their avoidance of traditional narrative, their emphasis on formal structure, and their preoccupation with the abstract organization of events in time and space (rather than in the context of narration), such works as the Futurist musical compositions of Luigi Russolo and Francesco Cangiullo (usually scored for Russolo's intonarunzori); the multi-medial Bauhaus ballets and stage works of Oskar Schlemmer and Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack; and Kurt Schwitters' epic sound poem, "Die Sonate in Urlauten", all rely on a musical, not discursive, formula. These various pieces differ markedly from one another in their ideological, stylistic, and formulaic identities. But they all share a pacing, phrasing, and harmonization of elements – that is, a determination of temporal incident – that can only be described as musical in its abstract and self-contained, rather than referential or representational, character. In such works as Schwitters' "Ursonate" or Schlemmer's "Triadisches Ballett" events do not mean anything, they simply happen, according to a formal logic derived from traditional musical (or choreographical) practice or simply from rudimentary counting structures (i.e., tempo) and conventions of relative stress (i e., rhythm, dynamics). (2)
As mentioned, such essentially musical performance works were the exception, not the norm, before World War II. After the War, however, the musical paradigm – i.e., the formal, non-referential organization of events in time – became the predominant mode of practice for art-related performance, and has remained so since. Where narrative or rhetorical concerns have figured significantly in performance work – as, for example, in early Happenings in New York or in "Aktionen" by Hermann Nitsch, Joseph Beuys, and many others – they have usually been ordered by a non-narrative, even self-consciously formalized shaping of time, to such an extent that that ordering became a prime consideration in the evaluation of the event's significance and its author's intent. (3) Even where time was itself diminished as an element of formulation (as in the highly conceptual and gestural performances proposed, and realized almost incidentally, by Fluxus artists), the earmarks and conceits of musical practice informed (however parodically) the presentation and even conception of the mixed-means timework. (4)
Toward the end of the 19th century, anticipating the emphasis on form which would characterize so much aesthetic impetus and analysis in the first half of this century, Walter Pater wrote that "all art tends to the condition of music". (This, of course, a century after Schopenhauer argued that, as music's basic abstractness brought it closer to the Will, it assumed primacy among the arts.) That is, all art strives to justify itself through its inherent qualities, not through its use as vehicle for narrative or rhetorical information. Time-based mixed-means artworks, with the important exceptions already mentioned, did not tend to the musical condition until after World War II – unless, of course, such mixed-means pieces were essentially expansions of and on music itself, like the color organs devised by such as Alexander Scriabin and Alexander Laszlo to embody synaesthetic sonic-visual relationships. After the War, however, the presumption grew that, in order to participate in avantgarde discourse, artwork must present what Roger Fry called "significant form" even when formal issues are not at the crux of the work's raison d'etre. Time as well as space, event as well as image, were to be ordered coherently, whether to other ends or for the sake simply of that ordering. (5) The true revolution in postwar art was in the redefinition of what constituted "ordering", and what exactly was to be ordered. What constituted ordering in time-based artwork was no longer only the recognized formats of musical, choreographic, theatrical, or simple declamatory tradition. Ordering could be a matter of shaping time not according to dramatic or even musical tension, but simply to a concept of process and variation – a concept closer to life than to traditional art, but nearer in its formal abstraction to music than to any other artistic discipline. And what was ordered was no longer presumed to be musical notes, dramatic gestures, stylized body movements, or verse. Any event was orderable, as cinematic technique (which rapidly increased in sophistication after the War) suggested. (6) Besides, aesthetic experience itself was no longer fixed, no longer bound by conventional definition. "Theater takes place all the time, wherever one is, and art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case", John Cage wrote, adding elsewhere that "everything we do is music".(7)
As theorist and as practitioner, John Cage provided the postwar avantgarde with the clearest philosophical and practical model for the expansion of artistic disciplines into full cooperation and even fusion with one another within a context of coherent formalization. The "active passivity" which Cage derived from Zen Buddhist doctrine, in which the world and its phenomena can be appreciated from an aesthetic standpoint, was never imparted as an amorphous, undisciplined apprehension of things. Cage's preachments and practices made it apparent to those who allied themselves with him that his and their roles as composers (or as creators of any mixed-means artwork) gave them the responsibility not of organizing sound itself (as per Edgard Varèse), but of conditioning the decisions by which musicians (or any kind of performer) organize sound (or any kind of event/phenomenon), and conditioning the perceptions of those who witness the results of those decisions. If Cage loosened the presumed intervening role of the composer in choosing notes, he maintained the intervening role of the composer in framing the choice of notes – of setting in motion processes and sequences and of framing the audience's comprehension of those processes and sequences (and, of course, their results).
In fact, if nature itself – the "chance" for which Cage, by way of Marcel Duchamp, came to have so much respect – were regarded as the "performer" in this light, the audience could apprehend natural, haphazard events as art if provided a framework with which to focus on such events. The composition for which Cage is most notorious, 4'33", does precisely that: it superimposes a strict temporal structure – two very short outer movements and a long central movement, all of which are defined by precise durations of time – on the sonic (and by extension visual and kinetic) phenomena that happen to occupy the same time and place as the presentation of the piece. The instrumentalist – nominally a pianist, as the sole activity specified is the raising and lowering of the keyboard lid – produces no sound him- or herself. The performer's single gesture, made twice, combines with his or her entrance and exit to demarcate the movements, i.e., to signal to those in attendance that 4'33" is over – or that their attentiveness to extraneous sounds and sights no longer constitutes John Cage's composition from that point, but constitutes their own.
In a very different way, a collaborative composition Cage realized around the same time as he composed 4'33" proposed the same comprehension: diverse phenomena constituting an aesthetic experience not through their selective coordination, but simply through the framing of their simultaneous occurrence. Untitled Event was mounted at Black Mountain College, in rural North Carolina, in the summer of 1952. Preparation for the evening event, according to a witness (Francine Duplessix-Gray, as parapharased by Roselee Goldberg) "was minimal":… performers were given a 'score' which indicated 'time brackets' only and each was expected to fill out privately moments of action, inaction and silence as indicated on the score, none of which was to be revealed until the performance itself. In this way there would be no 'causal relationship' between one incident and the next, and according to Cage, 'anything that happened after that happened in the observer himself'. Among the participants – that is, contributors – were dancer Merce Cunningham, painter Robert Rauschenberg, musicians David Tudor and Jay Watt, and poets Charles Olson and M.C. Richards. Cage's own participation consisted of reading texts of his own (on the relation of music to Zen) and of Meister Eckhardt and playing a radio as if it were a musical instrument – which, in this context (as in an earlier composition, the Imaginary Landscape nr. 1), it was. (8)
Black Mountain College was one of several schools founded in the United States during the 1930s that were based on the model of the Bauhaus and employed exiled Bauhaus masters. As such, it was the only such neo-Bauhaus committed to stage work and literature as well as visual disciplines. In 1944 the school introduced a summer session into which the extra-visual arts were particularly welcomed. John Cage and Merce Cunningham participated in the 1948 summer session, culminating in a performance of an Erik Satie music-drama, "La piège de Méduse", in which such luminaries as Buckminster Fuller and Willem and Elaine de Kooning also took part. This set the stage for Cage and Cunningham's return four years later.
Given the multi-artistic ambience of Black Mountain College, Cage and Cunningham fit right in. Having met and begun their association on the American West Coast in the middle 1930s, the pair – living by war's end in New York – had established an ongoing collaboration, one fueled by their mutual interest in Zen and indeterminacy. Just as Cage came to abandon "through-composed" music, preferring simply to set in motion the production (or, as discussed, the apprehension) of sound by setting down loose parameters for performing and for the choices performers must make, Cunningham turned away from the narrative story lines, no matter how abstracted, of his own teacher Martha Graham, and began to concentrate on organizing body movement itself. Everyday human motion seemed to him a rich source of choreography, and Cage's methods of inducing randomness into the organization of performance elements permitted Cunningham to maintain something of everyday life's richly haphazard character. Further, by the early 1950s Cunningham had decided not to work "with" (or, if you would, "against") music, but "through" it: inviting like-minded musicians to create compositions for his ensemble, Cunningham would simply set his dancers dancing, concerned only for the beginning and end of the sound. Motion was not paced to music, but followed its own inner structural logic – much of which was derived from the same kinds of chance procedures (notably I Ching tabulations) employed by Cage. Thus, in spirit, intent, and often method, Cunningham's dances paralleled the music of Cage and of other colleagues and collaborators, following the formalist, essentially musical paradigm of structure for the sake of structure.
In effect, what Cage, and Cunningham, were proposing – perhaps you could even say inventing – was an "induced synaesthesia". Equivalents between sensate elements were neither presumed nor sought, but were simply fabricated. The equality the disparate disciplines were accorded in a Cunningham dance or Cage event – and, in the later '50s and throughout the '60s, Cage events often were Cunningham dances, and vice versa (e.g. Cage's Variations V) – allowed them in their basic non-objectivity and non-referentiality to conflate into a whole, the way life does. The whole is not indivisible, but it is something else, conceptually and experientially, than merely the sum of its parts.
If Cunningham determined a staged equivalent to Cage's music, Cage himself, and the small group of musicians that had formed around him in New York in the early 1950s, devised a visual equivalent. Their intent originally was to formulate means of scoring their increasingly intricate combinations of precise and imprecise notation. But the graphic scores that resulted expanded the visual qualities of traditional scoring to such an extent that the scores began to take on the optical appeal of drawings. With Cage, David Tudor, Christian Wolff and Morton Feldman essayed such scores, resorting to geometric formulations which were coded to indicate performance parameters – parameters, as described before, within which performers could decide among a number of choices or could make entirely free decisions. (9)
It was Earle Brown, however, who, finally came up with a graphic score in which all interpretive decisions were up to the performer(s). His "December 1952", the last work in the 1951–52 Folio, consists entirely of vertical and horizontal black lines of varying thicknesses. None touches another. The score has no predetermined bars or measures of any kind defining or even suggesting pitch or temporal demarcation. It has no other marks save those lines. The relative position of the lines could indicate pitch; their thickness could logically dictate dynamics; and the length of the horizontal lines, at least, does suggest relative duration, while the verticals might hint at phrasing. But the basis for such relations is given nowhere; indeed, even the determination of which lines are vertical and which are horizontal is up to the player(s). Brown signed the score in one corner; but instructions in the cover of Folio prompt performers to ignore that signature.
The signature may not determine the orientation of "December 1952" as a score, but it does determine its orientation – indeed, its identity – as a drawing, something of a neo-plastic refinement of Piet Mondrian's proto-de Stijl "Pier and Sea" paintings. (10) As such, the "December 1952" score proposes a visual equivalent to music that – unlike the visual translations of music frequent in the earlier 20th century – precedes the music, that in effect embodies the essence of the musical concept before sound is produced. And, unlike traditional scoring, a free-form notation like "December 1952" does not even transcribe sound that the composer has heard beforehand in his or her mind's ear; it transcribes a pre-sonic concept. The score of "December 1952" does not embody the sounds of a performance of "December 1952"; it embodies the structure and method from which those sounds – whatever they turn out to be – are to emerge. Significantly, Brown has been quoted as seeking to emulate the work of particular visual artists, wanting to capture in his music "the integral but unpredictable 'floating' variations of a Calder mobile and the contextual rightness of Pollock's spontaneity and directness in relation to the material and his particular image of the work." (11)
The development of the graphic score after the breakthroughs of Brown, Cage, Feldman, et al., quickly took on international scope – especially as interest in aleatory compositional methods emerged in Europe in dialectical antithesis to the serial methods derived from the twelve-tone compositional system proposed three decades earlier by Arnold Schoenberg and refined by (prime among others) Anton Webern. This Darmstadt-Donaueschingen dialogue (which raged as well, of course, outside those German centers of experimental musical research) has been well documented elsewhere; (12) suffice it to say that, by the time of Cage's first visits to Europe in the later 1950s, he found a network of composers and musicians -and artists and writers – sympathetic to the aleatory approaches and graphic methods he and his New York colleagues had developed. In most cases – that of Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne, for instance, or Sylvano Bussotti in Milan – the musicians, initially unfamiliar with the solutions of Cage, Brown, et al., had developed their own approaches as they came to be provoked by similar problems. The disparities as well as similarities in attitude as well as form proved lively points of dialogue between Cage and the Europeans, but led to collegial friendships rather than animosity.
By 1960 the most radical center for graphic notation in Europe was Vienna, where musicians such as Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, Anestis Logothetis, and Josef Anton Riedl were creating visual scores of great elaboration and complexity. It is interesting to compare these compositions' visual density and musical drama both with the relatively spare formats of other European graphic scorings from this time (e.g. those of Cologne composers like Stockhausen, Mauricio Kagel, and Dieter Schnebel) and with the similarly anti-classical styles of other Viennese intermedialists who emerged at this time, notably the Aktionsschule (Hermann Nitsch, Otto MUM, Guenther Brus, Rudolf Schwarzkogler) and the poetic Wiener Gruppe (Ernst Jandl, Gerhard Rühm, Friederike Mayröcker, H.C. Artmann, Friedrich Achleitner, Oswald Weiner, Konrad Bayer).
It is interesting to note as well how this overarching "Viennese style" prefigured, and even influenced, the anti-minimalist strain in music and performance art which manifested itself as an important counterweight to the predominant minimalism of the later 1960s. In those years the aforementioned Cologne composers, for example, became much more interested in ritual and in graphic intricacy; visual poets in Italy and France evolved out of purely typographical design and into collaged superposition of word and image; and cybernetically-oriented artists and artist groups in Paris, London, New York, San Francisco, and elsewhere sought to create ever more elaborate and ambitious Gesamtkunstwerke. Clearly, the Viennese composers, poets, and performance artists were not the driving force behind this tendency; this late-60s quasi-baroque style embodied the countercultural Zeitgeist (while Minimalism embodied only one very specific – if not necessarily contradictory – aspect of it). But the Viennese artists embodied that tendency early on, and helped amplify it. (Nitsch and Haubenstock-Ramati, at least, were known in America by 1967.)
One factor which may have restrained composers in other avantgarde circles from setting out as quickly as the Viennese on this "maximalist" direction was the use of graphic scoring as a means of notating not aleatory compositions, but traditional or even post-Webernian through-composed works incorporating non-instrumental – i.e., taped and electronic – sound. In many cases, copyright requirements necessitated the fabrication of graphic equivalents to compositions of collaged real-life sounds (musique concrète) or of electronically generated sounds. More importantly, compositions in which instrumental performance was combined with pre-taped sound, notably in the precise coordination favored by those practicing serial methods, required the conformation of instrumental and electronic sound-gesture in instrumentalists' scores.
Electronic technology in music, interrupted by the War, had been taken up by Pierre Schaeffer in Paris, around 1948. Schaeffer was the first musician to capitalize on new sound-recording technology, transferring sounds in the studio from wax-disc record to wax-disc record until a carefully sequenced audio collage resulted. (Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky, working in New York, were the first to montage sounds using magnetic recording tape; they introduced their first tape-music experiments in 1952.) At the same time, filmmakers like Norman MacLaren and Len Lye in Canada were experimenting with a kind of "expanded animation", activating the sound as well as the visual component of the cinema by working directly on the film stock; and visual artists in Buenos Aires such as Gyula Kosice and Lucio Fontana (who moved to Milan, bringing the tendency there) instigated research into the incorporation of projected light and movement into the heretofore static realm of visual art. It is not surprising that much of the earliest such work emerged in the Americas, where technology, developing rapidly in wartime, became available throughout a hemisphere untouched by widespread devastation. But once they got a hold of the new technology European artists of all disciplines, and interdisciplines, made rapid advances. By 1953 Nicholas Schöffer had begun to bring such research into the electronic realm with his "spatiodynamic" towers, coordinating recorded sound with light projection and moving elements. Jean Tinguely, also based in Paris, likewise devised structures combining qualities of objecthood, kinesis, and sound, from the 1954 "Relief métamécanique sonore", presented in Milan, to the famed "Hommage a New York", the mechanism which destroyed itself in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art in 1960.
If the 1945–55 period saw the introduction of electronic multi- and intermedia in several ways and places, the succeeding ten years witnessed the wholesale acceptance of cybernetics into all artistic disciplines -and, of course, into the interstices between the disciplines, where the new technologies often facilitated multi-mediumistic combinations and even intermedial fusion. Sound-and-movement works such as Schöffer's towers variously contained recorded sound and programs for the activation of sound-producing devices in the structures themselves. An especially ambitious example of this was the pavilion contributed by the Philips Corporation to the 1958 Brussels World's Fair: designed by Le Corbusier, it incorporated into its design stochastic principles which the architect's assistant, Iannis Xenakis, had devised for composing his own music. The sound in the space itself, however, was the musique concrete of Edgar Varèse.
The 1955–65 period also saw the first neon art (fabricated by Dan Flavin in New York and Martial Raysse in Paris), the first radio art (realized by Mary Bauermeister in 1960 for Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln), the first video and television art (Nam June Paik shot the first artist's videotape in 1965, but TV art was presaged by objects and actions of Wolf Vostell and Paik himself which manipulated the components of the monitor), and the first computer art, music, poetry, and theater. Notable among the last two categories of computer work are the texts for oration or stage performance by Jackson MacLow, interfacing his own Cageian chance operations with the random selectivity of the computer. Elsewhere, computers were programmed to compose music in a similar fashion (the "Illiac Suite" for string quartet being the best known of these) as well as to generate sound, live or directly onto magnetic tape.
The Bell Telephone Laboratories near New York was a hotbed of artistic experimentation, equipped as it was with the IBM 7090 and other state-of-the-art computers. The curiosity and interest of the scientists and technicians at Bell labs also facilitated artists' experimentation, enabling one Bell Labs official, Billy Kluver, to instigate a program in the early '60s bringing visual artists, composers, and other creative individuals into the computer laboratories. Certain artists, like musician James Tenney, already had professional experience with computer technology; most, of course, did not, and welcomed the opportunity to collaborate with programmers in extending both their own work and the viability of the computer as an artistic tool. Many of the most adventurous artists conceived of objects and inventions which they needed or wanted to see exist, and hoped the lab technicians could create. Andy Warhol's wish for a floating lightbulb proved unfulfillable, for instance, but the photo-cell control system with which Merce Cunningham's dancers interacted in John Cage's "Variations V" was successfully devised, as was the contact transistor Yvonne Rainer wanted to use in her dance, "The House of My Body", to amplify the sound of her breathing and heartbeat. (13)
The most spectacular result of the Bell Labs program was the Nine Evenings of Art & Technology, organized by Kluver and mounted in New York in late 1966. The Nine Evenings featured performance works by John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, Steve Paxton, Lucinda Childs, Oyvind Fahlström, Robert Whitman, and other artists from various disciplines (and inter-disciplines). Many of these presentations engaged devices especially invented by Bell Labs technicians at the direction of the artists. Other innovations were prominent in the Brooklyn Museum exhibition of technological art, "Some New Beginnings", presented two years later by the organization which arose from the "Nine Evenings", Experiments in Art & Technology. E.A.T. also organized the art-filled, thoroughly cyberneticized Pepsi-Cola Pavilion at Osaka's Expo 70.
The later 1960s were a fertile time not just for E.A.T. and the artists it worked with, but in general for technologically-based art. An upsurge of public interest in kinetic art, "Op" art, and new art and technology in general encouraged the mounting of displays such as "The Responsive Eye", "The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age", and "Information" (all at the Museum of Modern Art), "Software" (at the Jewish Museum), and "The Magic Theater", a touring show (organized by the Nelson/Atkins Museum in Kansas City) which featured environmental, usually viewer-activated structures by Howard Jones, Boyd Mefferd, Stanley Landsman, Hans Haacke, and USCO. The last-named – with Rudi Stern and Jacki Cassen as its nucleus, and including other artists at various times – was one of many collaborative groups dedicated to technological investigation and spectacle which appeared in the Americas, first in South America (Madi, Equipo 57) and later in the North (Pulsa, Vortex Theater, the ONCE Group). USCO's prime historic significance was its involvement with the later -60s countercultural movement; its presentations deliberately suggested the perceptual distortions of LSD and also encouraged a sense of community among viewers. USCO coined the term "be-in" for its environments in 1963; within a few years the term had become popularly applied to all countercultural gatherings into which the public was invited.
The surge in cybernetic art, mixed-means and otherwise, of the later 1960s quickly faded for a variety of reasons. Most notably, the phenomenon lost its appeal to experimental artists. Some found that the state of technology at that point was simply not advanced enough to satisfy their vision, while others were turning to the far more austere, intellectually and/or physically rigorous tendencies coming out of Minimalism (e.g. Conceptual Art, Body Art). To these post-Minimalists cybernetic art seemed to have degenerated into a crowd-pleasing spectacle. The crowd itself, moving out of an era of visceral excitement and into one of confusion, disillusionment, and introspection, lost even its superficial taste for such work. The cybernetic devices themselves often proved cumbersome, undependable in operation, expensive or impossible to repair, and highly energy-consuming. With the energy crisis of 1973, elaborate, power-hungry machines came to seem ill-advised and irresponsible. By 1975, both social and aesthetic attitudes tended to favor "low-tech" simplicity (except, perhaps, in the rock-&-roll studio).
Given the intimate, solitary style favored by early-'70s performance artists, video art seemed the only technology which lent itself formally and ethically to art-making at this time.14 Most artists simply produced videotapes, but some were able to create time/space environments built around installations of video monitors and, frequently, live cameras. Among the American artists engaged in such "telenvironments" were Les Levine, Keith Sonnier, Shigeko Kubota, Peter Campus, Ira Schneider, Beryl Korot, Bruce Nauman, and Paul Kos. Certain other artists – notably Valie Export in Vienna and Dan Graham and Douglas Davis in New York – realized a kind of video-body art, engaging in physical activity while holding or wearing video cameras and thus transmitting or recording the body's "point of view".
This did not mean that mixed-means artistic practice fell out of favor as well. On the contrary, the early 1970s saw an explosion of interest in multimedia and intermedial art. The explosion was sparked in part by the cybernetic revolution of the preceding years, but its direct sources and models dated from the early '60s and even in the later 1950s. Again, the single catalyzing figure for this tendency was John Cage. In fact, his philosophy and aesthetics were more directly influential on this realm of mixed-means art than on the cybernetic realm. His Black Mountain event prefigured much ensemble performance and Minimal/Conceptual art; and the course he taught in new music composition and performance for two years in the later 1950s can be said to be the spring from which the whole mixed-means river – including the cybernetic, but especially the non-technological, streams – has flowed. Other sources fed this river independently of the Cage class, a few even previous to it. But no other group or event figured so centrally to the subsequent development of the mixed-means artwork.
Cage taught his class at New York's New School for Social Research between 1956 and 1958. Poets, filmmakers, and visual artists as well as musicians were among the attendees, to Cage's delight. Among those who came to know each other, and Cage, for the first time in this class were engineer George Brecht, graphic artist Dick Higgins, composers Richard Maxfield and Philip Corner, poet Jackson MacLow, filmmaker Al Hansen, and painter Allan Kaprow. Kaprow was beginning to move away from painting and collage at this time, but not towards mere three-dimensional objects. Under Cage's tutelage Kaprow came to realize that the realms of life itself – real space and real-time – were adequate realms for art, even preferable in their vitality and immediacy and the possibility they offered than the accidental, serendipitous intrusion of reality. Kaprow began working in environmental space in 1957 (15); soon after, provoked by Cage's ideas about everyday life constituting artistic experience and given means and techniques by Cage for shaping the occurrence and perception of quotidian events into art, Kaprow began activating his environments with human action, into Happenings. (16)
The presentation of 18 Happenings in 6 Parts in Autumn, 1959– not Kaprow's first Happening, but the first presented in a public context -ushered in a parade of Happenings and mixed-means performances in New York. The Ray Gun Theater of Claes Oldenburg, the Theater Pieces of Tobert Whitman, the play-like presentations of Red Grooms, and various mixed-means solo and ensemble works by Jim Dine, Al Hansen, and Dick Higgins, all determined a kind of (usually stageless) stage work that, taking its cue from visual art, music, and cinema, relied tangentially on narrative but centrally on image and on the sequencing (in time and often space) of discrete events. The actual media of painting, music, and film were normally incorporated into the proceedings, or at least into the decor. Some Happenings artists (notably Grooms, Dine, and Oldenburg) scripted their presentations in some detail, (17) while others (Kaprow and Higgins especially) were – like John Cage – more likely to define parameters of activity in terms of space, time, and sequence, and allow things to happen within those overall structures. (18)
The great stylistic variety among Happenings artists reflected their diverse backgrounds, sources, and intentions. Some of them (such as Grooms and Dine) realized Happenings for a very short time before returning to painting, others (Kaprow, Whitman) gave up static visual art altogether in favor of time-based mixed-means art, and still others (Hansen, Higgins, Oldenburg) worked (and still work) in two, three, and four dimensions as inspiration and opportunity dictated. (19) This array of different attitudes among Happenings artists was in fact a small part of the vast, complex, and multifarious mixed-means art scene in New York in the early 1960s. Only Happenings, however, comprised an art form native to the city; the many other mixed-means approaches, formats, and groups were coming into the New York scene from elsewhere – usually from art centers in which mixed-means activity had already reached levels of strength, conviction, and sophistication. Mixed-means art, it turns out, had been on the rise throughout the world since the mid-1950s – much more broadly even than the citations already made of early electronic art phenomena in Buenos Aires, Milan, Paris, etc., might indicate.
The Gutai group coalesced in Osaka in 1956. Comprised mostly of painters and sculptors such as Sadamasa Motonaga, Saburo Mirakami, Shozo Shinamoto, and Kazuo Shiraga, Gutai realized individual and group performances combining painted gesture with live use of studio and natural materials, often in natural settings. (20) A more music-oriented mixed-means group, Ongaku, emerged in Tokyo a few years later. Gutai artists were not well-known or well-travelled, but the musicians associated with Ongaku (including Toshi Ichiyanagi and Toru Takemitsu) and Japanese artists in various media influenced by both groups (such as Shusaku Arakawa, Taka Iimura, Yoko Ono, and Ay-O) were. Most visited New York, and several settled there around 1960.
By that time, mixed-means practice had come to predominate in the experimental arts throughout Europe. Poetry and painting, as well as poetry and music, had been conflated by the French Lettriste group almost from the time Isadore Isou penned the first Lettriste Manifesto, in 1948. Isou, Maurice Lemaître, François Dufrêne, and other Lettristes revived the concept and practice of the "liberated word", the Futurist expansion of typographical and recited poetic form which had been refined in the hands of post-Dadaists like Kurt Schwitters. In this the Lettristes were joined by the end of the 1950s by like-minded writer-performers all over the continent including the Wiener Gruppe; post-Futurists in Italy (e.g. Carlo Belloli); English expanded-poeticists like Bob Cobbing, Byron Gysin, John Furnival, and Ian Hamilton Finlay; and writer-artists like Di(e)ter Rot(h), Emmett Williams, Pierre and Ilse Garnier, and Eugen Gomringer, who divided time between France, Germany, or Switzerland and more exotic places: Iceland, the United States, and Brazil. Gomringer, in fact, was a bridge between concrete poetry – that is, typographically expanded poetics – in Europe and similar activity in Brazil, where he lived for several years. Noigandres, centered around Haroldo and Agosto de Campos, was the principle group of concrete poets in Brazil. Active from about 1954 well into the 1960s, Noigandres paralleled cybernetic art activity in Buenos Aires. (Lygia Clark, Brazil's leading cybernetic sculptor, often worked with Noigandres poets.)
Yet more prominent and far-reaching was the eruptive appearance of Les Nouveaux Realistes in Paris and Milan in the later '50s. In a conscious revolt against the dominance of l'Art informel, with its rarefied aesthetic of Bellepeinture, artists such as Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Daniel Spoerri, Arman, Jean Tinguely, and Niki de St. Phalle, championed by critic-polemicist Pierre Restany, insisted on the aesthetic value of mundane things and everyday situations – or, conversely, on the primacy of pure idea and gesture over mere art object. Those ideas and gestures often impelled the fabrication of assemblages, such as Spoerri's "traps" encapsulating the chance accumulations of meals and gatherings, or Arman's boxes filled with multiple examples of one kind of thing (doll's hands, for instance, or alarm clocks, or spoons), or the objects which were presented, wrapped like postal parcels, by Christo (a non-signer of the Nouveau Réaliste manifesto, but a "fellow traveller").
Closest in spirit to the mixed-means time-space activity of Gutai, Happenings, et al., were the downright subversive gestures and manifestations of Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni, designed to mock the art world's self-conscious pretensions even as they expanded the realm of art itself. Klein began his extra-pictorial activity in 1957, doing things like releasing 1001 blue balloons into the sky (an "Acrostatic Sculpture" from his "pneumatic period"), exhibiting an empty gallery space ("The Surfaces and Volumes of Invisible Pictorial Sensibility"), and selling his "immaterial pictorial sensitivity" for a gold leaf (then tossing the leaf into the river, while directing the purchaser of the "sensitivity" to burn the contract of sale). Klein's most widely-publicized event was the 1958 (and 1960) "live painting", Anthropometries of the Blue Period, painted using nude models not as posed subjects, but as "live paintbrushes". The performance was accompanied by a string ensemble playing Pierre Henry's Symphonie monotone, written for the occasion and defining in its 45-minute length the exact duration of the performance.
Influenced by Klein's earliest gestures, Manzoni similarly burlesqued common art practices in public performances and comical objects. In his 1961 "Living Sculpture" in Milan Manzoni signed the bodies of several volunteers, thus making them his "living sculptures". He filled balloons with his own breath – selling them as "Artist's Breath" – exhibited and sold images of his own fingerprints ("Artist's Fingerprint"), and even made an edition of his own feces, canned and labelled "Artist's Shit". Other, more purely sculptural works of Manzoni's still convey this droll dramatic spirit: a 1000-meter-long line drawn of a spiral page encased in a bronze cylinder; maps with visually subtle but geographically improbable alterations (Naples substituted for Dublin on a map of Ireland, for instance); and a Pedestal for the World, a large cube with "Socle du Monde" engraved on it – upside down.
The late 1950s and early '60s also saw much Happening-like mixed-means activity throughout the rest of Europe, including the "dé-collage" events of Wolf Vostell in Germany; public events and rituals by Jean-Jacques Lebel and Tetsumi Kudo in Paris, Ben Vautier in Nice, and others; the first manifestations of Gustave Metzger's "Destruction in Art" activities in London; stage works by Oyvind Fahlström in Stockholm; Hermann Nitsch's first Orgies-Mysteries Theater presentations in Vienna; son-et-lumière manifestations in Duesseldorf and elsewhere by the Gruppe Zero (Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Guenther Uecker) which in practice straddled cybernetic and low-tech mixed approaches; the first public visual-poetry performances in Milan and other Italian cities; and the increasingly gestural musical concerts of composers such as Gyorgy Ligeti, Giuseppe Chiari, Mauricio Kagel, and Nam June Paik.
Many of these European avantgardists made their way to New York during this fertile period, and the work of many others became known there as well. New York occasionally came to them, too. John Cage made several extended visits to various parts of the continent in the later 1950s and early '60s. Earle Brown also visited Europe at this time, familiarizing himself with new music activity in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere. And in 1961-62 several younger mixed-means artists came over and travelled about, meeting people they had heard of (Brown, Cage, and others), meeting people they had not heard of, and performing with these new-found friends and colleagues. The New Yorkers brought with them word of a newly-identified sensitivity, a mixed-means, art-life sensitivity into which their new friends and their peers also fit. The New Yorkers called the sensitivity "Fluxus".
The Fluxus sensitivity had been formulated in New York out of Happenings, the post-Gutai attitudes of Japenese emigres to New York (Ichiyanagi, Ono), and the "minimalist" attidues of other arrivals. These last, dancers, musicians, and sculptors, had come from California, where they had been influenced by the radical ideas of choreographer Ann Halprin. Halprin preached the incorporation of ordinary body movement into live-art activity - not just into choreographed dance, as Cunningham demonstrated, but into all time-and-space art. A number of participants in Halprin's Dancers' Workshop Company - including dancers Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer, musician La Monte Young, and sculptor Robert Morris - moved to New York around 1960, bringing Halprin's disciplined but liberating attitudes and practices with them. In New York they became the core of the Judson Dance Group, and their appreciation for the simple, integral gesture or unit of experience became the source for the prevailing mode in all the arts later in the decade: Minimalism. In creating the Dance Group and forging the Minimalist tendency, these Halprin disciples came into contact with Cage's students and acolytes, as well as the like-minded Japenese. Discovering their shared attitudes, these multi-disciplinary artists began working and performing together.
George Maciuna, an architect and gallery owner, fell in with this varied but generally like-minded interdisciplinarians, and sought to organize performances and publications for them. Heading for Europe in 1961, he brought examples of their work - open-ended scores proposing single, minimal gestures and events - with him, and realized "concerts" of this ultra-refined fusion of art and life. Having sought to publish an annual anthology of scores and devices by his friends that he wanted to call "Fluxus", Maciunas gave the name "Fluxus" to the sensitivity itself. He was joined in Europe by Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles, who were also supplied with scores and ideas and the names and addresses of potential allies in Europe. Thus, Fluxus was born in New York and took root in Europe, encompassing a sensitivity that had already been sense on three continents.
That sensitivity, implying a reductive gesturality (Minimalism), presumed a mixed-means approach to the creation of artwork. All media were fair game for combination and interpenetration. Bringing a new label, a new understanding of mixed-means art, and a new sense of organization and camaraderie, Maciunas and company had a galvanizing effect on European mixed-means avantgardists. They engaged artists as different in attitude (if similar in mixed-means practice) as Joseph Beuys, Willem de Riddler, Robert Filliou, Milan Knizak, and Thomas Schmit, either directly or - in the case of ZAJ, a Fluxus parallel which appeared spontaneously in Spain and Italy - indirectly. Further developments in New York (the year-long Yam Festival, organized by George Brecht and Robert Watts in 1963-64, for example) maintained the Fluxus spirit there while Maciunas was abroad.
Between the influence of Fluxus activity and the similarly growing engagement of non-Fluxus artists in performed and situational art - including those engaged in technological experiment - mixed-means art burgeoned in the later 1960s and into the following decade. Indeed, the 1970s were dominated by performance and performance-related work of many, many types, ranging from the diverse forms of self-transformation to variations on popular theatrical and musical modes. By the end of the decade, in fact, those popular arts were returning the attention and absorbing styles and attitudes from performance art. The interfacing of mixed-means art and popular music goes back at least as far as the cabaret songs sung at and written for the soirees at the Cabaret Voltaire. The current wholesale intermingling of the worlds of rock music and performance art, however, can be traced back to England in the late 1060s. This was, of course, when Fluxus artist Yoko Ono met up with the Beatle John Lennon and each invited the other into his or her artistic realm. A less publicized but broader development, talking place in London and in schools around the United Kingdom, ultimately proved more far-reaching. In the later 1960s a network appeared of classically trained composers and performers, with certain visual artists and writers, who shared a range of influences, from classical to rock music, from traditional Britannia to third-world culture, from Dada and Futurism to Cage's teachings and Fluxus practices. They perceived all cultural artifacts as potentially of equal legitimacy, and blended graphic scoring, Victorian literature, exotic instruments, pop-style collages, and left-wing politics into a wide range of objects and performances. Central to this network was the Scratch Orchestra, an ensemble organized by Cornelius Cardew, a proponent of graphic notation and methods of indeterminacy. Cardew himself later became an ardent Maoist, but his Scratch Orchestra activities, and the Cageian philosophy imparted through them, affected a number of musicians and non-musicians who were themselves soon to become influential.
Tom Phillips, a painter and graphic artist, had begun to work in an elaborate visual-poetry manner with a particular book he had found by chance, the overwrought Victorian novel A Human Document. Phillips wove its turgid pages into an ongoing account – called A Humument – whose obsessive, fantastical, often erotic overtones were enhanced by the artist's intricate visual detailings. Phillips has treated A Humument in many ways since first beginning work on the project over two decades ago, but his most ambitious formulation in the series to date has been the "opera" Irma, a graphically notated piece for voices and instruments using an especially intense extended passage from the manipulated novel. Phillips' highly pictorial treatment of Irma's score, realized in 1969, derives not only from his own visual style, but from Cardew's relatively ornate approach to graphic notation and from the witty, even cheeky spirit that prevailed in their circle.
Another figure to emerge from this loose English group of multidisciplinary quasi-musicians went on to become one of rock music's most influential theoreticians. Furthermore, like many rock musicians, he began as an art student; unlike most of those musicians, he continues to engage in serious art-making, even now creating spatial analogues to his "post-rock" aural work. Brian Eno came to popular attention as synthesizer player for the band Roxy Music in the early 1970s, but, at the height of the band's, and his own, popularity, left to do his own work. Since then, Eno has endeavored to develop forms of ambient sound, especially in conjunction with similar forms of visual installation, often working with other like-minded musicians. Eno now maintains his pivotal role in rock primarily by producing and working with bands like The Talking Heads, and by championing new popular music from the third world. But his own music has already left its mark. The roots of current "New Age" music, with its gentle harmonies, electronic modulations, and non-developmental sequencing, can be found in Eno's gentle updating of Erik Satie's "furniture music", electronically-generated compositions whose barely perceptible tonal shifts and low volume create a kind of sonic environment. But Eno is interested not in inflicting a new kind of muzak on concertgoers and elevator riders, but in effecting an alluring and contemplative sonic environment, one in which the texture of sound is as significant as melody, and one which still provokes attentiveness. The electronically generated sound often provides an aural component to Eno's video and light-sculpture installations.
Eno's own environmental sound was prefigured as early as 1960 by the proto-Fluxus, proto-Minimal performance concepts of La Monte Young. Influenced by Cage, Young developed a highly refined and attenuated approach (proposing, for instance, that musicians play a score consisting of a straight horizontal line for nearly an hour). After his move to New York with other Ann Halprin students, Young began an extended investigation into various instrumental tunings, notably of the piano, in which overtone harmonics figure as importantly as pitch sequences. This coordinates in practice with other musical approaches to Minimalism, approaches on which Young has had clear impact. So has his friend Terry Riley, still working in the San Francisco area, and Steve Reich, schooled there and now a resident of his native New York. (21) In the last decade musical "minimalism" has become the most widely known classical compositional style, not least because of its relatively high appeal to popular audiences and its ready accessibility, at least since Eno, to rock musicians. Of the classically-grounded Minimalist composers, the most readily recognized is probably Philip Glass. His fame springs principally from the ready appeal his rock and jazz-inflected compositions have for non-classical audiences, and from the extensive amount of music he has written for a variety of stage and film works. Of all the multimedia presentations to which Glass has contributed music, the most acclaimed and influential probably remains his first large-scale piece, Einstein on the Beach. Premiered at the Festival d'Avignon in the summer of 1976, this operatic presentation not only brought minimal music into the context of the (non-dance) stage for the first time, but in the scope of its structure and breadth of its vision constituted a genuine Gesamtkunstwerk. A five-hour spectacle engaging a large cast of speaking and dancing performers, plus Glass's own ensemble, Einstein on the Beach was in fact a collaboration between Glass and several other adventurous artists working in and from various disciplines, including dancers Andrew de Groat and Lucinda Childs, writer-performers Christopher Knowles and Sheryl Sutton, and most importantly – perhaps even more importantly than Glass himself – radical dramatist Robert Wilson.
Einstein on the Beach was Wilson's conception – based on his interest in the theories of relativity and their positive and negative effects on the contemporary world – and his design. The spectacle cohered through the insistent pulse and drive of Glass's scoring, but the social and scientific ideas linking the scenes together, and the stark, dreamlike images which constituted those scenes, were entirely the creation of Wilson, a former visual artist. (22) It is not without justification that Wilson's stage work – along with that of Richard Foreman and the Mabou Mines Troupe – has been called a "theater of images". In this new school of theater, narrative depends on scene, not the other way around; the overarching concept for each piece reveals itself in a series of tableaux which register in the mind like dreams. This aspect is most effective when enhanced with factors from other disciplines (musical accompaniment or interlude, poetic diction, choreographed motion); at its best the theater of images is multimedia Gesamtkunstwerk.
It seems ironic that such a richly textured theatrical experience should have originated in a period, the end of the 1960s and beginning of the '70s, when minimalistic starkness prevailed in artistic, especially mixed-means, activity. But at its inception the Theater of Images was itself spare and reductive. As Wilson, Foreman, Jo Ann Akalaitis of Mabou Mines, and other theatrical Imagists developed their work, they came more and more to include, rather than exclude, layers of information and effect. The same kind of development pertained at this in "pure" performance art, that is, the time-based mixed-means work issuing from the discourse of visual art. The rigors of orthodox Conceptual Art were giving way in the early '70s to the more dramatic and personal, yet no less systematic and process-oriented, "acts" of Body artists like Vito Acconci, Gina Pane, Rebecca Horn, and Dennis Oppenheim. From these manipulations of the physical self – presented either live or in documentary form – the solo performance medium evolved into manipulations of the persona. Transformation artists such as Urs Lüthi, Katherina Sieverding, Wally Stevens, and Luciano Castelli in Europe and Colette, Colin Campbell, and Paul Cotten in North America presented themselves as self-projections, images of masked, amplified, and perverted identity projected outward from the artist's own id and mediated by social custom. Lifestyle artists, on the other hand, adopted alter egos in their real lives, projecting ideal (not just subverted) personae into social and aesthetic discourse and collapsing reason and fantasy. Grouped especially in Canadian centers like Toronto (General Idea) and Vancouver (Western Front), but appearing in London, New York, and other places as well, lifestyle-art practitioners connected up with one another through a correspondence network of Mail artists, forming a styleless "movement" of Fluxus-influenced intimists who sought gently to capitalize on socially structured media (specifically the mail, although radio and television were also fair game when achievable).
The growing Feminist movement gained artistic expression in these performance and social modes, whether through the symbol-laden presentations of Ulrike Rosenbach in Germany, the political actions of Suzanne Lacy in California, or the autobiographical, essentially narrative but highly abstracted and image-based presentations of many female performance artists in America (e.g. Julia Heyward's stylized recountings of her Florida childhood and, in contrast, her New York art-ghetto adulthood). Some European performers, male and female, also worked with their own histories; Christian Boltanski was among the most notable of these. Other performance artists on both continents conflated actual self with imagined self, actual history with fabricated history, coming to live the lives of their characters as if inhabiting their own storybooks. Eleanor Antin's string of personal experiences, from being the "king" of her California town to a black ballerina once in the Diaghilev corps, to a nurse leading a soap-opera life of assignations and emergencies, were enacted both in fictive time and space (using film, video, and live stage) and in real time and space (confusing the neighbors). Laurie Anderson began her performance career somewhere between Body Art and autobiographical art. Her first live pieces were realized in public spaces, growing in conceptual and technical complexity as she ventured into more and more ambitious structures and more and more personal narrative material. Almost from the first, however, Anderson relied on a discipline which few of her autobiographic compeers engaged: music. Her very first performance, Automotive, made an orchestra out of an erstwhile concert audience in a rural Vermont town. A classically-trained violinist, Anderson began using her skills in the 1974 Duets on Ice, an outdoor piece performed in several locations around New York (and, the next year, in Genoa) wherein her playing was accompanied by taped music while she stood, wearing ice skates on melting blocks of ice. Anderson also sang and related autobiographical narrative – a format she repeated thereafter in several indoor performances, culminating in the For Instants series. These performances incorporated live playing, taped playing and singing, still and moving projections, and rudimentary versions of the sound and image technology which Anderson has since so successfully exploited. The For Instants presentations also featured Anderson's first fully-composed songs, droll and wistful accounts of her past and present life in which she invariably perceives fascinating structural patterns in people's behavior, coincidental occurrences, and the build-up of life's mundane circumstances into sudden, refreshingly droll realizations.
Perhaps as a result of her active participation in the 1978 "Nova Convention" and other contacts with the dystopian visionary novelist William S. Burroughs, Anderson's view of the world has become a good deal darker, more paranoid, and more oriented toward larger political and social issues. She has lost none of her wit or her musical sophistication, although she has adopted a progressively more popular, accessible musical mode. From the first, Anderson clearly conceived of her songs as participating in the rock/folk idiom. The unanticipated popular success of "O Superman", one of the songs from United States I-IV, has encouraged Anderson to commit herself yet more clearly to the rock style. At the same time, her success has encouraged and enabled her to continue to present her concerts as multimedia performances, much more sophisticated conceptually, formally, and technically than any normal rock concert could be. Laurie Anderson has realized the rock-art Gesamtkunstwerk.
Anderson's success in this realm should not come as any great surprise; the popular music audience was ready for a presentation as dense, lyrical, and technologically elaborate as United States, a performance in which the "high" art of mixed-means engages the "low" art of rock. Brian Eno had long proselytized for such a disintegration of barriers between the two modes of discourse, with some success. The emergence in the middle 1970s of Punk Rock further habituated the rock audience to the idea of a formalized, information-bearing mixed-means stage work built around rock music. In its late-Minimalist rawness, Punk did not propose this itself, but it did interact almost from its inception with the more forceful Body and Transformation artists. Their aggressive projection and manipulation of the self and its image found resonance in the deliberately ugly music played by Punk rockers and the hostile social stance adopted by them and their similarly garbed and behaved audience. A number of performance and identity artists in London, New York, and California played with and even started Punk bands. New York light sculptor Alan Bermowitz, also known as Alan Vega, became Alan Suicide for his group Suicide, and the London team of Genesis P. Orridge [sic] and Cosey Fanni Turd [sic], performing sometimes brutal body works as COUM Transmissions, played in an early and relatively successful Punk "noise" band, Throbbing Gristle. Also in London, the Nice Style group, performing tableau pieces, billed themselves as "the world's first pose band" – not a Punk pose, necessarily, but definitely a case of performance art taking on the trappings of the rock context. (23)
The emergence of a network of rock clubs featuring Punk and post-Punk music also gave artists, performance and otherwise, a new and exciting venue to work in. Beginning in the late 1970s and still continuing (if not with the same sense of adventure), these clubs have permitted younger and more daring artists to present their work outside the often restrictive context of publicly-founded galleries such as American "alternative spaces" and German Kunsthallen. The richer clubs also provide technically well-equipped stages, allowing more complex mixed-means performances to be mounted. The quality or sophistication of such presentations has not been uniformly high, but, then, neither has the quality or sophistication of the audience.
Many of today's most interesting and significant mixed-means performance artists have emerged from this quasi-popular context of Punk Rock and dance clubs. A whole generation of entertainment-oriented performers in America, character comics like Ann Magnuson and Eric Bogosian, began to develop their acts in these cabaret-like milieux. Interestingly, some of the strongest mixed-means time artists using ensembles, advanced technology, and other earmarks of the Gesamtkunstwerk have also come out of, or at least passed through the New Wave dance club context. Robert Longo, best know as a painter and sculptor and for a long time a guitarist in a New Wave band, has been developing a multi-sectioned, multimedia performance, Sound Distance of a Good Man, for almost a decade, adding movements, participants, media, and especially images until the work reaches epic proportions, both in length and in impact. Incorporating the music of Peter Gordon and his jazz ensemble, the dancers Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, singers, films, projected photographs, and other live and electronic elements, Sound Distance of a Good Man expresses the same fascination with and fear of individual and institutional power as that conveyed by Longo's two and three-dimensional tableaux – a social theme which recurs in Punk-New Wave sound and lyrics. Likewise, the "monodramas" of Diamanda Galas address themselves with post-Punk passion to contemporary social and spiritual issues, feminist, anti-fascist, apocalyptic and ecstatic. In command of a startling vocal range and wide array of extended vocal techniques, Galas further extends her voice with electronic modulation and accentuates the hallucinatory passion of her voice and her texts with dramatic lighting and an alternately vampiric and victimized stage persona. Having first presented these virtuosic son-et-lumière solos in jazz as well as New Wave clubs, Galas now draws enthusiastic crowds in concert halls and festivals.
The meeting of "serious" and "popular" modes, then, is happening in the realms of entertainment as well as the realms of culture – although the Punk-New Wave club is a much more advanced and sophisticated entertainment venue than, say, televised rock-video. That latter, entirely commercial format, however, has been showing signs of responsivity to the mixed-means work that, to a large extent, has filtered through the clubs. Conversely, mixed-means artists since Laurie Anderson have evinced new interest in state-of-the-art technology, whether or not designed for the stage. Now that computers are virtually universal, almost as much a household item as telephones and televisions, artists have regained access to them, and are more and more eagerly capitalizing on the machines' ever-growing capabilities. It may be that, this time around, the state of the art can keep up with the state of the artist. It is certain, however, that we are entering a new era of artistic experimentation, with new media and with old and new mixed-means formats – a perfect way to usher out a century of innovation and usher in one in which, as so many artists warn, we can either vastly improve our existence or destroy it.
Los Angeles August 1988
(1)
Perhaps I ought to define a certain number of these terms, especially given the disparity that exists among various commentators' use of such neologisms. The term "intermedia" applies to artwork which manifests characteristics of more than one art form, drawing on various of the otherwise distinct disciplines – the traditional, academically-defined practices of painting, musical composition, poetry, and other art forms – to establish an indivisible hybrid. The "multimedia" rubric pertains to work in which disparate artistic practices are superimposed; although separating them destroys the work originally intended, the separated aspects function as coherent artistic phenomena, and thereby at least as "souvenirs" of the original. Thus, visual poetry is an intermedium: if the visual aspect is removed, no verbal aspect remains. Grand opera, on the other hand, is a mixed medium: if the theatrical aspect is removed, the music remains as a discrete aesthetic phenomenon -as do the set designs, costumes, the poetry and/or prose of the original libretto, etc. "Mixed-means", as used here, refers to both intermedia and multimedia artworks, while "time art" connotes mixed-means artwork which exist in time as well as (or, in certain cases, instead of) space. A Gesamtkunstwerk is a mixed-means artwork which seeks to combine many arts multi-medially, or to fuse them intermedially, into an overarching whole; the parts of that whole can be divisible (as in Wagner's music theater) or not (as in Happenings), but they share a common source and focus, and are thus more meaningful together than separately. Einstein on the Beach, coordinating the theater of Robert Wilson, music of Philip Glass, choreography of Lucinda Childs and Andrew de Groat, and so forth, is an example of a contemporary multimedia Gesamtkunstwerk; John Cage's Variations V, in which the music consists of electronic sound triggered and modified by the dancing of Merce Cunningham and his company – the dancers becoming instruments in the production of the music – exemplifies intermedial Gesamtkunstwerk.  zurück
(2)
The Ursonate differs from the Triadisches Ballett not only because it proposes a sonic, not visual, experience, but because, while the ballet parallels music (especially written for it by Paul Hindemith), the Ursonate presumes to be music – indeed, music of rather traditional structure. zurück
(3)
The predominance of formalist criticism, notably about art and dance in New York, in the 1965–75 period contributed to this structural emphasis, leading to a musically analogous treatment of mixed-means performance. This is not to say that such critics relied on musical metaphors, but that they grasped in the staged works a sense of ordered time and organized event-sequence (parallel to Edgard Varese's description of music as "organized sound"). In fact, the references here to a "musical paradigm" are not meant to suggest that Happenings and the like have tended to follow the strict, readily recognizable organizational formulas which most musical compositions still display, but only that postwar mixed-means performance has emphasized the structuring of incident into time forms whose structural cohesion in fact is at least part of the performance content. zurück
(4)
Only in pre-recorded video art has this not generally been the case; and then, music has informed a significant minority of video-art pieces. Fluxus performances, it should be explained, were presented as "concerts", in deference to the musical background of many of its participants and the contexts in which they were first given. True to form, however, the Fluxus performers went to great pains – utilizing musical instruments wherever possible, performing with great precision and solemnity, even dressing in tuxedos – to satirize the stiff conventions of the chamber recital format. zurück
(5)
The late Kenneth Coutts-Smith, writing in 1978, proposed yet another reason for the musical analogy to, and influence on, postwar performance art, specifically Happenings and Fluxus events. "Happenings and Fluxus (and for that matter their prototypes in Dada)", he wrote, "do not fundamentally require the existence of an audience, though there most frequently is one. This realization immediately clarifies one significant and crucial factor: the analogy seen here (and the cross-references understood) should not be between Performance Art and drama, but between Performance Art and the musical concert. A performance of music does not depend upon the presence of an external audience for its very existence. Indeed, a great deal of music (such as chamber music and solo instrumental) is basically conceived and understood as being autonomous. The performers can, and frequently do, play entirely for their own pleasure. The aesthetic dimension lies in being a listener and observer of your own participation."
[Coutts-Smith, Kenneth, "Role Art and Social Context", in Bronson, A. A., and Peggy Gale, editors, Performance By Artists. Toronto: Art Metropole. 1979, p. 224.] zurück
(6)
In his book A Primer of Happenings and Time/Space Art [New York: Something Else Press. 1965, p. 94], Happenings artist Al Hansen, recalling his studies with John Cage, remembers that "… by time I had finished the course, I realized that all art forms do not meet in the film frame [as Eisenstein had said], but in the eyeball. In the head of the observer, for better or worse." Cage, relying on a paradigm that was in part derived from music, in part from Zen philosophy, had not supplanted Eisenstein's claim in Hansen's mind, but had expanded it. zurück
(7)
Among Cage's most famous aphorisms, these were quoted in the mixed-means "bible" of the middle 1960s, Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore's The Medium is the Message [New York: Bantam Books. 1967.] zurück
(8)
This description of Untitled Event abridges that appearing in Goldberg, Roselee, Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present. New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc. 1979, p. 82. zurück
(9)
In the liner notes to a record of his (and Brown's) music Feldman observes that he had "never thought of the graph as an art of improvisation, but more as a totally abstract sonic adventure." [Morton Feldman/Earle Brown. New York: Time Records 58007 or S/8007. 1961.] zurück
(10)
Karen Frank von Mauer discusses this analogy in her essay, "Mondrian und die Musik im 'Stijl'," appearing in von Mauer, Karen, editor. Vom Klang der Bilder: Die Musik in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts. Munich: Prestel-Verlag. 1985, pp. 400–407. zurück
(11)
Cited in Nyman, Michael. Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond . New York: Schirmer Books. 1974, p. 48. Some years later Brown actually composed a work which incorporates a Calder mobile, both as (percussion) instrument and (in its movement) as conductor. zurück
(12)
Most especially in Karkoschka, Erhard. Notation in New Music. New York: Praeger Publishers. 1972. zurück
(13)
Billy Kluver briefly recounts the history of his program to introduce artists to Bell Labs in the catalogue to the historical survey of electrically-powered art mounted in 1983 in Paris, Electra. [Paris: Les Amis du Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. 1983, pp. 284–287.] zurück
(14)
Certain other more intimately applied technologies were also investigated, such as the biofeedback mechanisms which Alvin Lucier used to produce music. zurück
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According to Kaprow's condensed resumé, written by the -artist, by 1957 his work had become "exclusively environmental - involving lights, odors, electronic sounds and unusual materials. His last two arrangements at the Hansa Gallery (1958) contained no art objects as such, but initiated a conception that now is commonplace among artists. The "art" was experienced as a surrounding rather than a picture of sculptures to be looked at, a surrounding which engaged the visitor with things to move, switches to manipulate, obstacles to climb, and food to eat. For the next seven years, he expanded the potential of the Environment (as it began to be called) at the Smolin Gallery, and at the Judson Gallery which he directed in 1961. Gradually the showcase space was abandoned for more informal and natural settings such as vacant breweries, open fields and woods. Comissions came from universities here in the U.S. and from arts institutions overseas. He also designed sets, costumes and fighting for the Eileen Passloff Dance Company, and electronic sound for Richard Barr's production of Ionesco's "The Killer"; numerous new music concerts presented his tapes. zurück
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Kaprow's resumé continues, "In the same period of 1957–58, Kaprow developed the Happening as an extension of the environmental concept, contributing an unexpected household word to our spoken language, and an art form that in various ways is practiced all over the world. In Kaprow's form of the Happening, ordinary people, ordinary time and the everyday spaces of streets and supermarkets, were frequently merged into nearly (but not quite) ordinary activities such as wallpapering a room, digging ditches and taking a pulse. Fantasy was never absent, but there was always a strong commitment to common experience. Art and life were blurred. Public response to this loss of clear distinctions was immediate. Kaprow found his work discussed in journals of painting, poetry, dance, architecture, music, drama and education. This, he felt, was appropriate: everyone was right. It was perhaps hitting the mark when, in an issue of Time Magazine in the 60's, his work was mentioned in its section "Modern Living". Since 1958, he has executed close to 200 such events. Beginning with Douglass College in New Jersey, his first public Happening; then in 1959 at the Reuben Gallery in New York – a performance-oriented group he helped organize and which exerted considerable influence on the new arts -his work has been sponsored by major institutions on both sides of the Atlantic… zurück
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In their approach, they were influenced by the traditional multimedia approach of the poets' and artists' theater also prevalent in New York at the time. Artists such as Larry Rivers, Alex Katz, and even Robert Rauschenberg – as well as Grooms and Dine themselves were designing sets and costumes for Dada- and Surrealist-influenced stage plays by Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and other "New York School" poets. zurück
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For detailed descriptions and discussions of Happenings by Kaprow, Whitman, Oldenburg, Dine, and Grooms, see Kirby, Michael, Happenings. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. 1965. zurück
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Although he collaborated on sets and costumes with Merce Cunningham and other dancers and performers, Robert Rauschenberg did not begin to create his own Happening-like performances until 1963. He continued to realize such time-based mixed-means work – in style more like post-Cunningham minimalist dance than like the painted Happenings of Oldenburg and Whitman – for the rest of the decade. zurück
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Udo Kultermann records that, for an open-air exhibit "in a pine woods at Ashyia City near Kobe, the Gutai artists built huge figures after designs by Atsuko Tanaka and lighted them from the inside with strings of colored lamps. The lamps flashed rhythmically, suggesting such disparate effects as outdoor advertising and blood circulation. A moving strip covered with footprints snaked across the forest floor and up a tree. There were also spatial constructions that could be entered, traffic signs, jellyfish-shaped mounds of mud, plastic, and rope, stuffed sacks hanging from trees tied with ribbons. In the same year Sabum Murakami stages "Struggling with the Screen", a Happening that involved an element later to be repeated in similar events all over the world: breaking and jumping through paper walls. In July of 1957 the Gutai group presented its first Happening in a theater, called "Gutai Art on the Stage". The amateur documentary films made there show figures in masks and fantastic costumes in an interplay of masquerade and strip show. They used spotlights, billows of smoke, fire, water, and incandescent light; they blew up balloon after balloon and popped them. The third theatrical presentation by the Gutai group, given in the Sankai Hall in Osaka in 1962, included Happenings called "Dance or Rock", "Faces and Signs", and "Turning Silver Wall". [Kulturmann, Udo. Art and Life. New York: Praeger Publishers. New York. 1971, pp. 80–81.] zurück
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Especially in the early years of Minimalist experiment, the compositions and performances involved a good deal of extra-musical activity, although none that was not integral to the production of sound. Riley's works in the late 1960s and early '70s tended to be aural meditations, presented with environmental modulation conducive to the meditative state, and Young's piano concerts incorporated (as they often do) the softly shifting projected light-and-shadow works of his wife Marian Zazeela. Reich's 1966 Pendulum Music consists of four microphones, each suspended over a speaker to which it connects; four attendants hold the microphones as high as possible, releasing them at the same time, and the music consists of the swooping feedback sounds that result. Reich's notation for this, and several other works composed in the mid-1960s, consists of verbal description, not the traditional (if patterned) notation he employs elsewhere. zurück
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Wilson has frequently exhibitioned drawn studies for his theater pieces in galleries and museums, where they have been admired as much for their abstract formal qualities as for their intimations of stage events. zurück
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Accounts of these activities, and the scandals that they sometimes engendered, can be found in Goldberg, Roselee. Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present. op. cit. pp. 116–122. zurück
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