John Cage and Fluxus

Kyle  Riley   ArtHist  5974   Prof.  Gena   Final  Research  Project   05.07.13     John  Cage  and  Fluxus     In  1952,  John  Cage  conducted  two  new  explorations  into  the  domain  of   performativity  within  his  compositional  work.    These  two  pieces  were  the   ostensibly  silent  composition  4’33’’  and  the  more  theatrical  proto-­‐Happening  at   Black  Mountain  College,  known  variable  as  the  ‘Black  Mountain  Piece’  or  the  ‘Black   Mountain  Event.’    Moving  away  from  the  traditional  idea  of  pure  musicality,  these   two  works  represented  a  newly  expanded  approach  into  the  conceptualization  of   what  music  could  be  and  how  its  structural  parameters  as  a  performatively   executed  time-­‐based  medium  could  be  considered.   These  two  works,  while  incredibly  influential  within  the  oeuvre  of  Cage   himself,  would  also  function  as  the  primary  points  of  influence  for  the  artists  who   would  come  to  operate  under  the  moniker  of  the  Fluxus  movement,  to  the  degree   that  it  can  be  effectively  described  as  such.    Superficially,  these  pieces  were  drawn   upon  because  of  the  way  they  each  represent  a  distinct  evolution  in  compositional   strategy;  the  first  being  the  idea  of  the  creative  manipulation  of  duration  and  the   development  of  strategies  for  the  foregrounding  of  the  spatialization  of  time   through  music,  and  the  second  being  Cage’s  move  towards  the  inclusion  of  an   overtly  visual  dimension  within  his  musical  work.   Beginning  here,  in  what  follows,  I  intend  to  analyze  the  exact  nature  of  the   complicated  scope  of  influence  that  Cage  exerted  upon  Fluxus.    My  contention  is  that   any  substantive  analysis  of  Fluxus  as  a  movement  must  be  understood  precisely  in   terms  of  the  role  that  Cage  played  in  its  genesis.    However,  as  I  hope  to  show,  any   attempt  to  chart  a  singular  line  of  influence  between  Cage  and  Fluxus  would  be   incredibly  reductive.    Many  of  the  artists  who  operated  under  the  Fluxus  moniker   met  during  Cage’s  classes  at  the  New  School  for  Social  Research  in  the  late  1950s,  so   Cage  should  necessarily  be  understood  first  and  foremost  as  a  conduit  through   which  these  Fluxus  artists  would  develop  a  series  of  methodological  and  ideological  

 

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Kyle  Riley   ArtHist  5974   Prof.  Gena   Final  Research  Project   05.07.13     affiliations.    This  relationship  between  Cage  and  Fluxus  must  be  approached  from  a   myriad  of  perspectives  that  accounts  for  the  manner  in  which  Cage  communicated   his  ideas  to  these  young  artists  in  his  class,  the  platform  of  the  class  itself  as  a   vehicle  for  the  comingling  of  similar  ideas  and  the  way  in  which  Cage  operated  as  a   concise  synthesis  of  various  divergent  lines  of  thought  that  had  existed  prior  to   these  artists’  interaction  with  him  at  the  New  School.   The  Black  Mountain  Piece,  developed  under  the  influence  of  Antonin  Artaud’s   The  Theater  and  Its  Double,  has  widely  been  referred  to  as  the  first  post-­‐war  mixed-­‐ media  event.1    This  piece  was  very  influential  to  the  Fluxus  artists,  first  and  foremost   because  of  its  theatricality  and  its  use  of  mixed  media,  but  also  because  of  the  way   that  it  proposed  the  idea  of  a  musical  score  as  something  capable  of  utilizing   openendedness,  multi-­‐directionality  and  the  complication  of  durational  narrativity.     In  fact,  as  I  will  demonstrate,  Black  Mountain  Piece  was  particularly  influential   precisely  because  it  used  many  of  the  same  tropes  that  later  Fluxus  artists  would   adapt  within  their  own  works.       Black  Mountain  was  organized  around  a  series  of  compartments  of  activity   that  would  be  assigned  to  each  performer  as  though  they  were  instrumental  parts  in   a  musical  score.    Following  the  idea  of  game  pieces,  a  performer  would  execute  their   compartment,  acting  within  it  for  as  long  and  in  any  way  that  they  chose,  at  which   time  they  would  signal  another  performer  to  start.    Importantly,  these   compartments  were  not  necessarily  acted  out  in  a  linear  fashion.      Rather,  they  were   intended  to  overlap  so  that  they  were  not  interpreted  as  a  sequence  of  components   that  culminated  in  a  unitary  whole,  but  rather  as  a  complex  arrangement  of   simultaneously  executed  discrete  actions  being  realized  individually  within  their   own  time-­‐space.   The  importance  of  time  in  the  ‘compositional’  structuring  of  this  event  was   not  only  extremely  important  within  the  programmatic  operation  of  Black  Mountain                                                                                                                   1  Kahn,  262    

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Kyle  Riley   ArtHist  5974   Prof.  Gena   Final  Research  Project   05.07.13     Event,  but  it  would  also  prove  to  be  a  defining  characteristic  of  much  of  Cage’s  later   work.    Cage  used  to  talk  often  about  his  idea  of  the  autonomous  behavior  of   simultaneous  events,  and  this  piece  is  perhaps  the  first  time  that  this  concept  was   fully  realized.    In  Black  Mountain,  each  performer  is  considered  in  terms  of   instrumentation.    Each  performs  a  part  that  is  meant  to  be  both  an  autonomous   articulation  and  a  gesture  that  operates  in  congress  with  that  of  the  other   performers.    This  polyphony  of  performance  events  would  become  a  defining   characteristic  of  later  Fluxus  artists,  particularly  with  the  ‘Event  score,’  which  would   become  the  primary  device  used  by  Fluxus  artists  in  their  compositions.       What  would  prove  to  be  the  most  influential  dimension  of  Cage’s   performance  was  not  so  much  the  obvious  theatricality  of  the  ‘composition,’  as   much  as  it  was  the  way  that  Cage  extended  a  composition  by  considering  time-­‐ bracketing  and  ‘parts’  beyond  the  domain  of  the  strictly  musical,  extending  it  out   into  the  domain  of  physical  interactions.    For  Cage,  the  event  was  a  way  to  draw   attention  away  from  the  structural  relations  that  exist  within  a  composition  so  that   the  composer  could  focus  on  the  idea  of  the  work  as  an  organic  whole.    This  idea  of  a   unitary  whole  would  prove  to  be  incredibly  influential  to  the  Fluxus  artists.     However,  this  influence  was  not  characterized  by  a  simple  wholesale  embracement,   but  rather  it  operated  through  a  complicated  entanglement  of  systematic   embracement  and  reactionary  transcendence.   4’33’’  and  Black  Mountain  Event  would  be  drawn  upon  by  the  Fluxus  artists   precisely  because  of  the  way  they  demonstrated  Cage’s  two  most  prominent   methods  of  engaging  performativity  in  his  compositions.    On  the  surface,  Black   Mountain  Piece  can  be  described  as  performative,  while  4’33’’  can  be  described  as   withholding  performance,  but  neither  characterization  adequately  describes  the   exact  nature  in  which  these  pieces  variably  engage  the  idea  of  performativity.    They   both  access  a  complex  type  of  performativity  and  merely  demonstrate  inverse  

 

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Kyle  Riley   ArtHist  5974   Prof.  Gena   Final  Research  Project   05.07.13     models  of  one  another  while  always  containing  within  it  the  type  of  performativity   highlighted  by  the  other.   Perhaps  the  more  important  point  of  commonality  that  links  these  two  works   is  the  manner  in  which  they  spatialize  time.    Both  are  as  much  about  time  and   duration  as  they  are  about  the  internal  relationships  of  the  sound  content.    To  this   end,  Cage  can  be  seen  as  using  the  time-­‐based  nature  of  the  composition  to  create   occasions  for  his  events.    I  would  argue  that  this  is  the  most  important  difference   between  his  work  and  Brecht’s  Event  scores,  which  I  believe  created  events  in  and   of  themselves.    An  example  would  be  the  events  executed  by  Brecht  himself,  which   were  often  brief  texts  containing  little  more  than  lists  and  cryptic  instructions  for   simple  performative  actions  like  making  a  cup  of  tea  or  watching  ice  turn  to  steam.     Rather  than  maintaining  the  necessity  for  an  overarching  control  structure  (the   composition)  within  which  things  can  occur,  the  Fluxus  Event  score  released  the   event  from  any  explicitly  defined  durational  limitations,  thereby  allowing  them  to   operate  freely  and  laterally  alongside  one  another  rather  than  in  a  consistent  and   systematized  way.    It  is  by  approaching  composition  in  this  way  that  Fluxus  artists   attempted  to  take  Cage’s  lessons  regarding  indeterminacy  and  push  them  further   beyond  what  they  perceived  to  be  its  inherent  limitations  caused  by  Cage’s  rooting   of  them  specifically  within  the  domain  of  music  rather  than  performance  in  general.   The  idea  of  chance  and  indeterminacy  as  (anti-­‐)  compositional  devices  had   been  gestating  in  the  minds  of  many  artists  in  the  late  1950s.    Within  the  domain  of   the  visual  arts,  these  ideas  were  first  articulated  in  a  fully  self-­‐aware  way  by  artists   like  Allan  Kaprow,  Jim  Dine,  Claes  Oldenburg,  Red  Grooms,  Al  Hansen  and  Robert   Whitman  who  were  experimenting  with  unscripted  performative  actions  that  they   came  to  refer  to  as  ‘Happenings’  and  ‘Environments.’    These  ideas  were  firmly   rooted  in  the  concept  of  the  subconscious  gesture  that  was  utilized  by  Abstract   Expressionist  artists,  with  Jackson  Pollock  being  chief  among  them.    Pollock  pursued   a  line  of  thought  that  can  be  traced  to  Surrealism’s  experimentation  with  free  

 

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Kyle  Riley   ArtHist  5974   Prof.  Gena   Final  Research  Project   05.07.13     automatism.    To  the  extent  that  Allan  Kaprow  can  be  understood  as  the  primary   figure  in  the  development  of  the  Happening  as  a  pre-­‐Fluxus  event-­‐based  medium,   this  is  the  historical  legacy  within  which  Fluxus  practice  should  be  understood  as   operating.   By  conceiving  of  Pollock’s  painting  as  performative  and  chance-­‐based  in   virtue  of  the  manner  in  which  his  materials  imposed  extraneous  limitations  on  his   ability  to  engage  in  a  compositional  approach  that  was  self-­‐aware  and  intentional   even  if  he  had  desired  for  it  to  be  so,  Kaprow  and  the  others  were  able  to  arrive  at  an   understanding  of  art  as  being  object-­‐based  to  one  that  based  in  situational  events,   found  materials  and  a  general  theatricality  in  execution.    This  awareness  was  what   propelled  Kaprow  to  take  Cage’s  ‘Composition  as  Experimental  Music’  course  at  the   New  School  in  1957.    Once  in  Cage’s  class,  Kaprow  began  to  develop  his  ideas,  both   through  Cage’s  teaching  as  well  as  through  his  interactions  with  the  other  students.     For  Kaprow,  the  most  important  idea  that  Cage  imparted  upon  him  during  this  class   was  the  possibility  of  comingling  desperate  unrelated  materials  and  compositional   structures  together  within  the  same  work.    The  synthesis  of  these  ideas  that  he   developed  in  the  class  enabled  him  to  conceive  of  the  idea  of  the  happening,  the  very   first  of  which  he  staged  in  Cage’s  class.     While  the  most  commonly  recounted  historical  narrative  of  artistic   development  in  the  immediate  post-­‐war  period  is  characterized  by  an  increasingly   foregrounded  deployment  of  chance  and  indeterminacy  (be  it  the  perceptual   conditionality  of  minimalism,  conceptualism’s  distantiation  of  the  idea  from  the   work  itself  and  the  spontaneity  and  unrepeatability  of  happenings),  it  is  important   to  note  that  while  Cage  may  represent  the  penultimate  culmination  of  this  tendency   at  the  earliest  point  of  integration  into  the  language  of  visual  art,  Cage’s  work  in   these  areas  represents  merely  one  piece  of  a  broader  dialogue  that  had  been   developing  around  the  nature  of  chance  and  indeterminacy  and  the  function  that   they  may  have  in  the  creation  of  visual  art.  

 

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Kyle  Riley   ArtHist  5974   Prof.  Gena   Final  Research  Project   05.07.13     At  first  appearance  Cage  would  seem  to  be  the  most  important  catalyst  in  the   development  of  Fluxus,  considering  that  artists  like  Brecht,  Kaprow  and  George   Maciunas  all  essentially  met  for  the  first  time  while  attending  Cage’s  ‘Experimental   Composition’  class  immediately  prior  to  engaging  in  the  series  of  actions  and   performances  that  would  later  cohere  around  Fluxus.    For  these  three  artists,  who   arguably  played  the  most  important  roles  in  the  early  genesis  of  the  practices  that   would  later  become  subsumed  under  the  moniker  of  Fluxus,  the  exact  nature  of   their  relationship  with  Cage  is  in  fact  much  more  complicated  and  indirect.    By   analysis  of  their  work,  it  becomes  clear  that  Cage  was  not  looked  upon  as  the   originator  or  these  ideas  (at  least  not  entirely),  but  rather  as  an  important   transitional  figure.     These  artists  had  already  largely  conceived  of  the  importance  of  chance  and   indeterminacy  in  their  own  respective  ways.    That  said,  however,  what  Cage  did   provide  was  the  necessary  motivation  to  take  their  interest  in  chance  off  of  the   canvas  and  the  musical  score,  as  it  were,  and  embed  it  within  the  scope  of  physical   experience.    It  was  not  about  the  direct  transmission  of  ideas.    Rather,  it  was  about   providing  these  artists  with  a  way  to  synthesize  these  ideas  together  into  something   new.    To  most  effectively  chart  this  development,  I  want  to  consider  how  Brecht   initially  arrived  at  the  idea  of  chance  operations  as  a  compositional  device,  and  how   he  mediated  Cage’s  ideas  with  his  own  understanding  of  the  potentialities  for   performativity  as  a  critical  method  within  the  domain  of  visual  art.   Like  Kaprow,  Brecht  began  his  career  as  a  painter,  for  whom  Jackson  Pollock   also  offered  the  most  effective  model  for  the  advancement  of  art  through  the   destabilization  and  displacement  of  the  idea  of  intentionality  and  artistic   authorship.    For  him,  as  with  Kaprow,  the  gestural  character  of  Pollock’s   compositional  approach  proved  a  powerful  example  of  a  chance-­‐based  procedure   that  could  provide  the  necessary  point  of  engagement  with  Cage’s  ideas.    Being   conscious  of  the  historical  precedents  for  his  thoughts  on  indeterminacy  was  

 

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Kyle  Riley   ArtHist  5974   Prof.  Gena   Final  Research  Project   05.07.13     important  for  Brecht.    In  1957,  the  same  year  he  met  Cage,  Brecht  wrote  ‘Chance-­‐ Imagery,’  an  essay  that  outlines  a  historical  narrative  of  the  development  of  chance   within  art  and  science.    This  narrative  included  Wassily  Kandinsky’s  improvisational   paintings  and  free  automatism  in  Dada  and  Surrealism,  but  it  was  Pollock  that   represented  the  fullest  immersion  into  the  logic  of  indeterminacy.       Particularly,  what  interested  Brecht  and  the  other  Fluxus  artists  was  not   Pollock’s  use  of  free  association  and  later  a  self-­‐described  unconscious  method  of   paint  application,  but  rather  it  was  the  technical  dimension  of  Pollock’s  practice  that   Brecht  found  most  inspiring.    Brecht’s  earliest  works  were  chance-­‐based  paintings   of  ink  done  on  crumbled  bed  sheets.    Like  Pollock,  Brecht  conceived  of  the  chance-­‐ based  dimension  of  this  work  as  emanating  from  his  inability  to  control  the   materiality  of  the  ink  and  bed  sheets.    As  with  Pollock,  Brecht  was  always  able  to   engage  in  varying  degrees  of  conscious  composition  should  he  choose  but  the   structural  limitations  imposed  by  the  materials  that  he  used  (for  example,  the   viscosity  of  the  ink,  the  porousness  of  the  sheets  and  the  particular  way  that  they   would  crumble)  were  all  ultimately  beyond  Brecht’s  control.    For  these  artists,  the   important  element  of  Pollock’s  drip  paintings  was  the  way  in  which  his  practice   relied  upon  self-­‐imposed  structural  limitations  that  would  problematize  Pollock’s   ability  to  realize  his  compositional  decisions.   This  was  a  dimension  of  indeterminacy  that  Brecht  failed  to  see  in  Cage’s   work,  so  he  sought  to  synthesize  these  two  concepts  together  into  a  single  coherent   method.    This  was  a  very  typical  sentiment  for  the  other  artists  in  Cage’s  class.     Describing  this  very  situation,  Stan  Brakhage  has  stated  that  Cage  had  “laid  down   the  greatest  aesthetic  net  of  this  century.    Only  those  who  honestly  encounter  it   (understand  it  also  to  the  point  of  being  able,  while  chafing  at  its  bits,  to  call  it   ‘marvelous’)  and  manage  to  survive  (i.e.,  go  beyond  it)  will  be  the  artists  of  our   contemporary  present.”2    As  was  readily  apparent  to  these  artists,  the  dialectical                                                                                                                   2  Kahn,  225    

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Kyle  Riley   ArtHist  5974   Prof.  Gena   Final  Research  Project   05.07.13     logic  of  avant-­‐gardism  broke  down  when  they  aligned  themselves  with  Cage.    There   was  no  need  to  reject  his  ideas  in  their  attempts  to  move  beyond  them  because  of   the  wide  latitude  his  methods  allowed  for  a  variety  of  different  critical  approaches.     Cage’s  methods  created  spaces  for  openendedness,  and  when  taken  to  their  logical   extremes,  pushing  them  to  their  fullest,  they  revealed  themselves  to  be  applicable  to   many  domains  of  artistic  practice  beyond  simple  musical  composition.   This  can  be  clearly  seen  by  examining  Cage’s  methods  of  instruction  during   his  ‘Experimental  Composition’  course  at  the  New  School.    Cage  commonly   employed  toy  instruments  as  vehicles  for  musical  experimentation  precisely   because  they  required  no  prior  musical  training.    They  thereby  functioned  as  tools   for  developing  experimental  approaches  toward  creation  itself  devoid  of  any   attachment  to  a  particular  medium.    The  effectiveness  of  this  approach  becomes   apparent  when  one  considers  that  of  all  his  students  who  would  become  aligned   with  Fluxus,  only  Brecht  had  a  background  in  musical  composition.    The  rest  were   artists  who  had  arrived  at  a  similar  interest  in  chance  as  a  means  of  exploratory   thinking  within  the  context  of  the  visual  arts.   The  most  fundamental  difference  between  Cage  and  the  Fluxus  artists  he   worked  with  was  not  so  much  any  particular  inability  on  the  part  of  Cage  to  foresee   the  applicability  of  his  methods  beyond  the  parameters  of  musical  composition,  but   rather  that  he  willfully  restricted  his  considerations  to  the  domain  of  music  because   of  the  promise  that  he  had  made  to  Schoenberg  to  dedicate  his  artistic  pursuits  to   musical  composition.    The  immediate  applicability  of  Cage’s  ideas  about  chance  and   indeterminacy  beyond  this  context  can  be  clearly  seen  in  his  later  visual  works,   most  notably  with  his  exhibition  project  rolywholyover.    Kaprow,  Brecht  and   Maciunas  were  willing  to  consider  Cage’s  ideas  in  terms  of  broader  applicability   from  the  beginning.    Perhaps  the  most  important  tenet  that  these  artists  drew  upon   from  Cage’s  teachings  was  his  idea  of  a  singular  ‘all-­‐sound’  which  posited  that  sound  

 

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Kyle  Riley   ArtHist  5974   Prof.  Gena   Final  Research  Project   05.07.13     is  everywhere  (as  made  evident  by  Cage’s  visit  to  the  anechoic  chamber  at  Harvard   University  in  1951),  and  that,  by  extension,  all  sound  is  capable  of  being  music.     Cage  arrived  at  this  realization  through  his  development  of  Schoenberg’s   ideas  regarding  chromatic  composition  as  a  method  from  moving  beyond  the   traditional  criteria  for  musical  relationality  that  organizes  the  principles  of   harmonic  composition.    What  distinguishes  the  role  of  this  idea  in  Cage’s  work  in   comparison  to  the  work  of  the  later  Fluxus  artists  is  that  Cage  composed  these   atonal  sound  events  together  into  singular  works  that  expanded  the  traditionally   reductive  ideas  of  musical  relationality  by  the  structural  proximity  of  these  events  to   one  another  within  the  composition.    To  be  more  specific,  Cage  used  the  event  as  a   device  to  broaden  understandings  of  the  composition  as  a  totality  by  problematizing   its  internal  dynamics.   Brecht  and  the  other  Fluxus  artists  used  this  same  principle  but  they   terminated  the  process  with  the  conception  of  the  singular  event.      Perhaps  precisely   because  so  many  of  them  came  from  non-­‐musical  backgrounds,  they  were  able  to   engage  with  Cage’s  compositional  philosophy  in  a  way  that  didn’t  tie  it  directly  to  a   system  (like  music)  that  fundamentally  necessitates  relationality  in  virtue  of  its   linear  organization  as  a  time-­‐based  medium.    So  Fluxus  conceived  of  the  sound   event  as  a  singularity,  rather  than  as  a  mere  component  of  a  larger  structure.    An   example  of  this  interest  in  isolating  sounds  can  be  found  in  Brecht’s  Drip  Music.    In   Drip  Music,  as  with  other  Fluxus  music,  there  is  still  an  attempt  to  link  sound  but  this   is  executed  in  a  more  problematic  way  because  it  does  not  maintain  the  importance   of  the  sound  itself  that  one  finds  in  Cage’s  work.    Rather,  Fluxus  artists  used  sound   utterances  as  a  way  of  referencing  to  things  that  were  external  to  the  composition   itself.       Even  those  Fluxus  artists  who  still  operated  within  the  confines  of  musical   composition  would  problematize  the  concept  of  compositional  relationality  by   concentrating  on  the  note  as  a  singularity  but  elongating  it  into  a  single  work  (as  

 

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Kyle  Riley   ArtHist  5974   Prof.  Gena   Final  Research  Project   05.07.13     with  La  Monte  Young),  so  that  what  is  accentuated  is  not  the  idea  of  linear   narrativity  as  much  as  the  destabilization  of  this  entire  process.    This  still   demonstrates  an  interest  in  comprehending  sound,  but  sound  as  a  discrete  unit   rather  than  as  a  component  of  a  larger  compositional  totality.    What  both  of  these   approaches  demonstrate  is  the  general  interest  on  the  part  of  Fluxus  artists  to   explore  the  threshold  conditions  of  audibility.3    Interestingly,  this  is  accomplished   by  approaching  sound  from  within  various  points  along  a  continuum  of  proximity  to   the  sound  itself.   This  interrogation  of  sound’s  integrity  was  not  engaged  through  a  simple   rejection  of  Cage’s  ideas,  but  through  a  continuation  of  Cage’s  ideas  regarding  big   and  small  sounds.    Cage  collapsed  the  distinction  between  noise  and  the  more   traditional  parameters  of  musically  appropriate  aurality,  meaning  that  these  so-­‐ called  small  or  “low”  sounds  were  not  organized  hierarchically  in  relation  to  the   larger  high  sounds.    This  relationship  between  these  distinctive  terms  also  function   on  the  level  of  the  relative  difference  between  the  engagement  of  volume  on  the  part   of  Cage  and  the  Fluxus  artists.    Cage  favored  small  sounds  over  large  sounds,  but  for   many  in  his  ‘Experimental  Composition’  class,  this  dedication  was  an  unresolved   inconsistency  in  relation  to  the  avocations  made  in  his  personal  philosophy  towards   the  fundamental  character  of  sounds.    As  former  student  Dick  Higgins  has  described,   “it  was  in  the  air  in  the  late  1950s  to  consider  the  balances  of  sounds.    The  small   sounds  that  John  Cage  tended  to  favor  didn’t  seem  complete  to  a  lot  of  people.    Many   of  us  wanted  sounds  to  have  a  real  physicality  that  sometimes  couldn’t  be  perceived   in  the  small  sounds,  as  well  as  the  larger  ones.”4   This  interest  in  the  physicality  of  sound  is  what  propelled  the  Fluxus  artists   to  utilize  sound  as  both  acoustic  utterance  and  symbolic  referent  to  objects  and   phenomena  in  the  real  world.    This  is  not  to  say  that  Fluxus  was  unconcerned  with                                                                                                                   3  Kahn,  226   4  Kahn,  227    

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Kyle  Riley   ArtHist  5974   Prof.  Gena   Final  Research  Project   05.07.13     the  small  sound.    They,  like  Cage,  were  interested  in  both  the  real  and  imaginary   within  the  domain  of  auditory  phenomena,  but  whereas  Cage  relied  upon   technology  to  work  through  the  idea  of  the  possibility  of  inaudibility  (again   demonstrated  by  Cage’s  experience  in  the  anechoic  chamber),  Fluxus  artists  felt  no   such  compulsion  to  pursue  Cage’s  idea  of  pan-­‐aurality  and  instead  chose  to  occupy   the  ambiguous  space  between  the  parameters  of  so-­‐called  real  and   imaginary/impossible  sound.    This  again  demonstrates  the  divergence  in  the   dedications  of  these  two  positions.    Cage  was  concerned  with  exploring  sound  and   the  limits  of  audibility,  and  Fluxus  artists  were  interested  in  thinking  about  precisely   what  Cage’s  motivation  meant  and  how  his  thinking  on  the  matter  could  propel   them  toward  new  conceptions  of  aurality.   Brecht’s  Event  scores  from  1960-­‐2  were  meant  to  tap  into  precisely  this  type   of  expanded  aurality.    Brecht’s  Event  scores  were  brief  texts  that  often  contained   little  more  than  lists  and  cryptic  instructions  that  used  open-­‐ended  laterally   organized  durational  structuring  and  various  strategies  for  the  complication  of   Cage’s  division  between  audibility  and  non-­‐audibility.    Given  this,  it  is  no  wonder   that  the  Event  score  would  become  the  primary  tactic  of  the  Fluxus  artist’s   performative  strategy.    Describing  his  own  artwork  in  1957,  Brecht  states  that  his   art  is  ‘a  deeply  personal,  infinitely  complex  and  essentially  mysterious  exploration   of  experience.    No  words  can  ever  touch  it.”5    It  is  interesting  that  Brecht  should   describe  his  interest  in  art  as  being  so  personal  that  it  somehow  exists  beyond  the   capacity  for  verbal  description  in  that  it  is  precisely  through  the  vehicle  of  the   written  word  that  he  chose  to  communicate  his  instructions  for  its  realization.   In  keeping  with  the  idea  that  they  describe  events,  even  when  the  scores  do   not  convey  enough  information  to  be  performed  in  any  fundamentally  coherent   way,  they  themselves  still  characterize  the  idea  of  temporality  through  the  words   that  Brecht  has  chosen  to  include  in  their  instructions.    A  common  feature  of  the                                                                                                                   5  Ouzounian,  180    

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Kyle  Riley   ArtHist  5974   Prof.  Gena   Final  Research  Project   05.07.13     scores  is  some  reference  to  an  object  or  phenomenon,  a  description  of  a  phase   change  (as  in  turning  something  from  on  to  off  or  describing  the  transition  from  ice   to  steam)  and  a  type  of  action  that  is  insinuated  to  instantiate  this  change.    Examples   of  these  particularly  concise  scores  are:     Three  Aqueous  Events  (Summer,  1961).   -­‐

ice  

-­‐

water  

-­‐

steam  

  Two  Vehicle  Events  (Summer,  1961)   -­‐

start/stop  

  and  Word  Event  (Spring,  1961)   -­‐

exit  

  What  is  interesting  is  that  these  Event  scores  communicate  their  schemes   through  language,  but  what  they  are  meant  to  describe  or  elicit  still  fundamentally   lies  outside  the  purview  of  language’s  descriptive  capacity.    There  is  a  dimension  to   each  score  that  is  not  communicated  by  the  instructions.    Perhaps  this  sparseness  of   text  is  exactly  what  allows  these  scores  to  operate  at  the  level  of  the  intensely   personal  as  Brecht  claimed  they  should.    They  are  fundamentally  open-­‐ended  and   the  relationality  of  their  terms  is  open  to  individual  interpretation.    Brecht’s  Event   scores  can  therefore  be  understood  as  emanating  largely  from  the  musical  scores   that  Brecht  composed  while  studying  with  Cage  at  the  New  School.    While  studying   Cage’s  theories  regarding  the  totalization  of  experience,  Brecht  began  to  consider   Cage’s  interest  in  this  type  of  unification  as  fundamentally  incomplete.    He  was   skeptical  towards  music  and  towards  attempts  to  compose  it  in  a  way  that  collapsed  

 

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Kyle  Riley   ArtHist  5974   Prof.  Gena   Final  Research  Project   05.07.13     individual  events  together  into  a  coherent  whole.    This  mistrust  of  coherence  is   precisely  what  motivated  Brecht’s  Event  scores.   By  being  incomplete,  by  withholding  information,  Brecht’s  scores  enable  the   performers  to  approach  an  understanding  of  the  unified  reality  that  Cage  attempted   to  highlight  through  his  own  work,  but  for  Brecht  that  reality  was  composed  of   disharmonious  relationships.    Brecht’s  mistrust  of  language  becomes  clear  when   one  examines  the  degree  to  which  his  Event  scores  interrogate  linguistic   inconsistencies  and  communicative  inadequacies.    In  searching  for  a  possible  line  of   causality  that  would  lead  Brecht  to  this  idea  of  problematized  language  as  a   compositional  device,  one  cannot  help  but  return  to  Cage’s  4’33’’.    It  is  worth   considering  4’33’’  as  a  similarly  organized  verbal  score  due  to  the  fact  that  the   intended  execution  of  its  three  movements  are  described  only  by  the  single  word   ‘tacet.’    While  obviously  not  operating  on  the  same  level  of  textuality  that  the  Event   scores  do,  it  does  apply  its  notational  system  in  a  very  unconventional  way  in  virtue   of  the  specific  function  of  this  single  instructive  command,  even  though  that   notation  may  be  comprised  in  a  relatively  standard  way.   This  is  precisely  where  it  began  for  Brecht  as  well.    Brecht  maintained  extensive   notebooks  from  the  period  between  1958  and  1960  that  reveal  a  series  of  notes  on   particular  pieces  of  music,  documentation  of  studies  into  alternative  notational   systems  and  several  original  compositions  that  also  employ  these  techniques.6    In   keeping  with  his  interest  in  list  making  that  we  find  in  his  later  Event  scores,  one  of   Brecht’s  notebooks  contains  a  series  of  notes  on  individual  musical  works  all   organized  under  the  heading  ‘Study  Material.’    This  list  includes  Anton  Webern’s   Symphony  Op.  21  (1928),  Karlheinz  Stockhausen’s  Klaviersteucke  XI  (1956),  an   unnamed  composition  by  Christian  Wolff  and  Cage’s  Music  of  Changes  (1951).   It  bears  consideration  that  Brecht  chose  to  consider  only  Cage’s  Music  of   Changes,  in  that  it  was  Cage’s  first  fully  indeterminate  work.    This  demonstrates                                                                                                                   6  Ouzounian,  201    

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Kyle  Riley   ArtHist  5974   Prof.  Gena   Final  Research  Project   05.07.13     precisely  what  Brecht  had  hoped  to  glean  from  Cage,  namely  his  method  of  change-­‐ based  procedures.    Interestingly,  Brecht’s  notebook  also  contains  a  single  non-­‐ musical  entry,  ‘Huang  Po  doctrine,’  which  references  the  text  The  Huang  Po  Doctrine   of  Universal  Mind  written  by  the  9th  century  Chinese  Zen  Buddhist  monk  Huangbo   Xiyun.7    Zen  was  a  significantly  influential  concept  for  Brecht,  and  while  he  and  Cage   discovered  it  independent  of  one  another,  it  is  interesting  that  they  were  both   similarly  attracted  to  Zen  because  of  its  concept  of  non-­‐intentionality.       Another  of  Brecht’s  notebooks  shows  the  transition  of  his  thinking  from   atypical  notational  systems  towards  an  interest  in  calculating  individual  instances  of   pitch  change  in  particular  works.    This  demonstrates  Brecht’s  transition  toward   thinking  about  elements  within  musical  compositions  as  individual  events,  and   Brecht  didn’t  stop  with  pitch.    His  notebook  also  describes  his  intention  to  similarly   chart  changes  in  frequency,  amplitude  and  duration,  breaking  down  the  totality  of   the  composition  and  expanding  the  individual  instances  of  specific  gestures  and   articulations  within  the  works.   What  this  represents  is  Brecht’s  attempt  at  thinking  about  performativity   through  the  language  of  music.    In  an  interview  with  Art  International  conducted  in   1967,  Brecht  describes  the  ideas  he  was  developing  at  the  time  by  asking:  “Suppose   that  music  isn’t  just  sound.    Then  what  could  it  be?    And  thinking  this,  I  made  a   series  of  propositions.    For  example,  a  string  quartet  where  the  players  simply   shakes  hands.    They  have  their  musical  instruments  and  they  sit  as  they  would  to   play  a  quartet,  but  they  just  shake  hands.    I  also  wrote  a  score  for  a  symphony  that   simply  says  ‘turning.’    This  can  be  realized  either  by  turning  or  by  observing   something  turning.    If  the  essential  part  of  music  is  time,  then  all  things  that  take   place  in  time  could  be  music.”8      

                                                                                                                7  Ouzounian,  201   8  Ouzounian,  202    

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Kyle  Riley   ArtHist  5974   Prof.  Gena   Final  Research  Project   05.07.13     It  is  important  to  point  out  that  Brecht  did  not  arrive  at  his  idea  for  the  Event   score  solely  through  his  thinking  about  expanded  notational  systems  and  the   dimension  of  time  in  music.    Like  Maciunas,  Brecht’s  interest  in  indeterminacy  and   chance-­‐based  procedures  was  also  strongly  influenced  by  his  background  in  science.     Brecht’s  15  years  of  experience  as  a  professional  chemist  would  irrevocably  inform   his  specific  interest  in  uncertainty  and  his  appreciation  for  experimentation.    This   would  have  been  so  because  it  was  already  a  part  of  his  life  in  that  it  characterized   much  of  his  scientific  work  that  had  predated  his  work  with  Cage,  particularly   considering  that  Brecht  worked  full  time  as  a  researcher  for  the  Johnson  &  Johnson   laboratories  in  New  Jersey  at  the  same  time  that  he  was  taking  Cage’s  course  at  the   New  School.9   Brecht  was  interested  in  establishing  parallels  between  art,  music  and   science,  conceiving  of  uncertainty  to  be  a  fundamental  characteristic  implicit  in  any   meaningful  approach  to  either  discipline.    Furthermore,  the  specific  entry  points  of   Brecht’s  analysis  into  this  idea  was  not  limited  to  just  chemistry  and  music.    In   keeping  with  his  interest  in  lists,  in  1958  Brecht  had  mapped  out  several  of  the  areas   of  scientific  and  philosophical  inquiry  from  which  he  was  hoping  to  draw.    This  list   included  such  concepts  as  Gestalt  psychology,  the  unified  field  theory,  space-­‐time   relativity,  matter-­‐energy  equivalence  and  oriental  thought.     So,  from  the  beginning  Brecht  had  demonstrated  an  interest  in   interdisciplineity,  materiality,  time  and  discrete  instances  that  would  all  culminate   in  his  later  Event  scores.    For  example,  an  early  Brecht  piece  titled  Elements  (June   1958)  is  composed  for  cellophane,  voice  and  mallet  and  uses  a  score  that  visually   resembles  a  periodic  table.    Burette  Music  (April  1959)  also  references  chemistry   and  uses  liquid  that  drips  into  a  series  of  burettes  at  varying  rates.    Confetti  Music   (July  1958)  uses  a  score  that  is  written  onto  a  set  of  cards  that  when  used  together   create  a  complex  set  of  instructions  for  the  instrumentation.                                                                                                                   9  Ouzounian,  202    

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Kyle  Riley   ArtHist  5974   Prof.  Gena   Final  Research  Project   05.07.13     Describing  these  compositions,  Brecht  has  stated  that  ‘the  sound  becomes  a   projection  of  the  record  of  a  state  (like  an  abstract-­‐expressionist  painting).’10    These   pieces  are  about  accentuating  individual  events  by  describing  a  phase  of  being   (on/off;  hot/cold;  solid/gas)  and  then  stringing  them  together,  creating  the  image  of   a  process.    Cage  had  described  this  exact  same  approach  to  composition  in  a  well-­‐ known  lecture  from  1958  titled  ‘Composition  as  Process:  Indeterminacy,’  which   Brecht  attended.11    Brecht  made  reference  to  these  ideas  in  his  notebooks,  and   through  his  synthesis  of  Cage’s  ideas  with  his  own  regarding  relativity  and   probability  drawn  from  his  background  in  science  and  mathematics,  Brecht  was   able  to  arrive  at  his  own  idea  of  the  Event  score.   As  I  believe  I  have  established,  as  Brecht’s  compositions  developed  there  was   an  increasing  distantiation  from  his  dedication  to  the  importance  of  sound.    In   keeping  with  this  development,  Brecht’s  interest  in  the  singular  auditory   phenomenon  rather  than  the  totality  of  the  composition  factored  into  an   overarching  interest  in  the  process  itself  and  the  physicality  of  the  materials  he   chose  to  use.    In  this  way,  while  originating  fundamentally  from  Cage,  Brecht   ultimately  moved  away  from  him  and  away  from  an  understanding  of   compositionality  that  is  fundamentally  tied  to  music  specifically.   The  concept  of  the  event  does  have  its  roots  in  Cage’s  teachings.    In  fact,   Cage’s  discussion  of  music  as  ‘events  in  sound-­‐space’  had  been  an  infamous   influence  on  Brecht,  so  much  so  that  Brecht  copied  Cage’s  quote  into  his  notebook   verbatim.12    Brecht’s  first  Event  score  was  composed  in  the  summer  of  1960.    Titled   Motor  Vehicle  Sundown  (Event),  which  was  dedicated  to  Cage,  Brecht  created  a  set  of   cards  that  contained  instructions  for  performing  various  actions  with  parked  cars   by  an  unspecified  number  of  participants.    The  cards  allow  for  randomization  of  the   total  ‘composition,’  the  structural  parameters  of  which  are  also  decided  by  the                                                                                                                   10  Ouzounian,  204   11  Ouzounian,  204   12  Ouzounian,  205    

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Kyle  Riley   ArtHist  5974   Prof.  Gena   Final  Research  Project   05.07.13     performers  as  there  is  no  prescribed  duration  for  the  event.    Again,  this  idea  of   duration  was  very  important  for  both  Cage  and  Brecht.    Duration  was  one  of  the  five   dimensions  of  sound  that  Cage  described  in  his  experimental  composition  course.     At  that  point  Cage  had  already  demonstrated  an  interest  in  composing  musical   structures  around  the  idea  of  duration  rather  than  harmonic  relationships.    This   allowed  him  to  use  these  ‘events  in  sound-­‐space’  that  would  include  both  auditory   and  non-­‐auditory  phenomena  (here  most  obviously  employed  as  silence).   In  July  1960,  Brecht  began  to  develop  a  new  description  of  the  Events  by   referring  to  them  as  ‘psycho-­‐physical  structures.’13    This  was  something  that  he   found  to  be  guiding  all  of  the  great  speculative  research  of  the  period,  and  that  his   work  in  music  and  visual  and  performance-­‐based  art  would  work  to  accentuate  this   broader  scope  of  inquiry.    By  1961,  he  was  composing  Event  scores  that  were   incredibly  concise  and  lacking  in  any  substantial  clarification  or  direction,  which  I   believe  brought  him  closer  to  approaching  the  conceptual  models  he  had  developed   in  his  earlier  research.   For  Brecht,  Cage  wasn’t  a  catalyst  for  innovation  so  much  as  a  point  on  a   continuum  that  characterized  the  development  of  art  and  science  towards  an   embracement  of  chance-­‐based  experimentation.    For  Brecht,  all  of  these  means  of   inquiry  were  somehow  equivalent,  and  it  is  precisely  through  considering  the  Event   score  as  such  a  form  of  speculative  inquiry  into  the  limits  of  aurality  that  later   Fluxus  artists  were  able  to  take  up  Brecht’s  project  and  push  it  further.    A  good   example  of  this  continuation  of  Brecht’s  transgression  past  the  limitations  he  found   in  Cage’s  method  would  be  La  Monte  Young’s  work  in  the  early  1960s.    Works  like   Composition  1960  #2,  which  dictates  that  the  performer  build  a  small  fire  in  front  of   the  audience,  and  Composition  1960  #5,  which  instructs  that  the  performer  release  a   butterfly  into  the  audience  during  the  performance,  both  demonstrate  Young’s   interest  in  simultaneously  instantiating  audible  and  inaudible  sound.                                                                                                                   13  Ouzounian,  206    

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Kyle  Riley   ArtHist  5974   Prof.  Gena   Final  Research  Project   05.07.13     These  are  both  Event  scores  as  Brecht  had  developed  them.    Composition   1960  #2  is  most  akin  to  Cage’s  4’33’’  in  that  it  is  a  performative  gesture  tied  to  a  very   specific  duration  (here,  the  time  it  takes  for  the  fire  to  die).    Moreover,  what  ties   these  two  pieces  together  is  the  way  in  which  they  engage  in  indeterminate   composition  by  creating  situations  that  produce  sound  events  that  are  entirely   beyond  the  control  of  the  composer  or  performer.    With  4’33’’,  Cage  attempted  to   demonstrate  the  reality  of  pan-­‐auralism  and  the  impossibility  of  true  silence,  as  well   as  the  idea  that  these  small  sounds  can  and  should  be  considered  as  music.    For   Young’s  compositions,  the  point  is  to  also  create  a  scenario  where  the  composition   itself  presumably  makes  no  sound  while  the  primary  sound  events  arise  from  the   audience,  but  the  fact  that  the  fire  also  emits  sound  that  is  barely  audible,  if  at  all,  is   also  a  major  component  of  this  piece.   Brecht  and  Young  clearly  demonstrate  Fluxus’s  use  of  the  Event  score  in   order  to  play  with  the  push  and  pull  that  exists  within  the  tension  of  Cage’s  small   sound/big  sound  binary.    They  are  playing  with  the  idea  of  a  threshold  for  audibility   that  Cage  denies,  seeking  to  occupy  a  space  outside  of  these  limitations  in  order.    For   both  artists,  this  is  accomplished  by  experimenting  with  the  problematization  of  the   correspondence  between  performers,  auditory  and  non-­‐auditory  content  and  even   the  relationality  of  the  terms  in  the  score  itself.    At  each  point,  what  ties  them   together  is  an  interest  in  withholding  information,  be  it  auditory/sensory,   conceptual/programmatic  or  otherwise.    This  impulse  is  in  complete  contradiction   to  Cage’s  own  interest  in  totalizing  the  composition.    All  the  fundamental  terms  are   present  in  each  approach,  but  what  ultimately  differs  is  their  relative  perspectives   on  the  importance  of  containment.   In  conclusion,  I  hope  to  have  demonstrated,  Cage  attempted  to  teach  Brecht   the  importance  of  sound.    However,  Brecht  took  this  idea  to  what  he  understood  as   its  logical  conclusion,  and  arrived  at  a  method  of  composition  that  was  entirely   different,  although  in  principle  Brecht  considered  them  to  be  one  and  the  same.    I  

 

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Kyle  Riley   ArtHist  5974   Prof.  Gena   Final  Research  Project   05.07.13     began  this  research  intending  to  find  evidence  that  Fluxus  had  developed  from  a   more  concise  appropriation  of  Cage’s  ideas,  particularly  considering  that  the  entire   American  dimension  of  the  movement  had  originated  in  Cage’s  ‘Experimental   Composition’  class,  but  what  I  found  was  a  much  more  complicated  relationship.    It   is  fair  to  say  that  Cage  was  a  catalyst,  but  I  think  I  was  also  expecting  to  find  that  we   well,  but  what  I  believe  I  found  was  something  different.       Again,  Brecht  considered  his  Event  score  to  be  the  accurate  culmination  of   Cage’s  ideas,  and  to  the  degree  that  the  Event  score  would  become  the  primary   vehicle  for  Fluxus  artworks,  it  is  fair  to  consider  the  entire  movement  more  or  less   within  this  context.    I  was  initially  unsure  how  to  consider  this  relationship.    I   considered  it  a  more  critical  assessment  realized  through  a  complete  appropriation,   in  a  similar  vein  as  the  way  Donald  Judd  and  Robert  Morris  conceived  of  their   minimalist  sculpture  as  the  complete  fulfillment  of  Clement  Greenberg’s  formalist   theory.    But  I’m  not  sure  that  that  is  true.    I  think  Cage  knew  precisely  what   capability  his  ideas  had  in  this  capacity  all  along,  and  that  he  had  consciously   restricted  himself  to  the  domain  of  musical  composition  rather  than  exploring  his   concepts  through  visual  art.       Those  ideas  were  always  there,  but  Cage  chose  to  avoid  them.    I  think  this  is  a   fair  assessment,  considering  Cage’s  later  work  in  visual  art.    In  the  end,  my  research   has  validated  my  initial  assessment  that  Cage  had  functioned  as  a  principle  catalytic   figure  in  the  theoretical  development  of  the  Fluxus  movement,  but  the  precise   conditions  of  that  relationship  and  how  the  Fluxus  artists  conceived  of  their   applicability  in  synthesis  with  the  similarly  indeterminate  and  chance-­‐based   dimension  of  Abstract  Expressionism  proved  to  be  much  more  complex  than  I  had   initially  imagined.    In  conclusion,  without  Cage  there  would  be  no  Fluxus,  but  the   manner  in  which  this  is  so  is  incredibly  multifarious  and  is  conceivable  through  a   consideration  of  the  manner  in  which  Cage’s  work  demonstrated  a  simultaneous  

 

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Kyle  Riley   ArtHist  5974   Prof.  Gena   Final  Research  Project   05.07.13     position  as  culminating  fulfillment  of  pre-­‐Cage  ideas  and  a  significant  point  of   further  transgression.      

 

                                                 

 

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Kyle  Riley   ArtHist  5974   Prof.  Gena   Final  Research  Project   05.07.13      

Works  Consulted     1.

Anderson,  Simon,  et  al,  In  The  Spirit  of  Fluxus.  Minneapolis:  Walker  Art      

 

Center,  1993.  

  2.

Dezeuze,  Anna,  “Origins  of  the  Fluxus  Score:  From  Indeterminacy  to  the     ‘Do-­‐It-­‐Yourself’  Artwork,”  Performance  Research  Vol.  7  Iss.  3  (2002):     78-­‐94.  

  3.  

Higgins,  Hannah,  Fluxus  Experience.    Berkeley:  University  of  California  Press,      

 

 

2002.  

  4.  

Joseph,  Branden  W,  Beyond  the  Dream  Syndicate:  Tony  Conrad  and  the  Arts      after  Cage.    New  York:  Zone  Books,  2008.  

  5.  

Kahn,  Douglas,  Noise,  Water,  Meat:  A  History  of  Sound  in  the  Arts.    Cambridge:    The  MIT  Press,  2001.  

  6.  

Kellein,  Thomas,  The  Dream  of  Fluxus  –  George  Maciunas:  An  Artist’s     Biography.    London:  Edition  Hansjoerg  Mayer,  2007.  

  7.  

LaBelle,  Brandon,  Background  Noise:  Perspectives  on  Sound  Art.    New  York:    Bloomsbury  Publishing,  2006.          

  8.  

Marter,  Joan,  ed.,  Off  Limits:  Rutgers  University  and  the  Avant-­‐Garde,  1957-­‐  

 

 

1963.    New  Brunswick:  Rutgers  University  Press,  1999.  

 

 

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Kyle  Riley   ArtHist  5974   Prof.  Gena   Final  Research  Project   05.07.13     9.   Ouzounian,  Gascia,  “The  uncertainty  of  Experience:  On  George  Brecht’s  Event      Scores,”  Journal  of  Visual  Culture  Vol.  10  No.  2  (2011):  198-­‐211.     10.  

Shaw-­‐Miller,  Simon,  “’Concerts  of  Everyday  Living’:  Cage,  Fluxus  and  Barthes,      

 

 

Interdisciplinary  and  Inter-­‐media  Events,”  Art  History  Vol.  19  No.  1      

 

 

(March  1996):  1-­‐25.  

  11.  

Smith,  Owen,  “Proto-­‐Fluxus  in  the  United  States  –  1959-­‐1961:  The      

 

 

Establishment  of  a  Like-­‐Minded  Community  of  Artists,”  Visible      Language  Vol.  26  No  ½  (1992):  45-­‐57.  

  12.  

Snyder,  Ellsworth,  “John  Cage  Discusses  Fluxus,”  Visible  Language  Vol.  26  No    ½  (1992):  58-­‐68.  

 

 

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