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A Something Else Reader
A previously unpublished anthology of classic texts from Something Else Press, assembled in the 1970s by Dick Higgins, with works by John Cage, Al Hansen, Claes Oldenburg and many more Conceived by poet, publisher, artist, composer and writer Dick Higgins (1938–98) in the early 1970s to celebrate Something Else Press―the legendary publishing company he founded in 1963 to showcase Fluxus and other experimental artists―this volume, which was never realized in Higgins' lifetime, collects an amazing array of 1960s avant-garde creativity. Something Else Press published some of the most radical art and literature of its time and provided a foundation and template for the artist’s book medium, which has flourished internationally since the 1960s.
The Reader features selections from rare and out-of-print Something Else classics such as Claes Oldenburg’s Store Days ; John Cage’s Notations ; Emmett Williams’ An Anthology of Concrete Poetry ; Richard Kostelanetz’s Breakthrough Fictioneers anthology; Jackson Mac Low’s pioneering poetry collection, Stanzas for Iris Lezak ; Gertrude Stein’s Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein ; Bern Porter’s I’ve Left ; Wolf Vostell’s Dé-coll/age Happenings ; Al Hansen’s A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art ; and other pamphlets and artist projects for the page by Robert Filliou, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Alison Knowles, Nam June Paik, Philip Corner, Daniel Spoerri, André Thomkins and Richard Meltzer, among others. A critical checklist/bibliography assembled by Hugh Fox and Higgins' introduction from 1973 completes the original manuscript.
The Reader features selections from rare and out-of-print Something Else classics such as Claes Oldenburg’s Store Days ; John Cage’s Notations ; Emmett Williams’ An Anthology of Concrete Poetry ; Richard Kostelanetz’s Breakthrough Fictioneers anthology; Jackson Mac Low’s pioneering poetry collection, Stanzas for Iris Lezak ; Gertrude Stein’s Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein ; Bern Porter’s I’ve Left ; Wolf Vostell’s Dé-coll/age Happenings ; Al Hansen’s A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art ; and other pamphlets and artist projects for the page by Robert Filliou, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Alison Knowles, Nam June Paik, Philip Corner, Daniel Spoerri, André Thomkins and Richard Meltzer, among others. A critical checklist/bibliography assembled by Hugh Fox and Higgins' introduction from 1973 completes the original manuscript.
351 pages, Paperback
Published November 29, 2022
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January 7, 2025
review of
the Dick Higgins edited A Something Else Reader
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - January 4-7, 2025
Reviews that're too long to post on Goodreads go, eventually, to my "Critic" website: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Critic.... . Alas, I'm getting slower & slower to create the relevant webpage - largely b/c I just don't enjoy it. Still, if you wait for a wk or 2 after this truncated review is posted & if you then go to the Critic link & search for A Something Else Reader you might find a review much longer than this.
Sometimes I think my favorite publishers are/were Something Else Press, Station Hill Press, mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press, Dalkey Press, David Tighe, & myself. That's a woefully incomplete list given that it doesn't include any Sci-Fi publishers &, in fact, doesn't include hundreds of publishers that continue to please & amaze me. Still, it puts Something Else into perspective somewhat & explains why I'd love reading this Reader so much. As I've mentioned many times, I had the honor of meeting Something Else's publisher, Dick Higgins, when he gave a reading to a small audience at my friend Marshall Reese's apartment in Baltimore in 1978 or thereabouts. Lardy! How I wish I cd revisit that experience!! Then he gave me his new catalog for the press that replaced Something Else at an Avant Garde Festival in NYC. Finally, he was in the same audience as me in 1982 for an event honoring Jackson Mac Low's 60th birthday. Higgins, alas, died at the ripe young age of 60 on October 25, 1998. He is missed, by me, &, I'm sure, many others. I had the honor of meeting Alison Knowles too, whose inadvertent comment lead to Something Else's being named as such. She's still going at age 91, thank goodness. The point being that I've crossed paths w/ a few people associatd w/ FLUXUS, to my delight b/c I LOVE Fluxus & delight in encountering things relevant. This Reader isn't entirely a Fluxus one but it's close enuf for me. When I lived in BalTimOre (roughly 1953 to 1994), Something Else Press bks were fairly easy to find so I accumulated quite a few. One I'll forever regret not picking up was Bern Porter's Found Poetry, something that I'm sure was available cheap for awhile. Many of the bks & pamphlets excerpted from are in my collection but I don't mind repeated readings from them b/c I enjoy encountering them in the greater context. Dick Higgins provided this Intro:
"Late one night in December 1963, I founded the Something Else Press by mistake. I was a writer using unorthodox forms. A composer by training (I had studied with John Cage and Henry Cowell), my instinct had led me into theater, where I had been among the very first to do Happenings (the form, not the pop term) in the late 1950s." - p 9
A part of what interests me about the above is Higgins's mention of his being a "composer by training". I'm currently reading a memoir by Emmett Williams called My Life in Flux in wch he stresses the musical aspect of the early Fluxus days. I think one of the reasons why I love Fluxus so much is b/c of its musical innovativeness - despite this, I have the impression that it's mostly thought of as an ART mvmt, the music is still too radical to find acceptance even today, over 60 yrs later. I've been primarily associated w/ a mvmt called Neoism. I find most Neoist musicians, who strive to be popular, to be dismally ignorant of music theory. At any rate, w/ the exception of myself (pause to imagine me patting myself on the back), I don't think there're (m)any Neoists who've broken any new ground - whereas almost everyone in Fluxus did. Then again, there are at least 2 Neoists other than myself who've done interesting work w/ sound & Monty Cantsin (Istvan Kantor)'s excursions into open-pop-star-hood deserve far more acclaim than they seem to get.
""We've founded a press," muddily.
"She, blasé: "Oh really, what's it called?" Unbelieving.
""Shirtsleeves Press." Good proletarian instincts.
""That's not good," she said. Call it 'Something Else.'"
"Which I did and which I've never regretted, even though it looks odd on our new nature books and science titles. Because it perfectly defined our editorial purposes." - p 11
"So the first year we did Ray Johnson's The Paper Snake, which was the first surfacing of mail art, as it's now known. And we worked on Al Hansen's A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art. And I worked up the idea of intermedia (my term). It was an attempt to systematize this apparently confused body of materials which were so basic to the arts, yet which simply didn't fit categories. The concept is basically this: work which falls conceptually between media is intermedial in it nature." - p 12
I have a copy of both of those bks. I had a brief correspondence w/ Johnson before he, alas, committed suicide. I haven't read Johnson's bk yet but I will soon. I HAVE read Hansen's bk & it's one of my favorites, chock-full of stimulating ideas.
"I thought about a series of pamphlets, nice fresh things with good stuff in them. Each of them like a one-shot magazine, maybe (little did I know how little stores would like them—covers fray, they get stolen easily, etc.), yes, a pamphlet series , I said, pouring myself a cup of water. And so the Great Bear Pamphlets were born. There were twenty—Happenings scenarios, new music, manifestos (including one by the proto-communist W. E. B. Du Bois Club), concrete poetry, chance-methodology by George Brecht (inclded in this book)." - p 14
I'm happy to report that I have many of these pamphlets, it's amazing to me that I managed to pick them up! They are, indeed, GREAT, some of my favorite reading material.
Higgins reports on a problem that's also been very common in my life:
"So whatever you did which was new, establishment types from the Village Voice and the like would say, "It's been done before," or, in exasperation, "It's Dada." Nonsense. Fluxus and Happenings had some parallels with Dada and Futurism, but nothing direct or very relevant." - p 14
Ha ha! 1st, I love that he lists "the Village Voice" as a voice for "establishment types"; 2nd, this problem of anything that's outside the mainstream being automatically dismissed as dada is one that was still ongoing when I lived in BalTimOre in the 1980s. People who knew next-to-nothing about art history (or much of anything else) were all-too-prone to refer to the only thing they did, at least, know the name of: "dada". This dismissal was a way of writing off anything outside of what they cd 'understand': viz: the stupidest LCD crap out there, the 'culture' where they took shelter from everything different that they feared.
Higgins's Intro was written on January 11, 1973. I was 19 yrs old at the time. I'd been writing significantly innovative work by then but my 1st bk didn't come out until 1977. Was this the time of the changing of the (avant) garde?
The 1st piece after Higgins's Intro is his "A Something Else Manifesto" from wch I quote the 1st paragraph, In Higgins's presentation of it there's no left, center, or right justification. He presumably wrote using a typewriter where such things were easier to accomplish.
"When asked what one is doing, one can only explain it as "something else. Now one does something big, now one does something small, now another big thing, now another little thing. Always it is something else." - p 21
Just like the justification is "something else" other than those standards I listed.
From Higgins's "Postface":
"There was the Yam Festival, the dance concerts at the Judson Memorial Church, Yvonne Rainer's great dance recital, various Philip Corner activities, the Pocket Follies, the goings-on at Hansen's Third Rail Gallery by Hansen, Vostell and others. It was the only year I have ever experienced that had no summer. The performances at the Grammercy Arts Theater, the Pocket Theater, and Judson Hall kept on taking place." - p 23
The next paragraph begins: "I wonder, will there be so much activity in Europe?" In Emmett Williams's My Life in Flux — — and Vice Versa (wch I'm currently reading) he relates a history of Fluxus activities (mostly his own) starting in 1962. His opinion was that, in these early days, Fluxus was mostly a European thing since that's where George Maciunas was living & organizing. Here's a (well, sortof) relevant quote:
"Like all historical accounts written by Fkuxus artists, this one, too, will prove to be incomplete and partial; but inlike most of them, it describes this "American invention" as a largely European phenomenon and experience — amost unorthodox approach, and a heretical one, too, in the eyes of many of my colleagues in the United States, who brush away the European contribution to Fluxus with pre-histories that begin long, long ago on the banks of the Hudson River." - p 27, Emmett Williams's My Life in Flux — — and Vice Versa
Now that I'vve muddied the waters, I shd calm them & clarify that in what I quoted from Higgins he's not necessarily even talking about Fluxus, just about the cultural innovations around him that were influential on the birth of Something Else. WTF, I just wanted to quote Williams.
From Bengt af Klintberg:
"Party Event
"Send invitations to all your friends—except one— with the following:
"green party green clothes
"And to one person:
"red party red clothes
"(Done in April, 1967 by Hans af Klintberg and Beatrice Heybroek)" - p 36
Gotta love it. This is exactly the sort of thing that interests me. It's an 'intrusion' into 'real life' that's likely to be harmless & exciting.
Allan Kaprow is someone whose work I unabashedly love. Here's an excerpt from the score to his " RAINING ":
"Sheets of writing spread over a field:
"An elderly woman might sit by herself and watch her old love latters wash away; a painter might spread out his worst drawings and laugh in the drizzle. These papers should be personal in any case." - p 40
From Al Hansen:
"Car Bibbe
Car One
(no lights on)
1. Enter car.
2. Toot horn 1x.
3. Count to forty."
[..]
"Car Two
(no lights on)
1. Knock on hood 2x.
2. Enter car.
3. Toot horn 3x." - p 43
"Car Three
1. Enter car.
2. Drive 100 yards away and face car towards main group.
3. Blink lights 1x."
[..]
"Car Four
1. Sit atop car.
2. Rap on roof with palm.
3. Enter car." - p 44
"Car Five
1. Drive around others 4x.
2. Position yourself with other cars.
3. Slam glove compartment 2x."
[..]
"Car Six
1. Enter car.
2. Open windows.
3. Yell loudly." - p 45
"Car Seven
1. Enter car through window.
2. Toot horn 2x.
3. Count to sixty."
[..]
"Car Eight
1. Enter car.
2. Blink lights 2x.
3. Toot horn 1x."
[..]
"8. Keep sharp lookout and if one car runs into another, enter your car and ram him.
9. If the driver attempts to escape, run him down." - p 46
"Car Nine
1. Circle a car 3x, and enter your car.
2. Blink lights 3x.
3. Slam door 1x." - p 47
The last instruction for "Car Four" is:
"17. Set fire to you car." - p 44
& the last instruction for "Car Five" is:
"14. Drive suddenly up over the dunes and into the sea." - p 45
It seems that Hansen is at least somewhat inspired by Demolition Derbies. It also seems unlikely that he expects "8. Keep sharp lookout and if one car runs into another, enter your car and ram him. 9. If the driver attempts to escape, run him down.", "17. Set fire to you car.", & "14. Drive suddenly up over the dunes and into the sea." to be executed. Instead, I think of these instructions as thought experiments of sorts intended to amuse & titilate the performers. There are many such dangerous instructions in the scores of other people's that follow in this bk.
Wolf Vostell's "skeleton" includes these instructions:
"16—people sit in chains in an exclusive restaurant
17—all christians wear cloth crosses sewn to their lapels
18—an express train has cattle cars
19—people are standing in front of a bank saying no" - p 50
These aren't exactly in the "dangerous" category mentioned above but they have a similar 'reality'-challenging quality. Vostell's put a tiger in your tanl dé-coll / age erasure as happening for h. c. artmann is similarly chellenging:
"to be performed for 12 hours at night
without interruption
by h. c. artmann
standing
alone and naked in his kitchen
the floow of which is covered to a height of 6 inches with honey
"a 500-watt bulb
"it takes 1 second to work the light switch
"in 12 hours this will amount to 44 200 times
"notation for the first minute
light out light on light out light on light out light out" - p 58
That might considered a rite a passage, an initiation. I've encountered Vostell's term "dé-coll/ age" many times & been interested in it as an alternate, more presonal, term for happening - but I usually forget whatever definition(s) I've run across.
"unpaste, tear off, the take-off of an airplane selected by wolf vostell in 1954 from langenschiedt's french-german dictionary (1952 edition) as the name for his form of expression his first performances were called dé-coll/age demonstrations his form of happening developed from these" - p 60
This reader is jam-packed w/ work by people that I think are major innovators & who I frespect as such. Nam June Paik's an excellent example - w/ his "Utopian Laser TV Station":
"Very very very high-frequency oscillation of laser will enable us to afford thousands of large and small TV stations. This will ffee us from the monopoly of a few commercial TV channels. I am video-taping the following TV programs to be telecast March 1, 1996 A.D.
"7 a.m. Chess lesson by Marcel Duchamp
8 a.m. Meet the Press. Guest: John Cage
9 a.m. Morning gymnastics: Merce Cunningham, Carolyn Brown
10 a.m. Something Else University: collection of unnecessary and unimportant knowledge (Indian incense, Chinese cockroaches, etc.) by David Tudor." - p 64
To me, this is all of extraordinary interest. More Allan Kaprow is certainly welcome:
"Paper
"(A Happening prepared for the University of California at Berkeley, March 1964)
"Setting
Street level of a three-tiered parking lot opposite residence halls. (During the two days before the performance, each participant crumples sheets of newspaper and strews it over the eastern half of the lot.) A record player is near the center and ten metal barrels are placed in line along the western end.
"Events
1———— Twist gal arrives, puts on rock and roll record, dances.
2 ———— Sweepers (25, male) with brooms arrive, sweep paper mechanically in a line towards western end." - p 67
Ah.. & then we reach Alison Knowles.. given that she's still alive, it'd be nice to collaborate w/ her one day.. I quote the places where some of her work was performed in the 1960s:
"Premiered August 1963 at National Association of Chemists and Performers in New York at the Advertiser's Club."
[..]
"Premiered October 21st, 1962 at Institute for Contemporary Arts in London." - p 71
"Premiered November 9th, 1964 at Café au Go Go in New York."
[..]
"Premiered November 25th, 1962 at Alle Scenen Theater, Copenhagen, at Fluxus Festival." - p 72
Next, more Higgins. Note how open the instructions are.
"Next the performer assigns all the thirty speeches given below to situations, with the option of assigning a speech to more than one situation but never of assigning more than one speech to a given situation. The performers now may begin to rehearse together." - p 76
The genius just keeps on coming, this time w/ Robert Filliou:
"(The poet sits on a chair. Behind him, a lecturer introduces him soberly to the audience, and reads as follows:—)
"Part One—The Adult Male Poet
"The body of the adult poet stands at an average height of 5' 5" and, on the average, weighs approximately 145 pounds.
"It is covered with and protected by a thin and elastic membrane, the skin, consisting of the epidermis and the dermis of the poet. The hair and nails of the poet are mere derivatives of his skin. The surface area of the skin covers about 1.8 square meters (17.2 square feet) of the body of the average poet." - p 83
& then there's "The Bloof of the Poet":
"When you sever a poet's jugular vein, blood does not stop running from the wound until the poet is dead. But if you saw up a poet whom you have just strangled to death, his body does not bleed." - p 84
One thing most, or all, of these contributors to the Reader have in common is a sense of humor. Big Time.
But what about Tomas Schmit?, you ask. Is he in there? To wch I reply: But, of course! But instead of quoting him I direct you to:
191. "typewriter poem - tomas schmit - march 63"
- directed & shot by Party Teen on Couch #2
- "typewriter poem" performance realized by etta cetera
- 8mm vaudeo
- 2:58
- march '98
- on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/XprYK4V5ZhQ
But in Schmit's section in the Reader it says: "the first realization of a 'questionaire' was dick higgins' lecture on unemployment in april '64 in new york city, where he employed the audience to answer various questions on unemployment" (p 113)
Who cd forget Philip Corner?:
"Pedal Player: crouches underneath to control the pedals, or manipulates dampers by hand." - p 117
Daniel Spoerri:
"(g) Metal stencils
of prime numbers†††† up to 12, of which the 1 is missing, used to number the review material.††††† (There were four numbers: 1,2,3 and 5.) These title-numbers were used for the following reason: just as a prime number can be divided only by 1 or by itself, so the contents of my review could be understood only through the contents itself, and not through comparisons or interpretations.
"Author's Additional Note
"†††† Jan. 30, 1962, Robert Filliou heard on the radio that the prime Amerian primer number had been discovered with the aid of an electronic brain at the University of California:
"(22442 — 1)" - p 134
George Brecht and Robert Filliou:
"from The Cedilla Cookbook
"cédillic:
6 pounds of zebra
18 pounds of dolphin
4 pounds of lynx
9 tame dormic
2 owls
5 liters of whale oil
dandelion root
willow leaves
"herbs
garam masala
powdered fresh coffee
palm tree kernels
cactus hearts
ocean water
river water"
[..]
"Serves:
2 Vostells
39 Brechts
1000 Maciunases
the Dick Higgins edited A Something Else Reader
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - January 4-7, 2025
Reviews that're too long to post on Goodreads go, eventually, to my "Critic" website: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Critic.... . Alas, I'm getting slower & slower to create the relevant webpage - largely b/c I just don't enjoy it. Still, if you wait for a wk or 2 after this truncated review is posted & if you then go to the Critic link & search for A Something Else Reader you might find a review much longer than this.
Sometimes I think my favorite publishers are/were Something Else Press, Station Hill Press, mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press, Dalkey Press, David Tighe, & myself. That's a woefully incomplete list given that it doesn't include any Sci-Fi publishers &, in fact, doesn't include hundreds of publishers that continue to please & amaze me. Still, it puts Something Else into perspective somewhat & explains why I'd love reading this Reader so much. As I've mentioned many times, I had the honor of meeting Something Else's publisher, Dick Higgins, when he gave a reading to a small audience at my friend Marshall Reese's apartment in Baltimore in 1978 or thereabouts. Lardy! How I wish I cd revisit that experience!! Then he gave me his new catalog for the press that replaced Something Else at an Avant Garde Festival in NYC. Finally, he was in the same audience as me in 1982 for an event honoring Jackson Mac Low's 60th birthday. Higgins, alas, died at the ripe young age of 60 on October 25, 1998. He is missed, by me, &, I'm sure, many others. I had the honor of meeting Alison Knowles too, whose inadvertent comment lead to Something Else's being named as such. She's still going at age 91, thank goodness. The point being that I've crossed paths w/ a few people associatd w/ FLUXUS, to my delight b/c I LOVE Fluxus & delight in encountering things relevant. This Reader isn't entirely a Fluxus one but it's close enuf for me. When I lived in BalTimOre (roughly 1953 to 1994), Something Else Press bks were fairly easy to find so I accumulated quite a few. One I'll forever regret not picking up was Bern Porter's Found Poetry, something that I'm sure was available cheap for awhile. Many of the bks & pamphlets excerpted from are in my collection but I don't mind repeated readings from them b/c I enjoy encountering them in the greater context. Dick Higgins provided this Intro:
"Late one night in December 1963, I founded the Something Else Press by mistake. I was a writer using unorthodox forms. A composer by training (I had studied with John Cage and Henry Cowell), my instinct had led me into theater, where I had been among the very first to do Happenings (the form, not the pop term) in the late 1950s." - p 9
A part of what interests me about the above is Higgins's mention of his being a "composer by training". I'm currently reading a memoir by Emmett Williams called My Life in Flux in wch he stresses the musical aspect of the early Fluxus days. I think one of the reasons why I love Fluxus so much is b/c of its musical innovativeness - despite this, I have the impression that it's mostly thought of as an ART mvmt, the music is still too radical to find acceptance even today, over 60 yrs later. I've been primarily associated w/ a mvmt called Neoism. I find most Neoist musicians, who strive to be popular, to be dismally ignorant of music theory. At any rate, w/ the exception of myself (pause to imagine me patting myself on the back), I don't think there're (m)any Neoists who've broken any new ground - whereas almost everyone in Fluxus did. Then again, there are at least 2 Neoists other than myself who've done interesting work w/ sound & Monty Cantsin (Istvan Kantor)'s excursions into open-pop-star-hood deserve far more acclaim than they seem to get.
""We've founded a press," muddily.
"She, blasé: "Oh really, what's it called?" Unbelieving.
""Shirtsleeves Press." Good proletarian instincts.
""That's not good," she said. Call it 'Something Else.'"
"Which I did and which I've never regretted, even though it looks odd on our new nature books and science titles. Because it perfectly defined our editorial purposes." - p 11
"So the first year we did Ray Johnson's The Paper Snake, which was the first surfacing of mail art, as it's now known. And we worked on Al Hansen's A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art. And I worked up the idea of intermedia (my term). It was an attempt to systematize this apparently confused body of materials which were so basic to the arts, yet which simply didn't fit categories. The concept is basically this: work which falls conceptually between media is intermedial in it nature." - p 12
I have a copy of both of those bks. I had a brief correspondence w/ Johnson before he, alas, committed suicide. I haven't read Johnson's bk yet but I will soon. I HAVE read Hansen's bk & it's one of my favorites, chock-full of stimulating ideas.
"I thought about a series of pamphlets, nice fresh things with good stuff in them. Each of them like a one-shot magazine, maybe (little did I know how little stores would like them—covers fray, they get stolen easily, etc.), yes, a pamphlet series , I said, pouring myself a cup of water. And so the Great Bear Pamphlets were born. There were twenty—Happenings scenarios, new music, manifestos (including one by the proto-communist W. E. B. Du Bois Club), concrete poetry, chance-methodology by George Brecht (inclded in this book)." - p 14
I'm happy to report that I have many of these pamphlets, it's amazing to me that I managed to pick them up! They are, indeed, GREAT, some of my favorite reading material.
Higgins reports on a problem that's also been very common in my life:
"So whatever you did which was new, establishment types from the Village Voice and the like would say, "It's been done before," or, in exasperation, "It's Dada." Nonsense. Fluxus and Happenings had some parallels with Dada and Futurism, but nothing direct or very relevant." - p 14
Ha ha! 1st, I love that he lists "the Village Voice" as a voice for "establishment types"; 2nd, this problem of anything that's outside the mainstream being automatically dismissed as dada is one that was still ongoing when I lived in BalTimOre in the 1980s. People who knew next-to-nothing about art history (or much of anything else) were all-too-prone to refer to the only thing they did, at least, know the name of: "dada". This dismissal was a way of writing off anything outside of what they cd 'understand': viz: the stupidest LCD crap out there, the 'culture' where they took shelter from everything different that they feared.
Higgins's Intro was written on January 11, 1973. I was 19 yrs old at the time. I'd been writing significantly innovative work by then but my 1st bk didn't come out until 1977. Was this the time of the changing of the (avant) garde?
The 1st piece after Higgins's Intro is his "A Something Else Manifesto" from wch I quote the 1st paragraph, In Higgins's presentation of it there's no left, center, or right justification. He presumably wrote using a typewriter where such things were easier to accomplish.
"When asked what one is doing, one can only explain it as "something else. Now one does something big, now one does something small, now another big thing, now another little thing. Always it is something else." - p 21
Just like the justification is "something else" other than those standards I listed.
From Higgins's "Postface":
"There was the Yam Festival, the dance concerts at the Judson Memorial Church, Yvonne Rainer's great dance recital, various Philip Corner activities, the Pocket Follies, the goings-on at Hansen's Third Rail Gallery by Hansen, Vostell and others. It was the only year I have ever experienced that had no summer. The performances at the Grammercy Arts Theater, the Pocket Theater, and Judson Hall kept on taking place." - p 23
The next paragraph begins: "I wonder, will there be so much activity in Europe?" In Emmett Williams's My Life in Flux — — and Vice Versa (wch I'm currently reading) he relates a history of Fluxus activities (mostly his own) starting in 1962. His opinion was that, in these early days, Fluxus was mostly a European thing since that's where George Maciunas was living & organizing. Here's a (well, sortof) relevant quote:
"Like all historical accounts written by Fkuxus artists, this one, too, will prove to be incomplete and partial; but inlike most of them, it describes this "American invention" as a largely European phenomenon and experience — amost unorthodox approach, and a heretical one, too, in the eyes of many of my colleagues in the United States, who brush away the European contribution to Fluxus with pre-histories that begin long, long ago on the banks of the Hudson River." - p 27, Emmett Williams's My Life in Flux — — and Vice Versa
Now that I'vve muddied the waters, I shd calm them & clarify that in what I quoted from Higgins he's not necessarily even talking about Fluxus, just about the cultural innovations around him that were influential on the birth of Something Else. WTF, I just wanted to quote Williams.
From Bengt af Klintberg:
"Party Event
"Send invitations to all your friends—except one— with the following:
"green party green clothes
"And to one person:
"red party red clothes
"(Done in April, 1967 by Hans af Klintberg and Beatrice Heybroek)" - p 36
Gotta love it. This is exactly the sort of thing that interests me. It's an 'intrusion' into 'real life' that's likely to be harmless & exciting.
Allan Kaprow is someone whose work I unabashedly love. Here's an excerpt from the score to his " RAINING ":
"Sheets of writing spread over a field:
"An elderly woman might sit by herself and watch her old love latters wash away; a painter might spread out his worst drawings and laugh in the drizzle. These papers should be personal in any case." - p 40
From Al Hansen:
"Car Bibbe
Car One
(no lights on)
1. Enter car.
2. Toot horn 1x.
3. Count to forty."
[..]
"Car Two
(no lights on)
1. Knock on hood 2x.
2. Enter car.
3. Toot horn 3x." - p 43
"Car Three
1. Enter car.
2. Drive 100 yards away and face car towards main group.
3. Blink lights 1x."
[..]
"Car Four
1. Sit atop car.
2. Rap on roof with palm.
3. Enter car." - p 44
"Car Five
1. Drive around others 4x.
2. Position yourself with other cars.
3. Slam glove compartment 2x."
[..]
"Car Six
1. Enter car.
2. Open windows.
3. Yell loudly." - p 45
"Car Seven
1. Enter car through window.
2. Toot horn 2x.
3. Count to sixty."
[..]
"Car Eight
1. Enter car.
2. Blink lights 2x.
3. Toot horn 1x."
[..]
"8. Keep sharp lookout and if one car runs into another, enter your car and ram him.
9. If the driver attempts to escape, run him down." - p 46
"Car Nine
1. Circle a car 3x, and enter your car.
2. Blink lights 3x.
3. Slam door 1x." - p 47
The last instruction for "Car Four" is:
"17. Set fire to you car." - p 44
& the last instruction for "Car Five" is:
"14. Drive suddenly up over the dunes and into the sea." - p 45
It seems that Hansen is at least somewhat inspired by Demolition Derbies. It also seems unlikely that he expects "8. Keep sharp lookout and if one car runs into another, enter your car and ram him. 9. If the driver attempts to escape, run him down.", "17. Set fire to you car.", & "14. Drive suddenly up over the dunes and into the sea." to be executed. Instead, I think of these instructions as thought experiments of sorts intended to amuse & titilate the performers. There are many such dangerous instructions in the scores of other people's that follow in this bk.
Wolf Vostell's "skeleton" includes these instructions:
"16—people sit in chains in an exclusive restaurant
17—all christians wear cloth crosses sewn to their lapels
18—an express train has cattle cars
19—people are standing in front of a bank saying no" - p 50
These aren't exactly in the "dangerous" category mentioned above but they have a similar 'reality'-challenging quality. Vostell's put a tiger in your tanl dé-coll / age erasure as happening for h. c. artmann is similarly chellenging:
"to be performed for 12 hours at night
without interruption
by h. c. artmann
standing
alone and naked in his kitchen
the floow of which is covered to a height of 6 inches with honey
"a 500-watt bulb
"it takes 1 second to work the light switch
"in 12 hours this will amount to 44 200 times
"notation for the first minute
light out light on light out light on light out light out" - p 58
That might considered a rite a passage, an initiation. I've encountered Vostell's term "dé-coll/ age" many times & been interested in it as an alternate, more presonal, term for happening - but I usually forget whatever definition(s) I've run across.
"unpaste, tear off, the take-off of an airplane selected by wolf vostell in 1954 from langenschiedt's french-german dictionary (1952 edition) as the name for his form of expression his first performances were called dé-coll/age demonstrations his form of happening developed from these" - p 60
This reader is jam-packed w/ work by people that I think are major innovators & who I frespect as such. Nam June Paik's an excellent example - w/ his "Utopian Laser TV Station":
"Very very very high-frequency oscillation of laser will enable us to afford thousands of large and small TV stations. This will ffee us from the monopoly of a few commercial TV channels. I am video-taping the following TV programs to be telecast March 1, 1996 A.D.
"7 a.m. Chess lesson by Marcel Duchamp
8 a.m. Meet the Press. Guest: John Cage
9 a.m. Morning gymnastics: Merce Cunningham, Carolyn Brown
10 a.m. Something Else University: collection of unnecessary and unimportant knowledge (Indian incense, Chinese cockroaches, etc.) by David Tudor." - p 64
To me, this is all of extraordinary interest. More Allan Kaprow is certainly welcome:
"Paper
"(A Happening prepared for the University of California at Berkeley, March 1964)
"Setting
Street level of a three-tiered parking lot opposite residence halls. (During the two days before the performance, each participant crumples sheets of newspaper and strews it over the eastern half of the lot.) A record player is near the center and ten metal barrels are placed in line along the western end.
"Events
1———— Twist gal arrives, puts on rock and roll record, dances.
2 ———— Sweepers (25, male) with brooms arrive, sweep paper mechanically in a line towards western end." - p 67
Ah.. & then we reach Alison Knowles.. given that she's still alive, it'd be nice to collaborate w/ her one day.. I quote the places where some of her work was performed in the 1960s:
"Premiered August 1963 at National Association of Chemists and Performers in New York at the Advertiser's Club."
[..]
"Premiered October 21st, 1962 at Institute for Contemporary Arts in London." - p 71
"Premiered November 9th, 1964 at Café au Go Go in New York."
[..]
"Premiered November 25th, 1962 at Alle Scenen Theater, Copenhagen, at Fluxus Festival." - p 72
Next, more Higgins. Note how open the instructions are.
"Next the performer assigns all the thirty speeches given below to situations, with the option of assigning a speech to more than one situation but never of assigning more than one speech to a given situation. The performers now may begin to rehearse together." - p 76
The genius just keeps on coming, this time w/ Robert Filliou:
"(The poet sits on a chair. Behind him, a lecturer introduces him soberly to the audience, and reads as follows:—)
"Part One—The Adult Male Poet
"The body of the adult poet stands at an average height of 5' 5" and, on the average, weighs approximately 145 pounds.
"It is covered with and protected by a thin and elastic membrane, the skin, consisting of the epidermis and the dermis of the poet. The hair and nails of the poet are mere derivatives of his skin. The surface area of the skin covers about 1.8 square meters (17.2 square feet) of the body of the average poet." - p 83
& then there's "The Bloof of the Poet":
"When you sever a poet's jugular vein, blood does not stop running from the wound until the poet is dead. But if you saw up a poet whom you have just strangled to death, his body does not bleed." - p 84
One thing most, or all, of these contributors to the Reader have in common is a sense of humor. Big Time.
But what about Tomas Schmit?, you ask. Is he in there? To wch I reply: But, of course! But instead of quoting him I direct you to:
191. "typewriter poem - tomas schmit - march 63"
- directed & shot by Party Teen on Couch #2
- "typewriter poem" performance realized by etta cetera
- 8mm vaudeo
- 2:58
- march '98
- on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/XprYK4V5ZhQ
But in Schmit's section in the Reader it says: "the first realization of a 'questionaire' was dick higgins' lecture on unemployment in april '64 in new york city, where he employed the audience to answer various questions on unemployment" (p 113)
Who cd forget Philip Corner?:
"Pedal Player: crouches underneath to control the pedals, or manipulates dampers by hand." - p 117
Daniel Spoerri:
"(g) Metal stencils
of prime numbers†††† up to 12, of which the 1 is missing, used to number the review material.††††† (There were four numbers: 1,2,3 and 5.) These title-numbers were used for the following reason: just as a prime number can be divided only by 1 or by itself, so the contents of my review could be understood only through the contents itself, and not through comparisons or interpretations.
"Author's Additional Note
"†††† Jan. 30, 1962, Robert Filliou heard on the radio that the prime Amerian primer number had been discovered with the aid of an electronic brain at the University of California:
"(22442 — 1)" - p 134
George Brecht and Robert Filliou:
"from The Cedilla Cookbook
"cédillic:
6 pounds of zebra
18 pounds of dolphin
4 pounds of lynx
9 tame dormic
2 owls
5 liters of whale oil
dandelion root
willow leaves
"herbs
garam masala
powdered fresh coffee
palm tree kernels
cactus hearts
ocean water
river water"
[..]
"Serves:
2 Vostells
39 Brechts
1000 Maciunases
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