Dada and Surrealist Performance, Black Mountain, Fluxus and Happenings

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Dada and Surrealist Performance, Black Mountain,
Fluxus and Happenings
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Dada

• Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound
  poetry, a starting point for performance art, a
  prelude to postmodernism, an influence on pop
  art, a celebration of antiart to be later
  embraced for anarcho-political uses in the 1960s
  and the movement that lay the foundation for
  Surrealism." Marc Lowenthal Translator's
  Introduction to Francis Picabia's I AM A
  BEAUTIFUL MONSTER Poetry, Prose, And Provocation
  (MIT PRESS 2007

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• Group of Dadaist form around the Cafe Voltaire in
  Zurich. Basically a gathering of people who
  disdained war.
• As a movement Dada protested war and senseless
  slaughter.
• In Tristan Tzaras manifesto he called for the
  destruction of good manners, an end to logic, the
  destruction of memory, spontaneity and
  forgetfullness

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Timeline

• 1913 - Duchamp makes the first 'readymade' - a
  bicycle wheel mounted on a stool
• 1916 - Cabaret Voltaire opens in Zurich on 5
  February. It soon takes the name 'Dada'
• 1917 - First issue of 'Dada' periodical
  published. Issues 1-4 of '391' periodical
  published by Picabia. Duchamp exhibits 'Fountain'
  in New York.
• 1918 - Tzara published his first manifesto, in
  'Dada' issue 3. Club Dada in Berlin starts to use
  photomontage
• 1919 - 'Litterature' periodical edited by Breton
  published. Ernst and Baargeld found Cologne Dada.
  Kurt Schwitters makes the first Merz works.
• 1920 - Tzara arrives in Paris. Club Dada tour of
  Germany. Ernst and others stage the 'Spring
  Awakening' exhibition in Cologne.
• 1921 - 'New York Dada' periodical published,
  edited by Duchamp and Man Ray. Dada stages the
  trail of Barres and in doing so loses the support
  of Picabia.
• 1923 - Duchamp finally stops work on The Bride
  Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors Even
• 1924 - Breton publishes the first manifesto of
  Surrealism.

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Marcel Duchamp
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Hugo Ball 1886-1927

• It is necessary for me to drop all respect for
  tradition, opinion, and judgement. It is
  necessary for me to erase the rambling text that
  others have written.
• The present does not exist in principles, but
  only in association. We live in a fantastic age
  that draws its decisions more from affiliation
  than from unassailable axioms. The creative man
  can do anything he wants with this age. It is,
  all of it, common property, matter.
• Nature is neither beautiful nor ugly, neither
  good nor bad. It is fantastic, monstrous, and
  infinitely unrestrained. It knows no reason, but
  it listens to reason when it meets with
  resistance. Nature wants to exist and develop,
  that is all. Being in harmony with nature is the
  same as being in harmony with madness.

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Hugo Ball Flight Out of Time
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Ball Reciting Sound Poem in the Cabaret Voltaire
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Hugo Ball performing Karawane
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(No Transcript)
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Café Odeon re-creation
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Emmy Hennings 1885-1948

• Dancer
• To you it's as if I was already
• Marked and waiting on Death's list.
• It keeps me safe from many sins.
• How slowly life drains out of me.
• My steps are often steeped in gloom,
• My heart beats in a sickly way
• And it gets weaker every day.
• A death angel stands in the middle of my room.
• Yet I dance till I'm out of breath.
• Soon lying in the grave I'll be
• And no one will snuggle up to me.
• Oh, give me kisses up till death.

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(No Transcript)
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Tristan Tzara

• Born Sami Rosenstock , Romanian, 1896-1963
• After 1929 attempted to reconcile surrealism and
  marxism. Joined the French Communist Party in
  1937. Fought in the French Resistance. Quit the
  communist party in 1956 over the russian
  repression of the Hungarian Revolution.

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(No Transcript)
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• The beginings of Dada were not the beginnings of
  an art but of a disgustTristan Tzara
• DADA is a virgin microbe DADA is against the
  high cost of living DADA limited company for
  the exploitation of ideas DADA has 391 different
  attitudes and colours according to the sex of the
  president It changes - affirms - says the
  opposite at the same time - no importance -
  shouts - goes fishing. Dada is the chameleon of
  rapid and self interested change. Dada is
  against the future. Dada is dead. Dada is absurd.
  Long live Dada. Dada is not a literary school,
  howl - Tristan Tzara

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Gas Heart 1923
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Costumes by Sonia Delaunay
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Delaunay Designs
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Sonia Delaunay (Sarah Stern) 1985-1979
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Simultaneous Store 1925
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Marcel Duchamp Fountain
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Dada Cards
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Man Ray Coat Stand
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Kurt Schwitters
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(No Transcript)
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(No Transcript)
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Surrealism
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• Au Rendez-vous des amis (1922) (First row)
  Crevel, Ernst, Dostoyevsky, Fraenkel, Paulhan,
  Péret, Baargeld, Desnos.
• (Standing) Soupault, Art, Morise, Raphael,
  Eluard, Aragon, Breton, de Chirico, Gala Eluard

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• Le Surrealist group 1924 Baron, Queneau, Breton,
  Boiffard, de Chirico, Vitrac, Eluard, Soupault,
  Desnos, Aragon.
• Naville, Simone Collinet-Breton, Morise,
  Marie-Louise Soupault

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Merce Cunningham and Buckminster Fuller at Black
Mountain
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1953 1957
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Nocturnes 1956
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Crisis 1960
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Museum Event 1966
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Event 1968
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Rain Forest 1968
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Second Hand 1975
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Square Game 1976
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John Cage 1912-1992
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Cage and Fluxus

• John Cage's 'Experimental Composition' classes
  from 1957 to 1959 at the New School for Social
  Research have become legendary as an American
  source of Fluxus, the international network of
  artists, composers, and designers. The majority
  of his students had little or no background in
  music, most of whom were artists. His students
  included Jackson Mac Low, Allan Kaprow, Al
  Hansen, George Brecht, Alice Denham and Dick
  Higgins, as well as the numerous artists he
  invited to attend his classes unofficially.
  Several famous pieces came from these classes
  George Brecht's Time Table Music, and Alice
  Denham's 48 SecondsWikipedia article on John Cage

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Water Walk on TV Game Show 1960
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Gutai Group

• The aim of the Gutai group was to break with the
  past and blur the boundaries between art and life
  in post-war Japan, seeking a new beginning in
  order to put the horrors behind.
• Yoshihara organized Gutai with the intent of
  renewing art by saving it from commerce and
  fetishism, and by allowing the material to
  express itself freely, unhindered by extraneous
  factors, non-material issues. The word Gutai was
  a composite of gu (tool) and tai (body).
  Yoshihara also took it as signifying
  concreteness and embodiment.5 In his Gutai
  Manifesto(1956), he denounced the way materials
  are loaded with false significance by way of
  fraud, so that, instead of just presenting their
  own material, they take on the appearance of
  something elsethe materials have been completely
  murdered and can no longer speak to us.
  Consistently, Yoshihara added to this the caveat
  that nothing may be copied.

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Atsuko Tanaka 1932-2005
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Atsuko Tanaka Electric Dress 1956
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• In a related work, Stage Clothes, she made a
  dress that included other dresses so that as she
  undressed she stayed dressed, with ever more
  garments appearing magically to clothe her. There
  was no escaping, in modern culture, the surfaces
  a woman could reveal. And yet her art was not a
  gloomy meditation on authenticity. The power of
  fashion also represented the freedom to remake
  oneself again and again.
• In Electric Dress, Tanaka seemed to fuse
  technology and the flesh. During the original
  performance, in fact, some people became
  concerned that she would electrocute herself and
  in Japan, the light of Hiroshima, which X-rayed
  the body, quickly came to mind. But Tanakas
  fusion went well beyond academic commentary on
  technology and womens issues. She became, in her
  dress, a kind of twinkling building on the
  horizon and, by extension, a symbol of the modern
  Asian city. She anticipated the delirium of light
  that is Tokyo. A city, like a woman in a dress,
  can be a mysterious object of desire. Tanakas
  light conceals as it reveals.
• Mark Stevens, New York Magazine, Sept. 27, 2004

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Yellow Cotton 1955
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Bells 1955
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• "The material as the actual source of interest
  ... lost its importance as soon as the
  electricity was switched on suddenly the sound
  of the bells were the work of art.Akira
  Kanayama, Gutai artist and husband of Atsuko
  Tanaka

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Work 1955
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• At the exhibition in July 1955, which was
  organized by the Ashiya City Art Association,
  other Gutai artists also performed Kazuo
  Shiraga, swinging an axe, put red-painted wooden
  cubes on top of each other, Saburo Murakami
  trampled down and tore to pieces roofing
  cardboard, Sadamasa Motonaga hanged up plastic
  bags with coloured water on the trees, Tsuruko
  Yamazaki hanged up sheet steel, Michio Yoshihara
  showed objects, made of garbage. Yozo Ukita
  described the exhibition as follows "At The
  Experimental Outdoor Exhibition of Modern Art to
  Challenge the Midsummer Burning Sun we did not
  try to overcome nature nor to challenge nature
  ... We wanted to find out how we could survive in
  this pine forest ..."

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Recent Paintings

• 1964-72

• 2001

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Shozo Shimamoto

• Please Walk on Here 1955

• Canon Painting 1956

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Crane performance Paintings 1994

• These works belong to a series realized all at
  once during a quite famous crane performance in
  Itami City ( Japan ). The performance, in
  collaboration with the Paper-Cup Artist LOCO,
  consisted of dropping colors contained in spheres
  made of cups by Shimamoto who hung from a height
  of 30 meters.

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Fluxus

• Fluxus is about spontaneity, chaos, and the
  inherent beauty in the accidental.
• Sometimes it concerns itself with the accident
  in the box
• Two formats are unique to Fluxus, a type of
  performance art called the Event and Fluxkit
  multiples, a collection of everyday objects or
  inexpensive printed cards, collected in a box for
  private and personal investigation

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George Maciunas Fluxmanifesto

• To establish artists nonprofessional,
  nonparasitic, nonelite status in society, he must
  demonstrate own dispensibility, he must
  demonstrate self-sufficiency of the audience, he
  must demonstrate that anything can substitute art
  and anyone can do it. Therefore, this substitute
  art-amusement must be simple, amusing, concerned
  with insignificances, have no commodity or
  institutional value. It must be unlimited,
  obtainable by all and eventually produced by all.

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Fluxkits Claes Oldenburg
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Flux Year Box 2, ed. Maciunas late 60s
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Beuys Everess 1968
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Beuys The Silence 1973
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Beuys Banknote 1979
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Beuys New York Subway Poster 1983
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Fluxus Piano
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Happenings

• Generally credited as originating with Allan
  Kaprows 18 Happenings in 6 Parts 1959
• A form of theater spectacle that rejects the
  conceit that everyone in the audience should see
  the same picture
• Happenings are comparmentalized, each unit is a
  whole in itself and there is no causal plot
• Characters tend to be allegorical and persons are
  treated like objects.

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Evolution of Happenings

• Kaprow credits the following evolution of the
  form as a progression from action painting to
  Assemblages, into Environments.
• Environments incorporating sound and people
  became happenings.
• Kirby finds Happenings have nothing to do with
  plastic arts but rather were a new kind of
  theater.

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Darko Suvins Categories

• Four categories to Happenings
• Events as single non-verbal activities
• Aleatoric scenes or longer activities where text
  is treated mainly as sound (chance construction)
• Happenings that range from non-verbal activities
  to clear compositions with well-rehearsed actors
  and composed text.
• Action Theater which may be like drama

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Allan Kaprow
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Kaprows notions

• Kaprow wants to introduce a new notion of space
  in which events make the space or create isolated
  nodes of spatial meaning. Time should be variable
  and discontinuous.
• Space and time cease to be conventions they
  become problematic materials. Space becomes the
  sum of all objects structured through
  object-relations which include real objects, as
  well as people. Happenings thus assign the
  audience the same ontological status as the
  performers both can provide performance-events,
  both are treated as objects.

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Kaprow 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, Fall 1959
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18 Happenings redo 2007
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Jim Dine Car Crash Nov. 1960
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Allan Kaprow Push and Pull A Furniture Comedy
for Hans Hoffmann, 1963
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Push and Pull reinvention 2007
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Kaprow 2005
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Allan Kaprow Spring Happening 1961
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Robert Whitman Mouth 1961
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Ben Patterson Licking Piece 1964
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Josef Beuys I Like America and America Likes Me
1974
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Fluids by Allan Kaprow

• A single event done in many places over a
  three-day period. It consists in building huge,
  blank, rectangular ice structures thirty feet
  long, ten feet wide, and eight feet high. People
  set the structures up using rock salt as a binder
  - which hastens melting and fuses the blocks
  together. The structures are built about 20
  places throughout Los Angeles. If one crosses the
  city he might suddenly be confronted by these
  mute and meaningless blank structures which have
  been left to melt. The structures indicate no
  significance, their very blankness and their
  rapid deterioration proclaims the opposite of
  significance.

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Esposizione by Ann Halprin

• .explored the architectonic concept of space
  and was performed on a large stage. To make the
  relatively large stage compared to the audience
  sufficient for their six-member company
  performance they suspended a cargo net across the
  proscenium in the air, to allow the dancers to
  move vertically. The dance evolved out of a
  spacial idea. They said that the theatre was
  their environment and they were going to move
  through the theatre. They took a single task
  burdening themselves with enormous amounts of
  luggage. Each person had to carry all kind of
  everyday objects automobile tires, gunnysacks
  filled, bundles of rags, newspapers rolled up,
  etc, and to allow his movements to be conditioned
  to speeds that had been set up for him. They
  started all over the place, so that it was like
  an invasion. The music started at a different
  time, dancers started at different times, so that
  the audience had no idea when anything started.
  The whole dance was a series of false beginnings.
  As soon as something got started, something else
  would be introduced. The dancers task was to
  carry things and to penetrate the entire
  auditorium. When they reached the high point they
  let the objects roll down, the whole space
  exploded.
• From Happening and Other Acts, ed. Mariellen
  Sandford, Routledge, 1995

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Anna Halprin
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Halprin Teaching
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• Beginning in 1955, after she returned from
  performing in New York at the 92nd Street Y in a
  concert curated by Martha Graham, Halprin was
  disillusioned by what she saw as a lack of
  individuality in the modern dance world. Halprin
  began experimenting in her new scenic dance
  laboratory, an outdoor deck that her husband and
  Arch Lauterer had just designed for her in a
  redwood grove on the steep hillside below their
  Marin County home on the side of Mount Tamalpais.
• ON THIS DECK Halprin learned to attend to nature
  the way H'Doubler had listened to the body,
  embracing everyday actions like dressing and
  undressing or dragging the relaxed body of a
  friend. Among the dancers who came to her summer
  workshops in the early 1960s were Simone Forti,
  Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Sally Gross, and
  Meredith Monk. Back in New York at Judson
  Memorial Church and other venues, they took
  forward Halprin's ideas of task performance, of
  the uncoupling of cause and effect in dance
  theater, and the use of the real world as a site
  for dance, into a new genre that became
  postmodern dance.
• It wasn't only nature, hut also the social
  environment that fed Halprin as an artist. In the
  late 1960s her interest turned toward community
  and the urban rituals that sustain it. Her 1969
  Ceremony of Us was shaped by racial tensions
  among the cast, which drew from black performers
  in the Watts section of Los Angeles and her white
  dancers from the San Francisco Dancers' Workshop.
  In the 1970s, as a cancer survivor, Halprin
  became interested in movement as a healing
  art--in social, psychological, and physical
  terms. She moved from incorporating ordinary life
  in her performance pieces toward an appreciation
  of the dancer in every person, trained or
  untrained.

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Alison Knowles
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Links

• Eco Art
• Happenings
• Fluxus.org
• The Fluxus Performance Workbook