Geoffrey Hendricks | Critical Mass

Geoffrey Hendricks [editor]
Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia and Rutgers University.
New Brunswick, USA: Rutgers University Press, 2003
210 pp., 28 x 21 cm., softcover
Edition size unknown

The Catalogue for an exhibition held at the Mead Art Museum from February 1st to June 1st, 2003, and later at the Mason Gross Art Galleries from September 29th to November 5th, 2003.

Edited by Geoffrey Hendricks, the volume includes contributions by Allan Kaprow, Jackson Mac Low, Robert Watts, Al Hansen, Carolee Schneemann, Dick Higgins, Philip Corner, Milan Knizak, George Maciunas and others.

"Rutgers University, from 1958 to 1972, was at the center of many new developments in the art world. Artists connected with Happenings and Fluxus created works that had a major impact in New York and abroad. A dozen years after Allan Kaprow's first Happening on Rutgers University's Douglass campus in 1958, George Maciunas (Mr. Fluxus) created his major late composition, Flux-Mass, in the same space, and Hermann Nitsch, the Viennese Actionist, presented his controversial Orgies-Mysteries-Theater. These radical shifts in art paralleled calls to rethink attitudes about race, sex, gender, and war during turbulent times in America's history. Critical Mass chronicles this ephemeral work on the Rutgers campus and in New York City, and the innovations that grew from Bob Watts, Allan Kaprow, and George Brecht's "Project in Multiple Dimensions." With texts and performance scores by artists-together with numerous photographs of the events and essays by art historians and critics Hannah Higgins, Jill Johnston, Susan Ryan, and Kristine Stiles-Critical Mass presents a vivid picture of this dynamic moment. This volume is a companion to an exhibit at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and at the Mason Gross Art Galleries at Rutgers University. / Geoffrey Hendricks is a professor emeritus of visual arts at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University."

- Publisher's blurb

"So I made this catalogue—I made this exhibition, Critical Mass:Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia and Rutgers University [1958–1972] from 1961 to 1971, or whatever the date parameters were. And I wanted to have all the text be by women, and I got Christine Styles, Jill Johnston—did Kate write something? Other than—well, you know, there was a piece of Al Hansen's."

- Geoffrey Hendricks, interviewed by Linda Yablonsky