Takehisa Kosugi | Events

Takehisa Kosugi

Events

New York City, USA: Fluxus, 1964

18 pp., 2.6 x 11.9 x 10 cm., loose leaves

Edition size unknown

After witnessing a performance at Tokyo’s Sōgetsu Art Center, composer Toshi Ichiyanagi sent scores and recordings made by Kosugi to George Maciunas, just prior to his founding of Fluxus. Originally intended as a "complete works" collection (which could be added to as new scores were created) the collection was first advertised in Film Culture magazine in the fall of 1963 and released early the next year. 

It was packaged in a modest white, black or clear plastic box, with variations on Maciunas' name plate design for the artist, often a square graphic on a rectangular box. 

It would be the only Kosugi work published by Fluxus, though other projects appeared in Fluxus newspapers and in the collective Fluxus 1 and Fluxkit boxes. 

Two scores from the box had previously been published in the Fluxus Preview Review [below, bottom].

Events was originally announced in Film Culture No. 30 [below], where it was listed with a price of $2.00. 

"Kosugi's contribution to Fluxus 1 was a graphic realization of Theatre Music (1963), in the form of a rectangle of cardstock bearing a spiral of moving feet (by other accounts, the imprint of a shoe) together with the instruction "Keep walking intently." It is one is a series of event scores cre-ated by Kosugi, including Organic Music (1962), which focuses on the per-former's breathing (instruments are optional) and emphasizes duration and the recognition of how sound is heard within and through the body, and Events, a Fluxus box containing a set of eighteen instructions. Kosugi's scores redefined the notion of music, directing performers and audience toward a phenomenological reengagement with the physicality of the world and themselves. Like Ichiyanagi's Music for Piano No. 4 (1960), with its instruction to "Use sustained sound(s) and silence(s) only," Kosugi's pieces involve the body as an instrument, and listening becomes a form of perception.”

- Charles Merewether