Simone Forti | Dance Constructions: Yoko Ono Chambers St. Loft Map

Simone Forti

Dance Constructions: Yoko Ono Chambers St. Loft Map

1974

Pen on paper

17.8 × 25.4 cm.

Unique

In honour of Simone Forti’s passing last month, Hyperallergic has just published an interview that Julia Bryan-Wilson conducted with the artist, dancer, choreographer and writer, particularly about her relationship with Yoko Ono. 

Julia Bryan-Wilson: When did you first meet Yoko Ono? What were some of your initial impressions of her?

Simone Forti: I must have started hearing Yoko’s name around 1960. I knew that she was married to Toshi Ichiyanagi and that they both were doing interesting work in the larger artistic community that I shared with La Monte Young.  

JBW: Your Dance Constructions were first seen at Yoko’s Chambers Street loft.  How did this event come about? 

SF: I became aware that she had a loft studio and that she was very generous with it, letting dancers sometimes use it. I have memories of working in a loft with Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton, and in a different loft with Bob Morris and Yvonne Rainer, and one of these lofts may well have been Yoko’s loft. La Monte Young is the person who invited me to participate in the series, and with whom I was in touch for practical matters. And Bob Morris is the person who helped me set up. 

JBW: We’ve all seen pictures, but can you describe more about what the Chambers Street loft was like, architecturally as well as socially? 

SF: The loft was a large raw rectangular space with a very rough wood floor and windows at one end. The entrance was along one of the longer walls and closer to the windows than to the “deep” end. My memory of it is that, like many of the lofts at that time, nothing had been painted. The walls, the floor, all had been left pretty much as they had been found, abandoned after decades of industrial use, just swept “clean” with a broom. 

In terms of who frequented Yoko’s loft, I saw some of the performers in that series, Jackson Mac Low, Henry Flint, of course Bob Morris. And La Monte. I know that Merce Cunningham came to one of my evenings, because someone told me that he had liked it. I don’t think any of the artists from the Reuben Gallery frequented that series. I may be wrong, but I think that the conceptual and the imagistic theater (happenings) folks didn’t follow each other’s work. In fact, when I had performed at the Reuben Gallery a few months earlier, Lucas Samaras complained to me that my work was not poetic.

[...]

JBW: Some of your Dance Constructions use the word “instruction.” Had you known of Yoko’s Instruction Paintings, which are also from this time period? 

SF: It’s possible that the “instructions” idea came to me from Yoko, through intermediaries, such as La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low. But certainly the concept also came from John Cage, through Bob Dunn’s class. And I had probably worked with instructions with Anna Halprin, but I don’t remember if she used that term.

JBW: Did you ever see any of Yoko’s performances? 

SF: I did see Charlotte Mormon perform Yoko’s piece where the audience members are invited to cut pieces of her dress right off of her [“Cut Piece,” first performed by Ono in 1964]. I think Charlotte had already been fighting cancer for some time, and the performance was very moving.

JBW: Did you participate in the cutting, and did you save the scrap? 

SF: Yes, I cut a very small piece. I think it was red satin. I kept it for years in one of those little special containers we all have, but I’ve lost track of it.

JBW: Were you aware of Yoko’s 1961 “Voice Piece for Soprano, to Simone Morris,” in which she instructs us to scream “against the wind, against the wall, against the sky?” It is dedicated to you using your married full name. Do you have any idea why she might have specifically invoked you here?  

SF: I’m thrilled to learn, or relearn, that Yoko made that piece and dedicated it to me. I tend to forget really important things. Maybe she dedicated the screaming piece to me because of my piece “Censor” that I performed in my spring 1961 concert in her loft. In that performance, one person vigorously shook a pan full of nails while the other sang an Italian folk song as loud as she could. 

[...]

One memory I have is from around 1976, when I made a performance, Planet, at PS1. I remember sitting with Yoko on a ledge on the PS1 roof and talking together comfortably. It was restful. Decades later, in 2011, I received the Yoko Ono Lennon Award for Courage in the Arts. Yoko, of course, was at the reception, handing out the awards. I’m now 79. I think Yoko is one or two years older than me. Well, she was looking very sharp in her cap and high heels and her blouse that revealed her cleavage. Very quick on her feet and smiling.

Read the full text, here. 

John Lennon | Piece for George Maciunas Who Can't Distinguish Between These Colors

John Lennon

Piece for George Maciunas Who Can't Distinguish Between These Colors

New York City, USA: Fluxus, 1971

12 x 24 x 2.5 cm.

Edition size unknown (only prototypes may exist)

Little is known about this work. It was never advertised in any of the Fluxus newsletters or mentioned in Maciunas' prolific correspondence (unlike countless other editions which were proposed but never materialized). However at least two copies exist: one in the Getty collection and other in the legendary Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus collection, now housed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. 

The work is proposed as a gift to Maciunas (who was colour blind) but the typewritten card displays the hallmarks of his design, suggesting it was intended as a Fluxus edition. [The Independent claims that the card was typed by Lennon]

The piece is very poorly documented, with only the above closed colour image from the MoMa and the black & white thumbnail available. 

"It was typical, perhaps even symptomatic that he used only black and white. He saw the world in sharp, moral terms, not in moderated shades of gray. Awake to the myriad logic forks in a chess game, he was insensitive to the hundreds of thousands of colors that human eyes distinguish. Someone once told me that George was color-blind. Perhaps it was true. If so, I can understand it.”

- Ken Friedman

Kynaston McShine | Information

Kynaston McShine [editor]

Information

New York City, USA: : The Museum of Modern Art, 1970

208 pp., 21 x 28 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

Debuting in the summer of 1970, the Museum of Modern Art exhibition Information was far from the first to document the burgeoning Conceptual Art scene, but distinguished itself through it’s international scope, curatorial approach, and this accompanying publication. 

The MoMA press release stated that "the exhibition and catalog contain work by more than 150 men and women from 15 countries including artists from Argentina, Brazil, Canada1, and Yugoslavia, being shown in this country for the first time [...] The only common denominator is that all are trying to extend the idea of art beyond traditional categories.”

These artists (and artist collectives) included Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Robert Barry, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Mel Bochner, George Brecht, Stanley Brouwn, Daniel Buren, James Lee Byers, Hanne Darboven, Jan Dibbets, Hamish Fulton, Gilbert and George, Hans Haacke, Douglas Huebler, On Kawara, Sol Lewitt, Richard Long, Bruce Nauman, N.E. Thing Co., Yoko Ono, Adrian Piper, Yvonne Rainer, Edward Ruscha, Robert Smithson, Jeff Wall, Lawrence Weiner, and dozens others. 

Arriving mere months after college campuses erupted in violence protesting Nixon’s incursion into Cambodia (and the death of four students shot by National Guardsmen), the exhibition inevitably featured works that responded to the political unrest. 

As the below schedule will attest, John Giorno programmed his Dial-A-Poem project so that callers might hear celebrated poets (Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs) alongside members of the Black Panther Party (Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver), The Weather Underground (Bernadine Dohrn) and the 

Chicago Seven (Abbie Hoffman). 

“At this point, with the war and the repression and everything, we thought this was a good way for the Movement to reach people,” Giorno wrote. This did not go unnoticed. The FBI caught wind of the work and several agents reportedly spent a day in the museum, listening on the phones to Dial-A-Poem.

Hans Haacke had proposed a piece entitled MoMA Poll, in which visitors would respond to a particular question by depositing their answers in one of two transparent Plexiglas ballot boxes. The artist neglected to provide the specific question to be asked until right before the opening. His query directly implicated a major donor and board member of MoMA: "Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon's Indochina Policy be a reason for your not voting for him in November?” By the exhibition’s conclusion in September, the Yes ballots outweighed the No, two to one [see below]. 

The publication continued this co-mingling conceptualism with political activism. Curator Kynaston McShine wrote, “If you are an artist in Brazil, you know of at least one friend who is being tortured; if you are one in Argentina, you probably have had a neighbour who has been in jail for having long hair, or for not being “dressed” properly; and if you are living in the United States, you may fear that you will be shot at, either in the universities, in your bed, or more formally in Indochina.”

The general image section of the volume included photographs of the Black Panthers, Che Guevera, the Great Wall of China, newspaper headlines about the Vietnam War, Bernie Boston’s Flower Power2 photograph, and the notorious And Babies poster that the MoMA had refused to distribute the year prior. 

“[The publication] was very much of its time,” recalled McShine, later. "One of the things I did in the catalogue was give each artist a page to do whatever they wanted to do.” This allowed the book to function autonomously, rather than merely document exhibition. 

The artist pages featured contributions in the form of photographic documentation, drawings, diagrams and descriptive texts. Many related to projects presented in the exhibition, but often artists included other work, sometimes pieces that had not yet been realized. 

The title also included a six-page recommended reading list, a chance-based index by Lucy Lippard, and a partial "but representative list of films that reflect many of the concerns and attitudes of the artists represented in the exhibition.”4

The original title now sells for upwards of five hundred dollars. In 2019, MoMA released a fiftieth anniversary facsimile reprint, which can be bought for $17.50 US, here. 

1. Canadians represented includ David Askevold, Iain & Ingrid Baxter, Gerald Ferguson, Les Levine, Michael Snow, Jeff Wall, Joyce Weiland, Ian Wilson and Marshall McLuhan, who is also cited countless times throughout the volume. The Information archive contains over twenty issues of his DEW-LINE newsletter and the includes his DISTANT EARLY WARNING cards from 1969.  

2. Taken on October 21, 1967, during the March on the Pentagon by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, Boston's photograph depicts protester George Harris placing a carnation into the barrel of an M14 rifle held by a soldier of the 503rd Military Police Battalion. 

3.The “Recommended Reading” list includes Books, Periodicals & Articles, and Exhibition catalogues (even a vinyl record: Art by Telephone). Authors include John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Lucy Lippard, Adrian Piper, Seth Siegelaub, Mao Tse-Tun and others. 

4. The film list includes works by Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Robert Barry, K.P. Brehmer, Stanley Brouwn, Christo, Bruce Conner, Hanne Darboven, Hollis Frampton, Dan Graham, Les Levine, Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono, Luca Patella, Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, Joyce Weiland, and many others. 

"The INFORMATION catalogue, an adjunct to the show, is being sold in the Museum bookstore. Specifically for the catalogue, Kynaston McShine has selected a variety of photographs that document his essay. The photographs, strong in visual imagery, depict 1970 life styles that greatly influence INFORMATION artists. Referring to these 150 artists from 15 countries abroad, Mr. McShine says, "Those represented are part of a culture that has been considerably altered by communications systems such as television and film, and by increased mobility. Therefore, photographs, documents, films and ideas, which are rapidly transmitted, have become an important part of this new work.”

- MoMA press release, 1970

"On the esthetic front, the events of spring 1970 drastically affected curator Kynaston McShine’s “Information” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. The show was intended to introduce to the establishment the products of some four years of relatively underground Conceptual art, to document the new art within a “culture that has been considerably altered by communications systems.” When it opened in July, however, many of the artists had revised their contributions to express their outrage at the war. The exhibition catalogue was particularly radical: the AWC’s And Babies poster was reproduced; the endpapers were serial photographs of a vast unidentified demonstration in Washington; and there were fifty pages of uncaptioned photographs making up the body of the catalogue and transforming it into a hybrid artist’s book. They mixed art and politics in a McLuhanesque jumble to an extent the show did not, including the Great Wall of China, a plane crash, our men on the moon, Che Guevara, Marcel Duchamp, flowers in guns, the Black Panthers, rock and roll groups, Native American earth drawings, and computer data.”

- Lucy Lippard, A Different War: Vietnam in Art

 

AIDS: The Public and Private Domains of the Miss General Idea Pavillion

General Idea

AIDS: The Public and Private Domains of the Miss General Idea Pavillion

San Francisco, USA: Art Space, 1988

[unpaginated], 12.8 × 12.7 × 0.3 cm., staple-bound

Edition of 1000

A small pamphlet produced to accompany the exhibition of the same name, at Artspace from the 12th of January to the 5th March, 1988.

Since that year, December 1st has been celebrated internationally as World AIDS Day, to raise awareness of the AIDS pandemic caused by the spread of HIV infection, and mourn those who have died of the disease. 

Raymond Pettibon | Tripping Corpse 6

Raymond Pettibon

Tripping Corpse 6

Lawndale, USA: SST Publications, 1985

28 pp., 21.6 x 14 x 0.2 cm., staple-bound

Edition of 500 numbered copies

Between the years 1981 and 1985, Raymond Pettibon produced six issues of Tripping Corpse, this being the final. The ‘zines were published by Pettibon’s older brother Greg Ginn, best known as the leader of the band Black Flag. 

Tripping Corpse included art, poetry, politics and band interviews and reviews. Number six features interviews with Keb Studerbox and Sonic Youth, an album review and drawings on 24 of the 28 pages. 

Reportedly, 400 copies of 500 produced were destroyed, making the title scarce. It has an estimated value of between three and five hundred dollars US. 

George Maciunas | Venus de Milo apron

George Maciunas

Venus de Milo apron

New York City, USA: Fluxus, 1973

75.7 × 40.3 cm.

Edition of 1000

The quintessential example of what George Maciunas defined as “functionalism” (see below) is a vinyl kitchen apron screen-printed with an image of the Venus de Milo, or Aphrodite of Melos. 

The work was originally intended for Implosions, Inc., a business set up by Maciunas and Robert Watts, and was co-credited to the pair. Implosions was a Fluxus offshoot designed to generate income for the group, and Maciunas excitedly wrote to Ken Friedman that these could be produced for fifty cents each and that they might raise funds by selling the them “to a large beer company”. 

The work was then slated to be included in the third Fluxus Yearbox. This was originally conceived of as a flat package of games, postage stamps, placemats, stationery and wearable goods, before the eventual format of a cardboard tube was decided upon (see below). 

By 1972, Maciunas had arranged with the editor of Flash Art magazine to produce the project, which then found its way into the hands of Gino Di Maggio's Multhipla imprint. 

 

According to Gwen Allen, Maciunas proposed to produce Fluxpack 3 in an edition of a thousand, but only a handful of copies were assembled. The Fluxus Codex makes no mention of this, but its scarcity bears Allen out. MoMA owns a copy (from the Silverman collection - the most comprehensive collection of Fluxus objects ever assembled) and there is also one in the impressive holdings of the Bonnato Foundation. I could locate no copies available for sale.  

“[F]unctionalism I would describe as follows: That's when the piece that you are doing has an inherent connection to the form, you know, so to give you example: we did the whole series of aprons. A non-functional apron would be to print some flowers on it. Okay? Now that has nothing to do with the fact that it's an apron or the fact that you wear it on top of your body. Right?

Let’s say you print McLuhan’s face on it, or Beatles or whatever is popular, you know. It has nothing to do with the fact that it's an apron or that you are wearing on top of your stomach. Okay, now that I would call non-functionalism. I wasn't interested in that. I was interested in functionalism so therefore when I came and designed aprons I designed aprons that had something to do with the shape that was going to cover you. So, for instance one version was Venus de Milo, both sides blown up so that when you covered your, from neck to knee, you were covered with this Venus de Milo - photographic image. Okay. Or another apron was image of a stomach right on top of your stomach. So, I would call that functionalism.”

- George Maciunas, interviewed by Larry Miller

 

Dieter Roth | 6 Piccadillies

Dieter Roth

6 Piccadillies

London, UK: Petersburg Press, 1970

61.3 x 77.8 x 8.9 cm.

Edition of 150

A portfolio of six double-sided screen print over offset lithographs, one with iron fillings, mounted board. 

"In the late 1960s, Rita Donagh, wife of Roth’s longtime friend and collaborator Richard Hamilton, gave the artist a postcard of London’s famous Piccadilly Circus. This unremarkable image is the basis for one of the artist’s best-known series of artworks, 6 Piccadillies. Roth enlarged and reproduced the image as a doublesided photolithograph, then transformed it through various interventions: overprinting it in Day-Glo colors, sub-merging it in a fog of translucent white, and almost completely erasing it with a layer of iron filings. The portfolio cover resembles a suitcase, an item that had a constant presence in Roth’s itinerant life. 96 Piccadillies, a later volume, reproduces the artist’s paintings on postcards picturing the same landmark; the reproductions themselves can be separated and sent as postcards.”

- MoMA wall label

Jane Knížák | Flux Papers

Jane Knížák

Flux Papers

New York City, USA: Fluxus, c1969

12 x 10 x 1.3 cm.

Edition size unknown

A clear plastic box (sometimes red and clear) with a George Maciunas designed label. Inside are five strips of toilet paper of various colours with designs of flowers and mock dollar bills.

The work is scarce - I can locate no copies for sale and only a few examples in institutions (MoMA, The Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon and the Bonotto Foundation). It was only advertised in a few Fluxus newsletters and it is Jane Knížák’s only edition for Fluxus, according to Jon Hendrick’s Fluxus Codex. 

 

Enrico Baj | Baj at Marconi's

Enrico Baj

Baj at Marconi's

Milan, Italy: Studio Marconi Editore, 1969

45 x 40.1 cm. (bag)

Edition of 30

A multiple to commemorate Enrico Baj’s exhibition Baj at Marconi’s, in 1969. The work consists of a screen=printed plastic shopping bag with handles, containing two screen-printed plastic ties, four postcards, three exhibition brochures, mannequin arm, and a promotional button.

Ian Murray | The Top Song

 

Ian Murray

The Top Song

Toronto, Canada: Shorewood Packaging, 1973

12” vinyl record

Edition of 250 numbered copies

I just read an article about angry composers (timed to coincide with the Succession finale tonight) upset with the “Skip Intro” feature on Netflix. They argue that TV opening credit theme music sets the tone, settles you down and guides you in. Watching downloaded  TV on a laptop, I invariably forward past the intro after the first episode.1 Apparently I am not alone. According to Netflix, the “Skip intro” button is now pressed 136 million times a day, saving users a cumulative 130 years. 

A decade ago, the radio station QuickHitz drew headlines for announcing that they would edit every song they played, in-house, to under two minutes. In the age of the dwindling attention span, the station aimed to play 24 songs an hour, twice the industry standard. A few months later, the station backtracked after considerable blowback, with most of the outrage coming from the industry and artists themselves, rather than the listener - many of whom had been skipping past the ends of songs on iPods since the beginning of the century. 

Ian Murray’s The Top Song explored the short attention span involved when consuming media, fifty years ago. The work responded to the practice of the time where radio disc jockeys decided the fate of a song in ten seconds. The liner notes to the LP explain: 

"When you have over three hundred 45's coming in a week, you don't have ime to listen to them all, or even half of them. Generally a disc jockey will play about ten seconds, and he can usually tell if it is a good song or not"

An early super-cut, "The Top Song" consists of the top hundred songs from the previous decade, all truncated to their opening ten seconds. Topping this, the b-side is a 17 minute live recording called "Keeping on Top of the Top Song”. Drummer Tim Cohoon was commissioned to play along with The Top Song, which he had not previously heard. 

The work was first performed at the Dalhousie University Student Union Auditorium in Halifax on November 22, 1970, and was broadcast on Dalhousie University Radio. 

The LP followed three years later and a decade after that, in 1984, Arno Niewenhuysen performed "On Top of The Top Song" in Amsterdam. Four years later, in 1988, a 3:15 excerpt of Niewenhuysen's performance appeared on Tellus #21 - Audio by Visual Artists, alongside works by Joseph Beuys, Christian Boltanski, George Brecht, Terry Fox, Joan Jonas, Marcel Duchamp, Richard Prince and others. 

In 2010, the work was performed again as part of the traveling exhibition Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965 - 1980. 

The above copy is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, in NYC. The liner notes describe the simple and effective premise: 

"A professional drummer was contracted to play along with a prerecorded tape. (He hadn't previously heard). He was told only that the tape went through a number of changes and that he should play continuously along with the music, always searching for a point of reference (allowing him to play without changing his rhythm)."

1. A rare exception is Sharon Horgan’s Bad Sisters, which featured a PJ Harvey cover of Leonard Cohen’s "Who By Fire", which I was happy to revisit weekly.