Peter Frank | Fluxus Music

Peter Frank

Fluxus Music

Berlin, Germany: Ricochet, 2015

8 pp., 20 x 14 cm., staple-bound

Edition of 50 

A six page ‘zine about the importance of music to Fluxus, reprinting an article from the Southern California Art Magazine issue #22, 1979, by Peter Frank. 

Frank is an American art critic and curator, living in Los Angeles. His curatorial work includes projects for Documenta, the Venice Biennale, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the  Guggenheim,  and many other national and international venues.

As a writer, he has contributed to The Village Voice, The SoHo Weekly News, the Huffington Post, Art in America, ARTnews, LA Weekly. and Visions Art Quarterly (where he served as editor). He is the author of the 1983 title Something Else Press, the only overview of the influential publisher. 

"In New York, where Fluxus began, John Cage - himself a product of unrigid West Coast thought in the 1930s and 1940s - exercised increasing influence over younger thinkers and devisers in all the arts. This influence was made possible by Cage´s own responsiveness to work in various arts, a responsiveness brought about by involvement with Merce Cunningham´s dance company, summers spent at the Black Mountain school (where all the arts were taught), and study of Zen Buddhist thought and practice. In 1956, and for two subsequent years, Cage taught a course in new music composition at the New School for Social Research. In this course several younger artists, musicians, writers filmmakers and others were led, or were encouraged to lead themselves, to means of escaping the restriction of given media and modes of thought. Allan Kaprow devised the first Happenings immediately after attending Cage´s class. Classmates of Kaprow, including George Brecht, Dick Higgings, Phillip Corner, and Al Hansen, broke through mediumistic boundaries with Cage´s encouragement and example mind. But, despite the friendships and aesthetics alliances that began in that class, there were divergent sensibilities. The complex, heavily theatrical, and painterly format of the Happening favoured by Kaprow, Hansen, and others who came on the scene was eschewed in favor of more restrained, reflective modes by such as Brecht and Robert Watts. Higgins, who was unusual in his ability to work with equal comfort on grand and minuscule levels, recalls that, after the flurry of excitement shared by Cage class alumni at the advent of Happenings ( and related forms in Europe), a contrasting interest arose.

[...]

The West Coast, Japanese, and sporadic European contingents merged with the New York group, attended one another´s loft performances, and began putting it all into words, into verbal instructions and position papers, into cards,flyers, and books. By the end of 1960 La Monte Young, a Cage disciple from Bay Area, had edited An Anthology of work participating in the new sensibility. In the version of the book published in 1963:

One of Young´s compositions bears resemblance to traditional musical notations: a fifth interval, B- natural and F-sharp, “ to be held for a very long time”. Another composition consists entirely of the direction, “ Draw a straight line and follow it.” Another: “The performer should prepare any composition and then perform as well as he can”. Another:” This piece is little whirlpools out in the middle of the ocean”. The Piano Piece for David Tudor no. 3 reads: “ Most of them/were very old grasshoppers.” Composition 1960 no.9 consists of a small card with a straight line on it, enclosed in an envelope on which the following is printed: “ the enclosed score is right side up when the line is horizontal and slightly above center”.

The concision and poetry of Young´s formats, the wide range if interpretation they encourage and the availability of their language - anyone can realise a Young composition at any time, with no concert hall, instrument training, or even effort necessary- attracted other artists of the new sensibility, especially those whose performance scores were evolving toward a simplicity of form and statement anyway. George Brecht , Robert Watts, Yoko Ono, Dick Higgins, Allison Knowles, and George Maciuanas, the designer of An Anthology, achieved new brevity, partly through Young´s model.”

- Peter Frank