George Brecht | Cedille Uhr

George Brecht

Cedille Uhr

Mönchengladbach, Germany: Kunstverein Mönchengladbach, 1973

4 x 4.5 x 0.75 cm. [men's], 3 x 3 x 1 cm. [women's]

Edition of 90 [+5 A.P.] signed and numbered copies

A wrist watch containing a variety of tiny objects. Produced in an edition of 90 copies: 45 men's size and 45 women's.

In 1969, George Brecht and Robert Filliou organized an exhibition titled "La Cédille qui Sourit" at the Municipal Museum in Mönchengladbach. The exhibition referred to their three year stay in France, in a house called "La Cédille qui Sourit" in Villefranche.

In the summer of 1965, Brecht and Filliou placed a yellow awning and chalkboard sign in the window of the house that had previously housed a television repair store and candy shop. They called it La Cédille qui Sourit, or "The cedilla that smiles”, after the diacritical mark added under certain letters to modify their pronunciation (suggesting an S sound rather than a K, under the letter C, for example). The proprietors claimed the store would offer for sale "anything that contained a cedilla, and anything that did not".

The store carried materials from a number of artist affiliated with Fluxus, including titled published by the Something Else Press, Fluxus, and MAT Editions, though it was difficult to discern which items were completed and which were "in-progress”, as the space mostly served as the pair’s studio. 

Filliou later recounted “[It was] a sort of workshop and of shop, of nonshop would we say now, for we were never commercially registered, and the Cédille was always shut, opening only upon request of visitors to our homes.” They viewed it as a "Center of Permanent Creation”, using it to conduct research, write letters, jokes, songs, poems, scores and recipes,  and produce puzzles, games, drawings, and events.

Even as a studio space, its use was questionable, with the artists reportedly more likely to be working in nearby cafes.

In the third year of the store's operation, the Something Else Press published Games at the Cedilla [see below] as their 14th title (it was immediately followed by Store Days, by Claes Oldenburg, whose similar venture operated in New York City a few years prior). The charming book is a compendium of ideas, notations, journal records, correspondence, games, "One Minute Scenarios" and other writings made while Brecht and Filliou tended store.

This watch was produced at La Cédille qui Sourit, and - like most objects created in the three-year span  - bears its name. 

Slowscan vol 40

[Various Artists]

Slowscan Vol 40 

Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands: Slowscan, 2018

20 x 20 x 3

Edition of 97 [+3 AP}

A boxed set of seven seven inch records: Albert M. Fine (Fear No Forks), George Brecht (Drip Music), Joe Jones (Solar Music Hot House), Ken Friedman (Zen For Record), Charles Amirkhanian (The Type Without Time), Adriano Spatola, Gian Paolo Roffi (Autoroute, Al Capone Poem), and Pauline Oliveros (World Ear Project). 

A deluxe edition of 30 was released with an accompanying hardcover catalogue (Visual Vinyl) and two audio cassettes: a 1977 interview with George Maciunas and a 15-track collection of Dick Higgins’ work (see below). 

George Brecht | Book

George Brecht
Book
Cologne, Germany: Michael Werner, 1972
[28 pp.], 31 x 22 cm., hardcover
Edition of 50 numbered copies

I’ve always considered George Brecht to be one of the most significant and influential Fluxus artists, but weeks went by after his death before an obituary appeared. Posthumous retrospectives have been few and far between, and only a couple of monographs have been published about his work. 

Robin Page described him as the only artist who could walk without leaving footprints. 

Dick Higgins, Ben Vautier, Ken Friedman, Geoffrey Hendricks, Larry Miller and other Fluxus artists I have spoken with/interviewed all held him in the highest regard and considered him the originator of the  “Event Score”, something quintessential to both performance and publications within Fluxus. 

When I taught I would regularly show students a few examples from his brilliant Wateryam box and announce “We’ll look into this more in a future class”, and then never did. It was almost as if I needed to keep it mysterious, unresolved. Not to them, to myself. 

I have folders of images of every iteration of the work, which could become a week’s worth of content here, but haven’t gotten around to posting them yet. Even now, five paragraphs in, I have to fight the urge not to (re!)save this as draft and return to it later. 

Brecht was a scientist before becoming an artist, he attended John Cage’s legendary classes, and his work predates and anticipates “Conceptual Art”, yet it tends to hit at an intuitive level, rather than intellectual one.

When asked to distinguish Fluxus from Pop Art, he described how Lichtenstein would take a newspaper cartoon and blow it up a hundred times and paint it on an enormous canvas. He said he would be more inclined to fold the cartoon and keep it in his pocket. 

Book was conceived in 1964, but not published until 1972, after Brecht relocated to Cologne. It’s an almost blank, tautological object. 

 

The clothbound cover boldly proclaims THIS IS THE COVER OF THE BOOK in debossed uppercase letters (leading many to mistake this as the book’s title). Inside, a further eighteen descriptions of the format of the book become the project’s sole content:

THIS IS THE TITLE PAGE

THIS IS THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TITLE PAGE, THAT GIVES YOU INFORMATION LIKE WHO PUBLISHED IT AND WHEN

THIS IS THE FIRST PAGE OF THE BOOK

THESE ARE THE END PAGES OF THE BOOK

It’s a mostly sober self-narration, but occasionally some playfulness appears, such as THIS IS THE PAGE THAT RUSTLES WHEN YOU TURN IT (MAYBE) or a description that plays with tense: 

THIS IS THE PAGE BEFORE THE TITLE PAGE OF THE BOOK THAT TELLS YOU WHAT THE TITLE IS OR WAS, OR IS GOING TO BE. 

It brings to mind a book I was made to buy when first hired to work for an antiquarian bookseller, to ensure the listings I wrote would be accurate: John Carter's ABC For Book Collectors. It’s essentially a glossary of industry terms - the bibliophile’s dictionary - with entries for things like conjugate leaves, endpapers, half-title, recto-verso, etc.

I expected it to be a dull, dry read, but it was actually pretty spirited. Sample entry: 

ELSE FINE

A favourite phrase with the never-say-die type of cataloguer: used in

such contexts as ‘somewhat wormed and age-stained, piece torn from

title, headlines cut into, joints repaired, new lettering-piece, else fine’.

‘Second impression, else fine’, noted by Carter, is an extreme case.

Book was re-issued in 2017 in a decidedly more affordable format, but can’t compete with the presence of the original. There have been many other titles, before and since, that tackle this same territory, but Book remains a gold standard in simplicity and presentation. 

"In 1972, Brecht went to Cologne and exhibited at documenta 5 in Kassel. During this period, he published his “blank book” BOOK, which directly references the concepts of Zen. In an attempt to bring a blind spot of object perception into focus, Brecht presented the object of the physical book and its elements, such as cover, endpapers, individual pages and colophon, with his written comments." 

- Ulrike Pennewitz

 

Bottles

 

Fluxus Text Shirts

Shirts by Fluxus artists featuring only text, by Ben, Ken Friedman, Yoko Ono and George Brecht. 

Jannis Kounellis | Kounellis

Jannis Kounellis

Kounellis

Monchengladbach, Germany: Städtisches Museum, 1978.

[5] pp., 19.5 x 15 cm., loose leaves, boxed

Edition of 440 numbered copies

Accompanying his exhibition, which ran from May 11th to June 11th in 1978, this boxed catalogue consists of a printed cardboard box containing four cards and a multiple by Kounellis. Three of the cards feature a continuous text of the poem Die Skythen, a poem written in 1918 by Russian lyrical poet Aleksandr Blok. The fourth is the title or colophon page. The multiple is made of compressed board, and features a metal rod embedded in white tissue. The rod is laminated in explosive powder the the work is intended to be ignited. 

When lit, the fuse produces a “bright hissing glow that leaves a black smoke trail on the grey-white plate”. 

This was the final boxed work in the Städtisches Museum series that began with Joseph Beuys in 1967 and also included editions by Carl Andre, Hanne Darboven, George Brecht & Robert Filliou, Piero Manzoni, Stanley Brown, Daniel Buren, Jasper Johns, Marcel Broodthaers, Lawrence Weiner, Gerhard Richter, and James Lee Byars, amongst others. 

The price during the run of the exhibition was DM 6. The work can now be purchased from Printed Matter, here, for $1800.00 US. 

George Brecht | V TRE

George Brecht

V TRE

Metuchen, USA: Self-published, 1963

2 pp., 32.2 x 24.8 cm., single sheet

Edition size unknown

The origin of the Fluxus newspapers (see previous post) can be traced back to publications that George Brecht produced to accompany his infamous Yam Festival. 

Brecht and Robert Watts met weekly for lunch at the Howard Johnson's in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where they conceived of the year-long performance art festival. It was intended to take place in Princeton, but ended up happening at George Segal's farm, on the campus of Rutgers, in New York City, and through the postal service - an early example of mail art. 

The project began in May of 1962 (Yam being May spelled backwards) and included events, Happenings and performances by Dick Higgins, Allan Kaprow, La Monte Young, Wolf Vostell, Watts and Brecht. These included "Yam Lecture", "Yam Hat Sale", "Water Day", "Clock Day", "Box Day" and "Yam Day". Examples of some of the printed materials that accompanied the festival are below. 

V TRE is the best known of the ephemera surrounding the event, as it became a proto-Fluxus publication, similar to Young and MacLow’s An Anthology. When Maciunas decided to produce a Fluxus newspaper, he appropriated the name, which Brecht had taken from a faulty neon sign in New Jersey. 

The two page broadsheet features announcements and works, interspersed with appropriated newspaper headlines and ad parodies. It features contributions by Ruth Kraus, Claes Oldenburg, Bob Morris, Dieter Roth, Angus Maclise, Jackson MacLow, Robert Morris, and Hans Gappmayr.