Geoffrey Hendricks | Ring Piece

Geoffrey Hendricks
Ring Piece
New York City/Barton, USA: Something Else Press, 1973
79 pp., 13.5 x 10.5 cm., softcover
Edition of 2000

Subtitled "The Journal of a Twelve Hour Silent Meditation", this slim volume documents the artist's performance at the 8th Annual Avant Garde Festival. Organized by Charlotte Moorman, the event took place on November 19, 1971, at the 69th Regiment Infantry Armory, in Manhattan. Other participants included Christo, Joe Jones, John Lennon, Hermann Nitsch, Yoko Ono, Ralph Oritz, Joey Skaggs, Bob Watts, and many others.

Hendricks sat in a tuxedo in silence for twelve hours, atop a six-foot tall mound of dirt, in the exact centre of the Armory, under which was buried his wedding ring, and various other relics relating to his marriage.

One of the smallest titles put out by the press, the book is designed to be the exact size of the little red journal that Hendricks kept during the 12 hour long meditation. "Good words from the Cloudsmith" is how it is described in the Something Else Press newsletter from January 1973. The title sold for $5.45, and a cloth signed and numbered edition (of 100) was offered for $15.00.

"For the Avant Garde Festival, which followed the Flux Divorce, I was asked by Charlotte Moorman what I wanted to do and I said "I'd like to dump a truckload of dirt in the middle of the Armory and bury my wedding ring there and sit on top of it. Bici and I are deciding to separate," Hendricks told me in the mid-nineties.

And, unless I'm mistranslating this casual interview, the ring in Ring Piece was absent:

GH: There had always been a certain amount of animosity between [George Maciunas] and Charlotte Moorman. Charlotte was someone who was all-embracing and George was very selective: "You're in, you're out". Even with the people who were part of this closer group, if he was irritated at somebody he would excommunicate them. And then they'd be back again, later. So he decided he was going to have nothing to do with anybody who participated in the festival. At first it was just that he was not going to help anybody, because I think Yoko was wanting him to fabricate her work and he was deciding that he didn't want to do this.

Since he had provided me with the box (for the ring) and glued it together and did the die-stamping I couldn't use it, because he didn't want any participation at all.

So the ring wasn't under me during the performance, but other relics were.

George ended up giving me a little text to post about how he would not have any verbal communication with anyone who participated in the so-called Avant Garde festival.

DD: For one year, was it?

GH: Yes, for one year, until the next festival.

DD: Did he keep his word?

GH: Pretty much. He used Barbara Moore as a conduit. He would call Barbara and tell her to call Geoff, or Joe Jones, or whoever and tell them that I need this, or I want this. If we wanted to reach George we'd have to call Barbara and say "Barbara, can you see if George has this?" or "What does he think about this or that",  whatever.


Ring Piece was preceded by Flux Divorce Album (see previous post), another work about his separation from Nye Ffarrabas (formerly Bici Forbes Hendricks), his partner of ten years and the mother of his two children.

Geoffrey Hendricks | Flux Divorce Album

Geoffrey Hendricks
Flux Divorce Album
New York City, USA: Fluxus, 1973
39.7 x 50.6 x 10.5 cm.
Edition size unknown

A boxed work documenting the artist's divorce from Nye Ffarrabas (formerly Beatrice Cobb Forbes, Bici Forbes, and then Bici Forbes Hendricks), in which all of their belongings were sliced in two. Items from their ten years of marriage - including documents, clothing, a love seat, and their marital bed - were cut in half with scissors, a paper cutter, an ax and a power saw.

Housed in a box crafted by woodworking graduate student, the work includes "Our Flux Divorce" which resembles a wedding album, and is also bisected, horizontally. Fragments of coats, barbed wire, plastic, correspondence cut in half, and half of a wedding announcement are also included. The documentation of the performative event is by Fluxus photographer Peter Moore. George Maciunas assisted with the design, and distributed the work through Fluxus.

When Maciunas married in 1978, Hendricks officiated (in a clerical robe) and the event can almost be viewed as the inversion of his divorce.


From an Oral history interview with Geoffrey Hendricks, 2016 August 17-18:

GEOFFREY HENDRICKS: With our 10th wedding anniversary coming along, it was like, How do we celebrate it? Because we were both, you know, queer and involved with others, and I just sort of tossed out the idea, what about a Flux-divorce? And it sort of resonated, and I said, "Let me talk to George Maciunas." And so I talked to George. He was absolutely thrilled and so he did a lot of the orchestrating of it, and figuring out how to divide up the house with a wall of cardboard boxes to separate one half of the room. For another, barbed wire between the living room and the kitchen island in the middle of the—before the dining room.

[...]

And then upstairs in the bedroom, we had a division of property and with a paper cutter, we cut our wedding document in half, the wedding invitation, some correspondence that was sort of symbolic. And then with, I guess, a utility knife, cut the mattress in half with scissors and ripped the sheets in half. And then I had this circular saw and cut the wooden platform of the bed in half. And there was a wicker loveseat that I chopped in half. So this was the division of property and we tore our wedding garments in half.

LINDA YABLONSKY: Was this documented?

GEOFFREY HENDRICKS: There's some documentation of it.

LINDA YABLONSKY: Photographs or video?

GEOFFREY HENDRICKS: Yeah, Peter Moore took photographs. And there are maybe some others. I don't know that there's video, but then I made a Flux–Divorce Box so that I have this as an object. And there are copies of it in, I guess, in MoMA and the Getty and the Sohm [Archive] collection in Stuttgart, and sort of, you know, there maybe half a dozen key Fluxus collection series.

LINDA YABLONSKY: It sounds like it sets quite a precedent for Gordon Matta-Clark.

GEOFFREY HENDRICKS: [Laughs.] Yeah, right, well—

LINDA YABLONSKY: Remember he split the house—

GEOFFREY HENDRICKS: Oh, yeah, no, I know.



From a casual interview I did with Hendricks in the early nineties:

DD: How many of these were produced?

GH: Not a lot. They were all hand done. There's one in the Silverman collection, there's one in the Jean Brown collection that's now in the Getty. Francesco Conz has one, Barbara Moore. Not many more than that.


From an interview with Lars Movin:

GH: Early in 1978 while George Maciunas was battling terminal cancer, he said to me "Geoff, we had your "Flux Divorce", we should also have a "Flux Wedding". Ht wanted to have a Flux Wedding with Billie Hutching, who he was with, and he wanted me to be 'minister'.

Geoffrey Hendricks | Picnic Garbage Placemat

Geoffrey Hendricks
Picnic Garbage Placemat
New York City, USA: Fluxus, 1973
35.5 x 42.5 cm.
Edition size unknown

Screenprint on fabric-backed vinyl, this placemat is designed to mimic the refuse after a picnic. It was distributed through Fluxus individually, and as part of the Fluxpack 3, which also included works by George Brecht, Ben Vautier, Robert Watts and George Maciunas.

Geoffrey Hendricks | Flux Reliquary

Geoffrey Hendricks
Flux Reliquary
New York City, USA: Fluxus, [circa] 1970
12 x 10 x 2.2 cm.
Edition size unknown

A compartmentalized Canal Street plastic box with a George Maciunas-designed label, containing pseudo-religious relics or "holy shit from the diners of the last supper." Items may have included fingernails in a capsule, a white rubber band, yellow water ("sweat") in a glass and metal medicine vial, a gelatin medicine capsule filled with small brass nails ("from the cross..."), a small coil of yellow electrical wire ("fragment of rope..."), a truncated ballpoint pen ("Pen used...to write...Nestorian errors"), dried excrement ("from diners of the The Last Supper") and a small flat pebble ("that stoned a Saint").

The above examples are from the The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Harvard Art Museum, the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, The Walker Art Centre, and the Bonotto Foundations collection.

The work existed in two other versions: a shit-dispensing vending machine and a drawer in Maciunas' Flux Cabinet, below.

Hendricks died on May 12 at the age of 86. Obituaries to follow, as well as other examples of his work throughout the week.

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Paul Butler | The Butler Edition

Paul Butler
The Butler Edition 
Toronto, Canada: Nothing Else Press, 2008
8.5" x 11"
Edition of 15 signed and numbered copies

The artist creates the quintessential “Butler” piece by altering an ad from a magazine, re-enforcing the cyclical relationship between advertising and the glamourization of its subject matter.

Paul Butler's New Old Works opens tonight at Division Gallery in Toronto, and continues until June 16th. For more information, visit the gallery website, here.