Yoko Ono | Self Portrait

Yoko Ono

Self Portrait

New York City, USA: Fluxus, 1964

envelope: 6.2 x 10.8 cm; mirror: 4.9 x 5 cm.

Edition size unknown

Yoko Ono's contribution to Fluxus 1 is an envelope stamped with her name and the title, which contains a metal mirror. It's a self-portrait not of the artist, but of the reader/viewer. 

The work is vastly improved in later box editions when it is retitled Box of Smile. Here the viewer also completes the piece (literally, with their image) but the act of opening the box and looking in only to see your face invariably prompts a smile from all but the most cynical of participants. The idea that you might close the box and it permanently house your smile is similar to many of the fanciful notions in her artist book Grapefruit, such as "Imagine the clouds dripping Dig a hole in your garden to put them in."

Ono produced a black, white and clear version of Box of Smile through Fluxus (and later ReFlux) as well as smaller editions that have served as gifts over the years. 

“When you go to hotels or somewhere like that, they always have a mirror, but the mirror doesn’t really reflect you. It just suggests, like an airbrush thing of you. And if you keep looking at what you see in that mirror, then you can’t really deal with your real face… You have to break the mirror, but you also have to see the mirror. You have to have that dichotomy constantly. If we don’t have that dichotomy, then we become sort of two-dimensional. We become like a painting, not a person.”

– Yoko Ono, Interview Magazine, November 26, 2013

Congo the Chimpanzee in Fluxus 1

It’s assumed I’m being facetious (or an asshole) when I say that my favourite painter is Congo the Chimpanzee. Not unlike the controversy around his work in the fifties and sixties, the assumption is that the sentiment is intended to disparage painters, which couldn’t be further from the truth. I would just rather one of his works on the wall over any other.1 

Congo was born in the wild in 1954, and entered captivity a year later. He began painting at the age of two, when English zoologist, surrealist painter and one-time curator of mammals at the London Zoo, Desmond Morris, offered the chimp a pencil. Morris observed that Congo would draw circles, had a basic sense of colour and composition, and a certainty as to when a work was complete. The chimp would “throw fits” if a painting was taken away before he deemed it complete, and would refuse to continue working on a piece that he considered finished. It was never in doubt that he was making aesthetic decisions about his compositions. 

By the age of four, Congo has completed almost 400 paintings. He incorporated repeated motifs, developed a personal style and reportedly took great pleasure in the act of painting. 

“No other apes were controlling the mark making and varying the patterns as he was,” Morris recalls. "He revelled in the fact that much bigger marks [than pencil] could be made with little effort, as the paint flowed from his brushes onto the large coloured sheets I provided."2

Famous for his appearances on Morris’ British television show Zootime (and for the debates his work caused about abstract expressionism), Congo’s paintings were collected by Joan Miro, Herbert Read, the Duke of Edinburgh and Pablo Picasso, who reportedly hung one of the ape's pictures on his studio wall after receiving it as a gift from Roland Penrose (who bought two paintings for himself, also). 

Morris published a book called The Story of Congo in 1958, as well as several articles in scientific journals. He also curated several exhibitions of paintings by primates. Congo's work was included in numerous other exhibitions at the time, also. 

In June of 2005, his paintings were included in an auction at Bonhams, alongside works by Renoir and Warhol. While their works remained unsold, Congo's sold for several times above the estimate. The American collector Howard Hong purchased three of Congo's tempura paintings for over US$25,000.

“We had no idea what these things were worth,” said Howard Rutkowski, director of modern and contemporary art at the auction house. “We just put them in for our own amusement.”3

Congo's work was also included in two important artists’ publications: the first Fluxus Yearbox and the 

penultimate issue of the SMS Periodical. The cover of SMS #5 reproduces a painting by Congo as a wrap-around folder, housing works by William Copley, Angus MacLise, Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono, Mel Ramos, Diane Wakoski, Lawrence Weiner and others (below, bottom).

The inclusion in Fluxus 1 (and, a few months prior, in Fluxus Newspaper No. 1, below) was likely intended as a comment by Maciunas on the democratization of art, moving it from a rarefied occupation of the skilled craftsmen to include anyone (and anything) that set their mind to producing art. 

The first time I visited Fluxus scholar Jon Hendricks in New York I was taken to his backyard office, which is lined with floor to ceiling library drawers. At one point I noticed a drawer labelled CONGO. It was both very funny to me, and indicated the meticulous and thorough nature of his work (then as a curator of the Silverman Fluxus collection, now as Yoko Ono's curator and right-hand man). 

Congo died of tuberculosis in 1964, at ten years of age - a third the life-expectancy of a male chimp in captivity today. 

Now 92 year old, Morris sold off his collection of Congo paintings last year, noting "I am holding onto the serious, scientific research notes that I made during my years working with Congo, but, at 91 years old, I now would rather that the paintings and drawings be made available to other collectors, to whom I hope they will bring as much pleasure as they have to me."

1. It does me no favours that next on my wishlist would be one of George Bush’s bathtub self-portraits. 

2. Monkey Painting. Thierry Lenain. London, UK: Reaction Books, 1997. What's not to like about a book that opens a chapter: "The second half of the 1950s was a golden age for monkey artists".

3. https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/chimpanzees-artwork-auctioned-for-25000/

Alison Knowles | Glove to be Worn While Examining

Alison Knowles

Glove to be Worn While Examining

New York City, USA: Fluxus, 1964

30.5 x 26.5 cm. 

Edition size unknown

A transparent plastic glove on greenish paper. Little is known about this work which appeared in some collations of Fluxus 1. The work does not appear to have been sold separately. 

"Takako Saito's Smell Chess (1965), which brings the olfactory senses of the body into play, and Chess Board Door (1973),which situates a person on either side of a revolving toilet stall, would have interested Maciunas for their scatological implications. The same is true of Knowles's early-1960s Glove to Be Worn While Examining, which suggests the erotic attraction of a vaginal or anal probe."

- Geoffrey Hendricks

Robert Watts | Dollar Bill (from Fluxus 1)

Robert Watts

Dollar Bill

New York City, USA: Fluxus, 1962

7 × 15.5 cm

Edition size unknown

Double-sided offset lithograph of a drawing of an American dollar bill. The work was predated by dollar bills by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. 

Dollar Bill also appeared in the Anthology of Contemporary Engraving: The International Avant-Garde: America Discovered: Volume 5, and $ Bills in Wood Chest (see earlier post, here). Edition Conz published a work in 1987 - a year prior to the artist's death - called Dollar Bills, which featured three volumes of bound bills, one of which is Dollar Bill (below, bottom). 

There was also talk of using the image as a part of printed toilet paper, though this doesn't seem to have materialized. 

Fluxus 1

 

[Fluxus]

Fluxus 1

New York City, USA/Wiesbaden, Germany: Fluxus, [c1964]

53 pp., 19 x 21 cm., bound with nuts and bolts

Unlimited Edition 

Designed, edited and published by George Maciunas, this anthology work is a one of the most important documents of Fluxus (and therefore of early conceptual art, performance art, artists' books, mail art, etc. etc.). It is the first collective Fluxus publication, following the proto-Fluxus book An Anthology, which was designed by Maciunas and edited by La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low. 

The bookwork features all of the hallmarks of the subsequent Fluxus publications: an inventive format, objects, typographical experiments, event scores, etc. etc. No two copies are alike. They feature different inserts, different artists and different covers. Most, but not all, are housed in either a cardboard or wooden slipcase, which typically doubles as the book's shipping crate. 

Designed as an unlimited edition, it is unclear how many were actually produced, due to production difficulties as well as limited resources - and limited interest from buyers. Best estimates put the edition size at around two hundred copies. The books are scarce and now valued at over ten thousand dollars. I've only handled one once, years ago when I was at Art Metropole. A book scout brought it in, I took it home for the night, collated it (with the help of Fluxus expert Jon Hendricks) and we sold it the next day to the Walther Philips Gallery in Banff. 

Hendricks comments that “There are a number of variations in Fluxus 1 because it was assembled by hand over a period of perhaps 13 years. During this time Maciunas’ attitude toward certain artists and/or works in the anthology changed, some works got lost or mislaid, and others ran out of stock.” The work variously included contributions by Ay-O, George Brecht, Stanley Brouwn, Congo the Chimpanzee, Brion Gysin, Ann Halprin, Sohei Hashimoto, Dick Higgins (early copies, before an ongoing dispute with Maciunas excluded him from later issues), Hi Red Centre, Joe Jones, Alison Knowles, Takehisa Kosugi, Shigeko Kubota, György Sándor Ligeti, Jackson Mac Low, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Benjamin Patterson, Takako Saito, Tomas Schmit, Mieko Shiomi, Ben Vautier, Robert Watts, Emmett Williams and La Monte Young

The cover is typically hand-stamped and the volume held together with nuts and bolts, possibly a nod to the 1927 book Depero Futurista by Fortunato Depero. The pages are interspersed with envelopes which house printed materials and small objects, including a strip of celluloid film, a 7-inch record, a surgical glove, a mirror, a white folded paper napkin, a burnt match stick, cards, stamps, and other envelopes.  

As the Fluxus anthology that followed was titled Flux Yearbox 2 (below), Fluxus 1 is sometimes referred to as the first Yearbox. Hendricks has noted that while portions of the work were printed in Europe in 1962, fully assembled copies were probably not completed until sometime in 1964. Production continued for more than a decade, with many changes to the format and contents. 

The work warrants more than a single post, so - over the next week or so - I'll be posting the book page by page, and (where possible) will include the same works as they appeared as stand-alone projects outside of the anthology. 

“Here the book is the performance, as well as containing it, and the work achieves the Fluxus goal of making the audience member a performer through the structure of the piece. One does not ‘read’ this work, but enacts it."

- Joanna Drucker