Ben Vautier | Mystery Envelope in Fluxus 1

Ben Vautier

Mystery Envelope

New York City, USA: Fluxus, 1964

15 x 15 cm.

Edition size unknown

An envelope containing black offset print on blue cardboard. The envelope reads MYSTERY ENVELOPE and the blue card reads NO MYSTERY. Another version featured the envelope bound the other way, so that the only way to open it was to unscrew the bolts holding the book together and completely disassemble its contents. Inside, cruelly, was a simple card with Ben's name. 

Vautier has produced many related works, both before and after Fluxus, including Mystery Box and Flux Mystery Food cans. 

Maciunas took great pleasure in the production of multiples that would "be very practical, since we can dispose of garbage by this...and even get money for it". He imagined filling the mystery boxes with egg shells and orange peels, chipped plaster, used stencils and tea bags. As they were designed to never be opened, it is unclear if he followed through with this approach.

"I made many Mystery Boxes in different forms. They were in my room of objects when George Maciunas [first] visited me in '63."

- Ben Vautier

George Brecht | Five Places (from Fluxus 1)

George Brecht

Five Places

New York City, USA: Fluxus, 1963

5.6 x 9 cm.

Edition size unknown

A rubber-stamped envelope containing five offset cards (2.6 x 4 cm each) printed with the word “Exhibit”. The envelope includes the instructions "Place Once Card in Each of Five Places". The works is usually accompanied in Fluxus 1 by an unidentified portrait of Brecht, typically attributed to Maciunas. 

Jon Hendrick's Fluxus Codex lists the work as not existing as a stand alone piece, but the picture above (top) suggests that it may have.  

An instructional version that reads "Write the word EXHIBIT on each of five small cards. Set each card in a place fairly distant from the others" appeared in various versions of Water Yam (below). 

La Monte Young in Fluxus 1

La Monte Young

Composition 1960 #2 (Relic)

New York City, USA: Fluxus, [circa 1964]

11.7 x 17 cm.

Edition size unknown

The score for Composition 1960 #2 was first published in the proto-Fluxus collection An Anthology, which was edited by Young and Jackson Mac Low, and designed by George Maciunas. It reads: 

Build a fire in front of the audience. Preferably, use wood although other combustibles may be used as necessary for starting the fire or controlling the smoke. The fire may be of any size, but it should not be the kind which is associated with another object, such as a candle or a cigarette lighter. The lights may be turned out.

After the fire is burning, the builder(s) may sit by and watch it for the duration of the composition; however, he (they) should not sit between the fire and the audience in order that its members will be able to see and enjoy the fire.

The composition may be of any duration.

In the event that the performance is broadcast, the microphone may be brought up close to the fire.

The "relic" version included in Fluxus 1 featured a burnt match. Versions of the piece featuring a matchstick in a jar were also advertised in Fluxus sales lists, but none are known to exist. 

Jon Hendricks posits in Fluxus Codex that the work was probably included by Maciunas without Young's authorization. 

In his 1965 lecture titled Lecture 1960, first published in the Tulane Drama Review, Young writes of a conversation with the poet Diane Wakoski about the work, and Composition 1960 #5: 

"Diane suggested that perhaps the reason the director of the noon concerts at the University would not allow me to perform “Composition 1960 No.5” on the third concert of contemporary music that we gave was that he thought it wasn’t music. “Composition 1960 No.5” is the piece in which the butterfly or any number of butterflies is turned loose in the performance area. I asked her if she thought the butterfly piece was music to any less degree than “Composition 1960 No.2” which consists of simply building a fire in front of the audience. She said, “Yes, because in the fire piece at least there are some sounds.” I said that I felt certain the butterfly made sounds, not only with the motion of its wings but also with the functioning of its body and that unless one was going to dictate how loud or soft the sounds had to be before they could be allowed into the realms of music that the butterfly piece was music as much as the fire piece. She said she thought that at least one ought to be able to hear the sounds. I said that this was the usual attitude of human beings that everything in the world should exist for them and that I disagreed. I said it didn’t seem to me at all necessary that anyone or anything should have to hear sounds and that it is enough that they exist for themselves. When I wrote this story out for this lecture I added, “If you think this attitude is too extreme, do you think sounds should be able to hear people?”

HI RED CENTER Poster from Fluxus 1

Hi Red Centre [ed. Shigeko Kubota]

HI RED CENTER

New York City, USA: Fluxus, 1965

22 x 16 ¾"

Edition size unknown

A cartographic poster documenting the activities of the Tokyo-based art collective Hi Red Center, which consisted of Genpei Akasegawa, Natsuyuki Nakanishi and Jiro Takamatsu. The work features a map of central Tokyo, upon which are superimposed descriptions of twenty Hi Red Center actions.

Like many early Fluxus editions, George Maciunas had conceived this as a "complete works by" project. Similar efforts were boxed works, to allow for the inclusion of new pieces, but the short-lived Hi Red Centre had already disbanded the year prior. 

The poster is designed by Maciunas and edited by Shigeko Kubota, who had just travelled from Tokyo to New York and sought to bring the group's efforts to the attention of American audiences. 

The double-side poster features documentation of the Japanese group's various "events and exhibits". These include performances such as Cleaning Event, where the trio washed city streets by hand, in response to the government’s demands that the city should present a clean image to the world. 

Other examples include: 

"Dinner party on the anniversary of non-V Day at Citizen’s Hall. A great and delicious meal was eaten energetically by performers while audience observed. At midnight Kazakura branded his chest with hot iron.”

“The Gallery stayed closed for 5 days. After 5 days a cockroach was released from a bottle kept there.”

“Books, pants, shirts, shoes, full trunk etc. were dropped from roof to street. Afterwards the smashed trunk was kept in the baggage room of Ochanomizu railroad station.”

The poster was included in Fluxus 1, and sold individually for fifty cents. For five dollars, one could purchase a crumped version held together with rope. The image was also reproduced as a wall piece for an exhibition at the MoMA in 2013. 

 

"Unlike a conventional map, the Hi Red Center poster is not a standardized tool for geographic orientation. Rather, the collective conceptualized the map as a means of crystallizing their ephemeral actions and public interventions—literally etching them onto the city grid. By superimposing documentation of their subversive actions onto a map of Tokyo, Hi Red Center reimagined the city’s urban landscape. In lieu of a traditional coordinate plane, lines connect geographic points to corresponding textual descriptions of events orchestrated by the collective. On the backside of the map are corresponding documentary photographs that provide visual evidence of interventions such as Dropping Event (October 10, 1964), during which Hi Red Center associates flung the contents of a suitcase, followed by the suitcase itself, off the rooftop of the Ikenobo Flower School’s headquarters. According to the text on the map, dropped items included “books, pants, shirts, shoes, full trunk, etc.”

- MoMA

Ben Vautier | Nine Directions in Art

Ben Vautier

Nine Directions in Art

Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Galerie Amstel, 1964

[unpaginated], 13 x 18.5 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

The contents of Fluxus 1 was always shifting, as George Maciunas ran out of copies of certain items, discovered new artists to include, or had falling outs with others. Less than a year after the announcement of the publication he was writing to Ben Vautier desperately seeking more content: 

"We ran out of your 'bag over the head' then ran out of the small booklets you sent, then ran out of the record labels, so we have NOTHING FROM YOU TO PUT IN FLUXUS 1 !! So please send a quantity of your contribution. Send anything you like". 

Presumably the "small booklets" cited above were copies of the slim Nine Directions in Art publications. An exhibition catalogue/leaflet as artist book, the title is now exceedingly rare. This copy comes from the Bonotto Foundation. The poster from the exhibition (below) is somewhat more common. 

The nine directions are: 

1. The Absence of art

2. Destroy all art

3. Everything is art

4. Don't sign art

5. Copy art

6. Do as usual art

7. Change art

8. You are art

9. 

These can be seen as laying out the modus operandi for Fluxus in general, but particular for Vautier, who maintained his interest in the destruction of art, nothing in art, copying and signing for his entire career and to this day. Now in his mid-eighties, the artist is still active. 

Ben Vautier | This was a gesture piece

Ben Vautier

Turn This Page / This was a gesture piece

New York City, USA: Fluxus, 1964

19 x 21 cm.

Edition size unknown

A double-sided piece of beige cardboard printed with TURN THIS PAGE on one side, and THIS WAS A GESTURE PIECE BY BEN, 1962 on the verso. 

The work isimilar to some of the George Brecht instructional scores (such as Exit) in which the viewer or 'performer' unwittingly performs the work just by going about their day. 

Vautier's later work Fold/Unfold was sometimes given the same Gesture Piece title (see below). Produced by George Maciunas in 1968, Vautier was reportedly not even aware that the work had been published until 1984. 

György Ligeti | Trois Bagatelles

György Ligeti

Trois Bagatelles 

New York City, USA: Fluxus, 1964

19 x 21 cm.

Edition size unknown

A bagatelle is a short piece of music, typically for the piano, and usually of a light, dulcet character: "a short unpretentious instrumental composition". The term is also used to describe "a thing regarded as too unimportant or easy to be worth much consideration."

Hungarian composer György Ligeti's Three Bagatelles is dedicated to pianist David Tudor (best known for debuting John Cage's 'silent' composition 4'33"). The 1961 work consists exclusively of one long C#1 whole note played in the first movement. Following that, the movement changes are marked by the turning of each page and the piece ends when the pianist stands up and takes a bow. 

The score also includes a fourth bagatelle as an encore, to be performed at the pianist's discretion.  It consists entirely of a sixteenth note rest.

John Cage was said to be deeply offended by the parody. 

The original manuscript is kept in Basel, in the Sacher Stiftung, as part of the Nordwall Collection, The piece was first performed in Wiesbaden by Karl-Erik Welin. 

A year after it's inclusion in Fluxus 1 it was published as a score by New York City-based Schott Music. It was reprinted (above, bottom) by the German publisher Schott, in 2000. 

The score was omitted from later collations of Fluxus 1 by Maciunas, and the only other work by Ligeti published by Fluxus was Poeme Symphonique, which appeared in the first Fluxus newspaper.