8
George Brecht the Philosopher of Fluxus A master of self-effacement who has spent the past three decades in "accelerated creative inactivity" George Brecht, one of the core members of the Ftuxus group, is reintroduced to a widepubtic in a comprehensive retrospective traveting in Europe. BY JILL JOHNSTON The whole universe interests me. ^George Brecht Not one sound fears the silence that extinguishes it. —John Cage I dont believe in art, I believe in artists. —^Marcel Duchamp C all me a Fluxus artist. On four different occasions I have partnered with one. And one has been George Brecht, the great Fluxmaster, now 79, suhject of a recent comprehensive retrospective at Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Partnering has been a salient feature of Fluxus since its origins in the early 1960s. In both partnering and grouping, Fluxus artists have subsumed their individuality, distinguishing themselves from the lone inno- vative geniuses of modernism. Lineages of skilled craftsmen in established mediums were disdained hy Fluxmen and the scarce women in their ranks. Hallowed mediums themselves disappeared in the vortex called Intermedia. But George Brecht was a genius! In his creation known as the Event- Score, he invented a whole new genre. At the heart of the Fluxconcert— that most delectable of group Fluxus enterprises worldwide ((;hiefly Ameri- ca, Europe and Japan)—was the Brechtian Event, a minimal action derived from the reading of a "score" consisting often of just a single word. Solo for Violin Viola Cello or Contrabass^ a classic Brecht score ever popular with Fluxus artists, carries tbe one word notation, "polishing." Judging from photos in Fluxus compendiums, and from the Fluxconcert of Brecht scores tbat preceded the September '05 opening of his retrospective in Cologne, the preferred enactment of this score in any performance setting has been sitting on a chair or stool and polishing a violin.' Between 1960 and 1963, Brecht's peak inspirational years, he wrote around 150 scores. Titles in black type appeared on small white stock cards, with bullet points underneath signaling the notations. It seems doubtful tbat Brecbt thought be was doing anything new himself, or if be did, that he was the author of it. The "death of the author" was epitomized in his Event-Score. He often said Apnl2006 MOTOR VEMICLC (EVENT) (TO JOHN CAG€) SH«tNG/SUMM£R 1960 G. BRECHT Any number of motor vehicles are arranged outdoors. There ve at least a$ many stts of instruction cards M veiitcles. All Instruction caH s«ts ar« shuffled collectively, and 22 cards are distributed to the single performer per v«hicie. At sundown (relatively darV.open area incident ii9ht 2 foot- candles or les«) the performers leave a central location, si- multaneously counting out (at an a9reed-upon rjrte) a pre- arranged duration 1 1/2 times the maximum requ'^ fo* any performer to reach, and seat himself in, his vehicle. At the end of this count each performer starts the engine of his ve- hicle and sut>se<)uefltly acts according to th« directions on his instruction cards, read consecutively as dealt. (An equi- valent pause is to be substituted for an instruction referring to non-avaitable equipment.) Having acted on ail instructions, each performer turns off the engine of his vehicle and remcins seated until all vehicles have ceased running. •alutt ii t« fW Mch CM. PmMhWic nuin*r*ls iMicM* dwttit nun. SpteiM Ityhit (8) mvt\ tiuch-bodir. MfWy. y. ftc. In couMS (X Wi n.by dwnc*. INSTRUCTION CARDS (44 per set): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. Head lights (high beam, low beam) on (1-5). off. Parking lights on ( I ' l l ) , off. Foot-brake lights on (1-3), off. (Right, lefO directional signals on (1-7), off. Inside light on (1-5), off. Gtove-compartment light on. Open (or close) glove compartment (quickly, with moderate speed, slowly). Spot-lamp on (1-11), move (vertically,twrizontally. randomly),(quickly,with moderate speed,slowly),off. Special lights on (1-9), off. Sound hom (1-11). Sound siren (1-15). Sound bell(s)(l-7). Accelerate motor (1-3). Wind-shield wipers on (1-5), off. Radio on,maximum volume,(1-7),off. Change tuning. Strike hand on dashboard. Strike a window with knuckles. Fold a seat or seat-back (quickly, with moderate speed, slowly). Replace. Open (or close) a window (quickly, with moderate speed, slowly). Open (or close) a door (quickly,with moderate speed. slowly). Open (or close) engine-hood, opening and closing vehicle door, if necessary. Trunk light on. Open (cr close) trunk lid (iF a car). rear-panel (if a truck or station-wagon), or equi- valent. Trunk light off. Operate special equipment (1-15), oft. 23-44.Pause(l-13).

George Brecht

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Page 1: George Brecht

George Brechtthe Philosopherof FluxusA master of self-effacement who has spent thepast three decades in "accelerated creativeinactivity" George Brecht, one of the coremembers of the Ftuxus group, is reintroduced toa widepubtic in a comprehensive retrospectivetraveting in Europe.

BY JILL JOHNSTON

The whole universe interests me. ^George Brecht

Not one sound fears the silence that extinguishes it. —John Cage

I dont believe in art, I believe in artists. —^Marcel Duchamp

Call me a Fluxus artist. On four different occasions I have partneredwith one. And one has been George Brecht, the great Fluxmaster, now

79, suhject of a recent comprehensive retrospective at Museum Ludwig inCologne. Partnering has been a salient feature of Fluxus since its originsin the early 1960s. In both partnering and grouping, Fluxus artists havesubsumed their individuality, distinguishing themselves from the lone inno-vative geniuses of modernism. Lineages of skilled craftsmen in establishedmediums were disdained hy Fluxmen and the scarce women in their ranks.Hallowed mediums themselves disappeared in the vortex called Intermedia.

But George Brecht was a genius! In his creation known as the Event-Score, he invented a whole new genre. At the heart of the Fluxconcert—that most delectable of group Fluxus enterprises worldwide ((;hiefly Ameri-ca, Europe and Japan)—was the Brechtian Event, a minimal action derivedfrom the reading of a "score" consisting often of just a single word. Solofor Violin Viola Cello or Contrabass^ a classic Brecht score ever popularwith Fluxus artists, carries tbe one word notation, "polishing." Judgingfrom photos in Fluxus compendiums, and from the Fluxconcert of Brechtscores tbat preceded the September '05 opening of his retrospective inCologne, the preferred enactment of this score in any performance settinghas been sitting on a chair or stool and polishing a violin.' Between 1960and 1963, Brecht's peak inspirational years, he wrote around 150 scores.Titles in black type appeared on small white stock cards, with bullet pointsunderneath signaling the notations. It seems doubtful tbat Brecbt thoughtbe was doing anything new himself, or if be did, that he was the author of it.The "death of the author" was epitomized in his Event-Score. He often said

Apnl2006

MOTORVEMICLC

(EVENT)

(TO JOHN CAG€)SH«tNG/SUMM£R 1960

G. BRECHT

Any number of motor vehicles are arranged outdoors.

There ve at least a$ many stts of instruction cards Mveiitcles.

All Instruction caH s«ts ar« shuffled collectively, and 22cards are distributed to the single performer per v«hicie.

At sundown (relatively darV.open area incident ii9ht 2 foot-candles or les«) the performers leave a central location, si-multaneously counting out (at an a9reed-upon rjrte) a pre-arranged duration 1 1/2 times the maximum requ '^ fo* anyperformer to reach, and seat himself in, his vehicle. At theend of this count each performer starts the engine of his ve-hicle and sut>se<)uefltly acts according to th« directions onhis instruction cards, read consecutively as dealt. (An equi-valent pause is to be substituted for an instruction referringto non-avaitable equipment.) Having acted on ail instructions,each performer turns off the engine of his vehicle and remcinsseated until all vehicles have ceased running.

•alutt i i t«fW Mch CM. PmMhWic nuin*r*ls iMicM* dwttitnun. SpteiM Ityhit (8) mvt\ tiuch-bodir. MfWy.

y. ftc.

In couMS (X Win.by dwnc*.

INSTRUCTION CARDS (44 per set):

1.2.3.4.5.6.

7.

8.9.10.11.12.13.1 4 .15 .16 .17 .

18 .

19 .

20.

21.

22.

Head lights (high beam, low beam) on (1-5). off.Parking lights on ( I ' l l ) , off.Foot-brake lights on (1-3), off.(Right, lefO directional signals on (1-7), off.Inside light on (1-5), off.Gtove-compartment light on. Open (or close) glovecompartment (quickly, with moderate speed, slowly).Spot-lamp on (1-11), move (vertically,twrizontally.randomly),(quickly,with moderate speed,slowly),off.Special lights on (1-9), off.Sound hom (1-11).Sound siren (1-15).Sound bell(s)(l-7).Accelerate motor (1-3).Wind-shield wipers on (1-5), off.Radio on,maximum volume,(1-7),off. Change tuning.Strike hand on dashboard.Strike a window with knuckles.Fold a seat or seat-back (quickly, with moderatespeed, slowly). Replace.Open (or close) a window (quickly, with moderatespeed, slowly).Open (or close) a door (quickly,with moderate speed.slowly).Open (or close) engine-hood, opening and closingvehicle door, if necessary.Trunk light on. Open (cr close) trunk lid (iF a car).rear-panel (if a truck or station-wagon), or equi-valent. Trunk light off.Operate special equipment (1-15), oft.

23-44.Pause(l-13).

Page 2: George Brecht

George Breckt's Motor Vehicle Sundown (Event), directed by Larry Miller, Cologne, 2005. Photo llUich Tillmann. Opposite, the printed "score"for the work, 1960.Staatsgaterie Stuttgart, Archiir Sohm. AU images this article, unless otherwise noted, courtesy Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

the score didn't exist without the attention of a witness, a viewer who mightinterpret and perform it, or simply take mental note of it, perhaps imaginingsome relevant (or irreievant) action. Simply to read a score is to perform it.Ohviously we could all be a part of this; we were ail potential partners.

A number of Brecht's Event-Scores first appeared in a fellow artist'smailbox. Composer La Monte Young was a favorite mark, with earlyBrecht pieces, like Solo for Wind Instrument ("putting it down"), orString Quartet ("shaking hands"), referencing music or musical instru-ments. Mail Art, a chief alternative means of getting the word out and ofcreating an international network, was rampant among Fluxus artists inthe early '60s, My own partnering with Brecht actually started in 1961-63when first we corresponded, but he was addressing me at that time as acritic, explaining his points of view—most strikingly, as I can see now, hisposition on John Cage.

Cage, the godhead at that time of new ideas in art, hecame Breoht'steacher and mentor beginning in 1958 when Brecht enrolled in his famouscourse in experimental composition at the New School for Social Researchin Manhattan. Brecht would soon hegin to outdistance Cage. After Cage,and Cage's hero Marcel Duchamp, came Brecht. Here was a lineageindeed, with its source in Duchamp's renunciation of painting and launchof the Readymade as far back as 1912; its continuation in Cage's own apos-tasy in music and wayward introduction of chance methodology, togetherwith his "musical" version of the Readymade in "found" sound, conceivedas either noise or silence; and its logical conclusion in Brecht's disappear-ing act through the Event-Score.

With the Event-Score, any author-agency, such as Cage's structuralnotations for "indeterminate" outcomes, was virtually abandoned.

Cage was still making music. Brecht posed a world without it—or onepermeated by it. "No matter what you do," he said, "you're always hearingsomething." One of his cards bears the ironic title Virtuoso Listener, withthe score "can hear music at any time." Life itself is music. You don't need"music" to experience it. "After the stream is crossed," Brecht wrote inone of his letters to me, "the raft must be abandoned." By "raft" he meantany organizational system, such as Cage's chance methods, widely adoptedby composers, poets and others whom he infiuenced, to keep generatingmusic or art—albeit of a radically alternative kind. Brecht's interest wasin "demonstrating the urgency of crossing the stream (mindlessly, andwith no purpose)."

Event-Scores became the rage with Fluxus, providing countless tinyscenarios for performances that could be strung together in Fluxconcerts,with Flux artists acting in pieces by each other, Countless more werenever performed, though many have been published. Early scores by Bre-cht, conceived in Cage's class, are as instructional in their way as Cage'sown notations. Brecht's l%(} Motor Vehicle Sundown (Event), dedicatedto Cage, has "any number" of performers, each manning a motor vehicle,and provided 'with a set of instruction cards listing 22 actions to be per-formed consecutively—all the things you can imagine doing in a car, liketurning headlights off and on, or opening and closing doors and trunks.For the Museum Ludwig retrospective, the score was performed onCologne's Dom Plaza in front of the cathedral on Sept. 17,2005.

Art in America 113

Page 3: George Brecht

Repository*, 1961, wait cabinet containing various objects, ^0'/* by lO'hby 3'/s inrhe.s. Mu.seum of Modem Art, New York. Photo © MOMA/SCALA/Art Reftourcp. New York.

During 1961 Brecht moved from the directive to the elective and dis-cretionary. Notations under titles would at first seem related, as with "atleast one egg," under Egg. Tlien quite unrelated, such as "turning," underSymphony No. 2. All notations, related or not to their titles, were reducedto nouns, or purely suggestive descriptions of actions that left out any verb,as in "from a suit{;ase," the score for Suitcase. In another early 1960s collec-tion of Event-Scores, original and often poetic, by Yoko Ono, the notationsunder all her titles begin with command verbs like "Ohserve" or "Count" or"Write" or "Throw."'- An Ono title. Painting to be Watered (1961), has a typicalimperative: "Water every day." Pronouns here are understood. It's al! in thegrammar. Scores by AlLson Knowles (often produced in conjunction with herprolifically active husband, Dick Higgins) are generally also prescriptive or

April2006

advisory.' Knowles, Higgins and Ono were all part of the earliest Fluxus coregroup. Knowles's Street Piece (1963) says, "Make something in the street andgive it away." Shuffle (1961) goes: "The performer or performers shuffle intothe periorniance area and away from it, ahove, hehind, around, or through theaudience. They perform as a group or solo: but quietly."^ In 1965, Ben Vautier,the French Fluxman, wrote "Fifty-Eight Propositions" that read like Event-Scores^—sans titles, however."' Practically every Vautier proposition includesthe words "this page." Almost all begin with command verbs. One that doesn'treads, "this page is a work of art." In others, Vautier playfully undercut theperemptoi>- moxie of his instructions: "swallow this page" or "set fire to thispage" or "look everywhere else."

The leap that Brecht made under Cage, passing him by, was a career-changing one. It took him into a conceptual never-never-land, where he dis-avowed his authorship and the relevance of any particular response. In ananarchic group of artists like Fluxus, thLs position made him very attractiveindeed. And while "everybody could do it," "it" was not something everybodycould understand by any means—always an appealing situation to hothouseartists operating far from the mainstream. In his haiku-like scores, Brechtfound a form for dri\ing home such isolated, smart Dada sa>'ings as TristanTzara's "Art. is not the most precious manifestation of life. Art has not thecelestial and universal value that people like to attribute to it. Life is farmore interesting."" Still, it's impossible to say that Brecht, the philosopherof Fluxus, didn't invent an "art form" to illustrate the preeminence of life.The paradox is everything.

And what kind of life did George Brecht favor? One thing he liked waschairs. Writing in these pages three decades ago, Jan van der Marck

observed, "Brecht takes the world sitting down. The chair, just barely priedloose from domesticity and always ready to he reused, is a prominent objectof his affection."" On view at the exhibition in Cologne were a large numberof Brechtian chairs, found objects far more common than Duchamp's urinalor stool-mounted bicycle wheel. Brecht's chairs may stand alone or haveobjects on or near them. The first and perhaps most intere.sting was titledChair with a History (1966). Brecht told an interviewer:

Chanre Painting, ^5,57, ink-slained bed sheet, 76% by 86^" inches.Hertha & George Brecht, Cotogne. ^__—-, *• - • E *

Page 4: George Brecht

Chair Event, 1969, painted chair, walking stick, orange, 34Vs by 18'/x by37% inches. Private collection. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, London.

In Rome I bought a very simple wooden chair and a very beautiful book boundin red leather. I began to note down in the book where I'd bought the chair, huwmuch I'd paid for it and where I'd found the pen I was writing with and the kindof ink I was using and so forth. Then I exhibited the chair and the book andeveryone was invited to add to the book whatever was happening while he wassitting on the chair,*̂

Alas, the chair and book are now the stuff of history. At Museum Ludwig,you were not, naturally, allowed to sit on the chair, much less write in thebook. Brecht's ideal of participation, once possible in settings like the Reu-ben Gallery in downtown Manhattan, site of Brecht's first solo exhibition in1959, has given way to an incipient canonization.

Along with the chairs at Museum Ludwig were a number of Brecht'sboxes and cabinets, also originally made for interaction, with play elementsand open compartments containing common objects (a.k.a. Readymades)that viewers could move around. Repository (1961) is a tall white cabi-net that has 16 compartments of different sizes, two with narrow doors, andtwo drawers at the bottom, One section consists of nine identical squarecompartments in a tic-tac-toe configuration; eight of these each holdsa unique ball (e.g., twine, Xmas bulb, baseball . . . ), leaving one spaceempty—a suggestive invitation to move the objects around (if not to oustand replace them). The ver>' year Repository was made, the Museum ofModern Art in New York not only included the cabinet in its trailblazing "Artof Assemblage" show, but bought it. As early as that, the collectivist spirit ofBrecht's oflerlngs was denied. But to this viewer, anyway, none of Brecht'sboxes and cabinets, or Fluxkits (those briefcases of assembled objects andliterature, after Duchamp's Boite-en-Valife, so favored by Fluxus artists).

A number of Brecht's boxes and cabinetswere originally made for interaction,with play elements and open compartmentsholding common objects (a.k.a. Readymades).

ever looked approachable for some divinely populist intervention. Whilefar from the intimate, untouchabiy mysterious, allusively narrative, ultra-esthetic box creations of Joseph Cornell (a Fluxus influence at a distance),they are beautiful—<:learly "art"—nonetheless. And buyable—unlike theEvent-Scores, which as concepts are the purest, most generous giveawayimaginable by an artist to people at large. Here we want to put quotesaround "artist," expressing the paradox tbat was Fluxus at its best. And weshould, I think, want to know more about how such a deviant and subversivetradition in art developed.

Why, for instance, did Duchamp renounce painting and deploy foundobjects in art contexts? And why did Cage abandon music and inaugurate"noise"? Why did they both react against the universally well-formed artist'sego? Did any significant failures figure in their histories? While I was writ-ing to Brecht in 1989 in Cologne (where he had heen living more and morereclusively as an American ex-pat since 1972), in a correspondence that hadlong since morphed from the polarized artist and-critic pairing to some-thing a lot friendlier, I told him about my interest in "Fluxlives." I thoughtthat bio-histories of Fluxus artists and performers, along with foundationaldates, names and places, could shed light on how so many diverse indi-viduals ended up together in an international community. Among the typicalFluxfestivals which often appropriated an entire city for days on end, withstreet performances and concerts in odd places like train stations, therewas the classic "Festival of Misfits" in London in 1962, the year GeorgeMaciunas gave Fluxus its name. If Fluxartists were Misfits, and surely theywere, I wanted their credentials. Brecht wrote back saying he was "retiredfrom Fluxus," and asked, "What do you mean that Fluxlives interest you?"

Somewhere in a subsequent letter I mentioned the fathers. "The fathersof these guys especially interest me." And in the fiotsam of exchanges, Iwould regale George with reports of meetings I was having with his historicmentor Cage, whom I knew socially fairly well at that time. In a surprisemove, with a letter George wrote Sept. 26, 1991, he turned me into a moreactive Flux partner. By then he knew a thing or two about my own father(never a subject I kept hidden from anyone), though I knew nothing what-ever concerning his, and had never asked. Proposing a "Father-project"between us, he said, "For every item of your father research, I'll give you oneof mine." And he started it off: "My father gave up music-making in the mid-'30s by lying down and not breathing any more on the couch at 165 W. 82ndStreet [New York], where we were living at the time." In his next letter, herepeated the news of the death: "My father breathed his last around 1936."But added the promised rmv item that his father was a fiutist." Ah! And heincluded a large Xerox of an impressively striking photo of his father seatedin a wicker armchair, in formal concert tux, flute held in left hand, lookingup at a fellow musician, a clarinetist, standing next to him. Now I wanted toknow his name, and his age at death, but George never told me, and I pulledback, being engaged in the matter as a friend, not as a writer. By the late1990s our correspondence had dropped off. Then in March 2005, when theMuseum Ludwig asked me to contribute to the Brecht retrospective cata-logue, the forgotten "Father-Project" rose up like an Excalibur in my head.I would virite a kind of "realization" of it, something Event-Scores are saidto achieve when anyone decides to perform them, or think about them or doatiything at all about them.

I t was evident right away that Brecht's father, and John Cage—^his "lib-erator," as he would call him—were linked in the field of music, and

that both men were performers. As a professional fiutist, Brecht's fatherhad played in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, the Cincinnati SymphonyOrchestra under Leopold Stokowski, the NBC Radio Orchestra under ArturoToscanini, at Radio City Music Hall, and in the John Philip Sousa Band.

Art in America 115

Page 5: George Brecht

He was bom George Ellis MacDiarmid in1894, inLittleRock, Ark., and died, just asBrecht told me, in 1936. So he was 42, andson George, also George Ellis MacDiar-mid and an only child, was just ten at thetime. In the world of Fluxus it's been com-mon knowledge that Brecht had long agochanged his name, though nobody seemedto know from what exactly, or when orwhy, and he has said Bertolt was not hisreference, that he picked the name moreor less out of a hat. For the Ludwig cat-alogue, he provided more information.He left MacDiarmid behind and becameBrecht in his late teens, around 1945,while serving in the army and stationed inGermany'" It's a serious breach to makesuch a change. Succession in the paternalname is a mark of pride and self-respect,even necessity, in any patriarchal culture.By changing his name, he broke not justwith his father but a grandfather and agreat-grandfather who were also GeorgeMacDiarmids." Brecht clearly intendedto re-invent himself somehow. During his20s, as he prepared himself for a career hichemistry, he was also involved with art.He became a successful research chemist,and was awarded various patents; in art,he developed his painting by chance meth-ods, using statistics and random numbers.

He also married and had a son, Eric, in 1953. By the mid-'50s he was wellaware of the work of both John Cage and Marcel Duchamp.

In 1993, while I was visiting Brecht in Cologne, he added to his fatherlore for me, providing two details that would later help me form a view ofthis artist's work through the agency or legacy of his progenitor. He said hisfather had a "nervous breakdown" when he had to play the lengthy flute pas-sage that opens RawVs Bolero. And tbat be "died from alcohol... one morn-ing he just didn't wake up." Of the 144 Event-Scores listed in the Ludwigcatalogue, made by Brecht between 1959 and I9G3, at least 27 have obviousmusical citations, and of these there is one, titled Flute Solo (1962), witha notation reading "disassembling assembling," that Brecht, in an unusualrevelation of a source, has linked directly to his father. In the 1970s, Brechttold the British composer and musicologist Michael Nyman ahout an inci-dent when bis father was playing for the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra:

A soprano was bugging everybody with temper tantrums during rehearsal, At acertain point tbe orchestra crashed onto a m^or seventh and tbere was silencefor tbe soprano and flute cadenza. Nothing happened. The wtprano looked downinto the orchestra pit and saw that my father had completely taken apart hisflute, down to the last screw. I used this idea in my 1962 Flute Solo.'-

Brecht has himself done a precise "realization" of Flut£ Solo, taking a fluteapart "down to the last screw" and putting it back together again. Nymansmartly pointed out to Brecht in his interview that his "sound producinginstruments [hi the EVent-Scores] have heen made mute (the violin, hi Solo

for Violin Viola Cello or Contrabass, is polished, not played), and non-sound-ing instruments, or non-instruments, for instance a comb {Comb Music, 1962),are made sounding." Flute Solo is one of many in the former categoiy.

One Fluxus favorite of Brecbt's that foils or circumvents an instrument'straditional use has been Piano Piece (1962), with the notation "a vase ofllowers/on(to) a piano." In a review I wrote in 1964, titled "Fluxus Fuxus,"of a flawlessly entertaining Fluxconcert at Carnegie Recital Hall, Idescribed Brecht's performance of it, "placing a vase of flowers... on thegrand piano,"'"' In Cologne, on Sept. 16, 2005, in an unfortunately lengthyand disorganized pre-opening concert of Brecht scores, it was performedtbe sameway.''*

Above, Brecht during The Chemistry of Music, 1968, performance and lecture with .slides, music and fireworks;at Foran Museet, Arhus.

Above and opposite, two slide images fromThe Chemistry of Music Slides belong to the Gilbert andLita Silverman Ftuxu.s Collection, Detroit.

Page 6: George Brecht

I recht doesn't distinguish between the event-as-perforniance and'the event-as-object. And he conflates what you see and what you

hear. Writer Henry Martin asked him, "You mean to say that all the acci-dental environmental sounds that surround the piece become a part ofthe realization of the score?"

GB: Yes, that's right,HM: 111 that case even the chairs are musical?GB: Yes, in fact, there Is perhaps nothing that is not musical. Perhapsthere's no moment in life that's not musical.... All instruments,musical or not, become instruments.'̂

And he meant the chairs, suitcases, dressers, clothes trees,tables, lamps, hooks and keyholes, motor vehicles, eggs, clocks,mirrors, sinks, ladders and many other "things" to he found inhis titles, or to be found standing alone, on display, or dwellingmultiply in his boxes, cabinets and Fluxkits.

I can see the whole kit and caboodle—^furniture and fixturesand music and musical instruments and word-scores and gamesand puzzles—as belonging in some imaginary home that Brechtbuilt during his career, inviting us to visit him in it, sit in a chairor at a tahle, hang a coat on a clothes tree, tum on a lamp, tumit off, move things around, listen to the atmosphere, play solitairewith cards of his design, eat an egg, and so on. There are no bedsin Brecht's gala?^ of ohjects, so I suppose staying ovemight wasnever an option.

If music is Brecht's touchstone, its historical particularities arereferences made only for subversion. In Cage's famed invention, thePrepai'ed Piano, the traditional use of piano keys to make music wastransferred to the engine or strings of the piano to perform "noise."Music, however perverted, was still being made, Brecht, purely byconcept, through word-forms, separates the sounds instruments emitfrom their sources, or converts all the world's objects into instru-ments wortl^ of making sounds. In fJuk Sob, Brecht separates his father fromhis flute (as we understand the use of flutes), which had ^parently caused him somuch trouble, even to the extent of killing him. The way Brecht has told it, whenhis father toured with the Sousa Band, he was "introduced to strong drink, whichlater did him in,""' With Flute Sob, he transformed the instrument his father

Brecht partnered his dead father in aseries of drawings that unite musicalinstruments with the paraphernalia ofBrecht's eariy career as a chemist.

Detective novels by San-Antonio, which were the basis of a Brecht showat Galerie BAMA in Paris, 1975.

dismantled in the Metropolitan Opera orchestra pit into an object of interest initself, lifting a ftinny insurrectionary story out of its original setting, isolating it in abenign, unassailable context—a Fiuxus performance.

In a touching work titled The Chemistry of Musk, a slide-lecture Brechtflrst delivered in London in 1968, he partnered his dead father, as can bededuced in drawings uniting musical properties like clefs and notes andinstrument parts with chemical tuhes and processes, the latter the parapher-nalia of Brecht's career as a research chemist (which he had abandoned uponleaving the U,S. in 1965). As I wnite at the time, "To an accompaniment ofdrum music by Walter De Maria, Brecht projected slides taken from drawingson a 6 by-6-foot fiberboard He stood by the boai-d, miming a lecture, point-ing out aspects of the slides and occasionally setting off small fireworks."'"

In the drawings, chemical processes are producing notes, and music iscreating chemistry. One drawing shows a man playing a flute, a bent strawattached to the flute's end, a drop of liquid falling from the straw into a testtube. He's "playing" Brecht's kind of music. Instead of sounds meant for ears,the flute is issuing fluid that falls into a deaf lab receptacle. In a more complexdrawing, a process ends up—through a series of arrows pointing the way froma slot machine, a collection of drums and a mediating test tube—in a bunchof sharps and one clef held in a man's open hand. TWo veiy different careers,father's and son's, functionally compromised, meet in a fantasy of the absurd.

In Brecht's postmortem rescues of his father, if you want to call them that,he made good on his father's failure, not as a musician—Brecht has said, "Iguess he got pretty good . , , as a joke he used to play Chopin's Minute Waltzin a minute"—but a.s a father."^ George Ellis MacDiarmid had a career thattook him on the road a lot, making him even more absent than traditionallyabsent fathers. He died when his son and only child was much too young, inan ending attributed to drink. The whole world (which is music, as Brecht hasrepeatedly said) is a world encompassed metonymically hy his father. A world-map drawing in The Chemistry of Music project, with musical signs posted onall the continents of tbe globe, very graphically puts his father everywhere.Such brilliant translations or conversions are the stuff of the "failures" thatpreceded Brecht in art, leading to the two postmodernist revolutions—inmusic and painting—awaiting him in the late 1950s.

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Unmistakabiy autobiographical, the BrunchMuseum tells us how Brecht must have feltin the mid-1970s when he retreated toCologne, leaving Fiuxus art circuits behind.

Brecht was lucky to find the cheerful and inspiring John Cage, whose ownteacher back in the 19:JQs, Arnold Schoenberg, had been witheringly discour-aging, showing a supreme lack of interest in Cage's work. "It became clear tobot,h of us," Cage ha.s said, "that I had no feeling for harmony." Without thisfeeling, Schoenberg warned Cage, he would always he thwarted in bis effortsto write music, coming to a wall through which he couldn't pass. Cage's famousresponse was, "In tbat case I will devote my life to beating my bead againstthat wall."^" Much later, when Cage was well known, Schoenberg would say of

Silence, 1966, cork letters on canvas, 8Vs by I3'A inches.Collection Gino Di Maggio, Milan.

him, "Of course he's not a composer, but an inventor—of genius."-" Curiously,Cage's father and patemal grandfather had both been inventors, and whilehe struck out on his own, first in painting, then music, he ended up in theirfootsteps anyway

It was Cage, of course, who championed the once-failed French painterMarcel Duchamp in America after World War II, becoming the main channelof Uuchamp's influence in the postmodemist realm of life afflmiing "non art,"transmitted to a whole new generation. Said Duchamp of his crucible experi-ence in March 1912 when he submitted his Nude Descending a Staircase tothe Salon des Independants in Paris, then was forced to withdraw tbe paint-ing, "It was really a turning point in my life, I can assure you,"-' The alignmentof Duchamp's "failure" with the failure of modernism hecame one of theabsorbing allegorical conflations of 20th-century art.

Duchamp's interests and influence are everywhere in Brecht's work. Inthe Ludwig exhibition was a little library of Brecht-owned books by the

French mysteiy writer San-Antonio, a pen name for Frederic Dard, to whomDuchamp apparently paid homage with his 1951 phallic readymade, pun-ningly titled Objet Dard. From a paragraph in a 2()0D obituary for Dard in theInternational Herald Tribune, it's easy to see what made him attractive toboth Brecht and Ducbamp. "By tbe time Mr, Dard died, he was recognized asa genius with words, a mai\ who created so many extraordinary—and untrans-latable—word games and neologisms, that he invented a language, an argot,all his own." The obituary goes on to say that Dard was a writer who "sufferedfrom the condescending attitudes of traditional critics."-- In the mid-1970sBrecht, with a surprising piece of fiction of his own, invented a misunderstood

genius reflecting Dard and Duchamp, as well as Brecht himself. "The BrunchMuseum" (1976), with 20 exhibits of objects accompanied by comical descrip-tive texts, LS about a man called "W.E. Brunch" who died in 1974 at the age of85, As a coincidence, or not, Ducbamp, who died in 1968 at age 81, would havebeen close to 85 in 1974,

Unmistakably autobiographical {Brunch/Brecht, to begin with), it tellsus something about how Brecht must have felt in the mid-1970s when beretreated to Cologne, left Fiuxus art circuits behind, and began ei^oying awithdrawal, or hermitage, that his Event-Scores had long predicted. One,titled 'Bx'O Signs (1968), with notations "Silence" and "No Vacancy," soundsfairly portentous. He seemed destined to personify bis disappearing act inthe Event-Scores, But it could not have been easy. The death of (the fictional)W.E. Brunch, saj's Brecbt in an introductory text., "came as a terrible blow toall those who knew him." The purpose of the Brunch Museum exhibits was toinspire a "more widespread appreciation ()f tbe great man," and for "the world

to know about the life and work of tbis \isionary genius, most of whosework is still relatively unknown."

The general view of Brecht as an unambitious recluse, a status oftenattributed to Duchamp as well, seems belied in the Brunch Museumproject Brecht, though a modest, unassuming man, no doubt had badnormal hopes for recognition, however complicated by Zen aspiratioasfor acquiescence. We might guess that he was able gradually to emhracesuch resignation through three successive decades of accelerated cre-ative inactivity. If that's the case, in an uncanny fulfillment of the BrunchMuseum work, Brecht has ironicallly been granted a belated apprecia-tion and discovery by the Museum Ludwig, As its director Kasper Konigsays, "It's time George Brecht was given the recognition he deserves asthe miyor modem artist he undoubtedly is,""'̂ Q

1. George Brecht, E>>en.ts: A HeUnvspecHve, Cologne, Museum Ludwig, Verlag derBuchhandlung Walther Konig, 2005, p, 133,2, Yoko Ono, Grapefruit, London, Sphere Books Ltd,, 1971,;j, Alison Kiiowles,^ Great Bear Pampkkt, New York, 1965,4, Ibid,5, FliLTUs Etc., catalogue for exhibition at Craiibrook Academy of Art Museumof the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fiuxus Collection, 1981, curator Jon Hen-dricks, p, 202,6, Lefiture on Dada by TYistan T/ara, 1922, reprinted in Robert MotherwelFs OnrfaPainters and Poets, 1989 (originally published in 19.51). P-92,7, Jan van der Marck, "George Brecht; An Art of Multiple Implications,"/Ir/ in>l/«.(*n'ra, July-August 1974, p, 51.8. Interview with Geoi^e Brecht by lmieline Lebeer, in Heniy Martin, An Ininttluc-

tion to George Brecht's 'Book of the DinihUr an Fin.'," Milan, Multipla, 1978, p. 87,9, Letter from George Brecht to Jill Johnston, Dec. 19,1991.10, George Brecht, Ei>ents, p, ;5()6,11, U.S, censuses, Ancestry,coni,12, Interview with Brecht by Michael Nyman, in Henry Martin, p, 120, footnote 19; see alsoGeorge Brecfii, Events, p. 238,13, Village \bice, July 2,1964; reprmted in Jih ioim^n, Marmalade Me, New York, Dutton,

14. Performance anunged by Lany Miller with Alison Knowles and Eric Andersen and guestpcrfonners Geoff Hendricks, Ben Patterson and Ben Vautier,11}, Interview with Brecht by Heni>' Martin, in Heniy Martin, p, S2.16, George Brechi, EimUs, p, 238,17, JUl Johnston, 'Tive Geoi^e," VUUige Ibice, Aug. 22,1968.18, George Brecht, Events, p, 238,m. David Ri^vin.The Roaring Silence, New York, Arcade, 1992, p. 53,20. Ibid, p, 47.21. Calvin Tbmkins, 77if Bnde and the Bachelors, New York, Viking, 1965, p, 22,22. An image of the obituary as printed in the International Herald TrUmne, June 10-11,2000, is reproduced in George Brecht, Events, p. 211,23. Geotye Brecht, Events, p, 8,

Special thanks to Jon Hendricks, Alison Knowles, Geoff Hendricks and Julia Robinson,

"George Brecht, Events: A Heteros'pective," curated by Julia Robinson and Alfred M.Pischj'r, i))ieiU'4 at the Museum Ludung, Cologne, Sepi 17, 2005-Jan. S, 2006. It travels toIhe Miiseu d'Arl Contemporaai de Barcelona, May 25-Sept 3. The show is accompanied bya comprelietisive catalogue mUi. a fmndpal text by Julia Robinson,

Authon Jill Johnston^ most recent book w At Sea on Land; Extreme Politics (Print MeansIm., 2005).

April2006

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