Tuesday, February 9, 2010

I Won't Be Your Yoko Ono

Richard O'Regan wrote a review of one of the very first Fluxus concerts (1962). Here 'tis:
The opening work that night was 'Danger Music No. 2' by a New Yorker, Dick Higgins. Higgins entered and took a bow. He sat himself beside a bucket. His wife, Alison Knowles, appeared with a pair of scissors. She began to cut his hair. Higgins looked content. After 15 minutes, the audience grew restless. Paper airplanes circled from the back row. Conversation took over. 'I'm sure I don't know what it is all about or what it is supposed to mean,' commented one of Germany's well-known abstract painters. 'I tell you Higgins is performing a rare work,' said Emmett Williams, a part-time performer and composer of this Very New Music living in Germany. 'He could play a Chopin étude every night. But Higgins can't give another performance like this for six months, until his hair grows back.' 'But there is no music,' we protested naively. 'Is this parody or protest?' 'You have to understand,' said George Maciunas, the American promoter of the festival, 'that in new music the audible and the visible overlap. This is what is called action music.'

(O'Regan, Richard. 'There's Music-and-Eggs-in the Air!' in Stars and Stripes. Sunday 21 October 1962, pg 33.
via Higgie, Jennifer. The Artist's Joke: Documents of Contemporary Art. London: Whitechapel and the MIT Press. 2007.)

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