Ladislav Kupkovic

points

Jim Leftwich

long war event
(pataphysical resistance generator #1)

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1- elongate tomato mask dance

2- stairs forest knob debark

3- nose adventure gel lyric hat

4- ladder tossed set

5- moon desk swept fetish ladle

6- gardner medicinal snake nation

7- blink wire banker storm of frogs

8- then soon altitude under beak mirage

9- beats align unbalanced sense and blimp

10- hurl tigers enigma melted cubes

11- model rites askew tinder chaff

12- at handle ports flurry mobile

13- midst simmer annual conic print

14- toll snare frosted markers

15- delve lure garment twill

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instructions: make your own.

Tom Johnson

intervals

[....]

prose score

Takehisa Kosugi

Jim Leftwich

mobile

Dick Higgins

the artist

  a metadrama


artist: "i'm hungry."
someone else: "here are twenty two ounces of honor."
artist: "i'm still hungry."
someone else: "here are twenty two more ounces of honor."

Dick Higgins

Statement about my "metadramas"

by Dick Higgins



  One of the main genres of Fluxus pieces of the 1960s is and was 
"events." These were first done before Fluxus, and came to be 
conceptually framed as a sort of cognate of happenings, which were new 
at the time-that is, intermedial, free-form pieces which lay 
conceptually among the bounds of music, theater and visual art. Events 
differed from happenings in that they were always as compressed as 
possible, minimal statements that would provide a mental or emotional 
impact. But, of course, they were highly abstract. I did them, George 
Brecht did them, and others of the Fluxus artists did them also though, 
for the most part, somewhat later than 1958 when George, I, AI Hansen 
and others studied with John Cage in his class at the New School for 
Social Research in New York, a story which has been told, more or less, 
to death.

  However, events made their point and the genre became well defined 
over the years, through Fluxus concerts and individual performances and 
works by, quite literally, hundreds of artists. In the sixties, when 
purely formal explorations seemed essential to sweep away the overly 
personal baggage of the 1960s, this was a positive thing. However, in 
the 1980s, when personal expression has been minimized, and when art 
performances, the heirs in some respect of happenings, often celebrate 
boredom and almost always deal essentially with technical and formal 
concerns, it seems more desirable to do pieces which are mainly minimal 
emotional statements or narrative ones, complete with characterizations 
in most cases. I had done a few such pieces previously, but not so 
consciously as now. I call them "metadramas" because they must be 
dramatic in order to satisfy the criterion, and, the "meta-" part 
suggests that they are "next to" or "about" what they relate to-that 
is, some are dramas about the drama, while others simply don't pretend 
to be dramas but do point in that direction. I wrote about sixty of 
them in the summer of 1985, destroyed most of them, and then noticed 
that they seemed to define a genre to which the earlier events belong, 
though not vice versa.

  Barrytown, New York
  18 September, 1985

Tom Johnson

[....]

points

prose score

Herbert Brun

Jim Leftwich

points

George Brecht

Swim Puzzle

Red plastic box with label on the lid containing clam shell 
and the score printed on card stock:
"Arrange the beads in such a way
the word CUAL never occurs."

Tom Johnson

intervals

[....]

prose score

mobile

John Cage

intervals

George Brecht

Untitled

Three of them were the same size, and two were not.

Tom Johnson

ART / FLUXUS ART-AMUSEMENT

[....]

intervals

prose score

James Tenney

mobile

George Brecht

Three Dances

1.
Saliva
2.
Pause
Urination.
Pause.
3.
Perspiration.

Tom Johnson

[....]

sequence

mobile

prose score

James Tenney

Jim Leftwich

Tom Johnson

sequence

[....]

prose score

mobile

Toru Takemitsu

Jim Leftwich

George Brecht

Symphony No. 5

I. before hearing
II. hearing
III. after hearing

Tom Johnson

sequence

[....]

prose score

mobile

Sylvano Bussotti