“Call It Something Else” in Madrid, Part 2

Ben Patterson

Your blogger continues to tussle with an account of the recent show about Dick Higgins’ Something Else Press. We meet Benjamin Patterson, Claes Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow, John Cage and John Giorno and Carolee Schneeman. And spend some time witih Alison Knowles’ “House of Dust”, a faux free school, and her “Big Book” hooked up to a toilet.

As per my last post on the recent “Call It Something Else” exhibition at Reina Sofia museum, it feels a bit silly to crank on for justice for the losers in the contest for recognition in their contemporary artworld. Of course my frustration is about me and all of us, back then and even now. The Fluxians were the classic la-dee-dah outsiders, the marginalized in the NYC artworld of their day. Their revenge is their influence today, and their status as diffident heroes of all those marginalized by the artworld made by the 1%.
As my internet searches reveal, they’re doing pretty well in recent widely distributed academic exhibitions. Scholars love puzzles.
The Fluxians laid a crooked path for others to follow in the conventional way artists move from one generation to the next. Rather than classic emulation and variation, or Bloomian reaction, the Fluxians proceeded by repetition of creative games and actions. This was true to their roots in music and theater with those genres' scores and scripts, but rather a spanner in the works of visual art. And from that grinding of the gears comes much of value for today’s concept work, performance art and social practice.

Bern Porter

The Fluxus cohort did undertake some large and influential projects, material remnants of which I'll describe eventually. But first I'll trot through the Reina Sofia exhibition and poke into just a few of its nooks and crannies.

Books Under Glass

As a publishing project, the Something Else Press was prolific, and the books it issued were extremely eclectic. A large number of these are nailed to the walls in a first room of the exhibition, in their hard and softcover editions. Among the earliest is The Four Suits (1965), like playing cards, with works by Alison Knowles, Benjamin Patterson, Tomas Schmit and Philip Corner. Knowles was Higgins’ partner, and an early silkscreen virtuoso. Corner is the piano guy. Schmit? No se.
Benjamin Patterson, the heart in the “Four Suits”, trained in the contrabass wind instrument. As an African-American, he could not get a job in a US orchestra and so expatriated. He met John Cage in Germany, and was a key contact in Wiesbaden, helping George Maciunas to produce the first Fluxus Festival there in 1962.

The Nassauischer Kunstverein in Wiesbaden remains a bastion of Flux-thought today. You might can still take Patterson’s questionnaire online for the 50th anniversary of Fluxus: “Has Fluxus changed the world?” (2012). Did Fluxus change the world?
Four Suits was Higgins first anthological book, produced around the same time as Maciunas was issuing “Fluxkits”, anthologies of miniature artworks. Barring copies to peruse, I can’t say anything about these SEP anthologies. I’ve never seen any cited. Maciunas’ group show boxes in museums you also cannot touch. More on this condition of not touching later.

Ladrones de Libros!

Other SEP publications in this gallery include their 1967 Store Days with Claes Oldenburg. I had a copy of this, which included a business card for the Raygun Store in a pocket. (Seller’s description: “Spot of dried glue residue on front endpaper where envelope containing Oldenburg's business card was anchored upon publication, typically now lacking”.) The book is a lovely illustrated record of that inspiring proto-Pop project, and of course my copy was stolen.
SEP also did an LP record with Allan Kaprow, “How to Make a Happening” (1967). (It’s on YouTube; access from Duck Duck Go’s “Duckplayer” to avoid ads.)
Kaprow taught for years at Cal Arts. He invited Higgins and Knowles. Kaprow on this record is extremely didactic: "There are 11 rules of the game. One: forget all the standard art forms." He lists them. "The point is to make something new. Something that doesn't even remotely remind you of culture. You've got to be pretty ruthless about this…."
"Art has always been different from the world's affairs. Now you've got to work hard to keep it all blurry." In this era of Netflix and auction-driven banality, these words ring like the roar of a Tyrannosaurus. [“Wait, I can’t see! Whose mouth am I walking into?”]
After 1968, most of the exhibition’s text panels disappear. Who knows what those books on the wall are about?

Carolee Schneeman's drawing for her body house book

One that’s briefly noted is Bern Porter’s I’ve Left (1971; still $15 at Printed Matter). A scientist working in NYC in 1930s, Porter was infected by the art virus. He worked on the a-bomb, and quit after it was used. He started his own publishing imprint and art gallery in San Francisco.
Peripetetic does not do justice to this pinball of a creative scientist. The book he did with Higgins “proposes wild and revolutionary improvements to and uses for books, poetry, clothing, theater, architecture, art, food, toys, and automobiles”.

Wrong Way In

During one of my visits to the show I walked into what turned out to be the back end. I ran into Bio-Music (1974), a book the SE Press made out of brain wave sound generation experiments. There was a video of John Cage wired up and beeping.
Big vinyl sheets had John Giorno’s repetitive poems stenciled onto them: Higgins published Giorno’s Cancer in My Left Ball (1973). The publication launch card was a copy of the poet’s colossal hospital bill.
Giorno’s “Dial-A-Poem” project is displayed. I remember calling this line a few times back in the day. It’s different hearing it on headphones… but I did, running into John Cage’s mallomar voice intoning “slowly we are getting nowhere” and “beginning to enjoy it”. Not me. In the days of full-out nuclear war anxiety, this Buddhist stuff, a kind of religiously managed tranquility was compelling to many artists. Now I think we gotta do something.
A wall was devoted to drawings from Carolee Schneeman’s Parts of a Body House (1972). Carolee was a a wonderfully sexy artist, and these erotic representations of a fleshly architectural conception made Dick Higgins balk. He only published the text; the Beau Geste Press in UK brought it out again with the illustrations.

A Bean-Like School: Fabbed or What?

Alison Knowles, Higgins partner, produced House of Dust at Cal Arts in 1971. This was an extended project with several collaborators. It featured two constructions (one burned down) of organic pod-like chambers, and scheduled events. The architecture came out of a computer-generated poem Knowles did at Bell Labs. (Hunh? An architecture lab in Argentina tried to explain it; see links below.) In one event a helicopter drops copies of the poem onto the house. This seems of a part with the extraordinary series of E.A.T. experiments, collaborations between artists and engineers overseen by Billy Klüver.

Knowles’ bean-shaped house was a site for events, a kind of free school within a school. “That’s what most people remember, that we would decide as a group what we were going to be doing” (Knowles in Sarbanes interview, link below).
This and other architectural pecadillos were combined in the book Fantastic Architecture, edited by Higgins and Wolf Vostell (1969/1970). (Primary Information reprinted this classic in 2015.)
That book is extraordinary. I remember the moment I found it in a college library. But again, here it is nailed to the wall and unseeable. The show emphasized artwork associated with the publication. A wall text puts the book into the historical context of artists’ resistance to Robert Moses’ LOMEX – cross Manhattan expressway, which would have obliterated the Soho industrial loft district where artists were living.

The wall texts in this show were extensive. I photo’d them, but did not reread them for this text. By the time I got around to attempting this review, the catalogue also had appeared; info overload. I’ll try to describe that also.

Fantastic Architecture in the Real

Fluxus animateur George Maciunas had architectural aspirations. Today the foundation with his name front pages his Fluxhouse cooperatives, illegally set up to house artists in Soho in the 1970s, and the struggles for living space there in those days.
Higgins and Maciunas paced each other in their overlapping spheres. The Something Else Press was born from Higgins’ frustration with Maciunas’ delay in publishing his book.
Both of them had a fascination with the vernacular. Fluxus events organized by these two animateurs tried for a mix of popular elements like circus, carnival, sportive contests, theater itself, often obsolete forms which the artists sought to reinject with abstruse experimental content. (Brecht’s concept of epic theater included similar analogs as a means of putting over political content.) If you don’t undertand what’s going on, at least you understand the frame, i.e., what might be supposed to be going on.

Return of the Monster Book

Alison Knowles made another sculptural installation she called The Big Book. It was a large sculpture represented in this show by a life-sized photo blowup. It looks like a giant wood-framed folder of photos and plastic-based collages in muted colors. The wall text suggests that it could be hooked up to plumbing like a house. The Big Book was exhibited in its day with success. The video in this show is full of shaky closeup details, but is unhelpful in understanding just what this installation artwork consisted of.
An idea of what The Big Book must have been like comes from a later work, The Boat Book, exhibited in Pittsburgh in 2016.

The Boat Book in 2016

Nadine Wasserman writes of it, The Boat Book, an immersive 8-foot-tall sculpture with proportionate, movable wood-framed pages…. [T]his book, similar to earlier versions called ‘Big Book’ and ‘The Book of Bean,’ is intended to be physically and mentally navigated. As an assemblage that includes a bean turner [?], poetry, books, a soundtrack of Knowles reading nautical-related material, and (the potential) for interaction, it has [a] non-hierarchical density of experience”.
The is surely the clearest example I’ve ever seen of the artist’s book as alternative space.


NEXT: Some more on the Reina Sofia show. A visit to the Vostell Museum in Caceres, another redoubt in the Fluxus “Game of Beans”. The catalogue.

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LINKS

Dick Higgins daughter has written on the movement from the rug rat’s eye view:
Hannah Higgins, Fluxus experience (University of California Press, 2002)

re. Ben Patterson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Patterson

good precis of his life and career: Andrew Russeth, “Ben Patterson, Cornerstone of Fluxus and Experimental Art, Dies at 82”, June 27, 2016
https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/ben-patterson-cornerstone-of-fluxus-and-experimental-art-dies-at-82-6578/

An Alternative History of Art, Episode 8 of 10 (13:44; 2018)
Naomi Beckwith, curator at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, explores the work of overlooked artist Ben Patterson - the only African American founder of the Fluxus movement.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09v6vt8

See also "Ben Patterson Tells Fluxus Stories (From 1962 To 2002)", and many recordings of his music at
https://www.ubu.com/sound/patterson.html

Carl Little, “Bern Porter: Never Finish”, April 26, 2015
https://hyperallergic.com/201631/bern-porter-never-finish/

Rachael Morrison, "Bern Porter" in MoMA Library; online exhibition
https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/lostandfound/

On Alison Knowles’ House of Dust:
Jonathon Keats, “Meet The Female Artist Who Programmed A Computer To Make A House In The 1960s”, July 30, 2022
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathonkeats/2022/07/30/meet-the-female-artist-who-programmed-a-computer-to-make-a-house-in-the-1960s/?sh=58edfb1e5209

See also Carlos Trilnick, "The House of Dust" (ESP; many photos)
https://proyectoidis.org/the-house-of-dust/

On Knowles’ experiences at CalArts, see:
Janet Sarbanes, “A School Based on What Artists Wanted to Do: Alison Knowles on CalArts” interview, August 7, 2012
https://eastofborneo.org/articles/a-school-based-on-what-artists-wanted-to-do-alison-knowles-on-calarts/

George Maciunas’ Fluxhouse Cooperatives
http://georgemaciunas.com/

Nadine Wasserman, “A retrospective gives Alison Knowles her due: A Fluxus artist’s journey is mapped in beans and unconventional ‘books’”, 2016
https://www.pghcitypaper.com/arts-entertainment/a-retrospective-gives-alison-knowles-her-due-1958208

"Call It Something Else”: The Tangled New Wilderness of Concept Art 1 of 3(?)

The recent exhibition "Call It Something Else: Something Else Press, Inc. (1963-1974)" at the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid "focuses on the books, projects, and activities of Dick Higgins’s publishing house Something Else Press, as well as on his theoretical notion of Intermedia, a term the publisher reappropriated to designate the heterogeneous and category-defying forms sustained by the Something Else matrix."
Fluxus? Neo-Dada? Proto Conceptual Art? Whatever it might be called, the Something Else Press projects were essential book things which ushered experimental art into a new terrain vague, an expanded field, a fertile littoral zone that Dick Higgins, in his chatty critical writing, called "intermedia".
Fine. But this was one seriously weird exhibition. Higgins’ publication project was so idiosyncratic, so surpassingly strange that it is, or has been until now, largely unrepresentable. Or, rather, no one has tried. The museum is heroic to make the attempt to do so, but the Reina Sofia is not afraid of obscure hardtack art. It’s the art institutions in the USA who, despite holding most of the cards, are the timid ones.

The Book as Alternative Space

That feels like a Lucy Lippardism. It was a concept to wrap one's head around in 1976 when Printed Matter artists bookstore was founded in NYC.
The book as exhibition: That was Seth Siegelaub's innovation, the gambit in 1968 that made him and his gang famous, producing exhibitions that weren't sited in an art gallery, but rather existed as books. His select group of WMA's became known as the group of conceptual artists. This is canonical 'contemporary' art history in the 20th century. From time to time bleatings might be heard from the margins, but the institutional shows and market of conceptual art revolved around that loud self-description.

These were the art scientists – the very programmatic, very deliberate “look at me doing scientific things”, very well documented trials of simple actions. Measuring things.
The bleatings from the margin, indeed the first ‘books as alternative space of exhibition’, had been done some while before by the Something Else Press. And conceived some years before that. This was in the context, more or less, of the international Fluxus movement. That was named by George Maciunas, proceeding more or less (a frequent term in this terrain of shifting variables, complicated by a team of jokesters who like to move the scenery around) from the Wiesbaden events of 1962.

The Boys Are All Right

This is not to say that Siegelaub's crew were pikers. They were just packaged better, and they had the enchufe. The outsider band of Fluxus was too gangly, too inscrutable. Many of the artists involved were tied to Dada, and to European lifeways which didn't square with American values. Besides, George Maciunas was a known communist and property outlaw. Higgins was this oddball Brit whose family made medieval armor. Check with the board of directors? Fuck that guy and the horse he rode in on.
What is art now? That’s easy: It’s what can sell and be sold, what you can stand in front of in the museum and take a selfie. And your friends will be impressed because they've heard of the celebrated author of the work you are in front of. (Which was most probably not made by her or him, but who cares about the creative supply chain?)
The ideas that motivate art, the generative source code for these creative effusions of human energy – that isn't usually on display in museums or art galleries.
You have to look for that in the trash. Sift among the pile of reject misfit toys.

Sorry, Too Strange

The Something Else/Fluxus project is where that code is to be found, the algorithms of mid-20th century post-modernism. In its day the movement was too casual, too heterodox, too 'dirty' and too confusing. Seth S. and his crew nailed it down to one thing – “this book is the exhibition”. In New York City. Advertised in the art magazines.
There is a lot more in the Fluxian nexus than the minimal hard edge concept art of the mainstreamers, the canonicals, whose work has been regularly exhibited and chewed over by academics for decades. Or, let's say, Fluxianisms are quite different. More 'arty', art-derived, game-oriented, experimental, much more mixed and opaque in their motivations, sources, and manifestations.
The one who brought it together, made it seem rigorous like a scientific procedure-based art should be, was John Cage. He elaborated a theory of chance operations which could make sense of it all. Or not at all, really. But seem to.
Despite that Something Else was NYC based, and quite a number of the artists were USAians, Fluxus has always been a European thing, as evidenced by the more extensive network of institutional formations given over to the movement there. (One of which, the Vostell Museum in Spain, I will come to in this blog.) In the USA there are a lot of Fluxus collections, but they are sequestered institutional repositories, archives, and not usually seen in spaces of exhibition or activation.

So, What About the Show Already?

That’s for next time. But a good start is the text in “links”, a review by a member of a group of East Europeans studying Fluxus.
“No idea is clear to us until a little soup has been spilled on it”.
“A Something Else Manifesto by Dick Higgins”, Great Bear Pamphlet, Something Else Press, NYC, 1966.
“If you can’t do it twice, you haven’t really done it.”
-- DH, 1974

LINKS

"Call It Something Else" exhibition flyer
https://www.museoreinasofia.es/sites/default/files/exposiciones/folletos/something-else-press-eng.pdf

Museum of Modern Art
https://www.moma.org › exhibitions: The Seth Siegelaub Papers as Institutional Critique
“This was the first show Siegelaub organized in which the catalogue, displayed in a private apartment, was the entire exhibition in itself.”
Do we detect a bit of mirror-gazing institutional narcissism here? Siegelaub, BTW, was also a Red. Maybe just quieter about it.

Book as Exhibition
https://book-as-exhibition.org
Seth Siegeulab "Xerox Book"
“A well-known example of a book as exhibition is the catalogue published in 1968 by Seth Siegelaub, which was the sole site for exhibitions of conceptual artists…”

An intelligent review of the show, drawing on the extensive wall texts
Aga Wielocha, “Call It Something Else: Something Else Press, Inc. (1963-1974)” at Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, October 10, 2023
https://activatingfluxus.com/2023/10/10/call-it-something-else-something-else-press-inc-1963-1974-at-museo-reina-sofia-madrid/