Flood And Tyde

Fluxus, Post-Modernism, Downtown Music and European Improvisation: a starting kit

Words: Gian Paolo Galasi

Maciunas, Fluxus ccVTRE Fluxus 1964-1975

When talking about the Downtown music scene, the 'Reaganomics', as the end of the 'Loft-Scene', postmodernism and the influence of Fluxus on avant-garde music were cited. 'Postmodernism' was a transversal movement, a tendency in contemporary culture to criticize sharp classifications - as male versus female, straight versus gay, white versus black, and imperial versus colonial - emphasizing the role of language, power relations, and motivations.

As a non-belief in objective truth, postmodernism is related to what happens in that space once called 'subjective'. A form of subjectivity not seen as a whole, but analyzed, which is disintegrated, in tendencies, influence spheres, disciplines. In a way, Postmodernism is related to the human being from a point of view that is strikingly similar to that of sociologists and anthropologists, even if 'in absence', so to speak. As Victor Turner, a British cultural anthropologist wrote in his "The Anthropology of Experience", 

'all human act is impregnated with meaning, and meaning is hard to measure […]. Meaning arises when we try to put what culture and language have crystallized from the past together with what we feel, whish and think about our present point in life'.

Victor Turner differentiated himself from Claude Lévi-Strauss structural anthropology in this, that he took up Wilhelm Dilthey idea of 'experience' and put it at the center. Experience so is the result of "the Hermeneutic circle", which is the recurring movement between the implicit and the explicit, the particular and the whole. This idea is at the core of what Turner called 'liminality'. As Charles La Shure states in his "What is Liminality?",

“liminal” first appears in publication in the field of psychology in 1884, but the idea was introduced to the field of anthropology in 1909 by Arnold Van Gennep in his seminal work, The Rites of Passage. Van Gennep described rites of passage such as coming-of-age rituals and marriage as having the following three-part structure: 1. separation, 2. liminal period, 3. reassimilation. The initiate (that is, the person undergoing the ritual) is first stripped of the social status that he or she possessed before the ritual, inducted into the liminal period of transition, and finally given his or her new status and reassimilated into society.

This is something similar to what happens in the art field. It is not by chance, in fact, that Victor Turner himself, in his "Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society" (1975) shifted on performative drama as modern forms of liminarity:

Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman - Living Cello

We tend to find very frequently that it is not a theorist’s whole system which so illuminates, but his scattered ideas, his flashes of insight taken out of systemic context and applied to scattered data. Such ideas have a virtue of their own and may generate new hypotheses. They even show how scattered facts may be systematically connected! Randomly distributed through some monstrous logical system, they resemble nourishing raisins in a cellular mass of inedible dough. The intuitions, not the tissue of logic connecting them, are what tend to survive in the field experience.

More recently, Davide Sparti (professor of Sociology of Cultural Processes and Epistemology of Social Studies), in his "L'identità Incompiuta. Paradossi dell'improvvisazione musicale" pointed at the issues of identity and social recognition as the main characteristics of improvised music. Having Michel Foucault and Annah Arendt as primary references, both involved in matters like change and freedom in the subjective experience, and their connection with social and cultural tendencies, Sparti tried to analyze improvised music - John Coltrane, the AACM, Sun Ra, Sam Rivers and Sonny Rollins are some of the musicians taken as an example - relating aesthetics choices to identity choices:

In the moment in which he detects in the improvisational event his proper and unique criterium, the jazz player seems to sentence himself to disregard and marginalization (both musical and social) […] a freeing from judgements and acknowledgments stored, without accessing to another community that can recognize the musician. [my translation in English] 

Those words are echoing the ones Anthony Braxton used when talking with journalist Graham Lock about 

'Western media's current misdocumentation and misunderstanding of 'trans-African functionalism', that is black culture and particularly jazz', 

even if the perspective is slightly different in focus. Sparti is working on an attempt to describe how subjectivity is involved in the process of improvising, seeing the final shape of the 'solo', the style of the musician and his social acceptance as results, whereas Braxton's statement stressed out how and why mass media were such as reductionists: 

"The music has always been associated with the red-light district and all of that mentality, as if the music was an affirmation of lower partials, or sin, when in fact in every phase all of the masters had a viewpoint about humanity, and the music that was solidified - the science and vibrational dynamics of that music - held forth the most positive alternatives for the culture" 

In that perspective, the 'loft era' was a permanent laboratory in which musicians, as individuals, had the possibility to get in touch and work on their artistic creation, to build something similar to a community in which to share their ideas and practice their music, and a place in which to have inputs on the matters of self production and self determination as creative human beings.

John Zorn, Polly Bradfield, Andrea Centazzo, Eugene Chadbourne - 1978

The following phase, in which post-punk, contemporary music and visual arts collided with jazz and improvised music, was like the big cauldron in which different tendencies and different aesthetics merged together.

Initially, the term Downtown music was given to the a scene that was heavily influenced by the Fluxus movement - even if the first musician to be actively involved in Fluxus was John Cage. Fuxus was concerned, both in Europe and in the Usa, on the cutting off with linear narration, using shock as a tool to communicate more directly than in the official - at that times 'bourgeois' was of common use - world related to art galleries.

As in George Maciunias' Manifesto (1963), we can read:

"Purge the world of bourgeois sickness, 'intellectual', professional and commercialized culture, PURGE the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract art, mathematical art." 

Whereas Sun Ra stated, in a 1983 interview with Graham Lock:

"I like all sounds that upset people, because they's too complacent. There are some sounds that really upset 'em and I like to shock'em out of their complacency 'cause it's a very bad world in a lot of aspects. You need to wake up." 

While Braxton's 'restructuralist' concept was an attempt to throw away the divisions between art and life, as in the romantic view of Charlie Parker as a self-destructive drug addicted but instinctive be-bop genius, Fluxus' ideal was exemplified by Maciunas with the lines

'FUSE the cadres of cultural, social and political revolutionaries into united front & action.' 

Performance, 1983. Courtesy Artservices / Lovely Music, New York

This idea of 'fusion' as revolution, against artificial division as an instrument of 'power' - bourgeois in this case, but if you take Malcolm X speeches, there were a lot of references to the Roman Empire, as a metaphor for both political and cultural colonialism - is the reason I put together references to Turner's anthropology with improvised music, Fluxus and Postmodernism. 

Even today a documentarist like Eyal Sivan puts the concept of subjectivity at the center of his work on social and political conflict, as the blind spot to start with in order to develop tools that can goes beyond a dualistic structure.

If we name a subject as someone who has a proper history, able to understand it and speak about it as to express the sense of it - that is the concept of 'hermeneutic circle': going from the 'inside', the lived experience, to the 'outside', the judgement on what experienced, and then again going 'inside', as a way to proof the validity of the given sense in the living experience -, it seems logically following the sense of what Sonny Rollins did every time he was spending some time far away from the clubs and the music business - everytime he would be able to keep success going on - in order to let his improvisational language evolve once more instead of becoming manieristic. 

Having your own language is a way to affirm newly, and in a different way, what you are, at your own risk of no more being recognized, as happened, at least at the beginning, to the musicians involved in the free jazz movement, often mislabeled as 'anti-jazz'.

As far as the Downtown scene with his many faces (conceptualism, minimalism, performance art, art rock, free improvisation are only some of them), the idea of mixing various forms of art in a provocative and apparently rough manner was related to that of getting rid of the artificial divisions between art forms, that was typical since the half of the 18th Century of the Capitalistic world.  

Globe Unity Orchestra - November 7, 1970
Kongresshalle - Berliner Jazztage Berlin, Germany

Nam June Paik installations, as an example, were also a way to communicate that the common classification of TV as a 'commercial' media and that of contemporaray music as a 'sophisticated' form of art is something that is related to a solidified and accepted use; by using TVs together with a viola you can create something in which to experience that the previous boundaries are blurring - philosoper Michel Foucault talks about something similar when referring to the 'technologies of the self'.

The idea of a new experience made possible by art means was the common and fertile ground of that period, both in New York and in many parts of Europe - almost in Central and Eastern Europe, where Dada and Surrealism developed before French Situationism and Lettrism. 

Even saxophonist Peter Brotzmann, initially a painter that worked with Paik helping him in his first performances in Germany, and other European improvisers were influenced by Fluxus elements, creating a music that was related to jazz as improvised music but in a very personal way.

Complete Communion next outputs will be dedicated to the Downtown New York movement since 1979, as far as to the European Impovised Scene. The goal of this series of articles, as of my last three on part of the AACM - even if only through the Art Ensemble of Chicago, at least for the moment - and the previous ones dedicated to the Loft-era - are meant to widen the boundaries of listening to music, giving tools in order to put music into its cultural context and have them as a whole.



Related Bibliography:
Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, 1909. University of Chicago Press, 1960
Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (1974), Cornell University Press 1975
Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (1982), PAJ Publication
Michel Foucault, Technologies of the self. In L. H. Martin, H. Gutman and P. H. Hutton (eds) Technologies of the self. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988
Graham Lock, Forces In Motion. The Music and Thoughts of Anthony Braxton. Da Capo Press, 1988
Stewart Home, The Assault on Culture. Utopian Currents from Lettrism to Class War. Ist edition Aporia Press and Unpopular Books, London 1988. 2nd UK edition AK Press, 1991.
Davide Sparti, Suoni inauditi. L'improvvisazione nel jazz e nella vita quotidiana. Il Mulino, 2005
Davide Sparti, L'identità Incompiuta, Paradossi dell'improvvisazione musicale. Il Mulino, 2010
Fluxus. Henie Onstad Art Center, catalogue, Henie Onstad Art Center 2010

Music as a matter of personality - Part 2

Fluxus, art, fellow musicians: taking the risky way 
Interview with Peter Broetzmann

Milano, May 8, 2011

Words + Photos: Gian Paolo Galasi

Artwork: Peter Broetzmann

Onie Onstadt Kunstsenter, Feb., 2011

Did you try to sing sometimes?

No, not really … but jazz horn, as how I see the music, has a kind of very personal voice, and a voice is telling stories, is telling about yourself, and your problems, your feelings, it forever belongs to you …

Working with Fluxus artists have you ever …

Fluxus movement was completely unfairy to, it had nothing to do with feeling, it was very contractive. These guys understood that very well at that time, they didn’t want any kind of big expression, they wanted all this stupid art get rid from; they organized very simple pieces, there is this famous Olivetti piece from Maciunas, or Bill Higgins, I can’t remember …

It was George Maciunas …

He performed a couple of times, and you just got it … you know, that Olivetti count machine …

Yes …

… of course you do … they produce that kind of little paper and so everybody got a piece of this paper and the number set different meanings, so everybody was reading papers and whenever there was a fight when you had to do this, so it was very mechanical way of producing things, away from the arts, away from the art business, away from the human. But it was a very understandable reaction from what was going on in the arts. So that was for me a good piece to learn, of course it was not my way of doing things, but it was good to know that things like that can work and we had fun, we had really some nice performances, and I had learned a lot from that …

… as an example? …

… mmm

… something you brought in your expression with the saxophone …

… you know, there was a piece, I think I brought from a piece of Paik he performed and it was called Piece for Violin. We had a guy who was actually our driver, he was a trumpet player, so we didn’t have a violin to do something, but he had his trumpet, he went onstage, he opened up the trumpet case, showed a little the trumpet to the audience and that was the violin piece. To lead things up ad absurdum, sometimes is a very good idea. So this kind of things I learned from the Fluxus guys, but from Paik I learned, in his early times, how to make prepared pianos, out of Cage pianos. He made it his way, with much more fun, much more Butoh …

Less Zen, maybe …  

Paik had very explicit meaning about Zen: “you can forget all the books written in Europe about Zen”. I did a piece, I was sitting on the toilet reading the newspaper; that was for him very much Zen. Paik started with his first television things, well far away from the very technical business he did in the last years, so just, for example, an empty TV wooden case, old fashioned, and the Buddha on it … So he was sitting there, and  the audience came in sometimes, things like that …

He was working on images; image as a language, something that comes before language, something that’s right there, like … this cup of coffee …

Yes, That’s true …

Sirene, 1979, Metal, wood

And when you play, I mean, I was listening to your old Die Like a Dog records; maybe that’s something coming from my side, but I feel a strong connection with painting … listening to you, Toshinori, William and Hamid, there are some references to music, to Ayler’s music, there’s  Toshinori playing some blues lines right in the middle of the flux of the music, but it’s more related to painting …

As a painter, I’m very connected with landscapes; whatever I do I see as a kind of landscape; I think I do in a way that’s the same in music, kind of picture that flows from one valley from the next mountain, and, especially this collaboration with Kondo, I mean, we are old friends, he’s one of my first Japanese friends, we still work together, and even if we’re not walking together we see each other. We are quite very close together ….

How would you describe him, as a person?

He’s very much as a Japanese of the ancient times, a samurai. The good thing with Paik was the same: when he got famous with the first day to business, when everybody was done and he has his six pack of beer and he opened up his Korean food in tins … so radish and all stinking shit … [we both laugh] … so we were sitting there after everybody was gone and in the night he was telling stories, usually laughing. With Kondo it’s the same, as much as we take what we are doing serious, but you always have to keep distance to it, and look at it from a little far away. You always quest on things, then you try next case, different and better, or going somewhere else.

I was reading an old interview in which you were talking about yourself and this ‘illusion’ that were in the Sixties, to change the world … [he laughs] … but it was an illusion because nobody changed the world, but artistically there were lots of things that were put on the table and that were really new … not because ‘new’ is something good by itself, but maybe, thinking that you can really change your situation, and the situation of other people around you, can help you to do something, really …

You can imagine, it was happening in Italy too, it was happening in France even; but for us Germans, born in the bore and cooling up in the afterwar times, in the first time of our government there was all the old Nazis in. Of course we didn’t want that, we didn’t want a new army, we said ‘Never again!’, that was what we really believed: we wanted to have a much more open society, a much more free society, and we though that music can be a part of that and make things possible, and of course we were on the loan. In the theater it was the same, and in the art world, we were trying to change really everything, get away from the all shit. But as it goes, no politics thought to drove money to rule the buck, and to fight against that is so think of impossibility but, what you can do? I still believe that and I’m sure about that, you can change with the music people’s mind, you can open people’s mind, you can give them a chance to see things differently; after a concert and before, and so you can work on that in very little steps.

So it’s a matter of working on your feelings and refining them, also?

That’s my fee, yes … I worked a lot in the last years since the East block opened up in Poland again, in Ucraina, sometimes in Russia, in Israel or in the Middle East, so to go especially to Poland, for example, as a German, with that history on my back, it’s not my fault but it’s my shame I carry around; and to go in Israel, and find there people of my age or even older speaking German to me, with a blue number on the arm, and they’re still friendly to me, that you can reach in music, a very deep experience. I had long discussions in my last trip to Ukraina, not in the big cities, to smaller places, and of course there was a lot to discuss but people were frontly open. I like being in my studio doing my painting and my artwork, it’s a nice place, and I like to work, to smoke, paint and to handle all kind of shit I’m working with. Sometimes I stay a longer period, let’s say four weeks at home, but then I have to go out, and play somewhere. Because with music the good thing is, you can get really very direct to the people. Just at the moment, and you can’t run away, it’s a very direct confrontation. I need that, I need that response, to convince an audience, at least one in the audience.

Workshop Freie Musik, 1972, Silk-screen print/DIN A1

So, you were saying to me before that when you usually play you don’t mind about the structure of music, so I think that is stupid to ask you how much composition and how much improvisation there were in Globe Unity Orchestra or there is in the Tentet now … the music changes because there are other musicians involved …

There’s thousand ways to make music, and for everybody it looks different, but I just can talk about my way, my understanding on which you’d work. I think you mentioned the Globe Unity since the best years of the Globe Unity have been when the orchestra decided just to improvise and forget about pieces and zones, and Kowald and I left after a concert we played in Montreux or somewhere. Because the Orchestra came back to very old fashioned structures, back the bebop business, back to all the things we had thrown away, and to come back to such things that didn’t make sense for us, so we left the band; and the way my Tentet works, not my Tentet but our Chicago Tentet works started because I was asking whoever wants to bring in pieces, ideas, little pieces of paper; people like Ken Vandermark, that like to write scores, really old fashioned then. In the first years it was a good way of getting close together, but then there was a moment after about five years I set around a rehearsal and said ‘ok, let’s throw away all the papers, forget them, tonight we’ll play just improvising’. 

You got to a point in which you knew each other so well …

I had the feeling that everybody knows how to find his way, and since we do that way, we were quite successful; we just set a fourteen days tour, and had three days in London, three days in my hometown, and that was looking so really fantastic, really great. So if I see that there is always a little more potential, more things to reach, more directions to go, and everybody contribute and everybody feels responsible and everybody takes his duties and works for the band and for the music, than it is really a very good feeling, and just the music for the very beginning was not only music for me, it was kind of a social experience too; and I think jazz music is the only music that still has that possibilities and abilities, and there’s a fascinating thing. As I said before, I never was kind of a bandleader, that tells ‘ok, I want this here and that there’, and ‘you play this and … ‘, no I always use my little ideas to get the people playing and finding their own ways to make things happen and this is a kind of risky way, because you can fall deep down [laughs] but I like that, the risk is very is important for art …