- The Score:How Does Fluxus Perform?
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In the mid-1960s, the Japanese composer Mieko Shiomi initiated a series of global events, or Spatial Poems, by mailing short sets of instructions around the world and asking recipients to reply with their interpretations. Scenarios ranged from "making or disturbing the movement of wind which surrounds this globe" in Wind Event, to answering the question, posed in Direction Event, "around the time listed, what kind of direction were you facing or moving towards?" Performed privately, Shiomi's requests were returned to her as a poetic document of connectivity and chance that spanned Europe, America, and Japan, forming a counter image to the geopolitical divisions and informational protocols imposed by the Cold War.
Shiomi had recently moved to New York, where she became involved with the international affiliation of artists, musicians, composers, and poets known as Fluxus. It was through the Fluxus network that Shiomi learned about the former physicist George Brecht and his "events"—performances scored for action that Brecht created while studying with the composer John Cage—which informed her own compositional methods. Now, she tapped the mailing lists of the prolific Fluxus administrator and artist George Maciunas to create her global events. The resulting Spatial Poems were compiled into Fluxus Editions, and, as if destined to reenter the postal universe, became available through Maciunas's mail-order warehouse.
Shiomi's Spatial Poem No. 1 was recently on view as part of Thing/Thought: Fluxus Editions, 1962-1978 at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, an informative and amusing exhibition of scores, objects, and publications drawn from an extensive collection of Fluxus materials recently donated to the Museum. The first Spatial Poem is based on Word Event, a score that instructs the recipient to "write a word or words on the enclosed card and place it somewhere." Participants mailed back descriptions of the word they came up with and where they placed it, and Shiomi compiled their responses onto a world map dotted [End Page 38] with small cardboard flags. Spatial Poem is a visualization of Fluxus: a mapping of the network, that, as Fluxus artist and musician Benjamin Patterson has remarked, looked a lot like the Internet before the Internet.1
The event score became a mainstay of Fluxus performance practice, which hinged on information exchange, public and private participation, and the distribution of disparate effects. If this mode of performance developed by Fluxus anticipated the command structure and connectivity of the Internet, however, it also demanded embodied experience. As the MoMA exhibition suggested, but could not exactly demonstrate, the interactive, instructional quality of scores were commonly translated into performative objects, "mass produced" under the Fluxus imprint. As was noticeable to those who had the impulse to reach their arm into one of Ay-O's Tactile Boxes, sniff Takako Saito's Smell Chess, or play with Brecht's various Games & Puzzles, but were denied by plexiglass barriers, these objects, while they are fun to look at, were designed for user experience and physical interaction. The museum is an institution governed by tenets of conservation and visual display; inside of it, the distributed, object-based aspect of Fluxus performance unfortunately and understandably withers. The institution seems to be caught in a double-bind (or a latent Fluxus prank): on the one hand, it is difficult to see Fluxus performance the same way one sees other art objects; on the other, their remains would fade away completely if throngs of museumgoers were to interact with these objects.
On the levels of preservation, display, and public engagement, Fluxus prefigured the challenges both digital media and...