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86 Benjamin Patterson’s Spiritual Exercises George E. Lewis The Lithuanian-born artist-curator George Maciunas is widely recognized as the catalyst for the creation of Fluxus, the now highly influential yet utterly amorphous art initiative that emerged in the early 1960s. Maciunas ’s early attempts to publish a magazine called Fluxus in New York provided the movement with its durable name, but before the first issue could be published Maciunas moved to Europe, where he took a job with the US Air Force in Wiesbaden, Germany.1 He began to gather contacts with artists he had heard about, including Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik, Emmett Williams, and others who would later become part of the movement. By 1962, Maciunas had developed the idea of combining the magazine with a “FLUXUS festival of new music,” which ultimately turned into the signal event that announced the name Fluxus to the larger worlds of art and music: the Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik, held in Wiesbaden over a three-week period in September 1962.2 Among the many artists Maciunas met was the young African American composer, performer, and visual artist Benjamin Patterson, who had moved to Cologne in 1960 to study electronic music.3 Patterson was performing as a contrabassist with the Seventh Army’s Symphony Orchestra, and also becoming an integral part of a contingent of young radical artists who were crisscrossing Europe. Born in 1934, as a child Patterson listened assiduously to classical music, particularly opera, and pursued postsecondary music study in composition and double bass performance at the University of Michigan, where he was a classmate of the composer Gordon Mumma.4 After Patterson graduated from college in 1956, according to his own account, “I also embarked on a crusade—to be the first black to ‘break the color barrier’ [and play] in an American symphony orchestra. . . . But in the Benjamin Patterson’s Spiritual Exercises • 87 end, even though such a famous conductor as Leopold Stokowski fought strongly on my behalf, America was not yet ready for a black symphony musician, and so I went to Canada.”5 During his initial brush with expatriate life, Patterson performed as a contrabassist with the Halifax Symphony Orchestra and the Ottawa Philharmonic Orchestra, and also became involved with electronic music, working in Ottawa with Canadian pioneer Hugh Le Caine and performing his own experiments.6 In Germany Patterson was developing new ways of making music. He worked briefly with Karlheinz Stockhausen, and met people like Paik and Williams. Moving to Paris in 1961, he collaborated with Robert Filliou and Daniel Spoerri, who encouraged him to self-publish his important 1962 collection of early text pieces, Methods and Processes.7 Filliou’s mobile Galerie Legitime became the space for Patterson’s early “puzzle-poems,” small text/object collages that the two artists exhibited in 1962 in a unique traveling exhibition that took place literally under Filliou’s hat.8 During this period, which Fluxus historian Owen Smith calls “protoFluxus ,” a rising tide of radical artists and activities was forming: the Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, where Cage had taught seminars ; the scene in Cologne around Stockhausen; the events at the studio of Mary Bauermeister, the visual artist who was then associated with Stockhausen; and the performances at Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, not far from Cologne. Maciunas heard about the Bauermeister studio events from Patterson, who premiered Cage’s Cartridge Music there with the composer, Paik, David Tudor, and Christian Wolff as the other performers .9 Patterson also met La Monte Young and George Brecht at this Fluxus equivalent of Minton’s Playhouse, experiencing a moment of self-realization that one might compare with Charlie Parker’s legendary chili house epiphany: “Even now I still have a vivid memory of telling myself . . . that this is the music that I had been hearing in my head for years but had never thought possible to realize.”10 Maciunas and Patterson began organizing festivals and performances in Germany, and by the time of the Wiesbaden festival, Patterson had become a central part of the radical new music scene.11 A 1964 letter from Maciunas to Wolf Vostell presented a “List of Fluxus people (inner core): George Brecht, Ay-O (Takao Iijima), Willem de Ridder , Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Joe Jones, Shigeko Kubota, Takehisa Kosugi, George Maciunas, Ben Patterson, Mieko Shiomi, Ben Vautier, Robert Watts, Emmett Williams, La Monte Young.”12 However, a curious tandem of display and erasure marks Patterson’s presence in subsequent histories...

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