How to Make a Happening (1966): Listen to Allan Kaprow’s 11 rules of unpredictable art

Legendary American painter Allan Kaprow instructs listeners in how, and how not, to make a ‘happening’.

Forget all the standard art forms: don’t paint pictures, don’t make poetry, don’t build architecture, don’t arrange dances, don’t write plays, don’t compose music, don’t make movies. And above all, don’t think you’ll get a happening by putting all these together. […] The point is to create something new.

Read the full transcript here.

Artist Simon Bouisson’s nine-hour film of a man walking backwards through Tokyo

In this nine-hour sequence of long takes, photographer Ludovic Zuili seems to be walking through a city moving backwards in time.

(via Simon Bouisson and France 4)

This entry was updated on 18 May 2014.

George Maciunas: Piano Piece (1962) — an outrageous absurdist composition in 12 movements

(Referenced in Jon Henricks’ Fluxus Codex.) Instructions on how to perform all twelve movements of Piano Piece, the 1962 absurdist score by Lithuanian architect and graphic designer George Maciunas (then-leader of the avant garde collective Fluxus):

No. 1: Let piano movers carry piano into the stage

No. 2: Tune the piano

No. 3: Paint with orange paint patterns over piano

No. 4: With a straight stick the length of a keyboard, sound all keys together

No. 5: Place a dog or cat (or both) inside the piano and play Chopin (hell no!)

No. 6: Stretch three highest strings with tuning key until they burst

No. 7: Place one piano on top of one another (one can be smaller)

No. 8: Place piano upside down and put a vase with flowers over the sound box

No. 9: Draw a picture of the piano so that the audience can see the picture

No. 10: Write ‘piano composition no.10’ and show to the audience the sign

No. 11: Wash the piano, wax and polish it well

No. 12: Let piano movers carry piano out of the stage

Watch several of the movements, (including Carpenter’s Piece — No. 13, 1964, an ancillary composition in which performers hammer nails into piano keys) successively staged by artists and musicians in 1985 at Denmark’s Festival of Fantastics, below.

Let the racket begin …

Video: Buster Keaton stars in silent short ‘High Sign’ (1921)

Masterly. Enjoy.

Watch Tate Gallery’s ‘Unlock Art’ episode on performance art

Educational Tate web short, sketching out the origins of time-based art. Written by art critic Jessica Lack.

(via Tate)

Rare early video art by Doris Chase

Early examples of computer-generated art and experimental video by multimedia artist Doris Totten Chase below.

Doris Chase, excerpt from Circles I, 1969–1970, in collaboration with programmers and computer engineers at The Boeing Company.
Computer film based on spinning hoops.

Doris Chase, excerpt from Circles II, 1972.
Colour separated telerecording of film footage to come out of a 1968 collaboration between the artist and the choreographer and dancer Mary Staton.

Doris Chase, excerpt from Jazz Dance, 1975.
Film combining computer-generated outlines of rhythmic dance movements and oscilloscope patterns of music. In the mid-1970s, Chase was creating groundbreaking work at the intersection of video, dance and computer-generated imagery — achieving a ‘hypnotic and strongly rhythmic synthesis’.

You can watch eight video clips from her oeuvre, which includes over 50 films, here.

Curated by Abmeyer + Wood.

Holographic Fashion Show

Stunning visuals by Tim Jockel for fashion designer Stefan Eckert.

Flight by Liz Magic Laser

For the episodic narrative of Flight (2010), New York based artist Liz Magic Laser choreographs foot chases from films like The Shining, 28 Days Later, Battleship Potemkin and Vertigo, to be performed among expectant audiences at appointed civic locations. Liz describes the performance, during which the chaser in one scene becomes the chased in the next, as a series of fast-paced slippages where villains become victims and witnesses become perpetrators.

I love the simplicity of the idea, the execution (skill of the performers to instill pathos into the repeated reversal of character roles), and the opportunity for nonplussed spectators (who might say something or step in) to interact with the scene. “Here's Johnny!”

(The above video excerpt is from a recent performance in Times Square. Via Times Square Arts, Arts Journal and Artsinfo)

People Like Us — Spinning

Vicki Bennett (aka. People Like Us) uses found footage from early silent comedy, avant-garde cinema and film documentary archives to make dark, witty film-based essays about popular culture. Spinning is an excerpt from one of her many extraordinary video collages created for a live performance event.

(via Vicki WFMU)