Good evening everyone, welcome to the
Jewish Museum. My name is Jenna Weiss. I'm
the manager of public programs. Thank you so much for joining us this evening for
tonight's lecture by Julia Robinson – the
1960's: the crucible of the Postmodern.
This event is presented as part of the
citywide festival, the 1960s the years
that changed America, organized by
Carnegie Hall. Programming for the
festival runs through March 24th and I
would like to thank our partners at
Carnegie Hall, particularly Adrienne
Fuchs for their support and encourage
you to visit Carnegie Hall dot org slash
1960s or take a program by the door for
full details on everything else coming
up and as we were planning for tonight's
event with them, we sort of search for
connections to our institutional history
so our speaker might connect to some of
those moments in the Jewish Museum's
past in the presentation this evening.
But I also wanted to mention our new
installation on the third floor 'Scenes
from the Collection' which recently
opened and contains nearly 600 works
from antiquities to contemporary art, so
you can find connections yourselves if
you come back and visit the third floor.
For information about all of our
upcoming programs, lectures, performances
and gallery talks please visit our
website or sign up for our e-newsletter.
Now I would like to introduce our speaker for this evening.
Julia Robinson is associate professor
of Modern and Contemporary art in the
department of art history at NYU. Her
scholarship focused on experimental
artistic practices of the 1960s and has
been published in journals such as
Performance Research, October, Grey Room, Art Forum and Mousse. Robinson is the
editor of the John Cage volume in the
October file series and has a
forthcoming book under the same imprint
on the Fluxus artist George Brecht.
She is also an active curator with
exhibitions including 'George Brecht
events: a Heterospective' at the Museum
Ludwig. 'The anarchy of silence:
John Cage and experimental art' at MACPA
in Barcelona and 'New Realisms, 1957 to
1963: Objects strategies between
ready-made and spectacle' and 'Plus or
minus 1961: Founding the expanded arts' at the Reina Sofia in Madrid. Now please
take a moment to silence your
cellphones and join me in welcoming
Julia Robinson.
Welcome everyone, thanks for coming
and thank you Halee and Jenna for organizing the program
and everyone else who did. So when we think
about the decade of the 1960s,
whether it be in art or in the world at
large
a number of exuberant iconic images come
to mind almost immediately.
I just can't see the light, sorry.
We think of a moment when post-war recovery was in place of a
burgeoning culture of commodities
infused with televisual and filmmaking
imagery that projected it larger than
life, creating a kaleidoscopicly
shifting Mediascape
of the everyday. We know that artists
reacted by adapting, translating or
abandoning more conventional forms of
modernist painting and sculpture and
took up technology theoretically and
actually. At their best, even in the best
cases, they try to figure the
implications of such technologies. As
such, the sixties generation is the first
arguably to demonstrate criteria in art
that are still urgent today. They could
be called the first post-modernists, if
indeed we can apply that term.
Post-modernism starts to sound a little dated almost
now, but it has the virtue of naming an
end to modernism. Paradoxically, probably
the reason that the frame does sound dated is because the change it describes,
as addressed particularly in artistic
innovations, has only become more
relevant, so we have to kind of exceed
that idea. However, when Fredric Jameson
developed this theory in the 1980s,
interestingly enough he named three
great modern artists as somehow post-modernists avant la lettre and they were
Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Stein and John
Cage.
So we'll get to that shortly, but
for now I'd just like you to think about
the art tendencies that come most readily to mind as emblematic of the 60s.
Most people probably think of pop art, though if you know the illustrious exhibition
history of this museum, you might also
say minimalism, recalling the landmark
primary structures shown here in 1966.
Depending on your knowledge of the
decade you could also think of fluxus,
conceptual art or even institutional
critique. What I want to do tonight is to
have you let go of those ideas and
suspend your disbelief to see how
productive we can be, we can see things
without the help of neat canonical
categorizations. We want to try to ask
questions that change our view of the
art and to bring out more of what was
going on in the minds of those who were
making it. For instance, pop art
supposedly drew in the real as so much
vocabulary heretofore unknown in art, but
we could probably say that minimalism
was more actual in many ways, that
breaking into the space of the viewer, it
dealt with an even more palpable real
than pop. To do this contrast justice
we'll need
to be sure to have the fullest
definitions of both on the table. In turn,
this is and this is my aim this evening -
we'll want to consider the questions that
the art and the artists themselves asked,
the research they undertook, not merely
the results as we now have them. This is
where the idea of the experimental comes
in. In what follows I hope to take your
sense of that concept experimental from
the general to the specific and in doing
so offer you a new lens onto this
extraordinary decade, the sixties. So in
pop art, just to kind of have a devil's
advocate thing for a moment, the
essentially American culture as the
referent and the most prevalent subject matter seems to
have collaterally branded that movement.
For instance, the name Richard Hamilton
comes up much less often say than Andy
Warhol, but the difference of their
approaches proves immensely instructive.
Hamilton himself offered a now classic
definition of pop. Pop art is popular, he
said, designated for a mass
audience, transient, short-term
solution, expendable, easily forgotten
low-cost, mass-produced, young, aimed at youth, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous and big business,
but this position on Hamilton's
part was arrived at analytically,
so it was part of the larger project, and this
is sort of an idea of getting back to
research. Some of you know the
independent group that
ran through the 1950s and met at
London's ICA Institute of Contemporary Art
involving a group of people thinking
through and across disciplines, including
science, art, technology, product design and popular culture. And in this context,
they tried to sort of think of all this in
the context of what they saw around them
as a rapidly changing world. So we might
think of it more as a think tank, figures
like Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton
and John McHale were sort of the artists
involved and then they were joined by
the critic Lawrence Alloway who in fact
coined the term pop art. But Hamilton
spoke of this activity - I'm sorry,
okay, to identify the slide - so Paolozzi
brings some, he creates collages already
in the late 40s that he uses magazine images that he's been
given by American military that he meets
and and sort of puts them together,
you know, well in advance of what we think of as the key images of pop, but you know
so already in '47 you have the two works on
the left. The independent group are
organizing exhibitions where they're
putting images of different scales all
through the space, thinking about
photography differently, thinking about,
you know, models for future research,
their own artistic research that they
can put into space as a kind of working
exhibition model. And on the lower right
is Hamilton's infamous founding of pop
collage, just what is it that makes
today's home so different, so appealing
from 1956. Now for those of you who
haven't sort of looked closely at this
work, it's kind of extraordinary all the
layers that he builds into it. From the moon
figure at the top, which is sort of
envisaging the space race to the
kind of phallic dimension of commodities
from the vacuum cleaner that extends all
the way up the stairs to the pop
popsicle, you know, I mean candy pop in
the weightlifters hand, to this kind of
these cutout figures that are more
magazine images than real-life people
and you notice the tape, magnetic tape,
recorder and player at the
bottom of the middle of the screen, so
this sort of thought about technology,
film images from a cinema scene in the
background. So it's very analytical
the way how Hamilton was bringing it
together and his colleagues and that's
what really differentiates it from
American pop because the Americans were
surrounded by it, it was their culture,
somehow you know it's sort of
interesting to see the the analytical
distance that that happened in England,
and what I'm gonna try and develop as we go through this lecture is somehow
a laboratory concept between all of the
artists, whether you're a dancer, a
composer, a painter or a poet through
this early moment of the 60s. So this
laboratory concept, we might say, starts
with the independent group.
So Hamilton said that he felt the need to cope with technology to sort of think through
what the next phase it would be in art.
He said "A great artist has a vision and
finds the technical means to create it.
If the means don't exist,
he'll invent them, as a chemist or an
engineer might, but the vision comes
first, not the technological background."
So it's really the thinking first that
comes in English pop. So this pop
can't fail to make us think differently
then about the entire landscape of the
turn of the sixties. So in the same
period as the independent group,
we see the activities of another
collective, the guitar group in Japan, who
were challenging traditional art
practices there and sort of working
those through by deconstructing
radically modernist painting, ideas of
modernist painting. So their
extraordinary innovations in performance
then lead to other collectives in Japan
such as Hi-Red Center, just to name
one.
So this assault that they
construct on painting - On the top left,
you see Murakami breaking through a
planar structure of paper,
so at once engaging, say, the idea of the
Shoji screen in Japanese culture and the
plane of modernist painting. So this assault on painting and sculptural
conventions becomes a basis for a kind
of breaking of codes that then draws in
people from music - there are composers that are involved in several
early Japanese collectives. And then
finally all kinds of, who are all,
all different disciplines are kind of
brought into how performance might
create a new field of artistic practice.
And with that the Japanese groups
they're sending out their Gutai
magazine, their various publications,
conscious of and need to be networked to
be connected in to other
artists in the world and and they end up
kind of, sort of, connecting with what was
going on in New York, with Fluxus
activities, so things are not as separate
as as we might imagine. So then, you know,
how then if we're thinking of
composition, music performance, visual art,
how do we consider this moment when
composers set out to illuminate their
musical innovations by unprecedented
extra-disciplinary
experiments in realization, when poets
use scores to shift the basis of their
work along the lines of chance and
duration, when dance becomes a contingent
mode of construction governed by
text-based rules, when an ontology of
sculpture could be reversed even
eradicated on the basis of the corporeal
address of a prop, indeed when a
thoroughgoing concept of spatio-temporal
extension could exact from artistic
disciplines a simultaneous
disintegration of their boundaries.
This is the expansive field that we see
around so-called minimalism.
So if art history first focused on sculpture as the salient mode beyond painting of the
you know, perhaps indeed because of the
forceful statements like those in
primary structures, we might today then
want to think of a different kind of primary structure
and sort of zoom in on a more laboratory model of how that was developed.
So Pollock, if we're sort
of drawing these lines between the
modern, the postmodern and the
contemporary, Pollock might be seen as
the figure of modernism who signals
its apotheosis and its end.
He not only shook up the interpretation
of painting for his own generation but
he troubled that project of abstraction
that was the culmination of modernism.
So the question for the next generation of
artists was - where do you go from here?
Abstraction had to become transferable,
thinkable as a process, not a fixed
object like a painting.
So Pollock is this extraordinary example.
Also the photographs of him start to
look to artists like performances.
S small anecdote that's
kind of useful is that Allan Kaprow sees
a Pollock show at Betty Parsons' gallery
and the gallery's so small and the
paintings are so big and they're on all
the walls that they almost seem to kind
of envelop him, that he starts to think
of Pollock's so-called all over painting
as something like an environment, so this
sort of excess of painting, the beyond
painting, starts to be a kind of set of
ideas that have to be developed.
So in this (Oh beg your pardon, I'm sorry). So one important thing that happens in the
Pollock criticism is that his
work starts to be read as chance rather
than, say, surrealist automatism.
Okay, so Abstract Expressionism is
discussed in terms of automatism the
critics connected to surrealism and
suddenly in 1950 one critic who had been
associated with a surrealist magazine, View,
Parker Tyler, calls Pollock's work,
he says he's marshalling the forces of
chance. Right so, suddenly, and and he
clears this slate of former associations
even his own language of surrealism,
deciding that...and dimming the
drip painting, something experimentally, says as a
problem for others to solve, that that's
what Pollock leaves.
So following from that idea of the experiment, Rosalind
Krauss has focused us on this idea,
she has highlighted the way that viewing
the Pollock-ian scenes
as akin to traceable evidence as a
scientist sets up an experiment and
follows a protocol, they might
be able to conduct it over and over again,
so this is sort of the
experimental position we're put in
looking at a Pollock.
But, Krauss says, the mystery in Pollock,
the mystery that confronts us
arises from what cannot
be repeated. So this is a very difficult
position if you're an artist trying to
kind of, pick up on Pollock or continue
an artistic project and I think the most
compelling aspect of that is to see
abstraction as something that the mind
does in the world rather than as this
kind of final and impossible to beat
model of painting. So the the way that
many younger artists got around this
impasse of Pollock was through the
presence of Duchamp who was more and
more visible in the decade of the 50s
and early 60s.
So Duchamp, initially he was sort of touted as the father of the ready-made but that really doesn't get
us very far and it's ultimately not a very, it doesn't do justice to how
Duchamp was read at the time. So more
complex questions asked even by the
artists of the time, since there were no
ready-mades still in existence, the
original ready-mades, were things like -
What is the relationship between the
ready-made and the photograph? Did, you
know, did Duchamp add something more to
that object by its photographic
condition? So the, and the other
extraordinary thing is that with this
Pollock-ian chance, there seemed to be a
way in which Pollock had seized on the
indeterminate, the impossible to
represent, grabbed a piece of that
indeterminacy and put it into painting.
But with this idea of it being
unrepeatable, then, you know, other models
had to be sought, and so in the 40s and
onwards Duchamp was started to be known
as someone who'd given up painting at
least 20 years ago, you know, and it was
sort of like shocking, here's this artist
and he can be an artist without painting,
how is that possible. So artist
and painter were almost synonymous
through the 50s in the minds,
particularly of many critics.
So Duchamp was the one figure
that had addressed this very interesting
complicated field of chance,
so chance had become a measure in the
20th century. In the 19th century,
chance was almost something to be
avoided, right, it was the
product of not knowing enough that these
chance events would occur and once you
get from Planck to Einstein in the 20th
century, chance becomes a measure and
part of the way that we construct the
universe, so artists were saying - well
Pollock isn't really transferable in
that way, but Duchamp had already, in that
very moment of Einstein, given himself a
kind of experiment, he had defined this
concept of the experiment - art as an
experiment - by setting himself a protocol,
right, so the work on the upper right -
Three Standard Stoppages is essentially
the product of Duchamp inviting
chance to participate in, to be that
measure that it had become.
Right, so he, you know, famously said "I'm not the author of this work, the author's chance."
Of course it was an extraordinary way of
framing chance.
So Duchamp's Stoppages get installed in MoMA in the 50s, in the Katherine Dreier collection,
along with other of his work including this small glass. Now, more recently and because of
the work that followed, we've started to
be able to think of this small glass as
as a kind of even more extraordinary
object then we, you know, heretofore imagined.
So what you can't see in this slide is a panel going across the glass which says, which is its title,
it's longer title, "To Be Looked at with One Eye, Close to, from the Other Side of the Glass, for Almost an Hour."
All right, so unbelievable that it's not only... Duchamp's works are of course
a critique of painting, painting
on glass, brought in the world in another way,
the renaissance idea of
painting as a window, but this work
actually told you where to stand, how to
look and if you could read the
instruction, you were on the wrong side
of the glass, so you had to go around
the other side, for how long to do it, you
know, and all of these things, so one may
radically think of it as the first
instructional work of the 20th century,
in its embedded in it, being this
critique of painting.
So with all these propositions, Duchamp also, as it was announced, had defined his work as an
experiment, meaning you can't use your
whole toolbox of analysis for painting,
analysis for, you know, classic analyses
of art in order to read this art.
He dismissed standard categories by saying 'my work is an experiment.'
So much as Cage has been credited with the idea of the experimental,
it does emanate from Duchamp. And Cage actually took a long time to admit the
connections with Duchamp, even in the
seventies, he said, "well, we were very
close but we didn't really ever talk
about work."
Right, because this was such an
extraordinary thing that he was
reformulating that he he might have
wanted all the credit to himself. (laughs)
So anyway, so Cage gives, this is
where we get to this idea of making the
experimental, shifting it from the
general to the specific.
So Cage wrote several texts defining the
experimental between '55 and '57, and for
him it was, it was tied to his concept of
indeterminacy but he only develops that
fully in 1958 and he develops a very, quite a bias, like a very eager,
you know, eccentric model of
indeterminacy, if you like, so just to
think about what he does with the
definition of indeterminacy in '55,
so he says, "Formerly, whenever anyone said that the music, the music, I presented was Experimental,
I objected. It seemed to
me that composers knew what they were
doing and that the experiments had been, that had been made had taken
place prior to the finished works, just
as sketches are made before paintings
and rehearsals precede performances. Now, on the other hand, times have changed;
Music has changed; and I no longer object
to the word 'experimental.' I use it in
fact to describe the music that
especially interests me and to which I
am devoted" – There's a bit of a glitch in
the sliding, sorry about that –
"So whether somebody else wrote it or I
wrote it myself, what has happened is
I've become a listener." So we know
the much more renowned argument of
Roland Barthes, you know, the death of the
author and the birth of the reader,
so this is quite a bit, a decade before that concept was formulated and
whether, we can debate whether Cage did completely become a listener, some of
his students had doubts about that, but
anyway he, this is how he
formulated the experimental. And then
beautifully, he was asked to sort of
rethink it in a lecture in Europe and he
said "Actually, America has an
intellectual climate," like he was sort of
saying it's best, it's easier to invent in
America, "suitable for radical
experimentation. We are, as Gertrude Stein
said, the oldest country of the 20th
century."
So Cage's book 'Silence' gets published in 1961 and with that, the Duchamp
reception that is growing meets Cage's
ideas as well. Interestingly enough, his
most famous piece 4'33" is barely
mentioned in that book 'Silence,'
but it's important as, sort of, as a matrix for us to think about what goes on
amid artists after this. So he actually
at the time connected 4'33" with painting,
with the painting of Rauschenberg, which
is sort of interesting to think as a
strategic move on Cage's side because
music wasn't actually getting the same
kind of attention as art was getting, so
he kind of, and Rauschenberg was
becoming very well known by
the early 60s, so at that, in that year
he's sitting on a panel with Duchamp at
the Art of Assemblage show in MoMA,
so it was kind of good timing for Cage to connect 4'33" with Rauschenberg.
But in the 50s, when he developed it, he first wrote it
on plain old staff notation. That score
got lost, conveniently, because it was a
fairly conservative way to write the
most radical musical piece to date in
the 20th century, so he let that go and
then he recast it in what he called
proportional notation or space-time
notation, so that's the one in the middle,
where 1/8th of an inch equals one second,
and this he compared to the abutments of
Rauschenberg's white paintings. And then
the third version interestingly comes a
bit later after he's connected with
younger artists in the end of the 50s as
he's teaching. So then he recasts it as
text and that too will have crucial
implications. What's amazing about 4'33,"
you know, people don't analyze it very
carefully very often, but it's an
extraordinary confluence of chance and
indeterminacy, and it helps us to find the
difference between those two terms. Cage
criticized himself for only using chance
in the phase of composition, so he would,
he spent eight months composing a piece
where he would toss coins and consult
the I Ching and finalize this
composition known as the, known as
Music of Changes, but once he'd done that
it was finished, right, and so every
performance would be using this same
structure. What indeterminacy does is make every
time that it's realized different by
composing parts of a score that then the
performer has to put together. What some
of his students felt was that he didn't
think of the audience still. He thought
of the composer and the performer,
but maybe not whether the audience could
understand what was going on.
But in any case he only really defines that idea of putting the score together on the spot
in '58 when he creates this term
Indeterminacy. So 4'33" has all that in it,
it's different every time no matter
where it's, it's sort of site-specific if you like,
it, you know, involves all the
environment, wherever it is, into the future
and so it, sort of, did this in '52,
way before Cage had even theorized that idea.
But when he does in the late 50s
Duchamp is giving, is speaking about a
particularly difficult piece of news for
younger artists to hear that, you know,
whatever they put into the artwork, it's
not going to be necessarily
interpretable by the audience. So Duchamp
gives a lecture called The Creative Act
in 1957, where he essentially speaks
about the fact that whatever the artist does,
all the passions, I mean this is one
year after Pollock's died,
all the kind of passions and emotions and direct expression that you might put into an
artwork is not going to be
legible in the result to others.
So Cage had moved out of that idea of direct expression and he started
started to write scores that were indeterminate like this one, Fontana Mix,
which will then be used by Yvonne
Rainer and people in dance and
people in visual art to kind of make all
kinds of work.
So this sort of intersection of Duchamp's news about, guess what, you know, what you put into
the artwork is not necessarily going to
be received, so you have to understand
that you're collaborating with a
spectator and then Cage's proposition for
a score that he didn't know what it was
going to look like or sound like when it
was performed, these came together in
'57, '58 and this is what creates what I'm
talking about as the kind of laboratory
of the next generation.
So Cage, how these ideas get transmitted is that Cage's teaching a class at The New School,
he does that interestingly in terms of the
'where do we go after Pollock' history.
He starts in 1956, the year Pollock dies and
teaches it through 1960
and so he finds himself confronted not only by would-be composers but many people who
never, don't ever want to write
composition or be musicians at all,
in fact they're artists looking to Cage's
methods to try and think where they can
take art. And artists did realize that
the place beyond painting had to do with
the space, your temporal field that
music could grasp far better than
anything else, right, so it was what one
of the artists called a relativistic field,
wherever you were hearing the
music, you know, it just encompassed a field
that no painting could
possibly account for in its conception.
So this is why artists and poets and all
kinds of people who'll be integral in
the downtown, what I'm calling this, laboratory,
they start with Cage's model
and expand it. So the class was when Cage
started teaching and it was called
'Composition' and it had mainly music
people there. Within about '58, when he's
starting to get all these artists,
he calls it, first he goes to 'experimental
music' and then he takes out the world
music all together and calls it
'experimental composition' and he says
that it's available to people with or
without previous training and he
emphasizes 'just as long as you're
inventive,' right, and the story goes
that he was quite amused when the artists
said I know nothing about music, you know,
and they sat there and sort of promised
him that they didn't have one bit of
experience and so he started to smile
and kind of enjoyed that,
so it was really a place that used composition as a matrix of invention without insisting on a discipline.
The first results of that are Allan Kaprow in 1958 conceived of a Total Art,
so Cage has talked about
"total soundspace" and that now this
field of sound can be minutely measured
by new technologies,
so Kaprow then extends that out to speak about a total perceptual field for art,
and he's, at the time, collaborating with a couple of other artists and they, as soon as
they've done with the first Cage class
that they take in '58, they write
this text called "A Project in Multiple
Dimensions." Now, some people think that
this, that this kind of moment of
thinking is pure Cage,
in fact, in the class, there are people who are working in experimental,
in electronic composition, and what the electronic composers find out, which Cage absolutely
positions himself against, is that there
are thresholds of perceptibility, right,
so if you play something at a certain
volume, it will be heard, it has to be
louder to be heard in the same way, right,
all this, they were using a lot of
recording technologies, working things
out in the studio, so they had all
this kind of very detailed graphs of
people's perception in real space and time.
So the artists put together this
idea about using light, space, sound,
all of these details already in '58 and
the discussion amongst electronic
composers was there's all this potential
to seize on a perceptual field, but it's
too, the technology is too expensive and
it's almost impossible now.
So these are Brecht, Kaprow, George Brecht, Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts wrote this text
"A Project in Multiple Dimensions" as a grant proposal to try and get the money
to execute these ideas. It doesn't happen,
so what Kaprow does is develop
an exhibition where he coins the term
"Happenings," but why am I drawing
attention to it now I think is to kind
of get away from that, again those
generalizations, get away from the whole
idea that "Happenings" is a big art movement,
right, this is a project that
Kaprow developed immediately out of the
Cage class. Cage came back from
presenting Indeterminacy in Europe and
and he had just created this piece that
many people know because it's now on
YouTube and everything called Water Walk
and this score was a realization of
another Fontana mix, the score I just
showed you.
So Cage walked around the stage and no
one had really seen a composer walking
before and scoring in the idea of
walking, right, and and he had this a
sense of a micro macro structure, so a
few things in space and time would match
the entire duration of the piece, right,
so Kaprow maps that on to the
Reuben Gallery space, this art space and he creates, I mean what I love about the picture on
the top left is it looks like a
stretcher bars for a painting, right,
and it's absolutely the transgression of
painting. So he divides the Reuben Gallery
up into three rooms because Cage had
these, kind of, ratios of structure - 3, 6, 18,
so three rooms, the audience will go
into each of the three spaces and
they'll see six things happen and then
they'll move three times, right,
so 3:6:18, so it's a purely Cage-ian ratio and
he's now bringing in proto pop elements
and in all the senses, so Cage had said
you know, theater, he redefined theater in
the context of experimental music and
said it's an activity that involves all
the senses, so Kaprow took him rather
literally and had a woman squeezing
orange juice, so you could smell
orange juice, tape machines playing in
the background and every, even Jasper
Johns and Rauschenberg acted as
painters, like in quotations, so there, so
18 Happenings was completely
structured as a kind of imprint of the
Cage-ian model, and interestingly the rest
of happenings from Oldenburg to Whitman
and others have nothing to do with Cage
and that those artists didn't care about
Cage, so it's good to kind of try and
think about this laboratory idea, this
idea of artists talking, coming out of
the Cage class, those who rejected it and
see what was at stake in each case.
The artist who was sitting next to Kaprow for two years in the Cage class was
George Brecht and he was much more
influenced also by Duchamp,
and so he developed this idea of scoring everyday objects, stopping painting, resisting the feeling,
the need to paint and so he had a
show right after Kaprow's show
18 Happenings in 6 parts, which was
actually a series of evening performances,
and did an exhibition where
he equally paced out the space, to find
the space that people would enter and
encounter certain objects, right, so one
of them was this medicine cabinet and he
relied on your knowledge of a medicine
cabinet to, sort of, open it and think
about what you could do with the items
inside, but it was almost a platonic
definition with ready-mades attached to it,
so one of the things, say, that he was defining, if we think about abstraction recast
as a process, was something like
roundness, a circle, a platonic circle,
something just abstractly defined, now is
a clock, it's a cup, it's a yo-yo,
it's a jar with seeds in it, it's the jar on
the lower shelf with cranberry juice
that you could drink, so you're
grasping that abstraction called
circularity, right, with ready-mades
attached to the object.
So this exhibition was announced with
this little flyer on a lunch bag, a brown
paper lunch bag and it gave instructions
on how to deal with all the objects in
the show, so for instance there
was a case and it says the case is found
on the table, it is approached by one to
several people and opened and the event
lasts probably 10 to 30 minutes, the
items inside are used in a way that's,
you know, corresponds to their nature, so
don't hit your head with the yo-yo, I mean,
do something yo-yo like, and then the event
will end, it sort of fills the gap
between approach and abandonment of the case. So he asked them to repack the case after,
so this is really putting, fleshing
out that abstraction called time,
an event by people's engagement. In the
Cage class, he wrote a score that was
more, like, to do with music, a piece
called Time Table Music, so they went to
the class, Cage class, went to Grand Central Station,
took an actual ready-may, the time table
and worked out, timed an event where they
all sat around and observed what was
going on in Grand Central in that given
period, right, and so that's when he was
thinking of music. Two years later,
with the whole scene of the New York
avant-garde, including performing in
Judson Dance things and other events
or, you know, things that are made by
dancers or composers, not just artists. He
then reformulates that Cage music idea
as an event. And so he develops his form
called the Event.
So in '61, these, again, the school of
artists working together thinking of
the next form are invited by a gallery,
which is normally a kind of painting gallery,
Martha Jackson Gallery, to this
exhibition that ends up being called
"Environments, Situation, Spaces" and Kaprow formulates his idea of an environment
based on a kind of three-dimensional
Pollock and picking up on the action
in a Pollock painting as an entire
experience now for the visitor to the exhibition.
Brecht does a piece called 
Three Chair Events that we could think
of as anticipating, perhaps, elements of
institutional critique. He put places as
one chair or white chair in the gallery
with a stack of scores. The other two,
the score says Three Chair Events, a
black one, a yellow one and a white one.
But you only have one score in the
gallery, this white score, so you have to
think about, yourself, how to complete
that act, right, this is sort of post Duchamp
in how do I complete this score. He
put the black score, the black chair in
the bathroom and the yellow chair, which
you can't see in the black of my photo
but he put it out the front of the
gallery, and actually Claes Oldenburg's
mother sat on it all night, so no one
could see that it was part of the piece
and the exhibition, so this
idea that you kind of, you know, take the
basis of something, the only part of the
proposition that was understood as art
was that in the gallery, right, so artists
later will put things outside the museum
to make you think is this art or is this
not art, but it's formulated in this
early moment. So I can see that time is
getting, pushing on, so I'm just going to
go through quite quickly some of this,
sort of, crucible of the postmodern
emanating from the the Cage background.
So in 1961 the artist Yoko Ono makes her
loft available to a bunch of different
kinds of artists, composers,
poets, all wanting to do, they call it
"concerts" and that allows you to put
anything in that frame of time of a
concert. So the composer La Monte Young
tries, he's trying to really be more
radical than everyone else,
has this score, a composition that, it's
dedicated to Robert Morris and it just
has a one-line saying "draw a straight
line and follow it." He writes that in 1960.
For the performance at Yoko Ono's
Loft in '61, he rewrites it 27 times
through the whole year, after the moment,
even after the moment of the concert.
So there's this strange idea that, but it's
exactly the same thing, the proposition
therefore of this score, this
program is that even if you do exactly
the same thing in a different time, 
it's different.
So he was able to repeat that drawing a
straight line from January to December
and have you understand that the same
thing is different. So all these kind of
one-upmanship ideas about the conceptual
basis of an action in time were being developed.
Simone Forti also 
had a concert in that series
and she developed something, she'd
been working on an idea she called
Dance Constructions and she had a first
effort at presenting this at the Reuben Gallery
and the reason I mentioned that
is because it was an artist gallery and
therefore, it somehow gave her permission
not to call it dance, right, so then,
when she gets to do this concert, she develops
this series of work that has this
incredible neologism aspect about it.
It's not sculpture and it's not dance.
It's a dance construction, but it
intervenes in sculpture just as much as
it, sort of, completely redefines dance.
So she had this event in this series at
Chambers Street called "Five Dance
Constructions and Some Other Things," and
one piece she did, which totally
recalibrated this big, looming
model of Cage-ian Cunningham, where they
separated the music from the dance
So Cunningham would do his
own dance and Cage would have his own music
and they had nothing to do
with each other, so Forti decides to do
this with a very stressfully annoying La Monte Young piece '"Friction sounds."
So she plays the tape of La Monte Young and gets wound up on the string and then the
person just lets her go and there's this
beautiful reflexive element of the tape
unwinding, playing the sound and
Forti unwinding on the rope and then it
stops and the tape still has about a
third to go, so she sits, she's there just listening.
So it's this extraordinary
instantiation of listening.
I see an image of Walter de Maria performing it in the lower-left and then another piece
that she did for this series, which is
now iconic, it's actually been purchased
by MoMA as an artwork is Huddle. So this
gives you this idea of a score basis of
an action of something sculptural. Huddle
is a noun and a verb, so it names the
structure that she referred to and the
action associated with its constant
transformation in time. In the loft series, 
she had two huddles
and all these other works, she spaced them out, in these..
It's sort of now become a landmark in post-war art,
and so Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton,
all these people were in her dance
constructions and they took that simple
gesture of the everyday, you know, and
expanded it as the vocabulary of Judson Dance. One figure that's always mentioned
in association with Forti is Anna Halprin,
who also had these long, sort of, sessions
of improvisation on her dance deck in
california and with whom Forti
spent many years, but I think if you
think about the Cageian context,
Forti's learning, they're all in a class, learning Cage's chance techniques
and it does more to disturb
improvisation than it does to follow it,
right, so somehow Forti's model is a mix,
it's a hybrid of everything that was
going on at this time and it can't be
reduced to one source or the other.
So then just speaking of a sort of expanded 
minimalism, she used sound and she
used objects to prompt action, so in the
work platforms on the Left she had two
people walk out and get under these
coffin-shaped boxes, right, and then what
they had to do is whistle. So suddenly
the boxes are not minimalist objects,
they, the whole space around them, that
phenomenological space or that
perceptual density that minimalism seems
to illuminate, was done through sound.
This kind of whistling in these two
boxes as though they were speaking to
each other, and then "Slant Board" is all
about ten minutes of action where you
have to deal with the gravity of that
45-degree angled plane, right, and if you're
tired, you rest, if not, you pass the
rope to someone else,
and you kind of develop this action
whose logic is legible to the audience,
as some of Cage's scores were really not.
Okay, so I'm going to start to get to the
end, since it's nearly an hour, hmm,
okay, so within this context, the artist
Robert Morris who was at the time
together with Simone Forti is also
developing something that is a concert
for this series in Yoko Ono's loft,
so he developed a work at the bottom, which
originally, now it's called Passageway,
but if you look at the flyer to that
concert series, it was called An Environment,
and that really links it to
other things that are going on at that
time, much more compellingly than this
later named Passageway. So, Morris created
a doorway that was flush with the
entrance of Ono's loft, like there's
no space in between the doorway and
you're walking into this, and you walk
through this sort of spiral space that
diminishes and diminishes. What people
don't realize or don't reference very
much these days is that it had this
heavy sound, in the, as you're
walking through this passageway as well,
a heartbeat, so there's this feeling of, 
kind of, the pressure of space coming in
on you as you're moving through this, his concert, his passageway
that you could visit several days a week,
right, and and at the same time he
creates this work that refers to itself
by this tape recording inside it,
which is a recording of how it was made, so
sawing wood, hammering nails and when
you go and experience the object, you
hear all of that process.
Morris' famous story's that he invited
Cage over to show him what he'd done
and Cage told him to go away and he sat
down and listened to this screechy,
sawing process of it's making for
hours, so it becomes an object totally
implicated in performance.
All right, so, La Monte Young essentially puts
all this new work, people proposing their
ideas, whether it's Forti writing up dance
or all of these other artists putting it
into words, he gathers textual
propositions for artworks in this book called "An Anthology" and that, they don't
have enough money to publish it when
he's doing that gathering in '61,
so it gets published in 1963, but in the
meantime, George Maciunas, who's the
designer takes all this new and exciting
work and starts Fluxus in Europe with
all those, you know, early New York
avant-garde models. So just to go quite
quickly, but Fluxus essentially uses the
basis of the score, the everyday object,
the casting into time, the engagement of
the audience as a kind of a dematerialized
basis for the work of art. So
they, for instance, so, and this event score
idea becomes a basis for a lot of
their activities. So this work by Brecht
sort of interesting if you think of the
trajectory, from Pollock, right, so Pollock's
drip paintings suddenly becomes an auditory address.
Drip music and all-over experience of
sound, so it was often performed
dripped, with drip water from a high
ladder into a vessel with a microphone,
so you have this kind of all over
dripping, and as you can see there,
with each performance, it takes on a slightly
different element, so George Maciunas
in Dusseldorf decided to do it from a
ladder. In the next location, he did it
very intimately, at the same level, more
like what Brecht would have done.
So, suddenly the score becomes this kind of
arena of interpretation and to do,
the artist sort of knew what the other
artist, their disposition was, and tried
to honor that in the way that they
realized it, but the authorship was going
around and around. Nam June Paik takes
La Monte Young's "Draw a Straight Line and
Follow It" and creates his own work
called "Zen for Head," which is another
seemingly post Pollockian gesture that
he calls action music. I'm not gonna, I'm
gonna go a bit faster through this, but
so you just see, I mean actually this
Olivetti is quite beautiful, it was made,
it's a score by George Maciunas, who's
the founder of the group Fluxus and he
uses an Olivetti adding machine that
spits out these numbers, right, rows of
numbers, and according to what number you
get, you have to raise your hat, put
up an umbrella, sit down, bow, and I feel
like it's almost an image, you know,
everyone's in suits, it's like a
Duchampian "Malic Moulds" forced into this, kind of, condition of, you know,
post-industrial order, you know, what
Adorno called an "administered society,"
so the Olivetti adding machine, kind of,
turning that Duchampian model into
something even more controlled in the
post-war period. So these are the kind of
things that the indeterminate 
score could play out.
So Fluxus comes back to New York and
ends up on Canal Street ...
... just gonna go fast, well, I feel like 
I'm running out of time ...
So just to cite two, I guess, canonical
works and how they, what they bring out
of the audience, Alison Knowles has a
piece that is a proposition, she calls
like La Monte Young calls his work a
composition, that still puts the author
in a place of some power. If you say
"Proposition," you're proposing something
to the audience, not sort of ramming it
down their throat, so her piece,
the one that you see here was, the
"Proposition" was "Make a salad" and she
performed it at the ICA in London,
exactly with the independent group, where
they were, had been working, and sort of
made the sound of making a salad and the
collective experience of it, which she
then shared the salad,
the performance, so if you think of things
recently like Rirkrit Tiravanija and
other things, they're all emanating from
this idea. She also had a piece called
"Shoes of your choice" and just, since we
started with Hamilton, I have to say
he was one of the first performers of
that piece at the ICA in London and he
got up and took off his 60s style big
platform shoe and started it, the idea
was that you described your own
shoe and formulate the piece
yourself, so he spent half an hour
talking about why he had this great pair
of shoes and where he got them and why he
liked them and everything, so this is an
extraordinary handing over of the entire
composition to the receiver.
In Yoko Ono's "Cut Piece," one thing to say, there's
plenty to say, but I just say that it
brought out a, sort of, psychology of the
audience, you know, how violent people
wanted to be to respond to this idea.
She offered scissors and they
could cut off her clothes, as most people
know, but it generated something in
the personalities of the people who were
there. Some people were very violent,
sometimes women were more 
violent than men,
and so it sort of, it's a kind of like a
crowdsourcing of some kind of reaction
when you offer a matrix, I mean whatever
we think about the rather alarming work
of Marina Abramović, she has built on
this entirely, right, so all of these
models start to look like basis of
things we know better now.
I think, I don't know, well, one thing I'll say about
Judson Dance is that they,
lot of the artists were using scores,
they were in a class where they learnt
Cage's scores, Indeterminate scores, and
they decided that they weren't very
applicable to dance and this raises a
question about indeterminacy in this
moment, that in fact, Merce Cunningham said
"I don't want to use it because the
dancers might run into each other and
hurt themselves" or something like,
he didn't, he wasn't interested in
indeterminacy, even though he gets, like,
quite a good reputation for, kind of,
being, him and Cage as these radical
figures, so it's a more tricky territory
than we might imagine.
So well, so Paxton, Rainer and others all started
composing with chance and then as
Rainer said, then she just developed the
look of indeterminacy, and she said a lot
of Judson just looks like that, so
that sort of takes us very far away from
those rigorous chance operations
that we started with.
So then, as the 60s culminates in this kind of idea of,
you know, bringing into that
indeterminate field confronted by the
artists, possibilities of technology,
so on the Dionysian and the Apollonian side
of this, you have, on the one hand
Warhol's "Exploding Plastic Inevitable," on
the other hand Billy Klüver and
Rauschenberg and others' "E.A.T.," Experiments
in Art and Technology, and finally, just
to sort of end where we began, I want
maybe to throw the idea out that we
think we can possibly see even minimalism now in a
different way, so I'm just showing you,
first of all this column by Robert Morris,
which started as a piece at The
Living Theater that, as you know, some
of you know very well that was a
performance, so he showed, he had seven
minutes, he showed it vertically for
three and a half minutes and knocked it
over and showed it horizontally for
three and a half minutes, all of this to
say that even Judson calling itself
Minimalist, Minimalism didn't exist in '62 to '64,
so it's far more interesting to
say what generated it, right, so similarly
Walter de Maria creates this column
structure and writes a letter to Cage
and says "dear Mr. Cage, I thought I
should tell you I made a portrait of you."
And that, once they become sort of money
and support by figures like Robert Scull
in the mid-60s that gets turned into
steel and becomes the object in primary
structures, right, so what are the sources
by which the monuments we have of the
60s have been, you know, firmly put in
place. Okay, I think I'm gonna leave it
there and open it up to questions if
anyone has any. Thanks a lot. (Applause)
(Jenna Weiss) I think, oh is this on, maybe I'll come around with a microphone, if anyone has questions,
please raise your hand ... yeah ... okay, oh wow, it definitely is on.
(Audience member) Um, you did a great job of explaining the different movements that were happening during
that period but could you distill, 
in a sense, for us,
where'd the postmodern of, say, the 30s
and in the 20s, which were a
postmodern period in their own way,
how do they come, you know, did they take
a break, do they come back, how did we
get here in, sort of, as summarized ...
(Julia Robinson) Well, I wouldn't call the 20s and 30s postmodern--
(Audience member) Well, I mean when you're talking about architecture and you're talking about ...
(Julia Robinson) It's pre-modern-- 
(Audience member) Oh so you're not saying it's postmodern ...
(Julia Robinson) It's within modern, yeah, yeah, so--
(Audience member) You're saying postmodern is basically beyond the modern, is that what, how you ...
(Julia Robinson) Yes, yeah, yeah,
so why we think about Cage in that
respect is because suddenly that, his
definition of theater broke the
the discipline of music, he
said we have eyes as well as ears,
we might as well use them, right, so when
you're sitting, hearing a piece of music
your, all your other perceptions are
going on, right, so that's a postmodern
model of perception, if modernism is
medium specificity, a focus on
disciplines and of taking the logic say
action to its quintessence, right,
so postmodern models break all that --
(Audience member) Breaks it up again, okay, thanks ...
[Sound of mic moving]
(Audience member 2) I find it hard to 
understand how from the very beginning
it ends up with something like 
Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd,
I mean from this very --
(Julia Robinson) Oh, it doesn't exactly 
end up with them. (laughs)
(Audience Member 2) How it evolves to it...
I'm glad you pointed that out, no I, 
just because you had that
opening slide that the museum showed of Primary Structures, I essentially
wanted to bring you back to see if you
see that a little differently by now,
right, so it's not that it ends with
those artists, it's that how can we look
at this steel object called Cage in
the Primary Structures show the same way if
we know about Morris' Column and De
Maria's sort of pilot project with this
little wooden object, right, so the LeWitt should look , LeWitt and Judd and everyone
should look a little
different to you at this point.
I mean, in fact, Judd was a critic through this entire period and he saw everything,
it troubled him, he, you know, famously
said that there wasn't enough art going
on in Morris's work. In his famous essay
Specific Objects, he actually,
people forget this, but he connects Morris
and George Brecht and says, you know,
those two haven't got enough going on,
they're dealing with understatement and
and things like that, so he's, for a
while, he's a critic, he writes about this
exhibition called Black, White and Gray
and, he really, he's not,
he's not the Judd that we know from '65 
onwards. In these years, he's really working
through exactly some of the things that
I've been showing, so when you get this
crystallization of this exhibition, it
isn't the whole story and hopefully
that's what I've been trying to
demonstrate, hmm.
(Jenna Weiss) Great! Well, thank you so much.
Oh did I, was there a last one? No? Okay, thank you so much Julia.
 
