1964 : chronologie performance
1964
- BEUYS Joseph, Le Chef (Der Chief), 1964 (action)
- BOYLE Mark, Suddenly Last Supper, 1964.
- BRECHT George, Solo For Violin, 25/04/1964 (FluxFest at Fluxhall), fluxus.
- BRUS Günter, Ana, 1964. (actionnisme)
« A movable feast…
A happy, pleasant, languid life…
The water is flowing. A duck is swimming on the water.
The so-called undertow swirls around. Aquatic birds glide by quickly.
Far off, a pebble drops into the water: another undertow.
The sky is full of stars. The bespectacled ones are looking up.
Some think that the celestial bodies are dragged by art.
A double paragraph indicates Jupiter’s bottom.
Strange, someone is lying ove there, someone turns, he scratches himself because he is itchy. A beautiful piece of horizon, if one looks around.
Splintered night eyeglasses. Light penetrates inside them.
In front of the first zone
the one near the first man
is singing in the second row
a song for vagabonds
and his melody sounds
like the “consecration of reality.“
What evidence? What a start for the artists who find themselves in front of the door which is opening! And an anonymus participant in the feast, in a dignified manner, arrests his neighbor:
a chain reaction!
(You didn’t happen to hear about “little bodies“?…) (see Lea Vergine, p. 61)
- DESIATO Giuseppe, Rite n°1, 1964-65.
« I was born in Naples in 1935 of an unknown father and Clementina Desiato. I became a painter because I did not want to become a tailor. My mother married a man who had four children when I was five years old.
My mother died a short time ago at the Cardarelli Hospital in Naples. I wanted to do something for her so that she would die later, since she was still young and because she had a curable sickness (elevated azotemia). During the preceding years, she used to tell me things about the life and I learned not who my father was – I never met him – but how he died (if in fact he did die). My mother was the daughter of a parish priest (San Marco La Catola in the province of Foggia). After a few years, they sent her to the Buon Pastore of Naples, an orphanage for priests’ and nuns’ children. When she was 18 they found a job for her as a nurse in a hospital that looked after children of unknown fathers, in Forcella, Naples area, which was – and still is – the biggest center of smuggling in Europe. In that place my mother conceived me, though I still do not know whether with a tabaconist, a grocer or a doctor from the ward where she worked.
I only know that she was an intelligent woman finding herself in that situation only because of the system in which she lived.
The meaning of my work is not separate from the sum of problems and experiences lived first by my mother and then by myself. I think that these situations are determined by the contradictions of the system in which we live. It is useless to try to construct only with reference to the future: it is important to take the past into account as well, and construct for the future through the past and the present.
My works have – and it can’t be otherwise – meanings and feelings linking them to matters of lived and handed-down life. Personal and individual possibilities aside, it is always the force of logic ans the weakness of contradiction in a system which decide and produce, in part, certain behaviors.
If an artist chooses to reduce or shorten the course of the path, without taking into account the rules of the system or even the progressive logic toward revolution, he does nothing but destroy the truth and reality which must be produced, lived and absorbed.
It is useless to improvise schemes and formulas in order to invent a new path. One must follow the course that I and others followed in order to go beyond the one of our predecessors.
The problem is certainly political. I quoted the facts related to myself because through them certain reasons and modes of artistic praxis can be shown.
I have never been able to have one-man shows because no one ever wanted to, or could show my things. I have only participed in group shows. » (see Lea Vergine, p. 88-89)
- GRUPPO ZAJ, Mask, 1964-73.
« A man is behind another one a long/very long time. Both of them hold one another down with their arms aroud their waists. If need be the genitals of the one behind could press the buttcocks of the one in front. » (see Lea Vergine, p. 261)
- GRUPPO ZAJ, Nocturne, 1964-73.
« Luckily a NOCTURNE is a well known thing. The poor know its meaning. A NOCTURNE is not only a rich man’s situation. A NOCTURNE is a poor cry in the middle of the starry night. KILL US! » (see Lea Vergine, p . 261)
- GRUPPO ZAJ, A Camel Strip-Tease, 1964-73.
« A man with 8 dignifying rings fixes a Camel cigarette, perforating it with a long hatpin from a woman’s old hat. Then, with extreme care, he takes away the paper that wraps its nudity revealing its obscene tobacco. » (see Lea Vergine, p. 261)
- JONES Joe, Plant Music, 1964 (fluxus).
- JONES Joe, Radio Hat, 1964 (fluxus).
- KAPROW Allan, Eat, 1964. Bronx. NYC.
- KAPROW Allan, Household, 1964. Cornell University.
- KAPROW Allan, Orange, 1964. Miami Arts Council.
- KAPROW Allan, Paper, 1964. UC Berkeley. Californie.
- KNIZAK Milan, An Individual Demonstration, 1964. (fluxus)
- KNIZAK Milan, Demonstration for all the Senses, 1964 (Prague) (fluxus).
- LEBEL Jean-Jacques, Collage, happening, Denison Hall, Londres. 1964 avec Carolee Schneemann, Daniel Pommereulle, Frédéric Pardo, Erro, J. de Noblet, Marc Boyle et Anina Nosei.
- MORRIS Robert, Site, 1964. With Carolee Schneemann.
Re-Enactment 1994 (commissaire de la Rétrospective Morris au Guggenheim, NYC : Rosalind Krauss) : « C’est Rosalind Krauss, commissaire de ma rétrospective de 1994 au Guggenheim qui a eu l’idée de filmer une version de Site, une performance de 1964. Elle trouvait intéressant de montrer ces performances et d’autres œuvres de la même période. Contrairement à la performance originale, la reprise a demandé des heures et des heures de répétitions et d’attente. Le processus filmique est tellement ennuyeux – du moins pour moi. Donc, le plaisir ne vient qu’à la toute fin, lorsqu’on voit le résultat final. J’imagine qu’on aurait simplement pu reprendre les performances, mais cela ne s’est pas produit ; on en a plutôt fait un film. Et l’espace filmique diffère beaucoup de celui de la performance. Ce sont les mêmes mouvements, mais vous êtes contrôlés par le réalisateur. En 1964, un panneau de contreplaqué restait en bon état pendant plusieurs performances, mais pour le film, nous avons dû en utiliser une dizaine. Le contreplaqué est si médiocre de nos jours, il n’a pas le même claquement, ni la même apparence. Bien sûr, une grande partie de ce film, peut-être même tout le film, concerne davantage Babette Mangolte (réalisatrice) que moi-même, Morris. Mais j’ai fini par l’accepter. C’est aussi devenu l’empreinte perpétuelle de cette performance – la seule, mis à part mes notes. Ainsi quiconque voudrait reprendre les performances n’aurait qu’à consulter le film. Je ne crois pas que je le ferais moi-même, mais quelqu’un d’autre pourrait vouloir le faire. » (R. M., NYC, le 31 mars 2001)
- MUEHL Otto et KREN Kurt, Mama und Papa, 1964.
- O’SHEA Hannah, A Visual Time Span. 1964-76. Londres (1980).
- ONO Yoko, Cut Piece, 1964 (Tokyo) (fluxus).
- PATTERSON Benjamin, Licking Piece, 1964 (fluxus).
- SCHNEEMANN Carolee, Looseleaf, 1964.
- SCHNEEMANN Carolee, Meat Joy, 1964 (happening). Judson Church, NYC.
Group performance : raw fish, chickens, sausages, wet paint, plastic, rope, shredded scrap paper. First performed as part of the First Expression at The American Center in Paris, and later at Judson Memorial Church in NYC. « Meat Joy has the character of an erotic rite : excessive, indulgent, a célébration of flesh as material : raw fish, chickens, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, rope brushes, paper scrap. It’s propulsion is toward the ecstatic – shifting and turning between tenderness, wilderness, précision, abandon : qualities which could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent. »
- SCHNEEMANN Carolee, Music Box Music, 1964.
- UECKER Gunther, Piano, 1964.
- VAUTIER Ben, Nine Directions in Art, Galerie Amstel 47, 25/11-12/12/1964.
- VOSTELL Wolf, In Ulm, um Ulm, und um Ulm herum, 1964 (fluxus)
- VOSTELL Wolf, You-Happening, 1964 (fluxus).
- WALTHER Franz Erhard, Demonstration the Elfmeterbahn, 1964.