Thanks for clearing this up Ken.
RA
Ken Friedman wrote:
> Reed Altemus writes,
>
> "I'm thinking perhaps Maciunas had little reason to see Charlotte's
> Festivals as competitive with his Fluxus program, in which case I conclude
> that he was just generally threatened by women who were doing things cf.
> Carolee Schneeman (later). He certainly seemed to get along fine with Yoko
> Ono at the time."
>
> George's opposition to the festival was not sexist. It was an issue of
> programmatic positions in his aesthetic-political system.
>
> George saw the Avant-Garde Festival as a large, eclectic stew of projects
> -- in essence, this raised the problem of the "neo-Baroque" position to
> which he opposed the "neo-haiku" Fluxus position.
>
> George's problem with Carolee was based on the same argument. She was doing
> happenings and messy, sexy, meaty multimedia performance that stood at the
> other end of a spectrum from George's demand for a clean, clear, simplified
> art.
>
> This, incidentally, was also George's argument against happenings in
> general, and this is part of the difficulty with Al Hansen's work.
>
> George was a purist but never a sexist. At a time when there was little
> room for women in the art world, George welcomed and worked with Alison
> Knowles, Mieko Shiomi, Shigeko Kubota, Yoko Ono, Alice Hutchins, Carla Liss
> and others.
>
> It seemed to many others that there was room for a great deal of overlap,
> fuzziness and ambiguity in the Fluxus position. The fact that George
> rejected the Avant Garde festivals did not bother the many Fluxus artists
> who took part in them.
>
> But it should be stated that George was a person who made decisions --
> including silly decisions -- on principle, not on the basis of personality,
> gender, sexual preference, race, religion, etc. To the degree that George
> was occasionally "cranky," he was an equal-opportunity crank.
>
> Ken Friedman
>
> --
