Dear Suse,
Nam June Paik did many works based on sex. The most famous of these is his Opera Sextronique with Charlotte Moorman. He wrote several manifestoes and articles stating his desire to bring sex onto music.
An article on Fluxus performance in the anthology on performance art by Gregory Battcock and Robert Nickas has a nice picture of a Paik performance showing Paik playing honky-tonk piano to accompany a stripper.
His Young Penis Symphony is another famous work.
Paik also did many Rabelaisian performances featuring pissing and bawdy jokes. You can find some of them in the Fluxus Performance Workbook available free on the web site of the journal Performance Research.
Carolee Schneemann is one of the major figures of feminist performance. She brought sex into performance in the early 1960s, doing happenings and actions that use the female body as a source of energy. The performance in which Ms. Schneemann reads a paper scroll that she slowly pulls out of her vagina is one of the iconic images of performance art.
Dick Higgins has many works that focus on sex. One of our favourite pieces among his works is a series of homosexual erotic poems in a book titled Of Celebration of Mornings. Through out his work, though, sex pops up in subtle comments and playful pediments to larger works.
Eric Andersen�s work is usually quite abstract, but he has done a few performances in recent years involving sex in some ay. One was a concert that reputedly included a woman giving birth live during the performance, and another was a plan to set up a piece where he invited people into a trailer for free liquor and sex. There was some catch to it, but I don�t remember quite how it worked.
There many such works scattered through the work of these artists. Some pop up like tiny jokes. There is a short piece by Robert Filliou that has a man lying in bed masturbating and drinking Coca-Cola to the sound of music played on a radio. When he finishes masturbating, he takes a drink of Coke, and then says, �Ah! Wine, women, and song!�
Ken Friedman wrote a reverse strip tease piece for a performer who comes on stage naked and covered with paint. The performer washes, dries, and dresses on stage.
You can learn more without doing too much research. Just do some Google searches on the artists by entering their names. We have found much of the material we have located by entering artist names (example: Carolee Schneemann) or artist names and the word Fluxus (example: Dick Higgins AND Fluxus).
Sincerely,
Secret Fluxus
Date: Sat, 1 May 2004 11:50:19 -0400 From: "suse" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: FLUXLIST: Fluxus and Sex
From: "secret fluxus" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Nam June Paik, Eric Andersen, Carolee Schneemann, Dick Higgins, andseveral
other Fluxus artists created works about sex, as well as cycles of erotic poetry or images.
with very little time on my hands (due to doing nothing) rather than researching this myself --can you tell us more? suse
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