Dear Ms. Klefstad,
Thank you for your letter yesterday. I passed it on to my colleagues in Secret Fluxus. We�ve been talking about it by telephone and sharing emails all day.
We�ll continue to reflect on this for a while. I want to share a few immediate responses.
As I wrote yesterday, we often consider questions like this. While we have never managed to state the problem as clearly as you do, we have given it serious thought in different ways.
The difficulty we have in considering this issue is that everything you say is right in some sense. At the same time, it does not capture the reality of our experience. The dialectic between the clarity of the problem and the reality of our experience has been a perpetual challenge to our development.
The beauty of your letter is that it clarifies the issue by using a term we have never considered: placeholders.
Are we performing scores that remain lively as original works or are we reviving earlier works? If we are reviving earlier works that can only have been performed in a past time and a different cultural context, then we probably are �place-holders for an experience that is arising directly out of life and the dictates of current culture/history, an experience of invention. The placeholder is the revived performance, that does have an air of nostalgia about it�.
If we perform the work as music, it has a dimension of freshness and invention with each new performance cycle. This is what we feel we are doing.
When we experience the reception of these works in public spaces, we don�t sense that people respond to a revival or nostalgia. In most cases, our audience don�t know this work and they don�t know the artists who created it. They experience these works for the first time, and when they do, the work is clearly as authentic and immediate for them as the work must have once been for other audiences at other times.
The many editions of event scores are probably ephemera � physical pages, boxed cards, anthologies and printed collections. The works that the scores convey are not ephemera. They are scores, and these scores are performance instructions.
Again, we point to the examples of drama and music. An early edition of a Shakespeare folio or a theatre program for the first UK performance of Eugene O�Neill�s Electra is ephemera, as a program of Parsifal signed by Wagner would be, or an autograph score by Cage.
The works are not ephemera. They are works, and they come alive when they are performed.
If we were concerned with �the preservation of ephemera,� we WOULD be an oddity. We agree that �truly Fluxus acts are not the revivification of old (now culturally out-of-place or anachronistic) performances, but the creation of new ones that have authentic immediacy�. We take the position that we realize the work in a deep way. For us, this work has a place in contemporary culture. It is fresh and immediate for us in our own time.
Your comment on Taoism is addresses this issue in a pointed way. David Doris�s article on Fluxus and Zen in The Fluxus Reader makes exactly this point in relation to koan practice. Most koans are centuries old. Zen students even carry little books with the loans and with earlier solutions as an aid to their own koan practice.
Despite the history of the koans, the same koans are used again and again, and they are used because they become new in the practice of each student, leading to �appropriate immediacy� to �act as response to context or current state of affairs�.
If we were attempting to reproduce the earlier performances, perhaps they would be �preserved, salted-down performances�.
Instead, we work with the scores through close reading and inquiry, debating the issues and bringing out from the works what we hope is a new and reflective approach to the ideas and possibilities inherent in the work.
We do sometimes worry about whether we are simply engaged in preservation or nostalgic recreation. We don�t think this is the case, but the dialectic is a healthy reminder of what we do not want to be or to become.
Thank you once again for a thoughtful reminder.
Sincerely,
Secret Fluxus
From: Ann Klefstad Subject: Re: FLUXLIST: Kitsch Date: Fri, 02 Jul 2004 10:25:40 -0700
My understanding of the nature of kitsch is that it�s the commodified sublime. It comes out of an era that sought the sublime in art � something that likely is impossible, at least in terms of the Kantian sublime, that experience that sort of strips the gears of perception, you know. But seemingly representations of landscapes personifying the sublime were accepted as sublime artworks (and this was true of poems, paintings, music).
Kitsch appears to be the response to the desire for the sublime. The sublime, in an industrial landscape or a commodified life, is a sort of negative space, a perpetually deferred longed-for experience that people attempt to fill by means of acquisition. Artifacts of wish-fulfillment � that is, representations of absent or impossible situations that promise sublimity but cannot deliver it � are acquired and quickly �used up,� they become useless. And so more must be purchased. Kitsch/Sublime becomes a kind of engine of consumption, the way a commodified culture paves its road toward the desired consummation with the sublime, a road made of discarded dreck, more of which is always needed.
In terms of this notion of kitsch, secret fluxus performances are only kitsch in that they are place-holders for an experience that is arising directly out of life and the dictates of current culture/history, an experience of invention. The place-holder is the revived performance, that does have a air of nostalgia about it.
I think what�s being discussed here is the oddity of the preservation of ephemera, and perhaps the point is that truly fluxus acts are not the revivification of old (now culturally out-of-place or anachronistic) performances, but the creation of new ones that have authentic immediacy. Of course this criticism could apply to other performances; it�s just much more pointed with regard to fluxus because fluxus always had as a subtext that sort of taoist regard for appropriate immediacy, act as response to context or current state of affairs.
So in some sense, preserved, salted-down performances, as a primary activity instead of an occasional apposite homage, could be seen in some sense as kitschy, as place-holding entities that are empty and thus that need to be endlessly repeated.
AK
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