Water Yam (artist's multiple)
Encyclopedia
Water Yam is an artist's book by the American artist George Brecht
. Originally published in Germany, June 1963 in a box designed by George Maciunas
and typeset by Tomas Schmit
, it has been re-published in various countries several times since. It is now considered one of the most influential artworks released by Fluxus
, the internationalist avant-garde
art movement active predominantly in the 1960s and '70s. The box, sometimes referred to as a Fluxbox or Fluxkit, contains a large number of small printed cards, containing instructions known as event-scores, or fluxscores. Typically open-ended, these scores, whether performed in public, private or left to the imagination, leave a lot of space for chance and indeterminancy, forcing a large degree of interpretation upon the performers and audience.
The work is considered an important precursor to conceptual art
.
Many of the scores had been used in mail art
events between 1961 and '63, occasionally hand-written, typed or hectograph
ed, more usually typeset; often signed neatly at the bottom of the card. When Maciunas collected the scores together the typeset style was kept, but the signatures were removed. The reliance on bullet points
(•) separating the performances from their title was a feature that remained consistent throughout the versions. The cards are all different sizes.
The scores divide roughly into three sections; the earliest ones, 1959–62, describe events intended to be performed (such as Solo for Violin, Viola, Cello or Contrabass • Polish, July 1962); a second group of scores from '62-63 tend towards describing the temporary creation of assemblages; (such as Chair Event • on a white chair a grater, tape measure, alphabet, flag, black and spectral colours, April 1962). The third group, also 1962-63, are more personal and abstract; (such as Thursday • Thursday, March 1963). When originally published, Maciunas decided to emphasize 14 of the more musical scores (such as the famous Drip Music; A source of dripping water and an empty vessel are arranged so that the water falls into the vessel, January 1962) by printing them on orange cards, whilst the rest (such as Keyhole •Through either side) were printed on Brecht's more usual plain white card.
at Rutgers University
in 1957, and through Watts, Allan Kaprow
. The three started to meet regularly for lunch at a local branch of Howard Johnson's
, New Jersey. After a meeting with John Cage
organised by Brecht whilst the latter was in New Jersey hunting mushrooms, the three men started to attend Cage's Experimental Music Composition classes at the New School for Social Research in New York. In the classes, Cage encouraged his students to use chance and games as major elements in the creation of art.
Initially writing theatrical scores similar to Kaprow's earliest Happening
s, Brecht grew increasingly dissatisfied with the didactic nature of these performances. After performing in one such piece, Cage quipped that he'd "never felt so controlled before." prompting Brecht to pare the scores down to haiku
-like statements, leaving space for radically different interpretations each time the piece was performed.
As well as Cage's constructive criticism, Brecht was becoming increasingly interested in Marcel Duchamp's
theories on art, which he'd written about at length in Chance-Imagery, a text written in 1957 but only published in 1966 by the Something Else Press
.
An exhibition of Brecht's work held at the Reuben Gallery, October 1959 Toward Events: An Arrangement clearly pointed the way: The press release stated that 'art is to become actively rather than passively existent, to be enjoyed as an unfolding experience....works, or 'events,' such as The Dome, The Case, The Cabinet, are presented three dimensionally.' The final piece in the jigsaw, combining a Duchampian love of chance with a scientific belief in art as research, was an ephiphany Brecht had in 1960, in which he decisively separated the artwork from the control of the artist;
farm.
The festival, ('May' backwards), was organised as a wide ranging series of events taking place throughout the month, whose main objective was to bypass traditional gallery outlets, giving artists and 'receivers' greater freedom.
Artists participating in the festival included Alison Knowles
, Allan Kaprow, John Cage
, Al Hansen
, Ay-O
, Dick Higgins
, La Monte Young
, Karlheinz Stockhausen
and Ray Johnson
. The festival has come to be seen as a proto-fluxus event, involving many of the same artists. Yam evolved parallel to George Maciunas' Fluxfests, set up with almost identical aims but currently operating only in Europe whilst Maciunas was stationed in Germany. The International Fluxus Festival of the Newest Music (Festum Fluxorum), 1962–63, would feature the work of artists such as Cage, Raoul Hausmann
and Nam June Paik
. Brecht's event-scores, including the famous Drip Event, were amongst the pieces Maciunas would perform, along with pieces by Kaprow, Watts, Daniel Spoerri
, Robert Filliou
, Terry Riley
, Emmett Williams
and Dick Higgins
.
stationed at Ehlhalten near Wiesbaden
, and placed them in a box with a fine example of his graphic design
pasted onto the cover. Maciunas referred to the box as 'Brecht's complete works' and intended it to be the first in a series compiling works by artists he admired. Few of these intended 'collected works' ever saw the light of day.The use of multiple font
s derived from his interest in experimental typography
by Dada
figures such as Hugo Ball
and Raoul Hausmann, and was to prove crucial in defining a recognisable style for fluxus products.
Published in spring 1963, the box was designed to be the cheapest and simplest way of disseminating art, and in keeping with Maciunas' beliefs, was neither numbered nor signed, although later editions would be published as limited, numbered editions. The box is the very first Fluxkit, and the only published link between Brecht and Watt's Yam Festival, and Maciunas' FluxFests.
George Brecht
George Brecht , born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer as well as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Mobil Oil...
. Originally published in Germany, June 1963 in a box designed by George Maciunas
George Maciunas
George Maciunas was a Lithuanian-born American artist. He was a founding member of Fluxus, an international community of artists, architects, composers, and designers...
and typeset by Tomas Schmit
Tomas Schmit
Tomas Schmit Tomas Schmit died on 4 October 2006 at the age of 63 in Berlin, Germany. The artist and author is one of the pioneers of the Fluxus movement of the early 1960s. During the subsequent 40 years, he developed a ramified work of drawings, texts, books and concepts of artists' books...
, it has been re-published in various countries several times since. It is now considered one of the most influential artworks released by Fluxus
Fluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
, the internationalist avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
art movement active predominantly in the 1960s and '70s. The box, sometimes referred to as a Fluxbox or Fluxkit, contains a large number of small printed cards, containing instructions known as event-scores, or fluxscores. Typically open-ended, these scores, whether performed in public, private or left to the imagination, leave a lot of space for chance and indeterminancy, forcing a large degree of interpretation upon the performers and audience.
In some cases [event-scores] would arise out of the creation of the object, while in others the object was discovered and Brecht subsequently wrote a score for it, thus highlighting the relationship between language and perception. Or, in the words of the artist, “ensuring that the details of everyday life, the random constellations of objects that surround us, stop going unnoticed.” The event-score was as much a critique of conventional artistic representation as it was a gesture of firm resistance against individual alienation.
The work is considered an important precursor to conceptual art
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
.
The scores
Early editions of Water Yam collected around 70 event-scores together, created over a four year period from 1959 to 1963. Later editions would add extra events (up to about 100), as well as a small flick book Nut Bone. A Yamfest Movie, and white-on-black invitations to contact Brecht via a New York PO Box and arrange 'deliveries and relocations'.Many of the scores had been used in mail art
Mail art
Mail art is a worldwide cultural movement that began in the early 1960s and involves sending visual art through the international postal system. Mail Art is also known as Postal Art or Correspondence Art...
events between 1961 and '63, occasionally hand-written, typed or hectograph
Hectograph
The hectograph or gelatin duplicator or jellygraph is a printing process which involves transfer of an original, prepared with special inks, to a pan of gelatin or a gelatin pad pulled tight on a metal frame.-Process:...
ed, more usually typeset; often signed neatly at the bottom of the card. When Maciunas collected the scores together the typeset style was kept, but the signatures were removed. The reliance on bullet points
Bullet (typography)
In typography, a bullet is a typographical symbol or glyph used to introduce items in a list. For example:*Item 1*Item 2*Item 3...
(•) separating the performances from their title was a feature that remained consistent throughout the versions. The cards are all different sizes.
The scores divide roughly into three sections; the earliest ones, 1959–62, describe events intended to be performed (such as Solo for Violin, Viola, Cello or Contrabass • Polish, July 1962); a second group of scores from '62-63 tend towards describing the temporary creation of assemblages; (such as Chair Event • on a white chair a grater, tape measure, alphabet, flag, black and spectral colours, April 1962). The third group, also 1962-63, are more personal and abstract; (such as Thursday • Thursday, March 1963). When originally published, Maciunas decided to emphasize 14 of the more musical scores (such as the famous Drip Music; A source of dripping water and an empty vessel are arranged so that the water falls into the vessel, January 1962) by printing them on orange cards, whilst the rest (such as Keyhole •Through either side) were printed on Brecht's more usual plain white card.
John Cage and the Experimental Composition Classes
Brecht met the artist Robert WattsRobert Watts (artist)
Robert Watts was an American artist best known for his work as a member of the international Avant-garde art movement Fluxus. Born in Burlington, Iowa June 14, 1923, he became Professor of Art at Douglass College, Rutgers University, New Jersey in 1953, a post he kept until 1984...
at Rutgers University
Rutgers University
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...
in 1957, and through Watts, Allan Kaprow
Allan Kaprow
Allan Kaprow was an American painter, assemblagist and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. He helped to develop the "Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. His Happenings - some 200 of them - evolved over the years...
. The three started to meet regularly for lunch at a local branch of Howard Johnson's
Howard Johnson's
Howard Johnson's is a chain of hotels and restaurants, located primarily throughout the United States and Canada. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Howard Johnson's was the largest restaurant chain in the United States, with over 1,000 restaurants...
, New Jersey. After a meeting with John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
organised by Brecht whilst the latter was in New Jersey hunting mushrooms, the three men started to attend Cage's Experimental Music Composition classes at the New School for Social Research in New York. In the classes, Cage encouraged his students to use chance and games as major elements in the creation of art.
"George Brecht's understanding of an intimate situation was far greater than mine. I needed more space to really work. But George really came to life in that situation.... He became a leader; and immediately he influenced not only me, but everybody else: Jackson Maclow, Higgins, Hansen. George Segal stopped by, and so did Dine, Whitman and Oldenburg." Allan Kaprow
Initially writing theatrical scores similar to Kaprow's earliest Happening
Happening
A happening is a performance, event or situation meant to be considered art, usually as performance art. Happenings take place anywhere , are often multi-disciplinary, with a nonlinear narrative and the active participation of the audience...
s, Brecht grew increasingly dissatisfied with the didactic nature of these performances. After performing in one such piece, Cage quipped that he'd "never felt so controlled before." prompting Brecht to pare the scores down to haiku
Haiku
' , plural haiku, is a very short form of Japanese poetry typically characterised by three qualities:* The essence of haiku is "cutting"...
-like statements, leaving space for radically different interpretations each time the piece was performed.
As well as Cage's constructive criticism, Brecht was becoming increasingly interested in Marcel Duchamp's
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
theories on art, which he'd written about at length in Chance-Imagery, a text written in 1957 but only published in 1966 by the Something Else Press
Something Else Press
Something Else Press was founded by Dick Higgins in 1963. It published many important Intermedia texts and artworks by Higgins, Ray Johnson, Gertrude Stein, George Brecht, Daniel Spoerri, Bern Porter, John Cage, Emmett Williams and others. The Something Else Press was an early publisher of...
.
It was only while reading Robert Lebel's 1959 monograph on Duchamp and pondering the consequences of the readymade that Brecht truly understood what he was searching for: Just as the readymade is an object lifted from its mere commodity status by being transported into an art context, the "event" would be an act--often a simple one performed daily, such as turning on and off a switch--on which he would cast his spotlight in order to force us to pay attention to it, in order, as the Russian formalists would have said, to "make it strange" and "de-automatize our perception."
An exhibition of Brecht's work held at the Reuben Gallery, October 1959 Toward Events: An Arrangement clearly pointed the way: The press release stated that 'art is to become actively rather than passively existent, to be enjoyed as an unfolding experience....works, or 'events,' such as The Dome, The Case, The Cabinet, are presented three dimensionally.' The final piece in the jigsaw, combining a Duchampian love of chance with a scientific belief in art as research, was an ephiphany Brecht had in 1960, in which he decisively separated the artwork from the control of the artist;
"In the Spring of 1960 ... waiting for my wife to come from the house, standing behind my English Ford station wagon, the motor running and the left-turn signal blinking, it occurred to me that a truly 'event' piece could be drawn from the situation." George Brecht.
The Yam Festival, 1963
Yam was a name thought up by Brecht and Watts in late 1962 to act as an umbrella project 'for all manner of immaterial, experimental, as yet unclassified forms of expression.' Specifically intending to provide a platform for 'art that could not be bought,' the earliest Yam events involved mailing event cards and other objects stamped with the word 'Yam', or variations, to friends. Designed to increase anticipation, the project reached a head with a month-long series of events in May, 1963, in New York, Rutger's University and George Segal'sGeorge Segal
George Segal is an American film, stage and television actor.-Early life:George Segal, Jr. was born in 1934 Great Neck, Long Island, New York, the son of Fannie Blanche and George Segal, Sr. He was educated at George School, a private Quaker preparatory boarding school near Newtown, Bucks County,...
farm.
The festival, ('May' backwards), was organised as a wide ranging series of events taking place throughout the month, whose main objective was to bypass traditional gallery outlets, giving artists and 'receivers' greater freedom.
"In all of its formats and strategies Brecht's and Watt's Yam Festival operated as an alternative to the gallery system, producing "art" that could not be bought." Julia Robinson
Artists participating in the festival included Alison Knowles
Alison Knowles
Alison Knowles in New York City is an American visual artist known for her soundworks, installations, performances, and publications. Knowles was very active in the Fluxus movement, and continues to create work inspired by her Fluxus experience....
, Allan Kaprow, John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
, Al Hansen
Al Hansen
Alfred Earl "Al" Hansen was an American artist considered as one of the most important Fluxus figures. He was a Norwegian American....
, Ay-O
Ay-O
is a Japanese artist, who has been associated with Fluxus since its international beginnings in the 1960s.-From Democrato to Fluxus:Probably, the best reference to understand the early years of Ay-O is the autobiographical retrospective book in the references "Ay-O, Over the Rainbow, Ay-O...
, Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins was a composer, poet, printer, and early Fluxus artist. Higgins was born in Cambridge, England, but raised in the United States in various parts of New England, including Worcester, Massachusetts, Putney, Vermont, and Concord, New Hampshire.Like other Fluxus artists, Higgins studied...
, La Monte Young
La Monte Young
La Monte Thornton Young is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist.Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is...
, Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music"...
and Ray Johnson
Ray Johnson
Raymond Edward Johnson , known primarily as a collagist and correspondence artist, was a seminal figure in the history of Neo-Dada and early Pop art...
. The festival has come to be seen as a proto-fluxus event, involving many of the same artists. Yam evolved parallel to George Maciunas' Fluxfests, set up with almost identical aims but currently operating only in Europe whilst Maciunas was stationed in Germany. The International Fluxus Festival of the Newest Music (Festum Fluxorum), 1962–63, would feature the work of artists such as Cage, Raoul Hausmann
Raoul Hausmann
Raoul Hausmann was an Austrian artist and writer. One of the key figures in Berlin Dada, his experimental photographic collages, sound poetry and institutional critiques would have a profound influence on the European Avant-Garde in the aftermath of World War I.-Early biography:Raoul Hausmann was...
and Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the first video artist....
. Brecht's event-scores, including the famous Drip Event, were amongst the pieces Maciunas would perform, along with pieces by Kaprow, Watts, Daniel Spoerri
Daniel Spoerri
Daniel Spoerri is a Swiss artist and writer born in Romania, who has been called "the central figure of European post-war art" and "one of the most renown[ed] [artists] of the 20th century." Spoerri is best known for his "snare-pictures," a type of assemblage or object art, in which he captures...
, Robert Filliou
Robert Filliou
Robert Filliou was a French Fluxus artist, who produced works as a filmmaker, "action poet," sculptor, and happenings maestro....
, Terry Riley
Terry Riley
Terrence Mitchell Riley, is an American composer intrinsically associated with the minimalist school of Western classical music and was a pioneer of the movement...
, Emmett Williams
Emmett Williams
Emmett Williams was an American poet and visual artist.Williams was born in Greenville, South Carolina, and grew up in Virginia, and lived in Europe from 1949 to 1966...
and Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins was a composer, poet, printer, and early Fluxus artist. Higgins was born in Cambridge, England, but raised in the United States in various parts of New England, including Worcester, Massachusetts, Putney, Vermont, and Concord, New Hampshire.Like other Fluxus artists, Higgins studied...
.
Maciunas in Germany
Clearly aware of the Yam Festival, Maciunas brought together 73 of Brecht's event-scores whilst working as a free-lance designer for the US armyAllied Occupation Zones in Germany
The Allied powers who defeated Nazi Germany in World War II divided the country west of the Oder-Neisse line into four occupation zones for administrative purposes during 1945–49. In the closing weeks of fighting in Europe, US forces had pushed beyond the previously agreed boundaries for the...
stationed at Ehlhalten near Wiesbaden
Wiesbaden
Wiesbaden is a city in southwest Germany and the capital of the federal state of Hesse. It has about 275,400 inhabitants, plus approximately 10,000 United States citizens...
, and placed them in a box with a fine example of his graphic design
Graphic design
Graphic design is a creative process – most often involving a client and a designer and usually completed in conjunction with producers of form – undertaken in order to convey a specific message to a targeted audience...
pasted onto the cover. Maciunas referred to the box as 'Brecht's complete works' and intended it to be the first in a series compiling works by artists he admired. Few of these intended 'collected works' ever saw the light of day.The use of multiple font
Font
In typography, a font is traditionally defined as a quantity of sorts composing a complete character set of a single size and style of a particular typeface...
s derived from his interest in experimental typography
Typography
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading , adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters...
by Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
figures such as Hugo Ball
Hugo Ball
Hugo Ball was a German author, poet and one of the leading Dada artists.Hugo Ball was born in Pirmasens, Germany and was raised in a middle-class Catholic family. He studied sociology and philosophy at the universities of Munich and Heidelberg...
and Raoul Hausmann, and was to prove crucial in defining a recognisable style for fluxus products.
Published in spring 1963, the box was designed to be the cheapest and simplest way of disseminating art, and in keeping with Maciunas' beliefs, was neither numbered nor signed, although later editions would be published as limited, numbered editions. The box is the very first Fluxkit, and the only published link between Brecht and Watt's Yam Festival, and Maciunas' FluxFests.
Later versions
It has since been re-published a number of times with differing numbers of event-scores, alternate designs on the cover, and housed in various materials, including plastic boxes and wooden ones. It is worth noting that later editions such as the English Parrot Impressions, 1972, or the Lebeer Hossmann edition, 1986, don't include Maciunas' graphic design, and don't include the word Fluxus anywhere in or on the work. Ironically, for an object conceived as an "inexpensive, mass-produced unlimited edition (designed) to erode the cultural status of art and to help to eliminate the artist’s ego." and originally sold for $4, early copies are now worth in excess of $1800.External links
- George Brecht; DADA and Radical Art, An Online Companion
- Fluxus Debris Archive
- George Brecht: Museum Ludwig, Cologne
- An article about Robert Watts, including an interview with Brecht about the Yam Festival
- http://printedmatter.org/catalogue/search.cfm?page=1&search=fluxus%20box&search_type=&sec=1&rows=10&search_recent=m1&search_sort=rz&email=&cookie1=DF2BCF39-1C42-ECEB-78DE499BCC6748B5&list_id=&list_id2=&Partists=&Ptitle=&Pcategory=&Pbook_type=&Psubtitle=&Pvol=&Ppages=&Pbook_cover=&Pbinding=&Pfeatures=&Pprocess=&Pcolor=&Pbook_signed=&Ppub=&Ppubcity=&Ppubloc=&Ppubdate1=&Psynopsis=&Pgenre=&Psubject=&Pretail1=&Pretail2=A nice archive of Flux boxes at Printed Matter]