How to Build Anything

Let’s admit it: no matter how much experience we have, most of the time most of us don’t know what we’re doing.

The so-called Fluxus movement was a loosely-coordinated constellation of artists, musicians, performers and poets who appeared on various parts of Earth sometime around the 1960’s. No one is certain how or why they arrived here, but I for one am glad they did.

On this International Women’s Day, so many things seem necessary to build, and so many things seem impossible to change. I’d like to highlight three of my favorite artists associated with Fluxus, each of whom had a great approach to the problem of making.

Courage

In 1964, a woman sat alone on a stage, wearing a nice suit. She remained motionless, staring straight ahead in silence. In front of her on the stage was a pair of scissors.

It was a time when things felt inevitable — things like America’s invasion of Vietnam, like the prospect of nuclear war, like continual everyday violence against women. Even the clothing on her back had a sense of inevitability, as if it were made not out of fabric but out of marble.

Here is a video of that performance:

The work of Yoko Ono shows how simply remaining still in the face of violence can itself be an act of creation. The scissors acknowledge the world’s latent aggression, but also a way to cut through and past it.

A few years later, Ono would spend her honeymoon performing another form of passive creativity — what she called “Bed-In For Peace.” She and her husband remained in bed for a week, in protest of the war in Vietnam. Sleeping in a bed is something that most of us do every day — but as Ono showed, it’s also a creative act, and generally a much better thing to do than much of the stuff that humans get up to (building bombs, for instance).

To many, Ono’s performance pieces didn’t deserve to be called art, because they didn’t look like the works of the European masters that most had studied in school. To face audiences as directly as she did — audiences that (like all audiences) were often disinterested and sometimes hostile — takes a kind of courage, just like it takes courage to present yourself as an artist when you don’t look or act like how artists are “supposed to.”

Play

Around the same time, another artist also displayed the courage to challenge the male gaze, as well as to break the protocol of Proper Artist Behavior.

Charlotte Moorman was a Juilliard-trained cellist, which means that for many years she subjected herself to hours of disciplined practice, preparing herself to (eventually, if she was lucky) join the ranks of one of the major orchestras in performing the most popular Romantic and Classical symphonic works.

She did actually do a bit of that, playing with a group that thrillingly advertised itself as “Jacob Glick’s Boccherini Players.” It didn’t take long, however, before she decided she was a lot bigger than that.

Although she became infamously known as “the naked cellist”, many of her performances engaged with much more than sexuality, most of them posing a challenge to the symbolic image of the very instrument that she had dedicated her life to studying: the cello.

In the above video, Moorman explains to the audience that the design of the cello has not changed for hundreds of years. Of the instrument she was playing in that performance, which was highly amplified and had a body constructed out of three television sets, Moorman quips, “I don’t know if Stradivarius would have approved.”

The cello is an instrument that was designed to look like the female body with ample curves. Moorman invited audiences to set aside the instrument’s associations with femininity and romance, encouraging audience members to use the wooden part of the bow to produce loud screeching and banging noises.

In Moorman’s work, the performance situation departs from the reverence often displayed in modern orchestra concerts, instead making the music an opportunity for free play, on her own part and on the part of the audience members whom she invited to participate. Her work shows that a departure from seriousness can lead not only to triviality, but also to insight and discovery.

Openness

A key element necessary for artistic play is mental openness, a trait exemplified by the work of Alison Knowles.

Knowles bills herself as a composer, but her works fit in just as well at art galleries, or even on the streets of New York, where for a time she was known to print in silkscreen on anything and everything. (“This piece is dangerous,” reads one of her scores. “Have some ready excuses such as ‘This ink is water soluable.’”)

Knowles’s openness allowed her to see art in everything, from the pair of shoes you are wearing right now to the beans you are cooking for dinner.

When Knowles finds something she likes, she finds out everything she can about it, and all of that makes it into the art. To take the example of beans, Knowles compiled huge sprawling documents of bean-related facts and images, which she printed on long rolls of paper.

The rolls show an openness to everything in the world, and like Yoko Ono’s work, her Bean Rolls are a passive form of resisting the terrible and stultifying things in life, by the simple act of directing the attention to anything — in this case, to beans.

Which, as far as I understand it, is as good a way as any to build pretty much whatever needs to be built. I rest my case.

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