DIVVY/dual.symposium.01 [Kusumi]

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Duration: 45 minutes and 22 seconds

Country: Japan

Language: Japanese

License: CC Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike

Genre: Instructional

Producer: NTT InterCommunication Center / NPO Gadago / Mozilla Japan

Director: Dominick Chen

Views: 3,101 (16 embedded)

Posted by: dominick on Apr 11, 2007

DIVVY/dual symposium at NTT ICC on 09.24.2006. Kiyoshi Kusumi, the former editor in chief of BT monthly (japanese contemporary art magazine) unfolds the relationship between the fluxus movement in the 60's and contemporary cultural examples of open work model. Transcription and initial translation by: - Ashley Rawlings - Tomomi Sasaki - Lena Oishi - Chihiro Murakami - Dominick Chen Related links: 0] DIVVY/dual 1] TokyoArtBeat 2] NTT ICC 3] Mozilla Japan

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So, when considering the topic of whether Open Source art is possible or not,
I am a specialist researcher in contemporary art,
so I want to start playing a game whereby I look for examples within so-called art history.
While thinking about Open Source art in art history, it suddenly came to mind that
it would be good for everyone to broach this subject by thinking about Fluxus.
Fluxus was a group of young artists who were based in New York in the 1960 but active all over the world.
It included Nam June Paik, Beuys, Rory Anderson, Yoko Ono;
the group was formed out of a variety of people under that name, even in the beginning when they weren't selling.
It was an alternative scene in New York that was in a sense a multinational force.
It wasn't just Americans of so-called Anglo-Saxon descent, but a mix of people who had entered America at the time.
Now we would call it multicutural, but then the group was actively using intermedia, new media
and methods of expression. From today's perpective, we would think of it as a multicultural artist group.
In that sense, you could say that 21st century art theory has developed extremely rapidly out of the 1960s.
In Japanese what the origin of the name Fluxus was about 'fluidity', the idea of something flowing and changing.
The word's origin is in Latin, and I would like to consider if that could bear some relation to Open Source in my talk.
When something is 'open' anybody is able to enter; it is unconcealed and open to the public.
'Source' conjures up images of the old English meaning of 'spring' as in 'water source'.
If you think of it that way, then 'Open Source' is a water source with the lid taken off, allowing the water to flow out.
On the one hand, Fluxus' founder George Maciunas, created a logo for the group that featured a figure in a
Chinese-style painting, pulling up the lower half of his clothes to reveal the word 'Fluxus' flowing out of his bottom.
So in a sense, Maciunas did not intend this 'flowing' to be a clean image, but rather a form of incontinence.
While the group used such a 'bad' image for their icon, he was employing an anti-art technique
to design his community as some sort of a spilling fountain, left open to anyone.
The video I have prepared for today shows the 'Fukui Fluxus' event that took place
at the retrospective of Fluxus member AIO, held at the Fukui Fine Arts Museum in March this year.
I will keep talking to you while the video is being screened.
A performance event was held at the Fukui Fine Arts Museum on March 12th 2006, bringing AIO together with other
members of Fluxus such as Ben Patterson, YORGEN OPRICH??, and Mieko Shiomi.
There are probably people here who are not so familiar with Fluxus' events,
but it is possible to make a clear distinction between regular performances and these 'happenings',
which they referred to as 'Score' at the time.
By 'Score' they essentially meant a form of 'musical score'.
For example, as in the installation work of Yoko Ono, there would be
things with 'Do this' or 'Do that' written on them, or words on paintings.
Either way, Fluxus would turn those performances into a 'score',
and people who bought that score from the Fluxus shop would be able to perform it freely for themselves.
In the way that you can buy a musical score and play it for yourself, you could buy a Fluxus score
and perform it for yourself too. What you are seeing now is a performance piece by Nam June Paik
entitled 'Zen for Head'. It shows contemporary footage of Japanese people performing it recently.
This is set in the present, decades after the original, being performed by completely different people.
This one, entitled 'One For Violin' is being performed by Japanese performer Keitetsu Murai.
As well as doing his own performance work, he performs Fluxus events whenever there is the opportunity.
By the way, sadly Nam June Paik died recently, but the scores he made are still with us,
and people all over the world are able to perform them.
Here, just to let you know, he's going to break the violin.
There's another score in which Paik breaks up a piano, but in this one it's a violin.
Of course, how you interpret a score comes down to individual interpretations,
in the same way that classical music is performed through a variety of interpretations,
however, here there is an incredibly spiritual 'XXX', and it is being played TIMEWISE??
[Chair] By the way, where can you get hold of these kind of scores?
Gallery 360º, for instance.
I think this one was first performed in the early 1960s,
since breaking a musical instrument like this was essentially an 'Anti-Art' act.
But it also has some of John Cage's influence, and by that I mean essentially
that the sound of a violin being broken up can also be listened to as a form of music.
There was also the belief that the period of silence up until the destruction of the instrument was a form of music.
So essentially, while to destroy the instrument that is the symbol of music is an act of anti-music,
at the same time it is affirming the time and environment of all surrounding sound as music,
it wasn't just Anti-Music but something that incorporated something like 'Pan-Music'.
As for the score you just saw, I don't know exactly how much it was at the time, but it was probably sold very cheaply
at the Fluxus store as a multiple, but the ones left over now are of course probably sold at a premium price,
or else if they are reproduced as new editions by the artists,
then it is possible that they are made so that you can copy them freely.
However, I think that that would all depend on the respective artists.
This work, entitled 'Cyclus', is by Thomas Schmidt, a score that involves
pouring water from one bottle to another in a ring of bottles.
[Chair] As you said before, the Fluxus group was notable for the diverse nationalities of its members,
and for having both men and women in it, working on diverse projects with Maciunas at the core of it all.
I'd like us to continue talking about how this distinctive feature is connected to Open Source.
For example, the scores you have been talking about are the source of a work;
you could consider scores to be analogous to programming codes in software.
At the time, scores could be bought cheaply as muliples, but now they come in editions,
with premiums and can cost you large amounts of money to get hold of. What do you think about that discrepancy?
Right. In one sense it's an issue that needs to be resolved while the artist is still alive.
At the time it was okay for anyone to perform the score: if you bought it, it was fine for you to perform it.
It was inherently a form of freeware, wasn't it.
[Chair] Saying it's okay to perform something is not like a contract for screening rights written in precise words, but
something a bit loose, don't you think?
It is, isn't it. XXX, in other words, I think there was the idea that if you explicitly state whose work it is,
then it's the same thing as it being okay for anyone to perform it.
These scores become harder and harder to get hold of as time goes by,
which makes it hard for people to perform them now in the literal way they were permitted to back then.
If you look at the concept as it was at that time, then it is clearly a form of freeware.
[Chair] At that time in the 1960s, when for example, someone could buy the score and perform it,
was it permitted for them to change it, or in other words, to alter the source in any way?
I think it was permitted back then, in the same way that the interpretation of a musical score is left up to the musician.
[Chair] No, that's not what I mean. I mean, to change the score itself. If Ay-O was the creator,
and I bought his score and remixed it, the original is his creation, but the remix is mine.
I see. I don't think there was ever an example of that happening.
[Chair] It was just a freedom in the mind of the Fluxus artists.
Of course, events and parties were held and all sorts of people would come,
and it was perfectly normal for them to perform each other's scores.
[Chair] To carry on from what you have just been saying, I don't know if this is a famous story or not, but
Nam June Paik was on stage with this violin thinking about what he should do with it,
but he had no idea and started to freeze up, until there was this shout from the audience: 'Smash it!'
and Paik thought 'okay, why not?' and smashed it. The person who had shouted out was Joseph Beuys.
[Chair] Therefore Fluxus was a proximity, both georaphically and chronologically
that made possible the peer-production of works as in the Manga community 'Tokiwa-so', as Kusumi-san pointed out,
perhaps it would be better to say that their group nature strongly influenced the formation of their individual works.
That's right. It's definitely true that Paik and Beuys had a mutual relationship of influence on each other's work.
For example, works that were painted completely white, like Ay-O's 'Rainbow Painting' or Yoko Ono's works,
or there was Paik's television with Color Bar Painting thing in it, a painting that responded to the color bars.
Or, and she was not one the Fluxus artists, but at that time,
there were also the dot paintings by artist Yayoi Kusama, who was living in and working in New York.
With their respective themes, these were works all shared the theory of covering up the canvas with something.
Even if the actual techniques differed, there was common ground in their methodological basis.
I think the idea for moving towards Open Source came out of that.
[Chair] So, that belief that things should be open simply ended with an implicit understanding then?
For example, Kusama said that in that in the 1960s, she showed one of her new works to Andy Warhol,
and the following week he stole the idea and came up with a similar work of his own.
In other words,
if you firmly institutionalize those situations, for example with something like a contract,
the score is distributed as a form of freeware,
and at the time there was no way of regulating its distribution, was there?
The fact that the artists set up their own shops,
and sold multiples at comparatively cheap prices makes that period a remarkable one.
So I think that it was a bit too early
for those artists to push that forward even more.
Conversely, we might be able to say that our time has finally come to catch up with their ideas.
by the way, I heard from Ay-O that George Maciunas wouldn't sign his works.
He was an immigrant of East European origin, so there was a background context to his outlook at that time,
a very communist approach to looking at things,
and he had this ideal of establishing the ideal artist commune.
and I think that the idea of abandoning personal possessions and sharing things was born out of that ideal.
[Chair] It was an inevitability of that age, wasn't it.
The act of destroying a musical instrument, to smash a violin or a piano,
was something that rock stars started to do after the 1960s had ended.
Pete Townsend from The Who would smash his guitars; Jimi Hendrix would set fire to his guitars;
There's no way of finding out whether they were making direct reference to Fluxus, but
Fluxus' events in the early 1960s in which they smashed musical instruments defined the atmosphere of the period,
while in the late 1960s, it became a part of performances taking place on the rock stage.
There was that, or the bus tours taking place at the same time, which was originally part of Beatnik culture.
For example, Ay-O was making bus tour works in 1964 or something.
If you think of that kind of thing as having been transmitted through the Magical Mystery Tour, namely The Beatles,
you realize that the things awakening within art were opening up in other genres,
and Fluxus had those Open Source properties to it.
Within art, for example, Gilbert and George began performing their 'Human Sculpture' works in 1969,
in which the two of them, wearing suits, would perform using sticks and records.
The record they used at that time was called 'Under the Arch', which was in a sense a homeless song.
In Japan would be a bit like the 'Yoitomake no uta' song.
The work started out on their university's campus festival, then was shown at galleries.
Then it was held as a street performance, invited to a jazz festival, until it finally ended up in museums.
In some sense, Fluxus events were also a form of party art.
I think you've seen enough to understand what's going on, but if you look at it afresh,
it is something that anybody could do, not far off from being a dinner party.
In a sense, it's a format like in a fancy dress contest, where the people
come out on stage and do something interesting.
[Chair] Yamagata-san, do you have any thoughts in response to this?
No, I'm sorry but I think that fancy dress contests are more interesting than Fluxus.
It's a difference of the period in which we are looking at it.
[Chair] Let's move on to the music piece you brought; now we move to our present day.
Until now we have been talking about the influence of art on music, so I would like to talk about music as it is today.
[Chair] Can I play it? [Musical intro plays] What kind of music is this?
It's DJ Food's 'Raiding the Twentieth Century', a project started by Coldcut under one of its aliases.
A work made under the concept of offering sound samples to a DJ in the way that tasty food would be offered.
The title is a little hard to translate into Japanese,
but you could translate it as something like
'niju seiki marugoto itadakimasu' or 'itadaki niju seiki!' Something like that.
Here, all the musical sounds of the 20th century have been sampled,
as a grand 60 minute non stop remix.
Of course, all the samples were used without permission, I think.
Moreover, it wasn't for sale, but distributed for free over the web; it's a work that exists on the web.
[Chair] Just to add, if you search for DJ Food on the web, you'll find a website that was distributing this music,
which also gave the credits for the 100 or more songs sampled in this track.
It was heavily attacked on the commercial level and now the distribution has been stopped.
It does live on in some mirror sites, so you are still able to get hold of it,
but of course DJ Food is not selling it,
rather the idea of 'Raiding the 20th century' is about receiving, or being given something;
Thinking about the 21st century, Coldcut is trying to summarize the 20th all in one go.
In essence, what is important is that the work exists on the web, but as for this remix...
[Chair] it's just a single, arbitrary remix.
That's right. In a sense, it is a symbol with meaning just because of its existence.
It's not that it gains its power just from that,
but recently I set up a '20th century fan club' on the Mixi online community,
the name of which originally came to my mind in 1995.
I thought that once we arrived in the 21st century,
specialist research and collection of things to do with the 20th century would progress to the academic level.
Or, that in the middle of all these museums and academic associations being set up from now on,
the 20th century would still on the other hand remain everybody's possession, and not the special privilege of a minority.
I set up the fan club thinking it would serve well as an everyman's icon.
In truth, I haven't actually done any concrete activity, and it stayed a fictional plan, until recently
I thought it would be interesting if just by offering the possibility for that community,
a community formed around it.
[Chair] Let's turn the volume down a bit and leave it playing.
So, fukui Fluxus in the year 2000 was a regeneration of the Fluxus of the 1960s,
and while the Fluxus of the 1960s was not the starting point for everything,
it was from its idea of cultural joint ownership that the joint ownership of a score as a form of source came out.
In the present day, we have for example relatively famous people like DJ Food working in this format,
deliberately trying to maximize their expression.
And today these movements are being restricted by various factors and entities, let it be corporate or institutions,
and conflicts arise out of that situation. Yamagata-san, do you have any comments about this continuous flow?
I don't know whether I should talk about it in artistic terms or computing terms,
but as you said from the beginning, art was originally Open Source.
To begin with, we need to know what is the 'source' of 'art' in general.
It is probably NOT as if you have a source code that you can compile to create the 'Mona Lisa'
This is my basic stance, but let's try to think alternatively.
With artworks, there has for a long time been this state in which 'art is expression',
but gradually the expressive element has given ground to an art that deals with the problems raised by ideas.
For example, Marcel Duchamp bought a urinal, gave it the title 'Fountain' and said 'there, that's an artwork'.
What was interesting about that is not that the urinal had fantastic curves on it or anything, but
the very idea that he had turned that kind of an object into art.
Brian Eno wrote in his diary that, if we were to revitalize Duchamp's spirit today,
we should organize Ducamp's retrospective exhibitions all over the world.
But regular exhibition shows old urinals with huge insurance premiums put on them,
but in fact that's not making any point, in my opinion.
As his original idea was to throw in banal urinal bought from a store in NY,
so the right way to re-exhibit this today is to buy a modern banal urinal somewhere around and throw that in.
Probably, the binary of expression and artwork, and the binary of idea and artwork have become seperated
and in the 20th century there emerged strange artworks that were evaluated solely on their conceptual basis.
That in a sense is what was interesting about the 20th century, and with regard to that, computers,
things like source code that express actual ideas, programs,
the object codes that people use - these things are seperating from each other.
This is a point on which there is quite a lot of resemblance,
but on the other hand, strange things are gradually emerging in either of those two worlds.
In the old days it was the idea itself: for example, Cézanne thought of painting from oblique angles to make clearer
paintings. There would be no problem if someone else imitated that, no question of Cézanne sueing them over it.
They just didn't think that way at that time, whereas now it would inevitably result in a lawsuit.
Then we have various programs for copyright protection, but in truth, while these programs may protect copyrights,
they do not protect ideas. Ideas belong to everybody, so this is an issue of protecting expression only.
So, when it comes to object code and source code today, it ought to be the case that
objects are expression and so the source code does not require protection, but
now source code also has to be tightly protected. Even with Fluxus today, it should be the case that scores are
everybody's possession from the beginning, but they have in fact become hard to get hold of, and are sold here and
there, making them hard to use. The free flow... the free flow of ideas has come to lose its fluidity.
The very scores themselves are now being presented as the intention of expression.
There is also the question of whether this is an obstruction to business, or an obstruction caused by rights, but
nobody thinks that Fluxus would have a large record company attached, backed up by lawyers,
And perhaps there is the fact that artists do stand in each other's way,
by denouncing plagiarism committed by others, shouting 'He stole my work!'
That is not about bad power oppressing people,
but rather about us obstructing each other's effort. The question is to know if that is a bad thing.
For example, if someone were to copy my website and just present it as theirs under a different name,
I would also be like 'What do you think you're doing?!' so I can't say that it's outright wrong to think that way,
but on the other hand, as I said before, our behaviour is blocking up the flow of ideas.
On another front, why do people appreciate people smashing up violin in the 60s'?
On the other hand, for some people scores carry special value.
It is exactly like Benjamin's discussion of 'Aura', and I feel theyare being used for that sort of fetichism.
However, I don't think the matter is as simple as us just opening everything up.
Thank you very much. Are there any comments in response to what Yamagata-san has said?
Definitely with regard to the flow of ideas, if scores are being handled in the art market,
then the meaning in that differs entirely from what was intended at the time, doesn't it.
And as a result you could say that the original scores are becoming stale.
The content of the works becomes pretty much an Aura.
Being handed down to us as a historical artifacts,
they take on a legendary value, and that's something that cannot be helped.
[Chair] As Yamagata-san has said, the problem is that since the 1960s, when more people could get a hold of
items cheaply from the Fluxus shop, while this situation should have continued and prices should have remained
the same as they were at the time, processes of mystification and mythologization have come into play and whatever
they were valued at at the time, being several hundreds or thousands times more now, they are completely different.
In other words, if you acknowledge history and think it is a wonderful thing,
then shouldn't the Fluxus shop still be here, allowing us to buy these scores cheaply?
I think that one problem - the process of mystification - in the way that it is perhaps one of human beings' limitations,
offers the chance for various forms of debate.
In that sense, the spirit of Fluxus really needs an upgrade.
In terms of social implementation, it needs an upgrade, doesn't it. The ideas are there, so it's a question of how they
are maintained nowadays, isn't it. Thank you very much Kisumi-san.
Next, we have Noboru Tsubaki, who will be showing us some videos and images.