The Performance of Time in Fluxus Intermedia Natasha Lushetich If the phrase “the performance of time” sounds slightly odd, the suggested action being both vaguely possible and, quite likely, impossible, it is because time is most often conceptualized as a flowing substance, an organizing principle, or a container in which events occur. In all of these cases, as indicated by the oft-used phrases “time flies” and “can you squeeze me in?” when refer- ring to an appointment or meeting, time is thought to have an existence independent of the human observer. As an externally observable phenomenon it can either be “perceived” by the Figure 1. Alison Knowles, The Identical Lunch, Barton, Vermont, 1967. A residual object from one of Knowles’s “noontime meditations.” (Photo courtesy of the artist) Natasha Lushetich is a PhD candidate at the University of Exeter and a lecturer at the University of Portsmouth, UK. She is also a performer, director, and interdisciplinary artist. Her publications include “On the Performativity of Absence” ( Performance Research, March 2010), “Ludus Populi: The Practice of Nonsense” ( Theatre Journal, March 2011), and “The Event Score as a Perpetuum Mobile” ( Text and Performance Quarterly, forthcoming). [email protected] TDR: The Drama Review 55:4 (T212) Winter 2011. ©2011 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 75 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00123 by guest on 29 September 2021 human subject if the subject chooses to avail herself of the “time sense,” the way she would avail herself of the sense of sight to look at a stone, or, it can be ignored. On this static, substantialist view, time cannot be performed but is a measure of performance, that in which performance occurs. I would like to suggest what might be called a “processualist” approach whereby time is the expressive activity of any given thing, being, or phenomenon. Instead of occurring in time, an event or an activity produces time in its occurrence, which further means that there can be no position outside of time since all things, beings, and phenomena are always already temporal- ized by the very nature of their existence. Rather than observing or measuring the “movement of time” statically — as a progression from a static point A to a static point B — the processualist logic operates from within the process of perpetual temporalization, continuous change, dif- ferentiation, and mutation. Although difficult to grasp as well as perceive, continuous change can be likened to the process of aging as opposed to that of growing. While the process of growing is marked by a clear beginning and an approximate end, the process of aging has nei- ther a beginning nor an end since it is not a passage from a fixed point in one’s youth to a fixed point in one’s old age, but a gradual process of continuous change whose starting point cannot be determined and which continues well after one’s death in the form of decomposition. This process, rendered imperceptible to the aging subject by the very gradualness of change, encom- passes change on all fronts: it is not only the color of one’s hair that changes but also the pos- ture, the smile, the texture of the skin, the voice, and not least of all, one’s consciousness. It is in this context of perpetual processuality that I propose to focus on Fluxus intermedia. Variously characterized as “the most radical experimental art movement of the sixties” (Harry Ruhé1 in Armstrong 1993:16), a “singularly strange phenomenon in the history of the arts of the twentieth century” (Doris 1998:91) and “an active philosophy of life that only some- times takes the form of art” (Friedman 1998b:ix), Fluxus is a loosely knit association of art- ists whose activity ranges from concerts, films, performances, and sightseeing tours to games, sports, instruments, and gadgets. It includes such names as Yoko Ono, Mieko Shiomi, George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Takehisa Kosugi, La Monte Young, Alison Knowles, Dick Higgins, and Ken Friedman, and spans the period of almost five decades. “Intermedia” is a term coined by Dick Higgins to refer to works that fall conceptually between media such as visual poetry or action music, as well as between art media and life media (Higgins 1998:222). The latter dis- tinction (or rather, contamination) is of particular importance to this discussion since the per- formance of time occurs at the intersection of pervasive temporalization produced by a divergent range of Fluxus works and the percipient’s musicalized mode of attention. This is made possible by the fact that all Fluxus works, including intermedial compositions, film, and durational per- formance — the focal points of my analysis — exhibit two fundamental characteristics: “pres- ence in time” and “musicality” (Friedman 1998a:250). As Friedman elucidates in “Fluxus and Company,” “presence in time” refers to the works’ gradual deployment, impermanence, and ephemerality while “musicality” refers to the fact that many Fluxus works, whether objects or performance instructions, games or puzzles, appear in the form of scores (250). That the works appear in the form of scores means that they can be realized by anyone, anywhere, in any num- ber of ways — the only common denominator being musicalized duration (251). But, despite the fact that musicalization and temporalization have much in common, musicalization is not a mere extension of temporalization, as music stands in an ambiguous relationship to time. Deep Listening In The Time of Music, the musicologist Jonathan D. Kramer engages with the philosopher Susanne K. Langer’s notion that “[m]usic makes time audible” (in Kramer 1988:1), which could be interpreted to mean that music generates time in its expressive, and thus temporaliz- ing, activity. However, this statement refers to a particular species of time, operative in the seg- FLUXUS, the Most Radical and 1. Harry Ruhé is the author of the 1979 uncirculated exhibition catalogue Natasha Lushetich Experimental Art Movement of the Sixties. The exhibition was held at A-Gallery, Amsterdam. 76 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00123 by guest on 29 September 2021 regated realm of ideality, since, as Langer notes “music [...] suspends ordinary time and offers itself as an ideal substitute and equivalent” (3). Kramer affirms this distinction and defines “musical time” as “the time the piece evokes” and “ordinary time” as “the time the piece takes” (7). He also states that the category of “deep listening” gives primacy to musical time over ordi- nary time. Although Kramer does not offer an explicit definition of “deep listening” but instead refers to T.S. Eliot who describes it as “music heard so deeply that [...] you are the music” (in Kramer 1988:7), “deep listening” could be defined as an attentional configuration of height- ened auditory susceptibility caused by a high degree of concentration and the correspond- ing emotional involvement, the combination of which allows the listener to transcend the time the piece takes and enter the time the piece evokes. The term has also received much exposure through the work of the experimental composer Pauline Oliveros, whose investigations into the awareness-heightening powers of sound began as early as the 1970s. In Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice Oliveros defines “deep listening” as an art in itself, a composer’s prac- tice as well as a meditational act “intended to heighten and expand consciousness of sound in as many dimensions of awareness and attentional dynamics as humanly possible” (2005:xxiii). Although in many ways concomitant with Oliveros’s, my use of the term does not refer to a sus- tained, intentional practice but remains concerned solely with attentional configuration. One of the reasons why this particular attentional configuration may be said to have the capacity to “suspend ordinary time,” as Langer claims, is its attunement to the nature of the medium, which tends to solicit an extremely temporalized mode of attention, since music is never given all-at-once but is in a continuous process of disappearing. Indeed, in “Structure and Experiential Time,” Karlheinz Stockhousen, a figure of considerable influence on a num- ber of Fluxus artists, defines the relationship between music and time along the axis of perpetual disappearance: If we realize, at the end of a piece of music — quite irrespective of how long it lasted, whether it was played fast or slowly and whether there were very many or very few notes — that we have “lost all sense of time” then we have in fact been experiencing time most strongly. (1959:65) This sort of listener involvement comes from the interplay of direct perception, memory, and pattern recognition. According to Kramer, these three cognitive processes are related mostly although not solely to musical linearity and tonality as exemplified by the Western cultural tra- dition, which is predominantly “goal-orientated” (1988:25). The main characteristic of such music is that it involves the listener in the pacing, timing, and articulation of an intricate vari- ety of shaped musical events that create what could be termed “temporal content.” However, the notion of musicalization, as operative in the Fluxus works, does not refer to an attempt to implant a teleologically driven temporal “content” in a nonmusical medium and in this way “elevate” the work to the realm of ideality by “suspending” it from the realm of ordinariness and corporeality. On the contrary, it refers to the percipient’s very corporeal and “lived” mode of attention, which does not segregate the work from its surroundings. Deep listening is thus an attentional configuration that rendersordinary time performative. A case in point is Takehisa Kosugi’s 1964 score: South No.