Interview: The Silverman Fluxus Collection

The first thing Gilbert Silverman does is show me a quote by the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Alfred Barr. It says: ’What makes men collect modern art? Acquisitiveness? Financial speculation? Social or cultural prestige? Competition with other collectors? The pleasure of arousing envy? The excitement of feeling in the avant-garde? The satisfaction of annoying one’s conservative friends? The noblesse oblige or richesse oblige to serve as a patron of the arts for the benefit of artists and the community? Perhaps even the love of art’.

Peter van der Meijden: Yes, OK, but why collect Fluxus?

Gilbert Silverman: I started collecting art with my second wife, Lila, as part of this sickness or genetic impulse to collect. I have always collected avant-garde art, way-out art. I kind of enjoy the part of the quote about the satisfaction of annoying your conservative friends. So in about 1976 I thought I would like to collect Dada, but when I started to look around in galleries I soon realised I couldn’t afford it. But some years earlier, in 1970, I had been to Japan to see the World's Fair in Osaka/Kyoto, and the only way to get a hotel room was to sign up for a 16-day tour, including 5 days in Tokyo. There I went to a gallery called the Tokyo Gallery, which was one of the best contemporary galleries in the Ginza, and they had a work from a previous show called ‘Sky and two pairs of pants’. It was a sky picture by an artist called Geoffrey Hendricks, Jon Hendricks’ brother. On the picture hung a pair of plasticized pants, overalls, also painted blue, and next to it a second pair of plasticized pants. I was very taken with that work, so I bought it.

From left to right Yoriaki Matsudaira, Nam June Paik and Benjamin Patterson

Peter van der Meijden: What was it that struck you about the work?

Gilbert Silverman: It was an American in a Japanese gallery, and then it was very pretty and kind of funny. But things got even funnier when the work was delivered to my office from the airport. I unpacked the crate and in it there was only the picture and one pair of pants, so I asked the driver where the other pair of pants was. He said that this was all they sent, so I got into my car, dashed over to the airport and found the second pair of pants in the dumpster. If I hadn’t gone right then I wouldn’t have got the second pair of pants.

So anyhow, it was probably in 1970 or ’71 that I got that work. In 1978 the place where one would buy contemporary art would be SoHo, in New York, and there, on the corner of Spring Street and West Broadway, across from where Ileana Sonnabend and John Weber had their galleries, on a little railing, a guy had set up about 20 plasticized paper bags, about 20 centimetres high, all painted the same blue as the colour that was used in ‘Sky and two pairs of pants’. So I went over and asked whether it was a work by Geoffrey Hendricks. They said it was, and how did I know? I answered that it was the colour. I recognised it as Geoffrey Hendricks blue, just like you would instantly recognise Yves Klein blue. I asked them how much the bags cost, and they told me that they were something like 5 dollars each, so I bought the show. I wanted to get them signed, but they said that the artist was in Italy. I agreed to leave the bags at the gallery and to visit Geoffrey Hendricks next time I was in New York.

So I went to Geoffrey’s house on Canal Street, in Greenwich – he lives next door to Jon. At Geoffrey’s I saw all these strange little boxes laid out on a counter, and I asked him what they were. He said: those are Fluxus. They reminded me of Dada, so I asked him how I could get some of these boxes. He told me that they were trying to raise money for George Maciunas, the central figure of Fluxus, who was in hospital in Boston with pancreatic cancer; they had a medical fund. So I asked what I would get if I gave them 1.000 dollars, and he answered that they would send me a whole bunch of boxes. I gave them the 1.000 dollars and received my bunch of boxes, and then I asked Geoff Hendricks how I could get some more of this stuff. He told me that his brother Jon next door had a gallery called Backworks, so the next time I came to New York I went to see Jon and he sold me some more things. But then Jon also became a kind of mentor to me, he explained it all to me.

At this time, there were only three Fluxus collections in the world: there was Hanns Sohm’s collection in Stuttgart, there was the Tate Archive (where they keep the remains of the ‘Fluxshoe’ exhibition that toured Britain in the early 1970s, PvdM) and then there was the collection of a woman who lived in Massachusetts named Jean Brown.

So I decided that the field was wide open and - you have to understand that real collectors are on a major ego trip and that the idea of collecting something is to have something more than somebody else - that if I worked very hard and really fast I could put together the biggest Fluxus collection in the world.

And very early on I realised that I couldn’t do it by going to galleries. There was one gallery in Bochum, in Germany, which had a little bit of stuff, but in most of the cases I had to go to the artists. We went to Japan, we were in Vienna, we went everywhere. I had a car in Vienna which we used to drive to Prague to see Milan Knižak (a Czech Fluxus artist, born 1940, PvdM). He needed money, so I bought a whole car full of stuff from him and smuggled it out of the country. I took it to the border and bribed the customs people with 10 dollars. That was in 1979. Then I went to Japan and bought things from Mieko Shiomi (a Japanese Fluxus artist, born 1938, PvdM) and Jiro Takamatsu, of Hi Red Center (a Japanese group associated with Fluxus.

Hi Red Center was active in 1963-64 and consisted, apart from Takamatsu, of Genpei Akasegawa and Natsuyuki Nakanishi, PvdM). I bought whole carloads of stuff from Dick Higgins (an American Fluxus artist, 1938-1998, PvdM), who lived in Barrytown, a little city up the river, where he owned a church and the house next door. And lots of others.

Jon Hendricks discusses Marcel Duchamp’s hair with one of the two co-curators of the show, Media Farzin.

Peter van der Meijden: In 2003, Jon Hendricks curated a show in Sao Paulo called ‘What’s Fluxus? What’s Not! Why’. Can I ask you the same question?

Gilbert Silverman: Let me tell you a bit about the genesis of that show. We had an exhibition in Vilnius, in Lithuania, and donated a room full of Maciunas’ Fluxus things – Maciunas came from Lithuania. When we had that show, they also had a show curated by René Block called ‘Fluxus in Germany 1962-1994. A Long Story with Many Twists’. As Jon and I walked through this show we noticed that about half the things on display were not Fluxus. We had formulated our own concept of what is Fluxus and what isn’t – for us it’s works by a certain group of people, made between late 1961 or early 1962, when Maciunas started using the word ‘Fluxus’, and 1978, the year Maciunas died. So we tucked that in our heads...

Jon Hendricks: There’s probably a short and a long answer to your question. There’s Fluxus the movement and Fluxus the adjective, and the problem with an adjective is that it is subjective. It is based on the prejudice of the person who’s using it. If you look at the self-defined movement of Fluxus, the way the artists and Maciunas defined it, it is actually very broad. That’s why the shows – both the one in Brazil and the one here in Roskilde –try to present the great variety of Fluxus. Take the score by Yoritsune Matsudaira (Japanese composer, 1907-2001, PvdM) that’s on display here, for example. Maciunas thought highly enough of him to write it out – it’s beautifully done, ten pages of score and two pages of instructions – and stamp each page Fluxus. The work was also programmed in some of the early concerts, so that is Fluxus as well. To deny that it is Fluxus is to reshape history, or to say that it doesn’t count because it doesn’t sound like Emmett Williams’ ‘Counting Song’ (Emmett Williams, Fluxus artist, 1925-2007, PvdM). His ‘Counting Song’ is a piece in which the audience is counted, PvdM) It is Fluxus! I think there’s a strength to the idealism of Fluxus, a real desire to shake things up, to revolutionise art, and I miss that in a lot of what’s now called Fluxus. It’s Fluxus or it isn’t, and if it’s what I think it is I’m very glad that I’ve spent the last 25 years working with it. If it’s not, I’ve squandered a third of my life, but I don’t think so and I don’t think Gilbert (Silverman) thinks so.

The exhibition poster, showing Dick Higgins perform his Danger Music Number 17: Scream!! Scream!! Scream!! Scream!! Scream!! Scream!! Photographer unknown, photograph in the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit.

Peter van der Meijden: let’s talk about the title of the show in Roskilde. It consists of three parts, Fluxus Scores and Instructions, The Transformative Years and Make a Salad. Could you tell me a bit more about each of the parts?

Jon Hendricks: First of all, Gilbert (Silverman) felt that it was very important to use the word ‘Fluxus’ first, so we stuck to that. As to the ‘scores and instructions’ bit, I’ve been wanting to do a show and probably a book about Fluxus performance for a number of years, but the performances are only one possible way of doing these scores and instructions. The instructions are set-ups, do-its, so to focus on the way they have been done seemed limiting. That’s why we dropped the show of Fluxus performance and shifted to Fluxus scores and instructions. We’ve been collecting scores and instructions pretty consciously for 20 years or so. Whenever I would be looking for material I would try to find the score. You can’t tell what the score of Robert Watts’ ‘Two Inches’ is just by looking at it (Watts was an American Fluxus and Pop artist, 1923-1988. In his ‘Two Inches’, a two-inch ribbon is cut, PvdM).

Maciunas published a lot of scores or descriptions of scores in the different Fluxus publications, and we reproduced many of them in these three volumes we published, ‘Fluxus Etc.’, ‘Fluxus Etc. Addenda I’ and ‘Fluxus Etc. Addenda II’ (in 1981 and 1983 respectively, PvdM), but they weren’t gathered together and I also realised that they were frequently not the complete score. They were descriptions that were useful to make a performance, but they weren’t necessarily what the artist had intended. And I realised that there were many more out there. So that’s the beginning of the title.

The next part of the title was simply going to be the years, 1961 to 1978, but several people, La Monte Young (American composer, born 1935) among them, started grumbling and said that they wanted to be pre-Fluxus, not Fluxus. I considered adding ‘And Before’, but that seemed a little awkward. And then there’s also the fact that so many exhibitions have a title and a subtitle. Shows tend to have these kind of obscure titles, so in a playful and ironic way I came up with ‘The Transformative Years’, which has to do with the idea of transforming or moving away from the musical score to the conceptual score. Whether it’s before, during or after Fluxus doesn’t matter; these years were transformative ones, not only for Fluxus, but also for art in general. So the ‘transformative years’-part of the title is partly a joke about titles, but it also sums up what the show is about.

The third part, ‘Make a Salad’, is an actual score, a beautiful score by Alison Knowles (American Fluxus artist, born 1933. The title of the salad piece is ‘Proposition’, and the score consists of the words ‘Make a salad’, PvdM). It has wonderful metaphoric possibilities: to mix things up, to stir things up – it acts as kind of a manifesto. It’s imperative, it says ‘make something’, ‘do something’, ‘get involved’. It’s a work by a woman artist, and frequently women artists are overlooked, so that was also a consideration. It was not limiting, it didn’t say make a potato salad or a salade Niçoise, it just said ‘make a salad’, so it demonstrates that a Fluxus score could be very broad and open - and it’s also a little perplexing. I like things to be a little perplexing or provocative. So that’s the progression of the title: Fluxus first, then a kind of a metaphoric manifesto for the whole idea of scores or instructions, and then the actual score.

Statement at the entrance of the room devoted to La Monte Young’s work		Score of Yoriaki Matsudaira’s Co-Action for Cello and Piano I, carefully copied out and stamped ‘Fluxus’ by George Maciunas in 1963.

Peter van der Meijden: In La Monte Young’s section of the exhibition there’s a large sign where he disassociates himself from Fluxus. Why?

Jon Hendricks: He felt very strongly that he wanted to establish that he was doing this sort of thing before Fluxus and that he felt that he had left Fluxus. He was perfectly happy about us showing the work, although he didn’t want it published in the catalogue, so I asked if he could write a separate text that could be published simultaneously with the catalogue. I asked him if he would write a text about the 1960-1961 compositions which I think are extremely important for Fluxus, and extremely important in terms of conceptual art as well. He’s a very busy person, but he got into it, and one day he phoned me and said, ‘I have 140 pages’. I think it’s fantastic: he’s writing a work that he’s always wanted to write and now, because of this discussion, he has finally gotten around to doing it.

In the meantime he felt very anxious about being in a show of Fluxus scores and instructions, and he wanted to clarify how he felt about his position within Fluxus, so he said, ‘Will you print the thing and put it on the door?’, and I said, ‘Sure, I’ll do that’. He said, ‘Will you make it big?’, and I said, ‘Sure, I’ll make it big’. ‘Would you make a billboard outside?’ - I said, ‘No, we cannot make a billboard outside of the museum, but we will make a panel the size of the door, as we don’t have a lot of wall space’. And he said, ‘Fine, print it bold’, and I said, ‘OK’ – and so this is why the text is there: out of respect for La Monte. And then I said, ‘La Monte, this is a pretty good text. I don’t agree with it, but that doesn’t matter, can we publish it in the catalogue?’, and he said yes. So the two pages will be in the catalogue (the catalogue is scheduled to appear in mid-June, PvdM).

Works by Ben Vautier in the kitchen of Museet for Samtidskunst		The bathroom at Museet for Samtidskunst. Above the toilet George Maciunas Fluxtoilet-proposals from 1973.

Peter van der Meijden: How are the works arranged in the show?

Jon Hendricks: Some has to do with the amount of work that a particular artist has done in connection with Fluxus, some has to do with my feelings about the work and some is just arbitrary. The spaces here are a little bit difficult. It’s by artist, and there’s a certain dialogue, for example between George Brecht (American Fluxus artist, born 1926) and Yoko Ono. There is kind of a suggestion to make a comparison. There was a temptation to do the whole show alphabetically, or to mix up the artists but to do it chronologically, but sometimes one doesn’t know all the dates. But they’re wonderful spaces.

The first space that you walk into contains work by Mieko Shiomi, Philip Corner (American composer and Fluxus artist, born 1933, PvdM) and Dick Higgins. We have a beautiful group of Higgins’ ‘Graphis’ works which hasn’t been shown for a long time, and some of his other works. Shiomi’s work is sometimes overlooked, so I felt she merited a whole section as well.

And as for Philip Corner: some 20 years ago we went through all the different pieces that Philip had composed or done within Fluxus and made an effort to buy the original scores. We know ‘Piano Activities’ (a notorious piece, because its performance at the first Fluxus festival in Wiesbaden, in Germany, in September 1962, involved the destruction of a piano with hammers, saws and stones, PvdM), but we don’t know the others, so this is a chance to show some of them.

Then La Monte had asked whether he could have a separate room, and Ben Vautier is in the kitchen because I felt he should have a separate room.

Basically it’s about space. There are works in the bathroom as well, but there is a certain connection there. There are works by Tomas Schmit from a group called ‘Sanitas’ that was typed on a brand of toilet paper called ‘Sanitas’, and then there are Maciunas’ instructions for toilet events. Some things seemed logical together, some have no relation to one another. In a way it’s like a Fluxus concert, it’s how things follow each other.

Works by George Brecht (in the display case and on the wall on the right hand side) and Yoko Ono (on the wall behind the display case).

Peter van der Meijden: Sometimes scores are shown together with performance photographs, for example in the case of Corner’s ‘Piano Activities’. Doesn’t that shift the focus away from the openness of the works, and onto a particular performance?

Jon Hendricks: In the case of the Corner work, lots of people know the photographs but I don’t think anyone knows the score. It’s not published. It is a score that I’ve worked many years to get. And then we had all these great photographs, and I thought it was fun to see all of them. We have lots of photographs in the collection and I could have done it for many scores, but it’s again a matter of not wanting to make a show of performance. It’s just to show some of the possibilities. We also have photographs of various performances of George Brecht’s ‘Drip Music’ (a work from 1962, the score of which consists of the word ‘dripping’, PvdM), to show the possibilities.

On the left the score of Philip Corner’s Piano Activities, and next to them four performance photographs from the performance at Wiesbaden in September 1962.		A display case showing the instruction cards for Jackson Mac Low’s Letters for Iris, Numbers for Silence, with above it a loudspeaker playing a recording of a performance of the work.

Marianne Bech: There are also loudspeakers above some of the works, so you can hear the sound of the performance.

Jon Hendricks: the original sound, the old sound.

Marianne Bech: And in the cinema you can see the old films. It’s very important to cover these aspects as well.

Peter van der Meijden: what feeling would you like the visitor to leave the show with?

Jon Hendricks: Wonder.

Marianne Bech: Curiosity.

Jon Hendricks: Amazement. I’d like people to leave and say, ‘Wow, there are so many possibilities!’ And I keep getting so excited, just going through the exhibition. A lot of art is a dead end, it closes you off, it excludes you, but this doesn’t do that at all. It’s quite the opposite.

A relieved Marianne Bech in front of the score of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Originale		A wall filled with Fluxus posters. On the top left hand side the poster announcing the six Fluxus concerts that took place in Copenhagen in November 1962.

A display case with works by Robert Watts		Works by Mieko Shiomi and Dick Higgins