Black Mountain and Fluxus: Reflecting on John Held Jr.'s mail-art show (including excerpts from Tom Clark's biography of Charles Olson)

[De Villo Sloan]

http://www.tomclarkblog.blogspot.com

October 20, 2010 - A number of IUOMA members have contributed to the mail-art show organized by John Held, Jr. in conjunction with the Black Mountain Museum and Arts Center conference (North Carolina) held October 8-10. I'm sure we'll hear news about the event - this must have been a huge undertaking. The occurrence of the conference and the Black Mountain connection to Ray Johnson led me to think about Black Mountain connections to not only mail-art but also Fluxus.

http://www.blackmountaincollege.org

I went back into Tom Clark's biography of the poet Charles Olson (Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet's Life, North Atlantic, 2000) and Olson's years at Black Mountain. Tom describes what he considers as the world's first "Happening" (akin to Fluxus performance) at Black mountain in 1952. I found this to be a fascinating historical look at the roots of performance art we know today. Olson, by the way, coined the term "post-modern." Below is written by Tom Clark:

John Cage, the avant-garde composer and Zen philosopher, represented a threat of a less direct kind [to Charles Olson]. Each a noted proponent of artistic indeterminacy, Olson and Cage were nonetheless quite unlike personally, with Cage much the cooler-headed of the two, by nature disinclined to heavy gestures and somewhat puzzled - if not put off - by Olson's sudden heats and mood swings. Olson seems to have regarded the composer with much the same mixture of respect and distrust that marked his relations with another artistic medium, Buckminster Fuller. He suspected Cage, like Fuller, of a fundamental lack of seriousness. And not withstanding his own expressionist's faith in improvisation, he felt a certain contempt for the mechanical reliance on chance as a compositional element that was the basis of Cage's aesthetic, finding it altogether too programmatic and technologically-bound. Indeed, the progressive composer's facility with 'anecdote,' 'magnetic tape' and other 'tricks' came under oblique attack this summer [1952] in Olson's poem 'A Toss,' addressed to Cage and allied avant garde experimenters.

Cage's indirect reply came in an evening of ultimate show-stealing that culminated the summer Institute, when he drafted the poet-host to play the straight man in a performance piece that would become legendary as the world's first 'Happening.' Olson's verse, distributed among students in the audience and recited earnestly by the poet himself from a stepladder perch, was drowned out in the ambient informational context, a chaotic sea of seemingly unrelated activity and noise that included Edith Piaf records played at double time, crying babies, barking dogs, David Tudor on piano playing a Cage chance composition, and the composer himself calmly cruising through an all but inaudible lecture on Zen. An entrepreneur of the overall summer proceedings, the evidently puzzled Olson had to keep to himself any misgivings inspired by these proceedings, but those few of his remaining faculty colleagues to harbor traditionalist aesthetic leanings were at less pains to conceal their view of the event as the nadir of his Institute. Halfway through it, his friend Stefan Wolpe, a respected composer and onetime theatrical collaborator of Bertolt Brecht, stomped out in disgust. Later, as the Cagean cacophony droned on, Johanna Jalowetz, teacher of book binding and voice, lamented Black Mountain had sunk 'deep in the Middle Ages.'

End of passage written by Tom Clark. Maybe some interesting context. Because these blogs are discussions among mail-artists where we're learning from each other: I refer to Tom Clark fairly often. In my estimation - shared by others - he is a true link (if you can trace it through a circuitous history traversing many historic scenes) to the original New York School: Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch. In academe, this group is often described as having translated abstract expressionism into poetry. This might not actually be the case - but I think the connection of poets to the visual arts is of great interest to mail-artists.

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[De Villo Sloan]

Erni - from all I gather, you've done all the work in all the right areas to have been awarded a Black Mt. degree, when degrees were still granted - no question in my mind you are honorary BMC.

Jon - great to have you in the fluxing cosmic rant tea party fashion that forms, fuses, disintegrates at random times. cool you could actually see the bmc johnson show

Cheryl - if you do get a new shirt, submit the old one to the Flux museum, please

[De Villo Sloan]

I'm liking your stage name: "Cheryl Shirt." When you don't feel like performing, you can just leave an empty shirt on the stage. What about a Cheryl Shirt look-a-like contest? We had better pull the plug on this fast lest it go viral.

[cheryl penn]

Sorry ERni - can I interrupt here and go back to the shirt? I asked Cheryl Number Two about it and off the cuff she said it was my First Inert Fluxus Dance Performance Accompanied by Chopin's Waltz in D Flat MAjor, op. 64/1.

[De Villo Sloan]

Nice catch - I wonder if the broken teacup was trying to say something along those lines - you can't drink from a broken tea cup - but there's another exmple of this kind of art. I won't comment on the shirt any more.

[jon foster]

A few months back I went to the Ray Johnson show at the Black Mountain Museum in Asheville, such a wonderful experience considering he (and by defacto, all of us) is the motivation for this whole thing.

[cheryl penn]

The shirt has to stay for a bit, I'm too busy to change..., but I'm prepared to share the tea...

[De Villo Sloan]

Erni - don't expect you to know all these U.S. poets. I'd be at a loss with Germans. Ed Sanders: investigative poetry, Trungpa scandal at Naropa, Charles Manson book. Ed Dorn: Rolling Stock newspaper in Colorado. Tom Clark - Paris Review editor Britain - NYC - CA. This is a certain generation of people. Speaking of tea, I think my first exposure to Fluxus was when a friend was curating one of his first shows. He hands me a plastic bag with a shattered teacup in it. I'm like: "So?" He says: "It's Fluxus! It's by Yoko!" My response is: "OK, but as art? no f____g way." Now look at me. Hey, there are people here who could share a whole lot more. Cheryl. What's up with the shirt?

[cheryl penn]

We had that too - so its not just a German thing!! - We even had fingers on lips - I ASK YOU!! No, we're not facing the corner, we're facing De Villo!

[cheryl penn]

Erni - I'm going with flattened - if you want, you can join me in the corner with another cup of tea - not that you do too bad yourself.

[De Villo Sloan]

Hi Erni - you're pretty much the primary target for this post - I mostly wanted to bring up John Cage and the harmony of Zen and chance operations therein. Tom Clark also has an interesting post on Aram Saroyan's minimalist poetry - Tom Clark also wrote a good bio of Kerouac. I'm glad this added to the dialog. I submitted to the BMC show and conference - solid people so documentation should emerge eventually.