Ah, don't tell me nothing. I'm in a good mood. Right: Dutschke, Ohnesorg, Shah, Berlin, Vietnam, Wall, Kennedy, Mao, and Khrushchev gave a percussion performance in front of the UN, was that already in the sixties? Yes, well? – not earlier? – Nope! – Happenings and Fluxus, Pop Art, Nouveau Réalisme, Tachisme, Action Painting, in the early sixties still the first big love, afterwards – oh! yes! – the sexual revolution and the women's councils in SDS local groups, the protest march in Bonn against the German Emergency Acts, Alvermann's Emergency-piggybank that got confiscated, Gallery Aachen, Gerd, Beatrice and Claas, Eberhard, Felicitas, Franziska, Sabine (Fee has just committed suicide, aged 40 – following Kolle, AAO, Bhagavan and everything else: see above) – VOSTELL, never to forget, the father of happenings; expansive, who at the age of 40, 10 years ago (perhaps more), said on TV that he was no longer a young artist but an old master. Beuys. Yes. Cladders. Jährling. Ute Klophaus. The 24-Hours happening in Wuppertal. Paik. Maruta and Tomas. Tsak! Addi, Tut. Count Stenbock-Fermor, chancellor of the Technical University in Aachen, chief administrator. Back in the days, in the SIXTIES. There are many others still – Arno Schmidt, also: Gaston Salvatore, who today honours top managers in Stern magazine. My GOd! – In Wuppertal – in Wuppertal there was this, I believe, nine-stage happening involving the collision of two DB locomotives and a car, shots on TV sets at the quarry. Birmingham, Alabama, USA. In the early sixties – for whom does this still sound familiar today? – Vostell did a happening for Birmingham – I believe Vostell is the first political artist in post-war Germany (West).
After those years, many things became slack. Some vanished into the various communist parties. That went wrong or amounted to nothing, but the lessons were drawn. To come apart. Or else: to be, and remain, the pennant of the upright.
THE SIXTIES: Oh-my-gosh! Ho-Chi-Minh!
The Moon landing – right as I was having sex with my then girlfriend.
Art was hot until the second half of the sixties, – then the SDS, then the seventies, but that's another thing. The news of Commune I and II from Berlin was received in the province, which tried hard to keep up. A3 printing machine for flyers and pirate prints – ten to twenty comrades at the SDS-headquarters for hours and hours assembling Reich's Orgasm-book, all going around the table – clockwise. Earlier, the flop with de Sade's 120 Days, despite writing the pagination with our own blood. – Rogner & Bernhard had just published its professional edition, at about the same price; ours, however, in all its awkwardness, was far more beautiful; as usual, that wasn't honoured; – the largest stack we sold through the station bookshop in Cologne – how many were that? Twenty, forty, fifty? – In Koblenz or somewhere, Bielefeld perhaps, the bookseller expelled us from his shop: he wouldn't deal in smut. But it was a nice ride trying to sell de Sade. Later, perhaps half the circulation lay around in Jülicher Straße; where did it end up? –
After the protest March in Bonn I visited there the secretary of the Spanish (Franco!) Embassy, who collected Minimal art, Carl Andre, work by ZAJ and Sol Levitt, and declared – his wife was just heavily pregnant – that if men would bear children, they'd have found a mechanical solution for the nine month of pregnancy-issue. With him in his CD-Mercedes we drove to Antwerp to the opening of the exhibition Section XIXe siècle, Département Aigle by Marcel Broodthaers. Miniskirts and paper dresses.
Fettkiste, Aachen, July 20, 1964 – 20th anniversary of the assassination attempt on Hitler: scandal. Beuys with a bloody nose and crucifix – photo world-renowned. (Just now: Kunstforum International, vol. 69, September 1983.)
FLUXUS / HAPPENINGS
From the art period up to the mid-sixties I have photos, from the SDS etc. period hardly any.
My Fluxus collection (in part better than Sohm's) was lost during a relocation in Bremen, I cried for two weeks, particularly as I had pretentiously smirked over some ‘missing’-indications at the Cologne Fluxus-Happening – no more smirking. – Little notes from the Fluxus Festival in Düsseldorf, where Beuys, already a professor, stood there for two evenings and wagged around with a headlamp in his hands. During the 24-Hours in Wuppertal with Jährling he crouched on a fruit box all along. Went there with Johannes on the rear of his moped. Johannes, the one with the lightly elated step of an ionic Greek islander, long-skulled and -limped, died of testicular cancer in the early 1970s. Fassbinder is also dead. Right: Love is Colder Than Death, Katzelmacher, Jean-Marie Straub and the film adaption of Böll, after all: that one! Yes! – Yes, that Straub was pioneering. A kind of revolutionary (sub/r-)avant-garde. Then, starting with Otton, interest declined. Pasolini. Seen all Italo-westerns. Almost all of them. The classics from the US as well. Bogart. Eat at the Greek and get wasted. Smoke weed. LSD. Rioja in five litre bottles from the Spaniard, who had on his wall an embroidery depicting J.F.K. Ass meat sausage and olives accompany the wine tasting before the purchase. – Gerd just said on the phone that he would think about something to add to my text here, and talk it on tape to insert here. He’s teacher now, has just flown to Ibiza today, with his wife and kid, not to the beach, but to the cool stone house in the middle of the island in the mountains, where a mutual friend makes a living from knitting: and quite well. What else was there in the sixties? – Marcuse and Freud, and later – that was the SDS time. Cooper and Laing. Watkin's War Game. Who or what is a threat to us all? Atomic death threatens us all! Today, as back then. WAR GAME. Nothing has changed, just been reinforced. Movies by Jonas Mekas. ICE: who did that one? –
Since I am a child of Eastern refugees; ‘half’ of my life took place within my ethnic group of expatriates. Associations, general meetings worldwide, youth in exile. Maruta. World Congress of Youth in Exile 1968, dispelled through Abrassimov's intervention (allegedly) from Berlin (West) to Hannover where it took place. A political issue. The fable goes that it was Axel Springer who had anonymously transferred to the association DM 50,000 to compensate for the financial losses. This would later become the basis of the fund of my ethnic group's Association of Youth in Exile. Well, all these deviations; back to Happenings & Fluxus. – [..]
On a Friday evening, a man/lad/tween, just having returned from Aachen for the weekend, walks along Neumarkt and receives a small card, little paper thrust into his hand, which states that just on that evening the following guys would perform at the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Gymnasium (FWG): A concert by and with John Cage, David Tudor, Carolyn Brown, Merce Cunningham. (A couple of years later in Krefeld with a stage design by Robert Rauschenberg). At that time he had never heard those names. But FWG was also Alexander von Schlippenbach. – So I'm going! WOW! Of course, back then, 1960 (?), not Schlippenbach but Cage, Tudor, Brown, Cunningham. Spicherstrasse (is that what it was called? – can't be bothered to find out!) – Vostell, Paik, Higgins, Knowles, who else? Tut and Addi? – Tomas? Exposition of Music. A crazy time. IN ULM, UM ULM UND UM ULM HERUM. This jet-fighter story on the Bundeswehr air base near Ulm. By Vostell. Peter Saage, who made the chewing gums resound for him, and programmed toning oak in Vermont for Dick Higgins. The Musik der Zeit concerts at WDR – Stockhausen, Fritzsch, Maderna, Ligeti (who recently, 20 years later, is being honoured by all the Berliner Festwochen). – Atelier Mary Baumeister with its musical soirees. Nono's Intoleranza at Cologne Opera; after the scandal in Venice, the Colognes also tried hard, but the audience was amply international on the second European premiere where I sat with a DM 3.60 student ticket on the seat of an unclaimed pre-order, after one and a half hours of waiting, being the third in line at the box office. The fifth already got nothing.
Aachen 1964 – when Vostell said he needed 100 kg of ocher colour powder in the Audi Max – OK, no problem; when he wanted a dog handler with a shepherd dog – done; a field of sheaves in the Audi Max – certainly: it's the end of July, the grain is ready to cut. But when he (W.V.) requested a jet fighter (Starfighter) in the Audi Max – that really didn't work. Vostell later made good for that in Ulm. – Miss Vietnam on a Cologne shooting range with an iron – Gerd, Beatrice, Henning, today a social worker (unemployed) in Essen (?) – with raw herring in mouth. Fashioning a Mao look. But that was already later, the boundaries are fluid. – Brock stood on his head and demonstrated Marx to be Hegel, or vice versa. Paik had just sent a poster design, which was then printed – an assembly from Japanese comics with sex and torture – glued to Aachen advertising columns, unimpeached. A couple of years later, Günter Brus, who had just escaped Austrian jurisdiction, gave the birth-performance Der Helle Wahnsinn at the Reiff Museum. Criminal complaints followed; as was the case in the aftermath of July 20; all not followed up upon by the prosecutor's office, though. They didn't want art lawsuits; where just recently Miller had been released, Olympia Press, Die Perle und Josefine Mutzenbacher, allegedly penned by the author of Bambi. Arno Schmidt worked on Karl May to that effect. Rotor by Kriwet, published at DuMont, 1961, with an epilogue by Konrad Boehmer – early chapter III: “The material's organization, while in fact executed with great meticulousness throughout, occurs as it were voluntarily.” Yes. Tsakiridis – Tsak – Josefine – Tsak, sculptor, poet, Luchterhand. Vostell, Berlin, met him a couple of years ago in Aachen, on Gerd's birthday.
The coverage of Fluxus and Happenings in the newspapers was often placed in the local section – as absurd sensation: “Bloody Ochsenkopf hung over the door” –, not in the feuilleton. That was Hamburg, and the participants were all a bit crazy. – With Christine in her wonderful DKW two-seater in the pouring rain we drove to Frankfurt to Bazon Brock's Theater der Position. From Donaueschingen to Pro Musica Nova in Bremen. Saw the Berliner Kritische Realisten (Großgörschen) first at Silex in Cologne, well, not particularly impressive and convincing. – They are still drawing women in suspenders – where in the world did that come from? – The last time I saw a woman in suspenders was some 20 years ago – since then: only pantyhose. – Do the Messrs. Criticals frequent brothels, where suspenders are said to be workwear? Then Vostell moved from Cologne to Berlin, but that was already circa 1970. Before that – and I am constantly telling anecdotes here – was Galerie Aachen. When we asked Beuys if he wanted to do an exhibition with us, he said he was already a respected artist while we were a young non-commercial gallery, which wouldn't fit together, but that he had this student who was good; we checked him out – he was really good – Jörg Immendorff – and is still good and even better. After a year, Beuys asked whether we now wanted to do the exhibition with him. We said, nope – he: a recognized artist, we: a young gallery, that does not fit together. In the meantime: Per Kirkeby, Bjørn Nørgaard, Eric Andersen. – Swell, swell from Denmark. Immendorf threw flowers not bombs on Vietnam – already back then: 1966. – And Chris Reinecke! What's she up to?
When Vostell pointed to the infant David – or was it Raphael? – and declared this was his greatest happening. Art is just life. Life. Art. Beuys wasn't far away. Successor of Mataré's professorship, the one with the wooden animals. Beuys also was into bunnies, deer and coyotes. Logical appointment of that chair. But Rau still threw him out, after all. That was some time later. He's not that bad after all! That Rau.
H. P. Alvermann, but he is not part of Happenings and Fluxus (in spite of the Quibb Manifesto: right (was it called that?) – the questionnaire, especially with the question “Do you love art? If yes, in what colour?”). But he was one of the rare political artists in the sixties: with his objects (“Objäckten”, as Eberhard would say in his Bad Mergentheim/-tal dialect). He gifted them to the GDR, into the possession of the Staatliche Museen Berlin (East) – almost his complete early work, only a few things remain in Westdeutschland, mostly private collections. HAPPENINGS and FLUXUS – Vostell started early to create for himself an archive on these things. With who? Star Wars.
Tomas Schmit has been drawing in Berlin for many years. In Wuppertal some 20 years ago he poured water from one bucket to another, perhaps 18 buckets standing in a circle. When people entered the room, he no longer poured but sat in an armchair in the centre of the circle and smoked. When there was no audience, he really poured the water from bucket to bucket – I believe him. He's honest. This can be seen in his drawings. However, at the time he could be amply underhanded: he wanted to drive a bus full of art friends some 50 km to a happening outside Copenhagen and let them dismount. The bus should then leave. – Let's see what they do. And he himself – driving away with the bus? Because of the beating? After 24-Hours T. S. declared “After my wife lay sick in bed for ten days, what else would there be to say about a festival but this?!” Schmitty political (unique, literally): “In Mao, the vowels are key. With Lenin, things are totally different.” – Anecdotes.
FLUXUS and HAPPENINGS.
COMMENTS
The Sixties – Happenings and Fluxus etc.
On 2 June 1967, the German Socialist Student League (SDS) organised a demonstration in opposition to the state visit of the Shah of Iran. During the protest the police shot student Benno Ohnesorg. This event gave rise to wide protests and escalated the riots of the student movement. The unofficial leader of the movement was Rudi Dutschke, who asked for radical changes in the social system.
The Action Council for Women’s Liberation in the framework of the extra-parliamentary opposition (APO) started the movement of feminism in the German Federal Republic.
In the protest demonstration March to Bonn (Sternmarsch) on 11 May 1968, several thousands participants took part in protest against the German Emergency Acts proposed by the government.
Artist Hans-Peter Alvermann got involved in the anti-emergency legislation campaign and, in the exhibition Political Objects at the Galerie Aachen on May 1966, exhibited The German Emergency Act Pigs – a piggy banks with a swastika and a text “If I am fat and overfed, I must be slaughtered”. In subsequent exhibitions by Alvermann the police confiscated the art works and legal proceedings were initiated against him.
Gerd and Béatrice Vorhoff, Eberhard and Felicitas Spahr were friends and fellow students of Valdis Āboliņš, and the co-founders of the Galerie Aachen.
Journalist, writer and film producer Oswalt Kolle became well-known in the 1960s after he published books and released films on sex education, which changed conservative moral norms.
The AAO – Aktionsanalytische Organisation, also known as the AA-Kommune – was a commune of free sexuality, which was established in 1972 as a social experiment and a model for future society by the Viennese Actionist Otto Muehl.
Bhagwan, later Osho – Indian spiritual teacher and mystic. In the 1960s he had public lectures and discussions, where he criticised both the traditional religions and socialism. He had many followers all over the world.
Johannes Cladders – the curator, critic and director of the Museum Mönchengladbach was an influential promoter and supporter of Western contemporary art.
Rolf Jährling, in his Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, organised several of the most prominent Fluxus events in Germany, among them the 24-Hour Happening (1965), where Joseph Beuys, Bazon Brock, Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman, Tomas Schmit and others participated. Ute Klophaus documented their actions in photographs, which were published in the book 24 Stunden.
Nam June Paik, Tomas Schmit and Maruta Schmit, Tsak (Vagelis Tsakiridis), Addi Køpcke, and his wife Tut Køpcke were Valdis Āboliņš’s friends from artistic circles.
Count Friedrich Stenbock-Fermor – a Baltic German lawyer born in Riga, was Chancellor of RWTH Aachen University. Reacting to the necessity to reform the structure of universities, he elaborated a model, which was later adapted by other universities in West Germany.
Arno Schmidt – a writer and translator in his works combined literature studies with avant-garde experiments with language, its syntax and sounding, witty word plays, dialects, allusions, references, notes, etc. His most outstanding work – the 1300 page long novel – Bottom's Dream is an intertextual story about Edgar Allan Poe’s personality and legacy.
Chilean writer and journalist Gaston Salvatore emigrated to Wes Germany and became an activist of the leftist movement, and, together with European avant-garde musicians, artists and directors, he created experimental performances. In the early 1980s, he published portrait articles about famous figures of the GFR in Stern magazine.
Wolf Vostell’s happening 9-Nein-de-coll/agen (1963) took place in nine locations in Wuppertal. Here, for the first time he transferred his de-collage principle to the moving image, thus giving rise to video art in Germany.
In Birmingham, Alabama, in one of the Baptist churches, on 15 September 1963, members of Ku Klux Klan organised one of the most brutal acts of racist terrorism. Vostell performed an action Alabama to commemorate the event during the happening Juxtapositionen in Galerie Aachen.
Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh was a key figure of the anti-Vietnam war movement and the idol of the New Leftist movement.
The SDS – the German Socialist Student League – organised the student protest movement in West Germany.
Berlin Kommune I and Kommune II were communes of radical political activists, the New Left and the SDS members, which initiated the communal project movement in West Germany. The members of these communes organised artistically and politically provocative actions and occupied empty buildings, claiming to revolutionize all aspects of life.
Austrian radical and Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, at the time of APO, became an idol of the student movement. His books. The Function of the Orgasm (1927) and The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933). became especially popular.
Marquis de Sade’s erotic and pornographic novel The 120 Days of Sodom (1785) experienced a new wave of popularity and book reprints in the 1960s in the context of the Sexual Revolution.
The Secretary of Spanish Embassy José Luis Castillejo was also a member of the Spanish performance group Zaj, which performed at the Galerie Aachen in 1966, and in RWTH Aachen University in 1967.
Marcel Broodthaers, in the exhibition cycle Musée d'Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (1968–72), announced himself as a ‘meta-institution’, pioneering institutional criticism in art. The first exhibition of the cycle – Section XIXème siècle – took place at his home in the presence of the leading art specialists in Brussels, and it was followed by exhibitions in Antwerp, Düsseldorf, Cologne, and elsewhere.
The dentist Hans Sohm was one of the most important Fluxus art collectors in Germany. His archive is currently stored at the Stuttgart National Gallery.
The retrospective and experimental exhibition Happening & Fluxus, curated by Harald Szeemann and Hans Sohm at the Kölnischer Kunstverein (1970), was the the first major attempt to bring together Fluxus art and artists on a global scale.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s early and avant-garde films, Love is Colder Than Death and Katzelmacher (both in 1969), were inspired by the works of Godard and Bertolt Brecht.
Jean-Marie Straub’s and Danièle Huillet’s early films, Machorka-Muff (1963) and Not Reconciled (1964–1965), the screen versions of Heinrich Böll’s stories, focus on the Nazi past through radical politics and form, which made both directors world-famous in the 1960s. Their film Othon (1969) was an adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s 17th century play about a Roman emperor in the atmosphere of a contemporaneous Rome.
David Cooper and Ronald David Laing were theoreticians of the New Leftist and anti-psychiatry movement.
Director Peter Watkins’s The War Game (1965) is a BBC television drama filmed in a documentary style about the nuclear war situation in London. The British government prohibited it from being shown in Great Britain, although Watkins received an Oscar for it.
Underground director Robert Kramer’s thriller Ice (1970) is dedicated to the explanation of left wing radical action. It consists of rhetorical episodes with dystopian future scenes, a war between the USA and Mexico, a despotic fascist regime in the USA, and a division of activists, which is getting ready for an armed revolution.
The USSR ambassador in DDR Pjotr Abrassimow demanded the prohibition of the Congress in West Berlin. The Western allies supported this ban due to the tense political situation in Czechoslovakia.
Axel Springer – the biggest media tycoon in the GFR – was known as an active anti-Communist, criticizing the regimes in Eastern Germany and Eastern Europe.
Carolyn Brown, Merce Cunningham, American choreographers and dancers, were the most notable personalities in the contemporary dance scene.
Alexander von Schlippenbach – a jazz pianist of Baltic German origin.
Exposition of Music – Electronic Television (1963) by Nam June Paik in Galerie Parnass showed interactive works like ‘prepared’ pianos, mechanical sound objects and installations; modified TV sets indicated the young composer’s interest in electronic media, and introduced the first experiments in video art.
Wolf Vostell’s happening In Ulm, um Ulm und um Ulm herum (1964) was the biggest happening in Germany to that date. Rhetorically reminding one of the recent past, it started in a military aerodrome as a concert of reactive fighters and continued in 24 different locations in Ulm and its surroundings.
Engineer Peter Saage helped to create the technological and interactive solutions in Wolf Vostell’s works. Together they created works Thermoelectronic Chewing Gum (1970) and T.O.T. (Technological Oak Tree): 310 Ideen ausgelöst durch die Natur von Vermont, für Dick Higgins (1970–1972).
Die Musik der Zeit, a series of contemporary music concerts, was organised by the Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne, and later elsewhere, too. Other festivals of the new music were also popular: Musik unserer Zeit and Musik der Gegenwart in Berlin, pro musica nova in Bremen, The Donaueschingen Festival and others.
Karlheinz Stockhausen, Johan Fritsch, Johannes Fritzsch, Bruno Maderna, and György Ligeti were composers of contemporary and avant-garde music.
Artist Mary Bauermeister, in her Atelier in Cologne in the early 1960s. organized concerts, public readings, exhibitions and actions, where avant-garde and Fluxus circle poets, musicians and artists participated.
The libretto of Luigi Nono’s opera Intolleranza 1960 (1961) was a symbolic reportage-fantasy about contemporaneous times, which illustrated various aspects of intolerance. It contained the texts and poetry of philosophical and political activists. The premiere of the opera at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice was interrupted by neo-fascists turning it into an international scandal.
Wolf Vostell’s happening Miss Vietnam (1967) was a homage to Vietnam War, where he declared that art is a total event. The happening took place on a firing range in Cologne, where under deafening sounds the participants and audiences carried out several ‘agonizing’ actions with dummies – as symbolic processes of war and consumer culture.
In another happening that took place in Cologne in 1967, where Vostell showed his video works, Valdis Āboliņš, Gerd Vorhoff and Henning Wolters from the Galerie Aachen improvised with flashlights and raw herrings in their mouths.
Henry Miller’s novels, Olympia Press publications, the magazine Die Perle and the novel Josefine Mutzenbacher were popular examples of erotic and pornographic literature, which were part of the Sexual Revolution atmosphere. Also Arno Schmidt’s book Sitara und der Weg dorthin (1963), where he reflected on the homosexuality of German youth literature idol Karl May, was an attempt to revise the past through the perspective of sexual openness.
Ferdinand Kriwet’s concrete poetry issue Rotor (1961) was a compilation of 98 experimental texts without any beginning and end, where the reader could choose the sequence of the texts.
Konrad Boehmer was a composer, writer and musicologist, who had studied under the guidance of Darmstadt School composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gottfried Michael Koenig.
Vagelis Tsakiridis (also Tsak) was a Greek writer and sculptor of who studied architecture in Aachen for several years. His books were printed by publishing house Luchterhand in Munich.
In Bazon Brock’s Theater der Position (1966) in Frankfurt, 17 scenes or structural principles of art and modern consumer culture were presented.
Gallery Tobiés & Silex in Cologne exhibited the works of popular emerging artists, among them the so-called Berliner Kritische Realisten, who were influenced by the traditions of Dada and Realism and were related to the artists’ cooperative gallery Großgörschen 35 in Schöneberg.
Jörg Immendorff’s solo exhibition at the Galerie Aachen on April 1966, as well as his actions in April 1967 during the last exhibition of the gallery, paid tribute to the Vietnam War. In this exhibition, entitled German–Danish Days, he was accompanied by Danish artists Per Kirkeby and Bjørn Nørgaard, as well as Immendorff’s partner Chris Reinecke.
Paper banners saying “Prima-Prima aus Dänemark” and “Prima-Prima aus Deutschland” (ironically quoting popular advertising slogans), which were placed at the entrance of the Galerie Aachen during the opening of German-Danish Days, was one of Jörg Immendorff's works.
The Social Democrat politician Johannes Rau was for many years the Minister of Science and Culture of North-Rhine Westphalia, later the President of Ministers, and the President of the GFR. In 1972, after Beuys announced that anyone could study under his guidance, including those who were not enrolled in the university, and the occupation of the premises at the Arts Academy of Düsseldorf, Rau made him redundant due to causing ‘public disorder’.