A study of systems
During a recent residency with Maddy Pethick at Spacex, Exeter, UK. We decided to focus on a one word event by George Brecht for one of our DIY Happenings: WATER. Events ranged from water droplet racing, generative rain drawing, musical water bottles, to boat building and transporting puddles.
I’ve always loved Tomas Schmit, Zyklus für Wassereimer (oder Flaschen) 1961 once recreating it with mustard bottles.
Recently I read “Between Water and Stone” by Kristin Stiles from the exhibition catalogue for “In the Spirit of Fluxus” at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1993, in some ways what she is describing in this passage could perhaps be understood as a live study of the computation, the system of human action, bottles, and water.
“Performed for the 1963 Fluxus festival in Amsterdam, the actions that constitute Zyklus für Wassereimer [oder Flaschen] (Cycle for Water-rhymes [or Bottles] are direct and simple, subtle and conceptually sophisticated. The score permits the performer between ten and thirty bottles or buckets. Its duration depends upon the speed and precision with which the artist undertakes the process of pouring, a procedure either quickly resolved or enduring for long periods. The task may, but does not have to, depend upon skill. It is the kind of quiet action that a thoughtful child might perform as a means to study the operation of things…Speculating on the nature of existence, the artist who performs Zyklus undertakes the careful exploration of human labor as a concrete condition that determines meaning. While Schmit’s score leaves the construction of labor and its significance open to a mechanics of doing, at the same time, doing emphasizes the concrete condition of being. This doing, because it has a temporal dimension, equally calls into question the relationship of being to becoming, in and through time, and positions ontological speculation in the pragmatic activities of labor. Doing both exhibits and stabilizes the unstable relationship between objects and the human states of becoming and being. Metaphysical questions circle in Zyklus in the mundane conditions of the piece itself, in the actual flow and change among human action, bottles, and water.”
Filed under: art, fluxus, performance, systems | Leave a Comment
No Responses Yet to “A study of systems”