A month ago I was asked to lecture to the Rotary Club of Wiesbaden. It makes you think about how you think and what causes you to think about this, that, or the other thing. Register here. Filliou carried the Puzzle-Poems under his hat, offering them to passersby for five francs apiece, just like the men he witnessed daily on the rue des Rosiers selling Swiss watches out of their coats.
To find out more, including which third-party cookies we place and how to manage cookies, see our privacy policy. PATTERSON: I think the two basic influences were music and nature, but I was always very curious about the sciences. Please order at: publications@downwithart.de. One his most infamous and most photogenic pieces, Variations for Double-Bass (1962), called for a solo performer to “agitate strings” of the instrument with a comb and corrugated cardboard, and balance it upside-down on its scroll while rubbing a rubber object against its strings. Another cofounder, the artist and entrepreneur George Maciunas, drew the name from a standard dictionary definition for flux: “any substance or mixture . Music overlapped with literature, visual art with urban planning; avant-garde performances began spilling into the streets. The word “performance art” hadn’t been invented and we thought, for lack of a better description, that it was new, new music. He creates new scores, but also reimagines classical music to redirect the viewer’s attention. But it was not until after Patterson moved to Paris, in 1962, that he began to produce explicitly visual works, the Puzzle-Poems. We use our own and third-party cookies to personalize your experience and the promotions you see. EMILY MCDERMOTT: I know you’re well known for Paper Piece and Lick Piece. . Abstract. Benjamin Patterson was born in Pittsburgh in 1934, and graduated from the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, in 1956 with a degree in music. In addition to the artistic contributions, the catalogue  is comprised of  interviews and texts on the historical Sneak Preview and the potentials and challenges of reenactments. I was commissioned to design a pavilion for the 50th Anniversary of Fluxus event in Wiesbaden in 2012 and now a Fluxus café/bar in a museum in Northern Germany. Performers talk about Benjamin Patterson's paper piece . That became the basis for producing a score. As an assistant conductor, he also works with electronic music, creates the "Tape Piece" with pure tone loops as a 26-year-old, meets John Cage in Cologne, performs "Antikonzerte" – his own aleatory pieces (eg "Paper Piece"), as well as the sound piece “Pond”, with toy frogs. PATTERSON: The influence of Fluxus is certainly still alive today. A typed version of the score for that work is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection. Asked about the impetus for those early radical works years later, Patterson told an interviewer, “There was a great protest, let’s say, against the materialism of the art market and buying and selling and so forth was not what we, as young idealists who wanted to change the world, thought was the purpose of art—it was to change the way people think, or to open their thinking.”. For access to motion picture film stills please contact the Film Study Center. To celebrate Patterson’s 80th birthday and his work, a series of events began in Berlin on 11 March 2014. it was comprised of a performance tour, a concert, an exhibition, and “Dr. You still see a bit of that today, although it’s much less.
Where have you been all this time?’ Typical Stockhausen arrogance.”, Paper Piece was in part a response to Stockhausen’s Kontakte (1958–60), an integration of electronic and instrumental music that demanded some 200 hours of rehearsal time for players to master. I buy thoughts from individuals that come to the booth and sell them new thoughts. 1964) Overture (ca. In Pond, you lay out a grid….

Penny for Your Thoughts is the old American expression. COURTESY CONTEMPORARY ARTS MUSEUM HOUSTON, Around 1987, he did indeed return to art, creating witty assemblages out of found objects, performing, and staging participatory artworks. A large sheet of paper was … It was in Halifax that he fell in with people involved with the government-funded electronic music center, which eventually led to a letter of introduction to Karlheinz Stockhausen, whom he met one evening after a performance in Germany in 1960. And actually I stayed in bed for ten days to think—how how how—and then—paper! A lot of my youth was spent with nature.

By visiting our website or transacting with us, you agree to this. While he was born in Pittsburgh, the performance artist now resides in Wiesbaden, Germany—the original Fluxus hotbed.