A Game without Rules

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Notes

1 For a deeper exploration of this concept, see: Thiselton (1980: 10–17, 149–54). Thiselton draws on the concept of the horizon in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1978: 39). Heidegger’s horizon unfolds in time.

2 Unless otherwise noted, all event scores in this article appear in Friedman et al. (2002) The Fluxus Performance Workbook, Friedman, Ken, Owen Smith, and Lauren Sawchyn, eds. Performance Research e-publications.

3 The traditional Noh stage projects outward into the audience.

4 In the late 1960s, I built on Buber’s work to create a concept that I described as I-Thou art (Friedman 1973: 6–13).

5 Some Fluxus artists are – or were – uncomfortable with the concept of unfolding and fusion as Higgins discusses it or as I do. They became comfortable with a specific kind of flat performance style in the early 1960s. This style is direct and blunt. It has little affect or emotion. While there is room for humorous Fluxus works in this approach, it is a humour without laughter. There is a distinct difference between the flat style and the humorous laughter of vaudeville. This separates many of George Maciunas’s joke-like works and pranks from the work of other Fluxus artists. It also separates some of the solemn, ritualistic events by Knizak or the mystical enactments of self-revelation in Beuys’s work. The thinking-through and upbuilding enquiry of hermeneutics makes – or made – it difficult for many Fluxus artists to understand Dick Higgins’s books. It finally occurs to me that most of my Fluxus colleagues have (or had) no interest in the possibility that the event score may contain multiple horizons and multiple meanings, or an inwardness that may disclose itself through discourse and interpretation. The issue is not that the work ‘means’ something in the sense of a fixed interpretation or even a meaning that can be interpreted. Rather, the work establishes a horizon. The fusion of horizons between the work and the viewer – or the work, the performer and the viewer – creates and recreates meaning, demolishes meaning and creates it yet again.

6 See Miloš Forman’s 1984 film version of Amadeus, scene 7. While this scene is imaginary rather than historical, it illustrates and exemplifies a central activity in the real Mozart’s life.

7 Curtis (1959). The most famous recording of this song was the hit 1966 single by the Bobby Fuller Four.

8 D. Anthony Storm’s (2015) commentary on Fear and Trembling offers a useful examination of the individual in relation to the universal.

9 For relics, see: Klein (2010: 55–67, esp. 63–4), and Junghans (2003: 21– 35). For Luther’s theology, see: Luther (1961), Wriedt (2003) and Oberman (1993: 151–74). For the Silverman Collection, see: Hendricks (1982, 1983a, 1983b, 1988, 2002) and Phillpot and Hendricks (1988).