Tribute to Fluxus Founder Has Jarring Effect on Bach Concerto

There is a new Christmas tradition in New York, one to join the inevitable “Messiah” and “Nutcracker” performances. Lately, Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concertos have become holiday fare. While these six secular Baroque showpieces, originally written for coffeehouse entertainment, are not exactly appropriate to the season, Bernard Holland suggested Tuesday in the New York Times that they do, at least, supply a sense of order and familiarity we find comforting at this chaotic time of the year.

A performance of the fourth “Brandenburg” on Tuesday night, however, did precisely the opposite. Though engagingly played by young, eager, accomplished and historically alert musicians, this Bach sounded startling, disconcerting, jarring even. Fluxus struck again.

Fluxus--a hard-to-pin-down, sneakily influential school of conceptual, neo-Dada art begun 36 years ago--lost one of its founders and most astonishing voices recently. Dick Higgins died, with the alarming suddenness of a Fluxus event, of a heart attack on Oct. 25. The concert by the S.E.M. Ensemble at the Paula Cooper Gallery was the first of a number of tributes to Higgins here (including a memorial Sunday at the Judson Memorial Church and an all-night reading of Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” at Paula Cooper on New Year’s Eve). It is hard to say exactly what Higgins did, partly because he did so much in his 60 years, and partly because what he did and stood for resists categorizing. Higgins called the Fluxus style of work “intermedia,” a term this highly literate composer, visual artist, book maker, filmmaker, publisher, performer, essayist, conceptual artist, theorist and performance artist plucked from Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

By intermedia, Higgins meant not simply the use of more than one medium (that’s multimedia) but the interpenetration of media, often canceling themselves out in a violent and sometimes hilarious self-destruction, like the collision of artistic matter and antimatter. This could mean visual poetry or poetic visions, action music or musical actions.

Higgins, who was born in England in 1938 and came to America in his youth, became deeply involved in the avant-garde as a student at the New School in New York, where he studied with the progressive California composer and early world-music specialist Henry Cowell and John Cage. In the early ‘60s, he and a group of like-minded artists devoted to Cage, to Marcel Duchamp and to the notion that nothing stands still, decided the best way to appreciate the world is by dramatically deconstructing it.

They were young, newsworthy and nutty. The composer, La Monte Young, fed hay to a piano. In Meiko Shiomi’s “Music for a Disappearing Face,” which was included on the S.E.M. program, the orchestra musicians slowly wiped the smiles off their faces.

Some Fluxus artists eventually became famous. The video artist Nam June Paik was a Fluxus founder, although he was a composer then. Yoko Ono got her start as an artist through Fluxus. Joseph Beuys joined in. Al Hansen is becoming well known thanks to the efforts of his grandson, the pop star Beck. Fluxus’ chairman, as Higgins called George Maciunas, has become something of a cult figure since his death in 1978.

Although the very nature of Fluxus defies definition, Higgins came up with a useful lineage. First there was collage. When Robert Rauschenberg added a third dimension, it became combine. When combine began to envelope the spectator, it became environment. When the environment began to include live performance, it became the Happening. When the Happenings were broken up into their minimal constituent parts, they became events. And when events were minimal but had maximum implications, they became Fluxus.

Higgins was the broadest, the most ambitious, the most prolific, the most tireless, the most intellectual and maybe the smartest of the Fluxus artists. A typical Fluxus piece was his “A Thousand Symphonies” project, which he began by shooting a machine gun at orchestral manuscript pages. S.E.M. performed Symphony #179, which uses paint smudges instead of bullets, looks interesting and sounds interestingly chaotic.

Among Higgins’ lasting accomplishments was establishing the Something Else Press in 1964, which published, in beautifully printed and bound volumes, works by Fluxus artists and facsimiles of important out-of-print books (Gertrude Stein’s epic “The Making of Americans” was one) and books of relevant theory.

It is hard to get a full grasp of Higgins, even though his work shows up all the time. This year in Los Angeles, for instance, it was included in the “Out of Actions” show at the Museum of Contemporary Art and performed in the “Beyond the Pink” performance art festival. The Getty collects Fluxus. His influence is also locally felt. Higgins taught at California Institute of the Arts at its inception in 1970-71, and helped mold its aesthetic.

But an overview is, right now, impossible. There are no collections of his essays, no retrospectives, no one-man concerts. Something Else Press books are collectors’ items. Practically none of his music exists on CD.

That will probably change, but not entirely. This is work that by its very intermedia nature doesn’t fit easily into single-media formats such as books, galleries or recordings. It is work that doesn’t stand still. Fluxus, after all, means flux.

And the S.E.M.’s “Brandenburg” brought that point home brilliantly, played as it was in a significantly incongruous context. It was preceded by a raw, disturbing string trio by Petr Kotik, the ensemble’s founder, conductor and a solo flutist in the Bach. Kotik’s “Music for 3 in Memoriam Jan Rychlik” practically caused a riot at its Prague premiere in 1964, what with its raw sounds made by bowing and thumping nearly every inch of the instruments.

Other works on the program included Ben Patterson’s “Pond 2,” in which orchestra members liberate wind-up frogs and croak; a touching performance by Jackson Mac Low and Anne Tardos of Higgins’ texts turned into chance poetry; a study by Alvin Lucier of imperceptibly changing long tones.

In such an environment, and one with modern paintings on the gallery walls, Bach seemed edgy and fresh. In an environment of unpredictable events and surprising sounds, everything became new.

New York, everyone complains, has never been more crowded or chaotic than it is this Christmas. Higgins’ legacy is to exuberantly remove the escape hatch. All the world is Fluxus. Even Bach.