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JUNE 3 - 4 - 5, 2009 / MOORAT RAPHAEL ARMENIAN CENTRE
PALAZZO ZENOBIO
GRAND HALL OF MIRRORS
DORSODURO 2597 - VENICE
curated by Chiara Vecchiarelli
On Wednesday, 3rd June 2009, Palazzo Zenobio in Venice will launch a three-day program dedicated to JOHN CAGE and ALLAN KAPROW, featuring artist ZACH ROCKHILL with his reinvention of SIX ORDINARY HAPPENINGS and STOCKROOM (3 and 4 June), a Happening and an Environment by Allan Kaprow dating back respectively to 1969 and 1961, and performer MARGARET LENG TAN - the most outstanding and acclaimed piano performer of Cage's works. The SIX ORDINARY HAPPENINGS will take place in the open, unostensibly, in the city of Venice. STOCKROOM: THE PLANET IN ORGASM, will be performed on June 4th at 3pm at Ca' Zenobio. Ms Tan's performance will conclude the program in Palazzo Zenobio's Great Hall of Mirrors on June 5th at midnight, with a concert dedicated to CAGE, KAPROW and FLUXUS.
ABOUT THE REINVENTION / SIX ORDINARY HAPPENINGS + STOCKROOM
SIX ORDINARY HAPPENINGS were realised by Allan Kaprow in the streets of downtown Berkeley, between March 7 and May 23, 1969. They are 6 actions to accomplish in the open space, in a logic of theatre that has abandoned every apparatus to become theatre of the most ordinary gestures, which are now performed - made happen - in a condition of awareness. The SIX ORDINARY HAPPENINGS, reinvented in 2009 by Zach Rockhill as a workshop/Happening, possessed each one a name. Of them, PURPOSE was about creating a sand mount, moving it until it was consumed, recording the sound of this action, re-recording it until the sound itself was consumed, and finally listening to the recording; CHARITY consisted of purchasing second hand cloths, washing them, and returning them to the second hand shop; FINE! was about parking a car in a parking forbidden area, waiting for the policeman, taking a picture of him while he was writing a ticket, sending him back pic, report and fine; SHAPE consisted of photographing the shape of shoes and bodies along the sidewalk, streets and fields, and publishing them on newspapers; POSE of bringing chairs to the open air in town, sitting on them, taking pictures, and leaving the pictures on the spot. GIVEWAY of leaving piles of dishes at the street corners, photographing them, then photographing them again the next day.
Realised by Allan Kaprow in Stockholm in 1961, STOCKROOM requires sufficiently spacious room to include the organic and not geometrical development of the Environment, to be created with cardboard boxes, newspapers and a whole set of stationary material. The created shapes must be pervious and in them style and repetition must be avoided. As regards gestures, they must be as human as possible.
Based on the shared date, 1961, Rockhill has set the imperative to revisit Kaprow's Stockroom alongside STANISLAV LEM's novel SOLARIS (published the same year). With its extended meditation on revisiting objects of desire (and by proxy our desire to revisit singular art historical events) as well as the origin of sculptural form, the novel 'Solaris' offers a new entry into the continuing re-invention of Kaprow's work. The Narrator, Kelvin, has his dead wife reappear on the space station circling Solaris - sent by the 'autistic ocean,' which continually generates elaborate sculptural 'mimoids'. He is at pains to parse the meaning of the emotionally charged re-visitation:
"So . . . .you think it's . . . the ocean? That the ocean is responsible for it all? But why? I'm not asking how, I'm simply asking why? Do you seriously think that it wants to toy with us, or punish us?" Unable to plumb Solaris's motive for the re-visitations, Kelvin becomes aware that despite his scientific and rational effort to understand his predicament, he loves the re-visitation as he loved the original: "You may have been sent to torment me, or to make my life happier, or as an instrument ignorant of its function, used like a microscope with me on the slide. Possibly you are here as a token of friendship, or a subtle punishment, or even as a joke. It could be all of those at once, or - which is more probably - something else completely."
ABOUT THE CONCERT / CAGE-KAPROW-FLUXUS
TOY PIANO DRAG, Margaret Leng Tan's tribute to Nam June Paik, recalls Paik's 1963 Violin with String. Three groundbreaking works by John Cage follow: SUITE FOR TOY PIANO, the first-ever serious composition for the instrument, Cage's legendary 4'33" in which he redefined silence as "all of the sound we don't intend", and WATER MUSIC, the precursor of '70s Performance Art.
Allan Kaprow created his 1957 performance score, MUSIC, in Cage's Experimental Music class at The New School for Social Research in New York. It was the outcome of an exercise in practical creativity where Cage asked his students to make and perform pieces using available materials at hand. Kaprow used a variety of noisemakers. His Music is strongly influenced by Cage's Water Music and its collage of real-world sounds. Music also shares Water Music's underlying premise which is art=life=theater.
The program includes two scores by Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins, pioneers in the Fluxus conceptual art movement of the 1960s along with Nam June Paik. Knowles, Higgins and Paik all regarded John Cage as their mentor. Ms. Tan revisits several "event scores" by Fluxus founding member, George Brecht, who passed away in December 2008. A rare performance of Cage's 0'00" (made for Yoko Ono and Toshi Ichiyanagi) concludes the program.
For any further information please call +39 041 5228770 or e-mail
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Il Collegio Armeno Moorat Raphael - Ca' Zenobio ha il piacere di informarvi della mostra "Surrealismo vitale" dello scultore Raffi Tokatlian.
On the occasion of the 53rd International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale