I hesitated a bit as to whether to include this title with the others by
bpNichol. It does come out of collaborations with him reaching in several
directions. At the same time, its base is a set of poems by Robert
Filliou, and Dick Higgins did as much to set it in motion as bp and I.
Beep and I had discussed various processes of transformation leading to
proposals for doing his Translating Translating Apollinaire
before the 1977 International Performance Art Festival, and continued
doing so during the festival itself.
The festival, like others during the 70s,
consisted of days and evenings of performances, followed by conversations
among participants that lasted most or all the nights in between. The 1977
festival was held in Milwaukee, so my house was were the all-night
conversations took place. We were assisted in this by a game of one-upmanship
played by Michel Beannamou and Ihab Hassan, each of whom tried to outdo
the other in spreading lavish tables of impeccably catered foods and
prestigious wines. After the performances, we went to whichever was acting
as host for the evening, ate heavily and drank deep, then migrated over
to my house. John Cage missed out on these sessions, since he was the
universally identifiable celebrity at the feasts, and could not escape
from those who had put money and clout into setting up the festival.
His mournful looks on watching the rest of us leave on two evenings when
we made our exodus gave me a new perspective on problems associated with
recognition outside artistic circles - it can be limiting as well as
gratifying. My respect for Michel Bennamou also increased in situations
such as this, since however much he could like manipulating situations, he
probably would have had a better time with the artists than with the patrons.
The conversational part of the night sometimes needed a bit of
decompression after the indulgence in food and drink. On one night, Steve
McCaffery, a diabetic, had had too much to drink and had passed out in the car
on the way from Hassan's. We carried him in and placed him on a sofa. Carolee
Schneeman had been lent a ridiculously expensive fur coat (insured at a
higher figure than my house) by the people with whom she was billeted.
She had objected to taking the coat, but her hosts had told her not to
worry about any damages, since the insurance would take care of any
mishaps. She covered Steve with the coat, tucking in his chin, covering
his ears, and generally fussing delicately over him in a manner that seemed
comic after her Dyonisiac performances we had been able to watch on film,
but were not allowed to perform live. Some of us made bets on whether
or not McCaffery would throw up on the coat. He didn't - and none of
us took the betting seriously enough for those who had betted against
to collect. The rest of us took some time to settle in to the standard
sacraments of cold coffee and relatively small amounts of cheap wine.
At times, congregants took naps in their chairs or on the floor, and
often formed smaller conversational units. For me, as I stated perhaps
most firmly in "Notation and the Art of Reading," my basic credo, these
conversations after the reading tended to be as important as the reading
itself. This is where friendships formed, alliances took shape, projects
got mapped out, plans made, ideas swapped, etc. As with any number of
dimensions, conferences and festivals could act like supercharged
readings. Here it was not just a matter of one reader, pumped with
adrenaline, and a few audience members charged with enthusiasm holding
a particularly animated conversation - it was solos, duets, trios,
quartets, quintets, and choruses that moved in and out of each other.
Dick Higgins had spoken about reprinting Robert Filliou's 14
chansons et 1 charade, originally published by Editions Hansjorg
Mayer. The original edition had included translations into English
by George Brecht and into German by Dieter Roth. The set of poems by
Filliou is set up in such a way that it could be used as the basis for
a performance piece. In earlier conversations with Dick, I assumed he
was thinking of reprinting the book himself.
The conversation between bp and I regarding the homolinguistic and
other transformative procedures we had engaged in for some time
extended to Dick who had also played with the idea. Play is an important
word here - we definitely wanted something more obviously game-oriented
than Louis Zukofsky's Catullus, a work we all admired, but saw going
in a different direction and being read in a different way than we wanted
our own work to go. I believe he first suggested trying something like that
with the trilingual Filliou work. He and Barrie were enthusiastic about
the idea, and more or less volunteered the unconscious McCaffery as the
third participant. Several other people present spoke of extending the
project at a later date. Jackson Mac Low was unsure of whether he would
be able to do this or not, but definitely wanted to see what happened
with the book as conceived with the six participants so far included. I
would have liked to take a try myself, but since I was going to publish
the book, it seemed best to wait and see if we could add other tiers at
a later time. This was not solely altruism on my part - I knew I'd
have enough expense with the six part book as it was.
We thus had a basic plan worked out during the conference, even though
three of its six parts had not yet been written. The composition of those
parts would act as extensions of performances into a book. Of course, we
thought the party we found ourselves in would go on forever, and that
we'd all transform the finished book into some kind of live performance
at some other festival where we would all be present and the party
would continue. If Dick were around now, I could imagine him
holding forth on the memento mori theme, but he is one of the four
who have died since the party within a party where this book began.
Then again, a book of this sort does act as a perpetual echo of a
celebration in which a group of people talked and laughed and shared
ideas; other books may be seen as something similar on a smaller
scale.
*
The first tier, Filliou's poem, with the translations of Roth and
Brecht, was a high point of Fluxus. One of its forms of what I call
triangulation was precisely literal: the work was published in three
languages. It had a multi-media dimension in that it was set up as a
group of performance pieces, which included the use of a jukebox.
The positions of the original participants, including Hansjorg Mayer,
had become canonical, and the book had achieved the status of a
classic in the movement. My correspondence with the original
participants in regard to doing the book proceeded in multiple Fluxist
modes, from Mail Art to asynchronous statements. All this had a kind
of purity to it, which amused me considerably given the bawdiness
and irreverence of the poems.
The second tier brought the original classic into a new framework.
Dick had been one of the original Fluxists, but the other three of us
were not part of the original movement, or, for that matter, of
the movement at all. Although homolinguistic translation is completely
Fluxus-friendly, the original members would have seen Zukofsky, one of
the models for the current group, as outside their fold. In the second
tier, Fluxus itself was undergoing translation into other sensibilities,
assumptions, tonalities, and formal properties. A basic Fluxus tenet was
the possibility of transformation into entities and event structures
which could not have been foreseen in the original first moves and
manifestations. At its best, I'd like to see Fluxus as a movement that
wished to see itself transformed into other genres and dispensation,
eventually to the point of being unrecognizable. This book seemed to
be at about midpoint in such a transition.
*
I had been able to buy some ocher colored French's Once Again line of
recycled paper at a bargain price. This stock seemed perfect for the
text and cover of the book, with blue-gray endpapers setting them off.
I reproduced Mayer's type, and set the three new sections in a similar
sans serif face. In the Production Department, the most fun I had in
addition to the usual satisfactions of printing came from giving the
book a full title which described it. This confused some bibliographers,
and I don't think I managed to get any booksellers to list it completely
and accurately, but I still had fun with it.
