DRIP EVENT (for George Brecht)

Friday, 21 September 2007
Reception at 7PM, Performances at 8PM
With arrangements by:
Miles Ake, Olivian Cha, Sharon Cheslow, Katie Herzog, Kelly Kleinschrodt,
Elana Mann, Alison O’Daniel, Adam Overton, Nancy Popp, Vincent Ramos, and Mark So
Curated by Natilee Harren

drip event
Kelly Kleinschrodt, balloon (video still), 2006

PawnShop is pleased to present DRIP EVENT (for George Brecht), an evening of realizations of Drip Music, the influential event score of Fluxus artist George Brecht.

Brecht’s minimal and enigmatic event scores are designed to be interpreted and enacted by the viewer according only to the limits of the imagination. Beginning in the early 1960s, they were sent to friends through the mail, included in Fluxus publications, and collected in boxed editions. Whether imperative or merely propositional, they are open and generative, embodying the potential for an immense range of actions to take place in their wake. Brecht is a crucial figure in the history of Fluxus for his dedicated experimentations with the event score format, including his famous Drip Music:

Drip Music (DRIP EVENT)

For single or multiple performance.

A source of dripping water and an empty vessel are arranged so that the water falls into the vessel.

Second version: Dripping

G. Brecht
(1959 - 1962)

When discovered by George Maciunas, Drip Music was immediately incorporated into the repertoire of Fluxus concerts. It appeared in the premiere Fluxus concert in Wiesbaden, Germany in September 1962 and remained on the festival program as it traveled to Copenhagen, Paris, Düsseldorf, and Amsterdam. Drip Music became a natural emblem for Fluxus as the word “flux” not only means movement and change but also fluidity, flowing, or more specifically a fluid’s rate of flow.

The score for Drip Music lays out a set of spatial and temporal relationships that, while to an extent specifically delineated, invite creative interpretation. This invitation embodies the boundless potential of the score, never to be exhausted by its next instantiation. The score calls the viewer to recreate it again and again, to flesh out a landscape of inextinguishable possibility. In this way the multitude of performances unleashed by Drip Music resembles the repetitious image of dripping, as if they might be thought of together as one extended performance-a rhythmic dripping, irritating yet compelling, that will never end.

Unlike historic Fluxus performances in which a work would appear once on the program, during DRIP EVENT (for George Brecht) only Drip Music will be presented, each performer offering his or her unique interpretation as part of a collective exploration of the infinite potential of the score. On view in PawnShop’s East Gallery will be Kelly Kleinschrodt’s balloon (2005), a digital video that has been appropriated and reframed as an iteration of Drip Music.

tear
tear DRIP (with onion), 2007