The Performance of Time in Fluxus IntermediaNatasha Lushetich

TDR: The Drama Review, Volume 55, Number 4, Winter 2011 (T212),pp. 75-87 (Article)

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75TDR: The Drama Review 55:4 (T212) Winter 2011. 2011

New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Performance of Time in Fluxus IntermediaNatasha Lushetich

If the phrase the performance of time sounds slightly odd, the suggested action being both vaguely possible and, quite likely, impossible, it is because time is most often conceptualized as a flowing substance, an organizing principle, or a container in which events occur. In all of these cases, as indicated by the oft-used phrases time flies and can you squeeze me in? when refer-ring to an appointment or meeting, time is thought to have an existence independent of the human observer. As an externally observable phenomenon it can either be perceived by the

Natasha Lushetich is a PhD candidate at the University of Exeter and a lecturer at the University of Portsmouth, UK. She is also a performer, director, and interdisciplinary artist. Her publications include On the Performativity of Absence ( Performance Research, March 2010), Ludus Populi: The Practice of Nonsense ( Theatre Journal, March 2011), and The Event Score as a Perpetuum Mobile ( Text and Performance Quarterly, forthcoming). natasha.lushetich@exeter.ac.uk

Figure 1. Alison Knowles, The Identical Lunch, Barton, Vermont, 1967. A residual object from one of Knowless noontime meditations. (Photo courtesy of the artist)

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human subject if the subject chooses to avail herself of the time sense, the way she would avail herself of the sense of sight to look at a stone, or, it can be ignored. On this static, substantialist view, time cannot be performed but is a measure of performance, that in which performance occurs. I would like to suggest what might be called a processualist approach whereby time is the expressive activity of any given thing, being, or phenomenon. Instead of occurring in time, an event or an activity produces time in its occurrence, which further means that there can be no position outside of time since all things, beings, and phenomena are always already temporal-ized by the very nature of their existence. Rather than observing or measuring the movement of time statically as a progression from a static point A to a static point B the processualist logic operates from within the process of perpetual temporalization, continuous change, dif-ferentiation, and mutation. Although difficult to grasp as well as perceive, continuous change can be likened to the process of aging as opposed to that of growing. While the process of growing is marked by a clear beginning and an approximate end, the process of aging has nei-ther a beginning nor an end since it is not a passage from a fixed point in ones youth to a fixed point in ones old age, but a gradual process of continuous change whose starting point cannot be determined and which continues well after ones death in the form of decomposition. This process, rendered imperceptible to the aging subject by the very gradualness of change, encom-passes change on all fronts: it is not only the color of ones hair that changes but also the pos-ture, the smile, the texture of the skin, the voice, and not least of all, ones consciousness. It is in this context of perpetual processuality that I propose to focus on Fluxus intermedia.

Variously characterized as the most radical experimental art movement of the sixties (Harry Ruh1 in Armstrong 1993:16), a singularly strange phenomenon in the history of the arts of the twentieth century (Doris 1998:91) and an active philosophy of life that only some-times takes the form of art (Friedman 1998b:ix), Fluxus is a loosely knit association of art-ists whose activity ranges from concerts, films, performances, and sightseeing tours to games, sports, instruments, and gadgets. It includes such names as Yoko Ono, Mieko Shiomi, George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Takehisa Kosugi, La Monte Young, Alison Knowles, Dick Higgins, and Ken Friedman, and spans the period of almost five decades. Intermedia is a term coined by Dick Higgins to refer to works that fall conceptually between media such as visual poetry or action music, as well as between art media and life media (Higgins 1998:222). The latter dis-tinction (or rather, contamination) is of particular importance to this discussion since the per-formance of time occurs at the intersection of pervasive temporalization produced by a divergent range of Fluxus works and the percipients musicalized mode of attention. This is made possible by the fact that all Fluxus works, including intermedial compositions, film, and durational per-formance the focal points of my analysis exhibit two fundamental characteristics: pres-ence in time and musicality (Friedman 1998a:250). As Friedman elucidates in Fluxus and Company, presence in time refers to the works gradual deployment, impermanence, and ephemerality while musicality refers to the fact that many Fluxus works, whether objects or performance instructions, games or puzzles, appear in the form of scores (250). That the works appear in the form of scores means that they can be realized by anyone, anywhere, in any num-ber of ways the only common denominator being musicalized duration (251). But, despite the fact that musicalization and temporalization have much in common, musicalization is not a mere extension of temporalization, as music stands in an ambiguous relationship to time.

Deep Listening

In The Time of Music, the musicologist Jonathan D. Kramer engages with the philosopher SusanneK. Langers notion that [m]usic makes time audible (in Kramer 1988:1), which could be interpreted to mean that music generates time in its expressive, and thus temporaliz-ing, activity. However, this statement refers to a particular species of time, operative in the seg-

1. Harry Ruh is the author of the 1979 uncirculated exhibition catalogue FLUXUS, the Most Radical and Experimental Art Movement of the Sixties. The exhibition was held at A-Gallery, Amsterdam.

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regated realm of ideality, since, as Langer notes music [...] suspends ordinary time and offers itself as an ideal substitute and equivalent (3). Kramer affirms this distinction and defines musical time as the time the piece evokes and ordinary time as the time the piece takes (7). He also states that the category of deep listening gives primacy to musical time over ordi-nary time. Although Kramer does not offer an explicit definition of deep listening but instead refers to T.S. Eliot who describes it as music heard so deeply that [...] you are the music (in Kramer 1988:7), deep listening could be defined as an attentional configuration of height-ened auditory susceptibility caused by a high degree of concentration and the correspond-ing emotional involvement, the combination of which allows the listener to transcend the time the piece takes and enter the time the piece evokes. The term has also received much exposure through the work of the experimental composer Pauline Oliveros, whose investigations into the awareness-heightening powers of sound began as early as the 1970s. In Deep Listening: A Composers Sound Practice Oliveros defines deep listening as an art in itself, a composers prac-tice as well as a meditational act intended to heighten and expand consciousness of sound in as many dimensions of awareness and attentional dynamics as humanly possible (2005:xxiii). Although in many ways concomitant with Oliveross, my use of the term does not refer to a sus-tained, intentional practice but remains concerned solely with attentional configuration.

One of the reasons why this particular attentional configuration may be said to have the capacity to suspend ordinary time, as Langer claims, is its attunement to the nature of the medium, which tends to solicit an extremely temporalized mode of attention, since music is never given all-at-once but is in a continuous process of disappearing. Indeed, in Structure and Experiential Time, Karlheinz Stockhousen, a figure of considerable influence on a num-ber of Fluxus artists, defines the relationship between music and time along the axis of perpetualdisappearance:

If we realize, at the end of a piece of music quite irrespective of how long it lasted, whether it was played fast or slowly and whether there were very many or very few notes that we have lost all sense of time then we have in fact been experiencing time most strongly. (1959:65)

This sort of listener involvement comes from the interplay of direct perception, memory, and pattern recognition. According to Kramer, these three cognitive processes are related mostly although not solely to musical linearity and tonality as exemplified by the Western cultural tra-dition, which is predominantly goal-orientated (1988:25). The main characteristic of such music is that it involves the listener in the pacing, timing, and articulation of an intricate vari-ety of shaped musical events that create what could be termed temporal content. However, the notion of musicalization, as operative in the Fluxus works, does not refer to an attempt to implant a teleologically driven temporal content in a nonmusical medium and in this way elevate the work to the realm of ideality by suspending it from the realm of ordinariness and corporeality. On the contrary, it refers to the percipients very corporeal and lived mode of attention, which does not segregate the work from its surroundings. Deep listening is thus an attentional configuration that renders ordinary time performative.

A case in point is Takehisa Kosugis 1964 score:

South No. 1 (to Anthony Cox)

Pronounce SOUTH during a predetermined or indetermined duration. (in Friedman1990:36)

Or, his

South No. 2 (to Nam June Paik)

Pronounce SOUTH during a duration of more than 15 minutes. Pause for breath is permitted but transition from pronunciation of one letter to another should be smooth and slow.(36)

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Both compositions are monostructural and consist of a single sound as well as movement. They have no phrases, no tension-building or tension-releasing progressions, variations, or goal-direction and are as such unlikely to have a captivating effect on the listener that would transport him or her to a different world. However, it would be inaccurate to say that these compositions do not alter the configuration of the listeners attention, since their monostruc-tural consistency both permeates the listener and acts as a platform for numerous other devel-opments. Such listener engagement can be compared to the spatial experience of viewing a sculpture, which, apart from being visual, is also deeply kinesthetic, possibly tactile, and even olfactory. When viewing a sculpture, our body negotiates the pacing of the experience: we walk around the sculpture, draw closer to it to inspect a particular detail, walk away, come back to take in the whole space, the coming and going of other visitors, the billowing of the curtains, the smell of coffee coming from the cafeteria. In contrast to viewing a small painting, which confines the circumference of our attention, viewing a sculpture expands and texturizes it. Likewise, the experience of listening to minimally varied, monolithic compositions amplifies the temporalities inherent in the environment. This amplification is made even more explicit in works such as Kosugis 1963 Theatre Music whose score reads: Keep walking intently (in Nyman 1974:68), or La Monte Youngs 1960 Composition No. 2, Build a fire in front of an audi-ence; or, his 1960 Composition No. 5, Turn a butterfly (or any number of butterflies) loose in the performance area (in Nyman 1974:70).

Apart from emphasizing extended duration as well as the multisensorially perceptible musi-cality of natural processes, found in a burning fire or the flight of butterflies, these pieces point to another element, crucial to the transference of deep listening from the segregated time-space of a musical composition to that of the world around it, namely concretism. Although usually associated with the more violent Fluxus compositions such as Nam June Paiks 1961 One for Violin Solo in which a violin is raised in a distended movement lasting several minutes, then sud-denly released downwards and smashed to pieces, or George Maciunass 1964 Piano Piece No. 13 in which piano keys are nailed down with a hammer, concretism plays an important part in dis-sociating music from ideality and associating it with concrete reality. In his 1962 essay Neo-Dada in Music, Theatre, Poetry, Art, Maciunas asserts:

A material or concrete sound is considered one that has close affinity to the sound pro-ducing material thus a note sounded on a piano keyboard or a bel-canto voice is largely immaterial, abstract and artificial since the sound does not clearly indicate its true source or material reality common action of string, wood, metal, felt, etc. (Maciunas [1962] 1993:15657)

This way of approaching a musical instrument as a total configuration, to borrow Michel Nymans expression, can be traced to John Cage and his prepared piano, among other tech-niques, which he began experimenting with in the early 1940s by inserting a variety of objects between the piano strings. As Nyman points out in Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, this practice exploited an instrument not as a means of making sounds in the accepted fashion, but as a total configuration the difference between playing the piano and the piano as sound source (1974:17) thus extending not only the traditional function of the piano but also that of the performer. However, Paiks One for Violin Solo and other Fluxus works differ profoundly from Cages work in that they perform the most elusive and yet most essential quality of ordi-nary or corporeal time, not to be found in the ideal species of time (which is repeatable and changeable): irreversibility. As Paik aptly points out: Once you break an expensive piano, it cannot be put back together. Once you throw water on the ground, you cannot scoop it back up (in Kaye 2007:41).

The Process of Time and Time as Process

While touching on the only uncontested point in a wide array of mutually exclusive theories of time, Paiks One for Violin Solo performs time as process, in other words its quiddity, and the pro-

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cess of time, in other words, its additivity. In doing so the piece offers for experiential con-templation or indeed enact-ment the paradox of time as evidenced by the parallel but mutually exclusive existence of two contrasting theories of time, aptly named the A-theory and the B-theory. As the time theorist Heather Dyke eluci-dates in McTaggart and the Truth about Time, according to the A-theory, or the so-called tensed theory of time, time is a real feature of the world. Despite the fact that the past and the future can only be accessed through the present moment, which is in perpetual motion and thus in a continual process of passing, the present moment is nevertheless a real loca-tion in the world. According to the B-theory, time is not a real existent. Events in space occur tenselessly, unrelated to the notion of present, past, and future and can only be spo-ken of in relational terms, such as earlier than, simultaneous with, or later than (Dyke 2002:13739).

By being both of time and being time, One for Violin Solo embodies as well as performs both of these views. Due to the fact that it disrobes ideal musical time of its rhythmically and melod-ically created multidimensionality and confines it to material time, in other words, the unidi-mensionality and unidirectionality of a moving body in space the violin One for Violin Solo simultaneously inhabits the zone of the A- as well as the B-theory. Once the violin has reached the point above the performers head and is on the verge of beginning its journey downwards, the temporal experience can be separated into three different categories: (1) the present the violin raised and held in an axe-like position; (2) the past the violins position seen as an accu-mulation of past-presents congealed into a concrete form; (3) the future the violins spatial direction, its imminent downwards journey which forms the notion of the future as a prospec-tive addition of not-yet-presents. The moment the violin reaches the end of its journey and is smashed to pieces is the point at which the mutually reinforcing conditions of additivity and congruence, which form the progression or the process of time, have been brought to a logical conclusion with regard to the initial arrangement of the violins component parts. Paiks One for Violin Solo embodies the tripartite division of time into distinct temporal aggregates, since the state of the violin at the end of the composition is radically different from the state of the violin at the beginning of the composition.

However, apart from revealing the additive aspect of time, or in other words its manner of unfolding, its processuality, the same composition also reveals time as process. In this regard, the arrangement of the violins constituent parts at the end of the composition will be different

Figure 2. Nam June Paik, One for Violin Solo, Neo-Dada in der Musik, Dusseldorf, 1962. (Courtesy of George Maciunas Foundation Inc. All rights reserved, 2011)

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enough to mark a category shift from the notion violin to the notion no-longer-violin or non-violin, (in other words from the category of being to the category of nonbeing), only if change is seen as a purely transient alteration in the spatial distribution of essential traits. If, however, change is seen as a continuum and not just a rearrangement of essential traits causing an object to become a nonobject the moment it loses its stable identity, then the passage from the state of violin-ness or violin-wholeness to the state of non-violin-ness or violin-smithereens is revealed to be heavily dependent on the frame of reference. If framed by the human observer, the process of change will be seen as corresponding to the notions of past, present, and future only on account of the triadic composition of human perception consisting of memory, direct perception, and expectation. The moment this frame is removed, the smithereens-condition of the violin is revealed as no more than a relational coordinate, a later than if compared to the earlier than of the wholeness-condition of the violin. But, regardless of the difference in the percipients temporal experience of One for Violin Solo, the composition reveals the one undis-puted sine qua non of time and that is irreversibility. For, whether regarded through the per-ceptual lens provided by the A-theory or the B-theory there is only one temporal direction accessible to our perception within the sphere of lived, material reality; the reverse is not. The temporal unidirectionality of lived corporeality and materiality, which, unlike the reversible temporal structure of musical time, cannot be experienced from a different angle in other words, externally testifies to the fact that as living beings we are internal to time, as are all other things, phenomena, and occurrences. The experiential appropriation of the notion that we are always already involved in the processual transition called time, but which could equally be called existence, and which, unlike musical time cannot be stopped, rewound, or restarted at will, has profound implications. Not only does it collapse the binary opposition between musi-cal or ideal time on the one hand, and ordinary or material time on the other, but, as Paiks, Kosugis, and Youngs compositions aptly demonstrate, it exposes the impossibility of the very notion of ideality since ideality hinges on purity, the unattainable state of untaintedness by things material and corporeal. By transferring deep listening, which makes time move [...] not an objective time out there, beyond ourselves, but the very personal time created within us as we listen deeply to music (Kramer 1988:6) to the realm of concrete reality, Paiks, Kosugis, and Youngs compositions sensitize the percipient to time as existence, that is to say to time as processuality and expressive activity always already underway in all things, beings, and phenom-ena. However, this work of pervasive musicalizing temporalization, which renders concrete, mate-rial time performative, is not only operative in Fluxus compositions but can also be found in a medium whose relationship to objective time is considered to be much more rigorously deter-mined, and that is film.

The Production of Lived Time in FluxFilms

In Time and Free Will as well as Creative Evolution, Henri Bergson likens scientific, objective, externalized, and spatialized time to cinematographic time (1960:81; 1911:329). The reason for this is the illusion of continuity created by the rapid succession of static frames only 1/24 of a second long, which, although static cannot be discerned as such by the naked human eye and are mistakenly perceived as a single, uninterrupted and continuous image. Bergsons refer-ence is not directed solely at the cinematographic projection but encompasses the entire cin-ematic procedure in which movement is filmed as continuous in real life, then mechanically broken down into a series of static single frames and subsequently projected as an illusion of continuity, imitative of the original continuous motion. In Creative Evolution Bergson compares this contrivance of the cinematograph (1911:332) to that of scientific and objective knowl-edge in general and objective notions of time in particular, which place the observing sub-ject outside the phenomena or processes observed: Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality (332). In contrast to the notion of divisibility into discrete and equal units or instants, exemplified by the succession of static

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frames whereby cinematographic time is understood to mean time placed at the service of the mechanics of the cinematic narrative, the Bergsonian concept of time is that of indivisible dura-tion withoutextensity.

Variously called duration, pure duration, and true duration, time is for Bergson a nonquantifi-able multiplicity, inseparable from its multiple states by an imaginary instant (1960:218). It is a permanent flux of qualitative change and as such permanently pregnant with creative potential. It is also characterized by interpenetration, or endosmosis the inward flow of a fluid through a permeable membrane toward a fluid of greater concentration of the different states of con-sciousness in which the past becomes immanent in the present, memory flows into perception, fantasy into reality, and the virtual into the actual. This is also the reason why time cannot be objectively conceptualized, externalized, divided into a series of smaller units of equal magni-tude whose divided state veils the continuous inner process of endosmosis. Like the successive notes of a tune (104) that both succeed one another and are perceived in one another (100), a comparison frequently used by Bergson as a way of avoiding spatial metaphors, pure duration is an inextensive multiplicity, a succession of qualitative changes which melt into and permeate one another, without precise outlines, without any tendency to externalize themselves in rela-tion to one another (104).

Although both Bergsons absolutistic terminology and his notions of spatial perception remain firmly bound by the early 20th-century zeitgeist, as not yet marked by phenomenol-ogy and its experiential self s concern-orientated conceptualization of space wherein an object an individual is looking at may be described as closer than the glasses they are using to look at the object, Bergsons notion of the spatialization of time denotes a fixed and ordered arrange-ment of clearly delineated units, reminiscent of a closed circuit. Thus visualized, spatialized time, of which cinematographic time is a variant, is closed, static, mechanistic, and teleologi-cal. To borrow a metaphor from Creative Evolution, it resembles a picture puzzle, which regard-less of how many times it is assembled and reassembled does not offer a change of content. Granted, there will be a change in experience accompanying the varying degree of speed and proficiency in composing the puzzle but the time permeating this action will remain inciden-tal, or, in Bergsons words, an accessory (1911:369). To contrast this notion of time reduced to mere time-length (372) with that of pure duration which is creative and productive and thus elevated to time-invention (372), Bergson uses the example of an artist and a blank can-vas where time is no longer an accessory [...;] it is not an interval that may be lengthened or shortened without the content being altered (370). The reason why cinematographic time is inert, according to Bergson, is because it does not produce pure duration, by which is meant an unpredictable interpenetration of images, but, instead, presents a mere succession.

Despite the fact that Bergsons views on cinematographywhich could be seen as lacking in breadthwere shaped by the early cinemas lack of formal complexity, whereas the evolu-tion of the cinema was to take place through montage and the elevation of the shot to a tempo-ral category, Bergsons point still has some validity. For although operative in the intertwining and permanently changing zone of the viewers lived and phenomenal time, film as a medium never theless remains contained in and by objective time, comparable to Bergsons puzzle. The notions of lived and phenomenal time are derived from two different sources: the phenom-enological accounts of temporality, such as those articulated by Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the Zen Buddhist views, as formulated by the Zen master Dogen and the Zen philosopher Kitaro Nishida. In Beyond Personal Identity, a comparative study of the phenom-enology of no-self, Gereon Kopf articulates the notion of phenomenal time in the following way: phenomenal time is posited by the experiential I who acknowledges its own temporality (2001:171). In other words, phenomenal time is constituted as the subjects external continu-ity, marked by the notion of finitude within which the subject relates to its past as to its factu-ality and perceives its future as its possibility. Lived time, by contrast, is the time established by the creative activity of the self (173) and refers primarily to the body. It is time experienced

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somatically that manifests its past and future by continually changing its relationship to its surroundings. However, while both phenomenal and lived time could be said to be in the sub-ject; objective time, most often conceptualized as a linear temporal progression from the past to the future, is placed outside the subject, or rather, the subject is placed outside of objective time. This means that while with each respective viewing a film may manifest or give rise to an entirely different phenomenal as well as lived temporality, depending on the viewers psy-chosomatic disposition and engagement, there still remains an element of unchanged objective time, fixed and made inert by the films length, tempo, and the structure of its internal, content- determining relationships.

In the cinematic production propelled by the cinematic narrative, it is also the objective tem-poral relationship between the speed of recording and the speed of projection that remains unchanged. The most striking feature of a number of FluxFilms is the fact that they temporal-ize the fixed and inert ratios between the recording and the projecting speed. In distorting one of the constituting features of cinematographic time, these films subvert the very notion of objective time.

Disappearing Music for Face is based on a 1964 score by Mieko Shiomi, which reads:

Performers begin the piece with a smile and during the duration of the piece change the smile very slowly and gradually to no smile. (in Friedman 1990:49)

It was performed in 1966 by Yoko Ono and shot using a high-speed slow-motion camera. The effect of this was that Onos disappearing smile, filmed in eight seconds of real time, resulted in 11 minutes of screen time when projected at normal speed. Because of the colossal dispro-portion between the duration of the action performed in real time and its highly temporally extended transposition to projection time (the proportion being 1:82), as well as the extreme close up that frames Onos lips, chin, and cheek in a way that temporalizes the spatial dimension of the shot by magnifying it thus creating a temporal stretch Disappearing Music for Face manifests extreme temporal thickness. The term temporal thickness is often used in time theory to refer to the rich texture of the temporal dimension composed of complete specious presents. As Francisco Varela explains in The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness, the specious present, which is the smallest unit of temporal thickness is itself composed of multiple temporal streamings (1997:n.p.).

Although Varela resorts to a spatial metaphor that of a field with a center representative of the now moment, bounded by a horizon or fringe of what has just past, also referred to as retention, and the horizon or fringe of what is about to happen, also referred to as pro-tention he insists on the mobility of these horizons, the texture of the movement, and the integration of the different frameworks of temporal perception (1997:n.p.). The effect this multi dimensional streaming has on perception in general and the perception of objects in particular is that it isolates and magnifies them in the sense of bringing them closer to the observer. As Midori Yoshimoto points out in Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York, the original intention of Shiomis score was to visualize a diminuendo of music by human action (2005:145). In other words, the intention was to transpose the gradual and extenuating nearing of the threshold of audibility (often accompanied by the minute tuning of the listeners aural attention to the subtleties of liminal sound), to a simple movement human beings perform on a daily basis. In the film version of Disappearing Music for Face, this diminuendo is effectu-ated by two intertwined cinematic elements: a tempo just quick enough for the movement of the disappearing smile to remain discernible throughout the film and a shot just long (far away) enough for the shapes in the shot to remain discernible as belonging to a human face. Both the fact that the movement of the disappearing smile is almost imperceptible but never quite per-ceived as static, and that the features of Onos face appear abstract but never melt entirely into a nonfigurative composition, point to a threshold phenomenon, a state of permanent oscillation. For Varela, the retentive-protentive temporal integration produced by the specious present is a

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permanently oscillating, perma-nently slipping process. While retention retains phases of the perceptual act by causing a pro-gressive slowing down of the velocity of perception or a slip-page (Varela 1997:n.p.); pro-tention links this slippage into affection. The parallel work-ing of retention and protention thus slows down the velocity of perception while producing an affective coloring that feeds back into retention and in this way produces a cumulative decelera-tion, a gradually distending dis-tension. By distorting the ratio between recording time and projection time, Disappearing Music for Face introduces what could be called a creative warp into objective cinematographic time within which the affec-tively colored mellower, softer, looser distension of the spe-cious present occurs. The colos-sal discrepancy between the average duration of a disappear-ing smile in real life and 11 min-utes of cinematic duration causes a progressive temporal swelling and alters the viewers sense of lived time by slowing down her breathing and bodily movement. What this means is that Disappearing Music for Face effec-tively perpetuates the production of time within the films objective duration and does precisely that which Bergson accused cinematographic or inert time of being incapable of doing.

The Continuity of Discontinuity

In a similar fashion, Nam June Paiks 1964 Zen for Film, engages the viewer in the produc-tion of time as a simultaneously continuous and discontinuous phenomenon. However, unlike Disappearing Music for Face, it does not belong to the category of slow films. Consisting of a roll of 16 mm film, a clear leader whose objective or closed running time is approximately 30 minutes, Paiks Zen for Film exposes the cinematic medium the blank celluloid and the projection apparatus to the cinematic gaze, devoid of any recorded material or any cinematic narrative-created temporal content. Instead, the film discloses what Paik has termed abstract time: time without contents (in Kaye 2007:52). This notion, as the Fluxus scholar Bruce Jenkins points out, is not only in sharp contrast to the pastness of filmic representation, with its indexical claims to capturing actual, pre-existing phenomena, it also

posits a concrete present in its moving-image tale of the celluloids journey through the transport mechanism of the projector [...,] a tale unique in each telling as Zen for Film was visibly changed by each viewing and maintained on its celluloid surface a record of those observations and screenings in the form of accumulated scratches, dust, dirt, rips and splices. (1993:137)

Figure 3. Mieko Shiomi, Disappearing Music for Face, 1966. (Photo by Peter Moore Estate of Peter Moore/VAGA, NYC)

This image has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Please refer to the print version.

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Paradoxically, the temporal structure of Zen for Film seems to be both continuous and discontinuous.

This structure is best understood through the prism of Kitaro Nishidas notion of the con-tinuity of discontinuity (1970:6), part of his Zen- as well as Bergson-influenced theory of tem-porality. This theory is rooted in the logic of basho whereby basho means that in which and is permanently engaged in a dialectical relationship with that which or in other words, the content of basho. The present is, according to Nishida, the basho of time and so is the self (67). Continuous time, flowing from the past to the future is both determined by discontinu-ity and is located in discontinuity, discontinuity being the basho of continuity. In other words, every new moment is different from the previous precisely because it is discontinuous. Each present is severed from the past present by a non-present, which means that continuous time disappears and is determined again in the next present.

This discontinuous time is located in something Nishida calls the eternal present: The past flows while turning to the present, whereas the future flows while turning to the present. Our world comes from the present and returns to the present (117). The notion of the eter-nal present as the basho of time, or that in which time turns ought to be understood in the context of the Zen tradition where the word eternal does not refer to transcendence. Not coming from the two world heritage characteristic of the Western metaphysical tradition in which immanent time is a linear construct, a sequential progression of instants, while eternity is placed entirely outside time, Nishidas eternal present is a dialectical concept rooted in the Zen Buddhist notion of momentariness and impermanence. This notion suggests that all exist-ents without exception are nonsubstantive and nonpermanent events, which, instead of mov-ing in time, are temporal in nature. All existents thus last only a moment they come into existence and go out of existence immediately afterwards. If a perceptual object m changes and from m mutates to m*, the state of m-ness will be destroyed and replaced by the state of m*-ness, which will in turn be destroyed and replaced by the state of m+-ness and so on ad infini-tum. The rapid succession as well as gradual variation in structure will make the states of m, m* and m+ appear identical and continuous and each present moment or existent will both deter-mine the percipients mode of perception and determine the next moment or existent. It is this processual dialectics of the eternal present or the continuity of discontinuity that Zen for Film brings intofocus.

In revealing a vast amount of flickering visual detail, Zen for Film resembles a microscopic view of a surface normally thought to be homogenous and temporally persistent in its mono-lithic identity if observed by the naked human eye but which turns into a flux of swarm-ing micro life, full of incessant biological transactions, when magnified. From the perspective of the Zen Buddhist notion of momentariness the static film frames are moments or exist-ents. Each subtly different from the next, their succession is translated into continuity by the working of the projecting apparatus, much like the momentariness of noncontinuous exist-ents is translated into continuous time by the working of the human brain. Because of the deteriorating nature of the material the celluloid as well as the numerous textural altera-tions inflicted by multiple projections, Zen for Film will in fact reveal the discontinuous, per-manently changing nature of continuity if viewed several times in a row. If, however, viewed several times over a longer period of time, such as a few years or a decade, the representational function of memory, which tends to freeze and archive the most essential features (the rea-son why we remember the smallness of a child we have not seen for 10 years, rather than the color of his or her eyes, and are invariably surprised by the fact that this essential feature has been replaced by another, contradictory feature, that of bigness), might make the film seem unchanged. This is due to the unifying nature of the subjects sense of phenomenal time, which has the power to thingify occurrences, processes, and phenomena experienced in order to turn them into milestones within the subjects perception of its own deployment in time as a tem-porally persistent, continuous entity. The temporal position from which Zen for Film will appear unchanged, thus itself also a continuous and temporally persistent entity, is that of a perspec-

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tivally construed continuity, which testifies to the possibility of alterity, namely discontinuity. As regards the immediate temporal experience of watching Zen for Film, it, too, shows itself to be woven entirely of the threads generated by the viewers perception, whether her retentive- protentive or associative mode of attention. Because the film has no cinematic content and because the only content is indeed the viewers own virtual content, the temporal dimension of Zen for Film is inherently performative. This is to say that, unlike the films with a cinematic content, whose tempo and narrative temporality operate along a mirror-like actual-virtual axis, involving the actual images and the viewers interpretative processing of these images, Zen for Film unfolds entirely in the arena of the viewers virtuality, thus making her inner temporality performative. The relationship between the percipients performance of her virtual content and what Paik has termed the abstract time of the blank celluloid reflects one of the primary pos-tulates of Zen, which, as Nishida suggests in reference to numerous Zen masters, is that form is emptiness and emptiness form ([1987] 1993:103).

Zen for Film is a processual interaction between form and emptiness the form given to emptiness by the viewing subject, which, while becoming the object of the subjects contempla-tion reciprocally gives form to the viewing subject. This dialectical determination is the eter-nal present whose paradoxical formulation indicates that while the fleeting existents can only appear as momentary configurations of emptiness, emptiness can in turn only appear in and asexistents.

The Braiding of Lived and Phenomenal Time in Durational Performance

This continuous mutual configuration between form and emptiness, between the already- existing and the not-yet-existing, created in the present activity as a movement from the pres-ent to the present and from the created to the creating (Nishida [1987] 1993:108), is further deployed on two different but mutually configuring time scales that of lived and phenomenal time in Fluxus durational performance, most notably Alison Knowless Identical Lunch.

Described by Knowles as her noonday meditation (in Corner 1973:1), The Identical Lunch was first discovered as a temporal objet trouv (an action Knowles performed every day), by her fellow artist Philip Corner and subsequently elevated into a formal score (1, emphasis added). The formal score read: a tunafish sandwich on wheat toast with lettuce and butter, no mayo, and a glass of buttermilk or a cup of soup (1). From the moment of its formal inception in February 1969, Knowles performed the score for a period of over a year, at exactly the same place, the Riss Restaurant in New York, and approximately the same time of day. Numerous other performers have also performed the score since then, at the Riss and elsewhere. As Jim Maya puts it in the Journal of the Identical Lunch (Knowless collection of her own and other per-formers observations): The identical lunch food demands little or no thought: the surrounding activities take all your thought: The waitress, her hair, her lips, the napkins. Their embossments or lack of embossments. The stools, the chairs, the heat. When youve finished You hardly know youve eaten (in Knowles 1971:n.p.). This view, essentially expounding the transparency of habit which, once practice-ingrained and sequence-locked, no longer requires the per-formers full attention and frees it up for the unforeseen, the marginal, and the accidental is shared by numerous other performers. Knowless own entries reflect her engagement with time as a process of becoming a continuous elaboration through differentiation and range from observations about the varying quality of the fish: tunafish is very watery; it is mid-week (11); the shape of the sandwich: for the first time the sandwich comes uncut (12); the difference in staff who serve her: L is young and Greek (13); to the impact she has on others, such as when a burn on her cheek makes those sitting opposite her eat hurriedly and leave (16).

By thematizing the continuous emergence of continuously proliferating differentiations, The Identical Lunch renders palpable the Nishidian notion of the eternal present. Here, the phenomenal continuity of the noonday lunch situation, part of the performers own continuity

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and thus history as well as narrative identity, is determined always anew in the discontinuity of disparate moments of which the performers lived time consists her physical disposition, the smell of the soup coming from the kitchen, the sogginess of the sandwich, or the absence ofnapkins.

Although determined by the performers past experiences, her perceptual frame is man-ifested in the present, and it is in the present that the prospective framing of futural events occurs. Every past and every future is in this sense manifested in the present and occurs always and only in the present. This means that the performers phenomenal continuity cannot be a preexperiential given but that it becomes apparent or, is constituted only in situations that frame the disparate sequence of events as continuity. Both situational continuity and per-sonal continuity are very closely linked to what might be termed experiential velocity, the speed with which we process experiences and relegate them to the rank of sameness or usu-alness. In perceptual terms, this rank equals background. Much like Cages 1952 49330 which requires the performer to remain silent for the duration of 4 minutes and 33 seconds and in this way draws attention to all events in time-space framed by this duration The Identical Lunch draws attention to the fact that there is no silence and no background. Rather, it amplifies the transparency of habitualization, which, paradoxically, is only felt when disrupted by an irregu-larity, which in turn gives rise to a change in affective coloring. In this sense, the score initiates the durational performer in a de-transparentization of the process of habitualization by collapsing the opposition between lived and phenomenal time. In contrast to lived time, which is essen-tially an interaction between the environment and the somatic self as expressive of past habit-ualizations and futural anticipations; phenomenal time is constituted as an externally viewed, larger scale amalgamation of the same habitualizations and anticipations. Phenomenal time forms the horizon of the subjects past and future within which a narrative identity is produced. Within this horizon the subject comes to view herself externally, as a coherent whole, a person who always fights injustice or laughs in the face of life. However, if phenomenal continuity is viewed from the perspective of lived experience that temporalizes and unifies past-and-future inside the present (Nishida [1987] 1993:137), phenomenal time is always already part of the temporalization and cannot posit the subjects past and future as some sort of external other.

Habit formation is thus the structuring activity of temporalization in which the past configures the present and the present simultaneously configures the future, thus creating new perceptual matrixes and consolidating old ones. In this sense, The Identical Lunch performs the braiding of lived and phenomenal time, which, like the continuity of discontinuity, does not denote two opposed processes or species of time, but exemplifies unification through perpetual differenti-ation. In involving the performer in a close examination of emergent affective tonalities active in the constitution of her lived temporality, which further leads to the formation of attitudes and personality, The Identical Lunch sensitizes the performer to the process of personal becoming. This process relates to the performers phenomenal continuity in the same way that temporaliza-tion relates to time. Much as time is temporalization and not its externally viewed and atem-poral other, phenomenal continuity is personal becoming the formation and differentiation of likes, dislikes, emotional and cognitive habits and not a congealed whole personality or identity. It is thus not only the elaboration and differentiation of the world around the per-former that takes place within the durational temporal activity of Knowless score, but also her own individuation.

In this sense, The Identical Lunch, like One for Violin Solo, Disappearing Music for Face, and Zen for Film, performs time by involving the percipient/performer in listening deeply to the dialec-tical, ordinary-musical, actual-virtual, lived-phenomenal production of existence, the only dif-ference being that of scale. Whether lasting several minutes or a year, these pieces produce pure duration, a qualitative, multisensorially texturized, musicalized immersion in the thickness ofexistence.

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