George Brecht (August 27, 1926 – December 5, 2008), born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer, as well as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Mobil Oil. He was a key member of, and influence on, Fluxus, the international group of avant-garde artists centred on George Maciunas, having been involved with the group from the first performances in Wiesbaden 1962 until Maciunas' death in 1978.
One of the originators of participatory art,George Brecht: Events, A Heterospective, Robinson, Walter König, p36 in which the artwork can only be experienced by the active involvement of the viewer, he is most famous for his Event Scores such as Drip Music 1962, and is widely seen as an important precursor to conceptual art.Independent ObituaryBrecht is the first artist mentioned in the text of Lucy Lippard's seminal history of Conceptual Art, Six years: the dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972, and is referred to as 'Independently and in association with the fluxus group, Brecht has been making "events" that have anticipated a stricter "conceptual art" since around 1960.' Six Years, Lucy R Lippard, University of California Press, 1973, p11Brecht used the term as early as 1957–58 in an essay Project in Multiple Dimensions; 'The primary function of my art seems to be an expression of maximum meaning with a minimal image, that is, the achievement of an art of multiple implications, through simple, even austere, means. This is accomplished, it seems to me, by making use of all available conceptual and material resources.' Quoted in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, K Stiles, P Selz, University of California Press, 1996 p333 He described his own art as a way of "ensuring that the details of everyday life, the random constellations of objects that surround us, stop going unnoticed."
Biography
Early life Brecht was born George Ellis MacDiarmid in New York, August 27, 1926.The reference to Halfway, Oregon, was a joke that appeared in an early fluxus periodical. A more reliable date is given in the book accompanying the major retrospective in Cologne, 2005; George Brecht Events; A Heterospective, p306 Robinson, Walter König His father, also George Ellis MacDiarmid, was a professional flautist who had toured with John Philip Sousa's marching band before settling in New York to play bass flute for the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and the NBC Symphony Orchestra.Obituary, New York Times After his father's death from alcoholism when Brecht was 10 years old,The Johnston Letters, Jill Johnston he moved with his mother to Atlantic City, New Jersey. He enlisted for military service in 1943, and it was whilst he was stationed near the Black Forest, Germany, 1945, that he changed his surname to 'Brecht' – 'not in reference to Bertolt Brecht, but because he liked the sound of the name'.
After World War II, he studied chemistry at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy & Science, finishing his degree and marrying his first wife Marceline in 1951. After working briefly for Charles Pfizer & Co as a quality control inspector, he took a job as a research chemist for Johnson & Johnson in 1953, settling in New Jersey. Over the next decade he would register 5 US patents and 2 co-patentsGeorge Brecht Events; A Heterospective, p306 Robinson, Walter König 2005 including four patents for tampons.He was sufficiently proud of these to include these patents in his Heterospective, Cologne 2005 His only son Eric was born in New Jersey in 1953.
Toward events Whilst working as a chemist (a job that he would keep until 1965), Brecht became increasingly interested in art that explored chance. Initially influenced by Jackson Pollock, and Robert Rauschenberg – Rauschenberg's exhibition of grass seeds, Growing Painting, 1954, left 'a significant impression on him' – he began to formulate ideas about 'chance method schemes' that would eventually be printed as a booklet by the Something Else Press as Chance Imagery (1957/66). The work was 'a systematic investigation of the role of chance in the 20th century in the fields of science and avant-garde art... reveal[ing] his respect for Dadaist and surrealist projects as well as for the more complex aspects of the work of Marcel Duchamp, whom he considered the embodiment of the 'artist-researcher'. Artworks in this period included bed-sheets stained with ink he called Chance Paintings.
In 1957, Brecht sought out the artist Robert Watts, after seeing his work exhibited at Douglass College, Rutgers University, where Watts taught. This led to lunch meetings once a week for a number of years at a cafe between the university and Brecht's laboratory.An Interview with George Brecht Watts' colleague Allan Kaprow would also regularly attend these informal meetings. Discussions at these lunches would lead directly to the setting up of the Yam Festival, 1962–63, by Watts and Brecht, seen as one of the most important precursors to Fluxus.Essay on Fluxus by Michael Corris, MOMA online The meetings also led to both Brecht and Kaprow attending John Cage's class at The New School for Social Research, New York, often driving down together from New Brunswick.
John Cage and the New School for Social Research Brecht studied with John Cage between 1958 and 1959,According to Julia Robinson, the first event score was 'Time-table Music', in which the whole class went to Grand Central Station 'where they used train timetables to create a composition, timing their visual, auditory and perceptual observations at the site.' see during which time he invented, and then refined, the Event ScoreKristine Stiles & Peter Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings (Second Edition, Revised and Expanded by Kristine Stiles) University of California Press 2012, p. 333Alison Knowles Website which would become a central feature of Fluxus. Typically, Event Scores are simple instructions to complete everyday tasks which can be performed publicly, privately, or negatively (i.e., deciding not to perform them at all). These ideas would be taken up and expanded upon by La Monte Young, Yoko Ono and many other avant-garde artists who passed through these classes.Allan Kaprow in conversation with Sidney Simon, early 70's. Quoted in George Brecht Events; A Heterospective, Robinson, Walter König p264 The two had originally met in 1957 when Brecht heard that Cage was planning to hunt mushrooms in the New Jersey area; he rang him up and invited him to 'stop by and say hello'. Cage accepted, and returned the invitation; it was whilst Brecht, Kaprow and their families were visiting his house in Stony Point on the Hudson, that Cage invited them to attend his classes in New York. Ironically, musicians found the course far harder than the visual artists who had enrolled; "Cage... was very keenly a philosophical mind, not just an artist's mind; his sense of aesthetics was secondary and thought was primary. He impressed me immediately. So I thought, well, who cares if he's a musician and I'm a painter. This is unimportant. It's the mind that transcends any medium..... "The rate of attrition was something fierce. The end result was that there were very few musician types and the event nature of the class became apparent. George Brecht's understanding of an intimate situation was far greater than mine. I needed more space to really work. But George really came to life in that situation..... He became a leader; and immediately he influenced not only me, but everybody else: Jackson Maclow, Higgins, Hansen. George Segal stopped by, and so did Dine, Whitman and Oldenburg." Allan Kaprow Initially writing theatrical scores similar to Kaprow's earliest Happenings, Brecht grew increasingly dissatisfied with the didactic nature of these performances. After performing in one such piece, Cage quipped that he'd "never felt so controlled before," prompting Brecht to pare the scores down to haiku-like statements, leaving space for radically different interpretations each time the piece was performed. Brecht would later refer to Cage as his 'liberator', whilst, in the opinion of some critics,George Brecht, Oxford Art Online moving beyond Cage's notion of music; Cage was still writing scores to be performed. Brecht had replaced this with a world permeated with music. "No matter what you do," he said, "you're always hearing something."
In October 1959, fresh from studying with Cage, Brecht organized his first one-man show at the Reuben Gallery, New York. Called Towards Events: An Arrangement, it was neither an exhibition of objects nor a performance, but somewhere in between.George Brecht Events; A Heterospective, Robinson, Walter König p34 Comprising works that emphasised time, the works could be manipulated by the viewer in various ways, revealing sounds, smells and tactile textures. One, Case, instructed viewers to unpack the contents and to use them 'in ways appropriate to their nature.' This work would become Valoche (see ), the last Fluxus multiple that George Maciunas, the 'Chairman' of Fluxus, would work on before his death 19 years later.Koan, from the same show, would also be considered as a Fluxus multiple, but only got so far as two incomplete maquettes, renamed 'A Question or More'. See Fluxus Codex, p183
New York avant-garde
Flute Solo In a frequently retold anecdote used to describe the origins of one of Brecht's most personal Event Scores, the artist recalled an incident when his father had a 'nervous breakdown' during a rehearsal at the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra: '[A] soprano was bugging everybody with temper tantrums during rehearsal. At a certain point the orchestra crashed onto a major seventh and there was silence for the soprano and flute cadenza. Nothing happened. The soprano looked into the orchestra pit and saw that my father had completely taken apart his flute, down to the last screw. (I used this idea in my 1962 FLUTE SOLO).'GB in interview with Michael Nyman, quoted in George Brecht Events; A Heterospective, Robinson, Walter König p284 Michael Nyman, the interviewer, responded that in Brecht's work "sound-producing instruments [in the Event-Scores] have been made mute (the violin, in Solo for Violin Viola Cello or Contrabass, is polished, not played), and non-sounding instruments, or non-instruments, for instance a comb (Comb Music, 1962) are made sounding." Another piece, Solo for Wind Instrument, contained the single instruction (putting it down).
Later in his life, when asked about his father, Brecht replied that "[he] gave up music-making in the mid-'30s by lying down and not breathing any more on the couch at 165 W. 82nd Street, where we were living at the time."
Yam Festival As Brecht's interest in Event Scores began to dominate his output, he started to mail small cards bearing the scores to various friends "like little enlightenments I wanted to communicate to my friends who would know what to do with them.Brecht quoted in A Heterospective, p70"
This method of distribution – soon to become known as mail art – would become the basis for the buildup to the Yam Festival (May backwards), mid 1962 – May 1963, organized with Robert Watts. The mailed scores were intended to build anticipation for a monthlong series of events held in New York and on George Segal's farm, New Jersey. Featuring a large cross section of avant-garde artists, the festival was based around the idea of operating 'as an alternative to the gallery system, producing art that could not be bought'.A Heterospective, p68 Artists participating in the festival included Alison Knowles, Allan Kaprow, John Cage, Al Hansen, Ay-O, Dick Higgins, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Ray Johnson. The festival has come to be seen as a proto-fluxus event, involving many of the same artists.