In the latest antidote to the algorithm, Robert Barry looks at the vinyl releases of the pivotal Fluxus movement – records that often resulted from the destruction of their peers
(Si apre in una nuova finestra)
In 1963, Nam June Paik made a doner kebab out of records. Born in Seoul in 1932, the irrepressible artist and composer had moved to Germany in 1957 to study music at the University of Munich. Soon after he fell in with Karlheinz Stockhausen and his soon-to-be-wife, the artist Mary Bauermeister in Cologne, after meeting the composer at the Darmstadt new music summer school. It was at Bauermeister’s atelier that Paik subsequently encountered John Cage, cutting off his tie and emptying a bottle of shampoo on his head in the middle of a performance there one night in 1960. Cage, apparently, was “terrified”, but also, somewhat fascinated. He paid close attention to the younger artist’s work from then on.
It was at Paik’s first solo gallery show in Wuppertal, in 1963, that he originally presented his sculpture Schallplatten-Schaschlik: a rickety tower of phonograph discs (‘Schallplatten’ in German) standing tall on a single spindle resembling the rotating meat-slathered spits familiar from Turkish eateries. Visitors to the gallery could place a record player tone arm at any point on the dozen-odd spinning discs to create their own aleatoric turntablist composition. Hence, the work’s subtitle: Random Access.
The previous year, Paik had participated in the very first Fluxus festival of new music in Wiesbaden. With Benjamin Patterson, George Maciunas and others, he studiously smashed at the strings of a piano in a performance of a work by Philip Corner and dipped his tie in a pot of paint then dragged it across a long stretch of paper on the floor by way of interpreting the single instruction that comprises La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #10 (“Draw a straight line and follow it”). There were no record players on stage at that first Fluxfest in Germany, but following Paik’s lead, the format would play a major part in the movement’s future – unsurprising, perhaps, given that several artists who went on to play a significant part in the group (such as Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, Robert Watts and George Brecht) had spent the late 50s studying experimental music with John Cage, who had pioneered the use of phonographs in his Imaginary Landscape series of 1939 to 52.
When Germano Celant curated ‘The Record as Artwork’ at the RCA in 1973, he included platters by Kaprow, along with other artists associated with Fluxus, such as Joseph Beuys and Henning Christiansen. Later exhibitions of artists’ albums, such as Ursula Block and Michael Glasmeier’s Broken Music at the Daadgalerie, Berlin, included numerous works by Paik, Kaprow, Brecht, Beuys and Christiansen, alongside recordings from Fluxus events, documenting performances by Watts and Ben Vautier. Others were made specifically as records, and some, like Paik’s vinyl shashlik, use LPs and 7” as the raw material to make new work – sometimes in rather alarming ways. What these discs tend to have in common is a certain sense of anarchy and insurgency – not to mention an especially deadpan humour.
I would never be able to afford anything once exhibited by Celant or Block. Beuys’ Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee, in particular, recorded at a Fluxus concert in Düsseldorf in 1968, now goes for absolutely silly money, despite being originally issued in an edition of several hundred. But at a certain point, thanks to the magic of Discogs, I did manage to start picking up a few slabs of Fluxus-adjacent wax. I think it started during the pandemic. While you were busy doing High Intensity Interval Training with Joe Wicks and whispering sweet nothings to your sourdough starter, I was poring over Items For Sale lists and weighing up whether I could really justify laying down £40 for an album in which one woman records herself flushing the toilet and a Frenchman whistles like a bird.
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10/07/2026