In this article, the author at first talks about how the Fluxus movement is all about the connections between different forms of media. He then goes on to illustrate these connections in the context of musical performances by various Fluxus artists. The first of these performances was 4' 33''. This piece involved the performer sitting at a piano and doing nothing but opening and closing the piano at certain intervals for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. The audience is supposed to notice the noises that they normally ignore, like the sounds of their pulse and the murmurs of the other audience members. The article states that it is a kind of social music. To be honest, I find the idea of this performance astonishingly stupid. I suppose I might be thinking about it too literally, but if I go to a “musical” performance, I want to hear some music, not sit there and watch someone do nothing.
Other things discussed in the article seemed a bit more interesting and relevant to the topic of intermedia art. One of the things that I found really interesting was the idea of the visual aspect of music. The part that made me think more about it was about a piece that, similar to the previous one, was about simply trying to close the piano lid in a such a way that it is inaudible to the performer doing this action. The article talked about the visual aspect of this performance, though the performance is written as a piece of music. While, again, I found the idea of the performance boring, the idea of visual aspects of music was interesting. Another interesting piece was the one where La Monte Young used the visual elements of fire and water to create music.
While a few were interesting, most of the performances in this article did not sound interesting at all. Some were downright stupid, and one in particular managed to be stupid and disgusting at the same time.
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