“One evening I was walking along Hollywood Boulevard, nothing much to do. I stopped and looked in the window of a stationery shop. A mechanized pen was suspended in space in such a way that, as a mechanized roll of paper passed by it, the pen went through the motions of the same penmanship exercises I had learned as a child in the third grade. Centrally placed in the window was an advertisement explaining the mechanical reasons for the perfection of the operation of the suspended mechanical pen.

I was fascinated, for everything was going wrong. The pen was tearing the paper to shreds and splattering ink all over the window and on the advertisement, which, nevertheless, remained legible.”

(John Cage, from “How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run” in A Year from Monday, p. 134. Interestingly online here.)

“Take a Larousse dict. and copy all the so-called “abstract” words. i.e., those which have no concrete reference.

Compose a schematic sign designating each of these words. (this sign can be composed with the standard stops.)

These signs must be thought of as the letters of the new alphabet.

A grouping of several signs will determine

(utilize colors – in order to differentiate what would correspond in this [literature] to the substantive, verb, adverb declensions, conjugations etc.)

Necessity for ideal continuity. i.e.: each grouping will be connected with the other groupings by a strict meaning (a sort of grammar, no longer requiring a pedagogical sentence construction. But, apart from the differences of languages, and the “figures of speech” peculiar to each language – weighs and measures some abstractions of substantives, of negatives, of relations of subject to verb, etc, by means of standard signs. (representing these new relations: conjugations, declensions, plural and singular, adjectivation inexpressible by the concrete alphabetic forms of languages living now and to come.).

This alphabet very probably is only suitable for the description of this picture.”

(Duchamp, note from The Green Box (published 1934), trans. George Heard Hamilton.)

“. . . And all the while, accompanying my every step, The Photographer is sounding in my head, purling incessantly through my clamped-on Walkman; it’s a good piece, Glass’s homage to Muybridge, minimalism used to maximal effect: with its repeating rhythms, endlessly rechurning, the music resembles a wave that doesn’t move, a standing wave; that’s what you listen to, the change and unchange of the wave, not any emergent melody: listening not above, but within; nowadays, I sit in Meador Park for hours on end plumbing the piece, turning the cassette over and over to extend it indefinitely; and it goes, the music just goes, without faltering, without hesitation, not depleted through repetition, but enriched; and as it goes – without faltering, without hesitation – the rapid-rushing piece instantly becomes the soundtrack to what I am looking at, regardless of what it may be: the varied tilts of oldsters’ hats, wind-gusts corduroying the park’s grass, the sparkling of pram wheels, children stepping onto the water fountain’s access ledge and hunchbacking behind their button-pushing hand and jutting lips; the music suits it all perfectly, uncannily, as absolutely apt accompaniment, the spirit of vision converted into onflowing sound; further it works just as well in the other direction: whatever I see also functions as a perfect illustration of The Photographer’s ceaseless undulant nattering; every event and gesture in my visual field – bicycle-spokes fanning, pinkie balls trickling across the ruffling green – seems to spring from some hidden imperatives of this unheard music: sight and sound have adhesive properties of which I had never before dreamed . . .

. . . It’s a question, really of figure and ground, of learning to integrate the two: of linking the landscape to the flamelike cypress thrusting up within it, of considering the World along with Cristina: dissolving patterns into particles . . . ; and I, for one, am perfectly positioned to make such investigations: I am either a bland assemblage of denim, sweatcloth, sneaks, connecting flesh and Walkman scudding through the streets of Springfield, barely perceptible in its random passages, or an indrawn 19-year-old with slightly stooped posture who has run away; it depends on whom you ask for the description: me, or anyone else in the world but me; figure and ground; figure or ground; but who, since Muybridge, even looks at the ground?; and Cristina was a cripple—”

(Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook (1995), pp.8–9)

A Something
Else Manifesto
by Dick Higgins

When asked what one is doing, one can only explain it as “something else.” Now one does something big, now one does something small, now another big thing, now another little thing. Always it is something else.

We can talk about a thing, but we cannot talk a thing. It is always something else.

One might well emphasize this. It happens, doesn’t it? Actually, everybody might be in on this Something Else, whether he wants it or not. Everyman is.

For what is one confined in one’s activity? Commitment on a personal level can be plural. One can be committed to both salads and fish, political action and photographic engineering, art and non-art. One does, we hope, what seems necessary, or, at least, not extraneous, not simply that to which one has committed oneself. One doesn’t want to be like the little German who hated the little Menshevik because the little German always did his things in a roll format, and when the little Menshevik did that kind of thing too, the little German got into a tizzy. If one is consistent and inconsistent often enough nothing that one does is one’s own, certainly not a form, which is only a part of speech in one’s language. One must take special care not to influence oneself. Tomorrow one will write Schubert’s Fifth Symphony, cook some kohlrabi, develop a non-toxic epoxy, and invent still another kind of theater; or perhaps one will just sit and scream; or perhaps . . .

When you touch a fact it is a fact. No idea is clear to us until a little soup has been spilled on it.

So when we are asked for bread, let’s give not stones, not stale bread. Maybe we have no bread at all, anyway. But why not give a little chicken?

Let’s chase down an art that clucks and fills our guts.

(From Manifestos, a Great Bear Pamphlet from 1966 containing various manifestos.)