Gino Severini - futurism and dance

The credit crunch clearly hasn't hit the world of super-rich art collecting - last week Danseuse (above), a 1915 painting by the Futurist artist Gino Severini sold for more than £15 million at Sotheby's.

Unlike some of his Futurist contemporaries, Severini (1883-1966) seems to have been at least as interested in the flow of the human form as in that of machines, and a number of his paintings feature the figure of the dancer. Severini frequented dance halls and cafés when he was living in Paris before the First World War, including the famous Bal Tabarin nightclub in Montmartre which opened in 1912 and featured in one of his paintings.

Blue Dancer (Ballerina blu), 1912

Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin, 1912.

Sea=Dancer (Mare=Ballerina), 1914

Fluxus and musical notation

At Tate Modern last month, the Long Weekend (24th to 26th May) included a series of free concerts featuring musical scores and events by Fluxus artists. I saw a performance of Ay-O’s ‘Rainbow No. 2 for Orchestra’ ('A totally inexperienced orchestra plays a 7 note major scale on various instruments' – in this case including banjo, bagpipes and harp); Takehisa Kosugi’s MICRO 1; the 1963 piece F/H Trace by Robert Watts ('A French horn is filled ping-pong balls. Performer enters the stage, faces the audience, and bows toward the audience so that the objects cascade out of the bell of the horn into the audience'); and a Willem de Ridder flute piece (performed by the man himself).

Other musical events which I didn’t see included performances of Yoko Ono’s Sky Piece for Jesus Christ (1965 - a chamber orchestra is gradually wrapped in bandages) ; Anagram for Strings (Yasunao Tone, 1963); Alison Knowles conducting her Newspaper Music (1965 – performers read from newspapers in time and volume according to composer’s instructions); Solo for Balloons by George Maciunas (see image); and various responses to La Monte Young’s Draw a Straight Line and Follow It.

All of these works from the early 1960s high point of Fluxus are characterised by a playful approach to performance and notation, as well as an implicit critique of the role of the artistic or musical specialist – in the programme Alice Koegel (curator) notes: ‘One of the most unique aspects of Fluxus was the ‘free license’ that artists gave one another in interpreting their works. In fact, many Fluxus objects and performances began as a text or score open to interpretation by anyone at any time’. An invite for the Festival of Misfits in London in 1962 declared: 'We make music which is not Music, poems that are not Poetry, paintings that are not Painting, but music that may fit poetry, poetry that may fit paintings, paintings that may fit... something'.

Related territory is explored in an article by Simon Yuill in the latest edition of Mute magazine, All problems of notation will be sold by the masses. Yuill compares the recent practice of livecoding – where music is generated by writing and playing around with software code – with previous collaborative experimental efforts to step outside of traditional musical notation, including Cornelius Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra (1969-1972) and the work of jazz musicians such as Sun Ra.

I was struck by the fact that Ornette Coleman used the term ‘free playing’ in opposition to the term ‘improvisation’ ‘on the grounds it was often applied to black music by white audiences to emphasise some innate intuitive musicality that denied the heritage of skills and formal traditions that the black musician drew upon’ (Yuill). He quotes Coleman’s statement that ‘during the time when segregation was strong… the [black] musicians had to go on stage without any written music. The musicians would be backstage, look at the music, then leave the music there and go out and play it… they had a more saleable appeal if they pretended to not know what they were doing. The white audience felt safer’. As someone’s who shares Simon Reynolds’ (and evidently Steve Albini’s) instinctive suspicion of some aspects of jazz improvisation, this is music to my ears

(I freely admit that my scanty knowledge of jazz precludes making any meaningful judgment about it. I vividly remember a conversation at a party years ago - it was in a squat in St Agnes Place in South London- in which I had this epiphany that the universe of music is full of more worlds than anyone could have time to fully explore in one lifetime. Later I decided that I would never again force myself to try and like music that didn’t appeal to me just because it was cool when there was so much music that did appeal to me that I didn’t have time to listen to. For me at least, life is too short for jazz - or at least it has been so far. Like a bit of Sun Ra though!)

Yoko Ono's Do It Yourself Dance Festival

Yoko Ono's '13 Days Do it Yourself Dance Festival’ was, I believe, first 'held' in England in September 1967 - although 'held' is perhaps not quite the right word as it was a festival that took place in the imagination of participants who received a daily instructional postcard from Yoko for its duration. John Lennon was amongst those who took part. The first postcard said ‘Breathe at Midnight’, followed by 'Breathe at Dawn'. The last one read ‘Colour yourself. Wait for the spring to come. Let us know when it comes’.

The Festival has been repeated a number of times since, including via radio in Norway in 2005. When Yoko Ono performed in Liverpool last month, the Festival instructions were given out to people attending. Does anybody have the full set of instructions? They don't seem to be online.

Robert Rauschenberg

US pop artist Robert Rauschenberg died yesterday aged 82. He was apparently raised as a Christian fundamentalist, but gave up his plans to to be a minister because his church banned dancing - I guess they might have had a problem with him being gay too.

His passion for dance led him to design costumes and sets for dance companies over a 50 year period, working particularly closely with Merce Cunningham.

This 1949 picture shows him with a unicorn Mardi Gras costume he designed while at Black Mountain College, worn here by one Inga Lauterstein.

Here We Dance

Last week I went to the launch of Here We Dance, at Tate Modern. The exhibition aims to look at 'the relationship between the body and the state, exploring how the physical presence and circulation of bodies in public space informs our perceptions of identity, nation, society and democracy. The title derives from a work by Ian Hamilton Finlay, which refers to the celebrations that took place during the French Revolution, and alludes to the importance of social gathering in any form of political action or resistance. Bodily movements and gestures, collective actions and games are examined through media as diverse as film, photography, neon text and performance'.

At the private view there was a performance of Gail Pickering's Zulu - a woman moving around wooden shapes while reciting texts which seemed to be from the Weather Underground and similar 60s/70s urban guerrilla groups. This is powerful material that needs a lot of critical discussion and I am not convinced that playing with it in a gallery context really allows the space for reflection - given that most people viewing it would have no idea of the context or even where these words come from.

For me, the most striking piece is the late Ian Hamilton Finlay’s neon sign Ici on Danse ('here we dance/here one dances') - the words displayed at the entrance to a festival that was held on the site of the Bastille in July 1790 to celebrate the anniversary of the storming of the prison. On the gallery wall next to the sign, there is an accompanying text by Camille Desmoulins:

‘While the spectators, who imagined themselves in the gardens on Alcinous, were unable to tear themselves away, the site of the Bastille and its dungeons, which had been converted into groves, held other charms for those whom the passage of a single year had not yet accustomed to believe their eyes. An artificial wood, consisting of large trees, had been planted there. It was extremely well lit. In the middle of this lair of despotism there had been planted a pike with a cap of liberty stuck on top. Close by had been buried the ruins of the Bastille. Amongst its irons and gratings could be seen the bas-relief representing slaves in chains which had aptly adorned the fortress’s great clock, the most surprising aspect of the sight perhaps being that the fortress could have been toppled without overwhelming in its fall the posterity of the tyrants by whom it had been raised and who had filled it with so many innocent victims. These ruins and the memories they called up were in singular contrast with the inscription that could be read at the entrance to the grove – a simple inscription whose placement gave it a truly sublime beauty – ici on danse’.

The image of dancing on the ruins of the Bastille certainly appeals to me, even if the experience of Desmoulins – a revolutionary executed in 1794 by the new post-revolutinary authorities – suggests that those celebrating should always be looking over their shoulder for those building new Bastilles around the corner.

Blinkers Instrument

I went to the degree show at Camberwell College of Arts yesterday and was struck by Georgia Rodger's video piece Blinkers Instrument, with its image of a woman plucking at a harp-like instrument physically connecting her eyes and her thighs.

The artist explains at her website: "In the gendered system of musical instrument classification, string instruments are Apollonian - external, public and masculine. In my contemporary response to this subject instead of the string instrument being representative of the external it is internalised and made bodily (as opposed to being worldly) by the player's elongated eyelashes becoming the plucked strings of the instrument. Compounding my subversion of traditional expectations, the blinkers cut off the player's visual perception of the world and force them to become more aware of the internal world. In respect to gender this feature also forces the aversion of the female player's gaze whilst super feminizing her by the ridiculous extension of her lashes". It put me in mind of Joanna Newsom (right) - well obviously she plays the harp, but also perhaps explores a similar territory of the boundaries between private introspection and public performance.