Michael Kirby (1)

One of the most inspiring bks of all-time for me. Happenings are visions of life lead according to the imagination. One might say that any performance, eg, is that, but I think Happenings went much further than most performances in their transformations of ordinary 'reality'. Happenings were less dependent on creating a suspension of disbelief than they were on simply (or complexly) reorganizing the matter(s) at hand into WHATEVER.

How can I 'do justice' to this bk?! If there's a way to add scans to these reviews I don't know it. If there's a way to make this computer screen reach out & tickle you I don't know it. Nothing less wd suffice. Oldenberg, eg, is pretty well-known as a pop artist, but how many people realize that when he was asked to do a Happening at a museum that he only used trash from around the site? That typifies the spirit here.

All these people took life & blew it up BIG & had FUN w/ it & let people LIVE. Living is precarious. Sometimes it's more than just working w/o a net, sometimes it's even working w/o the tightrope itself, it's walking across the void living on the faith that a tightrope isn't needed to levitate.… (plus d'informations)

This, &, more importantly, Kirby's bk "Happenings", were no doubt very important to me at some point or another. I'm sure I read at least one other bk about Italian Futurism but this is the one I'm positive of. The emphatic embracing of the industrial world seems naive & stupid in this era where industrialism is so obviously eco-destructive & capitalism is so obviously anti-humanity (& anti-life in general) intensive, but, in the 19-teens, this take on culture might've been the rough equivalent of Gangsta Rap in the sense of 'Fuck Y'all. This is what's here, we're gonna run w/ it.' The Italian Futurists were visionaries, they just didn't see far enuf. I think the dadaists saw much further. Legendarily, Marinetti (a primary Futurist) was friends w/ Mussolini. Both had very clear ideas of how they wanted to transform Italy. Mussolini caused alotof megalomaniacal grief. Marinetti probably didn't. From a formal perspective, the Italian Futurists broke new ground out the wazoo. Performance Artists of these days shd be this imaginative.. but are they?… (plus d'informations)