This article, written by Emmett Williams, was published in advance of the first major Fluxus festival to take place at the Museum Wiesbaden, West Germany, in September 1962. As one of the earliest journalistic accounts of Fluxus, it is remarkable on multiple accounts. Williams was a Fluxus insider, highly informed about the group’s activities, and yet he plays the role of a bemused novice to the avant-garde scene as he previews the Fluxus festival and asks questions of (then Paris-based) participant Benjamin Patterson, including about his approach to interpreting unconventional scores. Williams’s naïve posturing appears to be for the benefit of the readership of The Stars and Stripes: United States military personnel stationed abroad. Williams worked as editor for the newspaper, and he was not the only Fluxus affiliate to be employed by the US military. For a time, Patterson played in the Seventh Army Symphony, and George Maciunas worked as a graphic designer stationed with the U.S. military base in Wiesbaden, where the watershed Fluxus festival was soon to take place.
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