Working by day as a research chemist, George Brecht became involved in Fluxus by way of John Cage’s experimental composition course at the New School for Social Research and was one of the earliest innovators of the text-based performance instructions known as “event scores.” His Motor Vehicle Sundown (Event) was the first to include “event” in its title, signaling the artist’s scientific observation of everyday phenomena. This score was among Brecht’s contributions to An Anthology of Chance Operations. Brecht recounts: “In the Spring of 1960, standing in the woods in East Brunswick, New Jersey, where I lived at the time, waiting for my wife to come from the house, standing behind my English Ford station wagon, the motor running and the left-turn signal blinking, it occurred to me that a wholly ‘event’ piece could be drawn from the situation” (“The Origin of ‘Events’” [August 1970], in Happening & Fluxus, ed. Harald Szeemann and Hanns Sohm [Cologne: K.lnischer Kunstverein, 1970], n.p.). Brecht seized a moment from the flow of quotidian experience and recomposed it as a set of actions for anyone to perform, the sequence of which is randomized via a shuffled deck of instruction cards.
Motor Vehicle Sundown (Event) can be found in the Getty Research Institute’s unique copy of An Anthology of Chance Operations (1962), published by Jackson Mac Low and George Maciunas and edited by La Monte Young.
© 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
