This selection of scores was sent by George Brecht and Robert Watts to the poet and potter M. C. Richards, whom the artists met through David Tudor. Brecht and Watts, who first met in 1957, sent these mailings to a broad swath of their artistic community as the first gesture in their multipart YAM Festival, which culminated in a month-long series of performances and exhibitions in the New York area in May 1963. Watts’s score cards can be distinguished from Brecht’s irregularly formatted compositions in black-and-white by their consistent business card–like dimensions and colored paper. Whereas the Fluxus concert series unfolding simultaneously in Europe approached such scores as prompts for activities to be performed publicly in concert hall settings, Brecht and Watts’s mailing accords with what might better be described as a conceptual or mail art practice, as well as Brecht’s notion of the scores as “little enlightenments I wanted to communicate to my friends who would know what to do with them” (George Brecht, “The Origin of ‘Events’” [August 1970], in Happening and Fluxus, ed. Harald Szeemann and Hanns Sohm [Cologne: Kölnischer Kunstverein, 1970], n.p.).
© 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
