These two letters from George Brecht to Jill Johnston, the dance and theatre critic for The Village Voice who wrote about Brecht’s work on several occasions, document Brecht’s struggles to make Johnston understand his practice and its goals.
In the first two-page letter, Brecht’s discussion of “choosing” reflects upon the lasting significance of Marcel Duchamp’s readymade—a quotidian object chosen by the artist and reframed as a work of art. Foundational to Brecht’s practice, the notion of the readymade was extended to include the sorts of readymade actions captured in his event scores (i.e., “EXIT”). Brecht is particularly interested in the passivity of noticing or perceiving an event as opposed to actively performing or arranging one, a subtle yet important distinction that recalls George Maciunas’s letter to Brecht about perceptual versus conceptual experience also reproduced in this publication. Brecht writes, “There is neither action nor inaction, but simply an event occurring spontaneously, unwilled, out of nowhere, nowhen.”
The first letter also provides a catalog of Brecht’s art historical interests: Erik Satie, Kurt Schwitters, Duchamp, the Zen philosopher and calligrapher Hakuin Ekaku, and Man Ray. His mention of a “center” reflects his ongoing conversation with the poet and potter M. C. Richards, author of the 1964 book Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person. Finally, the enigmatic date provided—“day of last council”—is keyed to the poet (and drummer for the Velvet Underground) Angus MacLise’s Year (1962), a poetic alternative calendar that Brecht frequently used to date his personal correspondence.
In the second one-page letter, Brecht zeroes in on his relationship to chance operations and their pioneering use by Duchamp and John Cage. He explains that he is not committed indefinitely to chance operations but appreciates them as a means to de-subjectify the work of art and (perhaps impossibly) eliminate the determining role of the artist. “Beyond a certain point,” he writes, “the work is not ‘done’ (by anyone), but simply occurs.”
© 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
