Jackson Mac Low created performance works in dozens of formats over the course of his career, often appending detailed instructions for how performers should go about realizing a given work. Many of his works involve iterative operations on found texts, such as the Bible, newspaper articles, and the proper names of friends and colleagues, so it is not an exaggeration to say that Mac Low’s primary creative focus was on the procedures for realization rather than the semantic or linguistic content of the works as realized. This series of six postcards sent to the bassist-composer Benjamin Patterson in April 1963 show Mac Low consciously incorporating the elements of the emerging format of the event score: short instructional texts, often written in the imperative mood, often containing dedications to fellow artists or potential performers, with little or no explicit performance instructions. Patterson’s own Methods and Processes (1962) was an important early collection of such scores, along with Brecht’s Water Yam (1963) and Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit (1964). As with later event scores by Allan Kaprow and Alison Knowles (see chapters 9 and 11), the activities are drawn from “everyday life” and do not presume specialized musical or artistic training on the part of performers. Nonetheless, Mac Low seems to be seeking the conceptual limits of such deskilled performance in a work like Schedule (For George Brecht) (1963), in which the repeated instructions to “Sleep awhile / Wake up / Do something” could conceivably be realized by any living person (or animal) regardless of their conscious intent to enact a performance of the work. In the three Social Project scores (1963), Mac Low calls upon this deskilled pool of potential performers to enact social change—to “find a way” to end poverty, war, and unemployment and “make it work.” The naively stated political messaging offers an implicit critique of the depoliticized, middle-class “everydayness” found in many of Kaprow’s happenings, as well as of the attention-seeking antiart agitprop of the “Fluxus Propaganda” activities proposed by Henry Flynt and George Maciunas in Fluxus News—Policy Letter, no. 6 (6 April 1963). Always the anarchist, Mac Low championed activist communities that formed spontaneously, without coercion and without artistic or psychological manipulation of the audience-participants.
© Estate of Jackson Mac Low.
