TWO VEHICLE EVENTS
• start.
• stop.
Summer, 1961
—wrote George Brecht fifty-one years ago. It seems obvious; driving a vehicle, one starts it then one stops it. It is an action repeated several times a day, usually everyday. Yet Brecht’s Two Vehicle Events makes this many-times-a-day action an art performance. Also it’s a work performed by Brecht’s audience rather than Brecht himself, who simply wrote the script. And Brecht was not the only artist of the time who wrote instructions to their viewers. Consider Yoko Ono’s instruction paintings, for example:
send send something you can’t count.
These aren’t really art-objects. The physical aspects of these are simply directions; announcements that something is going to happen—much like the flyers for Dada events—all are statements about or descriptions of lived events. Their existence depends on the viewer’s willingness not only to perform the action and be part of it, but also to consider the action a performance, to become increasingly aware of the multiple details of their lives. This was an art meant to enrich life not simply by providing pretty or thought-provoking things, but to place the work more viscerally within the everyday; and thence, to transform life. Such ways of interacting with the public to create art continue; the MASS collective’s first event for EAST asks the public to enter their studio space and draw. The collective will take whatever gets drawn—the production of an at-this-moment-unknown-mass-ofpeople—and create work out of it. MASS first relinquishes control to their audience, letting them create their basic materials. Then they re-establish that control by creating larger assemblages later on. Then they let go again: once MASS displays the works, the public might interpret the assemblages as they will. Public participation becomes art-making, then becomes public participation again. At the moment of this writing there’s no way to know the appearance of the final objects; all we know is the loose structure of operations. Like Brecht, Ono and others, these younger artists desire a close interaction with an audience. Suffice to quote Allan Kaprow (1958):
… we must be acrobats, constantly shuttling between an identification with the hand and body that flung the paint and stood “in” the canvas and submission to the objective markings, allowing them to entangle and assault us. This instability is indeed far from the idea of a “complete” painting. The artist, the spectator, and the outer world are much too interchangeably involved here. (And if we object to the difficulty of complete comprehension, we are asking too little of the art.)