George Brecht

Void Stone, 1987, Arp-Museum, Rolandseck

George Brecht (August 27, 1926 – December 5, 2008) was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer as well as a professional chemist and consultant.

Quotes

• My work is a complex product of a personality continuous with all of nature, and one making progressively better-integrated efforts to structure experience on all levels.... My art is the result of a deeply personal, infinitely complex, and still essentially mysterious, exploration of experience. No words will ever touch it.
  • George Brecht, 1957/58, cited in: George Brecht, ‎Alfred M. Fischer (2005). George Brecht: events : eine Heterospektive. p. 224

• A. No matter what you do, you're always hearing something.

Q. You mean to say that all of the accidental environmental sounds that surround the piece become a part of the realization of the score?

A. Yes, that's right.

Q. In that case, even the chairs are musical?

A. Yes. In fact, there is perhaps nothing that is not musical. Perhaps there's no moment in life that's not musical.

• In: James Fitzsimmons, ‎Jim Fitzsimmons (1967). Art International. Vol. 11. p. 24

• The misunderstandings have seemed to come from comparing fluxus with movements or groups whose individuals ‘have had some principle in common, or an agreed-upon program. In fluxus there has never been any attempt to agree on aims or methods; individuals with something unnameable in common have simply naturally coalesced to publish and perform their work. Perhaps this common something is a feeling that the bounds of art are much wider than they have conventionally seemed, or that art and certain long-established bounds are no longer very useful. At any rate, individuals in europe, the us, and japan have discovered each other’s work and found it nourishing (or something) and have grown objects and events which are original, and often uncategorizable, in a strange new way.
  • George Brecht (1963), cited in: Hannah Higgins (2002), Fluxus Experience. p. 69

Quotes about George Brecht

• fluxus is the “event” according to george brecht:

putting the flower vase on the piano.

fluxus is the action of life/music: sending for a tango

expert in order to be able to dance on stage.

fluxus is the creation of a relationship between life and art,

fluxus is gag, pleasure and shock,

fluxus is an attitude towards art, towards the non-art of anti-art, towards the negation of one’s ego,

fluxus is the major part of the education as to john cage, dadaism and zen,

fluxus is light and has a sense of humor.

• Ben Vautier (1979) "Text on fluxus," partly cited in: Pina, Sónia da Silva. "Fluxus: do texto à acção. A cartografia de uma a (r) titude." (2011).