review of
Al Hansen's Al Hansen An Introspective
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - December 24, 2012

As is so often the case, the full review as I've written it is too long for the usual Goodreads review length so I've added it to "My Writing" in its full version here: http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/323052-al-hansen-an-introspective

I feel very lucky to've found this used copy of this bk & I feel like whoever got rid of it was foolish or desperate or underappreciative. 1st, it's lovingly produced - w/ multiple colored pages & some full color reproductions & sturdy binding. 2nd, what I didn't realize when I bought it is that it's made in memoriam to Hansen shortly after his death. As such, there's a collection of reminiscences / memorial pieces from Eric Andersen, George Brecht, Günter Brus, Lisa Cieslik, Francesco Conz, Philip Corner, Jim Dine, Ken Friedman, Allen Ginsberg, Red Grooms, Gordon Hansen, Geoffrey Hendricks, Dick Higgins, Peter Hutchinson, Allan Kaprow, Ivan Karp, Alison Knowles, Dorothy Lichtenstein, Daniel Liszt, Jackson MacLow, Anne Tardos, Phoebe Neville, Newman, Claes Oldenburg, Raphael Montañez Ortiz, Jack Ox, Takako Saito, Holly Solomon, Daniel Spoerri, I. Schneider, Endre Tót, SACHOR!, Carol Yankay, & La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela - in other words, a fantastic array of interesting folks, of prominent cultural figures: FLUXartists, Happenings artists, Pop artists, gallery owners, etc.. But there's much more to it than that.

It's hard for me to get a handle on whether I wd've liked Hansen's work 'in person' - even w/ this excellent bk to guide me. I'm mainly interested in Hansen's Happenings & the opportunity to witness one of them died w/ Hansen in 1995. I'm not so interested in his voluminous Venus collages, even tho their presence in this bk has made me somewhat interested in them, & I have to wonder whether this "Introspective" has been published as lavishly as it it has just to meet the ulterior motive of the art world to insure that this plethora of collages, persumably in the collections of many people, be considered valuable in the future.

Given that I was too young & too culturally isolated to have witnessed a Happening in their brief era of flourishing, I've only experienced them thru written & photographed accts - wch are, themselves, very exciting to me. Nonetheless, is the excitement mainly in the historification? Given how much I've seen the history of the movement that I've been a primary participant in, neoism, be obscured by self-serving &, often, almost totally ignorant pseudo-historians, it's quite possible that ALL the Happenings history I've read shd be taken w/ a grain of salt. Perhaps some of the people who made Happenings were not very inspired, were lazy; then again, perhaps some of them had abrasive personalities that rubbed the critics just enuf the wrong way so that these critics left people out of the histories who didn't deserve such neglect.

Dick Higgins writes: "Hansen was far too much of a free spirit for the official Happenings crowd, and he seldom worked with them, preferring to do his things with other "outsiders" like myself or with his superstars of the moment" (p 178) &, indeed, Michael Kirby's 1965 bk Happenings, wch, according to the bk jacket's inside flap blurb, is "the first book about the most exciting new theater-and-art form of this decade", only includes work by Jim Dine, Red Grooms, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, & Robert Whitman. Further proof of Hansen's 'outsiderness' might be that he's also NOT in Allan Kaprow's monumental 1966 bk Assemblage, Environments & Happenings. ALTERNATIVELY, both Kirby & Kaprow are in Hansen's own 1965 bk, published by Dick Higgins on his wonderful Something Else Press, A Primer of Happenings & Time / Space Art. Here's what Higgins says about the creation of Hansen's bk:

"Because of his informal lifestyle and his aversion to documenting his activities Hansen became the subject of many legends, such as that he spent most of the year 1965 underground riding the New York City subways. This was untrue, though he was indeed "making himself scarce" over a legal matter. In fact it was during that time that he produced his only large book, A Primer of Happenings & Time / Space Art (New York: Something Else Press, 1966), which was the most popular book on the subject for many years. I was the publisher of Something Else, and I wanted a simple, popular style book on Happenings, and who could better write such a thing than Hansen, the great raconteur? So I asked him to do it and he proceeded to try to do it as an art historian. It was dry as dust - completely out of character. Wrong approach. I wrote out an outline, bought some bottles of wine and brought my tape recorder along and, - presto! Al was in fine form. We transcribed it, Barbara Moore (then the editor) cleaned it up and the result was a delight, far more useful than most other books on the subject." (p 180)

[I shd note that while Higgins credits the bk as having come out in 1966, the date in my copy of it is 1965] Hansen dedicates A Primer of Happenings & Time / Space Art: "to Claes Oldenburg - a giant in an art world full of midgets" & in Al Hansen An Introspective Hansen writes: "It is interesting that though Kaprow and Oldenburg's pieces were rehearsed and mine weren't the audience saw the same sort of thing." (p 32) But did Kaprow & Oldenburg feel the same way?

Kaprow memorializes Hansen thusly [excerpted]:

"In the late 20th century of high-teck communications and multinational economics, the image of the wandering artist, the hobo avantgardist, seems anachronistic, if not self-conscious.

"Yet, Al Hansen cultivated the role - that's what it was - with great style and charm. It guaranteed him his freedom from attachments and obligations. he seemed to appear here or there and then vanish, leaving behind a gentle impression of easy friendship and vitality." (p 183)

& Oldenburg [entirety]:

"Al Hansen was an outsider, a self-made artist,
playing by rules he made up himself.
Even if you sometimes questioned his sense of form
(from a view of tradition) you could not resist his energy,
enthusiasm, humor, wild invention, and his love of art -
all of which he generously shared with others.
He hummed, he vibrated, he would try anything and go anywhere with you.
Al was an essential player." (p 201)

When people memorialize, they tend to write nicer things about a person than they may've always felt when the person was alive - after all, people want the same done for them & want to set an example along the lines of: 'See, I was nice when so-&-so died & you KNOW how much they got on my nerves!' Shit, I've done the same.. But if a person's honest, a little 'backhanded complimenting' might seep thru.. but is even that to be trusted as a more well-rounding of the 'truth'? It's all so wrapped up in interpersonal squabbles & other ulterior motives - not to mention more 'legitimate' philosophical & formal differences, etc..

The beginning of Kaprow's reminiscence, "In the late 20th century of high-teck [sic] communications and multinational economics, the image of the wandering artist, the hobo avantgardist, seems anachronistic, if not self-conscious. Yet, Al Hansen cultivated the role - that's what it was" strikes me as one of those backhanded compliments. While the reader is eventually told that Hansen did it w/ "great style and charm", they're also led into it w/ the implication that Hansen was a bit of a poseur, a poseur whose very pose was outmoded - thus, by implication, unimaginative. & then Oldenburg says that one "sometimes questioned his sense of form" - implying, I think, that perhaps both Kaprow & Oldenburg didn't exactly respect Hansen's unrehearsed Happenings as much as they respected their own rehearsed ones - &, given both my own propensities for structured improvisation (w/ very careful preparations) & my deep respect for Kaprow & Oldenburg's work, I have to wonder if I might not've agreed if I'd had a chance to witness all their Happenings.

But how CAN a person such as myself get a realistic grasp of Hansen's creativity in relation to Happenings & Fluxus? Higgins writes: "with a flurry of news releases, doing our most ambitious performance, including a piece by Hansen, untitled as I recall but which he described as a "multiprojector piece," performed in no fewer than sixteen movie projectors using the news and Fields movies and industrial movies which Hansen had retrieved from the garbage bins of advertising agencies. There were more performers than people in the audience, but no matter. The thing was duly reported in the local newspapers, and eventually it led to our biggest performance, on April 7, 1959, at New York's August Kaufman Auditorium of the 92nd Street YM-YWHA. Musicologist Paul Henry Lang, then the New York Herald Tribune critic, described it as a "nightmarish show, with the performers using toys and home-made instruments and grouped around a "Cro-Magnon...master score about ten by twelve feet - not inches". Lang further asserted that "the acceptance of this kind of nonsense implies a rejection of all music known since the beginning of the Christian Era". Such pieces later became, after 1962, the repertoire for Fluxus, in which Hansen only sometimes participated as he did not get along personally with its organizer, George Maciunas. However Maciunas was not the boss in Fluxus and, wherever we Fluxartists could, we included Hansen." (p 178) In other words, we get another taste of Hansen's outsiderness, his partial exclusion.

If I seem to exaggerate "his partial exclusion", consider this: In Jon Hendricks' 616pp Fluxus Codex, that's surely one of the most comprehensive bks on the subject, under the "H" section, Hansen gets a one sentence mention. He IS mentioned in 5 other places in the bk, but in what strikes me as a very marginal manner. He fares a little better in the 1970 happening & fluxus bk. In Kristine Stiles' article "Between water and Stone - Fluxus Performance: A Metaphysics of Acts" in the In the Spirit of Fluxus bk from the Walker Art Center, there's a footnote that mentions Hansen that's particularly telling: "Neat histories of art and the space limitations of exhibitions often, and must, gloss over these kinds of problematic uneven fits, and this essay is no exception-with a few exceptions! However, it would be historically negligent and art historically false to pretend that while Schneemann, Hansen, Lebel, and others may not have been close to the center of Fluxus, their important incursions into and around its fluctuating core did not contribute greatly to making Fluxus what it is." (footnote 80, p 98)

I think it's fairly accurate to say that art historians thrive on lumping artists together into movements & then appraising their relative value in terms of how 'purely' they represent the hypothetical goals of the movement. I, on the other hand, find movements very interesting but also seek out the individualists who're too original to fit the mold-of-the-moment. I'm not completely convinced that Hansen is absolutely so individualistic, but I still find his wandering marginality intriguing.

In the 1966 Great Bear Pamphlet entitled "Manifestos", Hansen is represented w/ a "Lettuce Manifesto":

"Lettuce bring art back into life
Lettuce forget theaters and perform in the world
Lettuce go over and around the real-estate men
Lettuce move out into the streets, subways and luncheonettes
Lettuce perform in life with no warnings
Lettuce create repertory companies on shoestrings
Lettuce concentrate on the portability of the Indian and the Arab
Lettuce shape
Lettuce dig the possiprobalities
Lettuce perform on roofs, in airplanes, on ferryboats and in trees [..]" etc..

That strikes me as as good as any other related manifesto of the time, if not better. Perhaps what makes me trust Hansen a tad more than others is that his A Primer of Happenings & Time / Space Art has an "Index and Directory" that lists an impressive number of people for such a small bk (138pp before sd index) & b/c he seems to be working toward an inclusiveness of participants rather than a canonization (as the Kirby & Kaprow bks seem to do). Sure, everyone w/ a critical mind is likely to have their favorites but if I were to write a bk on neoism, eg, I'd try to include everyone I cd remember or get info about who might seem relevant - that way one can provide a reference work for other people to research from rather than narrow the information field for the readership. Alas, finances are restrictive.

Will I never get back to reviewing Al Hansen An Introspective?! Hansen (handwritten): "In the late seventies I decided to spend the eighties living in different world capitols and really getting to know them. I had not been in Cologne for seven or eight years. In the early seventies I came to Cologne for two or three weeks each year. Visiting Sefan Wewerka in the Südstadt. Bar Soenius. I learned a lot about the art business works from Stefan. He said "You Americans come here on Thursday for a show that opens Friday. Saturday afternoon you have breakfast at a collector or a critic's flat. Sunday morning you take a plane to Paris, Monday to London and Tuesday you are back in New York. And you think you have been in Europe. If you stayed for a few weeks you would meet people and you would be here long enough for interested people to contact you." This made good sense so I began to come for some weeks each year on vacation from my art teaching job at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey." (p 19) While I think that Wewerka's criticism is so obviously class-based that it's ridiculous, I still like that Hansen took it enuf to heart to try to correct his own jet-setter tendencies.

"Once Dick Higgins told me that the winner of a Turkish wrestling match plays the flute. A sort of victory tune. This would seem quite normal to Turks but a western audience seeing the winning wrestler play the flute would see no connection, it would be a disconnected happening." (p 34)

"So in one sense, the performer participants have a list of things to do and a great deal of freedom of choice of what to do when and how. So you have what could be called an anarchous [sic] situation. For some reason when people have complete freedom to be good or bad the [sic] will do something bad." (p 37)

Really? It's at times like this that I doubt Hansen's intelligence. 1st "anarchous" instead of 'anarchic', 2nd the generalization: "For some reason when people have complete freedom to be good or bad the [sic] will do something bad." It's very hard for me to accept such a generalization w/o some qualification such as: 'I don't really think this is always 'true' but when it is I think this is b/c people are forced by laws to always live in fear of being anything but what someone else defines as 'good'. As such, people take advantage of being permitted to be 'bad'.

"Scientists into biogenetic engineering are trying to put a flounder gene into a tomato to keep it from freezing. Sounds like Fluxus?" (p 47) For somebody who seems to've been kept at somewhat of a distance from Fluxus history, that's one of the most pithy Fluxus definitions I've come across.

In what's apparently the unrealized plan for a 1966 "Car Bibbe No. 2" happening, it's written that "A caddy. is blown up with dynamite. After each explosion men in white with rakes rake all pieces into center. Ballerinas do barre exercises to various musics. Piece continues til caddy is reduced to shreds. Caddy is carried off in as many white shopping bags as is needed." (p 58) Online, there's "a virtual realization of Fluxus co-founder Al Hansen's unperformed "Happening" called "Car Bibbe II". In it, a free-form performance score calls for three things - the detonation of a Cadillac, ballerinas doing Barre exercises, and maintenance workers to clean it up for the next round. Text generously provided by Al's daughter Bibbe Hansen, Directed by Patrick Lichty and performed by virtual performance group Second Front" ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALXjFH6I6Dg ). Note that Hansen is called a "Fluxus co-founder", surely a gross exaggeration but a good example of divergent histories. This 2009 animation is, alas, little more than a shallow animation w/ an abysmal electro-pop soundtrack. At best, it's like an Istvan Kantor / Boris Wanowitch neoist music video from at least a decade or 2 earlier. For info about more substantial car destruction activities that aren't merely virtual, the reader is directed to the truly excellent Street Ratbag No. 5 magazine (limited edition 300, good luck in finding a copy).

On the other hand, I do believe that the 1964 "Car Bibbe" was realized & this piece is important to me. In it, there're instructions for 6 cars. These include doing things like knocking on the hood, slamming the door, tooting the horn, & racing the motor. This particular car performance piece may not've been the 1st such thing but it might be the earliest I know of. Robert Moran's "Thirty Nine Minutes for Thirty Nine Autos" (August 1969) might've been the next, Dick Turner's "Eloquent Voices" (1992) is another. No doubt there're many more I'm not thinking of - including by other Fluxartists. There's a mp3 of this "Car Bibbe" available on at least one website but I haven't gotten it to work. The date given for the piece there is 1958-1959. In Hansen's Primer the date is given as 1962. That seems most likely to me.

On p 101 of An Introspective, Hansen reveals that as a child he was "always getting little girls to get their clothes off. I was quite a Peeping Tom too and there was not a shower or a bath for blocks around that I couldn't get to from the back porch roof or a tree. I sat entranced and watched couples coupling." Opposite this revelation, there's a full color picture of Hansen working on one of his matchstick Venus collages w/ a nude young woman standing on a nearby table. Her presence seems irrelevant to the stylized picture insofar as her pose isn't reproduced.

"I think every mode of art has had exponents and proponents who have wanted to harness it, to make it used for something, and put it to a job, and usually when the job of art is other than just being art, art suffers...I would say that the most important thing I have to say with my art is that art can be fun, that art need not be serious." (p 125) Perhaps. But does "fun" have to equal shallow? I think not.

Ken Friedman's memorial to Hansen particularly impressed me: "Al lived in the same way poor and rich. When he was poor, he borrowed, bummed and slept on couches. He worked his way through more odd jobs than I can count and some of those jobs were truly odd. Al was the guy who had that job circumcising elephants at the zoo. he liked that job. the pay wasn't much but the tips were great. Al was the scalawag who played ragtime on an old, beat-up saloon piano, singing songs you wouldn't want your mother to hear. And then there was the time he had a job as a night watchman. Great job. he sat in his watchman's room making collages. Venus after Venus of Hershey Bar wrappers and cigarette butts, killing at least three birds with one stone: grab a snack, have a smoke, make some art." (pp 166-167) What if most artists only made work from their detritus? What wd the art of an artist using sushi packages look like in contrast to the art of an artist using Big Mac wrappers? Hansen was hardly setting a healthy example.

See above link to full review. ( )