Ulrike Meinhof

excerpt from The Urban Guerilla Concept

by The Red Army Faction April 1971

V. The Urban Guerilla

Imperialism and all reactionaries, looked at in essence, from a long-term point of view, from a strategic point of view, must be seen for what they are — paper tigers. On this we should build our strategic thinking.

Mao Tse Tung 1.12.58

If the paper tiger of American imperialism can eventually be defeated. If the tactics of the Chinese Communists are correct that the victory over American imperialism will be achieved through fighting imperialist forces everywhere, splitting them up, and then defeating these forces separately. If these assertions are correct, then there is absolutely no reason to rule out or disregard any region or country from the anti-imperialist struggle. This is also the case when revolutionary forces are particularly weak or the reactionary forces are particularly strong in those regions or countries.

It is mistaken to discourage revolutionary forces by underestimating them. It is also mistaken to fuel disputes between them that could eventually lead to their destruction. There is an undoubted tension between the Red Army Faction and some of our sincere comrades (we’ll leave out the windbags for now) who are currently active in political organisations. On the one hand we are accusing you of discouraging revolutionary forces – on the other hand you are accusing us of needlessly whipping them up. There is a tendency for factionalism in work-places and communities to have gone too far between some active comrades and the Red Army Faction. Dogmatism and adventurism are characteristic deviations in the weaker phases of the revolution. As for the anarchist reproach that we are ‘opportunists’ – that’s old hat – they have always criticised ‘opportunism’, it is nothing new.

The Urban Guerilla Concept comes from Latin America. The situation there is the same as here – a revolutionary intervention coming from relatively weak revolutionary forces.

The Urban Guerilla is not waiting for the Prussian-type marching orders that some so-called revolutionaries are holding out for in order to lead the people’s struggle. When the time comes, the Urban Guerilla is completely ready for the armed struggle. He [32] assumes that in a country like the Federal Republic, with a weak revolutionary tradition and massive potential for State violence, that revolutionary intervention is a necessity. The Urban Guerilla assumes that the conditions for revolution have never been better than at present – due to the economic and political circumstances prevalent in late-capitalism.

In this context the Urban Guerilla can be seen as a logical consequence of the long tradition of the negation of parliamentary democracy by its own representatives. The Urban Guerilla is the unavoidable response to the emergency and hand-grenade laws [33]; to the readiness of the system to use all means necessary to liquidate its adversaries. The Urban Guerilla Concept is based on an acknowledgement of these facts rather than trying to apologise for them.

The student movement had at least a partial experience already of Guerilla tactics when they translated some of the Left’s usual tactics – agitation and propaganda – into more concrete forms. This could be seen in the Springer campaign or by the Carbora-Bassa campaign carried out by Heidelberg students†. It was also evident in campaigning against the military aid given to the comprador [34] regimes by the Federal Republic. Guerilla tactics were also used in respect to exposing the court system, fighting class justice and achieving justice on the factory floor and other work-places. The Urban Guerilla turns all the talk about internationalism into the practical procurement of money and weapons. He renders the State tactic of banning communists irrelevant by organising an underground that is impossible for the police to penetrate. The Urban Guerilla is a weapon of the class struggle.

The Urban Guerilla Concept should be seen as an armed struggle taking place in the light of police shoot-to-kill methods and the class justice that managed to free Kurras [35]. The system would bury our comrades alive if we didn’t stop it. We will not be demoralised by the violence of the system.

The Red Army Faction intends to temporarily put specific parts of the State’s government and security apparatus out of action. This will destroy the myth of the overwhelming nature and invincibility of the system.

The Urban Guerilla Concept entails setting up an illegal organisation – involving safe houses, weapons, ammunition, cars, documents etc. Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla [36]

Before embarking on armed struggle it is important to gather appropriate political experience. If your attachment to the revolutionary Left has been of a more fashionable nature – then your involvement should only extend to a point where you can still turn back.

The Red Army Faction, by fusing the faction with political practice, have drawn a clear dividing line with the enemy. As a result, we will be the ones who will be most fiercely opposed by the State. This already assumes the attainment of political identity and also the fact that we have learnt some important lessons already.

Our original organisational concept involved linking the Red Army Faction with existing grassroots activists. We envisaged participating in existing socialist groups – we would work with them, influence debates, gather experience, learn some lessons. However, it soon became obvious that this wouldn’t work. Infiltration by the security services and their knowledge of meetings, agendas and plans, had reached a point that you were prevented from talking freely. You cannot combine legal political activism with an illegal political practice.

Being an Urban Guerilla requires a clear set of motives: You have to make sure that you are unaffected by the tabloid attacks. That whole “anti-semitic/criminal/low-life/murderers/arsonists” syndrome which is used to attack revolutionaries, all that shit must not affect you operating as an Urban Guerilla.

The system will be prepared to use any means, however scandalous, in order to restrict our terrain and show its determination to oppose us.

No areas of public life are left which don’t have, in some way or another, the main goal of serving the interests of capital. This also holds true for the Left, whose activities do not extend beyond their subscribers, their supporters, their internal organisation or their cadre. These activities play themselves out in the context of mostly private, coincidental, personal and bourgeois forms of communication. No publications escape the control of vested financial interests – through advertising; through ambitious journalists trying to make a name for themselves; through TV and radio; and through the concentration of media ownership. In the public domain a powerful elite has the dominant role. They divide and spread themselves around the market-place, filling in market gaps and distributing ideological content for specific audiences. The media’s message in a nutshell is... Sell. Anything that can’t sell is considered pukeworthy: News and information become commodities for consumption and the most popular publications become commercially saturated. A ratings war ensues on television. All this is an attempt to avoid contradictions and antagonisms latent in public audiences, those contradictions that are highlighted are never of any real consequence. In order to achieve any position in the market you must attach yourself to huge media corporations, for example the dependency of smaller entities on the Springer Corporation grows in proportion to Springer’s expansion – it has now started swallowing up local newspapers. An Urban Guerilla can expect absolutely nothing but bitter hostility from these institutions. An Urban Guerilla can only orient himself by means of self-criticism and Marxist critique – nothing else: “Whoever is not afraid of execution dares to tear the king down from his horse.” (Mao)

Formulating long-term strategies or just getting on with smaller tasks etc. are only applicable to the Urban Guerilla in the sense that he doesn’t only talk about them – he takes action. This takes place without any possibility of a return to some bourgeois career. There is no return to making the revolution by pinning stuff on the notice-boards of terraced houses. There must be a desire, even with its inherent pathos, of what Blanqui formulated: “The duty of all revolutionaries is to fight, to carry on fighting, to fight to the death”. There were never any revolutionary struggles where this principle has not applied – Russia, China, Cuba, Algeria, Palestine, Vietnam.

Some people think that not all the possibilities have been exhausted for political work in the form of propaganda, mobilisation and agitation. They maintain that only when all these avenues are closed should we resort to armed struggle. Our reply: It is never going to be possible to fully exploit these political opportunities because the armed struggle is an integral part of the politicisation process. The strategic identification that reactionaries are just paper tigers results from the tactical identification of them for what they they really are: criminals, exploiters and murderers.

We’re not going to brag about the armed struggle – we will do it. Freeing Andreas Baader was not done for publicity purposes – we wanted to get our comrade out of prison. The bank robberies the cops are trying to pin on us – we only did them to get a bit of money. The “splendid successes” mentioned by Mao when “the enemy is painting you in the darkest possible colours” will occur when we start scoring results of our own. We are indebted to our Latin American comrades for our progress so far. They have already established a clear dividing line with the enemy. The government is worried that the same thing will happen over here as well. As a result they have stated that they will ‘vigorously stand up to us’ – all this when all that has happened is that we are suspected of a few bank robberies. The huge outcry about us leaves the impression that the Red Army Faction has already become fully operational!

a five-way out

But when I would enter the gate

Of that golden atmosphere,
It is gone, and I wonder and wait
For the vision to reappear.
Fata Morgana, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

If she walks through the door and faces the mountains, North, she will find herself staring at a mossy wall that stands twenty feet high. The smooth lip of the wall hangs not over her, but over the other side. The shades of green, yellow and brown are reminiscent of the colors in this scene: collapsed by a stream, the tiger is submerged in mud, and mushrooms have sprouted from his side.

She steps back from the narrow wall, and sits down on a soft mound of moss. She allows her face to turn toward all sides of the structure. The wall she gazed upon earlier no longer seems to be a wall, and instead appears to be the corner where two long, curved walls meet. Imagine two cupped hands with the pads of middle and fourth fingers touching. From where she sits it is dark in that corner.

She finds it strange that her mind questions whether or not that sliver of a wall was ever parallel to her body. This question in her mind raises other doubts, and while observing five different white stairways leading out of the basin in which she sits, her mind teases out five memories of the hours she spent in Oliver’s garage.
The five stairways can lead to five plans, sensations, five imagined deaths, places, five rejections, tribulations, or one memory, five times…

Contemplating the stairs, her assured uncertainty extinguishes the fear of an infinite regress. She comes upon no reasons for knowing or choosing.

She does not know and does not choose, and so, her vision dims dark and her visions grow bright.


I.
My head was at the foot of the bed and the soft mattress held my hand.
Tossed the blanket onto the bed, uncovered two cockroaches dancing.
Oliver’s breathing was quiet, slow almost like dead.
He sleeps on his side—I can’t remember how he sleeps anymore, and we woke up in the same bed every morning for two years.
The air in the garage was thick because there was so much dust, so many spores, heavy particles in the air which sat on my head, putting pressure on my eyes, and my eyes, adjusting to the dark caused my brain behind the bridge of my nose to…
I can’t remember my body but I can remember Oliver’s. His skin was a light cream and incredibly soft, with beautiful scattered moles like sunspots on that glowing, burning core. A little patch of soft golden hair on his back, and the hair on his arms. The hairs on his arms were soft and light brown.

II.
Oliver is walking into the garage with a plate and two mugs. There are six pieces of toasted bread, four faces with butter and marmite lying like a cross, and two with butter and raspberry jam. The backs of the raspberry jam pieces are getting soft with marmite. It’s heavenly. He spills some earl grey tea onto the floor, and the thirsty green carpet soaks it up. He is smirking. I am sitting on the bed in the movie theatre we’ve made. I let the movie resume its unraveling. We hear, together, this rasping incantation over an image of dry, mid-Sahara: “The gates of paradise are open to everybody… you slake lime and are chosen for this by the rich.”

III.
Woke up in the night, in the freezing, sweat stinking garage, needing to pee.
I move my unwieldy body across Oliver’s to get to the floor from the molding bed. Before my foot touches the dark green ground, I see four cockroaches galloping on the thin crusty carpet like animals on a dry field. They are so heedless; I try to wake Oliver up, but he never wakes up for me.
In the middle of the night we peed on the grass in the backyard. There is a yellow patch where Oliver aims. I never killed the grass because I moved around. To save my thighs from supporting my tired, squatting body, I peed next to the cement stairs so I could half-sit. In a half-dream, the filth did not matter. What mattered was that while we slept and were tormented by nightmares, huge cockroaches were playing on the floor not far below us.

IV.
The tiger tried to remember
seven prayers some heavy
some hard to remember
The dying magical tiger
Right before he died
looked up at the sky
The dark grey and black
sheep and goats were
making hideous noises
desperate sounds similar to
a pair of brown eyes
half white—
Too dumb to fight off the
reflection of the sky on
the surface of shiny
eyeballs.

This magical tiger, as orange
as the moss hard on the
rocks green spots orange
spots and black stripes
like the deep brown mud
waiting for the sky to
open up green like the
ground—the sky is supposed
to be the ground The
place where he sits into
an expansive light
powder like dust.

Stumbling across the path feet
falling upon rock after rock rock
upon rock
Desperate to walk on soil
on an even ground, the
tiger looked for the next
spot to lay and look at
the sky—away from the
smaller noisy animals—
This creek running fast
and little bugs carried by
traveling plants
tiger collapsed on a sharp
green and orange rock
and slid down the dark
brown mud to the edge
of the running water
the plants lay down
understanding his weight
there is something in the center
of the tiger’s paw that needs
to snap back into place

It is a sharp and painful imagery rehearsal:
the tiger lain down,
waiting for the hard sky to lift the walls around him
and for the ground to open up beneath him.

VI.
The key to the swing door is on the shelf in the southeast corner of the room. Sometimes if the door is open, you cannot see the three-legged shelf. The overhead door is the west wall. Tonight I accidentally pushed the up-and-over door button instead of flipping the light switch. The only white wall in the room started moving up, and heavy cold air was slowly drawn in. Heaps of objects shifted, and the door would not shut again. There was a sliver of air between the door and the wall up near the ceiling. It was freezing, we sealed the gap with colorful rolled up blankets and sweaters, and talked about how nice the colorful stripe of stuffing looked in a room with three green walls and white doors.


If she approaches and grasps at the recycled days and images she sees, they will vanish away. So, she will leave in many directions— through the lonely fields, through the crowded thoroughfare, to the place where she can wonder and wait for another vision, the next recitation of the world, in its infinite regress. She climbs up a set of stairs, and will climb others on her many ways back.

Salomon saith, There is no
new thing upon the earth. So
that as Plato had an imagina
tion, that all knowledge was
but remembrance; so Salomon
giveth his sentence, that all
novelty is but oblivion.

Francis Bacon: Essays, LVIII

LETTER, APRIL 1968
HANS HAACKE

Extract from letter to Jack Burnham
in Kaspar Koenig (ed.), Hans Haacke-
Framing and Being Framed-
7 Works 1970-1975, The Press of
Nova Scotia College of Art and
Design, Halifax; New York University
Press, New York, 1975.


Last Week's murder of Dr. King came as a great shock. Linda and I were gloomy for days and have still not quite recovered. The event pressed something into focus that I have known for long but never realized so bitterly and helplessly, namely, that what we are doing, the production and the talk about sculpture, has no relation to the urgent problems of our society. Whoever believes that art can make life more humane is utterly naive. Mondrian was one of those naive saints... Nothing, but really absolutely nothing is changed by whatever type of painting or sculpture or happening you produce on the level where it counts, the political level. Not a single napalm bomb will not be dropped by all the shows of 'Angry Arts'. Art is utterly unsuited as a political tool. No cop will be kept from shooting a black by all the light-environments in the world. As I've said, I've known that for a number of years and I was never really bothered by it. All of a sudden it bugs me. I am also asking myself, why the hell and I working in this field at all. Again an answer is never at hand that is credible, but it did not particularly disturb me. I still have no answer, but I am no longer comfortable.

hans, my main man

Some artists decide that they will use the specific context of the place for which they produce work- the physical, social, and political context, as materials of considerable significance (materials as substantial as paint and canvas, or bronze and wax). Hans Haacke devises work in which aesthetic and thematic concepts are derived directly from the exhibition’s local context. However, during times where a work is shown outside of its original context- being where the project was conceived, background information needs somehow to be provided so that the viewers can understand the references and the impact it might have. At times, this background information is integrated into the artwork itself, a system created that does not require a viewer at all or completely depends on a participant, in order for it to function and create impact.


There are many factors which help decide the artist’s approach to dealing with his/her engagement with particular critical political, social, personal, racial, sexual issues/subjects, ranging from personal histories, the history of the exhibition space, the risk of censorship, etc. The background and foreground information offered in the work create a form of ‘counterinformation,’ which in successful cases can spark, perpetuate, and refine acts of resistance. Haacke uses two particular conceptual tools, collage and ‘real-time systems to discuss important, critical issues in his work.


An artist is never immune to being affected and influenced by the social-political value-system of the society in which they live, no matter how ignorant of these constraints they might be. Hans Haacke stated in an interview with Molly Nesbit, “Every artist who exhibits in a public institution is, in a way, a state artist.” Artists, just as any other individuals, cannot detach themselves from the social and political world in which they exist. Because artists and their work also exist in the world through institutions by which they show their art, politics infiltrate their lives in a very personal way whether they choose awareness or not. Hans Haacke writes, “‘Artists’ as much as their supporters and their enemies, no matter of what ideological colouration… participate jointly in the maintenance and/or development of the ideological make-up of their society.”




In MetroMobilitan (1985), Haacke utilizes the critical tool of collage, and the spirit of the Surrealist’s parlour game the ‘exquisite corpse,’ bringing together disparate elements offered to the viewer without smooth transitions and simple conclusions. The conflicts between the elements are all present, and it is up to the viewer to explore implications and meaning. He provides no explanations, utilizing the technique of causing creative friction, producing new and unexpected meanings. Haacke created this piece using the elements found in the “display culture” of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. He created banners, and mimicked the façade in order to expose the financial interests supporting the museum.


Through this piece, Haacke questions exhibitions in the context of donors, sponsors, and politics, and provides tools to uncover counterinformation. Nesbit comments, “The museum reveals its own moral weakness once we examine the parts, but we have to work to pry the elements apart.” Haacke explains the rationale behind the involvement of corporations in sponsoring culture with the title of a leaflet by the Museum: The Business Behind Art Knows the Art of Good Business. The relationships between corporate sponsors, museums, and the artists who show in the museums affect Haacke in that he is very aware of the self-censorship and outward censorship that result from such tangled webs. This work addresses the way in which managers and politicians, corporations and museums, instrumentalize art to blur economic or political conflicts of interest. This work is a site-specific intervention, reacting to suppressed information, information that the media had marginalized.



Gilles Deleuze asked questions about what the mysterious relationship between the work of art and the act of resistance was. He claimed that the work of art is not communication, and the work of art has nothing to do with counterinformation. However, he also claimed counterinformation is only effective when it becomes an act of resistance, and that there is a fundamental affinity with the work of art and the act of resistance. So, the work of art is to provide counterinformation, which is a form of resistance, and if especially thoughtful, will create resistance in the viewers and participants, whether they are needed for the work to function or not.

adrian piper not the pipers son

During the sixties and seventies, before MetroMobilitan, Haacke was interested in the demystification of the romantic concept of art. He explored this terrain with his creation of ‘Real-Time Systems’ inspired by a new understanding of complex systems and conversations developed by critic Jack Burnham, and also with work that relied heavily upon audience participation such as Welle (Wave) (1964), which swung like a pendulum when pushed.


Adrian Piper was also creating pieces that invited the public to handle the work, removing the idea of the untouchable work of art, and destroying its aura, actively involving the viewer. In Adrian Piper’s piece Context #7 (1970), the viewer is a constitutive element of the work of art. Context #7 could not physically or conceptually be realized without the viewer’s thoughts and physical involvement. Context #7 was a mixed media installation for the Museum of Modern Art Information Exhibition in which Piper offered the public seven black vinyl three-ring loose-leaf notebooks, a ballpoint pen, and a request from the artist in the form of a sign mounted on the wall. The request was to document a reaction to the situation of being directly addressed by the artist to realize a physical object in the museum. This piece rejects the notion of art works as complete and unchanging once displayed in a museum, and the action is a resistance to an invisible structure which perpetuates the creation of static, sterile art.

tactical magic

For works of art which Hans Haacke referred to as “Real-Time Systems,” he stressed that the materials, energy used, and their functioning as a system of interrelated elements, should exist independent of the interpretations the viewer or an audience would bring to them.

The Cricket- Activated Defense System (CADS), created by The Center for Tactical Magic, embraces this concept. The CADS project is an object that functions based on an invented technological system tied physically and conceptually to an environmental system.

The project was designed in response to illegal logging activity in the Redwood Forests of California. Using technology scavenged from military- industrial complexes, bioengineering that recombines consumer surveillance products with model rockets, a cricket- missile system was created to fight logging of endangered environments.

The object itself is a device that translates the sound of a significant number of the cricket population’s chirps to a firing signal for anti-logger missiles. This piece relies on the cricket’s unique audible responses to human encroachment and their subsequent transmission of a very precise frequency should they feel threatened, as well as their strategic positioning along the borders of logged and un-logged regions. CADS establishes a system of deterrence through the technological augmentation of natural systems.


The use of nature as a system, and as a site for artwork, is a practice Haacke explored with pieces such as Chickens Hatching (1969), and Grass Grows (1969). The use of living natural materials, such as plants and animals, led to a concentration not on the living things themselves, but on the growth process and growth’s role within a system, either constructed by the artist or found.



The CADS project utilizes a system found in nature, the defense mechanism crickets have developed, for the creation of a man-made system which creates a chain reaction of events, which promote discussion of such topics as the polemics of “violence,” along with notions of creative resistance and interdisciplinary social practices between various disciplines such as art, engineering, biology, environmental science, etc. This piece functions in many different realms, all of which can be tied together by The Center for Tactical Magic’s intention of evoking thought and implementing change.

1) body, action, sound

Play a sound,
Play it for so long,
Until you feel that you should stop.
Karlheinz Stockhausen, 1968

The perception of sound in which all is poetry, finally became a modern theory of music in 1913 with Italian futurist Luigi Russolo’s manifesto “The Art of Noises,” which called for musicians to replace the limited tones produced by orchestral instruments for the infinite variety of tones that existed in world, e.g. “the noises of trams, backfiring motors, carriages and bawling crowds.” This call for music based on a wider acceptability of and enjoyment for noise was answered with pieces such as George Antheil’s Ballet Mechanique, John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 1, Pierre Shaeffer’s first musique concrete piece Symphonie Pour un Homme Seul, and Edgard Varèse’s Poéme Électronique, to name a few (created before the year 1960!).






In this century, new philosophies of sound have developed parallel to innovations in technology. The very idea of what constitutes music has been evolving since the first translation of sound into electronic signals in 1876 with Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. One year after the telephone, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, which declared the age of the mechanical reproduction of sound. Twenty-nine years later, in the year 1906, a Canadian businessman named Thaeddeus Cahill invented the teleharmonium, which is the first electronic instrument known to our history of mankind and also a point of entry to understanding the ever-changing relationship between electro-acoustic sound and the human being.



The teleharmonium was a two hundred ton, sixty foot wide, $200,000 machine which used rotating electromagnetic generators to electric impulses which through a keyboard, knobs, and various other controls were sent down wires to a series of telephone receivers fitted with acoustic horns. This massive instrument was in many ways the first synthesizer in that its harmonic range was decided by the mix of different audio frequencies and each ton produced could be sculpted and reshaped with organ-like stops and foot pedals. Cahill’s idea of generating music to homes throughout the United States via telephone broadcasts was revolutionary and foreshadowed Muzak and online computer-accessed music. The teleharmonium inspired Ferruccio Busoni to write in 1907 Sketch for a New Aesthetic of Music, which outlined a philosophy that “music was born free; and to win freedom is its destiny.” This text inspired Busoni’s student Luigi Russolo to write his manifesto previously mentioned. Busoni’s prophesized “the virgin birth of a new beginning” where “in the new great music, machines will also be necessary and will be assigned a share in it.”


Ferruccio Busoni wrote of Cahill’s teleharmonium, “Only a long and careful series of experiments, and a continued training of the ear, can render this unfamiliar material approachable and plastic for the coming generation, and for Art.” Alas, a very long series of experiments birthed a long list of electronic instruments, which along with the grating and grinding tremble of complicated, variegated every-day urban noise, due to “multiplication of machines, which corroborate with man on every front,” has “trained” the ear to find aesthetic appeal in electro-acoustic sound.



A new awareness of the body in relation to sound caused the realization to some that there is no difference between noise, sound, and silence. Russolo believed that the only difference between what was recognized as music and noise was that one was organized and the other was “irregular in time and intensity.” So, in order to make every-day noise into music, one would just have to organize it utilizing the available technology. Musique concrète is an early example of the organization of sound not produced by acoustic instruments. With the invention of the tape recorder, any sound recordable could be organized. Although the exact beginning of musique concrète is hard to pinpoint, many consider 1948, with music of Pierre Schaeffer to be the start.

Shaeffer considered instrumental music to be “abstract” because it was first conceived of the mind, then noted on paper, and finally only realized by instrumental performance. On the other hand, musique concrète, begins with pre-existing sound elements, which may be recorded music or other sound elements, then the sounds are experimentally manipulated, and a montage is created. Shaeffer claimed that the traditional way of creating music was to take an abstract notation of sound, and make it concrete by getting people to perform it, while the new way of making music was by taking concrete sounds, and abstracting them by manipulating the magnetic tape onto which the sound was recorded. The final composition of musique concrète is a result of experiments.

The technology of the time partially dictated the compositional procedures, aesthetics, and theories that led to the completed work. The ability to record sound was pioneered in 1935 with the first tape recorder, the Magnetophon K1, developed by the German electronics company AEG and based on the invention of the magnetic tape by Fritz Pfleumer. Shaeffer spent several months experimenting with the technology available to him, and discovered that he could record sound material on locked- groove discs that repeated instead of spiraling inwards like normal phonograph records. He created rhythmic patterns with the use of repetition, and he discovered that by reproducing and recording sound at a slower or faster speed not only changed pitch but also created interesting timbral modifications. Shaeffer went as far as to make the act of repetition a creative tool: “Repeat the same sound fragment: It is not the same, it has become music.”



Shaeffer’s early revelation that no repeated sound is ever the same reached into the realms of Fluxus with La Monte Young and Takehisa Kosugi’s demonstration that any single sound was extremely complicated in its production, internal configuration, interaction with corporeal and environmental space. The human body and its environment changes sound from one moment to the next, so the “simple musical structure of repetition or sustainment is not simple at all.” La Monte Young made evident that true repetition is impossible with his piece X for Henry Flynt by making listeners aware that “factors of performing the task, of the physics of the instrument, the acoustics of the setting, the vicissitudes of listening, and the resonant complexity of the chosen sound itself forbid it.”


The human body’s now recognized power to transform sound by the act of listening helped to get right inside what it meant to create sound, no longer preoccupied with the external, but rather with the internal processes of becoming aware of what sound actually is like. As John Cage put it, “living takes place each instant and that instant is always changing. The wisest thing to do is to open one’s ears immediately and hear a sound suddenly before one’s thinking has a chance to turn it into something logical, abstract or symbolical.”



John Cage’s influence in electro-acoustic thought is unavoidable. Cage talked of electronics opening up “the entire field of sound, the entire field of time where no rhythm would be beyond the composer’s earth.” He embraced the Hindu philosophy of “using music to quieten the mind to its ultimate destination—silence,” and took inspiration from I Ching He once claimed that the music he preferred was “what we hear if we are just quiet.” With the musical philosophy of Cage, the relationship between the body and sound became a beautiful dance with chance.



Music to John Cage was a discovery of sound, not an exercise in illusions; the medium of sound was not to be ignored any longer and he believed that “the essence of music is sound, and the essence of making sound is ‘to wake people up to the very life they are living.’” He rejected the separation of music from life, and expressed a way of appreciating our ability to hear. For there to be music, “there need not be even any intention to make music for there to be music, only the willingness to attune to aural phenomena.”





The relationship between actions and sound is very exaggerated and dwelled upon with the music explored during the Fluxus movement. An important revelation made during the life of this art group was that “the making of a sound always was connected with a task, but the execution of a task was not always connected with an audible sound.” Their concentration of the body caused them to realize that sound-producing tasks do not always need to produce audible sound to produce works, because music is not just the perception of sound, but also performances, objects, bodies, technologies, texts, discourses, and institutions. An example of a Fluxus music piece is Erik Anderson’s Opera Instruction (1961), which asks the performer to “do and/or not do something universally.” George Brecht isolated a single, observed occurance and projected it into a performance activity:

Two Exercises, fall 1961:

Consider an object. Call what is not the object "other". Add to the object, from the "other", another object, to form a new object and a new "other". Repeat until there is no more "other". Take a part from the object and add it to the "other", to form a new object and a new "other". Repeat until there is no more object.

Douglas Kahn wrote: “Fluxus supported the idea that any performance could be “music” as they sought support in music to explain the performances that were occurring.” Fluxus embraced the body’s participation in making noise in the world, and while keeping the spirit that all noise is music, wanted to acknowledge action as a completely musical activity.

the barge

"On 4 April 1930, Mayakovsky bought a share in a housing cooperative. On 11 April, he missed a public appearance at Moscow University, because of illness. 12 April and 13 April were business as usually. He had numerous appointments for personal appearances on 14 April and 15 April. But, at 10:15 A.M. on 14 April 1930, Mayakovsky shot and killed himself in his Moscow office. He left a suicide note, dated 12 April, which read in part:

'As they say,
'the incident is closed.'
The love boat
wrecked by daily life.
I'm all even with life
and nothing would be gained by listing
mutual hurts,
troubles,
and insults.
. . . .
Don't think I'm a coward. Seriously, it could not be helped.'

Mayakovsky's body lay in state for three days and was viewed by 150,000 mourners. He was creamated on 17 April 1930."



Барышня и Хулиган