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TDR: The Drama Review, Volume 55, Number 4, Winter 2011 (T212),
pp. 75-87 (Article)

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The Performance of Time in
Fluxus Intermedia
Natasha Lushetich

If the phrase “the performance of time” sounds slightly odd, the suggested action being both
vaguely possible and, quite likely, impossible, it is because time is most often conceptualized as a
flowing substance, an organizing principle, or a container in which events occur. In all of these
cases, as indicated by the oft-used phrases “time flies” and “can you squeeze me in?” when refer-
ring to an appointment or meeting, time is thought to have an existence independent of the
human observer. As an externally observable phenomenon it can either be “perceived” by the

Figure 1. Alison Knowles, The Identical Lunch, Barton, Vermont, 1967. A residual object from one of
Knowles’s “noontime meditations.” (Photo courtesy of the artist)

Natasha Lushetich is a PhD candidate at the University of Exeter and a lecturer at the University of
Portsmouth, UK. She is also a performer, director, and interdisciplinary artist. Her publications include
“On the Performativity of Absence” ( Performance Research, March 2010), “Ludus Populi: The Practice
of Nonsense” ( Theatre Journal, March 2011), and “The Event Score as a Perpetuum Mobile” ( Text and
Performance Quarterly, forthcoming). natasha.lushetich@exeter.ac.uk

TDR: The Drama Review 55:4 (T212) Winter 2011. ©2011

New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 75
 human subject if the subject chooses to avail herself of the “time sense,” the way she would avail
herself of the sense of sight to look at a stone, or, it can be ignored. On this static, substantialist
view, time cannot be performed but is a measure of performance, that in which performance
occurs. I would like to suggest what might be called a “processualist” approach whereby time
is the expressive activity of any given thing, being, or phenomenon. Instead of occurring in time,
an event or an activity produces time in its occurrence, which further means that there can be no
position outside of time since all things, beings, and phenomena are always already temporal-
ized by the very nature of their existence. Rather than observing or measuring the “movement
of time” statically — as a progression from a static point A to a static point B — the processualist
logic operates from within the process of perpetual temporalization, continuous change, dif-
ferentiation, and mutation. Although difficult to grasp as well as perceive, continuous change
can be likened to the process of aging as opposed to that of growing. While the process of
growing is marked by a clear beginning and an approximate end, the process of aging has nei-
ther a beginning nor an end since it is not a passage from a fixed point in one’s youth to a fixed
point in one’s old age, but a gradual process of continuous change whose starting point cannot
be determined and which continues well after one’s death in the form of decomposition. This
process, rendered imperceptible to the aging subject by the very gradualness of change, encom-
passes change on all fronts: it is not only the color of one’s hair that changes but also the pos-
ture, the smile, the texture of the skin, the voice, and not least of all, one’s consciousness. It is in
this context of perpetual processuality that I propose to focus on Fluxus intermedia.
Variously characterized as “the most radical experimental art movement of the sixties”
(Harry Ruhé1 in Armstrong 1993:16), a “singularly strange phenomenon in the history of the
arts of the twentieth century” (Doris 1998:91) and “an active philosophy of life that only some-
times takes the form of art” (Friedman 1998b:ix), Fluxus is a loosely knit association of art-
ists whose activity ranges from concerts, films, performances, and sightseeing tours to games,
sports, instruments, and gadgets. It includes such names as Yoko Ono, Mieko Shiomi, George
Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Takehisa Kosugi, La Monte Young, Alison Knowles, Dick Higgins,
and Ken Friedman, and spans the period of almost five decades. “Intermedia” is a term coined
by Dick Higgins to refer to works that fall conceptually between media such as visual poetry or
action music, as well as between art media and life media (Higgins 1998:222). The latter dis-
tinction (or rather, contamination) is of particular importance to this discussion since the per-
formance of time occurs at the intersection of pervasive temporalization produced by a divergent
range of Fluxus works and the percipient’s musicalized mode of attention. This is made possible
by the fact that all Fluxus works, including intermedial compositions, film, and durational per-
formance — the focal points of my analysis — exhibit two fundamental characteristics: “pres-
ence in time” and “musicality” (Friedman 1998a:250). As Friedman elucidates in “Fluxus and
Company,” “presence in time” refers to the works’ gradual deployment, impermanence, and
ephemerality while “musicality” refers to the fact that many Fluxus works, whether objects or
performance instructions, games or puzzles, appear in the form of scores (250). That the works
appear in the form of scores means that they can be realized by anyone, anywhere, in any num-
ber of ways — the only common denominator being musicalized duration (251). But, despite
the fact that musicalization and temporalization have much in common, musicalization is not a
mere extension of temporalization, as music stands in an ambiguous relationship to time.

Deep Listening
In The Time of Music, the musicologist Jonathan D. Kramer engages with the philosopher
Susanne K. Langer’s notion that “[m]usic makes time audible” (in Kramer 1988:1), which
could be interpreted to mean that music generates time in its expressive, and thus temporaliz-
Natasha Lushetich

ing, activity. However, this statement refers to a particular species of time, operative in the seg-

1. Harry Ruhé is the author of the 1979 uncirculated exhibition catalogue FLUXUS, the Most Radical and
Experimental Art Movement of the Sixties. The exhibition was held at A-Gallery, Amsterdam.

76
regated realm of ideality, since, as Langer notes “music [...] suspends ordinary time and offers
itself as an ideal substitute and equivalent” (3). Kramer affirms this distinction and defines
“musical time” as “the time the piece evokes” and “ordinary time” as “the time the piece takes”
(7). He also states that the category of “deep listening” gives primacy to musical time over ordi-
nary time. Although Kramer does not offer an explicit definition of “deep listening” but instead
refers to T.S. Eliot who describes it as “music heard so deeply that [...] you are the music” (in
Kramer 1988:7), “deep listening” could be defined as an attentional configuration of height-
ened auditory susceptibility caused by a high degree of concentration and the correspond-
ing emotional involvement, the combination of which allows the listener to transcend the time
the piece takes and enter the time the piece evokes. The term has also received much exposure
through the work of the experimental composer Pauline Oliveros, whose investigations into
the awareness-heightening powers of sound began as early as the 1970s. In Deep Listening: A
Composer’s Sound Practice Oliveros defines “deep listening” as an art in itself, a composer’s prac-
tice as well as a meditational act “intended to heighten and expand consciousness of sound in
as many dimensions of awareness and attentional dynamics as humanly possible” (2005:xxiii).
Although in many ways concomitant with Oliveros’s, my use of the term does not refer to a sus-
tained, intentional practice but remains concerned solely with attentional configuration.
One of the reasons why this particular attentional configuration may be said to have the
capacity to “suspend ordinary time,” as Langer claims, is its attunement to the nature of the
medium, which tends to solicit an extremely temporalized mode of attention, since music is
never given all-at-once but is in a continuous process of disappearing. Indeed, in “Structure
and Experiential Time,” Karlheinz Stockhousen, a figure of considerable influence on a num-
ber of Fluxus artists, defines the relationship between music and time along the axis of
perpetual disappearance:

If we realize, at the end of a piece of music — quite irrespective of how long it lasted,
whether it was played fast or slowly and whether there were very many or very few
notes — that we have “lost all sense of time” then we have in fact been experiencing time
most strongly. (1959:65)

This sort of listener involvement comes from the interplay of direct perception, memory, and
pattern recognition. According to Kramer, these three cognitive processes are related mostly
although not solely to musical linearity and tonality as exemplified by the Western cultural tra-
dition, which is predominantly “goal-orientated” (1988:25). The main characteristic of such
music is that it involves the listener in the pacing, timing, and articulation of an intricate vari-
ety of shaped musical events that create what could be termed “temporal content.” However,
the notion of musicalization, as operative in the Fluxus works, does not refer to an attempt to
implant a teleologically driven temporal “content” in a nonmusical medium and in this way
“elevate” the work to the realm of ideality by “suspending” it from the realm of ordinariness
and corporeality. On the contrary, it refers to the percipient’s very corporeal and “lived” mode
of attention, which does not segregate the work from its surroundings. Deep listening is thus an
attentional configuration that renders ordinary time performative.
A case in point is Takehisa Kosugi’s 1964 score:

South No. 1 (to Anthony Cox)

Pronounce “SOUTH” during a predetermined or indetermined duration. (in

Time in Fluxus Intermedia

Friedman 1990:36)

Or, his

South No. 2 (to Nam June Paik)

Pronounce “SOUTH” during a duration of more than 15 minutes. Pause for breath is
permitted but transition from pronunciation of one letter to another should be smooth
and slow. (36)

77
 Both compositions are monostructural and consist of a single sound as well as movement.
They have no phrases, no tension-building or tension-releasing progressions, variations, or
goal-direction and are as such unlikely to have a captivating effect on the listener that would
“transport” him or her to a different world. However, it would be inaccurate to say that these
compositions do not alter the configuration of the listener’s attention, since their monostruc-
tural consistency both permeates the listener and acts as a “platform” for numerous other devel-
opments. Such listener engagement can be compared to the spatial experience of viewing a
sculpture, which, apart from being visual, is also deeply kinesthetic, possibly tactile, and even
olfactory. When viewing a sculpture, our body negotiates the pacing of the experience: we walk
around the sculpture, draw closer to it to inspect a particular detail, walk away, come back to
take in the whole space, the coming and going of other visitors, the billowing of the curtains,
the smell of coffee coming from the cafeteria. In contrast to viewing a small painting, which
confines the circumference of our attention, viewing a sculpture expands and “texturizes” it.
Likewise, the experience of listening to minimally varied, “monolithic” compositions amplifies
the temporalities inherent in the environment. This amplification is made even more explicit
in works such as Kosugi’s 1963 Theatre Music whose score reads: “Keep walking intently” (in
Nyman 1974:68), or La Monte Young’s 1960 Composition No. 2, “Build a fire in front of an audi-
ence”; or, his 1960 Composition No. 5, “Turn a butterfly (or any number of butterflies) loose in
the performance area” (in Nyman 1974:70).
Apart from emphasizing extended duration as well as the multisensorially perceptible musi-
cality of natural processes, found in a burning fire or the flight of butterflies, these pieces point
to another element, crucial to the transference of deep listening from the segregated time-space
of a musical composition to that of the world around it, namely concretism. Although usually
associated with the more “violent” Fluxus compositions such as Nam June Paik’s 1961 One for
Violin Solo in which a violin is raised in a distended movement lasting several minutes, then sud-
denly released downwards and smashed to pieces, or George Maciunas’s 1964 Piano Piece No. 13
in which piano keys are nailed down with a hammer, concretism plays an important part in dis-
sociating music from ideality and associating it with concrete reality. In his 1962 essay “Neo-
Dada in Music, Theatre, Poetry, Art,” Maciunas asserts:

A material or concrete sound is considered one that has close affinity to the sound pro-
ducing material — thus a note sounded on a piano keyboard or a bel-canto voice is largely
immaterial, abstract and artificial since the sound does not clearly indicate its true source
or material reality — common action of string, wood, metal, felt, etc. (Maciunas [1962]
1993:156–57)

This way of approaching a musical instrument as a “total configuration,” to borrow Michel

Nyman’s expression, can be traced to John Cage and his prepared piano, among other tech-
niques, which he began experimenting with in the early 1940s by inserting a variety of objects
between the piano strings. As Nyman points out in Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, this
practice exploited an instrument not as a “means of making sounds in the accepted fashion, but
as a total configuration — the difference between ‘playing the piano’ and the ‘piano as sound
source’” (1974:17) thus extending not only the traditional function of the piano but also that
of the performer. However, Paik’s One for Violin Solo and other Fluxus works differ profoundly
from Cage’s work in that they perform the most elusive and yet most essential quality of “ordi-
nary” or “corporeal” time, not to be found in the “ideal” species of time (which is repeatable
and changeable): irreversibility. As Paik aptly points out: “Once you break an expensive piano,
it cannot be put back together. Once you throw water on the ground, you cannot scoop it back
up” (in Kaye 2007:41).
Natasha Lushetich

The Process of Time and Time as Process

While touching on the only uncontested point in a wide array of mutually exclusive theories of
time, Paik’s One for Violin Solo performs time as process, in other words its quiddity, and the pro-

78
cess of time, in other words, its
additivity. In doing so the piece
offers for experiential con-
templation — or indeed enact-
ment — the paradox of time as
evidenced by the parallel but
mutually exclusive existence
of two contrasting theories of
time, aptly named the A-theory
and the B-theory. As the time
theorist Heather Dyke eluci-
dates in “McTaggart and the
Truth about Time,” according
to the A-theory, or the so-called
“tensed” theory of time, time
is a real feature of the world.
Despite the fact that the past and
the future can only be accessed
through the present moment,
which is in perpetual motion
and thus in a continual process
of passing, the present moment
is nevertheless a real “loca-
tion” in the world. According to
the B-theory, time is not a real
existent. Events in space occur
tenselessly, unrelated to the
notion of “present,” “past,” and Figure 2. Nam June Paik, One for Violin Solo, Neo-Dada in der Musik,
“future” and can only be spo- Dusseldorf, 1962. (Courtesy of George Maciunas Foundation Inc. All rights
ken of in relational terms, such reserved, 2011)
as “earlier than,” “simultaneous
with,” or “later than” (Dyke 2002:137–39).
By being both of time and being time, One for Violin Solo embodies as well as performs both of
these views. Due to the fact that it disrobes “ideal” musical time of its rhythmically and melod-
ically created multidimensionality and confines it to “material” time, in other words, the unidi-
mensionality and unidirectionality of a moving body in space — the violin — One for Violin Solo
simultaneously inhabits the zone of the A- as well as the B-theory. Once the violin has reached
the point above the performer’s head and is on the verge of beginning its journey downwards,
the temporal experience can be separated into three different categories: (1) the present — the
violin raised and held in an axe-like position; (2) the past — the violin’s position seen as an accu-
mulation of past-presents congealed into a concrete form; (3) the future — the violin’s spatial
direction, its imminent downwards journey which forms the notion of the future as a prospec-
tive addition of not-yet-presents. The moment the violin reaches the end of its journey and is
smashed to pieces is the point at which the mutually reinforcing conditions of additivity and
congruence, which form the progression or the process of time, have been brought to a logical
conclusion with regard to the initial arrangement of the violin’s component parts. Paik’s One for
Time in Fluxus Intermedia

Violin Solo embodies the tripartite division of time into distinct temporal aggregates, since the
state of the violin at the end of the composition is radically different from the state of the violin
at the beginning of the composition.
However, apart from revealing the additive aspect of time, or in other words its manner of
unfolding, its processuality, the same composition also reveals time as process. In this regard, the
arrangement of the violin’s constituent parts at the “end” of the composition will be different

79
 enough to mark a category shift from the notion “violin” to the notion “no-longer-violin” or
“non-violin,” (in other words from the category of being to the category of nonbeing), only if
change is seen as a purely transient alteration in the spatial distribution of essential traits. If,
however, change is seen as a continuum and not just a rearrangement of essential traits causing
an object to become a nonobject the moment it loses its “stable identity,” then the passage from
the state of violin-ness or violin-wholeness to the state of non-violin-ness or violin-smithereens
is revealed to be heavily dependent on the frame of reference. If framed by the human observer,
the process of change will be seen as corresponding to the notions of past, present, and future
only on account of the triadic composition of human perception consisting of memory, direct
perception, and expectation. The moment this frame is removed, the smithereens-condition of
the violin is revealed as no more than a relational coordinate, a “later than” if compared to the
“earlier than” of the wholeness-condition of the violin. But, regardless of the difference in the
percipient’s temporal experience of One for Violin Solo, the composition reveals the one undis-
puted sine qua non of time — and that is irreversibility. For, whether regarded through the per-
ceptual lens provided by the A-theory or the B-theory there is only one temporal direction
accessible to our perception within the sphere of lived, material reality; the reverse is not. The
temporal unidirectionality of lived corporeality and materiality, which, unlike the reversible
temporal structure of “musical time,” cannot be experienced from a different angle — in other
words, externally — testifies to the fact that as living beings we are internal to time, as are all
other things, phenomena, and occurrences. The experiential appropriation of the notion that we
are always already involved in the processual transition called time, but which could equally be
called existence, and which, unlike “musical time” cannot be stopped, rewound, or restarted at
will, has profound implications. Not only does it collapse the binary opposition between “musi-
cal” or ideal time on the one hand, and “ordinary” or material time on the other, but, as Paik’s,
Kosugi’s, and Young’s compositions aptly demonstrate, it exposes the impossibility of the very
notion of ideality since ideality hinges on purity, the unattainable state of untaintedness by
things material and corporeal. By transferring deep listening, which “makes time move [...] not
an objective time out there, beyond ourselves, but the very personal time created within us as
we listen deeply to music” (Kramer 1988:6) to the realm of concrete reality, Paik’s, Kosugi’s,
and Young’s compositions sensitize the percipient to time as existence, that is to say to time as
processuality and expressive activity always already underway in all things, beings, and phenom-
ena. However, this work of pervasive musicalizing temporalization, which renders concrete, mate-
rial time performative, is not only operative in Fluxus compositions but can also be found in a
medium whose relationship to “objective” time is considered to be much more rigorously deter-
mined, and that is film.

The Production of Lived Time in FluxFilms

In Time and Free Will as well as Creative Evolution, Henri Bergson likens scientific, objective,
“externalized,” and “spatialized” time to cinematographic time (1960:81; 1911:329). The reason
for this is the illusion of continuity created by the rapid succession of static frames only 1/24
of a second long, which, although static cannot be discerned as such by the naked human eye
and are mistakenly perceived as a single, uninterrupted and continuous image. Bergson’s refer-
ence is not directed solely at the cinematographic projection but encompasses the entire cin-
ematic procedure in which movement is filmed as continuous in real life, then mechanically
broken down into a series of static single frames and subsequently projected as an illusion of
continuity, imitative of the original continuous motion. In Creative Evolution Bergson compares
this “contrivance of the cinematograph” (1911:332) to that of scientific and “objective” knowl-
edge in general and “objective” notions of time in particular, which place the observing sub-
Natasha Lushetich

ject outside the phenomena or processes observed: “Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner
becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming
artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality” (332). In contrast to the notion
of divisibility into discrete and equal units or instants, exemplified by the succession of static

80
frames whereby “cinematographic time” is understood to mean time placed at the service of the
mechanics of the cinematic narrative, the Bergsonian concept of time is that of indivisible dura-
tion without extensity.
Variously called duration, pure duration, and true duration, time is for Bergson a nonquantifi-
able multiplicity, inseparable from its multiple states by an “imaginary instant” (1960:218). It is a
permanent flux of qualitative change and as such permanently pregnant with creative potential. It
is also characterized by interpenetration, or “endosmosis” — the inward flow of a fluid through
a permeable membrane toward a fluid of greater concentration — of the different states of con-
sciousness in which the past becomes immanent in the present, memory flows into perception,
fantasy into reality, and the virtual into the actual. This is also the reason why time cannot be
objectively conceptualized, externalized, divided into a series of smaller units of equal magni-
tude whose divided state veils the continuous inner process of endosmosis. Like the “successive
notes of a tune” (104) that both succeed one another and are perceived “in one another” (100),
a comparison frequently used by Bergson as a way of avoiding spatial metaphors, pure duration
is an inextensive multiplicity, “a succession of qualitative changes which melt into and permeate
one another, without precise outlines, without any tendency to externalize themselves in rela-
tion to one another” (104).
Although both Bergson’s absolutistic terminology and his notions of spatial perception
remain firmly bound by the early 20th-century zeitgeist, as not yet marked by phenomenol-
ogy and its experiential self ’ s concern-orientated conceptualization of space wherein an object
an individual is looking at may be described as closer than the glasses they are using to look at
the object, Bergson’s notion of the spatialization of time denotes a fixed and ordered arrange-
ment of clearly delineated units, reminiscent of a closed circuit. Thus visualized, spatialized
time, of which cinematographic time is a variant, is “closed,” static, mechanistic, and teleologi-
cal. To borrow a metaphor from Creative Evolution, it resembles a picture puzzle, which regard-
less of how many times it is assembled and reassembled does not offer a change of content.
Granted, there will be a change in experience accompanying the varying degree of speed and
proficiency in composing the puzzle but the time permeating this action will remain inciden-
tal, or, in Bergson’s words, “an accessory” (1911:369). To contrast this notion of time reduced
to mere “time-length” (372) with that of pure duration which is creative and productive and
thus elevated to “time-invention” (372), Bergson uses the example of an artist and a blank can-
vas where “time is no longer an accessory [...;] it is not an interval that may be lengthened or
shortened without the content being altered” (370). The reason why cinematographic time is
“inert,” according to Bergson, is because it does not produce pure duration, by which is meant
an unpredictable interpenetration of images, but, instead, presents a mere succession.
Despite the fact that Bergson’s views on cinematography—which could be seen as lacking
in breadth—were shaped by the early cinema’s lack of formal complexity, whereas the evolu-
tion of the cinema was to take place through montage and the elevation of the shot to a tempo-
ral category, Bergson’s point still has some validity. For although operative in the intertwining
and permanently changing zone of the viewer’s lived and phenomenal time, film as a medium
nevertheless remains “contained” in and by objective time, comparable to Bergson’s puzzle. The
notions of “lived” and “phenomenal” time are derived from two different sources: the phenom-
enological accounts of temporality, such as those articulated by Edmund Husserl and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, and the Zen Buddhist views, as formulated by the Zen master Dogen and the
Zen philosopher Kitaro Nishida. In Beyond Personal Identity, a comparative study of the phenom-
Time in Fluxus Intermedia

enology of no-self, Gereon Kopf articulates the notion of phenomenal time in the following
way: “phenomenal time is posited by the experiential ‘I’ who acknowledges its own temporality”
(2001:171). In other words, phenomenal time is constituted as the subject’s external continu-
ity, marked by the notion of finitude within which the subject relates to its past as to its factu-
ality and perceives its future as its possibility. Lived time, by contrast, is the time “established
by the creative activity of the self ” (173) and refers primarily to the body. It is time experienced

81
 somatically that manifests its “past” and “future” by continually changing its relationship to its
surroundings. However, while both phenomenal and lived time could be said to be “in” the sub-
ject; objective time, most often conceptualized as a linear temporal progression from the past
to the future, is placed outside the subject, or rather, the subject is placed outside of objective
time. This means that while with each respective viewing a film may manifest or give rise to
an entirely different phenomenal as well as lived temporality, depending on the viewer’s psy-
chosomatic disposition and engagement, there still remains an element of unchanged objective
time, fixed and made inert by the film’s length, tempo, and the structure of its internal, content-
determining relationships.
In the cinematic production propelled by the cinematic narrative, it is also the objective tem-
poral relationship between the speed of recording and the speed of projection that remains
unchanged. The most striking feature of a number of FluxFilms is the fact that they temporal-
ize the fixed and inert ratios between the recording and the projecting speed. In distorting one
of the constituting features of cinematographic time, these films subvert the very notion of
objective time.
Disappearing Music for Face is based on a 1964 score by Mieko Shiomi, which reads:

Performers begin the piece with a smile and during the duration of the piece change the
smile very slowly and gradually to no smile. (in Friedman 1990:49)

It was performed in 1966 by Yoko Ono and shot using a high-speed slow-motion camera. The
effect of this was that Ono’s disappearing smile, filmed in eight seconds of real time, resulted
in 11 minutes of screen time when projected at normal speed. Because of the colossal dispro-
portion between the duration of the action performed in real time and its highly temporally
extended transposition to projection time (the proportion being 1:82), as well as the extreme
close up that frames Ono’s lips, chin, and cheek in a way that temporalizes the spatial dimension
of the shot by magnifying it — thus creating a temporal “stretch” — Disappearing Music for Face
manifests extreme “temporal thickness.” The term “temporal thickness” is often used in time
theory to refer to the rich texture of the temporal dimension composed of “complete specious
presents.” As Francisco Varela explains in “The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology of
Time Consciousness,” the specious present, which is the smallest unit of “temporal thickness” is
itself composed of multiple temporal “streamings” (1997:n.p.).
Although Varela resorts to a spatial metaphor — that of a field with a center representative
of the “now moment,” bounded by a “horizon or fringe” of what has just past, also referred to
as “retention,” and the horizon or fringe of what is about to happen, also referred to as “pro-
tention” — he insists on the mobility of these horizons, the texture of the movement, and the
integration of the different frameworks of temporal perception (1997:n.p.). The effect this
multidimensional “streaming” has on perception in general and the perception of objects in
particular is that it isolates and magnifies them in the sense of “bringing them closer” to the
observer. As Midori Yoshimoto points out in Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New
York, the original intention of Shiomi’s score was “to visualize a diminuendo of music by human
action” (2005:145). In other words, the intention was to transpose the gradual and extenuating
nearing of the threshold of audibility (often accompanied by the minute tuning of the listener’s
aural attention to the subtleties of liminal sound), to a simple movement human beings perform
on a daily basis. In the film version of Disappearing Music for Face, this diminuendo is effectu-
ated by two intertwined cinematic elements: a tempo just quick enough for the movement of
the disappearing smile to remain discernible throughout the film and a shot just long (far away)
enough for the shapes in the shot to remain discernible as belonging to a human face. Both the
Natasha Lushetich

fact that the movement of the disappearing smile is almost imperceptible but never quite per-
ceived as static, and that the features of Ono’s face appear abstract but never melt entirely into
a nonfigurative composition, point to a threshold phenomenon, a state of permanent oscillation.
For Varela, the retentive-protentive temporal integration produced by the specious present is a

82
permanently oscillating, perma-
nently “slipping” process. While
retention retains phases of the
perceptual act by causing a pro-
gressive slowing down of the
velocity of perception or a “slip-
page” (Varela 1997:n.p.); pro-
tention links this “slippage” into
affection. The parallel work-
ing of retention and protention
thus slows down the velocity of This image has been removed due to copyright
perception while producing an restrictions. Please refer to the print version.
affective coloring that feeds back
into retention and in this way
produces a cumulative decelera-
tion, a gradually distending dis-
tension. By distorting the ratio
between recording time and
projection time, Disappearing
Music for Face introduces what
could be called a “creative warp”
into objective cinematographic
time within which the affec-
tively colored — mellower, softer,
“looser” — distension of the spe-
cious present occurs. The colos-
sal discrepancy between the Figure 3. Mieko Shiomi, Disappearing Music for Face, 1966.
average duration of a disappear- (Photo by Peter Moore © Estate of Peter Moore/VAGA, NYC)
ing smile in real life and 11 min-
utes of cinematic duration causes
a progressive “temporal swelling” and alters the viewer’s sense of lived time by slowing down
her breathing and bodily movement. What this means is that Disappearing Music for Face effec-
tively perpetuates the production of time within the film’s “objective duration” and does precisely
that which Bergson accused cinematographic or “inert” time of being incapable of doing.

The Continuity of Discontinuity

In a similar fashion, Nam June Paik’s 1964 Zen for Film, engages the viewer in the produc-
tion of time as a simultaneously continuous and discontinuous phenomenon. However, unlike
Disappearing Music for Face, it does not belong to the category of “slow” films. Consisting of a
roll of 16 mm film, a clear leader whose “objective” or “closed” running time is approximately
30 minutes, Paik’s Zen for Film exposes the cinematic medium — the blank celluloid and the
projection apparatus — to the cinematic gaze, devoid of any recorded material or any cinematic
narrative-created temporal content. Instead, the film discloses what Paik has termed “abstract
time: time without contents” (in Kaye 2007:52). This notion, as the Fluxus scholar Bruce
Jenkins points out, is not only in sharp contrast to “the pastness of filmic representation, with its
indexical claims to capturing actual, pre-existing phenomena,” it also
Time in Fluxus Intermedia

posits a concrete present in its moving-image tale of the celluloid’s journey through the
transport mechanism of the projector [...,] a tale unique in each telling as Zen for Film was
visibly changed by each viewing and maintained on its celluloid surface a record of those
observations and screenings in the form of accumulated scratches, dust, dirt, rips and
splices. (1993:137)

83
 Paradoxically, the temporal structure of Zen for Film seems to be both continuous and
discontinuous.
This structure is best understood through the prism of Kitaro Nishida’s notion of the “con-
tinuity of discontinuity” (1970:6), part of his Zen- as well as Bergson-influenced theory of tem-
porality. This theory is rooted in the “logic of basho” whereby basho means “that in which” and
is permanently engaged in a dialectical relationship with “that which” or in other words, the
content of basho. The present is, according to Nishida, “the basho of time” and so is the self
(6–7). Continuous time, flowing from the past to the future is both determined by discontinu-
ity and is “located” in discontinuity, discontinuity being the basho of continuity. In other words,
every new moment is different from the previous precisely because it is discontinuous. Each
“present” is severed from the “past present” by a non-present, which means that continuous
time disappears and is determined again in the next present.
This discontinuous time is located in something Nishida calls the “eternal present”: “The
past flows while turning to the present, whereas the future flows while turning to the present.
Our world comes from the present and returns to the present” (117). The notion of the “eter-
nal present” as the basho of time, or “that in which time turns” ought to be understood in the
context of the Zen tradition where the word “eternal” does not refer to transcendence. Not
coming from the “two world” heritage characteristic of the Western metaphysical tradition in
which immanent time is a linear construct, a sequential progression of instants, while eternity
is placed entirely outside time, Nishida’s “eternal present” is a dialectical concept rooted in the
Zen Buddhist notion of momentariness and impermanence. This notion suggests that all exist-
ents without exception are nonsubstantive and nonpermanent events, which, instead of mov-
ing in time, are temporal in nature. All existents thus last only a moment — they come into
existence and go out of existence immediately afterwards. If a perceptual object m changes and
from m mutates to m*, the state of m-ness will be destroyed and replaced by the state of m*-
ness, which will in turn be destroyed and replaced by the state of m+-ness and so on ad infini-
tum. The rapid succession as well as gradual variation in structure will make the states of m, m*
and m+ appear identical and continuous and each present moment or existent will both deter-
mine the percipient’s mode of perception and determine the next moment or existent. It is this
processual dialectics of the “eternal present” or the continuity of discontinuity that Zen for Film
brings into focus.
In revealing a vast amount of flickering visual detail, Zen for Film resembles a microscopic
view of a surface normally thought to be homogenous and temporally persistent in its mono-
lithic identity — if observed by the naked human eye — but which turns into a flux of swarm-
ing micro life, full of incessant biological transactions, when magnified. From the perspective
of the Zen Buddhist notion of momentariness the static film frames are moments or exist-
ents. Each subtly different from the next, their succession is “translated” into continuity by the
working of the projecting apparatus, much like the momentariness of noncontinuous exist-
ents is “translated” into continuous time by the working of the human brain. Because of the
deteriorating nature of the material — the celluloid — as well as the numerous textural altera-
tions inflicted by multiple projections, Zen for Film will in fact reveal the discontinuous, per-
manently changing nature of continuity if viewed several times in a row. If, however, viewed
several times over a longer period of time, such as a few years or a decade, the representational
function of memory, which tends to “freeze” and archive the most essential features (the rea-
son why we remember the smallness of a child we have not seen for 10 years, rather than the
color of his or her eyes, and are invariably surprised by the fact that this “essential feature” has
been replaced by another, contradictory feature, that of bigness), might make the film seem
unchanged. This is due to the unifying nature of the subject’s sense of phenomenal time, which
Natasha Lushetich

has the power to “thingify” occurrences, processes, and phenomena experienced in order to turn
them into “milestones” within the subject’s perception of its own deployment in time as a tem-
porally persistent, continuous entity. The temporal position from which Zen for Film will appear
unchanged, thus itself also a continuous and temporally persistent entity, is that of a perspec-

84
tivally construed continuity, which testifies to the possibility of alterity, namely discontinuity.
As regards the immediate temporal experience of watching Zen for Film, it, too, shows itself to
be woven entirely of the threads generated by the viewer’s perception, whether her retentive-
protentive or associative mode of attention. Because the film has no cinematic content and
because the only content is indeed the viewer’s own virtual content, the temporal dimension
of Zen for Film is inherently performative. This is to say that, unlike the films with a cinematic
content, whose tempo and narrative temporality operate along a mirror-like actual-virtual axis,
involving the actual images and the viewer’s interpretative processing of these images, Zen for
Film unfolds entirely in the arena of the viewer’s virtuality, thus making her inner temporality
performative. The relationship between the percipient’s performance of her virtual content and
what Paik has termed the “abstract time” of the blank celluloid reflects one of the primary pos-
tulates of Zen, which, as Nishida suggests in reference to numerous Zen masters, is that “form
is emptiness and emptiness form” ([1987] 1993:103).
Zen for Film is a processual interaction between form and emptiness — the form given to
emptiness by the viewing subject, which, while becoming the object of the subject’s contempla-
tion reciprocally “gives form” to the viewing subject. This dialectical determination is the “eter-
nal present” whose paradoxical formulation indicates that while the fleeting existents can only
appear as momentary configurations of emptiness, emptiness can in turn only “appear” in and
as existents.

The Braiding of Lived and Phenomenal Time

in Durational Performance
This continuous mutual configuration between form and emptiness, between the already-
existing and the not-yet-existing, “created in the present activity as a movement from the pres-
ent to the present and from the created to the creating” (Nishida [1987] 1993:108), is further
deployed on two different but mutually configuring time scales — that of lived and phenomenal
time — in Fluxus durational performance, most notably Alison Knowles’s Identical Lunch.
Described by Knowles as her “noonday meditation” (in Corner 1973:1), The Identical Lunch
was first discovered as a temporal objet trouvé (an action Knowles performed every day), by
her fellow artist Philip Corner and subsequently “elevated into a formal score” (1, emphasis
added). The formal score read: “a tunafish sandwich on wheat toast with lettuce and butter, no
mayo, and a glass of buttermilk or a cup of soup” (1). From the moment of its formal inception
in February 1969, Knowles performed the score for a period of over a year, at exactly the same
place, the Riss Restaurant in New York, and approximately the same time of day. Numerous
other performers have also performed the score since then, at the Riss and elsewhere. As Jim
Maya puts it in the Journal of the Identical Lunch (Knowles’s collection of her own and other per-
formers’ observations): “The identical lunch food demands little or no thought: the surrounding
activities take all your thought: The waitress, her hair, her lips, the napkins. Their embossments
or lack of embossments. The stools, the chairs, the heat. When you’ve finished — You hardly
know you’ve eaten” (in Knowles 1971:n.p.). This view, essentially expounding the transparency
of habit — which, once practice-ingrained and sequence-locked, no longer requires the per-
former’s full attention and frees it up for the unforeseen, the marginal, and the accidental — is
shared by numerous other performers. Knowles’s own entries reflect her engagement with time
as a process of becoming — a continuous elaboration through differentiation — and range from
observations about the varying quality of the fish: “tunafish is very watery; it is mid-week” (11);
Time in Fluxus Intermedia

the shape of the sandwich: “for the first time the sandwich comes uncut” (12); the difference in
staff who serve her: “L is young and Greek” (13); to the impact she has on others, such as when
a burn on her cheek makes those sitting opposite her “eat hurriedly and leave” (16).
By thematizing the continuous emergence of continuously proliferating differentiations,
The Identical Lunch renders “palpable” the Nishidian notion of the “eternal present.” Here, the
phenomenal continuity of the noonday lunch situation, part of the performer’s own continuity

85
 and thus history as well as narrative identity, is determined always anew in the discontinuity of
“disparate moments” of which the performer’s lived time consists — her physical disposition,
the smell of the soup coming from the kitchen, the sogginess of the sandwich, or the absence
of napkins.
Although determined by the performer’s past experiences, her perceptual frame is man-
ifested in the present, and it is in the present that the prospective framing of futural events
occurs. Every past and every future is in this sense manifested in the present and occurs always
and only in the present. This means that the performer’s phenomenal continuity cannot be
a preexperiential given but that it becomes apparent — or, is constituted — only in situations
that frame the disparate sequence of events as continuity. Both situational continuity and per-
sonal continuity are very closely linked to what might be termed “experiential velocity,” the
speed with which we process experiences and relegate them to the rank of “sameness” or “usu-
alness.” In perceptual terms, this rank equals background. Much like Cage’s 1952 4!33" — which
requires the performer to remain silent for the duration of 4 minutes and 33 seconds and in this
way draws attention to all events in time-space framed by this duration — The Identical Lunch
draws attention to the fact that there is no silence and no “background.” Rather, it amplifies the
transparency of habitualization, which, paradoxically, is only felt when disrupted by an irregu-
larity, which in turn gives rise to a change in affective coloring. In this sense, the score initiates
the durational performer in a de-transparentization of the process of habitualization by collapsing
the opposition between lived and phenomenal time. In contrast to lived time, which is essen-
tially an interaction between the environment and the somatic self as expressive of past habit-
ualizations and futural anticipations; phenomenal time is constituted as an “externally” viewed,
larger scale amalgamation of the same habitualizations and anticipations. Phenomenal time
forms the horizon of the subject’s past and future within which a narrative identity is produced.
Within this horizon the subject comes to view herself “externally,” as a coherent whole, a person
who “always fights injustice” or “laughs in the face of life.” However, if phenomenal continuity
is viewed from the perspective of lived experience that temporalizes and unifies past-and-future
inside the present (Nishida [1987] 1993:137), phenomenal time is always already part of the
temporalization and cannot posit the subject’s past and future as some sort of “external other.”
Habit formation is thus the structuring activity of temporalization in which the past configures
the present and the present simultaneously configures the future, thus creating new perceptual
matrixes and consolidating old ones. In this sense, The Identical Lunch performs the “braiding”
of lived and phenomenal time, which, like the continuity of discontinuity, does not denote two
opposed processes or species of time, but exemplifies unification through perpetual differenti-
ation. In involving the performer in a close examination of emergent affective tonalities active
in the constitution of her lived temporality, which further leads to the formation of attitudes and
personality, The Identical Lunch sensitizes the performer to the process of personal becoming. This
process relates to the performer’s phenomenal continuity in the same way that temporaliza-
tion relates to time. Much as time is temporalization and not its externally viewed and atem-
poral “other,” phenomenal continuity is personal becoming — the formation and differentiation
of likes, dislikes, emotional and cognitive habits — and not a congealed “whole” personality or
identity. It is thus not only the elaboration and differentiation of the world around the per-
former that takes place within the durational temporal activity of Knowles’s score, but also her
own individuation.
In this sense, The Identical Lunch, like One for Violin Solo, Disappearing Music for Face, and Zen
for Film, performs time by involving the percipient/performer in listening deeply to the dialec-
tical, ordinary-musical, actual-virtual, lived-phenomenal production of existence, the only dif-
ference being that of scale. Whether lasting several minutes or a year, these pieces produce
Natasha Lushetich

pure duration, a qualitative, multisensorially texturized, musicalized immersion in the thickness

of existence.

86
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