Happening/TheatrePiece#1
Principal Investigator
Collaborators
Dan Anderson, UNC Department of English and Comparative Literature
Jeff Beam, UNC Biology/Chemistry Library
Susan Harbage Page, UNC Art Department
Jeffrey Pomerantz, UNC School of Information and Library Science
Josh Hockensmith, Sloane Art Library
Project Description
Jones and his team will stage a modern “Happening” in the performance tradition of American avant-garde artist/musicians John Cage and Allan Kaprow. Happenings, as conceived by Cage, are theatrical events that abandon the traditional concept of stage-audience and occur without a sense of definite duration; instead, they are left to chance. They have a minimal script, with no plot. In fact, a Happening is so-named because it occurs in the present, attempting to arrest the concept of passing time. Cage believed that theater was the closest route to integrating art and (real) life.
In this same spirit of integrating art and life, Jones and his team will collaborate to recreate, document and allow remix of a modern recreation of the Happening based on a rare book housed in the UNC Libraries system. This project will be a significant reinventing and updating of these watershed moments in international multimedia, multidisciplinary arts. Like the earlier works, this project will abandon stage-audience distinction, but it will employ the pervasive technologies to which we now have access.
John Cage's Mushroom Book captures the experience of mushroom hunting through a collaboration between a noted mycologist (Alexander H. Smith), an extraordinary illustrator (Lois Long), and Renaissance man/visionary John Cage. Using scientific illustration and description, poetry, typography and text the book is essentially an early multimedia event. The team will re-capture the experience of their hunt and collaboration through a reinterpretation of the Mushroom Book: an interactive, three-dimensional, technologically-enabled multimedia experience.
This Happening will fulfill the as-yet unfulfilled promise to Dr. John Couch's widow, by the UNC-Chapel Hill John N. Couch Biology-Botany Library to make use of the Mushroom Book in the educational mission of the University. The volume was a gift from Mrs. Couch in memory of her husband's and John Cage's friendship. Dr. Couch was a world-renowned mycologist for whom the Biology-Botany library at UNC was named. Couch, Cage and others made a number of mushroom forays together.
The book is discussed in Cage's biography, Roaring Silence (Amazon preview) page 235-236, and Cage discusses technology on page 237. In Conversations with Cage, John Cage says 10 lithographs were by Lois Long (the scientifically correct mushroom images) and 10 by Cage, himself: "My texts ... handwritten in five different litho crayon intensities (... superimpositions making much unreadable) ... enabling the reader ... to go hunting in my handwritten page." (letter to Smith from Cage)
