>>From Dada to Fluxus<<

The Cologne artist Mary Bauermeister celebrated her 75th Birthday in September 2009.

Film producer Gregor Zootzky took this occasion to artistically reflect the role Mary Bauermeister

played in encouraging the art and music avant-garde in post WWII-Cologne.

In 1959, Mary Bauermeister returned to Cologne after short student residencies in Ulm and

Saarbrücken, hiring an attic in the elegantly newly built Lintgasse 28. Here she presented

exhibitions and concerts between 1960 and 1961. The Contre Festival – presented by Bauermeister

parallel to the ‘World Music Festival of the Internationalen Gesellschaft für Neue

Musik’ (IGNM) [International Foundation for New Music] in 1960 in Colongne became legendary.

She accommodated young composers turned down by the official festival, and presented

their concerts late at night , giving the musically interested public the chance to see

top range musicians of the new music in her studio in the Lintgasse. Here guests such as

John Cage, Nam June Paik, David Tudor, Sylvano Bussotti, Cornelius Cardew, Karlheinz

Stockhausen and many other found their way to Mary Bauermeister’s studio.

The main focus of the film is an evening which went down not only in music- but also arthistory

as one of the greatest „patricides“: The Korean musician and later performance- and

videoartist Nam June Paik shampoos the hair of his great Idol John Cage and cuts of his

necktie. This attack on Cage, completely surprising and deeply disturbing, was a very important

ritual for Paik. Paik, having had a classical musical education and working as composer

up to then, decided to end his musical career because he found that he would never reach

the nouveau of his great idols Cage and Stockhausen. Cutting the necktie of Cage was so to

speak cutting his own ideals, his career as musician. All the disappointment in his own failure

finds its expression in this act.

The performance of Paik featured here also shows a second important aspect of the film: the

radical nature of the avant-garde as reaction to the experiences of the war and post-war period.

Paik initially plays Chopin, tricking the audience into a false security of the familiar. Suddenly

he jumps up, overthrows the piano and starts to attack the audience with machine gun

salvos. With this he criticizes the stubborn silence of the Germans to the violence of the section

and suppression Helms experienced as jew during the war.

With recourses to Dada Zurich, the surrealists and the Nouveau Réalistes at the start of the

film, Zootzky contextualises the Studio Bauermeister in the classical avant-garde. The Dadaartists

of Zurich also confronted the violent butchery of thousands of men and woman during

WW I with biting cynicism. The more brutal and grotesque the war became, the more bizarre

the events in the Cabaret Voltaire developed. The first sound-poetry was howled to the audience

by Hugo Ball in an absurd costume. The middle class with its stuffy view of art and its

firmly established taste was attacked and denounced in a very similar way to that of Paik in

his performance in 1960. The mirroring of the violence of the war and the happenings of the

artist remains an important theme throughout the film.

Kerstin Skrobanek M. A.

Tranls. T. Van Niekerk.