Well, it depends on the piece for instance. „Make a salad“, it could be wrapped up very quickly if the
ingredients are all washed and ready, but they usually aren’t, they usually have to be torn apart and
chopped and sounded and so it’s very hard to, particularly for „Make a salad,“ to say ok, to the
organizer, its gonna be 10 minutes. You just don’t know, it could be half an hour, it could be more…
or there aren’t enough plates for the audience, things like that, haha (laughing). „Make a Salad“ is
different every time. Even somewhere like the Tate, where they are ready with all of the ingredients
and everything else. To get the salad out of the tarp, this huge tarp, into the little bowl, individual
bowls… that was time consuming. But it’s ok, people do their best. People getting up and leaving,
and being annoyed that they have to wait… sit there and wait while the salad is being made. They
thought its gonna be theatre or, I have had people stand up in the audience and ask me „What is
going on here?“ and then people behind are saying, „please sit down or go out“, so you get the
audience very involved.
In the early Fluxus performance years, people were not ready for this kind of activity at all. They
would want to go home, or they would want to call up and get their kids to come. It puts the
audience really on the spot, because they’ve all made a salad at home but… there have been some
amazing performances I want to mention, called „Child art piece.“ That’s where you get some brave
mother to stand up there with her 4 year old and put him up on… in front of the audience and
comfort him, and say that he’s gonna be up there for a couple of minutes alone, and some can do it,
and some can’t. So, the audience has a chance to kind of study a tiny person. Is he gonna stand up
there in front of the audience for a couple of minutes or run for his mother? It’s like an interesting
piece.
Now George Maciunas, was very much the impresario, the leader of the group, the Fluxus group and
he would have things not in disarray, he would have it very exactly done. So, sometimes the simpler
pieces by Brecht, or some of my one liner pieces, were more to his liking, where someone would
come up on stage and simply speak about their shoes and he could…”thank you very much.” I
probably had one or two pieces on a program. Someone who was very active on the group was Ben
Vautier from France. I mentioned George Brecht, but George Brecht didn’t like to be on the stage,
he wanted to give pieces but he didn’t want to be seen. People always had theirs…. And Dick Higgins,
he was fine with performing but he had to run a press in New York or wherever. So I was the one to
be traveling.
