Thirteenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Performed at the 1962 “Fluxus International Festival of New Music,” Philip Corner’s Piano Activities participates in dialectics of cultural production in the 1960s. Cold War historians emphasize cultural production as an assertion of ideological power. This ties to theories of cultural internationalism, a model to restructure relations through international exchange of visual and performing arts. Scholars address Fluxus’s use of humor, challenging the commoditization of art objects. Within scholarship, there is lack of attention to the political stakes of Fluxus experimental music. My research addresses Piano Activities as a method of protest against the political importance of cultural production during the Cold War. I argue for the significance of experimentation, addressing Piano Activities as a subversion to powers of cultural production undermining systems of cultural hegemony during the Cold War. Cultural production involves social processes in the manifestation of objects and circulation of cultural forms and values, in this case through artistic labor. Culture is then produced through mediums of force that had gone through the turmoil of wartime mobilization moving into postwar readjustment. I situate the importance of Piano Activities through formal and theoretical analysis of the score, performance, and geopolitical context of the festival. I address issues of concrete materiality, the dissolution of singular authorship, and non-hierarchical collaboration as methods of a revisionist approach to pre-determined systems of Cold War hegemony. I discuss that Piano Activities promotes a new form of cultural internationalism, tying into the return to form of these types of experimental collaborations in the modern-day.