NON-HAPPENINGS

I am here and there is nothing to say.

Nothing is happening. Nothing is happening. Nothing is happening.

Whenever nothing is happening. Not happening is happening.  

We are just talking. That is all that we are doing. That is all that we are not doing. This is in fact writing.

This is just a little writing.

The title of Ray Johnson’s selected writings: Not Nothing.

Not Nothing is a display of ashes.

Nothing changes from one generation to another except the things seen and the things seen make that generation, that is to say nothing changes in people from one generation to another except the way of seeing and being seen.

His presentations thwarted expectations and exhausted audiences. And Reichek remembered the duration of Reinhardt’s slideshow such that “you slipped into a state.”

And we all lay on the floor and he served us sherry and we watched slides.

We are seeing nothing. Nothing is being seen. We are attending to nothing. Attending nothing. It is all a pile of nothing.

Johnson’s “Nothings” – around thirty such meetings took place in the years up to 1977. In 1980, he placed an ad in the art section of the New York Times to announce, “Ray Johnson/ nothing.”

The more one eliminates the more logical life seems to become. I feel it may be possible some day to eliminate EVERYTHING.

There are multiple, oblique and shifting narrators in Johnson’s epistolary writings and notes, but the discrete “I” does not exist.

Void yourself at all times as you see me void. Shit.

Avoid something. Always and never. Avoid something.

I feel nothing.

And nothing is happening.

Reinhardt called his lectures “non-happenings,” suggesting, along with the wordplay of his 1963 talk “Get the Flux out of Here,” a direct awareness of the happenings of Allan Kaprow and Fluxus events in New York, and John Cage’s classes at the New School. Reinhardt was no doubt channeling one of the most notorious lectures at the Artist’s Club, Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing” in 1950.

I remember loving sound before I ever took a music lesson. And so we make our lives by what we love. (Last year when I talked here I made a short talk. That was because I was talking about something; but this year I am talking about nothing and of course will go on talking for a long time.)

Nothing is long. Nothing lasts. Nothing is real.

Not Nothing includes not only notes he sent to others, but also the scored corrections of one dissatisfied with the quality of response, an enfolding criticality.

For the last few years, the French artist, Pierre Leguillon, has been performing his Non-Happenings (After Ad Reinhardt).  These lectures are built around slides that he has borrowed from the estate of Ad Reinhardt.

So I was always very curious about Ad Reinhardt’s slides . . . why they attracted no attention.

Because the slides are not for sale. They cannot be bought, and they are, in themselves, nothing.

Just think about how he referred to the black paintings to which he devoted the last twelve years of his life, as “free, unmanipulated and unmanipulatable, useless, unmarketable, irreducible, unphotographable, unreproducible, inexplicable icons.” So he could only speak or write about what his painting was not. And in his slide shows everything becomes a flat photographic surface . . . everything is nothing but the photographs themselves. So at the very end, you almost don’t remember anything – you don’t remember anything at all – nothing – and that is the Non-Happening process. Nothing is arriving.

Nothing is here.