On the Continuity of Practice in Florian Feigl’s work

Florian Feigl, performance artist and educator based in Berlin who was a guest speaker in our SNSF project “Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge” (Monday, March 8, 2021), recalls that Klaasen, who witnessed Fluxus during his artistic career, must have repeated the action several hundred times. At the first glimpse, the enactment of the score seems simple. The work appears to be about producing sonic effects by hitting two hammers against each other. But this simple action might generate a range of results that create utterly different sonic and haptic experiences—a fact that reveals itself only in the moment of putting the information into action. If we choose two heavy hammers to perform the score, we might soon find out not only that the sound becomes unbearable but also that our endurance is limited due to the lifted weight. If the hammers are light and handy—like French hammers employed in shoemaking—chances are that we might arrive at a few hundred repetitions, accompanied by a distinct sonic effect. These two experiences of hammering will vary significantly as if the action effectuated from two different scores. When performing the score and experiencing it first-hand, no more can we simply say, this work is about hammering. The stuff in our hands makes the experience of the sensation contained in the action produced. The ordinary patterns of thought are challenged if we remove the “about.” As we learn from the Fluxus scholar Hannah B. Higgins, “if a piece is not about things but actually is them, then the signifying chain often applied to visual art in semiotic analyses needs to be modified to make physical or actual experiences central to the process of signification” (Fluxus Experience, 2002). Higgins points to the way in which [Fluxus] works problematize the Western metaphysics since Plato and Aristotle, which separated primary experience, e.g. the feel of hammering with a hammer, from secondary experience, that is the mental concepts related to it.