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Demolish Serious Culture!: Henry Flynt Meets The New York Avant-Garde

The document discusses a protest organized by Henry Flynt and others called Action Against Cultural Imperialism (AACI) that picketed outside a concert in New York City in 1964 to protest what they viewed as elitist and racist attitudes in avant-garde music. AACI distributed leaflets criticizing composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and his views. The group later staged another demonstration outside another venue in New York City to continue protesting these issues in avant-garde music.

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Ernesto Freie
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39 views1 page

Demolish Serious Culture!: Henry Flynt Meets The New York Avant-Garde

The document discusses a protest organized by Henry Flynt and others called Action Against Cultural Imperialism (AACI) that picketed outside a concert in New York City in 1964 to protest what they viewed as elitist and racist attitudes in avant-garde music. AACI distributed leaflets criticizing composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and his views. The group later staged another demonstration outside another venue in New York City to continue protesting these issues in avant-garde music.

Uploaded by

Ernesto Freie
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses

Demolish Serious Culture!


Henry Flynt Meets the New York Avant-Garde

On the evening of April 29, 1964, a group calling itself Action Against
Cultural Imperialism (AACI) mounted a picket line in front of Town Hall
on West 43rd Street in New York.1 Inside the hall took place a “gala con-
cert” sponsored by the West German government, with music by Karlheinz
Stockhausen, Hans Werner Henze, Paul Hindemith, and a few others. The
performers included Stockhausen, the pianist David Tudor, and the per-
cussionist Max Neuhaus. On the sidewalk in front of the hall marched
the demonstrators: the philosopher and composer Henry Flynt, artists
Ben Vautier and Takako Saito, Ikuko Iijima (wife of the artist Ay-O), and
George Maciunas, the impresario of Fluxus, a loosely organized art and
performance movement of the 1960s and 1970s. 2 Although he had been
invited to participate, Amiri Baraka chose to observe the event from across
permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

the street. AACI bore signs reading “Fight Racist Laws of Music!” and
“Fight the Rich Man’s Snob Art,” and, according to Die Welt, made quite
a racket chanting “Death to all fascist musical ideas!”3 The group also
distributed a leaflet in which Flynt attacked Stockhausen as a lackey for
the West German bosses and claimed that Stockhausen’s “repeated decrees
about the lowness of plebian music and the racial inferiority of non-Euro-
pean music, are an integral, essential part of his art and its ‘appreciation.’ ”4
On September 8, AACI staged another demonstration outside of Judson
Hall on West 57th Street. 5 Replacing Vautier was the poet, journalist, and
activist Marc Schleifer, later known as Abdallah Schleifer, who was associ-
ated with Progressive Labor. Iijima was also absent, but the actor and poet

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 2/20/2016 9:47 PM via 65


WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
AN: 357626 ; Piekut, Benjamin.; Experimentalism Otherwise : The New York Avant-garde
and Its Limits
Account: s8986463

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