1968: Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman, at New Paltz

So there I was, minding my own business in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. The Gregory Battcock Archive installation by Joseph Grigely was capturing my attention for a variety of reasons and then .... there .... on the wall was a poster for the Intermedia '68 tour by Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman to some SUNY campuses, including New Paltz. It's the lower framed item on the right wall in the picture above, image from the Grigely page on the Whitney Biennial website. Attending that concert is one of the most memorable, still in the mind's eye, occasions of my undergraduate years at New Paltz State.

The concert was so memorable for all the right reasons and for one more. At some point during the concert, a student, thinking this was participatory theater, threw a cymbal back on stage. All stage action stopped, Paik ordered that the student leave the auditorium. It may have seemed like chaos in the spring of 1968 but it was scripted theater and music, aka intermedia.

... rather arid semiotic scholasticism ...

"For [Gregory Battcock], Conceptual art had not yet devolved into the rather arid semiotic scholasticism so common today, which, whether descriptive or more ambitiously deconstructive, tends to focus either on Conceptualism's creation of new kinds of objects (albeit 'dematerialized' ones) or on its philosophical demonstration of the artwork's unstable discursive foundations." -- from "Transformer: David Joselit on Gregory Battcock" in Artforum international, v. 51, no. 1, September 2012, p. 508. I remember buying the Battcock anthologies on new tendencies in art, way back in the 1960s and early 1970s.