Ties that Unbind

Last night I had the pleasure of getting into a Cage role twice (well, David Tudor one time, really). At our Demagnetic Cabaret, I finished up with a group piece called Telemark — a kind of Pythonic reënactment of the 1959 Tristan Tzara interview Dada Into Surrealism — with an invitation to the audience to be Nam June Paik and come scissor up my necktie.

The audience rose to the occasion, and I was delighted to find that each would-be Paik had a unique approach to my poor, Freudian cravat. At the same time, enough people expressed surprise that I had named Paik rather than Yoko Ono that I began to doubt my sanity. (Ha.)

(Incidentally, one of my dehaberdashers kindly corrected my pronunciation of Paik — I'd always said "pike". However, my googling has turned up pronunciation notes from "pahk" to "pike" to "peck" to "pack" to "pake" to, most convincingly, "bæk". Calling all Koreans: what's the scoop?)

I had originally heard Cage's telling of the Paik/tie story probably in his recorded Diary: How to improve the World (You will only make Matters worse). But that was a long time ago, and it had seeped into my mind more as myth than as fact.

Hence the following from Artforum, April 2006, for the record:

News of [Nam Jun Paik's] events quickly reached New York, where George Maciunas was prompted to invite Paik to join Fluxus after hearing his Etude for Pianoforte, which premiered in 1960 at Cologne's Atelier Mary Baumeister. During the performance Paik jumped into the audience, cut Cage's tie with scissors, and doused him and composer David Tudor with shaving cream. The audience sat in stunned silence as Paik left the room. A short time later the phone rang offstage. It was Paik calling from the street to say the performance was over and everyone could go home. Paik described such performances as attempts to find a way out of the "suffocation of the musical theater as it is," adding that he sought to "complement Dada with music" and believed that "humor was not an aim but a result." The neo-Dadaist impulse in these events was so expanded that Cage himself noted, "You get the feeling very clearly that anything can happen, even physically dangerous things."

Ono's Cut Piece débuted four years later, in 1964. My bit for Telemark did particularly echo her piece in that it was she who invited the audience to cut her clothes, as opposed to going and cutting someone else's.

Also for the record, it's rather an experience to have a couple dozen people come up to one, brandishing scissors and carving away at one's accessories…