Immersion Into Noise

Noise Event Happening

In his seminal A Primer of Happenings and Space/Time Art, Al Hansen states that the idea of the Happening is that of “the artwork enclosing the observer, of art that overlaps and interpenetrates different art forms [...] these performances engulf the spectator: the environment is a work of art that the observer goes into and walks around in and in some cases actually participates in”. [266] Generally speaking then, Happenings bombard the participant with an excess of sensations which the viewer has to order in his or her mind to give the overall quality of the continuous commotion (noisily structured like a Cubist assemblage) cohesion. But also Happenings emphasized extemporaneous and migratory elements while manipulating performers, props and audience in ways designed to break down barriers between performance and audience. A Happening was neither an art exhibit nor a theatrical event but an immersive noise site for experimentation in perception.

The prime source of the Happening's central noise concept is that of collage, the juxtaposition of unrelated real-life elements in relationships contrived by the artist—that innovation by which Synthetic Cubism had ravaged the Renaissance window-in-the-wall conception of pictorial space. Most often, Happenings placed art inside an ideal banal sphere which was imagined less separated from everyday experience, thus challenging the previously established elite hierarchy of values. Towards this end, Happenings were sited in parking-lots, factories or on the street, and involved materials with no fine-art associations. By its emphasis on transient effects and materials, Happenings challenged notions of the permanence of art and the permanence of aesthetic values, hence the Happening became one of the most visible forms of artistic expression of the revolutionary aspect of the 1960s. [267]

Allan Kaprow, in the aforementioned Art News article “Jackson Pollock: An Artists' Symposium”, explained Pollock's role as progenitor of the Happening thus: “When his all-over canvases were shown at Betty Parsons's gallery around 1950, with four windowless walls nearly covered, the effect was that of an overwhelming environment, the paintings' skin rising towards the middle of the room, drenching and assaulting the visitor in waves of attacking and retreating pulsations. [...]. The expanding scale of Pollock's work, their reiterative configurations prompting the marvellous thought that they could go on forever in any direction including out, soon made the gallery as useless as the canvas, and choices of wider and wider fields of environmental reference followed. In process, the Happening was developed”. However, in Pollock Painting: The Photographs of Hans Namuth, Barbara Rose proposes that it was the publication of Hans Namuth's photographs and his film of Pollock painting that are responsible for the development of Happenings (as well as anti-form, distributional, conceptual, performance, and body art). But whatever the specific rationale, the implications of Pollock's work were vast, exerting even a persuasive impact on avant-garde dance, as it has been often noted that the dance choreography of Merce Cunningham is closely related to Pollock's painting. Cunningham essentially fused noise ideas extrapolated from Pollock with those of Marcel Duchamp, as understood and practised by his collaborating composer, John Cage. This tendency in dance was explored in the early-1960s by Jill Johnston, Yvonne Rainer and Ann Halprin.

The feeling/concept of “space in which anything can happen” seems to summarize Pollock's general significance to the artists he inspired. As an example, Claes Oldenburg, self-described as a “Post-Pollock painter” in the 1967 Art News article, conceived of himself as standing on the canvas that became his surroundings, and which stretched as far as he could see or hear. This suggests the idea of a new theme of distribution where the city's many signs are no longer depicted but included in the work, hence immersing the artist (and viewer's attention) in a new (Pop) art based on reproduction.

Certainly by the mid-1950s, media (print, radio, and television) influenced almost everything everywhere in post-industrialized countries, including members of the Gutai Group of Osaka Japan, an art-theater group made up of painters (including Akira Kanayama, Sadamasa Motonaga, Shuso Mukai, Saburo Mirakami, Atsuko Tanaka, Shozo Shinamoto and Kazua Shiraga). They had seen photographs of the theatrical French theoretician and action painter Georges Mathieu in Life Magazine decked out in an elaborate costume painting before television cameras at the Sarah Bernhardt Théâtre in Paris in 1956. These photos inspired their own live painting performances in which they threw balls of paint at the canvas or, in another instance, where an artist ran and leaped through a series of sequential canvases.

Moreover, Kazua Shiraga, a member of the Gutai Group, adapted and exaggerated Pollock's painting techniques and Mathieu's theatrical presentation of the painting-action with his Making a Work with His Own Body (1955), where the artist wallowed in the paint medium with his entire body, and again at the Festival di Osaka's Painting Performance (1959). Hanging from a rope, Shiraga threw himself, in a kind of overwrought psychic automatism, on the canvas and spread lumps of color with his feet around while swinging on the rope. Here the artist is literally inside the painting in a way which we will see again with the Vienna Actionists. Shiraga's work predates and reminds us of Yves Klein's well known 1960 Symphonie Monotone (Monotone Symphony) painting/music performance at the Galerie International d'Art Contemporain in Paris, especially when we consider it from the immersive position of the three female models themselves (one of whom I met and discussed this with). [268]

Another earlier moment leading to the program of the Happening can be traced to an evening in 1952 organized by John Cage at Black Mountain College. For the performance, an audience was seated in four inward-facing blocks as Cage delivered a lecture, punctuated by silences, from the top of a ladder. Poet Charles Olsen (1910–1970) and others read poems from another ladder while David Tudor played a piano and Robert Rauschenberg played a wind-up gramophone. Through this rich conflicting event, Merce Cunningham and other dancers moved about through the space where some of Rauschenberg's early white-on-white White Paintings were suspended as a sort of false ceiling overhead. [269]

In the mid-1980s, I obtained one of Rauschenberg’s black and white silkscreens from his Current and Surface Series (1970). Living with this work, I discovered the best of Rauschenberg’s noise work I think—work that contains rhizomatic layered image sequences where the viewer interprets the progression of images as though reading a ruined communication system arranged in multiple, simultaneous combinations. Rauschenberg here dissolves away the paradigmatic model of media as communications and replaces it with one of failed pageant that leads to both a collapse of meaning and the destruction of distinctions between media and myth. In Rauschenberg’s media noise society, I saw through the numerous saturating media messages, so that information and meaning imploded into pure effect, without content or meaning. In fact, here content becomes decorative and ornate.

This noisy rhizomatic Rauschenberg demands a different kind of looking—akin to the aggregated viewpoints of Cubism compared by John Cage to watching “many television sets working simultaneously all tuned in differently”. [270] In my piece from his Current and Surface Series, there is no obvious hierarchy of images to scan. The trajectory of visual exploration for it is of our own choosing—a dysfunctional situation that no longer communicates purposeful messages but rather proposes noise pattern. Here we have a rhizomatic visual pleasure, where everything equally connects to everything else and so replaces visual purpose. This is a noise art that demands of society an active visualizing participation in private interpretations—and thus is a legitimate metaphor for contemporary art as a form of simulation-shattering engagement. It functions by overloading representation to a point where it becomes non-representational noise. [271]

John Cage's strict musical development does not concern us here, except for his idea—derived from the work of Edgard Varése and the Zen philosophy of Daisety Taitaro Suzuki (1870–1966)—of treating all forms of noise as sound to be used by the composer, together with the corollary that silence is just as important. This led him ultimately to the nec plus ultra of noise music, 4' 33", perhaps the musical equivalent of the white-on-white canvases of Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935). 4' 33" consists of “silence” performed for this duration of time. In 4' 3", the fortuitous immersive noises in the room, usually unnoticed, and the hearers' own thoughts, become the content of the piece.

In terms of one's own thoughts becoming the content of a piece, we must note that in 1954, Dr. John C. Lilly, a pioneer in brain and behavioral research studies, began experimenting with the concept of restricting the amount of external sensory stimuli to the brain in a kind of anti-noise research project. When Lilly built his first isolation environment (what came to be known as isolation float tanks) he was determined to prove that the brain, without environmental input, would simply go to sleep. Using his own being for experiments, he learned the opposite is true. By removing all visual, acoustical, tactile and temperature stimuli, Lilly found that the brain continues to function independently and at an even higher level than normal. I have had this experience myself, so I know it to be true.

But the artist most identified with the external noise Happening and perhaps its chief exponent is John Cage's composition class student, Allan Kaprow. Kaprow began as a painter and his paintings moved from Abstract Expressionism into increasingly complex action-collage assemblages, like Pentiy Arcade (1956), Wall (1959) and Kiosk (1959), which were developed following his interest in the work of Jackson Pollock. The action-collages became bigger and projected further and further from the walls and into the room and included more and more audible elements. A person entering an action-collaged-noise space would become lost in an excessive labyrinthine atmosphere. Kaprow eventually thought how much better it would be if a visitor could just go out of doors. Thus in Kaprow's form of the Happening, ordinary people, ordinary time, and the everyday spaces of street and supermarket noise, were frequently merged.

Kaprow became a professor of art history, and this academic side of his activities made him a fluent and perceptive theorist, enabling him to elucidate how Happenings evolved from the action-collage environment idea of opening up the mind and the eye to the world of the street. In his book, Assemblage, Environments and Happenings, Kaprow explains the fusion of the concepts behind Pollock's gestural paintings and the junk-assemblage sculpture movement as culminated in this aspect of the Happening. Kaprow also wrote in his famous 1958 essay “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” that “Pollock, as I see him, left us at the point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of everyday life”.

By 1957, Kaprow's work became exclusively environmental involving lights, odors, electronic sounds and unusual materials. His environment at the Hansa Gallery in 1958 contained no art objects as such, but initiated a conception that art was experienced as a surrounding rather than a picture or sculpture to be looked at, a surrounding that engaged the visitor with things to do. However, Kaprow's first mature noise Happening, which involved Dada provocation, assemblage, and action painting, was 18 Happenings in 6 Parts that took place at the Reuban Gallery in October 1959 in New York City. It was tightly scripted and drilled. [272] After 18 Happenings, Kaprow did a number of similar pieces, including Coca-Cola, Shirley Cannonball? and A Spring Happening, the latter taking place in the new downstairs premises of the Reuben Gallery in March 1961. After waiting in a curtained-off lobby, the audience was shown into a dark tunnel, made of wood and hardboard painted black, and with a slit running along both sides at eye-level where they remained for the duration of the piece.

For the next seven years, Kaprow expanded the potential of the environment in a gallery setting, but gradually the showroom space was abandoned for more informal and natural settings such as vacant breweries, open fields, and woods. By 1969, Kaprow's work had evolved so distinctly into new phases that he gave up the designation Happening and adopted Michael Kirby's (1931–1997) term Activity.

By the early-1960s, artists’ noise actions performed in front of audiences and or cameras became more and more familiar as the Happening movement gained momentum. Two types of Happenings emerged: one involving a more or less static audience, and the other a walk-around environment (like Kaprow's Words, which was installed at the Smolin Gallery in 1962). Words was an arrangement of audience-participation devices, rolls of words to move, words on cards hung on strings, words to pin up and rubber-stamps to make phrases with. Garage, An Apple Shrine and Yard (which filled the Martha Jackson Gallery with car tires) also utilized such an approach.

In Paris during the late-1950s, a Marcel Duchamp-inspired renewed interest in Dada noise gave rise to various actions, dé-collages, and performances by artists such as Robert Filliou (1926–1987) and Jean-Jacques Lebel, the most active member of the group of younger artists to emerge from the Nouveaux Réalistes precepts. As an example of the first approach to the Happening, in an early 1960 Happening Funeral Ceremony of the Anti-Process conducted in Venice, Italy, Lebel invited the audience to attend a ceremony in formal dress. In a decorated room within a grand residence, a draped 'cadaver' rested on a plinth which was then ritually stabbed by an 'executioner' while a 'service' was read consisting of extracts from the previously mentioned French decadent writer Joris-Karl Huysmans and the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814). Then, pall-bearers carried the coffin out into a gondola and the 'body,' which was in fact a mechanical noise music sculpture by Jean Tinguely (1925–1991), was ceremonially slid into the canal.

Conspicuous, too, in this regard was the fascinating technologically-aided presentation of Mark Boyle, the performance Son et Lumière for Body Fluids (1966), where he presented a heterosexual couple making love with their encephalograms projected and enlarged on a screen above them. [273] Boyle went on to create light-shows for the psychedelic rock group, Soft Machine, and was involved in an early British experimental night-club called UFO.

Another important early noise Happening artist is Carolee Schneemann, particularly with her highly immersive (for the participants) and spectacular Happening bacchanal called Meat Joy, performed at the Judson Memorial Church in New York City in 1964 and in various locations in Europe (including the Festival de la libre expression at the American Center in Paris in 1964).

The Dionysian mystical impact of Schneemann's Meat Joy was heightened by the sexual implications of voluptuous, scantily clad people wallowing provocatively in paint and meat, somewhat beyond the truism that all sexual activity is about the mixing of gametes. Schneemann's environmental noise performance (performed in what she characterized as a “sensory arena”), Illinois Central, utilized a 360° visual environment contrived with film and slides that shifted over time. [274] Schneemann's grotto-like niche entitled Up To and Including Her Limits (Trackings), which she built for herself at the Basel Art Fair in 1976 also impresses, as the work addresses noise as liberation from confine. So, too, does David Tudor's Rainforest IV of 1973 (realized by Composers Inside Electronics), as the viewer is an integral part of the work. Rainforest extended the implications of Erik Satie's ambient Furniture Music of 1920. Like Satie (whom Tudor admired) Rainforest IV overturned the traditional view that music is performed at a specific time in a proscenium space in which the performers and audience are separate.

This relates to Yoko Ono's Cut Piece, first performed in Tokyo in 1964, in which she invited the audience to cut her clothes off, and deserves reference in terms of an artist putting herself in a visceral environment with a high-resonance of associative connotations. The same holds true for Yayoi Kusama, whose theoretical polemic concerning the distributed, scattered, multiplied, and obliterated self is best established, as she herself states, as an “obliteration of everything (including myself and others)” into a beguiling and excessive artifice which gives birth to an opalescent non-existence. [275] In explanation of her installation work, Yayoi Kusama said, “One day, I was looking at a table cloth covered in red flowers, which was spread out on the table. Then I looked up toward the ceiling. There, on the windows and even on the pillars, I could see the same red flowers. They were all over the place in the room, my body, and entire universe. I finally came to a self-obliteration and returned to be restored to the infinity of eternal time and the absoluteness of space”. [276] Paradoxically, Kusama tried to achieve an expression of this idea of the obliterated self by exposing herself (and others) fully nude and painted with polka-dots in various Happenings at high-profile New York City locations. Kusama staged several public demonstrations of painted polka-dotted nakedness entitled Anatomic Explosion, most notably on Wall Street, in the sculpture garden at the Museum of Modern Art, and in 1968 at the statue of Alice in Wonderland in Central Park.

Certainly, we must also briefly recall the Happenings of Jim Dine, most notably Car Crash (1960) and those of Wolf Vostell, for example his You (1964). Important, too, were the Happenings of Al Hansen, Dick Higgins (1938–1998), Claes Oldenburg, Red Grooms, Robert Whitman, Meredith Monk, Jeff Nuttall, John Latham and later the group improvisations of the Movement Collective.

But the Abstract Expressionist ancestry of noise as aesthetic experience is not confined to post-Pollock aesthetics. In this respect it is significant to note that a motion-picture immersive environment called Impressions of Speed appeared at the 1958 Brussels World Fair which seated 25 people at a time in the cab of a simulated railroad-engine. On view via wide screens was a color landscape in the front and on the two sides as well; a continuous, all-encompassing image projected on the simulated windows in an attempt to duplicate the total impression of actual peripheral noise experience.

To review the history of painting in relation to aspects of noise, I would be remiss to neglect to mention Post-Abstract Expressionist applications as practised by Robert Ryman. The 'pure' opticality of the color white embraced by Ryman is a prime example of subtle noise, as in his white paintings he addresses the problems arising from the tension created from the opposition between surface materiality and opticality in relationship to the edge of the painting and its relationship to the wall on which it is hung. This ambiguity of the painting's boundary in relation to the wall that contains it draws attention into an expanded subtle noise field which we will see will come to define the immersive art of the 1960s and 70s. Ryman does this by extending the optical white shimmering-field of color/light out from the painting onto the white gallery walls which present it. Now it is really the wall that provides the painter with his ground which Ryman himself clarifies when he writes “the wall plane is actually part of the painting and it extends out three or four feet...”. Hence Ryman presents his paintings as part of the white cube that has come to represent modernist ideals of purity and neutrality. The whiteness of the paintings require the whiteness of the walls, as the white-painted optical field spills out over the confining edge of the painting to fill, theoretically, the entire wall and room, thus texture, surface-plane, color and wall are unified. As Ryman himself says: “The wall becomes very much a part of the work”, and so by blurring the difference between painting and wall, Ryman extends our consciousness of painting into an expanded, immersive, subtle, visual noise environment. Of course, this liberation of color from form in the service of filling a room can also be seen in the neon-tube installations of Dan Flavin, where color spills out over the walls of the gallery in which the piece is installed, expanding its presence dramatically and soaking the visitor to the space in its soft, vibrating light.

So in the Viennese Actionist disposition, to move away from Abstract Expressionist action painting in the 1960s and towards the performance-oriented tendency of Actionism, was for the Viennese Actionists, very much in stride with the significant art of their era, impelled, as they were, by a Herculean sense of nosiy idealism based on a felt necessity for emancipation from what they saw as the repressive constraints of church and state power. Consequently, their Actions were intentionally and noisily inciting: deliberately exhibitionist, abhorrent, sexist and/or sacrilegious.

In a sense, Actionism can be seen in retrospect as a logical extenuation of the heroic male individuality of the Abstract Expressionist generation and their idealistic attempt to create a new post-war world based on an intimate subjectivity in pursuit of societal freedoms by turning their back on ideological traditions and engaging in the supposed non-ideological material world of the immediate. Though this seems an overly naïve belief to us now, it did provide the idealistic engine to what became a body of incredible noise work. In the early 1960s, the Actionists Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, Alfons Schilling and Rudolf Schwarzkogler began sensing their late connection with the Abstract Expressionist movement when already the arbitrary nature of personal subjective expression was beginning to become apparent in the repetitions of what became the Abstract Expressionist gestural formula. By the time the Actionists engaged in it, what was originally hailed as a new common language, gestural abstraction, began to degenerate into a self-indulgent, dipsomaniac activity in the hands of the more recent Abstract Expressionist neophytes. To their credit, the Actionist artists began to see that the total reliance on Abstract Expressionism's subjective feeling of personal assertion (which surprisingly began to look ever more and more similar) meant that Abstract Expressionism's message of immediacy and physicality was arbitrary. To counterbalance this, the Actionists, in a peculiarly comparative manner to the Pop and especially the Fluxus artists, aimed to produce art closer to real life and to re-mix aspects of reality into their art. [277] Thus they moved away from Abstract Expressionist ideology and eventually towards a greater "objectivity" of real life, which in turn led to the urge to challenge the power structures of church and state. Therefore, the Actionists moved art away from represented conflict (as recorded on the Abstract Expressionist canvas) and towards political conflicts and social associations in life between people.

In the Viennese studio, Günter Brus had been drawn towards Abstract Expressionist type informel painting and, following Pollock's lead, began identifying himself as working from inside of nature. Early on, he exemplified this ideology in his Labyrinth Paintings which he executed through the means of disorientation in immersive space. In the autumn of 1960, Brus almost entirely cleaned out his 2.5 by 6 meter (roughly 8.2 by 19.6 feet) painting studio and placed white-painted paper over all the available walls and began making use of the entire room (from floor to ceiling) in the unfettered splattering application of black paint, utilizing all three of the available surfaces simultaneously in an attempt to fracture the domination of the compositional mid-point and to penetrate into a much fuller sensation of immersive space. By doing so, Brus developed the ideal of the all-pervasive sphere in which the artist would be enclosed and in which the artist would then paint thoroughly in three-dimensions, using both feet and both hands.

Günter Brus's close painter friend at the time was Alfons Schilling, an artist who went on to utilize a mechanical machine in the creation of his paintings and who still later developed a brilliant series of consequential FOV modifying viewer head-pieces.

As documentation of the ideals under pursuit in the Actionist circle, Schilling left us some interesting extracts from his notebook from early-1961, which also shed light on the issue of immersive thinking in post-Abstract Expressionist painting. In them he wrote, “I can only feel infinity if I break out and reach beyond the closed composition and the frame. [...]. One must be able to enter my pictures from all sides and be able to leave it from all sides; the picture then continues like a tone that has been struck. [...]. The possibility of a limitless, never-ending painting can only be represented by means of a section. How can I possibly perceive 'infinity' in a picture, as long as the possibility of seeing pictures as something complete in themselves, is still not removed. Every barrier must be removed from one's vision (even if it is only the edge of the picture). A picture must offer no opportunity of beginning or ending anywhere. [...]. Getting inside, being inside, and having achieved unity I experience everything in a state of transformation”.

In 1963, Günter Brus received 5000 schillings from the Institut zur Förderung der Künste to assist him in the creation of a series of large-scale paintings. To do these large paintings, he stretched string backwards and forwards across empty gallery rooms and hung molino (a cheap substitute for canvas) and paper so that they reached the floor in order to create a labyrinth which would help prevent him from preconceiving a compositional idea too quickly. He then painted all the surfaces as if it were one large painting that completely surrounded him. Few people saw the painted labyrinth, however.

Subsequently, in the autumn of 1964, Brus carried out his first real Action titled Ana which took place in Otto Mühl's studio, a fellow artist and friend. In preparation for Ana, Brus painted Mühl's studio and several objects in the room (typical of a Viennese bourgeois apartment) a stark white. In effect, he began his Action with the classic white canvas, now extended out into the third-dimension. Hence he begins in an enveloping, immersive, unified, total-space. On starting the work, he emphasized this enveloping further by rolling across the floor of the room with his body completely wrapped in pieces of white cloth. The pieces of cloth unwound as a result of the motion and he remained motionless for a long period of time. Then Brus began to stream black paint over the white objects and over his wife who also participated (passively) in the action, with the aim of making a living painting. He then burst into a bout of painting and besmeared the walls until exhausted.

After Ana, Brus decides to produce the action called Self-Painting in which his own physique was to serve as a painting surface with the intent of binding himself into the picture-plane in order to “become one with the picture” and to thereby “disappear into the picture”. words which remind us of Yayoi Kusama's avowed ideal of doing likewise. As mentioned, Kusama has described the emergence of this perception/ideal by recounting a moment when she was watching a red pattern of a tablecloth coat everything around her and then swallow her up this way; “When I looked up, I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows, and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness”. [278] With apparently similar aims, Brus designed Self-Painting as a soundless action separated into three separate tableaux in which Brus placed together different parts of his painted white body with disparate objects that were also painted milky white. A jet black streak is painted vertically over Brus's face by himself and along his forearm as if his body had been ripped open by one of Barnett Newman's majestic zips.

In January 1965, Brus went on to perform painting actions Silver, Self-Painting II and Self-Mutilation for a film-maker and photographer and, on July 6^th, 1965, he performed a Self-Painting at the Galerie Junge Generation in Vienna. The day before, on July 5^th, he painted himself as in the Self-Painting Actions and proceeded to stride across Vienna as a living painting, but was stopped and arrested by a policeman for causing a civic disturbance.

Brus's peer Otto Mühl, too, was coming from the process-oriented matière side of Art Informel and the related assemblage movement of the Nouveaux Réalistes (for example Arman's accumulations of everyday rubbish) and the American junk sculpture movement. The term assemblage was coined in 1953 by Jean Dubuffet (1901–1983) to refer to works that supposedly went beyond the collage of Synthetic Cubism. In junk/assemblage sculpture of the late-1950s (and with Robert Rauschenberg's combines) art further challenged the boundary between everyday objects and High Art and the entire world opened up and became the raw material for the creation of art.

Mühl had met Brus in early December of 1960 at the famed Gesamtkunstwerk-oriented Sezession building and they shortly thereafter became engaged in an artistic discourse which eventually indelibly shaped both men's work. Otto Mühl wrote in “Weg aus dem Sumpf” in 1977 of Brus that “Brus painted in psychomotoric expressionist style, a wild criss-cross of lines hurled onto the paper. The paint sometimes exploded like a bomb when it hit the picture. That was total creative excess. I understood right away and was full of enthusiasm. The pictures were often 5 meters long by 3 meters high. The whole room was covered with splatters of paint, on the floor there was a centimeter thick layer of paint ooze that had dried up”. In 1961, Mühl gave up traditionally-scaled easel painting and began a series of Actions in which he poured paint and pigment onto paper and then wallowed in it, bringing structure to the pools of color. In a letter to his friend Erika Stocker dated January 8^th, 1961, Mühl writes, “I have, so to speak, produced my first tachiste picture. To do it I have developed an original technique. I painted it by laying it on the floor. It doesn't work on the easel anymore”. And on March 23^rd, 1961 he writes her again saying, “I wallowed in paint [...]. I slid from one end to the other, turning over once. In the process I worked the surface with my hands... “. Taking this sense of wallowing further, in May of 1961, Mühl created a full room installation in his studio called The Overcoming of the Easel Picture by the Representation of its Destruction Process by nailing or tying together his paintings into a unified Gesamtkunstwerk. Following this installation, Mühl moved increasingly towards creating three-dimensional assemblages and from there deeper into performance Actions.