henning christiansen: save the nature -- use fluxs, the box gallery parking lot, los angeles

Co-release with The Henning Christiansen Archive. In November 17, 2019, a six-hour performance was undertaken in the car park of The Box gallery in Los Angeles as a part of the Henning Christiansen/Ursula Reuter Christiansen exhibition, THEY WON'T SURVIVE WITHOUT THE BIRD SONGS. Thørbjorn Reuter Christiansen, son of Ursula and Henning, developed a timeline for the performance which was essentially designed to encompass a contemporary community of like-minded artists that spans generations and continents. The resulting performance included archival recordings taken from the H.C. Archive, which houses a vast collection of compositions, scores and correspondence of the late Christiansen. This limited-edition double-LP collects edited highlights from the day capturing the unique and somewhat unsettling atmosphere provoked by a diverse range of performances. Thørbjorn Reuter Christiansen developed a new action where he performed a sound piece on iconic instruments of Henning's alongside recorded sounds of his father. "The New Sound of the Living Dead": Bjørn Nørgaard presented two new iterations of some of his historical actions; Homage to Henning and Joseph, Manresa, a piece he first collaborated on with Henning Christiansen and Joseph Beuys at Galerieleri Schmela in Düsseldorf in 1966, and The Cake, a live construction of a monolithic yet impermanent sculpture meant to decay over time. Along with this he did a reading of a new piece of writing, "The Origin of the Future". Mai Dengsøe Hansen performed "EURASIENSTAB fluxorum organum op. 39", a piece for organ that Henning scored and used as the soundtrack for the film Eurasienstab, with Joseph Beuys. The BOX gallery founder Mara McCarthy, along with her father, the notorious Los Angeles artist, Paul McCarthy and Chiara Giovando performed "Knock Harder", a 20-minute improvisation that loosely recalls "Knocking", a sound scape Henning used repeatedly throughout many of his own compositions. Chiara and Mara can be heard singing and playing a selection of small instruments, while Paul methodically slammed the back door of the gallery with a piece of scrap 2x4 pinewood -- a kind of dedication to the monotony of Fluxus. Mark Harwood, the founder of experimental label Penultimate Press, performed an improvised musical protest incorporating fire, rhythm, and chaos alongside field recordings of the civil unrest in Chile that he collected occurred just prior to the opening of this exhibition. Ultra-deluxe set; two LPs held together with a printed rubber band, four large full-color double-sided art cards documenting the performances, a substantial booklet/catalog about the exhibition and a large poster featuring a drawing by Paul McCarthy made during the performance; edition of 500 copies.