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The Des Moines Festival of the Avant-Garde
October 1979
Descriptive Essay by Fred Truck, Festival Coordinator
To Start No One Should Be There
This festival came about because of a dream & an experience, & a trip to Holland
(a) I dreamed I was in England in 1642 the Puritans were burning down the theaters. I was working
w/a team of people who were sorting through the smoking timbers. We were to destroy any
remaining vestiges of the Elizabethan theater I realized people would soon forget what the building
& even the stage & all its machinery looked like. Suddenly I saw a large rolled up piece of paper. I
bent down, picked it up, unrolled it & read. I immediately realized by its arcane charts & symbols
resembling horoscopes that here was the secret of the great theater we had lately destroyed I
quickly hid the paper in my cloak.
The word went out through the countryside that I was to give a performance. From every part of
England people came to a very small clearing in the forest. I walked to the center of the clearing &
faced the people w/ my back to the forest. Then I turned around, opened a door cut out of the 3-
dimensional reality of the landscape, walked thru it & disappeared.
(b) Experience of Jarry's funeral on a continental scale. While a single good friend lugged my body
up a mountain to a grave, the remainder of my friends on the opposite side of the continent had a
really great party.
By the time these images coalesced I was living in Des Moines. I decided to found the Des Moines
Festival of the Avant-Garde. This was 1975. Of course, no one would come! But what could I do
by myself? I got as far as thinking about various photographs of myself in empty fields & parks.
Entitled the Festival, I let it drop.
In 1979, April, in Amsterdam, I mentioned the idea to my host Michael Gibbs. By this time it had
become inviting people not to come. Michael immediately suggested the postcard & the idea of
performance proposals. The Des Moines Festival suddenly became very possible.
Des Moines a Surprising Place
Because my city is not identified as a cultural center, a brief verbal tour of what is here will
elucidate the festival's relationship to the immediate climate here as well as the climate in the arts
generally. Des Moines is the capital of the state of Iowa, it is situated in the south central area of the
state on some of the richest soil in the world. The general environment here is agricultural, but
certainly not in the small farm image most of the world is familiar with.
For good or ill, as a result of machines & chemicals, farms in Iowa tend to be corporate entities, &
in the larger operations, limited amounts of shares are sold, there is a board of directors, etc. They
operate in terms of many thousands of acres & when prime soil goes at $3000 to $4000 an acre, big
money is involved. Productivity is fabulous even in horrible weather, as a result of hybrids resistant
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to all climatic conditions. These are successful farms. Most farms are not profitable & these are the
majority even here.
Des Moines is situated at the fork of 2 rivers, the Des Moines & the Raccoon. In the greater Des
Moines area there are approximately 200,000 people. The city is oddly independent of the
surrounding agricultural matrix because it does not depend on agri-business for its money.
Des Moines is a city of paper & gold run by the bankers & the insurance men. We are the 2nd
largest insurance city in the country & these men & women even more than the bankers are prime
movers in civic affairs.
The Insurance people, in their turn, generate tremendous amounts of work for printers of forms &
financial paper. In addition to these enterprises, Des Moines sports the publishers of the Register &
Tribune Company--Cowles Communications--& the publishers of literally hundreds of popular
magazines from Better Homes & Gardens to Penthouse-- Meredith Publishing.
There is some heavy industry. Both Firestone & Armstrong have rubber works here, Pittsburgh
steel has a steel mill, & John Deere & Massey Ferguson manufacture their agricultural machinery.
But the real power lies in the desk.
The overall economic picture is one of prosperity, modest wealth & moderate conservatism, both
politically & fiscally. Apparently this policy has paid off because not only is unemployment steady
at 1.2 %, but the City is one of the very few in America that has experienced a building boom
throughout the 70's, particularly in the area of public architecture. As evidence of this, while Des
Moines just opened a new & beautiful Civic Center for the Performing Arts the City is
simultaneously finishing a geodesic Dome Botanical Center, leveling several city blocks &
building a hotel to go along w/the rising skyline provided by the Financial Center & the Ruan
Building. & when I speak of the Financial Center in the same breath w/the City, keep in mind they
are in some senses synonymous.
The Insurance & Printing executives, as well as individuals of considerable economic power also
fund, w/ the benign good wishes of the city, an Art Center. This institution is known mainly for the
excellence of its collection which is concentrated on postwar abstraction & Pop Art. No wonder
that in 1977 Andy Warhol was the artist-in- residence for Cowles Communications.
Until October l, 1979, Des Moines existed in self-imposed isolation from cur-rent avant-garde art
activity. This occurred because art is viewed by those who promote it as an investment, because the
New Civic Center Building gives prestige to the city, never mind that there are no paid performers
attached to it, and most importantly, because the attention of the people of Des Moines is focused
on the recent past. This, in its turn, is a result of the attitude that permeates the Midwest. In general
& Des Moines in particular that is, whatever is happening, it's happening somewhere else.
Des Moines is an ideal setting for a Festival of Absence, a Dance for the Night Sun
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The Facts Ma’am, Just the Facts
I live in this strange place & work in the printing industry as a designer, typographer & layout
artist. By profession I am automatically thrust into the only real professional arts community in Des
Moines; but it would be wrong to assume that this community can be compared to other groups of
artists working elsewhere in America. We are community by virtue of job only. Other people who
work in the arts are connected w/ Universities in the area. There is also a small subset of
professional actors & actresses & fashion models who work in video, radio & some of the film
companies in town.
These people are concerned primarily w/ making a living. The markets are limited in Des Moines
& competition is very tough so awareness of the current directions in art IS nonexistent: it won’t
sell.
This is not discouraging for me because I use the machines available to me at work to accomplish
my own ends. Primarily I have been making books. Recently I have taken the language I invented
out of the book form, added a four-dimensional capability, and made several small objects
published in multiple.
Using the people & machines of Bill Coke Printing Co. & Type Etcetera, it was cheap & easy for
me to turn out a quality postcard. I sent this invitation to 80 artists I knew of who had participated
in performance in the last 20 years.
The stratagem involved in my announcement is designed to forge an agreement between myself &
the invited artist to violate an unwritten law of performance art: the artist who conceives the event
also performs it
The documentation that is promised will also add to the sense of absence because no matter what
form it takes this catalog, photos, b & w, color, Polaroid, film, sound tape, & we did all of these-
they are all substitutes for the contributing artists' eyes & ears. Documentation also reinforces the
sense of being an observer & to those who are used to being in the center of the storm. This will be
an unfamiliar role.
In point of fact the 1st bit of documentation was provided by the contributing artists themselves
when they wrote their performance instructions down in a complex moment of cultural self-
sacrifice.
Documentation of another kind was begun after I analyzed contemporary festivals here in the US.
Most of them are blatantly commercial events, even at the very classy arts festivals that can be
found throughout the country during the summer months you buy the right to hear the concert. If
the concert is free, you buy the food, you buy a t-shirt, you buy a pennant at the ball game etc. As a
result, outside of photographs, the most common way of documenting your presence at one of these
cultural debacles is by accumulating junk.
I decided at the outset to save everything connected w/ the festival after the core group was formed,
I had four other people saving everything as well. All this junk will be split up & put in the garbage
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bags along w/ this catalog. the poster, color & Polaroid photos (complete sets) b & w contact sheets
as well as selected prints, a tape & written account, the garbage bags will be put in boxes &
published in a limited multiple edition. This is what the Festival is really all about in the classical
American sense.
W/in a week & a half of mailing the first batch of invitations, I received George Brecht's proposal
reproduced here. Actually, Michael Gibbs gave me his proposal in Amsterdam, but Brecht's was
the first response received to my card. In addition to presenting his unique & private action, George
also related the Festival to an issue a currently discussed by artists who have been identified as or
who identify themselves w/ the experimental arts, & that issue is the end of the Avant-Garde?
There are several reasons for the emergence of this question now, in the late years of the '70's. One,
roughly remembered from a Dick Cavett Interview of Susan Sontag on PBS goes like this-the
avant-garde used to be the possession of elite cultural centers. As this century has won on,
communication has made the entire world smaller. Now even people in Des Moines can be avant-
garde & everyone is breaking the rules. A logical consequence of this view is to predict a period of
cooling off, consolidation, & development of the new freedoms as opposed to charging ahead in
new areas. & indeed, this was Sontag's position in the interview.
Michael Gibbs has a coolly reasoned & devastating view of the demise of the avant-garde. This
century has produced apocalyptic uses of technology. Auschwitz, Hiroshima to name a few these
disasters & others like them have dealt a death blow to the 19th century beliefs that science can
solve the problems of men & women. Therefore a faith in social progress is impossible for many
people to hold. A belief in progress is necessary for an avant-garde to exist because their radical
function is to perceive the future direction of the culture & then to effect a change in the arts, even
in the basic postulates of civilization, before the appointed time but you cannot be ahead of your
time if you don't believe in linear progress.
The Des Moines Festival enters the arena at the nadir of the avant-garde's feeling about itself. The
Festival stands for the most extreme kind of collapse imaginable, a Black Hole in the art world. As
Tim Benson, participant & photographer of the Festival remarked, “What you have here is a
nonevent at a non-site similar in its effects to dying, the Festival levels all distinctions.”
But as we were to discover, even in this neutralized state, the avant-garde can live & generate
response in the environment. I turned to the original French meaning of avant-garde, the military
meaning. The avant-garde were those in the foremost pan of the advancing army, the shock troops.
Others have capitalized on the SHOCK, of shock troops I decided to translate semantics into
concrete military thinking, specifically urban guerilla warfare strategy & use the result as a means
for planning & organizing the performances we wanted to do.
First, I analyzed Des Moines. It is mainly a city, not of heavy industry .but of commerce. Therefore
it is ideal for a modern day commercial festival there should be plenty of junk around.
The pattern of trade has a diurnal & weekly rhythm. During the five weekdays, people are heavily
concentrated downtown in the morning & afternoon. Evenings, people are concentrated in the nine
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or so shopping malls that ring the city. During the 2-day weekend, people are in the shopping malls
day & night.
This pattern of focused & radiating movement solidly affixed to the daily solar & weekly lunar
cycles fits in well w/ a typical guerilla strategy. That is to make hits downtown at noon when
people are out & about, quickly retreat during the confusion, lie low, & then in the evenings disrupt
the suburbs where people have gone to spend the evening. The actors in such a drama should fit in
w/ the community, should live there in strict conformance to the social norms. They should have
jobs.
The Festival, organized on this basis worked very well for the performance proposals I received
because the actions tended to be brief. They did not require extensive & elaborate sets, props or
other materials. Many of them could be done outside, & many could be done w/no rehearsal.
It also worked well for the people I assembled to do the performing. The core of the group was
formed by my family & friends. Almost all had jobs so the noon hour & evening timing synched
well w/ occupational & family schedules.
Another advantage in this sort of structure was that, unlike our policy when dealing w/ the city, we
felt no deep need to ask the shopping malls' permission to perform. We simply showed up, did our
hits & left, the whole event taking less than thirty minutes.
This tactic denied the owners' of the malls the right to refuse us space it also accented the elements
of unpredictability. Amazement & surprise in the minds of our random audience & freed me from a
whole lot of bureaucratic hassle, not the least of which was the omnipresent fear of being arrested.
In fact, for some concerned friends this threat was very real to the point of staying home that day!
We were never arrested, though, because our hits were short in duration. We always kept moving,
we were not destructive towards people or property, our appearances were unannounced. &
observers were always thunderstruck by our activities.
When I convened the group of performers for the 1st time, I had clarified these ideas in
conversations w/in on a more or less individual basis. I explained the concept of the group as a self-
sufficient, highly mobile unit that would realize the submitted proposals against the backdrop of
American commercial life in order to produce documentation & junk. This became our basic
purpose.
I also explained my concept of this kind of art as a friendly intrusion into the daily of life of
particular passersby & the immediate environment I developed this concept as a result of my
experiences in demonstrations & street fighting in 1969-'70 in Washington DC these were the great
demonstrations of the war period & I cannot describe what an impression it made on me I
remember sitting on the quad watching students toss the Frisbee I looked at his watch. --It's four, he
said. Everyone stopped what they were doing, people stripped down & started smearing their
bodies w/ grease as protection against tear gas. Gas masks, brass knuckles, bats, & other artillery
appeared. Our war was on, life as usual.
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I wouldn't describe the intrusions that followed such a scene as friendly, since we were blocking the
roads, just when people wanted to go home. Terrible violence was almost always the result so was
publicity. CBS was just down the street.
In Des Moines, our efforts produced no publicity. So it was good that we had concentrated on
producing our own documentation. The most outstanding reason we were unable to get publicity
was that Pope Jean Paul II came to town October 4th & the whole Midwest region was infected
w/pope-o-mania.
When I 1st heard that His Holiness was coming, I immediately sent him the same postcard I sent to
all contributing artists. But he foolishly ignored my invitation & came anyway. As to the worth of
Jean Paul II's holy war or mine thrown in opposition to his, let the times & the world judge. I can
only say that while the Pope was before the thousands performing his ablutions, I was alternately in
a store & deep in the woods performing mine, George Brecht's event.
The aim of any revolutionary group is to invade the seats of power & authority & take over. Our
targets were 2 civic institutions, the Des Moines Public Library, THE Source in town, & the Civic
Center, seat of the performing arts. After the takeover, a process of disseminating new information,
both social & political, begins. In the instance of the Des Moines Public Library, we used Michael
Gibb's EVENT FOR LARGE PUBLIC LIBRARY. The basic action is 5 minutes of reading aloud
in the building. We had an in there--my wife Lorna is Coordinator of Extension Services in the
Library. She told the Publicity Director, & she in her turn invited 2 TV reporters to cover cultural
events -something was going to happen in the reference room that might interest them. It gave the
appearance of institutional support, which we did not have, as the reproduced documents show.
Neither reporter showed. If news is slow, you're in. If news is fast you're out. Media-wise, score 1
for the Pope! The case of the Civic Center is very weird, but instructive as to the operations of
heavily funded, but new, city institutions. We originally asked permission to perform on Nollen
Plaza, adjacent to the CC, where, in conjunction w/ our performances, the new Claus Oldenburg
public monument. ROBINSON CRUSOE'S UMBRELLA was being erected. We thought this
would make an interesting setting. But it never happened
Instead, a P.R. person from the Civic Center administration invited us to per, form informally in the
lobby on 2 occasions. Oct 10th for a convention of architects. & Oct 14th for the Civic Center Open
House. We agreed to these dates in spite of the fact that they were after our announced time
BECAUSE we were promised interviews w/ reporters from the Register & Tribune. Interviews &
articles we were also promised audiences.
The crowds never materialized nor did the reporters & the reasons for this are interesting
indications as to the real power of such institutions. The Civic Center is donated space for ads for
shows, dances. concerts, etc. that come into town from the outside. However, they have to pay for
promotion of their own activities such as open houses, conventions & the like.
Another view of the same situation: The principle of absence, once its study is begun, shows up in
surprising ways; shadows, greys. degrees of absence, this allows for being simultaneously publicly
present (we did the events!) & publicly absent (no mention in the media.)
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This experience of the Festival also laid bare a problem rampant in the visual & performing arts,
the problem of institutionalization. When art or performance becomes identified w/ an institution,
no matter whether it be the academy, the museum, a civic building of some kind, it creates a focal
point, a locus to which it is necessary for people to go if they wish to partake of the delights therein
in order to attract people. Therefore these institutions must use the highways of public opinion,
promotion & advertising. This costs money. As a result of a bunch of complicated manipulations,
the end result insofar as the artist is concerned is that some art forms, having more economic clout
than others become FAMILIAR, whereas others, having less clout becomes UNFAMILIAR.
Therefore, the surest way to defeat yourself if you are doing a number like the Des Moines Festival,
is to attempt to locate your operation w/in the confines of an institution where draw becomes a
problem. Unfamiliar art being your main form. It is amazing to me how the art world, like most
religions, seems to be in pursuit of unreason. Commonplace logic surely tells that if you have
something you want to get around, you must take it to the people. Following that line of thought,
the Des Moines Festival had no trouble attracting audiences of 100 to even 250 people every time
we appeared, unannounced & unheralded.
Add to this the fact that our group was composed of people related by affection, of both familial &
friendship kinds. We felt good about ourselves & we did this project expressly to have a good time
good feelings always center attention. & to the artists who contributed proposals. Thank you for
helping us out.
The Proposals and How we Did Them!
Of the 32 proposals received. 26 were actually realized. The 6 that were not performed were not
actually rejected but could not be materialized under the conditions the Des Moines Festival was
operating. We accepted all that was sent to us.
Based on a thorough reading of the proposed performances, we adopted the European "no-
rehearsal" technique, not only to increase the spontaneity factor, but also because most of the
material involved presented a critical idea. Traditional theatrical rehearsal techniques are basically
an extended period of criticism & self-criticism. To cut through the redundancy that occurs when
you critically & self-critically enact a critical idea, we eliminated rehearsal & concentrated on the
idea itself.
Some proposals in the minds of Festival participants, could only be realized graphically. These
were grouped together w/ others that were designed from the outset as graphics. In the style of the
old-time pamphleteers & political rabble rousers, these were passed out on street corners, put under
car windshield wipers, etc.
Documentation was a splendid success. Using only our own resources, in the week of scheduled
performances & the 2 Civic Center performances, we took approximately 700 black & white
photos, 1 roll of color prints, 5 cassettes worth of sound, 2 packs of Polaroid, & 100 ft. of 16 mm
film, color. In addition, there will be, in the garbage bag multiple, written accounts, esp. of the
Masters of Bananology ceremonies.
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As a result of actually doing the proposals we developed a view of performance art. It is less a way
of acting theatrically than a way of behaving socially. When these events are orchestrated as
guerilla HITS, the performers are faced w/ a situation where they must immediately & recklessly
violate social behavioral taboos. The proposal itself acts as a new order of behavior & prevents
things from getting out of hand. The new behavioral order is supported by an intense exhilaration
that arises at the expense of the death of conventional social norms. Naturally the polar opposite of
exhilaration, paranoia plays a part as well, because when you just walk out into the shopping mall
& do it, no one really knows what will happen, in spite of the rules of the action -you can't control
the observers.
Finally, at its paranoid/exhilarated peak, the moment of absence is ephemeral. When convention
expires at the inception of an event, the rules of the action fill the void, But while you are out there
dancing over the void a feeling of great joy & hysteria fills your mind. From this I learned absence
is the very beginning & the army of the avant-garde are those who MAKE a black hole in
behavioral norms, skate out over this absence & perform. They are those who probe w/ behavior
like Jarry who became UBU. They return w/ reports glowing w/ fear & joy.
This is my report: Des Moines is a black hole in the art world, not because I made it one like I have
done w/ social norms, but because art is commercial & political business. It is sanctioned &
localized localization is generally thought of in terms of the great cultural centers of the world, such
as New York, Rome, Paris, Vienna, etc but it is much more than that. W/ in each city there are
various institutions promoting individual art forms or even conglomerates. This increases the ties
these institutions have to prevailing cultural & political systems people always have to make a trip,
a pilgrimage. So in a brief vacation, the participant receives a dose of 1 art & the result may amount
to 1 spasm in the quality of life.
Consequently, the army of the avant-garde are those who are hostile to this state of affairs. They
will behave in artistically calculated ways in the course of their daily lives. They will put their art &
their bodies on the line. They will precipitate new ways of acting in relationship to other people.
They know a few things anyone can act like a madman, but to do so successfully requires stern
purpose & will, the grace in action of an artist, & pleasure in the reasonings of fools.
In conclusion, there really is no conclusion. There will be another Festival of the Avant-Garde next
year & I will let it be known what we need for that.
To the artists who contributed their proposals a warm & heartfelt thanks for making the Festival
one of the most satisfying events in my life. I truly enjoyed each & every work submitted, & I hope
to see your work in the next Festival.
I must also extend my thanks to the family & friends who helped me realize w/ their art, their time
& energy, the large body of proposals. thanks to Cindy Hilden for coming from Baltimore for a
week of rioting. to Joann Young, to Bob & Chris Young. Bob for his good documentary footage
& Chris for several surprising performances. Sue Annett & Tim Benson (Tim especially for the
fine series of color photos showing me impersonating Cavellini as Xipe, Aztec god of the Setting
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Sun in my apotheosis. I am trying to hitchhike west in front of my house. failing this I retire & am
ceremonially flayed. the sequence ends w/ my Cavellini suit hanging empty from a tree.). Jim,
Dorothy & Nora Stick, Beth Hirst, Bill Edgerly. Chuck & Debbie Kolb, & finally 2 of my
favorite people, my wife Lorna & my son Ben.
