Tuning Fork: Shopfront
Allan Kaprow wrote in about 1960, ‘The young artist of today need no longer say “I am a painter” or “a poet” or “a dancer”. He is simply an “artist”. All of life will be open to him’.1 It is the last sentence that comes as a surprise. It would have been logical for him to say all of art will be open to that young artist working across different areas, because presumably all of life was already open to artists as subject matter. But Kaprow was making the point that advanced art of the time needed to break with what he called the ‘highly sophisticated habits’2 art contained, including the dependency ‘upon the conditions set down by the structure of the house’ as art’s ‘home base’.3
He goes on to list six rules-of-thumb for Happenings, events which he says take art in a new direction. In these rules-of-thumb and in the structure of architecture are the seeds of the performance Tuning Fork: Shopfront.
The work was developed by James Cunningham and Jondi Keane from observations, discoveries and decisions made about their interaction with the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Art’s shopfront space during a residency there; the work-in-process was visible to those passing by outside on Brunswick Street. Using common construction materials and objects, such as carbon fibre rods, tape measures, doors, columns and carpenter’s snap lines as props, Cunningham and Keane continued to evolve the work from night to night during its run, as in turn this iteration of Tuning Fork grew out of a previous performance of these artists together, in another space.
On the back wall of the space was a score, also