Contemporary attention art descends from a lineage of score-based performance and happening traditions.

Evidence

These kinds of “artworks” have a joyful and somewhat madcap-surreal lineage. One can trace a line back through the performative hijinks of the regal Marina Abramović (whose The Artist is Present of 2010 gave museumgoers the opportunity to wait in line for a chance to sit across the table and absorb a deep, eye-locked séance with the artist herself—intersubjective attention at its most melodramatic), back through the gamesome instructional art of Yoko Ono (whose Fly piece of 1963 invited folks to do just that—as best they could—with a stepladder sometimes provided), to the “action poems” and score-based works of the Fluxus group (if you’ve never heard of them, check it out!). And then there were the “happening”-like art pieces of the same era, which encouraged people to register the heightened experience of a collective awareness of sometimes pretty ordinary hangouts. Lots of little “recipes” for mixing up collective experiences of shared attention. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 378

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• XREF: The ‘score as notes of attentional modes’ idea recurs in the Order of the Third Bird passage and connects to Deep Listening’s compositional treatment of the soundscape.