Between 1962 and 1971, Kosugi Takehisa composed the ‘South’ series which spawned artistic responses from other Fluxus members, including Shiomi Mieko’s ‘Disappearing Music for Face’, part of which inspired this project.
“South at 60” revisits the series, inviting participation in a collaborative project.
Typewritten on index cards in English, the simple text scores, charged with meaning and references,
invited performers to transform a single word into an act of duration, focus, and discovery.
Each piece unfolded through time rather than melody — an exploration of sound as process, breath as structure, and voice as landscape.
“South at 60” extends this gesture into the present: ten artists across continents reinterpret Kosugi’s instruction through contemporary sound, image, and digital media. The project becomes a living dialogue with Fluxus, a meditation on language, collaboration, and the slow unfurling of a single word across sixty years.
Kosugi Takehisa
SOUTH NO.2. to Nam June Paik
Pronounce "SOUTH" during a duration of
more than 15 minutes. Pause for breath
is permitted but transition from pronunciation of one letter to another should be smooth and slow.
This is a collaboration between artists:
Serge Bulat
Silvia Marcantoni Taddei
Massimo Sannelli
Camille Nibungco
Ron Coulter
Paul Beaudoin
Robin Thornton
Miura Yoko
Viv Corringham
Jakub Rokita
Initiated and produced by Jakub Rokita
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Serge Bulat
IG: @sergebulat IG: @sergebulatmusic
Silvia Marcantoni Taddei & Massimo Sannelli
www.animaenoctis.com IG: @animaenoctis.duo
Camille Nibungco
www.CamilleNibung.co
Ron Coulter
www.roncoulter.org
Paul Beaudoin
IG: @paulbeaudoin www.soundcloud.com/paulbeaudoin
Robin Thornton
www.robinthornton.co.uk IG: @robinthorntonmusicteacher
Miura Yoko
www.amiranirecords.com/artists/yokomiura
Viv Corringham
www.vivcorringham.org www.flamingpines.bandcamp.com
Jakub Rokita
www.acousticsurveyartlab.co.uk
From “Documents of Contemporary Art - Sound”, Edited by Caleb Kelly”
“… Kosugi also created an intermediary form - set between the techniques of repetitive sounds and sustained sounds - that employed the idea of gradual processes. Perhaps the best-known gradual process pieces were his South No. 1 to Anthony Cox, in which the word south is pronounced for a 'predetermined or indetermined duration', and South No. 2 to Nam June Paik which more specifically instructs the performer to prolong the task of pronunciation for a minimum of fifteen minutes. Shiomi's Disappearing Music for Face (1964), a performance, film and flip-book that all involve a smile very gradually dropping (over the course of about five minutes in performance to twelve minutes in film) to no smile, employs a similarly slow transformation, no matter how mute. Shiomi's 'music' was entirely visual, and thus it could be filmed at high speed to extend its duration.
But in the Kosugi process pieces, slowing down the utterance 'south', using the technology of that time, would have altered the pitch beyond recognition. The yogic discipline of Kosugi's pronunciation of 'south' over a very long duration derived from an unusual vocal technique that turns in on its own minute operations, a rough technology that allowed a possible phonetic interior of the word to be divulged and further revealed that this interior was comprised not of syllabic segments but of an interpenetration between and among sounds. The entirety of the sound 'south' - its integrity - was shown to be at once indivisible and exceedingly complex, and thus the specific integrities of other sounds or other things, like the words that roll so easily off the tongue, were revealed to be potential worlds in themselves.
Kosugi's gradual process takes place in a temporal dimension, its duration unfurling like the distance travelled (south). Sustaining an individual sound for a long period, on the other hand, promotes an experience of time decidedly different from the measured time of traditional music, including that of Cage, who preferred rhythm to harmony and championed Satie the 'phonometro-logist'3° It was not until several years after Young's Composition 1960 #7 (1960), in which a B and an F sharp are 'held for a long time', that Cage himself began to depart from measured time.”
