Letters for Iris Numbers for Silence. Flux Year Box 1 by Mac Low, Jackson

One of Mac Low's several contributions to George Maciunas' Flux Year Box 1, a performance piece comprised of instructions offset print in black on hole-punched brown paper, with additional text "Thanks II" to verso, and a set of 51 small white cards with black text of letters and numbers. Instruction sheet approx. 7-1/2 x 4-1/2 inches, cards approx. 1-5/8 x 2-5/8 inches. Loose. N.p. (Amsterdam) (Maciunas) n.d. (1964). Flux Year Box 1 was assembled, designed, and produced by Fluxus leader George Maciunas. It contained various works and contributions from George Brecht, Giuseppe Chiari, Congo, Anna Halprin, Dick Higgins, Allan Kaprow, Jackson Mac Low, Ben Patterson, Tomas Schmit, Emmett Williams, and Ben Vautier. It originally came in two versions, a box and a book. Based off the hole-punched instructional page, we can assume this work of Mac Low's came from one of the book editions. According to the accompanying instructions, "Letters for Iris Numbers for Silence" was performed by distributing the cards to anywhere from 2 to 51 readers, not necessarily equally. The readers then pronounce the sounds of the letters. "All letters on each card are to be pronounced, once each, in any order. The silence prescribed by the integer must occur, as a whole, before or after all letters on a card are pronounced, or between the pronunciations of any two letters...Amplitude, pitch, timbre, tempo...are free. ...The sounds should be, for the most part, speech-like rather than song-like. A performance is over when all readers have read each of their cards once."