Al Hansen

Alfred Earl "Al" Hansen (5 October 1927 – 20 June 1995) was an American artist. He was a member of Fluxus, a movement that originated on an artists' collective around George Maciunas.

He was the father of Andy Warhol protégé Bibbe Hansen and the grandfather and artistic mentor of rock musician Beck and artist Channing Hansen. Bibbe and Channing continue his legacy by performing some of his most iconic works.

Biography Hansen was born in 1927 in the Richmond Hill section of Queens, New York City, to a working-class family of Norwegian and Irish-Scottish heritage. He was a friend to several notable artists, including Yoko Ono and John Cage. Hansen served in Germany during World War II. During his service, Hansen once pushed a piano off the roof of a five-story building, which became the foundation of one of his most recognized performance pieces, the Yoko Ono Piano Drop. He dated the action to a 1946 armed-forces show in Frankfurt, where he pushed a piano from a bombed-out building, and later described it as his first Happening. and Raphael Montañez Ortiz.

Hansen studied with composer John Cage at the now famous 1958 Composition Class at the New School for Social Research in New York City along with fellow students, Dick Higgins, George Brecht, and Allan Kaprow amongst others. Hansen made his mark in the emerging Happening movement with Alice Denham in 48 Seconds: Percussion Piece, presented at the New York YM-YWHA in April 1959 on a program alongside work by Cage.

He wrote an important book about performance art, A Primer of Happenings and Time Space Art published by Something Else Press in 1965.

In 1966 he attended the Destruction in Art Symposium in London organized by Gustav Metzger, where he met and befriended many of the Viennese Action Artists. In October 1966 Otto Muhl organized an event called "Action Concert for Al Hansen" in Vienna.

Hansen was a frequent visitor to The Factory, Andy Warhol's studio in New York. In 1969, Hansen founded the underground magazine Kiss, which featured a gossip column by Warhol and contributions by his Factory superstars.

He was an art professor at Rutgers University from 1967 to 1974. established an art school, the Ultimate Akademie. Inspired among others by the Final Academy of Genesis P-Orridge it became a meeting point for local and international performers of the time-based arts.

He was found dead of a heart attack in his Cologne apartment in June 1995 and was cremated. Coco Was a Poco Loco about Cacao and Men, 1968, MoMA, New York, NY John Cage Word Opera, 1972–1976, Walker Art Center Minneapolis, MN Amazone Venus 3/9 1994, Kölnisches Stadtmuseum. Yayoi Kusama's Yokohama Hammock 1963, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien Vienna.