Al Hansen – Joseph Beuys Stuka Dive Bomber Piece & Other Stories

Al Hansen was born in Queens, NYC, in 1927. He joined the US Air Force as a teenager and served as a paratrooper in World War II, an experience which had a lasting impact on his life and art. While being stationed in Frankfurt am Main after the war, he pushed a piano off the top of a bombed-out five storey building, an act which he would repeat many times all over the world as his performance piece ‘Yoko Ono Piano Drop’, named after his friend and fellow-artist. Once back in New York and dismissed honourably from the US Air Force, Hansen took classes from John Cage at the New School for Social Research together with Dick Higgins, George Brecht, Allan Kaprow. Much of what would be labeled ‘Fluxus’ a couple of years later had its origins in those seminal classes. Hansen was an early member of the Fluxus movement and wrote the influential performance book ‘A Primer of Happenings and Time Space Art’, published by Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press in 1965. In those days Hansen became a regular at Andy Warhol’s Factory too after his daughter Bibbe had been invited to collaborate with Warhol on various films.

In the late 1970s Hansen moved to the West Coast, where he became manager of Los Angeles punk bands The Screamers and The Controllers. A couple of years later he moved back to Germany, a country that he loved to hate, and established his ‘Ultimate Akademie’ in Cologne, inspired by Genesis P-Orridge’s Final Academy. The Ultimate Akademie developed into a meeting point for local and international artist and played an important part in Cologne’s lively and anarchic art scene of the period. Al Hansen died in Cologne in 1995.

Sea Urchin distributes the very last available copies of the Al Hansen LP that Jan van Toorn released on his Slowscan label. 300 copies were pressed on red, blue and black vinyl in 2006. This unique LP contains 4 pieces: Balloni Brothers Balloon Work (1987), Joseph Beuys Stuka Dive Bomber Piece (1987), Car Bibbe (1958-1959) and The Futuristic Chattanooga Choo Choo In The Mongolian Desert (1989). Only a handful of copies (red and blue vinyl) available!