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This became obvious once again on the evening of April 24 when the Andrea Rosen Gallery, which is currently showing a remarkable small exhibition of Hansen’s collages and sculptures, hosted "3rd Rail Revisited." This celebration of Hansen’s performance career and legacy featured snatches of video and audio of the great man himself, plus a string of more or less faithful restagings of his performances by his former colleagues and his surviving family members.

Hansen was a key member of the U.S. (and subsequently German) Fluxus artists, and of the group of artists who made Happenings in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He was at least briefly John Cage’s favorite pupil, and he wrote the priceless Primer of Happenings & Time Space Art in 1965.

His work almost always maintained an absurdist humor, and this was much in evidence at Andrea Rosen. One of his key works was what came to be called the Yoko Ono Piano Drop (in which, predictably enough, the piano is pushed from a great height), and this turned up in several guises, one in verbal description, one in a cartoon animation and one on video when it was performed by his grandsons Beck and Channing Hansen.

We also had a live performance of Alice Denham in 48 Seconds on various toy noisemakers by Fluxus luminaries Alison Knowles, Peter Frank, Larry Miller and Geoff Hendricks. The beautiful Ladder Poem #2 (in which the ladder in question is painted sky blue) was also on the bill, with the painting performed live, as was Elegy for the Fluxus Dead, performed by Channing Hansen. This work is now more poignant than ever as we must add not only Hansen’s own name to the list of the dead, but also those of Nam June Paik and Allan Kaprow.

Finally, My Stamp Collection was performed—and there was even an attempt to stage one of Hansen’s unplanned Happenings.

The entire anarchic evening was a suitably joyous salute to a true original. As his flickering face smiled down on the audience in one hugely enlarged video clip after another, Hansen’s approval of the evening’s happenings seemed palpable.