For the sake of our readers who don’t have personal memories of Fluxus, how would you synopsize it?
You want the two-sentence version of Fluxus?
It resists definition; we both know that. But can we come up with a short way of defining it?
I would say that Fluxus is justifiably defined in very different ways, depending on when, where, and how people learn about it. That would be one non-answer–the Flux answer. Most Fluxus artists all over the world were doing Fluxus-like work before there was something called Fluxus. So if you were in Denmark, you learned this through Eric Andersen and his experience of Bewogen Beweging, or “Moving Movement,” which was an historic kinetic art show from the 1960s. If you were in Germany, you found it among the students of Karlheinz Stockhausen and the Darmstadt circle–who were talking about serialism and experimental musical structure in a way that a student of Cage never would. If you’re talking to one of the Japanese Fluxus artists, there’s a good chance they met at the University of Tokyo, and had some relationship to Group Ongaku, which was another experimental musical group. Most of these scenes had some connection to music: some of the artists were training to be involved in music professionally, although most of them were actually discovering music as an “other”–a structure or practice distinct from forms more traditional to the art world, such as painting. Now, I’m the daughter of two New York Fluxus artists; Dick was in the historic John Cage composition class of 1958 at the New School for Social Research, which included most of the future practitioners of Fluxus in New York. For me, Fluxus is predominantly a social entity–it marked the need of a group of experimental artists to have a context, and they found each other in the Cage class. The “event,” which is this Minimalist performance form where you have a simple instruction like “dripping” or “polishing”–some very reduced action–was invented in that class by George Brecht. George Maciunas first engaged with this group of artists in 1961 through his gallery, AG, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan; he later invented the Fluxus Kit, which were these objects for handling and using, and which I think of as a materialization of the event. He also gave concerts to La Monte Young and many key figures in the avant-garde, and began publishing Fluxus scores and objects. So my definition comes from that New York context, which actually allows one to say quite a lot about Fluxus. But a definition of Fluxus should always hinge on the position from which your practitioner, writer, or thinker speaks about it.
That’s a good definition.
Although a lot falls outside it.
And later….
Yes, I wanted to ask about that. In your book, you talk about how Fluxus was influenced by John Dewey–someone typically read these days only by art educators–and his whole notion of art as experience, which is also out of fashion at the moment.
Yeah. I feel like I walk through conferences in some sort of Victorian neckline, you know? And I hope it’s not because I’m intensely repressed! I don’t think it is, but you can’t quite be sure. Anyway, Dewey was someone who went out of style with poststructuralism, but he was very important for many of the artists of the 1960s, at the time they were making their work. Allan Kaprow was reading Dewey, and making Happenings, and studying with Cage. Daisetz Suzuki, when he was teaching at Columbia University, kept a picture of Dewey over his desk. And Suzuki is crucial for Cage. So Dewey was at the center of how these artists understood their relationship to materials. He was also on the board of Black Mountain College, where Cage and Merce Cunningham taught and became sort of grandfathers to Fluxus. Many of the people who were experimenting with materials in that ’60s way–this sensual way that I’m interested in–had a connection to Dewey, although it was completely obscured when the challenges this work brings to verbal discourse became exploited by poststructuralism and political discourse. So Dewey is written out as some sort of crazy idea the artists were into, and then we get this poststructuralist balloon of theory telling us what the artists were really doing. Now, I love to read a lot of that theory, but I read it like a drug, because in understanding it, my brain is literally so stimulated it’s like firecrackers going off. I enter some sort of ether that has nothing to do with–
The real world?
Or the world that artists inhabit, which is a dumber world. And I mean that in the most flattering way. My mother’s always saying, “I’m so dumb.” And she doesn’t mean it to be a putdown to herself; she means it in the sense that, at some level, things really are that simple. And it’s true: it’s our excess intelligence that generates this sort of frothy foam on top of our coffee of life.
via hannah higgins.
RSS - Posts