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FLUXUS AND THE WORLD OF QUANTUM PHYSICS Enrico Pedrini The traditional confines between individual and environment are
beginning to break down, leading us towards a new sensibility in which identity
is no longer separate from the environment as a neutral container of our
activities. This area is increasingly composed of transparent, instantaneous,
interactive information and defined as "a hyperactive conscience in a
permanent state of flux and change". The need for new authenticity springs
precisely from a profound search not only for human and historical roots but
also from an urgent need for a new, flexible ethics. This is made possible
through the discontinuity and contiguity of our possible worlds, which are
identities imagined and experienced for their own sake. They relate and
interact with other spheres and are shared. Unlike televisions mass-man, who
was trapped inside a world made for him by the "industries of
conscience", information-man is not simply a consumer but has become a
producer and agent. His rapidity represents instant access to things and
information and his psychological and technological reality is in continuous
expansion. The access to possible worlds thus deepens the range of our culture,
whether we are penetrating worlds that were previously inaccessibie or
exploring matter, space and time with totally new techniques of physical or
mental access. Derrick de Kerckhove states that if television has created the
notion of "mass-man", computers have introduced the idea of "velocity-man",
particularly in relation to accelerated access to information. Indeed, the
expansìon of communication towards new infinite worlds offers artists the
ability to create new linguistic opportunitíes, which break down previous
hierarchical structures. “Imagining new worlds" thus becomes their working
commitment, while they see in the act that generates autonomous universes the
only way to free themselves from the serialisation and standardisation of
existence. We feel so free from the restrictions of one sole relation between space
and time that we can be everywhere while remaining in one place. We are now
able to expand our psychological identity beyond the confines of our body and
our skin. Indeed, the physical sensation of being able to be elsewhere because our
senses are at work all over the pianet is more a tactile experience than a
visual one. So how did we arrive at this new human attitude, this piurality of roles
and flexibility of behaviour? Towards the end of the 50s, the American model, which
was based on the great flexibility of the labour market and a smaller presence
of social networks compared with Europe and certainly founded upon a less
comforting and socially less costly economy, undoubtedly showed itself to be
faster and more flexible in adapting to change. Indeed, America's great skill
at transformation, which is generated and upheld by an instinctive aptitude for
experimentation and a natural bent for technological innovation, undoubtedly
encourages a constant vitality and dynamism that are unknown to European
rigidity and fixedness. The clash between the two models became increasingly evident,
emphasising their underlying philosophical and political foundations. In this
confrontation, the cognitive and pragmatic approach of the New World underlined
its own values of great flexibility, interdisciplinarity, interaction and
mutability - characteristics belonging to a cultural context that runs parallel
to the requirements of quantum mechanics - while Europe displayed a
deterministic rigidity that was still linked to a relativistic sphere of an
Einsteinian type. Even today, Europe is still questioning itself about the dual essence of
technology, which on the one hand represents the complete realisation of
metaphysics but, on the other hand, ends up by presenting itself as a world
that goes beyond metaphysics itself through the anti-metaphysical concept of
difference. In the Old World, therefore, technological prospects enable a
gradualist social mechanics, where each intervention is of such a limited nature
that continual errors can be corrected. The categorical basis of European rigidity is to be found in this
unresolved dialectical relationship between metaphysics and science. The
indeterminacy of the American world thus clashes with the determinacy and
non-flexibility of an Old Worid that is set on defending its historical
identity and ideological inflexibility. When Heisenberg discovered the Principle of Indeterminacy in 1927 and
Bohr discovered the Principle of Correspondence, this new knowledge found wide
adherence among American physicists. Such principles, indeed, state that the
worid of physics is a world contemplated "from within" and is
measured by equipment that is part of it and subject to its laws. In fact the
Principle of Indeterminacy broke with determinism's principle of cause and
effect - which went back to ciassical Newtonian physics, where an effect necessarily
corresponded with a cause - and posited another epistemological theory: the
casual origin of a phenomenon represents the probability (and not the
necessity) of the casual origin of another phenomenon. The concept of
"chance", which was so dear to the Dadaists and Duchamp, thus became
the "probability that continuously generates new possibilities and
contingencies". The study and development of statistics were given great
momentum by such an approach to reality. In 1932, Anderson obtained a clear photograph of a particle that he
called a "positron". Positrons were the new kind of matter-antimatter
that the American Dirac had theoretically predicted some years earlier. He had
indeed theorised a new conception of "void as a bottomless sea occupied by
negative electrons. A void was thus no longer an empty space containing no
elements but a space occupied by negative energy. From that time onwards, it
became clear that almost all particles have a corresponding mass anti-particle
with an opposite charge. When particles and anti-particles clash, they
annihilate each other and create light. The concept of matter and anti-matter,
particle and anti-particle suggests and visualises the notion of positive and
negative and opens up the possibility of self-presentation in three different
forms: "energy", "universal matter" and
"radiation" (since ali elementary particles with sufficiently high
energy can be transformed into other particles). This in turn opened up
unimagined horizons for art, which could now widen its investigation of new
fields of knowledge and move across unex-pected linguistic boundaries. It must
be stressed that in this new microphysics the phenomena studied are never free
from the effects and acts of disturbance caused by the observer, who thus
becomes an integral part of a phenomenon. The Principles of Indeterminacy and Correspondence,
the opening into the field of negativity through the dimension of anti-matter
and research on atomic fusion found support and, above all, room for growth on
the other side of Atlantic. The figure who best interpreted this new frontier
could therefore only have been an American because this way of facing the worid
was naturai to that environment. It was brought to the surface and promoted in
music and art and other fields of culture by John Cage, a pioneer not only of
the Happening but of Fluxus itself. Not only did he introduce the new
categories of probability into music, art and theatre but also the concept of
correspondence, uncertainty and interdisciplinarity. With his work, art was
able to detach itself from its own specific areas and, leaving aside its
traditional instruments, promote its status as a vehicle of information and
messages. In 1952, a performance by Cage at the Black Mountain College saw the
combination of various elements: indeterminate stage action without a framework
and a new expressive relationship between public and performance. This event
suggests the coexistence and mutability of quantum material in that the
elements and materials of the representation remain undetermined and
complementary. From Cage's point of view, music came close to life, which is
capable of providing an infinite number of musical elements if we listen to it
closely. As a part of everyday life and experience, noise is concrete and is as
important as silence in his work. Thus, rather than the role of a producer of
sounds, he played that of a listener who makes music emerge. As a consequence,
music itself, like Duchamps readymade, is already there waiting to be
identified through choice, objectification and naming. Every idea deriving from
real life can therefore become music, which explains the inclusion in music
itself of silence, noises, spoken stories, and so on. His performances also
included the voice, the body, objects and even musical instruments themselves,
such as the "prepared piano" and the "watergong". The advent of John Cage's music constituted a great evolutionary advance
(which I referred to years ago in The Quantum Machine and The Second
Avant-Garde as "out-of-the-frame" art) in that art ceases to be
an aesthetic phenomenon and becomes a totally quantitative and informative
entity. This "out-of-the-frame" art is no longer based on the
experience of an opposition (as, for example, the painting that accertata
itself as the opposite of photography) but presiede to dissolve ali essential
opposition between art and "other", between the concepts of truth and
story. No longer having an opposite or presenting itself as something true, art
goes beyond the dialectical concept of supersession. It no longer founds its
status on meaning but is situated in the area of a new signifier somewhere
beyond meaning itself. It ended up being collocated within the space of the event, a nihilistic
space whose dialectical means, articulateci around non-contradiction and
synthesis, ultimately failed. Rather than a will free from restrictions, it is
a case of an absence of will that turns the works into a succession of events.
The order of the worid is no longer "ready-made"; it is
contradictorily and interactively "in the process of becoming". The linguistic revolution begun by John Cage in the field of music, art,
dance, theatre, literature and architecture found later reformulation and
theorisation in the movements of the Happening and Fluxus. A common origin of
the these two currents of thought can be found in the courses held by Cage in
1958 at the New School for Social Research on West 12th Street in New York. Cage invited George Brecht and Jackson MacLow to present their works on
the various possibilities of indeterminacy. Among the pupils attending the
courses were Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, Dick Higgins and the composers Richard
Maxfield and Toshi lchiyanagi (Yòko Onos first husband). Less regular attenders
included Jim Dine and George Segal. These classes were later joined by strong personalities from the West
Coast such as Simone Forti, Robert Morris, Walter De Maria and Terry Riley, who
brought from California ideas that originated in the Far East. Cage
himself had developed his ideas about
indeterminacy from Zen thought. These individual figures were to have a
determining influence upon dance and certain forms of art that followed Fluxus,
such as Minimal Art, Land Art and New Music. In the same year, Allan Kaprow
performed one of his first happenings, which he entitled Untitled. In the summer of 1959, La Monte Young discovered
indeterminacy at Stockhausen’s Darmstadt seminar entitied "Composition as
Process", where Cage developed his ideas about music. In 1960-61, La Monte
Young studied electronic music at the New School for Social Research with
Richard Maxfield and developed a new concept in music - "one single point of
concentration, one single element". In 1960, a Lithuanian named George Maciumas, a graduate in the History
of Art and Musicology, met La Monte Young at Maxwell's school and was
introduced by him to the problem areas of the AvantGarde. After opening a new
gallery in New York, he presented Dick Higgins. The term FLUXUS appeared for
the first time in 1961 on invitations to three lectures heid by Maciunas on
"Musica Antiqua et Nova". lt was on this occasion that he asked for a
contribution of three dollars to help with the publication of the “Fluxus"
magazine. During the same year, Maciunas prepared An Anthology, a book
promoted by La Monte Young and Jackson MacLow that was only actually published
in 1963. In November 1961, Maciunas came into contact with Nam June Paik and
met Wolf Vostell in his Cologne studio in April 1962. On 16 June of the same
year, Nam June Paik organised the "Neo-Dada in Music" concert. Cage's music had become known in Europe as early as 1958. lndeed, we
know that in October of that year Nam June Paik attended Cage's Music Walk at
Gallery 22 in Düsseldorf. In the same year Ben Vautier had an important meeting
with Yves Klein and Arman. In 1959, Wolf Vostell created his first Dé-collage-TV
in Germany and in the same period Silvano Bussotti performed Piano for Davíd
Tudor in Florence and frequented the “Vita Musicale Contemporanea"
Association, where he met Giuseppe Chiari and the musician Pietro Grossi. The
quantum physicist Giuliano Toraldo from France was subsequently named president
of this association. Many artists in various countries developed their own ideas concerning
indeterminacy and this work was covered in September 1962 in Wiesbaden in the
“Fluxus International New Music" event. This large meeting in the German
city is now considered a landmark of the Fluxus Movement because it was the
first meeting of so many artists who, in their various ways, interpreted this
nascent world-view. This way of understanding reality was contained in John
Cage's music, which became known throughout the world through his records and
was amplified by the media because the direct presence of the composer was no
longer needed in order to spread the idea of chance and indeterminacy: it was
sufficient to listen to his music through the means of communication then
available. The artists mentioned above were joined by such names
as: Robert Filliou, Bob Watts, Charlotte Moorman, Henry Flint, Alison Knowles,
Geoffery Hendricks, Ben Patterson, Yoko Ono, Eric Andersen, Philip Corner,
Emmett Williams, Ken Friedman, Joe Jones, Ray Johnson, Tàkako Saito, Ay-O,
Milan Knizak, Arthur Köpcke, Tomas Schmidt, Takehisa Kosugi, Chieko Shioni,
Daniel Spoerri, Robin Page, Al Hansen, Larry Milier, Serge III, Jean Dupuy,
Carolee Schneemann and Joseph Beuys (who joined Fluxus in 1963). The introduction of spectators into representations
led to the birth of "happenings" - representations without a
framework in that the interpreters do not bring a created world with them
(i.e., an invented reality in time and space). They are not characters and do
not modify the personality of the actor, as happens in the theatre. The
function of interpreters in happenings has the same value as that of stage
objects. The artist, in this case Allan Kaprow, who is the founder and
promulgator, controls and directs the entire happening and is an integral part
of the action, which takes place with the help of friends and acquaintances in
the most varied places - e.g., attics, shops, gyms and courtyards. The artist
thus succeeds in integrating elements such as environment, compositions, time,
space and the people who attend. Happenings appear as compartmental or island
structures, whose images are evoked and tend to evade the confines of belonging
to a unitary structure because they are only interconnected by an emotional and
constant relationship in which the real becomes an occasion for the possible
and the undetermined. 1962 was the year in which the largest number of
happenings were presented: new themes invaded music, dance and theatre. Groups
were formed only to break up shortly afterwards and then form again, creating
matrices for new actions and new happenings. Society was growing and the economy was going through
its most flourishing period in history, as the economic indices of those years
testify. The great expansion of industry and mass consumption,
large-scale urbanisation and the faith in the future of those years; were
experienced by artists as enthusiasm for making visible their process of
appropriation of the urban sign through festivals, actions, happenings and
behaviours. In its exaltation of the economic growth that brought faith in an
increasingly prosperous future and in the wake of new knowledge that sought
acceptance in society, art for the Fluxus artist became a total piace that was ready
to accept any creative possibility - both as a personal proposal of oneself and
one's physicality and as a visualisation of the objects used, sometimes as
tools, in communicating with the spectators. Through re-manipulation and (at times violent) transformation
of the media, such as TV and radio sets, photocopies, newspapers, musical
instruments and spaces on the stage, Fluxus artists linguistically brought
about the recovery of currently dominant technologies. Going beyond the object and support where certain
artistic poetics (e.g., New Realism and Azimut) had stopped, these artists
pressed on with their investigation of pockets of the negative, a field as yet
unexplored, and attempted to reveal a new essence inherent in the event - the
totality of everyday life. An everyday life that experienced the new radical
change in our relationship with things and others; the loss of material
consistency of objects of perception, which had become or would become for a
new, widespread metropolitan sensibility truly “immatériaux", evanescent
and serial simulacra. And this is why the Fluxus movement, in its constant
recognition of the multiple levels of life, contained the vehemence and drive
towards the changing of myth that was proper to the Futurists. Contrary to this great early-twentieth-century
movement, whose action was directed towards the representation of the
technological and industrial dynamism of modern society, Fluxus fixed its
attention upon daily life in the global village, on the electric megalopolis of
the future founded upon the supremacy of information, where man's role is no
longer linked to the burden of work but to leisure time. It was an everyday life that underlay the abandonment
of possession of ourselves and the unity of personality in favour of plurality.
One true self no longer existed but different versions of the self that were
all legitimate. We have as many individual selves and roles as the situations
and social games in which we are take part. The individual is capable of
imagining him - or herself with various possible biographies that can all be
declined in the future tense and various forms and figures. We can be many
potential individuals in one and live in a world where we take part in a number
of vital worlds. Faced with the continuous and manifold proliferation
of new languages and new knowledge, the artist pays attention to materials of
little value from everyday existence and to the subterranean codes that move it
and impregnate it, such as sheets of paper, fragments, objects of everyday use,
poor materials, minimal structure, discontinuity, interdisciplinarity, body
language, photographic images and so on. It was above all the Fluxus movement, which saw the
influx of certain Happening artists, that insisted on these new linguistic
possibilities, breaking with the object and presenting themselves as action and
behaviour. With its new quantum image, art became a document, a practice, a
path, information, and the problem of value shifted from the field of
aesthetics to that of ethics. It is no coincidence that the Fluxus movement
came into being and developed at the same time as television, for such artistic
preoccupations underlined the phenomenon of the de-realisation of real data by
the media, which occurs through the visualisation of the new reality of the
image on the screen and its loss of concrete consistency as it becomes a
transmitted image, a cinematic appearance of the reality of the world. With the
spread of television, we have become increasingly involved in emphasis upon daily
life, which is expressed through the idea of the contingent and the precarious
that are part of everyday existence. This takes consistency away from
individuality and highlights, through emotional participation in the lives of
others, renunciation of the possession of the self - i.e., of the single unit
of personality in favour of plurality. For Fluxus artists, we can be many
individuals in one and live in a world where we take part in a number of vital
worlds. The new ethics that was born with the Fluxus movement is not based on
the absolute prohibition, since "exceptions" are now admitted. This
ethical view brings the “quality of life" into the foreground and switches
its attention not only towards reasonable well-being but, above all, to respect
for independent choices. The responsibilities and duties of man are therefore
to reflect upon the new dynamics of economy, technology and science and
industrialisation. In his comments on an art which has lost the fulcrum,
the finality of the market, the packaging of the product and does not attempt
to be something precise, determined or durabie, George Maciunas stated:
"Art must be simple, amusing and unpretentious and must involve
insignificant things, without requiring any particular skill... Everything can
be art and anyone can be an artist. It doesn't need to oppose the avant-garde
in the struggie for supremacy. lt is satisfied with the monostructural
properties of a simple natural event, a game or a gag. It is a mixture of
Vaudeville, gags, childish games, of Spike Jones and Duchamp. Art is the
indeterminacy of everything and the reverse of everything". The infinite
variety of solutions corresponds to the infinite variety of particular possibie
phenomena. Fluxus is an attitude of the possible, just as the quantum image is
a possibility of the indeterminate. Before the advent of this movement, artists were
divided by cultural matrices, by different geographical distances and different
poetics. Fluxus wanted to break up such divisions and fragmentation and create
a singie global community in which everybody can come and go as they please. In
fact this movement presented itself as a giobal movement from the very
beginning, stretching from the United States to Japan and Europe as the
reference-point of an attitude, a way of behaving towards things, peopie and
institutions. By breaking up specific areas of art, Fluxus became
the possibility of going beyond confines and an openness that creates a flux
"through which art acquires the movement of life". Thus, art no longer represents reality but coincides
with it entirely. There is no longer painting, scuipture, poetry or music but
an event that incorporates all existing disciplines. Through the Zen notion of
time, an incessant flow of moments that not only qualify extraordinary events
but also anonymous everyday ones, the time of Fluxus art respects the flow of
the time of life. Once the limit of institutional space (such as the painting
or the gallery) is overcome, space becomes the space of social communication, which
can be extended infinitely and interconnects distant realities. The refusal to
play the role of the professional artist and the consequent avoidance of the
gallery circuit generates the wish to communicate and promotes a space in which
everyones voice can be heard. For this reason, Fluxus artists used
insignificant materials, such as pieces of paper, photocopies and small
objects, for these documents took on as great a value as artistic products in
bearing witness to an everyclay event. The postal system allows such a message
to reach any destination and create a network of communication. And these
vehicles of information constituted another important contribution of Fluxus to
the History of Art – the “Mail Art" begun by Ray Johnson and George Brecht
in 1963. Today's e-mail over the Internet is what Fluxus
anticipated and promoted many decades ago. Fluxus is certainly a movement connected with the
future, for it interpreted, anticipated and revealed it. Indeed, its actuality
resides in the force and ciarity with which it predicted the future. |
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