fluxusgenova.org

What We Talk About When We Talk About Fluxus

What is there?

Everything is there.

W.V.O. Quine

(From a Logical Point of View)

(The idea that art is based on rarity has been mistakenly kept alive, for it has become a realm of abundance where what is done or what is indicated acquires a status of unquestionable presence. When the space that was occupied by form is “invaded or left to the so-called incalculable - chance, the other, the event”.) ¹

Before Fluxus: influences

Before Fluxus: the Roman circus, ecclesiastical processions, fairs, Vaudeville, Haiku, Byzantine iconoclasm... Rarely have a group of artists gone so far as to claim such remote and contradictory origins. And perhaps even today it is hard to believe (particularly in Europe, where a certain ideological rigidity – gradually fading from the socio-political sphere – remains at the root of cultural alignments) that the movement comprised individuals who were influenced by Wagnerian theories on the total work of art and the Futurist synthetic theatre or Bauhaus industrial design and Duchamp’s ready-made art.

The diagrams drawn by George Maciunas from which these notations are taken obviously involve a wider sphere (the expanded arts)² than that which properly concerns Fluxus. However, looking back, we have to agree that some of the more recent references did not constitute mere expressions of creative harmony but underlined effective working materials.

What was needed was an independent viewpoint, a common discovery-time in order to understand the essential contemporaneity and reciprocal functionality of movements which, despite having appeared within the space of a few years, seemed to European eyes to be chronologically distant and antagonistic and at times marked by a distrust generated by different national matrices. In this sense, the American cultural scene offered ideal terrain for freely picking up the threads of experimentation of earlier avant-garde movements without making too much distinction between them.

The emigration of European artists to America during the second world war had already contributed towards awakening interest in such problems. Robert Motherwell, an exponent of New York abstract Expressionism, had published an anthology entitled Dada Painters and Poets in 1951³. But the true intermediary in this case for many young artists (particularly, though not only, musicians) was John Cage. ‘

In an interview with Larry Miller in March 1978, a few months before his death, Maciunas mentioned one of the maps (not a marginal part of his activity) as a graphic image of the “‘Travels of John Cage’ like you could say ‘Travels of St. Paul’. Wherever John Cage went he left a little John Cage group, which some admit, some not admit his influence. But the fact is there, that those groups formed after his visits”⁴ .

In spreading his ideas, Cage drew inspiration from his sojourns in Europe before and after the war – in France and Italy and in German experimental music centres such as Darmstadt and Cologne – as well as from his personal closeness to Zen Buddhism. His awareness of the importance of Futurist synthetic theatre and the concretism of Russolo’s “Art of Noise” was an integral part of his frame of reference, together with the conceptual scheme of Duchamp’s ready-mades and the Dadaist practice of collage. Cage integrated such influences into a personal approach to life and to the materials of art that hinged upon the rejection of personal expression (which was the aim of his chance operations) and upon the creation of an immediate, harmonic relationship with nature, events and things. In Cage’s view, the object of art was to “change ways of seeing, to open up one’s eyes to just seeing what there was to see”⁵.

At that time (1958), when some of those who were to become leading figures in the Fluxus movement (Dick Higgins, Jackson McLow, Al Hansen and George Brecht) met at a seminar held by Cage at the New School of Social Research, Cage had already produced some of his fundamental creations – including the invention of the prepared piano (1938)⁶, the compositions of Music of Changes (1951), the proto-happening given at the Black Mountain College with Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg in the summer of 1952⁷, the presentation of the silent piece entitled 4’33’’, interpreted by David Tudor at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock in August of the same year⁸ – and the impact with his already mature positions was to be decisive.

Without forgetting the influence of another great American artist, Joseph Cornell⁹, particularly upon George Brecht and Bob Watts, Ben Vautier seems justified in observing that Fluxus would not have existed without Cage and his two “brainwashes… the first at the level of contemporary music by the notion of indeterminateness, the other by his teaching through the spirit of Zen and his will to depersonalize art”¹⁰.

Before Fluxus: the sidelines

the scene in the 1950s

The great wave of abstract Expressionism on the American scene had been followed by a no less intense phase, though this was not ruled by one dominant tendency: on the one hand, there were painters such as Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan and Lester Johnson, who were defined by Irving Sandler as “Gestural Realists”¹¹, and on the other hand Ellsworth Kelly, Myron Stout and Leon Polk Smith were producing a hard-edge version of abstraction. In the meantime, sculptors were experimenting with the use of filling material (first David Smith, and then Richard Stankiewicz, Jean Follett and John Chamberlain), while painters such as Rauschenberg (who, as we have seen, was himself connected with Cage) and Jasper Johns were introducing object elements into their works¹², which were in any case destined for frontal vision (e.g. Rauschenberg’s Bed, 1955, or Johns’ Targets series of the same year), following a neo-Dadaist direction that would ultimately lead to the phenomenon of Pop Art some years later. Allan Kaprow (who also attended Cage’s seminar) was beginning the reflection that would lead to the first historic happening at the Reuben Gallery in New York in 1959.

The scene was no less lively in Europe, particularly in Paris, where Dubuffet had hurled the first stone of Art Brut against the suffocating culture. Lettrisme again took up experiments in phonetic poetry in the late 1940s and in the following decade launched the séance de cinema¹³, (a sort of incunabulum of the happening), the integral meca-esthètique (which contemplated the use of all kinds of support) and the supertemporal painting, a work left open to the later intervention of other artists. The more radical wing of the movement – composed of Debord and Wolman, the founders of the Lettriste Internationale – were experimenting with the pre-Situationist practices of the psychogeographic dérive and the détournement of prefabricated aesthetic elements¹⁴.

Again in France, certain ultra-Lettristes gravitating around the journal entitled Grammes¹⁵ (Hains, Villeglé and Dufrêne, who later joined the ranks of Nouveau-Réalisme), cultivated their affichiste vocation by creating works from torn-down manifestoes and hoardings taken off the streets, while the leading lyrical Abstract artist Georges Mathieu staged the first performance of painting at the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre on the occasion of the 1956 Festival de Paris: in half an hour he painted a twelve-by-four metre canvas as a tribute to poets worldwide¹⁶. In his turn, Yves Klein presented his exposition du vide at Iris Clert’s gallery in 1958¹⁷ before producing his first “anthropometries” in 1960.

In London, the Independent Group¹⁸ launched Alison and Peter Smithson’s “Parallel of Life and Art” manifesto in 1952, and in 1956 organised the “This is Tomorrow” exhibition, which was centred on the theme of contemporary life. The catalogue to this exhibition appears to be an interesting precedent for the graphic art conceived by Maciunas for La Monte Young and Jackson McLow’s An Anthology (1963). In 1959, Günther Metzger inaugurated his experimentation with Auto-Destructive Art¹⁹ .

In September 1955, following his experience with the CoBrA Group, the Danish artist Asger Jorn set up the experimental Imagist Bauhaus Workshop at Alba with Piero Simondo and Pinot Gallizio²⁰.

In Austria in 1958, the poets of the Wiener Gruppe presented a provocative form of “lyterarische cabaret”²¹ which was in some respects close to Fluxus events. In the following year in Germany, Otto Piene, an exponent of the ZERO-Gruppe, presented his “Lichtballett” at the Schmela Gallery in Düsseldorf²² .

Finally, in the East, the Gutaj Group, set up in 1954 in Japan on the initiative of Jiro Yoshihara, was experimenting with environmental art (“Open-air exhibition of experimental modern art”, Ashiya 1955) and action (“Gutaj art on stage”, Osaka 1957), and remained in contact with European artists such as Mathieu and critics such as Michel Tapié²³.

Fluxus before Fluxus

Thus, it was in a particularly lively international context (which could be extended to the field of literature with reference to the works of the Beat Generation and to the formation of new experimental dance and theatre groups) that Fluxus completed its incubation. In this phase, the New York City Audio-Visual Group²⁴, founded by Al Hansen and Dick Higgins, presented “Stacked Deck” at the Village Gate, an electronic work by Higgins (April 1958), and subsequently a programme of advanced music with works by Cage, Wolff, Hansen and Higgins at the Kaufmann Concert Hall. The following year saw the meeting of George Maciunas²⁵ and La Monte Young, both of whom attended Richard Maxwell’s course, a follow-up to Cage’s seminar at the New York School of Social Research. In Europe, Nam June Paik paid homage to Cage in October 1959 with a lively six-minute concert at the Galerie 22 in Düsseldorf, which involved overturning a piano and smashing a pane of glass, (a year later he would cut off his tie in Mary Bauermeister’s Studio) and Ben Vautier produced Agui-Gui, sculpture vivante et mobile²⁶. While there was an ever-increasing number of happenings by Whitman, Grooms and Dine, December 1960 saw the beginning of a sequence of exhibitions directed by Young at Yoko Ono’s studio at 122 Chamber Street, which were followed by exhibitions organised by Maciunas at the AG Gallery in Spring 1961 under the title of “Musica Antiqua et Nova”, involving the participation of John Cage, Richard Maxfield, Dick Higgins, Jackson McLow, Earle Brown, Ray Johnson, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Yoko Ono and artists based on the West Coast, such as Robert Morris and Joseph Byrd. “Fluxus” began to be mentioned as the title of a journal that Maciunas intended to publish. Wolf Vostell, who had already presented actions in Paris and Barcelona, held an exhibition in May (“Décollage Collages”) at the Lauhaus Gallery in Cologne and during the same period began working with Ben Patterson. Bob Watts presented “Two Indeterminate Events” at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. In November 1961, Maciunas left for Europe.

Fluxus festivals

Contacts with German art environments, with Paik, and more conflictual contacts with Vostell, who was planning his Décoll/age journal, led to the organisation of the first Fluxus festival – the “Fluxus Internationale Neuester Musik” held at the Hörsaal des Städtischen Museum from 1 to 23 September 1962 and involving the participation of Robert Filliou, Dick Higgins, Arthur Koepcke, George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Ben Patterson, Emmett Williams, Wolf Vostell and the Swedish artist Karl-Erik Welin. The programme still seemed to lie somewhere between the academic (though advanced) context of works such as those by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gyorgy Lygeti, Gottfried Michael Koenig and Konrad Boehmer or by French artists like Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry and more typical Fluxus works such as “Zen for head”²⁷, the famous action by Paik in which he painted a black line with his head on a long sheet of paper, or “Danger Music 2”, in which, among other things, Alison Knowles shaved Dick Higgins’ head. Besides the works by artists and contributors already mentioned, this programme included a work by Terry Riley and various pieces by Philip Corner, who was to form the “Tone Roads Ensemble” the following year with James Tenney and Malcolm Goldstein, a musical ensemble whose name was taken from a series of compositions by Charles Ives. The performance of his “Piano Activities”, which involved the complete destruction of a piano, was a succés de scandale and was shown on German television. One novelty was the inclusion of Italian artists on the second evening of the programme, with pieces by Giuseppe Chiari (“Gesti sul piano”), Sylvano Bussotti (“5 Klavier Stücke für David Tudor”) and Walter Marchetti (“Muzik”). The “Parallele Auffuhrungen Neuester Musik” was performed (without the Fluxus label) at the Galerie Monet in Amsterdam in October and saw the participation not only of Higgins, Knowles, Maciunas and Paik but also of Carlheinz Caspari²⁸, Willem de Ridder and Tomas Schmit; it concluded with a street performance by Vostell which led to some disorder. The “Festival of Misfits” also took place in October at Gallery One in London and saw the involvement, among others, of Robin Page, Daniel Spoerri and Ben Vautier, who gave his celebrated performance of “Living Scuplture: 15 Days in a Window”, in which he spent fifteen days in the gallery window.

In November, the Nicolaj Kirke in Copenhagen hosted “Festum Fluxorum – Musik og Anti-Musik – Der Instrumentale Teater” as part of a limited number of concerts with tight thematic concentration. One of the performers on this occasion was Eric Andersen. The performances included George Brecht’s “Drip Music”²⁹ and “In Memoriam to Adriano Olivetti”³⁰ by Maciunas. The event was repeated in Paris in December.

There was a more important appointment in February 1963 at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf: The performers this time included Al Hansen, Robert Watts and Joseph Beuys, who presented the first movement of his “Siberian Symphony”, whose deathly atmosphere was decidedly out of tune with the spirit of Fluxus³¹, and the more playful “Composition for 2 musicians”, in which the artist seated at the piano watches two toy clowns playing a drum and cymbals. On this occasion, handouts of Maciunas’ “Flux Manifesto”³² were thrown into the crowd.

Among the artists taking part in “Kammer Fluxus” in Copenhagen in March were Henning Christiansen and a very young Per Kirkeby, while “Dangermusic” in Stockholm saw the first performance by Bengt-af-Klintberg.

A complex event called the YAM Festival³³ was organised by George Brecht with Bob Watts and Ben Patterson and took place in New York in May. Its organisers intended it to represent something more open and indefinite than Fluxus, which was beginning to acquire a more stable and recognised identity.

Other Fluxus Festivals were organised in Copenhagen, Amsterdam and the Hague. The Fluxus Festival of Total Art and Comportment took place in Nice in July and was marked by a prevalence of street performances. On this occasion, Ben declared the Promenade des Anglais an international museum of living sculpture and consecrated the city of Nice as an “Oeuvre d’Art ouverte”.

Fluxkits for unlimited art-amusement

In the early Fluxus exhibitions in the United States and Europe, the attention was centred upon the festival (which, besides being a way of presenting art live, offers a “weak” but at the same time particularly flexible aggregative formula) and the event, “a minimal unit in an artwork or performance or music”³⁴, with the intention of communicating to the audience “small illuminations”³⁵, revealing “an area of sensibility” that was new and centred upon “the trivial, the marginal, the overlooked, things that were silly and irrational, tics and fetishes, useless ideas, unnecessary inventions, large banalities, various forms of minor sacrilege”³⁶.

After Maciunas’ return to New York in August 1963 (preceded by the return of Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles), these forms – the one tending to contract into the scheme of the “concert”³⁷, the other tending, on the one hand, to form a repertoire and, on the other hand, to flow out of the closed environment of the room onto the street – were accompanied by greater interest in editorial projects and the creation of specific channels for the diffusion of works by individual Fluxus artists.

The project for a journal entitled Fluxus had been made public as early as 1961 in an invitation by Maciunas to three conference-demonstrations at the AG Gallery, where it was stated that the entrance fees would be used to fund its publication. In the “Brochure Prospectus for Fluxus Yearboxes” distributed on 9 June 1962 at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal on the occasion of his conference “Neo-Dada in the United States” and the related collection of events “Après Cage”, Maciunas referred to himself as the editor of the journal. Paradoxically, however, the group’s house organ only came out in 1964 (in the wake of an earlier experience of George Brecht on the occasion of the YAM Festival). Entitled cc V TRE, it was published in January 1964 and appeared at irregular intervals in seven editions until May 1966. Impaginated with graphics that are always surprising and communicatively effective, it contained ideas for events, correspondence, works by Fluxus artists and announcements about forthcoming activities and publications available at the Fluxshop in Maciunas’ home at 359 Canal Street, a second-floor apartment comprising a space set aside as a Fluxhall. The last three numbers, which were spread out over some time, are basically tributes to John Lennon and Yoko Ono³⁸ and to Maciunas himself (a “Laudatio scripta pro George concepta hominibus Fluxi” published in May 1976 and a homage published posthumously in March 1979)³⁹.

The appearance of the journal, which did not fail to cause argument among artists involved in Fluxus activities⁴⁰, anticipated the materialisation – from 1964 to 1968 – of another of Maciunas’ long-contemplated projects. This was transposed from the initially hypothesised editorial project to the creation of collections in formats that were multiple (Fluxus I, Fluxus Year Box 2, Fluxkit), thematic (Fluxfilms) and individual (e.g., the chess-board with pieces made from drill bits by Takako Saito, the “Finger Box” by Ay-O and “Fluxmusic” by Joe Jones)⁴¹.

The characteristic presentation of these collections of instructions for events, games, instruments, fake stamps, holes⁴², mysterious objects in suitcases, wooden and cardboard boxes and finally in perspex containers, perhaps partly transformed by the Duchampian “Boîte-en-valise”⁴³, is not only a highly important result in terms of creativity but also an exact concrete translation of Maciunas’ idea of an unlimited, mass-produced art amusement⁴⁴, and, potentially, a portable exhibition mode that diverges from the forms traditionally in use on the art circuit.

Flux-tensions & Something Else

The development of new fields of activity was naturally not meant to cancel out what had been the first area of success of the Fluxus movement. Numerous other concerts were to be organised in the United States and in Europe after 1963, beginning with the “Fully Guaranteed 12 Fluxus Concerts” held at the Fluxhall in Canal Street in April-May 1964 and the Fluxus Symphony Orchestra Concert performed at the Carnegie Recital Hall on 27 June in the same year. At the same time, however, conflicts began to emerge between Maciunas and other leading Fluxus figures. The delay in publishing his volume Jefferson’s Birthday/Postface⁴⁵ led Dick Higgins to found the Something Else Press in the spring of 1964, which in the years to come would publish important works both by figures connected with Fluxus such as George Brecht, Ray Johnson, Emmett Williams and Geoff Hendricks and by writers such as Marshall McLuhan, Merce Cunningham and Richard Meltzer, covering the subjects of visual poetry, the happening, choreography and the aesthetics of rock⁴⁶. The foundation of the new publishing house was interpreted as a sign of rivalry by Maciunas, who read a similar intention into the second edition of the “New York Avant-Garde Festival” organised in August of that year by Charlotte Moorman at the Judson Hall and he invited Fluxus artists to refrain from participating – an invitation that was ignored by Higgins and Paik. The performance of “Originale”, a multimedia work by Karlheinz Stockhausen, organised by Allan Kaprow as part of the Festival, became a further reason for discord and led to picketing outside the theatre entrance by Henry Flynt (who had in the meantime founded the A.A.I.C. - Action Against Cultural Imperialism), Maciunas, Ben, Ay-O and Takako Saito. The tensions generated on this occasion between those who were more sensitive to the political implications of cultural activities (Flynt and Maciunas, and – for slightly different reasons – Ben) and those who were mainly interested in artistic creation led to an internal crisis that brought about a call for Maciunas to resign as the Chairman⁴⁷ of Fluxus. Maciunas, who was also suffering from health problems, seems to have then handed things over to Bob Watts for a short time.

Yet such tensions did not mark what might have seemed the predictable end of Fluxus. Relationships between the individual artists who were involved cut across internal alliances and although subsequent exhibitions⁴⁸ at first reflected previous conflicts the consequences were not serious. As Hannah Higgins observes in a section of her essay Fluxus Fortuna entitled “Structure of Fluxus Community”, “Fluxus is simultaneously a diverse and deeply committed group of artists who disagree on much, but who continue to find each other’s company valuable, useful and fertile.” ⁴⁹.

Flux-related Groups & Singles

In the meantime, artists were beginning to emerge from outside the United States and from European countries that had been involved in the first round of Fluxus festivals. The Hi Red Center (Haireddo Senta) had been formed in Tokyo in 1963 by Jiro Takamatsu, Natsuyuki Nakanishi and Genpei Akasegawa, whose “Street Cleaning Event”⁵⁰ was presented in New York in June 1966 by Bob Watts, Dan Lauffer, Geoff & Bici Hendricks, George Maciunas, Barbara and Peter Moore and followed by a “Hotel Event” at the Waldorf Astoria. In Czechoslovakia, the Aktual Group⁵¹ (Aktual Umeni) animated by Milan Knizak with Jan Trtilek, Sona Svecova, Vit Mach and Jan Mach produced a Fluxus festival in Prague in October of the same year. In Spain, the Zaj Group⁵² (Esther Ferrer, Juan Hidalgo and Walter Marchetti) defied General Franco’s censorship and organised festivals at the University of Madrid (1965) and in various spaces in Barcelona (1966). In Italy, Daniela Palazzoli and Gianni-Emilio Simonetti⁵³ organised a concert by Giuseppe Chiari in March 1964 at the Galleria Blu in Milan, followed in September by a “Recital d’avanguardia” given by Brecht, Cage, Chiari and Higgins. A Fluxus concert was held in June 1967 at the Galleria Bertesca in Genova⁵⁴, while another event took place in the same month at Villa Cucirelli in Gallarate.

Fluxus through the 1970s

The ’60s witnessed many other events: the opening of “La cedille qui sourit” by Filliou and Brecht at Villefranche-sur-Mer; the “Vagina Painting” by Shigeko Kubota on 4 July 1965 at the “Perpetual Fluxfest” in New York; the presentation in November of the same year of the “Rainbow Staircase”, an environment created following the instructions of Ay-O, alternating various tactile, coloured, soft and hidden elements; the involvement of artists such as Jeff Berner, Davi det Hompson, Paul Sharits, Greg Sharits, Ken Friedman and – more marginally – John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s bed-in in Montreal and Amsterdam.

During the same period, Maciunas was organising a cooperative project for the creation of a Fluxhouse, which was to attract the unwanted attention of the American law and subsequently lead to a serious physical injury⁵⁵.

The following decade opened with an exhibition held at Douglass College thanks to the influence of Geoff Hendricks, who taught there. The main event was the performance of a “Fluxmass”, celebrated by Yoshimasa Wada and served by choirboys dressed as gorillas. The antiphonies were replaced by howling dogs to the enjoyment of many spectators and to the great disdain of the Chaplain of the Episcopal Church. Following the line inspired by the parody of contemporary rites (both religious and secular), Bici Forbes and Geoff Hendricks celebrated the ten year anniversary of their union in June 1971 with “Flux Divorce”, splitting up their house with a paradoxical logic that even required the installation of a barrier in the water closet.

An attempt to bring together Fluxus exponents and other artists that had some kind of affinity found space – though, with hindsight, not with apparent success – in “Fluxshoe”, a travelling show invented by Mike Weaver and David Mayor and organised in collaboration with Ken Friedman, which opened in October 1973 at Falmouth⁵⁶.

In September 1976, on the occasion of the 26th Festival of Art, a “Fluxuslabyrinth” complex was installed at the Academy of Art in Berlin. Designed and installed by Maciunas and Larry Miller, it was composed of doors, passage-ways, tactile and sensorial elements located along the walls and floor⁵⁷.

In 1978 Maciunas, who had in the meantime moved from New York to Marlborough, organised his “Fluxwedding” with Billie Hutchins. The ceremony, during which the couple swapped clothes, took place on 25 February and Geoff Hendricks performed the functions of “Fluxminister”. Only a short time afterwards, on 13 May, Hendricks again performed the role of celebrant in Maciunas’ funeral procession, the “Fluxfuneral” that George had so dearly desired.

Fluxus Museum Gala etc.

In November 1970, Fluxus received its first museum recognition in the form of what was to some extent a retrospective exhibition. Entitled “Happening & Fluxus”, it was organised by Hans Sohm and Harald Szeeman at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne. A second wave of such initiatives followed the movement’s twentieth anniversary with exhibitions such as “Fluxus etc. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection”⁵⁸, “Fluxus. Aspekte eines Phänomens”⁵⁹ and “1962 Wiesbaden FLUXUS 1982”⁶⁰. The third wave, at the beginning of the 1990s, culminated in the exhibition “Ubi Fluxus ibi motus (1990-1962)”⁶¹ organised in Venice by Achille Bonito Oliva on the occasion of the 44th Biennial. In a less contracted temporal perspective, it becomes easier to notice the distance created between Fluxus and the creative trajectories of artists who had nevertheless been profoundly involved in many of the group’s initiatives. The work of Beuys, Vostell, Spoerri and of Paik himself developed in directions that diverged from the basic ideas of Fluxus. Beuys claimed for art an increasingly distinct palingenetic component in the sphere of political participation and environmental protection; close to the 1980s, Wolf Vostell dedicated himself to painting with an Expressionist matrix;⁶² Spoerri cultivated personal projects such as Eat Art; Paik became increasingly involved in the creation of sculpture and video environments. At the same time, there was more widespread knowledge of the work of artists more closely connected with the Fluxus experience. The “Hidden Paintings” of Eric Andersen, the rainbow-canvases of Ay-O, Ben’s writings against the ego, Chiari’s slogans, Al Hansen’s silhouettes of Venus, Geoff Hendricks’ overcast skies and Dick Higgins’ arrow-covered scores entered the visual panorama of an increasingly wider number of people – as did Joe Jones’ automatic instruments, Milan Knizak’s “Destroyed music”, Alison Knowles’ bean tins and Larry Miller’s “Genomic Licenses”. Then there were Yoko Ono’s cats, Ben Patterson’s “Clinic of Doctor Ben”, Takako Saito’s chess-boards and Bob Watts’ “fluxstamps”. And in the field of music there were Philip Corner’s “Metal Meditations”.

Coda: Fluxus interpreted

Over the years, the identity of Fluxus has been the subject of a wide range of interpretations and/or theoretical speculation. “In the beginning there was confusion. Lots of it. Not the kind of confusion that there is today about what Fluxus is or was, or who is Fluxus and who isn’t. But there was a lot of flux in Fluxus in those days”⁶³. In this respect, the situation does not seem any clearer today. The question of whether Fluxus is (or was) a movement, a distinct historic group, one of the various contemporary ‘isms’ or an attitude – or even a trans-historical form of thought – still remains to be answered. Philip Corner’s advice is to give up: “the less we know [about Fluxus] the better”⁶⁴.

In the first place, it must be recognised that Fluxus (consciously) avoided the prevalent model of the avant-garde, presenting exhibitions in different places and with changing figures, thus establishing a flexible, though profound and lasting bond among those who contributed to the phenomenon. The initial situation was represented as a sort of “united front” established through the artists’ need for “a forum, free from the entanglements of the art establishment, in which to perform their own works, and the works of kindred spirits”⁶⁵. But the generational factor and the circumstances of its formation might seem to suggest some relation to the model of the American university class or fraternity.

One of the first figures to sustain the idea of Fluxus as an attitude was Dick Higgins, who stated: “Fluxus is not a moment in history, or an art movement. Fluxus is a way of doing things, a tradition, and a way of life and death”, whereas a middle position is held by a critic such as Owen K. Smith: “The word ‘Fluxus’ was both a name used by a varying community of individuals as a convenient label for their collective activities and a term for a generalized attitude not necessarily linked to a specific activity”.

Fluxus might further be thought of as an attitude expressed by a variable, albeit determined, community of people through a sequence of individual and collective activities. The historicity of Fluxus – like certain avant-gardes – does not in fact seem to depend upon circumstances that are more or less fortuitous but exactly situated at the time of formation or upon the fact that the activities carried out by Fluxers had identifiable temporal limits, even in a hypothetical sense. Rather, it seems to reside in the construction of an intellectual and cultural grid underlying the attitude itself, which in Higgins’ synthetic definition includes: “internationalism, experimentalism and iconoclasm, intermedia⁶⁶, minimalism or concentration, an attempted resolution of the art/life dichotomy, implicativeness, play or gags, ephemerality”⁶⁷. Ken Friedman’s⁶⁸ replacement of “internationalism” with “globalism” in a later inventory and the absence of hostile judgement of the image should not be read – like the absence of indeterminacy from the list in An Anthology – as a different description of common terrain but as an already noticeable divergence (which is historical in much more than a merely nominal sense) between two visions, both of which grew out of the same working environment.

This assertion quite evidently does not allow us to conclude that Fluxus is an interrupted journey or, more radically, a burnt-out phase. On the contrary, it leads us to consider, on an appropriate scale, the uniqueness of its platform or – to borrow George Brecht’s expression – the “something unnameable in common” that it allowed us to perceive. And, in a certain sense, it helps us understand that the statement “Fluxus has yet not begun”⁶⁹ is not just the umpteenth whimsical declaration destined to confuse ideas but a challenge that continues to be valid.

Sandro Ricaldone

NOTES

1. The text in brackets is a paraphrase of comments taken from Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, Il gusto del segreto, Laterza, Bari 1997.

2. “Expanded Arts Diagram” by George Maciunas, in Richard Kostelanetz, Essaying Essays, Out of London Press, New York 1975, appearing between pages 176 and 177.

3. Robert Motherwell (ed.), Dada Painters and Poets, Wittenborn, New York 1961.

4. Larry Miller, “Transcript of the videotaped Interview with George Maciunas, 24 march 1978”, in Ken Friedman (ed.) Fluxus Reader, Academy Editions, Chichester UK 1998, p. 183.

5. Irving Sandler’s interview with John Cage, New York 6 May 1966, quoted in Irving Sandler, The New York School. The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties, Icon Editions, Harper & Row Publishers, New York 1978, pp. 164-165.

6. Among the first compositions for “prepared piano” were “Imaginary Landscape No.1”, percussion, muted piano, record player, 1939; “Bacchanale”, first solo for prepared piano, Syvilla Fort dance, 1940 .

7. V. Rosalee Goldberg, Performance. Live Art 1909 to the Present, Thames & Hudson, London 1979, p. 82 and Martin Duberman, Black Mountain. An Exploration in Community, W:W. Norton, New York and London, pp. 368-379.

8. Larry Solomon, The Sound of Silence. John Cage’s 4’33”, 1998, at http://solo1.home.mindspring.com/4min33se.htm, where there is also a reproduction of the manifesto.

9. See Larry Miller’s interview with George Maciunas in K. Friedman, op. cit., p. 184.

10. Quoted in Owen Smith, Fluxus, the History of an Attitude, San Diego State University Press, San Diego CA 1998.

11. See Irving Sandler, op. cit., pp. 103-139.

12. Significantly, Rauschenberg called such works Combine-Paintings. See Lawrence Alloway, Rauschenberg Development in Robert Rauschenberg, catalogue for the National Collection of Fine Arts Exhibition Washington, 1977, pp. 10 ff.

13. See Maurice Lemaître, Le film est dejà commencé?, Editions André Bonne, Paris 1952.

14. See G. -E. Debord - G. J. Wolman, “Mode d’emploi du détournement”, in Les levres nues, n. 8, Brussels May 1956, pp. 2-9, and G.-E. Debord, “Théorie de la dérive”, in Les levres nues, n. 9, Brussels November 1956, pp. 6-13. Regarding the dérive, Debord shows mistrust towards chance and its “ideological and always reactionary use”, whereas in the détournement, emphasis is placed not upon the casualness of parallels but on the ratio of extraneousness of the elements involved.

15. Grammes, the journal of the Ultra-lettriste group promoted by Robert Estivals, appeared in seven issues between 1957 and 1961.

16. Georges Mathieu, De la révolte à la Renaissance. Au-delà du Tachisme, Gallimard, Paris 1973, pp. 125-126.

17. The exhibition was inaugurated on 28 April 1958 at the Galerie Iris Clert, no. 3 Rue de Beaux-Arts, in Paris.

18. See The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetic of Plenty, edited by David Robbins, catalogue for the Institute of Contemporary Arts exhibition – London, The MIT Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London 1990, esp. p. 129 and p. 150 ff. .

19. The manifesto of “Autodestructive Art” was published by Gustav Metzger in November 1959.

20. See Mirella Bandini, L’estetico, il politico, Officina Edizioni, Rome 1977, pp. 68-100.

21. See “Die Wiener Gruppe”, catalogue issued on the occasion of the 1997 Venice Biennial, Springer Verlag, Vienna 1997, p. 323 ff.

22. See Otto Piene. Retrospektive 1952-1996 catalogue for the Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf exhibition in Ehrenhof, Wienand, Cologne 1996, p. 111.

23. See Michel Tapié – Tore Haga, Continuité et avant-garde au Japon, F.lli Pozzo editori, Turin 1961.

24. The history of the New York City Audio-Visual Group is summarised by Al Hansen in the autobiographical third chapter of A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art, Something Else Press, New York 1965. See esp. pp. 102-104.

25. See Jackson Mac Low, “How Maciunas met the New York Avant Garde”, in Art & Design, profile n. 28, “Fluxus Today and Yesterday”, edited by Johan Pijnappel, Academy Group Ltd., London 1993

26. See Tout Ben, Editions du Chêne, Paris 1974, pp. 20-21

27. Paik’s action was a variation on a 1960 work by La Monte Young, which bore the instructions: “Draw a straight line and follow it”.

28. Carlheinz Caspari, director, was to work with Constant on the book Labyrimes published by Piet Clement in 1965.

29. The instructions were: “A source of dripping water and an empty vessel are arranged so that the water falls into the vessel”:

30. “Performers use old adding machine tape as a score. Each number on the tape represents a metronome beat. Each performer is assigned a number. When his number appears, he performs upon the beat. Performance can consist of actions (raising and replacing hat, shaking fist, making faces, etc.) or sounds (tongue clicks, pops, smacks, lip farts, etc.) Performers may all perform same action or different, or all perform same sound or different. Performers should practice their assigned sound or action so that each can perform clearly – sharp, defined action or sound, loud if sound, in time with beat.”

31. “The artist brings a dead hare onto the stage and, after having played passages from the “Messe des pauvres” and the “Sonnerie de la Rose + Croix” by Erik Satie, he ties the animal with strings that are attached to pine branches. He then removes its heart, which he ties to the blackboard and then places the animal on a crate at the foot of the blackboard” (See Joseph Beuys, Centre Pompidou exhibition catalogue, Paris 1994, p. 270).

32. “Purge the world of bourgeois sickness, ‘intellectual’, professional & commercialized culture, PURGE the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract art, illusionistic art, mathematical art, - PURGE THE WORLD OF “EUROPEANISM”! (...) PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART, Promote living art, anti-art, promote NON ART REALITY to be grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals. (...) FUSE the cadres of cultural social & political revolutionaries into united front & action.”

33. The title of the Festival was the name of the month spelt backwards (MAY-YAM).

34. Dick Higgins, Horizons. The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville 1983, p. 137;

35. George Brecht, “The Origin of Events”, in Hans Sohm – Harald Szeeman (eds.), Happening & Fluxus, catalogue for the exhibition held at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne from 6/11/1970 to 6/1/1971.

36. Henry Martin, An Introduction to George Brecht’s Book of Thumbler on Fire, Multhipla, Milan 1978, p. 17.

37. Ben Vautier notes: “A Fluxus concert is the result of Maciunas’ theoretical reflection. In an attempt to avoid the influence of knowledge and culture (cultural imperialism) and the boredom of an avant-garde spectacle, he has conceived the framework of a sequence comprising between 20 and 30 pieces lasting not more than one or two minutes each. Their rhythm is rapid, they are clear and crisp and they always avoid the pretence, aestheticism and theatricality of comedy – which he finds pointless. Thus, even though they are creative performances that have Fluxus ingredients, an ‘action and life’ spectacle by Vostell, a Total Art spectacle by Ben, a visual poetry spectacle by Higgins, a repetitive concert by La Monte Young etc. cannot be confused with the classic Fluxus Concert” (the original text can be found on the Ben Vautier web site at: http://www.ben-vautier.com/1997/fluxus4.html)

38. n. 9 (1970) - JOHN YOKO & FLUX all photographs copyright nineteen seVenty by peTer mooRE.

39. n. 10 (May 2, 1976) – FLUXUS maciuNAS V TRE FLUXUS laudatio ScriPTa pro GEoRge; n. 11 (March 24,1979) – a V TRE EXTRA.

40. Tomas Schmit and Dick Higgins complained that the journal used a form of humour that was too “plebeian” (see Owen F. Smith, op. cit., p. 140 ff.).

41. For a detailed description of the collective and individual Fluxus multiples, see Jon Hendricks, Fluxus Codex, The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit, Michigan in association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, New York 1988.

42. The reference is to Ben Vautier’s “Fluxholes”.

43. Marcel Duchamp, “La Boîte-en-Valise”, Paris 1936 – New York 1941. A cardboard box, sometimes inside a leather suitcase, containing from 68 to 83 (depending on the date of the edition) scaled-down or photographed reproductions of the artist’s work.

44. “The value of art amusement must be lowered by making it unlimited, mass-produced, obtainable by all and eventually produced by all”, George Maciunas, Fluxus Manifesto, 1965.

45. The two-volume work was the first publication by the Something Else Press (1964). According to a letter from Higgins to Tjeena Deelstra dated 13 March 1967, Higgins’ had at first chosen “Original Fluxus” as the name of his publishing house, probably as a polemical sign of Maciunas’ gradual distancing from the editorial programme as it had originally been conceived.

46. The catalogue of the Something Else Press in fact comprised such works as Chance Imagery by George Brecht (1966), Paper Snake by Ray Johnson (1965), Popular Entertainments by Philip Corner (1967), An Anthology of Concrete Poetry by Emmett Williams (1967), Ring Piece by Geoffrey Hendricks (1973), as well as Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations by Marshall McLuhan (1967), Changes: Notes on Choreography by Merce Cunningham (1968), Store Days by Claes Oldenburg (1968) and Aesthetics of Rock by Richard Meltzer (1970). For more detailed information regarding the publishing house founded by Dick Higgins, see also: Barbara Moore, “Some Things Else About Something Else”, in the catalogue for the “Fluxus Da Capo” exhibition, Wiesbaden 1992, pp. 96 ff.

47. In reality, the role of Maciunas did not depend on a formal and, in any case, semi-serious qualification but on the organisational activities effectively carried out.

48. “Perpetual Flux-fest, flux-sports” held at the Washington Square Gallery in New York in September 1964, with the participation of Ay-O, Joe Jones, George Maciunas, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi; “Concert”, Philadelphia College of Art, in October, with George Brecht, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik and Diter Rot.

49. Hannah Higgins, “Fluxus Fortuna” in K. Friedman (ed.), op. cit., p. 37.

50. “Performers are dressed in white coats like laboratory technicians. They go to a selected location in the city. An area of a sidewalk is designated for the event. This area of sidewalk is cleaned very thoroughly with various devices not usually used in street cleaning, such as: dental tools, toothbrushes, steel wool, cotton balls with alcohol, cotton swabs, surgeon's sponges, tooth picks, linen napkins, etc.”

51. On the subject of the connections and differences between Aktual and Fluxus, Knizak states: “There are no effective connections or differences. It was not the work of Fluxus that we loved (and needed) but its existence” (see Harry Ruhé, Fluxus, the most radical and experimental Art Movement of the Sixties, Galerie A, Amsterdam 1979, under Knizak).

52. For the group’s activities, see the catalogue for the exhibition held at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, from 23 January to 21 March 1996.

53. Gianni-Emilio Simonetti was to hold a concert entitled “Fluxus Concert for canvases, signals and wind” at Belgrade airport in June 1970. He and Carlo Romano also wrote the essay “Introduzione ad una fenomenologia rozza del gruppo Fluxus”, one of the first critical interpretations of Fluxus to appear in Italy (in n. 4/1976 of the journal entitled Le Arti). On the reception of Fluxus in Italy, Carlo Romano writes in his essay “Su Fluxus: lineamenti” (in Alfabeta n. 31, Milan, December 1981): “In the second half of the ’sixties in Italy – with certain texts by Palazzoli and certain of his initiatives, together with the works of Simonetti and the activity of the ED 912 – the increased depth of criticism began to portend the historical importance of the movement”.

54. “Concert Fluxus”, Bertesca Gallery, Genoa, 6 June 1967 (performers: Gianni-Emilio Simonetti, Ugo Nespolo, Gianni Sassi and Sergio Albergoni).

55. Following a dispute with a businessman who had worked as a subcontractor for one of the many cooperatives working on the renovation of buildings that he had set up, Maciunas was attacked and suffered several injuries, including the loss of an eye.

56. See the comments by David Mayor on the Tate Gallery web site (http://www.tate.org.uk/collections/mayor.htm).

57. See Jon Hendricks, op. cit., p. 76 ff.

58. The exhibition, which had an accompanying catalogue, took place at the Cranbook Academy of Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills (Michigan), from 20 September to 1 November 1981.

59. Exhibition organised by Ursula Peters and Georg F. Schwarzbauer, held at the Kunst und Museumsverein Wüppertal im Von der Heydt-Museum, from 15 December 1981 to 31 January 1982.

60. See 1962 Wiesbaden Fluxus 1982. Eine kleine Geschichte von Fluxus in drei Teilen, edited by René Block, Harlekin Art, Wiesbaden 1982.

61. See the catalogue published by Mazzotta, Milan 1990. The following were some of the Fluxus exhibitions held during this period: “Fluxus: Selections from the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection”, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1988-89; “Fluxus Subjektiv”, Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna 1990; “Was ist Fluxus?”, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, 1991; “Fluxus Virus”, Temporäres Museum (Kaufhof-Parkhaus, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Moltkerei) Cologne 1992; “In the Spirit of Fluxus”, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 1993.

62. See the catalogue to the exhibition “Wolf Vostell. Pour mémoire. Tableaux et dessins 1954-1982”, edited by Dominique Viéville, Musée de Beaux-Arts et de la Dentelle, Calais, 27 June – 15 November 1982, which also contains plates of the cycle of paintings dedicated by the artist to “Juana la Loca”. Vostell nevertheless continued to have connections with the Fluxus experience: in 1981 he organised a travelling exhibition (“Fluxus-Zug”), setting up a train that would visit fifteen cities of the Rhineland-Westphalia region; in 1995 he created a scale-model for a sculpture entitled “Fluxus-Russian”, which presented a jet covered with a sequence of TV screen images with its nose embedded in a piano.

63. Emmett Williams, “Happy Birthday Everybody”, in Art & Design profile n. 28, “Fluxus Today and Yesterday”, op. cit., p. 27.

64. See Henry Martin, “Fiat Flux”, in the catalogue to the “Fluxers” exhibition, Museo d’Arte Moderna, Bolzano (11 December 1992 - 14 February), p. 25.

65. Emmett Williams, “Happy Birthday Everybody”, in Art & Design profile n. 28, “Fluxus Today and Yesterday”, cit., p. 28.

66. Dick Higgins defined as “intermedia” the forms of art that lie in the unexplored territory between one artistic discipline and another. The happening, for example, is an intermedium between collage, music and theatre (see Horizons, op. cit., pp. 18 ff.).

67. See Dick Higgins, “Fluxus: Theory and Reception” in Modernism since Postmodernism. Essays on Intermedia, San Diego State University Press, San Diego 1997, pp. 174-175.

68. See Ken Friedman, “Fluxus and Company“, in K. Friedman (ed.), op. cit., pp. 244 ff.

69. A statement made by Dick Higgins or Emmett Williams, reported by Ken Friedman in “Introduction: a transformative Vision of Fluxus” in K. Friedman (ed.), op. cit., p. X.

NOTIZIA   |   MOSTRE   |   FOTOGRAFIE   |   TESTI   |   DOCUMENTI   |   LINKS


Webmaster: Sandro Ricaldone