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THE FLUXUS CONSTELLATION Sandra Solimano The Fluxus Constellation is temporarily housed in the rooms of the Villa
Croce Museum of Contemporary Art in an exhibition that covers the history of
the movement and documents the recent (yet inexorably distant) period of its
beginnings in the early '60s, without ignoring the more recent production of
its protagonists' freely heterogeneous creativity. The fortieth anniversary of the 1962 Wiesbaden Festival, considered to be the official date of the movement's birth, is certainly an important occasion, though not sufficient in itself to justify this exhibition in Genoa after the many that have aiready taken piace here and elsewhere in certain concomitance with other exhibitions - the closest being in Bologna, which is planned for April this year. Furthermore, the monumental Fluxus bibliography and the programmatic
writings of many of its leading figures makes the intention of offering
authentically innovative criticism, however honestly pursued, somewhat
improbable and absurd, even though the exorbitant and chaotic amount of
information available makes me personally dream of a good old-fashioned
critical history that may well be unpopular with artists but is certainly not
without its use for students and scholars and even for artists themselves - at
least for many of them, in order to escape from the cult-niche to which
knowledgeable and enthusiastic collectors consign them. I admit that this was
one of my intentions but, as has been observed by Harald Szeemann (a far more
creditworthy source than myself) the role of the scholar and critic is not
easily reconciled with the responsibilities of those who organise major events.
I am therefore forced to content myself with a few reflections that have grown
out of my contact with the exhibition-in-progress and, obviously, with the
other contributions in the catalogue. These critical pieces and personal
testimonies together go to make up a parallel constellation of
"readings". Returning to the reason for this exhibition in Genea,
the idea of organising it had nothing at all to do with the legendary
anniversary of Wiesbaden but grew out of the cultural history of this city and
direct, albeit partial, knowledge of its private collections of contemporary
art. Although Genoa is generally considered a traditional, conservative city
that jealously guards its past glories and splendours (artistic and otherwise),
which were recently celebrated in the large-scale exhibitions at Palazzo
Ducale, it was actually one of the centres of Fluxus in ltaly during the period
that began in Milan with John Cages concert in January 1959 and ran throughout
and beyond the '60s in Milan, Turin, Florence, Rome and Asolo. The arrival of Fluxus in Genoa is linked to the activities of the
Bertesca Gallery of Francesco Masnata, who carried out an important revised
overview of national and international art in the late 'sixties - from Pop Art
(in 1966) to the very new Arte Povera, for which he organised the first
exhibition in October 1967. Masnata's contacts with the Milanese environment
(mainly with Arturo Schwartz, who became interested in Fluxus through Dada and
Surrealism), and in particular his collaboration with Daniela Palazzoli and
Gianni Emilio Simonetti (for whom the Bertesca organised personal exhibitions
in 1967 and 1969), as well as his frequent trips and working visits to Germany,
brought him into personal contact with Fluxus in its most vital phase. This in
turn led to exhibitions that ran from the Fluxus concert in 1967 to Filliou’s
personal exhibition at the Bertesca in Milan in 1972, the 1973 exhibition
(which associated Fluxus with artists such as Kaprow, Richter and Parmiggiani)
and Vostell's Happening Calvario, which took piace in Milan and was
documented by the Masnata editions in Genoa. This scenario led to the
collecting of Fluxus art in Genoa (e.g., by Enrico Pedrini, who worked in
connection with the Bertesca but was also a keen free lance collector) and to
important contacts for the Genoese art scene - one important example being the
work of Claudio Costa. Judging from the gallery programming, Francesco Masnata
seems to have abandoned Fluxus after 1974, perhaps due to the influence of the
pictorial conceptualism of New Painting, which emphasised the pictorial
dimension rather than object or action, and for some years the movement was
absent from Genoa - at least in terms of exhibitions and events. Caterina Gualco then took up the cause, though not by simply following
in Masnata's footsteps: her compietely different approach tended, on the one
hand, to highiight the creative innovation of individuai artists (and follow
their contemporary development, independently of the official dates of the
movement's birth and death) and, on the other hand, to create a network of
contacts (in the form of correspondenee and through her personal journeys and
those of the artists) that today offers some idea of the spirit of Fluxus and a
mixed identity that lies between art and life. She began to be professionally
involved with Fluxus in the late 1970s, in keeping with her interests in
research on the conceptual, writing and performance and body art, which had
occupied a major part of the Unimedia Gallery's programming in the immediately
preceding years. The intermediary for her initial contacts with Fluxus artists
- as she herself recounts - was Claudio Costa, who had formed friendships with
Ben Vautier, Filliou and Vostell when he haci frequented the La Bertesca
gallery. It was Claudio Costa who took her to meet Ben Vautier in 1977, thus
beginning a working relationship that continues to be intense. In the following
year, the Galleria Unimedia organised a meeting with Robert and Marianne
Filliou and this was followed in 1982 by Ben Vautier's personal exhibition,
organised in collaboration with the Centre Culturel Galliera and Rinaldo Rottas
galiery in Genoa. In the meantime, Caterina Gualco hacl come into contact with
the most important organisers of Fluxus events in ltaly: Gino Di Maggio,
Rosanna Chiessi, Beppe Morra and Francesco Conz, with whom she organised the
first Fluxus exhibition in Genoa; this was followed by the Fluxus anthological
exhibition in 1988, which was set up by Rosa Leonardis galiery in collaboration
with the University of Genoa and the Goethe Institute Genua and the Centre
Culturel Franco-Italien Galliera.
If Fluxus was one of the
mainstays of Caterina Gualco's gallery, Genoa also confirmed itself as a Fluxus
city in the less systematic work of other galieries: Chisels' anthological
exhibition in 1987, Chiari’s personal exhibitions in 1987 and 1989 (at the
Galleria Rosa Leonardi and the Galleria Martini e Ronchetti, respectively),
Takako Saito's personal exhibitions in 1989 and 1994 (also held by Rosa
Leonardi), not to mention the return to Fluxus at the Masnata gallery in the
second half of the 1990s. It therefore seems more than reasonable for the
city's Contemporary Art Museum to cast light upon the genius loci of
this submerged Fluxist Genoa by means of an event that brings together and
documents the various souls of the movement and ali of those who have followed
and loved it, both in the past and in its very vital present. Understanding or, even worse, trying to explain Fluxus is an arduous
task: not by chance does the movement suffer from an overdose of definitions
and self-definitions that paradoxically seem to contradict one another and the
"wish" of the movement itself to be programmatically as difficuit to
grasp as water. Certainly, in such times of globalisation, one cannot help but
think of a GMO created through the blending of distant worlds and cultures with
the felicitous mobility of its protagonists, who are forever travelling around
the virtual world of communication and moving in the real world between America
and Europe, with a fair number of incursions elsewhere - above all the East.
Thus, Fluxus was a mixture of eastern spirituality and Zen, filtered through
John Cages teachings and his logical (prior to optical and acoustic)
destructuring of western culture; the rediscovery of the unconscious and the
casual by Surrealism and Dada (Duchamp, but not only Duchamp); the existential climate of the American
artistic avant-garde (e.g., the friendship between Brecht and Pollock) in a
context that was aiready broadly "polluted" by mass-media
communication and market consumer logic and, at the same time, characterised by
advanced technological research that was also applied to the field of
creativity (e.g., Richard Maxfield's course in electronic music at the New
School of Social Research in New York, which saw the attendance of Maciunas, La
Monte Young, Brecht, Al Hansen, Higgins and MacLow, who had been Cages students
at the Black Mountain College). The Fluxus mutation generated in this cultural
melting-pot, which was contemporaneous with the object-oriented evolution of
New Dada, was marked by the (momentary) desertion of the work of art as a
self-signifying artefact with aesthetic value and by the unhierarchical
co-presence of the "artistic" object within a system of intermedial
communication that radicaliv innovated its own modes of utilisation. Suffice it
to think of Cage's performance in the summer of 1952 (where Rauschenberg's
white monochromes were used as a projector screen), a veritable incunabulum
that gave parallel (and to some extent superimposed) rise to Allan Kaprow's Happenings,
Brechts Events and Higgins' Graphis. The latter represent a more
minimalist and conceptualised version in their extreme simplification of the
actions and the story-board (compared with the complex and rather cumbersome
scenarios of the happeníngs) and in the elementary visualisation of complex
concepts such as randomness. Brechts most essential and tautological works
derive from the Events and their potential for concentrating the existential
categories of time and space into a brief interval. Paradoxically, an exhibition on the history of Fluxus could not be the
philological reconstruction of an action or the photographic documentation of
that action or an exhibition of manifestoes or programmatic writings or musical
scores or the execution of musical scores - which would be as incomprehensible
now as they were then, except to an audience of highly specialised experts. It
would be like attempting to “exhibit” Klein's environment Le Vide or
Piero Manzoni’s Mangiare l'arte!
lndeed, the two days of Fluxus Events" programmed to follow the
opening of the exhibition will also have this unpredictable historical and
“philological” value, although there will be obvious variations caused by the
change of persons, things, place and time and all the other contextual data,
just as in the case of the performance of a musical score. Music immediately played a central part in the
movement's theoretical underpinnings and intermedial linguistic
experimentation, partly because of the educational background of many Fluxus
artists. An elite code that was much less frequently borrowed and
"abused" than the visual arts by avant-garde movements early in the
century, music is a privileged space for research at more specialised levels
(which it would be impossible for me to speak about knowledgeably) but also a
space for more theatrically subversive exhibitions instruments destroyed or
manipulated or simply not played or played in a random manner by Joe Jones's
mechanical hands), which can be perceived as such by an audience that is not
particularly sophisticated but familiar with the rituals of the stage. As for the presence of objects, which was subsequent
and basically subordinate, at least in the historical phase of Fluxus, there
are quite evident tributes to the Surrealist assemblage and Duchamps object-trouvé,
obviously to Brecht, as well as to the European Nouveaux Réalistes - Spoerri
and Vautier - but also to Paik's assemblages in the Fluxus ínvented
India series). The links with New Dada were no less evident (the 1960s collages
of Al Hansen and Knizak) as were those with Pop Art in the works made by Bob
Watts together with Maciunas (Underpants Implosíon Inc.). But all of this tends to be standardised in the
collective and tendentially anonymous production of the “Fluxuskits"
commissioned by Maciunas, which transiate Duchamp's museum suitcase into the
sample-case of a door-to-door salesman, cooling down the Surrealist aura of the
object as epiphany of the unconscious, just líke its New Dada value as a
desperate witness of everyday reality, and thereby reducing everything to a
mocking inventory of plain banality. The Fluxus artist does not decontextualise the common
object to transform it into a work of art but paradoxically confers upon
his/her works the status of a product that is multipliabie and can therefore be
inserted into the consumer circuit with an attitude that, on reflection,
anticipates by severai years the current ambiguous relationship between the
artist and the art system. This conspicuous adaptation of art to the standards
of everyday life has a subversive component that substantially demolishes
recognised values, first and foremost those of art itself (not only academic
and official art). This, together with the impact of performance actions and
the transgressive, anti-conformist life of many artists, was more than
sufficient to ensure the hostility of American public institutions (which
preferred Pop Arts more ambiguous "criticism of consumerism") and to
catalyse the interest and attention of the European left-wing intelligentsia in
the heated political climate of the 1960s. Fluxus had become known in Europe before the arrival
of Maciunas in Germany in November 1961, thanks to earlier contacts (besides
those who contributed to An Anthology, Paik, Bremer, Dieter Rot and Emmett
Williams also lived in Europe) and to those that Maciunas himself had promptly
established with Paik, who was in turn in contact with Cage and the underground
scene in Düsseldorf and Cologne (Mary Bauermeister's studio began to present works
by Brecht and La Monte Young in the '60s). It is hard to say whether the liaisons
created in these years between Fluxus and artists such as Beuys, Spoerri, Ben
Vautier, Vostell and others depended wholly on these artists' elective
affinities (of life and art) with the movement or whether they were partly a
strategic choice by Maciunas with the objective of consolidating Fluxus within
the cultural and artistic context of the new European avant-gardes. The fact is that if Fluxus represented a bridge between
American Action Art and contemporary European experiences (from Vostell's Dé-collages
to Ben Vautier's Gestes and Spoerri's Tableaux-piège, which
broaden the Duchampian principle of the objet trouvé to the dimension of
vie trouvée), it is no less true to say that Fluxus in Europe acquired
much more explicit political and ideological content in comparison with the
picketing of concerts by Stockhausen promoted in 1964 by the Office for Action
Against Capitalist Culture founded by Maciunas and Henry Flynt (in which Ben
Vautier also took part) and also developed, again in the area of action, the
conceptual reflections of Flynt himself and above all of Brecht and Higgins. In this sense, the Berlin experience seems
particularly significant. As René Block observes in his “Fluxus and Fluxism in
Berlin" (Berlinart 1961-1987, New York-Munich, 1987), the Fluxus
experience began there later than in other German cities but with different
characteristics, in which individual performances took precedence over the
existing system of festivals inaugurated with the fourteen Wiesbaden concerts
in September 1962 and systematically extended to Copenhagen, Dússeidorf,
Stockholm, Oslo, Amsterdam and Nice during 1963. The first Fluxus event in Berlin was Stanley Brouwn's
This Way Brouwn in October 1964. lt extended Higgins' reflections about
the casualness and randomness of graphic and sound paths, which were applied to
the urban paths of passers-by, who were chosen at random and questioned about
how to get somewhere. They were then asked to make a sketch of the route, and
this network of imaginary paths through the city was then transposed into the
space of the museum. This action, which opened up a reflection upon the
perception and visualisation of time and space mediated through the mechanisms
of communication (Brouwn used walkie-talkies), developed further complexity in
the subsequent performance by Joseph Beuys of
I am a Transmitter, I Emit at René Blocks gallery from 4 in the
afternoon till midnight on 1 December 1964. On this occasion, Beuys wrapped
himself in a roll of felt and emitted acoustic messages at irregular intervals,
which alternated in apparent contrast with fragments of a composition by
Andersen and Christiansen, and these were transmitted in real time to Robert Morris
in New York, who was involved in a similar situation. The reverent, almost religious silence of the
spectators - at least according to Vostell in his article for Der Tagesspiegel
- and the subsequent dialogue between the artist and those present about his
way of making art (above ali about the message "We need to lower the
Berlin Wall by three centimetres"), underline the ritual, shamanic aura
that Beuys conferred upon the event. They also emphasise his intention to use
Fluxus' channel of alternative information in a direction that was both
political and more broadly a metaphor of existence - in any case, fairly remote
from the usual Fluxus exhibitions centred around the code of music and sound
and its performance rítuals. Other performances in 1965 by Schmit, Gosewitz and
Ruhm, such as One-day publishing, One-day tour and Five
Minutes, were again dedicated to the concepts of time n the 'sixties and
'seventies, the artists who (with some intolerance) identified themselves with
Fluxus produced a fairly limited number of works but developed performance
activities to the full. Although public and private collectors in the late
1960s began to show interest in their work and there was a consequent boom in
the production of collective and individual Fluxuskits, and of art multiples in
numbered editions, these seemed to constitute an object-corollary of the
theorising and actions, almost a tangibie memory of events that, together with
photographic images of the leading figures, became veritable objects of fetishism
with the passing of time. Peter Moores celebrated and by now precious
photographs of Charlotte Moorman (included in any Fluxus exhibition worthy of
the name) are only the tip of the iceberg of an endless, widespread
photographic archive that is still “in progress”. Starting from Dick Higgins'
photographs of his artist friends included in this exhibition, these turn all
artists, whether alone or in a group, into a sort of aesthetic and behavioural
proposition - almost a collection of heretical "holy figures" that go
from catalogue to catalogue and end up by surpassing all other documentation as
a collective image of the movement. No less than Pop Art, Fluxus was a product
of its time and, like Warhol, it intercepted the mass-media mechanism of the
reiterated image but used it for its own purposes to build up a modern icon of
the "transgressive face" of art. The historic phase of Fluxus ended just after the
midseventies and was felicitously summarised by the last great event organised
by Maciunas, the Fluxus Labyrinth of 1976 (again in Berlin). As its
title suggests, this brought together the collective and deliberately
disorientating and disorientated dimension of art. From this point onwards, the
perception of Fluxus in contemporary art underwent developments that were in
some senses paradoxical. Child of a minor god in comparison with the more
"protected" Pop Art, it is only given a marginal mention in the
manuals of Art History (and is therefore little known outside the circle of
those involved and the “initiated”), but it is at the same time the victim of
an implacable historicisation that does not recognise its right to exist beyond
the conventional date of Maciunas' death. By contrast, compared with the
standardisation of style and behaviour required by its founder - and found
intolerable by all of the artists from the very beginning - the '80s and '90s
were characterised by freer individual work, even though this was obviously
less innovative and avant-garde, as is the case when any movement is physiologically
transformed into a codified language that is both usable and used inside and
outside the original context. The most recent Fluxus production often involves
continuity. The work of Philip Comer, for example, continues his musical work
and his transcription of sound into colour and sign; Emmett Williams' traces of
concrete poetry are revisited in the essentiality of the New Déco stained glass
of the Fluxus Cathedral; then there is the playful metamorphosis of Ben
Pattersons assemblages, whose flying contrabbasso summarises twenty
years of Fluxus performances and actions, and the cooled conceptualism of word
and object reproposed by Andersen and Flynt. Others such as Geoffrey Hendrícks
and Alison Knowles have developed more intimate, existential work by blending
the refined pleasures of the pictorial and lyrical dimension (whether they be
Hendricks' watercolour skies or the coloured serigraphs of Alison's golden
Lion) with the evocative value of objets trouvés or the unconscious
writing of light, shade and matter of the siate roof tiles, in a more complex
anthropological recovery of human existence, which is undoubtedly fairly remote
from the mass-media problems of the 'seventies and even more in disagreement
with the modern-day dimension of homo tecnologicus. The Fluxus constellation that we have attempted to
construct in the rooms of Villa Croce
is itself made up of these co-presences and these apparent contradictions in
the museum space but above all in the relatively short period of a history that
confronts the present without any real continuity and feeds upon that “spirit
of Fluxus" - to quote the title of a work by Ben Vautier included in the
exhibition - to which many different personalities have referred. Artists such
as Beuys, Paik, Spoerri, Ben Vautier and Vostell all participated in this
experience and then went their own independent ways in art and in life. “Fluxus cannot save the world”, wrote Ben Vautier in
the work prepared especially for this exhibition, thus affirming the bitter and
disenchanted irony that marks his most recent production - the definitive
failure of a Utopia yet also the awareness of having contributed to it and
shared in it. (translated from Italian by Colin Rice) |
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