Month: July 2007

If Fluxus is an attitude and not an "Art Movement" in the traditional art-historical context, what exactly is the Fluxus attitude?

While Fluxus objects and events tend to possess the physical attributes of humour, simplicity, and intermedia, they are also created from an attitude towards life and art that encourages globalism, chance, experimentation, temporal factors and the unity of art & life. These aspects of the Fluxus attitude should be very familiar to readers of this Blog because they are all ideas from Ken Friedmans "12 ideas of Fluxus" listed in the previous post! 

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In the post below I stated that Fluxus work nearly always contains four key elements, an attitude vs. an "art movement", intermedia, simplicity, and fun. I believe this to be true, but should also state that, as contained within the term itself, "flux"us is malleable and resists attempts to over-simplify its own definition. It can be (and often is) argued that there is no "one size fits all" definition of Fluxus and that even the four points that I see as commonalities will not adequately account for work that is clearly Fluxus, but does not conform or contain the four common features that I present.

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The Fluxus artistic philosophy can be expressed as a synthesis of four key factors that define the majority of Fluxus work:

1. Fluxus is an attitude. It is much more than an art history movement, or a style locked between a pair of dates.
2. Fluxus is intermedia. Fluxus creators like to to see what happens when different media intersect.
   They use found & everyday objects, sounds, images, and texts to create new combinations of objects, sounds, images, and texts.
3. Fluxus should be simple. The art is small, the texts are short, and the performances are brief.
4. Fluxus should be fun. If it isn't fun, then it isn't Fluxus

In a previous posting on the Fluxus Blog, I reduced Fluxus to 5 factors, based on Ken Friedmans 12 factors, and on Owen Smith's idea of explaining/defining Fluxus in terms of its being an attitude towards art, life and artmaking, as opposed to being pigeonholed as yet another art movement. I think that the five points are actually more than what is needed to accurately describe the core philosophical elements of Fluxus, so have further refined it to the four factors listed here..

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