29 May 05 - 14:43The Fluxus Artist
I loved this bit from the book
FLUXUS by Thomas Kellein:
After all, the Fluxus artist, in so far as one can compare
the central figure of George Maciunas with Joseph Beuys or the mature
Nam June Paik, was, to put it bluntly, an alarming social failure. In
the turbulent change of the 60s, he tended to be overlooked. In the
70s, he failed to have any links with the more thought-provoking and
process art. Before the art boom of the 80s had taken hold, he had
died. But then again, there was in any case no volume of early drawings
and objects which coul have been marketed profitably.
Um... maybe that was the point Tom.
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21 May 05 - 23:08New Responses to Fluxus History
Responses to a statement made recently to the effect that nobody
creating Fluxus related work today should "give a rat's ass" about the
first generation of Fluxus artists:
I GIVE A RATS ASS>>>
about the old fluxus people what about Don [Boyd]?
Talk about someone from the old days of fluxus..
He has been at it for
like 30 years.
History is important... where would we be without
it?
Marinetti - wanted us to burn the librarys. I would be upset
if that
had happened. I use the library very very often. ~ Crispin
[I] didn't mean to bite - I kind of give a rat's ass in that I do look back to see
what happened before for some type of context. But Fluxus is a deal where you
either get it or you don't. If you get it, your work is automatically Fluxus
because your work reflects you. To say that one is into Fluxus but doesn't do
Fluxus work would seem to me impossible. In the same way artists get rejected
their whole lives yet they continue to do their work - it's impossible to hide who
you are in your work. Art's spiritual properties lie in this fact. Fluxus is
MINE now it has little to do with Yoko or Joseph or Don. ~ Madawg
It is an interesting problem, and one that we will probably continue to grapple
with.
I believe that Fluxus owes its existence to the first generation Fluxus
group.
I think that what that group started continues to exist independently
of them.
Like Crispin, I think we should honour the efforts of the first
Fluxus group.
Like Madawg, I don't think that we should worry about whether
or not the remaining members of the first Fluxus group approve of our
activities. ~ Allan
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16 May 05 - 21:06A Child's History of Fluxus
The following was first published in 1979 in Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia
Long long ago, back when the world was young - that is, sometime around
the year 1958 - a lot of artists and composers and other people who
wanted to do beautiful things began to look at the world around them in
a new way (for them).
They said: "Hey! - coffee cups can be more beautiful than fancy
sculptures. A kiss in the morning can be more dramatic than a drama by
Mr. Fancypants. The sloshing of my foot in my wet boot sounds more
beautiful than fancy organ music."
And
though Fluxus is almost twenty years old now - or maybe more than
twenty, depending on when you want to say it began - there are still
new Fluxus people coming along, joining the group. Why? Because Fluxus
has a life of its own, apart from the old people in it. It is simple
things, taking things for themselves and not just as part of bigger
things. It is something that many of us must do, at least part of the
time. So Fluxus is inside you, is part of how you are. It isn't just a
bunch of things and dramas but is part of how you live. It is beyond
words.
When you grow up, do you want to be part of Fluxus? I do.
Excerpt from A Child's History of Fluxus (http://www.artnotart.com/fluxus/dhiggins-childshistory.html)
Written by Dick Higgins (1938 - 1998)
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16 May 05 - 20:43A Few Ideas About Fluxus
"...it was meant to be a long-lasting idea or tradition with continuing converts
and practitioners. That is the way I look at it and that is the way I deal with
it." [Don Boyd]
"I think what makes Fluxus so dynamic and interesting to
me is that there is no definition - I wish people would just accept that. The
appealing idea is that Fluxus is inclusive. Artists spend most of their careers
being rejected which is why Fluxus is so refreshing..." [Dawg]
"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." [Dick Higgins]
"Fluxus is more
valuable as an idea and a potential for social change than as a specific group
of people or a collection of objects." [Ken Friedman]
And three of my ideas about Fluxus:
1) Fluxus makes the mundane magical.
2) Fluxus happens when one feels
that life and art must be taken so
seriously, that it becomes impossible to
take life or art seriously.
3) Ordinary acts and ordinary objects perceived
in extraordinary ways.
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10 May 05 - 23:06Bukoff, Klefstad, and Vautier
On Ben Vautier's
web site there is an interesting discussion about the
state of contemporary Fluxus. Ann Klefstad has an excellent description
of what Fluxus today is about. A portion of her letter is quoted here:
...Shows of Fluxus artifacts, like the one at the Walker
Art Center a couple of years ago, are an incredible yawn, heaps of
paper in vitrines. They are evidence of the end of the thing.
Fluxus isn't meant to be an archive, it's meant to be a practice, and
such practices cannot be owned. The current discourse around the idea
of copyright that has been sparked by the internet illuminates this as
well. There is a potential in the net for great and radical changes in
the notion of the creative practice and its relation to the individual
and to the culture at large. This potential is intimately related to
the possibilities that Fluxus opened.
The full letter, along with an open letter to the first generation of Fluxus, written by Allan Bukoff can be read at
http://www.ben-vautier.com/2005/2005.php3?id_sujet=flux
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08 May 05 - 15:52Al Hansen Said:
In the book,
Beck & Al Hansen: Playing With Matches, Al Hansen says:
Anyone who thinks Fluxus is serious misses the point. One
who thinks Fluxus is not serious is closer to the point, but still
misses the point. A unique thing about Fluxus is it is also not
"in-between." Fluxus is not between "this" and "that." Fluxus is
everywhere at once. And nowhere. Its secret is - it does not really
exist - but it exists. In that way Fluxus is like God - it might not
exists. But we talk about God and we talk about Fluxus.
Al Hansen said a lot of other interesting things too. I will have more to say about him in later posts to The Fluxus Blog.
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08 May 05 - 15:43Label Power
Over the past 20 years psychologists have been discussing the power
that labelling has over perception. People are inclined to view things
according to how things are labelled. For psychotherapists, concerns
have been raised that once a person has been labelled with the name of
a mental illness, that person is no longer seen as being anything
besides the name of their illness.
I have been exploring the power of labels in my Fluxus work. By
labelling (literally) a place as a Fluxus Free Zone, that place becomes
a Fluxus Free Zone. Even if the person reading the label does not know
what Fluxus is, they are now seeing the place in the context of its
label. They "know" that they are in a Fluxus Free Zone even if they
don't know what a Fluxus Free Zone is. The labelling is equally
effective for people who
do know what Fluxus is. Those people must now
reflect on whether or not they agree with the label, and on what makes
the labelled location a Fluxus Free Zone. The same principle applies to
the objects and mail-art that I label as Official Fluxus Objects. By
labelling objects as Fluxus objects they become Fluxus objects.
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03 May 05 - 14:08Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono is probably the most famous Fluxus artist. Unfortunately she
is much better known as the wife of John Lennon than as a leader in the
avant garde art of the 1960s.
Peter Frank writes that:
As one of the founders of the Fluxus movement at the
beginning of the 1960s, Ono helped identify and define the playful,
subversive, visionary sensibility that has undergirded experimentation
in all the arts ever since. Her poem-like verbal scores, her films, and
her staged performances anticipated everything from minimalism to
performance art, the furthest reaches of new cinema to the most extreme
of Punk-New Wave music.
In 2002 the Japan Society organized a retrospective of Ono's work
called "Yes Yoko Ono" that travelled to the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art and to the Art Gallery of Ontario. The show title "refers to the interactive installation known as Ceiling
Painting, an important work shown at Ono’s historic 1966 Indica Gallery
show in London. The viewer is invited to climb a white ladder, at the
top of which a magnifying glass, attached by a chain, hangs from a
frame on the ceiling. The viewer uses the reading glass to discover a
block-letter “instruction” beneath the framed sheet of glass — it says
“Y E S.” It was through this work that Ono met her future husband and
longtime collaborator, John Lennon" (
SFMOMA)
I live in Toronto and was fortunate enough to see the exhibition for
myself. Although I had been aware before seeing the exhibition that Ono
was an artist before she met Lennon, and that she had been associated
with the Fluxus movement, I was astounded by the breadth and depth of
her work. Her work was Fluxus in its purest form and at its best,
encompassing the Fluxus trademarks of humour, playfulness, and
profundity existing together in the same works. Ono demonstrated a
"subversive, visionary sensibility" in her event scores, in her films,
and in her performances (
Frank).
Ono and her Fluxus contemporaries became the
precursors to everything from minimalism to performance art, cinema and
even to the most extreme forms of Punk and New Wave music. Her
influence continues to be felt in the visual arts, performance arts,
and popular music of the 21st century. Her influence is even present in
the work of contemporary artists who are creating their work unaware
that "Yoko already did that".
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01 May 05 - 15:39Ruud Janssen, Mail Art and Fluxus
In keeping with the mandate of The Fluxus Blog to examine both
historical and contemporary Fluxus, this is a profile of a contemporary
Fluxus artist. Ruud Janssen is a Fluxus community member who has been a
mail artist for many years. Recently Ruud has also established a
significant internet presence with his web sites and blogs. Jansen
manages an organization dedicated to mail art called the
International Union of Mail Artists which is now 17 years old. Ruud has been involved in mail art for more than 25 years. He has an ongoing mail art project,
Travelling Art Mail or TAM. TAM publishes a blog at
http://tampublications.blogspot.com/.
Mail art has been closely aligned with Fluxus since the early days of
both movements. The artist
Ray Johnson
is often considered to be an early link between the movements. Ray was not actively involved with
Fluxus, he was generally unwilling to be tied to any movement. However,
many of his contemporaries and friends were involved with either
Fluxus, mail art, or both - and Johnson was in the middle of it all.
Ruud Jansen is also involved with both mail art and Fluxus. More of
Ruud's correspondence and work can be seen on his
Tam and Ruud Findings blog.
Ruud has also interviewed many other mail artists and has maintained a
print-based interview publication project and a web-based interview
project. He introduces the interview project, "
The project started in 1994 where I started to interview people. Not
just anybody, but I choose the mail artists that I was in contact with
or the mail artists I had heard about. Mail art is a strange thing.
Only by doing it one can find out what it actually is all about. Well,
so I am told, and I must say, that after becoming involved in mail art
I couldn't explain to others what mail art was, unless they were
involved themselves too. The interviews were meant to find out what
mail art was according to other mail artists." and "
The interviews were not done in the normal way...Some interviews were done by mail, some by fax, some by e-mail, some
actually included personal delivory of the questions or answers. But
finally when the interview was ready, it was published too." The interview project is on the web at
http://www.iuoma.org/interview.html.
In addition to his mail art projects Ruud Janssen, together with his
partner
Litsa Spathi, maintains a Fluxus website from Heidelberg,
Germany, titled appropriately enough,
Fluxus Heidelberg. Jansen himself resides in the town of Tilburg, Netherlands.
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