+ 1 - 2 | § ¶Al 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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+ 1 - 1 | § ¶Label 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.
+ 1 - 1 | § ¶Yoko 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".