In putting together the rubber stamp box sets, Gaglione and Held followed the example of Fluxus impresario George Maciunas in his production of Flux-Kits. These inexpensive yet elegent multiple editions set the tone for the production of these post-Fluxus editions.

The video below was posted to Vimeo by Henning Lederer.

Der Mensch als Industriepalast [Man as Industrial Palace]

A wonderfully detailed, and illustrated article about Fritz Kahn has been posted to the Fluxlist Blog by Litsa Spathi.

I highly recommend it!

Hi

I (Amber Nelson) am guest editing the upcoming issue of SLOPE (issue 47) on the intersection of poetry and film. I think Fluxists tend to be artists that are able to extend intersections farther than other people and I was wondering if you or your compatriots might be interested in submitting. I'm looking for poetry, film, essays, multimedia, other... however one might see these intersections occurring. For example, I was looking at the fluxus blog and saw a video on Man as an Industrial Palace and thought that was both beautiful and interesting and is obviously filmic, but also poetic in many ways. Here is a link to the guidelines: http://www.slope.org/slope47/index.html

I hope you will consider it.

Thanks so much,
amber nelson

Matthew Rose: Collage has a long and rich history in Modern Art, beginning formally with Picasso's and Braque's experimental canvases in the early 20th century, cutting newspapers and wall papers and adding them to their canvases.  The effects were to inject a sense of found realism into their tableaux and change forever the illusion of the picture plane. Since then, of course, collage has become a dominate form of artistic production.  Schwitters most well known works are collage pieces; the Dadaists brought collage into a new world not only with physical art works but with performances in a kind of audio and perceptual collage. Painting, as a result of all this early 20th century activity was forced to change, and one might say that all painting now is influenced by collage.

As an artist who has long worked the medium of collage in both cut paper and paint, how do you assess the state of the art of collage?
 

Cecil Touchon: I would have to say that the state of the art just now is very much alive and the number of artists working in the medium is growing. My efforts to understand and advance this constructive medium have, aside from my own art making, been in the area of developing an online community of collage artists around a central hub which is the International Museum of Collage, Assemblage and Construction (collagemuseum.com) that I founded in 1998.
The museum began as an online virtual museum and then, through various projects, has developed into a significant archive of actual collage and assemblage art.  The collection numbers in the thousands of actual works. My intention has been to create a focal point for collage art. I hope to draw artists together working in this medium so that we might all know each other’s work. Communicating together as colleagues, we discuss issues related to collage such as its history, techniques, materials, copyright and archival issues. We also share information about artists currently working in collage. I also wish as to inspire and promote exhibitions. Through this continuous banter it is possible to get a sense of what everyone is thinking about and what ideas are circulating...

I have excerpted only the very beginning of the interview. The full interview includes images, illustrations, and photographs, in addition to an exceptionally thoughful commentary on contemporary collage.

Fluxus is not: a movement, a moment in history, an organization. Fluxus is: an idea, a kind of work, a tendency, a way of life, a changing set of people who do Fluxworks.--Dick Higgins

Fluxus is a loosely affiliated international network of visual artists, new-music composers, writers, and performers who have been active since the early 1960s.

Beginning with a series of festivals featuring concerts of new experimental music and other avant-garde performance, Fluxus artists reacted against the commodity status of art, its commercialization in the gallery system, and its static presentation in traditional institutions. They often rejected the concept of artistic genius and single authorship in favor of a collective spirit and a collaborative practice.

Fluxus compositions or scores for performances and events involve simple actions, ideas, and objects from everyday life. Some scores, such as those in George Brecht's Water Yam (1972), were printed on cards and then packaged into plastic boxes and sold as inexpensive multiples. These scores call for open-ended actions and events that can be performed by anyone at any time in any place. Also on view is Yoko Ono's Invitation to Participate in a Water Event, in which she invited people to bring containers to her 1971 exhibition. These vessels were filled with water, displayed in the show, and labeled as collaborative works of art.

Sometimes a documentation or artifact from a Fluxus event became a work of art, a material presence that referred to an absent action or previous performance. Alison Knowles' Journal of the Identical Lunch (1971), documents her ritual noontime performances at a New York diner with various artists and friends. In Dick Higgins' ongoing series, The Thousand Symphonies, he composes musical scores with bullet holes and paint on sheet music. The result is both a documentation of the artist's action and a work of visual art.

Incorporating musical compositions, concrete poetry, visual art, and writing, Fluxus performances embody Higgins' idea of "intermedia"--a dialogue between two or more media to create a third, entirely new art form. Fluxus performance also incorporates actions and objects, artists and non-artists, art and everyday life in an attempt to find something "significant in the insignificant." The influence of this highly experimental, spontaneous, often humorous form of performance art prevailed through the 1970s and has been rediscovered by a younger generation of artists working today.

I really like this definition. It pays respectful homage to the historical aspects of Fluxus, while remaining completely open to the idea that Fluxus continued to the present day, and that many people continue to include themselves within the Fluxus meme.

---

Produced by Angella Ferrara

Twitter is a social networking web application in which members post brief notes to each other in a manner similar to Facebook "status updates". Each post is limited to a maximum of 140 characters, including spaces, punctuation, and "hash tags" (more on these later).

IMHO ("In My Humble Opinion" - get used to cute acronyms if u r tweeting on Twitter) the vast majority of Twitter posts or "tweets" are not really worth reading by any public broader than the tweeter's personal peer network. It is hard for me to imagine that a worldwide audience for the inane pronouncements of self-absorbed net-kids exists. For example (...you KNOW that you wanted one!), a trending topic today is something called "sweetest day" and this is a typical post, "HAPPY SWEETEST DAY PPL!!!!!!!!!!" from a young woman who calls herself "reese_21". There are thousands of tweets today with some variation of this message. So, what makes Twitter interesting to the Fluxus Blog? Two things:

1. Each tweet is limited to a maximum of 140 characters. One of the characteristics of most Fluxus work is its brevity. The creative potential that is built into Twitter with its enforced brevity is an open invitation to Fluxification. Event scores, instructions, collaged haiku, haiku-based poems, very brief fluxpoems; all lend themselves beautifully to the technically imposed limits of Twitter.
2. The "hash tags" to which I alluded earlier. A hash tag is simply a word (no spaces please; the word, "word" being loosely applied here)  preceded by a hash mark, term used to describe what is also known as the "number sign" or the "pound key" on a computer or cell phone keyboard. Hash tags are searchable symbols that can be used to link individual tweets together. They are the magic symbols that permit online communities of twitterers to organically grow. For example visiting Twitter.com and searching for #haiku will display the posts of everybody that tagged their work with "#haiku". Twitterati sometimes use more esoteric tags like, #twaiku or #micropoetry to filter out the noise of a too-busy tag. The hash tags are also what permitted Iranian democracy activists to disseminate information to each other and to the world, using the tag, #iranelections.

 There are a few members of the contemporay Fluxus community currently using Twitter. I use it primarily to post traditional haiku, but also post fairly frequent Fluxus-oriented micropoems. Perhaps a critical mass of Fluxpeople will begin tagging their work #fluxus one day soon?

The opening was a spectacular affair that included performances by a troupe of international performance artists, many of whom were associated with Fluxus. The normally much quieter Emily Harvey Gallery space was overwhelmed (and almost overrun) by the hundreds of people that showed up for the opening. At one point there was a lineup that stretched down the street (Broadway) and around the corner, as the gallery space filled to capacity and a couple hundred people waited for their turn to enter. All in all Mr. Rose and the EHFG (with much help from Christian Xatrec) put together an exceptional production.

...But all of that is not really what this particular blog post is about. A Book About Death was promptly reborn into an active afterlife within only a few days of the gallery closing the show. The first twinge of this afterlife came about upon the acceptance of a complete copy of ABAD into the collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). For the many contemporary Fluxus artists that participated, this assumes added significance as it provides a contemporary counterbalance to the acquistion of the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection of Fluxus Art in February 2009. The Silvermans ammassed one the largest collections of early Fluxus works, but its scope was mostly limted to Fluxus prior to 1978.

Aside from the activity in New York City, editions of A Book About Death are beginning to be exhibited elsewhere. The first major exhibition is opening in Los Angeles at Otis College of Art and Design. This exhibition is special because it will be a reprise of the original exhibition since an attendee at the original opening, Mara Thompson (with a little help from her friends), was able to collect enough cards to organize a second free distribution event. Another re-exhibition is pending for Montreal, Canada. 

Social networks like Facebook are also buzzing with more plans for more exhibitions everywhere. Welcome to the Afterlife!

I don't think many Living Fluxus artists really believe that they (we) are part of a magical posthumous George Maciunas Fluxus Group. From what I have heard and read, George was fond of including and excluding people in "his" Fluxus as he saw fit... so who knows what he would have done with us? Maybe he would have loved us, and maybe he would have decided that we were not worth caring about. I believe that many artists, writers, historians, etc. have worked around this issue by accepting the two-part or three-part (Part 1 = GM; Part 2 = Worked with GM and kept working; Part 3 = Working today within the Fluxus meme) idea that I proposed in the first note I posted. It is an attempt to be respectful of the Fluxus One era, and of George Maciunas, who was unarguably the keystone to that era -- while acknowledging (what to me is an equally inarguable reality) that Fluxus continued on/continues on unabated after he died.

The label "Fluxus" is the label that works. It is descriptive, and I think it is accurate. Today's Fluxus work represents a continuation of the work that began in the 60s (the 50s if you include the pre-fluxus era of John Cage and Black Mountain College alumni).The passing of George Maciunas represents the end of a single chapter - not the end of the book. It was a really important chapter. The whole bool depends on it... but still, it was only one chapter.

When George Maciunas coined the name "Fluxus" and attached it to the work that he and a circle of likeminded people were making, something akin to Fluxus was already happening. This work was an amalgamation of ideas from Dada, Zen, John Cage, Ray Johnson, Black Mountain College. Many artists, writers, composers, and other creators were creating work that was very Fluxus even before George Maciunas attached a name to this work, and built a circle of like-minded creators around himself. I am confident that if there was no George Maciuans there would still have been a Fluxus - it would have been called something else perhaps, but the Fluxus meme already existed.

George Maciunas did not own Fluxus. He may have thought that he did, and it seems that there are 2 or three people who believe that he did, but there were many, many artists working contemporaneously with Maciunas who were also Fluxus, and subsequently there have been dozens, if not hundreds of artists (and anti-artists, poets, creators, etc.) who were, and still are Fluxus.

Fluxus happened. Fluxus is still happening. It is happening whether that is acknowledged by the School of Old Dead Fluxus or not. Of course, I would be thrilled if Living Fluxus was acknowledged by the remaining members of the Original Fluxus circle... but, whether Living Fluxus is acknowledged or not, there is the very real phenomenon of Contemporary Fluxus. That Fluxus is alive and well is not plausably deniable. The Fluxus meme is still alive, and creators around the world are working in the Fluxus milieu. The only way you can look up at the sun and say that it's night time is if your eyes are closed, or you are blind.

How can Fluxus be alive and well, and dead, at the same time? Well, that goes to the essence of this blog post. Artists die. Ideas don't. People die, "movements" end, but ideas are not constrained by the limitations of the single human lifespan. Fluxus has always been more than an art movement. In fact it has been argued that Fluxus was never an art movement.

So, while the circle of artists who surrounded George Maciunas dispersed after his death in 1978, the Fluxus attitude persisted, and continues to persist today. The passing of Maciunas may indeed mark the death of the first Fluxus circle, but while Maciunas can be credited with both coining the term, and with building the first Fluxus circle of artists - the idea of Fluxus was not (and never was) dependent on him. Dick Higgins, a co-founder of Fluxus was still active until his death in 1998 - long enough (although sadly missed) to bring Fluxus into the Internet age. Higgins co-founded the Fluxlist, which has been instrumental in bringing new generations of creators into the Fluxus Attitude.

Chronologically, I would divide Fluxus into three main epochs:

1. Original Fluxus: The cohort of artists who worked with Maciunas.
2. Transitional Fluxus: The artists associated with Original Fluxus, who continued working within the Fluxus Attitude. These would include Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Ken Friedman, Al Hansen, and Nam Jun Paik (among others).
3. Continuing Fluxus: This is contemporary Fluxus. The artists active in contemporary Fluxus are as infected by the Fluxus Attitude as the artists of Original Fluxus. They are no "less" Fluxus than Maciunas and his circle, even though most of them never met Maciuanas. While many of the know/knew/met the artists of Transitional Fluxus, this is by no means a pre-requisite to being a Fluxus Artist. Artists active in Continuing Fluxus include, Keith Buchholz, John M. Bennett, Allan Revich, Cecil Touchon, Reed Altemus, Ruud Jansen & Litsa Spathi and many others. The Venice based British artist, Alan Bowman, also continues to be active not only as an artist, but also as a bridge, binding together artists from all three epochs.

...had the genuine Fluxus offhandedness and the historically correct disregard for ceremony or performance-niceties such as a printed program. The latter would have allowed the patient audience -- outnumbered by the performers, as is also traditionally Fluxian -- to ascertain authorship, date of creation, and performer. Thus, 13 or so friendly Fluxians from here and abroad, most of whom had not met before, presented an hour-and-a-half of Fluxus pieces, old and new.

For the record, they were listed in WAGMAG, the Brooklyn Art Guide (which I had picked up at 111 High Street) in anti-alphabetical order: Allan Revich, Reid Wood, Mark Bloch, Christine Tarantino, Carol Starr, Reed Altemus, Tamara Wyndham, Don E. Boyd, Melissa McCarthy, Keith A. Buchholz, Bibiana Padilla Maltos, Bradstifter, Mary Campbell, Pronoblem and more!!

Balloons were inflated, water poured from one plastic cup into another in a circle of plastic cups, jellybeans dispersed, toy instruments given out -- as were miniature versions of U.S. tender. Various classic Dada texts were read, including a poem by Louis Aragon called Suicide, which consisted of reciting the alphabet. (It is one of my all-time favorites.) But in another rather anti-Fluxian demonstration, a woman asked if anyone could love her as much as she loved herself. Obviously not. So shopping bag in hand, she stormed out, never to return.

The best was saved for last. The interlocutor, one of five participants wearing black hats, tacked a piece of paper on the wall behind him, then left. Other Fluxians got up, read what was on the piece of paper, and also left. Then members of the audience, myself included, did likewise. I copied what was on the piece of paper: "Word Event/Exit/ George Brecht, 1961."

 Critic John Perreault in Artopia 9/20/09

What Is Copy Art?
by Reed Altemus, 2003

Of all the myriad individual ways of describing and defining photocopier art, there are two, in particular, which seem to me the most useful. The first is very broad: photocopier art consists of any instance in which an artist, cultural worker or any individual uses a photocopier as an important step, whatever that may be, in the process of producing creative work. Its set includes very definitelycopy-arts-and-crafts, flypostering, micropress, mail art, and zines. The second useful definition is more mediumistic and specific and says that copy art consists of an artistic and paradoxical reversal of the purpose of the technology, using a copying device to produce an original one-of-a-kind photocopy through an interference with or intervention in the usual functions and operation of the copy machine. The premise of this second take is that copy art is defined as work where the artist purposely uses a copying device to produce something which is not a copy and can therefore only be called an original by using certain more or less well-known techniques to divert the photocopier from its normal function. From this arose the epithet “original copy”. For copy artists, copy art is never a copy of art, but rather the goal is to produce an original work achieved through a process of exploration and experimental intervention. One might call the difference between the two areas as photocopy as a means to an end and photocopy as an end in itself – the ostensible difference being between using the technology as a machine i.e. duplication and using it as a tool i.e. creation. There are also certainly plenty of overlaps between the two, for instance, the production of editions and artists’ book to mention just two. The first catagory is probably more useful in describing the medium in general terms as it is most known, taking into view all the functions photocopiers play in cultural activities, and probably accounts for 99% of the cultural use of photocopier technology while the second is more an experimental and limited domain of specifically copy art praxis limited to the technical aspects of the medium and based on an artistically adopted paradox. The latter amounts to a very small segment of artists who consider use of the photocopier as an art medium in itself.

You can learn more about Copy Art on Reed's TONERWORKS blog, and more about Reed Altemus here.

Reed has also posted a comprehensive Copy Art Bibliography to http://leonardo.info/isast/spec.projects/electrobib.html

All the big names from the contemporary Fluxus art community flex their communal muscle in this extraordinary exhibition focusing on box assemblage. The FluxMuseum in conjunction with the International Museum of Collage, Assemblage and Construction has put together its third international exhibition focusing on specific aspects of Fluxus art practice. Works by artists from all over the world have been donated to the Fluxmuseum for this exhibition. Represented in this show are artists from the all parts of the USA, the UK, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Greece, Germany, Hungry, Italy, France and Cyprus.

The exhibition to be held during the Month of July (1-31) with a gathering from 6:00-8:00pm on Friday July 10th at The Gallery in the E.H. Hereford University Center at the University of Texas at Arlington in Arlington, Texas. This exhibition is sponsored by the Student Art Association at UTA, a student group that manages and promotes student funded, student managed art exhibitions.

This is the largest exhibition dedicated to contemporary Fluxus/Assemblage box artists ever assembled in the history of the Fluxus community. Box assemblage has been a significant art form within the Fluxus community since its early days. Inspired initially by Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell, Fluxus box assemblage quickly became a staple in the Fluxus community to gather together small works and editions of works from many artists into group and individual box assemblages.

The call for this show got a big boost when Yoko Ono - who has taken an interest since the second Fluxhibition in 2008 - help spread the word this time through her website ImaginePeace.com and through her tweets. Even the New York Times picked up the story. In fact a number of works in the show are inspired by or dedicated to this seminal Fluxus artist.

The FluxMuseum is dedicated to documenting the contemporary global Fluxus art scene and assembling a significant collection of works by contemporary Fluxus artists. The International Museum of Collage, Assemblage and Construction is dedicated to the collection, study and exhibition of collage, assemblage and all forms of constructive art.  A catalog will be available when completed. Details online.

1. Fluxus is an attitude. It is not a movement or a style.
2. Fluxus is intermedia. Fluxus creators like to see what happens when different media intersect. They use found and everyday objects, sounds, images, and texts to create new combinations of objects, sounds, images, and texts.
3. Fluxus works are simple. The art is small, the texts are short, and the performances are brief.
4. Fluxus is fun. Humour has always been an important element in Fluxus.

Previous articles here have explored the idea of Fluxus as an attitude. But, what is meant by "intermedia"?

The prevalence of digital communications technologies has tended to lead to some confusion between intermedia and multimedia. I would venture that in the minds of most people, including most artists, the two terms have become interchangable - or the term intermedia has disappeared altogether. This is unfortunate as intermedia is not at all interchangeable with multimedia.

Multimedia is most easily expressed and explained through the medium of video, or in the corporate world, through the application, PowerPoint. Intermedia does not necessarily require more than a single medium to be expressed. Intermedia is not concerned with the number of media that are combined to exhibit a work. An intermedia work can consist of multiple media (multimedia), but can also be expressed through a single medium. The important common denominator of all intermedia is the intersection of different media rather than the number of mediums used in the final product. 

One of the easiest to grasp examples of a single medium intermedia work is visual poetry. Visual poetry exists in its simplest finished form as marks on paper. But it is not just drawing since it generally relies heavily on text - but niether is it just poetry or prose, since it relies heavily on visuality too. Visual poetry is nether poetry nor drawing, but neither is it multimedia. It is intermedia. It is based on exploring the space in which poetry and visual art intersect. Cecil Touchon of Texas takes visual poetry to yet another level by creating visual poems on paper and the re-rendering them as paintings on canvas, which are made available through the mainstream art market.

Other examples of intermedia intersections are "sound art" in which elements of musicality and elements of visual art intersect, and result in work that is neither music nor visual. Sound art fills space like sculpture does, but it does not actually occupy space. It is appreciated through the sense of hearing, but it is not music or poetry. Video art can be multimedia, intermedia, or both. Video by its very nature is usually multimedia, combining audio, images, and time/motion. But to be intermedia there needs to be more than a combination of media - there needs to be an exploration of the space in which media intersect. Artists like my friend Nicolas Carras in France explore this through the video exploration of static images, and by exploring audio and visual elements simultaneously, but independantly of each other.