I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic … I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into today, and you may have the antique and future worlds.
The quote above is from Ralph Waldo Emerson, as found in Ken Friedman‘s essay, Fluxus: A Laboratory of Ideas, in the exhibition catalog for Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life, currently on view at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College.
While I am far from certain about how Ralph Waldo would react in the presence of Fluxus activity, he does seem to foreshadow and important element of the Fluxus philosophy. His is perhaps a more eloquent version of one of my own quick catchphrase explanations of Flluxus… “Fluxus makes the mundane magical”. Of course, Emerson was speaking about Fluxus in 1837, more that a hundred years before Fluxus even formally existed!