George Brecht:
In Fluxus there has never been any attempt to agree on aims or methods; individuals with something unnamable in common have simply naturally coalesced to publish and perform their work. Perhaps this common thing is a feeling that the bounds of art are much wider than they have conventionally seemed, or that art and certain long established bounds are no longer very useful.
An avant-garde, very loosely based group of artists, Fluxus was described by one of its founders as “a fusion of Spike Jones, gags, games, Vaudeville, Cage, and Duchamp.” That definition alone suggests just how difficult it is to put your finger on exactly what Fluxus is/was. What one can say is that Fluxus artists more or less shared the following understandings of art:
- An anti-art stance that incuded a rejection of “high culture” art and, with it, the authority of the museum
- The use of often sly humor (to get at serious issues)
- Viewer participation in the artwork
- A reliance on chance in the making of a work of art
- And finallly a belief that the process of creation, not the final product
- It’s also an important chapter in the emergence of video and performance art.
Reading / Looking:
- MoMA on Fluxus (although dry, this short reading has the virtue of attempting a definition of Fluxus)
- Dick Higgins: A Child’s History of Fluxus
- Video: John Cage on I’ve Got a Secret (1960)
For more
- Audio: Ken Friedman: Melon Melody (1965): “Create a a tonal percussion instrument of melons. Using melons of different kinds and sizes, yield different sounds. Play with a mallet.”
- Fluxus Portal
- Video: The Flux Olympiad (2008)
PPT: Fluxus
Critical Issues 
in response to the John Cage video:
So I gather he is the forerunner for experimental music. Now-a-day experimental music is really “hip” in musical culture so it’s interesting to hear the host refer to his music as controversial. Cage says “I produce sound, and call it music.”, which I mean at first sounds so basic, as in how have I not heard anyone refer to music like that before it is that straight forward. Music is sound, and so sound is music. I think it is important to note that where some of these compilations of sounds were successful, the host says some of them were not. Now, does that make one piece less of a musical piece than the other? This can be applied to art in general. The question of what art is and is not is still in question today, and if one piece is more successful than another, is it less artistic or more artistic or what?.
In Response to the reading:
I had no idea what fluxus meant as far as its relation to art is concerned. I like the idea of this as an artistic practice because it calls for participation of more people than just the single artist. When more people collaborate, I believe the uniqueness of the piece increases along with the originality. With art becoming easily accessible and replicated over and over, artists/people or whatever we want to classify them as (because people are artists and artists are people. and i personally believe everyone is an artist in their own right), are seeking out that one of a kind feel for art pieces now. People are exploring old world printing techniques and bringing back the large format cameras that need ridiculously long exposures and produce negatives with crazy focal ranges and effects. Fluxus artworks provide a sense originality bc of the organic nature of each piece, and the opportunities it provides for everyone to have a hand in.
And then again, the question of what is beautiful, what is not, is there anything even that can absolutely not be beautiful if its presented in the right fashion, comes into play. Fluxus work kind of forces one to reconsider their ideas of beauty. in my opinion, I think beauty is only definable by that one person. I think this because everyone comes from a different background and cultural experience so it is nearly impossible for every single person to define beauty in just one uniform way. For me, things thats are beautiful are also stimulating and fluxus work, and I won’t say fluxus work is alwaysssss stimulating, but most times it is. It provokes you to feel something and think deeply about something that you probably encounter on a day to day bases and pay no mind too. Fluxus works often MAKE you see the beauty in something you ordinarily would not.
So basically I think i’m more interested in fluxus work now than I was before. I use to think it was kind of cheap thoughtless art but when you really see it and interact with it, and learn about it, it begins to make sense. I see a purpose for it in the world now.
“I think it is important to note that where some of these compilations of sounds were successful, the host says some of them were not. Now, does that make one piece less of a musical piece than the other?”
I think it’s less a question of whether or not it is music or art, but rather whether we judge it as good or bad art (that is, once the artist has identified it as art). So random sound in the world isn’t music, but if a musician presents it as music, it is music. Whether or not it’s good is another question that leads us into the thicket of critical judgment. Who’s to say it’s good? What are the criteria? I have to admit that I do actually believe that we can make those distinctions although I am hard pressed to give a definitive explanation of just how we go about it.
So, me? I’d push back (gently!) against the notion that beauty is only definable by the one person judging. My argument has something to do with 1) our very long history of a kind of ragged consensus that some things are worth our collective contemplation and appreciation while others, not so much, and 2) the commonality of our physical experience–there is a line of scientific investigation that seems to suggest that we, as a species and across cultures, perceive certain physical traits as “beautiful” (facial symmetry, that sort of thing).
That said, notions of beauty are susceptible to change so it’s not as though I’m arguing that there are hard-and-fast “rules.” Maybe just soft-and-squishy ones.
Fluxus is a response to the calling of artists wanting to see something new in the world, yet grounded itself in being independent from societies construct of what art was at the time. I was always intrigued with movements in art history such as Dadaism, Pop Art, and the reoccurrence of happenings, etc. which again, consisted of various minds coming together and responding to how the world was and wanting to change it. Interpreting what Fluxus is/was can simply be thought of as a movement in history where artists were creating art that challenged the status quo. People like George Maciunas who thought differently and was fearless in his approach to highlight what other artists were doing contributed greatly to the rise of Fluxus and avant-garde artists. It refused to accept that art had to be made in a certain traditional manner, it didn’t matter if it was practical or if the artist’s hand was evident.
I couldn’t help, but make a link to the Do It exhibition we viewed last week. The gentleman who spoke to us said, in regards to approaching an artwork, that we could be one or all of three things. A viewer, a participant, or a creator and these ideas I believe demonstrate the nature of what artists involved with Fluxus were trying to communicate to their audience. Conceptual art redefined how the world views and thinks about art and the artist’s relationship with their work and the viewers experience with a piece.
There is an incredible occurrence in the creation of an artwork, whether it is a stroke of brilliance that comes to the artist in the end of creation, or a happy accident at the beginning (which I personally favor) that can completely change the work and its meaning. It may appear strange or awkward to a general audience and it may not be clear what the artist is saying, if anything at all, but because of these reasons, artists have the power to make people think and raise questions.
I cannot say much more about John Cage that hasn’t already been said about him in the art world. He, like Maciunas, was thinking differently early on in his career, unlike most working in his medium during the late 50’s and 60’s where people were eager to latch on to something that made a spark in their minds. This is not to dismiss other sound artists who created work that was conceptually similar prior to Cage, but he was an artist who perhaps was in the right place at the right time. I have seen Cage’s Waterwalk piece prior to this class and I greatly admire his intellect for thinking outside of the box and then quite literally hitting the box to create something no one had really experienced before. This is the core of what Fluxus strived to establish, however I am at a loss, because I can’t help but feel that perhaps these artists had no real motive behind the artworks aside from just making something new and the fact that we still discuss them and their contributions today makes them all the more significant to art history.
One of the things that’s so hard to capture about this particular moment in our cultural history is the optimism that was in the air. And I think that their motive may be discernible in that: the challenge to the status quo wasn’t just mindless adolescent rebellion (although there may have been some of that in the mix!). So, on the one hand, the mainstream culture was quite buttoned-down; while the Civil Rights movement was pushing back against systemic racism, the liberation movements of the 1960s-70s (feminism, gay liberation, Black Power) had yet to hit. But around the edges, a number of people (writers, artists, the Beats) were pushing against these relatively restrictive cultural norms.
In retrospect, the Fluxus artists and their ilk may seem as though they were just doing what they did to make something new and maybe get some attention, but the newness they were after was, I think, intended as a little cry of freedom.
After viewing this week’s material, I gather that the Fluxus movement was largely about accessibility. Not just accessibility to art, but to opportunities as well. Based on my knowledge of that time period (namely movies and That 70s Show), I gather that Fluxus closely mirrored the rise of the American middle class. Just as Eric Forman of That 70s Show was considering opportunities like to college, something his father had no access to, Fluxus examined the opportunities of the art world. No longer did Dick Higgins need to face rejection from museums and galleries for doing something different, because he and his cohorts created their own world to present to.
Fluxus reveled in the mundane, considering the beauty of a coffee cup, or the sound of a watering can. This movement also aimed largely to unify a scattered network of artists that are “had different names for what they were doing, even when they were doing the same thing. It was all mixed up.”
In defense of Fluxus, I would argue that yes, its goal of unification was met. An Anthology was a cutting edge idea that was orchestrated by cutting edge thinkers, but I would also consider the shortcomings. A movement powered by the desire for accessibility somehow neglected to be accessible for anyone but people in the modern, westernized world. I would even further guess that An Anthology was only seen by the western world, further alienating it from one of it’s original goals. I would also consider the audience. Who was their target audience? Were they ready for this complete unraveling of convention? After watching the Water Walk video, I would guess that they were not.
If I’m being brash, I would even go so far as to call it self-serving. I would even go as far as to equate it to the “Free the Nipple” movement of 2014. Both movements are based on novel ideas, but when executed, the message gets lost in the medium and lack of accessibility from the mainstream.
In a sense, you could say that much of the post-war art in America mirrored the rise of the middle class, particularly the educated middle class. These artists were the product (and often the children) of prosperity and, yes, they forced the “art world” to open up. I think that this opening-up also brought about an erosion of the distinction between “high” and “low” art and the idea of art as an aristocratic / elitist preoccupation. That said, this movement had, as you suggest, a relatively narrow audience. One of the ironies about modern art in general is that, while the artists frequently insisted on its “democratic” nature, the general public was either indifferent or actively hostile. The general taste ran more to traditional, realistic work and uninitiated viewers often felt that contemporary artists were just trying to put one over on the public–“the my kid could paint that” response.
But what’s also notable is the way that ideas that seemed over-the-top end up seeping into the larger (often commercial) culture.