Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in visual art and music as well as literature, urban planning, architecture, and design. Fluxus is often described as intermedia, a term coined by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins in a famous 1966 essay.
Fluxus art
The art forms most closely associated with Fluxus are event scores and Fluxus boxes. Fluxus boxes (sometimes called Fluxkits or Fluxboxes) originated with George Maciunas who would gather collections of printed cards, games, and ideas, organizing them in small plastic or wooden boxes.
The idea of the event began in Henry Cowell's philosophy of music. Cowell, a teacher to John Cage and later to Dick Higgins, coined the term that Higgins and others later applied to short, terse descriptions of performable work. The term "score" is used in exactly the sense that one uses the term to describe a music score: a series of notes that allow anyone to perform the work, an idea linked both to what Nam June Paik labeled the "do it yourself" approach and to what Ken Friedman termed "musicality." While much is made of the do it yourself approach to art, it is vital to recognize that this idea emerges in music, and such important Fluxus artists as Paik, Higgins, or Corner began as composers, bringing to art the idea that each person can create the work by "doing it." This is what Friedman meant by musicality, extending the idea more radically to conclude that anyone can create work of any kind from a score, acknowledging the composer as the originator of the work while realizing the work freely and even interpreting it in far different ways than the original composer might have done.
Event scores such as George Brecht's "Drip Music", are essentially performance scripts that are usually only a few lines long and consist of descriptions of actions to be performed rather than dialogue. Fluxus artists differentiate event scores from "happenings". Whereas happenings were sometimes complicated, lengthy performances meant to blur the lines between performer and audience, performance and reality, Fluxus performances were usually brief and simple. The Event performances sought to elevate the banal, to be mindful of the mundane, and to frustrate the high culture of academic and market-driven music and art. Other creative forms that have been adopted by Fluxus practitioners include collage, sound art, music, video, and poetry—especially visual poetry and concrete poetry.
Among its early associates were Joseph Beuys, Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell, La Monte Young and Yoko Ono who explored media ranging from performance art to poetry to experimental music to film. They took the stance of opposition to the ideas of tradition and professionalism in the arts of their time, the Fluxus group shifted the emphasis from what an artist makes to the artist's personality, actions, and opinions. Throughout the 1960s and '70s (their most active period) they staged "action" events, engaged in politics and public speaking, and produced sculptural works featuring unconventional materials. Their radically untraditional works included, for example, the video art of Nam June Paik and the performance art of Beuys. The often playful style of Fluxus artists led to their being considered by some little more than a group of pranksters in their early years. Fluxus has also been compared to Dada and aspects of Pop Art and is seen as the starting point of mail art. Artists from succeeding generations such as Mark Bloch do not try to characterize themselves as Fluxus but create spinoffs such as Fluxpan or Jung Fluxus as a way of continuing some of the Fluxus ideas in a 21st century, post-mail art context.
Artistic philosophies
Fluxus is similar in spirit to the earlier art movement of Dada, emphasizing the concept of anti-art and taking jabs at the seriousness of modern art.[1] Fluxus artists used their minimal performances to highlight their perceived connections between everyday objects and art, similarly to Duchamp in pieces such as Fountain.[1] Fluxus art was often presented in "events", which Fluxus member George Brecht defined as "the smallest unit of a situation".[1] The events consisted of a minimal instruction, opening the events to accidents and other unintended effects. Also contributing to the randomness of events was the integration of audience members into the performances, realizing Duchamp's notion of the viewer completing the art work.
The Fluxus artistic philosophy can be expressed as a synthesis of four key factors that define the majority of Fluxus work:
- 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 & 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.
Fluxus artists
Fluxus artists shared several characteristics including wit and "childlikeness", though they lacked a consistent identity as an artistic community. This vague self-identification allowed the group to integrate a varied group of artists, including a high number of women. The possibility that Fluxus had the most female members of any Western art group up to that point in history is particularly significant considering that Fluxus came on the heels of the white male-dominated abstract expressionism movement. However, despite the designed open-endedness of Fluxus, Maciunas insisted on maintaining unity in the collective. Because of this, Maciunas was accused of expelling certain members for deviating from what he perceived as the goals of Fluxus.
Many artists, writers, and composers have been associated with Fluxus over the years, including:
- Eric Andersen
- John Armleder
- Ay-O
- Joseph Beuys
- George Brecht
- Allen Bukoff
- Joseph Byrd
- John Cage
- Giuseppe Chiari
- Philip Corner
- Jean Dupuy
- Robert Filliou
- Henry Flynt
- Ken Friedman
- Al Hansen
- Beck Hansen
- Geoffrey Hendricks
- Dick Higgins
- Ruud Janssen
- Joe Jones
- Allan Kaprow
- Bengt af Klintberg
- Alison Knowles
- Takehisa Kosugi
- Philip Krumm
- Shigeko Kubota
- George Landow
- Vytautas Landsbergis
- György Ligeti
- Jackson Mac Low
- George Maciunas
- Gustav Metzger
- Larry Miller
- Charlotte Moorman
- Yoko Ono
- Genesis P-Orridge
- Nam June Paik
- Willem de Ridder
- Terry Riley
- Dieter Roth
- Carolee Schneemann
- Litsa Spathi
- Daniel Spoerri
- Yasunao Tone
- Cecil Touchon
- Ben Vautier
- Wolf Vostell
- Yoshi Wada
- Robert Watts
- Emmett Williams
- La Monte Young
