essential questions

Art is what makes life more interesting than art.

-Robert Filliou

 

Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life is the latest addition to Fluxus scholarship, provided by curator and director emeritus of the University of California Berkeley Art Museum, Jacquelynn Baas. Like its subject, infamously flippant and profound, the new Fluxus catalog is based on a recent exhibition which unfolds randomly on the rubric of a self-help book. And so visitor trajectories are determined by attraction to rhetorical questions such as: Time? Happiness? Nothingness? Sex? and, Art (What’s It Good For)?―among others, and not in that order. In this way the show at least rhetorically avoids static documentary, succeeds in inspiring a renewed exploration of works adamantly action-based.

The curator’s appreciation of Fluxus lays the ground for chapters on such slippery topics as the Flux approach to political aesthetics, and food, by Hannah Higgins and Jacob Proctor. As Baas so exactingly sums, “whether characterized as signal, tool, game, or learning machine, Fluxus ‘art’ becomes anything but by being everything and.”[i]

 

Art historian and daughter of Alison Knowles and Dick, Higgins shows how concerns for food production in the 1960s anticipate those of today. Observed now in the culmination of genetic modification and often fraught label-organicism, the start of efforts to naturalize chemical additives is a not-so-distant past. Fluxus group feasts and edible artworks provide early acknowledgement of the future of food, “a virtual reality of smell and taste.”[ii]

 

Proctor meanwhile offers new insight on the motivation of founder and architect George Maciunas. Reading Fluxus through French philosopher Jacques Rancière, Procter suggests that by rejecting “bourgeois sickness, ‘intellectual’, professional & commercialized culture” Maciunas nevertheless holds great distinction between fine art and aesthetics.[iii]  While mocking the then-contemporary arts industry, avant-garde artists did not, obviously, refuse all useless expression. In fact much of Fluxus elevates the aesthetic. Proctor shows how with tongue-in-cheek, Flux artists shook loose from the self-imposed expectations of high art while extending new forms of expression, and perception. Proctor writes,

As a lens through which to view the diversity of Fluxus practice and its political implications, Rancière’s reframing of the relationship between politics and aesthetics can perhaps help us understand how Fluxus was able, at times, to reclaim and fuse the contradictory impulses of the historical avant-gardes, combining Dada negation, for example, with the utopian appropriations of the Productivist phase of the post-revolutionary Soviet avant-garde.[iv]

Indeed, apart from any range of messages, the artists’ position is a political one: to make seen what goes invisible in common sense, to pull discourse out of noise.[v]  So, in their exaggerated proselytizing against fine arts, while proposing anart to overthrow what were considered dead museums and institutions, Flux artists extend a radical, extremist aesthetics by whatever means to stress twin moments basic to human being—the sensory, perceptive, and the political.[vi]

 

For Fluxus, as well as for those who’d write their own instructions, define their own music and cultivate their own food (however always with great sensitivity and appreciation for what is), the snares of bureaucracy, commercialism, and aspartame call out for continuous revolution. It is in this aesthetic regime of art and “its separation from the present of non-art” that Rancière locates the “incessant restaging of the past”[vii]  Encounter with a work of art is thus “the moment of the formation and education of a specific type of humanity.”[viii]

 

Finally, Flux artist and Dean of the Faculty of Design at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia Ken Friedman muses on what in particular Flux pioneers. Emphasizing theirs as a community-based practice, Friedman notes significant changes across the arc of Flux from the 1960s through 70s, and offers twelve criteria: “globalism, the unity of art and life, intermedia, experimentalism, chance, playfulness, simplicity, implicativeness, exemplativism, specificity, presence in time, and musicality.”[ix]

 

For all its effusive growth; rampant creativity, and hip-ness―however plagued by the problems of SOHO’s gentrification and increased class stratification― the only consistent interpretation of Fluxus may be as a form of research. In an approach recalling anthropologist Erving Goffman’s thinking on situational property; involvement, accessibility, and civic inattention,[x] Fluxus as a whole can be regarded as a quasi-ethnographic and particularly salient glimpse into the materiality of the everyday in pre-Prada downtown New York. These artists’ lives in what were the broken manufacturing districts of the city are very clearly marked by the industrial materials, small plexi-glass cases, Fluxkits, and office supplies that predominate in their aesthetic. Throughout, so-called “ephemera” prove more enduring than “new media,” the last of which seems to age immediately.

And so it is fitting to recognize Fluxus as research. Especially now during nascent movements for the preservation of Fluxus slough within the world’s most highly regarded institutions (perhaps the movements’ most cheeky maneuver) the resonance of even the most fleeting actions is shown to persist unfailingly in urban legend, and fine catalogs.

sb 12 2011

Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life, an exhibition traveling from Dartmouth College, and on to Michigan, is at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery, but only until December 3. The catalog, which features writings from the curator and other intimately connected Flux folks, provides an active exploration of early works by this international network of artists, composers and designers.

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