Fluxus Presentation

Fluxus began in a college class with John Cage at Black Mountain College. It began in the early 1960s with a group of artists working in NYC. Fluxus is an international, interdisciplinary, and broad movement, with artists working in sound, text, performance and new media which continues today. Nam June Paik and Global Groove talked about globalism. Dick Higgins, George Brecht, La Monte Young, Allison Knowles, George Macunias, and others were all Fluxus artists. 1. Flux Kits or Multiples and 2. The Event. Both of These forms are about the immediate quality of experience. This references New Media Technologies. Lev Manovich, contemporary new media scholar, talks about the Internet as malleable, hyperlinking, and asks us to reconsider the very paradigm of the aesthetic object. 1960s, multi-sensory experience, to introduce database logic in the event score. This presents an idea, and then it is carried out. Fluxus is where art and life are blurred. Improv everywhere and Flashmob could be seen as contemporary examples. A flux Kit is non-hierarchical, a list of unordered items, a database structure, a collection of individual items with every item having hte same significance as any other. The event is more like an algorithm. Fluxus views of art making: make ordinary into something significant. Some were about breaking down structure. Human experience is diverse, resulting in diverse work and therefore productive of the as yet unknown. Fluxus became accepted by the art world. No one can break down the walls of the art world, because the art world expands and groups them in. Valuing primary over secondary experiences. Fluxus strives to offer depersonalized, primary information about a subject or action. George Macunias made a FluxKit so that people could touch it. It was tangible, not behind a glass case. It is in some ways like web-based artwork. Meaning has a visceral basis- touch and exploration creates meaning. They considered the use of smell in art, There is no semiotic divide between the signifier-the smell which is being experienced, and the signified-the smell itself- they are one in the same. The Event originated, both practically and conceptually, in John cage's 1958-59 music composition class at the New School. John Cage and the logic of chance. Cage's idea was to accept whatever sounds occurred within a specific period of time. Those sounds determined the music. He also explored what silence did in a composition. Immanuel Kant said there are two things that don't have to mean anything: Music and Laughter. Since there is no silence, there is no pure music. The ambient sounds of the environment themselves constitute music: music is all around. George Brecht thought of his work as corrected abstract expressionism. The Fluxus movement followed 1950s Action Painting. Art objects are the physical result of human experience being subjected to an aesthetic process. The demeanor of a performer in an event score performance is more like that of a painter than that of an actor on stage. Life Media- Spontaneous decisions, the relationship to the environment, and the physical parameters within which the work occurs. Event scores involve simple actions, ideas, and objects from everyday life recontextualized as performance. Event scores are texts that can be seen as proposal pieces or instructions for actions. The idea of the score suggests musicality. Like a musical score, event scores can be realized by artists other than the composer.