Fluxier-than-Thou

Fluxus Experience . Hannah Higgins. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Pp. xv + 259. $29.95 (paper).

Teddy Hultberg, Oyvind Fahlström on the Air—Manipulating the World . Stockholm: Sveriges Radios Förlag / Fylkingen, 1999. Bilingual text, Swedish and English. Pp. 337. 2 CDs: Birds in Sweden, The Holy Torsten Nilsson . SEK 400 ($52.00) cloth.

"Fluxus," Dick Higgins has observed, "was not a movement; it has no stated consistent programme or manifesto which the work must match, and it did not propose to move art or our awareness of art from point A to point B. The very name, Fluxus, suggests change, being in a state of flux. The idea was that it would always reflect the most exciting avant-garde tendencies of a given time or moment—the Fluxattitude."¹ Hannah Higgins, the daughter of Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles, both of them foundational Fluxus intermedia artists, agrees. Again and again, in Fluxus Experience, she insists that Fluxus was not, as is usually thought, an iconoclastic avant-garde movement but a way of life, a "fertile field for multiple intelligence interactions" (193) that has strong pedagogical potential. In keeping with her father's theory of intermedia (see Figure 33), Hannah Higgins uses a Deweyite approach to map possible intersections between Fluxus and other disciplines so as to "allow for a sort of cognitive cross-training through exploratory creativity" (193). Within our existing university structure, a potential Fluxus program "would by definition be unspecialized . . . it would emphasize exploration and expression of individual skills" (197). For it is, after all, "through creative play that new solutions to problems may be found" (206).

This utopian and nostalgic "model for a multicultural, multilingual society that is characterized by both difference and group feeling, and by a sense of connection to the physical world" (207), is not quite borne out by Higgins's own incisive account of Fluxus, which details not only specific performances and publications but also the heated political controversies between George Maciunas, the movement's self-declared chef d'école, and such other Fluxartists as the less flamboyant Dick Higgins. Indeed, the non-movement called Fluxus had, by Hannah Higgins's own account, a specific point of origin: namely the 1957-1959 classes in musical composition offered by John Cage at the New School in New York. "The most durable innovation to emerge from that classroom," Higgins writes, "was George Brecht's Event score, a performance technique that has been used extensively by virtually every Fluxus artist. In the Event, everyday actions are framed as minimalistic performances or, occasionally, as imaginary and impossible experiments with everyday situations" (2). Thus Brecht's Keyhole Event (1962) was a handwritten card that contained the single word "keyhole" in large block letters, and beneath it the words "through either side / one event." In another Event, Drip Music, devised by Brecht and performed by Dick Higgins, the instructions read:

For single or multiple performance.

A source of dripping water and an empty vessel are
arranged so that the water falls into the vessel.

Second version: Dripping.

Such "scores," typeset and published as Fluxus editions or multiples, were placed in Fluxkits—an offshoot of Duchamp's boîtes en valise—containing such everyday objects as rubber balls, beans, shoe laces, blow horns, chess pieces, and prophylactics.

One of the best known fluxkits is the vinyl briefcase Finger Box by the Japanese artist Ay-O (1964), in which, Higgins argues, rows of yellow wooden blocks with holes in their centers challenge the viewer to engage in manual exploration:

When users plunge a finger into the box, their curiosity has overcome the sense of fear inherent in exploring the unknown. That several Finger Boxes contained nails indicates Ay-O's determination not to sidestep the challenge the work could issue: the danger to the instinctively apprehensive, hesitant user, who must touch the box, but carefully, with an "enquiring human gesture"

(40; see Figure 16)

Such a solemn appraisal of what is usually held to be the witty...