Anti-Art as the End of Cultural History

Anti-Art as the End of CulturalHistory Michel Oren I can imagine someone saying, since art is an important mode of knowing and communication, how can it ever become obsolete? This question is simply heedless toward the successive lessons of the avant-garde which prompted the brend theory. ... For us, all high art, for example, was seen in the shadow of Stockhausen's "scientific music." Its message, so far from being uplifting or even neutral , was a message we were better off without. -Henry Flynt, 1990' IN THE 1960S Fluxus offered a forum to performance artists coming from music similar to that provided by galleries to visual artists doing Happenings . Performers might read the numbers on adding machine tapes as a score and each accordingly raise and lower their bowler hats in the random order of the numbers. They might perform a "piano piece" by placing a vase of flowers on a piano. Such pieces opened up music to random and trivial events more characteristic of everyday life than what had been thought of as art. Was there a point in this process at which "art" would get so swamped or diluted by "life" that it would stop being art? Conversely , as in the Buddhist notion of an "art of everyday life," could one's means of dealing with life become so skilled or ennobled as to be considered an art? Some aesthetically-oriented societies had nonetheless no concept of art. Perhaps art would become obsolete and disappear from Western cultural life as well, and Fluxus, in helping to snuff out this beautiful sacrificial candle, would have illuminated the possibility of a more brilliant life for all humanity.2 1 Fluxus performances or "events" soon turned into the production of boxed multiples. The boxes usually contained either the printed notations or "scores" for the performances or assorted objects whose reference to events was more tenuous. Besides events and multiples, Fluxus (like many avant-garde groups, e.g. Symbolists, Futurists, Constructivists, Surrealists) also had a utopian political program, which in this case called for the abolition of art. The principle propagators of that program-with which some Fluxus members vehemently disagreed-were the Fluxus impresario George Maciunas and his sidekick Henry Flynt. It would be possible to describe Maciunas and Flynt as a pair of eccentric and amusing crackpots. On the other hand, it seems more interesting to take their politics seriously, to argue not only that their program was high-minded and deserving of support, but that their schemes for returning the Soviet Union to its revolutionary aesthetic of the 1920s might have been capable of realization . Their desire to restore to the individual some self-respect for his/ her taste preferences, represented by Flynt's picketing of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, and Lincoln Center, was in the highest traditions of participatory democracy, while their attempt to decolonize the international music scene by picketing the composer Stockhausen 's concerts was years in advance of its time. The tensions generated by their attempt to impose this program on the rest of the group, far from disintegrating it, were a major factor holding it together. Such positions run contrary to what a number of Fluxus members and critics have written. Although the venom of the Fluxus campaign against Western high art may now have been recuperated by art history, that campaign is still worth scrutiny. If one draws a line through the axes of the paradoxes it generated, that line will not prove tangential (as some have claimed), but will lead to the conceptual center of Fluxus. Further, the utopian coloring of that center, the ideals of progress that animated its socialist metanarrative to try to break down its encircling boundaries or frames, which were really the same as those between art and life, show that the movement was not postmodern (as some have claimed) but a child of that modernism called Dada3 Not only Dada notions, according to Maciunas, but others from Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, concept art (via Henry Flynt), Soviet Constructivism and Bauhaus rationalism (via Maciunas himself), games and puzzles (via George Brecht), haiku, Spike Jones, and vaudeville gags went to make up the compound...