Fluxux Familias

Books Reviewed: Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002; Alison Knowles, Footnotes: Collage Journal 30 Years, New York: Granary Books, 2000; Alison Knowles, Spoken Text, Barrytown, NY: Left Hand Books, 1993; Dick Higgins/Paul Woodbine, Life Flowers, Kingston, NY: McPherson and Co., Publishers, 1996/2002; Dick Higgins/Paul Woodbine, Octette, Kingston, NY: McPherson and Co., Publishers, 1994.

In 2002, while in upstate New York, I was lucky enough to be present at an evening of Fluxus performance and screening of Fluxfilms organized by Gary Wilke at the Uptown Café in Kingston. One of the highlights of the evening for me (besides Yoko Ono's Number 4, a five minute film of the buttocks of various performers walking away from the camera) was Alison Knowles's Mantra for Jessie—Some help in Sleeping (1971). The genesis of the piece was a moment when Knowles overheard her daughter Jessica, who at the time was seven, learning to knit with variegated yarn while naming the colors out loud. Listening from the next room, Knowles jotted down the names of the colors. Performed with objects the approximate colors of Jessica Higgins's variegated yarn, Mantra for Jessie is both conceptual and physical—a performer (Jessica Higgins the evening of November 7) calls out the names of the colors while holding aloft such things as a red pepper, a green skein of cord, a brown metal fragment and a white Tibetan scarf. Adding a new dimension of texture, experience and meaning to the words, all of the objects (no longer balls of yarn as they were when seven year old Jessica Higgins initially "performed" the piece) replace the spoken words. As evidenced by this performance, Fluxus, at least in the Higgins/Knowles household was and continues to be a family affair. I was charmed that night by the intergenerational performance, which reminded me of my own experience learning how to knit. Even at a tender age, Jessica Higgins, today a member of the second generation of Fluxus artists, was participating in her parent's performances.

Jessica's twin sister Hannah Higgins, although an art historian and critic rather than an artist, has also immersed herself in all things Fluxus, going so far as to write a dissertation on Fluxus art. Higgins's Fluxus Experience grew out of that dissertation. The book is an attempt to build upon the body of secondary critical writings about the movement that begin in 1993 with the important exhibition and accompanying catalogue In The Spirit of Fluxus at the Walker Art Center. Taking as her point of departure Kristine Stiles's contention that Fluxus performance and objects can be read as a "mode" of action in a world that has the potential to enact radical epistemological shifts, Higgins revisits Fluxus objects, performances, and books as well as the critical writing then in order to argue for the continuing relevance of Fluxus practice to the art world today. The central thesis of Fluxus Experience, as implied by the title, is that the art made by artists associated with the Fluxus movement—fluxkits, events (performances), books and charts, was meant to "form multiple pathways toward 'ontological knowledge.'" Fluxus art functioned by activating all of the senses—taste, smell, touch, hearing, and vision. Even this latter category, which has been the lynchpin upon which Western aesthetic theory has rested, is called into question by Fluxus objects and films. Rather than reinforcing the concept of the disembodied eye, they reembody that eye by forcing the viewer to acknowledge its corporeal function.

Prior to reading Fluxus Experience, I have to admit to having had some reservations about the rigor of this particular text given the extremely close relationship that Higgins has enjoyed with many of the major protagonists of the Fluxus movement. I was pleasantly surprised, therefore, to encounter a well-argued and researched text. Higgins's knowledge of contemporary art theory, particularly the theoretical discourse on the relationship between phenomenology and epistemology is impressive (she...