Fluxus: “The Exquisite Corpse Stirs”

FLUXUS Y "The Exquisite Corpse Stirs" Text by Ken Friedman Photos by Johan Elbers 16 Fluxus, the intermedial group of artists , composers, and performers, germinated in the late fifties and early sixties as a forum for the presentation of innovative works and projects which could find no other home in the world of the arts at that time. The origins of the group are in several places. In New York, quite a few of the Fluxus people-among them George Brecht and Dick Higgins -studied with John Cage in the famous courses at The New School "x- *e CO * 6 '4. e s e C4 '2"- b. e by b7 which produced an unparalleled generation of talented Americans. In Europe, independent artists had been working with similar ranges of idea and experience, among them Ben Vautier, Joseph Beuys, and Milan Knizak. Similarly, artists from the Orient such as Mieko Shiomi and Nam June Paik were developing projects which would fall into the areas pioneered by Fluxus. The exact origin of the name Fluxus is somewhat wreathed in mystery. Open to many meanings-"an outpouring , a gushing forth, a bringing together, a bloody enema" -the first products of the group were publications brought together by organizer-editor George Maciunas. The first visible product was not actually a publication of the "Fluxus Editorial Council," the elaborate and never-quite-functional board of editors , publishers and directors, who were to have been "Fluxus," but An Anthology, that exciting seminal and catalytic work (assembled in 1961 but published in 1963 and edited by La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low) which was to influence so much art since its time. While no one knows specifically who "invented" 24 the name Fluxus, we do know the year in which it was "founded." In 1972, Fluxus West in England arranged a year of exhibitions, concerts , and publications which were highlighted with the October 1972 Special Fluxus Issue of Art and Artists . In honor or the occasion, George Maciunas declared 1972 to be the "Tenth Anniversary Year." Whether it was or wasn't is somewhat beside the point. . . in his own inimitable manner, George declared it to be so, and no one saw any reason why it shouldn't. 1 The vital and interesting facts of Fluxus are relatively simple. Fluxus has maintained its liveliness precisely because of the fact that it was an extremely disorganized organization . Its structure resembles structures which could be called "group," "movement," "school," and "philosophy ," but it only resembles these structures in part. As a group, Fluxus has been loose, with a great deal of room for initiative and individual development or departure. The members have been free to act at will, and while calls to ideological purity were often made-particularly by Maciunas-no one particularly felt constrained to be pure. As a movement, cohesion came from friendship and respect for individual work and for the individuality and differences of the participating artists , rather than from stylistic or ideological similarities. As a school, the artists and their work benefited from interaction and influence on each other and on the art world at large without developing an academic piety toward themselves or their work. As a philosophy, Fluxus, much like the Zen Buddhism to which it has often been compared, holds within itself seeds for its own death and regeneration-rather than for a common set of beliefs held by all members-and for that reason has remained vital. The Fluxus attitudes toward performance have been mixed. There are leanings in the work of some of the artists toward Zen, and toward the ritual or the pure and detached, these being highly visible in the works of Shiomi, Knowles, Paik, Watts, Brecht, and Kosugi. Some of 19 the artists engage in a more direct existential confrontation with ideas and process, among them Vautier, Kirkby, and Spoerri. Beuys and Knizak deal in ritual and in ceremony often with highly symbolic overtones , while Vostell's performances -which to some degree relate to the other "happeners" in Fluxus-have a content which is both poetic and polemic in feeling. Higgins in his work moves into the realm of sound and tone. Maciunas himself was a...