A couple of weeks ago I read a fascinating piece about Fluxus, an international network of artists of all kinds (visual artists, composers, designers, architects...) that was especially active in the 1960s and known for their "intermedia" art pieces. A manifesto for the movement is pictured above. The piece I read is called "Between Water and Stone" by Kristin Stiles from the exhibition catalogue for "In the Spirit of Fluxus" at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1993. Here're some of my favorite bits:
"Performed for the 1963 Fluxus festival in Amsterdam, the actions that constitute
Zyklus für Wassereimer [oder Flaschen] (Cycle for Water-rhymes [or Bottles] are direct and simple, subtle and conceptually sophisticated. The score permits the performer between ten and thirty bottles or buckets. Its duration depends upon the speed and precision with which the artist undertakes the process of pouring, a procedure either quickly resolved or enduring for long periods. The task may, but does not have to, depend upon skill. It is the kind of quiet action that a thoughtful child might perform as a means to study the operation of things...Speculating on the nature of existence, the artist who performs
Zyklus undertakes the careful exploration of human labor as a concrete condition that determines meaning. While Schmit's score leaves the construction of laborand its significance open to a mechanics of
doing, at the same time, doing emphasizes the concrete condition of
being. This doing, because it has a temporal dimension, equally calls into question the relationship of being to
becoming, in and through time, and positions ontological speculation in the pragmatic activities of labor. Doing both exhibits and stabilizes the unstable relationship between objects and the human states of becoming and being. Metaphysical questions circle in
Zyklus in the mundane conditions of the piece itself, in the actual flow and change among human action, bottles, and water."
and
One artist, Robin Page, "turned a corner...into a
Suicide Room and filled it with all the knives, razor blades, and poisons normally found in the home. There the public was encouraged to interact and a sign read: "Kill yourself or else stop beefing and get on and enjoy life.""
And finally my absolute fav:
"'Goofing off' is a quality that Fluxus artists certainly honed in performance, and...there are positive qualities to goofing-off. Goofing off requires developing a fine-tuned sense of what it means to pause long enough and distance oneself far enough from worldly objects and events to recognize their illusory dimension and thereby reinvest the world with wonder.
In order to really goof off well, the instrumental sense of purpose so deeply ingrained in Western ego and epistemology must be abandoned."
Great stuff! Would have been awesome to be a part of.
