thumb|Fluxus Manifesto, 1963, by [[George Maciunas]]
thumb|Poster to Festum Fluxorum Fluxus 1963.
Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers, and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who, inspired by John Cage, engaged in experimental art performances which emphasized the artistic tradition of chance-based process over the finished product. Fluxus is known for experimental contributions to different artistic media and disciplines and for generating new art forms. These art forms include intermedia, a term coined by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins; conceptual art, first developed by Henry Flynt, an artist contentiously associated with Fluxus; and video art, first pioneered by Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell. Dutch gallerist and art critic Harry Ruhé describes Fluxus as "the most radical and experimental art movement of the sixties".
Fluxus artists produced performance "events", which included enactments of scores, "Neo-Dada" noise music, and time-based works, as well as concrete poetry, visual art, urban planning, architecture, design, literature, and publishing. Many Fluxus artists share anti-commercial and anti-art sensibilities. Fluxus is sometimes described as "intermedia". The ideas and practices of composer John Cage heavily influenced Fluxus, especially his notions that one should embark on an artwork without a conception of its end, and his understanding of the work as a site of interaction between artist and audience. The process of creating was privileged over the finished product. Another notable influence were the readymades of Marcel Duchamp, a French artist who was active in Dada (1916 – ). George Maciunas, largely considered to be the founder of this fluid movement, coined the name Fluxus in 1961 to title a proposed magazine.
Many artists of the 1960s took part in Fluxus activities, including Joseph Beuys, Willem de Ridder, George Brecht, John Cage, Robert Filliou, Ben Vautier, Al Hansen, Dick Higgins, Bengt af Klintberg, Alison Knowles, Addi Køpcke, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Shigeko Kubota, La Monte Young, Mary Bauermeister, Joseph Byrd, Ben Patterson, Daniel Spoerri, Jackson Mac Low, Eric Andersen, Ken Friedman, Terry Riley and Wolf Vostell. Not only were they a diverse community of collaborators who influenced each other, they were also, largely, friends. They collectively had what were, at the time, radical ideas about art and the role of art in society. Fluxus founder George Maciunas proposed a well known manifesto, but few considered Fluxus to be a true movement, and therefore the manifesto was not largely adopted. Instead, a series of festivals in Wiesbaden, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Amsterdam, London, and New York, gave rise to a loose but robust community with many similar beliefs. In keeping with the reputation Fluxus earned as a forum of experimentation,
Early history (late 1950s to 1965)
Origins
280px|thumb|Flux Year Box 2, , a Flux box edited and produced by George Maciunas, containing works by many early Fluxus artists
The origins of Fluxus lie in many of the concepts explored by composer John Cage in his experimental music of the 1930s through the 1960s. After attending courses on Zen Buddhism taught by D. T. Suzuki, Cage taught a series of classes in experimental composition from 1957 to 1959 at the New School for Social Research in New York City. These classes explored the notions of chance and indeterminacy in art, using music scores as a basis for compositions that could be performed in potentially infinite ways. Some of the artists and musicians who became involved in Fluxus, including Jackson Mac Low, La Monte Young, George Brecht, Al Hansen, and Dick Higgins attended Cage's classes. A major influence is found in the work of Marcel Duchamp. Also of importance was Dada Poets and Painters, edited by Robert Motherwell, a book of translations of Dada texts that was widely read by members of Fluxus. The term anti-art, a precursor to Dada, was coined by Duchamp around 1913, when he created his first readymades from found objects (ordinary objects found or purchased and declared art). Indifferently chosen, readymades and altered readymades challenged the notion of art as an inherently optical experience, dependent on academic art skills. The most famous example is Duchamp's altered readymade Fountain (1917), a work which he signed "R. Mutt." While taking refuge from WWI in New York, in 1915 Duchamp formed a Dada group with Francis Picabia and American artist Man Ray. Other key members included Arthur Cravan, Florine Stettheimer, and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, credited by some with proposing the idea for Fountain to Duchamp. By 1916 these artists, especially Duchamp, Man Ray, and Picabia, became the center for radical anti-art activities in New York City. Their artworks would inform Fluxus and conceptual art in general.
A number of other contemporary events are credited as either anticipating Fluxus or as constituting proto-Fluxus events. the month-long Yam festival held in upstate New York by George Brecht and Robert Watts in May 1963 with Ray Johnson and Allan Kaprow (the culmination of a year's worth of Mail Art pieces); As one of the movement's founders, Dick Higgins, stated:
<blockquote>Fluxus started with the work, and then came together, applying the name Fluxus to work which already existed. It was as if it started in the middle of the situation, rather than at the beginning.
</blockquote>
Neo-Dada Anthology of Chance Operations to Early Fluxus
In 1961 the American musician/artist La Monte Young had been enlisted to guest-edit an East Coast issue of the Wast Coast literary journal Beatitude to be called Beatitude East. But as the Beatitude connection was prematurly terminated, George Maciunas, a trained graphic designer, asked Young if he could layout and help publish the Neo-Dada material. Maciunas supplied the paper, design, and some money for publishing the anthology which contained the work of New York avant-garde artists from that time. The project took the title of An Anthology of Chance Operations from its full title An Anthology of chance operations concept art anti-art indeterminacy improvisation meaningless work natural disasters plans of action stories diagrams Music poetry essays dance constructions mathematics compositions. An Anthology of Chance Operations was completed and published in 1963 by Jackson Mac Low and La Monte Young, as Maciunas had by then moved to Germany to escape his creditors. After opening a short-lived art gallery on Madison Avenue, which showed work by Dick Higgins, Yoko Ono, Jonas Mekas, Ray Johnson, Henry Flynt and La Monte Young, Maciunas moved to Wiesbaden, West Germany, having taken a job as a graphic designer with the US Air Force in late 1961 after the gallery had gone bust. From Wiesbaden, Maciunas continued his contact with Young and other New York City-based artists and with expatriate American artists like Benjamin Patterson and Emmett Williams, whom he met in Europe. By September 1962, Maciunas was joined by Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles who traveled to Europe to help him promote a second planned publication to be called Fluxus, the first of a series of yearbooks of artists' works. Maciunas had first come up with the title Fluxus for a never done anthology of New York's Lithuanian artists, but instead applied the term to artists working in the Anthology of Chance Operations vein. Because after fleeing Lithuania at the end of World War II, his family settled in New York, where he first met the group of avant-garde artists and musicians centered around John Cage and La Monte Young. Thus Maciunas coined the name Fluxus not for his perceived group of Lithuanian artists but for the Neo-Dada art being produced by a range of artists with a shared sensibility as an attempt to "fuse... cultural, social, & political revolutionaries into [a] united front and action".
Maciunas first publicly coined the term Fluxus (meaning 'to flow') in a 'brochure prospectus' that he distributed to the audience at a festival he had organized, called Après Cage; Kleinen Sommerfest (After Cage; a Small Summer Festival), in Wuppertal, West Germany, 9 June 1962.
Maciunas was an avid art historian, and initially referred to Fluxus as 'neo-dadaism' or 'renewed dadaism'. He wrote a number of letters to Raoul Hausmann, an original dadaist, outlining his ideas. Hausmann discouraged the use of the term;
<blockquote>
I note with much pleasure what you said about German neodadaists—but I think even the Americans should not use the term "neodadaism" because neo means nothing and -ism is old-fashioned. Why not simply "Fluxus"? It seems to me much better, because it's new, and dada is historic.
</blockquote>
As part of the festival, Maciunas wrote a lecture entitled 'Neo-Dada in the United States'. After an attempt to define 'Concretist Neo-Dada' art, he explained that Fluxus was opposed to the exclusion of the everyday from art. Using 'anti-art and artistic banalities', Fluxus would fight the 'traditional artificialities of art'. The lecture ended with the declaration "Anti-art is life, is nature, is true reality—it is one and all."—resulted in the total destruction of a piano when performed by Maciunas, Higgins and others at Wiesbaden. The performance was considered scandalous enough to be shown on German television four times, with the introduction "The lunatics have escaped!"
<blockquote>At the end we did Corner's Piano Activities not according to his instructions since we systematically destroyed a piano which I bought for $5 and had to have it all cut up to throw it away, otherwise we would have had to pay movers, a very practical composition, but German sentiments about this "instrument of Chopin" were hurt and they made a row about it...
</blockquote>
At the same time, Maciunas used his connections at work to start printing cheap mass-produced books and multiples by some of the artists that were involved in the performances. The first three to be printed were Composition 1961 by La Monte Young (see it here, An Anthology of Chance Operations edited by Young and Mac Low and Water Yam, by George Brecht. Water Yam, a series of event scores printed on small sheets of card and collected together in a cardboard box, was the first in a series of artworks that Maciunas printed that became known as Fluxkits. Cheap, mass-produced and easily distributed, Fluxkits were originally intended to form an ever-expanding library of modern performance art. Water Yam was published in an edition of 1000 and originally cost $4. By April 1964, almost a year later, Maciunas still had 996 copies unsold.
Maciunas' original plan had been to design, edit and pay for each edition himself, in exchange for the copyright to be held by the collective. Profits were to be split 80/20 at first, in favor of the artist. Since most of the composers already had publishing deals, Fluxus quickly moved away from music toward performance and visual art. John Cage, for instance, never published work under the Fluxus moniker due to his contract with the music publishers Edition Peters.
<blockquote>Maciunas seemed to have a fantastic ability to get things done.... if you had things to be printed he could get them printed. It's pretty hard in East Brunswick to get good offset printing. It's not impossible, but it's not so easy, and since I'm very lazy it was a relief to find somebody who could take the burden off my hands. So there was this guy Maciunas, a Lithuanian or Bulgarian, or somehow a refugee or whatever—beautifully dressed—"astonishing looking" would be a better adjective. He was somehow able to carry the whole thing off, without my having to go 57 miles to find a printer.
</blockquote>
Since Maciunas was colorblind, Fluxus multiples were almost always black and white.
New York and the FluxShops
upright|left|thumb|[[Willem de Ridder's Mail Order FluxShop, Amsterdam, with Dorothea Meijer, winter 1964–65]]
After his contract with the US Air Force was terminated due to ill health, Maciunas was forced to return to the US on 3 September 1963. Once back in New York, he set about organizing a series of street concerts and opened a new shop, the 'Fluxhall', on Canal Street.
12 concerts, "away from the beaten track of the New York art scene", took place on Canal Street, 11 April to 23 May 1964. With photographs taken by Maciunas himself, pieces by Ben Vautier, Alison Knowles and Takehisa Kosugi were performed in the street for free, although in practice there was 'no audience to speak of' who encouraged members of Fluxus to take a more overtly political stance. One of the results of these discussions was to set up a picket line at the American premiere of Originale, a recent work by the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, 8 September 1964. Stockhausen was deemed a 'Cultural Imperialist' by Maciunas and Flynt, while other members vehemently disagreed. The result was members of Fluxus, such as Nam June Paik and Jackson Mac Low, crossing a picket line made up of other members, including Ben Vautier and Takako Saito who handed out leaflets denouncing Stockhausen as "a characteristic European-North American ruling-class Artist". Dick Higgins participated in the picket, and then coolly joined the other performers inside;
<blockquote>
Maciunas and his friend Henry Flynt tried to get the Fluxus people to march around outside the circus with white cards that said Originale was bad. And they tried to say that the Fluxus people who were in the circus weren't Fluxus any more. That was silly, because it made a split. I thought it was funny, and so first I walked around with Maciunas and with Henry with a card, then I went inside and joined the circus; so both groups got angry with me. Oh well. Some people say that Fluxus died that day—I once thought so myself—but it turned out I was wrong.
</blockquote>
The event, arranged by Charlotte Moorman as part of her 2nd Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, would cement animosities between Maciunas and her, with Maciunas frequently demanding that artists associated with Fluxus have nothing to do with the annual festival, and would often expel artists who ignored his demands. This hostility continued throughout Maciunas' life—much to Moorman's bemusement—despite her continued championing of Fluxus art and artists.
Middle history (1965–78)
Perceived insurgencies and the Asiatic influence
thumb|Cut Piece, a performance piece by Yoko Ono in which the audience is invited to cut off her clothing. This version was staged at Carnegie Recital Hall, New York, 21 March 1965. Still taken from a film by [[Albert and David Maysles]]
The picketing of Originale marked the high point of Maciunas' agitprop approach, an approach that estranged many of Fluxus' early proponents; Jackson Mac Low had resigned immediately after hearing 'antisocial' plans laid in April 1963, such as breaking down trucks under the Hudson River. Brecht threatened to quit on the same issue, and then left New York in the spring of 1965. Despite his continued allegiance to Fluxus ideals, Dick Higgins fell out with Maciunas around the same time, ostensibly over his setting up the Something Else Press which printed many texts by key Fluxus-related personalities and other members of the avant garde. Charlotte Moorman continued to present her Annual Avant Garde Festival in New York.
Such perceived insurrections in the coherence of Maciunas' leadership of Fluxus provided an opening for Fluxus to become increasingly influenced by Japanese members of the group. Since returning to Japan in 1961, Yoko Ono had been recommending colleagues look Maciunas up if they moved to New York; by the time she had returned, in early 1965, Hi Red Center, Shigeko Kubota, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi, Yasunao Tone and Ay-O had all started to make work for Fluxus, often of a contemplative nature.
In Tokyo Japan 1964 Yoko Ono, a nonconformist to the Fluxus community, independently published her artist’s book Grapefruit. The book’s text itself encompassing event scores and other forms of participatory art.
An event score from the book:
Cloud Piece
Imagine the clouds dripping.
Dig a hole in your garden to put them in.
Proto-performance art
On September 25, 1965, the FluxOrchestra, with La Monte Young conducting, played at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York City with a poster and program designed by George Maciunas. Copies of the program were folded into paper airplanes and launched during the evening, which included performances of "Falling Event" by Chieko Shiomi, "Symphony No. 3 'On the Floor from 'Clouds Scissors'" by George Brecht, "4 Pieces for Orchestra to La Monte Young" by Yoko Ono, "Disappearing Music for Face" by Shiomi, "Tactical Pieces for Orchestra" and "Olivetti Adding Machine in Memoriam for Adriano Olivetti" by Anthony Cox, "Trance for Orchestra" by Watts, "Sky Piece to Jesus Christ*" by Ono, "Octet for Winds 'In the Water' from 'Cloud Scissors" by Brecht, "Piece" by Shigeko Kubota, "1965 $50" by Young, "Piano Piece" by Tomas Schmit, "Sword Piece" by Cox, "Music for Late Afternoon Together With" by Shiomi, "2" by Watts, "c/t Trace" by Watts, "Intermission Event" by Willem de Ridder, "Moviee Music" by Stan Vanderbeek, "Mechanical Orchestra" by Joe Jones, and "Secret Room" by Ben Vautier.
In 1969, Fluxus artist Joe Jones opened his JJ Music Store (aka Tone Deaf Music Store) at 18 North Moore Street, where he presented his repetitive drone music machines. He created there an installation in the window so that anyone could press numerous door buttons to play the noise music machines displayed there. Jones also presented small musical installation performances there, alone or with other Fluxus artists, such as Yoko Ono and John Lennon, among others. From April 18 to June 12, 1970, Ono and Lennon (aka Plastic Ono Band) presented a series of Fluxus art events and concerts there called GRAPEFRUIT FLUXBANQUET. It was promoted with a poster designed by Fluxus leader George Maciunas. Performances included Come Impersonating John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Grapefruit Banquet (April 11–17) by George Maciunas, Yoshimasa Wada, Nye Ffarrabas (formerly Bici Forbes and Bici Forbes Hendricks), Geoffrey Hendricks, and Robert Watts; Do It Yourself (April 11–17) by Yoko Ono; Tickets by John Lennon + Fluxagents (April 18–24) with Wada, Ben Vautier and Maciunas; Clinic by Yoko Ono + Hi Red Center (April 25-May 1); Blue Room by Yoko + Fluxmasterliars (May 2–8); Weight & Water by Yoko + Fluxfiremen (May 9–15); Capsule by Yoko + Flux Space Center (May 16–22) with Maciunas, Paul Sharits, George Brecht, Ay-O, Ono, Watts, John Cavanaugh; Portrait of John Lennon as a Young Cloud by Yoko + Everybody (May 23–29); The Store by Yoko + Fluxfactory (May 30-June 5), with Ono, Maciunas, Wada, Ay-O; and finally Examination by Yoko + Fluxschool (June 6–12) with Ono, Geoffrey Hendricks, Watts, Mieko Shiomi and Robert Filliou.
Objects blurring boundaries
As Fluxus gradually became more famous, Maciunas' ambitions for the sale of cheap multiples grew. The second flux-anthology, the Fluxkit (late 1964), collected together early 3D work made by the collective in a businessman's case, an idea borrowed directly from Duchamp's Boite en Valise Within a year, plans for a new anthology, Fluxus 2, were in full swing to contain Flux films by John Cage and Yoko Ono (with hand held projectors provided), disrupted matchboxes and postcards by Ben Vautier, plastic food by Claes Oldenburg, FluxMedicine by Shigeko Kubota (containing empty pill packages), and artworks made of rocks, ink stamps, outdated travel tickets, undoable puzzles and a machine to facilitate humming.
Maciunas' belief in the collective extended to authorship; a number of pieces from this period were anonymous, mis-attributed, or have had their authorship since questioned. As a further complication, Maciunas was in the habit of dramatically changing ideas submitted by various artists before he put the works into production.
Solid Plastic in Plastic Box, credited to Per Kirkeby 1967, for instance, had originally been realised by Kirkeby as a metal box, inscribed 'This Box Contains Wood'. When opened, the box would be found to contain sawdust. By the time the multiple had been manufactured by Maciunas, it was a block of solid plastic contained in a plastic box of the same color.
Inventing performance art
In addition to his numerous original compositions which have joined the collective's catalog of works, Larry Miller, associated with the group since 1969, has also been active as an interpreter of the "classic" scores and responsible for bringing the group's works to a wider public, blurring the lines between artist, producer and researcher. Besides Miller's own artistic work, he has also organized, reconstructed and performed at numerous Fluxus events and assembled an extensive collection of material on the history of Fluxus. Through Miller, Fluxus attracted media coverage such as the worldwide CNN coverage of Off Limits exhibit at the Newark Museum (now The Newark Museum of Art) in 1999. Other Miller activities as organizer, performer and presenter within the Fluxus milieu include Performance in Fluxus Continue 1963–2003 at Musee d'Art et d'Art Contemporain in Nice; Fluxus a la Carte in Amsterdam; and Centraal Fluxus Festival at Centraal Museum in Utrecht, Netherlands. In 2004, for Geoff Hendricks' Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia and Rutgers University 1958–1972, Miller reprised and updated the track and field events of the Flux Olympics, first presented in 1970. For Do-it Yourself Fluxus at AI – Art Interactive – in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Miller worked as the curatorial consultant for an exhibit of works that allowed viewers hands-on experience including the reconstruction of several sections of the historic Flux Labyrinth, a massive and intricate maze that Miller originally constructed with George Maciunas at Akademie der Künste in Berlin in 1976 and which included sections by several of the Fluxus artists. Miller created a new version of the Flux Labyrinth at the In the Spirit of Fluxus exhibit at the Walker Art Center in 1994, where Greil Marcus said, "Miller was... fine tuning the monster."
Feminism
Women associated with Fluxus such as Carolee Schneemann and Charlotte Moorman, and founding members of the group such as Alison Knowles and Yoko Ono, contributed works in varying media and with differing content such as Knowles' "Make a Salad" and "Make a Soup.". Each was shaped by their times and their associations with artists of the previous generation such as Sari Dienes who were pointing the way to the changes of the 1960s and 70s with strong personas and art. Some made experimental and performative work having to do with the body that created a powerful female presence, which existed within Fluxus from the group's beginning as illustrated by works including Carolee Schneemann's "Interior Scroll", Yoko Ono's "Cut Piece", and Shigeko Kubota's "Vagina Painting". Women working within Fluxus were often simultaneously critiquing their position within a male dominated society while also exposing the inequalities within an art collective that claimed to be open and diverse. George Maciunas, in his rejection of Schneeman as a member of Fluxus, called her "guilty of Baroque tendencies, overt sexuality, and theatrical excess". "Interior Scroll" was a response to Schneemann's experience as a filmmaker in the 1950s and 1960s, when male filmmakers claimed that women should restrict themselves to dance.