Future Fluxus

The postulation of the unity between art and life, as called for by Fluxus, surely is an extreme example of transgression. 50 years on from the birth of “intermedia” as an art term, which like a viral web spread into fine arts, music, literature, architecture, city planning and design, Andreas Leo Findeisen and Markus Zimmermann will ask the question of today’s new forms of Fluxus, its ability to change, with the “Future Fluxus” project. In lectures, discussions and performances, the past will be examined and the founding generation interviewed in order to put the future of current artistic and political practices in the zeitgeist of Facebook and Wikileaks up for discussion. With the “Icelandic Fluxus Museum for Free Thoughts – A Global Theatre with Global Participation”, the project will continue the conceptual strands of 2010’s “Iceland Hits Danube”, examining the Fluxists’ historical connections with current forms of network art and activism.

pixel Reanimator/Andy Stringer
Introduction to FutureFluxus Virtual Theatre Performance 2011

…Then we would be interested in art as something that changed us… …And our changes, the changes in us, would be toward the broader use of our perceptions rather than toward the narrowing of our perceptions. So that instead of moving toward virtuosity, for instance, or elitism, or any of those things that require polishing, we would be moving towards the world that isn’t art or hasn’t been thought of as art, and turning it into art.

John Cage Interview on December 28, 1991 
Edit from Art & Design Profile No 28: Fluxus Today and Yesterday ’93

George Maciunas the founding member and leader of this radical/experimental art movement… Fluxus

Fluxus objectives are social (not aesthetic). They are connected to the LEF group of 1929 in the Soviet Union (ideologically) http://www.sovlit.net/lefprogram/ and concerned with: gradual elimination of the fine arts (music, theater, poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture etc. etc.)… this is motivated by desire to stop the waste of material and human resources… and divert it to socially constructive ends. Such as applied arts: industrial design, journalism, architecture, engineering, graphic-typographic arts, printing etc.  They are all most closely related fields to fine arts and offer the best alternative profession to fine artists…  Thus Fluxus is definitely against art object as non-functional commodity – to be sold and to make livelihood for an artist.

It could temporarily have the pedagogical function of teaching people the needlessness of art, including the eventual needlessness of Fluxus itself.    It should not be therefore permanent. (Incidentally one good way of  teaching is by satirizing art and satirizing avant-garde art! or yourself!)    You will notice this in the first V TRE newspaper…   Fluxus therefore is ANTI-PROFESSIONAL (against professional art or artists making a livelihood from art, or artists spending their full time, their life, on art).   Secondly, Fluxus is against art as medium or vehicle promoting artist’s ego, since applied art should express the objective problem to be solved, not artist’s personality or his ego.   Fluxus therefore should tend towards collective spirit, anonymity and ANTI-INDIVIDUALISM – also ANTI-EUROPEANISM (Europe being the place supporting most strongly – and even originating the idea of – professional artist, art-for-art ideology, expression of artist’s ego through art etc. etc.)   These Fluxus concerts, publications etc are at best transitional (a few years) & temporary until such time when fine art can be totally eliminated (or at least its institutional forms) and artists find other employment.

George Maciunas
Letter to Tomas Schmit January ’64

George’s humor is self-referential, Brechtian.
The awareness of every daily act we perform, of every daily object around us.   And the critique of it all by means of humor.   Pop Art took a look at the daily banality around us also. But it seemed to embrace it, to approve of it.   Fluxus brought it into a critical awareness by means of humor.   In that sense Fluxus is a political act.

Jonas Mekas
X. 15 (Mr Fluxus) undated

Shortly after his death George visited me in a dream. we were at the side of a pool.  He held a bunch of white flowers and was handing them out to people.  He gave me one. ‘Hello, Meiko,’ he said, ‘the smell of this flower fits in with the color of your dress, doesn’t it?’  But the flower didn’t smell at all.  A man in a formal suit began to play tuba on a ladder in the pool.  George apologized, ‘Sorry, I couldn’t get a trombone.’   The player said, ‘George, that’s OK, tuba would be nicer than trombone.’   ‘Ya, might be… ‘ George shrugged his shoulders, and went to bake pancakes…
It was a funny dream, but very real.

Mieko Shiomi
‘Memories of George’ manuscript, Osaka, June ’93

Nam June Paik states, ‘In a nomadic, post-industrail time we are more experience-oriented than possession-oriented.’
John Latham who said, ‘since the convergence of language and art within one frame of reference the public has been misled. Artists have responded during the 1960s and 70s through conceptualism and the dematerialisation of the art-object.
The dilemma is resolved at present in art. A point has been made anterior to distinctions between art and language (science) to generate a form transposing the object-based idea into event, visually.
Art is event-structure. Where language, government and money are dividing, the event-structred media are including.’

George Maciunas perceived clearly that the power of the new art could transform social and political practices directly, as he said in an interview with Peter Frank, few Fluxus artists made that a point in their work. Robert Filliou did, he formulated The Principles of a Poetic Economy saying, ‘The ideal organisation of society would be to arrive at a happy solitude for every human being.’  With his Genial Republic he wanted everybody to be his or her own territory so one would not have to appeal to any higher authority to make up one’s mind about anything.
George Brecht made social transformation a point too, saying, ‘Human solidarity is in its feeling the same for all, namely to combat the immense simplicity, sadness and lack of insight, and create a world in which spontaneity, joy, humour and a new form of higher wisdom bring real social prosperity with the same self-evidence as the green of my wife’s eyes.’
Emmett Williams comments upon Brecht thus, ‘George Brecht’s events were for him very private, like little enlightenments he wanted to communicate with his friends, who would know what to do with them.’
Dick Higgin’s approach was, ‘Fluxus is inside you, is part of how you are. It is part of how you live.’
Joseph Beuys, in that line of thinking, called the Social Sculpture the only art work he really wanted to establish, knowing that all people alive are the content of a coherent culture. His slogan was ‘Everybody is an artist.’ He added, ‘we are all as a person part of an ancient past. The theory of reincarnation is convinced about our repeated participation in the historical process. The individual therefore has to create itself anew into the current time frame.’
George Maciunas added that ‘if a man could experience the world, the concrete world surrounding him, in the same way he experiences art, there would be no need for art, artists and similar non-productive elements.’
For me, artists are the saints who show that from logic we now move to direct perception.  Which means no more than to live on the level of the positive mind that is ever present before logic comes in.  That lineage of artists dates back beyond Cezanne, but their quest grew stronger, especially with Fluxus.

Louwrien Wijers
Fluxus Yesterday and Tomorrow
Edited from An Artist’s Impression 26 January 1993

If as Ranciére implies, (within the logic revealed by surrealism) ‘the ordinary becomes beautiful as a trace of the true’ and the ordinary becomes beautiful as a trace of the true if it is torn from its obviousness…
Then in its own historical context, concept art, performance art, and works produced by Fluxus and its ‘participants’, surely constitutes instances of ‘the tearing of life from its obviousness’… only for the ‘truth of life’ to become beautiful, within the social…
Whilst recognising we must always be able to integrate the concrete with the virtual, it is how the future use of virtual ‘intermedia*’ may play a role in the development of our ‘place and our functional practice’ – within virtual systems and environments, it’s agency, strategy and eventual operational effect,  – that we must look to…
And recognise that Fluxus, and its progenitors are valuable vectors, with their significance and value, still open to our scrutiny, research and interrogation… ignoring  them would be cretinous, to continue our investigations – some thing more than truly edifying…
What better register, on which to (temporarily) conclude the initiation of an analysis of Fluxus/FutureFluxus, from the perspective of virtual practice than…

Another way to look upon the relationship between
Art, Science and Wisdom might be:
Science involves learning
Art unlearning and
Wisdom knowing
This does not mean that art and science are mutually exclusive, but that wisdom encompasses them both, which implies in turn that science and art alike need the voice of wisdom, and not the other way around.
What can art and science contribute then?
Well, a modern ‘vocabulary’ and techniques of integration for one, so that the language of wisdom – eternal truth – and the way of wisdom – peacefulness and harmony – can be re-understood and re-lived by all, regardless of race, sex, institutions or culture in this our world that has lost its bearings…

Robert Filliou
Edited from A letter on Art meets Science and Spirituality May 1987
from Art & Design Profile No 28: Fluxus Today and Yesterday ’93

Text To Screen Ends…

PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE
IN ART, Promote living art, anti-art, promote
NON ART REALITY to be grasped by all peoples,
not only critics, dilettantes and professionals.

Other information/items were passed (dropped on) to spectators such as Note Cards, Images, ‘Random’ Land Marks, AOs etc. as the event proceeded –

Dropped Note Cards

➊     PERSONALISED FUTURE FLUXUS NOTE CARD
        (each spectator’s name was appended to the note card before
        being given/dropped on the avatar)

THIS IS YOUR PERSONALISED FUTURE FLUXUS NOTE CARD
Use it to make notes of your most creative intelligent thoughts and
analysis of life – share those thoughts with as many people you are able

➋     AFTER BEN VAUTIER – SINCE DUCHAMP ’82
    •    Since Duchamp, a cigarette butt will do
    •    Since J Cage, the sound of a fly will do
    •    Since Fluxus, nothing will do
    •    Since Virtual Techno-Culture, psycho-phenomena will do

➌     VIRTUAL GAP EVENTS CARDS

➀    MOST STIMULATING VIRTUAL GAP EVENT
    •    between logging-on and logging-of

➁    COMMON VIRTUAL GAP EVENT
    •    between seeing and understanding

➂    MOST INSIDIOUS CAPITALIST IDEOLOGICAL VIRTUAL GAP
EVENT
    •    between desire and purchase/acquisition

➍     FLUXUS DEFINITION IN FLUX
        Characterisation of the contents for the Two Brochure Prospectuses for Fluxus Year-boxes series:

•     Anti art
•     Automatism
•     Bruitisme
•     Brutalism
•     Cinema
•     Concept art
•     Concretism
•     Dada
•     Dance
•     Happenings
•     Indeterminacy
•     Lettrism
•     Music
•     Nihilism
•     Philosophy
•     Plastic arts
•     Poetry
•     Prose
•     Theatre

Reproduction of a different dictionary definition of Fluxus attached
source: Fluxus Codex ’95

Dropped ‘Random’ Landmarks
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Deshima/116/128/2976
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Photon%20Pinks/101/128/44
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Black%20Spot/211/216/27
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/1920s%20Berlin/236/233/751
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/The%20Wastelands/99/172/76
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Moulin%20Rouge/70/186/29
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Sede%20di%20Marte/96/155/40

Dropped Images

FUSE the cadres of cultural, social and political revolutionaries into united front & action !

 

“Fluxus is Dead” – was a mixed reality event – in the frame of Futurefluxus for May, 7th, at 7:30 am SLT (2011), at the virtual world of Cyland – Media Art Lab in Second Life
Organised co-ordinated and presented by Pinkpink Sorbet
Gina Broono performed with me – the performance would not have been possible without her participation