Milan Knížák
Flux White Meditation
New York City, USA: Fluxus, 1969
11.9 x 10 x 1 cm.
Edition size unknown
Milan Knížák's works are incredibly important to the history of sound art, and Artists' Records in particular (Ursula Block took the name of one of his Broken Music as the title for her quintessential book on the subject), and his Vice-Versand edition is excellent.
His boxed works for Fluxus, however, are all pretty poor. Flux Snakes is particularly bad, and the empty boxes of Flux Dreams has been done better by many others, before and since.
Flux White Meditation features a plastic box with an offset label (as always, designed by George Maciunas - see his early study for the graphic below) and containing white powder.
Curator Jon Hendricks writes in Fluxus Codex: "Narcotic powder? dust? ashes? crushed rocks? The work is not explained and could relate to any number of Knizak's activities". He also adds that "Knížák has a very ambivalent attitude toward the Fluxus realizations of his pieces and remembers very little of their genesis." This suggests that they may have been throw-away ideas that Maciunas ran with.
Flux White Meditation was reissued/continued by Barbara Moore's Reflux Editions in the 1980s. Both versions remain scarce.
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