[Fluxus]
Fluxattitudes
Ghent, Belgium/Buffalo, USA/New York City, USA: Imschoot/Hallwalls/New Museum, 1991
62 pp., 62, 22.9 x 15.3 cm., softcover
Edition size unknown
A thin catalogue edited by Cornelia Lauf and Susan Hapgood, and designed by Nancy Dwyer, for the exhibition that ran from February 23rd to March 27th, 1991, at Hallwalls and then travelled to the next year to The New Museum in New York from May 10th to August 16th.
FluxAttitudes explored the tenets and significant influence of the Fluxus ‘movement'. The works included performance, sound, mail art, film, and audience participation projects, with many of the works responding to the 1992 Presidential election between Democrat Bill Clinton, incumbent Republican President George H. W. Bush, and independent candidate Ross Perot.
The title includes texts by Lauf, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Susan Hapgood, Bruce Altshuler, Kristine Stiles, Tod Lippy, Douglas Kahn, Ted Byfield, and Owen Smith.
Exhibited artists included Eric Andersen, Ay-O, Guillaume Bijl, George Brecht, Giuseppe Chiari, Philip Corner, Meg Cranston, Nancy Dwyer, Brian Eno, Robert Filliou, Henry Flynt, Ken Friedman, Group Material, Al Hansen, Sohei Hashimoto, Geoff Hendricks, Hi Red Center, Dick Higgins, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Joe Jones, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Milan Knizak, Alison Knowles, Takehisa Kosugi, Shigeko Kubota, Zini Lardieri, Liz Larner, György Ligeti, Jackson Mac Low, George Maciunas, Jill McArthur, Larry Miller, Peter Moore, Cady Noland, Claes Oldenburg, Ben Patterson, Takako Saito, Peter Schmidt, Thomas Schmit, Carolee Schneemann, Paul Sharits, Chieko Shiomi, Daniel Spoerri, Laura Stein, James Tenney, Tiravanija, Yasunao Tone, Ben Vautier, Wolf Vostell, Yoshimasa Wada, Robert Watts, Emmett Williams, and La Monte Young.
Works included classics like Yoko Ono’s Mend Piece, Nam June Paik’s Magnet TVs, and Dick Higgins’ Concerto For Politics. Newer works included Christian Marclay’s collaboration with a security guard (who plays harmonica, sporadically throughout the exhibition), Zen Domino by Vic Muniz, and Jackie McAllister’s recreation of Ono’s all-white chess set, made from Lego bricks.
"There are various ways to structure an exhibition about historical art, even art made during the last thirty years. There is the chronological progression, the connoisseur's choice, the great nations survey, the theme show, and the social history perspective - leading in turn to the discovery of the neglected Other - and the multicultural approach. We did not want to belittle any of these time-honored methods, adopted by Western museums from the Musee d'Orsay to The New Museum of Contemporary Art. But as the curators of this exhibition we believed the elusive Fluxus movement required another tack.
Organizing an exhibition about Fluxus along chronological lines seemed pointless, as did highlighting key individuals. A good number of supposedly Fluxus artists dispute both the term and their membership, defining their affiliation instead by the miles they'll drive to distance themselves from both. Nonetheless, museums throughout the world are presenting a variety of Fluxi, grappling with an amorphous, slippery character, force-fitting the institutional straitjacket onto an abundance of anti-institutional manifestations one might call the Fluxus movement. The general consensus of scholarly parasites claims that Fluxus was made by a loose-knit collective of artists who gathered some time in the early 1960s from the fields of music, performance, film and art. They pursued forms that were formless, events that could be repeated by anyone, and a battery of props that-unless perhaps in the annals of Zurich Dada-had few precedents for their economy of means, wit, mutability, and capacity for endless replication.
If one were to organize this exhibition chronologically with supposedly neutral documentation as a goal, where would one stake the precise beginning or end for Fluxus? And anyway, who would hammer the stake? Here the mercurial figure of George Maciunas enters, the man who appointed himself custodian of Fluxus, the stake-driver and list-maker. Some time in 1962 he began to systematize the many events that often arose from ideas transmitted in the late 1950s by John Cage. Maciunas named the ever-changing group Fluxus and proceeded to feverishly package and promote the work of this diverse and gifted collective of people until his death in 1978 -occasionally creating some art of his own along the way. If most agree that Fluxus officially began around 1962, when did it end? Some say it died with Maciunas, others say Fluxus lives to this day. With due respect to Maciunas, it was too arbitrary to doggedly follow his list and his dates.
After all,* the idea of Fluxus was to democratize the making process, devalue the commodity status of the art work, and free people to think about art in an everyday kind of way, with more humor than rever- ence. So, as we see it, FluxAttitudes is a tribute to this spirit, not to the differences between the individuals, but to their commonality. It includes the work of figures historically associated with the movement, as well as contemporary artists whose work reflects a Fluxus approach. It celebrates sensibility over form, the living over the relic.
While the appearance of the exhibition, both its first venue in 1991, at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, New York, and now at The New Museum, has mutated, its conceptual foundations have remained constant. In Buffalo, we integrated period Fluxus and post-Fluxus works of art with documentation, toys, and assorted books in an environment that blurred cate- gorical distinctions , and always emphasized the.viewer's interactive role. Throughout, we have aimed to expose the unspoken procedures of curators and institutions. For The New Museum, we even suggested a theme: we asked artists to address the 1992 U.S. Presidential elections in their work. Participants were invited to contribute an interactive element to the exhibition: a score, a performance, an object, or an idea that directly involves the visitor. Each work in FluxAttitudes is assigned an insurance value of $0, and information labels attributing specific works are once again eliminated. While these aspects caused some discomfort, we want to revive, momentarily, Maciunas's beliefs that art should be accessible to all, with- out commodity or institutional value, and that the individual ego should be suppressed in the interests of the collective. (Regarding his 1963 manifesto calling for a purge of bourgeois sickness, intellectual, professional, and commercialized culture-well, that wasn't so easy.)
There were various reactions to our invitation letter as the written responses on display indicate. Some artists refused to participate. Others did not answer. And then there is a list, a motley, glorious, seemingly infinite list of proposals for the visitor- activated work you see, hear and make in these two galleries. And this entire project, we hope, in its eclecticism, arbitrariness, and disrespect for traditional notions of quality and framing, will have a democratic strength, lightness of touch, and Fluxness
of attitude.
* "After all" means we get the last word here."
- Cornelia Lauf and Susan Hapgood
