Carla Liss | Sacrament Fluxkit

Carla Liss

Sacrament Fluxkit 

New York City, USA: Fluxus, c1969

Edition size unknown

A hinged plastic box housing vials of water of varying hues labeled "well," "faucet," "pool," "rain," "brook," "lake," "snow," "river" and "sea”. 

The water was intended to be housed in test tubes, though no known examples of this indicate that it was ever produced this way. Instead the water is housed in small injection bottles with metal caps and rubber diaphragms. The vials originally contained cortisone, which publisher George Maciunas injected to control his asthma. 

Maciunas also designed the box label, this being the less common of the two designs used for this work (see earlier post, here). 

Several versions of the Sacrament Fluxkit were advertised in Fluxus newsletters and price lists, varying from $6 to $30, including a wooden box containing test-tubes housing "water from many sources".

"Geoffrey Hendricks’s Flux Reliquary [below] and Carla Liss’s Sacrament Fluxkit take different approaches. Hendricks’s satirical “Flux Relics” include “Sweat of Lucifer from the heat of Hell,” “Fragment of rope by which Judas Iscariot hung himself,” “Holy Shit from diners at the Last Supper,” and other objects not that far removed from the relics found in churches around the world. Liss’s poetic Sacrament Fluxkit, on the other hand, consists of a box that is labeled on the inside lid with everyday sources of the “holy” water in the nine specimen bottles: “well, faucet, pool, rain, brook, lake, snow, river, sea.” Liss implies that it’s up to us; if we want, we can choose to have a sacramental experience each time we encounter water.”

- Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life