Fluxus and Friends

Estera Milman

Fluxus and Friends

Iowa City, USA: The University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1988

8 pp., 18 x 27 cm., staplebound

Edition size unknown

A slim oblong brochure for the exhibition Fluxus and Friends: Selections from the Alternative Traditions in the Contemporary Arts Collection, which took place between January and March of 1988 at the The University of Iowa Museum of Art.

The publication includes a text by curator Estera Milman (who also curated Fluxus: A Conceptual Country and guest-edited the Visible Language issue of the same name), an exhibition checklist and illustrations of work by Geoffrey Hendricks, George Maciunas, and Ben Vautier.

"In her Sunday, June 16, 1968, article for the New York Times, critic Grace Glueck reviewed the Flux Year Box 2, a wooden multiple containing samplings of miniature works by many Fluxus participants of that period. After describing its contents and listing its contributors, she wrote: "Flux Year Box 2 is produced by Fluxus, a loose knit collective of Happeners, Eventists, and way out musicians organized -no disorganized - in 1961 by George Maciunas. Though Fluxus's membership fluxuates [sic], it goes on dauntlessly producing fluxfests, fluxfilms, fluxgags and fluxbooks." Since this definition was offered, Fluxus has been described as a kind of alchemy, an international tendency, fusion or crossover, a transformation of life into art, a living collage, and a way of life. That the phenomenon appears to resist definition is based, in part, on the fact that Fluxus changed its public face to suit its intentions, its specific context, and the purposes of its many diverse practitioners.”

- Estera Milman