Fluxus Codex

Jon Hendricks

Fluxus Codex

New York City, USA: Harry N. Abrams, 1998

616 pp., 24 x 29 x 5.5 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

This catalogue raisonné represents an extraordinary amount of research, listing every artwork ever mentioned in a Fluxus newspaper, newsletter or correspondence with George Maciunas. If my library was on fire, I would run here first. 

"To understand Fluxus as an art movement, it is helpful to consider the contextuality of the phenomenon. Its primary concerns fall outside those of most other art movements, challenging preconceived notions about art, the function of art, and the role of the artist in society. Unquestionably, there were precedents for Fluxus earlier in the twentieth century. These precursors, in broad terms, were Futurism, Dada, and Russian Constructivism. Though elements of each had become generally accepted, the essence of each remained taboo in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when several experimental movements were struggling against the high tide of academic abstraction. It was a time of very rapid change, a time to try things out, a time when artists were unhooking the corsets of art and pushing ideas to whatever limits imagination and resources could make them go.

Fluxus begins before it begins and ends, one hopes after it ends. The 1950s were a time of political conservatism. A period in art of abstraction, individualism, and nationalism. By the late 1950s, Abstract Expressionism had run its course. Senator Joseph McCarthy had finally been discredited and isolationism was temporarily dissolving in the mist of a new internationalism, the world was preparing for the 1960s, which, in retrospect, appear as one of the most tumultuous, creative, and vibrant periods that Western culture has ever seen, certainly rivaling the first decades of the twentieth century in Europe. Fluxus was in the center of this maelstrom.”

- Jon Hendricks, introduction