Fluxus
international network of artists, composers and designers
Fluxus is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s.
Quotes
edit- The Fluxus movement... developed its 'anti-art', anti-commercial aesthetics under the leadership of George Maciunas. Fluxus staged a series of festivals in Paris, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, London and New York, with avant-garde performances often spilling out into the street. Most of the experimental artists of the period, including Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik, took part in Fluxus events. The movement, which still continues, played an important role in the opening up of definitions of what art can be.
- My first concert - apart from Beethoven at School and Satie at the opening of my exhibition in Kleve in 1960 - was at the gallery Parnass in Wuppertal in 1963. Dressed like a regular pianist in dark grey flannel, black tie and no hat, I played the piano all over – not just the keys – with many pairs of old shoes until it disintegrated. My intention was neither destructive nor nihilistic. “Heal like with like” – similia similibus curantur – in the homeopathic sense. The main intention was to indicate a new beginning.. ..or simply a revolutionary act. This was my first public Fluxus appearance.
- Joseph Beuys in: Interviews with Caroline Tisdall, 1974 & 1978; as quoted in Energy Plan for the Western man - Joseph Beuys in America, Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, 1993. p. 128 - Joseph Beuys' comment on his first Fluxus performance in 1963 'Heal like with like'.
- On the first night I performed a 'Concert for tow Musicians'. It lasted for perhaps twenty seconds. I dashed forward in the gap between two performances wound up a clockwork toy, two drummers, on the piano, and let them play until the clockwork ran down. That was the end. The Fluxus people felt that this short action was my breakthrough, while the event of the second evening was perhaps too heavy, complicated and anthropological for them. Yet the “Siberian Symphony, section 1.” contained the essence of all my future activities and was, I felt, a wider understanding of what Fluxus could be.. ..(the Fluxus artists) held a mirror up to people without indicating how to change things. This is not to belittle what they did achieve in the way of indicating connections in life and how art could develop.
- Joseph Beuys in: Interviews with Caroline Tisdall, 1974 & 1978; as quoted in Energy Plan for the Western man - Joseph Beuys in America, Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, 1993. pp. 128-129 - quote on his early performance 'Concert for two Musicians' in 1965
- Only then would the insistence on participation of the action art of FLUXUS and Happening be fulfilled; only then would democracy be fully realized. Only a conception of art revolutionized to this degree can turn into a politically productive force, coursing through each person, and shaping history.
- Quote of Joseph Beuys in The Role of Documentation in Conceptual Art, Robert C. Morgan (1978); An Aesthetic Inquiry, p. 176.
- The misunderstandings have seemed to come from comparing fluxus with movements or groups whose individuals ‘have had some principle in common, or an agreed-upon program. In fluxus there has never been any attempt to agree on aims or methods; individuals with something unnameable in common have simply naturally coalesced to publish and perform their work. Perhaps this common something is a feeling that the bounds of art are much wider than they have conventionally seemed, or that art and certain long-established bounds are no longer very useful. At any rate, individuals in europe, the us, and japan have discovered each other’s work and found it nourishing (or something) and have grown objects and events which are original, and often uncategorizable, in a strange new way.
- George Brecht (1963), cited in: Hannah Higgins (2002), Fluxus Experience. p. 69
- Purge the world of bourgeois sickness, ‘intellectual’, professional & commercialized culture ... PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART, ... promote NON ART REALITY to be grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals ... FUSE the cadres of cultural, social & political revolutionaries into united front & action."
- George Maciunas (1963), Fluxus Manifesto, copies of which were thrown into the audience at the Festum Fluxorum Fluxus, Düsseldorf, February 1963.
- fluxus is the “event” according to george brecht:
- putting the flower vase on the piano.
- fluxus is the action of life/music: sending for a tango
- expert in order to be able to dance on stage.
- fluxus is the creation of a relationship between life and art,
- fluxus is gag, pleasure and shock,
- fluxus is an attitude towards art, towards the non-art of anti-art, towards the negation of one’s ego,
- fluxus is the major part of the education as to john cage, dadaism and zen,
- fluxus is light and has a sense of humor.
- Ben Vautier (1979) "Text on fluxus," partly cited in: Pina, Sónia da Silva. "Fluxus: do texto à acção. A cartografia de uma a (r) titude." (2011).
