ART

Fluxus is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They varied in performance, Neo-Dada noise music and visual art, urban planning, architecture, design, as well as literature. Fluxus has a strong current of anti-commercial and anti-art sensibility. Fluxus is sometimes described as intermedia. Fluxus was heavily influenced by the ideas of John Cage, who believed that one should embark on the piece without having a conception of the eventual end. It was the process of creating that was important, not the finished product. Another main influence was Marcel Duchamp, a French artist who had originally been active within Dada whose 'readymades' were influential to Fluxus. George Maciunas, the founder, coined the name Fluxus in 1961 as the title of a proposed magazine.

 

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, Nam June Paik, Dick Higgins and Wolf Vostell 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. (Tate, London). 

 

The origins of Fluxus lie in many of the concepts explored by composer John Cage in his experimental music of the 1950s. Cage taught a series of Experimental Composition classes, run between 1957 and 1959 at the New School for Social Research in New York City which explored notions of indeterminacy in art. These classes—later taught by Richard Maxfield—were attended by many artists and musicians who would become involved in Fluxus, including Jackson Mac Low, La Monte Young, George Brecht, Al Hansen, Dick Higgins and, later, George Maciunas.

The other main influence was to be found in the works of Marcel Duchamp. The term anti-art, a precursor to Dada, was coined by Duchamp around 1913 when he created his first readymades out of found objects (everyday objects found or purchased and declared art). He had created a series of artworks that used found objects, thereby negating any need for traditional artistic skill. Known as readymades, of which the most famous is Fountain. Soon after arriving to New York from Paris in 1915, Duchamp formed a group with Francis Picabia and American artist Man Ray. By 1916 the three of them became the center of radical anti-art activities in the United States. Their artworks were to become a major influence on Fluxus and conceptual art in general. In the late 1950s and very early 1960s, activities that would later adopt delineations such as Fluxus, Happenings, Nouveau réalisme, Pop Art, mail art, performance art and others were lumped together under the catch-all term "Neo-Dada".

 

A number of other contemporary happenings are credited as either anticipating Fluxus, or as proto-fluxus events.The most commonly cited include the series of Chambers Street loft concerts, New York, curated by Yoko Ono and La Monte Young in 1961 featuring pieces by Jackson Mac Low, Joseph Byrd, and Henry Flynt; the month-long Yam festival held in upstate New York by George Brecht and Robert Watts in May 1963 with Ray Johnson and Allan Kaprow (the culmination of a year's worth of Mail Art pieces); and a series of concerts held in Mary Bauermeister's studio, Cologne, 1960–61, featuring Nam June Paik and John Cage amongst many others. It was at one of these events in 1960, during his Etude pour Piano, that Paik leapt into the audience and cut John Cage's tie off, ran out of the concert hall, and then phoned the hall's organisers to announce the piece had ended. Dick Higgins has stated:

Fluxus started with the work, and then came together, applying the name Fluxus to work which already existed. It was as if it started in the middle of the situation, rather than at the beginning.