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Fluxus
 

Fluxus (from "to flow") is an art movement noted for the blending of different artistic disciplines, primarily visual art but also music and literature. Fluxus is often described as being Intermedia because it occurs when different media intersect. For example, poetry and visual art intersect in Visual Poetry, and concept, text, and performance intersect in Fluxus Event Scores. Fluxus traces its beginnings to John Cage's 1957 to 1959 Experimental Composition classes at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Many of his students were artists working in other media with little or no background in music. Cage's students included Fluxus founding members Jackson Mac Low, Al Hansen, George Brecht and Dick Higgins. Many other artists were invited by Cage to attend his classes unofficially at the New School. Marcel Duchamp and Allan Kaprow (who is credited as the creator of the first "happenings") were also influential to Fluxus. Fluxus was named and loosely organized in 1962 by George Maciunas (1931-78), a Lithuanian-born American artist. In its early days Fluxus artists were active in Europe (especially in Germany), and Japan as well as in the United States.

Fluxus encourages a DIY (do it yourself) esthetic, and values simplicity over complexity. Like Dada before it, Fluxus includes a strong current of anti-commercialism and an anti-art sensibility, disparaging the conventional market-driven art world in favor of an artist-centered creative practice. Fluxus artists prefer to work with whatever materials are at hand, and either create their own work or collaborate in the creation process with colleagues. Hiring assistants or outsourcing part of the creative process to commercial fabricators is not part of typical Fluxus practice. The small scale and personal nature of Mail Art is much more in keeping with Fluxus than the large scale sculptures of Jeff Koons, even though Koons might share an anti-art, Dadaist esthetic with Fluxus.

The art forms most closely associated with Fluxus are Event Scores and Fluxus Boxes. Fluxus Boxes (sometimes called Fluxkits or Fluxboxes) originated with George Maciunas who would gather collections of his printed cards, games, and ideas, and put them into small plastic boxes. Event Scores, such as George Brecht's Drip Music, are essentially performance scripts that are usually only a few lines long and consist of descriptions of actions to be performed rather than dialogue. Fluxus artists differentiate Event Scores from "happenings". Whereas Happenings were sometimes complicated, lengthy performances meant to blur the lines between performer and audience, performance and reality, Fluxus performances were usually brief and simple. The Event performances sought to elevate the banal, to be mindful of the mundane, and to simultaneously dissemble the high culture of academic and market-driven music and art. Other creative forms that have been adopted by Fluxus practitioners include collage, audio, music, video, and poetry — especially visual poetry and concrete poetry.

Among its early associates were Joseph Beuys, Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik and Yoko Ono who explored media ranging from performance art to poetry to experimental music to film. They took the stance of opposition to the ideas of tradition and professionalism in the arts of their time, the Fluxus group shifted the emphasis from what an artist makes to the artist's personality, actions, and opinions. Throughout the 1960s and '70s (their most active period) they staged "action" events, engaged in politics and public speaking, and produced sculptural works featuring unconventional materials. Their radically untraditional works included, for example, the video art of Nam June Paik and the performance art of Beuys. The often playful style of Fluxus artists led to their being considered by some little more than a group of pranksters in their early years. Fluxus has also been compared to Dada and aspects of Pop Art and is seen as the starting point of mail art.

Since the death of Maciunas in 1978 a rift opened in the movement between those artists, historians and theorists who placed Fluxus in a specific time frame (1962 to 1978), and others who continue to see Fluxus as a living entity held together by its core values and world view. Thus it is not unusual for Fluxus to be referred to in either the past or the present tense. It has been suggested by some who continue to work in the Fluxus movement that a close association by the Fluxus artist and curator Geoffrey Hendricks with a major historical Fluxus collection (the Silverman collection) has unduly influenced the view that Fluxus died with Maciunas. Hendricks and associated art historians argue that Fluxus was a historical movement that occurred at a particular time, and that while contemporary artists may have been influenced by it, they cannot lay claim to being members of it.

While there is not a large Fluxus artist community in any single urban center, the rise of the Internet in the 1990s has enabled a vibrant Fluxus community to thrive online in virtual space. Some of the original artists from the sixties and seventies remain active in online communities such as the Fluxlist, and other artists, writers, musicians, and performers have joined them in cyberspace. Fluxus artists also continue to meet in cities around the world to collaborate and communicate in "real-time" and physical spaces.

Fluxus artists

Many artists have associated themselves with Fluxus over the years, including:

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