FLUXUS
The Fluxus movement , although a loose and sometimes disconnected array of individuals played an important role in the broadening of what is considered art...
Duchamp, Cage and 'indeterminacy'
The origins of the Fluxus movement lies in many of the concepts explored by composer John Cage in his experimental music of the 1930s through the 1960s, and who taught a series of classes in experimental composition from 1957 to 1959 at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Cage explored the notions of 'chance' operations in composition and was a key advocate of indeterminacy, creating music scores as a basis for compositions that could be performed in potentially infinite ways. Some of the artists and musicians who became involved in Fluxus, including Jackson Mac Low, La Monte Young, George Brecht, Al Hansen, and Dick Higgins attended Cage's classes.
A major influence is found in the work of Marcel Duchamp, who Cage admired. Also of importance were the Dadaist Poets and Painters. The term anti-art, a precursor to Dada, was coined by Duchamp around 1913, when he created his first 'readymades' from ordinary every day objects found or purchased and declared art.
Global Network of artists or (anti-artists) ?
Fluxus is often historically regarded as a global network of influential and vibrant artists who shared a unique, if not united, aspiration to revolutionise the avant-garde. Through the introduction of concept art, intermedia, and radical performance practices, Fluxus pioneered an aesthetic appreciation for the everyday. By intentionally confusing the boundaries of how and when an artwork could begin or end, exiting a room, making a salad, or ending a war were transformed into performative works of art. A diverse community of collaborators who influenced each other, Fluxus included amongst others the works of including Joseph Beuys, Willem de Ridder, George Brecht, John Cage, Robert Filliou, Al Hansen, Dick Higgins, Bengt af Klintberg, Alison Knowles, Addi Køpcke, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Shigeko Kubota, La Monte Young, Mary Bauermeister, Joseph Byrd, Ben Patterson, Daniel Spoerri, Ken Friedman, Terry Riley and Wolf Vostell.
Right: Flux Year Box 2, c. 1967, a Flux box edited and produced by George Maciunas, containing works by many early Fluxus artists
Events
A number of other contemporary events are credited as either anticipating Fluxus or as constituting proto-Fluxus events. The most commonly cited include the series of Chambers Street loft concerts, in New York, curated by Yoko Ono and La Monte Young in 1961, featuring pieces by Ono, 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 among many others.
The people in Fluxus had understood, as Brecht explained, that "concert halls, theatre's, and art galleries" were "mummifying". Instead, these artists found themselves "preferring streets, homes, and railway stations...." Maciunas recognized a radical political potential in all this forthrightly anti-institutional production, which was an important source for his own deep commitment to it. Deploying his expertise as a professional graphic designer, Maciunas played an important role in projecting upon Fluxus whatever coherence it would later seem to have had.