The Fluxus Reader (Academy Editions) - Softcover

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9780471978589: The Fluxus Reader (Academy Editions)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0471978582 ISBN 13: 9780471978589

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, 1998

The Fluxus Reader offers the first comprehensive overview on this challenging and controversial group. Fluxus began in the 1950s as a loose, international community of artists, architects, composers and designers. By the 1960s, Fluxus had become a laboratory of ideas and an arena for artistic experimentation in Europe, Asia and the United States. Described as ′the most radical and experimental art movement of the 1960s′, Fluxus challenged conventional thinking on art and culture for over four decades. It had a central role in the birth of such key contemporary art forms as concept art, installation, performance art, intermedia and video. Despite this influence, the scope and scale of this unique phenomenon have made it difficult to explain Fluxus in normative historical and critical terms.

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From the Author:

Fluxus is a Laboratory --
George Maciunas first asked me to write the history of Fluxus in the autumn of 1966. I was sixteen then, living in New York after dropping out of college for a term. George enrolled me in Fluxus that August. --

When I moved back to California. George appointed me director of Fluxus West. Fluxus West became a center for spreading Fluxus ideas across North America – as well as parts of Europe and the Pacific. We had a project center, a traveling exhibition program, a studio in a Volkswagen bus, a publishing house, and a research program. These last two led George again to ask me to write a comprehensive, official history of Fluxus. I agreed to do it. I didn’t know what I was getting into. --

The history was never completed, but the unfinished history gave rise to many projects and publications. The Fluxus Reader is one of them. It presents articles by some of the best historians and theorists writing on Fluxus today. Its purpose is explaining a how and why of Fluxus. --

Emmett Williams once wrote a short poem on that how and why. He wrote, "Fluxus is what Fluxus does – but no one knows whodunit." What is it that Fluxus does? Dick Higgins offered one answer when he wrote, "Fluxus is not a moment in history, or an art movement. Fluxus is a way of doing things, a tradition, and a way of life and death." For Dick, Fluxus was more important as an idea and a potential for social change than as a specific group of people or a collection of objects. --

As I see it, Fluxus has been a laboratory. It is a project characterized by George Maciunas’s notion of the "learning machine." Twelve ideas summarize the how and why of Fluxus: globalism, the unity of art and life, intermedia, experimentalism, chance, playfulness, simplicity, implicativeness, exemplativism, specificity, presence in time and musicality. --

The implications of these ideas have been more interesting – and more startling – than they may have first seemed. Fluxus has been a complex system of practices and relationships. The fact that the art world can sometimes be a forum for philosophical practice made it possible for Fluxus to develop and demonstrate ideas that would later be seen in such frameworks as multimedia, telecommunications, hypertext, industrial design, urban planning, architecture, publishing, philosophy, even management theory. This fluid, transdisciplinary, intermedia nature makes Fluxus lively, engaging. It also makes Fluxus difficult to describe. --

We can view Fluxus through several disciplines. One is history. Fluxus ideas were first summarized and exemplified by a specific group of people who pioneered these ideas when their thoughts and practices were distinct and different from the world around them. Fluxus was distinct from the art world and from the other fields in which Fluxus would come to play a role. History offers a useful perspective in understanding what Fluxus was and did. --

Fluxus, however, involves more than art history. Literature, music, dance, typography, social sculpture, architecture, mathematics, politics all played a role. Fluxus is an active philosophy of experience that only sometimes takes the form of art. It stretches across the arts and across the areas between them. Fluxus is a way of viewing society and life, a way of creating social action and life activity. The Fluxus Reader lays out a map, a cognitive structure filled with tools, markers, and links to ideas and history of many kinds. --

The Fluxus Reader corrects rigid, ill-informed notions that discount, discredit or disenfranchise the rich variety of ideas that made Fluxus such a lively forum. --

Marcel Duchamp once declared that the true artist of the future would go underground. Perhaps Fluxus has gone underground as an art form, leaving history, and a legend, behind. What survives and remains interesting is a body of knowledge, ideas, and social practice that flourished in the laboratory named Fluxus. --

From the Back Cover:

The Fluxus Reader Fluxus began in the 1950s as a loose, international community of artists, architects, composers and designers. By the 1960s, Fluxus has become a laboratory of ideas and an arena for artistic exprmentation in Europe, Asia and the United States. Described as ′the most radical and experimental art movement of the 1960s′, Fluxus chaqllenged conventional thinking on art and culture for over four decadese. It had a central role in the birth of such key contemporary art forms as concept art, installation, performance art, intermedia and video. Despite this influence, the scope and scale of this unique phenomenon have made it difficult to explain Fluxus in normative historical and critical terms. The Fluxus Reader offers the first comprehensive overview on this challenging and controversial group. The Fluxus Reader is written by leading scholars and experts from Europe and the United States. It is edited by Ken Friedman, a Fluxus artist as a sixteen–year–old university student in 1996 and now Associate Professor of Leadership and strategic design at the Norwegian School of Management, Oslo, where he also directs the Nordic Center for Innovation.

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