It has taken me a while to get to this entry. Duchamp, for me, ranks with John Cage as a figure of such incredible importance to the arts that it is simply not possible to sum him up in a few short sentences. At least not with a sense of justice. But then, since I did it for Cage, I'll do it for Duchamp too! Just remember that this is only the twenty second elevator speech version. Duchamp was active in the early part of the 20th century primarily as a painter. While even his paintings were revolutionary for their time (he included the dimension of time, taking cubism to another level - and cubism was already considered revolutionary), his real revolution came with his exhibition of the "ready-made" as a work of art. He turned a urinal 90 degrees, called it "Fountain", and signed it "R. Mutt", he brought a shovel into a gallery and called it, "in advance of a broken arm", and he exhibited a found bottle rack as a finished sculpture. His actions angered and confused the general public, and also most of the artistic elite. People ridiculed him and his work. But these simple actions by an artist changed art irrevocably and forever. These works forced people to ask not only what is "good art" or "bad art", but "what is art"? What can be art? What makes an object art anyway? Who can make art? Who can decide what is or is not art? Marcel Duchamp changed not only the world of art. He changed the world.
He was never closely associated with Fluxus, and his work falls pretty neatly into the modernist traditions of art and writing. So, why have I chosen to write about Cohen in The Fluxus Blog? I guess that the first connection that can be made between him and Fluxus is that one could make the argument that as a poet, singer, and songwriter, Leonard Cohen is engaged in the original Intermedia form. What could be more Intermedia than the intersection between poetry, music, and performance? I think that the argument is valid. But it is not overwhelmingly convincing. Fluxus was also about experimentation, humor, and postmodern philosophical ideas. Never-the-less, I think that poetic minstrels, like Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, at the dawn of the postmodern era, deserve a place at the Fluxus table. I chose Cohen primarily because of one stanza in one song. The song is Famous Blue Raincoat, and the stanza speaks about a friend who has moved into the desert to build a small home and plans to live off of the land. Cohen says of his friend, "You're living for nothing now, I hope you're keeping some kind of record." And for me, this moves Cohen's work outside of the modernist realm and into the realm of postmodern reflections on meaning and language.
Baudrillard's postmodern universe is very much in keeping with the Fluxus Attitude, and with Intermedia practices.
.My head is full of intellectual bullshit. Sometimes I welcome it. Sometimes I try to drive it out. Fluxus helps me do both.
I sometimes see Fluxus as being a continuation of dada, but with less nihilism --- or at least with a much more playful and optimistic view of nihilism. Perhaps something closer to Sartre (Existentialism is a Humanism) than to Nietzsche or Baudrillard. A kind of hedonistic nihilism, but one that leaves room to acknowledge love and suffering
I admit to being a nihilist myself --- nothing matters and nothing can change the fact that nothing matters. But (and this is important!) while we experience our existence in the universe everything matters ...and nihilism does not matter because it is useless as a way of living. For as long as we are alive --- Love is real. Pain is real. Suffering is real. Compassion is real. It doesn't matter that it doesn't matter because it matters while it matters, even if it doesn't really matter 'in the end'. I try to reconcile these two polarities. Fluxus helps. Sartre helps
I will answer your questions as best I can.
What in your opinion is the fluxus movement truly about ?
Your question makes a common but erroneous assumption. That is that Fluxus was a "movement". The idea of "movements" make the study of art history easier for art students and art historians, but Fluxus is not and never really was an art historical movement. It has been packaged as a movement for collectors of Fluxus objects and a few Fluxus artists have encouraged this in order to further their own careers or in an attempt to position themselves within an art historical context.
Fluxus was a way of being and a way of seeing the world and reacting to it. As such it shares a lot with dada, but without the same degree of nihilism and negativity. Fluxus continues to exist today because the attitudes and approaches to life that are embodied in Fluxus continue to exist.
The Fluxus artistic philosophy can be expressed as a synthesis of four key factors that define the majority of Fluxus work:
Why do you feel the fluxus movement is important in modern society ?
Fluxus is not important in modern society. Should it be?
Do you have any old articles or information on the fluxus art movement that would help in my thesis ?
Nothing
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has already received favourable reviews, including a review by Ken Friedman, one of the original Fluxus artists who himself produced numerous event scores. Friedman writes in part, "While there is still energy to be found in interpreting classical event scores, it is difficult to write new scores that convey the lively energy of earlier contributions. Cianciusi does this with works that balance subtle humor, meditative reflection, and a good sense of the tradition these works inhabit..." I am certain that any fans of Fluxus will find Walter's Event Scores
While Fluxus objects and events tend to possess the physical attributes of humour, simplicity, and intermedia, they are also created from an attitude towards life and art that encourages globalism, chance, experimentation, temporal factors and the unity of art & life. These aspects of the Fluxus attitude should be very familiar to readers of this Blog because they are all ideas from Ken Friedmans "12 ideas of Fluxus" listed in the previous post!
Much of the Fluxus attitude consists of what has also been termed postmodernism. The postmodern attitude is partly based on the idea of the simulacrum, described by Jean Baudrillard as a copy without an original. Baudrillard says in his essay, Simulacra and Simulation, "Of the same order as the impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real, is the impossibility of staging an illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible. It is the whole political problem of the parody, of hypersimulation or offensive simulation..." Fluxus art and artists often use postmodern playfulness as a tool to expose the unseen and unstated, yet often obvious, contradictions and hypocrisy in the ideas and beliefs that our modern society accepts as "known facts". Given Fluxus origins in the late 1950s and early 1960s it should be stated that postmodernism owes at least as much to Fluxus as Fluxus owes to postmodernism. Fluxus was in all the right places at all the right times to influence the postmodern philosophers and writers.
For me, much of the Fluxus attitude consists in making the mundane seem magical through the use of simple, playful experiments and exercise that take place where different media intersect.
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