The Fluxus Attitude
If Fluxus is an attitude and not an "Art Movement" in the traditional art-historical context, what exactly is the Fluxus attitude?
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.
one comment:
The Absurd.
Neil () - 02 11 07 - 21:54
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