Cecil Touchon on Fluxus
Cecil Touchon is an American artist who works with Fluxus. His website can be seen at http://cecil.touchon.com.Cecil wrote the following response to an art student who posted a question on the Fluxlist:Fluxus is a lot like Post-Dogmatism. In post dogmatism – which is not post-fluxus - the key thing is the focus on the ‘threshold of becoming” that place where all things that have shape, take shape. It is the point of inception, the place from which the creative impulse rises where art is pure and our interaction with life is at it’s most powerful. To arrive somewhere close to this threshold is to have pealed away many layers of other intentions (and beliefs) that ‘sully’ our relationship with that creative impulse.Cecil Touchon also maintains:http://fluxnexus.com, http://fluxcase.com, http://fluxmuseum.org and http://www.fluxshop.com/
Starting in the late 1800’s let’s say, with the advance of psychology, there came to be a rising concern with finding this place of creative purity and we see a lot of experimentation going on where artists are attempting to find that threshold and attempting to understand the optimal state of being that an artist should be in when having found it and then what sort of art might be generated by that process. It was assumed from an early period that the state of childhood innocence and wonderment is the most likely starting point and so children’s art became highly prized and studied for the creative solutions children come up with. Being child-like has never been the goal of our culture but with artists taking an interest in the creative activities of children, there has been a significant increase in having respect for the state of childhood.
Seen in this light, Fluxus has done a great job of articulating issues that hamper free artistic development and encouraging the idea that everyone should engage themselves in creative activity. This has been done to some degree by attempting to develop processes that can be easily and cheaply documented and easily reproduced, encouraging the participation of those who would normally be a passive audience member. This is done through creating performance scores and the creation of simple objects that, by the mere apprehension of them, the viewer has engaged directly in a performance.
These were general trends happening in the art world and in the culture at large at the time fluxus got started and, for me, fluxus became a basket that many related and not so related ideas got dropped into. The complexity of Fluxus rests in this fact and fluxus serves as a sort of smoking gun of the times in which it took shape. Our current experiment is to see if we can continue to keep shooting into the crowd with the same gun.
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