FLUXUS: Art as Provocation

NYU's Grey Art Gallery, in a few short weeks, will be nearing the end of its exhibition of "Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life." The show at 100 Washington Square East, runs through December 3rd.  Comprising an international network of artists, composers, and designers that developed in the 1960s, Fluxus resists categorization as an art movement, collective, or group. It also defies traditional geographical, chronological, and medium-based approaches. Rather, Fluxus participants embrace a “do-it-yourself” approach to art and creativity, fashioning their activities from the casual and prosaic aspects of daily life, which has the effect of blurring the boundaries between art and life. George Maciunas, Fluxus’s Lithuanian-born instigator, envisioned art as social process. He and other Fluxus artists created works that celebrate collaboration, the ephemeral, and the everyday—often inflected with a touch of playful anarchy. Aiming to circumvent both conventional aesthetics and the commercial art world, they urged both their colleagues and the public to approach life with a Fluxus attitude.

Yoko Ono's Lighting Piece

In keeping with this spirit, the exhibit at NYU's Grey Gallery encourages viewers actively to interpret and respond to the works on view, and to explore art’s relationships with essential themes of human existence. Follow the provided map to locate the fourteen sections framed as questions, for example, “What Am I?,” “Happiness?,” “Health?,” “Freedom?,” “Danger?.” Featuring over a hundred objects, documents, videos, and ephemera, the show also foregrounds two Fluxus innovations: event scores and art-as-games-in-a-box, many of which were gathered into Fluxkits and sold at intentionally low prices via mail order or at artist-run stores. The events were even more accessible. Sometimes consisting of just one word—such as George Brecht’s “Exit,” in the section “Death?”—Fluxus events could be performed by anyone, anywhere, at any time.  

Nam June Paik's Nothingness (from Zen for TV 1963/78)

The exhibit features work by one of the best known Fluxus artists, Yoko Ono, as well as Nam June Paik, George Maciunas and Ben Vautier, among many others.  Intended as "provocations to 'high'” culture and the increasing commodification of art, Fluxus works were meant to be picked up and handled, not simply looked at. Exhibiting Fluxus today highlights yet another question: How can we maintain the defiant and playful spirit in which these objects were made, while at the same time safeguarding and preserving them for future audiences?

NYU "Fluxus" exhibition website here

--Deep in the Heart of Brooklyn