162-403: Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers, and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finished product. Fluxus is known for experimental contributions to different artistic media and disciplines and for generating new art forms. These art forms include intermedia ,
324-657: A "painter who has left the canvas to activate the real space and the lived time." Joan Jonas (born July 13, 1936) is an American visual artist and a pioneer of video and performance art, who is one of the most important female artists to emerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Jonas' projects and experiments provided the foundation on which much video performance art would be based. Her influences also extended to conceptual art , theatre, performance art and other visual media. She lives and works in New York and Nova Scotia, Canada. Immersed in New York's downtown art scene of
486-439: A Dead Hare (1965) he covered his face with honey and gold leaf and explained his work to a dead hare that lay in his arms. In this work he linked spacial and sculptural, linguistic and sonorous factors to the artist's figure, to his bodily gesture, to the conscience of a communicator whose receptor is an animal. Beuys acted as a shaman with healing and saving powers toward the society that he considered dead. In 1974 he carried out
648-783: A French artist who was active in Dada (1916 – c. 1922 ). George Maciunas , largely considered to be the founder of this fluid movement, coined the name Fluxus in 1961 to title a proposed magazine. Many artists of the 1960s took part in Fluxus activities, including Joseph Beuys , Willem de Ridder , George Brecht , John Cage , Robert Filliou , Al Hansen , Dick Higgins , Bengt af Klintberg , Alison Knowles , Addi Køpcke , Yoko Ono , Nam June Paik , Shigeko Kubota , La Monte Young , Mary Bauermeister , Joseph Byrd , Ben Patterson , Daniel Spoerri , Eric Andersen (artist) , Ken Friedman , Terry Riley and Wolf Vostell . Not only were they
810-636: A Salad" and "Make a Soup.". Each was shaped by their times and their associations with artists of the previous generation such as Sari Dienes who were pointing the way to the changes of the 1960s and 70s with strong personnas and art. Some made experimental and performative work having to do with the body that created a powerful female presence, which existed within Fluxus from the group's beginning as illustrated by works including Carolee Schneemann's "Interior Scroll", Yoko Ono's " Cut Piece ", and Shigeko Kubota 's "Vagina Painting". Women working within Fluxus were often simultaneously critiquing their position within
972-445: A Shaker seed house, into an important center for both Fluxus artists and scholars, with Mrs. Brown alternately cooking meals and showing guests her collection. Activities centered on a large archive room on the second floor built by Maciunas, who settled in nearby Great Barrington , where it was discovered that Maciunas developed cancer of the pancreas and liver in 1977. Three months before his death, he married his friend and companion,
1134-512: A Young Cloud by Yoko + Everybody (May 23–29); The Store by Yoko + Fluxfactory (May 30-June 5), with Ono, Maciunas, Wada, Ay-O; and finally Examination by Yoko + Fluxschool (June 6–12) with Ono, Geoffrey Hendricks, Watts, Mieko Shiomi and Robert Filliou . As Fluxus gradually became more famous, Maciunas' ambitions for the sale of cheap multiples grew. The second flux-anthology, the Fluxkit (late 1964), collected together early 3D work made by
1296-542: A better adjective. He was somehow able to carry the whole thing off, without my having to go 57 miles to find a printer. Since Maciunas was colorblind , Fluxus multiples were almost always black and white. After his contract with the US Air Force was terminated due to ill health, Maciunas was forced to return to the US on 3 September 1963. Once back in New York, he set about organizing a series of street concerts and opened
1458-556: A book of random numbers developed to aid in the production of nuclear weapons during the Cold War, to randomly rearrange and rewrite text by Gertrude Stein in a series of poems. He originally discovered A Million Random Digits in 1958 and used it in work throughout his life. The Stein series, between 1998 and 2003, marks one of his final projects. Despite their mechanical nature, many of these chance poems open up space for sentimentality and delicate interpretation. One example of this
1620-440: A card, then I went inside and joined the circus; so both groups got angry with me. Oh well. Some people say that Fluxus died that day—I once thought so myself—but it turned out I was wrong. The event, arranged by Charlotte Moorman as part of her 2nd Annual New York Avant Garde Festival , would cement animosities between Maciunas and her, with Maciunas frequently demanding that artists associated with Fluxus have nothing to do with
1782-500: A cardboard box, was the first in a series of artworks that Maciunas printed that became known as Fluxkits . Cheap, mass-produced and easily distributed, Fluxkits were originally intended to form an ever-expanding library of modern performance art . Water Yam was published in an edition of 1000 and originally cost $ 4. By April 1964, almost a year later, Maciunas still had 996 copies unsold. Maciunas' original plan had been to design, edit and pay for each edition himself, in exchange for
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#17327724159751944-589: A commodity and declared themselves a sociological art movement. Fluxus was informally organized in 1962 by George Maciunas (1931–1978). This movement had representation in Europe, the United States and Japan. The Fluxus movement, mostly developed in North America and Europe under the stimulus of John Cage , did not see the avant-garde as a linguistic renovation, but it sought to make a different use of
2106-766: A composers' conference and led a workshop in Nelson, New Zealand . He read, performed, was interviewed, and led workshops in Wellington , Dunedin , and Auckland as well. In 1989, Mac Low participated in the Fine Arts Festival at the University of North Carolina . From 1990 to 1991, Mac Low served on the poetry panel of the New York Foundation for the Arts . In 1993, Mac Low and Anne Tardos gave
2268-531: A connection with performance art, as they are created as a live action, like his best-known artworks of paintings created with the bodies of women. The members of the group saw the world as an image, from which they took parts and incorporated them into their work; they sought to bring life and art closer together. One of the other movements that anticipated performance art was the Japanese movement Gutai , who made action art or happening . It emerged in 1955 in
2430-623: A contemplative nature. In Tokyo Japan 1964 Yoko Ono, a nonconformist to the Fluxus community, independently published her artist’s book Grapefruit . The book’s text itself encompassing event scores and other forms of participatory art. An event score from the book: Cloud Piece Imagine the clouds dripping. Dig a hole in your garden to put them in. On September 25, 1965, the FluxOrchestra , with La Monte Young conducting, played at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York City with
2592-536: A diverse community of collaborators who influenced each other, they were also, largely, friends. They collectively had what were, at the time, radical ideas about art and the role of art in society. Fluxus founder George Maciunas proposed a well known manifesto, but few considered Fluxus to be a true movement, and therefore the manifesto was not largely adopted. Instead, a series of festivals in Wiesbaden, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Amsterdam, London, and New York, gave rise to
2754-512: A fantastic ability to get things done.... if you had things to be printed he could get them printed. It's pretty hard in East Brunswick to get good offset printing. It's not impossible, but it's not so easy, and since I'm very lazy it was a relief to find somebody who could take the burden off my hands. So there was this guy Maciunas, a Lithuanian or Bulgarian, or somehow a refugee or whatever—beautifully dressed—"astonishing looking" would be
2916-536: A festival he had organized, called Après Cage; Kleinen Sommerfest (After Cage; a Small Summer Festival), in Wuppertal , West Germany, 9 June 1962. Maciunas was an avid art historian, and initially referred to fluxus as 'neo-dadaism' or 'renewed dadaism'. He wrote a number of letters to Raoul Hausmann , an original dadaist , outlining his ideas. Hausmann discouraged the use of the term; I note with much pleasure what you said about German neodadaists—but I think even
3078-434: A formal linear narrative, or which alternately does not seek to depict a set of fictitious characters in formal scripted interactions. It therefore can include action or spoken word as a communication between the artist and audience, or even ignore expectations of an audience, rather than following a script written beforehand. Some types of performance art nevertheless can be close to performing arts . Such performance may use
3240-637: A joint concert of their works for voices with prerecorded tapes at Experimental Intermedia, New York City . In January 1996, he presented readings and performances at Cowell College of the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2000, Mac Low performed two readings of his poetry at the Bjørnson Festival 2000 in Molde , Norway. He also unveiled a monument to Kurt Schwitters on an island off Molde. In 2008, Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works
3402-538: A locker (1971) he stayed for five days inside a school locker, in Shoot (1971) he was shot with a firearm, and inhabited for twenty two days a bed inside an art gallery in Bed Piece (1972). Another example of endurance artist is Tehching Hsieh. During a performance created in 1980–1981 ( Time Clock Piece ), where Hsieh took a photo of himself next to time clock installed in his studio every hour for an entire year. Hsieh
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#17327724159753564-415: A loose but robust community with many similar beliefs. In keeping with the reputation Fluxus earned as a forum of experimentation, some Fluxus artists came to describe Fluxus as a laboratory. The origins of Fluxus lie in many of the concepts explored by composer John Cage in his experimental music of the 1930s through the 1960s. After attending courses on Zen Buddhism taught by D. T. Suzuki , Cage taught
3726-543: A machine to facilitate humming. Maciunas' belief in the collective extended to authorship; a number of pieces from this period were anonymous, mis-attributed, or have had their authorship since questioned. As a further complication, Maciunas was in the habit of dramatically changing ideas submitted by various artists before he put the works into production. Solid Plastic in Plastic Box , credited to Per Kirkeby 1967, for instance, had originally been realised by Kirkeby as
3888-718: A male dominated society while also exposing the inequalities within an art collective that claimed to be open and diverse. George Maciunas, in his rejection of Schneeman as a member of Fluxus, called her "guilty of Baroque tendencies, overt sexuality, and theatrical excess". "Interior Scroll" was a response to Schneemann's experience as a filmmaker in the 1950s and 1960s, when male filmmakers claimed that women should restrict themselves to dance. He said we are fond of you You are charming But don't ask us To look at your films We cannot There are certain films We cannot look at The personal clutter The persistence of feeling The hand-touch sensibility In An evening with Fluxus women:
4050-686: A member of the New York State Association of Realtors. FluxHousing Co-Operatives continued to redevelop the area over the next decade, and were widened to include plans to set up a FluxIsland - a suitable island was located near Antigua, but the money to buy and develop it remained unforthcoming- and finally a performance arts centre called the FluxFarm established in New Marlborough , Massachusetts. The plans were continually dogged by financial problems, constant run-ins with
4212-479: A meta-art which arose when strategies of the Minimalists were expanded to focus on site and context. As well as an aesthetic agenda, the work progressed from perceptions of the physical properties of the gallery to the social and political context, largely taking the form of permanent public sculpture in the last two decades of a highly prolific career, whose diversity could exasperate his critics. Yayoi Kusama
4374-521: A metal box, inscribed 'This Box Contains Wood'. When opened, the box would be found to contain sawdust. By the time the multiple had been manufactured by Maciunas, it was a block of solid plastic contained in a plastic box of the same color. Conversely, Maciunas assigned Degree Face Clock , in which a clock face is measured out in 360°, to Kirkeby despite being an idea by Robert Watts ; Some years ago, when I spoke with Robert Watts about Degree Face Clock and Compass Face Clock , he had recalled thinking up
4536-623: A new shop, the 'Fluxhall', on Canal Street . 12 concerts, "away from the beaten track of the New York art scene", took place on Canal Street, 11 April to 23 May 1964. With photographs taken by Maciunas himself, pieces by Ben Vautier , Alison Knowles and Takehisa Kosugi were performed in the street for free, although in practice there was 'no audience to speak of' anyway. The people in Fluxus had understood, as Brecht explained, that "concert halls, theaters, and art galleries" were "mummifying". Instead, these artists found themselves "preferring streets, homes, and railway stations...." Maciunas recognized
4698-687: A poster and program designed by George Maciunas. Copies of the program were folded into paper airplanes and launched during the evening, which included performances of "Falling Event" by Chieko Shiomi , "Symphony No. 3 'On the Floor from 'Clouds Scissors'" by George Brecht , "4 Pieces for Orchestra to La Monte Young" by Yoko Ono, "Disappearing Music for Face" by Shiomi, "Tactical Pieces for Orchestra" and "Olivetti Adding Machine in Memoriam for Adriano Olivetti" by Anthony Cox , "Trance for Orchestra" by Watts, "Sky Piece to Jesus Christ*" by Ono, "Octet for Winds 'In
4860-606: A public action. Names to be highlighted are Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline , whose work include abstract and action painting. Nouveau réalisme is another one of the artistic movements cited in the beginnings of performance art. It was a painting movement founded in 1960 by art critic Pierre Restany and painter Yves Klein , during the first collective exhibition in the Apollinaire Gallery in Milan. Nouveau réalisme was, along with Fluxus and other groups, one of
5022-399: A radical political potential in all this forthrightly anti-institutional production, which was an important source for his own deep commitment to it. Deploying his expertise as a professional graphic designer, Maciunas played an important role in projecting upon Fluxus whatever coherence it would later seem to have had. Along with the New York shop, Maciunas built up a distribution network for
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5184-427: A range of publications, including The New York Times , The Guardian , The Village Voice and The Nation . Carolee Schneemann was an American visual experimental artist , known for her multi-media works on the body, narrative, sexuality and gender . She created pieces such as Meat Joy (1964) and Interior Scroll (1975). Schneemann considered her body a surface for work. She described herself as
5346-415: A regular newsletter with contributions by artists and musicians such as Ray Johnson and John Cale, and tin cans filled with poems, songs and recipes about beans by Alison Knowles ( see ). After returning to New York, Maciunas became reacquainted with Henry Flynt, who encouraged members of Fluxus to take a more overtly political stance. One of the results of these discussions was to set up a picket line at
5508-586: A roundtable discussion , hosted at New York University on 19 February 2009 by Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory and the Department of Performance Studies, a passage from Mieko Shiomi reads "...the best thing about Fluxus, I think, is that there was no discrimination on the basis of nationality and gender. Fluxus was open to anyone who shared similar thoughts about art and life. That's why women artists could be so active without feeling any frustration." Shigeo Kubota 's Vagina Painting (1965),
5670-481: A row about it... At the same time, Maciunas used his connections at work to start printing cheap mass-produced books and multiples by some of the artists that were involved in the performances. The first three to be printed were Composition 1961 by La Monte Young ( see it here , An Anthology of Chance Operations edited by Young and Mac Low and Water Yam , by George Brecht. Water Yam , a series of event scores printed on small sheets of card and collected together in
5832-428: A script or create a fictitious dramatic setting, but still constitute performance art in that it does not seek to follow the usual dramatic norm of creating a fictitious setting with a linear script which follows conventional real-world dynamics; rather, it would intentionally seek to satirize or to transcend the usual real-world dynamics which are used in conventional theatrical plays. Performance artists often challenge
5994-518: A series of Fluxfests across Western Europe. Starting with 14 concerts between 1 and 23 September 1962, at Wiesbaden , these Fluxfests presented work by musicians such as John Cage, Ligeti , Penderecki , Terry Riley and Brion Gysin alongside performance pieces written by Higgins, Knowles, George Brecht and Nam June Paik , Ben Patterson , Robert Filliou , and Emmett Williams , amongst many others. One performance in particular, Piano Activities by Philip Corner , became notorious by challenging
6156-559: A series of classes in experimental composition from 1957 to 1959 at the New School for Social Research in New York City. These classes explored the notions of chance and indeterminacy in art, using music scores as a basis for compositions that could be performed in potentially infinite ways. Some of the artists and musicians who became involved in Fluxus, including Jackson Mac Low , La Monte Young , George Brecht , Al Hansen , and Dick Higgins attended Cage's classes. A major influence
6318-436: A series of important video conversations called Interview With George Maciunas with Fluxus artist Larry Miller , which has been screened internationally and translated into numerous languages. Over the past 30 years, Miller has shot and collected Fluxus related materials including tapes on Joe Jones, Carolee Schneemann, Ben Vautier, Dick Higgins, and Alison Knowles, in addition to the 1978 Maciunas interview. Maciunas moved to
6480-432: A specific time frame (1962 to 1978), and the artists themselves, many of whom continued to see Fluxus as a living entity held together by its core values and world view. Different theorists and historians adopted each of these views. Fluxus is therefore referred to variously in the past or the present tense. While the definition of Fluxus was always a subject of controversy, the question is now significantly more complex due to
6642-663: A term coined by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins ; conceptual art , first developed by Henry Flynt , an artist contentiously associated with Fluxus; and video art , first pioneered by Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell . Dutch gallerist and art critic Harry Ruhé describes Fluxus as "the most radical and experimental art movement of the sixties". They produced performance "events", which included enactments of scores, " Neo-Dada " noise music , and time-based works, as well as concrete poetry , visual art , urban planning , architecture, design, literature, and publishing. Many Fluxus artists share anti-commercial and anti-art sensibilities. Fluxus
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6804-432: A text, and occasionally they appear in assemblies or artistic installations. Apart from their sculptures, Gilbert and George have also made pictorial works, collages and photomontages, where they pictured themselves next to diverse objects from their immediate surroundings, with references to urban culture and a strong content; they addressed topics such as sex, race, death and HIV, religion or politics, critiquing many times
6966-485: A year's worth of Mail Art pieces); and a series of concerts held in Mary Bauermeister 's studio, Cologne, 1960–61, featuring Nam June Paik and John Cage among many others. It was at one of these events in 1960, during his Etude pour Piano, that Paik leapt into the audience and cut John Cage's tie off, ran out of the concert hall, and then phoned the hall's organisers to announce the piece had ended. As one of
7128-501: Is Wall piece for orchestra (1962). Joseph Beuys was a German Fluxus, happening , performance artist, painter, sculptor, medallist and installation artist . In 1962 his actions alongside the Fluxus neodadaist movement started, group in which he ended up becoming the most important member. His most relevant achievement was his socialization of art, making it more accessible for every kind of public. In How to Explain Pictures to
7290-482: Is Jackson Mac Low's "Light Poems" that consisted of sentences randomly chosen from a chart documenting different kinds of light. In "32nd Light Poem: In Memorandum Paul Blackburn 9-10 October 1971," Mac Low uses this system of chance to pay respects to a late friend. The poem goes: "Let me choose the kinds of light/ to light the passing of my friend." Although the process appears mechanical, the poems themselves reveal grief and other emotions that appear to be at odds with
7452-459: Is a Japanese artist who, throughout her career, has worked with a great variety of media including:sculpture, installation, painting, performance, film, fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts; the majority of them exhibited her interest in psychedelia, repetition and patterns. Kusama is a pioneer of the pop art, minimalism and feminist art movements and influenced her coetaneous, Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg . She has been acknowledged as one of
7614-487: Is also known for his performances about deprivation of freedom; he spent an entire year confined. In The House With the Ocean View (2003), Marina Abramović lived silently for twelve days without food. The Nine Confinements or The Deprivation of Liberty is a conceptual endurance artwork of critical content carried out in the years 2013 and 2016. All of them have in common the illegitimate deprivation of freedom. In
7776-488: Is an artist and United States activist. She is one of the main African-American exponents of feminism and LGBT activism in the United States. In the beginning of the 1970s she worked as a teacher, writer and defender of the black feminism current. She has taught at numerous colleges and universities in the last five years. Smith's essays, reviews, articles, short stories and literary criticism have appeared in
7938-505: Is considered to have influenced artists including Laurie Anderson , Karen Finley , Bruce Nauman , and Tracey Emin , among others. Acconci was initially interested in radical poetry, but by the late 1960s, he began creating Situationist -influenced performances in the street or for small audiences that explored the body and public space. Two of his most famous pieces were Following Piece (1969), in which he selected random passersby on New York City streets and followed them for as long as he
8100-462: Is found in the work of Marcel Duchamp . Also of importance was Dada Poets and Painters , edited by Robert Motherwell, a book of translations of Dada texts that was widely read by members of Fluxus. The term anti-art , a precursor to Dada , was coined by Duchamp around 1913, when he created his first readymades from found objects (ordinary objects found or purchased and declared art). Indifferently chosen, readymades and altered readymades challenged
8262-482: Is linked to the happenings and "events" of the Fluxus movement, Viennese Actionism , body art and conceptual art . The definition and historical and pedagogical contextualization of performance art is controversial. One of the handicaps comes from the term itself, which is polysemic, and one of its meanings relates to the scenic arts. This meaning of "performance" in the scenic-arts context differs radically from
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#17327724159758424-430: Is sometimes described as "intermedia". The ideas and practices of composer John Cage heavily influenced Fluxus, especially his notions that one should embark on an artwork without a conception of its end, and his understanding of the work as a site of interaction between artist and audience. The process of creating was privileged over the finished product. Another notable influence were the readymades of Marcel Duchamp ,
8586-763: Is thought that the Dada movement was founded in the ten-meter-square locale. Moreover, Surrealists, whose movement descended directly from Dadaism, used to meet in the Cabaret. On its brief existence—barely six months, closing the summer of 1916—the Dadaist Manifesto was read and it held the first Dada actions, performances, and hybrid poetry, plastic art, music and repetitive action presentations. Founders such as Richard Huelsenbeck , Marcel Janco , Tristan Tzara , Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Jean Arp participated in provocative and scandalous events that were fundamental and
8748-447: Is to generate a reaction, sometimes with the support of improvisation and a sense of aesthetics. The themes are commonly linked to life experiences of the artist themselves, the need for denunciation or social criticism and with a spirit of transformation. The term "performance art" and "performance" became widely used in the 1970s, even though the history of performance in visual arts dates back to futurist productions and cabarets from
8910-784: The Beatitude connection was prematurly terminated, George Maciunas , a trained graphic designer , asked Young if he could layout and help publish the Neo-Dada material. Maciunas supplied the paper, design, and some money for publishing the anthology which contained the work of New York avant-garde artists from that time. The project took the title of An Anthology of Chance Operations from its full title An Anthology of chance operations concept art anti-art indeterminacy improvisation meaningless work natural disasters plans of action stories diagrams Music poetry essays dance constructions mathematics compositions . An Anthology of Chance Operations
9072-645: The Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven , credited by some with proposing the idea for Fountain to Duchamp. By 1916 these artists, especially Duchamp, Man Ray, and Picabia, became the center for radical anti-art activities in New York City. Their artworks would inform Fluxus and conceptual art in general. In the late 1950s and very early 1960s, Fluxus and contemporaneous groups or movements, including Happenings , Nouveau réalisme , mail art , and action art in Japan, Austria, and other international locations were, often placed under
9234-559: The US Air Force in late 1961 after the gallery had gone bust. From Wiesbaden, Maciunas continued his contact with Young and other New York City-based artists and with expatriate American artists like Benjamin Patterson and Emmett Williams , whom he met in Europe. By September 1962, Maciunas was joined by Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles who traveled to Europe to help him promote a second planned publication to be called Fluxus ,
9396-563: The University of Chicago in 1941—where he continued to take graduate courses in philosophy and literature into 1943—and his bachelor's degree in ancient Greek from the evening division of Brooklyn College in 1958. The higher degree allowed Mac Low to support his artistic career as an instructor of English as a second language at New York University from 1966-1973 and as a reference book editor for many publishers, including Knopf , Funk & Wagnalls , Pantheon , Bantam , and Macmillan . In 1965, Mac Low gave lectures on mousike for
9558-544: The Viennese Actionists and neo-Dadaists , prefer to use the terms "live art", "action art", "actions", "intervention" (see art intervention ) or "manoeuvre" to describe their performing activities. As genres of performance art appear body art , fluxus-performance, happening , action poetry , and intermedia . Performance art is a form of expression that was born as an alternative artistic manifestation. The discipline emerged in 1916 parallel to dadaism, under
9720-548: The Wayback Machine , edited by Anne Tardos and Michael O'Driscoll. One type of non-intentional composition that he used relied on an algorithm he dubbed "diastic", by analogy to acrostic . He used words or phrases drawn from source material to spell out a source word or phrase, with the first word having the first letter of the source, the second word having the second letter, and so forth, reading through ( dia in Greek)
9882-535: The "classic" scores and responsible for bringing the group's works to a wider public, blurring the lines between artist, producer and researcher. Besides Miller's own artistic work, he has also organized, reconstructed and performed at numerous Fluxus events and assembled an extensive collection of material on the history of Fluxus. Through Miller, Fluxus attracted media coverage such as the worldwide CNN coverage of Off Limits exhibit at Newark Museum, 1999. Other Miller activities as organizer, performer and presenter within
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#173277241597510044-536: The 1910s. Art critic and performance artist John Perreault credits Marjorie Strider with the invention of the term in 1969. The main pioneers of performance art include Carolee Schneemann , Marina Abramović , Ana Mendieta , Chris Burden , Hermann Nitsch , Joseph Beuys , Nam June Paik , Tehching Hsieh , Yves Klein and Vito Acconci . Some of the main exponents more recently are Tania Bruguera , Abel Azcona , Regina José Galindo , Marta Minujín , Melati Suryodarmo and Petr Pavlensky . The discipline
10206-546: The 1940s and 1950s, the action painting technique or movement gave artists the possibility of interpreting the canvas as an area to act in, rendering the paintings as traces of the artist's performance in the studio According to art critic Harold Rosenberg , it was one of the initiating processes of performance art, along with abstract expressionism. Jackson Pollock is the action painter par excellence, who carried out many of his actions live. In Europe Yves Klein did his Anthropométries using (female) bodies to paint canvasses as
10368-467: The 1950s and 1960s, including a number of theatrical productions that were traditionally scripted and invited only limited audience interaction." A happening allows the artist to experiment with the movement of the body, recorded sounds, written and talked texts, and even smells. One of Kaprow's first works was Happenings in the New York Scene , written in 1961. Allan Kaprow's happenings turned
10530-440: The 1960s, Jonas studied with the choreographer Trisha Brown for two years. Jonas also worked with choreographers Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton. Yoko Ono was part of the avant-garde movement of the 1960s. She was part of the Fluxus movement. She is known for her performance art pieces in the late 1960s, works such as Cut Piece , where visitors could intervene in her body until she was left naked. One of her best known pieces
10692-654: The 20th century, who worked with various mediums and techniques such as painting, sculpture, installation , decollage , video art , happening and fluxus . Vito Acconci was an influential American performance, video and installation artist , whose diverse practice eventually included sculpture, architectural design, and landscape design. His foundational performance and video art was characterized by "existential unease," exhibitionism, discomfort, transgression and provocation, as well as wit and audacity, and often involved crossing boundaries such as public–private, consensual–nonconsensual, and real world–art world. His work
10854-636: The 20th century. He studied music and art history in the University of Tokyo. Later, in 1956, he traveled to Germany, where he studied Music Theory in Munich, then continued in Cologne in the Freiburg conservatory. While studying in Germany, Paik met the composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage and the conceptual artists Sharon Grace as well as George Maciunas , Joseph Beuys and Wolf Vostell and
11016-651: The American premiere of Originale , a recent work by the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen , 8 September 1964. Stockhausen was deemed a 'Cultural Imperialist' by Maciunas and Flynt, while other members vehemently disagreed. The result was members of Fluxus, such as Nam June Paik and Jackson Mac Low, crossing a picket line made up of other members, including Ben Vautier and Takako Saito who handed out leaflets denouncing Stockhausen as "a characteristic European-North American ruling-class Artist". Dick Higgins participated in
11178-458: The Americans should not use the term "neodadaism" because neo means nothing and -ism is old-fashioned. Why not simply "Fluxus"? It seems to me much better, because it's new, and dada is historic. As part of the festival, Maciunas wrote a lecture entitled 'Neo-Dada in the United States'. After an attempt to define 'Concretist Neo-Dada' art, he explained that Fluxus was opposed to the exclusion of
11340-585: The Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art . Beginning in 1981, Mac Low and Anne Tardos wrote, directed, and performed in seven radioworks. In 1986, he received a Fulbright travel grant for New Zealand, where he was the keynote speaker at the Australia and New Zealand American Studies Association conference at the University of Auckland . He also participated in
11502-711: The Berkshire Mountains in Western Massachusetts in the late 1970s. Two decades earlier, after collecting paintings, the Boston art collector Jean Brown, and her late husband Leonard Brown, began to shift their focus to Dadaist and Surrealist art, manifestoes and periodicals. In 1971, after Mr. Brown's death, Mrs. Brown moved to Tyringham , and expanded into areas adjacent to Fluxus, including artists' books, concrete poetry, happenings, mail art and performance art. Maciunas helped turn her home, originally
11664-796: The British government and the established power. The group's most prolific and ambitious work was Jack Freak Pictures , where they had a constant presence of the colors red, white and blue in the Union Jack. Gilbert and George have exhibited their work in museums and galleries around the world, like the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum of Eindhoven (1980), the Hayward Gallery in London (1987), and the Tate Modern (2007). They have participated in
11826-605: The Flux Olympics, first presented in 1970. For Do-it Yourself Fluxus at AI – Art Interactive – in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Miller worked as the curatorial consultant for an exhibit of works that allowed viewers hands-on experience including the reconstruction of several sections of the historic Flux Labyrinth , a massive and intricate maze that Miller originally constructed with George Maciunas at Akademie der Künste , Berlin in 1976 and which included sections by several of
11988-689: The Fluxus artists. Miller created a new version of the Flux Labyrinth at the In the Spirit of Fluxus exhibit at the Walker Art Center in 1994, where Griel Marcus said, "Miller was... fine tuning the monster." Women associated with Fluxus such as Carolee Schneemann and Charlotte Moorman , and founding members of the group such as Alison Knowles and Yoko Ono , contributed works in varying media and with differing content such as Knowles' "Make
12150-577: The Fluxus milieu include Performance in Fluxus Continue 1963–2003 at Musee d'Art et d'Art Contemporain in Nice; Fluxus a la Carte in Amsterdam; and Centraal Fluxus Festival at Centraal Museum, Utrecht, Netherlands. In 2004, for Geoff Hendricks' Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia and Rutgers University 1958–1972 , Miller reprised and updated the track and field events of
12312-627: The Hudson River . Brecht threatened to quit on the same issue, and then left New York in the spring of 1965. Despite his continued allegiance to Fluxus ideals, Dick Higgins fell out with Maciunas around the same time, ostensibly over his setting up the Something Else Press which printed many texts by key Fluxus-related personalities and other members of the avant garde. Charlotte Moorman continued to present her Annual Avant Garde Festival in New York. Such perceived insurrections in
12474-550: The Nazi Party, continued incorporating experimental performing arts in the scenic arts training twenty years before the events related to the history of performance in the 1960s. The name Bauhaus derives from the German words Bau, construction and Haus, house ; ironically, despite its name and the fact that his founder was an architect, the Bauhaus did not have an architecture department the first years of its existence. In
12636-561: The New York authorities, and eventually resulted, on 8 November 1975, in Maciunas being severely beaten by thugs sent by an unpaid electrical contractor. It is arguably said that Fluxus came to an end when its founder and leader George Maciunas died in 1978 from complications due to pancreatic cancer. Maciunas' funeral was held in typical Fluxus style where they dubbed the funeral "Fluxfeast and Wake", ate foods that were only black, white, or purple. Maciunas left behind his thoughts on Fluxus in
12798-433: The U.S. in 1968. A work of this period, Paradise Now , was notorious for its audience participation and a scene in which actors recited a list of social taboos that included nudity, while disrobing. Fluxus , a Latin word that means flow , is a visual arts movement related to music, literature, and dance. Its most active moment was in the 1960s and 1970s. They proclaimed themselves against the traditional artistic object as
12960-902: The United States, were new forms of theatre, embodied by the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Living Theatre and showcased in Off-Off Broadway theaters in SoHO and at La MaMa in New York City. The Living Theatre is a theater company created in 1947 in New York. It is the oldest experimental theatre in the United States. Throughout its history it has been led by its founders: actress Judith Malina , who had studied theatre with Erwin Piscator , with whom she studied Bertolt Brecht 's and Meyerhold 's theory; and painter and poet Julian Beck . After Beck's death in 1985,
13122-605: The Venice Biennale. In 1986 they won the Turner Prize. Endurance performance art deepens the themes of trance, pain, solitude, deprivation of freedom, isolation or exhaustion. Some of the works, based on the passing of long periods of time are also known as long-durational performances. One of the pioneering artists was Chris Burden in California since the 1970s. In one of his best known works, Five days in
13284-663: The Water' from 'Cloud Scissors" by Brecht, "Piece" by Shigeko Kubota , "1965 $ 50" by Young, "Piano Piece" by Tomas Schmit , "Sword Piece" by Cox, "Music for Late Afternoon Together With" by Shiomi, "2" by Watts, "c/t Trace" by Watts, "Intermission Event" by Willem de Ridder , "Moviee Music" by Stan Vanderbeek , "Mechanical Orchestra" by Joe Jones , and "Secret Room" by Ben Vautier . In 1969, Fluxus artist Joe Jones opened his JJ Music Store (aka Tone Deaf Music Store ) at 18 North Moore Street , where he presented his repetitive drone music machines. He created there an installation in
13446-546: The annual festival, and would often expel artists who ignored his demands. This hostility continued throughout Maciunas' life—much to Moorman's bemusement—despite her continued championing of Fluxus art and artists. The picketing of Originale marked the high point of Maciunas' agitprop approach, an approach that estranged many of Fluxus' early proponents; Jackson Mac Low had resigned immediately after hearing 'antisocial' plans laid in April 1963, such as breaking down trucks under
13608-570: The area of Manhattan known as 'Hell's Hundred Acres', soon to become rebranded as SoHo , allowing artists to buy live/work spaces in an area that had been blighted due to a proposed 18-lane expressway along Broome Street . Led by Maciunas, plans were laid to start a series of real-estate developments in the area, designed to create an artists' community within a few streets of the FluxShop on Canal Street. 'Maciunas wanted to establish collective workshops, food-buying cooperatives and theaters to link
13770-414: The arm with a small-caliber rifle. A prolific artist, Burden created many well-known installations, public artworks and sculptures before his death in 2015. Burden began to work in performance art in the early 1970s. He made a series of controversial performances in which the idea of personal danger as artistic expression was central. His first significant performance work, Five Day Locker Piece (1971),
13932-491: The artist's body in the creative process, it acquires similarities with the beginnings of performance art. In the 1960s, with the purpose of evolving the generalized idea of art and with similar principles of those originary from Cabaret Voltaire or Futurism , a variety of new works, concepts and a growing number of artists led to new kinds of performance art. Movements clearly differentiated from Viennese Actionism , avant garde performance art in New York City, process art ,
14094-433: The artwork are deeply bound. It uses nature as a material (wood, soil, rocks, sand, wind, fire, water, etc.) to intervene on itself. The artwork is generated with the place itself as a starting point. The result is sometimes a junction between sculpture and architecture, and sometimes a junction between sculpture and landscaping that is increasingly taking a more determinant role in contemporary public spaces. When incorporating
14256-725: The audience to think in new and unconventional ways, break conventions of traditional arts, and break down conventional ideas about "what art is". As long as the performer does not become a player who repeats a role, performance art can include satirical elements; use robots and machines as performers, as in pieces of the Survival Research Laboratories ; involve ritualised elements (e.g. Shaun Caton ); or borrow elements of any performing arts such as dance, music, and circus . Performance art can also involve intersection with architecture, and may intertwine with religious practice and with theology . Some artists, e.g.
14418-412: The basis of the foundation for the anarchist movement called Dada. Dadaism was born with the intention of destroying any system or established norm in the art world. It is an anti-art movement, anti-literary and anti-poetry, that questioned the existence of art, literature and poetry itself. Not only was it a way of creating, but of living; it created a whole new ideology. It was against eternal beauty,
14580-448: The body conceptually and critically emerged. Jackson Mac Low Jackson Mac Low (1922 – December 8, 2004) was an American poet, performance artist , composer and playwright , known to most readers of poetry as a practitioner of systematic chance operations and other non-intentional compositional methods in his work, which Mac Low first experienced in the musical work of John Cage , Earle Brown , and Christian Wolff . He
14742-432: The chaos protagonized their breaking actions with traditional artistic form. Cabaret Voltaire closed in 1916, but was revived in the 21st century. Futurism was an artistic avant garde movement that appeared in 1909. It first started as a literary movement, even though most of the participants were painters. In the beginning it also included sculpture, photography, music and cinema. The First World War put an end to
14904-452: The coherence of Maciunas' leadership of Fluxus provided an opening for Fluxus to become increasingly influenced by Japanese members of the group. Since returning to Japan in 1961, Yoko Ono had been recommending colleagues look Maciunas up if they moved to New York; by the time she had returned, in early 1965, Hi Red Center , Shigeko Kubota , Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi , Yasunao Tone and Ay-O had all started to make work for Fluxus, often of
15066-549: The collective in a businessman's case, an idea borrowed directly from Duchamp's Boite en Valise Within a year, plans for a new anthology, Fluxus 2 , were in full swing to contain Flux films by John Cage and Yoko Ono (with hand held projectors provided), disrupted matchboxes and postcards by Ben Vautier, plastic food by Claes Oldenburg , FluxMedicine by Shigeko Kubota (containing empty pill packages), and artworks made of rocks, ink stamps, outdated travel tickets, undoable puzzles and
15228-500: The company member Hanon Reznikov became co-director along with Malina. Because it is one of the oldest random theatre or live theatre groups nowadays, it is looked upon by the rest. They understood theatre as a way of life, and the actors lived in a community under libertary principles. It was a theatre campaign dedicated to transformation of the power organization of an authoritarian society and hierarchical structure. The Living Theatre chiefly toured in Europe between 1963 and 1968, and in
15390-494: The concept of "performance art", since performance art emerged with a critical and antagonistic position towards scenic arts. Performance art only adjoins the scenic arts in certain aspects such as the audience and the present body, and still not every performance-art piece contains these elements. The meaning of the term "performance art" in the narrower sense is related to postmodernist traditions in Western culture. From about
15552-399: The copyright to be held by the collective. Profits were to be split 80/20 at first, in favor of the artist. Since most of the composers already had publishing deals, Fluxus quickly moved away from music toward performance and visual art. John Cage, for instance, never published work under the Fluxus moniker due to his contract with the music publishers Edition Peters . Maciunas seemed to have
15714-420: The creation process. His priority is the idea and the creative process over the result. His art uses an incredible array of materials and especially his own body. Gilbert and George are Italian artist Gilbert Proesch and English artist George Passmore, who have developed their work inside conceptual art, performance and body art. They were best known for their live-sculpture acts. One of their first makings
15876-412: The daily, many times with small actions or performances. John Cage was an American composer, music theorist , artist, and philosopher. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music , electroacoustic music , and non-standard use of musical instruments , Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde . Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He
16038-540: The early 1960s, New York City harbored many movements, events and interests regarding performance art. Amongst others, Andy Warhol began creating films and videos, and mid decade he sponsored The Velvet Underground and staged events and performative actions in New York, such as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966), that included live rock music, explosive lights and films. Indirectly influential for art-world performance, particularly in
16200-402: The early 1970s the use of video format by performance artists was consolidated. Some exhibitions by Joan Jonas and Vito Acconci were made entirely of video, activated by previous performative processes. In this decade, various books that talked about the use of the means of communication, video and cinema by performance artists, like Expanded Cinema , by Gene Youngblood, were published. One of
16362-405: The early seventies. Joan Jonas started to include video in her experimental performances in 1972, while Bruce Nauman scenified his acts to be directly recorded on video. Nauman is an American multimedia artist, whose sculptures, videos, graphic work and performances have helped diversify and develop culture from the 1960s on. His unsettling artworks emphasized the conceptual nature of art and
16524-455: The eternity of principles, the laws of logic, the immobility of thought and clearly against anything universal. It promoted change, spontaneity, immediacy, contradiction, randomness and the defense of chaos against the order and imperfection against perfection, ideas similar to those of performance art. They stood for provocation, anti-art protest and scandal, through ways of expression many times satirical and ironic. The absurd or lack of value and
16686-489: The everyday from art. Using 'anti-art and artistic banalities', Fluxus would fight the 'traditional artificialities of art'. The lecture ended with the declaration "Anti-art is life, is nature, is true reality—it is one and all." In 1962, Maciunas, Higgins and Knowles traveled to Europe to promote the planned Fluxus publication with concerts of antique musical instruments. With the help of a group of artists including Joseph Beuys and Wolf Vostell , Maciunas eventually organised
16848-478: The evolution of The Living Theatre or happening , but most of all the consolidation of the pioneers of performance art. The term Viennese Actionism ( Wiener Aktionismus ) comprehends a brief and controversial art movement of the 20th century, which is remembered for the violence, grotesque and visual of their artworks. It is located in the Austrian vanguard of the 1960s, and it had the goal of bringing art to
17010-504: The fact that many of the original artists who were still living when Maciunas died are now dead themselves. Performance art Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a public in a fine art context in an interdisciplinary mode. Also known as artistic action , it has been developed through
17172-550: The first of a series of yearbooks of artists' works. Maciunas had first come up with the title Fluxus for a never done anthology of New York's Lithuanian artists, but instead applied the term to artists working in the Anthology of Chance Operations vein. Because after fleeing Lithuania at the end of World War II , his family settled in New York, where he first met the group of avant-garde artists and musicians centered around John Cage and La Monte Young . Thus Maciunas coined
17334-691: The gap between the artist community and the surrounding society' The first of these, La Cédille qui Sourit or The Cedilla That Smiles , was set up in Villefranche-sur-Mer , France, by Robert Filliou and George Brecht, 1965–1968. Intended as an 'International Centre of Permanent Creation', the shop sold Fluxkits and other small wares as well as housing a 'non-school', boasting the motto "A carefree exchange of information and experience. No students, no teachers. Perfect licence, at times to listen at times to talk." In 1966, Maciunas, Watts and others took advantage of new legislation drafted to regenerate
17496-439: The ground of performance art, and is linked to Fluxus and Body Art. Amongst their main exponents are Günter Brus , Otto Muehl and Hermann Nitsch , who developed most of their actionist activities between 1960 and 1971. Hermann, pioneer of performance art, presented in 1962 his Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries (Orgien und Mysterien Theater). Marina Abramović participated as a performer in one of his performances in 1975. In
17658-476: The habitual process of decision-making. This idea is rooted in Buddhism in which one achieves enlightenment through discovery outside of one's habits, culture, and personal history and the achievement of a greater sense of generality. Mac Low's use of chance operations allows for a greater degree of universality. Although the language used is not universal, the operations used to produce the poems can be applied to
17820-603: The honey or the grease used by the tartars who saved in World War Two. In 1970 he made his Felt Suit . Also in 1970, Beuys taught sculpture in the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In 1979, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of New York City exhibited a retrospective of his work from the 1940s to 1970. Nam June Paik was a South Korean performance artist, composer and video artist from the second half of
17982-424: The idea himself and was surprised that George Maciunas advertised them as Per Kirkeby's. Watts shrugged and said that was the way George worked. There would be ideas in the air and Maciunas would assign the piece to one artist or another. Other tactics from this time included Maciunas buying large amounts of plastic boxes wholesale, and handing them out to artists with the simple request to turn them into Fluxkits, and
18144-525: The idea of a political concentration, with poetry and music-halls, which anticipated performance art. The Bauhaus , an art school founded in Weimar in 1919, included an experimental performing arts workshops with the goal of exploring the relationship between the body, space, sound and light. The Black Mountain College , founded in the United States by instructors of the original Bauhaus who were exiled by
18306-460: The important status of the piano in post-war German homes. The score—which asks for any number of performers to, among other things, "play", "pluck or tap", "scratch or rub", "drop objects" on, "act on strings with", "strike soundboard, pins, lid or drag various kinds of objects across them" and "act in any way on underside of piano"—resulted in the total destruction of a piano when performed by Maciunas, Higgins and others at Wiesbaden. The performance
18468-555: The initiation of actions and proceedings. Process artists saw art as pure human expression. Process art defends the idea that the process of creating the work of art can be an art piece itself. Artist Robert Morris predicated "anti-form", process and time over an objectual finished product. Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort in The New Media Reader , "The term 'Happening' has been used to describe many performances and events, organized by Allan Kaprow and others during
18630-414: The late 1960s, diverse land art artists such as Robert Smithson or Dennis Oppenheim created environmental pieces that preceded performance art in the 1970s. Works by conceptual artists from the early 1980s, such as Sol LeWitt , who made mural drawing into a performance act, were influenced by Yves Klein and other land art artists. Land art is a contemporary art movement in which the landscape and
18792-454: The lines between life, Zen, performative art-making techniques and "events," in both pre-meditated and spontaneous ways. Process art is an artistic movement where the end product of art and craft , the objet d’art ( work of art / found object ), is not the principal focus; the process of its making is one of the most relevant aspects if not the most important one: the gathering, sorting, collating, associating, patterning, and moreover
18954-411: The main art channels that separate themselves from specific language; it tries to be interdisciplinary and to adopt mediums and materials from different fields. Language is not the goal, but the mean for a renovation of art, seen as a global art. As well as Dada , Fluxus escaped any attempt for a definition or categorization. As one of the movement's founders, Dick Higgins , stated: Fluxus started with
19116-569: The main artists who used video and performance, with notorious audiovisual installations, is the South Korean artist Nam June Paik , who in the early 1960s had already been in the Fluxus movement until becoming a media artist and evolving into the audiovisual installations he is known for. Carolee Schneemann 's and Robert Whitman's 1960s work regarding their video-performances must be taken into consideration as well. Both were pioneers of performance art, turning it into an independent art form in
19278-429: The many avant garde tendencies of the 1960s. Pierre Restany created various performance art assemblies in the Tate Modern , amongst other spaces. Yves Klein is one of the main exponents of the movement. He was a clear pioneer of performance art, with his conceptual pieces like Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle (1959–62), Anthropométries (1960), and the photomontage Saut dans le vide . All his works have
19440-404: The meanings of a performance-art presentation. "Performance art" is a term usually reserved to refer to a conceptual art that conveys a content-based meaning in a more drama-related sense, rather than being simple performance for its own sake for entertainment purposes. It largely refers to a performance presented to an audience, but which does not seek to present a conventional theatrical play or
19602-686: The mid-1960s into the 1970s, often derived from concepts of visual art, with respect to Antonin Artaud , Dada , the Situationists , Fluxus , installation art , and conceptual art , performance art tended to be defined as an antithesis to theatre, challenging orthodox art-forms and cultural norms. The ideal had been an ephemeral and authentic experience for performer and audience in an event that could not be repeated, captured or purchased. The widely discussed difference, how concepts of visual arts and concepts of performing arts are used, can determine
19764-558: The mid-1970s, behind the Iron Curtain, in major Eastern Europe cities such as Budapest , Kraków , Belgrade, Zagreb , Novi Sad and others, scenic arts of a more experimental content flourished. Against political and social control, different artists who made performance of political content arose. Orshi Drozdik 's performance series, titled Individual Mythology 1975–77 and the NudeModel 1976–77. All her actions were critical of
19926-440: The most important living artists to come out of Japan and a very relevant voice in avant garde art. In the 1970s, artists that had derived to works related to performance art evolved and consolidated themselves as artists with performance art as their main discipline, deriving into installations created through performance, video performance, or collective actions, or in the context of a socio-historical and political context. In
20088-498: The movement's founders, Dick Higgins, stated: Fluxus started with the work, and then came together, applying the name Fluxus to work which already existed. It was as if it started in the middle of the situation, rather than at the beginning. In 1961 the American musician/artist La Monte Young had been enlisted to guest-edit an East Coast issue of the Wast Coast literary journal Beatitude to be called Beatitude East . But as
20250-715: The movement, even though in Italy it went on until the 1930s. One of the countries where it had the most impact was Russia. In 1912 manifestos such as the Futurist Sculpture Manifesto and the Futurist Architecture arose, and in 1913 the Manifesto of Futurist Lust by Valentine de Saint-Point , dancer, writer and French artist. The futurists spread their theories through encounters, meetings and conferences in public spaces, that got close to
20412-405: The name Fluxus not for his perceived group of Lithuania artists but for the Neo-Dada art being produced by a range of artists with a shared sensibility as an attempt to "fuse... cultural, social, & political revolutionaries into [a] united front and action". Maciunas first publicly coined the term Fluxus (meaning 'to flow') in a 'brochure prospectus' that he distributed to the audience at
20574-527: The new art across Europe and later outlets in California and Japan. Gallery and mail order outlets were established in Amsterdam, Villefranche-Sur-Mer, Milan and London, amongst others. By 1965, the first anthology Fluxus 1 was available, consisting of manila envelopes bolted together containing work by numerous artists who would later become famous including La Monte Young, Christo , Joseph Byrd and Yoko Ono. Other pieces available included packs of altered playing cards by George Brecht, sensory boxes by Ay-O ,
20736-701: The newly founded Free University of New York . From 1964 through 1980, Mac Low participated as a visual artist, composer, poet, and performer in the Annual Festivals of the Avant-Garde in New York. In 1968, he signed the " Writers and Editors War Tax Protest " pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War . His work was published in 0 to 9 magazine , an avant-garde publication that experimented with language and meaning-making. In 1969 he produced computer-assisted poetry for
20898-401: The notion of art as an inherently optical experience, dependent on academic art skills. The most famous example is Duchamp's altered readymade Fountain (1917), a work which he signed "R. Mutt." While taking refuge from WWI in New York, in 1915 Duchamp formed a Dada group with Francis Picabia and American artist Man Ray . Other key members included Arthur Cravan , Florine Stettheimer , and
21060-630: The patriarchal discourse in art and the forced emancipation programme and constructed by the equally patriarchal state. Drozdik showed a pioneer and feminist point of view on both, becoming one of the precursors of this type of critical art in Eastern Europe. In the 1970s, performance art, due to its fugacity, had a solid presence in the Eastern European avant-garde, specially in Poland and Yugoslavia, where dozens of artists who explored
21222-656: The performance I Like America and America Likes Me where Beuys, a coyote and materials such as paper, felt and thatch constituted the vehicle for its creation. He lived with the coyote for three days. He piled United States newspapers, a symbol of capitalism. With time, the tolerance between Beuys and the coyote grew and he ended up hugging the animal. Beuys repeats many elements used in other works. Objects that differ form Duchamp's ready-mades, not for their poor and ephemerality, but because they are part of Beuys's own life, who placed them after living with them and leaving his mark on them. Many have an autobiographical meaning, like
21384-549: The performers of the poem to have their own sense of determinism, which reflects Mac Low's own anarchist affiliations. Speaking on this dynamic between the author and performers, Mac Low stated: "Although performers are not directly regulated by a central authority, eventually they are, since I as the composer am giving them the materials, procedures, rules, etc. This is why I usually say these days that such performances are "analogies" rather than "paradigms" of free communities. Nevertheless, they're exercising their own initiative within
21546-434: The picket, and then coolly joined the other performers inside; Maciunas and his friend Henry Flynt tried to get the Fluxus people to march around outside the circus with white cards that said Originale was bad. And they tried to say that the Fluxus people who were in the circus weren't Fluxus any more. That was silly, because it made a split. I thought it was funny, and so first I walked around with Maciunas and with Henry with
21708-556: The poet Billie Hutching. After a legal wedding in Lee, Massachusetts, the couple performed a "Fluxwedding" in a friend's loft in SoHo, 25 February 1978. A videotape of the Maciunas' wedding was produced by Dimitri Devyatkin . The bride and groom traded clothing. Maciunas died on 9 May 1978 in a hospital in Boston. After the death of George Maciunas a rift opened in Fluxus between a few collectors and curators who placed Fluxus as an art movement in
21870-449: The power structure between reader and author and serves as an analogy for a free community in which people make their own choices for how to live and structure their thinking and decisions. Mac Low used chance operations as a way to distance himself from choice therefore habit. Whether conscious or unconscious, these habitual decisions rooted in personal history create limitations for an individual. Mac Low rejected choice in order to reduce
22032-399: The process by which they were developed. Jackson Mac Low was invested in pushing the boundaries of author and audience. He regularly asserted that the author is not responsible for producing meaning, but rather creating the environment for the audience to extract a unique interpretation. He was interested in the dynamic between chance and choice within syntax. Works produced by chance allow
22194-499: The public into interpreters. Often the spectators became an active part of the act without realizing it. Other actors who created happenings were Jim Dine , Al Hansen , Claes Oldenburg , Robert Whitman and Wolf Vostell : Theater is in the Street (Paris, 1958). The works by performance artists after 1968 showed many times influences from the political and cultural situation that year. Barbara T. Smith with Ritual Meal (1969)
22356-484: The region of Kansai ( Kyōto , Ōsaka , Kōbe ). The main participants were Jirō Yoshihara , Sadamasa Motonaga, Shozo Shimamoto, Saburō Murakami, Katsuō Shiraga, Seichi Sato, Akira Ganayama and Atsuko Tanaka. The Gutai group arose after World War II. They rejected capitalist consumerism, carrying out ironic actions with latent aggressiveness (object breaking, actions with smoke). They influenced groups such as Fluxus and artists like Joseph Beuys and Wolf Vostell . In
22518-522: The repetition of the letter "L" in the third and fourth word of each stanza by allowing the fourth word to repeat the third. For example, the poem starts with the line "Circulation. And long long", spelling out the first part of the source-text phrase, "Call." Mac Low's interest in chance operations within poetry led him to adopt new experimentation techniques during his work on the Stein series. He used A Million Random Digits With 100,000 Normal Deviates ,
22680-577: The rubric of Neo-Dada ". A number of other contemporary events are credited as either anticipating Fluxus or as constituting proto-Fluxus events. The most commonly cited include the series of Chambers Street loft concerts, in New York, curated by Yoko Ono and La Monte Young in 1961, featuring pieces by Ono, Jackson Mac Low , Joseph Byrd , and Henry Flynt ; the month-long Yam festival held in upstate New York by George Brecht and Robert Watts in May 1963 with Ray Johnson and Allan Kaprow (the culmination of
22842-515: The situation, the given materials being analogies of the real-life conditions provided by nature and society." Within Mac Low's work, he disrupts subjectivity through the use of chance operations and the responsibility to extract and enact meaning falls on the role of the reader. Because of this, the reader functions more as performer than the author. For Mac Low, this method of producing poetry reflects his anarchist engagements because it dismantles
23004-403: The source. During the last 25 years of his life, he often collaborated with Anne Tardos . Jackson Mac Low is known for using chance and experimentation in the production of his diastic poems. He engaged in projects that would extract words from the work of other poets and writers through a specific system he devised in order to produce a new poem. He would often extract these words from texts he
23166-453: The starting process of performance art. The Cabaret Voltaire was founded in Zürich , Switzerland by the couple Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings for artistic and political purposes, and was a place where new tendencies were explored. Located on the upper floor of a theater, whose exhibitions they mocked in their shows, the works interpreted in the cabaret were avant garde and experimental. It
23328-443: The strengths of various media together and bridge the gap between the artist community and the surrounding society' The first warehouse, intended to house Maciunas, Watts, Christo & Jeanne-Claude, Jonas Mekas, La Monte Young and others, was located on Greene Street. Likening these communities to the soviet Kolkhozs , Maciunas didn't hesitate to adopt the title 'Chairman of Bldg. Co-Op' without first registering an office or becoming
23490-475: The umbrella of conceptual art. The movement was led by Tristan Tzara , one of the pioneers of Dada . Western culture theorists have set the origins of performance art in the beginnings of the 20th century, along with constructivism , Futurism and Dadaism. Dada was an important inspiration because of their poetry actions, which drifted apart from conventionalisms, and futurist artists, specially some members of Russian futurism , could also be identified as part of
23652-430: The use of the rapidly growing international network of artists to contribute items needed to complete works. Robert Watts' Fluxatlas , 1973, for instance, contains small rocks sent by members of the group from around the world. In addition to his numerous original compositions which have joined the collective's catalog of works, Larry Miller , associated with the group since 1969, has also been active as an interpreter of
23814-434: The window so that anyone could press numerous door buttons to play the noise music machines displayed there. Jones also presented small musical installation performances there, alone or with other Fluxus artists, such as Yoko Ono and John Lennon , among others. From April 18 to June 12, 1970, Ono and Lennon (aka Plastic Ono Band ) presented a series of Fluxus art events and concerts there called GRAPEFRUIT FLUXBANQUET . It
23976-435: The work, and then came together, applying the name Fluxus to work which already existed. It was as if it started in the middle of the situation, rather than at the beginning. Robert Filliou places Fluxus opposite to conceptual art for its direct, immediate and urgent reference to everyday life, and turns around Duchamp's proposal, who starting from Ready-made , introduced the daily into art, whereas Fluxus dissolved art into
24138-436: The years as a genre of its own in which art is presented live. It had an important and fundamental role in 20th century avant-garde art . It involves five basic elements: time, space, body, and presence of the artist, and the relation between the creator and the public. The actions, generally developed in art galleries and museums, can take place in the street, any kind of setting or space and during any time period. Its goal
24300-476: Was The Singing Sculpture , where the artists sang and danced "Underneath the Arches", a song from the 1930s. Since then they have forged a solid reputation as live-sculptures, making themselves works of art, exhibited in front of spectators through diverse time intervals. They usually appear dressed in suits and ties, adopting diverse postures that they maintain without moving, though sometimes they also move and read
24462-490: Was able, and Seedbed (1972), in which he claimed that he masturbated while under a temporary floor at the Sonnabend Gallery , as visitors walked above and heard him speaking. Chris Burden was an American artist working in performance , sculpture and installation art . Burden became known in the 1970s for his performance art works, including Shoot (1971), in which he arranged for a friend to shoot him in
24624-489: Was also instrumental in the development of modern dance , mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham , who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives. Cage's friend Sari Dienes can be seen as an important link between the Abstract Expressionists , Neo- Dada artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Ray Johnson , and Fluxus. Dienes inspired all these artists to blur
24786-560: Was at the vanguard of body and scenic feminist art in the seventies, which included, amongst others, Carolee Schneemann and Joan Jonas . These, along with Yoko Ono , Joseph Beuys , Nam June Paik , Wolf Vostell , Allan Kaprow , Vito Acconci , Chris Burden and Dennis Oppenheim were pioneers in the relationship between body art and performance art, as well as the Zaj collective in Spain with Esther Ferrer and Juan Hidalgo . Barbara Smith
24948-407: Was completed and published in 1963 by Jackson Mac Low and La Monte Young, as Maciunas had by then moved to Germany to escape his creditors. After opening a short-lived art gallery on Madison Avenue , which showed work by Dick Higgins , Yoko Ono , Jonas Mekas , Ray Johnson , Henry Flynt and La Monte Young, Maciunas moved to Wiesbaden , West Germany, having taken a job as a graphic designer with
25110-475: Was considered scandalous enough to be shown on German television four times, with the introduction "The lunatics have escaped!" At the end we did Corner's Piano Activities not according to his instructions since we systematically destroyed a piano which I bought for $ 5 and had to have it all cut up to throw it away, otherwise we would have had to pay movers, a very practical composition, but German sentiments about this "instrument of Chopin" were hurt and they made
25272-403: Was created for his master's thesis at the University of California, Irvine, and involved his being locked in a locker for five days. Dennis Oppenheim was an American conceptual artist , performance artist, earth artist , sculptor and photographer. Dennis Oppenheim's early artistic practice is an epistemological questioning about the nature of art, the making of art and the definition of art:
25434-411: Was from 1962 on, a member of the experimental art movement Fluxus . Nam June Paik then began participating in the Neo-Dada art movement, known as Fluxus , which was inspired by the composer John Cage and his use of everyday sounds and noises in his music. He was mates with Yoko Ono as a member of Fluxus . Wolf Vostell was a German artist, one of the most representative of the second half of
25596-1013: Was married to the artist Iris Lezak from 1962 to 1978, and to the poet Anne Tardos from 1990 until his death. An early affiliate of Fluxus (he co-published An Anthology of Chance Operations ) and stylistic progenitor of the Language poets , Mac Low cultivated ties with an eclectic array of notable figures in the postwar American avant-garde , including Nam June Paik , Kathy Acker , Allen Ginsberg , and Arthur Russell . His work has been published in more than 90 anthologies and periodicals and read publicly, exhibited, performed, and broadcast in North and South America, Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. He read, performed, and lectured in New York and throughout North America, Europe, and New Zealand, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Asnières, Paris, Bouliac (near Bordeaux), Marseilles, Buffalo, Philadelphia, and New York. Mac Low received his associate's degree from
25758-448: Was performed by attaching a paintbrush dipped in red paint to her underwear, then applying it to a piece of paper while moving over it in a crouching position. The paint evoked menstrual blood. Vagina Painting has been interpreted as a critique of Jackson Pollock 's action paintings, and the male-dominated abstract expressionist tradition. A number of artists in the group were interested in setting up Flux communes, intending to 'bridge
25920-779: Was promoted with a poster designed by Fluxus leader George Maciunas . Performances included Come Impersonating John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Grapefruit Banquet (April 11–17) by George Maciunas, Yoshimasa Wada , Nye Ffarrabas (formerly Bici Forbes and Bici Forbes Hendricks), Geoffrey Hendricks , and Robert Watts ; Do It Yourself (April 11–17) by Yoko Ono; Tickets by John Lennon + Fluxagents (April 18–24) with Wada, Ben Vautier and Maciunas; Clinic by Yoko Ono + Hi Red Center (April 25-May 1); Blue Room by Yoko + Fluxmasterliars (May 2–8); Weight & Water by Yoko + Fluxfiremen (May 9–15); Capsule by Yoko + Flux Space Center (May 16–22) with Maciunas, Paul Sharits , George Brecht , Ay-O , Ono, Watts, John Cavanaugh ; Portrait of John Lennon as
26082-459: Was published, edited by Anne Tardos. In 2012, Counterpath Press released 154 Forties , a collection of poems written and revised by Mac Low between 1990 and 2001, edited by Anne Tardos. Counterpath also completed a project of shooting videos of contemporary poets and artists reading the Forties . In 2015, Chax Press released THE COMPLETE LIGHT POEMS: 1–60 [1] Archived March 1, 2015, at
26244-483: Was reading on the subway during his commutes. One such example is Mac Low's "Call Me Ishmael", developed from the source text Moby Dick by Herman Melville . "Call Me Ishmael" is a phrase from "Loomings", the first chapter of the book. Mac Low moved chronologically through the book after finding the phrase extracted from the source text, "Call Me Ishmael," and allowing the first letter of each word in each stanza to spell out "Call Me Ishmael." Additionally, he played with
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