When it comes to the influ­ence of the arts on every­day life, it can seem like our real­i­ty derives far more from Jeff Koons’ “aug­ment­ed banal­i­ty” than from the Fluxus move­ment’s play­ful exper­i­ments with chance oper­a­tions, con­cep­tu­al rig­or, and impro­visato­ry per­for­mance. But per­haps in a Jeff Koons world, these are pre­cise­ly the qual­i­ties we need. Main­ly based in New York, and “tak­ing shape around 1959,” notes the Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa’s Fluxus: A Field Guide, “the inter­na­tion­al cohort of artists known as Fluxus exper­i­ment­ed with—or bet­ter yet between—poet­ry, the­ater, music, and the visu­al arts.” Big names like John Cage and Yoko Ono might give the unini­ti­at­ed a sense of what the 60s art move­ment was all about. An “inter­dis­ci­pli­nary aes­thet­ic,” writes Ubuweb, that “brings togeth­er influ­ences as diverse as Zen, sci­ence, and dai­ly life and puts them to poet­ic use.”

Of course, there’s more to it than that… but Fluxus artists keep us won­der­ing what that might be, sug­gest­ing that ordi­nary expe­ri­ence and the stuff of every­day life pro­vide all the mate­r­i­al we need. Japan­ese artist Mieko Shio­mi describes Fluxus as a “prag­mat­ic con­scious­ness” that makes us “see things dif­fer­ent­ly in every­day life after per­form­ing or see­ing Fluxus works.”

The def­i­n­i­tions of Fluxus, you might notice, can begin to sound a bit cir­cu­lar, maybe because they are entire­ly beside the point. George Maci­u­nas, who named and co-found­ed the move­ment, called Fluxus “a way of doing things.” He called it a num­ber of oth­er things as well.

Maci­u­nas’ 1963 “Fluxus Man­i­festo” makes all the right man­i­festo moves, para­phras­ing Tris­tan Tzara’s “Dada Man­i­festo” in its promise to “purge the world of bour­geois sick­ness, ‘intel­lec­tu­al,’ pro­fes­sion­al & com­mer­cial­ized cul­ture,” and so on. He begins with a dic­tio­nary def­i­n­i­tion of Fluxus, involv­ing the symp­toms of dysen­tery, and “the mat­ter just dis­charged.” But the art of Fluxus, aim­ing at a “non art real­i­ty,” seems mild-man­nered by con­trast with this iron­ic blus­ter.

Though it could also be dan­ger­ous at times, Fluxus was always a form of play, often seem­ing­ly con­tent­less, as in Nam June Paik’s “Zen for Film,” a silent, eight-minute film almost entire­ly com­posed of a fuzzy white screen or, in the most noto­ri­ous exam­ple, John Cage’s “musi­cal” com­po­si­tion, 4.33.

Fluxus has become so close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the musi­cal exper­i­ments and per­for­mance art of Cage and Ono that the cen­tral­i­ty of poet­ry and the visu­al arts to the move­ment can go unre­marked. Maci­u­nas him­self was a high­ly skilled graph­ic artist and an aspir­ing bour­geois pro­pri­etor: he first sought to turn Fluxus into a com­mer­cial cor­po­ra­tion and designed a num­ber of prod­ucts such as chess sets, posters, and a wood­en box filled with assem­blages of small art objects cre­at­ed by his fel­low Fluxus artists. He lat­er admit­ted, “no one was buy­ing it.” Of course, plen­ty of peo­ple did, just not in a way that returned on his siz­able cash invest­ment. See an “unbox­ing” of Maci­u­nas’ Flux Box 2, above and try not to think of Wes Ander­son.

Like their Dada fore­bears, Fluxus artists worked in every medi­um. At the Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa Library’s Fluxus Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tion, you can find visu­al art by Maci­u­nas and his col­leagues, like Joseph Beuy’s “Fluxus West” post­card, fur­ther up, George Brecht’s Fluxus Games and Puz­zles below it, and A‑Yo’s “Fin­ger Box,” above. At Mono­skop, you’ll find links to more art, film, music, and books by and about artists like Yoko Ono and Fluxus poet Dick Higgens.

At Ubuweb, you’ll find a Flux­film Anthol­o­gy, dat­ing from 1962–1970 and con­tain­ing short films by Paik, Ono, Maci­u­nas, George Brecht, and many more (includ­ing a 1966 short from John Cale). And at Ubuweb: Sound, you’ll find eight cas­settes worth of Fluxus and Fluxus-inspired music, from 1962 to 1992, like the Wolf Vostell “music sculp­ture,” Le Cri / The Cry, from 1990, above. The Fluxus approach may seem puck­ish­ly quaint, even pre­cious, next to the slick hyper­re­al­i­ty of Snapchat, but you will expe­ri­ence the every­day world around you quite dif­fer­ent­ly after immers­ing your­self in the con­cep­tu­al process-world of Fluxus.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Yoko Ono Lets Audi­ence Cut Up Her Clothes in Con­cep­tu­al Art Per­for­mance (Carnegie Hall, 1965)

The Music of Avant-Garde Com­pos­er John Cage Now Avail­able in a Free Online Archive

When John Cage & Mar­cel Duchamp Played Chess on a Chess­board That Turned Chess Moves Into Elec­tron­ic Music (1968)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Carl Spitzweg’s 1839 paint­ing The Poor Poet is an odd can­vas, one which, the Ger­man His­to­ry in Doc­u­ments and Images project writes, “tes­ti­fies to a gen­er­al mid-cen­tu­ry unease with the extremes of Roman­tic ide­al­iza­tion.” On the one hand, it pokes fun at its sub­ject, a “cliché of the artist as an oth­er­world­ly genius who must suf­fer for his art.” (The poet’s stove appears to be fueled by his own man­u­scripts.) On the oth­er hand, the paint­ing shows a sense of defi­ance in its fig­ure of the bohemi­an: “anti­bour­geois, des­ti­tute, but inspired,” argues the Leopold Muse­um of anoth­er ver­sion of the paint­ing. The Poor Poet’s ambi­gu­i­ty is “expressed in the iconog­ra­phy of the point­ed cap… for dur­ing the French Rev­o­lu­tion the so-called Jacobin or lib­er­ty cap was used as a sym­bol of repub­li­can resis­tance.”

Spitzweg’s paint­ing was one of the most beloved of the peri­od, and it cement­ed the rep­u­ta­tion of the mid­dle class for­mer phar­ma­cist as a fore­most artist of the era.

It also hap­pens to have been Adolf Hitler’s favorite paint­ing, a fact that rather taint­ed its rep­u­ta­tion in the post-war 20th cen­tu­ry, but did not pre­vent its proud dis­play in Berlin’s Neue Nation­al­ga­lerie, where, in 1976, Ger­man artist Ulay—part­ner of Mari­na Abramović from 1976 to 1988—walked in, took the paint­ing and walked out again. “Ulay drove—with the muse­um guards at his heels—to Kreuzberg, which was known as a ghet­to for immi­grants,” writes the Louisiana Chan­nel in their intro­duc­tion to the 2017 inter­view with the artist above.

Here, Ulay ran through the snow with the paint­ing under his arm, to a Turk­ish fam­i­ly, who had agreed to let him shoot a doc­u­men­tary film in their home—however unaware that it involved a stolen paint­ing. Before enter­ing the family’s home, the artist called the police from a phone booth and asked for the direc­tor of the muse­um to pick up the paint­ing. He then hung up the paint­ing in the home of the fam­i­ly “for the rea­son to bring this whole issue of Turk­ish dis­crim­i­nat­ed for­eign work­ers into the dis­cus­sion. To bring into dis­cus­sion the institute’s mar­gin­al­iza­tion of art. To bring a dis­cus­sion about the cor­re­spon­dence between art insti­tutes from the acad­e­my to muse­ums to what­ev­er.”

You can see Ulay’s film, “Action in 14 Pre­de­ter­mined Sequences: There is a Crim­i­nal Touch to Art” at Ubuweb. The “action,” as he calls it, did indeed elic­it the kind of inflamed respons­es the artist desired. Ulay puts sev­er­al of the head­lines before the cam­era, such as “Mad­man steals world-famous Spitzweg paint­ing in Berlin” and “Poor Poet to Adorn the Liv­ing-Room of Turks.” The last head­line hints at the kind of big­otry Ulay hoped to expose. “This par­tic­u­lar paint­ing, you could say,” he tells us in his inter­view, “was a Ger­man iden­ti­ty icon, besides it was Hitler’s favorite paint­ing.”

Ulay’s art rob­bery under­scores the mul­ti­ple the­mat­ic and polit­i­cal ten­sions already embod­ied in The Poor Poet—a shrewd choice for his attempt “to give a real­ly strong sig­nal of what I am about as an artist.” An artist does not seclude him­self in his gar­ret with Roman­tic dreams of rev­o­lu­tion, Ulay sug­gests, all the while rep­re­sent­ing “bour­geois tastes,” writes Lisa Beis­s­wanger at Schirn­mag, in “the tem­ple of bour­geois high cul­ture, for the artis­tic plea­sure of the social establishment”—pleasing every­one from art crit­ics, to sol­id Ger­man cit­i­zens who still hang the repro­duc­tions in “liv­ing rooms full of the same uphol­stered fur­ni­ture and wall-to-wall oak-front­ed cup­boards,” to a geno­ci­dal dic­ta­tor who played on the prej­u­dices of the Ger­man peo­ple to accom­plish the unthink­able.

Of what aes­thet­ic val­ue is this kind of per­for­mance art? Does Ulay’s out­rage at the sit­u­a­tion of Turk­ish work­ers, which he calls “not accept­able,” war­rant the “action” of hang­ing stolen art­work in the home of one such immi­grant fam­i­ly? We might not see “art theft as art­work,” as Beis­s­wanger argues, but we can still see Ulay’s action as com­posed of mul­ti­ple mean­ings, includ­ing rad­i­cal cri­tiques not only of racism and exploita­tion, but of the mar­gin­al, per­haps crim­i­nal, sta­tus of art and of the artist in a com­pla­cent­ly xeno­pho­bic, exploita­tive soci­ety.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

In Touch­ing Video, Artist Mari­na Abramović & For­mer Lover Ulay Reunite After 22 Years Apart

When Bri­an Eno & Oth­er Artists Peed in Mar­cel Duchamp’s Famous Uri­nal

Per­for­mance Artist Mari­na Abramović Describes Her “Real­ly Good Plan” to Lose Her Vir­gin­i­ty

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness