Fluxus Heidelberg Center BLOG

This BLOG is maintained by the FLUXUS HEIDELBERG CENTER. See: WWW.FLUXUSHEIDELBERG.ORG.

This FHC BLOG will contain an overview of all news we find and get in connection to Fluxus. Articles, publications, events, celebrations, Biographies, you name it. Every month the collection of the blog will be published on the FHC website as a digital archive

Saturday, December 01, 2018

Fluxus in Wikipedia

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.[1][2] Fluxus is known for experimental contributions to different artistic media and disciplines and for generating new art forms. These art forms include intermedia, a term coined by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins;[3][4][5][6] concept art, first developed by Fluxus artist Henry Flynt;[7][8] and video art, first pioneered by Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell.[9][10][11] Dutch gallerist and art critic Harry Ruhé describes Fluxus as "the most radical and experimental art movement of the sixties."[12][13]

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Saturday, March 05, 2016

Books available - Fluxus Heidelberg Center



where there are publications for sale.


Emmett Williams - Germany

Emmett Williams in memoriam

Er war Dichter, Künstler, Publizist, und – äußerst kooperativ, wie eine Gedenkschau bei Barbara Wien zeigt
Zu seinem zehnten ­Todestag ist der amerikanische Fluxus-Pionier Emmett Williams, der am 14. Februar 2006 in Berlin starb, wieder Thema in der Galerie Barbara Wien. Williams hat in der Zusammenarbeit mit Kollegen stets die Möglichkeit gesehen, sein ohnehin sehr freies, nonkonformistisches Spiel zu erweitern. Die Ausstellung „Projects with A-Yo und Yo-Yo Ma“ hebt diese Seite des Künstlers hervor, der in den Zwischenräumen zwischen Gesehenem, Gezeichnetem und Gehörtem experimentiert hat.
Seine Performance „Incidental Music for Yo-Yo Ma“ ist hier zum ersten Mal als Installation dokumentiert. Vor der Wand mit einer Serie von Zeichnungen, auf denen sich Linien Blatt für Blatt zu einer chaotischen Partitur verwandeln, erklingt das entsprechende Spiel des bekannten Cellisten Ma. Eine kindliche Neugier und gezielte Leichtigkeit ist dagegen in den grafischen Arbeiten erkennbar, die Williams mit dem japanischen Künstler A-Yo geschaffen hat. Ein anderer Höhepunkt sind seine Papierarbeiten aus den 50er-Jahren. Die Serie „The Book of

Emmett Williams Family Reunion (part of the The Book of O series), 1958, Monoprint, 15,8 x 21,5 cm (auf weißes Papier aufgezogen 21 x 29,7 cm), Monoprint, 15,8 x 21,5 cm (mounted onto white paper 21 x 29,7 cm). Courtesy: Estate of Emmett Williams & Galerie Barbara Wien, Berlin
Emmett Williams Family Reunion (part of the The Book of O series), 
1958, Monoprint, 15,8 x 21,5 cm (auf weißes Papier aufgezogen 
21 x 29,7 cm). Courtesy: Estate of Emmett Williams & 
Galerie Barbara Wien, Berlin
O“ zeigt, was Williams am Herzen lag: Hier befreit sich ein Buchstabe aus einem Gedicht von seiner literarischen Funktion, wird zu Form und verbindet sich wieder mit dem Erzählerischen. Williams ging es auch darum, den Humor des Moments festzuhalten, in dem Kunst entsteht. 


Bis 16.4.: Galerie Barbara Wien, Schöneberger Ufer 65, 3. OG, Tiergarten, Di–Fr 13–18, Sa 12–18 Uhr

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Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Article by Clive Phillpot - Manifesto I

Manifesto I

FLUXUS: MAGAZINES, MANIFESTOS, MULTUM IN PARVO

By Clive Phillpot

source: http://georgemaciunas.com/about/cv/manifesto-i/
maciunas-menifesto
George Maciunas’ choice of the word Fluxus, in October 1960, as the title of a magazine for a projected Lithuanian Cultural Club in New York, was too good to let go when that circumstance evaporated. In little more than a year, by the end of 1961, he had mapped out the first six issues of a magazine, with himself as publisher and editor-in-chief, that was scheduled to appear in February 1962 and thereafter on a quarterly basis, to be titled Fluxus.
The projected magazine might well have provided a very interesting overview of a culture in flux. Maciunas planned to include articles on electronic music, anarchism, experimental cinema, nihilism, happenings, lettrism, sound poetry, and even painting, with specific issues of the magazine focusing on the United States, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and Japan. Although its proposed contents reflected a contemporary sensibility, its emphasis on the publication of essays on those topics suggests that the magazine would have been relatively conventional in presentation. But the seeds of the actual Fluxus magazine that was eventually published were nonetheless present, even in the first issue of the projected magazine, since it was intended to include a brief “anthology” after the essays.
This proposed anthology would have drawn on the contributors to La Monte Young’s publication An Anthology, the material for which had been amassed in late 1960 and early 1961, and which George Maciunas had been designing since the middle of 1961. In fact Fluxus was “supposed to have been the second Anthology.” But the anthologized works projected for the first Fluxus were radically different from the articles, since they were printed artworks and scores—as were most of the pieces in An Anthology, which was finally published by La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low in 1963.
After interminable delays, Fluxus 1 finally appeared late in 1964. But during this three-year gestation period it had evolved dramatically and become virtually an anthology of printed art pieces and flat, or flattened, objects; the essays had practically vanished. At the same time, the appearance of the idiosyncratic graphic design that Maciunas was to impose on Fluxus gave the magazine a distinctive look. The presentation of Fluxus 1 had also become more radical, for not only did it consist of diverse formats and small objects, often in envelopes, but these components were also fastened together with three large metal bolts. In addition, the magazine was mailed in a wooden box branded or stenciled with its title. The quarterly magazine had also been superseded by the concept of Fluxus yearboxes. Whether or not Fluxus 1 lived up to George Maciunas’ intention that it “should be more of an encyclopedia than…a review, bulletin or even a periodical,” it certainly met the original definition of the word “magazine”: a storehouse for treasures—or explosives. This format was also very influential, affecting the presentation of several “magazine” ventures later in the decade. (The original meaning of “magazine” was exemplified even more emphatically by the truly three-dimensional successors of Fluxus 1 , such as the Fluxkit suitcases and the Flux Year Box 2, containing innumerable plastic boxes, film loops, objects, and printed items.)
When George Maciunas consulted his dictionary he found that the word “flux” not only existed as a noun, a verb, and an adjective, but also had a total of seventeen different meanings. At the head of his Fluxus…Tentative Plan for Contents of the First 6 Issues, issued late in 1961, he rearranged five of these definitions to explain the use of the term Fluxus, bringing to the fore the idea of purging (and its association with the bowels). By 1963, these selected dictionary definitions of “flux” could no longer encompass the developing intentions of Fluxus, and Maciunas began to promote three particular senses of the word: purge, tide, and fuse—each not amplified by his own comments. These amounted to new working definitions of the three senses, and were refined to the point where they could finally be incorporated into a collaged, three-part Manifesto, together with photostats of eight of the dictionary definitions.
The aims of Fluxus, as set out in the Manifesto of 1963, are extraordinary, but connect with the radical ideas fermenting at the time. The text suggests affinities with the ideas of Henry Flynt, as well as links with the aims of radical groups earlier in the century. The first of the three sections of Maciunas’ Manifesto revels that the intent of Fluxus is to “PURGE the world of dead art…abstract art, [and] illusionistic art…” What would be left after this purging would presumably be “concrete art,” which Maciunas equated with the real, or the ready-made. He explained the origins of concrete art, as he defined it, with reference to the ready-made objects of Marcel Duchamp, the ready-made sounds of John Cage, and the ready-made actions of George Brecht and Ben Vautier.
The first section of the Manifesto also states that Fluxus intends to purge the world of such other symptoms of “bourgeois sickness” as intellectual, professional, and commercialized culture. In one of a series of informative letters to Tomas Schmit, mostly from 1963 to 1964, Maciunas declares that “Fluxus is anti-professional”; “Fluxus should become a way of life not a profession”; “Fluxus people must obtain their ‘art’ experience from everyday experiences, eating, working, etc.” Maciunas is for diverting human resources to “socially constructive ends,” such as the applied arts most closely related to the fine arts, including “industrial design, journalism, architecture, engineering, graphic-typographic arts, printing, etc.” As for commercialism, “Fluxus is definitely against [the] art-object as [a] non-functional commodity—to be sold and to make [a] livelihood for an artist.” But Maciunas concedes that the art-object “could temporarily have the pedagogical function of teaching people the needlessness of art.”
The last sentence of this section of the Manifesto reads: “PURGE THE WORLD OF ‘EUROPANISM’!” By this Maciunas meant on the one hand the purging of pervasive ideas emanating from Europe, such as “the idea of professional artist, art-for-art ideology, expression of artists’ ego through art, etc.,” and on the other, openness to other cultures. The composition of the group of Fluxus people was exceptional in that it included several Asians, such as Ay-O, Mieko Shiomi, Nam June Paik, and Yoko Ono—as well as the black American Ben Patterson and a significant number of women—and in that it reached from Denmark to Italy, from Czechoslovakia through the United States to Japan. Interest in and knowledge of Asian cultures were generally increasing in the West at the time, and, in this context, are evidenced by Maciunas’ tentative plans in 1961 for a Japanese issue of Fluxus, which would have included articles relating to Zen, to Hakuin, to haiku, and to the Gutai Group, as well as surveys of contemporary experimental Japanese art. (Joseph Beuys rather missed the point when he altered the 1963 Manifesto in 1970 and read: “Purge the World of Americanism.”)
The second section of the Manifesto, which initially related to flux as “tide,” is really the obverse of the first: “PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART. Promote living art, anti-art, promote NON ART REALITY to be grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals.”
Maciunas’ third section was “fuse,” and read: “FUSE the cadres of cultural, social & political revolutionaries into [a] united front & action.” Inevitably most of Maciunas’ time was spent trying to fuse cadres of cultural revolutionaries, though not all the Fluxus people saw themselves in this way. One of his tactics was the employment of the term Fluxus beyond the title of the magazine as a form of verbal packaging, whereby Fluxus people would benefit from collective promotion.
Toward this end, Maciunas established Conditions for Performing Fluxus Published Compositions, Films & Tapes, which ruled that a concert in which more than half of the works were by Fluxus people should be designated a Fluxconcert, whereas in a concert where fewer than half of the works were by Fluxus people, each Fluxus composition should be labeled “By Permission of Fluxus” or “Flux-Piece” in the program. In this way, “even when a single piece is performed all other members of the group will be publicized collectively and will benefit from it,” for Fluxus “is a collective never promoting prima donnas at the expense of other members.” Maciunas, therefore, was for the “collective spirit, anonymity and Anti-individualism,” so that “eventually we would destroy the authorship of pieces and make them totally anonymous—thus eliminating artists’ ‘ego’—[the] author would be ‘Fluxus.’”
Two years after the 1963 Manifesto, George Maciunas produced another manifesto, significantly different in tone. But in this new statement Henry Flynt’s ideas once again seem evident. Maciunas introduces the topic of “Fluxamusement,” which appears to be an adaptation of Flynt’s “Veramusement,” one of the “successive formulations of [Flynt’s] art-liquidating position.” While Maciunas still aspires “to establish artists nonprofessional, nonparasitic, nonelite status in society” and requires the dispensability of the artist, the self-sufficiency of the audience, and the demonstration “that anything can substitute [for] art and anyone can do it,” he also suggests that “this substitute art-amusement must be simple, amusing, concerned with insignificances, [and] have no commodity or institutional value.”
Later in the year, in a reformulation of this 1965 Fluxmanifesto on Fluxamusement, Maciunas added that “the value of art-amusement must be lowered by making it unlimited, massproduced, unobtainable by all and eventually produced by all.” He further states that “Fluxus art-amusement is the rear-guard without any pretension or urge to participate in the competition of ‘one-upmanship’ with the avant-garde. It strives for the monostructural and non-theatrical qualities of [a] simple natural event, a game or a gag.”
The 1963 Manifesto, with its talk of purging and revolution, did not include any mention of amusement or gags, and yet the element of humor was not something introduced suddenly with the 1965 manifestos; it had been an integral part of Fluxus from its beginnings. Talking to Larry Miller in 1978, George Maciunas observed: “I would say I was mostly concerned with humor, I mean like that’s my main interest, is humor… generally most Fluxus people tended to have a concern with humor.” (Ay-O summed up the matter concisely when he said: “Funniest is best that is Fluxus.”)
In this same interview, Maciunas made another intriguing remark, explaining that Fluxus performances—or concerts or festivals—came about first because they were “easier than publishing,” and second “as a promotional trick for selling whatever we were going to publish or produce.” Even as early as the falloff 1963 he was able to say that festivals “offer [the] best opportunity to sell books—much better than by mail.”
However, in spite of these beginnings, one might say that ultimately the purest form of Fluxus, and the most perfect realization of its goals, lies in performance or, rather, in events, gestures, and actions, especially since such Fluxus works are potentially the most integrated into life, the most social—or sometimes, anti-social, the obverse of the same coin—and the most ephemeral. And they are not commodities, even though they may exist as printed prescriptions or “scores.” But when such scores and other paraphernalia are encountered in an exhibition, rather than activated and experienced through events, a vital dimension of Fluxus is missing. There are some Fluxus works that can be experienced simply by looking, because they work visually, and there are others that can be performed by an individual as mind games. But many more works require that they be performed through physical activity by one or more persons, with or without onlookers. When works or scores such as these are seen or read in an exhibition, experience of them can only be vicarious.
But Maciunas also said, in 1964, that “Fluxus concerts, publications, etc.—are at best transitional (a few years) and temporary until such a time when fine art can be totally eliminated (or at least its institutional forms) and artists find other employment.” He also affirmed that Fluxus people should experience their everyday activities as “art” rather than such phenomena as Fluxus concerts, for “concerts serve only as educational means to convert the audiences to such non-art experiences in their daily lives.”
Although Maciunas himself, even by 1973, was referring to the years 1963-68 as the “Flux Golden Age,” Fluxus concerts, publications, and so on, however “transitional,” actually lasted more than “a few years,” for Fluxus did not come to an end until the death of George Maciunas in 1978. By that time the exact composition of the Fluxus group had changed many times: some had left early; some had returned; others had arrived late.
A few Fluxus people and neo-Fluxus people believe Fluxus is still a flag to follow, while others believe that “Fluxus hasn’t ever taken place yet!” George Brecht may have put the matter to rest recently, when he declaredthat “Fluxus has Fluxed.” But the elusive sensibility that emerged from a world in flux in the late fifties and early sixties, and which George Maciunas labeled Fluxus, has weathered the seventies and eighties and is fortunately still with us. Today it goes by many names and no name, resisting institutionalization under the name Fluxus even as it did while Fluxus packaged pieces of it decades ago.

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Artists's Institute - Manhattan

The Artist’s Institute, Manhattan’s Indefinable Art Space, Heads Uptown

source:  http://www.artnews.com/2016/02/23/the-artists-institute-manhattans-indefinable-art-space-heads-uptown/

For the past five years, the Artist’s Institute has been one of the more pleasantly peculiar exhibition spaces on the Lower East Side—or really anywhere in Manhattan. It divides its programming into six-month seasons, devoting each one to a different artist whose practice inspires all sorts of intriguing exhibitions and events. The first time I visited its modest storefront, one evening in 2011, during season one, which was focused on the French Fluxus practitioner Robert Filliou, Ajay Kurian and Anicka Yi had covered a good portion of the floor with bread dough. People trampled all over the sticky stuff, which was later baked into loaves. These were, thankfully, not consumed.
Now, with ten seasons under its belt, the Artist’s Institute is moving uptown, to a ground-floor space at 132 East 65th Street, a handsome town house owned by Hunter College, which helped found the Institute and whose students are involved with the project through a class. “A town house feels right for the Artist’s Institute because it’s intimate,” Jenny Jaskey, its director, told me as she took me around the freshly renovated new location one recent rainy afternoon. “Our new space is bigger than what we had—and thank goodness we’re climate controlled now—but it still maintains the right scale.”
Among the new space’s amenities are library shelves, which are now home to tranches of books pertaining to each of the past seasons’ artists, who have included Haim Steinbach, Jimmie Durham, Lucy McKenzie, and Carolee Schneemann. The newest set of books feature writings by Hilton Als, whose season begins at the Institute on March 2. Though Als’s work as a critic is well known, “people may not realize that Hilton has a history of making visual art,” Jaskey said. “In the ’90s he made collaborative works with the photographer and filmmaker Darryl Turner.”
Jaskey.COURTESY THE ARTIST'S INSTITUTE
Jenny Jaskey.
COURTESY THE ARTIST’S INSTITUTE
“I’m also very interested in the world that Hilton creates for us,” she continued, “and how he always, through his writing—which bridges portraiture, and memoir, and criticism—he always comes back to himself and his history and how that weaves in with other people. He’s someone who’s been a touchstone for thinking for so many artists.”
Many events will be devised and announced as the season progresses, but Als has already signed on to organize three shows at the Institute, including one that addresses the history of trans women in New York in the 1970s.
Though the Artist’s Institute typically shows some work by each season’s artist, it tends to take a broad approach with their careers. “I am as interested in the things an artist makes as I am in what they love and care about—those things that fuel their production,” Jaskey said. “So I hope we can visualize their world here.”
Pierre's, the first issue of the magazine of the Artist's Institute.COURTESY THE ARTIST'S INSTITUTE
The first issue of Pierre’s, the magazine of the Artist’s Institute. The cover shows the key to its original space on the Lower East Side, which Pierre Huyghe melted down to what he termed its “native state.”
COURTESY THE ARTIST’S INSTITUTE
To that end, another new effort is afoot: a regular magazine for the Artist’s Institute, whose first issue, Pierre’s (tied to Pierre Huyghe’s season), just dropped. It is a delectable thing—a thick, weighty glossy on which it seems no expense was spared, with contributions by a crew that spans Huyghe’s diverse interests and diffuse network, including Ian Cheng, Jonathan Lethem, Camille Henrot (a typically winning photo spread), and Sean Raspet (a scratch-and-sniff page). There are high-res photos of Huyghe’s work. There is a glow-in-the-dark section, too.
“The most important part of our name is the possessive, ‘Artist’s Institute,’ ” Jaskey told me. “I think that that possessive relates to how we think about working with an artist. I want this to feel like Hilton’s institute, Pierre’s institute.”
The Institute tends to pick artists with ardent fan bases. Als certainly fits that profile, as does the next season’s artist, Sharon Lockhart. “It’s intentional, maybe, that the artists we have chosen are artists who mean so much to other artists,” Jaskey said, when I asked her about that. She added, “We aim to be a generative space for other artists in New York to think about their own work.”
Copyright 2016, ARTnews Ltd, 40 W 25th Street, 6th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10010. All rights reserved.

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Monday, December 14, 2015

Horns

The Handmade Horns and Drone Music of a Fluxus Composer

Yoshi Wada introducing “Earth Horns with Electronic Drone” at the Emily Harvey Foundation (photo by @thehouseofdis/Instagram)

Yoshi Wada introducing “Earth Horns with Electronic Drone” at the Emily Harvey
Foundation (photo by @thehouseofdis/Instagram)
“The performance is about 70 minutes long,” said 72-year-old composer Yoshi Wada, introducing his iconic “Earth Horns with Electronic Drone” at Soho’s Emily Harvey Foundation, a performance presented by Issue Project Room. Conceived in the early 1970s, Wada’s piece is a variable-duration drone composition written for the titular electronic drone and “earth horns” — lengthy wind instruments handmade with metal pipes. “Some people get bored,” Wada added with a smile, “so you can sleep — or leave quietly.” Several audience members giggled, although in the ensuing hour several also took Wada up on both of his suggestions. Indeed, as the immersive, corporeal tones of the horns and electronics began to replace the urban clatter coming from Broadway into the performance space, some listeners were discomfited: “It’s too physically demanding,” said the woman next to me, walking out after five minutes. Most listeners, however, let their eyes flutter and sank slowly into their seats, into the floor, into — if the piece were to go on longer than 70 minutes, one imagines — the earth’s crust.
Tashi Wada, Yoshi’s son and an accomplished composer in his own right, kickstarted the performance with a mid-frequency hum generated by an organ. After a few minutes, two short, higher-pitched horns entered the mix. The players held the notes interminably, with subtle differences in pitch prompting a rhythmic pattern that felt embedded into the surfaces of the room. Then two larger horns — each roughly 20 feet long, stretching across the floor — entered, one providing an impossibly deep backbone to the existing swirl of sounds, the other punctuating the dense composition with shorter, slightly higher moans. Once each instrument had been introduced, they began to cycle in and out according to Wada’s diagrammatic score, in a way that kept the sound in constant yet nearly negligible flux — wavering and shifting second by second in microscopic increments. Calm but never silent (indeed, often quite loud), Wada and his cohorts breathed — or rather, blew — organic life into calculated minimal music that could, in the hands of lesser musicians, be a bit “boring.”
Wada’s approach to drone music, like that of many of his contemporaries, draws inspiration from, on the one hand, various musical traditions of east and south Asia, and on the other, the post–John Cage American avant-garde. (Wada notably studied Scottish bagpipe music as well.) Born in Japan but based in the United States for nearly 50 years, Wada rose to prominence in the late 1960s as a member of the international art collective Fluxus. By the time he composed “Earth Horns,” drone music had represented the crux of the Fluxus musical practice for several years. The collective’s best-known composer at the time, La Monte Young, proffered a brand of drone based on pitch ratios that, in his view, had been reverberating throughout the cosmos since the beginning of time. As if to drive this notion home, Young called his group the Theatre of Eternal Music. Wada and Young’s Fluxus associations (as well as their mutual kinship with the great Hindustani vocalist Pandit Pran Nath) might suggest that the two composers share similar approaches to drone. But Wada’s performance at Emily Harvey made it clear — if the title, “Earth Horns,” hadn’t already — that he and Young ultimately exist in different realms: one terrestrial, one extra-. Young’s perpetual installation “Dream House,” for example, on display this summer at Dia:Chelsea and otherwise in Tribeca, prods visitors toward transcendence with bright purple lights, images of eastern spiritual leaders, an imperative to take off your shoes because of the carpeted floor, and above all, humming drone music playing from speakers hung near the ceiling.

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Happy 2016


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Saturday, May 16, 2015

Yoko Ono at MoMa - NY

Yoko Ono was about to burn a painting.
Standing alongside curators and conservators in an unused gallery at the Museum of Modern Art this spring, the 82-year-old superstar wanted to copy a cigarette hole that John Cage, the avant-garde composer, had burned into another blank canvas of hers half a century earlier. For the remake, she had asked for the French cigarettes that Cage would have used but ended up settling for one from Nat Sherman. Lighting up in a museum that had not smelled of tobacco for decades, she reached out and, with a sure artist’s touch, scorched a tidy round hole. Velazquez painting the Spanish king could not have been watched more closely than Ms. Ono was — though it was hard to know whether these courtiers were crowding around to witness creation or to prevent conflagration.


Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971,” opening on May 17 in one of MoMA’s prestigious sixth-floor galleries, is a major event of the museum’s summer season. On display will be more than 100 vintage works — and in a few cases, as with the burned canvas, facsimiles — that represent the heyday of Ms. Ono’s first career in art, long overshadowed by her better-known image as pop-culture icon and widow of John Lennon. A great deal is riding on the event — for Ms. Ono, for the museum and also for Klaus Biesenbach, chief curator at large at MoMA and a co-organizer of her show. The exhibition could recalibrate the reputations of all three.

Photo

An album cover of Ms. Ono and John Lennon’s “Unfinished Music No. 2: Life With the Lions” (1969) Credit via Museum of Modern Art, New York

“Yoko Ono in the ’60s was a historically important, groundbreaking, influential artist, working in London and Tokyo and New York,” explained Mr. Biesenbach, sitting in a MoMA boardroom, his platinum hair slicked back above one of his trademark skinny suits. Ms. Ono’s achievement as an artist, he said, “is nearly hidden by her fame; we want to uncover it.”
As for Mr. Biesenbach, the show may help counteract the drubbing that he has taken for “Björk,” his celebration of the Icelandic pop star that is now filling MoMA’s atrium. One critic said it had “laid a colossal egg”; another called for his resignation. Working with Ms. Ono satisfies the curator’s well-known love of celebrities, but the artist’s early, conceptual work has an undeniable heft and rigor that may help earn back Mr. Biesenbach’s credentials as someone sober and substantial.

source:  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/arts/design/yoko-onos-1971-moma-show-finally-opens.html?_r=3

Blogger and Facebook

Since a lot of people are currently also on Facebook, we published a lot of information there on the special group made at:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Fluxus-Heidelberg-Center/350382864971716?ref=hl

For the coming months we will also be activiating this blog again with some publications since the archiving of blogs is easier then finding things back on faecbook

Saturday, October 12, 2013

Performa Arts : Fluxus Weekend

Fluxus Weekend


In the spirit of Fluxus, Performa will produce an intensive 52-hour program across New York City, collaborating with members of the Performa Consortium. A five-part program will be presented in several key Fluxus forms, honoring the history and prompting the making of new Fluxus actions, objects, music, film, and ideas for the twenty-first century. The projects, ranging in size from large events to small-scale gestures, will be concentrated in downtown Manhattan in tribute to Fluxus history, and to George Maciunas and the Fluxus pioneers who lived and worked there.

source: http://11.performa-arts.org/performa-presents/fluxus-weekend

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Fluxus in Britannica

Fluxus, a loose international group of artists, poets, and musicians whose only shared impulse was to integrate life into art through the use of found events, sounds, and materials, thereby bringing about social and economic change in the art world. More than 50 artists were associated with Fluxus, many producing a periodical anthologizing the latest experiments across the world in art and antiart, music and antimusic, and poetry and antipoetry and many taking part for the sheer collaboration opportunities and the built-in audience. Fluxus involved artists from around the world, including the Americans Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles, the Frenchman Ben Vautrier, the Korean artist Nam June Paik, and the German artist Wolf Vostell.
The name Fluxus, meant to suggest both “flow” and “effluent,” was coined by Fluxus founder George Maciunas (1931–78), a Lithuanian American designer and “cultural entrepreneur.” Maciunas used the word fluxus to describe a wide range of his activities, from a published call for a common front of artists against culture to a New York artists’ housing association, as well as a publishing concern that produced ephemeral interactive multiples and staged live events called Happenings that were precursors to performance art, video art, and other progressive art forms.
In its early years, from 1962 to 1966, Fluxus fused conceptual art, minimalism, new music, poetry, and chance-based work into an intermedia phenomenon, identifiable more through its irreverent attitude toward art than through the use of any distinct style. Utilizing humour—in the spirit of Dada—and everyday materials and experiences, Fluxus created original and often surprising objects and events. The Fluxus event, sometimes a minimal live gesture initially presented as part of a concert or a poetry reading, was researched and developed in part from ideas collected by the American experimental musician La Monte Young and published by him and the American poet and playwright Jackson Mac Low in 1963 as An Anthology of Chance Operations…. This publication—which collected “chance operations, concept art, anti-art, indeterminacy, plans of action, diagrams, music, dance constructions, improvisation, meaningless work, natural disasters, compositions, mathematics, essays, [and] poetry”—was designed by Maciunas and formed much of the material for his “Festum Fluxorum,” a European tour of 1962–63 during which Fluxus became an official movement and its international character was confirmed.
From 1964 Maciunas designed, produced, and promoted hundreds of multiples: a remarkable range of objects from tiny books of compositions to uniquely altered attaché cases with compartments full of games in small plastic boxes, plus films, records, jokes, miniature environments, posters, and charts using imagery publicly available from the New York Public Library. All Fluxus production was driven by a utilitarian philosophy in which colour, scale, material, and font were secondary to affordability and available space—a format that brought coherence to the otherwise heterogeneous Fluxus style. More than 30 individuals, from Christo to Yoko Ono, collaborated with Maciunas, who interpreted their ideas, whether for a chess set or for an apron, into multiple forms. Produced on demand by hand, using volunteer labour and the cheapest material, these provocative and amusing items were deliberately ephemeral, inexpensive, and intended for use rather than display.

source: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1345511/Fluxus

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Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Claes Oldenburg in Guggenheim.


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October 30, 2012
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Guggenheim Bilbao

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Claes Oldenburg: The Sixties
October 30, 2012–February 17, 2013

Guggenheim Bilbao 
Abandoibarra Hiribidea, 2
48009 Bilbao, Spain

www.schiele.guggenheim-bilbao.es
Curated by Achim Hodchdörfer, Curator of the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (mumok).

Co-organized by mumok Vienna and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Claes Oldenburg: The Sixties is the largest show to date dedicated to the path-breaking, emblematic, early work of the 1960s by Claes Oldenburg (Stockholm, Sweden, 1929), one of the most influential artists since the 1950s. The presentation in Bilbao has been made possible thanks to the generous sponsorship of Fundación BBVA, and with support from the Terra Foundation for American Art.

With his ironic and sharp witted representations of everyday objects from the 1960s, Oldenburg made a huge contribution to renovating the North American art scene, and is a major figure in performance art, installation art and Pop Art. However, his multifaceted body of work goes much further. He has also had a profound influence on art in public spaces with his monumental large-scale projects in numerous major cities worldwide, created in partnership with Coosje van Bruggen.

One central point of reference in Oldenburg's oeuvre is the industrially produced object—the object as commodity, which in ever new metamorphoses of media and form becomes a conveyer of culture and symbol of the imagination, desires, and obsessions of the capitalist world.

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao will showcase a magnificent selection of nearly 300 works on Museum's second floor galleries. The exhibition will begin with the installation The Street and its graffiti-inspired depictions of modern life in the big city, and continue to the famous consumer articles of The Store and to the spectacular everyday objects of the "modern home."

The exhibition also dedicates a section to Oldenburg's early designs for public spaces around the world and to his emblematic Mouse Museum, a walk-in miniature museum in the form of a Geometric Mouse, for which Oldenburg has collected 381 objects since the late 1950s.

Lastly, owing to the Claes Oldenburg's close collaboration on the project, the exhibit will also include a series of works that have rarely or never before been seen: drawings, photographs and films by the artist himself, and especially notebook pages that offer unique insights into the witty thought processes of the artist.

Sponsored by Fundación BBVA.
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