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, March 27, 2010

FRANTICHAM'S ASSEMBLING BOX NR 2

VISUAL POETRY AND WORKS INFLUENCED BY FLUXUS



A5 box with contributions from 23 invited artists
Visual poetry, collages, prints, multiples and objects
This is a project on invitation only
40 copies signed and numbered 1/40 to 40/40
Only 15 copies available for sale
Price: 70 euro / 100 $ / 60 UK st.

Contributions from:
Fernando Aguiar, Portugal - Antic-Ham, South Korea - Anna Banana, Canada - Vittore Baroni, Italy
Robert Brandy, Luxembourg _ Keith Buchholz, USA - Bruno Chiarlone, Italy
David Dellafiora, Australia - Klaus Peter Dencker, Germany - Klaus Groh, Germany - Susanna Lakner, Germany
Pascal lenoir, France - Jim Leftwich, USA - Serse Luigetti, Italy - mIEKAL aND, USA
Bernd Reichert, Belgium - Gianni Simone, Japan - Litsa Spathi, Germany - Pete Spence, Australia
Carol Stetser, USA - Sztuka Fabryka, Belgium - Thierry Tillier, Belgium - Francis Van Maele, Ireland -

You can also order by email at info@redfoxpress.com

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Exploring Intermedia - James Clegg

How many ways was Fluxus ahead of its time?

(What follows covers a large amount of ground and so I apologise for the current malnourishment of references and quotations)

There are a lot of strange ideological assumptions underlying my question here. Perhaps the most important is that it assumes that time is a singular kind of line towards progress that might allow me to look at an historical movement like Fluxus and say, “you know, given the historical trajectory of such-and-such, Fluxus was amazing!” But this idea of time has been largely discredited, it is a construct that doesn’t fit at all with a reality that is teaming in all kinds of ‘directions’. Moreover, it seems completely inconsistent with Fluxus, which was amazing because it emphasised that reality was teaming in all directions, experienced and fleeting, rather than trying to section off neat little parts of it. But, it was not amazing because it pre-existed a singular development of artistic practices (there isn’t one, outside the fabrications of art history or the particular gloss of certain exhibitions).

My question is ideological for less philosophical reasons too. It allows me to introduce words such as ‘amazing’, which I’ve done here none too subtly. To say something was ahead of its time implies it was not only more advanced, but also better from our standpoint today. This doesn’t help to found an objective study as I’m trying to do here, and we must really think carefully about the implications of the way we have conceived of our standpoint today. Whose standpoint is this? Who benefits from it? What does it include or preclude from what we consider to be ‘today’?

So why ask this question at all? Well, despite the worrying nature of some of these problems, we still need some way of orientating ourselves. Regrettably understanding relies on a certain ability to focus on somethings and ignore others (what we’re wanting to do is find different things to focus on, so hopefully we stop ignoring other important things. A study is always relative to many, many others – and broader cultural ideas too. We don’t need to say how things are, but supplement the picture created by all these other forms of understanding in a way we feel might make up for some omissions.)




An Image of the way we need to stop thinking!


Thinking about trends within contemporary art and we are given a list of adjectives that seem to correspond to a lot of what Intermedia and Fluxus was particularly good at highlighting, so many years ago: Relational Aesthetics, Everyday life, Networks, Global Art, Appropriation, Re-enactments, New Media. And this is why such a question, though problematic, might help lead us on to more helpful questions in the future.

Anna Dezeuze has written a particularly good article about how Fluxus was in many ways more radical than the conception of relational aesthetics advocated by Nicholas Bourriaud (also see Dezeuze 2006). Here Dezeuze highlights the way that Fluxus artists such as George Brecht and Alison Knowles challenged institutional conventions that separate everyday life and art. Brecht’s Three Chair Event for example, raises questions that are still pertinent today (see my review of a recent exhibition in Glasgow called votive).

Fluxus works could also be considered open works, in that the event scores used by the artists require the participation of others. The group of artists making Fluxus performances could obviously be considered a network too, but I think the key point here is that Fluxus works are never supposed to be autonomous works of art. In this way, they are radically different from the way objects are presented in Galleries behind display cases or as untouchable wall pieces – as if complete without the actions of people (though obviously concealing the actions of those who ‘perform’ the works autonomy into being by not touching it, guarding it, cleaning around it, labeling it, speaking about it in particular ways etc.)

Here also, there is more than a passing connection to globalization (reference to be added). The work of Nam June Paik, for example, seems always to be discussed in relation to the speed of Global relationships, and indeed the artists aspirations are always to transcend local cultural boundaries. Paik was himself indicative of the migratory types of artist making up Fluxus, which we might remember was an International Movement. Allan Kaprow was also (later) keenly interested in the work of Marshal McLuhan, who was important in opening up discussions on The Global Village. McLuhan’s excentric work, written with Bruce A. Powers, made a strange argument about the changing of humanity’s brain orientation towards a state less rational and more creative – an interesting but somewhat strange study compare to the ludic activities of Fluxus.

Finally, as the Intermedia programme pursued in Iowa and for a long time led by Hans Breder, and considering Paik and Knowles pioneering of Video Art, attests, Fluxus was also open to media, including new media. Not being defined by products Fluxus didn’t really discriminate art forms and therefore opened up opportunities for an exploration of new technologies. This can be seen in the work of Pat Badani who is one of the few artists to openly acknowledge the important influence of Fluxus on her own work.

So, how many ways was Fluxus ahead of its time? Well, as you can see, it seems to link to many of the art-worlds current obsessions, and in many ways it remains more complex and challenging that a lot of what preceded it (and my long term commitment to it must be able to expand on this and explore it much further). I’m certain that my list here could also be expanded in lots of different directions. For now, let’s think about why Fluxus was ahead of its time in so many ways. And here, I think we must return to our acknowledgement of the ideological assumptions our guiding question made… and here is a speculative answer:

What if Fluxus seems so ‘ahead of its time’ because it broke with so many rules of art? Because art doesn’t progress in any simple way these rules weren’t broken and broken for good, but were more subtly reinstated (and never really disappeared anyway) by practices which require art to conform to certain ‘rules’, or lets say models, in order to form a system that requires a cultural, academic, social and aesthetic economy to be in place. It requires the trading of objects, and here I don’t mean ‘objects’ in a strict sense of material things, but also objects of thought, objects of style … relatively solid units that can be exchanged. How many times have you read a gallery blurb in order to find out the ‘idea behind’ a work of art. Isn’t this to establish the terms of your relationship with it? Isn’t it to help you confirm (even if by completely disagreeing with it) what looking at the artwork can give you? Mmmm… well as I borrow techniques for studying these questions from fields like Anthropology I might be able to offer a much richer account of this process (peoples’ actually very complex relationship with things, with art). But this seems like a reasonable model, something to work with. Fluxus seemed so ‘ahead of its time’ because it traversed so many boundaries that the tangible ‘ideas’ and physical ‘untouchable’ artworks that institutions (and not just galleries but places of art instruction and education) keep restoring. We’re not going forward, or backward, but territories and objects are constantly being marked out against the liminal reality Fluxus tried to highlight. I think Fluxus seems so ‘ahead of its time’ because it remains a relitively open pool of ideas to which we can return (and hopefully in order to re-enact rather than simply historicise) that help to expose restrictions in artistic practices and ways of thinking that might always be there as part of the general economy that is art.

(I might be idealising Fluxus here. I’m conscious of that, but need to do a lot more before I can make a more subtle and informed series of claims.)


References
•Dezeuze, Anna (2006) Everyday life, ‘relational aesthetics’ and the ‘transfiguration of the commonplace’. In Journal of Visual Art Practice, 5, 3. pp 143-152.

source: http://blog.eca.ac.uk/exploringintermedia/2010/03/26/how-many-ways-was-fluxus-ahead-of-its-time/

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Art and Life

Transfiguration of the Commonplace
Anna Dezeuze -Variant issue 22

The Old 'Art and Life' Chestnut

'Art is what makes life more interesting than art.' Such was the apt definition provided by Robert Filliou, a French artist who was affiliated to the Fluxus group in the 1960s.1 The relation between art and life has long been a recurrent trope of aesthetics and artistic practice of various kinds, and the 1960s was a period when artists seemed particularly concerned with this issue. Robert Rauschenberg, for example, famously said: 'Painting relates to both art and life. ... (I try to work in that gap between the two).'2 Allan Kaprow, the inventor of 'happenings,' stated on his part that 'the line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible.'3
If it is by now widely acknowledged that the opening of art to life in the 1960s radically changed the definition of art, then these three statements alone point to important differences between the forms that this relation (between art and life) can take. Acting in the gap between art and life like Rauschenberg does not imply the same kind of activity as creating works which, according to Filliou, serve somehow as marginal tools to make life more interesting than art. And surely there is quite a substantial distinction between keeping a line fluid, and blurring boundaries altogether, even if Kaprow tentatively aligns one with another.
My contention is that the reasons why these differences are, more often than not, neglected by art historians and philosophers alike is that discussions tend to forget the other term of the relationship. Instead of asking 'what is art?,' shouldn't we be asking: what is life? This question is obviously much too general to be answered by any one single person, and could indeed be considered as the main question of philosophy and other forms of enquiry. When it is posed in a specific context, however, a more precise focus can be singled out for discussion. In the cases of Rauschenberg, Kaprow and Filliou, for example, it is clear that their concerns lay specifically in the realm of everyday life, and in particular the everyday life that had been excluded so forcefully by the Abstract Expressionist generation of painters and Clement Greenberg's formalist criticism.
In order to explore the relations between art and what has variously been called the everyday, the commonplace, the ordinary, the banal, I will be referring in particular to two texts: Arthur Danto's landmark work, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, and a more recent book by the French curator and critic Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics. While sketching out the ways in which these two authors responded to the emergence of the everyday in artistic practices ranging from Andy Warhol and Fluxus to 1990s contemporary art, I will also examine their ideas in the light of theories of everyday life, in particular Michel de Certeau's 1980 Practice of Everyday Life. Specific artistic practices will be the guiding thread in this discussion, for it is artists who pose the questions that aesthetics struggle to answer.

The Conditions of Transfiguration
Between art and everyday life, there is no difference ... The difference between a chair by Duchamp and one of my chairs could be that Duchamp's chair is on a pedestal and mine can still be used.
George Brecht4

One of Danto's greatest achievements lies in his analysis of the sudden visibility of the everyday in 1960s art. Danto has often recounted how seeing Warhol's Brillo Boxes at the Stable Gallery in 1964 was the trigger for his reflections on the differences between artworks and everyday objects. The Warhol Boxes, he explains in the introduction to The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 'so totally resemble what by common consent are not art works' that they 'make the question of definition urgent.'5 Analysing key notions of illusionism, mimesis, belief, interpretation, style and expression, Danto develops the argument that one of the differences between a Brillo box and the new 'Brillo-box-as-work-of-art' is the fact that the artwork takes the non-artwork as its subject-matter and simultaneously makes a point about how this subject-matter is presented. The mode of representation thus creates a surplus meaning which does not allow the two objects to be equated one with another.
'Make a salad.' This 1963 Proposition by Alison Knowles is cited by Arthur Danto in a recent essay on Fluxus as one of many examples of the group's engagement with everyday life. In this discussion, Danto also quotes Brecht's statement (cited above) about the difference between his chairs and Duchamp's readymades. Brecht's contribution to the 1961 exhibition Environment, Situations, Spaces (Six Artists), at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York, was the placement of three different chairs in various parts of the gallery. Since viewers had no indication that these chairs were part of an artwork, some visitors sat on them without a second thought, much to Brecht's satisfaction.
In the same essay, Danto extends to Fluxus his earlier discussion of Pop art, revisiting specific ideas from The Transfiguration of the Commonplace which, indeed, seem to fit Fluxus like a glove. In particular, Danto points to the fact that in the 1960s he shared with Fluxus an interest in Zen, and he reproduces a quote by Zen Buddhist Ching Yuan which he had included in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace:
Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains and waters are not waters. But now I have got to the very substance I am at rest. For it is just that I saw mountains again as mountains and waters once again as waters.6
The idea that there is nothing internal to these three experiences which distinguishes them obviously from one another was in tune with Danto's preoccupations with the absence of differences between artworks and mere things. What, indeed, is the difference between performing Knowles' instruction and the act of making a salad that many of us regularly perform? As in the case of Warhol's Brillo Boxes, Danto concludes:
What Fluxus helped us see is that no theory of art could help us pick out which were the artworks, since art can resemble reality to any chosen degree. Fluxus was right that the question is not which are the art works, but how we view anything if we see it as art.7
In their critical study of Danto's aesthetics, Greg Horowitz and Tom Huhn have discussed the conditions required for this 'transfiguration' of the everyday into art.8 The question they ask is the following: does Pop according to Danto allow the everyday to take over art ('a return of the everyday in art') or is it rather a moment in which art seizes the everyday for its purposes ('a return to the everyday by art')? If, as in the former, Pop marks a return of the everyday in art, then it means that there is no possibility of its redemption, since transfiguration can only occur when there is a distance that allows the everyday to be presented as art. Pop, Horowitz and Huhn conclude, therefore needs to be a return to the everyday by art in order to remain art. If Pop artists did embrace the everyday, then, in contrast with Abstract Expressionists before them, they nevertheless kept a critical distance from it by using it for other purposes than presenting the raw everydayness of their material - in order, for example, to comment simultaneously about the state of art, the accelerating production and increasing sophistication of packaging and advertising.9 When Danto claims that Warhol and Fluxus question 'how we view anything if we see it as art,' he is thus implicitly positing this distance from the everyday. As Horowitz and Huhn suggest, the experience which allows the viewer to bind art and the everyday according to Danto can only function if this distance is introduced even before any artistic process takes place: in order to make the everyday available for aesthetic experience, the artist, and the viewer, need to have detached one specific aspect of the commonplace (its novelty, its aesthetic qualities, its strangeness ... ) from its original 'rawness'.
While I agree that this 'pre-aestheticising' process operates in Pop, I would like to argue that Fluxus works such as Brecht's Three Chair Events or Knowles' Proposition shrink the distance presumed by Danto, in order to explore the rawness which aesthetics seeks to exclude for the sake of transfiguration. This aesthetic distance was preserved by Danto, and the Pop artists, by eliminating one particular aspect of the everyday's rawness: use and habit. Brecht has recounted how once he tried to sit down on the chair included in Rauschenberg's 1960 combine, Pilgrim, only to be stopped and told that he could not. Recalling his frustration, Brecht explained: 'After all, if it's a chair why shouldn't you sit in it?'10 Unlike Brecht's, Rauschenberg's chair can no more revert to its initial function than Warhol's painted wood Brillo boxes. By shifting the emphasis from object to performance, Fluxus works emphasise use and habit, and thus establish a radically different relation to the commonplace. Fluxus picked up another aspect of Zen: the full embrace of everyday activities such as eating, drinking and sleeping. For, whether Ching Yuan saw mountains as mountains or whether he saw mountains as not mountains would never have prevented him from climbing one of them when he wanted to go for a walk. In doing so, he may have been performing a Fluxus score by Takehisa Kosugi (Theatre Music, c. 1963) which simply reads: 'Keep walking intently.'

Relational Aesthetics
I started to make things so that people could use them ... [My work] is not meant to be put out with other sculpture or like another relic to be looked at, but you have to use it ...
Rirkrit Tiravanija11

Thirty years after the birth of Fluxus in 1962, artist Rirkrit Tiravanija presented Untitled (Free) at the 303 gallery in New York, a work in which he decided to put all the things he found in the storeroom and office into the gallery itself, using the storeroom to cook Thai curries for the visitors to the gallery and leaving the leftovers, kitchen utensils and used food packets in the gallery when he was not here. This work is typical of what Nicolas Bourriaud called a new 'relational art,' which requires a new kind of 'relational aesthetics' in order to account for its emergence and to describe its characteristics. Relational art, according to Bourriaud, is characterised by the fact that it takes 'as its starting point human relations and their social context, as opposed to autonomous and exclusive art.'12 Hence, relational aesthetics must be 'an aesthetic theory consisting in judging artworks in terms of the inter-human relations which they show, produce, or give rise to.'13
Bourriaud's relational aesthetics could be seen as an alternative to Danto's transfiguration of the commonplace because it seems to focus precisely on the terms which the latter excludes. Bourriaud for example explains that contemporary works such as Tiravanija's should not be considered as spaces to be walked through but instead as durations to be experienced, where the performative aspect of the work is more important than either objects to be viewed in space or the space of the gallery itself. Focusing on the relations between the artist and the gallery visitors, the interactions between the guests, and the atmosphere created by Tiravanija's cooking obviously shifts the emphasis away from the finished object towards the process, the performance, the behaviours which emerge from the artist's everyday intervention. It is much more difficult to define what the form of the work actually consists in. Whereas Danto systematically tried to define the Fluxus and Pop works as ontological entities, Bourriaud is content with describing 'form' as nothing more than a 'coherent plane' on which heterogeneous entities can meet; it must be unstable, open to exchange and dialogue.14
Instead of an opposition between art and the everyday articulated in the transfiguration of the commonplace, Bourriaud describes art as a 'social interstice.' Bourriaud borrows the term 'interstice' from Marx, who used it to describe exchange spaces which can escape from the dominant capitalist economy (barter is one of his examples). For Bourriaud, artworks exist in such a space, a space that is part of the global system but nonetheless suggests the possibility of alternative exchanges. Bourriaud singles out in the global capitalist system one particular aspect of everyday life which art can resist by multiplying new 'social interstices': the commercialisation and spectacularisation of inter-personal relations in everyday life.
By emphasising events, performance, and behaviours; alternative modes of exchange over unusable, commodified objects; by privileging flexible notions of form instead of trying to define art, Bourriaud's relational aesthetics seem to be more able to describe the nature of the everyday in works by Tiravanija and Fluxus alike. Yet, if Danto's aesthetics may be too restricted to encompass the variety of relations between art and everyday life, Bourriaud's ideas, for their part, suffer from not being precise enough. There are many obvious reasons for this: Bourriaud is a critic rather than a philosopher, an advocate rather than an analyst of these artists, and he is clearly implicated in the commercial and institutional art world (he is the co-director of the Palais de Tokyo, which was founded a few years ago as an institutional showcase for contemporary art in Paris). Perhaps there is even a deliberate decision on the part of Bourriaud to elude, for the sake of packaging a new generation of artists, the crucial questions of how exactly inter-personal relations have become commercialised and spectacularised, and how getting together to have a curry with Tiravanija somehow resists this state of things. What I would like to underline here is that, despite his apparent embrace of the everyday, Bourriaud, like Danto, seems to take for granted a universal definition of the commonplace. Only by retrieving the specificity of the everyday can the works discussed by Bourriaud and Danto be extracted from the rhetorical uses to which they have been subjected.

Describing the Everyday
If [Michel de Certeau's] Practice of Everyday Life is seen as attempting to register the poiesis of everyday life through poetics, then it is a poetics that articulates activities rather than expresses identities - a poetics of uses rather than users.
Ben Highmore15

Knowles' proposition to 'make a salad' relates to an act that we perform in our everyday life, and the form it takes evokes very directly an object of everyday life: the recipe. In her study of cooking as a practice of everyday life, Luce Giard explains that:
In every language, recipes comprise a kind of minimal text, defined by its internal economy, its concision and its low degree of ambiguity.16
Knowles' Proposition is certainly presented in a concise and minimal format, but it does not, however, provide any of the information which is considered to be 'indispensable' in a recipe: it states neither the ingredients nor the utensils and techniques to be used, and the name of the prepared dish is generic rather than particular, leaving the whole process as ambiguous as possible (Knowles says 'salad' rather than 'Greek salad,' or 'salade niçoise,' for example). Thus, while we can conclude that Knowles' piece is actually totally useless as a recipe, we can also see how it uses the format of the recipes to explore key characteristics that are relevant both to Fluxus and to cooking. Four of these dimensions can be briefly outlined here. Firstly, authorship for recipes is usually collective, if not anonymous. Similarly, Fluxus as a group explored ways of undermining the highly personalised traditional notions of authorship both through collective production and an increased reliance on reader/spectator participation. Secondly, recipes can be transmitted orally as well as through publications, which is also the case for many Fluxus scores: you do not need Knowles' book to own Proposition. Swedish folklore specialist and Fluxus artist Bengt af Klintberg highlighted the relations between these two aspects of cooking when he explained that Fluxus 'reacted against the pompous image of the artist as a genius with a unique, personal style' by creating 'simple pieces filled with energy and humour, pieces without any personal stylistic features, pieces that could be transmitted orally just like folklore and performed by everyone who wanted to.'17
The third aspect of recipes which Knowles' Proposition brings to the fore is the complex relations which recipes set up between process and result. Any cook knows that sometimes, for practical reasons, you may need to replace one ingredient by another, but of course, if you replace too many ingredients, then it becomes a whole new recipe. In Fluxus pieces, which emerged from the context of experimental music, this relation between the specific and the general is akin to the relation between a musical score and the ways of performing it. How badly does a score by Mozart need to be played before ceasing to be a Mozart piece? This complex question is central to any study of musical performance. The performative dimension of the recipe is closely linked to the fourth, and final, characteristic which I would like to list here. The recipe is one tool among others within a process, and cannot be considered as an isolated object: it is necessarily part of a wider, more complex, network which includes ingredients, implements, spaces, family life, tradition and innovation, to cite only some of the terms analysed by Giard.
Thus, viewed from the perspective of art, Knowles' work questions traditional notions of authorship and the status of the artwork, but if it were to be encountered in a recipe book, for example, it may be read as liberating for the cook. By reducing the instructions to a generic invitation, Knowles frees cooks from the stringent demands of the recipe, which dictate a type of behaviour and emphasise the finished product, to be judged according to absolute criteria of quality. Everyday life becomes a practice to be explored, rather than a boring routine that needs to be transfigured by art.
The term 'practice of everyday life' is a translation of the title of Michel de Certeau's 1980 L'Invention du quotidien (literally the 'invention' of the everyday), and it was in the second volume of this book that Luce Giard's analysis of cooking was included. In Relational Aesthetics, Bourriaud actually refers to de Certeau and the 'invention du quotidien' when he writes about relational practices such as Tiravanija's. For example, Bourriaud claims that the practice of everyday life is 'not an object less worthy of attention' than 'the messianic utopias' specific to modern art.18 In this opposition between everyday practices and 'messianic utopias,' Bourriaud follows de Certeau's distinction between tactics and strategy. Strategy, according to de Certeau, is a means of calculation and manipulation in order to gain power over another, in situations where the distinction between one's own space and the other's is clear-cut. In contrast, tactics describe actions which take place solely within the 'other's space' because it is impossible to isolate the two spaces from each other. The 'interstice' occupied by relational art according to Bourriaud seems to be the very space of everyday life in which de Certeau places tactics, those everyday ruses with which some members of society 'tinker' with the dominant social order for it to work in their favour.19 The question of whether relational art is politically radical or not is thus closely related to the general issue of whether, as de Certeau claims, certain tactical practice can effectively subvert the everyday life in which they are embedded.
De Certeau's considerable contribution to the study of everyday life has been not only to highlight the complexity of everyday practices such as cooking, walking or inhabiting living spaces, but also to reflect on the methods for studying these practices. As Ben Highmore has explained, de Certeau sought to create a general poetics of everyday life which aims at achieving the generality of a science without losing sight of the singularity of the actual - an issue that resonates with Fluxus event scores which oscillate between the extreme generality of the instruction and the inevitable specificity of each individual performance of its terms.20 De Certeau's poetics successfully capture the singularity of everyday life, but encounter problems when trying to theorise the political, subversive potential of its practices. This issue, which is one of the central problems of studies of everyday life throughout the twentieth century, plagues Bourriaud's relational aesthetics as well. To analyse Bourriaud's text, it would thus be useful to start by unpacking the models of everyday life to which he is referring. In the process, one would find that he seems to be combining de Certeau's non-oppositional theorisation with references to Situationist thinkers such as Guy Debord and Henri Lefebvre, who came from a Marxist tradition obviously bent on a transformation of capitalist society.
The tension between conflicting models of the 'critique of everyday life' is arguably inherent to the very works acclaimed by Bourriaud. Janet Kraynak has aptly criticised discourses such as Bourriaud's which describe Tiravanija's work as generous offerings providing an alternative exchange logic to commodity fetishism.21 Tiravanija's art, Kraynak argues, occupies an ambiguous position which exceeds such simplistic celebrations of a supposed return of everyday life in art. On the one hand, she explains, Tiravanija's work embraces the shift in the new globalised economy from the production and exchange of material objects to that of an equally alienating 'symbolic capital'. On the other hand, however, it simultaneously reveals the increased homogenisation of cultures as they enter the new symbolic order of global capitalism. Where Fluxus could still dream of a de-commodified everyday life based on collaboration, participation and other modes of 'folkloric' exchange, 'relational art' in the 1990s marked an embrace, rather than a rejection, of the museum, as well as a return to traditional modes of authorship - Tiravanija's presence, as Kraynak points out, is by now acknowledged to be a necessary aspect of his work.

Conclusion
Both Danto's Transfiguration of the Commonplace and Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics are significant attempts to grapple with the new relation between art and life explored by successive generations of artists. While Danto's reflections successfully highlight the importance of the everyday in works by Warhol or Fluxus, I have suggested that his ontological enquiry is restricted by the static polarity it sets up between art and a commonplace which remains in essence everything that is not art. Bourriaud's definition of relational aesthetics introduced post-structuralist, Deleuzian notions of flow and dynamic forms that are more amenable to capture the nature of practices by Fluxus or Tiravanija. Nevertheless, as I have shown, the kind of everyday practices which Bourriaud celebrates remains sketchy, as he refuses to address the ways in which they participate in, or resist, a dominant social order. Studies of everyday life such as de Certeau's complement enquiries such as Danto's or Bourriaud's by disrupting reductive descriptions of a universal everyday and looking at the specificities of the practices with which art practices stand in dialogue.
Filliou's quip about art being what makes life more interesting than art may suggest that art should become less interesting - indeed, works such as Knowles' Proposition, Brecht's Three Chair Event or Tiravanija's meals, deliberately ask to be dismissed as unremarkable occurrences which exist in the same time and space as everyday activities, in a way that neither Rauschenberg's 'combines' nor Warhol's Brillo Boxes could ever dream of. At the same time, the important thing about Filliou's definition of art is that it exists as a dynamic, reversible movement, in which the artwork can make life more interesting not because it is as boring as life, but because life is at least as complex as art. It may seem paradoxical to conclude that we may need simple, often literal, forms of art to tell us about the complexity of everyday life. And it may seem rather pathetic that we need to be told that everyday life is complex in the first place. Yet the question of whether, and how, the everyday can be studied is in fact a complex topic in itself - a topic that requires a further discussion, over a salad or a Thai curry, it goes without saying.

Notes
1 Robert Filliou (1970) 'Interview', quoted in Robert Filliou: Génie sans talent, (2004) exh. cat. (Villeneuve d'Ascq: Musee d'Art Moderne Lille Métropole), back cover.
2 Robert Rauschenberg (1959) 'Untitled Statement,' in Dorothy C. Miller, ed., Sixteen Americans (New York: Museum of Modern Art), p.58.
3 Allan Kaprow (1966) Assemblages, Environments and Happenings (New York: Harry N. Abrams), p.188.
4 George Brecht (1965) 'A Conversation about Something Else: an Interview with George Brecht by Ben Vautier and Marcel Alocco,' in Identités, nos. 11-12; rep. in Henry Martin, ed. (1978) An Introduction to George Brecht's Book of the Tumbler on Fire (Milan: Multhipla edizioni), p.71.
5 Arthur Danto (1981) The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: a Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, MA, & London: Harvard University Press), p.vii.
6 Ching Yuan, in D.T. Suzuki, Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D.T. Suzuki, quoted by Danto (2002) 'The World as Warehouse: Fluxus and Philosophy,' in Jon Hendricks, ed., What's Fluxus? What's Not! Why., exh. cat. (Brasília: Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil), p.31. This passage is reproduced in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, p. 133.
7 Danto, 'The World as Warehouse: Fluxus and Philosophy,' op. cit., 31.
8 Greg Horowitz and Tom Huhn (1998) 'The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy and the ends of Taste,' in Greg Horowitz and Tom Huhn, eds., The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy and the ends of Taste (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International), pp.1-56.
9 For such an analysis of these different aspects of Warhol's works, see Benjamin Buchloh (1989) 'Andy Warhol's One-dimensional Art, 1956-1966,' in Kynaston McShine, ed., Andy Warhol: a Retrospective, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art), pp.39-61.
10 George Brecht (1967) 'Interview with Henry Martin,' in Art International, vol. XI, no. 9, rep. in Henry Martin, p.80.
11 Rirkrit Tiravanija, quoted in Janet Kraynak (1998) 'Rirkrit Tiravanija's Liability,' Documents, no. 13, p.36.
12 Nicolas Bourriaud (1998) Esthétique relationnelle (Dijon: Presses du réel), p.117 (my translation). An English translation by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods was published in 2002 (Relational Aesthetics, Dijon: Presses du réel).
13 Bourriaud, p.117.
14 Bourriaud, p.115.
15 Ben Highmore (2002) Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction (London and New York: Routledge), p.156.
16 'Dans chaque langue, les recettes de cuisine composent une sorte de texte minimal, défini par son économie interne, sa concision et son faible degré d'équivocité.' Luce Giard (1980) 'Faire-la-cuisine,' in Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, Pierre Mayol, L'Invention du quotidien, vol. 2: Habiter, Cuisiner (Paris: Gallimard), 1990 ed., p.303 (my translation).
17 Jean Sellem (1991) 'The Fluxus Outpost in Sweden: an Interview with Bengt af Klintberg', in Jean Sellem, ed., Fluxus Research, special issue of Lund Art Press, vol. 2, no. 2, p.69.
18 Bourriaud, p.14.
19 Michel de Certeau (1980) L'Invention du quotidien, vol. 1: Arts de faire (Paris: Gallimard), 1990 ed., p.xxxix.
20 Highmore, ch. 8. For more about the general and the specific in Fluxus scores, see Ina Blom (1992) 'The Intermedia Dynamic,' in Ken Friedman, ed., Fluxus Virus, 1962-1992, exh. cat. (Cologne: Galerie Schüppenhauer and Kölnischer Kunstverein), p.216.
21 Kraynak, pp.26-40.

Anna Dezeuze is a Research Fellow at the AHRB Research Centre for the Studies of Surrealism and its Legacies.

source: Variant issue 22 http://www.variant.org.uk/ variantmag@btinternet.com

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Fluxus & Happening

archives and collections (by J. Seegers)

This is a list of public and private collections with records of Fluxus artists, holdings of original Fluxus works and objects by individual Fluxus artists. These collections also include Fluxus multiples edited, designed and published by George Maciunas; Something Else Press books and multiples edited, designed and published by Dick Higgins; along with multiples and books published by such Fluxus-related publishers as Edition Block, Edition Hundertmark, Vice Versand or Editions Conz.

ARCHIVES OF AMERICAN ART
Ken Friedman Papers, 1969-1978
Materials relating to Friedman's career, his art and his involvement in Fluxus and Fluxus West, including correspondence; exhibition announcements; bulletins; newsletters; clippings; card files of names and addresses; postcards; catalogs; press releases; journals; notes; comic strips; printed materials; material for "Annotated Bibliography on Zen Buddhism"; a cassette tape; manuscripts; writings about art projects; Fluxus mailing lists; examples of correspondence art, stamp art, and newspaper collages; receipts; photographs and slides; brochures; and artifacts.

ARTPOOL
Artpool, founded in Budapest in 1979 by György Galántai and Julia Klaniczay was an attempt to create an alternative art institute. Artpool was established at a time when art forms out of keeping with the official cultural policy were denied access to the public. Subsequent to the political changes of 1989, Artpool, which already had an international reputation, was officially recognized and in 1992 the Artpool Art Research Center opened to the public with funding from the Budapest Municipal Council. The collection of sources covers 300 meters. The archive and library house primarily documents relating to the Hungarian avant-garde art movements of the 70s and 80s, as well as sources on the new international art trends of the past 30 years: Fluxus, performance, sound poetry, visual poetry, artists' bookwork, mail art, artists' stamps, artists' postcards, artists' periodicals, copy art, computer art and video art. A sound, a video, and a slide archive are also available to researchers. [reading] Geza Perneczky, 'The Artpool Archives. The Story of a Hungarian Art Collection', in New Hungarian Quarterly (1989) 192-196.

GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE
Jean Brown Collection Jean Brown and her husband Leonard, were early collectors of Dada and surrealistic ephemera. When Leonard died in 1971 and Jean moved to Massachusetts, her collection grew rapidly. Upon exhausting Dada and Surrealist sources, Brown acquired materials from those movements, especially Fluxus, mail art and concrete poetry, which grew out of Dada and Surrealism. Many of these artists worked on the fringes of the established museum and gallery system and showed their work in alternative spaces or created alternative distribution systems. Brown maintained close friendships with many of the artists whose work she collected, including George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, Ken Friedman, Peter Frank, and Rimma and Valery Gerlovin, to name a few. Brown became a part of the international mail art network. Every major mail artist sent her examples of their work. Eventually, she found it impossible to keep up with the quantity of mail she was receiving and by the mid-1980s had stopped answering their letters. After her dead in 1994 the collection was acquired by the Getty Center for the arts and Humanities. See also the website of To & From Davi Det Hompson Correspondents.
[finding aid] Inventory of the Jean Brown Papers, 1815-1995 (Bulk 1916-1985) / prepared by Lynda Bunting (1997), in the Special Collections of the Getty.
[interview] Jean Brown, interviewed by Richard Ca´ndida Smith and documented in the Art History Oral Documentation Project (Oral History Programme, University of California, Los Angeles, and the Getty Centre for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1993).

HARVARD UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM
Barbara and Peter Moore Fluxus Collection In July, 2005 the Harvard University Art Museums announced the acquisition of the Barbara and Peter Moore Fluxus Collection. The Moore Collection is a large and comprehensive group of works assembled by Barbara and Peter Moore, both of whom were involved with the Fluxus movement as close friends and sometime collaborators with artist George Maciunas, the movement's principal organizer. [source: Resource Library]. The Barbara and Peter Moore Fluxus Collection features a remarkable range of Fluxus editions and multiples dating from the movement's inception in the early 1960s through the late 1970s. The Moore Collection consists of 121 works, including pieces by Yoko Ono, Claes Oldenburg, George Brecht, and Christo, among many others, as well as early and rare examples of many key multiples, a number of unique and rare works, and prototypes or models for editions.

HOOD MUSEUM OF ART
George Maciunas Memorial Collection The George Maciunas Memorial Collection was founded by Jan van der Marck, Director of Dartmouth College's Hopkins Center Art Museum and Galleries in 1978. A steering committee for the collection was established 'To honor George Maciunas and to bring together, as a tribute to this remarkable artist, a collection of works of art and documents to be held in trust at Dartmouth'. Members of the committee included many of Maciunas' friends such as Billie Maciunas, Jean Brown, John Cage, Jon Hendricks, Claes Oldenburg, and Nam June Paik. The collection consists of 479 works by Fluxus artists including Maciunas as well as many others.

MUSEUM AM OSTWALL
Sammlung Siegfried Cremer (I) The Museum am Ostwall houses important collections related to Fluxus. In 1988 the museum acquired the collection Feelisch. In the early ninties the museum was able to add part of the the collection of Siegfried Cremer. [catalogue] Dieter Daniels und Barbara John (Hrsg.), Sammlung Cremer. Bestandskatalog (Stuttgart : Edition Cantz 1991-1994) 3 vols. Vol. III was published on the occasdion of the exhibition 'Sammlung Cremer - Schrift und Bild', Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund (1994). Sammlung Feelisch [catalogue] Sammlung Feelisch, Museum am Ostwall / Text, Layout und Konzeption Peter Schmieder; red. Mitarbeit, Alexander Braun, Rosemarie E. Pahlke (Museum am Ostwall : Dortmund 1993).

MUSEUM MODERNER KUNST
Sammlung Wolfgang Hahn
The collection Wolfgang Hahn (Cologne) is since 1978 housed at the Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna. [exhibition catalogue] Kunst der letzten 30 Jahre. Sammlung Hahn (Museum Moderner Kunst : Wien 1979) 2 vols. [exhibition catalogue] Sammlung Hahn (Wallraff-Richartz Museum : Köln 1968).

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
Franklin Furnace Archive
The collection of the Franklin Furnace Archive, New York is housed at the Library of the Museum of Modern Art. The Franklin Furnace Archive was founded by Martha Wilson in 1976 as an archive of artist's books and an exhibition and performance space. Through 1994, programs included an archive of artists' books, periodicals, postcards, soundworks, manifestoes and broadsides; travelling shows of artists' books; historical and thematic exhibitions of published work by artists; and a reference library on various fields of avant-garde expression.
Following the sale of the archive to the MoMA Library in 1994, Franklin Furnace continued to operate as an alternative artists' space. The archive also includes secondary materials such as books, exhibition catalogues, ephemera, sound recordings, photographic portraits of artists, performance documentation, newsletters, and periodicals relating to the collection. In addition, the archive contains documentary materials generated by Franklin Furnace, such as exhibition planning records and correspondence, published checklists and catalogues, and records relating to acquisitions. [source:MoMA].

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY MUSIC LIBRARY
Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts
The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts Music Manuscript Collection was compiled by John Cage in the 1960s to support the projects of the Foundation. The collection consists of nearly four hundred manuscripts composed by 272 composers. The manuscripts can be viewed by appointment at the Northwestern University Music Library. [finding aid] Notations. Music Manuscript Collection.

[publication] John Cage (comp.), Notations (Something Else Press : New York 1969).

HENIE ONSTAD KUNSTSENTER
Fluxus Collection.

STAATSGALERIE STUTTGART
Archiv Hanns Sohm
"Das seit 1981 in der Staatsgalerie Stuttgart beheimatete Archiv Sohm ist keine »Kunstsammlung«, sondern eine umfassende Zeitdokumentation aus Korrespondenzen, Fotos, Büchern, Katalogen, Zeitschriften, Filmen, Videos, Aktionsrelikten und Objektkunst.
Hanns Sohm (1921-1999) konservierte durch das Aufheben von authentischen, nirgendwo sonst bewahrten Dokumenten jene heute oftmals als »Neo-Dada« bezeichnete Gegenkultur, die in den 1960er und 1970er-Jahren ihr weitestes Spektrum erlangte. Zeugnisse intermediärer Phänomene wie Beat-Szene, Happening, Fluxus, Wiener Aktionismus, Konkrete Poesie, die multimediale Produktion Dieter Roths, Zero, Undergroundliteratur und Künstlerbücher sind im Archiv ebenso einzusehen wie die über die Protestbewegungen Situationismus, Gruppe »Spur« und »Subversive Aktion« erfolgte Grenzüberschreitung der Kunst ins politische Handeln der »68er«." [exhibition catalogue] Thomas Kellein, "Fröhliche Wissenschaft". Das Archiv Sohm (Staatsgalerie Stuttgart : Stuttgart 1986). Published on the occasion of the exhibition 'Fröhliche Wissenschaft', November 22, 1986-January 11, 1987.

STATENS MUSEUM FOR KUNST
Sammlung Ursula und René Block
[catalogue] Samling, Sammlung, Collection Block ... [Cover title Hovedet gennem muren = Mit dem Kopf durch die Wand = Head through the wall] / udstillingens tilrettetæggelse og redaktion af katalog Elisabeth Delin Hansen, René Block (Copenhagen 1992; 2nd ed. Wiesbaden 1996).

THE TATE GALLERY
Archive Collection David Mayor/Fluxshoe/Beau Geste Press
The David F. Mayor Archive Collection is housed at Tate Gallery Archives. This large archive comprises three distinct groups of material relating to three areas of David Mayor's life: Mayor's own papers, 1960-1989; the 'Fluxshoe' touring exhibition, 1968-1974 (which includes material by and about Fluxus artists, 1959-1989, and material by and about Shoe artists, 1961-1963); and the records of the Beau Geste Press, 1971-1983. The bulk of the archives were purchased from David Mayor in February 1981, with additional material donated by Mayor in March 1982 and again in May 1992.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
Ken Friedman Collection 1964-1971
The bulk of the materials in the Ken Friedman Collection date from 1967 to 1970 -- for Friedman, a period of expansive production of Fluxus materials and a continuing commitment to Happenings/events, collaborations, and the Unitarian Universalist Church and its affiliate organizations of Free Religious Youth (FRY) and Liberal Religious Youth (LRY). The collection best documents graphic design of the period (with many examples from Friedman's Fluxus offset press), works of the Fluxus group and publications by Aktual. Numerous scenarios, musical compositions, prose and poetry works are also included. Another interesting facet of the collection are the works and correspondence by poet d.a. levy and New York Correspondence School founder Ray Johnson. The collection is housed at the Mandeville Special Collections Library, Geisel Library, University of California, San Diego [finding aid]The Register of Ken Friedman Collection 1964-1971 (Finding aid generated: 2006-07-27).

UNIVERSITY OF IOWA
Alternative Traditions in Contemporary Art
Serving as an interface among University of Iowa facilities (the Museum of Art, the University Libraries, and a number of academic units) Alternative Traditions in the Contemporary Arts (ATCA) is committed to the collection and preservation of works and papers of contemporary artists and to the facilitation and dissemination of research related to the post-World War II avant-garde.
Individual ATCA Collections:
ATCA Artists' Works and Correspondence Collection [finding aid]
ATCA Periodicals and Zines Collection [finding aid]
ATCA Rubber Stamp Art Collection [finding aid]
ATCA Comics Collection [finding aid]
The Artists' Television Project
Artwords and Bookworks
Bergus Zine Collection
The CAYC Conceptual Art Collection
The Buster Cleveland Collection [finding aid]
The Steven Durland Correspondence Art Collection [finding aid]
The Albert M. Fine Collection [finding aid]
The Fluxus West Collection [finding aid]
The Ken Friedman Archive and Collection
The Dick Higgins Collection
The E.F. Higgins III Collections
The Alice Hutchins Collection [finding aid]
The Estera Milman Collection [finding aid]
The Lil Picard Papers [finding aid]
NC92 Networker Databank Congress
Artifacts of the Eternal Network [finding aid]

WESTFAELISCHES LANDESMUSEUM
Sammlung Siegfried Cremer (II)
Since 1974 the collection Cremer was housed at the Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster. In 1991 Siegfried Cremer split up his collection: part was housed at the Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund and part went as Sammlung Stiftung Cremer to the Hamburger Kunsthalle. In 2004 the latter returned to the Landesmuseum Münster.

PRIVATE COLLECTIONS
Sammlung Andersch
[catalogue] Fluxus aus der Sammlung Andersch / hrsg. vom Bielefelder Kunstverein in Zusammenarb. mit Erik Andersch, Andreas Beaugrand und Friedemann Malsch (Pendragon Verlag : Bielefeld 1992). Sammlung Ute und Michael Berger [exhibition catalogue] Ulrich Meyer-Husmann (Hrsg.), Multiples und Objekte aus der Sammlung Ute und Michael Berger (Museum Wiesbaden : Wiesbaden 1984). Published on the occasion of the exhibition in Wiesbaden, 7 February-12 August 1984. [exhibition catalogue] Ulrich Meyer-Husmann (Hrsg.), Zwischen Zeichnung und Video. Sammlung Ute und Michael Berger (Museum Wiesbaden : Wiesbaden 1985). Published for the exhibition held in Museum Wiesbaden, October 22-December 29, 1985. [reading] Niklas Jacobs, 'Kirchhoff/Berger zwei Wiesbadener Sammlungen', published on the site of Freunde der Kunst im Museum Wiesbaden eV.
Archivio Francesco Conz Vicolo Quadrelli 7 – 37129 Verona - Italy [interview] 'An Interview with Francesco Conz', in 22, No. 4 Umbrella (December 1999) 95-99.
Sammlung Klaus Groh

[interview] Judith H. Hoffberg, 'A Conversation with Klaus Groh', in Umbrella 20, No. 3/4 (October 1997) 108-109.
Emily Harvey Foundation
In 1982 Emily Harvey established Grommet Gallery on Broadway in SoHo with artists Christian Xatrec (her second husband) and Jean Dupuy. In 1984, she bought the gallery space (formerly George Maciunas's studio) and changed the name to Emily Harvey Gallery; she specialized in the work of Fluxus artists. Among the artists she showed were Maciunas, Geoff Hendricks, Eric Anderson, Alison Knowles, Dick Higgins, Charlotte Moorman, Ben Vautier, Daniel Spoerri, Ay-O, Emmett Williams, Carolee Schneemann, Lamonte Young and Nam June Paik. From her third husband, Venetian sculptor Angelo Colombo, she inherited a number of properties in Venice. She opened another gallery there, Archivio Emily Harvey, in 2001, and laid the groundwork for the Emily Harvey Foundation, which includes her archives and exhibition spaces, and provides residencies to artists and writers in Venice and New York. Harvey's personal collection and extensive library and archives, which include prime examples of books published by Dick Higgins under the Something Else Press imprint, will also become part of the foundation's assets. All materials and art works will be made available for research and for rotating exhibitions in the Venice and New York spaces.
Jonas Mekas Collection

[exhibition review] Jill Connor, 'Fluxus. To George With Love', in The Brooklyn Rail (October 2006). Review of the exhibition 'Fluxus : To George With Love. From the Personal Collection of Jonas Mekas', Maya Stendhal Gallery (February 16–April 15, 2006).
Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Foundation
[collection catalogue] Jon Hendricks (ed.), Fluxus etc. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection (Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum : Bloomfield Hills MI 1981).
[collection catalogue] Jon Hendricks (ed.), Fluxus, etc. Addenda 1. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection / catalogue by Melanie Hedlund ... et al. (Ink & : New York 1983).
[collection catalogue] Jon Hendricks (ed.), Fluxus etc. Addenda II. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection / catalogue by Melanie Hedlund, Jon Hendricks (Baxter Art Gallery : Pasadena 1983). Published on the occasion of the exhibition at Baxter Art Gallery, California Institute of Technology (September 28-October 30, 1983).
[catalogue] Jon Hendricks (comp.), Fluxus Codex. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit, Michigan (New York 1988).
Ellsworth Snyder Collection
Collected by concert pianist Ellsworth Snyder, who knew several of the artists personally, the collection consists of objects, posters, programs and all kinds of publications. The artists includes among others Christo, Beuys, Cage, Oldenburg and Yoko Ono, as well as the usual Fluxus suspects, George Brecht, Maciunas, Vostell, Robert Watts and Ben Vautier.
[exhibition catalogue] Fluxus Necessarius. The Ellsworth Snyder Collection of Fluxus Multiples and Ephemera (Roth Horowitz Anderson : Los Angeles 2002). Published to coincide with the 'Fluxus Necessarius' exhibition at Roth Horowitz Anderson Gallery, Los Angeles (February 14-March 30, 2002).

source: http://members.chello.nl/j.seegers1/flux_files/fluxus_archives.html

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Friday, March 26, 2010

Fluxus Holland Stamp

Monday, March 08, 2010

THE LAST VISPO

COMMON GROUND ART GALLERY
in conjunction with
RAMPIKE Magazine
Very Proudly Present

T H E L A S T V I S P O
: selections from the upcoming anthology
edited by Crag Hill and Nico Vassilakis
(This selection compiled by Volker Nix)

Opening reception: Saturday, March 13th, 2010, Windsor, Ontario
Exhibition runs until April 10th, 2010

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

Way back in 2008, American writers Crag Hill and Nico Vassilakis put out a world wide call for submissions for an upcoming anthology of visual poetry. Slowly, in the two intervening years, a 300 page book of such work has been brought together which covers the decade between 1998 and 2008, and features well over 125 different seasoned and emerging writer/artists from around the world. Cut to March of 2010; while these intrepid editors are busily shopping this gargantuan (and very colourful) manuscript around to an array of would-be publishers, Common Ground Art Gallery of Windsor Ontario has jumped at the opportunity to be the first gallery in Canada to exhibit a sneak peak at what these editors are hoping to see published sometime later this year.


Haven't the foggiest notion as to what The Last Vispo is? Should you find yourself in the area, there's no quicker way to answer that question for yourself by attending the reception we are holding in honour of the many artists, writers and editors who have all profoundly contributed to the curious phenomenon of visual poetry; a veritable black sheep on the landscape of our language arts. So come on down to Common Ground the evening of Saturday March 13th beginning at 7 pm and see for yourself what all the fuss is about.


The following artists from The Last Vispo have works currently on display in the gallery:


mIEKAL AND (U.S.A.), Hartmut Andryczuk (Germany), Petra Backonja (U.S.A.), Michael Basinski (U.S.A.), Guy R. Beining (U.S.A.), Marc Bell & Jason McLean (Canada), John M. Bennett (U.S.A.), Carla Bertola (Italy), Jaap Blonk (Holland), Chrisitan Bok (Canada), Daniel f. Bradley (Canada), Nancy Burr (U.S.A.), Mike Cannell (England), David Baptiste Chirot (U.S.A.), Jo Cook (Canada), Judith Copithorne (Canada), Klaus Peter Dencker (Germany), Brian Dettmer (U.S.A.), Fabio Doctorovich (Argentina), Maria Damon (U.S.A.), Amanda Earl (Canada), Shayne Ehman (Canada), Greg Evason (Canada), Oded Ezer (Israel), Luc Firens (Belgium), Angela Genusa (U.S.A.), Jesse Glass (Japan), Robert Grenier (U.S.A.), Bob Grumman (U.S.A.), Scott Helmes (U.S.A.), Geof Huth (U.S.A.), Serkan Isin (Turkey), Michael Jacobson (U.S.A.), Karl Jirgens (Canada), Alex Jorgensen (U.S.A.), Chris Joseph (England), Joe Keppler (U.S.A.), Dirk Krecker (Germany), Edward Kuleman (Russia), Jim Leftwich (U.S.A.), Troy Lloyd (U.S.A.), Carlos M. Luis (U.S.A.), Jeurgen O. Olbrich (Germany), Sonja Ahlers (Canada), Donato Mancini (Canada), Cy Machina (Canada), Keiichi Nakamura (Japan), Marko Niemi (Finland), Rea Nikonova (Russia), Christopher Olsen (Canada), Clemente Padin (Uruguay), Michael Peters (U.S.A.), Nick Piombino (U.S.A.), Ross Priddle (Canada), e.g. vajda (U.S.A.), Marilyn Rosenberg (U.S.A.), Jenny Sampirisi (Canada), Suzan Sari (Turkey), Serge Segay (Russia), Douglas Spangle (U.S.A.), Litsa Spathi (Greece), Pete Spence (Australia), Matina Stamatakis (U.S.A.), Miroljub Todorovic (Serbia), Cecil Touchon (U.S.A.), Aysegul Tozeren (Turkey), Stephen Vincent (U.S.A.), Reid Wood (U.S.A.) and James Yeary (U.S.A.). -- ENOUGH ! ENOUGH !

But wait, that's not all !

Karl Jirgens, editor of Rampike Magazine (since 1979!) and former Head of the English Department at the University of Windsor currently on sabbatical, (and ALSO one of two local Windsorites whose work will be featured in this upcoming anthology), had the fortuitous good fortune to choose this exact time to bring out his latest issue of RAMPIKE Magazine; an issue coincidentally devoted entirely to the musings of visual poetry, at that! So, in conjunction with this special exhibition featuring selections from The Last Vispo, Karl has very generously offered to bring a stack of the newly minted visual poetry issue of RAMPIKE to the reception to be given away free to all interested parties who attend this reception. So if you don't know what Vispo is, this exhibition of selections from The Last Vispo coupled with the latest issue of Rampike Magazine will certainly go a long way in furnishing a very concrete example for your edification, amusement and enjoyment !

Furthermore, (if poetry is not your thing and you're more easily given over to pursuits of the boogie woogie kind) local artist/musican KERO, featured on the cover of this issue of RAMPIKE, will provide his unique post-electronic musical stylings at some point during the course of the evening.

This, as with all Common Ground events, is FREE and OPEN to the public.

COMMON GROUND
3277 Sandwich St.
Windsor, Ontario
N9C 1A9
CANADA

519-252-6380

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Friday, March 05, 2010

Fluxus, Mail Art and Rubber Stamps

Greetings from Daddaland: Fluxus, Mail Art and Rubber Stamps
Stendhal Gallery
New York, New York

April 15- May 29, 2010

Stendhal Gallery will present the exhibition, “Greetings from Daddaland: Fluxus, Mail Art and Rubber Stamps,” opening April 15 – May 29. The exhibition is drawn from the collections of John Held, Jr. of San Francisco and Picasso (Daddaland) Gaglione of Chicago, collectively known as The Fake Picabia Brothers.

Gaglione and Held presented a showcase for Fluxus, Mail Art and rubber stamp art at The Stamp Art Gallery in San Francisco during the mid-nineties. The current exhibition documents the gallery’s activities through posters, exhibition catalogs, performance documentation, mail art, artist postage stamps and rubber stamp box sets made to commemorate the various exhibitions.

Coupling his passion for collecting sets of antique rubber stamps (dating from the 1920s), and his penchant for Fluxus inspired works, Gaglione began creating rubber stamp box sets to accompany exhibitions by contemporary artists and to honor historic figures of the 20th Century avant-garde, who had influenced his artistic practice.

In putting together the rubber stamp box sets, Gaglione and Held followed the example of Fluxus impresario George Maciunas in his production of Flux-Kits. These inexpensive yet elegent multiple editions set the tone for the production of these post-Fluxus editions.

In the production of the rubber stamp boxed sets, Gaglione and Held, worked closely with noted art historians. Their exploration of Yves Klein’s “Blue Stamp,” created and mailed for a 1957 gallery exhibition, brought them into contact with the late Pierre Restany, the French critic who formulated Nouveau Realism. Their work on the history of French/American artist Arman, lead Held to the artist’s studio in New York City, where he not only was interviewed, but created original drawings to be made into rubber stamps.

By the time the Stamp Art Gallery closed in late 1997, Fluxus related rubber stamp box sets produced included “George Macunias: Passport Photographs by Peter Moore” (1996), “Belgium Fluxus by Luce Fierens” (1996), “Jeff Berner: Self Portrait Stamps” (1997), “Fluxus Commemorative” (1995), “Ken Friedman: Faux Fluxus West Edition” (1995), “Geoffrey Hendricks: Cloudsmith” (1997), “Geoffrey Hendricks: Identification Kit” (1997), “Alison Knowles: St(r)ing Piece” (1996), “Takako Saito: Enjoy Your Life” (1997), “Mieko Shiomi: Endless Music” (1997). Ruud Janssen: TAM Rubberstamp Archive (1996).

In addition to Gaglione and Held’s interest in Fluxus, other box sets mark their interest in Dada (Bay Area Dadaists, Marcel Duchamp, Raoul Hausmann), Russian Futurism and Constructivism (Zaum poets, Tatlin), Kurt Schwitters, Nouveau Realism (Klein, Arman, Tinguely), Conceptual Art (Dieter Roth, Tom Marioni) and Mail Art (Ray Johnson, buZ blurr, Richard Craven, Ulises Carrion, Guglielmo Achille Cavellini, Robin Crozier, Ed Plunkett, Endre Tot and May Wilson).

A complete collection of Stamp Art Gallery catalogs have been previously acquired by the Museum of Modern Art Library, New York. Held has also compiled collections for the Getty Museum and the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. The works on display are drawn from his personal collection with new rubber stamp works produced by Gaglione, now living and working in Chicago under the rubric of Stampland.

source: http://stendhalgallery.com/?p=3395

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Thursday, March 04, 2010

Mail from Fluxus Dakota - USA

 

(c) 2006-2010 by Fluxus Heidelberg Center