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

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Felt: Fluxus, Joseph Beuys, and the Dalai Lama [Paperback]


Felt: Fluxus, Joseph Beuys, and the Dalai Lama [Paperback] by Chris Thompson (Author)

Review

"Felt introduces us to a new generation of experimental performance scholars, seeking simultaneously art historical, experiential, and poetic points of entry into the important art of our time. Chris Thompson clearly has a defining role to play in this process and does it with aplomb."—Hannah Higgins, author of Fluxus Experience


"In the end, Felt is a letter lovingly recounting the often fragile moments in which artists have put themselves on the line to try to bring about a transformation in the human spirit. Thompson’s answer to his own question—‘what happens when nothing happens?’—seems to be, quite a lot."—Andrew Murphie, co-author of Culture and Technology

Product Description

Felt provides a nonlinear look at the engagement of the postwar avant-garde with Eastern spirituality, a context in which the German artist Joseph Beuys appears as an uneasy shaman. Centered on a highly publicized yet famously inconclusive 1982 meeting between Beuys and the Dalai Lama, arranged by the Dutch artist Louwrien Wijers, Chris Thompson explores the interconnections among Beuys, the Fluxus movement, and Eastern philosophy and spiritual practice.
Building from the resonance of felt, the fabric, in both Tibetan culture and in Beuys’s art, Thompson takes as his point of departure Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion in A Thousand Plateaus of felt as smooth space that is “in principle infinite, open, and unlimited in every direction,” its structure determined by chance as opposed to the planned, woven nature of most fabrics. Felt is thus seen as an alternative to the model of the network: felt’s anarchic form is not reducible to the regularity of the net, grid, or mesh, and the more it is pulled, tweaked, torn, and agitated, the greater its structural integrity.
Felt thus invents its methodology from the material that represents its object of inquiry and from this advances a reading of the avant-garde. At the same time, Thompson demonstrates that it is sometimes the failures of thought, the disappointing meetings, even the untimely deaths that open portals through which life flows into art and allows new conjunctions of life, art, and thought. Thompson explores both the well-known engagement of Fluxus artists with Eastern spirituality and the more elusive nature of Beuys’s own late interest in Tibetan culture, arriving at a sense of how such noncausal interactions—interhuman intrigue—create culture and shape contemporary art history.

Product Details

* Paperback: 320 pages
* Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press (February 25, 2011)
* Language: English
* ISBN-10: 0816653550
* ISBN-13: 978-0816653553
* Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 1.5 inches

source: www.amazon.com

Labels: , , , ,

Do-it-Yourself (new book)


The 'Do-it-Yourself' Artwork: Participation from Fluxus to New Media (Rethinking Art's Histories) [Hardcover]

Viewers of contemporary art are often invited to involve themselves actively in artworks, by entering installations, touching objects, performing instructions or clicking on interactive websites. Why have artists sought to engage spectators in these new forms of participation? In what ways does active participation affect the viewer’s experience and the status of the artwork? Spanning a range of practices including kinetic art, happenings, environments, performance, installations, relational and new media art from the 1950s to the present, this critical anthology sheds light on the history and specificity of artworks that only come to life when you -- the viewer -- are invited to "do it yourself."

Rather than a specialist topic in the history of twentieth- and twenty-first century art, the "do-it-yourself" artwork raises broader issues concerning the role of the viewer in art, the status of the artwork, and the socio-political relations between art and its contexts.

From the Inside Flap

Viewers of contemporary art are often invited to involve themselves actively in artworks, by entering installations, touching objects, performing instructions or clicking on interactive websites. Why have artists sought to engage spectators in these new forms of participation? In what ways does active participation affect the viewer’s experience and the status of the artwork? Spanning a range of practices including kinetic art, happenings, environments, performance, installations, relational and new media art from the 1950s to the present, this critical anthology sheds light on the history and specificity of artworks that only come to life when you – the viewer - are invited to ‘do it yourself.’ The volume consists of fifteen essays by art historians, critics and curators, which are divided into three sections. Part I addresses the emergence of spectator participation in the 1960s, while Part II brings together in-depth case studies of specific participatory practices in the 1960s, 1970s and 1990s, analysing the issues that they raise in their very modes of operation. The more general critical essays in Part III map out a range of theoretical approaches to the ‘do-it-yourself’ artwork. Together, the three sections provide invaluable historical perspectives and theoretical tools for scholars, students, artists and readers interested in contemporary art. Rather than a specialist topic in the history of twentieth- and twenty-first century art, the ‘do-it-yourself’ artwork raises broader issues concerning the role of the viewer in art, the status of the artwork, and the socio-political relations between art and its contexts.

Product Details

* Hardcover: 336 pages
* Publisher: Manchester University Press (June 22, 2010)
* Language: English
* ISBN-10: 0719081440
* ISBN-13: 978-0719081446
* Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches

source: www.amazon.com

Labels: , ,

Saturday, January 01, 2011

Weserburg Museum Presents Exhibition of Work by Robert Rehfeldt



Weserburg Museum Presents Exhibition of Work by Robert Rehfeldt
The Weserburg Museum presents an exhibition of work by Robert Rehfeldt on view now through 6.02.2011.


Robert Rehfeldt was one of the most well-known and most important artists in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) of the 1970s and ’80s. He was a draughtsman, graphic artist, painter, filmmaker, action artist, visual poet and mail artist. His worldwide artistic connections made him a contact partner for numerous artists in the East and West. He would have celebrated his eightieth birthday in January 2011. The exhibition thus also pays homage to an exceptional artist who, undaunted by Socialist Realism and the doctrinaire bureaucracy of the GDR, created a complex oeuvre characterized by a unique brand of visual and linguistic subversiveness.

The exhibition of the Research Centre for Artists’ Publications is the first to focus on his entire graphic oeuvre, which mirrors the story of a restless and uncomfortably non-conformist artistic career in its many facets. In addition to lithographs, etchings, woodcuts and silk-screens, Rehfeldt executed cliché prints which incorporate the principle of sequencing and are among his most interesting printmaking works. For the latter, he also made use of montage techniques of Mail Art merging semantic and artistic structures. His statements or word works, for example ‘Künstler rührt Euch, sonst werdet ihr weggetreten’ / ‘Artists, bestir yourselves, otherwise you’ll be dismissed’ exist as postcards or stamp prints and in a kind of “cross-writing” become visual poetry. These art-mail letters or Contart News are graphic works and letters at once.

Aside from original prints and two important graphic portfolios, the exhibition will also feature graphic posters, artist’s postage stamps, small-scale graphic works in the form of postcards, stamp works and Mail Art works. These will be further supplemented by exhibition posters, photographic works and cinematic activities providing an impression of Robert Rehfeldt’s artistic oeuvre as a whole. Numbering over two hundred, the individual works will be presented at the Research Centre on two exhibition levels.

In cooperation with the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University Bremen

Image: Hommage à Lenin, 1978, ©VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2010

Weserburg Museum of Modern Art
Teerhof 20 28199
Bremen Germany
Fon: +49–(0)421–59 83 9-0
Fax: +49–(0)421–50 52 47
E-mail: mail(at)weserburg.de

www.weserburg.de

Labels: ,

 

(c) 2006-2010 by Fluxus Heidelberg Center