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Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers, and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finished product. Fluxus is known for experimental contributions to different artistic media and disciplines and for generating new art forms. These art forms include
intermedia Intermedia is an art theory term coined in the mid-1960s by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe the strategies of interdisciplinarity that occur within artworks existing between artistic genres. It was also used by John Brockman to refer to ...
, a term coined by Fluxus artist
Dick Higgins Dick Higgins (15 March 1938 – 25 October 1998) was an American artist, composer, art theorist, poet, publisher, printmaker, and a co-founder of the Fluxus international artistic movement (and community). Inspired by John Cage, Higgins was ...
; conceptual art, first developed by Henry Flynt, an artist contentiously associated with Fluxus; and
video art Video art is an art form which relies on using video technology as a visual and audio medium. Video art emerged during the late 1960s as new consumer video technology such as video tape recorders became available outside corporate broadcasting. V ...
, first pioneered by
Nam June Paik Nam June Paik (; July 20, 1932 – January 29, 2006) was a South Korean artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with the first use (1974) of the term "electronic super highway" ...
and Wolf Vostell. Dutch gallerist and art critic Harry Ruhé describes Fluxus as "the most radical and experimental art movement of the sixties".. 1979. ''Fluxus, the Most Radical and Experimental Art Movement of the Sixties'' Amsterdam: Editions Galerie A. They produced
performance A performance is an act or process of staging or presenting a play, concert, or other form of entertainment. It is also defined as the action or process of carrying out or accomplishing an action, task, or function. Performance has evolved glo ...
"events", which included enactments of scores, "
Neo-Dada Neo-Dada was an art movement with audio, visual and literary manifestations that had similarities in method or intent with earlier Dada artwork. It sought to close the gap between art and daily life, and was a combination of playfulness, iconoclas ...
"
noise music Noise music is a genre of music that is characterised by the expressive use of noise. This type of music tends to challenge the distinction that is made in conventional musical practices between musical and non-musical sound. Noise music include ...
, and time-based works, as well as
concrete poetry Concrete poetry is an arrangement of linguistic elements in which the typographical effect is more important in conveying meaning than verbal significance. It is sometimes referred to as visual poetry, a term that has now developed a distinct mea ...
,
visual art The visual arts are art forms such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, photography, video, image, filmmaking, design, crafts, and architecture. Many artistic disciplines such as performing arts, conceptual art, and texti ...
,
urban planning Urban planning (also called city planning in some contexts) is the process of developing and designing land use and the built environment, including air, water, and the infrastructure passing into and out of urban areas, such as transportatio ...
, architecture, design, literature, and publishing. Many Fluxus artists share anti-commercial and
anti-art Anti-art is a loosely used term applied to an array of concepts and attitudes that reject prior definitions of art and question art in general. Somewhat paradoxically, anti-art tends to conduct this questioning and rejection from the vantage poi ...
sensibilities. Fluxus is sometimes described as "intermedia". The ideas and practices of composer
John Cage John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and Extended technique, non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one ...
heavily influenced Fluxus, especially his notions that one should embark on an artwork without a conception of its end, and his understanding of the work as a site of interaction between artist and audience. The process of creating was privileged over the finished product. Another notable influence were the readymades of
Marcel Duchamp Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (, ; ; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, Futurism and conceptual art. He is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Pica ...
, a French artist who was active in
Dada Dada () or Dadaism was an anti-establishment art movement that developed in 1915 in the context of the Great War and the earlier anti-art movement. Early centers for dadaism included Zürich and Berlin. Within a few years, the movement had s ...
(1916 – ).
George Maciunas George Maciunas (; ; November 8, 1931 Kaunas – May 9, 1978 Boston, Massachusetts) was a Lithuanian American artist, art historian, and art organizer who was the founding member and central coordinator of Fluxus, an international community of ...
, largely considered to be the founder of this fluid movement, coined the name Fluxus in 1961 to title a proposed magazine. Many artists of the 1960s took part in Fluxus activities, including
Joseph Beuys Joseph Heinrich Beuys ( ; ; 12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986) was a German artist, teacher, performance artist, and Aesthetics, art theorist whose work reflected concepts of humanism and sociology. With Heinrich Böll, , Caroline Tisdall, Rober ...
,
Willem de Ridder Willem de Ridder (14 October 1939 – 29 December 2022) was a Dutch anarchist and artist, known as a founder of Fluxus. He was the foremost Fluxus member in the Netherlands. He showed and sold Fluxus works in his gallery, Amstel 47, and shops F ...
,
George Brecht George Brecht (August 27, 1926 – December 5, 2008), born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer, as well as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnso ...
,
John Cage John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and Extended technique, non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one ...
,
Robert Filliou Robert Filliou (17 January 1926 – 2 December 1987) was a French artist associated with Fluxus, who produced works as a filmmaker, action poet, sculptor, and happenings maestro. Life In 1943, Filliou became a member of the French Communis ...
,
Al Hansen Alfred Earl "Al" Hansen (5 October 1927 – 20 June 1995) was an American artist. He was a member of Fluxus, a movement that originated on an artists' collective around George Maciunas. He was the father of Andy Warhol protégé Bibbe Ha ...
,
Dick Higgins Dick Higgins (15 March 1938 – 25 October 1998) was an American artist, composer, art theorist, poet, publisher, printmaker, and a co-founder of the Fluxus international artistic movement (and community). Inspired by John Cage, Higgins was ...
,
Bengt af Klintberg Bengt af Klintberg (Bengt Knut Erik af Klintberg; born 25 December 1938 in Stockholm) is a Swedish folklorist, ethnologist, and artist who is known for his work on modern urban legends. His work reached a large audience with such books as ''Rått ...
,
Alison Knowles Alison Knowles (born 1933) is an American visual artist known for her installations, performances, soundworks, and publications. Knowles was a founding member of the Fluxus movement, an international network of artists who aspired to merge diffe ...
, Addi Køpcke,
Yoko Ono Yoko Ono (, usually spelled in katakana as ; born February 18, 1933) is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking. Ono grew up in Tokyo and moved to New York ...
,
Nam June Paik Nam June Paik (; July 20, 1932 – January 29, 2006) was a South Korean artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with the first use (1974) of the term "electronic super highway" ...
,
Shigeko Kubota (August 2, 1937 – July 23, 2015) was a Japanese video artist, sculptor and avant-garde performance artist, who mostly lived in New York City. She was one of the first artists to adopt the portable video camera Sony Portapak in 1970, likening ...
,
La Monte Young La Monte Thornton Young (born October 14, 1935) is an American composer, musician, and performance artist recognized as one of the first American minimalist composers and a central figure in Fluxus and post-war avant-garde music. He is best k ...
,
Mary Bauermeister Mary Hildegard Ruth Bauermeister (7 September 1934 – 2 March 2023) was a German artist who worked in sculpture, drawing, installation, performance, and music. Influenced by Fluxus artists and Nouveau Réalisme, her work addresses esoteric iss ...
,
Joseph Byrd Joseph Hunter Byrd Jr. (born December 19, 1937) is an American composer, musician and academic. After first becoming known as an experimental composer in New York City and Los Angeles in the early and mid-1960s, he became the leader of The Uni ...
,
Ben Patterson Benjamin Patterson (May 29, 1934 – June 25, 2016) was an American musician, artist, and one of the founders of the Fluxus movement. Biography Benjamin Patterson was born in Pittsburgh on May 29, 1934. He attended the University of Michigan fr ...
,
Daniel Spoerri Daniel Spoerri (; 27 March 1930 – 6 November 2024) was a Romanian-born Swiss visual artist and writer. He is considered to be an important figure among the artists within the so-called "second wave" of the Pop art movement. Spoerri is best kno ...
,
Eric Andersen (artist) Eric Andersen (born 1940 in Antwerp) is a Danish artist associated with the Fluxus art movement. He lives in Copenhagen, Denmark. Eric Andersen's artistic activities invite the audience to look at life from new, unexpected perspectives. It can d ...
,
Ken Friedman Ken Friedman (born September 19, 1949 in New London, Connecticut) is a design researcher. He was a member of Fluxus, an international laboratory for experimental art, architecture, design, and music. Friedman joined Fluxus in 1966 as the youngest ...
,
Terry Riley Terrence Mitchell Riley (born June 24, 1935) is an American composer and performing musician best known as a pioneer of the minimalist music, minimalist school of composition. Influenced by jazz and Indian classical music, his work became notab ...
and Wolf Vostell. Not only were they a diverse community of collaborators who influenced each other, they were also, largely, friends. They collectively had what were, at the time, radical ideas about art and the role of art in society. Fluxus founder George Maciunas proposed a well known manifesto, but few considered Fluxus to be a true movement, and therefore the manifesto was not largely adopted. Instead, a series of festivals in Wiesbaden, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Amsterdam, London, and New York, gave rise to a loose but robust community with many similar beliefs. In keeping with the reputation Fluxus earned as a forum of experimentation, some Fluxus artists came to describe Fluxus as a laboratory.


Early history: late 50s to 1965


Origins

The origins of Fluxus lie in many of the concepts explored by composer
John Cage John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and Extended technique, non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one ...
in his
experimental music Experimental music is a general label for any music or music genre that pushes existing boundaries and genre definitions. Experimental compositional practice is defined broadly by exploratory sensibilities radically opposed to, and questioning of, ...
of the 1930s through the 1960s. After attending courses on
Zen Buddhism Zen (; from Chinese: '' Chán''; in Korean: ''Sŏn'', and Vietnamese: ''Thiền'') is a Mahayana Buddhist tradition that developed in China during the Tang dynasty by blending Indian Mahayana Buddhism, particularly Yogacara and Madhyamaka ph ...
taught by D. T. Suzuki, Cage taught a series of classes in experimental composition from 1957 to 1959 at the
New School for Social Research The New School for Social Research (NSSR), previously known as The University in Exile and The New School University, is a graduate-level educational division of The New School in New York City, United States. NSSR enrolls more than 1,000 stud ...
in New York City. These classes explored the notions of chance and indeterminacy in art, using music scores as a basis for compositions that could be performed in potentially infinite ways. Some of the artists and musicians who became involved in Fluxus, including
Jackson Mac Low Jackson Mac Low (September 12, 1922 – December 8, 2004) was an American poet, performance artist, composer and playwright, known to most readers of poetry as a practitioner of systematic chance operations and other non-intentional compos ...
,
La Monte Young La Monte Thornton Young (born October 14, 1935) is an American composer, musician, and performance artist recognized as one of the first American minimalist composers and a central figure in Fluxus and post-war avant-garde music. He is best k ...
,
George Brecht George Brecht (August 27, 1926 – December 5, 2008), born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer, as well as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnso ...
,
Al Hansen Alfred Earl "Al" Hansen (5 October 1927 – 20 June 1995) was an American artist. He was a member of Fluxus, a movement that originated on an artists' collective around George Maciunas. He was the father of Andy Warhol protégé Bibbe Ha ...
, and
Dick Higgins Dick Higgins (15 March 1938 – 25 October 1998) was an American artist, composer, art theorist, poet, publisher, printmaker, and a co-founder of the Fluxus international artistic movement (and community). Inspired by John Cage, Higgins was ...
attended Cage's classes. A major influence is found in the work of
Marcel Duchamp Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (, ; ; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, Futurism and conceptual art. He is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Pica ...
. Also of importance was ''Dada Poets and Painters'', edited by Robert Motherwell, a book of translations of Dada texts that was widely read by members of Fluxus. The term
anti-art Anti-art is a loosely used term applied to an array of concepts and attitudes that reject prior definitions of art and question art in general. Somewhat paradoxically, anti-art tends to conduct this questioning and rejection from the vantage poi ...
, a precursor to
Dada Dada () or Dadaism was an anti-establishment art movement that developed in 1915 in the context of the Great War and the earlier anti-art movement. Early centers for dadaism included Zürich and Berlin. Within a few years, the movement had s ...
, was coined by Duchamp around 1913, when he created his first readymades from
found object A found object (a calque from the French ''objet trouvé''), or found art, is art created from undisguised, but often modified, items or products that are not normally considered materials from which art is made, often because they already hav ...
s (ordinary objects found or purchased and declared art). Indifferently chosen, readymades and altered readymades challenged the notion of art as an inherently optical experience, dependent on academic art skills. The most famous example is Duchamp's altered readymade ''
Fountain A fountain, from the Latin "fons" ( genitive "fontis"), meaning source or spring, is a decorative reservoir used for discharging water. It is also a structure that jets water into the air for a decorative or dramatic effect. Fountains were o ...
'' (1917), a work which he signed "R. Mutt." While taking refuge from WWI in New York, in 1915 Duchamp formed a Dada group with
Francis Picabia Francis Picabia (: born Francis-Marie Martinez de Picabia; 22January 1879 – 30November 1953) was a French avant-garde painter, writer, filmmaker, magazine publisher, poet, and typography, typographist closely associated with Dada. When consid ...
and American artist
Man Ray Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky; August 27, 1890 – November 18, 1976) was an American naturalized French visual artist who spent most of his career in Paris. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealism, Surrealist movements, ...
. Other key members included
Arthur Cravan Arthur Cravan (born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd; 22 May 1887 – disappeared 1918) was a Swiss writer, poet, artist and boxer. He was the second son of Otho Holland Lloyd and Hélène Clara St. Clair. His brother Otho Lloyd was a painter and photo ...
,
Florine Stettheimer Florine Stettheimer (August 19, 1871 – May 11, 1944) was an American modernist painter, feminist, theatrical designer, poet, and salonnière. Stettheimer developed a feminine, theatrical painting style depicting her friends, family, and expe ...
, and the
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven Elsa Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven (née Else Hildegard Plötz; 12 July 1874 – 14 December 1927) was a German avant-garde visual artist and poet, who was active in Greenwich Village, New York, from 1913 to 1923, where her radical self-displa ...
, credited by some with proposing the idea for
Fountain A fountain, from the Latin "fons" ( genitive "fontis"), meaning source or spring, is a decorative reservoir used for discharging water. It is also a structure that jets water into the air for a decorative or dramatic effect. Fountains were o ...
to Duchamp. By 1916 these artists, especially Duchamp, Man Ray, and Picabia, became the center for radical anti-art activities in New York City. Their artworks would inform Fluxus and conceptual art in general. In the late 1950s and very early 1960s, Fluxus and contemporaneous groups or movements, including
Happenings A happening is a performance, event, or situation art, usually as performance art. The term was first used by Allan Kaprow in 1959 to describe a range of art-related events. History Origins Allan Kaprow first coined the term "happening" in t ...
,
Nouveau réalisme A ''nouveau'' ( ), or ''vin (de) primeur'', is a wine which may be sold in the same year in which it was harvested. The most widely exported ''nouveau'' wine is French wine Beaujolais ''nouveau'' which is released on the third Thursday of ...
,
mail art Mail art, also known as postal art and correspondence art, is an artistic movement centered on sending small-scale works through the mail, postal service. It developed out of what eventually became Ray Johnson's New York Correspondence School and ...
, and action art in Japan, Austria, and other international locations were, often placed under the rubric of
Neo-Dada Neo-Dada was an art movement with audio, visual and literary manifestations that had similarities in method or intent with earlier Dada artwork. It sought to close the gap between art and daily life, and was a combination of playfulness, iconoclas ...
". A number of other contemporary events are credited as either anticipating Fluxus or as constituting proto-Fluxus events. The most commonly cited include the series of Chambers Street loft concerts, in New York, curated by
Yoko Ono Yoko Ono (, usually spelled in katakana as ; born February 18, 1933) is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking. Ono grew up in Tokyo and moved to New York ...
and La Monte Young in 1961, featuring pieces by Ono,
Jackson Mac Low Jackson Mac Low (September 12, 1922 – December 8, 2004) was an American poet, performance artist, composer and playwright, known to most readers of poetry as a practitioner of systematic chance operations and other non-intentional compos ...
,
Joseph Byrd Joseph Hunter Byrd Jr. (born December 19, 1937) is an American composer, musician and academic. After first becoming known as an experimental composer in New York City and Los Angeles in the early and mid-1960s, he became the leader of The Uni ...
, and Henry Flynt; the month-long ''Yam'' festival held in upstate New York by George Brecht and
Robert Watts Robert Watts (23 May 1938 – 30 September 2024) was a British film producer who was best known for his involvement with the ''Star Wars'' and ''Indiana Jones'' film series. Career Watts began working in the film industry in 1960, after two ye ...
in May 1963 with
Ray Johnson Raymond Edward "Ray" Johnson (October 16, 1927 – January 13, 1995) was an American artist. Known primarily as a collagist and correspondence artist, he was a seminal figure in the history of Neo-Dada and early Pop art and was described as < ...
and
Allan Kaprow Allan Kaprow (August 23, 1927 – April 5, 2006) was an American performance artist, installation artist, painter, and assemblagist . He helped to develop the " Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. ...
(the culmination of a year's worth of
Mail Art Mail art, also known as postal art and correspondence art, is an artistic movement centered on sending small-scale works through the mail, postal service. It developed out of what eventually became Ray Johnson's New York Correspondence School and ...
pieces); and a series of concerts held in
Mary Bauermeister Mary Hildegard Ruth Bauermeister (7 September 1934 – 2 March 2023) was a German artist who worked in sculpture, drawing, installation, performance, and music. Influenced by Fluxus artists and Nouveau Réalisme, her work addresses esoteric iss ...
's studio, Cologne, 1960–61, featuring
Nam June Paik Nam June Paik (; July 20, 1932 – January 29, 2006) was a South Korean artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with the first use (1974) of the term "electronic super highway" ...
and John Cage among many others. It was at one of these events in 1960, during his Etude pour Piano, that Paik leapt into the audience and cut John Cage's tie off, ran out of the concert hall, and then phoned the hall's organisers to announce the piece had ended. As one of the movement's founders, Dick Higgins, stated:
Fluxus started with the work, and then came together, applying the name Fluxus to work which already existed. It was as if it started in the middle of the situation, rather than at the beginning.


Neo-Dada Anthology of Chance Operations to Early Fluxus

In 1961 the American musician/artist
La Monte Young La Monte Thornton Young (born October 14, 1935) is an American composer, musician, and performance artist recognized as one of the first American minimalist composers and a central figure in Fluxus and post-war avant-garde music. He is best k ...
had been enlisted to guest-edit an East Coast issue of the Wast Coast literary journal ''
Beatitude The Beatitudes () are blessings recounted by Jesus in Matthew 5:3–10 within the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew, and four in the Sermon on the Plain in the Gospel of Luke, followed by four woes which mirror the blessings. In ...
'' to be called ''Beatitude East''. But as the ''Beatitude'' connection was prematurly terminated,
George Maciunas George Maciunas (; ; November 8, 1931 Kaunas – May 9, 1978 Boston, Massachusetts) was a Lithuanian American artist, art historian, and art organizer who was the founding member and central coordinator of Fluxus, an international community of ...
, a trained
graphic design Graphic design is a profession, academic discipline and applied art that involves creating visual communications intended to transmit specific messages to social groups, with specific objectives. Graphic design is an interdisciplinary branch of ...
er, asked Young if he could layout and help publish the
Neo-Dada Neo-Dada was an art movement with audio, visual and literary manifestations that had similarities in method or intent with earlier Dada artwork. It sought to close the gap between art and daily life, and was a combination of playfulness, iconoclas ...
material. Maciunas supplied the paper, design, and some money for publishing the anthology which contained the work of New York
avant-garde In the arts and literature, the term ''avant-garde'' ( meaning or ) identifies an experimental genre or work of art, and the artist who created it, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable ...
artists from that time. The project took the title of '' An Anthology of Chance Operations'' from its full title ''An Anthology of chance operations concept art anti-art indeterminacy improvisation meaningless work natural disasters plans of action stories diagrams Music poetry essays dance constructions mathematics compositions''. ''An Anthology of Chance Operations'' was completed and published in 1963 by
Jackson Mac Low Jackson Mac Low (September 12, 1922 – December 8, 2004) was an American poet, performance artist, composer and playwright, known to most readers of poetry as a practitioner of systematic chance operations and other non-intentional compos ...
and La Monte Young, as Maciunas had by then moved to Germany to escape his creditors. After opening a short-lived art gallery on
Madison Avenue Madison Avenue is a north-south avenue in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, New York, that carries northbound one-way traffic. It runs from Madison Square (at 23rd Street) to meet the southbound Harlem River Drive at 142nd Stree ...
, which showed work by
Dick Higgins Dick Higgins (15 March 1938 – 25 October 1998) was an American artist, composer, art theorist, poet, publisher, printmaker, and a co-founder of the Fluxus international artistic movement (and community). Inspired by John Cage, Higgins was ...
,
Yoko Ono Yoko Ono (, usually spelled in katakana as ; born February 18, 1933) is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking. Ono grew up in Tokyo and moved to New York ...
,
Jonas Mekas Jonas Mekas (; ; December 24, 1922 – January 23, 2019) was a Lithuanian-American filmmaker, poet, and artist who has been called "the godfather of American avant-garde cinema". Mekas's work has been exhibited in museums and at festivals world ...
,
Ray Johnson Raymond Edward "Ray" Johnson (October 16, 1927 – January 13, 1995) was an American artist. Known primarily as a collagist and correspondence artist, he was a seminal figure in the history of Neo-Dada and early Pop art and was described as < ...
, Henry Flynt and La Monte Young, Maciunas moved to
Wiesbaden Wiesbaden (; ) is the capital of the German state of Hesse, and the second-largest Hessian city after Frankfurt am Main. With around 283,000 inhabitants, it is List of cities in Germany by population, Germany's 24th-largest city. Wiesbaden form ...
, West Germany, having taken a job as a graphic designer with the
US Air Force The United States Air Force (USAF) is the Air force, air service branch of the United States Department of Defense. It is one of the six United States Armed Forces and one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. Tracing its ori ...
in late 1961 after the gallery had gone bust. From Wiesbaden, Maciunas continued his contact with Young and other New York City-based artists and with expatriate American artists like Benjamin Patterson and
Emmett Williams Emmett Williams (4 April 1925 – 14 February 2007) was an American poet and visual artist. He was married to British visual artist Ann Noël. Williams was born in Greenville, South Carolina, grew up in Virginia, and lived in Europe from 1 ...
, whom he met in Europe. By September 1962, Maciunas was joined by
Dick Higgins Dick Higgins (15 March 1938 – 25 October 1998) was an American artist, composer, art theorist, poet, publisher, printmaker, and a co-founder of the Fluxus international artistic movement (and community). Inspired by John Cage, Higgins was ...
and
Alison Knowles Alison Knowles (born 1933) is an American visual artist known for her installations, performances, soundworks, and publications. Knowles was a founding member of the Fluxus movement, an international network of artists who aspired to merge diffe ...
who traveled to Europe to help him promote a second planned publication to be called Fluxus, the first of a series of ''yearbooks'' of artists' works. Maciunas had first come up with the title ''Fluxus'' for a never done anthology of New York's
Lithuania Lithuania, officially the Republic of Lithuania, is a country in the Baltic region of Europe. It is one of three Baltic states and lies on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea, bordered by Latvia to the north, Belarus to the east and south, P ...
n artists, but instead applied the term to artists working in the ''Anthology of Chance Operations'' vein. Because after fleeing Lithuania at the end of
World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...
, his family settled in New York, where he first met the group of avant-garde artists and musicians centered around
John Cage John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and Extended technique, non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one ...
and
La Monte Young La Monte Thornton Young (born October 14, 1935) is an American composer, musician, and performance artist recognized as one of the first American minimalist composers and a central figure in Fluxus and post-war avant-garde music. He is best k ...
. Thus Maciunas coined the name ''Fluxus'' not for his perceived group of Lithuanian artists but for the
Neo-Dada Neo-Dada was an art movement with audio, visual and literary manifestations that had similarities in method or intent with earlier Dada artwork. It sought to close the gap between art and daily life, and was a combination of playfulness, iconoclas ...
art being produced by a range of artists with a shared sensibility as an attempt to "fuse... cultural, social, & political revolutionaries into united front and action". Maciunas first publicly coined the term ''Fluxus'' (meaning 'to flow') in a 'brochure prospectus' that he distributed to the audience at a festival he had organized, called ''Après Cage; Kleinen Sommerfest'' (After Cage; a Small Summer Festival), in
Wuppertal Wuppertal (; ) is a city in North Rhine-Westphalia, in western Germany, with a population of 355,000. Wuppertal is the seventh-largest city in North Rhine-Westphalia and List of cities in Germany by population, 17th-largest in Germany. It ...
, West Germany, 9 June 1962. Maciunas was an avid art historian, and initially referred to Fluxus as 'neo-dadaism' or 'renewed dadaism'. He wrote a number of letters to
Raoul Hausmann Raoul Hausmann (July 12, 1886 – February 1, 1971) was an Austrian artist and writer. One of the key figures in Berlin Dada, his experimental photographic collages, sound poetry, and institutional critiques would have a profound influence on ...
, an original
dada Dada () or Dadaism was an anti-establishment art movement that developed in 1915 in the context of the Great War and the earlier anti-art movement. Early centers for dadaism included Zürich and Berlin. Within a few years, the movement had s ...
ist, outlining his ideas. Hausmann discouraged the use of the term;
I note with much pleasure what you said about German neodadaists—but I think even the Americans should not use the term "neodadaism" because neo means nothing and -ism is old-fashioned. Why not simply "Fluxus"? It seems to me much better, because it's new, and dada is historic.
As part of the festival, Maciunas wrote a lecture entitled 'Neo-Dada in the United States'. After an attempt to define 'Concretist Neo-Dada' art, he explained that Fluxus was opposed to the exclusion of the everyday from art. Using 'anti-art and artistic banalities', Fluxus would fight the 'traditional artificialities of art'. The lecture ended with the declaration "Anti-art is life, is nature, is true reality—it is one and all."


European festivals and the Fluxkits

In 1962, Maciunas, Higgins and Knowles traveled to Europe to promote the planned Fluxus publication with concerts of antique musical instruments. With the help of a group of artists including
Joseph Beuys Joseph Heinrich Beuys ( ; ; 12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986) was a German artist, teacher, performance artist, and Aesthetics, art theorist whose work reflected concepts of humanism and sociology. With Heinrich Böll, , Caroline Tisdall, Rober ...
and Wolf Vostell, Maciunas eventually organised a series of ''Fluxfests'' across Western Europe. Starting with 14 concerts between 1 and 23 September 1962, at
Wiesbaden Wiesbaden (; ) is the capital of the German state of Hesse, and the second-largest Hessian city after Frankfurt am Main. With around 283,000 inhabitants, it is List of cities in Germany by population, Germany's 24th-largest city. Wiesbaden form ...
, these ''Fluxfests'' presented work by musicians such as John Cage, Ligeti,
Penderecki Krzysztof Eugeniusz Penderecki (; 23 November 1933 – 29 March 2020) was a Polish composer and conductor. His best-known works include '' Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima'', Symphony No. 3, his '' St Luke Passion'', '' Polish Requiem'', '' ...
,
Terry Riley Terrence Mitchell Riley (born June 24, 1935) is an American composer and performing musician best known as a pioneer of the minimalist music, minimalist school of composition. Influenced by jazz and Indian classical music, his work became notab ...
and
Brion Gysin Brion Gysin (19 January 1916 – 13 July 1986) was a British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet, performance artist and inventor of experimental devices. He is best known for his use of the cut-up technique, alongside his close friend, the ...
alongside
performance A performance is an act or process of staging or presenting a play, concert, or other form of entertainment. It is also defined as the action or process of carrying out or accomplishing an action, task, or function. Performance has evolved glo ...
pieces written by Higgins, Knowles, George Brecht and
Nam June Paik Nam June Paik (; July 20, 1932 – January 29, 2006) was a South Korean artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with the first use (1974) of the term "electronic super highway" ...
,
Ben Patterson Benjamin Patterson (May 29, 1934 – June 25, 2016) was an American musician, artist, and one of the founders of the Fluxus movement. Biography Benjamin Patterson was born in Pittsburgh on May 29, 1934. He attended the University of Michigan fr ...
,
Robert Filliou Robert Filliou (17 January 1926 – 2 December 1987) was a French artist associated with Fluxus, who produced works as a filmmaker, action poet, sculptor, and happenings maestro. Life In 1943, Filliou became a member of the French Communis ...
, and
Emmett Williams Emmett Williams (4 April 1925 – 14 February 2007) was an American poet and visual artist. He was married to British visual artist Ann Noël. Williams was born in Greenville, South Carolina, grew up in Virginia, and lived in Europe from 1 ...
, amongst many others. One performance in particular, ''Piano Activities'' by
Philip Corner Philip Lionel Corner (b. The Bronx, New York, April 10, 1933; name sometimes given as Phil Corner) is an American composer, trombonist, alphornist, vocalist, pianist, music theorist, music educator, and visual artist. Biography After The ...
, became notorious by challenging the important status of the piano in post-war German homes. The score—which asks for any number of performers to, among other things, "play", "pluck or tap", "scratch or rub", "drop objects" on, "act on strings with", "strike soundboard, pins, lid or drag various kinds of objects across them" and "act in any way on underside of piano"—resulted in the total destruction of a piano when performed by Maciunas, Higgins and others at Wiesbaden. The performance was considered scandalous enough to be shown on German television four times, with the introduction "The lunatics have escaped!"
At the end we did Corner's ''Piano Activities'' not according to his instructions since we systematically destroyed a piano which I bought for $5 and had to have it all cut up to throw it away, otherwise we would have had to pay movers, a very practical composition, but German sentiments about this "instrument of Chopin" were hurt and they made a row about it...
At the same time, Maciunas used his connections at work to start printing cheap mass-produced books and multiples by some of the artists that were involved in the performances. The first three to be printed were ''Composition 1961'' by La Monte Young
see it here
''An Anthology of Chance Operations'' edited by Young and Mac Low and '' Water Yam'', by George Brecht. ''Water Yam'', a series of event scores printed on small sheets of card and collected together in a cardboard box, was the first in a series of artworks that Maciunas printed that became known as ''Fluxkits''. Cheap, mass-produced and easily distributed, ''Fluxkits'' were originally intended to form an ever-expanding library of modern
performance art Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a pu ...
. ''Water Yam'' was published in an edition of 1000 and originally cost $4. By April 1964, almost a year later, Maciunas still had 996 copies unsold. Maciunas' original plan had been to design, edit and pay for each edition himself, in exchange for the copyright to be held by the collective. Profits were to be split 80/20 at first, in favor of the artist. Since most of the composers already had publishing deals, Fluxus quickly moved away from music toward performance and visual art. John Cage, for instance, never published work under the Fluxus moniker due to his contract with the music publishers
Edition Peters Edition Peters is a classical music publisher founded in Leipzig, Germany in 1800. History The company came into being on 1 December 1800 when the Viennese composer Franz Anton Hoffmeister (1754–1812) and the local organist Ambrosius Kühn ...
.
Maciunas seemed to have a fantastic ability to get things done.... if you had things to be printed he could get them printed. It's pretty hard in East Brunswick to get good offset printing. It's not impossible, but it's not so easy, and since I'm very lazy it was a relief to find somebody who could take the burden off my hands. So there was this guy Maciunas, a Lithuanian or Bulgarian, or somehow a refugee or whatever—beautifully dressed—"astonishing looking" would be a better adjective. He was somehow able to carry the whole thing off, without my having to go 57 miles to find a printer.
Since Maciunas was
colorblind Color blindness, color vision deficiency (CVD) or color deficiency is the decreased ability to see color or differences in color. The severity of color blindness ranges from mostly unnoticeable to full absence of color perception. Color bl ...
, Fluxus multiples were almost always black and white.


New York and the FluxShops

After his contract with the US Air Force was terminated due to ill health, Maciunas was forced to return to the US on 3 September 1963. Once back in New York, he set about organizing a series of street concerts and opened a new shop, the 'Fluxhall', on
Canal Street Canal Street may refer to: Places United Kingdom * Canal Street (Manchester), Manchester, England * Canal Street, Oxford, Jericho, Oxford, England United States * Canal Street (Buffalo), a street and district at the western terminus of the Er ...
. 12 concerts, "away from the beaten track of the New York art scene", took place on Canal Street, 11 April to 23 May 1964. With photographs taken by Maciunas himself, pieces by
Ben Vautier Benjamin Vautier (; 18 July 1935 – 5 June 2024), also known mononymously as Ben, was a French visual artist. Early life Benjamin Vautier was born on 18 July 1935 in Naples, Italy, to a French family. He was the great-grandson of the Swiss p ...
,
Alison Knowles Alison Knowles (born 1933) is an American visual artist known for her installations, performances, soundworks, and publications. Knowles was a founding member of the Fluxus movement, an international network of artists who aspired to merge diffe ...
and
Takehisa Kosugi was a Japanese composer, violinist and artist associated with the Fluxus movement. Early life Kosugi was born in Tokyo in 1938, and studied musicology at the Tokyo University of the Arts, graduating in 1962. Early musical influences Kosug ...
were performed in the street for free, although in practice there was 'no audience to speak of' anyway.
The people in Fluxus had understood, as Brecht explained, that "concert halls, theaters, and art galleries" were "mummifying". Instead, these artists found themselves "preferring streets, homes, and railway stations...." Maciunas recognized a radical political potential in all this forthrightly anti-institutional production, which was an important source for his own deep commitment to it. Deploying his expertise as a professional graphic designer, Maciunas played an important role in projecting upon Fluxus whatever coherence it would later seem to have had.
Along with the New York shop, Maciunas built up a distribution network for the new art across Europe and later outlets in California and Japan. Gallery and mail order outlets were established in Amsterdam, Villefranche-Sur-Mer, Milan and London, amongst others. By 1965, the first anthology '' Fluxus 1'' was available, consisting of manila envelopes bolted together containing work by numerous artists who would later become famous including La Monte Young,
Christo Christo Vladimirov Javacheff (1935–2020) and Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon (1935–2009), known as Christo and Jeanne-Claude, were artists noted for their large-scale, site-specific environmental installations, often large landmarks a ...
,
Joseph Byrd Joseph Hunter Byrd Jr. (born December 19, 1937) is an American composer, musician and academic. After first becoming known as an experimental composer in New York City and Los Angeles in the early and mid-1960s, he became the leader of The Uni ...
and Yoko Ono. Other pieces available included packs of altered playing cards by George Brecht, sensory boxes by
Ay-O Takao Iijima (born May 19, 1931), better known by his art name Ay-O (靉嘔 ''Ai Ō''), is a Japanese avant-garde visual and performance artist who has been associated with Fluxus since its international beginnings in the 1960s. Biography Earl ...
, a regular newsletter with contributions by artists and musicians such as
Ray Johnson Raymond Edward "Ray" Johnson (October 16, 1927 – January 13, 1995) was an American artist. Known primarily as a collagist and correspondence artist, he was a seminal figure in the history of Neo-Dada and early Pop art and was described as < ...
and John Cale, and tin cans filled with poems, songs and recipes about beans by
Alison Knowles Alison Knowles (born 1933) is an American visual artist known for her installations, performances, soundworks, and publications. Knowles was a founding member of the Fluxus movement, an international network of artists who aspired to merge diffe ...

see
.


Stockhausen's ''Originale''

After returning to New York, Maciunas became reacquainted with Henry Flynt, who encouraged members of Fluxus to take a more overtly political stance. One of the results of these discussions was to set up a picket line at the American premiere of ''
Originale ''Originale'' (Originals, or "Real Characters"), musical theatre with ''Kontakte'', is a music theatre work by the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, written in collaboration with the artist Mary Bauermeister. It was first performed in 1961 ...
'', a recent work by the German composer
Karlheinz Stockhausen Karlheinz Stockhausen (; 22 August 1928 – 5 December 2007) was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He is known for his groun ...
, 8 September 1964.Bloch, Mark. "On Originale.", from Bloch, Mark, editor
. "Robert Delford Brown: Meat, Maps and Militant Metaphysics", Cameron Museum of Art, Wilmington, North Carolina, 2008.
Stockhausen was deemed a 'Cultural Imperialist' by Maciunas and Flynt, while other members vehemently disagreed. The result was members of Fluxus, such as Nam June Paik and Jackson Mac Low, crossing a picket line made up of other members, including Ben Vautier and
Takako Saito is a Japanese artist closely associated with Fluxus, the international collective of avant-garde artists that was active primarily in the 1960s and 1970s. Saito contributed a number of performances and artworks to the movement, which continu ...
who handed out leaflets denouncing Stockhausen as "a characteristic European-North American ruling-class Artist". Dick Higgins participated in the picket, and then coolly joined the other performers inside;
Maciunas and his friend Henry Flynt tried to get the Fluxus people to march around outside the circus with white cards that said Originale was bad. And they tried to say that the Fluxus people who were in the circus weren't Fluxus any more. That was silly, because it made a split. I thought it was funny, and so first I walked around with Maciunas and with Henry with a card, then I went inside and joined the circus; so both groups got angry with me. Oh well. Some people say that Fluxus died that day—I once thought so myself—but it turned out I was wrong.
The event, arranged by
Charlotte Moorman Madeline Charlotte Moorman (November 18, 1933 – November 8, 1991) was an American cellist, performance artist, and advocate for avant-garde music. Referred to as the "Jeanne d'Arc of new music", she was the founder of the Annual Avant Garde Fes ...
as part of her ''2nd Annual New York Avant Garde Festival'', would cement animosities between Maciunas and her, with Maciunas frequently demanding that artists associated with Fluxus have nothing to do with the annual festival, and would often expel artists who ignored his demands. This hostility continued throughout Maciunas' life—much to Moorman's bemusement—despite her continued championing of Fluxus art and artists.


Middle history: 1965–78


Perceived insurgencies and the Asiatic influence

The picketing of ''Originale'' marked the high point of Maciunas'
agitprop Agitprop (; from , portmanteau of ''agitatsiya'', "agitation" and ''propaganda'', "propaganda") refers to an intentional, vigorous promulgation of ideas. The term originated in the Soviet Union where it referred to popular media, such as literatu ...
approach, an approach that estranged many of Fluxus' early proponents; Jackson Mac Low had resigned immediately after hearing 'antisocial' plans laid in April 1963, such as breaking down trucks under the Hudson River. Brecht threatened to quit on the same issue, and then left New York in the spring of 1965. Despite his continued allegiance to Fluxus ideals, Dick Higgins fell out with Maciunas around the same time, ostensibly over his setting up the
Something Else Press Something Else Press was founded by Dick Higgins in 1963. It published many important intermedia texts and artworks by such Fluxus artists as Higgins, Ray Johnson, Alison Knowles, Allan Kaprow, George Brecht, Daniel Spoerri, Robert Filliou, A ...
which printed many texts by key Fluxus-related personalities and other members of the avant garde. Charlotte Moorman continued to present her Annual Avant Garde Festival in New York. Such perceived insurrections in the coherence of Maciunas' leadership of Fluxus provided an opening for Fluxus to become increasingly influenced by Japanese members of the group. Since returning to Japan in 1961, Yoko Ono had been recommending colleagues look Maciunas up if they moved to New York; by the time she had returned, in early 1965, Hi Red Center,
Shigeko Kubota (August 2, 1937 – July 23, 2015) was a Japanese video artist, sculptor and avant-garde performance artist, who mostly lived in New York City. She was one of the first artists to adopt the portable video camera Sony Portapak in 1970, likening ...
, Takako Saito,
Mieko Shiomi was a Japanese amateur photographer in Shōwa era Japan. Life Shiomi was born in Osaka, and graduated from Shimizudani Girls' High School in 1927 (Shōwa 2). Shiomi joined the Tampei Photography Club in 1948, and thereafter joined two othe ...
,
Yasunao Tone was a Japanese multidisciplinary artist born in Tokyo, Japan and working in New York City. He graduated from Chiba University in 1957 with a major in Japanese Literature. An important figure in postwar Japanese art during the 1960s, he was active ...
and
Ay-O Takao Iijima (born May 19, 1931), better known by his art name Ay-O (靉嘔 ''Ai Ō''), is a Japanese avant-garde visual and performance artist who has been associated with Fluxus since its international beginnings in the 1960s. Biography Earl ...
had all started to make work for Fluxus, often of a contemplative nature. In Tokyo Japan 1964 Yoko Ono, a nonconformist to the Fluxus community, independently published her artist’s book ''
Grapefruit The grapefruit (''Citrus'' × ''paradisi'') is a subtropical citrus tree known for its relatively large, sour to semi-sweet, somewhat bitter fruit. The flesh of the fruit is segmented and varies in color from pale yellow to dark red. Grapefru ...
''. The book’s text itself encompassing event scores and other forms of participatory art. An event score from the book: Cloud Piece Imagine the clouds dripping. Dig a hole in your garden to put them in.


Proto-performance art

On September 25, 1965, the FluxOrchestra, with La Monte Young conducting, played at
Carnegie Recital Hall Carnegie Hall ( ) is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. It is at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east side of Seventh Avenue between 56th and 57th Streets. Designed by architect William Burnet Tuthill and built by its n ...
in New York City with a poster and program designed by George Maciunas. Copies of the program were folded into paper airplanes and launched during the evening, which included performances of "Falling Event" by Chieko Shiomi, "Symphony No. 3 'On the Floor from 'Clouds Scissors'" by
George Brecht George Brecht (August 27, 1926 – December 5, 2008), born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer, as well as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnso ...
, "4 Pieces for Orchestra to La Monte Young" by Yoko Ono, "Disappearing Music for Face" by Shiomi, "Tactical Pieces for Orchestra" and "Olivetti Adding Machine in Memoriam for Adriano Olivetti" by Anthony Cox, "Trance for Orchestra" by Watts, "Sky Piece to Jesus Christ*" by Ono, "Octet for Winds 'In the Water' from 'Cloud Scissors" by Brecht, "Piece" by
Shigeko Kubota (August 2, 1937 – July 23, 2015) was a Japanese video artist, sculptor and avant-garde performance artist, who mostly lived in New York City. She was one of the first artists to adopt the portable video camera Sony Portapak in 1970, likening ...
, "1965 $50" by Young, "Piano Piece" by Tomas Schmit, "Sword Piece" by Cox, "Music for Late Afternoon Together With" by Shiomi, "2" by Watts, "c/t Trace" by Watts, "Intermission Event" by
Willem de Ridder Willem de Ridder (14 October 1939 – 29 December 2022) was a Dutch anarchist and artist, known as a founder of Fluxus. He was the foremost Fluxus member in the Netherlands. He showed and sold Fluxus works in his gallery, Amstel 47, and shops F ...
, "Moviee Music" by Stan Vanderbeek, "Mechanical Orchestra" by Joe Jones, and "Secret Room" by
Ben Vautier Benjamin Vautier (; 18 July 1935 – 5 June 2024), also known mononymously as Ben, was a French visual artist. Early life Benjamin Vautier was born on 18 July 1935 in Naples, Italy, to a French family. He was the great-grandson of the Swiss p ...
. In 1969, Fluxus artist Joe Jones opened his ''JJ Music Store'' (aka ''Tone Deaf Music Store'') at 18
North Moore Street North Moore Street is a moderately trafficked street in TriBeCa, a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan. It runs roughly east–west between West Broadway and West Street. Automotive traffic is westbound only. Naming On stree ...
, where he presented his repetitive
drone Drone or The Drones may refer to: Science and technology Vehicle * Drone, a type of uncrewed vehicle, a class of robot ** Unmanned aerial vehicle or aerial drone *** Unmanned combat aerial vehicle ** Unmanned ground vehicle or ground drone ** Unma ...
music machines. He created there an installation in the window so that anyone could press numerous door buttons to play the
noise music Noise music is a genre of music that is characterised by the expressive use of noise. This type of music tends to challenge the distinction that is made in conventional musical practices between musical and non-musical sound. Noise music include ...
machines displayed there. Jones also presented small musical installation performances there, alone or with other Fluxus artists, such as
Yoko Ono Yoko Ono (, usually spelled in katakana as ; born February 18, 1933) is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking. Ono grew up in Tokyo and moved to New York ...
and
John Lennon John Winston Ono Lennon (born John Winston Lennon; 9 October 19408 December 1980) was an English singer-songwriter, musician and activist. He gained global fame as the founder, co-lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of the Beatles. Lennon's ...
, among others. From April 18 to June 12, 1970, Ono and Lennon (aka Plastic Ono Band) presented a series of Fluxus art events and concerts there called ''GRAPEFRUIT FLUXBANQUET''. It was promoted with a poster designed by Fluxus leader
George Maciunas George Maciunas (; ; November 8, 1931 Kaunas – May 9, 1978 Boston, Massachusetts) was a Lithuanian American artist, art historian, and art organizer who was the founding member and central coordinator of Fluxus, an international community of ...
. Performances included ''Come Impersonating John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Grapefruit Banquet'' (April 11–17) by George Maciunas, Yoshimasa Wada, Nye Ffarrabas (formerly Bici Forbes and Bici Forbes Hendricks), Geoffrey Hendricks, and Robert Watts; ''Do It Yourself'' (April 11–17) by Yoko Ono; ''Tickets by John Lennon + Fluxagents'' (April 18–24) with Wada,
Ben Vautier Benjamin Vautier (; 18 July 1935 – 5 June 2024), also known mononymously as Ben, was a French visual artist. Early life Benjamin Vautier was born on 18 July 1935 in Naples, Italy, to a French family. He was the great-grandson of the Swiss p ...
and Maciunas; ''Clinic by Yoko Ono + Hi Red Center'' (April 25-May 1); ''Blue Room by Yoko + Fluxmasterliars'' (May 2–8); ''Weight & Water by Yoko + Fluxfiremen'' (May 9–15); ''Capsule by Yoko + Flux Space Center'' (May 16–22) with Maciunas, Paul Sharits,
George Brecht George Brecht (August 27, 1926 – December 5, 2008), born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer, as well as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnso ...
,
Ay-O Takao Iijima (born May 19, 1931), better known by his art name Ay-O (靉嘔 ''Ai Ō''), is a Japanese avant-garde visual and performance artist who has been associated with Fluxus since its international beginnings in the 1960s. Biography Earl ...
, Ono, Watts, John Cavanaugh (sculptor), John Cavanaugh; ''Portrait of
John Lennon John Winston Ono Lennon (born John Winston Lennon; 9 October 19408 December 1980) was an English singer-songwriter, musician and activist. He gained global fame as the founder, co-lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of the Beatles. Lennon's ...
as a Young Cloud by Yoko + Everybody'' (May 23–29); ''The Store by Yoko + Fluxfactory'' (May 30-June 5), with Ono, Maciunas, Wada, Ay-O; and finally ''Examination by Yoko + Fluxschool'' (June 6–12) with Ono, Geoffrey Hendricks, Watts, Mieko Shiomi and
Robert Filliou Robert Filliou (17 January 1926 – 2 December 1987) was a French artist associated with Fluxus, who produced works as a filmmaker, action poet, sculptor, and happenings maestro. Life In 1943, Filliou became a member of the French Communis ...
.


Objects blurring boundaries

As Fluxus gradually became more famous, Maciunas' ambitions for the sale of cheap multiples grew. The second flux-anthology, the ''Fluxkit'' (late 1964), collected together early 3D work made by the collective in a businessman's case, an idea borrowed directly from Duchamp's ''Boite en Valise'' Within a year, plans for a new anthology, ''Fluxus 2'', were in full swing to contain Flux films by
John Cage John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and Extended technique, non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one ...
and Yoko Ono (with hand held projectors provided), disrupted matchboxes and postcards by Ben Vautier, plastic food by Claes Oldenburg, FluxMedicine by
Shigeko Kubota (August 2, 1937 – July 23, 2015) was a Japanese video artist, sculptor and avant-garde performance artist, who mostly lived in New York City. She was one of the first artists to adopt the portable video camera Sony Portapak in 1970, likening ...
(containing empty pill packages), and artworks made of rocks, ink stamps, outdated travel tickets, undoable puzzles and a machine to facilitate humming. Maciunas' belief in the collective extended to authorship; a number of pieces from this period were anonymous, mis-attributed, or have had their authorship since questioned. As a further complication, Maciunas was in the habit of dramatically changing ideas submitted by various artists before he put the works into production. ''Solid Plastic in Plastic Box'', credited to Per Kirkeby 1967, for instance, had originally been realised by Kirkeby as a metal box, inscribed 'This Box Contains Wood'. When opened, the box would be found to contain sawdust. By the time the multiple had been manufactured by Maciunas, it was a block of solid plastic contained in a plastic box of the same color. Conversely, Maciunas assigned ''Degree Face Clock'', in which a clock face is measured out in 360°, to Kirkeby despite being an idea by
Robert Watts Robert Watts (23 May 1938 – 30 September 2024) was a British film producer who was best known for his involvement with the ''Star Wars'' and ''Indiana Jones'' film series. Career Watts began working in the film industry in 1960, after two ye ...
;
Some years ago, when I spoke with Robert Watts about ''Degree Face Clock'' and ''Compass Face Clock'', he had recalled thinking up the idea himself and was surprised that George Maciunas advertised them as Per Kirkeby's. Watts shrugged and said that was the way George worked. There would be ideas in the air and Maciunas would assign the piece to one artist or another.
Other tactics from this time included Maciunas buying large amounts of plastic boxes wholesale, and handing them out to artists with the simple request to turn them into Fluxkits, and the use of the rapidly growing international network of artists to contribute items needed to complete works. Robert Watts' ''Fluxatlas'', 1973, for instance, contains small rocks sent by members of the group from around the world.


Inventing performance art

In addition to his numerous original compositions which have joined the collective's catalog of works, Larry Miller (artist), Larry Miller, associated with the group since 1969, has also been active as an interpreter of the "classic" scores and responsible for bringing the group's works to a wider public, blurring the lines between artist, producer and researcher. Besides Miller's own artistic work, he has also organized, reconstructed and performed at numerous Fluxus events and assembled an extensive collection of material on the history of Fluxus. Through Miller, Fluxus attracted media coverage such as the worldwide CNN coverage of ''Off Limits'' exhibit at the The Newark Museum of Art, Newark Museum (now The Newark Museum of Art) in 1999. Other Miller activities as organizer, performer and presenter within the Fluxus milieu include ''Performance in Fluxus Continue 1963–2003'' at Musee d'Art et d'Art Contemporain in Nice; ''Fluxus a la Carte'' in Amsterdam; and ''Centraal Fluxus Festival'' at Centraal Museum in Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands. In 2004, for Geoff Hendricks' ''Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia and Rutgers University 1958–1972'', Miller reprised and updated the track and field events of the Flux Olympics, first presented in 1970. For ''Do-it Yourself Fluxus'' at AI – Art Interactive – in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Miller worked as the curatorial consultant for an exhibit of works that allowed viewers hands-on experience including the reconstruction of several sections of the historic ''Flux Labyrinth'', a massive and intricate maze that Miller originally constructed with George Maciunas at ''Akademie der Künste'' in Berlin in 1976 and which included sections by several of the Fluxus artists. Miller created a new version of the ''Flux Labyrinth'' at the ''In the Spirit of Fluxus'' exhibit at the Walker Art Center in 1994, where Griel Marcus said, "Miller was... fine tuning the monster."


Feminism

Women associated with Fluxus such as Carolee Schneemann and
Charlotte Moorman Madeline Charlotte Moorman (November 18, 1933 – November 8, 1991) was an American cellist, performance artist, and advocate for avant-garde music. Referred to as the "Jeanne d'Arc of new music", she was the founder of the Annual Avant Garde Fes ...
, and founding members of the group such as
Alison Knowles Alison Knowles (born 1933) is an American visual artist known for her installations, performances, soundworks, and publications. Knowles was a founding member of the Fluxus movement, an international network of artists who aspired to merge diffe ...
and
Yoko Ono Yoko Ono (, usually spelled in katakana as ; born February 18, 1933) is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking. Ono grew up in Tokyo and moved to New York ...
, contributed works in varying media and with differing content such as Knowles' "Make a Salad" and "Make a Soup.". Each was shaped by their times and their associations with artists of the previous generation such as Sari Dienes who were pointing the way to the changes of the 1960s and 70s with strong personnas and art. Some made experimental and performative work having to do with the body that created a powerful female presence, which existed within Fluxus from the group's beginning as illustrated by works including Carolee Schneemann, Carolee Schneemann's "Interior Scroll", Yoko Ono's "Cut Piece 1964, Cut Piece", and
Shigeko Kubota (August 2, 1937 – July 23, 2015) was a Japanese video artist, sculptor and avant-garde performance artist, who mostly lived in New York City. She was one of the first artists to adopt the portable video camera Sony Portapak in 1970, likening ...
's "Vagina Painting". Women working within Fluxus were often simultaneously critiquing their position within a male dominated society while also exposing the inequalities within an art collective that claimed to be open and diverse. George Maciunas, in his rejection of Schneeman as a member of Fluxus, called her "guilty of Baroque tendencies, overt sexuality, and theatrical excess". "Interior Scroll" was a response to Schneemann's experience as a filmmaker in the 1950s and 1960s, when male filmmakers claimed that women should restrict themselves to dance. In ''An evening with Fluxus women: a roundtable discussion'', hosted at New York University on 19 February 2009 by ''Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory'' and the Department of Performance Studies, a passage from Mieko Shiomi reads "...the best thing about Fluxus, I think, is that there was no discrimination on the basis of nationality and gender. Fluxus was open to anyone who shared similar thoughts about art and life. That's why women artists could be so active without feeling any frustration." Shigeko Kubota, Shigeo Kubota's ''Vagina Painting'' (1965), was performed by attaching a paintbrush dipped in red paint to her underwear, then applying it to a piece of paper while moving over it in a crouching position. The paint evoked menstrual blood. ''Vagina Painting'' has been interpreted as a critique of Jackson Pollock's action paintings, and the male-dominated Abstract expressionism, abstract expressionist tradition.


Utopian communities

A number of artists in the group were interested in setting up Flux communes, intending to 'bridge the gap between the artist community and the surrounding society' The first of these, La Cédille qui Sourit or ''The Cedilla That Smiles'', was set up in Villefranche-sur-Mer, France, by
Robert Filliou Robert Filliou (17 January 1926 – 2 December 1987) was a French artist associated with Fluxus, who produced works as a filmmaker, action poet, sculptor, and happenings maestro. Life In 1943, Filliou became a member of the French Communis ...
and George Brecht, 1965–1968. Intended as an 'International Centre of Permanent Creation', the shop sold Fluxkits and other small wares as well as housing a 'non-school', boasting the motto "A carefree exchange of information and experience. No students, no teachers. Perfect licence, at times to listen at times to talk." In 1966, Maciunas, Watts and others took advantage of new legislation drafted to regenerate the area of Manhattan known as 'Hell's Hundred Acres', soon to become rebranded as SoHo, allowing artists to buy live/work spaces in an area that had been blighted due to a proposed 18-lane expressway along Broome Street. Led by Maciunas, plans were laid to start a series of real-estate developments in the area, designed to create an artists' community within a few streets of the FluxShop on Canal Street.
'Maciunas wanted to establish collective workshops, food-buying cooperatives and theaters to link the strengths of various media together and bridge the gap between the artist community and the surrounding society'
The first warehouse, intended to house Maciunas, Watts, Christo & Jeanne-Claude, Jonas Mekas, La Monte Young and others, was located on Greene Street. Likening these communities to the soviet Kolkhozs, Maciunas didn't hesitate to adopt the title 'Chairman of Bldg. Co-Op' without first registering an office or becoming a member of the New York State Association of Realtors. FluxHousing Co-Operatives continued to redevelop the area over the next decade, and were widened to include plans to set up a ''FluxIsland''- a suitable island was located near Antigua, but the money to buy and develop it remained unforthcoming- and finally a performance arts centre called the ''FluxFarm'' established in New Marlborough, Massachusetts. The plans were continually dogged by financial problems, constant run-ins with the New York authorities, and eventually resulted, on 8 November 1975, in Maciunas being severely beaten by thugs sent by an unpaid electrical contractor.


Fluxus since 1978


Death of George Maciunas

Maciunas moved to the Berkshire Mountains in Western Massachusetts in the late 1970s. Two decades earlier, after collecting paintings, the Boston art collector Jean Brown, and her late husband Leonard Brown, began to shift their focus to Dadaist and Surrealist art, manifestoes and periodicals. In 1971, after Mr. Brown's death, Mrs. Brown moved to Tyringham, Massachusetts, Tyringham, and expanded into areas adjacent to Fluxus, including artists' books, concrete poetry, happenings, mail art and performance art. Maciunas helped turn her home, originally a Shaker seed house, into an important center for both Fluxus artists and scholars, with Mrs. Brown alternately cooking meals and showing guests her collection. Activities centered on a large archive room on the second floor built by Maciunas, who settled in nearby Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Great Barrington, where it was discovered in 1977 that Maciunas developed cancer of the pancreas and liver. Three months before his death, he married his friend and companion, the poet Billie Hutching. After a legal wedding in Lee, Massachusetts, the couple performed a "Fluxwedding" in a friend's loft in SoHo, 25 February 1978. A videotape of the Maciunas' wedding was produced by Dimitri Devyatkin. The bride and groom traded clothing. Maciunas died on 9 May 1978 in a hospital in Boston. His funeral was held in typical Fluxus style where they dubbed the funeral "Fluxfeast and Wake", ate foods that were only black, white, or purple. Maciunas left behind his thoughts on Fluxus in a series of important video conversations called ''Interview With George Maciunas'' with Fluxus artist Larry Miller (artist), Larry Miller, which has been screened internationally and translated into numerous languages. Over a 30 year period, Miller shot and collected Fluxus related materials including tapes on Joe Jones, Carolee Schneemann, Ben Vautier, Dick Higgins, and Alison Knowles, in addition to the 1978 Maciunas interview.


Post-Maciunas developments

After the death of Maciunas a rift opened in Fluxus between a few collectors and curators who placed Fluxus as an art movement in a specific time frame (1962 to 1978), and the artists themselves, many of whom continued to see Fluxus as a living entity held together by its core values and world view. Different theorists and historians adopted each of these views. Fluxus is therefore referred to variously in the past or the present tense. The definition of Fluxus was always a subject of controversy, complicated by the death of the original artists who were still living when Maciunas died. Some have argued that the unique control that curator Jon Hendricks (artist), Jon Hendricks holds over major historical Fluxus collection the Gilbert and Lila Silverman collection has enabled him to influence, through the numerous books and catalogues subsidized by the collection, the view that Fluxus died with Maciunas. Hendricks argues that Fluxus was a historical movement that occurred at a particular time, asserting that such central Fluxus artists as Dick Higgins and Nam June Paik could no longer label themselves as active Fluxus artists after 1978, and that contemporary artists influenced by Fluxus cannot lay claim to be Fluxus artists. The Museum of Modern Art makes the same claim dating the movement to the 1960s and 1970s. Many of the original Fluxus artists still working enjoy homages by younger Fluxus-influenced artists who stage events to commemorate Fluxus, but discourage the use of the "Fluxus" label by younger artists. Others, including historian of art Hannah Higgins, daughter of Fluxus artists
Alison Knowles Alison Knowles (born 1933) is an American visual artist known for her installations, performances, soundworks, and publications. Knowles was a founding member of the Fluxus movement, an international network of artists who aspired to merge diffe ...
and
Dick Higgins Dick Higgins (15 March 1938 – 25 October 1998) was an American artist, composer, art theorist, poet, publisher, printmaker, and a co-founder of the Fluxus international artistic movement (and community). Inspired by John Cage, Higgins was ...
, assert that although Maciunas was a key participant, there were many more, including Fluxus co-founder Higgins, who continued to work within Fluxus after the death of Maciunas. The rise of the internet in the 1990s enabled a vibrant post-Fluxus community to emerge online. Some of the original Fluxus artists from the 1960s and 1970s, including Higgins, created online communities such as the Fluxlist; following their departure, younger artists, writers, musicians, and performers have attempted to continue their work in cyberspace. The influence of Fluxus continued also in multi-media digital art performances, such as that presented by Other Minds (organization), Other Minds in the SOMArts building in San Francisco to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Fluxus in September 2011. The performance was curated by Adam Fong who was also one of the performers along with Yoshi Wada,
Alison Knowles Alison Knowles (born 1933) is an American visual artist known for her installations, performances, soundworks, and publications. Knowles was a founding member of the Fluxus movement, an international network of artists who aspired to merge diffe ...
, Hannah Higgins, Luciano Chessa and Adam Overton. In 2018 the Los Angeles Philharmonic in its ''Fluxus Festival'' presented a fluxus performance incorporating John Cage, John Cage's "Europeras 1 and 2" directed by Yuval Sharon. Fluxus artists continue to perform today on a smaller scale.


Influences

An immediate predecessor of Fluxus, according to Maciunas, was the Gutai group which promoted art as an anti-academic, psychophysical experience, an "art of matter as it is" as explained by Shiraga Kazuo in 1956. Gutai became connected with a sort of artistic mass-production, anticipating Fluxus's trademark, i.e., ambiguity between the cultivated and the trivial, between high and low. Indeed, avant-garde art in Japan tended toward informal rather than conceptual elements, radically opposing the extreme formality and symbolism found in Japanese art. In the 1950s New York music scene there could be discerned many issues related to the post-war disenchantment experienced by many throughout the developed world. Such disillusionment in itself presented a case for commitment to Buddhism and Zen in everyday matters such as mental attitude, meditation, and approach to food and body care. It was also felt, however, that there was a general need for a more radical artistic sensibility. The themes of decay and of the inadequacy of the idea of modernity in artistic fields were adopted, partly from Duchamp and Dada and partly from consciousness of the uneasiness of living in contemporary society. It is said that Fluxus challenged notions of representation, offering instead simple presentation. This, in fact, corresponds to a major difference between Western and Japanese art. Another important Fluxus characteristic was the elimination of perceived boundaries between art and life, a very prominent trend in post war art. This was exemplified by the work and writings of Josheph Beuys who stated, "every man is an artist." Fluxus's approach was an everyday, "economic" one as seen in the production of small objects made of paper and plastic. Again, this strongly corresponds with some of the fundamental characteristics of Japanese culture, i.e., the high artistic value of everyday acts and objects and the aesthetic appreciation of frugality. This also links with Japanese art, and the concept of shibumi, which may involve incompleteness, and supports the appreciation of bare objects, emphasizing subtlety rather than overtness. The renowned Japanese aesthetics scholar Onishi Yoshinori called the essence of Japanese art pantonomic because of the consciousness of no distinction between nature, art and life. Art is the way to approach life and nature/reality corresponding to actual existence.


Fluxus art

Fluxus encouraged a "do-it-yourself" aesthetic, and valued simplicity over complexity. Like
Dada Dada () or Dadaism was an anti-establishment art movement that developed in 1915 in the context of the Great War and the earlier anti-art movement. Early centers for dadaism included Zürich and Berlin. Within a few years, the movement had s ...
before it, Fluxus included a strong current of anti-commercialism and an
anti-art Anti-art is a loosely used term applied to an array of concepts and attitudes that reject prior definitions of art and question art in general. Somewhat paradoxically, anti-art tends to conduct this questioning and rejection from the vantage poi ...
sensibility, disparaging the conventional market-driven art world in favor of an artist-centered creative practice. As Fluxus artist
Robert Filliou Robert Filliou (17 January 1926 – 2 December 1987) was a French artist associated with Fluxus, who produced works as a filmmaker, action poet, sculptor, and happenings maestro. Life In 1943, Filliou became a member of the French Communis ...
wrote, however, Fluxus differed from Dada in its richer set of aspirations, and the positive social and communitarian aspirations of Fluxus far outweighed the anti-art tendency that also marked the group. Among its early associates were
Joseph Beuys Joseph Heinrich Beuys ( ; ; 12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986) was a German artist, teacher, performance artist, and Aesthetics, art theorist whose work reflected concepts of humanism and sociology. With Heinrich Böll, , Caroline Tisdall, Rober ...
,
Dick Higgins Dick Higgins (15 March 1938 – 25 October 1998) was an American artist, composer, art theorist, poet, publisher, printmaker, and a co-founder of the Fluxus international artistic movement (and community). Inspired by John Cage, Higgins was ...
, Davi Det Hompson,
Nam June Paik Nam June Paik (; July 20, 1932 – January 29, 2006) was a South Korean artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with the first use (1974) of the term "electronic super highway" ...
, Wolf Vostell,
La Monte Young La Monte Thornton Young (born October 14, 1935) is an American composer, musician, and performance artist recognized as one of the first American minimalist composers and a central figure in Fluxus and post-war avant-garde music. He is best k ...
,
Joseph Byrd Joseph Hunter Byrd Jr. (born December 19, 1937) is an American composer, musician and academic. After first becoming known as an experimental composer in New York City and Los Angeles in the early and mid-1960s, he became the leader of The Uni ...
,
Al Hansen Alfred Earl "Al" Hansen (5 October 1927 – 20 June 1995) was an American artist. He was a member of Fluxus, a movement that originated on an artists' collective around George Maciunas. He was the father of Andy Warhol protégé Bibbe Ha ...
and
Yoko Ono Yoko Ono (, usually spelled in katakana as ; born February 18, 1933) is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking. Ono grew up in Tokyo and moved to New York ...
who explored media ranging from performance art to poetry to experimental music to film. Taking the stance of opposition to the ideas of tradition and professionalism in the arts of their time, the Fluxus group shifted the emphasis from what an artist makes to the artist's personality, actions, and opinions. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s (their most active period) they staged "action" events, engaged in politics and public speaking, and produced sculptural works featuring unconventional materials. Their radically untraditional works included, for example, the
video art Video art is an art form which relies on using video technology as a visual and audio medium. Video art emerged during the late 1960s as new consumer video technology such as video tape recorders became available outside corporate broadcasting. V ...
of Nam June Paik and
Charlotte Moorman Madeline Charlotte Moorman (November 18, 1933 – November 8, 1991) was an American cellist, performance artist, and advocate for avant-garde music. Referred to as the "Jeanne d'Arc of new music", she was the founder of the Annual Avant Garde Fes ...
and the performance art of Joseph Beuys and Wolf Vostell. During the early years of Fluxus, the often playful style of the Fluxus artists resulted in them being considered by some to be little more than a group of pranksters. Fluxus has also been compared to
Dada Dada () or Dadaism was an anti-establishment art movement that developed in 1915 in the context of the Great War and the earlier anti-art movement. Early centers for dadaism included Zürich and Berlin. Within a few years, the movement had s ...
and aspects of Pop Art and is seen as the starting point of
mail art Mail art, also known as postal art and correspondence art, is an artistic movement centered on sending small-scale works through the mail, postal service. It developed out of what eventually became Ray Johnson's New York Correspondence School and ...
and no wave artists. Artists from succeeding generations such as Mark Bloch (artist), Mark Bloch do not try to characterize themselves as Fluxus but create spinoffs such as Fluxpan or Jung Fluxus as a way of continuing some of the Fluxus ideas in a 21st-century, post-
mail art Mail art, also known as postal art and correspondence art, is an artistic movement centered on sending small-scale works through the mail, postal service. It developed out of what eventually became Ray Johnson's New York Correspondence School and ...
context. In terms of an artistic approach, Fluxus artists preferred to work with whatever materials were at hand, and either created their own work or collaborated in the creation process with their colleagues. Outsourcing part of the creative process to commercial fabricators was not usually part of Fluxus practice. Maciunas personally hand-assembled many of the Fluxus multiples and editions. While Maciunas assembled many objects by hand, he designed and intended them for mass production.Maciunas on Fluxus
Retrieved 5 September 2010
Where multiple publishers produced signed, numbered objects in limited editions intended for sale at high prices, Maciunas produced open editions at low prices. Several other Fluxus publishers produced different kinds of Fluxus editions. The best known of these was the
Something Else Press Something Else Press was founded by Dick Higgins in 1963. It published many important intermedia texts and artworks by such Fluxus artists as Higgins, Ray Johnson, Alison Knowles, Allan Kaprow, George Brecht, Daniel Spoerri, Robert Filliou, A ...
, established by Dick Higgins, probably the largest and most extensive Fluxus publisher, producing books in editions that ran from 1,500 copies to as many as 5,000 copies, all available at standard bookstore prices. Higgins created the term "
intermedia Intermedia is an art theory term coined in the mid-1960s by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe the strategies of interdisciplinarity that occur within artworks existing between artistic genres. It was also used by John Brockman to refer to ...
" in a 1966 essay. The art forms most closely associated with Fluxus are event scores and Fluxus boxes. Fluxus boxes (sometimes called Fluxkits or Fluxboxes) originated with George Maciunas who would gather collections of printed cards, games, and ideas, organizing them in small plastic or wooden boxes.


Event score

An event score, such as
George Brecht George Brecht (August 27, 1926 – December 5, 2008), born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer, as well as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnso ...
's "Drip Music", is essentially a
performance art Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a pu ...
script that is usually only a few lines long and consists of descriptions of actions to be performed rather than dialogue. Fluxus artists differentiate event scores from "happenings". Whereas happenings were sometimes complicated, lengthy performances meant to blur the lines between performer and audience, performance and reality, event performances were usually brief and simple. The event performances sought to elevate the banal, to be mindful of the mundane, and to frustrate the high culture of academic and market-driven music and art. The idea of the event began in Henry Cowell's philosophy of music. Cowell, a teacher to John Cage and later to Dick Higgins, coined the term that Higgins and others later applied to short, terse descriptions of performable work. The term "score" is used in exactly the sense that one uses the term to describe a music score: a series of notes that allow anyone to perform the work, an idea linked both to what
Nam June Paik Nam June Paik (; July 20, 1932 – January 29, 2006) was a South Korean artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with the first use (1974) of the term "electronic super highway" ...
labeled the "do it yourself" approach and to what
Ken Friedman Ken Friedman (born September 19, 1949 in New London, Connecticut) is a design researcher. He was a member of Fluxus, an international laboratory for experimental art, architecture, design, and music. Friedman joined Fluxus in 1966 as the youngest ...
termed "musicality." While much is made of the do it yourself approach to art, it is vital to recognize that this idea emerges in music, and such important Fluxus artists as Paik, Higgins, or Corner began as composers, bringing to art the idea that each person can create the work by "doing it." This is what Friedman meant by musicality, extending the idea more radically to conclude that anyone can create work of any kind from a score, acknowledging the composer as the originator of the work while realizing the work freely and even interpreting it in far different ways from those the original composer might have done. Other creative forms that have been adopted by Fluxus practitioners include collage, sound art, music, video, and poetry—especially visual poetry and
concrete poetry Concrete poetry is an arrangement of linguistic elements in which the typographical effect is more important in conveying meaning than verbal significance. It is sometimes referred to as visual poetry, a term that has now developed a distinct mea ...
.


Use of shock

Nam June Paik Nam June Paik (; July 20, 1932 – January 29, 2006) was a South Korean artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with the first use (1974) of the term "electronic super highway" ...
and his peers in the Fluxus art movement thoroughly understood the impact and importance of shock on the viewer. Fluxus artists believed that shock not only makes the viewer question their own reasoning, but is a means to awaken the viewer, "...from a perceptive lethargy furthered by habit." Paik himself described the shock factor in his Fluxus work: "People who come to my concerts or see my objects need to be transferred into another state of consciousness. They have to be high. And in order to put them into this state of highness, a little shock is required... Anyone who came to my exhibition saw the head and was high." Paik's "head" was that of a real cow displayed at the entrance to his exhibition, Exposition of Music—Electronic Television, located in the Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal, Germany in 1963.


Artistic philosophies

Fluxus is similar in spirit to the earlier art movement of
Dada Dada () or Dadaism was an anti-establishment art movement that developed in 1915 in the context of the Great War and the earlier anti-art movement. Early centers for dadaism included Zürich and Berlin. Within a few years, the movement had s ...
, emphasizing the concept of
anti-art Anti-art is a loosely used term applied to an array of concepts and attitudes that reject prior definitions of art and question art in general. Somewhat paradoxically, anti-art tends to conduct this questioning and rejection from the vantage poi ...
and taking jabs at the seriousness of modern art. Fluxus artists used their minimal performances to highlight their perceived connections between everyday objects and art, similarly to Duchamp in pieces such as ''
Fountain A fountain, from the Latin "fons" ( genitive "fontis"), meaning source or spring, is a decorative reservoir used for discharging water. It is also a structure that jets water into the air for a decorative or dramatic effect. Fountains were o ...
''. Fluxus art was often presented in "events", which Fluxus member
George Brecht George Brecht (August 27, 1926 – December 5, 2008), born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer, as well as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnso ...
defined as "the smallest unit of a situation." The events consisted of a minimal instruction, opening the events to accidents and other unintended effects. Also contributing to the randomness of events was the integration of audience members into the performances, realizing Duchamp's notion of the viewer completing the art work. The Fluxus artistic philosophy has been defined as a synthesis of three key factors that define the majority of Fluxus work: #Fluxus is intermedia. Fluxus creators like to see what happens when different media intersect. They use found and everyday objects, sounds, images, and texts to create new combinations of objects, sounds, images, and texts. #Fluxus works are simple. The art is small, the texts are short, and the performances are brief. #Fluxus is fun. Humor has always been an important element in Fluxus.


Late criticism

There is a complexity in adequately charting a unified history of Fluxus. In ''Fluxus: A Brief History and Other Fictions'', Owen Smith concedes that, with the emergence of new material published about Fluxus and its expansion into the present, its history must remain open.O'neill, Rosemary. ''In the Spirit of Fluxus''. Art Journal 53.1 (1994): 90–93. Web. The resistance to being pigeonholed, and with the absence of a stable identity, Fluxus opened up to wide participation but also, from what would appear in history, closed off that possibility. Maciunas made frequent acts of excommunication between 1962 and 1978 which destabilized the collective. Kristine Stiles argues in one of her essays that the essence of Fluxus is "performative", while recently she feels that essence has been "eroded or threatened". Fluxus instead moved towards favoring the objects of publication, Stiles asserts: "Care must be taken that Fluxus is not transformed historically from a radical process and presentational art into a tradition static and representational art." With no leadership, no identifiable guidelines, no real collective strategy, no homogeneity in terms of practices, Fluxus cannot be handled through traditional critical tools. Fluxus is an indicator of this confusion. Fluxus therefore is nearly always a discourse on the failure of discourse.


Fluxus artists

Fluxus artists shared several characteristics including wit and "childlikeness", though they lacked a consistent identity as an artistic community. This vague self-identification allowed the group to include a variety of artists, including a large number of women. The possibility that Fluxus had more female members than any Western art group up to that point in history is particularly significant because Fluxus came on the heels of the white male-dominated abstract expressionism movement. However, despite the designed open-endedness of Fluxus, Maciunas insisted on maintaining unity in the collective. Because of this, Maciunas was accused of expelling certain members for deviating from what he perceived as the goals of Fluxus. Many artists, writers, and composers have been associated with Fluxus over the years: *Eric Andersen (artist), Eric Andersen (born 1940) *John Armleder (born 1948) *
Ay-O Takao Iijima (born May 19, 1931), better known by his art name Ay-O (靉嘔 ''Ai Ō''), is a Japanese avant-garde visual and performance artist who has been associated with Fluxus since its international beginnings in the 1960s. Biography Earl ...
(born 1931) *
Mary Bauermeister Mary Hildegard Ruth Bauermeister (7 September 1934 – 2 March 2023) was a German artist who worked in sculpture, drawing, installation, performance, and music. Influenced by Fluxus artists and Nouveau Réalisme, her work addresses esoteric iss ...
(1934-2023) *
Joseph Beuys Joseph Heinrich Beuys ( ; ; 12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986) was a German artist, teacher, performance artist, and Aesthetics, art theorist whose work reflected concepts of humanism and sociology. With Heinrich Böll, , Caroline Tisdall, Rober ...
(1921–1986) *Bazon Brock (born 1936) *
Joseph Byrd Joseph Hunter Byrd Jr. (born December 19, 1937) is an American composer, musician and academic. After first becoming known as an experimental composer in New York City and Los Angeles in the early and mid-1960s, he became the leader of The Uni ...
(born 1937) *
John Cage John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and Extended technique, non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one ...
(1912–1992) *
George Brecht George Brecht (August 27, 1926 – December 5, 2008), born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer, as well as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnso ...
(1926–2008) *Giuseppe Chiari (artist-composer-philosopher), Giuseppe Chiari (1926–2007) *Henning Christiansen (1932–2008) *
Philip Corner Philip Lionel Corner (b. The Bronx, New York, April 10, 1933; name sometimes given as Phil Corner) is an American composer, trombonist, alphornist, vocalist, pianist, music theorist, music educator, and visual artist. Biography After The ...
(born 1933) *Jean Dupuy (artist), Jean Dupuy (1925–2021) *Felipe Ehrenberg (1943–2017) *Öyvind Fahlström (1928–1976) *
Robert Filliou Robert Filliou (17 January 1926 – 2 December 1987) was a French artist associated with Fluxus, who produced works as a filmmaker, action poet, sculptor, and happenings maestro. Life In 1943, Filliou became a member of the French Communis ...
(1926–1987) *Simone Forti (born 1935) * Henry Flynt (born 1940) *
Ken Friedman Ken Friedman (born September 19, 1949 in New London, Connecticut) is a design researcher. He was a member of Fluxus, an international laboratory for experimental art, architecture, design, and music. Friedman joined Fluxus in 1966 as the youngest ...
(born 1949) *
Al Hansen Alfred Earl "Al" Hansen (5 October 1927 – 20 June 1995) was an American artist. He was a member of Fluxus, a movement that originated on an artists' collective around George Maciunas. He was the father of Andy Warhol protégé Bibbe Ha ...
(1927–1995) *Martha Hellion (born 1937) *Geoffrey Hendricks (1931–2018) *Nye Ffarrabas, Bici Hendricks (born 1932) *
Dick Higgins Dick Higgins (15 March 1938 – 25 October 1998) was an American artist, composer, art theorist, poet, publisher, printmaker, and a co-founder of the Fluxus international artistic movement (and community). Inspired by John Cage, Higgins was ...
(1938–1998) *Davi Det Hompson (1939–1996) *Alice Hutchins (1916–2009) *Toshi Ichiyanagi (born 1933) *Terry Jennings (1940–1981) *
Ray Johnson Raymond Edward "Ray" Johnson (October 16, 1927 – January 13, 1995) was an American artist. Known primarily as a collagist and correspondence artist, he was a seminal figure in the history of Neo-Dada and early Pop art and was described as < ...
(1927–1995) * Joe Jones (1934–1993) *
Allan Kaprow Allan Kaprow (August 23, 1927 – April 5, 2006) was an American performance artist, installation artist, painter, and assemblagist . He helped to develop the " Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. ...
(1927–2006) *
Bengt af Klintberg Bengt af Klintberg (Bengt Knut Erik af Klintberg; born 25 December 1938 in Stockholm) is a Swedish folklorist, ethnologist, and artist who is known for his work on modern urban legends. His work reached a large audience with such books as ''Rått ...
(born 1938) *Milan Knížák (born 1940) *
Alison Knowles Alison Knowles (born 1933) is an American visual artist known for her installations, performances, soundworks, and publications. Knowles was a founding member of the Fluxus movement, an international network of artists who aspired to merge diffe ...
(born 1933) *Arthur Köpcke(1928–1977) *
Takehisa Kosugi was a Japanese composer, violinist and artist associated with the Fluxus movement. Early life Kosugi was born in Tokyo in 1938, and studied musicology at the Tokyo University of the Arts, graduating in 1962. Early musical influences Kosug ...
(1938–2018) *Philip Krumm (born 1941) *
Shigeko Kubota (August 2, 1937 – July 23, 2015) was a Japanese video artist, sculptor and avant-garde performance artist, who mostly lived in New York City. She was one of the first artists to adopt the portable video camera Sony Portapak in 1970, likening ...
(1937–2015) *George Landow (filmmaker), George Landow (1944–2011) *Vytautas Landsbergis (born 1932) *
John Lennon John Winston Ono Lennon (born John Winston Lennon; 9 October 19408 December 1980) was an English singer-songwriter, musician and activist. He gained global fame as the founder, co-lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of the Beatles. Lennon's ...
(1940–1980) *
Jackson Mac Low Jackson Mac Low (September 12, 1922 – December 8, 2004) was an American poet, performance artist, composer and playwright, known to most readers of poetry as a practitioner of systematic chance operations and other non-intentional compos ...
(1922–2004) *Richard Maxfield (1927–1969) *
George Maciunas George Maciunas (; ; November 8, 1931 Kaunas – May 9, 1978 Boston, Massachusetts) was a Lithuanian American artist, art historian, and art organizer who was the founding member and central coordinator of Fluxus, an international community of ...
(1931–1978) *
Jonas Mekas Jonas Mekas (; ; December 24, 1922 – January 23, 2019) was a Lithuanian-American filmmaker, poet, and artist who has been called "the godfather of American avant-garde cinema". Mekas's work has been exhibited in museums and at festivals world ...
(1922–2019) *Gustav Metzger (1926–2017) *Larry Miller (artist), Larry Miller (born 1944) *Kate Millett (1934–2017) *
Charlotte Moorman Madeline Charlotte Moorman (November 18, 1933 – November 8, 1991) was an American cellist, performance artist, and advocate for avant-garde music. Referred to as the "Jeanne d'Arc of new music", she was the founder of the Annual Avant Garde Fes ...
(1933–1991) *Maurizio Nannucci (born 1939) *
Yoko Ono Yoko Ono (, usually spelled in katakana as ; born February 18, 1933) is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking. Ono grew up in Tokyo and moved to New York ...
(born 1933) *Robin Page (1932–2015) *
Nam June Paik Nam June Paik (; July 20, 1932 – January 29, 2006) was a South Korean artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with the first use (1974) of the term "electronic super highway" ...
(1932–2006) *
Ben Patterson Benjamin Patterson (May 29, 1934 – June 25, 2016) was an American musician, artist, and one of the founders of the Fluxus movement. Biography Benjamin Patterson was born in Pittsburgh on May 29, 1934. He attended the University of Michigan fr ...
(1934–2016) *
Terry Riley Terrence Mitchell Riley (born June 24, 1935) is an American composer and performing musician best known as a pioneer of the minimalist music, minimalist school of composition. Influenced by jazz and Indian classical music, his work became notab ...
(born 1935) *Dieter Roth (1930–1998) *
Takako Saito is a Japanese artist closely associated with Fluxus, the international collective of avant-garde artists that was active primarily in the 1960s and 1970s. Saito contributed a number of performances and artworks to the movement, which continu ...
(born 1929) *Wim T. Schippers (born 1942) * Tomas Schmit (1943–2006) *Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019) *
Mieko Shiomi was a Japanese amateur photographer in Shōwa era Japan. Life Shiomi was born in Osaka, and graduated from Shimizudani Girls' High School in 1927 (Shōwa 2). Shiomi joined the Tampei Photography Club in 1948, and thereafter joined two othe ...
(born 1938) *Gianni-Emilio Simonetti (born 1940) *Joey Skaggs (born 1945) *
Daniel Spoerri Daniel Spoerri (; 27 March 1930 – 6 November 2024) was a Romanian-born Swiss visual artist and writer. He is considered to be an important figure among the artists within the so-called "second wave" of the Pop art movement. Spoerri is best kno ...
(born 1930) *James Tenney (1934–2006) *
Yasunao Tone was a Japanese multidisciplinary artist born in Tokyo, Japan and working in New York City. He graduated from Chiba University in 1957 with a major in Japanese Literature. An important figure in postwar Japanese art during the 1960s, he was active ...
(born 1935) *Peter Van Riper (1942-1998) *
Ben Vautier Benjamin Vautier (; 18 July 1935 – 5 June 2024), also known mononymously as Ben, was a French visual artist. Early life Benjamin Vautier was born on 18 July 1935 in Naples, Italy, to a French family. He was the great-grandson of the Swiss p ...
(1935-2024) * Wolf Vostell (1932–1998) *Yoshi Wada (1943–2021) *
Robert Watts Robert Watts (23 May 1938 – 30 September 2024) was a British film producer who was best known for his involvement with the ''Star Wars'' and ''Indiana Jones'' film series. Career Watts began working in the film industry in 1960, after two ye ...
(1923–1988) *
Emmett Williams Emmett Williams (4 April 1925 – 14 February 2007) was an American poet and visual artist. He was married to British visual artist Ann Noël. Williams was born in Greenville, South Carolina, grew up in Virginia, and lived in Europe from 1 ...
(1925–2007) *
La Monte Young La Monte Thornton Young (born October 14, 1935) is an American composer, musician, and performance artist recognized as one of the first American minimalist composers and a central figure in Fluxus and post-war avant-garde music. He is best k ...
(born 1935)


Scholars, critics, and curators associated with Fluxus

*Jacquelynn Baas (born 1948) *Mark Bloch (artist), Mark Bloch (born 1956) *Jean Brown (1911–1994) *Peter Frank (art critic), Peter Frank (born 1950) *
Ken Friedman Ken Friedman (born September 19, 1949 in New London, Connecticut) is a design researcher. He was a member of Fluxus, an international laboratory for experimental art, architecture, design, and music. Friedman joined Fluxus in 1966 as the youngest ...
(born 1949) *John Hanhardt (born 1945) *John Held Jr. (mailartist) (born 1947) *Jon Hendricks (artist), Jon Hendricks (born 1939) *Hannah Higgins (born 1964) *Judith Hoffberg (1934–2009) *Jill Johnston (1929–2010) *Clive Phillpot (born 1950) *Kristine Stiles (born 1947) *Knud Pedersen (1925–2014)


Major collections and archives

* Alternative Traditions in Contemporary Art, University Library and University of Iowa Museum of Art, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, USA * Archiv Sohm, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany * Archivio Conz, Verona, Italy * Artpool, Budapest, Hungary * Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, California * Emily Harvey Foundation, New York City, and Venice, Italy * David Mayor/Fluxshoe/Beau Geste Press papers, Tate Gallery Archive, Tate Britain, London, England * , collection Ute and Michael Berger, Wiesbaden-Erbenheim, Germany * Fluxus Collection, Ken Friedman papers, Tate Gallery Archive, Tate Britain, London, England * Fluxus Collection, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA * Fondation du Doute * FONDAZIONE BONOTTO, Molvena, Vicenza, Italy * Franklin Furnace Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York City * George Maciunas Memorial Collection, The Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA * Gilbert and Lila Silverman, Fluxus Foundation, Detroit, Michigan, and New York City, USA * Museo Vostell Malpartida Cáceres, Spain * Museum Fluxus+ Potsdam, Germany
Jean Brown papers, 1916–1995
finding aid, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles * Sammlung Maria und Walter Schnepel, Bremen, Germany * Institute for the Arts & Science, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA * De Montfort University, Leicester, UK * TVF The Endless Story of FLUXUS, Gent, Belgium * Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center, Vilnius, Lithuania * The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Gift from the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection, Detroit, to American Friends of the Israel Museum * In 2023, Sub Rosa (label), Sub Rosa records released a collection of Fluxus sound works on CD entitled ''Fluxus & NeoFluxus / Stolen Symphony''


See also

* Art intervention * Artist's book * Body art * Fluxus at Rutgers University * Gutai group * Ministry of Fluxus * Xerox art


Selected bibliography

* Jürgen Becker, Wolf Vostell, ''Happenings, Fluxus, Pop Art, Nouveau Réalisme''. Eine Dokumentation. Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek 1965. * ''Happening & Fluxus''. Kölnischer Kunstverein, 1970. * Baas, Jacquelynn, Friedman, Ken ''Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life''. Chicago and Hanover, NH: University of Chicago Press and Hood Museum of Art, 2011. . * Bernstein, Roslyn, and Shael Shapiro. ''Illegal Living: 80 Wooster Street and the Evolution of SoHo'' (Jonas Mekas Foundation), www.illegalliving.com , September 2010. * Block, René, ed. ''1962 Wiesbaden Fluxus 1982''. Wiesbaden: Harlekin Art, Museum Wiesbaden, and Nassauischer Kunstverein, 1982. * Clay, Steve, and Ken Friedman, eds. ''Intermedia, Fluxus and the Something Else Press: Selected Writings by Dick Higgins''. Catskill, New York: Siglio Press, 2018. . * Chamberlain, Colby, ''Fluxus Administration: George Maciunas and the Art of Paperwork'', University of Chicago Press, 2024 * ''Der Traum von Fluxus. George Maciunas: Eine Künstlerbiographie''. Thomas Kellein, Walther König, 2007. . * Fluxus und Freunde: Sammlung Maria und Walter Schnepel, Katalog zur Ausstellung Neues Museum Weserburg Bremen; Fondazione Morra, Napoli; Kunst Museum Bonn 2002. * Friedman, Ken, ed
''The Fluxus Reader''
Chicester, West Sussex and New York: Academy Editions, 1998. * Gray, John. ''Action Art. A Bibliography of Artists' Performance from Futurism to Fluxus and Beyond''. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1993. * Haskell, Barbara. ''BLAM! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism and Performance 1958–1964''. New York: W. W. Norton in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1984. * Hansen, Al, and Beck Hansen. ''Playing with Matches''. RAM USA, 1998. * Harren, Natilee. ''Fluxus Forms: Scores, Multiples, and the Eternal Network.'' Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. * Hapgood, Susan, and Cornelia Lauf. ''FluxAttitudes''. Ghent: Imschoot Uitgevers, 1991. * Held, John Jr. ''Mail Art: an Annotated Bibliography''. Metuchen, New Jersey and London: Scarecrow Press, 1991. * Held, John Jr. ''Where the Secret is Hidden: Collected Essays'' Breda: TAM-Publications Netherlands, 2011. * Hendricks, Geoffrey, ed. ''Critical Mass, Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia and Rutgers University 1958–1972''. Mason Gross Art Galleries, Rutgers, and Mead Art Gallery, Amherst, 2003. * Hendricks, Jon, ed. ''Fluxus, etc.: The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection''. Bloomfield Hills, Michigan: Cranbrook Museum of Art, 1982. * Hendricks, Jon. ''Fluxus Codex''. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988. * Hannah Higgins, Higgins, Hannah. ''Fluxus Experience''. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. * Janssen, Ruud. ''Mail-Interviews Part 1 Interviews with Mail-Art and Fluxus Artists''. Breda: TAM-Publications, Netherlands 2008. * Thomas Kellein, Kellein, Thomas. ''Fluxus''. London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1995. * Milman, Estera, ed. "Fluxus: A Conceptual Country", ''Visible Language'' [Special Issue], vol. 26, nos. 1/2, Providence: Rhode Island School of Design, 1992. * ''Fluxus y Di Maggio''. Museo Vostell Malpartida, 1998, . * Moren, Lisa. ''Intermedia''. Baltimore, Maryland: University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 2003. * Paull, Silke, and Hervé Würz, eds. "How We Met or a Microdemystification". ''AQ 16'' [Special Issue], (1977) * Saper, Craig J. ''Networked Art''. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. * Schmidt-Burkhardt, Astrit. ''Maciunas' Learning Machines: From Art History to a Chronology of Fluxus'', with a foreword by Jon Hendricks. Second, revised and enlarged edition, Vienna and New York: Springer, 2011. . * Smith, Owen F. ''Fluxus: The History of an Attitude''. San Diego, CA: San Diego State University Press, 1998. *''Nie wieder störungsfrei! Aachen Avantgarde seit 1964'', Kerber Verlag, 2011, . * ''Fluxus at 50''. Stefan Fricke, Alexander Klar, Sarah Maske, Kerber Verlag, 2012, . * ''Fluxus! 50 Jahre Fluxus''. Werner Esser, Steffen Engle, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 2012. . * Stegmann, Petra, ed. '' 'The lunatics are on the loose…' European Fluxus festivals 1962–1977''. Down with art! Berlin 2012. . * Stegmann, Petra, ed. ''Fluxus East. Fluxus-Netzwerke in Mittelosteuropa. Fluxus Networks in Central Eastern Europe''. Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin 2007. . * Würz, Fleurice ''Fluxus Nice''. Saarbrücken (Germany): AQ-Verlag, 2011. . * Zanichelli, Elena (2012). ''Women in Fluxus & Other Experimental Tales: Eventi Partiture Performance''. * ''Beuys Brock Vostell. Aktion Demonstration Partizipation 1949–1983''. ZKM – Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Hatje Cantz, Karlsruhe, 2014, .


Notes


Sources

* * * * * * * * *


External links

*Links at Ubuweb:
Samples of Fluxus Audio
on the Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine
''An Anthology of Chance Operations'' (1963)

European Fluxus Festivals 1962–1977John Cage on I've Got A Secret performing ''Water Walk'', January 1960, from the same era as his teaching classes at the New SchoolMOMA online archive of Fluxus 1, Fluxkit and Flux Year Box 2Museum Fluxus+ Potsdam, GermanyMuseo Vostell Malpartida
Cáceres, Spain.
The Copenhagen Fluxus Archive

Dick Higgins collection at the University of Maryland, Baltimore CountyFondazione Bonotto, Fluxus works collection Fluxus Digital Collection, University of Iowa

Fluxus West Digital CollectionFluxus Comes Alive - interactive Fluxus guide
* {{Authority control Fluxus, Contemporary art organizations Conceptual art Avant-garde art Experimental music International artist groups and collectives Neo-Dada