The Fluxus Movement

As we get older, the space that we have in our mind for newer ideas is smaller than it was when we were younger. We don’t give the ideas in our heads uniform amounts of space, but as our knowledge and experience accumulates, the percentage of space that an idea can have declines. I probably know too much about Bob Dylan, but as much as I know, by percentage, of all I know is declining against what I know of Torah and Talmud.

Lately, I find that I have been expanding what I know about the art and culture of the 1960s, not the popular culture, but the Jazz world and the art world. This is the 1960s that is not much in evidence in the pop cultural representations that we see. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel probably came as close to portraying this world in its representation of the club world in Greenwich Village early on in the run of the show.

The folk music world shared space with the comedy world, but also with the Jazz world and the art world. My reading on Boris Lurie brought me back to this era. The fact that he had a relationship with Jack Micheline brought me back to the larger scene in New York at the time. I have a wonderful photo of Jack reading a poem with Charles Mingus accompanying him on bass. Lurie knew most of the abstract expressionists whose work was moving into the establishment, but he also knew (and intensely disliked) the artists who were coming up in pop art. He was associated with some of the artists who were putting on happenings, a form of anarchistic theater/dynamic visual art. Alan Kaprow was the initiator of this style of art.

Kaprow was only one of the artists who were students or collaborators with John Cage. They were in the penumbra of influence that spread from Black Mountain College after its dissolution in the 1950s. This loosely collected group moved towards a specific movement in the early sixties through the organizing efforts of George Maciunas who introduced the word Fluxus, which became the rough name for a group of artists working in widely different modes of artistic production. Among the better known figures are Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, La Monte Young and Joseph Beuys, although Maciunas was able to name many parents of their movement beyond Cage — the Dada movement. Other early influences on the movement, as expressed in Dick Higgins' Fluxus oriented publishing project, The Something Else Press, included Gertrude Stein, the composer Henry Cowell and the dancer Merce Cunningham.

Like Boris Lurie, Maciunas sometimes referred to Fluxus productions as Anti-Art. Maciunas functioned as a self-appointed administrative head of the Fluxus coterie, though eventually a conflict with Dick Higgins led to broader objections to Maciunas presentation of himself as a leader. Maciunas was a refugee from Lithuania, but he had an admiration of the collectivist idea of the Soviet Union and wanted to use art as a way to make art the common possession of everyone and an activity that everyone would be able to engage in at similar levels of competence. He also hoped to move art away from a model where artists take credit for their work. Maciunas, however, had his name on much of what he hoped others would do with increasing anonymity. Higgins objected to this, feeling that artists should have claims on their productions. In certain ways Higgins' reaction was reactionary. Despite that, Maciunas’ maximalist program is impractical. Art is a talent that some have more so than others. Even if one wants to move art in the direction that Maciunas preferred, the existence of teachers and identified skilled figures is helpful in making art accessible to the young and those with less innate talent.

Cage’s artistic approach centered the idea of indeterminacy in art. Modern computing needs a supply of random numbers in order to operate. Cage hoped to achieve something more purposeful than randomness. Indeterminacy leads to results that are not random, but not pre-selected by the artist/composer. His paradigmatic composition is the piece “4 minutes 33 seconds” which consists of the musicians not playing anything and the audience along with the musicians listening to a program of the ambient sound around them for the duration described by the title. Some of the types of sounds that one will hear will be somewhat predictable – coughs, scraping chairs, street noise, breathing, heating or air conditioning – but there could be other sounds that would be less common. The experience would be variable for those in attendance depending on their location within the space. Cage was known to use the I-Ching to determine decisions. “4 minutes 33 seconds” has all the qualities of Taoist contemplative practice.

Fluxus performances were not that indeterminate. They have “scores,” even if they were sometimes minimal, which were scores of actions rather than of specific musical notes. An example was Maciunas’ “In Memoriam to Adriano Olivetti.”

“Named after the founder of an office-machine manufacturer famous for its elegant showrooms and practice of hiring artists and poets, ‘In Memoriam’ calls for ten or so performers to each use a discarded roll of Olivetti adding-machine paper as an individualized score. In sync with a metronome each reads their score line by line, taking every appearance of any preselected digit as a trigger to execute a predetermined action. A typical repertoire of gestures might include removing a bowler hat, smacking lips, or shaking coins – everyday actions made automatic, even robotic, yet also rhythmic and musical.” [Colby Chamberlain, “George Maciunas and the Art of Paperwork.”]

One can see how this challenges ideas of what constitutes musical composition. Like the happenings, Fluxus' events were more confrontational and dramatic than Cage’s composition. This rethinking of the way one performs can be seen in the percussive approach to piano of Cecil Taylor which became more pronounced through the sixties and seventies. (I’ve been listening to his “In Transition/Cecil Taylor” and “Silent Tongues: Live at Montreux ‘74”). For Maciunas this was a part of a program to undermine capitalism and promote collectivization, but it was less programmatic for Claes Oldenberg , Red Grooms, Jim Dine Robert Delford Brown, Lucas Samaras, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolee Schneemann and later figures like Yoko Ono, Wolf Vostell and Yayoi Kusama (earlier an associate of Boris Lurie in the NO! Art movement).

I collected books by Higgins’ Something Else Press for many years and learned about Fluxus from an off-centered point of view. Fluxus work is hard to explain. Much of what Fluxus did was ephemeral. What remains, along with books, are the artifacts. Maciunas created a vast array of papers and the movement was home to mail artist Ray Johnson. Both of them used the mails as an artistic medium.

(Another Fluxus idea was “The Postman’s Choice,” a postcard with stamps on each side and a different addressee named on each side.) There were kits and boxes with various materials and collections of cards of scores for different actions. Music and dance were parts of Fluxus events or events unto themselves. Nam June Paik’s introduction of video arts broadened the range of technologies used. Only in my recent reading have I begun to see Fluxus as a larger whole. Much of what we see as the expanded range of artistic practices beyond the traditional arts developed in and around Fluxus. As a result, the novelty of Fluxus (like Cage’s “4 minutes 33 seconds”) is not what it once was.

As I look back on the 1960s in this environment I see an inflection point, but the sense that this art was ultimately disruptive of the ideologies and political realities of the West is somewhat diminished. I have mentioned Boris Lurie above quite a few times. This is because his work was done in the same time period; however his struggle to push back against American culture and complacency has been less successfully domesticated. The question that has been in the back of mind in this is about promoting cultural change. What is the way that we can push changes in Jewish life forward? Is radical change a successful method? Is it realistic to try to change cultural norms? How can we move culture, a conservative range of behavior, towards healthier social norms? Are we talking about deep changes or just about moving around the deck chairs on the Titanic (or as an old friend used to say, “sweeping the fleas around the barn floor”)? Looking at cultural inflection points seems like the right type of place to look, but is it? No answers here today, just questions.