Fluxus Fluxed

Fluxus Concert poster from 1967, Do it yourself Fluxfest Presents

"Many of the thirty or so Fluxus artists met each other in the late 1950s in situations linked to experiments in musical edu-cation. The most important of these was a 1957–59 class in musical composition offered by experimental composer John Cage at the New School for Social Research in New York.

The most durable innovation to emerge from that classroom was George Brecht’s Event score, a performance technique that has been used extensively by virtually every Fluxus artist with varying degrees of success. In the Event, everyday actions are framed as minimalistic performances or, occasionally, as imaginary and impossible experiments with everyday situations." From Hannah Higggins book Fluxus Experience

 https://monoskop.org/images/c/ce/Higgins_Hannah_Fluxus_Experience.pdf

Dick Higgins performing George Brecht's Drip Music

  

Many more event scores in the free pdf of the Fluxus Workbook, including these:

Finger Exercise
Perform with Finger(s)

-Larry Miller,1983

Danger Music Number 31 

Liberty and Committee work! 

-Dick Higgins,1963

Disappearing Music for Face

Performers begin the piece with a smile and during the duration of the piece, change the smile very gradually to no smile
-Meiko Shiomi, 1964

http://www.deluxxe.com/beat/fluxusworkbook.pdf

Charlotte Moorman, performing on Nam June Paik's TV Cello

1963 Fluxus Manifesto, by George Maciunas

Between cut out dictionary definitions of flux the manifesto reads:

Purge the world of bourgeois sickness, "intellectual", professional and commercialized culture. PURGE the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract art, illusionistic art, mathematical art, - PURGE THE WORLD OF "EUROPANISM"

PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART, promote living art, anti-art, promote NON ART REALITY to be grasped by all peoples, not only critics dilettantes and professionals.

FUSE the cadres of cultural social and political revolutionaries into united front and action.

1965 Fluxus Manifesto by George Maciunas

FLUXMANIFESTO on fluxamusement – Vaudeville – Art? To establish artists nonprofessional, nonparasitic, nonelite status in society, he must demonstrate own dispensability, he must demonstrate self-sufficiency of the audience, he must demonstrate that anything can substitute art and anyone can do it. Therefore this substitute art-amusement must be simple, amusing, concerned with insignificances, have no commodity or institutional value. It must be unlimited, obtainable by all and eventually produced by all. The artist doing art meanwhile, to justify his income, must demonstrate that only he can do art. Art therefore must appear to be complex, intellectual, exclusive, indispensable, inspired. To raise its commodity value it is made to be rare, limited in quantity and therefore accessible not to the masses but to the social elite.

Part of Diagram of Historical Development of Fluxus and Other 4 Dimentional, Aural, Optic, Olfactory, Epithelial and Tactile Art Forms, by George Maciunas

 More about George Maciunas:

 http://georgemaciunas.com/

Ben Vautier. Total Art Matchbox from Flux Year Box 2. c.1968

 

Ben Patterson, Penny for your Thoughts, 2013

Benjamin Patterson’s work A Penny for Your Thoughts promotes an exchange between artist and viewer in which the artist offers participants hats constructed from newspapers in exchange for an idea, imbuing the performance with a type of humor common to many Fluxus projects.