Ken Friedman 'Fluxus' Legacies

Although the Fluxus art (non-)movement is often read as a historical phenomenon, the breadth of its innovations and complexities actively thwarts linear and circumscribed viewpoints. The notion of Fluxus incorporates contradiction in challenging and enduringly generative ways. More than five decades after its emergence, this special issue of OnCurating entitled Fluxus Perspectives seeks to re-examine the influence, roles, and effects of Fluxus via a wide range of scholarly perspectives. The editors Martin Patrick and Dorothee Richter asked notable writers from different locations, generations, and viewpoints, all of whom having written about Fluxus before, to offer their thoughts on its significance, particularly in relation to contemporary art. With its emphasis upon events, festivals, and exhibitions, Fluxus may also be interpreted as an important, prescient forerunner of contemporary strategies of curating.

Contributions by Simon Anderson, Jordan Carter, Kevin Concannon, Ken Friedman, Natilee Harren, John Held, Jr., Hannah B Higgins, Hanna B. Hölling, Natasha Lushetich, Billie Maciunas, Peter van der Meijden, Ann Noël, Martin Patrick, Dorothee Richter, Henar Rivière, Julia Robinson, Owen F. Smith, Weronika Trojanska, and Emmett Williams.

Legacy involves difficulties for those who inherit and for those who do not. History is both a gift and a burden when it involves art. It is equally problematic when it involves the Fluxus intermedia forms that hover between art and life. This special issue of Visible Language — Fluxus After Fluxus — explores the challenging questions of Fluxus legacy. This includes the right to participate in a discourse network, canon formation, literature development, and the work of younger artists toward a heritage that some demand and others reject. These issues particularly trouble the legacy of Fluxus. Fluxus was an invisible college, created by the artists, composers, designers, and architects who took part. It functioned as a laboratory of experimental ideas. Fluxus challenged art and the art world on political and economic grounds using artistic means and philosophical principles. The perception of Fluxus has changed in recent years. The shift in standing and status has been bound up with and transformed by the institutions that collect, preserve, and interpret historical artifacts and documents. These artifacts and documents once told different versions of the Fluxus story to an uninterested world. Today, they tell a complex and often misunderstood story to a world that is interested in Fluxus for the wrong reasons. This situation defeats Fluxus with the trappings of success. This special journal issue on Fluxus After Fluxus explores the dialectical and hermeneutical work of recovery. It addresses the challenge of legacy by examining different aspects of the Fluxus legacy through multiple views.

This review of Intermedia, Fluxus and the Something Else Press: Selected Writings by Dick Higgins, co-authored by Steve Clay and Ken Friedman, is itself a collaboration between Virginia Kuhn and Betsy Sullivan. Both approaches, to the review and the book here under consideration, capture the importance of community in creating and sustaining the art of Intermedia, Fluxus, and the Something Else Press.