Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 1 Introduction The master asked Nan-ch’uan (Nansen) “where does a person who knows all there is to know go?” Nan-chu’an said: “They go to be a water buffalo at the house of a lay person at the foot of the mountain”. (Nan-ch’uan cited in Zhaozhou (Shi) 1998: 12) WhatXXX Xis Fluxus? Variously characterised as “the most radical art and experimental movement of the sixties” (Ruhé 1979: 1), “a singularly strange phenomenon in the histo- ry of the arts of the twentieth century” (Doris 1998: 91) and “an active phi- losophy of experience that only sometimes takes the form of art” (Friedman 1998: ix), Fluxus has persistently eluded definition, classification and com- partmentalisation. There are several reasons for this. First, its prolific and multi-locational activity, which spans the period of al- most five decades, includes artists from America, Asia and Europe, and con- sists of concerts, films, objects, gadgets, instruments, games, sports, books, newspapers, postal stamps, flags, banners, weddings, divorces, funerals, reli- gious rituals, shops and mail order centers, mobile clinics, housing coopera- tives, sight-seeing tours and educational initiatives, cannot be subsumed un- der any one category. Second, the rhizomaticity of its development remains difficult to survey to this day. Initially intended by George Maciunas – Fluxus artist and principal organiser – as a magazine in which the work of young experimental New York artists 2 Fluxus The Practice of Non-Duality gathered around John Cage, such as Yoko Ono, was to be published, Fluxus soon became an organisational platform for concerts and performances in a number of European cities. Here the work of a diverse group of artists such as George Brecht, Dick Higgins, Bengt af Klintberg, Alison Knowles, George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Ben Patterson and Wolf Vostell, was shown. Despite this diversity, however, a manifesto was presented at the Festum Fluxorum in Düsseldorf in 1963 reading: PURGE the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract art, illusionistic art … PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART, promote living art, promote NON-ART REALITY to be grasped by all peo- ples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals … FUSE the cadres of cul- tural, social & political revolutionaries onto united front and action (Maciunas 1963: np; emphasis original). But contrary to what one might expect, this manifesto, which was written by Maciunas, was not a portentous philosophical statement. Instead, it was pro- duced in response to the organiser’s, Joseph Beuys’s last-minute request that some sort of manifesto be presented at the performance. Not only was the manifesto not a carefully crafted philosophical statement in the Futurist or the Dadaist vein but as Dick Higgins who was present at the Festum Fluxorum quips: “[n]obody was willing to sign the thing” ([1982]1999: 219). The comical discrepancy between the exclamatory tone of the manifesto, the manifesto’s improvised nature and its subsequent failure to launch is in many ways characteristic of Fluxus. In fact, the genesis of what is today known as Fluxus – although a number of Fluxus artists, such as George Brecht, insist that there can be no general, but only “individual understanding of a specific Fluxus work” (Brecht 1964:1) – is of a distinctly bricoleur brand. Habitually used to refer to improvisatory tactics and the use of the means at hand, brico- lage is often employed in contradistinction to engineering which functions as a clearly delineated strategy. The difference between the bricoleur and the engineer is one of procedure as well as one of logical operator; while the bricoleur proceeds from the specifics of a given situation without any notion of the whole and in this way resists generalisation, the engineer proceeds from the specifics-governing master plan or projected whole. Both the heteroge- neity of Fluxus activity and its bricoleur tendency are directly related to the third reason why Fluxus eludes definition five decades after its inception: Fluxus is, quite simply, not a discursive phenomenon. This fact, however, is .

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