The readymade metabolized: Fluxus in life Author(s): DAVID JOSELIT Source: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 63/64, Wet/Dry (spring/autumn 2013), pp. 190-200 Published by: {ucpress) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23647763 Accessed: 24-05-2017 19:43 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics This content downloaded from 130.182.24.103 on Wed, 24 May 2017 19:43:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 190 RES 63/64 SPRING/AUTUMN 2013 Man ifzsto • 2. TO affect, or bring to a certain state, by subjecting to, or treating with,a tlux. "Fluxed into another vror\<\." South. 3. Med. To cause a discharge from, as in purging. flux (fluks), n. [OF., fr. L. fluxus, fr. fluere, fluxum, to flow. See fluent; cf. flush, n. (of cards).] 1. Med. a A flowing or fluid discharge from the bowels or other P part: esp.. an excessive and morbid V>4M» » discharge: as, the bloody flux, or dysentery, b The matter thus discharged. Purge the world of bourgeois sic ten? "intellectual " profession#/ A com merercr/izec{ culture, FUZ6E the wor/d of dead art , imitation , artificial art, attract arC^ if/usionistic art, mathematical arV , / PUP6E THE lVO£LT> OF "FUPoFAM'SM 2. Act of flowing: a continuous moving mmm on or passing by. as of a flowing strea , n . d a continuing succession of changes. 3 A stream; copious flow; flood; rf BEFLUX 4 The*• setting ineseiiiiigti«_ in of the tide toward the shore. Cf. beflux. i; ;J hMt. fusion. Rare. 5. State PROMOTE A gSVOLVTIOKjAFY F LOOJO A/VP T\T>& ltd ATT Promote living art, anti-art , promoTe MOK) AFT FTAL/TY to be grasped f all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals. 7. C hem. A Metal, a Any substance or mixture used to promote fusion, esp. the fusion of metals or minerals. Common metallurgical fluxes are silica and silicates (acidic), lime and limestone (basic), and fluorite (neutral), b Any substance applied to surfaces to be joined by soldering or welding, just prior to or during the operation, to clean and free them from oxide, thus promoting their union, as rosin. f'F'SEi cadres of cultural[ Social f political revolutionaries into uni fed front %r cxc tion , Figure 1. George Maciunas, Fluxus Manifesto, 1963. Offset, 8 3/16 x 5 11/16 in. (20.8 x 14.5 cm). The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008. Courtesy of Billie Maciunas. Digital Image © The Museum of Modem Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York. This content downloaded from 130.182.24.103 on Wed, 24 May 2017 19:43:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The readymade metabolized Fluxus in life DAVID JOS ELIT in 1978 the video artist Nam June Paik claimed that a collapse between aesthetics and everyday experience the distribution of artworks had begun to matter more (which Rauschenberg himself was careful to finesse by in Fluxus impresario George Maciunas's work than their positing a "gap" between them), there is surprisingly production. Paik wrote: little acknowledgment that their most successful elision occurs in the socalled culture industry where life and Marx gave much thought about the dialectics of the production and the production medium. He had thought visual production are fused with such force and influence rather simply that if workers (producers) OWNED the that artists can hardly compete. To put it bluntly, film production's medium, everything would be fine. He did not and television accomplish the rapprochement of art give creative room to the DISTRIBUTION system.. .. and life more fully than any artist could, and it is in the George Maciunas' Genius is the early detection of this blockbuster exhibition, not the downtown Happening, post-Marxistic situation and he tried to seize not only the that the art world approaches ordinary experience for production's medium but also the DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM anyone who is not already an insider. of the art world.' Maciunas and his Fluxus colleagues were well aware This insight has everything to do with Paik's own of this double bind and they approached it in a variety engagement with television—the mid-century of ways, including an unapologetic engagement with distribution system par excellence—but its relevance entertainment. As Maciunas stated in the "Fluxshop/ reaches beyond video. As Paik noted, Maciunas is one Fluxorchestra/Fluxmanifesto on Fluxamusement" of 1965: of the first artists—if not the first—to take distribution FLUXMANIFESTO ON FLUXAMUSEMENT— itself as his medium. He did so in at least four ways: by VAUDEVILLE—ART? TO ESTABLISH ARTISTS distributing artists physically through an international NONPROFESSIONAL, NONPARASITIC, NONELITE network of Fluxfestivals featuring an evolving repertoire STATUS IN SOCIETY, HE MUST DEMONSTRATE of performances; by distributing information about OWN DISPENSABILITY, HE MUST DEMONSTRATE the history of art in countless charts, diagrams, and SELFSUFFICIENCY OF THE AUDIENCE, HE MUST publications; by distributing artworks inexpensively in DEMONSTRATE THAT ANYTHING CAN SUBSTITUTE a variety of innovative multiples and Fluxstores; and by ART AND ANYONE CAN DO IT, THEREFORE THIS SUBSTITUTE ART-AMUSEMENT MUST BE SIMPLE, distributing real estate ownership through his cooperative AMUSING, CONCERNED WITH INSIGNIFICANCES, HAVE Fluxhouses, or artists' lofts in Soho. NO COMMODITY OR INSTITUTIONAL VALUE. IT MUST There is, however, a conceptual paradox that results BE UNLIMITED, OBTAINABLE BY ALL AND EVENTUALLY from taking distribution as one's medium. It hinges on a PRODUCED BY ALL. concept that is often cited in relation to mid-twentieth century art but seldom carefully parsed: namely, the In other words the art object itself could wither away if relationship perceived between art and life that Robert artists succeeded in producing a form of entertainment Rauschenberg so famously summarized when he stated capable of transforming experience. If one takes this goal "Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be seriously, then instead of merely signifying everyday life made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)"2 While a by incorporating cast-off readymades or by introducing great deal of lip service is paid to the liberating effects of performative actions into one's art, one must confront the more intractable problem of how to invent an aesthetic practice situated beyond the narrow precincts of the art world—one that is capable of entertaining 1. N.J. Paik, "George Maciurias and Fluxus," Flash Art 84-85 (Oct as well as edifying. The Fluxus artist and philosopher Nov 1978): 48. 2. R. Rauschenberg, "Untitled Statement" (1959), in Theories and Henry Flynt was acutely aware of one of many corollary Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings, ed. difficulties attendant on such a project—namely, that K. Stiles and P. Selz (Berkeley, 1996), p. 321. in order to be truly effective, the artwork would have to This content downloaded from 130.182.24.103 on Wed, 24 May 2017 19:43:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 192 RES 63/64 SPRING/AUTUMN 2013 become absolutely customized to address the particular distribution: the circulation of commodities that Paik sensory apparatus of individual viewers. Reflecting identified as central to Maciunas's art, and the body's on his concept of "brend," or the "just-likings" of metabolican distribution system. In the Fluxus Manifesto individual—which for him was the proper objective (fig. 1),of which is drawn in part from a dictionary, art—Flynt declared retrospectively in 1990, "My one anti definition of Fluxus reads as follows: "A flowing art theory was a philosophical argument that if taste or fluid is discharge from the bowels or other part: subjective, then nobody is more able than me to esp., create an excessive and morbid discharge." While it's an experience to my taste ... the artist is in the understandablesame that art historians have exhibited a false position as the fashion designer who says 'Wear certain myreserve regarding this first definition of Fluxus, clothes to be yourself.'"3 it does not require much digging to find a host of Flynt's statement embodies the central paradox scatological faced references and allusions in Fluxus products, by a Fluxus program. On the one hand, Maciunas including works such as Excreta Fluxorum (1973) in (and Flynt) understood entertainment, or brend, as which the various forms of animal waste are contained in objective of art; Maciunas, at least, had no compunction a box analogous to those that hold small readymades about using existing markets parasitically to disseminate or artists' works in other Fluxus multiples (fig. 2), or his various wares. But, as Flynt states, the Fluxus a trough of elephant shit to be placed in the obstacle embrace of entertainment sought to avoid commercial course of the Flux Labyrinth exhibited in Berlin in culture's trap wherein an individual is supposed 1976.5to Fluxus thus embraces objects that have been embrace a mass-produced product, a readymade, broken as down and reconstituted organically in a manner the special sign of his or her own identity—a form consistent of with Bauman's definition of fluid modernity's misrecognition which, for Flynt, is exemplified by liquefaction the of communal bonds: false promise that wearing designer clothes will allow The solids whose turn has come to be thrown into the one to express his or her "true" self.