Tag Archives: Amalia Pica

Fluxus & Commerce: Frieze Art Fair’s Tribute to “Flux-Labyrinth”

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A plain plywood door was the mysterious entrance that fair-goers recently waited patiently for, at Frieze Art Fair’s reenactment of the original immersive environment conceived by Fluxus founder George Maciunas in 1975 (check out photos of the realized 1976 labyrinth here). Maciunas asked artists to contribute ideas for Flux-Labyrinth that created a series of obstacles and blockages that the participant would have to overcome to continue on in the maze. This version at Frieze brought together artworks old and new. Amidst the commercial spectacle of Frieze, Flux-Labyrinth offered a bodily, rather than visual, opportunity to experience art that was not for sale. Despite the menacing waiver, this project was popular enough to draw long lines of people both the Friday, May 16 and Saturday, May 17 that I visited.

Just what were some of these obstacles? Well….

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First, one had to figure out how to open a door…not as straightforward as it sounds when the knob is altered on the other side…

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Before long a professional gentleman offered you an absurd form that he promptly stamped and shredded (Amalia Pica’s A bureaucratic obstacle)….

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There were some awkward steps (George Maciunas, Shoe Steps) …

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As well as Foam Steps and Slipper Steps (also by Maciunas)…

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Then, there was a piano (Nam June Paik, Piano Activated Door). I played Chopsticks.

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Large rubber bands followed by Ay-O’s Brush Obstacle…

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A ball pit (Ay-O, Balloon Obstacle), and here things were starting to get rowdy…

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Lastly, there was a room full of strange machines, tubes, and sounds that opened onto…

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This grinning gentleman and five others, clad in wigs, gold hotpants and plastic tubing, whom I had to brush past to exit the labyrinth.

John Bock’s Sweat Production No. 9a thus offered the fairgoer a particularly memorable experience that certainly counter-acted much of the passive viewing that is the typically fair experience. Consider the disjunction between the site of this Flux-Labyrinth and the words of Fluxus’s first manifesto of 1963, which read: “Purge the world of bourgeois sickness, ‘intellectual,’ professional and commercialized culture; Purge the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract art, illusionistic art—PURGE THE WORLD OF ‘EUROPANISM!'” Playful and certainly not precious, this Frieze Project felt like a homeopathic remedy to the crush of commodity fetishism and fashion outside.

 

do it: Taking the Global Local

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I’m excited to get the ball rolling on a few projects for Fall, one of which is an exhibition that art history PhD student Brooke Leeton and I will be curating at the Lamar Dodd School of Art entitled Let’s do it UGA. We recently created a website for the project at www.letsdoituga.wordpress.com.

do it is a curatorial project begun by Hans Ulrich Obrist based on a simple proposition: “Create an instruction that someone else can use to make an artwork.” (More about that on e-flux’s project website.) In “Let’s do it UGA,” graduate students select different sets of do it instructions that form the basis of works of art. Instruction-based art privileges themes of variation, copy and authenticity, and play and experimentation, resulting in a work of art unconcerned with ownership or style. Instead, what drives the exhibition is the act of interpretation.

Brooke and I have enjoyed preparing the framework for the exhibition, but most of all we are excited to see what it will look like when it opens October 17. Because the artists are working from different sets of instructions that changes how they normally work, rather than us selecting objects or artist’s who work we are familiar with, the end result is a surprise. The only performance we can predict is one we will do ourselves, on the opening night of the reception. Following Amalia Pica’s instructions Throw A Party (2012), Brooke and I will end our night sweeping confetti evenly against one wall.

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