Tag Archives: Fluxus

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.

 

Hungarian Art: Tamas St. Auby’s Portable Intelligence Increase Museum

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Q: What is a “Portable Intelligence Increase Museum”?
A: A laptop.

No, this isn’t material from a dated Sci-Fi novel. Nor is it part of some absurdist imaginary critique of Communism that the main record of Hungarian ‘unofficial’ art had to be gathered and held surreptitiously on one man’s laptop. It might be absurd, but it is true. The main historical record of Pop art/Conceptual art/Actionism in the 1960s came from non-artist Tamas St. Auby‘s laptop.
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Tomas St. Auby was born in 1944 and has lived in Budapest, save for a 20 year expulsion by the Communist government. He ‘quit’ his art career early and begin to establish himself as a non-art artist, arranging the first Fluxus happening in Hungary (which the secret police came to and actively detailed in their notes). In 1968 he established IPUT, the International Parallel Union Of Telecommunications, a fake organization in which he has held and still holds a series of positions. His confrontational approach did not go down well with the communist authorities and St. Auby was forced to leave Hungary in the mid-70s.

He returned to Budapest in 1991 and joined the newly-founded Intermedia Department of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts. In 2003, he established the Portable Intelligence Increase Museum, an interactive computer-based exhibition that expose the gaps in official accounts of Hungarian art of the 1960s and 70s which he had documented. Over 1100 works by about 70 Hungarian artists have since been shown throughout Europe.

St. Auby holds a key position in the history of Hungarian art not only for the influence he continues to have on a younger generation of artists, especially through his teaching position, or his role in disseminating Fluxus happenings throughout Hungary, but for his documentation of art that would otherwise be forgotten.

As Culturebase puts it:

“St. Auby has recently been doing what Hungarian and international art historians might have yet to do. In 2002, St. Auby founded the Global Front of Anti-Art History Falsifiers of the Neo-Social Realist IPUT (NETRAF), in whose name he presents the Portable Intelligence Increase Museum. This interactive object makes the Hungarian avant-garde (from 1956 to 1976) accessible for the first time through objects, photos, films and documents.”

Connections: John Cage

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When an unfamiliar name pops up, I may or may not pay attention, unless it happens twice in a day. John Cage was big at the Guggenheim’s The Third Mind and then at Merce Cunningham’s Nearly Ninety at BAM, where the program noted that the Merce Cunningham Dance Company was partly founded by John Cage. I started to pay attention.

John Cage, Where R = Ryoanji (3R/17), 1992

John Cage with Pianist David Tudor


Yes, the same man is connected with the circle drawings above at the Guggenheim, the photo on the left, the Fluxus movement, Merce Cunningham, and silent music. I was surprised by the collaboration of Sonic Youth and Merce Cunningham, but apparently Sonic Youth, the experimental rock band, are fans of Cage who included 3 of his pieces on their album SYR4.

John Cage (1912-1992) was primarily a composer, albeit one more fascinated by sounds in themselves than creating structure. His most (in)famous piece, 4’33, consists of three movements of silence, signaled by the pianist opening and shutting the piano. The idea behind it is to open you the the noises in the room, the rustling, the whispers, sounds from the street. Many people at the original performance did not appreciate this.

Cage is now a well-established cutural influence, whose Bhuddist-inspired work left a huge-impression on American art. As the Guggenheim describes it, “Cage staunchly refused to create art in keeping with expectations, and all his creative endeavors, including dance, music, and visual art, were revolutionary. His Lecture on Nothing began with his statement, “I am here and there is nothing to say.” His concerts were even more challenging.”

John Cage, Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel, 1969

John Cage’s Experimental Composition classes in the 1950s have become legendary as an American source of Fluxus, the international network of artists, composers, and designers. In addition to music, Cage created works of visual art, like the one above referring to his old chess partner Marcel Duchamp, and writings. Cage was also a life-long mushroom collector.