Where did Fluxus come from?
I was trying to write a short introduction to Fluxus - how this fascinating intermedia/ multidisciplinary/ multi-national art 'movement' came about, what were the intellectual/ philosophical roots? Who was involved? So here's a sketch of what I found (much more to come, I'm updating these articles sporadically) There were two American colleges that played key roles in the development of the experimental, interdisciplinary art and art-education in the 1940s-1960s: The New School for Social Research in New York and Black Mountain College in North Carolina: both had a profound influence on post-war culture, and both were marked by the presence of pre-Fluxus avant-garde intermedia creatives like John Cage.
The New School for Social Research (often shortened to The New School) provided a very broad cultural research platform, embracing all the arts and including the famous Parsons School of Design - importantly offering a wide range of design disciplines within an even more significant inter-disciplinary framework - including 'design strategies' and other theoretical-research directions. All this delivered in the familiar Bauhaus-style 'flexible learning' based on Dewey's practical-learning ideas (I call this 'student-centred project-based learning'). Other sections of the New School include a College of Performing Arts, a School of Music, a special Paris campus, and schools of Drama, Fashion, Art, Media and Technology, the Constructed Environment, Art and Design and Theory.
Notable artist-practitioners included Erwin Piscator, Stella Adler and Lee Strassberg in Drama with students including Marlon Brando, Ben Gazzara, Tony Curtis, Harry Belafonte, Rod Steiger and Harry Belafonte exerting a tremendous influence on Fifties and Sixties theatre and film. In terms of composition and performance the New School boasted the composers Henry Cowell and John Cage. the famous political philosopher and historian Hannah Arendt and the radical economist Thrstein Weblen, also taught at The New School.
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So the importance of Black Mountain College and the New School is that they encouraged experimental inter-disciplinary collaborations of staff and students, spurring and catalysing mixed-media experimentation in the two decades preceding the Sixties. From the Geodesic Dome to Happenings, Method Acting, and the Happening, to the Moviedrome and the mixed-media work of Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, the painters Willem and Elaine de Kooning, accompanied by, in the wider world, The Living Theatre, the Angry Young Men and the French Existentialists, Richard Hamilton and the Independent Group, the ICA in London, the Chicago Institute of Design, and, later in the Sixties, Joe Boyd and Hoppy Hopkins Underground Freak Out (UFO) club, Jim Haynes Drury Lane Arts Lab, David Bowie's Beckenham Folk Club-cum-Arts Lab, the Isle of Wight Festivals - as well as the whole underground/avant-garde scene of Concrete Poetry, London and NY Film Clubs, the French workshop of experimental (potential) literature (Oulippo) Henri Chopin's, Ou Review, Musique Concret, Situationist International, British R&B, the New Television (Citizen 63, Dr Who, Ready, Steady, Go!, TW3 (That Was the Week, That Was), et cetera. We all got caught up in the tornado of incendiary experimentation of the 1950s...!
"One finds in Fluxus work genre-blurring “intermedia,” provocative performance events, and mobile art “kits.” One finds an international syndicate of collaborating, agitating, pranksterish artmakers. And while there were indeed disagreements among its core practitioners of about forty artists, few movements of the twentieth century share its longevity. The American Dick Higgins notes, “[T]his depended upon a fluid conception of group identity: anyone who wanted to do that kind of thing was Fluxus … [we] stuck together to do Fluxus kinds of things, even when [we] were also doing other kinds of things at the same time.”[2]Indeed, it is often difficult to discern the boundaries separating Fluxus from other circles—whether it be action music, mail art, conceptualism, assemblage art, concrete and sound poetics, and so on. This was its revitalizing strength. Fluxus members worked in areas across and between multiple forms, challenging distinctions between artistic genres, and between art and everyday life. Perhaps it’s best to think of Fluxus as a provisional space wherein an undetermined number of artists, writers, and musicians with shared approaches to art did things together."
(Hannah Scates Kettler | Project Coordinator: Fluxus Library )(http://fluxus.lib.uiowa.edu/about.html)
(Dick Higgins was also important as the founder and editor/owner of Something Else Press - publisher of key intermedia texts by the likes of Higgins, Al Hansen, Alison Knowles, Ray Johnson, Daniel Spoerri, Robert Filiou, Richard Huelsenbeck, Emmett Williams, John Cage, Brion Gysin, Gertrude Stein, and Claes Oldensburg.
George Maciunas: these typographic diagrams of literate-man versus post-literate man and contemporary-man (c1968-1970) echoe some of the surmised characteristics of the Left Brain vs Right Brain analysis of the later 1970s. But what is really fascinating here is Maciunas' illustrations themselves - as attempts to condense or compress and accelerate communication as an alternative to long, linear, text-based expliques. It's also of course an instance of intermedia thinking - selecting carefully from the palette of 'intermedia' the most appropriate tool for the expression of an idea/feeling.
George Maciunas: Expanded Arts Diagram (originally made in 1964) - maps the genesis of inter-disciplinary arts...
It was this 'intermedia' focus that first attracted me to the work of Fluxus - I had bought a copy of Dick Higgins: Postface/Jefferson's Birthday and Al Hansen's A Primer of Happenings and Time/Space Art (both publications of Higgin's Something Else Press) around 1966 - because I was preparing research for an intended degree-essay on the Gesamptkunstwerk. Around this time I also corresponded with Stan Vanderbeek - I'd read somewhere of his Stony Point MovieDrome - a multimedia, immersive, audio-visual environment.
Stan Vanderbeek: MovieDrome 1963
and in 1967 he sent me a copy of his 1965 'Inventory' of his dome-studio-laboratory-theatre he called MovieDrome...
reconstructed MovieDrome at MOMA 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb-azQRfehc
So, my point is that several artists were arriving independently at similar conclusions (I would say, expressing the zeitgeist in contingent ways). Both Black Mountain College and The New School, following the definitive Bauhaus example, attracted dynamically inspirational students and artist-lecturers - at Black Mountain College in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it was the combustive mix of John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Stan Vanderbeek, Robert Rauschenberg, Elaine de Kooning and Richard Buckminster Fuller that ignited innovations like the performance-focussed mixed-media events that later were called Happenings.
"Merce Cunningham Dance Company world tour, Cologne, 1964. Pictured in helicopter: Carolyn Brown, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Doris Stockhausen, David Tudor, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Pictured below: Steve Paxton, Michael von Biel, and Rauschenberg." Photo-montage: Unattributed (https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/b/black-mountain-college/black-mountain-college-john-cage-merce-cunningham)
What a line-up! and what a collage! Talk about flying down to Rio, here's some of the top echelon of the world's avant-garde artists, touring around the world in 1964.
Geodesic class at Black Mountain - supervised by Buckminster Fuller - the accent was on the John Dewey dictum of learning by doing - and you learn more from your mistakes, than your successes - Black Mountain mixed interdisciplinary staff and students in collaborative projects...In British Art Schools of the 1960s we developed 'student-centred, project-based learning' - resting on project briefing > research > development with regular critiques by staff and students> presentation of work > summary critique and reflection.
Robert Rauschenberg and Ingeborg Svarc Lauterstein, students at Black Mountain College c.1948-1949. (Photo by North Carolina State Archives)
"The name of this short-lived liberal-arts college in rural North Carolina – it was not an art school, though its founder, John Rice, thought art ‘should be at the very centre of things’ – immediately evokes a hazy mythos, primarily for its associations with Anni and Josef Albers, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, the trio of John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg and the poets Charles Olson and Robert Creeley." (Black Mountain College).
Another student at Black Mountain in 1949 was the interdisciplinary media-artist Stan Vanderbeek - who in 1963, created his Moviedrome "The Movie Drome was a grain silo dome which he turned into his "infinite projection screen." Visitors entered the dome through a trap-door in the floor, and were encouraged after entering to spread out over the floor and lie with their feet pointing towards the center. Once inside, the audience experienced a dynamic inter-dispersal of movies and images around them, created by over a dozen slide and film projectors filling the concave surface with a dense collage of moving imagery." (wikipedia)
(In the early 1970s, I still remember the thrill of climbing-up through a similar hatchway into Christopher Logue's loft apartment just off the southern end of Portobello Road in Simon Close, and renewing our acquaintance from the IOW Bob Dylan Festival in 1969, where Logue had read his poems to the largest poetry audience ever assembled...)
"Dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer and musician John Cage were already working together when they first came to Black Mountain in 1948 and reconstructed Erik Satie’s The Ruse of the Medusa with collaborators including Buckminster Fuller, Elaine and Willem de Kooning. On their return in 1952 they worked with others, including pianist David Tudor and artist Robert Rauschenberg. Together, though orchestrated by Cage, this group created what could be called the first ‘happening’, an untitled event (now sometimes known as Theatre Piece no.1) in the college dining hall (in 1952). A number of performances took place within a choreographed time bracket, but without narrative or causal relation to each other. Though few were there in the audience, the ripples of the event played out through the following decades in avant-garde performance." (Tate op cit)
Performers - including Merce Cunningham and Elaine de Kooning - in Erik Satie’s The Ruse of the Medusa (1948) and (later) in Theatre Piece No1 1952.
"At 8:30 tonight John Cage mounted a stepladder and until 10:30 he talked about the relation of music to Zen Buddhism while a movie was shown, dogs ran across the stage barking,12 persons danced without any previous rehearsal, a prepared piano was played, whistles blew, babies screamed, Edith Piaf records were played double speed on a turn of the century machine."
– Francine du Plessix Gray (diary entry from August, 1952) (quoted in https://www.blackmountaincollege.org/performance-womenofbmc/)
... "Working together in the late 1940s and early 1950s (and throughout their rest of their lives) Cage and Cunningham collaborated on music and dance pieces that, while they occured together in the same space and time, were conceived independently. They also drew upon Oriental philosophies of Zen Buddhism and the I Ching to incorporate chance and indeterminacy into their works. When the Merce Cunningham Dance Company began in 1953, Cage was the musical director and Rauschenberg the décor and costume designer. Their influence on the art world back then, as well as the world of avant-garde performance and experimental music today, is startling." (Tate.org op cit)
This media-mix or mediaplex of dance, impromptu and ad lib improv performance, Zen and Chinese I-Ching - introducing stochastic tools into the performance - and loosely scripted algorithms (later called 'event scores' by George Brecht), and 'repeat loops' suggested by Terry Riley, Dick Higgins and others in the new composition school - all these have considerable resonance with developments in computer-programming at that time: 'if/then', 'repeat with', 'go to', 'random RNG' etc. Event scores were effectively algorithms - and they were invented by Fluxus artists - and 'cut and paste' was a technique associated closely with artwork-prep for photo-litho printing in the era of Xerox photo-copying and the use of Grant Projectors and paste-ups coming to prominance then in the 1950s...
La Monte Young: An Anthology of Chance Operations (1961-1963)
"Artist's book, letterpress and offset printed. Original copies of this seminal fluxus book, in perfect condition after over 50 years * Edited by La Monte Young in 1961, designed by George Maciunas, and published in 1963, An Anthology contains contributions by more than a dozen artists, many of whom would become associated with Fluxus. An early manifestation of the genre of artists’ books —books in which the content is the artwork— An Anthology contains a diverse array of contributions, including musical notation, visual and concrete poetry, graphics, instruction–based works, and essays. A complex happening is also covered in An Anthology edited by La Monte Young, New York (1963). This book is a concrete manifestation of 'cool nonformalism', particularly in relation to natural and technological media. It was in this context that Walter de Maria published Art Yard (1960), On the importance of the natural disaster (1960), and Meaningless Work (1960) three texts in which the use of super technological and macro-natural media, such as bulldozers and natural catastrophes, coincide with a work of art, a work of mental processes, of thought, which finds in the book an immediate actuality." (https://www.soundohm.com/product/an-anthology-1)
Note that Maciunas designed this book - including the typographic front cover (way before software made this kind of typo-collage easy) - Maciunas had studied graphics at Cooper Union in the early Sixties... - and had studied art, architecture, art-history, and musicology - an intermedia back-story that stood up well in his shortish but immensely significant Fluxus life. La Monte Young was a jazz saxophonist and experimental, minimalist composer, influencing collaborators including John Cale - with his invention of Drone Music. He also studied at UCLA and at Darmstadt, with electronic-music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen - and became a central figure in Fluxus. Influenced by Cage, he developed a fascination with stochastic (chance) operations - thus this important collation...
It was this 'intermedia' work, with its strong premonitions of the digital future of world media that got me interested in other materialised and written visions of the future of 'art-media' not only as pointers to the multimedia. multichannel, 24/7 digital media world we now inhabit, but similar art and technological insights into the future that were emerging in the early Sixties from artists, critics and engineer-scientists as diverse as Jean Tinguely, John Cage, J.C.R. Licklider, Alison Knowles, Douglas Engelbart, Carolee Schneeman, Ted Nelson, Eduardo Paolozzi, Charlotte Moorman, Reyner Banham, Pauline Boty, Allan Kaprow, Shirley Clarke, George Brecht, Susan Sontag, Storm de Hirsch, Buckminster Fuller, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Marianne Faithful, Barbara Rubin, John McHale and Marshall McLuhan. By Art-Media I meant that fusion of the avant-garde + counterculture + new media emerging in art-forms like the This is Tomorrow exhibition, the light-shows of Underground-Freak-Out (UFO) in Tottenham Court Road, the Hornsey Light/Sound Workshop in North London, and the Happenings intermedia performances of Alan Kaprow, Al Hansen, John Cage and others at this time.
Sure, we had had related interdisciplinary visions of the future - the Independent Group's This is Tomorrow exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1956, for example, some pavilions at the Brussel's Worlds Fair in 1958, and Walt Disney's Imagineering R&D Centre at his Grand Central Creative Campus in Glendale California created in 1952, also the considerable designs, slide graphics, films and ideas of Ray and Charles Eames.
Disney Imagineering: Disneyland, Anaheim, California 1955
Edgard Varèse: Poème électronique for Le Corbusier's Philips Pavilion, Brussels World Fair 1958 Part of a 4-projector slide/movie show plus c350 sound-speakers to spatially demarcate Varèse's composition.
So this is some of the context in which Higgins, Maciunas, Vanderbeek, Hansen, Cage and others grew into in the 1940s-1950, but back to Fluxus: There were two focal points in the USA:
Buckminster Fuller, Elaine de Kooning andJoseph Albers construct geodesics at Black Mountain College (1948).
- Black Mountain College in the late 1940s and New York's New School for Social Research in the 1950s - and both related to John Cage. Black Mountain attracted Cage and boasted a wide range of creative talents - as faculty and as students, including Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Joseph Albers, Robert Rauschenberg, Stan Vanderbeek - and many more young talents...
Rauschenberg stage-scenario for Merce Cunningham
Rauschenberg's dance experiences with John Cage and Merce Cunningham Nam June Paik + Charlotte Moorman: TV Bra 1969.
Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman: TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969)
"There were several options for its operation. The TV sets could be tuned to broadcast television or display prerecorded tapes; they could also show a live, closed-circuit image captured by Paik as he walked among the audience with a video camera. (“Putting the audience’s faces on my brassiere,” was Moorman’s description of this method.) When Moorman wore “TV Bra” she improvised what she called abstract sounds on her cello and altered the television pictures in various ways. Sometimes she taped magnets to her wrists, which distorted the video images as she moved her arms; other times, she used a microphone to pick up the cello sounds, which were then transformed into optical signals that disturbed the television pictures." (Joan Rothfuss: On Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik's TV Bra. MIT Press Reader)
"“TV Bra” belongs to this aesthetic species, but its central theme was the link between human beings and their machines. “The real issue implied in [the fusion of] ‘Art and Technology,’” Paik wrote in the Wise Gallery exhibition brochure, “is not to make another scientific toy, but how to humanize technology and the electronic medium, which is progressing rapidly — too rapidly.” In “TV Bra” he accomplished this through a doubling in which Moorman’s body became a television screen and televisions stood in for parts of her body." (Joan Rothfuss: op cit)
The Aesthetic Species that Rothfuss refers to was the 'Living Sculpture' tropes of the 1960s (Gilbert & George etc), but as she says, Paik was especially concerned with the Art and Technology flux or fusion that seems central to the 20th century zeitgeist.
Shigeko Kobuta: Duchampiana: Nude Descending A Staircase 1976 - Standard-definition video and Super 8mm film transferred to video
(color, silent; 5:21 min.), four cathode-ray tube monitors, and plywood (MOMA)
"A photograph of a 1976 multimedia sculpture by artist Shigeko Kubota entitled “Duchampiana: Nude Descending a Staircase.” Inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s seminal modernist painting “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2” (1912), Kubota’s sculpture is a four-step staircase built out of wood. Square video monitors are inserted into the front face of each step, each displaying a blue-tinted video of a figure walking down a staircase. The sculpture is shown on the diagonal and sits directly on a tan, linoleum floor, with a flat, white wall behind it." (VoCA Journal, March 17, 2019, https://journal.voca.network/sound-and-vision/kubota_693_1981_cc-full-jpeg/.)
Much impressed by Duchamp's neo-conceptual art, Kobuta - long-time collaborator of George Macuinas and Nam June Paik - and both members of Fluxus...
George Brecht: Event Scores - art algorithms for Fluxus 1962-1963 - expressed by Yoko Ono, DickHiggins et al...
As I suggested above, the Fluxus repertoire of creative processes, while coincidently (?) analogues of computer operations, were also perhaps premonitions of a digital age to come. Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, Stan Vanderbeek, Joe Licklider and others were actively predicting a networked digital future of computer-related archives, intercomms, hypertext, computer internetworks - Licklider called it an 'Intergalactic Network' in 1962 - what they were glimpsing was the globally networked and interconnected feast of linked-information and communication channels - and perhaps also the ideas (proposed by Alan Kay) of the computer as a personal tool (he called it the Dynabook in 1968), and 'the computer as a medium' (Alan Kay) able to simulate all media - text, graphics, photography, animation, video and film - Nam June Paik also of Fluxus called the futurist media vision the 'information superhighway' in 1995,
Nam June Paik: Information Superhighway 1995
and also (a suggestion by Jay Wright Forester in 1958) computers were able to model and to simulate real-world situations and processes -
Jay Wright Forrester: Urban Dynamics from System Dynamics (1958)
- organisations, war-games, businesses, local governance, etc. During this same period (1950s-1960s) the USA was extending Dowding's idea of a National defence system linking human observers, RDF, telephone and radio to a manually-managed 'operations' or 'ops' table - into a computer-operated national network or early-warning system (the DoD and USAF SAGE system came online in 1962-63) with 'BigBoard' data-visualisation:
DoD + USAF: 'Bigboard' data-map display c1960 - the 'ops board' replaces Dowding's Ops Table and is shared nationwide by television links
Stanley Kubrick and Ken Adam: War-Room set for Dr Strangelove (1962) - "You can't fight here - this is the War-Room"
On the Performance front, Brenda Laurel's Computers as Theatre (1991) and Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997) are both essential classics - and bring together some aspects of the wide range of Fluxus activities...
There's a lot more to come on this fascinating coeval history of Fluxus and Digital Media... I've been trying to paint a picture of the avant garde cultural climate that was the context for the birth of Fluxus...