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Fluxus and the Essential Questions ofLife

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uxus
and the Essential Questions of Life
Edited by
Jacquelynn Baas
With Contributions by
Jacquelynn Baas
Ken Friedman
Hannah Higgins
Jacob Proctor
Hood Museum of Art, D artmouth College • H anover, N ew Hampshire
in Association with
The University of Chicago Press • C hicago and London

J ~cq u e l y nn B~~ s is director emeritus of
the Unive rsity ofC~ liforni~ Berkeley
Art Museum ~nd P~cific Film Archive.
Prev iously she se rve d ~ s director of th e
Hood Museum of Art. She is the ~u th or,
co~ uth or, or editor of m ~ny publi c~ tion s,
in cl uding S111ile of th e Buddha : East em
Philosophy aud Hlestem A rt.fimll J\1Io 11et
to Today (C~ li forn i~ . 2005), Buddlw
Mi11d iu Coute111pomry Art (C~ liforn i ~.
2004), Leamiug i\1/iud: Expericuce iuto
A rt (C~ liforni ~. 2010) , Meas ure o(Ti111e
(C~ l ifo rni ~ . 2007), Darrell Waterstou:
Rcprcscutiug the liwisible (C h ~rt~. 2007),
~ nd T he ludcpeudcut C roup : Postll'ar Britaiu
nud the Aesth etics of Pleuty (MIT, 1990).
Published by
Hood Museum of Art,
D~rtmouth Coll ege
1-l ~ n over, New 1-l ~ mp s hire 03755
ww\v. hood n1u se u n1.da rtmou th .edu
and
The Unive rsit y ofC hi c~go Press,
C hi c~go 60637
The Unive rsity ofChi c~go Press, Ltd. ,
London
© 20.11 by T he Trustees of
Dartmouth Coll ege
All rights reserved. Published 2011.
Every effort h ~s been m~d e to identify
~ nd l oc~ t e th e ri ghtful copyri ght holder
of a llm~t e ri ~ l not s p ec ifi c~ ll y
commissio ned for use in this p ubli c~ ti o n
and to secure pennission , w here
applica ble, for rem e of ~ II such materi al:
Any error, 01ni ss ion, or £1 ilure to obtain
authori za tion with respect to 1nateri al
copyrighted by other sources has been
either un~void~bl e or unint e nti o n~l.
The editors ~nd publishers welcome ~ n y
info rm ~ tion th~t would ~ ll ow them to
correct future reprints.
The c~ t ~ l og u e ~ nd ex hibition titled Fluxus
aud the Esseutinl Q uestious of Life were
o r g ~nized by th e Hood Muse um of Art
~ nd ge nerously supported by C onst~n ce
~nd Wa lter Burke, C l~ ss of 1944, the
R~ y Winfield Smith 19 18 Fund, ~nd the
Marie-Louise and s~ mu e l R.. R.o se nrh ~ l
Fund.
Exhibition schedule
Hood Muse um of Art,
D~rtmouth College
Apri l 16-August 7, 20 11
Grey Art Ga llery,
New York Universit y
September 9-December 3, 2011
University of Michiga n
Museum of Art
February 25-May 20, 2012
Ed ited by Nils Nadeau
Designed by Glenn Suokko
Printed by Capit~ l O ffset Co mp~n y
T he following images are photographed
by Jeffrey Nintzel: cover, fro ntispiece,
ca talogue numbers 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,
13, 15, 17, 22, 26, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36,
37, 42 , 46, 52, 55 , 56, 59, 63,64, 65 , 70,
72, 73, 74, 78, 79, 80, 85, 90, 93, 96, 102,
106, 107, 11 0, Ill , 11 2, 1"13, 116
Cover and b~ c k cover: Flux Year Box 2,
1966, fi ve-compartment wooden box
containing work by various artists . Hood
Museum of Art, Dartmouth Coll ege,
George Maciun as Memori~ l Collection:
Purchased through the Wi lliam S. Rubin
Fund; GM.987.44.2 (ca t. 6)
Frontispiece: George M~ c iuna s, Btuglnry
Fluxkit, 1971 , seven-compartment
pl ast ic box containing seven keys.
Hood Muse um of Art, D~rt m ou th
College, George Maciunas Memori al
Coll ection: Gift of the Friedman Family;
GM.986.80 .1 64 (c~t. 22) © Courtesy of
Billie Maciun ~s
Printed in the United S t ~ t es of America
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-03359-4 (pa per)
ISBN-10: 0-226-03359-7 (paper)
Libr~ry of Congress Cataloging-in­
Publication Data
Flu x us ~nd the esse nri ~ l questions of
life I edited by J ~c qu e l y nn Baas; w ith
contributions by Jacquelyn n Ba~ s .
(et ~ I.] .
p. Cnl.
Includes bibliographica l references.
Exhibition schedul e: Hood Museum of
Art, Dartmouth College: April 16-August
7, 201 1; Grey Art G~ ll e r y , New Yo rk
University: September 9-December 3,
20 1"1 ; Universit y ofM i c hi g~ n Museum of
Art: Febru ary 25-May 20, 2012.
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-03359-4 (pbk. : alk .
paper)
ISBN-10: 0-226-03359-7 (pbk. : alk.
p~p e r ) l. Flu xus (Group of ~rtis t s)­
.Ex hibitions. 2. Art, Modern-20th
century-Exhibitions. I. Baa s, Jacquelynn ,
1948- II. Hood Muse um of Art.
N6494. F55F57 2011
709.04'60747423-dc22
2010051 925
This paper meets the requirements of
ANSI/ NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of
Paper).

Contents
Lenders to the Exhibition
Preface
Juliette Bianco
Acknowled gments
Jacquelynn Baas
I. Introduction
Jacquelynn Baas
2. Food: The R aw and the Fluxed
H annah Higgins
3. George M aciunas's Politics o f Aesthetics
J acob Proctor
4. Flu xus: A Laboratory of Ideas
Ken Friedman
vii
ix
xiii
1
13
23
35
CATALOGUE OF THE EXHIBITION 45
5. Flux us and the Essential Questio ns of Life 4 7
Jacquelynn Baas
Art (What's It Good Fo r)? 47 C hange? 49
D anger? 52 D eath ? 55 Freedom ? 56 God ? 59
H appiness? 60 H ealth? 64 Love? 66
N o thingness? 70 Sex? 71 Staying Alive? 74
Time? 76 What A m I? 79
Illustrated List of W orks 85
Selected Bibliography 131

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4
Fluxus: A Laboratory of Ideas
Ken Friedman
In 1979, H arry Rube labeled Fluxus " the most
radical and experimental art movement of the
sixties ." 1 In those days, few believed him. Three
decades later, more people might feei this to be
o, but few could say why. We might answer that
question ftrst by noting that experimentati on is
ultimately marked by qualities that emerge in a
laboratory, scientific or otherw ise. In this essay I
will exa mine Fluxus as an international laboratory
of ideas- a meeting ground and workplace
for artists, composers, designers, and architects, as
wel l as economists, mathemati cians, ballet dancers,
chefs, and even a wou ld-be theologian. W e
ca me from three continents-Asia, Europe, and
N orth America. At first, many critics and artists
labeled us charl atans; the general public ignored
us. Later they called us artists; ftn ally they saw us
as pioneers of one kind or another. The conceptual
challenge of this essay by a Flux us insider,
then, lies in trying to identify just what kind of
. .
piOneers we were.-
Emerging from a community that bega n in
the 1950s, 3 Fluxus had gained its name and its
identity by 1962. In different places on different
continents, meetings, friendships, and relationships
brought va rious constellations of people
Opposite:
Ken Friedman, A Fl11x Corsage, 1966-76, clea r plastic box wi th
paper label on lid containing seeds. Hood Museum of Art, Danmouth
College, George Ma ciunas Memori al Coll ection: Gift of
the Friedman Fami ly; GM.986.80.40 9 (ca t. 17).
into contac t w ith one another. The peripatetic
George Maciunas managed to meet many of
those w ho would cohere into Flu xus in the ea rly
1960s. H e had been trying to create an avantga
rde art gallery named AG that was already
nearl y bankrupt on the day it opened. N ext,
he wanted to publish a magazine-really an
encyclopedia of sorts-documenting the most
adva nced art, m usic, literature, film, and design
work being done anywhere in the world. George
had an ambitious plan for va rious interlocking
editorial boards and publishing committees, but
it never ca me to fruition. (H e was better at planning
than he was at fundraising or leadership.)
By 1962, George was in Germany, developing a
series of festivals for the· public presentation of
work that he planned to publish in the magazine
he still had on the back burner. The magazine
was to have been called Flux us, so the festiva l was
ca lled Flux us.
Nine artists and composers ca me together
in Wiesbaden to perform: Dick Higgins, Alison
Knowles, Addi K0pcke, George Maciunas,
N am June Paik, Benj amin Patterson , Wolf
Vostell , Karl Erik W elin, and Emmett Williams.
The German press liked the name of the fe tival
and bega n referring to the Wiesbaden nine
as die Flux us leute-"the Flux us people"- and
the name stuck. 4 Other artists became associated
with Flux us through contac t w ith members of

this burgeoning international ava nt-garde community,
including such varied prac titioners as
Joseph Beuys, H enning Christiansen, Robert
Filliou, Bengt af Klintberg, Willem de Ridder,
and Ben Vautier. Others joined later, including
Jeff Berner, Geoffrey H endricks, Milan Kniza k,
and me. 5
It is important to note that Flux us was a
community rather than a collective with a common
artistic and political program. 6 (None of
the artists signed the suppo ed Flux us manifestoes
that George M aciunas created- not even
George himsel f. ) Several streams of thought meet
in th e work and prac tices of the Fluxus community.
One stream is the well-known Fluxus
relationship to the teaching of John Cage, and
to related lines of practice reaching back to Z en
Buddhism. 7 Another stream is the more oblique
but still strong relationship to ea rlier- twentiethcentury
ava nt-garde manifestations ranging from
LEF and constructivism to Dada (though Fluxus
people were not linked to the anarchistic and
des tructive ethos ofDada).
Perhaps the best short definition of Fluxus
is an elegant little manifesto that Dick Higgins
published in 1966 as a rubber stamp:
Flux us is not:
-a moment in history or
-an art movement.
Flux us is:
-a way of doing things,
- a tradition, and
-a way oflife and death.B
These words summarize the time-bound,
transformational, and interactive development
of Flu x us. In the late 1970s, I suggested using
content analysis of Flux us projects to give an
overview of Fluxus, and in 1981, Peter Frank
and I used this method to chart the participants
for a history of Fluxus 9 In 1991, James Lewes
brought our chart forward in time by surveying
twenty-one Flux us exhibitions, catalogues, and
books. The resulting chart offers an overview of
the "who was who (and where)" ofFluxus over a
thirty-year period. 10
The study suggested a consensus of opinion
about the allegiance of those whose names
appea red in more than half of th e compilations
as a key participant in Fluxus. There were thirtythree
artists on this list: Eric Andersen, Ay-0 ,
Joseph Beuys, George Brecht, Philip Corner, Jea n
Dupuy, Robert Filliou, Albert Fine, Ken Friedman,
Al H ansen, Geoffrey H endricks, Dick Higgins,
Joe Jones, Milan Kniza k, Alison Knowles,
Addi K0pcke, Takehisa Kosugi, Shigeko Kubota,
George M aciunas, Larry Miller, Yoko Ono,
N am June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Takaka
Saito, Tomas Schmit, Mieko Shiomi, Daniel
Spoerri, Ben Vautier, Wolf Vostell , Yoshimasa
Wada, Robert Watts, Emmett Williams, and La
Monte Young. These thirty-three individuals are
included in the majority of projects and exhibitions,
but a broad vision of the Flu x us community
would include m any more, among others
Don Boyd, Giuseppe Chiari, Esther Ferrer, Juan
Hidalgo, D av i det Hampson, Alice Hutchin ,
Bengt af Klintberg, Carla Liss, Jackson M ac
Low, Walter Marchetti, Richard M axfield, Jonas
M ekas, Carolee Schneem ann, Greg Sharits, and
Paul Sharits.
In 1982, Dick Higgins wrote an essay in
w hich he attempted to id e11 tify nine criteria
th at di stinguished, or indicated the qualities of,
Fluxus: internationalism, experimentalism and
iconoclasm , intermedia, minimalism or concentration,
an attempted resolution of the art/
life dichotomy, implicativeness, play or gags,
ephemerality, and specificity. Later on I worked
with Dick's list, expanding it to twelve criteria:
globalism, the unity of art and life, intermedi a,
experimentalism , chance, playfulness, simplicity,
implicativeness, exemplativism , specificity,
presence in time, and musicality. 11 While Flu xus
had neither an explicit re ea rch program nor a
common conceptual program, a range of reasonable
issues could be labeled id eas, points of
commonality, or conceptual criteriaY If they do
36 Fluxus .1nd the E~semi.1l Qut'\tJom nfLJtt•

not constitute the framework of an experimental
research program, they do make a useful framework
for a laboratory of ideas.
In some respects, the Flu xus community
functioned as an invisible college, not unlike the
community that would give rise to early modern
science. 13 The first invisible colleges involved
"groups of elite, mutually interacting, and productive
scientists from geographically distant
affiliates who exchange[d] information to monitor
progress in their fi eld [ s] ." 14 In a different way,
Fluxus fulfilled many of the sa me functions, and
several Flu xus people identified their work-and
Flux us-as a form of research. 15
D espite the parallels, though, there are also
major differences, particularly in the respective
attitudes of the two groups toward experiment,
and in the debate surrounding what each group
lea rned from or developed through experimental
work. The natural philosophers whose
efforts gave rise to modern science developed
an agreed-upon language and method of formal
experiment, while the artists and composers
in Fluxus ex peri men ted informally and hardly
agreed on anything. Formal experiment often
seeks to answer clea rly identified ques tions; artisti
c experiment usually seeks informal, playful
results that are cast as emergent discoveries only
in retrospect. Finally, beginning with the earliest
journals-the Journal des Scavans (1665-1792)
and Philosophical Transactions (1665-present)­
natural philosophers and scientists used articles,
monographs, and other media, along with public
debates and programs of experiments, as platforms
for exchanging ideas and debating results,
producing in the process a robust, progressive
dialogue. Flux us never developed such robust
mechani m s. 16
What does make the comparison with the
invisible college appropriate is that hardly anyone
in Fluxus was part of a formal institution. What
we shared were common interests and reasonably
regular meetings, both personal and virtual.
M embers of th e Flux us community created a
rich informal information sys tem of newsletters,
multiples, publications, and personal correspondence
that enabled continual communication
among colleagues who might not meet in per on
for years at a time. There were only one or two
large-scale events that ga thered the entire community
in one place. 17 N evertheless, subsets and
constellations among Flux us participants have
been meeting in a rich cycle of concerts and
festivals that began in 1962 and have continued
sporadically for much of the half century since
then. All of this created a community that fits
the description of an invisible college in many
respects.
The idea of Flux us as a laboratory, on the
other hand, goes back to America n pragmatism
and its predecessors, Unitarianism and America n
transcendentalism , as well as to the Shakers. 1 R
The Unitarians descended from the Congregational
churches of N ew England. These were
Puritan Calvinist churche , but Puritanism took
a radical turn in the theology of William Ellery
Channing. In the ea rly 1800s, Channing turned
away from the doctrine of si n and punishment,
as well as the doctrine of the Trinity, to establish
w hat became Unitarian C hristianity. 19 Channing
influenced Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry
D avid Thoreau, and the other transcendentalists,
several of whom sought ways to build a world
of action in daily life through communities that
embraced new concepts ofwork. 20 Among Europea
n thinkers of interest to the transcendentalists
were Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose term
" intermedia" would reappea r in Fluxus (though
with a different meaning), and Friedrich Schleiermacher,
whose work on Biblical criticism and
hermeneutics (the art of interpretation) paved the
way for a new concept of interpretation theory.
Emerson foreshadowed both Cage and
Fluxus by introducing the concept of the ordinary
into American philosophy and art. H e was
one of the first Americans to write about Asian
religion and philosophy as well-another link to
Cage and to Fluxus artists, many of whom shared
an interest in Asian philosophy, especially Z en
Buddhism . In contrast to the European concept
Fluxus: A Laboratory of Ideas 37

of the sublime, which was a distinctly different
view of culture, Emerson emphasized the present
moment and the commonplace. In his essay titled
"Experience," Emerson writes, ' I ask not for the
great, the remote, the romantic ... I embrace
the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the
familiar, the low. Give me insight into today, and
you may have the antique and future worlds."
His embrace of the quotidian even turns rhetorical:
"What would we reall y know the meaning
of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan;
the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the
glance of the eye; the form and ga it of the body." 21
Like Emerso n and his close friend H enry David
Thoreau, Flu xus artist Dick Higgins would also
celebrate the near, the dow n-to-earth, the fa miliar,
in his "Something Else M anifesto" and "A
C hild 's History of Flux us." 22
Transcendentalism's emphasis on experience
as th e basis for philosophy evolved into pragmatism
toward the end of the 1800s in N ew England.
John D ewey, George H erbert M ead, and
C harles Sanders Peirce were born in N ew England,
and William James spent much of his life
there. R elated to the Puritan Calvinist tradition
through Congregationalism and transcendentalism,
23 these men ultimately developed a
concrete philoso phy for the New W orld . M ead 's
contribution to social thought through symbolic
interac tionism provides a rich framework
for understanding Flu xus. The idea behind w hat
George M aciunas labeled " functionalist" art was
not functionalism as we understand it today but a
complex paradigm of sy mbolic functions. 24
The transcendentalist concern for the significa
nce of everyday life manifested itself in the form
of utopian communities such as Brook Farm, but
this was not the first such effort, nor would it be
the las t. The so-called "Eightfold Path" of Buddhism-right
view, right intention, right speech,
right discipline, right livelihood, right effort,
right mindfulness, right concentration-embodies
similar concepts of common work. 25 George
M aciunas's grea t, unrealized vision of Fluxus
was to establish such a community, an idea he
pursued in the Fluxhouses and several other ventures.
M aciunas was never able to rea li ze this
fully, but his ideas did give rise to a number of
workable projects.U'
George's las t attempt at building a utopian
community took place in N ew M arlborough,
Massachusetts, w here he moved in order to be
close to Jean Brown's Fluxus collection and
archive in an old Shaker seed house in Tyringham
, M assachusettsY This part of the United
States had a tradition of utopian communities,
from the revolutionary period, to the America
n renaissance sparked by Emerson, Thoreau,
and the transcendentalists, to Shaker se ttlements.
Things had not changed all that much w hen Jea n
se t up shop a little ways down the road from a
half a dozen communes . 2 H
The Shakers were among the first productive
utopians of the modern era. They were a religious
community to be sure, but their religion
was one of service. They established some of the
first m ass production industries in the world,
selling obj ects and arti fac ts through catalogues.
Their furniture, superb in design and perfect in
balance, was the first example of industrial design
and ergonomic sensibility in the furniture trade.
And they supplied America's farms and gardens
with top quality seed.
A seed house was a building where seeds
were sorted and packaged. 'The packages could
be ordered individually by ca talogue or m ail
order, in much the sa me way M aciunas would
market Flux-products. There were also seed kits
with an assortment of packages in tidy boxes that
were not too different in shape or size from the
suitcase-sized Fluxkits of the 1960s. Like the
Flu xkits, only a few remain. In an interesting
coincidence, the most complete extant seed kit
is to be found at Enfield Shaker Village, 29 close
to H anover, N ew Hampshire, where the Hood
Museum of Art at Dartmouth College houses a
Flu xus collection established in honor of George
M aciunas.
Like George, the Shakers were abstemious
and celibate, and there were other delightful
38 Fluxus ,md lilt I ~'l'llll d t~dc t1un ut il'c'

similarities as well. The Shaker umon of work
and life included art and music as more than mere
pastimes. A sense of industry and a light spirit
were central characteristics of the Shaker community,
qualities that also typified the Fluxus
community at its be t. The Shakers organized
their communal life around two functi ons, work
and worship, and the productive Shaker economy
was a distinctive attribute of their villages. 311
R eading the rules of the order, it is nea rly impossible
to sepa rate work from other aspects ofShaker
life, with risi ng and returning to bed, meals, and
even household management structured around
the tempo and meaning of the working life. 3 1
When I fmt met Dick Higgins in 1966, I
caught from his ideas a vision of work as part
of exactly that kind of community life. Dick's
"Something Else M anifesto" called for artists
to "chase down an art that clucks and fills our
guts." 32 This was a call to collaboration and a call
to productive work, to art as a kind of production
that engages the concept of community.
Dick would introduce me to George M aciunas,
w hose philosophy of Fluxus articulated many of
the same principles. George's vision of Fluxus
called for artists w ho were w illing to create work
together, sharing ideas and principles, supporting
one another. While George's vision ofFlu x us
was intensely political at one point in his life, by
the time I met him he had shifted from a strictl y
hierarchical concept of the collective to a vision
that was much more open.
H ow did Flux us so readil y become this collaborative
working community or laboratory of
ideas and practices? For one thing, most of the
Fluxus artists were already collaborating in one
way or another; Fluxus simply became a new
point of intersection for usY Some of the artists
already knew one another, and others had
worked together for many years, such as those
in the N ew York Audio-Visual Group and John
Cage's former students. They did not come to
Fluxus, Flux us came to them w hen George
M aciunas crea ted the name for a magazine that
would publish their work. This was a building
already under construction when Maciunas came
along and named it Fluxus.
For another thing, despite the broad range
of interests and w ide geographical spread, Fluxus
was not that large a community-in the 1960s, it
involved fewer than a hundred people in a world
population of about three billion, part of a slightly
larger community of several hundred people w ho
were ac tive in a relatively small sector of the art
world that we might label the ava nt-garde. Those
w ho knew each other brought other interesting
people into the group, w here they beca me interested
in the same kinds of issues and undertook
the sa me kind of work.
History is always contingent, and there
are countless scenarios in w hich certain people
might never have met, or might have met without
forming a community, or formed a very
different kind of community. As it happened,
however, the social and historical development of
Fluxus generated intense correspondence among
artists even at a distance, countless common
projects, and many different kinds of collaboration.
Flux us artists met together sporadically but
relatively often, and some have worked togeth er
closely for five decades now.
The concept of experiment m akes claims on
both thought and action. In a community such as
Fluxus, these claims lead in different and occasionally
contradictory directions. Such a diverse
community of experimental artists, composers,
and designers, who lacked a coherent resea rch
program while working with a multiplicity of
approaches, runs the risk of being seen as an artist
group or even a movement w ith some kind
of continuing connection. This is especially the
case because some of the participants managed to
ea rn a living making art and most were happy,
or at least willing, to exhibit their products in art
museums and sell it in art galleries . While Flux us
was aggressively interdisciplinary, involving art,
architecture, design, and music (among other
things), it was never the kind of late modernist
art movement to which it has often been reduced.
The Dartmouth College motto is apposite
Fluxus: A Laboratory of Ideas 39

here: Vox Claman.tis in Deserto, taken from the
first words of Isaiah 40:3: "A voice cries, 'In the
wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord. Make a
straight highway for our God across the wastelands."'
In this passage, the mountains are to be
made flat, the rough ground level, and the rugged
places a fertile plain. For George Maciunas,
the way forward involved leveling and bringing
an end to the art world. He felt that art was a
distraction that prevented people from building a
better world, while reinforcing the concepts and
privileges of the upper class. George's vision of a
productive world entailed erasing art, but it was
a vision that tended to confuse art and the economic
and social forces that surrounded it. Many
Fluxus artists disagreed with his view, and even
George was inconsistent-his taste in music, for
example, embraced both Monteverdi and Spike
Jones.
Of course, many love the mountains and
the rough ground as much as the highways and
the plains. The dialectical demands of Fluxus
also included George Brecht's proposal to think
something else, Milan Knizak's call to live differently,
Robert Filliou's vision of an art whose
purpose is to make life more interesting than art,
and Dick Higgins's metaphor of an art that clucks
and fills our guts. Such an approach to art and
life-to art within life-entails an experimental
approach that connects in significant if sometimes
amorphous ways with being-in-the-world,
and that generates multiple activities of different
kinds. 34
The differences within Fluxus have made it
difficult to frame us all as "Flux us people." Art
has been a default frame, one that is only occasionally
appropriate. Compressing the larger laboratory
into that frame means that a great deal
about Fluxus has been missed. What Fluxus was
and perhaps remains is the most productive laboratory
of ideas in the history of art, an invisible
college whose field of study encompasses the
essential questions oflife.
Notes
1 Harry Rube, Flu x us: The
Most R adical and Experimwtal
A rt Movenrent of the Six ties
(Amsterdam: A. , 1979).
2 In the space ava ilable here, it wi ll
be impossible to provide a full
account of Fluxus as a laboratory
of ideas and an experimental
network. This is instead an "essay"
in the classical sen es of the word,
as defin ed by th e Oxford English
Dictio11ary: "Action or process
of trying or testing," and "A
composition of moderate length
on . .. [a subj ect] more or less
elaborate in style, though limited
in range
3 Several excellent accounts
examine the yea rs before
Fluxus emerged, including AI
Hansen, Happwir·rgs : A Primer
of Time-Space Art (N ew York:
Something Else Press, 1965);
Dick Higgins, j ifferson's Birthday /
Post Fa ce (N ew York: Something
Else Press, 1964); Higgins, " In
einem Minnensuchboot um
die W elt," in 1962 Wiesbaden
FL UX US 1982 (Wiesbaden and
Berlin: H arlekin Art and Berliner
Kunstlerprogramm des DAAD,
1982), 126-35 (in parallel German
and Eng Li sh); J erry Hopkins, Yoko
Ono (New York: Mac millan),
esp. 20-30; Jackson Mac Low,
"Wie George Maciunas die New
Yorker Avantgarde kennelernte,"
in 1962 Wiesbaden FLUXUS 1982,
11- 125 (in parallel German and
English); O wen Smith, "Proco­
Fiu xus in the United States: The
Establishment of a Like-Minded
Community of Artists," in
Fhrx us: A Concept1wl Country, ed.
Estera Milman, a special issue
of Visible Language, vol. 26, nos.
1-2 (Providence: Rhode Island
School ofDesign, 1992), 45-57;
and Owen Smith, Flu x us: The

History of a11 A ttitude (San Diego:
San Diego State Unive rsity Press,
1998), 13-68.
4 For a comprehensive history
ofFluxus, see Smith, Flu x us:
The History of a11 Attitude. For
discussions of ea rly Flu xus, see
also O wen Smith, " Developing
a Fluxable Forum: Earl y
Performance and Publishing,"
in Th e Flu xus Reader, ed. Ken
Friedman (London: Academy
Press, J ohn Wiley and Sons,
1998), 3-21, and Hann ah
Higgins, " Flux us Fortuna," in The
Flux us R eader, 31- 59. Th e Fht x us
R eader also contains an extensive
chronology.
5 The loose but purposeful
evolution ofRobert Filliou into
Flu xus is relatively typica l; see
Patrick Martin, " Unfinished
Filliou: On the Flu xus Ethos
and the Origins of R elational
Aesthetics," A rt j ournal 69, nos.
1-2 (Spring-Summer 2010):
44-62. Bengt afKlintberg is
another good story; see Ken
Friedman, "The Case for Bengt
afKlintberg," Perfonnance Resea rch
11 , no. 2 (2006): 137-44, and
Bengt afK!intberg, Svensk Fht x us
(Swedish Fhtxus) (Stockholm:
Rannells Antikvariat, 2006) . Dick
Higgins described the Flu xus
expansion process as a seri es of
waves; see Higgins, Modernism
since Postmodemisrn: Essays on
fl·ttermedia (San Diego: San Diego
State University Press, 1997), 163.
6 For an explicit discussion of this
issue by Fluxus co-founder Dick
Higgins, see Higgins, Modemism
sit"JCe Postm odemism, 161-63 and
173-82. Correspondence between
the artists and George M aciunas,
as well as correspondence among
the artists themselves, contain s
explicit refusals to sign any
proposed manifesto as well as
opposition to the very notion of
a common ideology. (There are
many exampl es in the Archi v
Sohm in Staa tsga leri e Stuttga rt
and the j ea n Brown Archive at
the Getty R esearch Institute.) A
recent conference titled Alternative
Practices i11 Desig 11 : The Collective:
Past, Present, a11d Future at RMIT
University in Melbourne explored
the multiple dimensions of the
idea of the collecti ve. In th e 1960s,
the word was closely lin ked to the
Soviet notion of collecti ve farms
and forced industrial collecti ves,
which probably influenced
George Maciunas's view at some
point; certainly governance by
an unelected commissar was one
reason that most Flu xus artists
shied away from the idea. After
the Melbourne conference,
however, my own view on aU of
this changed, and l have come to
feel that more recent models of
collecti ve community and ac tion
might usefully describe th e Fluxus
ph enomenon.
7 See Ellsworth Snyder, "John Cage
Discus es Flu xus," in Fht xus: A
Co nceptual Co u11try, 59-68. For
an enlightening exa mination
of Flu xus and Z en, ee D avid
T. D ori s, " Z en Vaudeville: A
M edi (t)a tion in th e Margins of
Fluxus," in Th e Fht xus R eader,
237-53.
8 Higgins, Modemism since
Postrn odemistn, 160.
9 Ken Friedman and Peter Frank,
" Fiu xus," in A rt Vivant: Special
Report-Fhtxus 11 (Tokyo: N ew
Art Seibu Company, Ltd., 1983),
and Ken Friedman w ith Peter
Frank, " Flu xus: A Post-Definitive
History: Art Where R esponse Is
the H eart of the Matter," High
Perfo rm ance 27 (1984): 56- 61, 83.
10 Ken Friedman w ith James Lewes,
" Flux us: Global Com.mun it y,
Human Dimensions," in Fht xus:
A Concept11al Co t.tt·ttry, 154- 79.
The completed chart offers a
broad consensus of opinion by
thirty experts who have given
lengthy co nsideration to Flu xus,
including scholars, critics,
curators, ga llerists, art dea lers,
Flu xus artists, and other artists
interested in Flu xus. A !together,
the chart includes 351 artists
presented in twenty-one different
projects representing a wide
va riety of ve nues, prese ntati on ,
and publica tions during the
thirty years of Flu xus up to
1992.
11 Dick Higgins, " Fiu xus: Theory
and R eception," L1.111d Art Press,
Fluxus R esea rch issue, vo l. 2, no.
2 (1991): 33. Dick's first ve rsion
of the nine criteria appea red
in a privately published 1982
paper titled " Flu xus T heory and
R eception," which was reprinted
in 1998 in Tlte Fluxt.ts R eader,
217-36. Dick expanded his li st to
eleven in Higgins, Modentism si11 ce
Postm odemism, 174-75. For my
amended li t, see Ken Friedman,
Flu xps aud Co mpauy (N ew York:
Emily Harvey Gallery, 1989), 4,
reprinted in Achille Bonito Oliva,
Gino DiMaggio, and Gianni
Sassi, eds., Ubi Fluxus, ibi motus
1990-1962 (Veni ce and Milan: La
Biennale di Venezi a and Mazzotta
Editore, 1990), 328-32. A later
version of Flu x us and Company
appea red in The Fhtx t.ts R eader as
well, 237-53.
12 Dick and I discussed these ideas
extensively over the yea rs, and at
different times Dick labeled them
criteria or points. In Modernism
sirtce Pos t111odemism, he used th e
term " points" but added, " rea lly,
they are alnwst criteria" (175).
Fluxus: A Laboratory of Ideas 41

13 For more o n th e concept of the
invisible college, see Diana C rane,
luvisible Colleges: D iffusiou

20 For more on transcendentalism,
see J oel Myerson, Tir e Tmrrsce/1-
deura/isrs: A R evier// of R esearch 1111d
Criticis 111 (New Yo rk : Modern
Language Association of America,
1984), and Myerson, ed., Trarr scerrdcutalislll:
A Reader (N ew York :
Oxford University Press, 2000).
21 R alph Waldo Emerson, Essays aud
Lectures (New York: The Library
of America , 1983 [1 837J), 68-69.
Thanks to Dine Fri edman for
directing me to these passages.
22 The "Something Else Man ifesto"
was published in 1964 in Mauifestoes
(N ew York: Something Else
Press), 21 (digital reprint avai l­
able from UbuWeb at http://
www.ubu.com / h istorica 1/ gb/
index.html). "A Child's History
ofFiuxus" was published in 1979
in C harlton Burch's Liglrrworks
magazine and reprinted in Dick
Higgins, Horizous: Tir e Poetics aud
Theory of tire lrrtenuedia (Carbondale:
Southern lllinois Universi ty
Press, 1984).
23 That is to ay, not alvinist
dogma but rather Jonathan
Edwards's mystica l "divine and
supernarurallight" imparted to
the soul from God.
24 See George Herbert Mead, Mi11d,
Se[f, aud Society fro ru tire f(/1/dpoiur
of a Social Belraviorisr, ed. and
intro. Charles Morris (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1967
[1 934]) , and Herbert Blumer,
Sy111bolic luteracriouis111: Perspecti11e
aud Met/rod (Berkeley: University
ofCalifornia Press, 1986) , esp.
1-60 on methodology and 61-77
on M ea d 's thought. 1 discovered
Mead 's work in 1965 and Blumer's
in th e early 1970s and have
relied heavily on both in the
decades ince. The fir t doctoral
dissertation to examine Flu xus
was by anthropologist Marilyn
Ekdahl Ravicz, who developed
her perspective based on Dewey's
pragm atism. Titled "Aesthetic
Anthropology: Theory and
Analysis of Pop and Concepwal
Art in America," she completed
it in 1974 for the Department of
Anthropology of the University of
California at Los Angeles.
25 One of the genuine puzzles l
contend with in considering
Fluxus and o ther art (or "anarr")
communities that acknowledge
Buddhism a a o urce has been
the general lack of interest in
ethics. lt is difficult to conceive of
Buddhism , either Zen or the other
schools, without th e foundational
ethics of the Eightfold Path .
26 For an exceLlent di sc ussion of
George Maciunas's experiment
in urban development and th e
Fluxhouses, see C harl es R .
Simpson, "The Achievement of
Territorial Community," in SoHo:
Tire Artisr i11 rlre Ciry (Chicago:
The University of C hicago Press,
1981), 153-88. In 2008, Stendhal
Gallery in New York organized
an exhibition titl ed C eor:ge
Machuras: Prifabricated Buildiug
Sysrern that examined Maciunas's
architectllral ideas . The Simpson
chapter is available on the gallery's
website, along with excellent
essays by Julia R obinson, Carolina
Carrasco, M ari Dumett, and
others. The ga llery URL is
http://stendhalgallery.com, and
the essays are ava ilable at http://
stendhalga ll ery.com / ?page_
id=852 (accessed Au gust 19,
2010).
27 A sensitive portrait of George's
last community appears in a book
by his widow: Billie Maciunas,
Tir e Eve of Flux us: A F/u x /1/ e/ll oir,
w ith a preface by Kri stine Stiles,
an introduction by Geoffrey
Hendricks, and an afterword by
Larry Mi ller (Orlando, Florida:
Arbiter Press, 2010). The J ea n
Brown Archi ve is now part of
the Getty Center for the Arts
and Humanities in Los Angeles,
alifornia. Its UR.L is http://
www.getty.edu / research/. The
online catalogue and findings aids
describe the collection.
28 I spent the summer of 1972 in
Tyringham working with Jea n
Brown and helped arrange the firSt
meeting between Jea n and George
M aciunas. I knew th ey would hit
it off but never imagined how
rich their relationship would
become. It delighted me th at
Jea n's archi ve was located in an
old Shaker seed hou e in the
Berkshires of Massachusetts. Every
evening when we ate dinner
together, J ea n would quote the
old Shaker proverb, " Hands to
work and hea rts to God." It is
fitting th at Ameri ca's first great
Flu x us collection was established
in a Shaker seed ho use, while
George's last Fluxus cooperative
housi ng project was based nea rby
in the wooded hea rtland of
tra nscendenta I ism.
29 Information on th e Enfield Shaker
Museum is available at http://
www.shakermuseum.org/ index.
html.
30 See Edward Deming Andrews,
Tir e People Ca lled Shakers (Oxford :
Oxford University Press, 1953),
94- 135.
31 Ibid ., 253-89.
32 Dick Higgins, "A Something
Else Manifesto," in Man ifestoes,
21. Digital reprint ava ilable from
UbuWeb at http://www.ubu.
com/ h isrorica 1/ gb/ index. html.
33 This includes even people like
me, w ho were not artists before
we became in volved w ith the
artists and composers in Flu x us.
For the story of how a would-be
minister became an artist-or,
in M arcel Duchamp's terms, an
F!Jxus. A Laboratory of Ideas 43

"anartist"- see Ken Friednun,
"Events and the Exquisite
Corpse," in Tl1 e Exq11isire
Corpse: Cha11ce and Collaborarion
in S11rrealis111's Parlor Ga111e, ed.
Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren,
Davis Schneiderman, and Tom
Denlinger (Lincoln: University
of N ebraska Press, 2009), 73-74,
fn. 6, as well as Peter Frank, "Ken
Friedman : A Life in Fluxus,"
in Artistic Berljellows: Hisrories,
Theories and Conversations in
Collaborative Art Practices, ed. Holly
C rawford (Lanham: University
Press of America, 2008), 145-86.
34 Curatorial analysis in general
has tended to dismiss Flux us's
engagem ent with the larger world
by portray ing its experiments
and failures as ineffective. For
example, in Thomas Kellein's
2007 book George Mach111as and th e
Dream of Fhi XIIS (London: Thames
and Hudson), George is depicted
as a brilliant but failed dreamer.
It is certainly true that we often
influenced social change without
influencin g the formal qualities or
conceptual fo cus of the trends and
iss ues that we helped to create.
Fluxus W es t, for example, was
one of th e six or seven founding
publishers of the Underground
Press Syndicate in 1967, but we
never gained any traction on the
way th e papers were designed or
what they dealt with. Even though
we ca n be found in the first lists
of founding papers, along w ith
the Easr Village Other, the Berkeley
Barb, and th e Los Angeles Free Press,
we vanish from history soon after
because our focus was so vastly
different. Did we exert a role
in developing the concept of an
alternate press' Yes. Did we have
any real part in the way the press
developed? Perhaps we did, at least
in a small way. Did we succeed
in directing serious attention to
cultural issues beyond the standard
underground press fo ca l points of
rock music, drugs, sex, and new
left politics? Not hardly.
44 Fluxus ,\lld thl' Es'L'Iltl.ti Qul'\tioth ofltlt: