The Assemblagist

Have taken on new moniker :: Fluxs​.us because … well, it’s a nice look­ing word.

Many of you out there on this great planet of ours ask:

What is Fluxus?

What is Fluxyou? What is, for that mat­ter, Flux­them? What does it all mean?
The answer, accord­ing to Mr. Nat­ural, is “It’s about this big and it’s about this tall and it’s about this art I’m talk­ing about.”

A def­i­n­i­tional direc­tion to pur­sue if one wishes to broaden one’s Fluxs​.us under­stand­ing:
Fluxus began in the 1950s, some argue the 1960s. Fluxus began in Ger­many. Oth­ers argue its routes lie some­where in NY. A global under­cur­rent dri­ven by ambigu­ous minds, many of which were housed some­where in the Syra­cuse NY vicin­ity. When research­ing this “move­ment”, direct your activ­i­ties toward all sources in the US and abroad.
(or abroad and the UK, or abroad and Bel­gium, or abroad and Ger­many… get the idea? Fluxus Inter­na­tional = Not Con­fined to a spe­cific Geo­graphic Location)

Here’s what this Assem­blag­ist learned over the past decade of Fluxus study and imple­men­ta­tion: Orig­i­nal Fluxus Artists protested Art’s Intri­cate Inclu­sion Require­ments, sort of like Grou­cho Marx and his I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts peo­ple like me as mem­bers. One of the most fas­ci­nat­ing aspects of Mod­ern Day Fluxus lies in the con­sis­tent dia­log and debate over Fluxus Death or Fluxus Now. I leave it to my read­ers to find the argu­ments online but *pssssst* look on Face­book. It seems every­one within and with­out the Fluxus Com­mu­nity of 2010 con­tributes to the argu­ment. Read more on the Dig­i­tal Salon (see link accom­pa­ny­ing Cecil’s quote)

I devel­oped my own def­i­n­i­tion for Fluxus much as did I for Mail Art. Com­ing into this Flux’d scene as an Out­sider — as a Writer and not an Artist by trade, my view­point bears no his­tor­i­cal prej­u­di­cial aspects. Sim­ply put — I liked the word itself. FLUXUS. Say it out­loud. “Flux” or “Fluxus” or Flux Me”

My begin­ning Mail Art def­i­n­i­tion, though, quickly became non­sen­si­cal and irrel­e­vant due to many cir­cum­stances, the least of which was that I believed Mail Art to be Art Con­structed From Mail. Not, as it truly is, Mail Con­structed As ART.

Now links to all these items: Fluxus, Flux­Mass, Is Fluxus Dead?, IUOMA, Dig­i­tal Mail Art, FluxList and more can be found via Google. I rec­om­mend you become an avid researcher of the top­ics, accept­ing not ONE sin­gu­lar def­i­n­i­tion of the Move­ments but instead, form­ing your own cir­cu­lar con­struct of what all Fluxus ideas mean:
1. an Art Move­ment,
2. a Response to Cul­tural Mores of the Day,
3. as Par­tic­i­pa­tory Art (Hap­pen­ings, true, but also how the view­ing of a FluxBox or whathaveyou requires a dia­log between the piece AND the viewer), and
4. the Euro­pean Fluxus Move­ment and its influ­ence on the US Fluxus Move­ment and VICE VERSA. Best to under­stand the sig­nif­i­cance of both the Fluxus of Yes­ter­day and the New New Fluxus of Now and the con­tin­u­ous drama and debate revolv­ing around both categories.

One often takes sides, call­ing out the other. Is Fluxus Dead as a ques­tion or Fluxus Is Dead as a declara­tory sen­tence. Immerse your­self in the debate of whether Col­lec­tions of Art define the Exis­tence or Death of a Move­ment. Con­sider if the SALE of a piece of FLUXUS is fun­da­men­tally wrong, does the sale of some­thing negate its worth as an Artis­tic Cul­tural Com­ment when Fluxus involves its pretty self into the argument.

George Maci­u­nas

New quote from Cecil Tou­chon on Dig­i­tal Salon:

Con­clu­sion: I think today we need to under­stand how this attempt at anti-​collect-​ability was some­thing of a fail­ure and to then rethink how to approach art and cap­i­tal­ism in less of an adver­sar­ial way. Maybe even accept and embrace it. Then mess with it! I think it best not to work against things when instead we can work with them.

Cecil Tou­chon

These Fluxus Links begin the project of
Flux Doc­u­men­ta­tion online
and will con­tinue indef­i­nitely.
Sug­gest a link.

mace­wan @ assem​blag​ist​.com

http://​www​.art​no​tart​.com/​f​l​u​x​u​s​/​k​f​r​i​e​d​m​a​n​-​f​o​u​r​t​y​y​e​a​r​s​.​h​tml

…The computer-​generated images pre­sented today as com­puter art or the frac­tal images of chaos stud­ies are sim­plis­tic pre­sen­ta­tions of an idea. They are lab­o­ra­tory exer­cises or dis­plays of tech­ni­cal vir­tu­os­ity, designed to test and demon­strate the media and the tech­nol­ogy. They are the intel­lec­tual and artis­tic equiv­a­lent of the paint sam­ples that inte­rior design­ers use to plan out larger projects. They may be inter­est­ing and use­ful in some way, but only peo­ple shop­ping for paint find them relevant.

In con­trast, Fluxus sug­gested approaches that are sim­ple rather than simplistic.

The level of com­plex­ity in any given work was deter­mined by philo­soph­i­cal par­a­digms and not by avail­able tech­nol­ogy. This is an impor­tant dif­fer­ence a tech­no­log­i­cal age…

–Ken Fried­man

Ben Vau­tier

Flux­Mu­seum call for work

Flux­Mu­seum web­site, A Wing of the Onto­log­i­cal Museum

The Fluxus Portal

Cecil Tou­chon

The Col­lage Museum

“…There­fore,… the con­cep­tion of the Avant Garde
is dis­carded as a gen­eral move­ment for­ward toward
a utopian exter­nal and is reori­ented to a gen­eral move­ment inward…“
from “Avant Garde?” as seen in the Post-​Dogmatist Quarterly

Doug Tanoury — but his link is no longer valid. Tanoury was in the Dead Mule at one time, if I remem­ber cor­rectly. Any­one know where he is and why?

Crit­i­cal Snips — read more… it’s full of stuff like: Each person’s crap-​detector is embed­ded in their value sys­tem; if you want to teach the art of crap-​detecting, you must help stu­dents become aware of their val­ues. After all, Vice Pres­i­dent, Spiro Agnew, or his writ­ers, know as much about seman­tics as any­one in this room. What he is lack­ing has very lit­tle to do with tech­nique, and almost every­thing to do with values.

Fail­bet­ter link­age — a most enjoy­able place where once we vis­ited. I remem­ber you well.

Allan Bukoff — a fluxus resource on PhD level

Fail­bet­ter Now

Naim June Paik — He makes tech­nol­ogy ridicu­lous. He is “the father of video art” — really he is.

No Fluxus Link­age List­ing would be com­plete with­out Yoko Ono.

Willem de Rid­der — The Nether­lands cre­ates great flux. His Fluxus Slideshow.

Mas­sure­al­ism — “Mas­sur­re­al­ism is the mar­riage of mass media sub­jects and tech­niques to the sur­real, which are indi­vid­u­ally expressed by each artist.”

*ahh­hhh, quiz here — who coined the term “mosaic mesh”?

Neil Post­man, a vsion­ary: “…goes fur­ther than other crit­ics in demon­strat­ing that tele­vi­sion rep­re­sents a hos­tile attack on lit­er­ate cul­ture.” Objec­tive of teach­ing should be: to “…dis­tin­guish use­ful talk from bullshit”