1) Come on, Heiko. Please respect the facts.
You write,
"How would you call the time between the Cage class and this armystyle
artmovement with general, officers and soldiers, with Al
Hanson dissenting, "Prefluxus" ?"
No matter how well organized Maciunas would have liked to have been, there
was never any "army style art movement with general, officers and soldiers."
Fluxus was not a movement. A movement implies an organized agenda with a
plan of action or a common goal to which participants subscribed. This was
never the case with Fluxus. There were manifestoes at different times, but
no one signed them ....
When you join an army, you sign papers or take an oath agreeing to some
legitimate chain of command. It's impossible to compare Fluxus to an
oberdient army. It often seems that people could barely agree on common
points long enough to get a festival or a publication completed (and not
even them, sometimes). Or people would simply meet and work together, each
in their own way, without regard to the agenda or program planned in
advance. It was what it was, but it wasn't an army.
Whatever Fluxus was, Maciunas was never a "general" in charge of anyone
else. If, at times, he acted as the leader or commissar of a movement, no
one else saw him that way. Everyone saw themselves as a chief. It is
precisely the refusal of Fluxus participants to follow a common agenda --
or even to agree with one another -- that led to much of the dissent and
creative chaos within Fluxus. No one could be termed an "officer" under any
circumstances, much less a "soldier."
It's easy to call George Maciunas a "cranky old fart." I'd disagree with
that. George made mistakes, and then he grew and changed. Unfortunately,
people were often so tired of the earlier struggles that they didn't want
to work with him in his new, extraordinarily democratic style. I found
George easy to work with. And at all times, cranky times and democratic,
George put his money where his mouth was, making great sacrifices of time
and money to make things happen for the artists in whose work he believed
so deeply.
Al was a great man and a good friend, but I'd no more call him the only
dissenter from this imaginary army than I'd call George a cranky old fart.
As much as I respected and loved George, I am aware of the kinds of
behavior that led to conflicts before I came along. In those days, a lot of
people could be characterized as dissenters, from Jackson Mac Low -- who
formally resigned from Fluxus -- to Dick Higgins with Something Else Press.
If you term Al a dissenter, you'd have to characterize dozens of actions
from those days as acts of dissent.
A little respect for facts, please.
2) Footnote to Davidson G.
I'll add a brief footnote to Davidson G. Part of it is my answer, above,
regarding George as a "cranky old fart." I disagree for the reasons given
above. George made grand mistakes in tune with his grand ambitions and his
grand willingness to support his friends and colleagues. In that, he was
much like Charlotte. George disagreed with Charlotte's festival on
quasi-politicized aesthetic grounds, but he never did in any rigorous way
carry out his threat to boycott anyone who worked in the context of
Charlotte's festival.
Charlotte herself was seen as part of Fluxus by most everyone, so even if
you want to counterpose Charlotte to George, you'd have to see them as two
wings of the same thing.
One small point. Some of the exciting phenomena and places you noted were
impotant, but they came along in the 1970s, not in the late 1950s and early
1960s. One example is Franklin Furnace. It was established in the late
1970s, and -- despite its many struggles to grow and survive -- it also
received significant government funding and support, along with many of the
alternate spaces of that era such as Clocktower, P.S. 1, P.S. 122, LAICA,
The Kitchen, all the Canadian artist-run spaces, and so on. Some of these
places also recevied generous international funding and major corporate
support. This gave them access to far different networks than those to
which we had access, and as a result, the projects and artists they
presented were generally integrated into the art world (and the art market)
in ways that we were not.
When criticism and history finally caught up with the work presented in
those well funded spaces, it was inevitable that artists active in earlier
phenomena such as Fluxus, Living Theater. Other non-funded,
nonestablimentarian or underground also received a measure of attention by
then.
For the most part, though, the art world phenomena you mention were from a
different time than Fluxus and Living Theater, all later, and often well
supported by government agencies, art magazines, the critical-historical
network and even by museums, and they were supported by these from nearly
the start, not as a retrospective tip of the hat for the foundations they
laid decades before to make the new work possible.
It's true that there were other, unheralded phenomena during the time. Some
were active in the arts as Living Theater was. Others were more general
counterculture phenomena such as Pacifica Radio or the Underground Press
Syndicate. But most of the counterculture art explosion came later. Much of
it was made possible by government art funding, especially generous during
the middle 70s to the early 80s. And most of it vanished when the generous
government programs dried up. It's one thing to be committed to programs
such as this when government arts officers are strolling around with grant
application forms. It is another to do it when you've got to round up the
money yourself, or earn it in another field and put it to the service of
the arts.
In this, George Maciunas and Charlotte Moorman were both pioneers,
colleagues and heroes. And if George was occasionally cranky, look at it
this way: if you worked full time much of your life to support the vast
range of publications, festivals, etc., that George supported with the
earnings from his day job ands free-lance work, you'd occasionally be
cranky, too.
Ken Friedman
--
Ken Friedman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Knowledge Management
Norwegian School of Management
+47 22.98.51.07 Direct Line
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Home office:
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