I would like to conclude my thoughts on Fluxus by returning to the idea that I mentioned earlier, (and one that both Sol and George brought up in their responses) that of cognitive intermedia. The general focus of many Fluxus type works is on the process of meaning-making which highlights the continuous deconstruction of established meanings and the projection of new possibilities. This process is not actualized as a means to achieve an end but as part of the act itself which is formed through a self-perpetuating process. Most Fluxus works create a potentially infinite play of associations and difference. The relational nature of meaning production is evident in many Fluxus works which stress the notion of differing situational interpretations. The meaning evident through Fluxus events and objects shifts and changes because they are tied to, and activated by the situations in which they are viewed or enacted. Fluxus works not only recognize, but in fact performativly activate the nature and workings of the concept of difference. Works such as Alison Knowles' Performance Piece #8 (1965) play off of the understanding that it is only through our own limited view of difference and its workings, from within the operation of language, culture, philosophy, etc., that we gain any glimpse of cognitive and/or linguistic operations at all. The score for Knowles' Performance Piece #8 creates such a context for engaging with conceptual frames: Divide a variety of objects into two groups. Each group is labeled "everything." These groups may include several people. There is a third division of the stage empty of objects labeled "nothing." Each of the objects is "something." One performer combines and activates the the objects as follows for any duration of time: 1. something with everything 2. something with nothing 3. something with something 4. everything with everything 5. everything with nothing 6. nothing with nothing In this work, and others like it, the task that confronts the performer is to directly engage with the materials at hand (both something and nothing as Knowles calls them), to enact a perceptual process process as the basis for action (the 6 listed actions all require a sense based perception as an initiating point) and simultaneously carry out such actions through one's cognitive filters (the performers understanding of words such as something, nothing and everything). The referential nature of Fluxus works like Knowles' Performance Piece #8 reflects a recognition of meaning as a construct of the particular framework, or situation in which it is placed or occurred. This piece thus manifests itself not as a series of fixed points but as a conditionally determined field, bound up with contradiction or the potential for it. The process of exploring such a field is initiated by a referential whole, that is the intersection of both the score and the performer's conceptual understandings, and all of these elements ultimately "makes" the work a possibility. Such open ended pieces, as most Fluxus works are, are not intended to create a new media or center, but instead aim to deflects us back to one's starting point, the world itself with all of its vagueness, dislocations and potentialities. The Fluxus investigation of the concrete is a simple insistence on experience as an interaction between the subject (viewer) and the object (the performance, the poem or the work) which seeks to minimize the potential closure of play. This emphasis on the concrete and a parallel absence of singular or dominant abstract concepts or ideas, what might be though of as the conceptual media, is enacted in Fluxus works as part of an attempt to extend potential conceptual domains and the play of signification infinitely into what I am calling a cognitive intermedia. The rejection of hierarchies, fixed meaning, and denotative forms in Fluxus are all related to an awareness of, and emphasis on the lack of a non-context bound center, that is media, whether it be physical or cognitive. The free or open play of meaning, through the substitutions of one signifier for another, in Fluxus can no longer be called to a halt, or grounded because it is only through the presence of a center, or media, that the play of substitutions can be arrested. The lesson of this kind of infinite play, as contained in Fluxus, is that the process of unending substitutions is an act of life. The joy of such a recognition is that traditional systematics are no longer valid. One's field of awareness is of the potential for infinite possibilities of new and differing meanings; in my way of thinking Fluxus is a paradigm or a way of thinking and acting that offers us a wonderful possibility, a possibility of a world where we can truly hear literature, read art and see music. Emmett Williams - Song of Uncertain Length, 1960 The performer, with a bottle or glass balanced on his head, walks or runs about the stage singing or speaking until the glass or bottle falls off. Suggested performance variation - go to a restaurant and order a bottled beer when the beer arrives balance it on your head and walk around the restaurant singing or speaking until the bottle falls off. To extend this performance you might also combine this work with another work of Emmetts: The Gift of Tongues, 1962 Sing meaningfully in a language made up on the spot.
