Cecil touchon wrote:
> Hi Aaron Kimberly,
> So tell us what you found regarding the connection between Zen and Fluxus.
I
> would love to hear about that.
> Cecil Touchon
Hi Cecil,
What I learned in a brief survey of texts I had to condense into a 20 page
paper. As with all things Fluxus, it wasn't an easy thing to pin down. But
there are so many fleeting references to Zen in regards to Fluxus, that it
was an issue in need of expansion. Not all Fluxus members were into Zen, and
not all artists/performers who were into Zen were Fluxus. It was important
to me to not centralize the movement too much in the US since the
contributions from Europe and Asia were important. I had to look, on one
hand, to the phenomenon of Buddhists monks leaving Asia to teach in North
America and Europe - and the challenges that posed to modernism. Then I also
had to look at the introduction of the "avant garde" in Asia where Buddhism
was already readily available.
I began the paper with John Cage:
- his studies with D.T. Suzuki
- his use of chance and the I Ching
- indiscriminate use of sounds (which included audience participation)
- how this related to other art like Abstract Expressionism
Then I talked about the George Maciunas paradigm:
- cohesively organized, documented and charted
- his public/social interests and Leninist influences
- I discussed, with the use of a few Maciunas quotations how he used the
lingo of Zen, but really didn't embody it. e.g.. his miss-use of words like
"Ego" where Buddhism is concerned.
However, he also coined phrases like "Neo-Haiku Theatre" which were most
useful for my topic. The portable, humorous, elegant, repeatable,
iconoclastic, anti-sublime, implicative qualities of Fluxus is where I dive
in to Zen.
I compare the Fluxus aesthetic of eloquent humour with Zen teaching
practices where humour is both an arrow penetrating the ego, and a signifier
of understanding.
Then, I discuss at length Haiku - especially in conjunction with Yoko Ono
and her Instructions. Ono's conceptual use of language is paradoxically used
to rest the mind. The viewer must respond intuitively. The empty state, she
suggests, is beyond duality. Likewise, the Zen koan is language meant to
penetrate beyond the semiotics of language.
That's it in a nutshell...a "boy this got long" nutshell.
Cheers,
Aaron
