[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > Somebody please be kind enough to tell me what Fluxus really is. >Clearly, I must've been mistaken, as there is plenty of hostility and >negativity concerning false Fluxus and who is more Fluxus than someone >else. Mr. Andersen, I acknowledge your history with Fluxus and I understand >that you are a well established artist in the Fluxus field. Maybe you would >be the one to provide a detailed and rigid form of what art must be to be >defined as Fluxus, and more importantly, why, as you seem to be the only >person who sees Fluxus in any sort of limited scope.
Fluxus is by nature anti-reductivist, for it does not seek the illumination of some end or fact but celebrates the participation in a non-hierarchal density of experience. In this way Fluxus does not refer to a style or even a procedure as such but to the presence of a total of social activities. The attempt to place Fluxus in history falls into the positivist (in the sense that human knowledge derives from systematic study) as well as art historical trap of defining the presence of something by divining the presence of a core, whether it be of ideas, people or activities. Thus as the debate rages as to who was part of Fluxus and who wasn't, or when and where Fluxus existed, one of the most central and crucial aspects of Fluxus is often disregarded. Although some trace of Fluxus does exist in what was done and who did it, such a narrow view obscures the key to Fluxus, that which I call a world view. If there is an ontology of Fluxus it is connected with what we have begun to call, for lack of a better term, postmodernism. Postmodernism as an attitude, and not as a specific form of cultural production, is in part based on the notion that the contradictions of the interpretation of any given meaning statement really exist, even though they may be hidden to the author who desires to form a coherent and unified statement of meaning. The relation of this concept of meaning production to the Fluxus world view is evident in 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 pushes this recognition to the point where the existence of contradiction (or at least its possibility) becomes recognized as part of the extended creative act in as far as these acts mirror the contradictory operations of the world. By participating in these operations Fluxus seeks not to reconstruct what makes thought or experience coherent, but to demonstrate the ultimate incoherence of thought and action when removed from its operational contexts. Thus Fluxus manifests itself not as a series of fixed points but as a conditionally determined field, bound up with contradiction (and the potential for it) and tied to a referential whole that "makes" the work a possibility. The Fluxus world view is, with its emphasis on the whole/system as the means by which meaning is conferred on any given particular, a manifestation of a rejection of liberal individualism. The Fluxus world view must ultimately been seen as intimating the rejection of the idea that individual can have an identity apart from the social order. This recognition of self as defined not by pre_societal factors, but as developed through the self's relations to others, does not support the identification of a universal and preexisting standard (of society) but simply stresses the significance of relations, or difference, in identification of a concept or even an individual. Fluxus recognizes that the artist, working inevitably from within a specific tradition, and its parent culture, cannot be considered the sole author of the particular work. For the nature of the individual work, no matter how innovative, is always determined it relationship to other objects and established traditions: the determination of existence by opposition. Even though some aspects of Fluxus seem to be marked by extreme individualism, such as in the work of Ben, there is none-the-less an underlying awareness that the work (object/performance) as a supposed extension of the individual, can have no pre-determined identity or even purpose exterior to the social order within which it exists. This facet of Fluxus is a simultaneous rejection of freedom as defined by an autonomy from the social order and an embracement of the other major aspect of the Fluxus world view, the freedom of play.
