from Amazon.com:
Fluxus Experience
by Hannah Higgins
Paperback: 304 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.65 x 7.96 x 6.10
Publisher: University of California Press; ISBN: 0520228677; (December 2,
2002)
$29.95
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
In this groundbreaking work of incisive scholarship and analysis, Hannah
Higgins explores the influential art movement Fluxus. Daring, disparate,
contentious-Fluxus artists worked with minimal and prosaic materials now
familiar in post-World War II art. Higgins describes the experience of
Fluxus for viewers, even experiences resembling sensory assaults, as
affirming transactions between self and world. Fluxus began in the 1950s
with artists from around the world who favored no single style or medium
but displayed an inclination to experiment. Two formats are unique to
Fluxus: a type of performance art called the Event, and the Fluxkit
multiple, a collection of everyday objects or inexpensive printed cards
collected in a box that viewers explore privately. Higgins examines these
two setups to bring to life the Fluxus experience, how it works, and how
and why it's important. She does so by moving out from the art itself in
what she describes as a series of concentric circles: to the artists who
create Fluxus, to the creative movements related to Fluxus (and critics'
and curators' perceptions and reception of them), to the lessons of Fluxus
art for pedagogy in general. Although it was commonly associated with
political and cultural activism in the 1960s, Fluxus struggled against
being pigeonholed in these too-prescriptive and narrow terms. Higgins, the
daughter of the Fluxus artists Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins, makes the
most of her personal connection to the movement by sharing her firsthand
experience, bringing an astounding immediacy to her writing and a palpable
commitment to shedding light on what Fluxus is and why it matters.
