Dear Ann, dear fluxlisters, dear Allen,
First I would like to say that I'm terribly sad that you (Allen) withdraw from Fluxus and from fluxlist: what you did, what you do, what your are, makes you a important figure in the fluxus network, and in Fluxus too. I know that what you express in your open letter is not a short term decision, so I won't try to convince you not to do it, even if this news saddens me deeply, and even if I think that you should stay where you deeply belong. But your immense deception somewhat leads you to go to far in your declarations: for example, you close the site you did for Ben Patterson (the museum of the sub-conscious): > memorial website, and numerous other webpages promoting the work of many > > original Fluxus artists. I doubt that many of you will notice. I have > > also walked away from FLUXLIST-the pioneering Fluxus email discussion group > > that I co-founded with Dick and Ken Friedman. FLUXLIST is another example > > of what I am talking about. Most of you could never even bother to > > subscribe. By not participating you have missed a great audience and a > > wonderful chance to discover and encourage many new Fluxus artists and to > > learn about their work. But as far as i know, it's only since a couple of months that Ben owns a computer, and he's only beginning to get into the internet stuff, so it's not because he had no interest in Fluxlist, or in what you were doing that he was not on Fluxlist. Otherwise, you're speaking of the lack of openness for new artists from the FLuxus originators. This is a bit unfair at least regarding Ben Vautier who always added new people to his flux events: even for the 40 years of Fluxus he organized last year in Nice, many many many other artists were invited, people from the second or the third "fluxus generation".It is a bit unfair too for Emmett Williams who curated the exhibition "Fluxus und die FOlgende" in Wiesbaden in 2002, with no "historical Fluxus" in it, but many young artists that were working "under the influence of Fluxus". However, these new artist are not Fluxus, and they don't pretend to be Fluxus, and better, they don't care being or not Fluxus or anything else: they feel close to, they get inspired by, they're developping from, but they don't want, even in their worsts nightmares, to become Fluxus. Now, why did you want to be Fluxus? Why do so many people around the world want to be Fluxus, or to be part of Fluxus? This is a good question too. Are labels as important as that? Being an artist in not so easy, not to speak about being THIS type of artist (and not another type), so what's the big thing about bein a Fluxus Artist? Who is defending what position in this situation? I would add one or two things about the actual practice of Fluxus artists today, and what they do as art, since the last, say, twenty years. Are they still doing event scores? Do they still consider concerts as their major work? Do they still refuse to create objects, as they used to? No, of course. Do they exhibit only together, as a group, or are they mingling with anyone, in collective exhibition, as any individual artist do? Guess... Are they so solid as an entity, as a community, that they have all reached the same achievments, the same fame, the same level in the art market? What collective position is to be defended, exactely? You're talking about "expanding fluxus" as if art was a land to conqueer, as if there were any hegemony to build out of it, but that's not the point at all: in fact Fluxus artists never wanted to be in such position, the only one who wanted that was Maciunas, and he failed and almost lost "his" group after he had proposed to do "terrorist acts as art" in '64. What I mean is that they have all followed their own path through the art world and through their own practice, I would say as they always did -in so far as they met "by accident" in the sixties- even though they're still able to create new fluxus pieces. But their fluxus production have always been a part of their global artistic production, and only a part of it: as Dick Higins himself pointed, an artist that would be only making Fluxus pieces, would be a very poor, if not a very bad, one. That means also that being a FLuxus artist today has very little sense, because that means that one has to create following a path that has been left by those who had initiate it, since many years. Last, I would recall that they never choosed to be called FLuxus or anything else, the name was given to them, as you perfectly knows, after Wiesbaden: Fluxus was to be the name of the publication Maciunas was preparing, not the name of the people that were to be published in! Now comes something else, as an art historian with a phd on fluxus, i find myself a bit concerned with what Ann wrote about fluxus, archive, and the dust of the art history, and this is also close to what Allen calls the Fluxus Legacy, which is supposed to have been shaped by the artists during the last twenty years. > Allen is right. Fluxus has devolved into the sad spectacle of those who > originally disdained canonicity desperately trying to ensure the presence of their own work in the canon. It's a bit pathetic. If you have seen what Eric Andersen or Emmett Williams, or Ben Patterson (for example) are doing today as artworks, you certainly can't say that they "desperately try" to respect " the canon" they have themselves built 40 years ago, fortunately, they're doing something completely different today than they did when they were twenty. And they do so, even though everyone (spectators, curators, "specialists", critics, collectors, amateurs...)expect them to keep on doing their good ol' stuff, and don't really like what they're doing today. I just ask: who wants them to remain the same as they were 40 years ago? > Fluxus, the original entity, has become a collection of objects and texts of interest only to academics, such as Hannah Higgins, bless her good If that so, how did you got involved in it? How is that that these texts which were so fruitful and stimulating 20 years ago, aren't anymore today? Who changed? the texts or us? What is it that makes these texts more interesting to art historian that to young artist? But also, what does it means to ask for a part of the fluxus umbrella to put over one's own work, if the theory of Fluxus is no longer valuable? What do one look at when one say that this is a fluxus inspired object , or is not? What is the reference? > Shows of Fluxus artifacts, like the one at the Walker Art Center a couple of years ago, are an incredible yawn, >heaps of paper in vitrines. They are evidence of the end of the thing. Who is responsible for that? The curator or the (sometimes dead) artist? Don't you see that they also have been trapped in this FLuxus stuff, which have completely turned down their respective careers? Don't you think that they paid the price (and a high one for most of them) to deserve a minimum of acknowledgement in a time when their epigones are so many, and the quality so rare? Don't you think that they would prefer to show their contemporary works than these old works they don't own anymore? How many people can cite more than three names of individual artists in Fluxus? Wouldn't it have been better for them if they had been pop artists at Castelli? > Fluxus isn't meant to be an archive, it's meant to be a practice, and such > practices cannot be owned. I agree with you, but I shall say that Fluxus did absolutely meant to be archived SINCE THE VERY BEGINNING, even for George Maciunas. They kept everything they could, they recorded everything they could in all the medias they could reach, they published as often as they could, and they, since the very beginning, gave tons of materials to collectors/archivists, to prove what they were doing. More, since the very first days of Fluxus (I mean even before Wiesbaden!), they began to fight to know "who had did this or that first". >The current discourse around the idea of > copyright that has been sparked by the internet illuminates this as well. > There is a potential in the net for great and radical changes in the notion > of the creative practice and its relation to the individual and to the > culture at large. This potential is intimately related to the possibilities > that Fluxus opened. YES, I absolutely agree with you, there is a form of generosity in FLuxus, the way it spreads its productions etc. > So why, then, do later practicitioners want a relation to the name Fluxus? > Why don't we simply call it something else, "Call it something else" quote from Alison Knowles, origin of the name of DIck Higgins press (Something else Press) following D. Higgins. Autrisme (elseness) concept developped by FIlliou (anything you do, do something else). > Because the practice known as Fluxus is a legitimate > component in what is happening,and > it's weird and cumbersome to be forced to ignore it, a kind of > falsification. When Fluxus wasn't yet Fluxus, it was called -even by Maciunas- Neo-Dada. At that time, the founding father of Dada, Raoul Haussmann, kept on saying that 1/ what they (neo-dada) were doing, they (dadas) had done it 40 years before them and 2/that neo-dada is stupid and shows that they (neo-dadas) were not doing anything interesting. Then fluxus aroused from the Wiesbaden festival, and being FLuxus, what they were doing had nothing to do with Dada (neo, post, or anything), it had it's own "legitimate component", even if the scores WAS THE SAME THAN BEFORE. So, changing for another name is not uninteresting, all the more that, as Fluxus was not doing Dada -neo or post or of any kind- before finding its name (even if Haussmann said it did), we, "neo-fluxus" are not doing any fluxus, in any way possible: the world have changed (so much!!!!), the medias have changed (so much!!!), everything is different, and needs a different way to do thing and to talk about it: Fluxus may be still accurate for FLuxus people, but before all, it's , a wonderful starting point for all of us. Do you think Alan Bowman is making any FLuxus art? No, and that's very good, that's even why his work is so good, but he has spent many years with these artists, he performed wtih them, drank and ate, and talked, and joked, so I know that he has a very deep and subtile understanding of what is Fluxus, but he does something else, which is his own work. > Plus, to stop using the word is to acknowledge that a group of people who > once pursued the practice own the word and its attributes, even own the > practice. It's sort of like being disowned by one's parents. If my father > insisted that the name "Klefstad" was his, and that all the characteristics > that it implied stopped with him, because he owned the word and its > attributes, and said, "Find your own name," Yes for sure, but would you go to see another man, whose individual characteristics fits completely to what you have dreamed and hoped and waited from a father since the day you were born, and say to him "hello Mr so-and-so, I have decided that I was your daughter and my name is now Ann so-and-so"? Do you think he would agree as easily as that? > Anderson/Friedman feud to the notion that the term "Fluxus" was reserved >for the chosen few. The Friedman Andersen feud was not on that point, it was focused on the role played by Ken in Fluxus, and I remember you that it was originally a private discussion who should never had been released on Fluxlist. However, interpersonnal problems do exist, and they always existed, in Fluxus, as they do in any collective (even as loose as Fluxus) organization. It's 2h35 in the morning, I need some sleep, I hope I haven't been to rude to any of you, once again I'm really sad to see Allen leaving, and I hope he will keep a strong link with us, even if he doesn't come back offically on the list. All the bests to all, Bertrand
