Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life

Organized by Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College

A truly international network of artists, composers, and designers that developed in the 1960s, Fluxus resists categorization as an art movement, collective, or group. It also defies traditional geographical, chronological, and medium-based approaches. Rather, Fluxus participants embrace a “do-it-yourself” mentality, fashioning their activities from quotidian experiences and blurring the boundaries between art and life. George Maciunas, Fluxus’s Lithuanian-born instigator, envisioned art as social process. He and other Fluxus artists created works that celebrate collaboration, the ephemeral, and the everyday—often inflected with a touch of playful anarchy. Aiming to circumvent both conventional aesthetics and the commercial art world, they urged both their colleagues and the public to approach life with a Fluxus attitude. In keeping with this spirit, Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life encourages viewers actively to interpret and respond to the works on view, and to explore art’s relationships with essential themes of human existence. Follow the provided map to locate the fourteen sections framed as questions, for example, “What Am I?,” “Happiness?,” “Health?,” “Freedom?,” “Danger?.” Featuring over a hundred objects, documents, videos, and ephemera, the show also foregrounds two Fluxus innovations: event scores and art-as-games-in-a-box, many of which were gathered into Fluxkits and sold at intentionally low prices via mail order or at artist-run stores. The events were even more accessible. Sometimes consisting of just one word—such as George Brecht’s “Exit,” in the section “Death?”—Fluxus events could be performed by anyone, anywhere, at any time. Intended as provocations to “high” culture and increasing commodification of art, Fluxus works were meant to be picked up and handled, not simply looked at. Exhibiting Fluxus today highlights yet another question: How can we maintain the defiant and playful spirit in which these objects were made, while at the same time safeguarding and preserving them for future audiences?

Curators

The exhibition was curated by Jacquelynn Baas.