Fluxus in the Art History Library

Fluxus is / was an avant garde art movement formed in the early 1960s and active until the late 1970s. It was comprised of an international network of artists, composers and designers. Founded by George Maciunas, a graphic designer, the movement championed an "anti-art" sentiment that rejected elitist gallery culture in favour of accessible, often humorous, and participatory experiences. Maciunas coined the term “Fluxus” in 1961, and soon thereafter, performances were held in Wiesbaden, West Germany under that name.

From the beginning, Fluxus was international, with adherents in North America, Europe, and Japan. The art was improvisational, anti-institutional, antiauthoritarian, often funny. The elevation of ephemeral paper-based and found objects resulted in the widest variety of media than any other “art movement”: books, artists’ books, posters, invitations, musical scores, records of performances, found objects, kits, board games, installations, postcards, mail art, stamps, masks, and periodicals.

The anarchistic spirit of Fluxus is especially evident in performance pieces. The starting points for many pieces were simple instructions, which the performer was free to interpret. In 1960, La Monte Young wrote, “Draw a straight line and follow it”.  The Fluxists’ interest in simple performances and cheap, reproducible objects comes from their democratic, antielitist spirit; they wanted to subvert the process by which artworks are anointed by critics, curators, and collectors as precious objects. It is ironic that the cheaply created materials related to Fluxus are now highly desirable to collectors and institutions. They are appealing to researchers in Art History, Visual Studies, Music, Printing, Book History and Psychology.

Over the past 20 years, the Department of Art History Librarian, Margaret English, has been collecting compelling examples of original Fluxus materials to form a critical mass of study material. Works by noted artists such as George Maciunas, Alison Knowles, Ben Patterson, Al Hansen, La Monte Young, Ay-O, Yoko Ono, Robert Watts, Dick Higgins, Ben Vautier, Geoffrey Henricks form part of the collection. Much of the material is interactive, and we encourage students to come and see our display case within the library.

We are slowly digitizing items in the collection and offer them here for your perusal and amusement.

Credits

Rusudan Lomtatidze; Margaret English