Hood Quarterly, spring/summer 2011
Jacquelynn Baas, Exhibition curator, emeritus director of the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and chief curator and then founding director of the Hood Museum of Art from 1982 until 1989
One recent letter form my mother counsels me that "Life is like an onion: you peel it off layer by layer, and sometimes you weep" . . . Considering my life a failure, she often ends her letters with the painful rhetorical question: "What did Dad and I do wrong?"
—Emmett Williams in Daniel Spoerri's An Anecdoted History of Chance(1)
The Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College is home to the George Maciunas Memorial Collection, established by then–museum director Jan van der Marck in 1978 to honor the cantankerous, Lithuanian-born organizer of the international Fluxus movement, who had died that year. Now, thirty-three years later, the Hood is presenting Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life, an exhibition designed to provide new ways to experience the radical and influential cultural development that was Fluxus. Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life shifts attention away from attempts to define and toward the asking of questions. Its most fundamental question—"what's Fluxus good for?"—has important implications for how art is made and life is lived.
Fluxus resists characterization as an art movement, collective, or group and defies traditional geographical, chronological, and medium-based approaches. Often called an "anti-art" movement, Fluxus was more subversive than even this characterization suggests. From its origins in the United States and Europe in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Fluxus was more of an "anartmovement," along the lines of Marcel Duchamp's "anartist":"I'm against the word 'anti'," Duchamp said,"because it's very like 'atheist' as compared to 'believe.' An atheist is just as . . . religious . . . as the believer is, and an 'anti-artist' is just as much of an artist as the other artist. 'Anartist' would be much better . . . meaning, 'no artist at all.' That would be my conception."(2)
The notion of Fluxus as an anartmovement corresponds with Maciunas's philosophical/political position that the end of art, in the sense of its goal, is the end of art, in the sense of its absorption into the practice of being alive. His statement that "Fluxus objectives are social (not aesthetic)"(3) indicates his intention to circumvent both aesthetics and the commercial art world, and to empower people to engage with essential issues via the Fluxus approach to life as connection and flow.
Fluxus introduced two new things into the world of art: event scores and artas-games-in-a-box, many of which were gathered into "Fluxkits" along with other ephemera. The idea was to sell these kits at low prices—not through galleries but by mail and through artist-run stores. The events were even more accessible. Sometimes consisting of just one word— such as George Brecht's "Exit"—Fluxus events could be performed by anyone, anyplace. Brecht wrote that his event scores were meant to "prepare one for an event to happen in one's own now."(4)
"Fluxus," Maciunas wrote,"is definitely against art-object as non-functional commodity . . . It could temporarily have the pedagogical function of teaching people the needlessness of art, including the eventual needlessness of itself."(5) His point is clear: art, to cite the title of pragmatist philosopher John Dewey's well-known book, is experience. The pedagogical function of Fluxus artworks is to help us practice life; what we "learn" from Fluxus is how to be ourselves. To Emmett Williams's mother's question,"What did Dad and I do wrong?" George Maciunas might have answered,"It doesn't matter; there's nothing wrong." From a Fluxus perspective, no life is a failure and no answer, much less any question, is wrong.
Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life is designed to generate viewer experience around fourteen questions: (1) Art (what's it good for)? (2) Change? (3) Danger? (4) Death? (5) Freedom? (6) God? (7) Happiness? (8) Health? (9) Love? (10) Nothingness? (11) Sex? (12) Staying Alive? (13) Time? (14) What Am I? A free brochure containing a map of the exhibition will allow visitors to go directly to the questions of most pressing interest to themselves. The accompanying catalogue is conceived as an art self-help book that will be of interest to students and the general public as well as to scholars. The book, co-published by Dartmouth College and the University of Chicago Press, contains an introduction by Jacquelynn Baas and essays by Baas, Fluxus artist Ken Friedman, and scholars Hannah Higgins and Jacob Proctor. After closing at Dartmouth, Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life travels to the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, September 9–December 3, 2011, and to the University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor, February 25–May 20, 2012.
This exhibition and catalogue were organized by the Hood Museum of Art and were generously supported by Constance and Walter Burke, Class of 1944, the Ray Winfield Smith 1918 Fund, and the MarieLouise and Samuel R. Rosenthal Fund.
Notes
1. Daniel Spoerri, An Anecdoted Topography of Chance (Re-Anecdoted Version), with the help of Robert Filliou and translated and further anecdoted by Emmett Williams (New York: Something Else Press, 1966), 11–12.
2. From "Marcel Duchamp Speaks," an interview on 19 January 1959 by George Heard Hamilton in New York and Richard Hamilton in London, broadcast over the BBC Third Program, in the series "Art, Anti-Art, 13 November 1959:http://www.ubu.com/ sound/duchamp.html
3. From a 1963 letter to Tomas Schmit quoted in Clive Phillpot and Jon Hendricks, Fluxus: Selections from the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988), 24.
4. From the unpublished manuscript George Brecht Notebook VII, March–June 1961, The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Museum of Modern Art, New York; quoted in Julia Robinson,"In the Event of George Brecht," in George Brecht Events: A Heterospective, ed. Alfred M. Fischer (Cologne: Museum Ludwig, 2005), 16.
5. January 1964 letter to Tomas Schmit, in What's Fluxus? What's Not! Why., ed. Jon Hendricks (Rio de Janeiro and Detroit: Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil and Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Foundation, 2002), 163.