Fluxus

Joseph Beuys
[title not known] 1963
Fluxus-Namensliste

Collage, ink and pencil on paper
support: 620 x 218 mm frame: 761 x 544 x 28 mm
on paper, unique


Fluxus
An international avant-garde group or collective founded and given its name in 1960 by the Lithuanian/American artist George Maciunas; originally for an eponymous magazine featuring the work of a group of artists and composers centred around John Cage. The Latin name means flowing. In English a flux is a flowing out. Maciunas said that the purpose of Fluxus was to 'promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art, promote living art, anti-art'. This has strong echoes of Dada with which Fluxus had much in common. The group coalesced on the continent, first in Germany where Maciunas worked for the US Army. Fluxus subsequently staged a series of festivals in Paris, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, London and New York at which activities included concerts of avant-garde music and performances often spilling out into the street. Almost every avant-garde artist of the time took part in Fluxus, such as Joseph Beuys, Dick Higgins, Alice Hutchins, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Ben Vautier, Robert Watts, Emmett Williams, and it played an important part in the opening up of definitions of what art can be that led to the intense and fruitful pluralism seen in art since the 1960s (see eg Conceptual art, Performance art, Film & Video art, Postmodernism). Its heyday was the 1960s but it still continues.


Fluxus was a network of international artists who collaborated in Europe, the United States and Japan from the 1960s to 1970s. This display focuses on its collective manifestations, through concerts, festivals and publications.

Characterised as being both in flux and between media, Fluxus began as an innovative series of concerts organised in 1962 by George Maciunas, a Lithuanian-born American graphic designer and architect. These Zen-like performances, influenced by experimental music and concrete poetry, developed into extended festivals and group activities, such as FluxSports and even a FluxMass. From simple events to collective games, Fluxus performances stress the interaction between the material and the intellectual, the private and the social. The event structure becomes a vehicle for playfulness, humour and open-ended speculation.

Fluxus set itself in opposition to the prevailing social, cultural and artistic climate, especially the seriousness of Abstract Expressionism. It developed a distinct political stance, bypassing the museum system through film, performance and publishing. As early as 1961, Maciunas had collaborated with the composer La Monte Young on an interactive book, An Anthology. From that period onwards, publications ranged from collective anthologies such as Fluxus 1 and the Fluxus newspaper V TRE to Fluxboxes, Fluxkits or the collected works of individual artists, which were intended to be open-ended.

Openness and the dissolution of boundaries between traditional art forms was key to Fluxus, which had a profound impact on the arts of its period and on subsequent generations, from the development of artists’ books, Minimalism and Conceptual art, to performance, music, film and video art.