Ken Friedman

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1. The Fluxus Idea, 1962-2007

1.1 The birth of Fluxus, more or less
Forty-five years ago, the first organized Fluxus festival took place in Wiesbaden, Germany. This generally calls for anniversary celebrations on the decade – the mid-point between forty and fifty offers a good moment for reflection, and an opportunity to reflect on the relation between Fluxus and design.

Emmett Williams once wrote, “Fluxus is what Fluxus does – but no one knows whodunit.” This concise description makes two radical statements. The statement that no one knows “who done” Fluxus rejects the idea of Fluxus as a specific group of people. It identifies Fluxus with a frame of action and defines Fluxus as a cumulative, aggregate of Fluxus activities over the past forty-five years. I never asked Emmett what he thought of this interpretation of his playful conundrum, so I don’t know whether he would have agreed with me. Dick Higgins did.

Dick explicitly rejected a notion that limited Fluxus to a specific group of people who came together at a specific time and place. Dick wrote, “Fluxus is not a moment in history, or an art movement. Fluxus is a way of doing things, a tradition, and a way of life and death.”

For Dick, for George Maciunas, and for me, Fluxus is more valuable as an idea and a potential for social change than as a specific group of people or a collection of objects.

As I see it, Fluxus was a laboratory. The research program of the Fluxus laboratory is characterized by twelve ideas:
globalism,
the unity of art and life,
intermedia,
experimentalism,
chance,
playfulness,
simplicity,
implicativeness,
exemplativism,
specificity,
presence in time, and
musicality.

1.2 Ideas and Issues
The Fluxus idea is distinct from the specific group of people. The Fluxus idea existed long before the specific group of people identified with Fluxus....