Fluxus was an interdisciplinary arts movement centered in NYC who participants included seminal artists in the fields of minimalism, performance art and much, much more. There were numerous occultists involved as well including the poet Ira Cohen, the musician Angus MacLise and fellow travellers included the likes of Harry Smith. Boo Hooray 27th Catalogue is devoted to Fluxus and Minimalism. Their site says:
Helmed by its founder George Maciunas, the Fluxus movement comprised an international network of artists active during the 1960s and 70s whose output encompassed visual art, music, film and video, artist multiples, publishing, and performance, as well as genres beyond and between established disciplines. What united these artists was the direct, experimental, irreverent, and often provocative spirit of their work. Drawing from earlier twentieth-century avant-garde precedents like Dada and Russian Constructivism, Fluxus sought to critique bourgeois culture and the commercialized art world by subverting the inherited values and aesthetics of high modernism. The artists of Fluxus centered conceptual rather than formal elements, emphasized collaborative modes of expression over individual creation, and embodied an anarchic defiance best exemplified by their ephemeral, process-based works.
Fluxus emerged during a period when radical new forms of artmaking were taking root across the globe. Alongside Fluxus, the renegade artists of Black Mountain College, the Situationists in Europe, and the Gutai movement in Japan all precipitated the erosion of artistic categories long defined by critics and art historians. Commensurately, the boundaries of the Fluxus circle were fluid, and this catalog demonstrates the intermingling of Fluxus with the experimental film, postmodern dance, avant-garde theater, and minimalist music scenes.
While this catalog traces the wide-ranging activities of the Fluxus movement, particular attention is paid to its live performances. This includes concerts by John Cage, La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Toshi Ichiyanagi, and other pioneers of minimalism (items no. 2, 16-22, 33, 47-50, 52-56, 59-61, 69-70); Allan Kaprow’s happenings (items no. 16, 77-78, 81, 83, 106, 108); Intermedia events (items no. 17-18, 101-104), and Festum Fluxorum, Maciunas’ touring Fluxus festival (item no. 2). Other highlights include examples of Fluxus’ experimental publishing practices (items no. 1, 3-7, 11-12) and a rare manuscript score of Steven Reich’s minimalist masterpiece, “Clapping Music” (item no. 51).
Also heavily featured are materials documenting the long-running artistic collaborations between cellist Charlotte Moorman and composer and video artist Nam June Paik, as well as between minimalist composer La Monte Young and artist Marian Zazeela. These artist pairings were prime examples of Fluxus’ collaborative, interdisciplinary nature. Moorman often performed musical accompaniment to Paik’s videos—at times even becoming a video installation herself, as in TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969), which saw Moorman performing the cello while wearing two Paik-designed miniature television screens on her chest (item no. 15). A photograph of Charlotte Moorman documents the night she earned the nickname the “Topless Cellist” for performing Paik’s Opera Sextronique nude from the waist up, resulting in her arrest on charges of indecent exposure (item no. 13). Young and Zazeela’s collaborative light and sound installations, including their groundbreaking immersive environment Dream House (1969), are also well represented here (items no. 58, 62-65, 67-68, 72-73.
Beyond her collaborations with Paik, Moorman was the founder and director of the annual New York Avant Garde Festival, which ran for fifteen years, from the early 1960s until 1980. The Festival presented work by key figures in Fluxus, and other international avant-garde movements, in public spaces around New York (no. 106-116). What began as a showcase of the experimental music scene developing out of Fluxus grew to encompass experimental art in all manner of media, with the Festival featuring work by Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono, Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneemann, Giuseppe Chiari, Alison Knowles, and many, many more.
