Fluxus. Behind the Green Box
To Marilyn Ann Briggs, who showed me the device that structures the symbolic production of the unconscious.
The gaze, the most extreme of the aporetic exercises.
How to define the dedication to this little contribution, if not the obligatory introduction to an Erörterung?
If we understand Fluxus as a device Fluxus represents the material or coercive aspect of an event as opposed to its narrative ballast. In this sense it can be aligned to a textual flow, the reflecting part of a signifier device that makes a meaningful concept of art to match the non-sense of current life. In its topical representation it appears as a reflection of a concinnity. It follows that the work is comparable to a contrivance (con.cidnus), the body of an event in the form of a mise-en-scène.
Seen from the side of the audience, Fluxus is the projection of an event. To experience it one has to explore its recesses. Look hard at its rickety rhizomatic symmetries. Clear the embroidery of obscurity. Renounce the (mercantile) glitter of the signature. Only in this way does the apparent fixity of the firmament become evident.
Thinking of modern art as a “stripping” implies an answer. Is there a jouissance in stripping, in the art of making meaning finer? One of the objectives of the action in a Fluxus concert is the unveiling (stripping) of the motility of musical noise. Here, compared to the “pro-ject,” jectare is a lyricism.
The viewer Fluxus appears like a pagus that turns experience inside out through its paradigm. Then if we assume a gap between truism and evidence it is here that this poetic dug the groove of nonsense. It is here that its eschatological traces rest.
Action has to go so far as to lacerate the pagus, as the nib of the pen sometimes does on the page. To become a blot, a resistance. Only the nib that holds the ink knows the obscure prophecy of meaning. That is what two outstanding writers teach us, Raymond Roussel and Franz Kafka.
I asked him. Master what should I do?
He replied. Enter the stage like a
young woman who is attracted by sin.
A Fluxus concert is a system of mutations of meaning. How does it work? By undermining conceivability so as to defeat expectations and stumble onto the unexpected. Hence it is a technique of “riguardamento”.
The (fatal) error is to think of Fluxus expecting a revelation. In German the heimlich is the familiar, but interpretation calls for a certain caution because, as Sigmund Freud pointed out, the meaning can flip into its opposite. Inadvertently.
In order to be effective, a Fluxus concert as a whole has to appear a disorder of orders. A storm blowing from the obvious and getting entangled in nonsense. So if the storm is comparable to a poetic, Fluxus is in the form of a symptomatia.
The commercial value of modern art is like a magic-sacral reflex. Through this reflex the market materializes the medium of artistic communication. This medium is an implant from the point of view of its profit because it is conceived in its image. By contrast artistic value is necessarily a financial value because the object does not need so much “care” (Heidegger) as an expensive mothering. Commercialism, moreover, is homogeneous to art of which it is the midwife, from coprolites to the Manzoni’s cans of shit.
In modern times, beginning with the Salon de Paris, it is the institution that “institutes” art. This action has its semiotic root in “put” and a putting of this kind surmounts all the possible authority of the artist. From this point of view, the esthetic resurrection imposed (implanted) by the form of the museum on the ready-made has been exemplary. The alternative was dust. Why otherwise would Robert Filliou have collected it in museums?
There is a big difference between ready-mades and George Maciunas’s boxes. Ready-mades are an object in the painting. Try to remove them from the painting and the work disappears. To be clear, we can even call the painting the context. Nothing changes. We are still in the presence of a cultural artifact.
Art as remainder is a reflection in which art becomes itself by comparing itself with utility and function, a first step towards its enhancement. That is why the remainder in Fluxus cannot be dealt with by de.constructionism, if one wants to avoid the pointless exercise of the so-called textual reading on the decommissioned heterogeneous.
Is there a civilization of art.e.facts? Are they perhaps an epiphany of material culture? What happens if the culture of the image falls into the gulf of the digital? Other infernos or other glaciations? Rummaging the future in the past blurs history, but it reveals the weakness of being like that. In other words, the relation of the event to the appearance (Adorno).
The remained is opposed to the resurrection and dissolves the function of form as the social revolution dissolves the system in which the senseless dominates the teleological. Such a dissolution brings with it the conditions that condemn it. In any case latency anticipates its destiny! The real drama of an artist is to be ignored by his own art.
When form lies, does it do so in order to wed the content or to divorce from the barbaric literalness of what esthetics imposes on illusion? The rebellion of appearances reinforces the whole.
Through the shadow, which allocates the current life, Fluxus becomes the allocation (Heidegger). This implies that the work of art is interpreted as the origin of the artist. But can art ever be the origin of something? Become the Sanskrit cloud gravid with water? Overcome the force of gravity (Thomas Mann)?
Fluxus is a social relation of men and women who believe in creation mediated by the dream of a thing (George Maciunas). This is because creative spontaneity was the blow to the heart that some artists (sic) after Maciunas dealt to the reasons of Fluxus.
The instructions for the execution of an event are the maps prepared for the mise-en-scèneof the hidden sides of the obvious. In this ontological absence the event is the occurrence of hic et nunc.
It’s worth believing in seeing, if after believing you see nothing. At Fluxus concerts the public tends to exchange the appearance of nothing as the representation of nothing. This is because when banality suggests the glimmer of a possible ontology the viewer is led to see beyond what he believes (he is seeing). Unfortunately for faith the end of the work is not something suspended somewhere above it, like the dove hovering in flight that is called the holy spirit.
Arte Povera and conceptual art which for a short time ran beside Fluxus are the empty sepulchers that faith in artisticity indicated as inhabited by the Zeitgeist. So, unlike Fluxus, they need priests for their ceremonies the dominus is the one that forms. Besides, if artisticity manages to seem like a content, confidence in art works miracles.
Since representation never keeps its promises, the disappointed tend to take refuge in tautology. Let’s say that in modernity the avidity of sense beatifies its bulimia sufficiently so as not to deal with the twilight of iconoclasm.
For example, with Victor Hugo ink stains and coffee appeared as a narrative relief. But how can we forget, behind the narrative, the gnarigàre(the purgation) that George Maciunas promised the world?
If illusion is the past participle of deceiving, Fluxus is the social adventure that comes closest to the art of prestidigitation. The viewers, who have always expected something from art, in the society of the spectacle can no longer expect or deserve anything. Yet the fact remains that they keep waiting with hat in hand, waiting for a rabbit that is not there!
After Dada it was Fluxus that thought Freudianly by representations without images that cracked the “what is it”? But the “what is it” does not imply a definition. For the representation there is no contradiction between a funfair and esthetic value, between the spectacle and Babel. How can we say otherwise? And if the “what is it” were asleep in the dust?
As for cross-dressing in Fluxus. I’ve always dreamed of being Dora. The return of the repressed makes the artist, a héros malgré lui.
Complexity caused the failure of perspective vision in the arts by dominating with the logic of evidence. But here there is an advantage: complexity silences the ravings of some critic, that of the de.marcaters of a pagus that do not even recognize a sown field.
Readers of Semiotext(e). The success of the esthetic cognitivism that distinguishes the neo.language of art criticism has its best ally in the retreat of dialectical materialism from the barricades of the social question. In another way. What renders invisible the weight of the economic in the analysis of art forms is its determinism.
The commodity form tends to transform the representation into specificity. The more specific an object is, the more mercantile attention it deserves. The more it is specific the more it needs altars. In the zoo of the specifics of the work as “operation” it loses the skin of representation. In fact specification can make a bottle-dryer a work of art provided that such an object is put in a significant paradigm or enjoyed after going on a binge.
In Fluxus it is not uncommon for the detail perceived as a ruin, a remnant, a pittance to contain the whole. By contrast, the totality without details of many poetics of modern art are only a metaphysical or even reactionary infatuation. Here it should be noted that in the “low English” of art criticism the whole is often mistaken for a Gestalt. A good example is the case of Robert Morris and his papier-mache L’s. In art criticism what cannot be said is. For example, its object. Oh, the wonderful nostalgia for the regenerating bathrooms of tautology!
Heidegger writes the “servability” (of the work) is combined with its Gestalt.
Simple does not mean elementary. What is simple in a Fluxus action cannot be simpler than just any action because of the rest. It should also be noted that the simple in the arts is a surrogate for the sense of the whole that eludes us inasmuch as it is a whole. For a long time, in this respect, tautology was regarded like a representation of the whole without a language, although it should be understood at least as a rhetorical figure.
A language in pieces is not in the least composed of pieces of language. Visual certainty is not a semiotic certainty. One only needs to avoid smoking a pipe.
Evidence does not lie in the rest, says Ernst Bloch, it is installed. From the condition of self-referentiality representation is installed. (Perhaps for Bloch the root was in stellen, but here we are turning on Greek stellein, away, place.) The evidence of the rest is in that which does not become and makes Martin Heidegger say that being-work signifies… affirming a world.
We can conclude with Ernst Bloch. The technical relationship with art repeats the existing social relationship in another form.
Where Fluxus is an emptying of representation what regards.us? Corollary. On Fluxus we cannot raise our eyes as long as it persists as emptying. Nor can it dis.tractfrom it the zero degree of meaning. The emptying has a semiotic nature (because) the representation is a degeneration of the void.
With the disappearance of the “gaze” (Barthes) visual observation is no longer able to “think” the difference between what is art and what is not yet art.
Fluxus has always been underrated because the spectacle promotes the esthetic perception at the expense of the rest of the art. In esthetics less is more, a compensation, as in the paranoid syndrome. It is the void of the sepulcher in which the in-star has rotted.
In this regard there are few poems that have failed so “blatantly” on the stage of modern art, consigning themselves to the symbolic question and resurrecting by the weakness of convictions. How to put it? The firefly of paranoia de.signs on the shadow!
We are careful to commercial success. His holiness makes democratic artists even those Fluxus up to altruism: Everything is art, everyone can be artist.
In the manner of George Maciunas. When the bond of conflict between art and reality conflict one ends in the “piattanza” of detergent wipes. Why? Between art and reality there is not de.marcation, but conflict.
Then there is the deception of cultural studies: everything is art, the hand and its proshesis are capable of everything, provided one stays away from the instruments of the class struggle, like those hectograms of a “certain substance” that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century accompanied the lunch box of the cheminots… a role-playing game.
Fluxus has no authoritative bibliographies. Why? Because art criticism relies on them to perform the task of designing that poetic paradigm that cannot say differently. Look at the books of Arthur C. Danto.
In art the limites are “cut”; in Fluxus they are “resutured”. For weavers the reason is obscure, but the market knows this. One has to pass from the illusion of knowledge-art-knowledge to the chilling money-art-money. For this reason the mapping of paths to enhance the work is defined as a philosophy of art. Here, clearly, “speculation” distinguishes art from what it is not convenient should be art!
Speculation: From the high place of the gaze to an attempted commercial enterprise.
The “well made” belongs to technology, not to art, but this is also problematic if we consider its power of laceration, as opposed to the cure.
The more the interpretation of “well made” in the arts is habitual the more it is an outrage. It goes too far. Ability, for those who go on stage to crack nuts or sing (Josephine), is grueling. It does not matter if the etymology of attrition is a devouring or a profiteering. The important thing is for the ability of the form of capital not to reach the human content (Marcuse).
Success is assured for artists who define their age from the standpoint of passiveness. It begins with Andy Warhol and the culture of detergents perhaps it would be better with the suggestion of packaging as a fetishization of the commodity and comes down to Damien Hirst and his half a cow. Reductionism, here, acts on representation as on ideas and creates simulacra for the liturgy of the form of the spectacle. Try it and see for yourselves. Cut a flea in two and immerse half of it in formaldehyde. In this perspective, spontaneity is transformed into an excrement.
To the institutional theory of art, a Fluxus work is “art” only with the recognition of experts, but this is in contradiction to what Fluxus defines as art. So if an expert defines something related to Fluxus as a work of art, that something is not a work of art or the attribution to Fluxus is false. There is no alternative unless you want to call in question the meaning of the work within bourgeois culture.
If the event is a situation there are events that can be repeated lightly by the performer. There is no versatility in the repetition; every Fluxus concert or performance, like energy, however, is a process that anyway has a course, a preferred direction, and is not reversible, as plastically taught by combustion. Perhaps it is this that gives rise to the “slothful formality” of the caravan of Fluxus artists always wandering around the world but far from Ginger Island. Or. The tyche in Fluxus is the bad conscience of victory. Hence, woe betide anyone who does not stumble on the rope lying on the stage of the spectacle!
When we look at the yearbooks divided by the nationality of the artists, friends and supporters of Fluxus, it is inevitable to think of the signs hanging in the halls of buildings in the Latin Quarter in Paris at the time of the “historical avant-gardes”: Eau etgazii toutes les etages. Pas de chiens, pas de chats, pas des russes.
If art like diction is a representation of wholes it is here that the significance of a Fluxus event is to be found from the vantage point of topicality, its use value which is put upside down (Marx).
The event in Fluxus conveys nothing immediate and direct that can resolve the equation that makes art a complement of life. Communicating is not simple, just like picking up a shadow.
The English-language art criticism has always ignored Fluxus in comparison with the other poetics of its time and the fact that escapes the methodological instrument of comparative analysis is not a mitigating factor (for this criticism). The fact that the work remains such even when remaining outside any reference shows, by contrast, that being in a set of references does not always appertain to it (Heidegger). When Arthur C. Danto exercises himself in this critical analysis can we be sure that he is actually placing a work of art at its base?
This explains why I hate sponges for washing the bottoms of pans. To gloss Theodor W. Adorno: where we have got to with art can be seen from the place where it is meant to live. Cardboard packaging and their waste are used by the homeless to keep out the cold in spite of any esthetic transfiguration.
Observes Martin Heidegger: “Works of art are shipped around like the Ruhr coal or logs from the Black Forest.” Recourse to irony serves to attenuate the impact on the character of res of the work and with its consequences. In fashioning the liveries for bachelors Marcel Duchamp had guessed it so as to resort to transubstantiation.
He had enough friends at the Congress of Tours, not knowing that the other side of the res (Ding) was the form of goods or pure nothing.
What counts in a Fluxus event is a combination of the properties through which it generates the whole or the musical fact. This combination determines the interpretation. Here it is evident that the res is not a substance, but a determination. When you bang down a vase of flowers on a piano or break a violin on the edge of a table we are not in the presence of acoustic data (Heidegger) or a noise, but of what distracts us. Visually distracting is deterring. If then this shapes the occurrence its aim has been reached.
The action on stage is always self-formative and transmits that action freely that in the Manuscripts of ’44 “refer to the animal functions such as eating, drinking, procreating” (Marx).
The exemplary performance of Fluxus we owe to Karl Marx. It consists of calculating how many boxes of shoe polish our life is worth (Towards a Critique of Political Economy, 1859).