Taking shape around 1959, the international cohort of artists known as Fluxus experimented with —or better yet between—poetry, theater, music, and the visual arts. More than a list of artists, a historical moment, or a set of artifacts, Fluxus gives name to a network of social relationships and common approaches to art-making that highlights, among other things, playfulness, simplicity, internationalism, intermedia, ephemerality, and the unity of art and everyday life.
One finds in Fluxus work genre-blurring “intermedia,” provocative performance events, and mobile art “kits.” One finds an international syndicate of collaborating, agitating, pranksterish artmakers. The American Dick Higgins notes, “[t]his depended upon a fluid conception of group identity: anyone who wanted to do that kind of thing was Fluxus … [we] stuck together to do Fluxus kinds of things, even when [we] were also doing other kinds of things at the same time.” Fluxus members worked in areas across and between multiple forms, challenging distinctions between artistic genres, and between art and everyday life. Perhaps it’s best to think of Fluxus as a provisional space wherein an undetermined number of artists, writers, and musicians with shared approaches to art did things together.
