What the hell is a Fluxus? Well, for starters, its just Fluxus. But this is Fluxus:
Now you may say, wait this can’t be right, this is a mere manifesto. And you may ask, what sets this apart from the Communist Manifesto or the Futurist Manifesto?
Well, unfortunately this is an answer not simply put. Fluxus is a difficult artistic concept to fully grasp. But, basically, Fluxus played off the prostitution of writing by “hack-writers” who blurred and distorted language until it became merely declaratory. Maciunas brought around the politicization of this declaratory writing by “thrusting” language “into the arena of performativity.” Performativity, unlike the act of performing (as one might think it would mean), is the breaking of linguistic (or logical for that matter) conventions through the use of the means of those conventions. Thus, our Fluxus Manifesto by George Maciunas becomes the basis for the work of Fluxus art. But what does this artwork even mean?
Well, for one, Maciunas manipulated the dictionary definition of flux with his own handwritten notes on the word, and successively juxtaposed these two different forms in a way that the handwritten notes almost satirize the dictionary definition. This style or process can be alikened to the Duchampian satirization of the notion of art through his use of the “ready-made” urinal. Thus, Maciunas manipulated the dictionary definition to show its ready-made qualities, and that of words in general. Specifically, he picked and chose words from the dictionary and changed their syntax within his own notes to give them a sort of double (or even multiple) entendre, leaving them needing the interpretation of the audience because his piece can be evocative in many ways to many people. On top of that, he uses revolutionary diction (oddly enough, it is very prevalent in the dictionary definition of flux) to highlight a need for the “violent” overthrow of the “bourgeois (corporatized/commercialized) culture.” What better way to overthrow bourgeois culture, than by provoking the heart of cultural revolution in society by using words evocative of the Bolshevik revolution, who aimed at precisely the same thing. But, to me, the whole Fluxus Manifesto acts as a reflection of Maciunas’ idealistic goal for the future of art; art will become an intertwining of language and performance on the way to giving art what it had truly lacked on a massive scale prior to him– context. This new context represented a violent change for Maciunas, one that took him a “matter of months” to become radicalized for, and this revolutionary diction and positive/negative contrast of the page itself represent the lurking violent change that Fluxus will inspire. Rather than create art for its own sake, art will become socially relevant and the audience will transcend the visual to become active participants in reaction against the commercialized culture, somewhat similar to pop art in a way.
