Fluxus

Based on Wikipedia: Fluxus

In 1960, at a concert in Cologne, a young Korean artist named Nam June Paik was performing a piano piece called Etude pour Piano. Midway through, he suddenly leapt into the audience, produced a pair of scissors, and cut off John Cage's necktie. Then he ran out of the concert hall. Minutes later, the phone rang: Paik was calling to announce that his piece had ended.

This was Fluxus before it had a name.

The movement that would become Fluxus—Latin for "to flow"—emerged in the early 1960s as perhaps the most radical artistic experiment of that turbulent decade. Dutch art critic Harry Ruhé called it simply "the most radical and experimental art movement of the sixties." That's a bold claim for an era that gave us Pop Art, Minimalism, and the psychedelic explosion. But Fluxus earned the title by attacking something deeper than style or aesthetics. It attacked the very notion of what art could be.

The Problem with Masterpieces

To understand Fluxus, you need to understand what it was against. By the mid-twentieth century, the Western art world had calcified into a system of galleries, museums, collectors, and critics—a complex machinery for identifying "great art," assigning it monetary value, and preserving it for posterity. Art was precious. Art was for experts. Art hung on walls or sat on pedestals, protected by velvet ropes.

Fluxus wanted to burn all of this down.

The artists who would form Fluxus believed that the boundary between art and everyday life was artificial and destructive. Why should a soup can in a museum be art while the identical can in your kitchen was merely groceries? Why should sitting silently in a concert hall listening to music be fundamentally different from hearing the same sounds drifting through an open window? The traditional art world, they argued, had "mummified" creativity—their word, not mine—turning living experience into dead objects for wealthy collectors.

Their solution was radical. Make art that couldn't be bought or sold. Make art that was indistinguishable from ordinary life. Make art that anyone could perform. Make art that might not look like art at all.

John Cage's Classroom Revolution

The intellectual foundation of Fluxus was laid in an unlikely setting: a series of classes on experimental composition taught by John Cage at the New School for Social Research in New York City from 1957 to 1959. Cage, already famous for his radical musical ideas, had recently been studying Zen Buddhism with the scholar D. T. Suzuki. The combination of Eastern philosophy and Western avant-garde thinking produced something explosive.

Cage taught his students that the traditional Western approach to composition—where a genius conceives a masterwork in his mind and then transcribes it for others to perform—was fundamentally wrong. Instead, he argued, artists should embark on works "without a conception of their end." The process of creation mattered more than the finished product. Chance and accident were not enemies to be controlled but collaborators to be embraced.

The students who passed through Cage's classroom read like a founding roster of Fluxus: Jackson Mac Low, La Monte Young, George Brecht, Al Hansen, Dick Higgins. They absorbed Cage's ideas and pushed them further. If the process mattered more than the product, why create products at all? If chance was valuable, why not make art that was entirely unpredictable? If the boundary between music and noise was arbitrary, what about the boundary between performance and everyday life?

The Duchamp Connection

Fluxus also drew deeply from an earlier revolutionary: Marcel Duchamp, the French artist who had scandalized the art world decades earlier with his "readymades." In 1917, Duchamp had submitted an ordinary urinal to an art exhibition, signed it "R. Mutt," titled it Fountain, and declared it a work of art. The piece was rejected, but the argument it made was devastating. If an artist could transform a mass-produced urinal into art simply by declaring it so, then art was not a matter of craft or beauty or skill. Art was a concept, a frame, a way of looking.

Duchamp had been part of the Dada movement during World War One—a group of artists and writers who responded to the insanity of industrial warfare by embracing absurdity, chance, and the rejection of all rational systems, including the system of art itself. They called their approach "anti-art." Duchamp brought Dada to New York, where he formed a group with Francis Picabia and Man Ray that would influence American art for decades.

By the late 1950s, these Dada ideas were experiencing a revival. Critics began using the term "Neo-Dada" to describe the new generation of artists who were challenging artistic conventions. Fluxus founder George Maciunas initially embraced this label, calling his movement "neo-dadaism" or "renewed dadaism." He even wrote letters to Raoul Hausmann, an original Dadaist, seeking his blessing.

Hausmann's response was telling. "I note with much pleasure what you said about German neodadaists," he wrote, "but I think even the Americans should not use the term 'neodadaism' because neo means nothing and -ism is old-fashioned. Why not simply 'Fluxus'? It seems to me much better, because it's new, and dada is historic."

George Maciunas: The Organizer

If Fluxus had a founder—and many of its members would dispute that it did—it was George Maciunas. Born in Lithuania in 1931, Maciunas fled with his family at the end of World War Two and eventually settled in New York, where he encountered the avant-garde circle around John Cage and La Monte Young. He was trained as a graphic designer, possessed extraordinary organizational energy, and had a missionary's zeal for promoting the kind of art he believed in.

Maciunas was also, by all accounts, a strange and striking figure. One collaborator remembered him as "astonishing looking" and "beautifully dressed," somehow able to "carry the whole thing off" despite having almost no money and frequently dodging creditors. He was colorblind, which is why Fluxus publications were almost always printed in black and white. He had a fantastic ability to get things done—finding printers, organizing events, building distribution networks—that made him invaluable to artists who wanted to create but lacked the practical skills or patience for the business side.

In 1961, Maciunas conceived the name "Fluxus" for a proposed magazine. The magazine never materialized, but the name stuck. In a lecture he gave in June 1962, Maciunas explained that Fluxus was "opposed to the exclusion of the everyday from art." Using "anti-art and artistic banalities," he declared, Fluxus would fight "the traditional artificialities of art." He ended with what amounted to a manifesto: "Anti-art is life, is nature, is true reality—it is one and all."

The European Festivals

The movement truly coalesced through a series of festivals that Maciunas organized across Western Europe in 1962. After his Madison Avenue gallery failed (Maciunas was always struggling financially), he took a job as a graphic designer with the United States Air Force in Wiesbaden, West Germany. From there, he maintained contact with artists in New York and connected with American expatriates in Europe like Benjamin Patterson and Emmett Williams.

In September 1962, Maciunas organized fourteen concerts over three weeks in Wiesbaden. The performers included established avant-garde composers like John Cage, György Ligeti, and Krzysztof Penderecki alongside the newer generation of Fluxus artists. The pieces performed were often startling, confusing, and deliberately provocative.

One performance in particular became notorious. Piano Activities by Philip Corner consisted of a score that asked performers to "play," "pluck or tap," "scratch or rub," "drop objects" on, and otherwise interact with a piano in any way they chose, including acting on the underside of the instrument. When Maciunas, Dick Higgins, and others performed the piece in Wiesbaden, they systematically destroyed the piano.

The destruction shocked German audiences. Germany in 1962 was still recovering from the war, and the piano held enormous cultural significance—it was the instrument of Beethoven, of Brahms, of Chopin, a symbol of civilized European culture. Deliberately smashing one seemed barbaric. German television broadcast footage of the destruction four times, introducing it with the words: "The lunatics have escaped!"

Maciunas was unrepentant. He had bought the piano for five dollars, he explained, and destroying it was actually practical: "otherwise we would have had to pay movers."

What Is an Event Score?

One of Fluxus's most distinctive contributions was the "event score"—a set of simple written instructions that anyone could follow to create a performance. These were often absurdly minimal. George Brecht's Drip Music consisted entirely of the instruction: "A source of dripping water and an empty vessel are arranged so that the water falls into the vessel." His Word Event was even simpler: "Exit."

Event scores democratized art in a profound way. You didn't need training or talent or expensive materials. You didn't need to be in a gallery or concert hall. Anyone, anywhere, could perform these pieces. They turned the audience into performers and erased the distinction between artist and viewer.

Brecht collected his event scores on small cards, printed cheaply and packaged in a cardboard box called Water Yam. Maciunas printed a thousand copies in 1963, priced at four dollars each. A year later, he still had 996 copies unsold. Commercially, Fluxus was a disaster. But that was almost the point. If these works had become valuable collector's items, they would have failed in their mission to escape the art market entirely.

Intermedia and New Forms

Fluxus artists didn't just challenge what counted as art—they invented entirely new art forms. Dick Higgins coined the term "intermedia" to describe works that existed between traditional categories. A piece might be simultaneously music, visual art, poetry, and theater, fitting neatly into none of these boxes.

Nam June Paik pioneered video art, using the new technology of television as an artistic medium. Wolf Vostell explored similar territory. Henry Flynt developed what he called "concept art"—art in which the idea itself was the artwork, rather than any physical object. (Flynt's relationship with Fluxus was contentious, but his influence was undeniable.)

These innovations would reshape the art world for decades. Conceptual art became one of the dominant modes of contemporary art. Video art filled galleries and museums. The very notion that art could exist "between" traditional categories—neither purely visual nor purely musical nor purely theatrical—opened possibilities that artists are still exploring today.

Anti-Commercial, Anti-Art

Many Fluxus artists shared what they called "anti-commercial and anti-art sensibilities." This wasn't just aesthetic preference; it was political conviction. They believed the art market corrupted creativity by turning expression into commodity. The gallery system excluded ordinary people from both making and experiencing art. The cult of the masterpiece elevated a few geniuses while dismissing the creative potential of everyone else.

Their response was to make art that resisted commodification. Event scores couldn't really be bought or sold—how do you purchase the concept of dripping water into a vessel? Fluxus multiples were deliberately cheap and mass-produced, undercutting the art world's fetish for rare and precious objects. Street performances were free and ephemeral, leaving nothing to collect or preserve.

George Brecht captured this philosophy when he explained that Fluxus artists had come to understand that "concert halls, theaters, and art galleries" were "mummifying." Instead, they found themselves "preferring streets, homes, and railway stations." Art belonged in life, not in museums.

A Community of Friends

One thing that made Fluxus unusual was its social dimension. This was not just a movement or a style; it was a community of friends. The artists involved collaborated constantly, influenced each other, attended each other's performances, and often lived in close proximity. They had radical ideas about art, but they also genuinely enjoyed spending time together.

The roster of participants reads like a who's who of mid-century avant-garde art: Joseph Beuys, the German artist who would become one of the most influential figures in contemporary art; Yoko Ono, later famous for her relationship with John Lennon but already a significant artist in her own right; La Monte Young, the composer whose experiments with sustained tones would influence everything from minimalist music to drone metal; Ben Patterson, one of the first African American artists to achieve international recognition in the experimental music scene.

They met through Cage's classes, through the loft concerts that Yoko Ono and La Monte Young organized on Chambers Street, through Mary Bauermeister's studio in Cologne, through the festivals and publications that Maciunas coordinated. The connections were personal as well as artistic. As Dick Higgins noted, "Fluxus started with the work, and then came together, applying the name Fluxus to work which already existed. It was as if it started in the middle of the situation, rather than at the beginning."

Was It a Movement?

Here's the paradox of Fluxus: it was an organized movement dedicated to opposing organization, a named tendency whose participants often rejected the name.

Maciunas proposed a manifesto, but few Fluxus artists adopted it. He tried to establish collective ownership of copyrights and a formal distribution system, but composers who already had publishing deals couldn't participate. John Cage, whose ideas had inspired the whole thing, never published work under the Fluxus name because of his contract with Edition Peters.

Some artists embraced the Fluxus identity enthusiastically. Others participated in events and publications while rejecting any group affiliation. Still others drifted in and out over the years, sometimes associated with the movement and sometimes not. Henry Flynt, whose concept art was among the most radical ideas to emerge from this milieu, had a famously difficult relationship with Fluxus and eventually distanced himself from it entirely.

Perhaps the most accurate description came from those who called Fluxus a "laboratory"—a space for experimentation rather than a school with fixed principles. The festivals in Wiesbaden, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Amsterdam, London, and New York created a loose but robust community with similar beliefs. What held it together was not ideology but sensibility: a shared conviction that art could be different, that the boundaries between art and life were artificial and should be dissolved, that anyone could be an artist if they simply chose to act like one.

After Canal Street

After Maciunas returned to New York in 1963, he opened a shop called the Fluxhall on Canal Street and organized twelve concerts there in the spring of 1964. These were held "away from the beaten track of the New York art scene"—which in practice meant there was "no audience to speak of." Pieces by Ben Vautier, Alison Knowles, and Takehisa Kosugi were performed on the street for free, documented only by photographs that Maciunas took himself.

Maciunas built up a distribution network for Fluxus works across Europe, with outlets in Amsterdam, Villefranche-sur-Mer, Milan, and London, and later in California and Japan. By 1965, the first proper anthology, Fluxus 1, was available—a collection of manila envelopes bolted together containing works by numerous artists who would later become famous.

But commercial success continued to elude the movement. This was by design, of course—you cannot simultaneously attack the art market and thrive within it. The Fluxkits that Maciunas produced were deliberately cheap and mass-produced, sold for a few dollars, meant to be accessible rather than precious. They succeeded in being accessible. They failed, mostly, in being sold.

Legacy

Fluxus as a coherent movement faded by the 1970s, though many of its participants continued creating work for decades. But its influence proved enormous—far greater than its commercial success or contemporary recognition would suggest.

The idea that process matters more than product, that chance can be a collaborator, that the boundary between art and life is arbitrary—these notions, once radical, have become commonplace in contemporary art. Conceptual art, performance art, video art, intermedia, mail art: all of these trace their origins in part to Fluxus experiments.

More broadly, Fluxus anticipated a shift in how we think about creativity. The internet age has been characterized by remix culture, user-generated content, and the blurring of boundaries between producer and consumer. When everyone with a smartphone can create and distribute images, music, and video, the Fluxus question—who gets to be an artist?—becomes more relevant than ever.

The movement's anti-commercial stance looks different now too. In an era of billion-dollar art sales and artist brands as luxury commodities, the Fluxus insistence that art should be cheap, accessible, and impossible to hoard seems less like naïve idealism and more like a principled alternative. You can still find event scores online and perform them yourself. George Brecht's instructions for dripping water into a vessel belong to no one and everyone.

The Scissors and the Tie

Return for a moment to that concert in Cologne in 1960. Nam June Paik, a trained classical musician who had studied composition in Germany and Japan, chose to express himself by cutting John Cage's tie and running out of the building. The gesture was absurd, confrontational, and utterly memorable. It made no sense as traditional music. It made perfect sense as a challenge to everything traditional music represented.

Cage, the victim of this assault, was not angry. He had spent years teaching his students that art should be unpredictable, that the artist should give up control, that surprise was more valuable than mastery. Paik was simply taking those ideas to their logical conclusion.

This is what Fluxus understood at its core: that the most radical artistic statement is not a shocking image or a disturbing sound but a fundamental challenge to how we separate art from not-art, performance from everyday life, the artist from the audience. Cutting off a tie is meaningless. Cutting off a tie as art is a revolution.

Whether that revolution succeeded depends on what you think success means. If it means changing the art world, Fluxus certainly did that. If it means destroying the boundary between art and life, the jury is still out. Museums still exist. Galleries still sell art for millions of dollars. Critics still debate what counts as genius.

But somewhere, right now, someone is dripping water into a vessel, or exiting a room, or cutting someone's tie. They might not know they're performing a Fluxus score. They might not think of themselves as artists at all. That, perhaps, is the point.