Philip Corner (1962) Piano Activities

George Brecht (1962) Solo for Violin, Cello or Contrabass

Make a Salad

Jackson Mac Low (1961) 2nd Gatha

“It’s fairly well known that for the last thirty years my main work as an artist has been located in activities and contexts that don’t suggest art in any way. Brushing my teeth, for example, in the morning when I’m barely awake; watching in the mirror the rhythm of my elbow moving up and down...”

(Kaprow 1986)

Allan Kaprow’s Fluid, Re-created in Los Angeles in 2008

Thinking in Flux

Suzuki, D.T (1949)

“Words, to paraphrase a Zen adage, are so many fingers pointing to the Fluxmoon, and are not to be confused with the Fluxmoon itself”.

(Doris 2005, p.91)

John Cage

(1912-1992)

“I am here and there is nothing to say” (1987, p.109)

“There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make silence, we cannot.”(Cage 1987, p. 8)

Steve Reich (b. 1936 ): “The distinctive thing about music processes is that they determine all the note-to-note details and the over all form simultaneously. One can’t improvise in a musical process – the concepts are mutually exclusive” (1974, p.11)

Gutai (1954~1974)

Saburu Murakami (1956) Sadamasa Motonaga

“… a philosophy of art is steralized unless it makes us aware of the function of art in relation to other modes of experience, and unless it indicates why this function is so inadequately realised, and unless it suggests the conditions under which the office would be successfully performed”

(Dewey 2005, p.10)

“The world view associated with Fluxus is fundamentally connected to a rejection of the western tradition of the metaphysics of presence... The goal or aspiration of much of the tradition of Western thought has been directed towards the establishment of meaning and presence as an outgrowth of fixed abstract essences of higher conceptual ideals.” (Smith 1992, p.116)

Joseph Kosuth

One and Three Chairs (1965)

Robert Rauschenberg (1960) Pilgrim

George Brecht (1966) Chair Event

Intermedia Definitions

“The intermedial response can be applied to anything – say, an old glass. The glass can serve the geometrist [sic] to explain ellipses; for the historian it can be an index of the technology of a past age; for a painter it can become part of a still life, and the gourmet can use it to drink his Chateau Latour 1953”

“We are not used to thinking like this, all at once, or nonhierarchically, but the intermedialist does it naturally. Context rather than category. Flow rather than work of art.”

(Ibid p.105)

“Fluxus materials are useful in … an emancipatory sense – not because they construct political ideologies but rather because they provide contexts… for primary experiences.” (Higgins 2002, p.58)

Ontology

Institutional Art

intermedia

Institutional Art

Cornelia Parker (1991) Cold Dark Matter

George Macuinas (1931 -78)

Why is this interesting today?

(Ingold and Hallum 2007)

A ‘Forward Reading’ of Creativity

• Temporal• Relational• Generative• ‘It is the way we work…’

Le Corbusier (1928) Villa Savoye