HFA Remembers Fluxus

“Anything can be art and anyone can do it,” claims George Maciunas, the founder of the Fluxus movement. The 1960s saw Maciunas filling Fluxboxes with games, ideas, and art; Nam June Paik forging robot sculptures out of television sets; and the likes of John Cage and Allan Kaprow creating “Happenings” with minimal script and ambiguous staging to blur the lines between art and reality. They formed part the loose network of border-crossing artists that shared the ethic of Fluxus.

“Fluxus on Film” will be onscreen at the Harvard Film Archive from May 4th through May 15th. The films complement “Multiple Strategies: Beuys, Maciunas, Fluxus,” the art exhibition currently showing at the Busch-Reisinger Museum until June 10th.

Jacob Proctor, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and Harvard University Art Museums’ Lauer Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Prints, curated both the exhibit and the film series. Proctor says that Fluxus and Beuys still influence artists today.

“The work is really relevant right now,” he explains. “And I’ve been struck by how many people, you know, kind of jaded from the contemporary art world, come in and say ‘oh my god it feels so fresh.”

Proctor expands the seemingly trivializing maxim of Fluxus—the notion that “anything can be art and anyone can do it”—by explaining its central themes in terms of contemporary society. Rather than limiting art to the elite, Proctor says, Fluxus aims to renegotiate the position of art in the social structure.

“[Fluxus] is really a kind of egalitarian move, where there is the sense that art should not be something that is made by a few, and only accessible to a few,” he says. “The idea in many cases with Fluxus is to sort of rescue experience and reclaim that kind of special experience for the everyday,” says Proctor.

“The idea wasn’t to get rid of art so we live in this world of bland unrelenting sameness,” he adds. “It is that we should be able to appreciate and pay attention to insignificant events within our lives, that we should bring to that the same level of attention that we would normally only be reserved for something that would be framed as art.”

Initially, Proctor intended to include Fluxus films as part of the installation in the Busch-Reisinger Museum. But he says he felt that the videos did not work with the exhibit as a whole, which places the work of Beuys, who excluded himself from the movement, in context with that of the formal Fluxus community in order to find points of convergence between the two.

Proctor notes the irony of placing the exhibit in Harvard’s Busch-Reisinger Museum since Fluxus rejected formalized borders and specifically the notion of museums as institutions.

“You have to toe the line between presenting the work and making sure it stays alive for subsequent generations, while making sure it doesn’t become art with a capital ‘A’ that it didn’t want to turn into,” says Proctor.

The motivations for bringing Fluxus to the Busch-Reisinger were primarily practical.

“One of the major reasons why the Fluxus collection ended up here is because of the study rooms,” Proctor says.

Visitors to the museum can enjoy hands-on access to the pieces.

“You can actually get the little Flux boxes and take the pieces out and play with the cards and what have you,” Proctor explains.

To Proctor, the interest of Fluxus is not simply in the way it dethrones serious culture. Instead, he hopes to illuminate the relationship between art, democracy, and society to provoke lasting interest.

“I hope people can come back and satisfy their curiosity later on.”