ABSTRACT
Fluxus is an international movement of artists, poets, composers, and individuals formally untrained in art, producing objects, installations, performances, collective festivals, celebrations, exhibitions, publications, mail art, editions, and multiples. Oen characterized by its lack of pretension, playfulness, and humor, Fluxus is also noted for its philosophical acceptance of life’s ƒuidity and ephemerality. George Brecht distinguished Fluxus artists as those who understand that “the bounds of art are much wider than they have conventionally seemed,” and who “never … aempt to agree on aims or methods” (1964, 111). Some Fluxus artists also pioneered queer sexual politics and aesthetics, including George Maciunas, the self-appointed titular head of Fluxus. Jon Hendricks, curator of the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, which the Silvermans donated to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2009, considers Maciunas “the father” of Fluxus and only what Maciunas “put
forward” as constituting authentic Fluxus works (2002, 14, 20). Hendricks also dates the end of Fluxus to Maciunas’ death in 1978, despite the many artists who identify with and continue to exhibit under the Fluxus moniker. Others agree with Ina Bloom that, “e history of Fluxus […] demonstrates the di‚culty of speaking of Fluxus as one phenomenon, movement or artistic identity,” and that to assert this “does not mean […] that Fluxus is essentially inclusive and endlessly pluralist” or that it “def[ies] denition” (2002, 49).
