ABSTRACT
What would it mean to recognize the possibility that, perhaps counterintuitively, some artists have sought to activate viewers through the death of their work? And what repercussions would this recognition have for keeping such work alive in archives, museums and other institutions today? Although Fluxus chairman George Maciunas described the fluctuating, ephemeral and transitory work of Fluxus artists as “living,” this chapter argues that for artists working in the 1960s in Eastern Europe, many of whom Maciunas wished to band together as “Fluxus East,” the symbolic idea of death offered the promise of a failure that was, in fact, active and emancipatory. Through an examination of Polish Fluxus affiliate Tadeusz Kantor’s 1967 Happening The Letter and a reflection upon Wiesław Borowski’s influential theory of “an elimination of art from art,” this chapter formulates the concept of the “dead letter”—literally, a piece of unclaimed mail at the post office, though originally signifying a useless or ineffective statute of ordinance or decree—as one method employed by artists to escape the mapping of external powers onto their work. By activating a void of authority, dead letter artworks delivered to subjects the ability to un-connect as individuals, together—a utopian, participatory model of art particularly attractive to artists under communist rule. Polish contemporary artist Goshka Macuga’s The Letter tapestry, made in 2011 and based on Kantor’s work, provides a concluding example of how an artist might respectfully activate the conceptual tenets of a dead letter performance. Her work occasions a rethinking of the care of art objects to better align with specific art histories.
