c. 1962–1978 · Artist group

Fluxus

In September 1962, young artists at the Museum Wiesbaden took a grand piano apart in front of an audience. What looked like vandalism was a concert. Fluxus set out to dissolve the boundary between art and life, with short actions, instructions, wit and everyday objects. The Rhine region, from Wiesbaden to Cologne, Düsseldorf and Wuppertal, became one of its centres.

A piano taken apart

Wiesbaden, September 1962. In the lecture hall of the municipal museum, the Fluxus International Festival of New Music took place. The programme included pieces with titles such as Piano Activities. Young artists from the USA, Germany and Korea worked on a grand piano with hammers, saws and bare hands until only its parts remained. The local press was outraged, the audience divided.

It was the birth of Fluxus in Europe. The festival had been organised by the Lithuanian-born George Maciunas, then working as a designer for the US Air Force in Wiesbaden. He had also chosen the name, Latin for “flow” or “flux”.

Art as instructions

Fluxus was less a style than an attitude. Its model was the composer John Cage, who had declared chance and everyday sounds to be music. Many Fluxus works are so-called event scores: short instructions that anyone can carry out. George Brecht’s Drip Music consists of a brief instruction: a source of dripping water and an empty vessel are arranged so that the water falls into the vessel. Art was not to be locked up in museums but to be cheap, witty and accessible to all. For this, Maciunas issued small boxes of cards, games and objects, the Fluxus boxes.

The Rhineland as a stage

Even before Wiesbaden, Cologne was a meeting point. From 1960, in the studio of the artist Mary Bauermeister, composers and artists such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage and Nam June Paik met for concerts and actions.

In February 1963 Joseph Beuys, then a professor at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, brought Fluxus into his own house. At the Festum Fluxorum Fluxus in the Academy’s auditorium, he performed the Siberian Symphony, with a piano, a dead hare and chalk drawings on a blackboard. A few weeks later, Nam June Paik opened his Exposition of Music – Electronic Television at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, with prepared pianos and manipulated television sets. It is regarded as one of the founding moments of video art.

Women in Fluxus

From the start, Fluxus gave women artists more room than many earlier movements. In Make a Salad, Alison Knowles prepared a salad on stage for the audience. The Japanese artist Mieko Shiomi sent instructions for actions to artists all over the world. In Cut Piece, Yoko Ono sat motionless on stage and invited the audience to cut pieces from her clothing with scissors, an early work about vulnerability, violence and the gaze on the female body.

A network without a centre

Fluxus spread rapidly, from New York and Wiesbaden to Nice, Copenhagen, Prague and Tokyo. Maciunas tried to steer the movement and expelled artists who did not follow his line, such as Nam June Paik after he performed with Stockhausen in 1964. Many artists, however, continued to work independently. For many, Fluxus ended as a movement with Maciunas’s death in 1978; as an attitude it lives on.

Why it still matters

Fluxus opened art up to everyday life, humour and audience participation. Performance, Conceptual Art, video art and many forms of participatory art have roots here. And the Rhine region, where Fluxus made its first major appearances in Europe, remains closely tied to this history. The Museum Ostwall in Dortmund holds an important Fluxus collection, and the Museum Wiesbaden, where the first festival took place, regularly revisits this history.