Our research team recently spoke with Intermedia artist, Eric Andersen, to reflect on the Fluxus network and some questions posed by Intermedia works of the recent historical past (fig.1). Our conversation broadly touched on the notions of continuity and change, loss and preservation, and crucially, how Intermedia works might endure both through and as a form of time to evolve beyond the originating moment of their creation, as well as the singular authorship of their creators.
For Andersen, audience participation is tantamount to the transformative potential of Intermedia artworks. By delegating artistic agency to the experiential faculty of participants, each of Andersen’s works have the capacity to change indefinitely. One pertinent example includes Opus 22, the score for which was conceived either in 1960 or 1961, as per the Fondazione Bonotto and MoMA respectively (fig. 2). The score for Opus 22 asks the audience to decide between three pieces of music to hear. The piece or pieces to be played depends on the number of votes cast by the audience – how they might cast their vote is fundamentally left open, although Andersen suggests crying, putting up their fingers or writing on a piece of paper. Opus 22 is thus realised on the collaborative decision making of the audience, and this process of deciding also comprises an integral part of the work. As a result, it is impossible for the work to be experienced the same way twice.
That the score has no fixed date of conception seems like an intentional gesture by Andersen – it becomes more difficult for discursive operations to anchor Opus 22 in a singular moment in time. Within the wider context of Andersen’s many other Opus projects (usually titled Opus and followed by a number), these pieces are not named according to any systematic logic, and certainly are not ordered by chronology. Andersen’s primary concern is that art communicates, not matters of production. We discern little about Andersen’s Opus’s as artworks from their title and date of conceptualisation if, indeed, there is a date to be found at all.
While Opus 22 lends itself to change, however, Andersen contends that each performance still constitutes the same work of art. How much can a work change, then, before it becomes another work altogether? Would such a transition matter? Opus 51, more readily attributed to the year of 1964, tests the relationship between change and continuity further. The material score for Opus 51 exists in at least three alternative iterations, included below as a screenshot of one document compiled by Carl Bergstrøm-Nielsen in an anthology published by Aalborg University, Denmark (fig. 3).
This document shows the multiple manifestations, which invariably consists of the words “I have confidence in you,” accompanied by different configurations of the English alphabet amongst other symbols. Here, the boundaries of the artwork’s identity are pushed on two levels, not only in terms of interpretative openness but also because the score, which might be understood as stabilising performance, is rendered an unstable entity itself.[1] Perhaps it would be awry to speak of identity at all, at least if we are to still understand identity only as something static. For Andersen, there is no identity, only circumstance. And circumstances are liable to change. This aversion to stasis brings us to something in which Andersen has less confidence in – the ability of museums to contend with the life force of Intermedia works, particularly where institutional concerns could prioritise an artwork’s past over nurturing the multiplicity of it’s possible futures.
Source: Carl Bergstrøm-Nielsen, IIMA Anthology Vol. 1-8. Screenshot of page 10. Accessed at Intuitive Music Homepage: http://intuitivemusic.dk/iima/
One exception might be Museo Vostell in Malpartida, Spain, founded by the artist Wolf Vostell in 1976, which Andersen recommends as “the best Intermedia Museum in the world.”[2] Rather than holding items hostage in display cases, codifying things as object-artefacts, Museo Vostell mobilises its collections through more immersive environments for the visitor to experience. But still, as Andersen goes on to note, musealisation often comes at the expense of touch. For many historic works of Fluxus Intermedia, Fluxkits being the most obvious example, denying touch arrests the object’s function as a vehicle for experience, transforming it into a relic rather than an active ingredient of the work. The object is laid to rest in a de-activated state, and one might even say that the object is now dead, particularly if its primary mode of being is constituted more so by what it does rather than what it is.[3] Andersen suggests that these musealised remnants could be studied for what they are – as remnants, but it would be absurd to still consider these remnants as Intermedia works of art. This need not mean, however, that the artworks must share the same fate as musealised objects, especially as Fluxus and Intermedia practices alike were (are?) primarily time-based, concerned with events.
It is perhaps worth noting that an object’s function is not the only way it exists in the world. By paying close attention to an artefact’s materiality, we might reveal meanings embedded in the fabric of the object.[4] Consequently, the term ‘wounded’ seems to better account for the ambivalent status of the de-activated object than alluding to its ‘death’ as I did earlier, at once gesturing towards the closing of one function, or one life, and the possible opening of another.[5] Moreover, a wounded object can both reveal another layer of itself on a physical level, and potentially do so on conceptual levels which unfold both internally and externally to the work of art.[6] A wound might even complicate the boundaries between the inside and outside registers of an artwork altogether. If we accept that wounded objects are endowed with a certain agency, capable of animating new processes that bring an artwork to life,[7] then I do not think it would be unreasonable to suggest that the lives of Intermedia artworks are the very processes of unlocking new dimensions of the work, at work. The circumstances that bring a work into existence becomes the lifeblood of an artwork’s being, in this way blurring inside (being), and outside (circumstance). What processes, then, might surface in the wake of wounded Fluxus objects?
Andersen makes one suggestion by way of remaking. The concept of remaking serves as a potential strategy for activating historic works of Fluxus Intermedia, one that is productively anachronistic in that replicas offer heterogenous temporalities. At once a re-construction of the past as a present creation, a remake seems capable of fabricating its own reality that resists the purely historical time through which museums traditionally try and frame their collections while also lending itself to physical engagement. What additionally interests me about the idea of remaking past pieces are how they might perform the work of ‘letting go’ as a mechanism for working through the irretrievable loss of past worlds. These things might generate new worlds while also being the same work of art, disrupting the logic of value judgements that privilege original over copy, first over second. There is, of course, a risk that remakes could later become valorised as relics in their own right. For now, however, the remake encourages us to see loss positively so that we do not lose sight of the necessity for change. There might even be a kind of continuity to loss, insofar that for Fluxus Intermedia, continuity of the Fluxus spirit hinges on change. As Andersen reminds us “sometimes forgetting and losing is very nice.”
References
Brooks, Mary M. ‘Decay, Conservation, and the Making of Meaning through Museum Objects,’ in Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge, eds. Pamela H. Smith, Amy R. Meyers, and Harold J. Cook (New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2017), pp. 377-404.
Bruno, Giuliana. Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
D’Amato, Alison. ‘Mutable and Durable: The Performance Score after 1960’, in Object – Event – Performance: Art, Materiality, and Continuity Since the 1960s, ed. Hanna B. Hölling (New York, Bard Graduate Center, 2022), pp. 137-56.
Hölling, Hanna, B., forthcoming publication, ‘Notation and Eternity in Symphonie No.5 and Liberation Sonata for Fish,’ in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Nam June Paik: I Expose the Music at Museum Ostwall, Dortmunder-U, Germany, pp. 109-15.
Rubio, Fernando Domínguez. ‘On the discrepancy between objects and things: An ecological approach,’ Journal of Material Culture 21, no.1 (March 2016), pp. 59-86.
van der Meijen, Peter. ‘Fluxus art amusement and the museum of gags: Objectification and bafflement, encounter and engagement at the museum’, Nordisk Museologi, no. 1 (2017), pp. 90-105.
[1] For more on the instability of scores, see Alison D’Amato, ‘Mutable and Durable: The Performance Score after 1960’, in Object – Event – Performance: Art, Materiality, and Continuity Since the 1960s, ed. Hanna B. Hölling (New York, Bard Graduate Center, 2022), pp. 137-56.
[2] All artist’s quotations in this short intervention have been extracted from our conversation with Eric.
[3] Peter van der Meijen suggests that this conceptual shift is necessary if Fluxus is to be displayed meaningfully in exhibitions. This shift must take into account the work’s “career” rather than any single manifestation, in ‘Fluxus art amusement and the museum of gags: Objectification and bafflement, encounter and engagement at the museum,’ Nordisk Museologi, no. 1 (2017), p. 99.
[4] See for example, Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
[5] I borrow the term ‘wounded’ from Mary M. Brooks, ‘Decay, Conservation, and the Making of Meaning through Museum Objects,’ in Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge, eds. Pamela H. Smith, Amy R. Meyers, and Harold J. Cook (New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2017), pp. 377-404.
[6] See Hanna B. Hölling, forthcoming publication, ‘Notation and Eternity in Symphonie No.5 and Liberation Sonata for Fish,’ in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Nam June Paik: I Expose the Music at Museum Ostwall, Dortmunder-U, Germany, pp. 109-15.
[7] See for example, Fernando Domínguez Rubio, ‘On the discrepancy between objects and things: An ecological approach,’ Journal of Material Culture 21, no.1 (March 2016), pp. 59-86, for the intensive museum ecologies animated by the Mona Lisa and “the seemingly banal fact that things are constantly falling out of place,” p. 60.
Featured photo: Eric Andersen, I wasn’t the first person who left a performance by Eric Andersen (1985). Button, 7.5 cm. Source: https://www.galerie-krinzinger.at/exhibitions/30100/fluxus-abc/works/428994/i-wasn-t-the-first-person-who-left-a-performance-by-eric-andersen/.
Activating Fluxus 