On Thursday, June 22 and Friday, June 23, the Museum Ostwall in Dortmund is hosting an online symposium titled The Crazies are on the Loose: FLUXUS GLOBAL/DIVERS. The symposium’s main title is an English translation of the German phrase “Die lrren sind los,” which was originally scratched into a poster advertising Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik, the inaugural Fluxus festival held in Wiesbaden in September 1962. This symposium aims to delve into Fluxus as a global network of “crazies,” understood here as extraordinary artists who transcend their own time, with a special emphasis on its female protagonists. The event will feature both upcoming and renowned scholars and curators who will explore what we can learn from Fluxus in today’s digitally connected world and identify any existing blind spots in the current scholarship and reception of this complex, hard-to-define, and still enigmatic non-movement.
Activating Fluxus team is excited to have the opportunity to present their research in such a remarkable setting. In our talk, “Parsing Difference: Alison Knowles’ The Identical Lunch and the Question of Continuity,” we will be sharing recent experimentations, discoveries and challenges regarding the interpretation of Alison Knowles’ The Identical Lunch (1969) (please refer to the abstract below for more details). Additionally, Josephine Ellis, a doctoral candidate in our project, will be revealing the findings from her master’s thesis research in a presentation titled Queering ‘Grapefruit’—Yoko Ono’s Materials Matter. Furthermore, our associate researcher Sally Kawamura, will deliver a talk entitled Mieko Shiomi – Boundary Lines.
The program of the symposium and the registration link can be found on the event website.
For those interested in our continuous research on Alison Knowles’ Identical Lunch (1969), we invite you to explore the following blog posts:
- On Alison Knowles’ Identical Lunch at Research Apero by Hanna Hölling
- The common arts of Fluxus by Stefanie Manthey
- The Same Lunch? Thinking about Continuity of Fluxus over a Çiğ Köfte wrap by Aga Wielocha
Parsing Difference: Alison Knowles’ The Identical Lunch and the Question of Continuity
A tuna fish sandwich on wheat toast with butter and lettuce, no mayo and a cup of soup or glass of buttermilk. These ingredients form the recipe for Identical Lunch (1969), one of Alison Knowles’ most recognised event scores which consists of an invitation to eat this same lunch every week, at the same place, and at roughly the same time.
While the instruction appears simple, the lunch can never actually be “identical”. Not only does each enactment require Knowles’ ingredients to be purchased anew each time the score is performed, but more complex questions also arise if we take into consideration that the specificity of a performer’s reality inevitably translates Knowles’ original idea into their situated contexts.
As an event score, Identical Lunch follows the operative logic of musical notation which suggests that each performance is an equally valid instance of Knowles’ artwork, varying in the degree of interpretation and adherence to the score. Nevertheless, the parameters of change can be difficult to detect. What happens if, as Knowles experienced, there is no whole wheat bread in Germany, or a tuna fish sandwich is swapped for a regional tofu soup in Asia? Are these the same work of art or should they be regarded as distinct iterations? What if the artist sanctions certain alterations, restricts others, and her sanction is itself subject to change over time? In tracing the identity of this work, can we parse difference, not as a negative value but as a productive ingredient integral to Knowles’ ever-changing proposition?
Drawing on the authors’ continuing engagement with Identical Lunch, this presentation will explore some of the challenges posed by this changeable artwork that comes into being through translations across different cultures, spaces and times, and speculate about what this means for the continuity of Fluxus more broadly.
Activating Fluxus 