On Thursday, June 22, and Friday, June 23, the Museum Ostwall in Dortmund hosted an online symposium titled The Crazies are on the Loose: FLUXUS GLOBAL/DIVERS. The two days saw many engaging presentations and thought-provoking discussions over the history and legacy of Fluxus from several critical angles, ranging from the global dimensions of the international Fluxus network to questions of conservation, presentation, and display of Fluxus artworks and artifacts in institutions today.
Members of the Activating Fluxus team – Hanna Hölling, Aga Wielocha and Josephine Ellis – collaboratively presented on Alison Knowles’ infamous Identical Lunch (1967). The talk, Parsing Difference: Alison Knowles’ Identical Lunch and the Question of Continuity, drew on our sustained engagement and fascination with Knowles’ score which highlights several key concerns of our project, namely: How might we understand an artwork’s changing identity, not as a negative value, but as positive forces of vitality and survival? What are the acceptable parameters of change? How might we contest these parameters? When is an artwork the same or different? And finally, how can we conceive of sameness and difference beyond binarised lines of thought?
During our panel discussion, we reflected in particular on the role of the artist’s intention, sanction, and their tendency to change over time as an artwork itself is also subject to change. The recording of our presentation is available here. More in-depth elaborations on our previous engagements with Identical Lunch are available here and here.
We were joined in our panel by Sook-Kyung Lee, Curator of International Art at Tate Modern, London, and Eva Bentcheva, art historian, curator, and lecturer at the Heidelberg Center for Transcultural Studies, whose presentations are respectively available here and here. Sook-Kyung’s presentation, “Global Groove” – the world as synthesis, traced the influential practice of Nam June Paik in South Korea while Eva introduced the productive notion of ‘resonances,’ explored through Fluxus translations and transmissions made manifest in the Philippines between the 1960s and 80s in her presentation, Fluxus in the Philippines – “Resonances” and Translations.
PhD candidate in our project, Josephine Ellis, and one of our research associates, Sally Kawamura, additionally gave individual presentations in the same panel together with Franziska Koch, lecturer at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. The three talks were conceptually linked through themes of care, touch, love, and gender in relation to the Japanese Fluxus artists Yoko Ono, Mieko Shiomi and Shigeko Kubota.
Josephine’s presentation, “Queering” Grapefruit- Yoko Ono’s Materials Matter considered Ono’s canonical artist’s book in terms of its evolving materiality, both as a book and as a ‘conservation object’ that potentially queers longstanding paradigms of material preservation. Within the scope of traditional conservation, when artworks are touched by material change these processes – of decay and degradation – are oft framed as indices of loss, negatively impacting an artwork’s value. What alternate systems of value emerge, however, when transience, not permanence, appears more conducive to an artwork’s meaning? In what different ways might Grapefruit come to matter through the mutability of Ono’s objects? How are our normative understandings of protection and destruction challenged by the conservation and presentation of books? These questions also strike a chord with our wider project interests, and Josephine’s full presentation is available here.
In Mieko Shiomi – Boundaries, Sally explored Shiomi’s intriguing experimentations with the notion of boundaries, attending to the motif of boundary lines within Shiomi’s oeuvre, as well as the mechanisms through which Shiomi challenges conventional boundaries between the artist, artwork, and participant. Franziska’s presentation, “Worlding” Love, Gender, and Care. Shigeko Kubota’s “Sexual Healing” effectively demonstrated the affordances of an art historical methodology predicated in intimacy and transculturality through the prism of Kubota’s late video work. Both Sally’s and Franziska’s wonderful presentations can be accessed here and here respectively.
To view all the speaker’s abstracts and presentations, please follow this link to Museum Ostwall’s compilation of the symposium. Many thanks to the team at Museum Ostwall, especially Anna-Lena Friebe, for organising this truly enriching event.
Activating Fluxus 