We are delighted to share the line up of the speakers for our online session at the CAA 112th Annual Conference, titled ACTIVATING FLUXUS, EXPANDING CONSERVATION, scheduled for Thursday, February 15, 2024, from 4:00 PM to 5:30 PM CET. Registration details and the comprehensive program for the conference can be accessed HERE.
Below you may find other sessions aligned with the themes of our project.
We look forward to your participation and meaningful discussions during this conference!
Activating Fluxus, Expanding Conservation
Presenters:
Magdalena Holdar, Danielle Johnson, Kate Lewis, Hannah Mandel, Peter Oleksik, and Inbal Strauss
SESSION CHAIRS & MODERATION:
Hanna B. Hölling, Aga Wielocha, Josephine Ellis
PRESENTATION ABSTracTS in order of apperance:
Processing Fluxus and Media Art Histories: A Case Study of the John G. Hanhardt Archives at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College
Hannah Mandel, Center of Curatorial Studies, Bard College
This presentation is a case study of a decade-long archival processing project by the Archives at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. The John G. Hanhardt Archives document the fifty-plus year career of John Hanhardt, curator of Film and Video at the Whitney Museum (1974-1996); Guggenheim Museum (1996-2006); and Smithsonian (2006-2013). Several hundred boxes of archival material represent the development of film, video and media arts as a medium of equal standing in museum and exhibition contexts to previously established genres. The collection is a rich repository of Fluxus material. The bulk of the archive dates from 1974-2001, which places it in the unique position of presenting an early Fluxus historiography—insight into how key figures perceived the legacy of their contributions in the years immediately following the movement. The archive includes Fluxus multiples, performance ephemera, and media, as well as extensive correspondence and documentation of Hanhardt’s involvement in the development of Intermedia pedagogy at universities. Notably, the archive documents Hanhardt’s close relationship with Nam June Paik, for whom Hanhardt served as an ambassador. Hans Breder, Ken Friedman, Jon Hendricks, Shigeko Kubota, Jonas Mekas, Yoko Ono are also heavily represented. The multifaceted nature— conceptually, and physically— of the Hanhardt Papers raises unique questions about the role of the Archivist in describing curatorial records. This presentation provides an account of the decisions made, and offers a model for future archival description of Fluxus material that activates the far-reaching implications of the movement, and incorporates the self-described legacies of its participants.
Fluxus Bit by Bit: Dick Higgins and the Great Bear Pamphlet Series
Dr Magdalena Holdar, Stockholm University
Researching Fluxus means engaging with words. Compositions are text based, instructions are written and events described on printed posters. We tend to think of Fluxus art as ephemeral and built around everyday objects and activities, but language is often what binds them all together. Is the published text in fact a key component of Fluxus’s reinvention and renewed relevance? If so, how does the constancy of printed matter align with Fluxus art’s ability to continuously transform?
This paper addresses agency and activation of Fluxus art through the medium of publications. The Great Bear Pamphlet series, published by Dick Higgins between 1965 and 1967, serves as a clarifying case. A diligent writer, theorist, and publisher, Higgins was instrumental in communicating the theoretical foundation of Fluxus. His series of inexpensive and distribution-friendly pamphlets has circulated widely, reaching new readers and practitioners since they were first published.
My presentation explores ways in which Fluxus publications destabilize the notion of printed texts as steady entities, arguing that they instead actively produce new meaning thanks to their medium. Texts, maybe more than artworks, enable re-performance and reactivation of Fluxus works by new generations of artists. Publishing could consequently be seen as another tool in the Fluxus toolbox.
“… Treating with a Flux.”: Case Studies from The Silverman Fluxus Collection, at The Museum of Modern Art
Peter Oleksik, Kate Lewis, Danielle Johnson – The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA
The Silverman Fluxus Collection was acquired by MoMA in 2008 and has been challenging institutional approaches and care for material ever since. Once staff began to process this collection into various departments (the Drawings & Prints curatorial department and Library and Museum Archives), media conservation was enlisted in 2011 to survey the time-based material. This survey prompted numerous engagements: migrations, reconstructions and activation. This presentation considers 2 case studies illustrating how MoMA has cared for, and learned from, the collection.
The first case-study includes Nam June Paik’s Zen for TV and Shigeko Kubota’s Nude Descending a Staircase, and Berlin Diary:Thanks to My Ancestors which engaged an active approach to Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) monitors to support their long term display in MoMA’s galleries.The second case-study focuses on the films of Dick Higgins and how traditional methods of film preservation and migration are challenged by his practice, and how networks of research and care are necessary to exhibit and conserve this material. The aim of this presentation is to illustrate how these Fluxus works force the museum to approach the material with an open mind, allowing the art to guide in its translation into the present and point to how the work should be cared for in the future.
Capri Battery: Powering Decolonial Display Practices through Multisensory Interaction
Dr Inbal Strauss
ABSTRACT: According to the dominant Western paradigm of aesthetic reception, artworks differ from everyday artifacts in activating us solely through visual perception. Correspondingly, Joseph Beuys’s Capri Battery is commonly exhibited inside a vitrine with the lemon replaced with a plastic one. From a conservation perspective, these decisions prevent physical interaction and having to continually replenish the decaying exhibit. However, from a critical perspective, the fact Beuys designed Capri Battery for physical interaction and arguably appropriated the lemon for its ephemeral multisensory properties calls up the surreptitious reasons behind these “conservationist” display decisions. Rooted in colonialism and racial sensory hierarchies, they privilege sight over marginalized modalities historically considered non-Western. How, then, may Capri Battery still challenge the dominant and visualist Wetsern paradigm of aesthetic reception to inform contemporary museum practices?
The paper introduces Wolfgang Kemp’s theory of aesthetic reception, which describes how artworks activate viewers through visual perception, and Donald Norman’s theory of interaction design, which describes how everyday objects activate users through multisensory perception. Drawing on both theories, it offers a keyhole comparison of an everyday lemon battery and Beuys’s Capri Battery, whereby the interaction analysis of the former enables an unexpected aesthetic reading of the latter. The analysis builds upon Capri Battery’s accepted environmental reading yet sheds fresh light on how its display affects the efficacy of its call for action.
Finally, the paper suggests how this case study—and the broader legacy of Fluxus—can inform museum practices that re-embody disembodied spectatorship and decolonize the still-pervasive visualist paradigm of aesthetic reception/perception.
Related Sessions AT THE CAA CHICAGO:
Moon is the Oldest AR (A Response to Nam June Paik)
TIME: Friday, February 16, 2024, 11:30 PM – 1:00 AM CET
CHAIRS: Craig J. Saper, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Hannah B. Higgins, UIC College of Architecture and the Arts
ABSTRACT “Moon is the Oldest TV” (1965) is the name of an early video installation by Korean Fluxus artist Nam June Paik. For this benchmark video installation, Paik formed a circle of TV screens each showing one part of the lunar cycle. Standing in the middle, the rotation of the viewer animates the cycle. Paik was clearly interested in provoking disruptions to normally passive spectator behavior. This panel invites artists and scholars to address Paik’s moon, or any other work by the artist, from a variety of undertheorized perspectives including, but not limited to, the perspective of augmented reality technologies that predate or postdate TV, of intellectual challenges to the Enlightenment’s artificial clarity, of his idea of a University of Avant-Garde Hinduism, or shifting definitions of the augmented real. Paik would not want his work to sit still in the confines of its historic moment, rather this panel instantiates how some media experiments cycle eternally like the moon. “Moon is the Oldest AR” seeks papers, performances and presentations in any format.
PRESENTATIONS IN THIS SESSION:
The World’s Complicity: Nam June Paik’s Whole Earth Politics
Nicole Woods, Loyola Marymount University
Fish (also) Flies on Sky
Stephen Vitiello
Lunacy: Machines, Moons and Madness
WJT Mitchell, University of Chicago
Saturday, February 17, 2024, 9:30 PM – 11:00 PM CET
Shan Lim, Dongduk Women’s University
PART OF THE SESSION: Reinterpreting Buddhism in Contemporary Art
This presentation analyzes Nam June Paik’s art as the practice of a Zen master. Nam June Paik, known as “the father of video art,” revealed characteristics resembling a Zen master while experimenting with various forms of experimental art. This exploration is observed in his pieces such as Zen for Head, Zen for Film, Zen for TV, and TV Buddha, wherein he integrated the spiritual enlightenment derived from Zen Buddhism into his artistic expressions. During the Zen-boom era, many Western artists conveyed their connection with Zen Buddhism through their artistic creations. However, Paik stood out by revealing a profound and extensive level of understanding of Zen Buddhism. His performance art emerged as a manifestation of Zen teachings. His aesthetics of Chance and Indeterminism expressed not only conveyed the ethos of Fluxus utopia, seeking the unification art and everyday life but also encompassed the principles of annica and enlightenment. Moreover, the contemplation of images embodied by the electrons of video technology contained Zen Buddhist teachings such as practice, experience, and emptiness. As a result, Paik’s video artworks transcend the realm of mere sensory reactions to the observable and tangible world. Instead, they encapsulate teachings parallel to those imparted by a Zen master, catalyzing a profound understanding of one’s self, the nature of reality, and the interwoven universe. Through an exploration of Nam June Paik’s sage-like methodology, as evident in his Buddhist-inspired creations, our objective is to reevaluate the historical significance of both Nam June Paik himself and his artistic oeuvre.
Electronic Superhighway: The Satellite Networks of Nam June Paik in the Global Village
Thursday, February 15, 2024, 9:30 PM – 11:00 PM CET
Vuk Vuković, University of Pittsburgh
PART OF THE SESSION: Art that Re-imagines Community and the Commons in the Vacuum of Outer Space
In 1988, Korean-born artist Nam June Paik collaborated with eleven broadcasting stations across the globe, including ones from the Soviet Union and China, to create Wrap Around the World, the last in a trilogy of his global satellite works. By broadcasting live and pre-recorded art, music, and dance performances, Paik assembled a global program employing his “electronic superhighway” networks to emphasize the positive aspect of television crossing national borders (Paik, 1974). Paik actually imagined this term before anyone else did, doing so in response to Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who had himself coined the term “global village” to define the phenomenon of a networked world made possible by electronic media (McLuhan, 1962). While McLuhan argues for an interconnected world, the global village he offers is not supposed to project a utopian future but to illustrate an alternative to the dystopian present caused by Cold War politics. By analyzing a trilogy of satellite works in which Paik developed his idea of the “electronic superhighway,” ranging from Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984), Bye Bye Kipling (1986), and Wrap Around the World (1988), I will examine how Paik employed satellite technology to imagine a visual network that runs across Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. By thinking of his attempts to develop a worldwide communication network independent of national borders, I will demonstrate how Paik reimagined satellite technology to create works of art that model imagined futures through alternative uses of technology both for artistic ends and utopian possibilities.
Activating Fluxus 