Activating Fluxus
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Event Swirl: Scoring Digital Connections
Event Swirl is a webb app and communication method inspired by the principles of Fluxus practice. Each participant receives simple instructional scores and responds with their own interpretations through images, video, or sound—forming a collaborative network where chance, play, and everyday moments become opportunities for collective creative experience.
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The Multiple as Agential Object: Daniel Spoerri’s Object Complicity
When, in late November 1959, Spoerri established the first of three instalments of the Edition MAT, it was also the first attempt of its kind to build something of a concrete infrastructure around the multiple’s production and dissemination. Taking Spoerri’s logic of the multiple as my point of departure, gleaned from a mixture of Spoerri’s…
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Weronika Trojańska: The Ten Thousand Things of Charlotte Moorman
Weronika Trojańska, PhD candidate at the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław, shares her archival investigations at the Archivio Conz, Berlin. Trojańska takes, as her focus, a mysterious suitcase signed by Charlotte Moorman filled with equally mysterious contents, and attempts to discern what they are—and what they might become.
ABOUT OUR PROJECT, IN BRIEF
This research project, which has been funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation at Bern University of the Arts, investigates the objects, events, scores, and ephemera that emerged in the spirit of Fluxus in the 1960s–70s in Switzerland, Europe, the UK, and the USA. Inherently fluctuating by definition, Fluxus rejects any stable, material form. Considering the transitory aspects of Fluxus forms not destined for preservation, and looking through a multidisciplinary lens of conservation, art history, performance studies, heritage studies and museology, our project will advance novel strategies for activating Fluxus through the reconstruction, adaptation and artistic reinterpretation of Fluxus forms.
AIMS AND MEANS
The project has three principal aims : (I) Using examples of collections and individual artworks held in Switzerland and abroad, the project reviews, catalogues, evaluates and systematises the current strategies for exhibiting, conserving and documenting Fluxus. (II) By means of a theoretical investigation of the notions of authenticity, changeability and intentionality and the role they play in the continuing life of Fluxus intermedia, (III) the project advances new strategies for activating Fluxus works through (a) the reconstruction, (b) the adaptation and (c) the artistic reinterpretation of Fluxus forms.
IN DETAIL
Activating Fluxus centers on the lives and afterlives of Fluxus objects, events, and ephemera created in the 1960s–70s in Switzerland, Europe, the UK, and the US. Fluxus transformed creative practice for good, not least by questioning the dominant preconception of the artwork as something that endures unchanged. Inherently fluctuating by definition, the creative outputs of Fluxus reject any stable, material form. While many histories of the post-war avant-garde focus on the implications of nascent conceptualism and performativity for other artistic genres, the proposed project considers the fundamentally transitory aspects of Fluxus forms not destined for preservation. By seeking new ways to engage with the legacy of Fluxus through the lens of conservation, art history, performance studies, heritage studies and museology, this project examines the possibility of activating Fluxus, challenged as it is by its paradoxical coexistence of ephemerality and materiality, with implications for how we conceive of changeable artworks that emerged after the 1960s.
Activating Fluxus 