GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

SECTION B

MARCH 25, 1994

Evenings Out

In a state of Flux: a short history

of the future

Wexner Center's gallery show of antigallery art

by Charlton Harper

Anyone who has attended at least one event in Cleveland's current Performance Art Festival may have come away wondering just what is art, anyway? If you have spent an evening of performance art bewildered and confused, wondering at what point art left the safe distance of the frame and took a more interactive approach with its audience, then a good point of reference is the exhibition "Outside the Frame: Performance e and the joy of view at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art through May 1. That exhibition traces the history of performance art back to the 19th century and highlights the issues that have fueled the progression of modern art.

For a more intensified look at some of the names you may come across at that show, check out the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus. There you'll find an exhibition that serves equally well at illuminating the current issues that contemporary artists face-the role of the artist in our society, high art versus consumer art, the presentation of art, the barriers between art and life-while also serving to flesh out the history of an important forerunner to Performance Art.

"In the Spirit of Fluxus," on view through April 10 at the Wexner Center, traces the development of that well-known but littledocumented art movement of the 1960s, Fluxus.

Fluxus was a loose-knit consortium of artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers who sought to break the barriers that existed between art and life and destroy the high levels of meaning that had succeeded over the years in alienating art from its audience. George Maciunas, the central figure of '60s Fluxus work, wanted a virtual elimination of the fine arts by implanting an artistic aesthetic into everyday life. Plain simple shit like bacon and eggs and TV dinners suddenly had an aethestic, sometimes political, sometimes funny meaning beyond their literal existence. And it didn't stop there. Participation and interaction between artist and audience grew to become the thing itself. In essence, the happening, the experience, the now, became the The Thing. In a published essay from 1962, Maciunas said that "If man could experience ... the concrete world surrounding him . . . in the same way he experiences art, there would be no need for art, artists and similar 'nonproductive' elements."

Fluxus artists also sought out new spaces for their work, turning their backs on established galleries and museums for representation. You can thank Fluxus for the current trend of showing art in coffee houses and delis. But because of that disdain for the

establishment by Fluxus artists, little effort has been made at assessing the value of

Fluxus or its impact on the art of today by the current mainstream establishment.

The Wexner show, organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, is an attempt to correct the textbook omission of Fluxus. The show has a three-fold emphasis. There is an effort to chart the history of Fluxus and Fluxus events from the early '60s on, through a variety of multi-media documents-audio-visual sources, papers, posters, photographs. This serves to plant a framework for Fluxus and the milieu in which Flux art was created. Most memorable here is Ben's Window, an enormous re-creation of a London gallery window that artist Ben Vautier lived in for fifteen days in 1962 as a performance piece entitled Living Sculpture. It's a deceiving window that seems half store front, half apartment, filled with the weight of everyday life. Unfortunately, without a human presence, it seems more museum piece than performance art.

The second part of the show examines objects from various important Fluxus works of the period 1962-1978. Here you will also find "multiples," objects that were created in large numbers, reflecting a processed, man-made aesthetic that sought to destroy the idea of art object as a precious, valuable thing. Everyday objects-pop bottles, stilts, food, garbage, modified chess sets take a prominent place here. Several works directly invite the participation of the viewer. One very large wooden wall filled with painted squares with holes in their centers teases the viewer with PUT FINGER IN. The day I saw the show, the gallery was filled with the squeals of kids as they put their fingers in and got blasted with car horns, chirping crickets, whistles

and sirens. The brilliant colors of the squares did not fail to attract an army of curious fingers.

The third section shows larger Fluxus works and work by contemporary artists influenced by Fluxus. Here is the meat of the show. There are works here by Joe Jones, Nam June Paik, Alison Knowles, Benjamin Patterson, Ben Vautier and Yoko Ono (yes, Yoko Ono). There's a lot of fun in Robert Watts' stainless steel reproductions of food-a half dozen or so silver eggs in a shiny silver carton, a metallic, frozen TV dinner with glowing dessert. Yoko Ono is represented by couple of pieces that surprised me with their depth. One work in particular comes loaded with personal meaning. Painting to Hammer a Nail (1961/1966) is a block of wood embedded with nails, some angled and rusted. A hammer dangles below. In a note to the piece, Ono tells how a man came up to her at the original showing of the work and asked to hammer a nail into the wood. When she said he could if he paid a fee, he asked could he hammer an imaginary nail instead. She knew he understood where she was coming from; he was John Lennon.

As funny and fascinating as this show is, there's one big problem: setting an allencompassing show like this, in a major academic environment, defeats the essence of Fluxus, which is to prevent this very thing. Ben Vautier's Ben's Museum, 19691992, illustrates the problem. It's a giant, half-open crate that is stuffed with junk— dolls, figurines, animal images, cut-out pictures from magazines, mirrors, trinkets— set against hand-written text that says things like ART IS MADE FOR MUSEUM BASEMENTS,

Violin in Bird Cage (circa 1965)

mixed media, 1634" x 13" x 13" Joe Jones

and THIS BOX TO BE CLOSED 10 AM EVERY YEAR AND THEN PUT INTO THE BASEMENT FOREVER. Fluxus artists were aware that what they were doing to break away from academic ideology and categorization of modern art was in itself a death sentence that would plant the seeds for future academic assessment and revival like this Wexner show. Like Ben's Museum, the show itself becomes an unearthed time capsule, fresh from the gallery basement. My friend Dan said it best: "After its time, it is simultaneously relevant and not relevant." Something to think about.

There's also an annoying naiveté about Fluxus that predates more recent cultural issues and awareness. Though women artists are represented, nothing really explores what we might think of today as "women's issues," nor is there a real woman's sensibility in any of the work. And there's little that might be termed sexual or sensual. The emphasis on the object, the event and the man-made allows for little sensual stimulation. But even in this Age of AIDS, I have unconciously come to demand at least the negation of the human body, if not a full embrace of our physical lives in sex, in death, in disease, in love, in lust and animal

craze.

But that's okay. Take Fluxus for what's it's worth. The manic exuberance that fueled so many 60's “experiences” and “happenings" helped make today's stand-up comic geniuses our cultural shamans. That pre-computer imagination and belief in everyone's ability to create art, harnessed to today's technology, makes possible the indie revolution in the music industry and the current desktop 'zine phenomenon. The spirit of Fluxus lives on.

Again, Dan said it best as we drove back to Cleveland, talking about all that history preserved in acrylic boxes, waiting to be closed at 10 am. "It's like a visual textbook," he said. Maybe more like interactive virtual reality.

Wexner Center for the Arts, is located at Ohio State University, North High Street at 15th Avenue, in Columbus.