Activating Fluxus

This project examines the lives and afterlives of Fluxus objects, events, and ephemera created in the 1960s-70s in Switzerland, Europe, United Kingdom 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 a 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 will examine the possibility of activation of Fluxus, challenged as it is by its paradoxical coexistence of ephemerality and materiality. Fluxus’ neologism of “intermedium”-which signifies a work existing between art and life, and between established media categories such as poetry and painting (visual poetry) or text and performance (event)-will be reconsidered to encompass the in-between state of transition in Fluxus works, with potential implications for how we generally conceive of changeable artworks that emerged post 1960s. As this project will demonstrate, these specifics complicate the very notion of traditional conservation that was focused on safeguarding the physical properties of artifacts. Embracing change as a positive value on the one hand, and applying strategies of reconstruction, adaptation and artistic reinterpretation as valid measures to sustain Fluxus artworks on the other, this project proposes an alternative to the traditional politics of conservation and care. Further, it forges conservation as an intellectual endeavor, a way of theorizing and bringing objects to conscious attention. Fluxus here offers an immensely fruitful means of explicating the theoretical-practical intricacies of contemporary conservation, exposing its continuing attachment to traditional paradigms, and testing its tolerance for “the new.”

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