Flux Generations

This intergenerational conversation between Fluxus artists and their children was held on November 6, 1999, on the occasion of a concert/performance memorial for the late Fluxus artist Dick Higgins at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, organized to coincide with Part II of The American Century: Art and Culture, 1950-2000. The participants included Alison Knowles (Dick Higgins's wife) and their daughter Hannah Higgins and Geoffrey Hendricks and his son Bracken Hendricks. It was moderated by Janet A. Kaplan.

Kaplan: What do you see as key tenets of Fluxus?

Knowles: I've always thought of Fluxus as remarkable for its offering of collaboration with so-called ordinary people as well as Fluxus artists.

G. Hendricks: The whole aspect of the family spirit, the generational interaction, the collaborative and performative quality, the sense of play, of impermanence, which is about focusing on the moment, so that things can be ephemeral, the playing down of ego. There were certainly conflicts and rivalries in the group, but basically we are an amazingly harmonious bunch.

B. Hendricks: Also, in this performance and collaboration, dialogue is central, and establishing a forum to examine experience. Rather than producing products, it creates a context to think about action and to play with the processes of creation, communication, and investigation. It's a methodology, like the scientific method. It sets up a process for engaging questions of what and how and why you make and do things. You're destroying the object nature of the objects to think about the underlying questions that are imbedded in them. To say anything too definitive is destructive to the spirit of it, because there's a subtlety of interactions and connections between people or particular moments. Fluxus asks, "If you change the context or the perception of things, what does that do?" It's setting yourself up to learn from, look at, and play with the experience, to discover. It's less about the product than about the process of getting to the product.

G. Hendricks: Not wanting to pin it down is interesting. Fluxus has strong links to Zen Buddhism. Back in the 1950s there was a feeling that it was, in a way, really wrong for these books to be coming out about Zen, because it was contrary to the spirit of Zen. The minute you pinned it down with writing you were in a way destroying it or missing the essence of what it was about. I think this is also true with Fluxus.

Higgins: I think that explains many of the problems of articulating Fluxus. It's important to avoid rigid positions. I've been trying to think about what words might define Fluxus, and things come to mind like veins, currents, fluid metaphors. It's in the name of Fluxus, but it's lost on most writers who write about it, who tend to want to understand fluidity only as against structure, and then the fluid form only exists as a kind of negation.

Kaplan: Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurist performance activities seem to have shared a similar spirit of exploration, of breaking down boundaries, of looking to process instead of product. They have an elaborate history in modernist thought. Yet, there was relatively little coverage of Fluxus at the time, and it certainly isn't part of the standard art history walk-through. What do you see as different about Fluxus from those precursors? Do you see it as part of a continuum?

Knowles: My Fluxus involves performance as its major ingredient. There is no problem making links to Filippo Tomaso Marinetti or the Caf[acute{e}] Voltaire as earlier performance groups. However, Fluxus is a very loosely associated group of friends without a political direction who are nonjudgmental of one another. Remember, Kurt Schwitters was not avant-garde enough to be in the Dada group because he had a Christmas tree! That's so absurd. Fluxus would never take a stand like that, probably because there wouldn't be agreement on whether a Christmas tree was necessarily bourgeois. Phil Niblock hung his Christmas tree upside down from the ceiling one year! Very avant-garde.

G. Hendricks: During the Avant-Garde Festival in Central Park in 1965, I dumped flowers in the middle of the conservatory pond and came out with police lights on me. Then, over the loudspeaker Charlotte Moorman asked me to come and perform Schwitters's class-struggle opera. Schwitters was incorporated right into the whole thing. Dick Higgins published the Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck and was very interested in the roots of Dada in relation to Fluxus.

Higgins: The question of whether Fluxus is an avant-garde comes up again and again among the artists. I remember at the Copenhagen Fluxus in 1993, with Geoff and Eric Andersen and my mother, it wasn't a shouting match, but there was a strong sense of investment in taking the position that Fluxus is or is not an avant-garde movement. I wouldn't describe Fluxus as avant-garde in the traditional sense. At a certain point, it was a useful short-hand. But it gives a false sense of containment and control over the group. Party politics implies a kind of directionality that is necessary for destroying the bourgeois order. Fluxus is more anarchistic. If it has a political implication, it's an atomizing of the world, getting so close to things that their connection to other things tends to dissolve and materialize at the same time.