Fluxus Handout Summary

• Rene Block coined the term Fluxism which refers to the idea and philosophy of Fluxus.
  
• Fluxus is rooted in ideas of global transformation, changes in the world and changes in the way we see the world.
• Paradigms in art emerge when the world-view is shifting. Shifts in vision shape culture, history and science.
• Fluxus and intermedia emerged in the era of electronic music and video.
• Visibility and value do not always coincide.
• Fluxus was born at a shifting point in the world views.
  
• The idea that you can be an artist, and at the same time an industrialist, an architect or a designer, is a key to the way we view our work and our role in society.
• Fluxus was first a magazine title that never took off. But when a festival emerged in Wiesbaden, Germany, it was called a Fluxus Festival, and that eventually made the Fluxus group.
• A second generation emerged as the Fluxus artists began to influence others through friendship, collaboration or even teaching.
• Fluxus has been able to grow because its had room for dialogue and transformation.

Twelve Criteria of Fluxus:

1. Globalism: embraces the idea that we live on a single world, a world in which the boundaries of political states are not identical with the boundaries of nature or of culture.
2. Unity of Art and Life: when Fluxus was established, the conscious goal was to erase the boundaries between art and life, the sort of language appropriate to the time of pop art and of happening.
3. Intermedia: idea that Fluxus was an art form appropriate to people who say there can be no artificial boundaries between art and life. Without those boundaries, there can be no boundaries between art form and art form.
   
4. Experimentalism: trying new things and assessing the results. Experiments that yield useful results cease being experiments and become usable tools.
5. Research Orientation: applies not only to the experimental method, but to the ways in which research is conducted.
6. Chance: in the sense of aleatory or random chance, is a tradition with a legacy. Random chance, a way to break the bonds. Evolutionary chance engages a certain element of the random. Genetic changes occur as well in a process that is known as random selection.
   
7. Playfulness: the play of ideas, the playfulness of free experimentation, the playfulness of free association and the play of paradigm shifting that are as common to scientific experiment as to pranks.
8. Simplicity: refer to the relationship of truth and beauty, and related to the term elegance.
9. Parsimony: refer to the relationship of truth and beauty, and related to the term elegance.
10. Implicativeness: an ideal Fluxus work implies many works. This notion is close to and grows out of the notion of elegance and parsimony.
11. Exemplativism: the quality of a work exemplifying the theory and meaning of its construction.
12. Specificity: has to do with the tendency of a work to be specific, self contained, and to embody all its own parts.

• Musicality refers to the fact that many Fluxus works are designed as scores, as works which can be realized by artists other than the creator.
• The issue of musicality has fascinating implications: the mind and intention of the creator are the key element in the work.
  
• Fluxus today isn't the Fluxus that was sometimes an organized group, or movement.
• Fluxus, the circle of friends, the way of thinking and working, is alive