Researching Happenings and the Fluxus tendency

"In Fluxus there has never been any attempt to agree on aims or methods; individuals with something unnamable in common have simply naturally coalesced to publish and perform their work. Perhaps this common thing is a feeling that the bounds of art are much wider than they have conventionally seemed, or that art and certain long established bounds are no longer very useful."

Instead of producing expensively autographed trophy objects that only the rich could buy, Fluxus artists set out to mass-produce witty, ephemeral think-art that everyone could afford and that carried subversive messages out of the gallery system and into your daily life. There’s a jokiness afoot as well, which you recognise from the default tone of modern advertising. Read anything in here and the chances are that it will a) need to be read again and b) make you smile.

For these same democratic reasons, Fluxus pioneered outdoor happenings and street events, particularly of a musical bent. If a cello player stripped naked to play Berio, or someone began wrapping their violin in sticky tape at the climax of a Ligeti composition, they were probably doing it for Fluxus reasons.

 All artists staging Happenings operated with the fundamental belief that art could be brought into the realm of everyday life. This turn toward performance was a reaction against the long-standing dominance of the technical aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism and was a new art form that grew out of the social changes occurring in the 1950s and 1960s.

A main component of Happenings was the involvement of the viewer. Each instance a Happening occurred the viewer was used to add in an element of chance so, every time a piece was performed or exhibited it would never be the same as the previous time. Unlike preceding works of art which were, by definition, static, Happenings could evolve and provide a unique encounter for each individual who partook of the experience.

These happenings, that emphasise the temporary nature of experience draw me towards the idea of the mandala. Tibetan monks create mandala sand paintings as a form of meditation and then destroy them, in recognition of the temporality of life - I learnt this at a really special Mandala Ceremony that was shown at Splendour in the Grass last year, Tibetan throat gurgling was also part of this ceremony!