Fluxus and after

'FLIJXIJS IS ST I LL NEEDED, IN A WORLD OF PRETENS ION AND FALSENESS , GRANDIOSITY AND lilT MO R L E S S N E S 5' ( D i c k Higgins) Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles were two of the original protagonists of Fluxus in the United States. Many of their performances and installations from the early 1960s have since become classics, and are models of the Fluxus precept that art and life should be indistinguishable. With backgrounds in poetry and the visual arts respectively, Higgins and Knowles used basic elements of daily life, such as cooking and reading the newspaper, as the focus of their work which relied for its effect upon simplicity, specificity and chance. Dick Higgins has often been regarded as Fluxus' major thinker and was the earliest to theorise the phenomenon. The term 'Intermedia' was coined by him to describe a new site of creative activity which existed between various fields (music, poetry, design, theatre, vaudeville, high art EJXX etc.), thereby continuing the blurring of classic distinctions which had begun earlier in the century with Futurism and Dada. In his landmark statement of 1966, Higgins observed that such an impulse had re-emerged as a result of the challenge felt by artists to respond to dramatic shifts in cultural value systems: 'For the last ten years or so, artists have changed their media to suit this (current) situation, to the point where the media have broken down in their traditional forms, and have become merely puristic points of reference. The idea has arisen.., throughout the entire world, LLJ that these points are arbitrary and only useful as critical tools... This is the intermedial approach, to emphasise the dialectic CQ between the media... the central problem is now not only the new formal one of learning to use them (the intermedia), but the new and more social one of what to use them for. Having discovered tools with an immediate impact, for what are we going to use them?... there are dangerous forces at work in our world, isn't it appropriate to ally ourselves against these, and to use what we really care about and love or hate as the new subject matter in our work?... We must find the ways to say what has to be said in the light of our new means of communicating... There is a great deal for us to do...'. (Statement on Intermedia by Dick Higgins, New York, 3 August 1 966) Poetry Intermedia Gift of the artist, Barrytown, New York 1993 Collection of small 'intermedial visuals' from the 1960s and 1970s including a word puzzle, Ode to London 1967, the poem pearls, pearls of pearls, and a handful of copies of Tamurlane's 'Darugarl Higgins explains: 'This piece, dating from c.1964, is a sound poetry event for audience. Everyone is given a score, and they howl out, as loud as possible, the indicated sounds in any order. The piece I lasts as long as desired'. (Letter toA. Kirker,4July 1993) °- Self portraitof 1973 takes the form of a pithy quotidian poem on delicate handmade paper impressed with leaves and butterflies. CD Xm.e~ 410w 30 3L 3B 3Lm.AL 4W 30 3L 00