In Latin and other languages, "Fluxus" literally means "flow" and "change."

Authors Avatar

In Latin and other languages, "Fluxus" literally means “flow” and “change.” Similarly, the related English word "" is used variously to mean “a state of continuous change”,”a .” Fluxus ideas were prevalent well before the 1960’s, growing with the idea of intermedia, but first summarised, exemplified and presented in a festival jointly organised by the German, Joseph Beuys, and Lithuanian-born architect and designer, George Maciunas. It was Maciunas’ desire to show the work of a specific group of people, sharing the same thoughts on art at the time and it was he who coined the name Fluxus. The Fluxus performance festival held at the Düsseldorf Art Academy on 2-3 February 1962 was a significant historical marker in the early development of the Fluxus group. Numerous Fluxus and Fluxus-type festivals and activities continued to be presented in Europe throughout the 1960’s after which the focus shifted to New York. Fluxus has been described as “the most radical and experimental art movement of the sixties. 

 Fluxus differs from most art in being purely conceptual. Characterized by a strongly  attitude, Fluxus promoted artistic experimentation mixed with social and political activism, an often celebrated anarchistic . Although  was its principal location, Fluxus was an international  movement, active in major , , , Swedish, and  cities. Its participants were a divergent group of individualists whose most common theme was their delight in  and humour. Fluxus members avoided any limiting art , and spurned pure  objectives, producing such  works as poems, mail art, silent orchestras, and  of such readily available  such as scavenged , newspapers, and other . Their activities resulted in many events or situations, often called ‘Actions’ or as known in the USA, ‘Happenings’, which were works challenging definitions of art as focused on . Street theatre was very popular as were other performances such as concerts of electronic . An account given by the American Fluxartist Dick Higgins described the sort of happening you would expect at one of his Fluxconcerts. This particular description is from the concert at Düsseldorf and it had become a kind of set piece for these festival performances. Higgins described his arrangement, Constellation No 4 as follows:

“Each performer chooses a sound to be produced on any instrument available to him, including the voice. The sound is to have a clearly defined percussive attack and a delay which is no longer than a second. Words, crackling and rustling sounds, are excluded because they have multiple attacks and decays…Each performer produces his sound as efficiently as possible, almost simultaneously with the other performers sounds. As soon as the last decay has died away, the piece is over.”

Join now!

A person, who attends a Fluxconcert, after the first shock, typically gets caught up in the spirit of it and begins to enjoy it, without consciously knowing why. What the recipient sees is coloured by his or her perception of it and instinctively he or she is matching horizons, comparing expectations, participating in the process; the more actively he or she does so, the more likely they will be able to enjoy the experience.

In 1981 Dick Higgins Wrote a list of nine criteria that he suggested central to Fluxus:

  1. internationalism
  2. experimentalism and iconoclasm
  3. intermedia (a ...

This is a preview of the whole essay