FLUXUS was an international avant-garde movement that started in the 1970s and in which an important role was played by George Maciunas. Members of the movement wanted to shake up the existing cultural foundations and to act as an antithesis to the commercial art of the time.
A strong impetus for this revolution was the intrusion of reality into creativity, erasing the boundaries between elitist, mass appeal, film and applied arts. Activities that were typical of FLUXUS members were anti-elitist, “do it yourself”, simple, mundane, jokes, reproductions, performances, processual aesthetics. And, of course, one of its essential hallmarks – the collective nature of creativity.
The FLUXUS Hive exhibition presents a part of the FLUXUS collection held by the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center that represents this movement as a collective activity. Of course, FLUXUS was an exclusively performative, unending experiment which is why today we can only present documents and artifacts that reflect that multi-layered process, or, simply put – archival material.
The FLUXUS exhibition at the National Library is presented through this prism of collectiveness and is not reflective of avant-garde art in the narrow sense, but as a general view of the world which is like a wave that expands and in ever more unexpected ways affects ever wider cultural areas.
The principle of collectiveness in FLUXUS is reflected through different aspects: (a) several collective FLUXUS actions, happenings, festival posters (b) artifacts that were collectively created (sometimes without noting the actual artist’s name) (c) objects created for public interaction (d) and finally, through fragments and associative documents, the creation of the SoHo artists’ community in New York. Therefore, the nature of the collectiveness of FLUXUS is a metaphor for a beehive that reveals itself through a number of archival edges.
The exhibition opens on May 23 at 5PM and can be visited until July 9. The curator of the exhibition is Dr. Kęstutis Šapoka.
The exhibition Avilys of FLUXUS works is part of a larger project. The other half, FLUXUS & Maciunas ‘92” opened on May 9 at the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center, Malunu St. 8, Vilnius. The exhibition is a reconstruction of one of the first FLUXUS projects in Lithuania that took place in 1992 in Vilnius at the Youth Center. Collectiveness was also an important part of the Lithuanian project.