Tuesday 20 April 2010

“Formless Curation: a proposal for institutional critique”

In the following text it will be attempted to (de) construct the weave of institutional critique through contemporary curatorial practise. It will be questioned in a Derridarian way, how Western society has constructed a semantic, practical, and an operative field around artistic practise and its main characters, based and filtered through a somehow limited language.

Referring to what a critical reading should produce, the Argelian-french philosopher Jaques Derrida, expresses in his texts “The Exorbitant: Question of Method” and “The Engraving and the Ambiguities of Formalism” from Of Grammatology, that “the writer writes in a language and in a logic whose proper system, laws, and life his discourse by definition cannot dominate absolutely. He uses them only by letting himself, after a fashion and up to a point, be governed by the system. And the reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses.”[1]

Is this only applicable on critical reading? Haven’t other disciplines made language one of the most important elements to construct their own discourse?

Such as literature appears to be forever tied to language, there are other fields as art that have been “benefited” from it. Even though artistic practise aimed to create a “new way of expression” or “communication of ideas”, most of the time it ends tripping over linguistics. It seems that there is no “artistic communication” between the different characters appearing on the artistic scene, if there was, there would not be words in museums, no artistic reviews or critiques in journals, no catalogues, nor other kinds of tools used by artists, curators, critics, spectators, journalists, museographers, among loads of other characters involved. In fact, in other sense, we can turn back to Hegel and some of his followers (such as Arthur Danto), which “predicted” that art was going to turn into text or philosophy.

In spite of this, some might rightfully claim that art operates through a system of signs, which may constitute a language. In fact, Derrida himself suggested that “if art operates through the sign…it can only take place within the system of a culture… Aesthetics passes through a semiology and even through an ethnology. The effects of aesthetic signs are only determined within a cultural system.”[2]

Nevertheless, we should take into account that even those signs can be translated into a text filtered by language. Both image and word (letters), working as signs, refer to something in particular but they are thought, explained, expressed, shaped and even exist through the same language that, as Derrida suggests, operates into a cultural system.

If Clement Greenberg claimed in the past that three-dimensionality was a proper quality of sculpture and that painting should stop borrowing it, why does literature does not claim its own rights? It might be because language is not a proper quality of literature either; in fact the misconception appeared when Western societies thought that they constructed language: it was language which constructed them, their lives and all the social and cultural practises, their weltanschauung is completely filtered by it. As once Ludwing Wittgenstein expressed “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

Now that this has been said, the question is, how could the semantic field around artistic practise be used as critique? Is it possible to make institutional critique through curating? (Saying that most of the time the practise and the dictionary meanings of curating are associated to institutions).

This is not such a recent idea, as there are texts, reviews, symposiums, conferences, and even practical intents that talk about it. For example, “Issues of curating contemporary art and performance”, as its own intro suggests, this was a book which came out from a series of symposia hosted in 2004 and 2005 by the University College for the Creative Arts at Canterbury “on issues of curating as a form of critical intervention into ways of comprehending contemporary culture.”[3] The authors of the book explain how during the 1960s, curatorial criticism became latent as the space of exhibition turned to be a critical tool as important (or even more) as the art object. It is also pointed out that curatorial criticism was different from “that of traditional western art criticism (i.e. linked to modernity)” in the sense that they included the role which the curator played on exhibitions. It is said that in the 1990s, artists and curators were compromised with this “neo-criticality” and to show their engagement, they stretched the parameters of the exhibition to “incorporate more discursive, conversational, and geo-political discussion.”[4] Nevertheless, all this was done in order to establish curatorial practise as a space of critique, indeed, according to them, the curator took the place of the critic.

But, is that doing institutional critique through curating? Speaking about politics does not mean being critical. It seems that it was just a change of role, or better, the appearance of a new character, a new producer of cultural value, which by the way, needs to earn money for a living. This new character now has become an unarguable job vacancy on the artistic sector, mainly on institutions.

It is worth to bring up the point that this “new face” of curating which aimed to do institutional critique, did it sometimes through institutions in a Kantian way: apparently institutions tried to become self critical. That was such a moderate, pink-light way of doing it! Wasn’t it kind of hypocritical? A tricky attempt with a kantian-marxist mask to show the world that the art institution is not authoritarian nor it has an hegemonic structure.

This does not exactly mean that all the critical purposes through curating were hypocritical; in fact, there are plenty of great projects that do a truly sincere institutional critique. Nowadays the job of the curator appears to be much more flexible, what takes me to think that the concept is limited. If practically the concept is trying to expand, then why not doing a theoretical expansion as well?

Referring to this expansion of the concept of curating, Alex Farquharson in the article “I curate, you curate, we curate” says that “new words, after all, especially ones as grammatically bastardised as the verb “to curate” (worse still the adjective “curatorial”), emerge from a linguistic community’s persistent need to identify a point of discussion.”[5] This may be useful, but just to show how the expansion of meaning comes from a need of clarification, and not as a new way of taking the concept into practise.

To revert this, what this text proposes is to work through the meanings of the words that constitute the art weave. That is to say, a deconstruction or an expansion of the semantic field of the words, leaving behind the mental procedure of using words as defined on the dictionary. It will not be the dictionary which defines words, but how do they operate, or even better, how COULD they operate, this means to leave open the condition of possibility.

George Bataille defined the “formless” on his “Critical Dictionary” saying that “a dictionary should begin from the point when it is no longer concerned with the meaning but only with the use of words. Thus formless is not only an adjective with a certain meaning, but a term serving to deprecate, implying the general demand that everything should have a form. That which it designates has no rights to any sense, and is everywhere crushed under foot like a spider or a worm.”[6]

Therefore, the proposal is going to be the publication of a newspaper called “Formless Curation”, making obvious reference to the concepts reviewed before. It will be published every week.

This proposal emerged by going through the ideas of Fluxus and Situationism. It has theoretical elements of both movements, but also with some ambiguous aspects. It will not be engaged to any particular statement or idea and it will have the format of a real newspaper.

Its theoretical framework is based on this text and is also inspired by Wittgenstein’s Tractatus- logico philosopicus. If the questions are: what is a newspaper? What is a museum? What is an exhibition? What does “visiting” a museum or an exhibition mean? What is an artist? What is curating? Then the answers that the Tractatus would give are:

2.014

Objects contain the possibility of all situations.

3.02

A thought contains the possibility of the situation of which it is the thought. What is thinkable is also possible.

Therefore, if I think that a museum can be a newspaper and the curator can literally perform through it, then it is possible, and it is not anymore about the practise being in agreement with what the concept says, but it is about making a concept through the way it can operate. The thing is to feed this idea of a shift of episteme and of structure (in which art and art history have been engaged playing a fundamental role) within the flexibility not only of the semantic field, the discourse, or even the mere “artistic” practise, but with the whole “dispositif.”

Newspapers are a key issue on enhancing and maintaining “the exercise of power within the social body.”[7] They are well located as “truthful” pieces of paper and even if they pretend they are not, they appear to be always engaged to ideological “institutions.” Here, two concepts are going to be deconstructed: newspaper and institution; on one hand, why would a newspaper be exactly as we know it?

And on the other hand, institutions are not only buildings with doors, but ideological fields; then doing institutional critique is criticising ideology.

But the question is, what would happen if the meaning of this rooted words/things/concepts change or expand? It would be a slight micro-possibility (may be utopian, as it is stated that a proposal can be[8]) of breaking or penetrating on the hegemonic structure. This structure is of course sub-divided, and some of those divisions can be the museum as an institutional framework of art, the characters involved, such as the curator, and the tight structure of the media as a “truthful” device.

This newspaper will have the appearance of a normal newspaper, the price will be the same as the cheapest newspaper available, and it will be sold in the same places. It is going to assume itself as a museum and the names of the staff are going to have the same titles as the typical museum staff. i.e. there will be no editor, there will be curators, museographers, etc.

Such as the newspaper, it will have different sections but all of them related to artistic practises. For example, in the business/finance/economy section, the works published may be related to auctions, market, sales, etc. This may be contradictory, but the market is part of the art world and this newspaper is not pretending to hide anything. There will not be any intentional non dit.

Some of the pages will be dedicated to temporary exhibitions (the public will be able to send their works and proposals to the office and they will be analysed and chosen by a committee, then the curator will work with the artist or the artists). Articles, essays, manifestos, critiques, etc. could be published as well. It will be different from a journal because it will not be homogeneous in themes nor practises, but the difference with a traditional newspaper will be that it will not promote itself as a “truthful” space nor it will attempt to construct any particular discourse, the ideal will be to be seen as: an archive and as an artwork itself that can only be judged in a Kantian way.

In conclusion, it is left to be said that this may be one in a thousand proposals of doing institutional critique; in fact, there is nothing original about this one, but the main attempt is to collect several proposals with different ideologies, to deconstruct through several mediums the concept of art institutions, artistic practise, and its main characters in order to aspire to a change of episteme. In this case, the medium aims to be language and to think about it in terms of how the things that it represents COULD operate, and not to understand it as an absolute and breaking point category of practise.

Bibliography:

Bataille, Georges “Critical Dictionary”, in Art in Theory: 1900-2000…An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. By Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 482-484.

Derrida, Jacques, “The Exorbitant: Question of Method” and “The Engraving and the Ambiguities of Formalism, form Of Grammatology, in Art in Theory: 1900-2000…An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. By Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 944-949.

Farquharson, Alex. “I curate, you curate, we curate”, Art Monthly, Issue 269, September 2003: 7-10.

Lewis, Peter, “If X, then Y, A Pure Condition: Proposals and Rehearsals”, /Seconds http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/003/003/articles/01_plewis/index.php [accessed 5 March 2010]

Rugg, Judith and Michèle Sedgwick, Issues in curating contemporary art and performance, (Intellect Books: The University of Chicago Press, 2007).

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, (Oxford: Rhees, 1984).



[1] Jacques Derrida, “The Exorbitant: Question of Method” and “The Engraving and the Ambiguities of Formalism, form Of Grammatology, in Art in Theory: 1900-2000…An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. By Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 944-949, p. 944.

[2]Jacques Derrida, p. 946.

[3]Judith Rugg and Michèle Sedgwick, Issues in curating contemporary art and performance, (Intellect Books: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 7.

[4] [4]Judith Rugg and Michèle Sedgwick, p. 13.

[5] Alex Farquharson, “I curate you curate we curate.” Art Monthly. Issue 269, September 2003: 7-10.

[6] Georges Bataille, “Critical Dictionary”, in Art in Theory: 1900-2000…An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. By Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 482-484, p. 483.

[7] Peter Lewis “If X, then Y, A Pure Condition: Proposals and Rehearsals”, /Seconds http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/003/003/articles/01_plewis/index.php [accessed 5 March 2010]

[8] Peter Lewis “If X, then Y, A Pure Condition: Proposals and Rehearsals.”

Tuesday 9 March 2010

class workshop 1.1

1 2 3

PERFORMANCE/INTERVENTION


class workshop 1.0

TRACTATUS

TEXT EXPLANATION --> Project

The proposal is the publication of a newspaper. It will be published every week.
This proposal emerged by going through the ideas of Fluxus and Situationism. It has theoretical elements of both movements, but also with some ambiguous aspects. It will not be engaged to any particular statement or idea.
It somehow attempts to have the “Slashseconds” ideology, but with different projects and in the format of a real newspaper.
Its theoretical framework is also inspired by Wittgenstein’s Tractatus- logico philosopicus. If the questions are: what is a newspaper? What is a museum? What is an exhibition? What does “visiting” a museum or an exhibition mean? What is an artist? What is curating? Then the answers that the Tractatus would give are:

2.014
Objects contain the possibility of all situations.

3.02
A thought contains the possibility of the situation of which it is the thought. What is thinkable is also possible.

Therefore, if I think that a museum can be a newspaper and the curator can literally perform through it, then it is possible. The thing is to feed this idea of a shift of episteme and of structure (in which art and art history have been engaged playing a fundamental role) within the flexibility not only of the semantic field, the discourse, or even the mere “artistic” practise, but with the whole “dispositif.”
Newspapers are a key issue on enhancing and maintaining “the exercise of power within the social body." (Peter Lewis “If X, then Y, A Pure Condition: Proposals and Rehearsals”, /Seconds http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/003/003/articles/01_plewis/index.php [accessed 5 March 2010])
They are well located as “truthful” pieces of paper and even if they pretend they are not, they appear to be always engaged to ideological “institutions.”
But what would happen if the meaning of this rooted word/thing/concept changes or expands? It would be a slight micro-possibility (may be utopian, as it is stated that a proposal can be: Peter Lewis “If X, then Y, A Pure Condition: Proposals and Rehearsals.”) of breaking or penetrating on the hegemonic structure. This structure is of course sub-divided, and two of those divisions can be the museum as an institutional framework of art and the tight structure of the media as a “truthful” device.
This newspaper will have the appearance of a normal newspaper, the price will be the same as the cheapest newspaper available, and it will be sold in the same places. It is going to assume itself as a museum and the names of the staff are going to have the same titles as the typical museum staff. i.e. there will be no editor, there will be curators, museographers, etc.
Such as the newspaper, it will have different sections but all of them related to artistic practises. For example, in the business/finance/economy, the works published may be related to auctions, market, sales, etc. This may be contradictory, but the market is part of the art world and this newspaper is not pretending to hide anything. There will not be any intentional non dit.
Some of the pages will be dedicated to temporary exhibitions (the public will be able to send their works and proposals to the office and they will be analysed and chosen by a committee, then the curator will work with the artist or the artists). Articles, essays, manifestos, critiques, etc. could be published as well. It will be different from a journal because it will not be homogeneous in themes nor practises, but the difference with a traditional newspaper will be that it will not promote itself as a “truthful” space nor it will attempt to construct any particular discourse, the ideal will be to be seen as: an archive and as an artwork itself that can only be judged in a Kantian way.


Bibliography:

Lewis, Peter, “If X, then Y, A Pure Condition: Proposals and Rehearsals”, /Seconds http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/003/003/articles/01_plewis/index.php [accessed 5 March 2010]

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, (Oxford: Rhees, 1984).

Wednesday 24 February 2010

STEP BY STEP

First of all, what is Fluxus?


When you google the word "fluxus", the second webpage that appears (after wikipedia, of course...) is www.fluxus.org which appears to be really useful (click and you'll see..).

Quickly I found exactly what I wanted... "A child's history of fluxus" by Dick Higgins, and I decided to work on it a bit. Let's see what we can do...

Tuesday 23 February 2010

Lets say that mum is reading this to her child;
  • Yellow (original text by Dick Higgins)
  • Pink (Conversation between mother and child → my intervention)
  • Pictures (my intervention)

"A Child's History of Fluxus" by Dick Higgins

The following was first published in 1979 in Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia.

Long long ago, back when the world was young - that is, sometime around the year 1958 - a lot of artists and composers and other people who wanted to do beautiful things began to look at the world around them in a new way (for them). They said: "Hey! - coffee cups can be more beautiful than fancy sculptures. A kiss in the morning can be more dramatic than a drama by Mr. Fancypants. The sloshing of my foot in my wet boot sounds more beautiful than fancy organ music."
And when they saw that, it turned their minds on. And they began to ask questions. One question was: "Why does everything I see that's beautiful like cups and kisses and sloshing feet have to be made into just a part of something fancier and bigger? Why can't I just use it for its own sake?" When they asked questions like that, they were inventing Fluxus; but this they didn't know yet, because Fluxus was like a baby whose mother and father couldn't agree on what to call it - they knew it was there, but it didn't have a name.
Ch: Like you and dad, mom?
M: Yes, like dad and me.



Well, these people were scattered all over the world. In America there were George (George Brecht) and Dick (Dick Higgins) and La Monte (La Monte Young) and Jackson (Jackson MacLow) and plenty of others. In Germany there were Wolf (Wolf Vostell) and Ben and Emmett (Ben Patterson and Emmett Williams) who were visiting there from America, and there was another visitor in Germany too from a very little country on the other side of the world, from Korea - his name was Nam June Paik. Oh there were more too, there and in other countries also. They did "concerts" of everyday living; and they gave exhibitions of what they found, where they shared the things that they liked best with whoever would come. Everything was itself, it wasn't part of something bigger and fancier. And the fancy people didn't like this, because it was all cheap and simple, and nobody could make much money out of it. But these people were scattered all over the world. They sometimes knew about each other, but they didn't see each other much or often. And they spoke different languages and had different names for what they were doing, even when they were doing the same thing. It was all mixed up.



Ch: Why didn’t they see each other often?
M: Because they lived too far away and it was not as easy as today to travel.
Ch: And how did they come up doing the same thing if they were so far away and spoke different languages?

M: mmmhh.. I don’t know, I think it was God’s will.

Ch: But dad says that there is no such thing as God.




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9UTCnMjml0
[very fluxus → quite nice collection of images (collection → leftovers → anthology]

Well, La Monte had a pal - another George, George Maciunas: his name looked strange but sounded easy enough-- "Ma-choo-nuss". And George Maciunas liked to make books. So La Monte said, "Let's do a book of-our kind of thing." And his friend Jackson agreed. And they did it. La Monte collected the things for the book, and George Maciunas put it onto pages, and after a while, they were able to take it to a printer and have it printed. They called the book An Anthology which is a fun word for a collection. No fancy name. Not "A Fluxus Anthology", because Fluxus things weren't named yet. Just An Anthology. It was a beautiful book and you can still buy it and look at the beautiful, simple things in it - ideas and piles of words and ways for making your own life more wonderful.

Well, it costs money to make books, and if you spend your money on one thing you can't spend it on another. George Maciunas had rented a beautiful big room in the fanciest part of New York City, and there he had an art gallery where Fluxus kinds of things were shown and shared or allowed to happen. But when there was no money to pay for all that, once the book was done, George Maciunas had to give up his AG Gallery, as he called it; and he decided to go to Germany. With him he took some big boxes all chockablock full of leftover things that La Monte and the others had collected, but which didn't fit into the Anthology.

George Maciunas' idea was to get together with the people in Germany who were doing the same kind of thing, and to do something like a book and something like a magazine - it would be printed every so often, and it would always change, always be different, always be really itself. It needed a name. So George Maciunas chose a very funny word for "change" - Fluxus. And he started taking Fluxus things to the printers in Germany, to make his magazine. To let people know about this kind of book, he decided to give some Fluxus concerts there, so the newspapers would write about them and people would find out about his books. So in September 1962 the first of the Fluxus concerts happened in a little city where George Maciunas was living, in Wiesbaden, Germany (you say that - "Vees'-bodd-en"). Dick went there from New York, with Alison (Alison Knowles) his artist wife, and they took with them lots of pieces by other American people who had been finding and sharing Fluxus kinds of things.

The concerts certainly did get written about! They were on television too. Poor George Maciunas' mother! She was an old-fashioned lady, and when the television showed all the crazy things that her son George was doing at the Fluxus concerts, she was so embarrassed that she wouldn't go out of her house for two weeks because she was so ashamed of what the neighbors might say. Oh well, you have to expect that kind of thing. Actually some of the neighbors really liked the Fluxus concerts. The janitor at the museum where the Fluxus concerts were happening liked them so well that he came to every performance with his wife and children.

By and by other museums and public places wanted Fluxus concerts too. So Fluxus concerts happened next in England and Denmark and France. And new pieces kept being found or done -Fluxus people (we called them "flux-people") sent things from Japan and Holland and all kinds of places. Fluxus got famous. And then Fluxus began to get copied. Fancy people began copying Fluxus things and ideas. But they tried to make fancy things out of them - and that changed them. When teacups were replaced by millions of teacups they weren't simple any more, so they stopped being Fluxus. That was always the difference: they stopped being art of life. You could always tell the real Fluxus thing from the fake ones because the real ones stayed simple, while the fake ones had fancy names attached to them.


Ch: Mom you’ve just said that fancy people didn’t like this!
M: Yes I did.

Ch: Did they change their mind?

M: Yes they did.

Ch: As John Lennon changed his mind?

M: What?

Ch: Yes, he intended to show that in the song, right?
M: Well…


Once fame began to happen George Maciunas and the other Fluxus people had to figure out what to do next to keep Fluxus fun and working for everybody. George liked to be the boss; but he was smart enough to know that he couldn't be boss and tell the Fluxus artists what to do. because they'd quit and they were mostly better artists than he was. So he became the chairman instead. That meant that he couldn't tell people what they had to do, or what they must not do if they wanted to stay part of Fluxus; instead he could tell the world what Fluxus was, and anyone who wanted to do that kind of thing was Fluxus. That was smart because it meant the Fluxus people didn't break up into gangs that disagreed, the way lots of artists' groups did before that. They stuck together to do Fluxus kinds of things, even when they were also doing other kinds of things at the same time.

Twice George Maciunas forgot this. Once, in the winter of 1963, Dick and Alison went to Sweden and gave Fluxus concerts; but there was no money to buy tickets so George Maciunas or Ben or Emmett could come to Sweden. So Dick (that's me) and Alison gave the concerts with new Swedish Fluxus people there. George got very angry and told Dick and Alison they couldn't be Fluxus people any more. But so what: nobody paid any attention to that. because Dick and Alison were doing Fluxus concerts of things by Ben and Emmett and George (Brecht) and Bob (Watts) and the Japanese Fluxus people and so on.

It was fun and it was Fluxus, which was what counted.

In 1963 George Maciunas came back to America. He opened a Fluxus store and gave Fluxus festivals. The German Fluxus people came to visit; so did the artists' groups before that. They stuck together to do Fluxus kinds of French ones. Invitations began to come from fancy places - museums and colleges; but the Fluxus people were too smart to get involved with those. They would have lost their freedom. Ch: STOP! So the colleges' and museums got the fake Fluxus people and things (and they still have them, mostly). You could tell the fakes because they weren't themselves: because of their famous names. The real things were much cheaper, and this confused the fancy folk. But oh well.
Ch: Stop!
M: What…

Ch: Why were they smart?
M: I just read it.
Ch: Yes, but why is there such a thing as “fakes” if fluxus is change and freedom?

M: Because….mmmh, just because.

Ch: Just because?

M: Yes, just because!

Ch: Was it a change?

M: Fluxus means change!

Ch: Was it a change? As John Lenon changed his mind?


But by 1965 some of the Fluxus people themselves began to get famous. This would have been okay, except that George Maciunas didn't know how to handle them anymore. He kept trying to be boss. He got very very angry when a group of Fluxus people decided to join some artists who weren't Fluxus people in a big performance that was kind of a circus, called Originale ("Or-ee-ghee-noll-eh"). Maciunas and his friend Henry Flynt tried to get the Fluxus people to march around outside the circus with white cards that said Originale was bad. And they tried to say that the Fluxus people who were in the circus weren't Fluxus any more. That was silly, because it made a split. I thought it was funny, and so first I walked around with Maciunas and with Henry with a card, then I went inside and joined the circus; so both groups got angry with me. Oh well. Some people say that Fluxus died that day - I once thought so myself - but it turned out I was wrong.

Ch: Mhhh? is fluxus art?

M: why are you asking?

Ch: “He got very angry when a group of Fluxus people decided to join some artists who weren’t Fluxus …”

M: Mmm I don’t know…
Ch: You don’t know anything.

Why was I wrong? Because Fluxus things still needed doing and Fluxus people kept on doing them. Maciunas kept printing Fluxus things - cards and games and ideas - and putting them into little plastic boxes that were more fun than most books. I made little books that were really Fluxus, though they didn't have that name on them. And every so often there were flux-concerts.

And there still are. A lot of time has gone by now. As I write this it is almost 1980. George Maciunas died last year of a long and horrible illness. But he knew before he died that his mistake was forgiven, that all the Fluxus people were together again - they came together for concerts, for New Years' parties, for many things like that. And when Maciunas was dying, they came together to his house to help him finish up a lot of his Fluxus boxes and works before he died. When Maciunas went into the hospital for the last time, his doctors said, "We don't know why this man is still alive". But the Fluxus people knew. Being friends and sharing simple things can be so very important.
And though Fluxus is almost twenty years old now - or maybe more than twenty, depending on when you want to say it began - there are still new Fluxus people coming along, joining the group. Why? Because Fluxus has a life of its own, apart from the old people in it. It is simple things, taking things for themselves and not just as part of bigger things. It is something that many of us must do, at least part of the time. So Fluxus is inside you, is part of how you are. It isn't just a bunch of things and dramas but is part of how you live. It is beyond words.

Ch: Like God?
M: Yes! Exactly, like God!


When you grow up, do you want to be part of Fluxus? I do.


Ch: Yes! I do too!
M: Good.
Ch: Mom, do you believe in God?

M: Sure! Do you?

Ch: No…I just believe in Fluxus… Fluxus and me…