George Maciunas (ed.): Flux Year Box 2 (1965-68)

Flux Year Box 2, a signature Fluxus production, is a boxed anthology of works that was edited and assembled by Fluxus “chairman” George Maciunas beginning in about 1965. Like all Fluxus editions, the contents of each box varies depending on what Maciunas had available at the time.

“With this project, the assembled works nestle inside a partitioned wooden box designed by Maciunas and printed with a matrix of mismatched fonts on its hinged cover. In his request for ideas, Maciunas indicates the edition will be “limited to book events only, i.e. events that are enacted by the reader automatically as he inspects the book or box.” Scores for performances requiring additional props or instruments—for example, Albert M. Fine’s Fluxus Piece for G.M.—do not factor among this criteria. Rather, immediate sensation and contained experience are accentuated. A sort of tool kit or supply chest, Flux Year Box 2 contains materials for actions, such as corresponding using Ben Vautier’s The Postman’s Choice postcard, medicating oneself with capsules from Shigeko Kubota’s Flux Medicine, or burning down all libraries and museums using Ben Vautier’s Total Art Match-Box. In addition, during this period Maciunas produced film programs called Fluxfilms, and incorporated this audiovisual dimension into Flux Year Box 2, including numerous short loops and a hand-crank viewer with which to watch them.” (source)

via Iowa Digital Library

Wikipedia

PDF (60 MB)

Chris Thompson: Felt: Fluxus, Joseph Beuys, and the Dalai Lama (2011)

“Felt provides a nonlinear look at the engagement of the postwar avant-garde with Eastern spirituality, a context in which the German artist Joseph Beuys appears as an uneasy shaman. Centered on a highly publicized yet famously inconclusive 1982 meeting between Beuys and the Dalai Lama, arranged by the Dutch artist Louwrien Wijers, Chris Thompson explores the interconnections among Beuys, the Fluxus movement, and Eastern philosophy and spiritual practice.

Building from the resonance of felt, the fabric, in both Tibetan culture and in Beuys’s art, Thompson takes as his point of departure Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion in A Thousand Plateaus of felt as smooth space that is “in principle infinite, open, and unlimited in every direction,” its structure determined by chance as opposed to the planned, woven nature of most fabrics. Felt is thus seen as an alternative to the model of the network: felt’s anarchic form is not reducible to the regularity of the net, grid, or mesh, and the more it is pulled, tweaked, torn, and agitated, the greater its structural integrity.

Felt thus invents its methodology from the material that represents its object of inquiry and from this advances a reading of the avant-garde. At the same time, Thompson demonstrates that it is sometimes the failures of thought, the disappointing meetings, even the untimely deaths that open portals through which life flows into art and allows new conjunctions of life, art, and thought. Thompson explores both the well-known engagement of Fluxus artists with Eastern spirituality and the more elusive nature of Beuys’s own late interest in Tibetan culture, arriving at a sense of how such noncausal interactions—interhuman intrigue—create culture and shape contemporary art history.”

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2011
ISBN 0816653542, 9780816653546
319 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2020-7-1)
EPUB (updated on 2020-7-1)

Robert Filliou, et al.: Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts / Lehren und Lernen als Auffuehrungskuenste (1970–) [EN/DE, FR]

“Off and on 3 years of work and now VERLAG GEBR. KOENIG, KOELN – NEW YORK publishes the first draft of TEACHING AND LEARNING AS PERFORMING ARTS by ROBERT FILLIOU and the READER if he wishes, with the participation of JOHN CAGE, BENJAMIN PATTERSON, GEORGE BRECHT, ALLEN KAPROW, MARCELLE, VERA and BJOESSI and KARL ROT, DOROTHY IANNONE, DITER ROT, JOSEPH BEUYS. It is a Multi – book. The space provided for the reader’s use is nearly the same as the author’s own” (from cover)

Publisher Verlag Gebr. König, Cologne/New York, 1970
Editor Kasper König
236 pages
via Charles Turner

Commentary: Hannah Higgins in Fluxus Experience (pp 188–189, 195–207).

Reprint (Occassional Papers, 2014, added 2015-8-18)

Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts / Lehren und Lernen als Auffuehrungskuenste (English/German, 1970, no OCR)
Enseigner et apprendre, arts vivants (French, 1998, 34 MB, added on 2017-6-20)