Hannah Higgins: Fluxus Experience (2002)

“In this work, Hannah Higgins explores the influential art movement Fluxus. Daring, disparate, contentious—Fluxus artists worked with minimal and prosaic materials now familiar in post-World War II art. Higgins describes the experience of Fluxus for viewers, even experiences resembling sensory assaults, as affirming transactions between self and world.

Fluxus began in the 1950s with artists from around the world who favored no single style or medium but displayed an inclination to experiment. Two formats are unique to Fluxus: a type of performance art called the Event, and the Fluxkit multiple, a collection of everyday objects or inexpensive printed cards collected in a box that viewers explore privately. Higgins examines these two setups to bring to life the Fluxus experience, how it works, and how and why it’s important. She does so by moving out from the art itself in what she describes as a series of concentric circles: to the artists who create Fluxus, to the creative movements related to Fluxus (and critics’ and curators’ perceptions and reception of them), to the lessons of Fluxus art for pedagogy in general.

Although it was commonly associated with political and cultural activism in the 1960s, Fluxus struggled against being pigeonholed in these too-prescriptive and narrow terms. Higgins, the daughter of the Fluxus artists Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins, makes the most of her personal connection to the movement by sharing her firsthand experience, bringing an astounding immediacy to her writing and a palpable commitment to shedding light on what Fluxus is and why it matters.”

Publisher University of California Press, 2002
ISBN 0520228677, 9780520228672
259 pages

Reviews: Ken Friedman (Design Research, 2003), Jennie Klein (PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 2004), Roy R. Behrens (Leonardo, 2004), Branislav Jakovljevic (TDR: The Drama Review, 2004), Ágnes Ivacs (Artpool, n.d.).

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-7-18)

Miklós Peternák, Éva Kozma (eds.): Bauhaus Lab, Film Workshop, Budapest (2010) [English/Hungarian]

Publication from the workshops and presentations dedicated to László Moholy-Nagy, held in 2009 in Budapest.

Publisher C3 Center for Culture and Communication, Budapest, 2010
ISBN 9789638879202
85 pages

Event
Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-8-3)

Elizabeth Legge: Michael Snow: Wavelength (2009)

“In 1966 Michael Snow made the film Wavelength, a masterful exploration of the nature of perception. Throughout the film’s forty-five minutes, the camera slowly zooms from one end of a New York City loft space to its far wall, accompanied by the sound of a rising sine wave.

In this critical study, Elizabeth Legge describes Wavelength as a film of expertly managed tensions, sensuous beauty, subtle light and colour and recession into perspectival depth. Wavelength was crucial to critics’ efforts to establish a vocabulary for the experimental film movement emerging a the time, and has functioned ever since as a blue screen in front of which a range of ideological and intellectual dramas have been played.”

Publisher Afterall Books, 2009
One Work series
ISBN 1846380561, 9781846380563
112 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2020-7-13)