Eric Andersen (artist)

Last updated

Eric Andersen (born 1940 in Antwerp) is a Danish artist associated with the Fluxus art movement. He lives in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Contents

Eric Andersen's artistic activities invite the audience to look at life from new, unexpected perspectives. It can deal with widely different phenomena such as: composing music, the function of museum institutions, the postal system, art or ethnological collecting to natural phenomena such as our circulation around the sun or the functions of or scent. His activity is intermedial, that is to say that he does not use traditional artist's materials and that meant that he and others broke with what kind of issues/subjects art could include.

Life and work

In 1962 Andersen first took part in one of the early concerts given by Fluxus held during the Festum Fluxorum in the Nikolai Kirke (Nicolas Church) in Copenhagen. [1] He soon took an early interest in intermedial art. [2] [3] In his Opus works from the early 1960s, Andersen explored the open interaction between performer and public, [4] developing open self-transforming works, such as arte strumentale.

Eric Andersens most eminent works include: Hidden Paintings , Crying Spaces , Confession Kitchens (Mitologia della lingua , Lawns that turn towards the Sun , Opus 51 - I HAVE CONFIDENCE IN YOU , Mariane - Artificial Stars and PLEASE LEAVE .

Hi's performances depend very much on the public. This is true of not only his Fluxus actions but also his installations, to which the public may be prompted to contribute. From 1962 to 1966 he worked closely with Arthur Kopcke. Andersen turned in the late 1960s to mail art and then in the 1970s was concerned with geographical space.

Already during the 1960s, Andersen began to take an interest in using computers. Unlike the other pioneers in this time, he did not use them to create images, but was fascinated by the algorithms and how he could use them to control the audience. His work opus 1966 is an early form of artificial intelligence, consisting of a poem, which constantly recreates itself. In 2023, he transformed this work into a choral piece in connection with an exhibition on artificial intelligence in Chicago.

Andersen was often a guest in the former East Block countries and was essential as a connector of avant-garde movement between the West and East Pacts on each side of the Iron Curtain. In 1966, he held a three-day event in Prague with the Fluxus artists Tomas Schmit and Milan Knížák. Those were the first Fluxus events in Czechoslovakia. In Poland he exhibited in Galeria Akumulatory 2 in Poznań and in the Galeria Potocka in Kraków.

In 1985 he arranged the Festival of Fantastics in Roskilde, Denmark. In the year in which Copenhagen was Europe’s cultural capital, 1996, Andersen arranged a three-day event Margrethe Fjorden Intermedia festival. Here he performed, among other things, the compositions: parachute-jumping, helicopters, mountaineering, live sheep and 500 singers walking on water.

2017 appeared the book The Glorious Way of Unproductivity by Per Brunskog. In the spirit of Eric Andersen's intermedia tradition, this book is not a biography, but takes the form of a textbook in intermedia, based exclusively on Eric Andersen's work. The book is so far only available in Danish.

Eric Andersen opposes those who describe Fluxus as an: art movement or -ism, as he points out that it was just a global network of artists, but that they had no common form of expression or goal. Or those who designate Fluxus with the term neo-dada , when he mean that Dada was obsessed with the definition of art; while those who participated in the Fluxus events were indifferent whether they were creating art or whether what they were doing was any other form of human activity.

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Owen Smith (1998) Fluxus: The History of an Attitude, San Diego State University Press, p.83
  2. ↑ The Fluxus Reader by Ken Friedman ISBN   0-471-97858-2 Page 43, Page 44, Page 125
  3. ↑ Hannah B Higgins, "The Computational Word Works of Eric Andersen and Dick Higgins" in H. Higgins, & D. Kahn (Eds.), Mainframe experimentalism: Early digital computing in the experimental arts, p.283
  4. ↑ Higgins, Hannah. Fluxus Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. ISBN   0-935640-40-1 p. 150

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fluxus</span> International network of artists, composers and designers

Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers, and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finished product. Fluxus is known for experimental contributions to different artistic media and disciplines and for generating new art forms. These art forms include intermedia, a term coined by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins; conceptual art, first developed by Henry Flynt, an artist contentiously associated with Fluxus; and video art, first pioneered by Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell. Dutch gallerist and art critic Harry Ruhé describes Fluxus as "the most radical and experimental art movement of the sixties".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Postmodern art</span> Art movement

Postmodern art is a body of art movements that sought to contradict some aspects of modernism or some aspects that emerged or developed in its aftermath. In general, movements such as intermedia, installation art, conceptual art and multimedia, particularly involving video are described as postmodern.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dick Higgins</span> English composer and poet (1938–1998)

Dick Higgins was an American artist, composer, art theorist, poet, publisher, printmaker, and a co-founder of the Fluxus international artistic movement. Inspired by John Cage, Higgins was an early pioneer of electronic correspondence. Higgins coined the word intermedia to describe his artistic activities, defining it in a 1965 essay by the same name, published in the first number of the Something Else Newsletter. His most notable audio contributions include Danger Music scores and the Intermedia concept to describe the ineffable inter-disciplinary activities that became prevalent in the 1960s.

Intermedia is an art theory term coined in the mid-1960s by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe the strategies of interdisciplinarity that occur within artworks existing between artistic genres. It was also used by John Brockman to refer to works in expanded cinema that were associated with Jonas Mekas' Film-Makers’ Cinematheque. Gene Youngblood also described intermedia, beginning in his Intermedia column for the Los Angeles Free Press beginning in 1967 as a part of a global network of multiple media that was expanding consciousness. Youngblood gathered and expanded upon intermedia ideas from this series of columns in his 1970 book Expanded Cinema, with an introduction by Buckminster Fuller. Over the years, intermedia has been used almost interchangeably with multi-media and more recently with the categories of digital media, technoetics, electronic media and post-conceptualism.

Ken Friedman is a design researcher. He was a member of Fluxus, an international laboratory for experimental art, architecture, design, and music. Friedman joined Fluxus in 1966 as the youngest member of the classic Fluxus group. He has worked closely with other Fluxus artists and composers such as George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, and Nam June Paik, as well as collaborating with John Cage and Joseph Beuys. He was the general manager of Dick Higgins's Something Else Press in the early 1970s. In the 1990s, Friedman's work as a management consultant and designer led him to an academic career, first as Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design at the Norwegian School of Management in Oslo, then as Dean of the Faculty of Design at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. Friedman is currently University Distinguished Professor at Swinburne and Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies at Tongji University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Maciunas</span> Lithuanian artist

George Maciunas was a Lithuanian American artist, art historian, and art organizer who was the founding member and central coordinator of Fluxus, an international community of artists, architects, composers, and designers. He is most famous for organizing and performing in early Fluxus Happenings and Festivals, for his Fluxus graphic art work, and for assembling a series of highly influential Fluxus artists' multiples.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alison Knowles</span> American visual artist, performances, soundworks, and publications (born 1933)

Alison Knowles is an American visual artist known for her installations, performances, soundworks, and publications. Knowles was a founding member of the Fluxus movement, an international network of artists who aspired to merge different artistic media and disciplines. Criteria that have come to distinguish her work as an artist are the arena of performance, the indeterminacy of her event scores resulting in the deauthorization of the work, and the element of tactile participation. She graduated from Pratt Institute in New York with an honors degree in fine art. In May 2015, she was awarded an honorary doctorate degree by Pratt.

The mid-20th-century art movement Fluxus had a strong association with Rutgers University.

Geoffrey Hendricks was an American artist associated with Fluxus since the mid 1960s. He was professor of art at Douglass College, Rutgers University, where he taught from 1956 to 2003 and was associated with Fluxus at Rutgers University, Allan Kaprow, Roy Lichtenstein, and Lucas Samaras during the 1960s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hannah Higgins</span> American historian

Hannah B. Higgins is an American writer and academic living in Chicago, Illinois. Higgins's research examines various post-conceptual art historical subjects in terms of two philosophically and practically entwined terms: information and sensation. She is a Professor in the Department of Art History and a founding Director of IDEAS, an interdisciplinary arts major, at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ay-O</span> Japanese artist

Takao Iijima, better known by his art name Ay-O, is a Japanese avant-garde visual and performance artist who has been associated with Fluxus since its international beginnings in the 1960s.

Danger music is an experimental form of avant-garde 20th- and 21st-century music and performance art. It is based on the concept that some pieces of music can or will harm either the listener or the performer, understanding that the piece in question may or may not be performed. Kyle Gann describes in his book Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice how Takehisa Kosugi's composition Music for a Revolution directs the performer to "scoop out one of your eyes 5 years from now and do the same with the other eye 5 years later." Works such as this are also sometimes referred to as anti-music because they seem to rebel against the concept of music itself. Danger music is often closely associated with the Fluxus school of composition, especially the work of Dick Higgins, who composed a series of works entitled Danger Music.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joe Jones (Fluxus musician)</span> American classical composer

Joe Jones (1934–1993) was an American avant-garde musician associated with Fluxus, especially known for his creation of rhythmic minimal music machines.

Takako Saito is a Japanese artist closely associated with Fluxus, the international collective of avant-garde artists that was active primarily in the 1960s and 1970s. Saito contributed a number of performances and artworks to the movement, which continue to be exhibited in Fluxus exhibitions to the present day. She was also deeply involved in the production of Fluxus edition works during the height of their production, and worked closely with George Maciunas.

Source: Music of the Avant-Garde – also known and hereafter referred to as Source Magazine – was an independent, not-for-profit musical and artistic magazine published between 1967 and 1973 by teachers and students of the University of California, Davis, California. It emerged from the flourishing Californian musical experimentalism of the late 1950s-early 1960s, at UC-Davis and Mills College. The 11 issues document new music practices of the period like indeterminacy, performance, graphic scores, electronic music and intermedia arts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ben Patterson</span> American musician

Benjamin Patterson was an American musician, artist, and one of the founders of the Fluxus movement.

Mieko Shiomi is a Japanese artist, composer, and performer who played a key role in the development of Fluxus. A co-founder of the seminal postwar Japanese experimental music collective Group Ongaku, she is known for her investigations of the nature and limits of sound, music, and auditory experiences. Her work has been widely circulated as Fluxus editions, featured in concert halls, museums, galleries, and non-traditional spaces, as well as being re-performed by other musicians and artists numerous times. She is best known for her work of the 1960s and early 1970s, especially Spatial Poem, Water Music, Endless Box, and the various instructions in Events & Games, all of which were produced as Fluxus editions. Now in her eighties, she continues to produce new work.

Giuseppe Chiari was an avant-garde Florentine conceptual artist and experimental musician active in Neo-Dada circles, specifically the Fluxus art movement. Chiari was a supporter of intermedia work conducted between music, speech, gesture and image.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Larry Miller (artist)</span>

Larry Miller is an American artist, most strongly linked to the Fluxus movement after 1969. He is "an intermedia artist whose work questions the borders between artistic, scientific and theological disciplines. He was in the vanguard of using DNA and genetic technologies as new art media." Electronic Arts Intermix, a pioneering international resource for video and new media art has said, "Miller has produced a diverse body of experimental art works as a key figure in the emergent installation and performance movements in New York in the 1970s... His installations and performances have integrated diverse mediums [sic] and materials."

The Sōgetsu Art Center (SAC) was a Tokyo-based experimental art space. The center was established in 1958 and its activities ceased in 1971. It was founded by Sōfū Teshigahara, creator of the Sōgetsu-ryū (草月流), a school of ikebana, that he founded in 1927. It was directed by Teshigahara's son, Hiroshi Teshigahara.

References

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.