Fluxus at Rutgers University

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The mid-20th-century art movement Fluxus had a strong association with Rutgers University . [1] [2] [3]

Fluxus 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 Fluxus artist Henry Flynt; 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."

Rutgers University multi-campus American public research university in New Jersey, United States

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, commonly referred to as Rutgers University, Rutgers, or RU, is a public research university in New Jersey. It is the largest institution of higher education in New Jersey.

Contents

History

Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts, both key figures in the movement, originally met while they were students at Columbia University; though only together there for one year, soon after they both began teaching at Rutgers. George Brecht was working in New Brunswick, New Jersey when he saw the work of Robert Watts on display at the university. He was so impressed that he sought him out and they became friends.

Allan Kaprow American artist

Allan Kaprow was an American painter, assemblagist and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. He helped to develop the "Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. His Happenings — some 200 of them — evolved over the years. Eventually Kaprow shifted his practice into what he called "Activities", intimately scaled pieces for one or several players, devoted to the study of normal human activity in a way congruent to ordinary life. Fluxus, performance art, and installation art were, in turn, influenced by his work.

Columbia University Private Ivy League research university in New York City

Columbia University is a private Ivy League research university in Upper Manhattan, New York City. Established in 1754, Columbia is the oldest institution of higher education in New York and the fifth-oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. It is one of nine colonial colleges founded prior to the Declaration of Independence, seven of which belong to the Ivy League. It has been ranked by numerous major education publications as among the top ten universities in the world.

George Brecht American artist and composer

George Brecht, born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer, as well as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Mobil Oil. He was a key member of, and influence on, Fluxus, the international group of avant-garde artists centred on George Maciunas, having been involved with the group from the first performances in Wiesbaden 1962 until Maciunas' death in 1978.

Claes Oldenburg referred to Allan Kaprow, George Segal, George Brecht, Robert Whitman, Robert Watts, Lucas Samaras, Geoffrey Hendricks and Roy Lichtenstein as the New Jersey School. George Segal and Allan Kaprow referred to it as the New Brunswick School of Painting.

Claes Oldenburg American artist

Claes Oldenburg is an American sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring large replicas of everyday objects. Another theme in his work is soft sculpture versions of everyday objects. Many of his works were made in collaboration with his wife, Coosje van Bruggen, who died in 2009; they had been married for 32 years. Oldenburg lives and works in New York.

George Segal was an American painter and sculptor associated with the Pop Art movement. He was presented with the United States National Medal of Arts in 1999.

Robert Whitman American artist

Robert Whitman is an American artist best known for his seminal theater pieces of the early 1960s combining visual and sound images, actors, film, slides, and evocative props in environments of his own making. Since the late 1960s he has worked with new technologies, and his most recent work incorporates cellphones.

In the late 1950s, George Segal invited Allan Kaprow to go on a mushroom hunt with him and John Cage. Cage is remembered for his class in experimental composition, but he also taught mushroom identification. A discussion on the use of electronic sound recordings in art pieces led to Cage inviting Kaprow to his class. George Segal, Allan Kaprow, and Robert Watts all attended Cage’s class.

John Cage American avant-garde composer

John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, artist, and philosopher. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.

Avant-garde works that are experimental or innovative

The avant-garde are people or works that are experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society. It may be characterized by nontraditional, aesthetic innovation and initial unacceptability, and it may offer a critique of the relationship between producer and consumer.

The first "happenings"

Segal hosted annual picnics for his New York art friends. It was at one of these that Kaprow first coined the term Happening, for an impromptu artistic event, in the Spring of 1957. ‘Happening’ first appeared in print in the Winter 1958 issue of the Rutgers undergraduate literary magazine, ‘’Anthologist’’. [4] The form was imitated and the term was adopted by artists across the United States, Germany, and Japan. Jack Kerouac referred to Kaprow as “the Happenings man,” and an ad showing a woman floating in outer space declared, “I dreamt I was in a happening in my Maidenform brassiere.”

A happening is a performance, event, or situation meant to be considered art, usually as performance art. The term was first used by Allan Kaprow during the 1950s to describe a range of art-related event or multiple events.

United States Federal republic in North America

The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States or America, is a country composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions. At 3.8 million square miles, the United States is the world's third or fourth largest country by total area and is slightly smaller than the entire continent of Europe's 3.9 million square miles. With a population of over 327 million people, the U.S. is the third most populous country. The capital is Washington, D.C., and the largest city by population is New York City. Forty-eight states and the capital's federal district are contiguous in North America between Canada and Mexico. The State of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east and across the Bering Strait from Russia to the west. The State of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U.S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, stretching across nine official time zones. The extremely diverse geography, climate, and wildlife of the United States make it one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries.

Germany Federal parliamentary republic in central-western Europe

Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central and Western Europe, lying between the Baltic and North Seas to the north, and the Alps to the south. It borders Denmark to the north, Poland and the Czech Republic to the east, Austria and Switzerland to the south, France to the southwest, and Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands to the west.

Other events

Yam Festival

George Brecht and Robert Watts would meet for lunch once a week at the Howard Johnson's in New Brunswick, they were occasionally joined by Geoffrey Hendricks. It was there that they planned the Yam Festival. While the festival was originally supposed to take place in Princeton at the suggestion of Bob Whitman, it ended up taking place at George Segals farm, on the Rutgers campuses, and in New York City. It was venue on May, 1963 to actions and Happenings by artists including Dick Higgins, Allan Kaprow, La Monte Young and Wolf Vostell who made the Happening TV-Burying in coproduction with the Smolin Gallery. [5]

Howard Johnsons American chain of hotels, motels and restaurants

Howard Johnson's, or Howard Johnson by Wyndham, is an American chain of hotels and motels located primarily throughout the United States and Canada. It had also once been a chain of restaurants for over 90 years and its name was widely known for that alone. Founded by Howard Deering Johnson, it was the largest restaurant chain in the U.S. throughout the 1960s and 1970s, with more than 1,000 combined company-owned and franchised outlets.

New Brunswick, New Jersey City in New Jersey

New Brunswick is a city in Middlesex County, New Jersey, United States, in the New York City metropolitan area. The city is the county seat of Middlesex County, and the home of Rutgers University. New Brunswick is on the Northeast Corridor rail line, 27 miles (43 km) southwest of Manhattan, on the southern bank of the Raritan River. As of 2016, New Brunswick had a Census-estimated population of 56,910, representing a 3.1% increase from the 55,181 people enumerated at the 2010 United States Census, which in turn had reflected an increase of 6,608 (+13.6%) from the 48,573 counted in the 2000 Census. Due to the concentration of medical facilities in the area, including Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital and Saint Peter's University Hospital, as well as Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey's Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, New Brunswick is known as both the Hub City and the Healthcare City. The corporate headquarters and production facilities of several global pharmaceutical companies are situated in the city, including Johnson & Johnson and Bristol-Myers Squibb.

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

Yam Festival was a year-long festival that took place between 1962 – 1963. Yam is May backwards. Happenings included Yam Lecture, Yam Hat Sale, Water Day, Clock Day, Box Day and Yam Day. [6] The Yam Festival Delivery Event was an early mail art piece.

Orgies Mysteries Theater

In 1970, Hermann Nitsch performed his Orgies Mysteries Theater at the round house on College Farm Road on the Cook College campus. A lamb was killed, skinned, disemboweled, and hung on a wall.

Other happenings

In 1968, Dick Higgins shot sheets of orchestral paper with a machine gun to create ‘’One Thousand Symphonies’’, which was later performed by Philip Corner.

Geoffrey Hendricks performed ‘’The Sky is the Limit’’ in the Voorhees Chapel in 1969. [3]

A 1970 Flux Fest at Douglass featured soccer played on stilts, a javelin event with a balloon replacing the javelin, and table tennis with holes in the center of the paddles or tin cans glued to the paddle.

Today

Watts taught at Rutgers for 31 years. Geoffrey Hendricks retired in 2003, after nearly 50 years at Rutgers.

In 1999, Joan Marter published ‘’Off Limits: Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde, 1957-1963’’, which featured an exhibit of the same name at the Newark Museum. It won the International Association of Art Critics award for “Best Exhibition in a Museum Outside New York City.”

In 2003, the art galleries at Mason Gross held ‘’Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia and Rutgers University, 1958-1972’’ to coincide with the release of a book by the same name by Geoffrey Hendricks. It featured artifacts from performances by Rutgers-affiliated Fluxus artists. The Flux Mass was re-staged that year on November 1 (in the same chapel as the original Flux Mass) as part of a series of performances to accompany the exhibition. The mass was also re-created at Amherst College. [7]

Selected bibliography

Related Research Articles

Dick Higgins English composer and poet

Dick Higgins was an American composer, poet, printmaker, artist, and a co-founder of Fluxus.

Al Hansen American artist

Alfred Earl "Al" Hansen was an American artist. He was a member of Fluxus, a movement that originated on an artists' collective around George Maciunas.

George Maciunas Lithuanian artist

George Maciunas was a Lithuanian American artist. He was a founding member and the central coordinator of Fluxus, an international community of artists, architects, composers, and designers. Other leading members brought together by this movement included Ay-O, Joseph Beuys, Jonas Mekas, George Brecht, Dick Higgins, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell.

Something Else Press was founded by Dick Higgins in 1963. It published many important Intermedia texts and artworks by such Fluxus artists as Higgins, Ray Johnson, Alison Knowles, Allan Kaprow, George Brecht, Daniel Spoerri, Robert Filliou, Al Hansen, John Cage, Emmett Williams and by such important modernist figures as Gertrude Stein, Henry Cowell, and Bern Porter.

Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University

The Zimmerli Art Museum is located on the Voorhees Mall of the campus of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The museum houses more than 60,000 works, including Russian and Soviet Nonconformist Art from the acclaimed Dodge Collection, American art from the 18th century to the present, and six centuries of European art with a particular focus on 19th-century French art. The Zimmerli is also noted for its holdings of works on paper, including prints, drawings, photographs, original illustrations for children's books, and rare books.

Lucas Samaras American artist

Lucas Samaras is an artist who was born in Kastoria, Greece. He studied at Rutgers University on a scholarship, where he met Allan Kaprow and George Segal. He participated in Kaprow's "Happenings," and posed for Segal's plaster sculptures. Claes Oldenburg, in whose Happenings he also participated, later referred to Samaras as one of the "New Jersey school," which also included Kaprow, Segal, George Brecht, Robert Whitman, Robert Watts, Geoffrey Hendricks and Roy Lichtenstein. Samaras previously worked in painting, sculpture, and performance art, before beginning work in photography. He subsequently constructed room environments that contained elements from his own personal history. His "Auto-Interviews" were a series of text works that were "self-investigatory" interviews. The primary subject of his photographic work is his own self-image, generally distorted and mutilated. He has worked with multi-media collages, and by manipulating the wet dyes in Polaroid photographic film to create what he calls "Photo-Transformations".

<i>Water Yam</i> (artists book) artists book by George Brecht

Water Yam is an artist's book by the American artist George Brecht. Originally published in Germany, June 1963 in a box designed by George Maciunas and typeset by Tomas Schmit, it has been re-published in various countries several times since. It is now considered one of the most influential artworks released by Fluxus, the internationalist avant-garde art movement active predominantly in the 1960s and '70s. The box, sometimes referred to as a Fluxbox or Fluxkit, contains a large number of small printed cards, containing instructions known as event-scores, or fluxscores. Typically open-ended, these scores, whether performed in public, private or left to the imagination, leave a lot of space for chance and indeterminancy, forcing a large degree of interpretation upon the performers and audience.

In some cases [event-scores] would arise out of the creation of the object, while in others the object was discovered and Brecht subsequently wrote a score for it, thus highlighting the relationship between language and perception. Or, in the words of the artist, "ensuring that the details of everyday life, the random constellations of objects that surround us, stop going unnoticed." The event-score was as much a critique of conventional artistic representation as it was a gesture of firm resistance against individual alienation.

Joe Jones was an American avant-garde musician associated with Fluxus especially known for his creation of rhythmic music machines.

Robert Watts (artist) American artist in Fluxus

Robert Watts was an American artist best known for his work as a member of the international group of artists Fluxus. Born in Burlington, Iowa June 14, 1923, he became Professor of Art at Douglass College, Rutgers University, New Jersey in 1953, a post he kept until 1984. In the 1950s, he was in close contact with other teachers at Rutgers including Allan Kaprow, Geoffrey Hendricks and Roy Lichtenstein. This has led some critics to claim that pop art and conceptual art began at Rutgers.

Eric Andersen is a Danish artist associated with the Fluxus art movement. He lives in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Letty Lou Eisenhauer was an American visual and performance artist known for her free-spirited Fluxus performances during the 1960s. She is now on faculty at the Borough of Manhattan Community College as a counselor, professor, and forensic psychologist.

Ben Patterson American musician

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

The Smolin Gallery was an avant-garde art venue and gallery on 57th Street in New York City, at its peak in the 1960s. It was known for its involvement with installation art, performance art and experimental art, and was best known for the Allan Kaprow assemblage performance of September 11–12, 1962 entitled "Words", believed to be the first allowing the audience to participate in an art gallery context. Kaprow "used two continual rolls of cloth with words from poems, newspapers, comic and telephone books" during which the audience were asked to "tear off the words, staple them together, write notes, even attack and hack them". Verbal fragments were pasted on the walls from floor to ceiling. In April 1963, Lima and Tony Towle gave their first public recital at the gallery.

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 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."

References