Larry Miller (born 1944) 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."[1]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."[2]
Miller’s early works already demonstrate his personal understanding of the artist as an investigator of experience and of art as an experiment.[3] In addition to his work with Fluxus and DNA, Miller's work can be divided into two distinct categories: 1) Miller's own video pieces, which were often components of his larger installations and performances and 2) documentary videotapes of Fluxus interviews, performances and events. Since the 1960s, Miller has shot and collected an impressive number of Fluxus related materials, including the 1978 interview with George Maciunas.[2]
The interview that Miller conducted with Maciunas shortly before the latter's death is an outstanding documentation, which has made a great contribution to the reconstruction of early Fluxus history in particular.[4] Miller has also done interviews with artists Joe Jones, Carolee Schneemann, Ben Vautier, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles and others.[2] Miller has helped produce, organize and develop exhibitions for Fluxus artists such as Maciunas and Nam June Paik.[5] Miller also organized several evenings at the Judson Church in New York.[6]
Biography
Larry Miller was born in Marshall, Missouri in 1944. He earned his MFA degree at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1970 when he began exhibiting his work in New York. Larry Miller studied under Robert Watts at Rutgers University, and has been active in the Fluxus network since the late 1960s.[7] He lives in New York with artist Sara Seagull, who is also associated with the Fluxus movement. Miller and Seagull met in the early 1970s under the mutual influence of Fluxus artist Robert Watts who taught film and mixed media at Rutgers University from the 1950s to the 1980s and remained a lifelong friend of both artists.[7]
Miller's performance residencies have included Portland School of Art, Maine; Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Santa Barbara Museum, California and has taught and lectured at colleges and universities throughout the country. In 1986, Miller was the subject of a retrospective and catalogue, As If the Universe Were An Object at the Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond and Washington Project for the Arts, Washington, D.C.[2]
Miller and Seagull live in New York City. They maintain a studio near New Paltz, NY.[7]
Work with Fluxus
Miller's official association with the Fluxus group dates to 1969 when the founder of the group George Maciunas took him on as a protege, leading to close collaborations. Many of Miller's original compositions have become part of the Fluxus collective's standard repertoire of works. Miller has become a frequent interpreter of "classic" Fluxus scores and is credited with enlarging the group's works to a wider audience, often straddling the boundaries between research, art, and producer.[8]
Through Miller, Fluxus attracted media coverage such as the worldwide CNN coverage of Off Limits exhibit at Newark Museum, 1999.[9] Other Miller activities as organizer, performer and presenter within the Fluxus milieu include Performance in Fluxus Continue 1963-2003 at Musee d'Art et d'Art Contemporain in Nice; Fluxus a la Carte in Amsterdam; and Centraal Fluxus Festival at Centraal Museum, Utrecht, Netherlands. In 2004, for Geoffrey Hendricks' Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia and Rutgers University 1958-1972, Miller reprised and updated the track and field events of the Flux Olympics, first presented in 1970.[10] For Do-it Yourself Fluxus at AI - Art Interactive - in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Miller took on the role of curatorial consultant for recreation that offered viewers experiential interactive participation in Maciunas's original design of the historic Flux Labyrinth, a large, complex maze built by George Maciunas at Akademie Der Kunst, Berlin in 1976 featuring sections by many Fluxus artists with Miller's assistance.[7]
"The Flux-Labyrinth was essentially a giant Fluxbox. Because when we did it we were trying to engage all these aspects of experience— aural, optic, olfactory, epithelial and tactile," Miller told post-Fluxus artist Mark Bloch in a 2015 interview. "The fundamental idea behind the Flux-Labyrinth is Maciunas was taking that essential idea of the puzzle of consciousness... and trying to translate it in basic 20th Century terms which to me were existential."[8] Miller created a new version of the Flux Labyrinth at the In the Spirit of Fluxus exhibit at the Walker Art Center in 1994, where Griel Marcus said, "Miller was... fine tuning the monster."[11]
During the opening night of George Brecht - A Heterospective at Museum Ludwig, Cologne in 2005, Miller organized fellow Fluxus artists Alison Knowles, Ben Vautier and others to convey the ideas behind Brecht's original "event" scores in a performance program that embodied the subtleties of the genre including a rare reenactment of Brecht's 1960 Motor Vehicle Sundown (Event) For John Cage, featuring more than 40 vehicles in the historic Dom Platz adjacent to the famous Cologne cathedral the following day. With a large local audience in attendance, the event spectacle, broadcast live on German television, utilized fire trucks, police and military vehicles and vintage automobiles as sound instruments to bring Brecht's classic score to life.[7]
Miller and three collaborators Alison Knowles, Geoffrey Hendricks and art critic Peter Frank did a live performance of Pre-Fluxus, Pre-Happenings artist Al Hansen's Alice Denham in 48 Seconds at Andrea Rosen Gallery in 2006.[12]
Before Fluxus founder George Maciunas died in 1978 from complications due to pancreatic cancer, he left behind his thoughts on Fluxus in a series of important video conversations with Miller called Interview With George Maciunas which has been screened internationally and translated into numerous languages.[13]
A notable contribution to the spirit of Fluxus-related works by Miller has been the "Flux-Tour", a form of performance whereby artist-performers conducted alternative museum and gallery tours in which guides focused attention to the architectural spaces themselves rather than discussing or interpreting works of art on display, resulting in the examination of minute detail such as the floors, structural elements and lighting present in the spaces.[7]
Miller reprised examples of earlier Flux-Tours at the Grey Gallery at New York University, New York,[14] in 2011 in conjunction with the exhibitions, Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life and Fluxus at NYU: Before and Beyond which featured documentation from prior Flux-Tours, dating back to 1976.[15]
Miller has been active with the FluxOlympics, unproductive group activity staged as sports events which were altered to the point of being unrecognisable as Fluxus practice went from being housed in concert halls or theatre spaces to having more urban settings the end of the 1960s. "In Fluxus' historic context these events were organised by means of open calls for participation, in which artists carried out their proposals, thus nourishing the movement's collaboration and communication grid. Later, artists such as Larry Miller and Sara Seagull became the main promoters of this type of activity.[16]
Art and Science
Since the late 1980s, Larry Miller has questioned such boundaries in works exploring issues raised by science, exploring subjects as diverse as DNA, hypnosis and turning ordinary chocolate and carrots into art objects.[17]
According to his website, "Whether presented as live performance, specific site installation, or gallery exhibition, Miller considers all of his works -- as well as himself -- to be 'performing objects.' In this view, there are no fixed boundaries between objects, events, time and space, or between definitions that societies offer for science, art, and religion."[7]
From an event realized under the influence of hypnosis, Larry Miller created an installation "Mom-Me," from 1973, which featured snapshots, family photos by the artist, video freeze frames and video as part of The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia at the Guggenheim Museum from January to April 2009.[7]
In addition to Fluxus, Miller is best known for his works with genetics. "Basing lines of conceptual inquiry on his 1989 'copyright' claim to his personal genome, he focused on questions of the ownership of DNA, and of the commercial applications of genetic technology. In 1992, Miller launched an international public action, which has since facilitated thousands of individuals in making claims to their genetic rights. Miller created the Genetic Code Copyright Certificate and published it in several language, a document that, when signed, guarantees the multiplication of one’s own genome.[7] In 1990 and 1993, Miller traveled to actions and exhibitions in Poland, where, among other things during the festival Constructions in Process IV by the International Artists' Museum in Łódź, he registered the DNA of poet Allen Ginsberg, and installed a sound sculpture in honor of Nicolaus Copernicus. He also produced an advertising campaign calling for the public to copy their DNA.[3]
A form on Miller's website provides a declaration of copyright of the user's DNA genome. Subsequent works emerging from this activity have created speculation on the genetic science applications. Miller's "Genomic License series postulates that DNA is a malleable material which, like clay or digital information, can be shaped into novel products -- bought, sold, and distributed like any other commodity.[7] Miller riffs on the increasing commodification of the double helix, in the form of patents on natural genes... He portrays 11 artists, each with a vial of his own blood or other cells, and offers to license, for a price and one-time-only use, the genes that undergird his creativity."[18]
Larry Miller's genetics works have been seen in numerous exhibitions including Paradise Now: Picturing the Genetic Revolution, Exit Art, NYC, 2000 (touring U.S. through 2004);[19]From Code to Commodity: Genetics and Visual Art, New York Academy of Science, NYC, 2003;[20]Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics,[21] Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, 2002 to 2005), Codes and Identity, Clifford Art Gallery, Colgate University, New York, 2003,;[22]How Human: Life in the Post Genome Era, International Center of Photography, New York, 2003[18] and DNA: Do Not Assume Bowling Green State University, Ohio 2005.[1][7]
Exhibitions
Larry Miller's work has been supported by the New York State Foundation for the Arts, Creative Artists Program and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has exhibited at the 112 Greene Street Gallery,[23] Gallery LeLong, Stux Gallery, and Emily Harvey Gallery, New York. Institutions such as Franklin Furnace, PS 1, Exit Art and the Kitchen as well as The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim Museum, The New Museum, and the Walker Art Center, The New Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco and numerous other venues in Canada, Europe, Korea, Japan, and Australia have exhibited Millers work. In particular, Miller's art has appeared at the Venice Bienalle, Italy; Akademie Der Kunste, Daadgalerie and Bonner Kunstverein, Germany; Ecole Nationale Des Beaux Arts, Galerie 1900-2000, France.[2]
Related Research Articles
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".
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.
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 was a Lithuanian American artist, born in Kaunas. A founding member and the central coordinator of Fluxus, an international community of artists, architects, composers, and designers, he is most famous for organising and performing early happenings and for assembling a series of highly influential artists' multiples.
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.
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.
Shigeko Kubota was a Japanese video artist, sculptor and avant-garde performance artist, who mostly lived in New York City. She was one of the first artists to adopt the portable video camera Sony Portapak in 1970, likening it to a "new paintbrush." Kubota is known for constructing sculptural installations with a strong DIY aesthetic, which include sculptures with embedded monitors playing her original videos. She was a key member and influence on Fluxus, the international group of avant-garde artists centered on George Maciunas, having been involved with the group since witnessing John Cage perform in Tokyo in 1962 and subsequently moving to New York in 1964. She was closely associated with George Brecht, Jackson Mac Low, John Cage, Joe Jones, Nam June Paik, and Ay-O, among other members of Fluxus. Kubota was deemed "Vice Chairman" of the Fluxus Organization by Maciunas.
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 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.
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 (1934–1993) was an American avant-garde musician associated with Fluxus, especially known for his creation of rhythmic music machines.
Spice Chess is an artist's multiple by the Japanese artist Takako Saito, while she was resident in the United States. Originally manufactured winter 1964–65, and offered for sale March 1965, the work is one of a famous series of disrupted chess sets referred to as Fluxchess or Flux Chess, made for George Maciunas' Fluxshop at his Canal Street loft, SoHo, New York City and later through his Fluxus Mail-Order Warehouse.
"Takako Saito engaged with Duchamp's practice but also with masculinist cold war metaphors by taking up chess as a subject of [her] art. Saito's fluxchess works... question the primacy of vision to chess, along with notions of perception and in aesthetic experience more generally.... Her "Smell Chess," "Sound Chess" and "Weight Chess" reworked the game of chess so that players would be forced to hone non-visual perception, such as the olfactory sense, tactility, and aurality, in order to follow chess rules." Claudia Mesch
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.
Robert Marshall Watts (1923-1988) 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.
Milan Knížák is a Czech performance artist, sculptor, noise musician, installation artist, political dissident, graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art associated with Fluxus.
Fluxus 1 is an artists' book edited and produced by the Lithuanian-American artist George Maciunas, containing works by a series of artists associated with Fluxus, the international collective of avant-garde artists primarily active in the 1960s and 1970s. Originally published in New York, 1964, the contents vary from edition to edition, but usually contain work by Ay-O, George Brecht, Alison Knowles, György Ligeti, Yoko Ono, Robert Watts and La Monte Young amongst many others.
Eric Andersen is a Danish artist associated with the Fluxus art movement. He lives in Copenhagen, Denmark.
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.
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