The Ministry of Fluxus (Lithuanian: Fluxus ministerija) is an inclusive, publicly accessible art project in Lithuania.
Lithuanian is a Baltic language spoken in the Baltic region. It is the language of Lithuanians and the official language of Lithuania as well as one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 2.8 million native Lithuanian speakers in Lithuania and about 200 thousand abroad.
The "Ministry of Fluxus", or FxM, was established on 23 April 2010 in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. The FxM Project began in an abandoned medical building on Gediminas Avenue in Vilnius, but it is currently housed in a former shoe factory in Kaunas, Lithuania's second city by size.
Vilnius is the capital of Lithuania and its largest city, with a population of 574,147 as of 2018. The population of Vilnius functional urban area, that stretches beyond the city limits, is estimated at 697,691. Vilnius is in the southeast part of Lithuania and is the second largest city in the Baltic states. Vilnius is the seat of the main government institutions of Lithuania and the Vilnius District Municipality.
Gediminas Avenue is the main street of Vilnius, where most of the governmental institutions of Lithuania are concentrated, including the government, parliament, Constitutional Court and ministries. It is also the place of cultural institutions such as Lithuanian National Drama Theatre, Bank of Lithuania, Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre and Martynas Mažvydas National Library Nowadays it is also a popular shopping and dining street. It is partially a pedestrian street in the evenings when the traffic is prohibited.
Kaunas is the second-largest city in Lithuania and the historical centre of Lithuanian economic, academic, and cultural life. Kaunas was the biggest city and the centre of a county in Trakai Municipality of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania since 1413. In the Russian Empire, it was the capital of the Kaunas Governorate from 1843 to 1915.
The Ministry turns abandoned buildings into publicly accessible studio, performance and exhibition space. Participating artists need only check with organizers to ensure that there is space for them. Most events hosted at the FxM are free. The project's open and accessible structure make it an excellent atmosphere for artistic collaboration.
The project began as a celebration of the Fluxus art movement. The Fluxus movement began in the 1960s and 1970s in the U.S. and later spread to the rest of the world. It opposed the commercialization of art and its domination by an elite caste of self-important artists. One of the movement's main initiators was Jurgis Mačiūnas, a Lithuanian-American artist who brought together a group of international artists to create collaboratively. Mačiūnas was pivotal in forming and implementing the movement's goals. Other significant participants included Yoko Ono and Jonas Mekas. One excellent example of their accomplishments is the revitalization of New York's SoHo neighborhood in the 1970s. By repurposing old, abandoned manufacturing spaces as studios, artists turned urban blight into productive artistic spaces.
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 often mistakenly labelled as Fluxus though he considers himself to be extremely separate from the label, 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."
The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States or America, is a country comprising 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 most populous city 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.
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.
Jonas Mekas was a Lithuanian American filmmaker, poet, and artist who has often been called "the godfather of American avant-garde cinema". His work has been exhibited in museums and at festivals worldwide.
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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.
Adolfas Mekas was a Lithuanian-born American filmmaker, writer, director, editor, actor and educator. With his brother Jonas Mekas, he founded the magazine Film Culture, as well as the Film-Makers' Cooperative and was associated with George Maciunas and the Fluxus art movement at its beginning. He made several short films, culminating in the feature Hallelujah the Hills in 1963, which was played at the Cannes Film Festival of that year and is now considered a classic of American film.
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.
Anthology Film Archives is an international center for the preservation, study, and exhibition of film and video, with a particular focus on independent, experimental, and avant-garde cinema. The film archive and theater is located at 32 Second Avenue on the southeast corner of East 2nd Street, in a New York City historic district in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan.
Takao Iijima, better known by his art name Ay-O, is a Japanese artist who has been associated with Fluxus since its international beginnings in the 1960s.
The Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center is an avant-garde arts centre in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Vilnius Guggenheim Hermitage Museum was a proposed art museum in the city of Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. On April 8, 2008 an international jury named Zaha Hadid, a British-Iraqi architect, the winner of the international design competition for the museum. The museum was initially scheduled to open in 2011. Later, it was announced, that museum was scheduled to open in 2013. However, the project was postponed due to alleged illegal channeling of funds to the Jonas Mekas Arts Center and has been under investigation since 2010. The museum project, as of March 2012, was reported as having regained support, including that of the Vilnius mayor, Arturas Zuokas, even though the embezzlement inquiry was still ongoing.
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.
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 currently lives in Düsseldorf in Germany. She is most famous for pieces like Silent Music or for her special Chess sets.
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.
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.
Knud Pedersen was a Danish artist and resistance leader. He was born in the Danish city of Odense. His career as a public figure started in 1942, when he, together with seven other young Danes, founded the resistance group Churchill Klubben. After the war, he worked briefly as a newspaper reporter, attended law school, and worked for a film company before devoting his life to art.
Alice Hutchins, was an American sculptor known for her metal assemblages and constructs. She incorporated magnets into many works, and interactive participation by the viewer is also a core component of many of her sculptures.
Audra Vau is a Lithuanian transdisciplinarity artist born in 1970 in Vilnius, Lithuania. She lives and works mostly in Vilnius, Lithuania and London.
Contemporary Art Centre – art institution, established in 1992 by Lithuanian Ministry of Culture. CAC has replaced the Arts Exhibition Palace and took over its building in Vilnius, 2 Vokiečių street. CAC contains five exposition rooms and a cinema hall. In 1997 FLUXUS cabinet of George Maciunas was opened, housing a permanent exhibition of fluxus artworks, assembled from private collection of Gilbert and Lila Silverman. Since 2005 CAC the periodic journal "ŠMC/CAC Interviu" is issued by CAC.
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."
Harry Stendhal is an American gallerist and arts organization founder. As an art dealer he operated the Stendhal gallery in the Soho section of New York City and then the Maya Stendhal Gallery in Chelsea section of New York City and exhibited among other artists; the painters Ron English and Rick Prol, the Dadaist Hans Richter and the Fluxus group members Ken Friedman and Larry Miller. During the second incarnation of his gallery he became ensnared in a legal imbroglio with the filmmaker and visual artist Jonas Mekas. Therein the then octagenarian accused the gallerist of selling his artwork without his consent and or reimbursement for among other things as an avenue for Stendhal to cover his tab at Cipriani. The case was eventually settled.
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