Fluxus Internationalism

Whereas Happenings developed primarily in response to second-generation action painting and only secondarily in response to Cage, Fluxus was much more identified with the composer and with new music in general.* The term was coined by George Macunias, who used the actual dictionary definition of flux as part of the definition of Fluxus, which reads as the "[a]ct of a flowing; a continuous moving on or passing by, as of a flowing stream; a continuous succession of changes" (Schimmel 71). Two influential members of the Fluxus group, Yoko Ono and Nam Jun Paik, made the transition from music to the visual arts through Cage. Korean-born Paik studied music and art history at the University of Tokyo after completing his thesis on composer Arnold Schoenberg. While Paik worked at the Studio for Electronic Music of West German Radio (where the serialist composer Stockhausen was affiliated), Cage was in residence at the International Vacation Course for New Music in Darmstadt. Paik's intersection with Cage revolutionised his artistic development (Schimmel 72). After a series of action-packed, anti-music performances dedicated to and inspired by Cage, Paik exhibited for the first time the installation Exposition of Music Electronic Television at the Rolf Jahring's Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal in 1963. Paik took Cage's invention of the prepared piano to a new level of complexity by presenting three prepared pianos with thirteen television sets.

Paik's work had a profound effect on a generation of video artists in the late 1960s and early 70s. Yoko Ono's work, on the other hand, had a similar impact on performance artists and anticipated the body-works.** In 1964, she premiered Cut Piece at the Yamiachi Concert Hall in Kyoto and presented it again at the Destruction in Arts Symposium held in London in September 1966. Dressed in an elegant cocktail suit, she invited the audience to cut away at her clothing while she sat calmly in a state of contemplation. Later, in collaboration with John Lennon, she performed a number of events that involved press manipulation and creation of a mass media persona (O. F. Smith 24).

Movements away from traditional forms of art making were international, and even as early as the 1950s artists started collaborating and even forming groups. Most important to mention in this respect is Gutai from Japan, New Realism in France, and Fluxus, which, significantly, did not have a specific location. Communication technologies had already started to spread the influence of artists on each other across borders. For instance, Yves Klein, associated with the New Realism group, was influenced by the Japanese group in his experimentation with using the human body as a brush. It is unfortunate that he failed to acknowledge this influence and even blamed the international press for making the connection (Schimmel 33). He, too, contributed to the carefully constructed persona/myth of the artist becoming the valuable commodity by documenting performative works and indeed staging some of them specifically for the camera.*** As Paul Schimmel notes in his introduction to the Out of Actions exhibition catalogue documenting the work of artists from 1949-1979, it is difficult to imagine the work of the French artist, Gine Pane, or the American, Chris Burden, occurring without the precedence of Klein's Leap (33).

With the introduction of television and other mass media technologies onto the palette of the artist, creation of a media persona became essential in delivering the message regardless of the form. But networked art draws from conceptually based movements much more than media-based art, because its essence is making non-linear connections between disciplines, people, and ideas. ****

In an interview with Richard Schechner, when Kaprow is asked about Happenings and McLuhan, he acknowledged the importance of TV but stressed that the television community is passive and that he is interested "in a variety of modes including contemplation, observation, and participation" (Schechner 225). McLuhan, on the other hand, calls the emergence of a "global village," a simultaneous happening:
  Ours is a brand-new world of allocanceness. "Time" has ceased, "space" has vanished. We now live in a global village… a simultaneous happening. We are back in acoustic space. We have begun again to structure the primordial feeling, the tribal emotions from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us." (Medium 63)  
In the 1960s when the foundation for the Internet was being laid and Ted Nelson coined the term hypertext, artists began to experiment with communication technologies and to collaborate directly with engineers. The most relevant example of this kind of effort is Experiments in Art & Technology (E.A.T).

* For an excellent resource on Fluxus, see In the Spirit of Fluxus Exhibition Catalogue. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1993. Distributed by New York: D.A.P. (Distributed Art Publishers).
** Ono's Cut Piece had implications on subsequent performance artists working with their bodies, such as Marina Abramovic, Ana Mendieta, and Gina Pane, and anticipated the work of Chris Burden and Vito Acconci.
*** Yves Klein's infamous Leap into the Void, 1960, Photomontage by Harry Shunk, serves as a powerful metaphor for the creative act. The fictionalised photograph had an extraordinary impact on performance artists in the 1970's, frequently involving self-endangering the body.
****For an excellent paper on the connection between conceptual art and technology, see Edward A. Schanken, "Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art" forthcoming in Michael Corris, ed., Invisible College: Reconsidering "Conceptual Art," Cambridge UP, 2001.