Symploke 23 1-2 0309

Fluxus, or the Work of Art in the Age of Information
Author(s): Roger Rothman

Source: symplokē, Vol. 23, No. 1-2, Posthumanisms (2015), pp. 309-325
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FLUXUS, OR THE WORK OF ART
IN THE AGE OF INFORMATION
ROGER ROTHMAN
Fluxus
Over the past two decades, critical and historical understanding of

Fluxus has shifted dramatically. Upon its emergence in the early sixties, it
confronted criticism as little more than a belated rehabilitation of Dadaist
provocation.1 In time, however, its reception changed to such a degree that it
is now widely hailed as a crucial precursor to the conceptual and performa-
tive practices of the late sixties and early seventies.2 Indeed, today Fluxus is
typically presented as the most politically progressive instantiation of John
Cage’s aesthetic of chance and, at the same time, as the advent of post-war
institutional critique.3 Effective though the current perspective is in capturing
1
Fluxus artists were aware of this criticism and sought to distinguish their work from that
of the Dadaists. Robert Filliou, for example, explicitly distanced his work and that of other
Fluxus artists from what he called “the trap of anti-art (neo-dadaism).” (Letter to the editor of
the Berlinske Tidende, Copenhagen, December 21, 1963. Copy of the original, Archiv Sohm,
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart). Similarly, Dick Higgins noted: “I knew several of the old Dadaists, had
been raised on their work, and there was no doubt in my mind that what we happenings and
Fluxus people were doing had rather little to do with Dada” (Higgins 1998, 218). Looking back
on Fluxus from the vantage point of 1980, Jackson Mac Low recalled that “none of us…were,
as far as I know, seriously anti-art…Only Henry Flynt—and somewhat differently Maciunas—
came during the 1960s, to develop various anti-art and art-replacement theories” (Low 1993, 47).
For a recent reconsideration of the relationship between Fluxus and Dada, see Brill (2010).
While Brill argues that the relation between Fluxus and Dada has not received the attention it
deserves, she does note that figures such as Estera Milman and others raised the question as
far back as the nineteen seventies (Brill 2010, 98). For accounts by Milman, Stephen Foster, and
Nicholas Zurbrugg on the relations between Fluxus and Dada, see their essays in part 3 (“Critical
and Historical Perspectives”) of Friedman (1998).
2
Often overlooked in the literature is anthropologist Marilyn Ekdahl Ravicz’s doctoral dis-
sertation: Fluxus: Aesthetic Anthropology: Theory and Analysis of Pop and Conceptual Art in America
(1974). Aspects of Ravicz’s argument will be addressed below.
3
See in particular Benjamin Buchloh, in Foster et. al. (2004, 456). In a related manner, Bu-
chloh has proposed that aspects of Fluxus should be understood as “theaters of advanced reifica-
© symploke Vol. 23, Nos. 1-2 (2015) ISSN 1069-0697, 309-325.
310 Roger Rothman Fluxus, or the Work of Art in the Age of Information
some of the key components of Fluxus, much of what distinguishes it so

radically from the mainstream practices of the post-war avant-garde is left
unregistered. Focusing exclusively on the question of institutional critique
makes is difficult, if not impossible, to make sense of the complex and crucial
role that humor, collectivity, and joyous affirmation played for so many of the
Fluxus artists.
In order to make sense of these aspects of Fluxus a different paradigm is
required, one that is able to account for the affirmative spirit of play, commu-
nication, and sharing. And in order to do this, it will not be enough to find
a space for Fluxus within the established discourse of the avant-garde as
negation, critique, and deconstruction (Tristan Tzara’s “great negative work
of destruction”; Theodor Adorno’s “negative canon”).4 The vast majority of
Fluxus seeks not to dismantle, but to assemble. It aims not expose fallacies,
but to play games.
Crucial in this regard was the influence of John Cage. As Henry Flynt,
an artist who was, himself, deeply committed to the practice of institutional
critique, recalled in 1993, Cage’s significance derived in large part from the
composer’s affirmative position and practice: “Dada’s transgressive gestures
were intended as savage satires. One can read all of Dada, in fact, as a
protest against World War I. (A protest whose inconsequentiality showed
that parody and mobilization are art’s least worthy, least credible functions.)
Cage’s ‘absurdist’ works, on the other hand, meant to promulgate a new
sensibility, a sensibility of accident, of vanishings, of nothing. Resentment
was not a consideration” (Flynt n.p.).
This fundamentally affirmative aspect of Cage’s influence most clearly
resonates with what could be called, following Bruno Latour, caring construc-
tion. For Latour, the time has come to reassess both the work of criticism and
the subject-position of the critic: “The critic is not the one who debunks, but
the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under
the feet of the naïve believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in
which to gather. The critic is…the one for whom, if something is constructed,
then it means it is fragile and thus in great need of care and caution.”5 For
Latour, the productive limits of critique as exposure and negation have been
reached and exceeded. An alternate course is now required, one in which
care and construction are held above debunking and deconstruction.
Latour’s critique of critique is echoed in the late writings of Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, in which she argued that the legacies of Marxism, psychoanalysis,
and deconstruction have devolved into a compulsory paranoia that needs
to make way for what she calls the reparative position: “No less acute than a
tion,” in which are enacted “those conditions of collective object competence and of advanced
desubjectivization.” (Buchloh, “Robert Watts: Animate Objects, Inanimate Subjects,” in Buchloh
[2000, 551]). See also Kotz (2001, 55-89). A revised version of this essay appears in Kotz (2007,
59-98).
4
Tzara (2005, 256); Adorno (1997, 34).
5
Latour (2004, 246). For a critique of the post-critical turn, see Foster (2012b).
symplokeˉ 311
paranoid position, no less realistic, no less attached to a project of survival,

and neither less nor more delusional or fantasmatic, the reparative reading
position undertakes a different range of affects, ambitions, and risks. What
we can best learn from practices are, perhaps, the many ways selves and
communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—
even a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them.”6
Although by no means identical, the arguments of Latour and Sedgwick
prepare a frame within which it is possible not only to recognize the humor
and collectivity of Fluxus, but also to make sense of how its humor and
collectivity derive from and work within the network logic of the informa-
tion age.7 By reading Fluxus through the lens of network theory it becomes
evident that the artists who worked within its orbit deployed the network
logic of informationalism so as to assemble (in Latour’s sense) the reparative
tools of humor and collective play.
George Maciunas proposed the term Fluxus in 1961, and said he chose it
because of the multiple meanings in the word “FLUX.”8 First and foremost
was the notion of flow and change—which he associated with John Cage’s
ideas on chance (Maciunas was among a small but influential group of young
artists who attended John Cage’s classes in experimental music at the New
School in the late fifties.) But it also carried with it the sense of purging and
excreting waste. As he put it in his 1963 manifesto, Fluxus sought to “purge
the world of bourgeois sickness, ‘intellectual’, professional and commercial-
ized culture. Purge the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract
art, illusionistic art, mathematical art…” Maciunas also liked the chemical
definition of FLUX as a fusing of metals. Fluxus would, he declared, “fuse
the cadres of cultural, social and political revolutionaries into [a] united front
6
Sedgwick (2003, 150). Elsewhere in the text, Sedgwick describes “paranoid hermeneutics,”
as “[the] infinitely doable and teachable protocols of unveiling [that] have become the common
currency of cultural and historicist studies…. What makes pleasure and amelioration so ‘mere’?
Only the exclusiveness of paranoia’s faith in demystifying exposure: only its cruel and contemp-
tuous assumption that the one thing lacking for global revolution, explosion of gender roles,
or whatever, is people’s (that is, other people’s) having the painful effects of their oppression,
poverty, or deludedness sufficiently exacerbated to make the pain conscious (as if otherwise it
wouldn’t have been) and intolerable (as if intolerable situations were famous for generating
excellent solutions)” (Sedgwick 2003, 143-44). In contrast: “To read from a reparative position is
to surrender the knowing, anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently
unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new; to a reparatively positioned reader, it can
seem realistic and necessary to experience surprise…Hope, often a fracturing, even a traumatic
thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to
organize the fragments of part-objects she encounters or creates” (Sedgwick 2003, 146).
7
Ken Friedman details the central role played by “communal work” for him and other Flux-
us artists (Friedman 2008, 139).
8
The best overview of Fluxus is Smith (1998).
and action.” Critics have lit upon this manifesto, along with Maciunas’s
contemporaneous flirtation with the politics of the Russian avant-garde, as
keys to unlocking the political radicality of Fluxus.9
It should be noted however, that Maciunas’s perspective shifted signifi-
cantly in the subsequent years. By 1965, Maciunas abandoned the revolu-
tionary rhetoric of his 1963 manifesto and declared that Fluxus should be
understood as an artistic “rear-guard”: “without any pretention or urge to
participate in the competition of ‘one-upmanship’ with the avant-garde.”
Fluxus, he insisted, had less in common with the radical negativity of the
historical avant-garde than it did with ordinary jokes and games. In the 1965
“Broadside Manifesto,” he described Fluxus as “the fusion of Spike Jones,
Vaudeville, gags, children’s games and Duchamp” (Maciunas 1995, 135).
By 1978 Maciunas had found an even simpler and less antagonistic defini-
tion of Fluxus: “I think it’s good, inventive gags. That’s what we’re doing”
(Miller 1998, 196). Indeed, far too much has been made of Maciunas’s 1963
manifesto. Not only was it promoted by Maciunas for but a brief moment,
it was also aggressively opposed by a number of other Fluxus artists, such
as Jackson Mac Low who rejected it as “old time middle-class (to shock the
middle-class is a favorite middle-class activity) sadistic dada & sadly out
of place in our present world” (Smith 1998, 114).10 Nevertheless, so long as
critical opinion continues to interpret Fluxus through the lens of Maciunas’s
passing identification with the Russian avant-garde of the twenties, it will be
difficult, if not impossible, to draw forth the equally radical implications of
his particular deployment and distribution of humor and play.
Fluxus play typically involved performances (events and their written
scores) as well as object constructions.11 La Monte Young’s instruction to
“Draw a Line and Follow It,” is exemplary, as are Robert Watts’s many rocks,
measured by weight and volume and offered for sale in wooden or plastic
boxes. Maciunas spent many years seeking out these and other objects to
be packaged together and sold as Fluxus kits. He would implore his friends
via the mail to ask that they send him something, anything, that he could
put into his kits. He’d ask that they be cheap items, easily reproduced so
that the kits could be sold for modest amounts (one kit, which included
dozens of individual objects, was priced at $100; individual items could
be purchased for as little as 25¢). They included things like Robert Watts’s
rocks and George Brecht’s Inclined Plane Puzzle (a box with a small ball inside
along with the instruction to “Place ball on inclined surface. Observe the
ball rolling uphill”). The objects, instructions, and games were inserted into
9
In addition to Buchloh, see, for example, Robinson (2008). For a detailed account of Maci-
unas’s interest in the Russian avant-garde, see Medina (2004), Medina (2005), and Medina (2006).
10
Mac Low derided Maciunas’s 1963 call for a series of public demonstrations as “bizarre,
disruptive, antisocial manifestations,” and subsequently “resigned” from Fluxus in a public let-
ter to Maciunas (Mac Low 1982, 132).
11
Mary Flanagan describes the role of play in Fluxus as serving to “undermin[e] the serious-
ness of high art, and point[] irreverently instead to intentionally creating everyday actions and
experiences instead of sanctifying a pristine art object” (Flanagan 2009, 101).
symplokeˉ 313
Figure 1. Marcel Duchamp, Boîte-en-Valise, 1938-41.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY. © Succession
Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York 2015.
envelopes or boxes which were labeled and set inside divided sections within
the kit. Some, like Brecht’s puzzle, were meant to provoke a laugh, while
others offered instructions for simple activities that might draw attention to
mundane events (like Alison Knowles’ directions for the recipient to “make a
salad”12). Some also included flip-books and short super-eight films, as well
as found or store-bought items like a packet of seeds or a folded napkin. As
a “product” for purchase and consumption, the Fluxkits eschewed avant-
gardist critique in favor of small, simple, and momentary sentiments of joy
and the affirmation of everyday life.
Initially, however, the affirmative dimension of Fluxus was difficult to
recognize as its debt to Dada was thought to be more salient. The echo of
Hugo Ball’s 1917 performance of Karawane seems to lurk behind events like
Philip Corner’s 1962 “Piano Activities,” in which a piano was gradually
destroyed over the course of a nearly month-long festival. Likewise does
Marcel Marien’s monocular glasses of 1937 make the objects that Daniel
Spoerri and François Dufrêne’s designed for their 1963 book, L’Optique
Moderne: Collection de Lunettes, seem to some to be all but a carbon copy. Of all
the specters hovering over Fluxus, however, none weighs heavier than that
of Duchamp. Indeed, insofar as the most distinctive products of the Fluxus
endeavor are the kits, it would seem that Duchamp already achieved what
they had set out to do with his Boîte-en-Valise (fig. 1).
The comparison with Duchamp’s work is useful since the superficial
similarities between Fluxus and Dada serve to draw attention to what is in
fact the most significant aspect of Maciunas’s kits: their network structure.
Consider, for example, the three versions of Year Box 2 preserved in the
Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection (fig. 2). Examining them side by side, a
number of differences are immediately obvious. For example, one includes a
12
For a Cagean study of Knowles’s work, see Robinson (2004).
Figure 2. George Maciunas, Flux Year Box 2. c.1968.

Photo Credit: The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY
plastic pear, another a mottled stone. Indeed, were we to remove all the items
and catalog them, we would find that a number of the plastic containers are
also different as are the contents of the various envelops inserted in beneath
the box’s lid. This is because, unlike Duchamp, Maciunas was constantly
adjusting the contents of his boxes, in part because he had to make do with
whatever his friends were willing or able to send him. And he would practi-
cally beg them to send him things to include: “Please send me some of your
compositions,” he wrote to Willem De Ridder. “Please send me anything
you think will fit [inside]…Maybe you can make flip-book movies…You
have time till mid-Summer, OK?” he pleaded to Vautier, while to Watts he
beseeched: “keep sending me your GOODIES! It is never too late.”13 Indeed,
reading his countless pleas for more objects makes one suspect that what
mattered most to Maciunas was not the objects themselves but the interpre-
tive connections they enabled. In one instance we are asked to consider a
film by Yoko Ono in relation to a piece of plastic fruit submitted by Claes
Oldenburg. In another we face a rock by Watts and some plastic straws by
Ben Vautier. Recently, Ken Friedman has analyzed Fluxus in related terms by
underscoring the hermeneutic dimension of the Fluxkits and other interme-
dial works (Friedman 2012, 390-93).
13
Citations from Hendricks (1988, 122; 122; 119).
symplokeˉ 315
What becomes especially salient for the recipient of Maciunas’s box is the
sense that one is invited to unpack, peruse, and play with a diverse collection
of tiny objects that are in themselves almost entirely negligible. By virtue of
the triviality of the individual units contained inside the box, what emerges
as consequential is not the games and gags themselves but rather the network
into which these games and gags have been inserted. The box’s collection of
diverse objects invite recipients to consider the connections between Vautier
and Ono, Watts and Oldenburg, which is to say, to think of the world in terms
of relations rather than substances, networks rather than units.
That the Fluxus artists saw themselves as enmeshed within a complex
social network was first addressed at length by Marilyn Ravicz.14 In her 1974
dissertation, Aesthetic Anthropology: Theory and Analysis of Pop and Conceptual
Art in America, Ravicz contrasted the locally bounded network in which
the Pop artists practiced with the international network through which
the Fluxus artists circulated (Ravicz 1974, 263). Moreover, she underscores
the fact that the Fluxus network reached beyond that of the art-world that
Lawrence Alloway had dissected in his 1972 Artforum essay, “Network:
The Art World Described as a System.” More recently, in an essay on Ken
Friedman, Peter Frank noted that although Maciunas sought to establish
Fluxus as a “hierarchically driven collective,” the vast majority of the artists
organized themselves as a “relatively open and informal network” (Frank
2008, 145). Friedman himself has addressed the networked aspect of Dick
Higgins’s political conception of Fluxus. For Friedman, Higgins’ perspective
was shaped by a politics of everyday life as “a complex relational network”
(Friedman 2012, 383). Elsewhere Friedman has pointed out that a number
of Fluxus activities prefigured the networked practices of web-based art and
communications. As early as the 1950s, notes Friedman, “artists such as Nam
June Paik and Wolf Vostell were working with television and dreaming of
artist-controlled broadcast media. In the early 1960s, Paik called for a new
utopia through television, in a series of manifestos that resembled many of
the features that would later typify the Internet and the World Wide Web”
(Friedman 2005, 411).15 Friedman was himself deeply engaged in network
14
Ravicz’s focus is anthropological, so she attends to aspects of Pop art and Fluxus that
art historians often overlook. For example, she notes that “the meteoric rise to fame of the Pop
artists and of their style was in large part made possible by the communication network which
linked the New York and the Los Angeles galleries and museums; the news and information
regarding shows and exhibits in major cities filtered back to New York via Chicago, Dallas, and
Minneapolis, and were fed back into the point of view from which the New York artists contin-
ued to develop” (1974, 204). Likewise she highlights the roles of information technology and ris-
ing affluence as key determinants in the development of Pop: “After World War II, the spread of
technology and of communications and the media, as well as a rising income and the growth of a
university educated middle-class have contrived to change the profile of the culture-consumers”
(1974, 212). With regard to Fluxus, she notes that “the communication network is such that al-
though some of the important artists are not permanently resident in the United States, much of
their work has been communicated to, or exhibited in American institutions or cities” (1974, 263).
15
In “Utopian Laser TV Station,” Paik asserted that “Very very very high-frequency occila-
tion of laser will enable us to afford thousands of large and small TV stations. This will free us
practices. As he described his contribution to Amazing Facts Magazine: “At

one point in the 1960s, I was interested in how experimental artists were
communicating, how they worked with one another, how they interacted.
That interest led to a series of projects involving mailing lists and ‘zines. The
lists gave birth to projects such as the File magazine lists and to directories
such as Art Diary” (Janssen 1996). Moreover, understood as a tool for estab-
lishing and expanding social networks, the content of the magazines was less
significant than the effects of their distribution. With regard to Ray Johnson’s
New York Correspondence School Weekly Breeder, for example, Friedman has
described it as “both a joke and way to establish regular, weekly contact with
other artists” (Saper 2001, 124).
The sense of Fluxus as structured by expansive social networks is best
exemplified by the project that Brecht and Robert Filliou began in 1965.
Filliou described the project in his book, Teaching and Learning as Performing
Arts, as an attempt to establish a workshop and a store in Villefrance-sur-mer.
But the shop, which they named La Cedille qui Sourit (The Smiling Cedilla), was
“never commercially registered” and was almost always shut. Visitors had
to meet them at their house to have it opened for them. Filliou described the
workshop as “an international center of permanent creation”:
We played games, invented and desinvented [sic] objects, corresponded

with the humble and mighty, drank and talked with our neighbors, manu-
factured and sold by correspondence poems and rebuses, [and] started
to compile an anthology of misunderstandings and another of jokes, and
began to film some of these along with our one-minute scenarios, and even
managed to organize in Paris a pre-Christmas show where tens of artists
joined us in the creation of small, inexpensive artworks that could be
considered gifts rather than collector’s items.16
Out of this project, Filliou and Brecht developed what they called “The
Eternal Network.”17 For Filliou, it was crucial for artists to recognize not
only the artistic network in which all artists are obviously embedded, but
also and more importantly: “the artist must also realize that he is part of
wider network…around him all the time in all parts of the world.” Filliou’s
program, therefore, included the performance of “such things as private
parties, weddings, divorces, lawcourts, funerals, factory works, trips around
from the monopoly of a few commercial TV channels.” In Higgins (1966, 25).

16
Filliou (1970). I have removed the word “suspense” between “correspondence” and “po-
ems” (1979, 198).
17
For a consideration of Fluxus in relation to Nicolas Bourriaud’s influential but much
criticized notion of relational aesthetics, see Patrick (2010) and Clavez (2005). Clavez contrasts
what he sees as the transformative agenda of Fluxus with the relational practices championed by
Bourriaud: “In the 1960s, the exploration of conviviality was seen as an act of possible cultural
regeneration. At the time, this vision extended to a larger culture, including the culture outside
of the world of art. Today, the work is the place of conviviality itself. It uses the context it ques-
tions—mostly institutional—without trying to modify, change or disturb it in any way” (Clavez
2005, 239).
symplokeˉ 317
towns in busses, pro-Negro manifestations, or anti-Vietnams [sic] ones, bars,

churches, etc.” (Filliou 204). Together, what Brecht and Filliou’s Eternal
Network, Maciunas’s Year Boxes, as well as Young and Brecht’s scores (often
explicitly dedicated to friends18) suggest is that Fluxus was structured by the
logic of networks: not only their construction, but also their organization,
maintenance, and inevitable transience.19
As such, Fluxus testifies to what Manuel Castells describes as the shift
from a society primarily constructed around forces of industry to one orga-
nized by flows of information: “Industrial society (both in its capitalist and
its statist versions) was predominantly structured around large-scale, verti-
cal production organizations and extremely hierarchical state apparatuses…
Around the energy nucleus of the industrial revolution, technologies clustered
and converged in various fields, from chemical engineering and metallurgy
to transportation, telecommunications, and, ultimately, life sciences and their
applications.”20 By contrast: “Informationalism is a technological paradigm
based on the augmentation of the human capacity of information process-
ing and communication made possible by the revolutions in microelectron-
ics, software, and genetic engineering” (Castells 2004, 9). For Castells, the
expansion of capitalism, along with the new electronic technologies, resulted
in a shift from an industrial mode of operation to an informational mode:
“The conditions of a mature industrial society [enabled the emergence of]
autonomous projects of organizational networking…When they did, they
could use the potential of microelectronics-based communication technolo-
gies” (Castells 2004, 5). From industry to information, force to flow: these
are coordinates within which Castells developed his concept of the network
society.21
At the same time, however, it is important to underscore that this network
society did not erupt suddenly.22 Indeed, as Alfred Chandler and James
Cortada note: “Americans have been preparing for the Information Age for
more than 300 years. It did not start with the introduction of the World Wide
Web in the early 1990s.” Information networks that predate and prefigure the
18
For example, La Mont Young’s most well-known score, Composition 1960 #10 (“Draw a
straight line and follow it”) was dedicated “to Bob Morris.” Liz Kotz has demonstrated a num-
ber of hidden complexities imbedded within the apparently simple scores that Young and Brecht
produced, but one crucial element that she does not address is the fact that their scores were
often written to a particular individual and that they used the postal system as the vehicle for
establishing these network connections. Kotz (2007).
19
For Friedman, Filliou’s “Eternal Network” was “not a call to action, but something be-
tween a metaphor and a description of what Filliou believed to be an emerging social reality.”
For Friedman, the unfortunate failure of Filliou’s project stemmed from “the fact…that the Eter-
nal Network functioned primarily on a metaphorical level” (Friedman, 2005, 414).
20
Castells (2004, 5; 8).
21
Castells (1996-1998). Each volume has been revised since its initial publication.
22
Nor does the network society obviate the role of place. For the role of cities in the global,
networked society, see especially Sassen (1991). For a rich account of the Soho art scene in the
sixties and seventies, see Simpson (1981). Simpson’s book addresses Maciunas’s pioneering at-
tempt to establish a “Fluxhouse Cooperative” (1981, 155-162).
contemporary computer networks include “the U.S. postal system and roads
for the mail to travel on…copyright laws…newspapers, books, pamphlets,
and broadsides…telegraph, telephone, phonograph, and motion pictures”
(Chandler and Cortada 2000, v). What is distinctive about the period that
began in the sixties is not the emergence of information systems, for they had
existed for centuries, but rather the development of an information system
that operates, for the first time, free of any necessary connection to the content
it is presumed to transmit. As Michael Hobart and Zachary Schiffman point
out:
Information in the classical age was thoroughly wedded to an idea

of substance, as the nouns and adjectives of natural language had
their semantic references in the world of things…Now, in contrast
to the previous age, substance has vanished entirely from informa-
tion. Our information technology stakes out a realm in which mean-
ing or content—what earlier ages had abstracted from experience,
shaped or formed as information, and understood as contained in
memory—is replaced by logical rules. The rules simply bracket, or
delineate, the algorithmic procedures by means of which a piece
of experience can be encoded and thus informed…. The techni-
cal processing of empty symbols, an activity governed entirely by
power and play, has replaced…all vestiges of substance. (Hobart
and Schiffman 2000, 203)
Thus was the emergence of the network society shaped by a new concep-
tion of information. No longer simply the vehicle through which communi-
cative substance (meaning) is transmitted, information is shorn of substance
and ruled exclusively by logical rules (scripts, codes).
Of all the works of Fluxus artists that speak to this shift from industry
to information and, with it, from a system in which information was under-
stood as secondary to and dependent upon the content it carried to a system
in which “content…is replaced by logical rules,” the most striking is Ben
Vautier’s Receive/Return. The work consists simply of a blank postcard with
the same information printed on each side. The sender writes his or her
name and address on one side and the receiver’s name and address on the
other. Then the sender folds the card horizontally so that only the receiver’s
address is visible on the outside. The receiver, in turn, folds the card the other
way and sends it back to sender. The resulting object is absent any substance;
it is no more than a conduit between individuals.23 It is, as Chandler and
Cortada put it: “free of any necessary connection to the content it is presumed
to transmit” (Chandler and Cortada 2000).
23
Saper interprets this work differently. He understands it, and other works like it that
depend upon the postal system, as a “sociopoetic experiment” in which the work “compels the
participant to become a mail artist…[by] using the bureaucratic postal system for intimate aes-
thetic ends” (Saper 2001, 127-28).
symplokeˉ 319
In addition to the shift from content-based information to protocol-based

information, systems shaped by information introduce a social practice that
tends to be far less salient in systems shaped primarily by industry: sharing.
As Castells notes:
The free sharing of knowledge and discovery is the essential mecha-

nism by which innovation takes place in the information age…And
since innovation is the source of productivity, wealth, and power,
there is a direct relationship between the power of sharing and the
sharing of power. So, networking for the sake of networking, being
ready to learn from others and to give them what you have, could
be the culture of the network society: a belief in the power of the
network, in your empowerment by being open to others, and in the
joy of diversity. (Castells 2004, 40)
Although evident almost everywhere in Fluxus, this abiding faith in the

power of sharing and the imperative to freely give away what one has worked
to produce was most concisely articulated by Dick Higgins who said that “it
mattered little which of us had done which piece. The spirit was: you’ve seen
it, now—very well, it’s yours. Now you are free to make your own variation
of it if you like, and the piece and the world will be a little richer for all that.”24
In this regard, Yochai Benkler’s analysis of the economics of sharing within
the context of the network society is especially pertinent. “The networked
environment,” writes Benkler, “makes possible a new modality of organiz-
ing production: radically decentralized, collaborative, and nonproprietary;
based on sharing resources and outputs among widely distributed, loosely
connected individuals who cooperate with each other without relying on
either market signals or managerial commands” (Benkler 2006, 60). Rather
than consign the concept of sharing to the realm of misty-eyed utopianism,
Benkler demonstrates how—within a networked economy—sharing can
function as the most efficient and effective mode of production and distribu-
tion. Moreover, in a manner that echoes uncannily the processes by which
Maciunas elicited and assembled the items contained within his Fluxkits,
Benkler notes:
Creative labor in the context of peer production can be harnessed

when a project is broken up into discrete modules, whose granular-
ity is varied and sufficiently fine grained to allow individuals with
diverse motivations to engage in the effort at levels appropriate for
their motivations but still provide stable contributions to the whole.
In this, the modularity and granularity of the individual effort and
time required by a project allow individuals to segment their own
24
“Open letter from Dick Higgins to George Maciunas, 1974” (Getty archives). Cited in
Joseph (2008, 96). Friedman addresses the role of sharing in “Working Together,” in Friedman
(2008).
days, weeks, or months such that they can find “excess capacity”
that they can contribute to the common effort. (Benkler 2004, 336)
Crucial to the functioning of such networks of sharing is the existence

of a social network (a collection of individual human relations) that is, as
Mark Granovetter famously put it, defined by the presence of “weak ties”:
interpersonal relations that are casual, informal (in contrast to the “strong
ties” of intimate friends and family members). For Benkler, weak ties enable
groups to engage in collective projects that would likely prove impossible for
groups bound together by strong social ties:
The phenomena [of shared production and distribution] rely on

relatively impersonal, or loosely coupled, cooperation, are gener-
ally focused on a particular functional project, and are based on
quite radically decentralized action. Their impersonality is what
allows them to scale to very large groups, which can nonetheless
maintain effective action, because intimacy, or even substantial
familiarity, is highly limited by each individual’s time, memory,
and emotional capacities. Their relatively project-specific pattern
is what allows for moderately impersonal exchange to suffice…The
absence of these stronger, “stickier” bonds makes these phenomena
attractive as a modality of production because they allow greater
flexibility and liquidity in the deployment of resources—whether
human or material—through these systems, more so than systems
that depend on more centralized organizational infrastructures
or that claim broader scope over the participation of participants.
(Benkler 2004, 343-44)
Benkler’s account of the weak-tie structure not only speaks to the condi-
tions in which Fluxus sharing flourished, it also suggests that the conditions
of reception enables still more sharing. Fluxus works of art are themselves
open to sharing with others to a degree not present in other works of art. This
is the case not only because of the low cost of the objects themselves (neither
precious nor unique, they may be passed from individual to individual with-
out fear that one’s personal investment is in danger), but also because the
experience itself is so simple and unprepossessing. Remember that Fluxus
objects were typically designed to provoke laughter. Not awe, not reverie,
not frozen meditation. As such, their effect on the viewer is short-lived. Like
a good joke, one laughs, but then moves on. One doesn’t spend hours gazing
at a joke the way one might before a painting by Rothko or Rembrandt. As
such, Fluxus works do not reward ownership in the way that a Rothko or
Rembrandt would. In the language of Benkler, Fluxus works are—for each
individual who experiences them—”rapidly decaying goods.” That is, they
are useful to the owner for only a short time (the time it takes to “get” the
joke). Once “gotten” there is little reason to hold onto it. One might as well
symplokeˉ 321
share it, for in sharing it, the owner gains social capital in the place of the
(now depleted) physical capital.25
The uniqueness of Fluxus production and distribution—founded, as
Benkler’s work helps clarify—upon both the shareability of certain types
of goods as well as the particular social conditions of loosely knit groups
become all the more evident when compared with Surrealist practice. Recall,
for instance, Boiffard, Eluard and Vitrac’s preface to the first issue of La
Révolution Surréaliste. The scene they staged as emblematic of the Surrealist
project is that of familial intimacy—the paradigm of strong-tie relations.
“Each morning, in all families, fathers, mothers, and their children, IF THEY
HAVE NOTHING MORE IMPORTANT TO DO, tell each other about their
dreams” (Boiffard, Eluard, and Vitrac 1924, 1). The criticism leveled against
André Breton for having been ruthless in enforcing a strict code of conduct
among fellow Surrealists may well deserve to be reconsidered as an attempt
to maintain the strong-tie relations that are implicit in the Surrealist project
of sharing intimate stories about oneself. Fluxus, by contrast, was founded
on the production and distribution of small, impersonal objects for which the
issue of rigid containment is at odds.
Bengt af Klintberg, folklorist and participant in some of the earliest
Fluxus events, refers to this as the “non-individual character of Fluxus art.”
To Klintberg, there are many works of Fluxus about which it no more makes
sense to speak of “ownership” than it does when considering a folk tale
(Klintberg 1993, 120). Thus it is no surprise that a number of artists involved
in Fluxus balked at Maciunas’s attempts to establish a tightly-knit group in
which control and ownership would necessarily come to the fore. Looking
back on the years when Maciunas was living in Europe and organizing Fluxus
concerts and events, Emmett Williams described Maciunas has having had
two sides: “Fluxus George” and “Air Force George.”:
Air Force George was the man who worked as a designer at the
American airbase in Wiesbaden, shopped in the commissary, and
made the dollars that paid for the festivals, the promotion and the
publications. Fluxus George was a tyrant, in the style of Tzara and
Breton. (Williams 1993, 28)
Even among those who participated most fully in the practice and
dissemination of Fluxus were never comfortable defining it. Dick Higgins,
who preferred to refer to Fluxus as “rostrum” rather than a movement,
25
Here I am relying on a distinction Daniel Bell makes in his forward to the 1999 edition
of The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: “Physical capital is the control of goods and resources,
financial capital the command of money, human capital the acquisition of new skills and knowl-
edge through education. Social capital is the awareness of new opportunities and possibilities
for advancement through new information and, most important, by acquiring connections” (Bell
1999, lviii). In the case of Fluxus objects, the owner who shares the works she has purchased
for herself provides herself with new information and new connections at a minimal cost to her
own financial capital.
manufactured a list of no fewer than nine criteria that defined it. Ken
Friedman’s list numbers twelve.26 Maciunas himself eventually agreed that
Fluxus shouldn’t be considered a group at all. “It’s more a way of doing
things…Very informal, sort of like a joke group…In fact, I wouldn’t put it in
any higher class than a gag, maybe a good gag” (Miller 1998, 195). A good
gag is neither sophisticated nor enlightening. A gag is good so long as it
manages to make people laugh. The quality of a gag is thus assessed by
the degree to which the laughter it induces links people together. Unlike
the sharing of a dream, the sharing of a joke establishes weak-ties, and thus
fosters the very model of social production and distribution that Benkler sees
as a powerful alternative to both market exchange and state control, an alter-
native uniquely suited to the conditions of informationalism.
In an essay concerned with weak-tie social networks and their implica-
tions, it seems appropriate to end with a consideration of works by Yoko
Ono, an artist whose own relation to Fluxus was arguably of the “weak”
sort, having participated in Fluxus events and object-productions irregularly
throughout her career (Hendricks 2000). Ono’s objects and performances
are crucial here not only because many of them explicitly call for shared
production (Painting to Hammer a Nail In, 1996; Cut Piece, 1964, White Chess
Set, 1966), but also because they make it clear that social production demands
acceptance of vulnerability. Sharing can only take place in an environment
in which individual participants willingly suspend their autonomy and thus
their instinct for self-preservation. Most evident in this regard is her most
famous performance Cut Piece, in which Ono sat cross-legged on the floor
with a pair of scissors placed to her side. Submitting herself to the audience’s
urges and inclinations, viewers were invited to walk up to her and cut off
pieces of her clothing.
Most emblematic of the vulnerability requirement implicit in shared
production is Ono’s Ceiling Painting (Yes Painting), 1966. Here the viewer, not
the artist, is the one placed in a position of vulnerability (albeit not nearly as
self-exposed as Ono in Cut Piece). The work is composed of a step ladder, a
piece of paper on which the word “yes” is written and which is itself affixed
to the ceiling, and a magnifying glass which the viewer can use to read the
word (it is too small to read from the floor). In order to experience the work,
the viewer must climb the ladder and, in doing so, place oneself in a situ-
ation likely to inspire a certain amount of fear or anxiety. Standing atop a
ladder in the middle of a gallery filled with people one doesn’t know inevi-
tably provokes the fear that perhaps somewhere in the room lurks a nefari-
ous individual who might suddenly knock over the ladder. The “yes” the
viewer reads thus functions as the artist’s acknowledgement of the viewer’s
acceptance of vulnerability, of the trust that climbing the ladder requires.
The viewer gives to the work his/her trust and the work in turn affirms the
viewer’s act of trusting. Works like Ceiling Painting and Cut Piece speak to the
26
Higgins (1998); Friedman, “Fluxus and Company,” In Friedman (1998, 237-253).
symplokeˉ 323
distinction between the critical practices that have long served as the modus
operandi of the avant-garde and the fundamentally affirmative orientation
of Fluxus. They speak to an historical moment in which network systems
enable new modes of social production and exchange as well as to a post-
critical position from which one can model, as Friedman put it “a hopeful,
proactive engagement with the world” (Friedman 2012, 375).
BUCKNELL UNIVERSITY
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Fluxus, or the Work of Art in the Age of Information

Author(s): Roger Rothman

Over the past two decades, critical and historical understanding of

© symploke Vol. 23, Nos. 1-2 (2015) ISSN 1069-0697, 309-325.

some of the key components of Fluxus, much of what distinguishes it so

paranoid position, no less realistic, no less attached to a project of survival,

Figure 1. Marcel Duchamp, Boîte-en-Valise, 1938-41.

Figure 2. George Maciunas, Flux Year Box 2. c.1968.

practices. As he described his contribution to Amazing Facts Magazine: “At

We played games, invented and desinvented [sic] objects, corresponded

from the monopoly of a few commercial TV channels.” In Higgins (1966, 25).

towns in busses, pro-Negro manifestations, or anti-Vietnams [sic] ones, bars,

Information in the classical age was thoroughly wedded to an idea

In addition to the shift from content-based information to protocol-based

The free sharing of knowledge and discovery is the essential mecha-

Although evident almost everywhere in Fluxus, this abiding faith in the

Creative labor in the context of peer production can be harnessed

Crucial to the functioning of such networks of sharing is the existence

The phenomena [of shared production and distribution] rely on

Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. R. Hullot-Kentor. London: Athlone, 1997.

___. “Post-Critical.” October 139 (Winter 2012b): 3-8.

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