An original Dadaist talked Fluxus out of calling itself neo-Dada
George Maciunas first pitched his circle of experimental artists as neo-Dada. Raoul Hausmann, one of the original Dadaists, wrote back that neo means nothing and any -ism sounds dated, so why not simply Fluxus? The name, meaning to flow, stuck, and a piano smashed at an early festival soon caused a stir in Germany.
Fluxus was a loose international community of visual artists, composers, designers and poets active in the 1960s and 1970s. Inspired by John Cage, they valued chance and process over finished objects, staging performance events from scores, making noise music, concrete poetry and publications, and often sharing anti-commercial, anti-art attitudes. The label intermedia is sometimes applied to the way they crossed disciplines. Participants ranged from Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik to Joseph Beuys and Alison Knowles.
The roots lie in experimental composition classes Cage taught in Manhattan between 1957 and 1959, at the New School for Social Research, which he began after attending D. T. Suzuki's courses on Zen Buddhism. Proto-Fluxus events followed, notably loft concerts on Chambers Street curated by Ono and La Monte Young in 1961. In a sense the work came first and the name was attached afterwards to what already existed.
Maciunas, a trained graphic designer, got involved when he offered to lay out material Young had gathered for a journal issue. He publicly coined the name in a brochure handed out at a festival he organised in Wuppertal, West Germany, on 9 June 1962, and argued in a lecture that Fluxus opposed shutting everyday life out of art. That year he, Dick Higgins and Knowles toured Europe, launching Fluxfests with 14 concerts in Wiesbaden between 1 and 23 September.
At Wiesbaden they performed Corner's Piano Activities, a score inviting performers to pluck, scratch, drop objects on and otherwise act upon a piano. They took it further, systematically wrecking an instrument Maciunas had bought for 5 dollars, which offended German feelings about the instrument of Chopin. Maciunas also used work connections to print cheap multiples and books, beginning with pieces by Young and George Brecht's Water Yam.
Source: Fluxus
