Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life

Consider a corollary case. Much the same common ability to sort the artworks out from the rest of the world’s inventory would have been thought easily able to distinguish music from mere noise. To be sure, many will say that music from exotic cultures sounds like so much noise to them, but the perception that the sounds emanated from stringed instruments or sets of pipes blown through and sticks beaten together would convince them that it was being performed in a disciplined way by what their culture would class as musicians, however cacophonous, to their ears, the effect. But this would not be said of the mere noises of everyday life—the rumble of the subway trains, the rattle of the taxis, to quote from an old show tune. It was precisely this boundary that the American composer John Cage set out in the early fifties to call in question: “I had taken steps,” Cage wrote in his foreword to M, “to make a music that was just sounds, sounds free of judgments about whether they were musical or not.” He elaborated:

In these crucial years, especially in and around New York, the commonplace world of everyday experience had begun to undergo a kind of transfiguration in artistic consciousness. The idea dawned that nothing outward need distinguish a work of art from the most ordinary of objects or events, that a dance can consist in nothing more remarkable than sitting still, that whatever one hears can be music—even silence. The plainest of wooden boxes, a coil of clothesline, a roll of chicken wire, a row of bricks could be a sculpture. A simple shape painted white could be a painting. The institutions of the art world were not well suited to this moment. It was unreasonable to pay admission to watch a man not move or to listen to oneself breathe while someone, sitting before a piano, did not touch the keys. So much the worse for the institutions of the art world! At any time the weather allowed, a group could assemble to perform Dick Higgins’s 1959 Winter Carol, listening to the snow fall for an agreed-upon period of time. What could be more magical?

None of these movements reached further or went deeper in this effort than Fluxus, many of whose first adherents were members of Cage’s New School seminar in experimental composition. But they were not interested simply in the noise-music disjunction. They were interested in abolishing the line Kennick supposed would be recognized by all who entered the warehouse, between works of art and whatever else there was, whatever problems there might be in deciding on which side of the line something belonged. Coffee cups are no less beautiful than the most exalted sculptures, a kiss is as dramatic as the Liebestod, the slosh of water in wet boots is not to be invidiously distinguished from organ music (this inventory is paraphrased from Dick Higgins’s A Child’s History of Fluxus). George Maciunas, who gave Fluxus its name and a considerable portion of its form and feeling, declared in Neo-Dada in Music, Theater, Poetry, and Art that “if man could experience the world, the concrete world surrounding him, in the same way he experiences art, there would be no need for art, artists, and similar ‘nonproductive’ elements.” Maciunas’s idea was that something could be art without necessarily being high art. “There’s a lot, too much high art, in fact; that’s why we’re doing Fluxus,” he told Larry Miller in a 1978 interview. “We never intended it to be high art. We came out like a bunch of jokers.”

The lingering conceptual question was by virtue of what were Fluxus and so-called high art both to be considered art. The slogan, from the French artist Ben Vautier, one of the stalwarts of Fluxus, that “Absence d’art = Art,” left unresolved the question of what connection there could be between a box of matches, say, and The Last Judgment of Michelangelo or Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. What was revolutionary about Fluxus was that it removed from the concept of art whatever had been thought to ground the distinction—“Exclusiveness, Individuality, Ambition … Significance, Rarity, Inspiration, Skill, Complexity, Profundity, Greatness, Institutional and Commodity Value,” to cite a partial catalog from Maciunas’s 1966 Fluxus Manifesto. The effort was not to deny that the history of art up to that point had been marked by these qualities. It was rather to deny that any of them was essential to a concept of art that was to include the “Simple Natural Event, An Object, a Game, a Puzzle or a Gag.” The mark of Fluxus art is that much of it would be seized upon by anyone conversant with the history of art as not art at all. A paradigm Fluxus work would be precisely the kind of simple game I cited above, in which one tries to get two metal balls to settle into holes where the eyeballs are located in a crude chromolithograph of a clown’s face. The frontispiece of the publication that accompanied the Walker Art Center’s 1993 exhibition, “In the Spirit of Fluxus,” shows George Brecht’s 1975 Valoche (A Flux Travel Aid)—an open and partially unpacked wooden box containing or surrounded by toys: a jump rope, some balls, a top (perhaps), a children’s block with a snowman painted on it, a chess piece, a plastic egg or two, and what might or might not be prizes from boxes of Cracker Jacks. Fluxus did not show that no definition of art could be given. It showed that whatever definition there was had to deal with these least prepossessing of objects and actions. Maciunas cites with considerable satisfaction a Fluxus performance by George Brecht where he turned a light on and off. “That’s the piece. Turn the light on and then off. Now you do that every day, right?”

Since not every action consisting in turning a light on and off is an artistic performance, the question is what accounts for the difference. It was, it must be conceded, no part of Fluxus to answer this question. I regard it, however, as the central question in the philosophy of art, and part of why I cherish Fluxus is that it raised it in a particularly acute form. In truth, it could have been generated from many sectors of the avant-garde art world of the 1960s—from Pop or Minimalism, and most especially from Conceptual art late in the decade, when it was no longer accepted that art even required that there be a physical object at all. In principle, the question could have been raised at any time in the history of art, but it would have made no sense to philosophers, since there would have been nothing to nourish it in actual artistic practice until the time of Fluxus. What is fascinating is that it arose from within artistic practice itself at this particular historical moment, and it has occupied philosophical attention—or at least my philosophical attention—ever since.

In addition to the philosophical problem, there is a question of historical explanation: Why at a particular moment did art take this singular and largely unprecedented turn? The best that art historians are able to offer by way of a historical explanation of Fluxus, or the other movements in the extraordinary moment to which it belonged, is that they were reactions against Abstract Expressionism. “At some point,” Barbara Haskell writes in the catalog for her wonderful exhibition of 1984, Blam!, “Every generation feels the need to explore territory different from that occupied by its elders.” She is entirely right in emphasizing the degree to which Abstract Expressionism’s exaltation of the artist as a hero, and of art itself as a probe into the deepest recesses of spiritual reality, became a target of revulsion or ridicule for the generation that followed. There is no question that there was a reaction against the excessive romanticism of Abstract Expressionism, but that cannot account for the different forms the reaction took in Fluxus, Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptual art, each of which admittedly shared some traits. Minimalists, for example, were often disposed to use vernacular materials, like bricks or plywood. In this Minimalism resembled Fluxus. But Fluxus entirely shunned the reductionism of Minimalist art. Pop artists were attracted to throwaway imagery—to labels on canned goods, bubblegum wrappers, advertising boilerplates, pictures in comic books or movie magazines—but their effort was to turn these into oil paintings on the same monumental scale favored by Abstract Expressionists, to make them into “works of art” in a fairly conventional sense. Fluxus too was interested in these images but had no interest in doing anything to them. Wittgenstein said that philosophy should leave the world as it found it. Something like that is true of Fluxus as well. George Brecht said, “Between art and everyday life, there’s no difference … I take a chair and I simply put it in a gallery. The difference between a chair by Duchamp and one of my chairs is that Duchamp’s is on a pedestal and mine can still be used.”

How were we to do that? Here positions varied. Some philosophers felt that the methods of science offered the best model of clarification. All we needed to do was to specify the kind of observations that would verify a proposition, and that would take care of matters entirely. Indeed, if we cannot connect language with observation, that is to acknowledge that we are speaking nonsense. Other philosophers felt that if we pay close attention to the way we use ordinary language, we will see that that suffices all our intellectual needs. In the fifties and sixties, avant-garde philosophy consisted either in the logical examination of the language of science or in the close reading of the way ordinary men and women use language in the everyday scenarios of common life. In a somewhat loose way, these two strategies could be said to correspond to the reductionist agenda of Minimalism or to the reversion to ordinariness we find in Pop or Fluxus. I think these parallels between advanced philosophy and avant-garde art would have taken place whether or not philosophers and artists knew of one another’s existence, and that the explanation of why this took place would tell us a great deal about the direction of culture in the second half of the twentieth century. But I have no general explanation of my own to offer.

Eating and dressing figure in many of Fluxus’s performances, such as Ben Vautier eating of “Fluxus Food” in 1963, and food and garments constitute—or constitute parts of—Fluxus objects, such as the false fruits and vegetables and fried eggs with which Claes Oldenberg filled a drawer in a cabinet of drawers titled Flux Cabinet (another drawer had partitions containing Excreta Fluxorum). Food offered opportunities for a variety of practical jokes, which is an important constituent of Fluxus sensibility, but jokes calculated to induce enlightenment play a definite role in Zen as well. Alison Knowles’s performance Proposition (1962) consisted in making a salad. Her performance Identical Lunch involved several performers eating the identical lunch in the same diner over several days. In the main, Fluxus performances were exceedingly simple events, consisting of a single occurrence—like George Brecht’s turning a light on and off. Except against a background of theatrical expectations, they were chosen to have zero degree of excitement.

“I would give to George Brecht a lot of credit for extending that idea of ready-made into the realm of action,” Maciunas observed. The idea of a ready-made action—like the idea of a ready-made object—is not without certain constraints. A ready-made object has somehow to be ultraordinary, an object with nothing extraordinary about it. A ready-made action has similarly to be the kind of action simply and easily performed by anyone at anytime—an action that requires no particular training and the acquisition of no particular skills, the kind of action that would offer itself as an example for Zen. Yoko Ono, who had been instructed in Zen teaching and practice in Japan, created a number of exceedingly simple performances early in her career. Lighting Piece of 1955 is a good example: “Light a match and watch till it goes out.” In point of simplicity, Lighting Piece bears comparison with the kind of art that Duchamp, as far back as 1915, had begun to make out of ordinary objects, selected from what phenomenologists designate as the Lebenswelt. His so-called ready-mades were, for the most part, manufactured objects of known utility, available to anyone who needed to shovel snow or dry bottles or groom dogs. Anyone with a few dollars could in principle walk into a hardware store and walk out with a work of art. But the ready-mades would certainly have been overlooked by anyone walking through Kennick’s warehouse. In art-historical truth, Duchamp’s ready-mades were not entirely in the spirit of Zen, for they were chosen with reference to rather definite criteria, namely, their utter lack of aesthetic interest. “A point which I very much want to establish is that the choice of these ‘ready-mades’ was never dictated by aesthetic delectation,” Duchamp wrote in 1961. “The choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste … in fact a complete anesthesia.” Duchamp polemicized against what he ironized as “the retinal shudder!”—the gratification of the aesthetic eye. At one point, Duchamp raised the idea of what he termed “reverse ready-mades,” objects with a high degree of aesthetic interest put to a certain use in which their beauty played no role. His example was a Rembrandt painting turned into an ironing board. There is something even more revolutionary in the reverse ready-made than in the ready-made as such. It anticipates a political gesture that was to become institutionalized in some of the radical egalitarian movements of the twentieth century, like turning artists and poets into night-soil workers under the Cultural Revolution in China. The idea of making a tool into an artwork and an artwork into a tool is, as we who have lived through the twentieth century know, a shattering political analogy. In Cambodia under Pol Pot, even wearing glasses was enough to get one into terrible trouble—it implied literacy.

The thought of bringing high art down, however, was entirely in the spirit of Dada, which was the first of the century’s movements to produce an art that was antithetical to fine art in every way. The spirit of Dada was a refusal of high-mindedness, an endorsement of nonsense and buffoonery, and a rejection of beauty as a form of consolation. Its repudiation of high art was based on the recognition that Europe, which claimed cultural superiority to the rest of the world on its art, had been responsible for an event of unprecedented horror, the Great War, in which thousands upon thousands of young men went to their pointless deaths. Perhaps Dada inherited from the nineteenth century the idea that art would somehow save us—a promise that achieved its most extreme form in Wagnerism—but it would be a very different kind of art, an art not of heroes but of comedians—or what Maciunas spoke of as “jokers”—dedicated to play instead of sacrifice. The First International Dada Exhibition held in Berlin in 1922 proclaimed the Death of Art. “We have gotten beyond venerating works of art as divine and worshipping them,” Hegel had written a century earlier, but until Dada no one could have known how far beyond worship the attitude toward art could go. “Thought and reflection have spread their wings above fine art,” Hegel wrote in advancing his stunning thesis that “art in its highest vocation is and remains for us a thing of the past.” Dada might have responded that there could be no higher vocation for art than to destroy that quasi-religious intoxication that drove nation to battle nation in the blood frenzy Europe had just staggered through.

As we saw, Maciunas referred to Fluxus as Neo-Dada. But he also had a certain political vision that has affinities to some of the most radical movements of the century. He had definite collectivist ideals. “Fluxus aspirations,” he wrote in 1964, “are social (not aesthetic).” He envisioned a time when fine art can be totally eliminated … and artists find other employment. In his view, “Fluxus is a collective.” No individual artist, but only the collective itself, should benefit from art done in the name of Fluxus. But beyond that Maciunas’s manifesto specifies Fluxus art as having the “impersonal qualities of a simple natural event.” In this respect, some of Duchamp’s ready-mades would be ideal as Fluxus works. His metal grooming comb was so undistinguished, so “monostructural” in its flat metallic grayness, that, as he said, nobody had ever tried to steal it. And, if anyone did, one could always find another just like it. That is why Fluxus objects, as understood by Maciunas, should be essentially mass producible and radically inexpensive, like printed flyers. Maciunas held up as exemplary certain of the political virtues enjoined by a collective that called itself LEF—“The Left Front of the Arts,” which changed its name in 1929 to “Revolutionary Front.” In a letter of 1964, Maciunas wrote, “Fluxus is definitely against art-object as non-functional commodity—to be sold & to make livelihood for the artist. It could temporarily have the pedagogical function of teaching people the needlessness of art including the needlessness of itself. It should therefore not be permanent.” Maciunas’s radicalism was not necessarily shared by other Fluxists, but one could hardly have chosen better illustrations for “the needlessness of art” than the characteristic works that they produced. They are art and they serve no need beyond themselves, not even those “higher needs of the spirit” that Hegel says art once served. There is an ingratiating lightness to Fluxus art, even a certain playful innocence. In part this is because so much of it consists of playthings—cheap objects from the five-and-ten, like the balls and marbles Joseph Cornell vested with such magic when he juxtaposed them in boxes behind glass. Indeed, exactly the things that turn up in Cornell’s boxes, including vintage engravings, are to be encountered in Fluxus objects, together with a great deal more. But none of it is really intended to induce the sense of uncanniness and beauty one feels in the presence of Cornell’s work. Often the objects are fitted together in valises, like Duchamp’s portable museum of his own work, but with a heterogeneity and purposelessness that leave one with few options but to unpack and repack, since there is little to do with the components on their own. The unifying element in Fluxus work is Maciunas’s intoxicating style of graphic design, strong black letters arranged to form words that have their own mystery, such as the cover he made for George Brecht’s 1963 Water Yam.

Though I was certainly around in the early sixties in New York, and even preoccupied by the kinds of questions Fluxus was raising at the time, I knew nothing about it, nor did I encounter Fluxus until I saw Barbara Haskell’s 1984 exhibition, Blam!, at the Whitney Museum of American Art. My first essay in the philosophy of art, “The Art World,” was published in the Journal of Philosophy in 1964. It concerned itself precisely with the question of what makes something an artwork when something else, exactly like it, is merely an object. My paradigm was the Brillo Box of Andy Warhol, and though the art world was filled with other possible paradigms had the Brillo box not existed, it was the Brillo box—an object so crushingly ordinary in the way it looked, that Warhol’s 1964 exhibition was visually of a piece with what one would see in the stockroom of a supermarket—that became the agency of my own philosophical enlightenment. Though I knew no one who belonged to the downtown art world that drew its inspiration from Cage and Maciunas, my office in the philosophy department at Columbia was on the same floor as the seminar room in which Dr. Suzuki held his classes. And Zen ideas found their way into “The Art World.” I cited a passage from Ching-Yuan, which I had found in one of Dr. Suzuki’s books: “Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains and waters are not waters. But now that I have got the very substance I am at rest. For it is just that I see mountains again as mountains and waters once again as waters.” What moved me in this wonderful passage was the idea that there would have been nothing internal to the three experiences that could distinguish them from one another. I could imagine, if Ching-Yuan were an artist, that he might have painted three indiscernible landscapes answering to these three moments of his spiritual itinerary. You could not see any difference among the landscapes exemplifying his pre-enlightenment, his false-enlightenment, and his postenlightenment vision of the world, since in principle they looked all alike. But the differences, however necessarily inscrutable, were obviously momentous. I think in the early sixties, we were thinking in a similar way that a world of artworks and a world of mere things might look exactly alike, though the difference there as well should be momentous.

In the Whitney show, a dense array of Fluxus objects filled a few display cases. I could make very little of them at the time, though I might have reflected that Fluxus paid a price in anonymity for the unassumingness of most of its products. Some time later, when I was at the Getty Center in Santa Monica, I was shown a room full of Fluxus objects the institution had just acquired. They were piled on the floor, or placed on steel shelves, and as an ensemble it made a vivid impression on me. I could tell very little about what I was looking at, though it gave an impression not unlike that of a warehouse, to revert to Kennick’s imaginary example. But little of it would have been selected as among the artworks had someone entered Kennick’s warehouse circa 1958. In fairness to him, none of the standard philosophical theories of art would have helped anyone in making the right choices at that time. What Fluxus helped us see is that no theory of art could help us pick out which were the artworks, since art can resemble reality to any chosen degree, including zero. Fluxus was right that the question is not which are the artworks, but how we view anything if we see it as art. Meanwhile, it has struck me ever since my experience at the Getty—and more recently at the Silverman collection of Fluxus in Detroit—that the warehouse provides just the right context for viewing Fluxus. Willem de Ritter’s European Mailorder Warehouse/Fluxshop of 1965, which the Silvermans and the curator of their collection, Jon Hendricks, went to remarkable lengths to reconstruct, is the showpiece of their collection and somehow the embodiment of the Fluxus spirit—a toy fair for sophisticates, the commonplace transfigured, the world as warehouse.