Reading Room catalogue

There are few art-world figures as influential—and as little known—as Dick Higgins (1938-1998), co-founder of Fluxus, “polyartist,” poet, scholar, theorist, composer, performer and, not least, the publisher of the Something Else Press. In 1965 he restored the term “intermedia” to the English language, giving it new dimension to recognize the dissolution of boundaries, the expansion of liminal spaces between traditional modes of art making, and the open field for new forms that cannot be compartmentalized. His own contributions to intermedia are many—as a participant and instigator of Happenings, as writer and composer straddling traditional and vanguard forms, among others—but it was the Something Else Press (1963-1974) that redefined how “the book” could inhabit that energized, in-between space.

Something Else Press was as much a critical statement and radical experiment as it was a collection of books by some of the most luminary artists and writers of the twentieth century: Gertrude Stein, John Cage, Ray Johnson, Dieter Roth, Bern Porter, Emmett Williams, Robert Filliou, George Brecht, among many others. Along with his Great Bear pamphlet series and the Something Else Press newsletter, Higgins exploited and subverted conventional book production and marketing strategies to get unconventional and avant-garde works into the hands of new and often unsuspecting readers.

Edited by Granary Books publisher Steve Clay and Fluxus artist Ken Friedman, this judiciously curated and indispensable compendium of essays, theoretical writings and narrative prose by Higgins dives deep into the ever-influential ideas that he explored in theory and practice. (It also includes a substantial, highly illustrated Something Else Press checklist including Higgins’ jacket and catalog copy about the books he published.) Clay and Friedman have chosen works that illuminate his voracious intellectual appetite, encyclopedic body of knowledge, and playful yet rigorous experimentation in a selection that includes many writings long out-of-print or difficult to find.

Born of necessity in 1961, fathered by George Maciunas and mothered by the rejection of high art and commerical values, the anti-art Fluxus movement is here recorded with encyclopedic thoroughness. With historical essays by Fluxus artists including George Brecht, Robert Filliou, Dick Higgins, Allan Kaprow, Per Kirkeby, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik and Maciunas, and critical passages by Arthur Danto, Joan Rothfuss, and others, this book questions what it asks, in true Fluxus fashion.

Artwork by Robert Filiou, Dick Higgins, Kate Millett, Tomas Schimit, Ben Vautier, Robert Watts, La Monte Young, George Brecht, Allan Kaprow, Per Kirkeby, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell.

Texts by Tobias Berger, René Block, Ina Blom, Harry Ruhé, Arthur Danto.

An exhibition catalogue produced in conjunction with the “Fluxus etc. / The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection” exhibit. Includes transcript of the videotaped interview with George Maciunas by Larry Miller, Mar. 24, 1978.

Catalogue of the exhibition presented at the Baxter Art Gallery, California Institute of Technology, September 28 – October 30, 1983.

Fluxus Codex is an indispensable study of Fluxus product (non-performance works), compiled by Jon Hendricks, the recognized authority in the field and curator of the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, the pre-eminent collection of its kind. Here for the first time, a research team systematically tackles the question, “what is a Fluxus work?” using extensive correspondence by George Maciunas – architect and primary organizer of the movement – to a number of Fluxus artists, as well as original documents and all known Fluxus publications.

Fluxus Codex traces the development of every Fluxus work, planned or made, from the beginning to Maciunas’ death in 1978. This publication is, in effect, a catalogue raisonné of Fluxus.

With a text by Ken Friedman (“Rethinking Fluxus”) in English.

George Maciunas (1931–1978) was the founding member and leader of the most radical and experimental art movement of the 1960s, Fluxus, whose members rejected the traditional systems of high art. This biography will help to reveal the man and the artist, hidden behind so many masks of his own devising, to the wider public his accomplishments demand.

Dispensing with the official role and elitist nature of the conventionally conceived art object, Fluxus artists’ books sought to occupy more clandestine, subversive positions by shirking conventional modes of conception and distribution, breaking all commercial ties and operating as salvos in the struggle to bridge art and life. These books offered artists fuller autonomy in the production of their own work and opportunities for broader distribution, and became central to the amorphous movement. Using inexpensive printing processes such as stenciling, photocopying and offset printing, Fluxus artists became their own publishers, gallerists and curators. As books took on the character of events, expected to do more than merely contain thoughts and images, they exceeded the structure of the traditional book format and mutated into boîtes, containers, binders and boxes.

Fluxbooks, the first detailed study of the artist’s book within the Fluxus movement, presents Fluxus as the site of some of the most productive and irreverent transformations of the book medium in art history. Drawing on the Luigi Bonotto Collection and including works by George Maciunas, Wolf Vostell, John Cage, Alison Knowles, Dick Higgins, George Brecht, Allan Kaprow, Jackson Mac Low, Gyorgy Ligeti and many others, this extensively illustrated volume presents the publications with minimal critical commentary, allowing the books themselves to narrate their nature and development.

Mokslinės konferencijos medžiaga.

Exhibition Catalogue (Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, October 18, 2013 – January 24, 2014)

Luigi Bonotto dedicated himself to keeping the work of the artists of Fluxus and Experimental Poetry alive, and to preserving, cataloguing, and promoting their poetry, music, and work, which was strongly influenced by John Cage and the key concept of his theoretical framework, indeterminacy.

Reprinted on the occasion of an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, this book presents the international Fluxus legacy through sound. With works by John Cage, Philip Corner, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, George Maciunas, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, and others, it explores the interest of Fluxus artists in music and sound through performance, scores, records, and objects from the Luigi Bonotto Collection. Their public events challenged conventional form and content in music, and the approach to music scores was equally radical. Instead of traditional sheet music, they devised notational systems based on graphics, poetry, and the visual arts.

The art of networked thinking consists in making complexity easier to handle and creating scope for new ideas. The approach, which is now applied in all spheres of knowledge, is one which also defines artistic practice. The subject of this book is some two dozen atlases, charts, and diagrams of Russian history and the history of art from antiquity to postmodernism that were designed between 1953 and 1973 by Fluxus initiator George Maciunas. Without such visualization of the past, so Maciunas believed, there could be no real understanding of how art and politics have evolved. His maps, charts, and diagrams, more than half of which are published for the first time here in this second edition, attempt in various ways to draw a picture of history made up of dates and facts, and lines and arrows.

Extensive documentation of 32 selected European Fluxus events in Aachen, Aberystwyth, Amsterdam, Berlin, Budapest, Copenhagen, Düsseldorf, London, Madrid, Nizza, Oslo, Paris, Prague, Poznan, Rotterdam, Scheveningen, Stockholm, Vilnius, Wiesbaden, Wuppertal. The exhibition and publication aim to present a new perspective on the radical art actions of Fluxus. A multimedia exhibition installation documents the Fluxus events of the 1960s and 70s and offers active encounters with art actions, artists and eyewitnesses.

My Life in Flux – and Vice Versa is an unconventional, unchronological, and uncensored autobiography of an internationally respected poet, performer, painter, and printmaker. A partisan of Fluxus since the first Festum Fluxorum in Wiesbaden in 1962, Emmett Williams has written what he describes as “a digressive catalogue raisonné”, a book of free associations based upon all of my performances that I have been able to remember or track down” from 1960 to the present; and he warns to the reader that he has “not been reluctant to recall some of the funny things that happened on the way to the Forum.” These frank reminiscences and reflections leap backwards and forwards in time, from country to country, and from continent to continent. The book is generously illustrated with pictures, documents, poems and scores.

Jurgis Mačiūnas buvo radikaliausio eksperimentinio 7-ojo dešimtmečio meno judėjimo Fluxus pradininkas ir lyderis. Šio judėjimo nariai atmetė tradicines aukštojo meno sistemas ir kūrė stebinantį antimeną, kuris apėmė viską – nuo fotografijos ir gatvės meno iki poezijos ir dramos. „Mr. Fluxus“ – pirmoji šios iškilios XX amžiaus meno pasaulio asmenybės biografija, atskleidžianti netradicinį, prieštaringą ir stebinantį genijų.

Jurgis Mačiūnas buvo klounas ir humoristas, bet kartu ir mirtinai rimtas revoliucionierius. Jis mėgino valdyti Fluxus totalitariniu būdu, tačiau juokėsi pats iš savęs ir juokindavo aplinkinius, šaipydamasis iš nepagydomų ligų ir skaudžių realijų, kurios persekiojo jį didumą jo gana trumpo gyvenimo. Iš šios buvusių Fluxus kolegų bei daugybės jo bičiulių ir priešų atskleistos anekdotų ir įspūdžių kolekcijos iškyla informatyvus įkvepiančio, pasaulį, pirmiausia meno pasaulį, pakeisti siekiančio kovotojo portretas. Dėl savo pastangų, skirtų didiesiems meno „šventikams“ bei jų samdiniams nuvainikuoti, būdamas gyvas daug draugų meno sluoksniuose jis neturėjo. Tačiau kartu su Tristanu Tzara, André Bretonu, Marceliu Duchamp’u ir Johnu Cage’u Mačiūnas įsitvirtino kaip viena iš pripažintų varomųjų jėgų, kuri sukėlė šiuolaikinio meno perversmą.