After looking at the Diego Rivera exhibit at MoMa, I then saw another exhibit that was particularly interesting: a Fluxus exhibit. The Fluxus exhibits had similar ideals but slightly different modernized definitions of art from the one at the Grey Art Gallery.
At the Grey Art Gallery, Fluxus art was mainly focused on to solve the “Essential Questions of Life”. Thus abstract, unusual images were used to cause people to learn more about aspects in life that people would see as “commonplace”. Thus Fluxus art at the Grey Art Gallery has its main purpose: to mix the usual with the unusual. The exhibit, although tending to have some traditional rules such as no touching of the artwork, did add a sense of abstractness into it as much as it could, by adding non-traditional clocks, “weird” shirts and underwear and a strangely erotic video representative of sex. But it also is more traditional than other museums as well, adding a history of Fluxus art that some other museums would skim by more often. Thus the “do-it-yourself” approach is combined with an approach that is far from being that.
Fluxus art at the MoMa was less interactive, but to me, it was more interesting. “L’art n’est pas art”, an image in French that drew to me showed this meaning of Fluxus art within MoMa: that art is not art and what is not art is art. This was explained at the Grey Art Gallery, but only in a more instructional manner, rather than in one that uses the art of language to explain how Fluxus Art is not just anti-art, but a lifestyle. The Fluxus Box made more sense to me than it did in the Grey Art Gallery due to this emphasized concept. As well, although there was not as much bizarre images(the short video clip representing “sex” had less of a mystique and there was not any strange clothes or weird clocks), there was a work that drew me in, also known as “The Opera” a piece that represents what a modern day, sick and twisted libretto would be like. This piece made me realize that with the Operas we watched, the music, and every mixed art we have experienced in the Macaulay seminar can be mixed up today to be Fluxus art, which is why the determination of art today is truly ambiguous. The MoMa Fluxus exhibit was more enlightening to me for it made me realize that all modern art is technically Fluxus art, whether it is a Fluxus Box, a painted garbage can in Coney Island, or a wall with graffiti.
