Fluxus

On Friday September 16th I went to the Grey Art Gallery in Manhattan and saw the Fluxus exhibit. This exhibit was one of the oddest ones I’ve ever visited. Entering the building seemed normal enough, a security guard sitting in the front and a woman taking my bag for security purposes. This is where the normality ended. I felt like I was in a different world. The idea of Fluxus is to go against the normal notions of art and create something that makes the viewer think and hopefully upsets some established artists and art critics at the same time. The man who started the entire Fluxus movement, George Maciunas, basically wanted to start an artistic revolution to combat the growing “commercialization” of art. What he and a group of other artists ended up creating was an incredibly bizarre collection of pieces that focused around some of the many aspects of life that the pieces were associated with, like love and happiness. Some of the art pieces were very creative and interesting, like Yoko Ono’s Painting to Be Stepped On  and Robert Watts’ 10 Hour Clock. Ono’s painting was hilarious in my opinion; at first I actually walked around it to avoid stepping on it because I hadn’t read the title, and I thought Ono did a great job in doing exactly what the Fluxus project centered around, which was being different and the foil to mainstream art. The clock piece was clever and wasn’t quite as unique as Ono’s idea, but whenever I see a clock that doesn’t have 12 hours, I can’t help but find it hilarious. I thought the exhibit was fairly controversial, from suicide kits to film of a naked woman’s body being played on repeat, but if the point of the entire project was to completely differ from what everyone expects art to be, then I think Maciunas and all of the artists who contributed did just that.