Word: fluxus
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...what came to be known as heftige Malerei (violent painting), the political artists, the conceptualists with chips on their shoulders. Some were raised in the divided city; others had been drawn there by the Free University or, more generally, by the anarchic and utopian Bohemia of the '60s: the Fluxus group and its best-known member, Joseph Beuys, with his shaman's wands and dead hares; Eugen Schonebeck, with his images of mutants and cripples; K.H. Hodicke, who made fervently swiped homages to Max Beckmann; and Georg Baselitz, creator of clumsy, wistful figures stumbling about in an apocalyptic landscape...
...then to Germany, to study music. In Germany he met Composer John Cage, that perennially controversial guru of the avantgarde, and he was soon busily involved in the multimedia "events" and benignly neo-Dadaist actions of a European artists' group that called itself, for its commitment to change, Fluxus...
...Fluxus was less a defined art movement than a loose anarchist confederacy, given to ritual gestures of protest against "high" culture. Paik, who was to move to New York in 1964, would play a piano and then topple it over onstage; he would cut a pianist's shirttails to shreds with scissors, or stage a little musical "event" by dragging a violin along the sidewalk on a string, like a scraped and protesting pet. A cellist, Charlotte Moorman, would appear for Paik at a concert and play her instrument with tiny TV sets rigged over her breasts...