SARAH URIST GREEN: Throughout history, food
has served as subject matter, inspiration,
and of course sustenance for artists.
Food has also been the art on a number of occasions.
On today's "Art Cooking", we're exploring the activities
of a group of artists working in the 1960s and '70s
who believed the stuff of our everyday lives could be art
and that any of us can be artists.
Sometimes it involved food.
Fluxus began before it was given a name.
Like this quintessentially Fluxian instruction piece
asking us to light a match and watch it until it goes out
was written by Yoko Ono in 1955, firmly
before the early '60s when the name was coined
and Ono became associated with the movement,
or nonmovement as its members prefer it to call it.
The late 1950s saw a bubbling up of alternative art practices
in the US and Europe--
happenings, experimental music, and dance.
And Fluxus flowed out of that, not a style but an approach--
prompts or event scores like this one, sometimes funny
and often utterly unremarkable.
But the man who named the group was George Maciunas, or Mr.
Fluxus as this book calls him, who
emigrated from Lithuania to the US in 1948
and staged the first official Fluxus events in 1961 and '62.
We're going to pretend like we were invited to contribute
to the New Year's Eve Flux feast Maciunas organized
in New York in 1969.
The distribution list is a veritable
who's who of Fluxus artists, all asked
to participate by contributing either a food
or drink of your own invention or to make something up
from the list below.
First on the list are Flux eggs, which
we're going to give a go, first emptying out some egg
shells per his instructions.
He probably didn't use this nifty egg topper
that's supposed to give us a clean cut
and make for some pretty egg shells.
It doesn't work perfectly for me,
so let's talk about something else.
Maciunas was the group's most prominent instigator
and evangelist, and he published a Fluxus manifesto in 1963.
The name is derived from the Latin [LATIN],, to flow,
and Maciunas embraced its association
with bodily discharge and scientific processes.
He called to purge the world of bourgeois sickness
and promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art.
He wanted to promote living art, antiart, promote nonart reality
to be grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes,
and professionals.
Maciunas was often the MC at Fluxus events,
but it had a relatively diverse roster
of members and participants.
There was Nam June Paik, a Korean artist who went on
to pretty much found video art; Alison Knowles, whose
food work we're going to enact later;
the concrete poet Emmett Williams.
Of course there's George and artist, composer,
and classical double bassist Benjamin Patterson.
There was also Charlotte Moorman, seen here
performing a work by Paik; Ben Vautier, here performing
a work by George Brecht, also involved with Fluxus;
Shigeko Kubota first executed her performance
affixing a paint brush to her underwear
and brushing red paint onto paper at a Fluxus festival
in 1965--
LaMonte Young; and of course Yoko Ono,
among a number of others, many of whom
were present for the New Year's Eve feast at hand.
Speaking of, we're to fill our shells
with any of a list of materials, the first of which is plaster.
This doesn't seem quite right, so we're
going to go ahead and rename ours after Maciunas's home
country and mix it up per the box instructions, or roughly
so, pouring it in our first egg shell and letting it dry.
Next step is urethane foam, which
you can buy or secretly steal a bit
from a cushion in your house.
After that, liquid white glue.
Yeah, this doesn't look right either.
There we go.
Now would be a good time to mention that us and others saw
the group as being a kind of contemporary expression
of Dada.
Like Dada, Fluxus rejected the status quo, upsetting norms
and their focus on humble, everyday objects,
presenting them in unexpected places and in unexpected ways.
And last up, some white paint.
Other items on his list are ink, water, white gelatin, coffee,
bad smell, good smell, dead bug, and the all important category
of et cetera.
So you can really take this in whatever direction you wish--
Clearly inedible, but also delightfully confounding.
Artists at the time were turning away
from the drama and self-seriousness
of abstract expressionism.
Fluxus had a sense of humor, and as you
should be able to tell by now, was
not about the individual artist but about group practice,
a more democratic form of art open
to anyone who could follow some instructions.
Like I too can make Fluxus art happen
by following Maciunas's tea variations,
also on the New Year's Eve menu, which
can be made from boiling wood or rope or leather or wool
or paper.
We've found some jute rope that we
thought would do well for this and are going to simply steep
it with some boiling water, letting
it sit there for a while.
Because we should probably make something edible,
we're also going to try one of the monocolor meals
on the list.
And we've chosen the black meal, contributed by Bici Hendricks,
who now goes by the name Nye Ffarrrabas.
First we gather ingredients that we
perceive as black, like these grapes and black beans.
I've invited a friend by the way, the artist Lauren Zoll
who contributed the assignment off
and who also happens to be doing a project where she's
harvesting ink from black beans and fruits
to make solar panels that mimic photosynthesis
and create detectable amounts of electrical energy.
But we also have black sesame seeds and ripe mulberries,
black race, and nori or dried seaweed, black coffee,
and dark chocolate, which doesn't end up
looking very black at all.
We've also got some black-bean juice and mulberry juice
from Lauren's project along with blackstrap molasses and hoisin
sauce.
Then we set about making some dishes from our ingredients.
I'm going to try making some black sushi, a little rice,
some berries, some grapes, a little hoisin sauce,
and then I'll do a super amateurish job
of wrapping this up.
Apologies to any sushi chefs in the audience,
but I have my untrained amateur rep to protect.
Then we'll dip into our sesame seeds and set aside.
While I make some more sushi, Lauren
is going to attempt some black-bean foam, working
from her black-bean juice, some mulberries,
maybe throw in a little black rice for some starch,
a little cream, and we're going to shake it up
in a whip-cream dispenser.
Might as well shake the camera a little too while we're at it.
And whoa, out it comes.
We're pleased with our test, so we add it to our plate,
making a handsome pool of our foam around the sushi.
Let's garnish with some more grapes and berries
and black beans.
And behold, a black meal, which of course
demonstrates clearly that black is never really black--
OK, OK, except for maybe Anish Kapoor's precious Vantablack.
But we see purple and gray and green and brown and red.
And you know, it's not half bad, a little sweet
and a little savory with the funky fishiness
of the nori and complexity of the hoisin
and beaniness of the foam.
We didn't fight over the remaining pieces,
but all in all a success.
Other Hendricks suggestions for monocolor meals
are blue, red, or green, which I really
hope you'll all do and share photos with us
online with the hashtag #TheArtAssignment.
This, I'm sure, looks nothing like the black meal
that took place at the original event
as 1969 turned into 1970 at Jonas Mekas's Cinematheque
at 80 Worcester Street in New York, but that's the point.
A simple prompt can lead in any number of directions.
And shoot, Lauren escaped before we could share our jute tea.
Say that 10 times fast.
Sorry, Mark, it's going to be just the two of us.
Wow, this stuff is pungent.
We're not going to actually drink it
because we're not sure it's safe,
but the aroma is overwhelmingly earthy and sharp and ropey.
Since we've got some leftover eggs--
oh hey man, how's it going--
we might as well enact this event score
by Fluxus artistic Dick Higgins titled "Danger Music Number
15" from 1962.
It reads, "Work with eggs and butter for a time."
In case you're vegan or don't have any eggs,
here are "Danger Music Number 17" and "Danger Music 24"
for your consideration.
But let's get started.
In the late '50s, Higgins studied
at the New School of Social Research in New York
with composer John Cage, who had a huge influence on Higgins
and many others.
Cage allowed and embrace chance as a part of his work,
like Higgins does here, leaving a lot of room
for interpretation.
What does work mean and how long is a time?
Improvisation was assumed in the event scores produced
by Fluxus artists.
They're instructions that, when followed, produce an artwork.
Like Philip Corner's event score for piano
activities doesn't give the exact direction
to destroy a piano and auction its pieces to the audience,
but that's precisely what happened when it was performed
at a Fluxus festival in 1962.
Musical instruments had the potential
to generate sounds and experiences in many more ways
than in their traditional deployment.
Fluxus was deeply rooted in experimental music
but also in philosophy, literature, theater,
and poetry.
Higgins called this kind of art intermediate,
occupying the uncharted land that
lies between the categories generally assigned in the arts.
Anyway, a newspaper account of Higgins performing this work
tells us that he smashed some of the eggs on his head,
tossed some of them in the air, and handed
over some of the mixture to members of the audience.
So here you go.
The final course of our Flux feast today
is going to be Alison Knowles' identical lunch, which
she dictates is a tuna-fish sandwich on wheat
toast with lettuce and butter, no mayo, and a cup of soup
or a glass of buttermilk.
So in the late 1960s, Knowles would often go to lunch
at the Riss diner near the home she shared with other Fluxus
artists, including Dick Higgins who
was her husband at the time.
Side note, they divorced in 1970,
but they didn't have a flux divorce like Jeffrey
and Bici Hendricks had in 1971.
Anyhow, her friend Philip Corner of piano activities fame
noticed she ate the same thing every day,
and then she decided to make a kind of performance of it.
She invited friends to join her and asked others
to try the same lunch wherever they were and write about it.
Corner did his own version, steadily
working through the entire Riss menu, item by item.
I went ahead and made my tuna salad off screen
because I really think it's something that should only
happen in private.
And let's be real, it couldn't have been anything other
than iceberg lettuce.
And there we are, tuna-fish sandwiches.
We pour our glasses of buttermilk and dig
into our perfectly edible identical lunch.
Our two sandwiches may be functionally identical,
but they certainly aren't identical to any tuna
fish sandwich Knowles has ever had nor any
that you would make if you set out to do the same.
This type of performance required no audience.
It happened whether or not she was alone or with others,
whether she did it or other people.
Knowles made a book about the project in 1971
with one of the best quotes ever included in an art book
by Corner's aunt.
"What's there to write about?
It's just a lousy tuna-fish sandwich."
But that's the thing.
This meager sandwich not only demonstrates
the impossibility that anything can ever be identical
but also that there's something to be said
for the often-overlooked activities of our daily lives,
the performances we enact and put on each day,
whether or not we're aware of them.
Knowles said about it, "It was about having an excuse to get
to talk to people, to notice everything that
happened, to pay attention."
That was lovely, but now we must confront George Maciunas's
variation on the lunch, which unfortunately requires
me to put the entire meal into a blender, blend until smooth,
and drink it.
Gah Maciunas, you had to go and make it unpalatable,
didn't you?
We made another sandwich for this purpose
and are following his instructions to a T,
although desperately searching for a loophole that
will allow us to escape our fate,
but there doesn't seem to be any vagueness in this prompt.
The artists involved in Fluxus were
immensely talented in the skill of taking the magic out
of art, taking the ego out of it.
Most of what's left of Fluxus are
printed pieces of paper and photographs,
because that's all it was really--
event scores, instructions, kits, and publications,
inexpensive to produce and distribute and to purchase.
They took apart what it was to be an artist
and what kind of work it required, not
about feeling but doing.
And do it we did.
It's been argued that Fluxus came to an end
when Maciunas died in 1978 from pancreatic cancer, after which
there was a Flux feast and wake where
guests ate foods that were only black, white, or purple.
But there's no real clarity about when it ended
or even if it did.
Fluxus was never a finite movement but a loose network
of artists working among and between media,
united by core values.
In one sense, all of their works were
recipes able to be carried out by anyone, anywhere,
and with the potential to unfold in any number of ways.
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