Work in Fluxus: Remediating the Sixties

This 20 minute paper considered the Fluxus art movement, an international network of avant-garde artists and composers founded in the 1960s. Taking up the theme of transnational and intermedial collaboration it explored how Fluxus’ redefinition of art and writing ‘promote[d] a revolutionary flood and tide in art’ to consider ‘anti-art’. Taking the original Latin meaning of the word Fluxus – meaning flowing, or in English a flux is a ‘flowing out’ – it questioned Anglo- and Euro- centric interpretations of flow, radical ideas and information during and since the 1960s. Through close exploration of Unword – a series of iterative performances made by the artist Ian Breakwell between 1969 and 1970 – it considered the transnational tropes which influence dialogues the Sixties as a ‘decade’. Framed by Frederic Jameson’s discussion of the ‘Long Sixties’ discussion the paper will reflected upon the influence of radical education, print-cultures and publishing and the process of re-recording, the flow of information through technologies and historical accounts, to reflect upon how (contrary to their intention) avant-garde discourses can in themselves become status quo.