Dorothee:
Sounds like a great dissertation and film !
More needs to be written about Fluxus and gender, or what has been written should now interrupt the repetitive male histories. Ken does note this in "Freedom? Nothingness? Time? Fluxus and the Laboratory of Ideas" but then 'reverts' or takes up the rest of the space with what male philosophers or artists have to say about this or that. Was glad to see Kristine Stiles, "Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle," Durham Press, 2010 in Ken's bibliography. It well worth reading though it is depressing how much misogynous detail it contains about those "alternative" or "radical" male artists we cuddle up with. Worth remembering that Mr. Let's-keep-the-club-membership-under-control Maciunas was not so open-network friendly?
When Filliou talked about Charles Fourier's statement about "handing the world over to women and children" and the woman's movement of the 1970s being "the most important project right now," he added, "for all of my past dealings with women, I must say, I must admit, that I hope to be former 'phallocrat minable,' roughly translated as former phallocratic trash. " Perhaps late in the day (I was then 31) but I was irreversibly affected by the Filliou's statement in 1977. Alongside the spirit of "the eternal network" (written in the protest moment of 1968), projects like Klaus Groh's International Artist Cooperation (BRD) and Jos Tilson's publication "Catalyst" (UK), File (Canada) were among many other early 1970s network support vehicles useful for further 'democratisation and decentralisation' (single quotes because this was to become official cultural policy of France and later Canada). Decentralization was always the easier part...
Clive
|