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Dear Clive,

Yikes! I seem already to have entered the conversation and I haven’t yet managed to post my own intro. So be it.

Your points are well taken. Some nuance is required.

You write, “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.”

This is correct, yet misleading.

Fluxus took place in a specific time, and that time partly shaped what was possible. Fluxus had a greater variety of artists of different kinds than any similar community at the time – the early 1960s. At that time, the Fluxus community included far more women than any other community of artists – greater numbers in both absolute terms and percentages.

It’s odd to speak about “reverting.” When you write about ideas, you use the sources. This article was a look back over a half century. Men wrote many of the source documents. Many writers on hermeneutics are men – hermeneutics grew from theology, a discipline that was almost male by definition until the 1980s, and still heavily male. While your critique is in one way correct, Riceour, Gadamer, Thistelton, Klemm, and Vanhoozer are worth reading, male or not.

Even though I agree with your criticism, any discussion of history reflects the time under review. The sources are also located in time. If you look at your own note, you tip your hat to Kristine Stiles and Carolee Schneemann before praising an group exclusively comprised of men. I could write about your note what you wrote about my article: “Clive raises the issue of gender and women, before he ‘reverts’ to a male philosopher (Fourier), an exclusively male list of artists (Filliou, Groh, Tilson) and a suite of male-managed projects (File, Catalyst, International Artist Cooperation).”

What you’ve written about George Maciunas troubles me. It is not entirely fair to write, “Worth remembering that Mr. Let’s-keep-the-club-membership-under-control Maciunas was not so open-network friendly?”

George was different in the early years of Fluxus than he was later. In the early days, he attempted to control people and took a collectivist attitude rather than a networking attitude. He was quite different by the time I met him.

Two things deserve saying.

First, George never controlled Fluxus. He may have wanted to do so at the start, but the fact remains that a larger group of people formed a community. They pursued their own goals. No one obeyed George. What kind of control could he exert?

I discuss this in a catalogue essay (Friedman 2011) that I’ve posted on Academia.edu, “Fluxus: A Laboratory of Ideas.” It covers some issues that I don’t discuss in the article, including questions of the collective and control.

http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman

Second, George was as responsible as anyone for the network quality of Fluxus – for the great number of female participants. Many of the women active in Fluxus joined the community on George’s invitation.

Like all of us, George was an imperfect human being who tried to achieve more than he managed to do. George was one of those serious, inspiring characters who did not give up when things did not work – he tried many ways of doing things, growing and shifting his perspectives with each effort.

You and your Canadian colleagues had the good fortune of living in Canada at a time of generous government support for artist networks. As you noted in your intro, these were not always what they seemed to be. Canada’s artist network efforts, artist centers, and artist magazines did not always turn out as people hoped they might, but there was serious and significant support. Moreover, other forms of support were accessible to Canadian artists before the government allocated specific support to artist networks, centers, organizations, and publications.

Imagine the problems Canadian artists would have faced in establishing networks completely on their own with no support whatsoever. Then imagine working eight hours a day in an ordinary job to earn the money to do that. Ordinary jobs don’t involve universities, art schools, or museums. Ordinary jobs are eight-to-five jobs in such fields as design, production graphics, typography, or architectural drafting. Those are the kinds of job that George Maciunas took – both eight-to-five and freelance – to earn the money that he spent supporting and developing the Fluxus network.

It seems to me ungracious to label George with the pejorative epithet, “Mr. Let’s-keep-the-club-membership-under-control.”

Robert Filliou and George Brecht were cordial and generous in conceiving the model of the Eternal Network. They functioned as pure artists, floating around the world to develop and enjoy their own projects. They did not build or maintain networks for anyone else, and they did not keep networks functioning. At a certain point, each of them retired from the world, abandoning any connection they had once had to the networks in which they took part.

In contrast, such Fluxus people as George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik, or myself built and maintained active projects, networks, and nodes on the network. What differs with these networks to single-purpose art projects using network models is that people other than ourselves made use of these networks for their own projects, much as people use the phone system or a canal or the Internet for their own projects rather than only for something that the network owner wishes them to do. People also adapted the networks and models we built to purposes of their own without involving us at all.

While I agree in great part with what you’ve said, it made me uncomfortable to see the suggestion that Robert was congenial in his development, management, and use of networks while George was a controlling figure in the mode of an Andre Breton. Robert was congenial – but he did not develop or manage networks: he thought about them and shared his ideas. That’s rather like a political scientist discussing what government ought ideally to be, as contrasted with people who enter the arena of politics to deal with the messy business of governing.

This difference becomes clear to anyone that studies political and economic history rather than art history. It’s visible in the difference between the abstract, clear, and distant analysis that a superb historian such as Sir John Keegan (2003) shows in his short biography of Winston Churchill or Gordon Wood (2006) shows in hisgroup biography of the American revolutionary leaders. Compare this with the real lives of the people these historians analyze. They make decisions in the heat of a moment, good and bad, knowing they must act.

I’ve occasionally had jobs that require me to take responsibility for massive budgets and many people. One thing I often found is that the decisions I made were often choices that required me to decide not between good and bad, but between two significantly good opportunities, each lodged in a larger context that guided my choice. What this meant was that deciding to take one good opportunity required me to choose against another good opportunity. No matter how good the choice I made, I was forced to choose against something else that I also valued.

George was sometimes wrong in his choices and behavior. He grew as a human being, and he did things in different ways at different times. He earned the money he spent on Fluxus, and he paid for every choice he made. Artists whose networks were funded by supportive governments were paid for their work. George paid to work. As much as I valued Robert and his ideas, he did not invest the time and effort in networks that George did.

In a famous speech delivered to the Commons – a speech in which he honored the memory of one of his great political opponents – Winston Churchill stated that we don’t have the privilege of knowing the final results of our actions in advance. We cannot determine our historical legacy. Actions that seem grand when we undertake them soon appear foolish. Historians continually change their views in the light of mounting evidence. What seems to have been a blunder may later prove to be a valuable contribution, while essential actions may prove to be minor deeds.

Churchill’s conclusion was that we must live as well as we can, doing as much as we canwith what we have. That’s the measure of a human being. George attained this admirable standard, demanding of himself as much as he asked of others. In the end, that is the measure of a human being.

This leads me to a suggestion based on your comments to my article. You write, “More needs to be written about Fluxus and gender, or what has been written should now interrupt the repetitive male histories.”

You are yourself an art historian. Why not write some of this yourself?

Before I close, I should note that the free copy of my article (Friedman 2012) in Theory, Culture, and Society vanished with the new issue. I’ve placed a copy on my Academia Edu page, along with other Fluxus materials. Scroll past the design entries to find them:

http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman

Yours,

Ken

Guest Professor | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China

References

Friedman, Ken. 2011. “Fluxus: A Laboratory of Ideas.” Fluxus and the Essential Qualities of Life. Jacquelynne Baas, editor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp.35-44. Available at URL:

http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman

Friedman, Ken. 2012. “Freedom? Nothingness? Time? Fluxus and the Laboratory of Ideas.” Theory, Culture, and Society. Vol. 29, No. 7/8, December, pp. 372–398. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0263276412465440

Also available at URL:

http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman

Keegan, John. 2003. Churchill. London: Phoenix.

Wood, Gordon. S. 2007. Revolutionary Characters. What Made the Founders Different. London: Penguin Books.