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Fluxier-than-Thou Fluxus Experience. Hannah Higgins. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Pp. xv + 259. $29.95 (paper).
Teddy Hultberg, Oyvind Fahlström on the Air-Manipulating the World. Stockholm: Sveriges Radios Förlag / Fylkingen, 1999. Bilingual text,Swedish and English. Pp. 337. 2 CDs: Birds in Sweden, The Holy Torsten Nilsson. SEK 400 ($52.00) cloth.
"Fluxus," Dick Higgins has observed, "was not a movement; it has no stated consistent programme or manifesto which the work must match, and it did not propose to move art or our awareness of art from point A to point B. The very name, Fluxus, suggests change, being in a state of flux. The idea was that it would always reflect the most exciting avant-garde tendencies of a given time or moment-the Fluxattitude."' Hannah Higgins, the daughter of Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles, both of them foundational Fluxus intermedia artists, agrees. Again and again, in Fluxus Experience, she insists that Fluxus was not, as is usually thought, an iconoclastic avant-garde movement but a way of life, a "fer tile field for multiple intelligence interactions" (193) that has strong pedagogical potential. In keeping with her father's theory of intermedia (see Figure 33), Hannah Higgins uses a Deweyite approach to map possible intersections between Fluxus and other disciplines so as to "allow for a sort of cognitive cross-training through exploratory creativity" (193). Within our existing university structure, a potential Fluxus program "would by definition be unspecialized ... it would emphasize exploration and expression of individual skills" (197). For it is, after all, "through creative play that new solutions to problems may be found" (206).
This Utopian and nostalgic "model for a multicultural, multilingual society that is characterized by both difference and group feeling, and by a sense of connection to the physical world" (207), is not quite borne out by Higgins s own incisive account of Fluxus, which details not only specific performances and publications but also the heated political controversies between George Maciunas, the movements self-declared chef d'ecole, and such other Fluxartists as the less flamboyant Dick Higgins. Indeed, the non-movement called Fluxus had, by Hannah Higgins's own account, a specific point of origin: namely the 1957-1959 classes in musical composition offered by John Cage at the New School in New York. "The most...