Hannah Higgins explores the influential art movement Fluxus. Daring, disparate and contentious, Fluxus artists worked with minimal and prosaic materials now familiar in post-World War II art. Higgins describes the experience of Fluxus for viewers as affirming transactions between the self and the world.

The Taste of Art offers a sample of scholarly essays that examine the role of food in Western contemporary art practices. The contributors are scholars from a range of disciplines, including art history, philosophy, film studies, and history. As a whole, the volume illustrates how artists engage with food as matter and process in order to explore alternative aesthetic strategies and indicate countercultural shifts in society. The collection opens by exploring the theoretical intersections of art and food, food art’s historical root in Futurism, and the ways in which food carries gendered meaning in popular film. Subsequent sections analyze the ways in which artists challenge mainstream ideas through food in a variety of scenarios. Beginning from a focus on the body and subjectivity, the authors zoom out to look at the domestic sphere, and finally the public sphere. Here are essays that study a range of artists including, among others, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Daniel Spoerri, Dieter Roth, Joseph Beuys, Al Ruppersberg, Alison Knowles, Martha Rosler, Robin Weltsch, Vicki Hodgetts, Paul McCarthy, Luciano Fabro, Carries Mae Weems, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Janine Antoni, Elżbieta Jabłońska, Liza Lou, Tom Marioni, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Michael Rakowitz, and Natalie Jeremijenko.

If it seems like the world is in a constant state of flux, that's because it is. Our work, our families, our friendships, and our society are always changing, which can leave us feeling disoriented and discouraged. And while lots of people offer "tips and tricks" or "life hacks" to help us cope, the real secret to feeling like we're standing on solid ground is deeper--and we can't do it alone. In Life in Flux, leadership, career, and vocation experts Michaela O'Donnell and Lisa Pratt Slayton teach the practical skills needed in order to navigate constant change. They show you how to · face the pain and longings that come with change · do the inner work of waking up and letting go · embrace the unknown with confidence · listen to God's guiding voice · get to know yourself, really · find and keep friends for the journey · stay attuned to your rhythms and values moving forward When you feel truly at home in your world and with yourself, you can do hard things with great courage. Life in Flux can get you there.

“PURGE the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art. . . . Promote living art, anti-art, promote NON ART REALITY to be grasped by all peoples,” writes artist George Maciunas in his Fluxus manifesto of 1963. Reacting against an elitist art world enthralled by modernist aesthetics, Fluxus encouraged playfulness, chance, irreverence, and viewer participation. The diverse collective—including George Brecht, Robert Filliou, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi, Ben Vautier, and Robert Watts—embraced humble objects and everyday gestures as critical means of finding freedom and excitement beyond traditional forms of art-making. While today the Fluxus collective is recognized for its radical neo-avant-garde works of performance, publishing, and relational art and its experimental, interdisciplinary approach, it was not taken seriously in its own time. With Fluxus Forms, Natilee Harren captures the magnetic energy of Fluxus activities and collaborations that emerged at the intersections of art, music, performance, and literature. The book offers insight into the nature of art in the 1960s as it traces the international development of the collective’s unique intermedia works—including event scores and Fluxbox multiples—that irreversibly expanded the boundaries of contemporary art.

Focusing on the most definition-resistant art movement in history and departing from its two chief characteristics: intermediality and interactivity, this book develops an original theory of practice, the experiential philosophy of non-duality, which is the philosophy of dynamic co-constitutivity. This is done by tracing the performativity of intermedial works – works that fall conceptually between the art and the life media, such as Bengt af Klintbergs’s event score: “Eat an orange as if it were an apple” – in five key areas of human experience: language, temporality, the sensorium, social rites and rituals, and systems of economic exchange. The main argument, woven with the aid of the Derridian blind tactics, the Gramscian production of social life and the Zen-derived interexpression of Kitaro Nishida, is that the practical philosophy of co-constitutivity arises from the logic of the intermedium. In pursuing this argument, the book does three things: (1) it theorises an oeuvre that has remained under-theorised due to its fundamentally non-discursive nature and in doing so reinstates Fluxus as an influential cultural, rather than a “merely” artistic paradigm; (2) it serves as a companion to thinking by doing since most Fluxus intermedia are ready-mades, and, as such, readily available in the everyday environment; and (3) it establishes the counter-hegemonic logic of fluxing while tracing its legacy in contemporary practices as diverse as the culture-jamming activism of The Yes Men, the paradoxical performance work of Song Dong and the pervasive game worlds of Blast Theory. Natasha Lushetich is an artist, researcher and Lecturer in Performance at the University of Exeter, UK. Her specialist areas include intermedia, live art, performance and philosophy, and questions of identity and ideology. Her recent writings have appeared in Babilonia, Performance Research, TDR, Theatre Journal, Total Art Journal as well as in a number of edited collections.

Being based in different countries around the globe, but keen to work together, Fluxus artists developed collaborations based on shared resources and creative autonomy – methods that also gave the artworks agency to perform beyond the control of their originators.

"George Maciunas is typically associated with the famous art collective Fluxus, of which he is often thought to have been the leader. In this book, critic and art historian Colby Chamberlain wants us to question two things: first, the idea that Fluxus was a "group" in any conventional sense, and second, that Maciunas was its "leader." Instead, Chamberlain shows us how Maciunas used the paper materials of bureaucracy in his art-cards, certificates, charts, files, and plans, among others-to subvert his own status as a "figurehead" of this collective and even as a biographical entity. Each of the book's chapters situates Maciunas's artistic practice in relation to a different domain: education, communication, production, housing, and health. We learn about his use of the postal service to make Fluxus into an international network; his manipulation of US copyright law to pursue a "Soviet" ideal of collective authorship; his intervention in Manhattan's zoning restrictions as founder and manager of the "Fluxhouse" artists' lofts in SoHo; and his performances protesting against normative ideals of health and family, focusing on his own, ultimately failed medical self-management. Fluxus Administration is not a biography, but it does delve more deeply than any other book into Maciunas's life and work, showing the lengths to which the artist himself went to disrupt any easy account of himself"--

A man of extraordinary and seemingly limitless talents—musician, inventor, composer, poet, and even amateur mycologist—John Cage became a central figure of the avant-garde early in his life and remained at that pinnacle until his death in 1992 at the age of eighty. Award-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman gives us the first comprehensive life of this remarkable artist. Silverman begins with Cage’s childhood in interwar Los Angeles and his stay in Paris from 1930 to 1931, where immersion in the burgeoning new musical and artistic movements triggered an explosion of his creativity. Cage continued his studies in the United States with the seminal modern composer Arnold Schoenberg, and he soon began the experiments with sound and percussion instruments that would develop into his signature work with prepared piano, radio static, random noise, and silence. Cage’s unorthodox methods still influence artists in a wide range of genres and media. Silverman concurrently follows Cage’s rich personal life, from his early marriage to his lifelong personal and professional partnership with choreographer Merce Cunningham, as well as his friendships over the years with other composers, artists, philosophers, and writers. Drawing on interviews with Cage’s contemporaries and friends and on the enormous archive of his letters and writings, and including photographs, facsimiles of musical scores, and Web links to illustrative sections of his compositions, Silverman gives us a biography of major significance: a revelatory portrait of one of the most important cultural figures of the twentieth century. !--?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /--

Over the course of fifteen years, Nicholas Zurbrugg interviewed the avant-garde poets, filmmakers, dancers, writers, composers, and performance artists who were defying tradition, crossing genres, and forever changing how art would be created, performed, and interpreted. These conversations with thirty-one of the leading multimedia artists in the United States now form a comprehensive record, from the insiders' perspectives, of the most vital component of the postmodern American art world. Passionate about postmodernism and committed to innovative creativity, Zurbrugg asks these artists probing and insightful questions. How did their work evolve? Who most influenced them? How did they assess changes in contemporary art, and what did they think of each other's work? Which of their experiences had the most powerful effects on their creative development? What could lie ahead for American art? As these questions are answered by individual artists, the interviews also cumulatively address larger issues of artistic expression, including the idea of the avant-garde itself. The book features interviews with Kathy Acker, Charles Amirkhanian, Laurie Anderson, Robert Ashley, Beth B, David Blair, William S. Burroughs, Warren Burt, John Cage, Richard Foreman, Kenneth Gaburo, Diamanda Galas, John Giorno, Philip Glass, Brion Gysin, Dick Higgins, Jenny Holzer, Mike Kuchar, Robert Lax, Jackson Mac Low, Meredith Monk, Nam June Paik, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Reich, Rachel Rosenthal, Bill Viola, Larry Wendt, Emmett Williams, Robert Wilson, Nick Zedd, and Ellen Zweig. Introductory notes to each interview provide context and connect the work and experiences of various artists, and photographs of theseartists contribute a significant visual element to the book. Nicholas Zurbrugg (1947-2001) was professor of English and cultural studies, as well as director of the Centre of Contemporary Arts, at De Montfort University in Leicester, England. He is the author of The Parameters of Postmodernism and Critical Vices: The Myths of Postmodern Theory.