In state of Fluxus - how to go with flow at art show
INVITE TO STEP INTO REIMAGINED EXHIBITION AT THE GALLERY
AN exhibition of avant garde art with movement and change at its core opens to the public today having had the first in a series of transformations.
residue…what remains is an evolving five-month programme of displays, performances and installations related to the Fluxus art collective – regarded as one of the most significant creative movements of the 20th century, and one which still exerts a powerful influence on artists today.
Artists in the exhibition include, among others, Yoko Ono and David Byrne and William Burroughs.
It first opened at The Gallery on De Montfort University’s (DMU) campus on February 6, with works by Fluxus founder John Cage and others.
In keeping with the spirit of Fluxus – the word is Latin for flow – curator Sue Schroeder has reimagined the show, changing the works on display in the gallery itself, and presenting a new range of installations, performances and events at the campus.
All are available to the public for free.
The reopening will include a recreation of Bean Garden by American artist Alison Knowles, a founding member of Fluxus who died in October.
Using Knowles original instructions for this famous interactive sound installation and performance piece, Bean Garden involves the construction of a large, shallow wooden platform which is then filled with hundreds of thousands of dried Great Northern beans.
Visitors are invited to physically step into the work. As they walk, dig or play, the beans shift and crunch, offering an audible and tactile interactive experience that breaks the boundary between audience and artwork.
Microphones capture the vibrations of every movement and the sounds are amplified throughout the gallery, turning movement into a spontaneous, indeterminate musical composition.
Later, immediately after the gallery opening this evening, American percussionist Jeff Arnal, and the German musician and composer Dietrich Eichmann, will perform together at DMU’s Pace building.
Also there, on March 21, Arnal, who is executive director of Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center in North Carolina, will give a talk called Black Mountain College 1933–1957: Experimentation, Performance and Interdisciplinary Collaboration.
Then there will be a screening of Merce Cunningham’s Points In Space – a seminal 55-minute dance work created for the BBC, and based on the Albert Einstein quote “there are no fixed points in space”.
The curator is the choreographer Sue Schroeder, artistic director of Core Dance in USA, an acolyte of Fluxus choreographer Anna Halprin.
She said: “With movement at its core, this exhibition continues to evolve and change over the many weeks that it is open.
“With movement and change as foundational to my artistic practice, and now this exhibition, it also connects to my commitment to art as a catalyst for social change. Art as movement to create change.
“My hope is that this exhibition will inspire creativity and play as well as agency – to take an action in your life and what you do, what we can do together, that is generative.”
residue…what remains draws on key Fluxus collections from across Europe and the United States, as well as DMU’s own connection with the collective through the use of many works in the Zurbrugg Collection.
They were bequeathed to the university by the late Professor Nicholas Zurbrugg, whose collecting and work established DMU as a significant centre for Fluxus research.
Fluxus artists’ work has influenced art since the 1960s and did much to normalise the idea – born of Dada and the Conceptual Art movement – that almost anything can be considered as art.
■ residue...what remains runs until Sunday, June 7 at The Gallery at De Montfort University.