My last year in Iowa City, I landed the research assistantship of my dreams - working for Estera Milman, founding curator of Alternative Traditions in the Contemporary Arts at the University of Iowa Museum of Art. I was wildly romantic about Fluxus, especially Anna Banana's stamp sheets, George Brech'ts events, and all the ridiculous games cooked up by George Maciunas. Here was a movement that lived up to its promise. Anyone could be an artist. Just pick up the games and play. Your hand was no different from Banana's or Brecht's. Art was no longer about objects - it was about events.
Looking back, I realize how prophetic the Fluxus badasses were. Spontaneous communities forged by instant publishing, blogging, and interactive media - they're all just high-tech correspondence art. We rubber stamp our emails with signatures, we decorate our pages with Flash animations and jpegs, and there is no clear distinction between life and art. MOMA curators don't march in to tear down our lomos. No editors cross out our sentences. I still feel romantic about handmade collage, but I think we're witnessing an interesting transition in the arts. Back when Fluxus began, the idea of spontaneous, non-institutionally mediated artistic communities was downright subversive. As Estera wrote:
"for Filliou and George Brecht, the Eternal Network had absolutely nothing to do with art as a privileged, unnatural thing, situated within a separate realm. For them (although admittedly not for all correspondence network participants), the artist was but one player in a wider network of everyday events, doings, and sufferings 'going on around him all the time in all parts of the world.'"
What happens when those networks are made explicit, as in online publishing and open-comments blogs? What happens when they are commonplace? Does art finally become of and for the people?
One of my jobs at the museum was scanning the stamps, postcards, and other works for an online exhibition catalog, and eventually, a database. I'll never forget the day I opened an old box and pulled out a plastic bag filled with hair. Long, black hair, held together like a ponytail. "Oh, that's Yoko Ono's," my boss said. It was an artifact from a performance, the kind of thing you find all the time in Fluxus archives. These were the artifacts in Artifacts of the Eternal Network. Even though Fluxus intended to do away with the privileged art object, every one of their games, every last letter and Flux box, every magazine, and every sample of hair had been preserved. There was still a sense that objects were necessary, as evidence that art had been created. I fantasized about stealing a few strands of Yoko's hair and sending them to a forensics lab. What might be found there, hidden in the cuticles?
Which leads me to this dilemma: In the digital world, we move further and further away from objects. It's all about data, pixels, bits. What happens when correspondence is just a network, no artifacts?