Freedom? Nothingness? Time? Fluxus and the Laboratory of Ideas

At the 50-year anniversary of Fluxus, Ken Friedman looks back on the activities and achievements of a laboratory for art, architecture, design, and music. This article examines the political and economic context of the 1950s against which Fluxus emerged to become the most radical and experimental art project of the 1960s, thoroughly international in structure, with women as well as men in central roles. The article examines the hermeneutical interface of life and art through 12 Fluxus ideas: globalism, the unity of art and life, intermedia, experimentalism, chance, playfulness, simplicity, implicativeness, exemplativism, specificity, presence in time, and musicality.