Radio Fluxus: Stories from the Fluxus Archives

The sound installation When Elephants Fight, It Is The Frogs That Suffer – A Sonic Graffiti was conceived by Ben Patterson specifically for documenta 14, which took place in 2017 in Athens and Kassel. Development of the work was disrupted by the artist’s sudden death in June 2016 and was undertaken again by the artist’s estate in collaboration with Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden (NKW) and Berlin-based composer Bernd Schultheis. In this episode, Elke Gruhn—art historian, former director of the Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden, and longtime friend of Patterson—recounts the story of realizing the work in Patterson's absence, revealing details of gathering and arranging the components of the sound piece and translating the artist’s instructions into site-specific installations mounted in Athens and Kassel. Gruhn reflects on the challenges related to unavoidable speculation on the artist’s intention, technical difficulties presented by the two distinct sites of documenta 14, and the subsequent inclusion of the work in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.More information about the episode, the piece and the guest is available ⁠on the episode's ⁠website.

The concept of switching motors between a fan and a clock was conceived by American intermedia artist Larry Miller around 1973-74. He shared the concept/score of “Very Fast Clock and Very Slow Fan” with Fluxus producer and publisher George Maciunas, who created around 1975 a version specifically for the house of collector Jean Brown. In this episode of Radio Fluxus conservator, researcher, and writer Rachel Rivenc examines the Miller/Maciunas version of the work acquired by the Getty Research Institute archives as part of the study collection Jean Brown papers 1916-1995. The story guides the audience through the process of discovering, researching, and preparing the work for the exhibition “Fluxus Means Change: Jean Brown's Avant-Garde Archive” at the GRI Gallery. More information about the episode, the piece, the artists and the guest is available on the episode's website.

Dream Piece (1976) is a performance by John Armleder, conceived and enacted within the expansive context of the Ecart Group, an artistic collective that thrived in Geneva during the 1970s. Ecart's approach to art bore a strong imprint of Fluxus influence, a fact made evident by the numerous characteristics that situated the group firmly within the broader Fluxus network. Ecart's headquarters in Geneva was multifunctional, serving as a gallery, a concert venue, a bookshop, a library, a publishing house, and a distribution centre for art by Ecart’s extended network. Furthermore, invested in experimenting with alternative models of distribution and dissemination, Ecart became a key node and facilitator in the international mail art network. In this episode of Radio Fluxus, Yann Chateigné narrates his multifaceted interactions with Dream Piece, assuming roles as an art historian, curator, writer, and performer. More information about the artist, our guest and the work is available on the episode's website Disclaimer: Feathers and face paint hold significant spiritual and cultural importance in Native cultures, with their meaning varying based on tribal customs and personal interpretations. They are typically earned through honorable actions that bring honor to tribes and nations. We are aware that wearing a headdress reinforces stereotypes about Native peoples, appropriates their culture with little or no regard for their traditions. We decided, however, to publish these images as a documentary evidence of artistic practice, rather than a display of our believes. This episode features Ludwig van Beethoven, Ich Liebe Dich, performed by Lotte Lehmann (sopran) and Erno Balogh (piano), recorded March 13, 1936 and 1/1 by Brian Eno, Rhett Davies, Robert Wyatt from album Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978).

Open and Shut Case (1965) is a score-based work which manifests itself in a variety of ways. As is often the case for Fluxus events, the score has been written down a posteriori, out of the creation of an object. The first pre-score iteration of the piece was an objet trouvé — a matchbox altered by Friedman with two imperative sentences: “open me” written on the outside and “shut me quick” on the inside of the box. Both this one and the subsequent version of this work, which also used a matchbox and was made by Friedman for Dick Higgins, have not survived. One year after Friedman formulated his initial concept,  George Maciunas asked the young artist to write down the instructions for the piece for the first time and subsequently interpreted it into a Fluxus box — Open and Shut Case (c. 1966). After Maciunas’ passing, his iteration of the score was republished by Barbara Moore as Open and Shut Case (1987) through ReFlux Editions, founded in the 1980s as a platform for continuing the publication of classic Fluxus multiples. In 1993, Dutch collector of artists’ books Peter Van Beveren published Open and Shut Case (1993) — a direct interpretation of the score also in the form of a box, mimicking the first matchbox version. Consecutive interpretations of the Open and Shut Case, generated often on the occasion of exhibitions of Friedman’s scores, resulted in aesthetically dissimilar objects. In 2021, Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, Connecticut produced a short TikTok video explaining the action scripted in the score with the use of a DIY Open and Shut Case made out of a wooden fruit crate. The elegant box in dark red faux leather made for the recent show in Kalmarkonstmuseum exemplifies an opposite approach to the realisation of the same, fairly simple instructions (see photograph below). The score as a text might also take on several material manifestations. While in the 1970s it was typewritten, xeroxed and distributed by post, in the 2000s it was sent digitally as a pdf and made into ‘print on acid-free paper’ using a high-quality inkjet printer. The printout can be consequently presented flat in a vitrine, pinned bare to the wall or presented in black or white Ikea’s Ribba frames.

This episode presents George Brecht’s event score titled Thursday. This conceptual piece that relates rather to the tradition of musical notations than to the object-oriented realm of visual arts exists in various material instantiations. In museum collections, it appears as a note scribbled down on a piece of a creased white sheet of paper as one of the cards in Water Yam – a box collection of Brecht’s scores, assembled and designed by George Maciunas and published by Fluxus in 1963. In this episode our guest, Jules Pelta Feldman examines both the material and conceptual dimensions of this piece, comparing it with other Fluxus works and practices and contemplating what it means to perform Thursday and how this work could be potentially activated. More details about the work, the guest and the artist are available here.