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 Berl...

This episode explores Philip Corner’s iconic work Piano Activities , starting with its controversial 1962 premiere at the Wiesbaden festival. Our guest, artist Sean Miller, narrates his experience interpreting Corner’s latest version of the score, titled Piano Aktivitys as a Disciplind Destruktshun (2022), which he orchestrated and performed in 2024 in Gainesville, Florida as part of the “Fluxus i...

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 wri...

Alison Knowles's Performance Piece #8 (Summer 1965) exists as a language-based proposition published in the first Great Beat Pamphlet (New York: Something Else Press, 1965). It also exists as a "graphic performance" entitled The "T" Dictionary . “The Dictionary” was first made public in the book The Four Suits (New York: Something Else Press, 1965). The following year, it w...

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 headquart...

Composed by Bengt af Klintberg in 1963, Orange Event No 3 (or Apelsinhändelse nr 3 in Swedish) is one of the scores from the series Twenty-Five Orange Events . The series was published several times, the first time in Swedish in 1966, together with other writings by af Klintberg. Like many other Fluxus scores, this particular work does not possess a singular manifestation; instead, it exists in va...

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 qui...

The third episode of our podcast presents Mirror Piece (1963) by Japanese artist Mieko Shiomi. This work, as many other Fluxus scores, does not have a singular manifestation but rather exists as many different entities, the material ones and the performative ones captured through documentation. Two versions of the handwritten score – in English and Japanese , live in the collection of the Museum o...

This episode features Benjamin Patterson’s work Hooked (1980) from the collection of Getty Research Institute, acquired in 1985 as a part of Jean Brown Archive . Formally, Hooked is a fishing tackle box that contains several found, similarly unrelated objects adorned with either hooks or lures. One of the items included inside the box was a can of sardines. Our guest, conservator Albrecht Gumlich...

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 Br...