1962: First Fluxus Festival

The first of many Fluxus festivals, or Fluxconcerts, was organized by Maciunas in 1962 at the Museum Wiesbaden in Wiesbaden, Germany, to promote the anthology. The International Fluxus Festival of the Newest Music (festum fluxorum) consisted of 14 concerts, presenting musical and performance work by Joseph Beuys, Brecht, Cage, Alison Knowles (b 1933), Paik, Wim T. Schippers, Wolf Vostell, Robert Watts (1923–87), Young and others. Fluxconcerts—sometimes called Aktionen—also took place in Düsseldorf, Wuppertal, Paris, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Nice, Stockholm and Oslo in 1962 and 1963. These events organized by Maciunas were influenced and paralleled by the independent activities of Young, Flynt, Robert Morris (ii) and others at Yoko Ono’s studio in New York in 1961 and Brecht and Watts’s Yam Festival in New York in 1963. All these artists were eventually associated with Maciunas and Fluxus, either through their collaboration on multiples, inclusion in anthologies, or participation in Fluxus concerts. The typical Fluxconcert consisted of a rapid series of performances of short events of scored actions and music. These events frequently consisted of physical performances representative of mundane activities, or music based on non-musical sound sources. They were often humorous and concerned with involving the audience, specifically to disrupt the expected conventions of musical and theatrical performance and spectatorship; their ‘event scores’ were characterized by reduction, repetition, improvisation and chance. [more...]