fluxus
Fluxus in Belgrade
Salon of the MoCAB,  14 Pariska str.
December 5th 2014 – January 25th 2015
14 Pariska St., Belgrade
Working hours: from 12:00 to 20:00, except Tuesdays
Admission is free of charge

Author of the exhibition: Dejan Sretenović Ph.D.

Eric Andersen, Joseph Beuys, George Brecht, Albert M. Fine, Robert Filliou, Henry Flynt, Wolf Vostell, Ken Friedman, Al Hansen, Dick Higgins, Arthur Koepke, Milan Knjižak, Takehisha Kosugi, George Maciunas, Jackson Mac Low, Alison Knowles, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Ben Patterson, William De Ridder, James Riddle, Mieko Shiomi, Thomas Schmitt, Endre Tot, Emmet Williams, Ben Vautier, Robert Watts…

The first and only exhibition in Belgrade dedicated to Fluxus was held at the Gallery-Legacy of Milica Zorić and Rodoljub Čolaković in 1986 under the title “Fluxus” and it presented the works of the protagonists of this international neo-avant-garde tendency from the collection of the MoCAB that counts 18 works, as well as from several private collections. The exhibition “Fluxus in Belgrade” partly adopts the material from the previous exhibition and due to this it can be characterized as its new and altered version that also has a didactic character, and is primarily designed for new generations of art lovers. Having in mind that the material available now in Belgrade mostly comes from the period of the historic Fluxus (1962–1966) and the Fluxus from the first half of the seventies, the exhibition is concentrated on these periods, appending to the original works (boxes, objects, graphic works, drawings, scores) textual, photo, video and audio documents related to the activities of this movement, including exhibits related to the contacts of domestic authors (Branko Vučićević, Miroljub Todorović) with the protagonists of Fluxus.

Fluxus was not a movement but an incoherent constellation of authors from the fields of music, visual art, performance and poetry who, relying on the experiences of Dada and Duchamp, shared a common aspiration for tearing down the culturally set distinction between art and life, and therefore abolishing the bourgeois institution of art. Fluxus was an “active philosophy of experience that sometimes takes the form of art” (Ken Friedman) and that sometimes starts from the belief that artistic activity must be deprived of special status as a special activity and resituated inside the broader field of everyday experience. As opposed to the historic avant-gardes, the Fluxus artists did not strive towards positive utopia and making models for the transformation of world, but directed their creative potential towards small and simple events, situations and things that constitute daily life. The Fluxus artists employed a broad spectrum of expressive means that includes events, happenings, performances, objects, installations, music, poetry, films, video, multiple and mail art, all this through destruction of the specialist aspects of art.

Fluxus presented a kind of hub and filter for various radical ideas, language experiments and manifestations of intermediality that circulated in the neo-avant-garde circles in the first half of the sixties and subsequently developed their identity in specific programs and individual poetics of conceptual and processual art, Arte Povera, performance, mail art etc. Besides presenting this specific collection of the MoCAB, the exhibition “Fluxus in Belgrade” has a goal to present this antiartistic, anti-institutional and countercultural phenomenon, to interpret it from the contemporary perspective and rescue it from unrecognizability into which if fell by dispersing its ideas and traces throughout the artistic practices from the sixties until today.

The Museum of Contemporary Art wishes to thank Bojana Makavejev, Miroljub Todorović, Branko Vučićević and Branislav Dimitrijević for loaning exhibits for the exhibition.