Rush provides a brief history of contemporary avant-garde
media and its respective artists in the introduction. One statement that
affected me was how if it is experimental, it isn’t art. I then thought it was
interesting how this statement paralleled the current status of art history. We
can’t write history if we are part of it, Rush essentially claims. So, with the
“one foot in the past, one foot in the present” notion of time, I think the
near self-expansion, change, and adaption of art is unbelievable. Duchamp
effectively supports this ubiquitous notion with his barrier breaking pieces.
The most
interesting part of the introduction for me was the excerpts of the Fluxus
Artists. These were the artists that opposed mainstream; instead of
exaggerating and dramatizing daily life or stories, they stripped them down to
the bare minimum. The best example for me was the piece where Yoko Ono turned
an eight second shot of her smiling and turned it into an eleven minute
artistic expression. Another example I enjoyed was when the artist simply used
the film as the medium instead of actually filming a shot.
This film
by Yoko Ono is the lighting of a match. What usually takes a few seconds turns
into five minutes. The simplistic nature of the action still tells a story; the
fire at times looks like it might burn the thumb, and how it rescinds at the
end are the effects Fluxus Art, I believe, aim for.
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