Response to The Origins of Video Art - Ekin Erkan

The mirroring of technological advancements and innovation has resulted in post-modernism art, much initially stimulated and engaged by the likes of John Cage and Nam June Paik. In this Neo-Dada art, dubbed Fluxus, the pursuance of aesthetics entirely anti-bourgeois and avant-garde - Yoko Ono's Avant Garde Chamber Street Loft Concerts - resulted in the innovation of something self editing and entirely experiential. Technology usurped an almost "nightmarish" and cyber-punk reality where a man-made manifestation could subjectively become integrated.
This mindlessness or crazed-brainedness reflected the "product television" so vehemently corroding subjectivity in art, with the reactionary being in Video Art. Anti-art sensibilities, minimalism, and a DIY aesthetic were proponents of Fluxus with a hand-assembly and anti-outsource outlet. The message was, in its entirety, anti-art and disparaging the market-driven art. The Fluxus movement, under dispensary proponents like Dick Higgins' Something Else Press, began the manifestation of intermedia and interplay of artistic universes. With facets technological or bodily simple (like George Maciunas's Fluxus Boxes gathering artifacts of cards, games, prints, and ideas) collage was introduced. Performance art also manifested, via pieces like George Brecht's "Drip Music" - musical scores transformed into sound art/dialogue happenings, distorting the fourth wall between audience/reality and performance/abstraction.
A most beautiful depiction of the essence of Fluxus is Nam June Paik's Fluxfilm Zen For Film. Here we note the dispersed alignment of varied elements - Zen, monotomy of average life, and science. Intimate concentration on nothingness shows the prevalence of something concrete - art subjectively created. This is the personality of Fluxus - entirely DIY. Zen For Life could very well be played in a seemingly endless projected loop, burgeoning its message in an imaginatively reactionary audience. The dust particles and scratches - purposeful pursuits of the intentionally seedy and grainy technological character that has been made aesthetic "forsaken luxury" in timelessness -  are illuminated by the luminescent light that occasionally gleams and fades. Analogous to, or maybe an ode to, John Cage's works featuring silence or non-musical sound in his works, this film is as anti-film as Cage's anti-music. Cage's 4'33 encouraged the subjectivity of creating music in silence - Paik's film encourages imagery in emptiness.