Stepping on a painting is one of those things that you just don’t do. Paintings are meant to be hung up in galleries, to be carefully admired from a respectful distance,dictated by the burly man in the security uniform eyeing your toes with suspicion. It is this internalized boundary that makes it difficult, even when directed by the official plaque, to step on the painting at your feet.
It was, therefore, with trepidation that the student-docents tiptoed across the artwork, still afraid that their third grade teacher would come running into the room, scolding them for disobeying the “rules” that had been ingrained in their minds at such a young age.
U of M Art History professor David Doris, however, took the plaque on the wall to heart. It read, “Leave a piece of canvas or finished painting on the floor or in the street.”
“You are participating in the making of this painting!” he said, as he tap-danced on Yoko Ono’s work. “In having this painting on the floor, Yoko Ono asks us to reconsider what it is that makes a painting. Is a painting finished when an artist puts his brush down? Her brush down?…You change the painting, you transform the painting…by acting on it,” Doris explained to me later, his face bright with excitement.
Watching a grown man tap dance is one thing, but watching a grown man tap dance on a painting, in the University of Michigan’s Art Museum, is another thing entirely. Most would probably dismiss him as one of those crazed-art professors who has sniffed a bit too much acrylic paint in his day. But as I watched him attempt to explain the contradictory, paradoxical, utterly inexplicable UMMA Fluxus exhibit, I didn’t see some crazy hyped up on paint fumes, but a man who identified himself with the Fluxus movement, a man whose passion for this art, this way of life, was clear by how he studied the event cards in the cases, how he stared at the “Zen Film” piece done by Nam Jun Peik.
Doris explained this piece to me later, as we sat in his dimly lit office that is wedged somewhere in the downstairs of the U of M’s Art History building: “It is just a reel of film that has nothing on it. Or rather, it doesn’t have any images as such…All you see is just the grain of the film, and every time you play it, it will be different…When you play a film through a projector, it chips away at that film a little at a time; it leaves a little scratch, a little grain, a bit of dust. And so, you are looking at a living organism. It’s not nothing that you’re looking at.”
It is observations like this that began the Fluxus movement in the 1960s. “These [Fluxus artists] were people who were not interested in making paintings, or big grand concertos, or great gestures. They were instead focusing on the most ordinary events, things that you might, or might not notice, and bringing them into the field of our perception. And they did this in very interesting ways,” said Doris. One of these ways is by creating what are called event scores. Doris keeps a box of these “event scores” in his office, almost as a momento of his Master’s thesis on Fluxus art, and as a reminder that at any moment, he can choose to pick up a card and learn something, or, not learn something. For example, the text of Takehisa Kosugi’s event score called “Chironomy 1” is as follows: “hold a hand out a window for a long time.”
Now, this doesn’t seem like much. But try it when you go home –if you’re in the mood– and see what happens. Decide on what’s a “long time.” Say a half an hour is a long time. And, you put you hand out, which doesn’t seem like much, but what you observe during that time, what happens, is extraordinary. But maybe it won’t be, right?” mused Doris. “Maybe it won’t be extraordinary, but I remember the times that I have done this…it was a real, very interesting kind of revelation…Put a hand, out a window, for a long time. Fifteen minutes can be a long time, ten minutes, whatever, but stick with it. Because if you say, “Okay, that’s long enough,” then, who knows. But you can do that, too, of course.”
In addition to the business-card sized event score pieces, Fluxists also express themselves through performance. When studying for his Master’s Thesis, Doris got involved with some of these performances. Diverse in focus, and normally very peculiar, these performances range from watching a person hitting his or her head against the wall to “Philip Corner’s Carrot Chew,” in which the man named Philip Corner would chew a carrot, and then give the chewed carrot to a member of the audience.
On Mar. 14, the UMMA is put on a “Fluxus String and Water Compendium,” to celebrate the fiftieth-anniversary of the Fluxus Concerts, that originated in Wiesbaden, Germany in 1962.
Doris was giddy with anticipation when telling me about the exhibition. He added that Ben Paterson, a man who performed at the original Fluxus Concert in 1962, would be performing works from his own event scores.
While the UMMA has had many controversial exhibits, Doris makes a good point that this exhibit is almost ridiculing the institution of the museum itself: “We associate art museums with all that is serious and noble in our culture. And, okay, there is a certain responsibility that falls onto a museum’s shoulders. This work…this exhibition that’s up now about Fluxus asks us to think about what it is that a museum does. Here were works that were not really intended to last through the ages. But now, they’ve become monuments of art history…That in itself is a peculiar paradox.”
Because Fluxus isn’t one of those art movements that you can understand by reading a paragraph buried somewhere in a poorly-written art textbook, it is through these performances and event scores that you can begin to grasp its purpose, or not grasp its purpose at all.
“Fluxus artists invite us to pay attention to the world that we live in—the little things, the small things that we barely notice, the big things that we can’t miss. And to think about how we think about them. I think that’s why I love it…it’s not about museums: None of it is precious,” Doris contemplated.
It might have been the lighting, but his expression seemed to have changed, albeit very slightly. He was still excited, intrigued, astounded by this art, but it was with a quieter fascination than before: “There [is] value in it, and yet, it doesn’t matter all that much”
