Valoche/A Flux Travel Aid

Emerging in the early 1960s, the loosely organised group Fluxus was characterised by a spirit of rebellion and a purposeful lack of definition. Inspired by earlier avant-garde movements such as Dada and Futurism, Fluxus artists relied upon chance, humour and performance in their endeavours to collapse the gap between art and life. Founded by George Maciunas, the name Fluxus was selected to represent the flux and precarity of the group’s diverse activities which embraced multiplicity and process; their art was purposefully difficult to pin down. Writing in his manifesto, Maciunas announced that Fluxus would ‘promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art, promote living art, anti-art, promote non-art reality to be grasped by all peoples’ (G. Maciunas, ‘The Fluxus Manifesto’, reprinted in C. Phillpot and J. Hendricks, Fluxus: selections from the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1988, p. 12). The group was international and had a strong presence in New York City, where artists such as George Brecht worked closely with Maciunas. Often focussing on the immaterial, Fluxus owed a debt to the dedicated efforts of collectors, enthusiasts and curators, who carefully compiled the documentation and ephemera associated with the movement. The pioneering San Francisco art dealer and collector Steven Leiber, in whose collection the following lots by Kaprow, Brecht and Robert Filliou resided for many years, was one such. Beyond the United States, Fluxus was championed by Joseph Beuys in Germany. Seeking provocation and enigma, Beuys, in particular, adopted a process-oriented aesthetic with which he sought to inspire a collaborative, utopian version of society. His works subvert long-held ideas regarding what constitutes an art object by preserving diverse forms created through a multitude of processes, both physical and social. United by a desire to upend both the art world and greater society, Fluxus artists, in varied and distinctive ways, offered new ways to see the world.
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Other unique variants are in the collection of Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge and Fondazione Bonotto, Molvena.