Thursday, February 28, 2019

George Brecht, Artist


George Brecht, Valoche/A Flux Travel Aid, 1975, wood, paper, objects, 6 ⅛ x 10 1/16 x 8 ½ in. (15.6 x 25.6 x 21.6 cm) box. Collection Walker Art Center, Walker Special Purchase Fund, 1989, 1989.111.1-.26.



Unlike most exhibitions that center on the artistic innovations of the 1960s and 1970s, Art Expanded, 1958–1978 foregrounds the work and activities of Fluxus, a neo-avant-garde collective that emerged in the early 1960s primarily in Europe and the United States, with a network of affiliated artists around the globe. With a name derived by George Maciunas from the Latin verb fluere (“to flow”), the group—George BrechtAlison KnowlesBenjamin PattersonRobert WattsNam June PaikBen Vautier, and many others—signaled a decisive move away from received notions of artistic authorship and aesthetic autonomy. Galvanized by the teachings of John Cage at the New School for Social Research in New York (1957–1959) and his use of chance operations and indeterminacy, this new generation gravitated toward a score-based practice of street actions, intermedia events, and proto-conceptual instructions. Their work signaled a new sense of mobility and critique within art; no longer tied to the physical spaces of the institutionalized art world—the studio, the gallery, and the museum—Fluxus destabilized art’s economic system and its critical faculties with ludic activities rooted in participation, collaboration, and dematerialization. - Eric Crosby


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