ionaries of Leninism (Knabb 131). Situationist Raoul Vaneigem, in examining its participatory ethos, saw that ‘the ultimate logic of the happening and its derivatives is to supply the society of masterless slaves, which the cyberneticians have planned for us, with the spectatorless spectacle it will require’ (85).”
This critique is prescient because it speaks together two terms, art and labor, which are usually kept separate. It is a springboard for comment today on the contemporary institutional and academic versions of “participatory art.” These elite forms of artmaking need to be questioned for the ways in which they glamorize new regimes of capitalist labor and consumption in a post-industrial age.
Fluxus: Art is Motion
Kaprow himself was uninterested in politics. He cared about systems, rules – the formal structure of the event-as-art itself. Some of the artists of the Fluxus movement, however, had no such compunctions.
Lithuanian artist George Maciunas organized the international Fluxus movement, a loose-knit network of artists who often worked together. In 1962, while working at a U.S. Air Force base in Wiesbaden, Germany, Maciunas produced the first Fluxus Festival. The event was structured like a musical concert with scripted actions performed by artists, among them Wolf Vostell, Nam June Paik, Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins, artists who would go on to comprise the core of the Fluxus movement.
Maciunas idealized the Russian Constructivist artists' group LEF, and he published numerous Fluxus manifestoes spiced with revolutionary political intentions. While Maciunas believed art should merge with popular amusement, Fluxus events tended to be abstract. The actions were at once humdrum -- with segments drawn from everyday life -- and bizarre. Like musical compositions, these events were infinitely repeatable as "scores." A pure instance of this kind of work is by George Brecht, who wrote simple sets of instructions for art events on cards which any reader could enact. Yoko Ono’s art instruction texts are contained in a book called Grapefruit (1963). The tradition continues in an interactive dynamic website of art action texts growing out of an exhibition called “Do It” (1999; ongoing on the web).
Despite Maciunas' manifestos, most Fluxus artists remained apolitical. The nature of most of their work was wry and obscurely humorous. This disengagement actually helped the spread of the movement. The authorities didn’t catch on what the artists were up to. In fascist Spain, the artists and poets of Grupo Zaj dared regular evenings of performance, once even touring El Pardo, the town where the dictator Franco had his palace, performing in taverns and courtyards. Impeccably dressed as itinerant musicians – albeit with ridiculous instruments – the artists of Zaj were not molested by police.
The apolitical forms of this new mode of event art, then, were well adapted to thrive as underground culture in authoritarian regimes. And so they did, particularly in eastern Europe under state socialism, as a poetical kind of conceptual art throughout the 1970s and ‘80s. Fluxus built naturally on the ground prepared by international Surrealism and Dada during the modernist period. Both movements were long-lived in eastern Europe. Joseph Beuys aligned himself with the Fluxus movement. He pitched some of his early performances to the east, especially Eurasienstab (Eurasian Staff), in which he symbolically united East and West through the "iron curtain" with his messianic presence and mysterious actions.
Japan: Action Art and Anti-Art
Numerous Asian artists participated in the Fluxus movement, most notably the Korean-born Nam June Paik who went on to become a master of video art. Paik was living in Germany for the first Fluxus event, then moved to New York. Yoko Ono was already there.
In Japan, the 1950s action art of Jackson Pollock had inspired a radical group of performance artists in Gutai who staged a series of dramatic and unusual festivals. At an outdoor exhibit in 1955, the artists of the group (“Gu” is tool or means, and “tai” i