ntained 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” is substance, or body), hung themselves in trees, threw themselves around in mud, ran through paper screens, and knocked logs down on top of themselves. This was resolutely materialist work, unlike the optical participatory experiments of the European technology artists. Interaction with the spectator was a part of the project.
Allan Kaprow included the Gutai Group along with the Europeans Vostell and Lebel, in his landmark 1966 coffee table book Assemblage, Environments and Happenings. Artists in Japan soon took the new event- and installation-based modes of artmaking in a strongly political direction under the banner of “anti-art.” This aesthetic philosophy evolved as street demonstrations raged against the U.S.-Japan military agreements, vestiges of the postwar occupation. The Neo-Dada Organizers broke furniture in a gallery as jazz music blared, and the artists of Hi-Red Center dressed in lab coats and meticulously cleaned busy public streets in Tokyo and New York (1966).
The Japanese modes of radicalized street work, exhibitions and installations were largely carried out by groups. Collectivity indeed became the predominant way to organize the cultural work that can comfortably be called social sculpture, and it remains a favored mode of organizing this kind of cultural work.
Crazy Dot Lady
That said, the influence of one charismatic clinical obsessive cannot be denied. Yayoi Kusama was a manic presence in New York City during the 1960s. (She also worked in Holland and Rome.) She produced numerous events called Happenings where nude men and women – in the parlance of the tabloid press – “cavorted,” their bodies painted all over with polka dots by the artist. These events included at least one gay wedding. Kusama sited her events in very public and provocative locations – the Museum of Modern Art sculpture garden, the Brooklyn Bridge, and Wall Street in front of the stock exchange.
In the press, which she courted, Kusama was identified with free love and the psychedelic hippie culture. She understood herself a