Conceptual Art, Fluxus and Performance

In 1967 Sol LeWitt published an article that gave a loose tendency its name. In conceptual art, he wrote, the idea is the most important part of the work: the planning and the decisions come first, “and the execution is a perfunctory affair.” It was a startling claim for an artist trained to make things, and it described work already under way in several cities at once.

This section gathers three overlapping fields: conceptual art, the Fluxus network, and performance. All three asked what an artwork has to be, and all three answered that it need not be an object made by hand and sold through a gallery.

Ideas first

Tate dates conceptual art as a movement from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s, happening more or less at the same time across Europe, North America and South America. Its landmarks include Joseph Kosuth’s series Titled (Art as Idea as Idea) of 1966 to 1967, the proposal Air Show by Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin, founder members of the group Art & Language, and John Baldessari’s word paintings, shown in Los Angeles in 1968. In New York in 1969 the dealer Seth Siegelaub organised an exhibition whose title promised no objects, no painters and no sculptors. The critic Lucy Lippard documented the period in her 1973 book Six Years, covering 1966 to 1972.

The roots go further back. Marcel Duchamp’s readymade Fountain of 1917 is often cited as the first conceptual work. Many artists in the movement also had political aims, and Tate points to Joseph Beuys’s idea of social sculpture as an example. Others, including Martin Creed and Simon Starling, have carried the approach into this century.

Fluxus

The Lithuanian American artist George Maciunas founded Fluxus in 1960. It began as a small international network of artists and composers rooted in experimental music, named after a magazine that published work by musicians and artists around the composer John Cage. Maciunas said its purpose was to “promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art.” The first Fluxus event took place at the AG Gallery in New York in 1961, and festivals in Europe followed in 1962. Its main centres were New York, Germany and Japan.

Fluxus had no house style. It favoured chance, humour, cheap materials and collaboration with the audience. Joseph Beuys, Dick Higgins, Alice Hutchins, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Ben Vautier, Robert Watts, Benjamin Patterson and Emmett Williams all took part. Henry Flynt, one of the group, was already describing his performance pieces as concept art in 1961.

Paik shows how far the network reached. A Seoul native, born in 1932, he trained in Tokyo before moving to Germany and the circle of Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne. After meeting Maciunas in 1961 he joined European Fluxus performances with prepared pianos and, later, altered television sets. His first solo exhibition, in Wuppertal in 1963, set music and television side by side.

Performance

The terms performance and performance art became common only in the 1970s, but the history is usually traced to Futurist productions and Dada cabarets of the 1910s. After the war, performance aligned itself with conceptual art because both resisted the finished, permanent object. Today the word covers live actions and also the film, photographs and installations that record them, and Tate describes it less as a medium than as a set of questions about how art relates to people.

A note on evidence

Much of this work survives as instructions, scores, typed sheets, photographs and video. That makes the archive part of the art. The articles below pay close attention to those documents, and to the people who kept them.