Saturday, July 09, 2011

Photobooth Performances Call - Update

Looking forward to your Fluxus performances for this book. Providing steps for submission due November 30th:
1. Take/make 4 photos of your photobooth performance.
2. Put the original photos in an envelop - do not email
3. On a piece of paper draw dialogue bubbles for talk, think and/or holler (or you can collage from the ones provided at http://ginnylloyd.blogspot.com and also in the Facebook group). Make sure you indicate which bubble goes with each photo.
4. Clearly print your text in the bubble(s).
5. Add the paper to the envelop.
6. Mail envelop to Ginny Lloyd, PO Box 1424, Jupiter, Florida 33468 USA

One submission per person and no returns. Group photos are okay and count as a separate submission. More info is at the Facebook page and link given above.

Sunday, July 03, 2011

FLUXUS MANIFESTO FOR THE 21st CENTURY

FLUXUS MANIFESTO FOR THE 21st CENTURY

This is what Fluxus is today. It is pretty much the same as what Fluxus was, but the old actors have been replaced by new ones. And behind our generation Fluxus artists there is already a new generation ready to displace us. We welcome them.

FLUXUS TODAY:

Fluxus today is built on the solid foundations of Fluxus yesterday. The artists may be new, but the work they are making is as much a part of Fluxus tradition as the work that came before.

Here is what Ken Friedman wrote in 2002. It was first published in 1989 by the Emily Harvey Gallery as "Fluxus and Company".

"...Emmett Williams once wrote, "Fluxus is what Fluxus does - but no one knows whodunit." This concise description makes two radical statements. The statement that no one knows "who done" Fluxus rejects the idea of Fluxus as a specific group of people. It identifies Fluxus with a frame of action and defines Fluxus as a cumulative, aggregate of Fluxus activities over the past forty years or so. While Emmett is famous for playful conundrums, he may not agree with this reading of his text. Dick Higgins did.

Dick explicitly rejected a notion that limited Fluxus to a specific group of people who came together at a specific time and place. Dick wrote, "Fluxus is not a moment in history, or an art movement. Fluxus is a way of doing things, a tradition, and a way of life and death."

For Dick, for George Maciunas, and for me, Fluxus is more valuable as an idea and a potential for social change than as a specific group of people or a collection of objects."


We, the Fluxus artists of the 21st century have taken these words to heart. We are Fluxus and we are making Fluxus work. Friedman, building on previous work by Dick Higgins, described Fluxus as a "laboratory characterized by twelve ideas".

1. globalism,
2. the unity of art and life,
3. intermedia,
4. experimentalism,
5. chance,
6. playfulness,
7. simplicity,
8. implicativeness,
9. exemplativism,
10. specificity,
11. presence in time, and
12. musicality


We live and work under the umbrella of these twelve ideas.

FOUR FLUXUS PRINCIPLES

Ideas from Ken Friedman, Owen Smith, George Maciunas, and Dick Higgins along with direct observation of Fluxus work past and present, can be synthesized to create an even more concise set of Four Fluxus Principles:

1. Fluxus is an attitude. It is not a movement or a style.
2. Fluxus is intermedia. Fluxus creators like to see what happens when different media intersect. They use found and everyday objects, sounds, images, and texts to create new combinations of objects, sounds, images, and texts.
3. Fluxus works are simple. The art is small, the texts are short, and the performances are brief.
4. Fluxus should be fun. Humor has always been an important element in Fluxus.

As with Friedman's 12 ideas, these four principles are flexible guidelines, not commandments carved in stone. They are meant to help people understand and work with Fluxus. Not to confine them or restrain their creativity.

We, the Fluxus artists of the 21st century, know that we owe George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, Ken Friedman, and all of the original Fluxus artists a debt of gratitude for building the ship that we are now sailing on. Anyone, anywhere, is welcome aboard. Just remember that the ship has already started to sail.

Signed on the 19th of May in 2011 by,

Allan Revich, Cecil Touchon, Keith Buchholz, Bibiana Padilla Maltos, ejva/nsva, Mary Campbell, Ed Varney, Melissa McCarthy, Carol Starr, Ginny Lloyd, John M. Bennett, Séamas Cain, Litsa Spathi/Nobody, Ann Klefstad, Caterina Davinio, Ruud Janssen, Christopher Hoddinott, Roger Stevens

Vispo

...voeglein poem...


"...voeglein poem..." - visual bird poem by Litsa Spathi

PROXY: MEXICO/LATIN-AM


PROXY GALLERY (now showing: the mexico/latin-america collection): Select and assemble your own custom art exhibition with catalogue! Ultra hi-res art files, suitable for printing, are delivered in one custom pdf/ebook. Thousands of enlarged (custom, patented algorithms) and enhanced photographs (now, likely several hundred thousands, soon over a million,) mostly low-res cellphone, web-cam, and low-end digital camera self-portraits (self-packaging), culled from dating/social websites -- as you might expect, there is some explicit content (more than is permitted here unfortunately: you really should see them all, but it probably makes little difference) -- fascinating and occasionally disturbing. I've decided to also add a set of painting-filters -- this was good, as it enabled a 'recovery' of many more worthwhile images, and also clouded any possible erogenous/irregular corporate claims, but the project now extends beyond my life-span. I could easily make small paintings from these images but who support that activity? It's interesting to find the balance/inertia point between the look of photo and painting, and it speaks to the current social/heroic condition! Often it makes faces look squinty so it's necessary to 'bring-back' facial aspects. The display images on this site are but quick approximations of the larger art files which simply don't scale -- kinda like paint on canvas. Another advantage of the painting filters is that they drastically reduce the file sizes and make it well-nigh impossible for someone to covertly res-up these display images for printing. It's quite incredible to realize that many of these pictures were only 3-4K or so when I started to work on them. You may realize that this is not the first time I've collected anonymous found-public imagery: notably dumpster-diving (bicycling with backpack at midnight,) at photofinishers' in the 70's. And of course, there's the "Insatiable Abstraction Engine" -- collections from newsgroups. [http://bbrace.net/insatiable-abstraction.html] But come to think it, nearly all my work involves repeated multiples or collections of imagery. My new friends. Whenever possible I retained any color casts, cropping and lighting. The portraits are actually very considered, sometimes selections made/altered merely to obscure the identity that they wished to presumably portray initially. Sunglasses are a popular ruse, as are close-ups of cleavage, butts, tattoos, feet and groins. (Curiously, I've yet to see a picture of hands... ok, now I have: some intricate fingernails and the love/hate finger-tats.) Many feature-obilerating camera-flash-portraits in the bathroom mirror. Many of course, occur in and around motorized vehicles. Only one (so far) in a grocery store. And some, but surprisingly few, are filched from somewhere online, but this must be a risky choice in the event of an 'actual encounter.' How much introductory information/description do you want to put out there to begin with? There are some very creative, even artful, solutions to this dilemma. Various select groups of portraits are included in each PDF 500-page ebook/catalogue for $250 (sorry about the price but it was a hellish amount of work and I guarantee you won't be disappointed or YMB), and can be ordered directly. The images contain sufficient resolution to print them out on letter-size/A4 paper for an instant exhibition. Use my verified Paypal account to have the DVD delivered at no charge: [bbrace@eskimo.com; http://bradbrace.net/buy-into.html] Or, even better, assemble your own catalogue/exhibition at the Proxy Gallery storefront [http://cart.iabrace.com/]. Art files are only $1 each. My new friends. Having been recently kicked-off Facebook (there was an anonymous report of a depicted nipple!), and losing 5,000 so-called friends - it was the perfect place to host a social-media profile-portrait-collection, I've decided to also open an online storefront where individual high-res files will sell for only $1/each. [http://cart.iabrace.com] How hypocritical to object to profile pictures that were on FB to begin with; but it's fun to now position coloured boxes and bars over n•pples, c•nts and c•cks. How idiotic is that? The prints of course required different custom algorithms and some masterful retouching -- they look great! Technically given the incredibly diverse range of imagery it was difficult to make them all equally legible; despite a variety of intricate processing directives, the scripts would inevitably crash or be unable to render a decent image. These were handled individually as were the painting-filters. If I receive a reasonable number of orders, I'll offer additional states of the union or countries... but California had to be the place to begin. Sure to be a collectors' (socio-anthropologists') item! An amazing and compelling, collective portrait! The interspersed military/gangster imagery (or maybe something else), also introduces a new spin on the hopes for this already tenuous social-media culture. I've had to organize/sub-divide these in some fashion, so by state/country seems to be the prevailing approach. And given how often workers are compelled to move around, there's more of a local difference in cultural self-perception, body language, and social-sexual proclivity than you might expect. It really is a perhaps overlooked (overly-present), socially significant era when a massive proportion of the population is able to individually exorcise their self-imagery instead of being routinely dependent on existing systematized systems of portraiture and presentation -- which is not to say that it's entirely free from stylistic-cultural-corporate constraints and codification (and why, for now at least, I left the imagery in a nearly random arrangement), but the individual, probably for the first time ever, is seen freely negotiating a shifting porous skein of varied reception... well, something like that... what does it matter in this big world of shuffled lies... ( commissioned encaustic paintings on 12x12" panels of any subject are available for $15,000US ) http://cart.iabrace.com