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The Fluxus group show held at the Yuill Crowley Gallery last year as part of the Sydney Biennale was a modest, impressive, introductory selection of works representative of the movement. The show's irreverent, witty and entertaining exhibits illuminated, in clear and vivid terms, the Biennale's post-Duchampian focus. Thus, this is not an exhaustive survey show, but instead, Rene Block has given us a valuable keyhole appreciation of the aesthetic thread which runs through Fluxus, namely the key notion of directness , humour and simplicity. As a Neo-Dadaist inspired rebellious and highly spirited avant-gardism, Fluxus stressed an anti-elitist approach to art and the role of the artist in late-capitalist society. Its anyone-can-do art philosophy (echoing Giuseppe Chiari 's Art is Easy, 1974) embodies a playful iconoclastic fusion of the experiential and the existential. Further, Fluxus' underlying idealist anarchy not only insisted on an art work being cheap and mass-reproducible, but through its Happening-based theatre events, manifestos, publications, films, and exhibitions, it underscored the communal and the democratic, an investigation of the formalist strictures of conventional boundaries and an avoidance of making metaphorical statements.
The show gives us a fairly good idea of how Fluxus artists came and went, making art individually and collectively, depending on their personal circumstances and mood. We encounter works by John Cage, Nam June Paik, Emmett Williams, Robert Filliou , Arthur Kopcke, Joseph Beuys, George Brecht, Robert Watts, Ben Vautier, Diter
Rot and the movement's charismatic Diaghilev-like organiser, the American artist George Maciunas. It was Maciunas who, through his organisational skills and sheer dedication, articulated Fluxus as a revolutionary movement that was and is predicated on a Minimalist aesthetic that valorises the expressive end of Conceptual