Interviewed by Nicholas Tsoutas
Nicholas Tsoutas You have been intimately involved with Fluxus for approximately a quarter of a century. How did you become involved with these artists?
Francesco Conz I became involved with Fluxus artists in about 1972. My speciality is the second wave of Fluxus works. I went to Berlin in 1972 and met Joe Jones and Herman Nitsch, and then Rühm. Immediately after I closed my gallery in Venice. When I met these Fluxus people it was such a pleasure compared with the artists that I was working with before, who mostly belonged to the academic avant-garde of the seventies. At that time I was really very naive. My love for art was enormous but the question was how to make contact with "real" art and not make mistakes. Sometimes you spend five or ten years finding the right answer.
Nicholas Tsoutas Is there any particular event that you recall which immediately attracted you to the Fluxus ideas?
Francesco Conz No, just the attitude of the artists. It was no particular event, because every event was a "real" event. Every meeting was a pleasure. Every conversation was a pleasure. Every exhibition I saw was utterly unexpected. Everything was a huge surprise and a lot of fun.
Nicholas Tsoutas Could you perhaps explain how Fluxus envisaged the connection between art and life?
Francesco Conz Macunias' idea was to bring artworks to everybody. He thought, as well, that art should be very, very cheap. For instance, I think Yearbox I, a collaborative piece by all the artists which was manufactured in 1965, was on sale for thirty dollars. I bought it in 1975 through Geoff Hendricks for a hundred dollars - already... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline