Leaves on the Language Trees of Babel: Torched

Guilty. I confess. I am a moth to the status of celebrity, unable to resist the siren song of an artistic icon, and so I succumbed. Despite the newly acquired knowledge that I should resist, The Lennon Diary 1969 sucked me in. And just as I already knew, it was an amusing bunch of pages with the same message scrawled in increasingly incoherent scribbling. Is it a mere recording of the inanity of daily life? Or does the increasing scrawl indicate growing frustration as the box? And if so, why buy another diary? Scholarly analysis is beyond me, really, I just enjoyed the ride, and therein lies, I suspect, a great part of the raison d’etre of fluxus and received art. It’s just fun to play.

The psyche of fans like me played an important role in the intricacies of intimate bureaucracies. Ray Johnson was the master of playing off the dynamics of celebrity status and the role of fans. His on-sending philosophies dared both unheralded participant and towering celebrity to defy their social status and participate as equals. No one in the transactional processes of networked art had any superiority or even ownership in the interactions; it was merely a conveyance of art to art. But the presence of celebrities in any environment is a powerful lure. Craig J. Saper writes that “one cannot avoid the urge” and that is certainly true in my case. I played right into the game, and wanted to read Lennon's diary even though I knew that there was no great literary payoff – just a joke on me, on my “narcissistic identification with a star” (Saper). John Lennon, and through him Yoko Ono, are icons of my past, and so their art appeals to me not because of any aesthetic merit, but just because it is theirs. This is in direct opposition to the goals of intimate bureaucracies, but I could not resist the psychological call to investigate further.

In some ways I am guilty of sticking my finger in an Ay-O fluxus finger box, knowing full well that it contains objects that could pierce my skin, but nonetheless unable to resist my curiosity. Fluxus, including Lennon’s diary, continues the perplexing dilemma I have encountered throughout this semester’s study of the avant-garde – is it art, is it anti-art (and is there really a difference?), or is it avantgarbage? I find it increasingly difficult as we travel from Dada through Surrealism to Oulipo and Fluxus to peruse all of it through a scholarly lens. I just want to toss off my academic robes and romp on the playground. There is so much potential (how Oulipean) to have creative fun, even when creativity is allegedly the antithesis of the form. It’s irresistible. To write, to draw, to paint, to sculpt, to perform in an outrageous costume and shout silly nonsensical syllables – to play! I realize that it all had profound significance in the world of art and even politics, but every aspect of it cries for creativity. From calligrams to fluxus kits – who can keep their fingers out of it? Certainly not me.

I absolutely qualify as an outsider in every sense of the term, and thus I am drawn to receivable art, fanzines, and on-sendings as connectional tools to others who are playing the game. I’m not too keen on the poking, scissors games, but many others seem like great fun, from literary craftings to fluxus kits. And the spin that much of the work contains, promoting pacifism, unconventiality and cooperation, is highly appealing. If there are no divisions of win and lose on Yoko's white chessboard, the only choice is to play consensually. Perhaps that is why Western society struggles so much with these art forms, they offer community rather than exclusivity, the Yoko Ono-Lennon merge that made so many traditionalists crazy.

The interconnections of assemblings, received art, fluxus and all of the democratically-functioning art forms open up new possibilities in interpretations - both scholarly and ludic, and therein lies their authenticity. While there is a huge enclave of dark, transgressive work, there is also just plain fun, from Ubu to George Maciunus's snake in "New Flux Year." The art is the process, and occasionally the product, but mostly it is fun to play.