The Dialectics of Legacy

Abstract

Legacy involves difficulties, for those who inherit and for those who do not. The history that is a gift and a burden when it involves art is equally problematic when it involves the Fluxus intermedia forms that hover between art and life. This article explores the challenging questions of Fluxus legacy: the right to participate in a ?discourse network, canon formation, literature development, the work and feelings of younger artists toward a heritage that some demand and others reject. These issues particularly vex the Fluxus legacy. An invisible college of artists, composers, designers and ?architects created Fluxus. It functioned as a laboratory of experimental ideas. The Fluxus challenge to art and the art world took place on political and economic grounds and involved artistic means and philosophical principle. The shift of Fluxus discourse from outsider status to historical standing is bound up with and transformed in meaning by the institutions that collect, preserve and interpret historical artifacts and documents. These ?artifacts and documents once tried to tell different versions of the Fluxus story to a relatively uninterested world. Today, they tell a complex and often misunderstood story to a world that seems to be interested in Fluxus for precisely wrong reasons, a situation that defeats Fluxus with the trappings of success. This article explores ?the dialectical and hermeneutical work of recovery, to address the challenge of legacy by examining its many aspects.