Dada's Children: Fluxus Redux

The early 1960s artists' collective known as Fluxus is among the most elusive "movements" of late twentieth century art. Its name itself bespeaks a fundamental desire to create art perpetually in flux, to move art out of galleries and into unconventional spaces, to infiltrate commercial culture, to provide an alternative to restrictive formalism. An exhibition of Fluxworks, therefore, poses a perplexing curatorial problem. Nonetheless, under the direction of Benjamin Buchloc and Judith Rodenbeck, the List Visual Arts Center at MIT has recently attempted to put together a comprehensive show, called Experiments in the Everyday, of two artists active in Fluxus, Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts. Despite attempts to reconcile such anarchic art with the limitations of a traditional gallery space, the exhibit is unable to unweave the paradoxes inherent in its conception.

The shorthand biographies of Watts and Kaprow reveal a commonality of experience if not direction: both began as abstract expressionist painters, both got master's degrees from Columbia, both collaborated on the Rutgers faculty. And both challenged traditional conceptions of art-Watts with his pop-like manipulation of media and surfaces and Kaprow in his experiments with assemblages, alternative spaces and performance art events which he called happenings.

There's no doubt that neither Watts nor Kaprow would have intended a museum retrospective such as _Experiments in the Everyday_. Kaprow's happenings and Watts's mail-order catalogues, newsletters and consumer items were conceived to bring art out of the galleries and the audience into art. To place such objects behind the glass of a gallery frame is to stifle the subversive potential of these works: happenings were meant to be experienced, not looked at through photographs, and the newsletters and stamps were made to be circulated, not framed.

Clearly, an exhibition of Flux works should create a space for audience interaction and response, which _Experiments in the Everyday_ fails to do. This is more the fault of the gallery institution in the abstract than of the List Center in particular. Unfortunately, the audience is just as trapped by the gallery institution as the work is behind the glass; the visitors gaze as reverently at, say, a baseball "signed" by Du*rer, as they would at a nativity scene. These works are humorous, shocking, psychologically subversive-and somehow that message has been lost in the translation.

Fluxus is often pegged the "other tradition" of the twentieth century avant-garde, the irrational alternative to high modernism's fixation on form, structure and dogma. Watts and Kaprow inherited this position from Marcel Duchamp, father of Dada and first to insist that "the viewer completes the work of art." Their process was Duchampian in intent and radical in form: they created art objects from everyday objects and performance pieces from everyday events, decontextualizing those elements and thereby giving the piece a new function within the aesthetic space of the gallery. Often they rejected the confines of the gallery space altogether. Watts's and Kaprow's objects range from industrial plastics to balls of yarn to stamp machines, recalling Duchamp's ready-mades nearly 50 years earlier. But, while Dada posited itself in rabid and unwavering antagonism to the status quo and thereby destined itself to self-destruction, Fluxus had no prevailing militant ideology. It was and is an anti-movement, a flexible, durable and practical tool. In the words of one artist, "Fluxus is not a movement, a moment in history, an organization. Fluxus is an idea, a kind of work, a tendency, a way of life, a changing set of people who do Flux works."

It comes as no surprise that Buchloch, co-curator of _Experiments in the Everyday_, is particularly interested in Watts's work. Though Watts never achieved the same kind of notoriety as Kaprow did, the exhibit grants disproportionate weight to his work, leaving the Kaprow offerings spare but satisfying.

Memorable are two early paintings by Kaprow, both of which reveal his abstract expressionist training: "Hysteria," a visually assaulting assemblage of painted fragments and mirrors, and "Rearrangeable Panels," a series of nine wall-sized panels which have been presented in any number of concatenations. Though each panel is derivative of Robert Rauschenberg in painterly technique and choice of materials (plastic fruits, leaves, mirrors, colored lightbulbs), the piece as a whole reveals an attitude of Dadaist whimsy in the operation of chance, in the perpetual disruption of predetermined order. Also by Kaprow are a series of photographs and instruction sheets from past happenings. The problem here is that these images and remnants are displayed as art objects, when in fact they merely document a past art event. Kaprow's happenings were intended as temporal events requiring spectator participation. As a result, these still shots appeal more to an anthropological understanding of Fluxus than an aesthetic one, and must be approached with caution.

The clear tour de force of the exhibit is the surprisingly complete array of work by Watts, including early drawings and paintings, mail-order newsletters and found objects. Just as Kaprow's early paintings revealed abstract expressionist beginnings, so too do Watts's "Blink" and "Monhegan" drawings.

The curators also include examples of Watts's subversion of three consumerist and capitalist systems: the bureaucratic system in his attempt to patent the word "pop" and his collection of all "pop"-related patents, the postal system in his endeavor to circulate his own stamps and the monetary system in his attempt to mint his own mock currency. Hastily labeled as subtle critiques of the privileged class's control of aesthetic standards, these pieces are significant for their wit, whimsy, and delightful irreverence.

As Buchloc is wise to point out, Watts is a sculptor of the surface, not of substance. It avoids linear meaning and sculptural formalism, displaying instead a fetishistic obsession with surface textures, transparency, translucency and reflection in works like "Three Clouds" (cubes patterned with cloud images), "Phono Records" (four LPs made of different materials) and, most impressively, his huge array of objects cast in a high-sheen chrome. The series of metallic West African votive dolls are craftily placed together in the penultimate room of the exhibition space, mimicking an ethnographic collection.

Though sterilized in the gallery environment, Watts's game-based compositions and verbal pieces are centerpieces. Pieces such as "Frog Game" and samples from the Yam Festival newsletter, commemorating a year-long arts festival in 1963-4 which began and ended in May (Yam backwards), offer an intriguing glimpse at the earnest wit and interactive character of Watts's aesthetic. The weakest pieces by both Kaprow and Watts are the found objects, such as a stamp machine and a bucket with balls of yarn, which are derivative of Duchamp's ready-mades. They lack the spontaneity and originality of Kaprow's and Watts's more interactive works.

Nonetheless, _Experiments in the Everyday_ offers a delightful display of two artists who pushed in tandem towards an innovative dissolution of traditional notions about art and artist. In the words of Watts, "one can imagine an audience where the audience becomes the sole activator and responds to itself." Until then, we can enjoy the elegant, complete, yet unresolved gallery presentation of Kaprow's and Watts's work at the List.

Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts-Events, Objects, Documents _is on display at the List through July 2. The List is at 20 Ames St. on the MIT campus, near the Kendall subway stop. Hours are Tuesday through Sunday, 12 to 6 p.m. and 12 to 8 p.m. on Fridays. Admission is free._