At Champlain College, John Killacky Revisits an Art Movement With FluxFest 

click to enlarge

• Courtesy Of Jeanmarie Cross
• Still from "Flux" by John Killacky

John Killacky's 14-minute video "Flux" (2022) offers a good introduction to the Fluxus art movement of the 1960s and '70s. In it, the artist performs a number of unrelated actions in silence while seated at a desk. He lights a match and watches it burn. He brushes a broken violin with his hand. He opens and closes a music box. By the end, he has stood a bunch of VHS tapes on end in a gooey pile of plaster of paris and set a bubble maker going above this assemblage.

What does it all mean? The film pays homage to a movement about which Killacky, 71, has lately become extremely passionate. Its practitioners, mostly in big cities in the U.S., Germany and Japan, attempted to dethrone art by putting its enactment in the hands of ordinary people. They created "event scores" that consisted of minimal instructions for art making to be interpreted as the maker chose, with process valued over final product.

In 1955, for example, Yoko Ono wrote such a score for lighting a match and watching it go out. Nam June Paik smashed a violin on a table in his 1962 "One for Violin Solo." Joseph Beuys sat at a desk and wound up a musical toy in 1963.

Killacky, currently the artist-in-residence at Champlain College, decided to expand his homage to Fluxus — a movement he deems unjustly forgotten — into an entire festival. "It would be an experiment," he said during a phone call.

With Champlain College Art Gallery director and curator Wylie Garcia, Killacky organized FluxFest, which brings together contemporary Fluxus-inspired work by invited artists, students and faculty for a three-week festival and one-week exhibition. Among its models are the original Fluxus festivals, the first of which occurred in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1962.

The public is invited to get its bearings at a roundtable discussion led by Killacky on Wednesday, October 11. The participants are original Fluxus member Nye Ffarrabas, 91, who lives in Brattleboro; gallerist Adam Silver, who represents Ffarrabas at C.X. Silver Gallery in West Brattleboro; and Barre-based collector Mark Waskow, who owns a significant collection of Fluxus art.

The heart of FluxFest is the exhibition opening on Friday, October 20, which will feature performances and other happenings. The show stays up through Sunday, October 29. During the intervening weekdays, select artists will give performances daily at 4 p.m. Meanwhile, Vermont PBS' "Made Here" will air Killacky's "Flux" and two other videos he made — "Elegies" (2019) and "Flow" (2017) — on October 26.

Killacky was in the midst of visiting 12 creative-media and core classes with Garcia when Seven Days reached him, and he said students have been responding in large numbers. That prompted Garcia to expand the exhibition beyond the gallery to "a good portion of the second floor" of the creative media building. In the Fluxus spirit, student work will be installed non-hierarchically among works by invited artists and faculty.

"It's so thrilling to me that they're taking on an aesthetic that's not really remembered anymore," Killacky said.

Fluxus was instigated by a group of art students in John Cage's 1958 class "Composition as Process" at the New School for Social Research in New York City. At the time, the iconoclast composer was best known for "4'33"," his 1952 piece in which the musicians do nothing but sit for the specified time while the audience listens to ambient noises.

"Cage's influence was [the message that] you aren't the most central figure; the audience is," Killacky said. "He wanted to blur all distinctions between art and life."

click to enlarge

• Courtesy Of Erin Holland
• "Prosthetic Silence #1" by John Thomas Levee

When Killacky moved to New York City as a classical ballet dancer in 1973, "the movement was pretty elusive," he recalled. He got to know Cage personally while managing Trisha Brown Dance from 1983 to 1985 but never heard Fluxus mentioned. While serving as performing arts curator of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis from 1988 to 1996, Killacky arranged a lecture by Cage for a Jasper Johns print show and organized the performative component of the exhibition "In the Spirit of Fluxus."

His current interest in Fluxus history was reignited during the pandemic, when he read Cage's Silence: Lectures and Writings and Ono's Grapefruit, a collection of her scores. (Ono's then-husband was in Cage's class.) Then Killacky happened to drop in on Waskow and spotted a stack of Fluxus catalogs on the collector's desk.

"He was shocked," recalled Waskow, who is president of the Northern New England Museum of Contemporary Art, a collection that has an online presence but not yet a physical location. "[John] said, 'These are really sought-after catalogs.'"

Waskow proceeded to show Killacky the hundreds of Fluxus items in his collection, including "historical ephemera, books, posters, broadsides, a wedding program called the Fluxus Wedding, exhibition announcements, manifestos" and dozens of Flux Kits, small plastic boxes containing scores for actions such as "Smile." "It was just an epiphany for him," Waskow said.

By 2022, Killacky had reached a time of flux in his own life, having been executive director of the Flynn Center from 2010 to 2018 followed by a four-year stint as a Vermont House representative for South Burlington, where he lives. Throughout, he made video art about personal subjects, which he narrated in voice-over.

The more he learned about Fluxus, however, the more he realized how indebted his artistic practice was to the movement.

"They were the precursors to video art, conceptual art, body art," Killacky said. "A lot of feminist art came after." In "Cut Piece," for example, Ono invited people to cut off her clothing while she sat passively onstage. "For me, change always happens from the fringe," he said.

Killacky is "committed to continuing the vibe of Fluxus into a contemporary dialogue and setting," Garcia noted, adding that the movement's aims remain remarkably relevant.

"We're in a cultural space right now that is addressing some of the issues of the 1960s: body and gender identity, sexuality, human rights, racism, economic disparities," Garcia said. "Fluxus poked tongue-in-cheek fun at political and social justice issues. It wasn't really direct; it was in a more experiential and participatory way."

"There was a humor and playfulness in all of these things," Killacky agreed. "They all had a wink and a smile."

Though it would be un-Fluxus-like to reveal exactly what's in FluxFest, the artists whom Killacky invited to participate "embody the spirit of Fluxus in their artistic practice," he said. They include DJ Hellerman, the former BCA Center curator (2012-16) and current chief curator and director of curatorial affairs at Philadelphia's Fabric Workshop and Museum. There Hellerman is planning a Fluxus show that will include works from Waskow's collection.

click to enlarge

• Courtesy Of Kelly Holt
• Film still from "Ironing" by Kelly Holt and Erika Senft Miller

Killacky also invited multisensory conceptual artist Erika Senft Miller of Colchester, whose past performance installations at the Vermont Railway salt shed and other sites put audiences at the center of her work.

Miller will do two collaborative pieces for the festival. She and experimental photographer Kelly Holt made "Ironing," a video involving the act of ironing and water, which accompanies Holt's mixed-media images of irons. With artist-curator Chris Thompson, Miller created "Sour Candy," described as a "pilot study in radical re-embodiment," which asks audiences to fill out a survey about their senses and take a piece of candy.

John Thomas Levee, an assistant professor at Champlain College who teaches game sound design, also lifted the curtain on his contributions: two works from his Prosthetic Silence series, which involve homemade soundproof helmets. Averring that his work is often generated through text scores and is "heavily influenced" by Cage and Fluxus, Levee wrote in an email that his prostheses make up for the missing element of silence in his life. He'll wear a helmet at the opening.

To witness all this Fluxus-inspired activity has been "so fulfilling for me," Killacky declared. "I've just been happy, happy, happy."