Consider invisible art. That’s not a Fluxus instruction. Or maybe it is.
At a conversation last Thursday with guest curator Mark Waskow at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, Fluxus artist Nye Ffarrabas contended that the 1960s art movement isn’t over, so it seems like anyone, art reviewers included, can still add to it. Asked how many Fluxus artists were in the movement, she responded, “Well, how long is a stick?”
Fluxus was (is?) a network of artists at the junction of performance art, concrete poetry, experimental music and other forms that blurred boundaries between art and life, often creating “scores” or instructions ranging from the mundane to the absurd. Familiar figures such as Yoko Ono, Allan Kaprow, Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik and John Cage were all considered members of the movement. Brattleboro artist Ffarrabas is a lesser-known but no less important practitioner. At 92 years old, she has opened her first solo museum show, “Truth IS A Verb!,” on view through July 6 at BMAC.
Ffarrabas, formerly Bici Forbes Hendricks, had displayed her work in group shows and galleries, including a 50-year retrospective at C.X. Silver Gallery in Brattleboro, which contributed many works to the exhibition. Waskow first met her there, at a screening of John Killacky‘s 2022 video, “Flux.”
“I realized the significance of who she was and then discovered that she hadn’t had a museum show, ever,” he said. Waskow is president of the Northern New England Museum of Contemporary Art, which has a significant number of Fluxus works in its collection. He enthusiastically took on the task of organizing and presenting works that, by their nature, resist display.
Many of the objects in the show are what’s known as ephemera: postcards, notes, typed instructions. Vitrines hold items such as “Language Box,” a piece published under the name Black Thumb Press, which Ffarrabas used for many of her printed works. The language box, from 1966, holds 333 cards, printed with one word on each side in pairs, such as: “TROUBLE / SHOOT,” “HANDLE / EMOTION,” “ONE / ONLY.” During her artist talk, Ffarrabas mentioned that one pair went through 17 different permutations. “I had no idea why I was collecting word pairs or what they were for, what they meant,” she said. “Pairs of words would come to me.”
Casual viewers may be daunted by the thought of text-based, conceptual and performance works. Encountered in books and in art history classes, they can seem overly academic or stuffy. But seeing them in person, Ffarrabas’ works are not only political and poetic, they’re often hilarious.
Printed event scores run around the ceiling of the gallery, such as “Peach Method: Inhale in the vicinity of a peach until you have completed aerial ingestion of the entire fruit” and “Household hint: you can mar the finish of your dining room table and no one will be any the wiser” and “Be a success! (for a limited time only!).”
The scores, and other works like them, came out of “The Friday Book of White Noise,” a series of journals that Ffarrabas kept with her then-husband, artist Geoff Hendricks, in which they would write ideas, notes, poems, instructions. They showed the journals to Geoff’s brother, Jon, who was the director of the basement gallery at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, an epicenter of the Fluxus movement. That led to Ffarrabas’ 1966 solo show “Word Work” at the gallery and to the connections she made with other artists.
Evidence of those relationships is clear in the collections of postcards that Ffarrabas made, some with her husband, and sent to or received from friends. Waskow described this during the talk as “sort of like a game of Telephone that was in writing.”
They include creative directives such as “Imagine that today’s newspaper is a book of mythology,” or philosophical ones such as “QUESTION: A Circle?” with a yellow circle below it. Reinforcing the idea that there is no boundary between art and life, another is a birth announcement for the couple’s son, titling it a “NEW/ BOY EVENT.”
Ffarrabas described the inception of one of their best-known pieces, represented in the show by postcards and a framed contract. “Our interests had gone in separate directions, and we had both come out. And he said to me one day, ‘You know, our 10th anniversary is coming up. What shall we do?’ I said, ‘Oh, let’s get a divorce.’ And then we both said, ‘a Flux Divorce!'” The performance, which drew artists and celebrities such as John Lennon, involved barbed wire, a bed cut in half with a chain saw and the couple wearing coats Ffarrabas had sewn together, back to back. “The men pulled Geoff and the women pulled me until we came apart,” Ffarrabas said.
Though their divorce was amicable, Ffarrabas jokingly underscored how, in the end, “he took the art career, and I took the kids.” Even in a movement that foregrounded feminism, many female artists such as Ffarrabas were sidelined because their primary work — raising children — made their other work less visible to institutions and historians.
Luckily, Ffarrabas delights in the intangible. A photo and drawing in the show document her “Ice Jigsaw Puzzle,” which melted apart, causing a widening rift between pieces. The artist said she’d also love to work with smoke, though she hasn’t yet (she did describe once burning a novel she couldn’t finish writing in a hibachi grill in the gallery, as a performance piece). Lately, she has been considering the fractal nature of elderberry bushes.
At the talk, Waskow asked Ffarrabas what her work was about. “About?” she asked, incredulous. “There’s been a great deal of discussion about what is art and what is not art.” (Ffarrabas was, in fact, wearing a T-shirt proclaiming “NOT ART.”) “For me, art is much more of a process — I don’t even like the word ‘art.'” Asked if there was anything else she wanted people to know about her work, Ffarrabas, who has spent more than half a century considering the nature of art-as-action, gave a characteristically concise, poetic answer: “It doesn’t stop.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Fluxus Flex | BMAC presents Nye Ffarrabas’ first solo museum show”
This article appears in May 14-20, 2025.
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