Natilee Harren

This book examines the status of the object in the intermedia practice of Fluxus, an artist collective founded in Wiesbaden, Germany in 1962 and centered in New York with far-flung international outposts. Utilizing an interdisciplinary methodology rooted in art history, musicology, and literary theory, the book traces Fluxus artists’ development of innovative formats that reimagined the ontologies of music, painting, and sculpture as well as prevailing economic models of the commodity and the commercial art gallery. Beginning with an account of Fluxus artists’ radical innovations on abstract expressionist painting and the experimental notations of the New York School composers, the book examines the development and critical significance of key Fluxus formats of the event score and multiple. This work reflected new modes of late-capitalist subjectivity and community formation, and ultimately laid crucial pathways for the kinds of conceptual, ephemeral, and performative art practices that define contemporary art of the present.