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| Ben Vautier, Total Art Match-Box, about 1965. Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, MoMA |
Fluxus, the almost indefinable global art movement that ran from the 1950s to the 1970s, rejected the art market, intellectual theorizing, and museums. Fluxus was a DIY anti-art of concepts, performances, humor, and small, cheap materials. Fluxus has had a limited presence in museums, but that's starting to change. As one marker of that, just in the past few weeks the Getty Research Institute has announced the acquisitions of the archives of Fluxus artists
Emmett Williams (1925–2007) and
Simone Forti (born 1935).
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| Emmett Williams, abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz (Alphabet Poem), about 1963. Getty Research Institute. © The Estate of Emmett Williams |
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| Simone Forti, Red Hat in Yellow and Red Landscape, 1966. Getty Research Institute |
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| George Brecht, Deck and letter to George Maciunas, 1966. Jean Brown collection, Getty Research Institute |
The GRI has been acquiring Fluxus materials since 1985, when it added the 6000-piece Fluxus collection assembled by Jean Brown. This was the first major set of contemporary material acquired by the GRI. Since then the institute has added individual archives of Allan Kaprow, Robert Watts, Yvonne Rainer, David Tudor, and others. Though the main mission of the GRI collection is to aid scholarship, in the case of Fluxus there is a thin line between document and art work. Fluxus material has often been included in GRI exhibitions, such as as 2017's concrete poetry show.
In 2008
Gilbert and Lila Silverman donated their Fluxus collection to the Museum of Modern Art. MoMA had ignored Fluxus when it was being created; since then selections from the Silverman trove of 7000 items have been regularly on view in collection installations. Another important museum-based holding of Fluxus is at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. In L.A. the Broad has a 570-piece collection of Joseph Beuys multiples.
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| Joseph Beuys, Evervess II 1, 1968. The Broad. (c) Artists Rights Society, New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn |
The GRI's Williams archive includes concrete poems, artist's books, prints, paintings, and photographs. The Forti material spans diaries, performance notations, paintings, drawings, and Xerox collages.
In the 1970s Forti collaborated with physicist-artist Lloyd Cross to produce so-called multiplex holograms. These used the medium to produce a blend of 3D and a moving image. The GRI Forti archive includes one such hologram,
Movements/Crawl Sit. Another hologram from the same series was featured in LACMA's 2018 "3D: Double Vision" (and acquired by LACMA).
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| Simone Forti, Striding Crawling, about 1975–78. LACMA. © 2019 Simone Forti, photography © 2019 Fredrik Nilsen, All Rights Reserved |
Comments
What might have been? The Board selected van der Rohe. Howard Ahmanson vetoed the choice.
Ahmanson also drove Ric Brown, the Director, out of town.
Brown was a man of great taste. He went on to become Director of the Kimbell Art Foundation. There, he oversaw the construction of the Kahn building, an architectural masterpiece.
Maybe, it was all meant to be. Van der Rohe + Kahn = Zumthor.
To have allowed the idiotic Michael Govan to get away with this debacle says a lot about just how corrupt and reckless many public figures in LA are.
It's not merely about the Zumthor pile of concrete being this or that. It's just as much about the elimination of any other stable aspects of the now-defunct LA County Museum of Art. From its budget to its curators, from its collections to its conservation laboratory, from its theater to its hundreds of donors.
There is a nice, warm place in hell for Michael Govan.
You think David Geffen was going to give $150 million to save a building named after a family (the Ahmanson's) whose money supported the passage of Prop 8.
If anyone looks like an idiot here, it's Giovannini, Goldin, the Ahmanson family, and the Save-LACMA mob. Govan and Geffen exposed all of you for the rustics and quacks you are.
Thanks, rube!
For all your "sophistication" and "big" words, you did NOT have the money or connections to save the old LACMA from demolition.
Makes one wonder how "sophisticated" you really are...
No wonder you sympathize with idiotic Michael Govan. After all, he's set LA back by decades, to the cornpone era of artwork sharing space with dinosaur bones in Exposition Park.
https://twitter.com/KennethTuran/status/1248009939261374464
https://twitter.com/KnightLAT/status/1247877486651650048
https://twitter.com/cmonstah/status/1247933312758210560
Yea, those are snarky remarks. But the conniving idiot that is Michael Govan deserves no less.
Knight's articles on the encylopedic museum and the Ahmanson Foundation/LACMA gave a false version of history. What is worse is Knight pandered to and promoted the provincial activism of the Save-LACMA mob.
Miranda is NOT an architectural critic. She majored in Latin American Studies. She is NOT qualified to read a building, let alone declare that it will be a "spectacular failure." Does she even read her Pulitizer-Prize-winning peers at the NY Times? Because those peers recently checked her hubris by declaring that the Zumthor building will be "restorative" and a welcoming urban gesture.
It's shameful that Knight/Miranda is what passes for arts coverage at the LA Times. LA deserves better. Part of the reason many of you don't know about the artists emerging in LA is that Knight/Miranda have shown no commitment to covering what has happened or is happening in the museum boards and the art studios of LA. Indeed, for a complete account of what happened at MOCA with Helen Molesworth one had to look elsewhere. In many ways, Molesworth's dismissal was one of those events that would have allowed any astute reporter/critic to tell a broader story about patronage and what constitutes great art (Wood vs. Grotjahn). But Knight and Miranda were as clueless as ever.
If you want good arts coverage, subscribe to the NY Times, check ArtNews.com/ArtNet.com, or follow this blog. Stay away from Knight and Miranda. They are as phony as it gets in LA.
> check ArtNews.com/ArtNet.com, or follow this blog. Stay
> away from Knight and Miranda. They are as phony as it gets
> in LA.
Whereas a rube or rustic in LA, such as yourself, is what?
"A gifted artist, the L.A.-born and -based Grotjahn has been working for 20 years. (More than one MOCA trustee is a major collector.) His painterly overhauls of established Modernist propositions can mesmerize. [...] Grotjahn’s geometric abstractions employ disjointed vanishing points, the kind originally invented to create a convincing figurative illusion but here swallowing up visual energy as if some vividly chromatic black hole. [...] A calculated frenzy dismembers Modernist tribalism."
--- https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-moca-firing-20180320-story.html
Painterly overhaul (as in engine and garage) and chromatic black hole (as in a vacuum and the universe), that's bad writing and nonsense. Disjointed vanishing points swallowing up visual energy, that's more nonsense? Close read if you dare. It's gibberish.
Knight must think his readers are not smart enough to recognize his empty words and phrases. Maybe he is right...