Mari Dumett
Mari Dumett is an art historian and curator. Her primary area of research is
post-World War II American and European art and critical theory, with
an emphasis on performance art and object sculpture. She completed all
of the requirements for her doctorate at Boston University in September
2008, with the degree to be conferred in January 2009. Her current book
project is an analytic history of the international art collective
Fluxus, 1962-1978, entitled Corporate Imaginations: the Fluxus
Collective in the Age of Multinational Capitalism. In
2007, she co-curated The Avant-Garde: From Futurism to
Fluxus.
This was the inaugural exhibition at the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center
in Vilnius, Lithuania, for which a full-page, color catalogue was
produced, including Mari’s essay “George Maciunas
and Fluxus’s
Rear-Guard.” Also in 2007, she was invited to give talks on
Fluxus at
the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Karlsruhe,
Germany, and
at the University of York, York, UK for the international conference
Real Things: Matter, Materiality and Representation, 1880 to the
Present. Her essay “The Great Executive Dream: George
Maciunas, Adriano
Olivetti, and Fluxus Incorporated” will appear in the next
issue of the
journal Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics
published by Harvard University Press. Mari also lectures at the Rhode
Island School of Design in Providence, RI.
Fluxus and the Postwar Subject of Organization
Dutch artist Willem de Ridder once stated: “I loved the idea
that George was setting up a business….It created a
fantastic confusion and nobody dared to take the risk not to take you
seriously….” Ridder was speaking of the
Lithuanian-born artist George Maciunas and his founding of the art
group Fluxus (1962 to 1978). My paper will take off from this point of
Fluxus’s “fantastic confusion,” arguing
that for all its criticality, Fluxus also ambivalently shared aspects
of the rising corporate culture of the post-World War II period. What
was the historical significance of this apparent contradiction at the
heart of Fluxus that a diverse array of international artists known for
their anarchical cultural acts, such as demolishing a classical piano,
should willingly be “incorporated” into a business
enterprise for the selling of “Fluxus Products”?
Through close readings of the way Maciunas structured and directed
Fluxus, as well as of specific performances (including comparison to
other Fluxus artists), I will argue that Maciunas developed an
alternative model of critical art that prioritized the (white-collar)
labor of organization as the new artistic labor within the postwar
system of multinational capitalism. Furthermore, I will suggest that
the art works represented strategies by which the artists (and their
viewers) could become conscious critical subjects of organization in
relation to a broader discourse on the fate of the individual within an
increasingly organized, mechanized, routinized, and systematized
society.
Homepage
Contact: maridumett@gmail.com