Fluxus Humour; Fluxus Liberation

Early reception sources are in agreement that Fluxus called to mind a range of lowbrow popular culture forms from the music hall to the funfair. In particular, the ‘Festival of Misfits’ (1962) and John Cale’s ‘Little Festival of New Music’ (1963), both held in London, were received as a peculiar kind of entertainment. Fluxus artists, moreover, were attuned to the fact that what they were doing was related to folklore, mass production, vaudeville, games, and early Hollywood cinema. George Maciunas cited Spike Jones and Buster Keaton as key precursors and points of affinity. In response, this essay presents a psychoanalytic reading of Fluxus through the work of Freud, Marcuse, and Alenka Zupančič, showing that it embodied a collapse of symbolic authority. Fluxus should be seen as the enactment of a reversal, a shifting of emphasis from work to play, toil to joy, productiveness to receptiveness, and ultimately repression to liberation. Humour provides a crucial point of connection between Fluxus, childhood, and mass media. Fluxus pieces return us to a childlike state by foregrounding the aimless and transgressive dynamics of play. It is through this preoccupation with comedy and play that Fluxus envisions a utopian freedom—from labour, from meaning, from subjugation.