Flux

Over the break, I went to see a fluxus art exhibit at the MoMA, where one artist asked others to send him instructions which he would then execute uniquely. Some of them got really weird. Some of them were incredible indicators of human behavior. For example, in one video that played on repeat, the audience was lined up on all four walls of a room, and the artist, without speaking would slowly choose a member of the audience, wait a long while, and then kiss them. The ways in which people would react when they were chosen were so illuminating, especially for an actor. The instruction on the side of the video was "Kiss someone. Back away. Repeat."

For my project, I wanted to play with the idea of "audience" and "artist". I tried, instead of making the cards for the audience to experience, to make them so that the artist him/herself would see the class or objects around the room as the exhibition. I'm not really sure how successful I was in doing that, but it was a really interesting mind game, and gave me a great outlet to philosophize a little bit about the structure of art. Like Dean always says about the structure of the classroom, the teacher stands here and the students sit there, and that sets up this almost formulaic stagnancy between the two parties.