Nico Anklam |
Nico Anklam is a lecturer in art theory at the Institute of Art Research and Aesthetics of UdK Berlin, preparing his PhD thesis on Videoflux. The relationship between Video Art and Fluxus . He studied art history, cultural studies and aesthetics in Berlin, London and as a Fulbright Scholar in New York. At the Bologna.Lab of Humboldt University Berlin he taught art of the 20th century in Germany and Europe. His research interests lie in strategies of South African concept art around 1990 and Fluxus and Fluxus related practices in Northern and Northeastern Europe. He has also realized several international exhibitions, amongst others as curator at Kunsthal 44 Møen in Denmark.
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on garden orchestras and melting ice cubes - fluxid activations of marginal materials |
The Danish composer and Fluxus artist Henning Christiansen (1932 - 2008) turned away from the centers of the Danish and German art world to live on the small Danish island Møn in the 1970s. The decision to buy an old farm in a remote place came not only as a consequence of disagreements with large parts of the Danish art scene at the time, but also as an artistic decision in terms of material. "Unlike the complexity of musical modernism so far, my vision thus tends towards extreme simplicity," stated Christiansen. This “extreme simplicity” meant using the sounds and materials that surrounded him on Møn, from tweeting birds to the sounds of the forest, from the ring of his telephone to the garden tools – the sonic atmosphere of the everyday that he then restaged as “Henning’s garden orchestra”. Soon enough his house attracted key players of the Fluxus and avant-garde music scene from Denmark and abroad. Based on such analysis, this paper aims to locate further practices that are typically not read through the lens of Fluxus. Namely, I will discuss a set of works by Belgian artist Francis Alys that were performed in Mexico City in the 1990s. On the one hand I want to argue that certain strategies will resonate here in regard to Christiansen - specifically, the unexpected re-use of marginal, everyday materials that goes beyond a Duchamp’ian recontextualization - a concern shared with Fluxus though perhaps not immediately informed by it. On the other I shall show that such practices as the ones of Christiansen and Alys can be understood as related condensations of marginal materials that are charged performatively in and through geographical or social spaces which are usually overlooked, and thus experience an activation of aesthetic and/or political agency that bear fluxid qualities. |