It's never clear whether displaying conceptual art in a museum is in fact destroying it. How can one curate a show of art that is morally and philosophically opposed to its own role, mocking its own existence until it presents an impossibly vicious cycle of meaning and anti-meaning?
Questions like these may have originated with the Dadaists, those avant-garde artists led unofficially by Marcel Duchamp, the father of the ready-made, but in the '60s, a revised movement emerged that gave it new voice: Fluxus. The Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard has taken on these risky pieces in a new exhibit that revolves around the rejuvenating idealism of this anti-art movement.
"Multiple Strategies," on view until June 10, exhibits a variety of Fluxus creations, focusing primarily on American George Maciunas, the founder of the movement, and Joseph Beuys, the German artist who worked under the Flux-like idea that "everyone is an artist."
The exhibit focuses on the radical nature of Fluxus as a movement meant to bring art to all people of all classes and beliefs. It was meant to be the new form of consumerism, the most accessible of artwork, and cheap, so that anyone could own it. Thus, it seemed that anyone could make it.
Spanning two rooms in the intimate Busch-Reisinger galleries, the exhibit requests that visitors forget the conflict that goes into organizing this kind of show, as putting this sort of art on display is ridiculously antithetical to nearly every message and statement it tries to make. To enjoy the show, this problem must be ignored as viewers make their way through displays that are jokes and witty jabs at the very same art world they enter upon walking into the Fogg Museum.
The name of the exhibit refers to what came to be known as "multiples," objects meant to be made in series and copies, so that they could be widely distributed or manufactured. Since the pieces were most commonly handmade, large-scale production was difficult. Yet the pieces keep in line with the consumerist culture they mock or try to infiltrate, fashioned primarily out of materials of mass production and endowed with some (usually ludicrous) utility that could be mistaken for a common, everyday function.
With conceptual art like this, there is a particular response, which is to make those looking at it giggle, and then walk away - a trait encompassed by Yoko Ono's 1971 "A Box of Smile," hiding nothing but a mirror to evoke the obvious surprise response: the title's smile. Though sometimes interactive in this way, there is little lasting effect, and the overarching themes of the movement seem to have been more important than the actual art objects themselves, which makes an exhibit focusing on it somewhat disengaging beyond the history lesson it provides and the philosophical questions it evokes.
Artists like Beuys and Maciunas are clever, but do they make art that can stand on its own, separate from a concept? Beuys' "Object to Smear and Turn" (1972) implores the viewer to act on it, but in its place behind a glass case, all it represents is some nondescript gel-like substance in a tin can next to a screwdriver. Other examples call for mental involvement, like Beuys' approximate 12,000 copies of a stark wooden box, named "Intuition" (1968), which was sold at a cheap price, intended to contain its owner's thoughts on a daily basis.
Beuys' work is certainly diverse, and it seems his ideas were born and conceived all at once, because his projects lack connections to one another yet no doubt sprung from the same overactive mind. The artist used his already well-known name to question the status of art in his series called "Wirtschaftswerte" ("Economic Values").These works are the closest he got to the famous ready-made prototype of Duchamp, presenting a series of objects, mostly from former East Germany, onto which he has scribbled his signature. Here, though, he has incorporated his own status as an established artist poking fun at himself, the viewer and the curator who would put these behind glass, whereas Duchamp did not claim his "Fountain" (1917) for himself, but signed it R. Mutt. The idea here is like most of Beuys': a preference for mental labor over physical labor, and an attempt to create a form of art pervasive in everyday activities that would bring high art's sense of contemplation and meditation to ordinary life.
What "Multiple Strategies" highlights is the emphasis on the political ideas of Beuys and his different tactics and performances meant to facilitate a utopian kind of social change. The sense is that he stood out from the rest of the Fluxus group, but that many political endeavors, including the Green Party, which he joined, failed to take his proposals and values seriously. While idealistic, his work is refreshing even today, and the exhibit manages to make us both roll our eyes and look fondly upon Beuys' na'vet?© at the same time, which is absolutely worth something. His symbolism may get extreme (his "Honey Pump in the Workplace" in 1977 involved 200 pounds of margarine and plastic tubing filled with honey to represent collective thought), but it is important to remember that at one time, the art world had room for these visions, no matter how extravagant.
Although "Multiple Perspectives" touches upon Hi Red Center, the Japanese Fluxus movement, and the functional dysfunctions of works like a placemat printed with images of garbage or an apron showing the organs hidden beneath, the emphasis is certainly on Beuys and his works of momentary genius - pieces that are worth the giggle and remain powerful, quietly slapping the faces of the walls on which they hang.
