Get a crash course in '60s art movement Fluxus from this 2020 reimagining

In the 1960s and '70s, there was a group of artists from all over the world who got together for experimental art performances. And rather than focusing on the finished product, they found meaning in the process of making art. (Yoko Ono was even part of it.)

The community called itself Fluxus. Part art movement, part artist collective, it played an important part in expanding the boundaries of what people considered art.

This year, a group of Montreal-based concert producers reimagined Fluxus as it might look during a pandemic, when people can't get together in the same space to perform. 

"When we couldn't do this in person anymore, we put out an open call … for artists to submit a proposal of an online Fluxus work — whatever shape that could take," said musician Noam Bierstone.

Bierstone created the project with No Hay Banda, the concert production group he co-founded. 

"This project was kind of an imagining of what Fluxus could be in a digital medium," he said.

That manifested in a website with 12 curated performances. About half of them are "very sound-based," and one features NSFW visuals, while others include what are known in Fluxus as "scores": text instructions for people to follow to create the performance themselves. 

One of the performances was done via Google Docs, where artists got together to collaborate on one of the scores. It now exists on the website until the next time it's performed, when it will change and become something new.

Another used artificial intelligence to generate a score by inputting Fluxus texts from the '60s and '70s.

The idea is the scores can either be performed by being read aloud or just in your head. Bierstone said you are still performing the artist's work even if you are just doing it privately, for yourself — making it easy to do if you're in isolation or quarantine. 

The whole thing took about two months and was a big departure for Bierstone and the rest of the crew at No Hay Banda.

"We wouldn't have made it otherwise," said Bierstone. "It was really a result of the pandemic. We tried to really consider it as a way of making something that's special for the digital medium…. Presenting all these different artists in a format that also allows us to reach way more people than we usually do through our concerts in Montreal was new and special for us. That made it worthwhile and very rewarding."

You can check out the exhibition, Fluxus Online, here. 

À lire en français sur le site de Radio-Canada.

This story is part of Digital Originals, an initiative of the Canada Council for the Arts. Artists were offered a $5,000 micro-grant to either adapt their existing work or create new work for the digital world during the COVID-19 pandemic. CBC Arts has partnered with Canada Council to feature a selection of these projects. You can see more of these projects here.