"THE SECRET HISTORY
OF WESTERN TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE"

The First International Exhibition and Road Show
of The Fluxus Indian Museum

Art Gallery of Windsor
Windsor , Ontario
January 27 - March 25, 1995

The 'official' history of the Fluxus art movement begins in 1962 with a series of concerts that took place in Europe. The international group of experimental artists who presented these concerts were organized by Fluxus' impresario, the New York based George Maciunas, who died in 1978, prophetically chose a particularly mercurial name for this movement and one that has continually eluded definition. This suited the Fluxus artists admirably as it allowed them unlimited freedom as well as providing an open context in which their experimentations could be situated.

At the most basic level, Fluxus has been concerned with presenting everyday actions and objects within artistic and non-artistic environments with the intention of provoking an enriched re-perception of these same things within the everyday lives of the audience members. These 'events' as they preferred to call them ranged from making salads on stage, musical pieces that consisted of the sounds made by a piano while it was being violently dismantled, to an event in which the audience was simply instructed by the performer to leave the theater! In the last analysis the two most potent aesthetic weapons in the Fluxus arsenal have been a simplicity coupled with a whimsical and mischievous sense of humor.

Now, with the establishment of the Fluxus Indian Museum, a previously secret history of Fluxus has come to light. For who would have imagined that centuries before the appearance of the electric lightbulb, the duplicating machine and the record player that the Fluxus Indians had already drawn up the plans for the invention of these technologies?

So, the next time you switch on a light, push the button on a duplicating machine or place the needle on your favorite record, spare a moment to think of the Fluxus Indians who made this all possible.