Fluxus was born at a shifting point in world views. The era that the
English-speaking world once called the Elizabethan Age is only now coming
to a close. This was the age of the pirate kings, an age in which
gunpowder technology permitted the Western nations to conquer and dominate
the rest of the world.

The greatest portion of the world's wealth and power were once concentrated
in Asia. A number of poor decisions on the part of Asian rulers created the
context in which the European powers were virtually assured of global
dominance, despite the relative youth of the European empires and cultures
that were primitive in comparison with the Asian empires. Two of the most
significant of these decisions were the mandated destruction of China's
ocean-going fleets and the closing of Japan. These decisions were also two
of the most foolish, folly because they were decisions made by powerful
governments that finally weakened the power of their nations. In that
sense, China and Japan transformed themselves from two of the world's most
developed nations into nations that would later find themselves at great
disadvantage primarily because they cut themselves off from the competition
and evolution of a changing world-wide environment.

This was a far different situation than the situation of the nations and
empires of India, Korea and Viet Nam, all of which found themselves in
problematic situations dictated more by historical circumstance than
troubles brought about by specific and bad decisions. For any number of
reasons, however, the empires of Asia, old, wealthy and powerful, were
unable to innovate and compete effectively against the vigorous and often
ruthless expansion of the Western powers. The Asian powers had their own
ruthless dynasties. The triumph of the West did not occur because the West
was willing to be immoral where the East was spiritual and unprepared to
resist. The main issues were technological and economic: the West had a
more effective technology than the East had, a technology that was coupled
to a culture more able to innovate and initiate change. That moment
essentially dictated the shape of world power and the global economic
system for roughly five centuries. Those five centuries are now coming to
an end.

A new era is taking shape now. We don't yet have a name for the new era,
but it's clear that a new time is emerging. Asia is once again a wealthy,
powerful region, expanding and transforming the world economy. Led first by
Japan, later by Korea and Taiwan with mainland China about to emerge and
India following after, Asia will soon be the world's largest regional
economy. The Asia-Pacific region already equals Europe and the United
States in wealth. It may soon equal them in power and geopolitical
influence. There is every reason to believe that the Asia-Pacific region
(possibly including Australia and North America) will play the kind of role
in the 21st Century that Europe played from the 17th century to the first
half of the 20th Century and that America played from the early 20th
century on. The consequences of this transformation will be good and bad.
The degree to which the transformation will work good or bad results on
individuals and societies will depending on who they are, on where they are
and on their viewpoint. Whether the changes are good or bad, however, the
moment in which the new era takes shape will be a time-based boundary
state.

Boundary states in ecological systems give rise to interesting life forms.
Transition times in history give rise to interesting culture forms.

The first signs of this global transformation began in the last century.
The old era could be said to have ended with the Treaty of Vienna that
closed the Napoleonic Wars. That was the last real moment of the old
Europe, the old diplomacy, the old empires. The putative revolutions of the
mid-century, the revolutions that failed, were the beginning of the new
nationalism, a clear sign that the European empires were doomed. Even
though they didn't know it yet, the Hapsburgs were in trouble, as were the
Romanovs, the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha Windsors-to-be and the Hohenzollerns of
Prussia, whose imperial aspirations were essentially doomed even before
their empire was cobbled together by the Iron Chancellor. The final result
of the 20th century could not have been predicted at that time but change
was on horizon. Technology, economy and history doomed the static and
slow-moving empires with all their cultural baggage.

The transformative zone in the cultural ecology that ushered in our century
became visible in the 1890s with the work of artists and composers such as
Alfred Jarry, Pablo Picasso, Douanier Rousseau and Erik Satie. (Even though
I've raised Picasso's name, it's impossible to adequately categorize
Picasso pr his work. Picasso opened the century in company with Jarry and
the others. Unlike them, he participated in and provoked both sides of
modernism, the public, heroic tradition and the intellectual, hermetic
tradition. Picasso's art was informed by the cultures of many nations. His
genius and his tragedy was that of a lucid cultural pirate, a self-willed
king who shaped such a kaleidoscope of modernist traditions that he had an
effect on all the art that followed his work as well as half the literature
and music.) The tradition they established became a kind of left-handed,
Tantric approach to art, contrarian and often hermetic. It was a
transnational art in an era that would become increasingly national under
the influence of the national romantic movements in art and music that
accompanied the break-up of the empires and the liberation of conquered and
colonized nations.

As a result, this tradition in art excited and stimulated young artists,
opened the doors to many cultures and at the same time inevitably came into
conflict with the very cultures they enlivened. Only the moment of
international modernism made Hollywood possible, for example, and yet
Hollywood movies grew and blossomed as a typically American art form. a
cultural innovation as boldly ethnocentric as the music of Grieg and
Sibelius, as peculiarly archetypal in their national expression as the
paintings of Matisse or Gaudi's architecture. The end result was that this
century saw two arts and two cultures growing side by side. One was public,
heroic and national in inclination. The other was intellectual, hermetic
and global in tone.

These two traditions challenged and informed each other, yet for a host of
reasons, they remained separate, separated as much by the demands of
politics and economics as by the reality of art. Take the case of Abstract
Expressionism, for example. This was the first art movement to exert
world-wide influence after America took on the international leadership
that the disintegrated European empires and their impoverished heirs could
no longer afford.

Europe and Asia informed the best sentiments of Abstract Expressionism. It
was an art that would have been impossible without the twin influences of
Surrealism and oriental culture on America. When it came time for America
to stand for its own in the international art world, however, politics,
economics and political economics dictated that Abstract Expressionism be
treated as some kind of uniquely American triumph. Viewed in one way, this
was the voice of a young nation come into its own. Viewed another way, this
was history chasing its own tail. The triumph of American painting was
heralded by myopic art critics. Some of them were well informed in the
narrow terms of art history, but they were conveniently ignorant of larger
cultural history. Most of them managed to overlook the fact that the art
market and art history are generally -- and only temporarily -- dominated
by the nation that currently holds the balance of power in the geopolitical
and economic terms. This view served the political purposes of the American
government. There was no purpose to be served by making clear just how
impossible this artistic achievement would have been without the defeated
Japan, the problematic China, or an occasionally fractious Europe that
America was attempting to dominate and lead. Thus the acolytes of Abstract
Expressionism ballyhooed the grandeur of the New York painters, treating
everything up to that moment as the prelude to their triumph. One can't
entirely blame America for this attitude. It's not as though the Greeks,
the Italians, the Dutch, the British or the Japanese hadn't done so
themselves, not to mention that French on behalf of the their several
republics and empires.

It's the other tradition that influenced Fluxus, a tradition that has
inevitably been neglected because it is anti-nationalistic in sentiment and
tone and practiced by artists who aren't easily used as national
flag-bearers. )Individual artists such as Marcel Duchamp and John Cage are
accurately seen as ancestors of Fluxus, but ideas played a larger role than
individuals. Russian revolutionary art groups such as LEF were an influence
on some. For others, De Stijl and the Bauhaus philosophy were central. The
idea that one can be an artist and -- at the same time -- an industrialist,
an architect or a designer is a key to the way one can view Fluxus work and
the artist's role in society. It is as important to work in the factory or
the urban landscape as in the museum. It is important to be able to shift
positions and to work in both environments.

Dada was farther from Fluxus in many ways than either De Stijl or Bauhaus.
The seeming relationship between Fluxus and Dada is more a matter of
appearances than of deep structure. Robert Filliou pointed this out in 1962
statement making clear that Fluxus is not Dadaistic in its intentions. Dada
was explosive, irreverent, and made much use of humor, as Fluxus has also
done. But Dada was nihilistic, a millenarian movement in modernist terms.
Fluxus was constructive. Fluxus was founded on principles of creation, of
transformation and its central method sought new ways to build.

Jean Sellem asserts that the Fluxus tradition is, indeed, a tradition
rooted in hermetic philosophy and even in the hidden traditions of such
movements as Kabbalah and Tantra. I can't quite agree with him, yet I think
he brings up a point that offers valid ways to understand Fluxus. So, too,
this assertion works well with some of the ways in which Fluxus works.
Fluxus aspires to serve everyone but it demands a certain kind of
perspective and commitment. Anyone can have it, but everyone must work to
get it. The premises and the results are simple, the path from the premises
to the goal can be difficult.

One way or another, though, Fluxus is a creature of the fluid moment. The
transformative zone where the shore meets the water is simple and complex,
too. The entire essence of chaos theory and the new sciences of complexity
suggest that profoundly simple premises can create rich, complex
interaction and lead to surprising results. Finding the simple elements
that interact to shape our complex environment is the goal of much science.
In culture, too, and in human behavior, simple elements combine in many
ways. On the one hand, we seek to understand and describe them. On the
other, we seek to use them. The fascination and delight of transformation
states in boundary zones is the way in which they evolve naturally.