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Fluxus was a provocative and humorous art movement that produced objects, performances and events which challenged the boundaries between traditional art and everyday life. Early Fluxus pieces included feeding a bale of hay to a piano, a painting to be stepped on and the sound of dripping water.

 

The Fluxfilm Anthology, showing here in its most comprehensive version to date, includes Zen for Film (a clear film for collecting dust), Four (Yoko Ono’s infamous film of bare bottoms), Smoking (cigarette smoke shot with a high speed camera) and other films of comical street performances, counting games, x-ray movies and interference patterns. The Fluxfilms embodied the minimal aesthetic, playfulness and poetic dimensions of Fluxus and transposed its performative aspect to the cinema.

 

This informal late night event is a unique chance to see films by artists such as George Brecht, John Cale, Dick Higgins, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Paul Sharits, Chieko Shiomi, Ben Vautier, Wolf Vostell and Robert Watts presented on the big screen of the Rio Cinema, East London's splendid art deco picture palace. Jonas Mekas will be present to discuss Fluxus and his friend and fellow Lithuanian émigré, the late George Maciunas.

 

Seminal figures of the New York downtown art scene since the beginning of the 1960s, Jonas Mekas (b.1922) and George Maciunas (1931-78) were connected through many different projects. Mekas was a central force of the avant-garde film scene and presented early screenings at Maciunas’ AG Gallery. Maciunas coordinated Fluxus as an international community of artists, whose contributors also included Joseph Beuys, Henry Flynt, Takehisa Kosugi, John Lennon and La Monte Young.

 

Maciunas was also fundamental in the emergence of SoHo as an artistic centre in New York. As early as 1966, he began to purchase dilapidated industrial buildings and convert them into cooperative real estate, starting the trend for loft-style living. Jonas Mekas was one of the first to participate in the Fluxhouse venture, acquiring space for both his own home and the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque / Anthology Film Archives.

 

This event is supported by the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture and Freedom Brewery.
  
17 October, 2008, Friday. 11.15pm until late. Rio Cinema, 107 Kingsland High Street, London E8 2PB. Tickets: £6. Bookings recommended. Box office: 020 7241 9410

Rail: Dalston Kingsland
Buses: 30, 38, 75, 149, 242, 243
Night buses: N38, N149, N242, N243