1960s

Milan Knížák and Ken Friedman: Keeping Together Manifestations in a Divided World

One of the many intercontinental relationships to arise from Fluxus in the second half of the 1960s was the one between Milan Knížák and Ken Friedman, the two directors of Fluxus East and Fluxus West, respectively. When, in the 1980s, Dick Higgins and Ken Friedman outlined the basic ideas of Fluxus,1Dick Higgins, “Fluxus: Theory and…

“Revolution Not Only In The Arts, But In Connection.” Interview with Vytautas Landsbergis

Professor at the Lithuanian Conservatory of Music in Vilnius and scholar of the early 20th-century composer and painter Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, Vytautas Landsbergis connected with the international Fluxus community in the 1960s via his childhood friend George Maciunas. As a result, he corresponded also with Ken Friedman in California and Mieko Shiomi in Tokyo, and…

Tomislav Gotovac: “When I open my eyes in the morning, I see a film”

Tomislav Gotovac—the influential avant-garde filmmaker, conceptual artist, and anarchist leader of Croatian performance art—occupies an authorial position within the alternative New Art Practice of the late 1960s in the former Yugoslavia. After studying film directing at the Academy of Theater, Film, Radio, and Television in Belgrade, Gotovac made his first experimental films, inaugurating the golden…

Sound in Two Dimensions: Graphic Scenario of Performances by Zero Jigen in the 1960s

Zero Jigen (Zero Dimension), a performance collective active in the 1960s in Tokyo and Nagoya, Japan, has only recently become better known in the international art world through the following exhibitions and content: Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2012–13) with screenings of the group’s performance documents; Great Crescent: Art and Agitation…

“Partition is what we are living even now”: A Conversation with Nalini Malani

This informal conversation took place in March 2015 in Nalini Malani’s studio in Mumbai during a C-MAP trip to India. Gayatri Sinha and Stuart Comer talked to Malani about her practice, spanning from the 1960s to the 1990s. The discussion focused on Malani’s early lens-based experiments, her interest in psychoanalysis, her activities in the 1980s…