Fluxus, By Chance
Exhibition
September 25, 2025 – February 22, 2026
West Bund Museum Centre Pompidou, Shanghai
Press release
1994, Centre Pompidou Collection, Paris
National Museum of Modern Art Industrial Creation Center
© Man Ray 2015, Trust / Adagp, Paris
Fluxus emerged at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s from the coming together of individuals who were not artists but became so through emulation. George Brecht was a chemist before becoming an artist. Robert Filliou was an economist; La Monte Young was a musician; Emmett Williams was an anthropologist; George Maciunas was a graphic designer (and colourblind) before becoming an artist, and so on. Their individual experiences offer significant experimental potential, because Fluxus was a collective, cosmopolitan and participatory adventure. Through events and play, it sought to break down the boundaries and hierarchy between audience and artist.
Maciunas came up with the name for this emerging group. Fluxus comes from the word flux, and Fluxus activism spread through festivals, with the publication of a wide variety of magazines and editions, advocating art without works and without virtuosity, against the persistent over valuation of the autographed art object, whose presumed excellence lay in its uniqueness, even after Duchamp. In this respect, Fluxus anticipated conceptual art.
The exhibition spills over into extends to the antecedent to Dada and some of its natural heirs such as Jonathan Monk and Claide Closky. It also pays tribute to Huang Yong Ping, a self-proclaimed Dadaist, and to Geng Jianyi, an influential professor at the China Academy of Fine Arts who, at least telepathically, could not have been unaware of Fluxus.
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Communiqué de presse - Fluxus by Chance
PDF - 130Ko
Press officer:
Mia Fierberg
00 33 (0)1 44 78 13 77
mia.fierberg@centrepompidou.fr
Communication and digital media department
Director
Geneviève Paire
Head of the press office
Dorothée Mireux
