This was published in the 2002 Fluxus Constellation catalogue. The formatting here mimics the original version.

FLUX' is us!
Philip Corner

If fluxus is flux then everything is.

If Heraclitus ... then Vivaldi too and Jazz. ...... let's take---move-over Spike Jones or better yet "Roll over" ----- : Mozart, Leopold,'s hunting-symphony with the pack of dogs in the last movement, the 1812 Overture (wIth, of course, the chorus, the bells of Moscow and how about a real church, and the cannons), and not just a recording, either: like Mendelssohn's 'Spring Song' with all the birds tweeting, as presented in my Elementary School Music Appreciation Class.

A decade ago ... at the VeniceBiennale ... the show Ubi Fluxus Ibi Motus so-expanded the "club" ...... that practically Every One who has been doing interesting things in the last 30years

can be in-cluded,.........

isn't that Great?

but isn't it also Time To Be More Discriminating? ..................... i would prefer ........................... to forget the forgettable... ...... ( there are those who are just being perpetuated by pedigree i think. ...... (I am not naming ANYONE.)

I've never wanted to write history-----and certainly not The Fluxus Story. I feel myself sort-of forced into it: there are somany errors going around.

This one, for instance, needs correction:
........."Fluxus" was not born in 1962.
......... It was named in 1961. ............Instead-of a presumed
Original Group consisting of those few who happened to be in Wiesbaden in 1962 ... There are those who not-only were working in That Way years before, but those who knew George (Maciunas) when. That means: being in New York at the same time; being privy to his plans; hearing the proposed name from his lips; having been recruited for specific projects and appointed to specific roles. Those whom i personally knew include Ay-O, the other George (Brecht), Jackson MacLow, Yoko Ono, Bob Watts, La Monte Young and ... -of course- ...my 'flux' and 'preflux' family .... Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles ... We didnot "join" after the Wiesbaden festival. We simply did not make the trip. But our works did,
for sure.
So much for credentials.

More..... there can be in my opinion no such thing as "fluxism" (sorry René Block) for the simple reason that no common denominator can be found among those of us impeccably and incontrovertably stamped with flux-identity by participation in its actions. (Let us try to avoid that distortion come down from the ancient philosophers whereby a phenomenon is defined by only one of its characteristics eg. 'Man is the reasoning animal") Even the author of the much-quoted "nine criteria" has expressed his doubts to me.
Perhaps we can definitively eliminateno ex-clude rather (to eliminate is impossible) the most reactionary academic forms of neo-somethingor other---but arenot suchthings already ipso facto "Bad"?

Neither is Fluxus to be limited to those cute little fun&games.

Another thing: the fluxtechniques, even if reduced to the characteristic aphorisms of the Event Score -------- or an other of Maciunas' dogmatic and arbitrariy pre--scriptions ---- can be just-as-well, any of them, found in the works of other artists or groups.

So what then is being defined?

(Just as Boulez forinstance made very clear to us the possibility of being at the same time an innovator and an academic, totally essentially rigidly and hopelessly academic ....... so to there may exist (paradoxically, a kind of fluxconservatism. Let us avoid that!!!)
it seems to me that what unifies-in-diversity the GoodWorks of the 50s and 60s - and subsequently ... might be resumed under the lable "Action-Concepts". This would express well the characteristic expansion towards corporeal and intellectual extremes. What properly belongs Fluxus surely forms a worthy contribution to this .....but as a part. (The Whole is ofcourse not a part of IT!)

We are looking back at, and longing forward to, a world of artistic cooperations without artificial boundaries.

All the rest is but self-serving and politics.