Fluxus art amusement and the museum of gags. Objectification and bafflement, encounter and engagement at the museum

Abstract

When museums are mentioned in connection with art that as a critical
strategy generates primary bodily experience, it is usually to claim that they are
incompatible. However, both museums and artists have developed new strategies
to deal with the changing times. This article seeks to re-evaluate the claim that
museums will always treat works as objects by comparing Fluxus works and their
staging by Fluxus organiser George Maciunas to examples of newer work that
seeks a similar kind of interaction with the viewer. The solution they suggest is
documentation of the way a primary audience interacted with the work in order
to make it available to the (secondary) museum audience. Current models of
museum viewing tend to be oriented towards experience or data retrieval. The
alternative, it is argued, is a museum that draws attention to the historicity,
specificity and authoredness of the viewing situation. A museum that no longer
distinguishes between artwork and mise-en-scène, but wants to document both.
A museum that bridges the gap between the professional roles it performs and
uses all the physical and communicative spaces at its disposal to make available
the type of communication that the artwork originally sought to establish to a
contemporary audience.