A crushed piano, sawed into pieces, is one of many art installations featured at Santa Fe College’s “Fluxus in the Swamp” gallery.
As you walk through the gallery, you can touch and interact with the pieces you see, a staple of Fluxus art design. Unlike in most museums, a wooden capsule filled with meteorite dust invites people to handle and shake the piece, resulting in the creation of a simulated cosmic event.
Sean Miller, an associate professor at the University of Florida School of Art and co-creator of this exhibit, says Fluxus challenges the definition of what defines art because “in one level it's theoretical and in another level it's like going to get a cup of coffee or putting some flowers on a table.”
Fluxus art emerged in the 1960s, using objects to “blur the boundaries between art and everyday life”, according to the event website. The Museum of Modern Art says Fluxus artists have a “shared impulse to integrate art and life.” Artists like Yoko Ono and John Cage drew attention to the movement through the integration of Fluxus principles into their performance work.
Miller stressed the importance of making art accessible to anyone, working with Billie J. Maciunas, Ph.D. to curate this exhibition. Maciunas owned pieces created by her husband George Maciunas, the founder of the Fluxus movement. Maciunas loaned many of the pieces that had not been seen before to the Santa Fe College exhibit.
But the leveled piano is arguably the focal point of the gallery, inspired by an original score, or set of instructions, written specifically for Miller by Philip Corner. Named “Piano Aktivitys as a Disciplind Destruktshun (a piano work’t),” the intentionally mispelled title is a continuation of his 1962 score, “Piano Activities.”
The original score was performed by George Maciunas and a group of artists in 1962 at the Fluxus Festival in Wiesbaden, Germany. In their own interpretation of the score, Miller said, the group broke a piano into pieces.
“Philip actually didn't want the piano busted to pieces,” Miller said. “He just wanted you to, you know, do activities to the piano to change the sound.”
The new score Corner wrote for Miller was performed for the first time at the opening reception of “Fluxus in the Swamp” on September 6. The score’s jumbled title is meant to resemble written music, Miller said, and the purpose of the performance was to produce sound through the destruction of the piano.
The performance involved ripping out the piano keys, bending the piano lid up and backwards and bashing the legs off with a sledgehammer, according to the score’s instructions.
“It's going to be a series of sculptures and other objects after the exhibition ends,” Miller said.
Benedicta Opoku-Mensah, a masters of fine art in sculpture student at UF, performed the score alongside Miller and other Fluxus performers.
Opoku-Mensah says she doesn’t consider herself a Fluxus artist, but “can connect it to my own work in some way because I also use ordinary objects in my work,” Opoku-Mensah said.
“People were amazed when they saw little details,” Opoku-Mensah said of reactions to the artwork on opening night. “And that was the best part, looking at them from a different angle.”
Attendees are encouraged to make art of their own. The walls on either side of the main entrance are covered in postcard-sized instructions with prompts written by artists. It can involve physical or performance art, and the idea is that it should be able to be repeated by anyone, in their own way.
The exhibition is free and open to the public from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday at the Santa Fe College Gallery located at 3000 NW 83rd Street. The event will run until October 20.