Our discussion on Bogg's Bills got me thinking of another form of art that deals with money; it is substantially less intrinsic or detailed than Bogg's works, but still entertaining in a way that engages aesthetic sensibility: money artwork.

In essence, the idea behind money artwork is little more than altering currency to make it look like something else, be it George Washington as various incarnations of Lady GaGa, Andrew Jackson as Gene Simmons of KISS, or Ulysses S Grant as Macho Man Randy Savage. These creations draw on (no pun intended) the playful sensibility of the Fluxus movement, as well as some Dada aspects of art. It presents itself as little more than passing entertainment, but invites deeper introspection to those who want to search for it.

One could argue that these drawings, while borne from idle hands, carry a deep message about the illusory state of currency; indeed, it almost makes a postmodernist statement about money being nothing more than an agreed-upon illusion, and that paper currency does not deserve elevation above any other medium as a place of artistic expression. By the same token (again, no pun intended) this is simplistic and juvenile; the artists are not likely trying to tackle the issues of identity and social agreement in their pieces, but like the Dadaists and Flux artists they are creating works with valuable meaning, so long as one is willing to look for it.

Tehching Hsieh: Performance Art and the "Unique Significance of Particular Experiences"

Hannah Higgins says in "Fluxus Experience 1" that she believes "the ultimate goal of Fluxus [is] to form multiple pathways toward 'ontological knowledge' and the expansion of the 'setting of the human experience.'" ("Fluxus Experience 1," page 38). Her argument is that the experiences of a specific human does much more in understanding the whole of humanity than a concept of universal knowledge, such as the Jungian collective unconscious.

There is a performance artist named Tehching Hsieh who made a name for himself in the 1970s as someone who explored the boundaries of his own body through acts of personal deprivation. The boundaries he set were almost Oulipian in their arbitrary nature, but he adhered to them to the letter. As an example, (the one I will use to discuss his relation to the Fluxus movement, however tenuous it may be) Hsieh undertook a one-year project wherein he would take a photo of himself every hour on the hour for a full year, wearing the same outfit every time he took the picture. This performance, which was simply titled One Year Performance (1980-1981) (http://www.one-year-performance.com/) explores the idea of elevating the mundane in a very Dada-esque way.

The photos Hsieh took were actually individual frames of film on a camera; every time he punched a time clock to show he was present for the picture every hour of the year, the camera would expose a single frame of film so that by the end of the year Hsieh had a nearly seven minute film showing him gradually aging over the course of the year. Individually, the photographs mean nothing. They are not particularly well-framed or aesthetically pleasing, and they don't show anything particularly groundbreaking in and of themselves. Strung together into a film, though, they make a strong statement about the passing of time and the nature of humanity with relationship to time. There is a video of his performance piece on YouTube, which is definitely worth exploration. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVpyMfeqoBY

Hsieh would be demonstrating Higgins' idea of the "unique significance of particular experiences" ("Fluxus Experiences 1," page 38) to show something about the whole of humanity while using only himself to make this statement. There is no effort on his part to try to make this an overarching narrative on human life or the effects of time on the body, but those are both evident. This piece is playful, in spite of its somber tone, because of the arbitrary nature of its rules, and this is what makes me consider it a Fluxian, or at least neo-Dada piece.

There is an argument that the actual performance, which took place over the course of a year, is far too long for a Fluxus piece, since most Fluxus artists aimed for brevity in their work, keeping everything simple and concise. I would argue that the film is the end result of the project, though, and that it should stand alone in consideration as an art piece. That Hsieh took a year to make the piece is impressive and remarkable, but his documentation of the performance is the true art piece. At less than seven minutes, the film could definitely be considered a Fluxus piece.

Oulipo and Surrealism

It almost pains me to say this. For years I was a strident follower of the works of Dali, being enthralled in his dreamlike paintings and eccentric personality. I was drawn to the idea of Surrealism as something that allows for uninhibited expression of one's innermost thoughts through wildly subjective representations. Surrealism was more than an art form; it was, in my mind, paradigm-altering and represented a clear schism between traditional art and modernist art. There was little that could convince me there was something remotely as interesting as Surrealism.

Then I learned of Oulipo. Initially I couldn't quite understand why I was so drawn to Oulipo, which seemed to be a group of writers resorting to semantic gimmickry and entirely whimsical boundaries as influences to their work. Selecting a specific restriction and then observing it as law. I wasn't impressed with the movement until I learned of Queneau's book Cent mille milliards de poèmes that I finally understood the impact of this movement; fourteen individual sonnets bound together was nothing particularly special, but the true ingenuity of slicing the pages so that every line of every poem could be matched with lines from other sonnets within the same book floored me. Queneau had written the longest book in the history of literature, and it was thinner than most television operation manuals.

This was how I came to understand that Oulipo is a movement that pushes for originality and inventiveness. It applauds writers that can operate within constraints and make something truly original from these constraints that reads as literary. Unlike the Surrealists, who believed creativity to be entirely ethereal, spawned in hypnagogic states of altered consciousness, Oulipo writers (Oulipans?) felt creativity had to be pulled from one's self through repetition and constant exploration of the edges of creative thought. This is not to say Surrealism is without merit, of course. To do that would be folly. But while Surrealism seemed to encourage (consciously or otherwise) acting as a vessel through which creativity could manifest itself and in essence having an external locus of control with regards to creative output, Oulipo placed the creative weight squarely on the shoulders of the writers. Their purpose was to experiment, and to show others whether their experiments worked. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't, but that's the beauty of experimental writing.

It is difficult to imagine where literature as a creative art would be without the incredibly prolific efforts of the Oulipo writers, who in their pursuit of bringing experimentation on par with that of any physical science helped to define what does and does not work in unleashing the creative genius within themselves altered the course of creative writing and critical analysis for decades to follow.