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FLUXUS EXPERIENCE
By HANNAH HIGGINS University of California
Copyright © 2002 Regents of the University of California
All right reserved. ISBN: 0-520-22867-7
Chapter One
Fluxus Vision (Blink) During a brief encounter with Fluxus in the mid-1960s, John Cavanaugh produced a film called Flicker. Included in the 1966 program of Fluxfilms assembled by George Maciunas, Flicker consists of alternating frames of black and clear celluloid that, when projected, assault the eye with a battery of flickers in extremely bright white and pure black (Fig. 9). After a few seconds of this flickering, the eye becomes fatigued. Vision fades into a temporary blindness characterized by slowly moving, pulsating, colorless blobs that hover over the continuous flash of film, a response due to the inability of the optic nerve to register the flickering frames.
In Flux Year Box 2 from 1968, a handheld projector was included with the films for manual operation (Fig. 10). With it the viewer, blinking while watching the film at variable speeds, slows the pace of the flickering frames, just as rapid blinking slows the pace of the flickering spokes of a spinning bicycle wheel. Blinking lessens the fatigue of the optic nerve, which may recover sufficiently to take in some part of the flicker again-that is, until the muscles around the eye grow fatigued as well, rendering the rapid, rhythmic blink physically impossible. In the end, the eye is simply too tired to continue its futile effort to race the mechanical projector, or to coordinate with the uneven rhythm of the handheld one.
Staring or blinking or manipulating the film's projection exposes the physical limits of the viewer's eyes. The viewer experiences the limitations of both the visible (what is seen in the world) and the optical (how humans see these things). There is neither a tangible object that corresponds to the colorless blob that hovers over the flicker, nor an objective framework that determines the precise form the blob takes. In this manner Flicker creates an optical experience that lies beyond the realm of the visible, where visible refers to an objective world of things "out there" that can be perceived or observed by the eye "in here."
An optical experience beyond the realm of the visible may seem self-contradictory. How can something that is not objectively there be seen? The answer, it seems to me, lies in rethinking the proposition that if something is not visible, it does not exist or cannot be seen.
The possibility of seeing the invisible calls into question the common phrases "Seeing is believing" and "I'll know it when I see it." The simultaneously optical and invisible experience of Flicker shifts one from the sense of sight toward something else, such as "Feeling is believing" or "I'll know it when I experience it." Clearly, something that is not visible can be seen, as it is in Flicker, even though what is seen is not a physical object. Rather, it is an image produced by optical fatigue-though there are other causes of invisible visions (such as ghosts, dreams, hallucinations of all kinds, images caused by eye malfunctions, mirages, magic, and games of illusion). Experientially, then, Flicker initiates a visual impression-the colorless blob registered by the optic nerve-that is radically distinct from what is shown, namely, alternating frames of black and clear celluloid. Viewers ultimately witness the boundary of their visual capacity-their limits as seeing persons -in response to an "outside" stimulus. Put differently, the experience is neither subjective nor objective. The stimulus (film) is not what is seen (the blob), nor is it independent of what is seen. Rather, what is seen combines a world "out there" and a self "in here."
Because it occurs in this interstitial location between objective and subjective, Flicker works against the belief that experience is mediated by clearly delineated senders (objects) and receivers (subjects) of information, a duality that lies at the core of the Western philosophical tradition. With few exceptions, in this tradition ideas are located exclusively in the mind. They are therefore distinct from an objective world or, conversely, illustrate the unknowability or lack of existence of that objective world. In contrast, experience of Flicker is based within an indivisible object/subject matrix or field. In other words, the most striking effect of Flicker is that experience of it is simultaneously self-reflexive-the viewer witnesses the fatigue of his or her own optic nerve-and externally triggered: the eye constitutes the organic boundary of a person watching a movie shown on an external screen. Experience of the film cannot readily be dissected to locate elements exclusively in one or the other domain; it occurs equally within both. Experience of Flicker is therefore consistent with John Dewey's conception of aesthetic experience as that which "signifies complete interpenetration of self and the world of objects and events."
Put differently, Flicker illustrates the mutual nature of, or correlation between, so-called sense data and stimulus or matter. J. L. Austin describes this correlation: "One of the most important points to grasp is that these two terms, 'sense data' and 'material things,' live by taking in each other's washing-what is spurious is not one term of the pair, but the antithesis itself." Fluxfilms offer rich evidence in Austin's favor.
At the other extreme in pace from Flicker is Yoko Ono's film Eyeblink (1966), included in the same Fluxfilm program, which consists of a blinking eye filmed at two thousand frames per second on a high-speed camera by the Fluxus photographer Peter Moore. Shown at a regular speed, the film presents an extremely slow motion image of a blink. The slow and partial pulse of muscles in the fatty tissue of the lower lid, the pull of each muscle to move the lid, the tears flowing over and around the eye during the blink, and the partial dilation of the pupil during a fraction of a second only gradually become apparent. The viewer's own blinking action punctuates the pace of the model's (Ono's) blink shown in the film. Significantly, a quick reflex movement-the blink of an eye-has been extended almost unendurably in close proximity and sharp focus.
Since during a blink the eye is never fully open, most of Eyeblink shows the eye while it is not seeing-at least while it is not seeing visible things. Rather, the image on the screen shows a prolonged space or interstice between normative visual experiences. From the perspective of the film's viewer, the red curtain of the subject's eyelid closes and opens on the seeing eye of the viewer, who might in turn imagine the fractal patterns seen during the interim by the model. Like Flicker, then, Eyeblink invokes an invisible visual experience, this time not by way of extreme optical fatigue, but instead through the protracted representation of a space between normative visual experiences. The experiential breadth and limits of the apparatus of perception itself are (once again) the explicit subject matter of the work.
In both films, vision has been placed firmly within the body. The embodiment occurs in Flicker through the effect of fatigue on the viewer's optic nerve and eye muscles and in Eyeblink through the protracted representation of an interstice of vision. Through this embodiment of nonobjective (yet visible) elements, Flicker and Eyeblink offer alternatives to the continuous, objective field of vision, or scopic unity, associated with commercial film. They do so by replacing the illusion of a unified field of representation (the perspectivally coherent film space) with primary experience. In contemporary art historical jargon, by forcing the eye to the limits of its visual capacity (Flicker) and by accessing the break in visibility characterized by a blink (Eyeblink), these films undermine the authority of the disembodied gaze.
The destruction of the disembodied gaze is likewise the subject of Daniel Spoerri and François Dufrêne's Optique Moderne, a book displaying altered spectacles. One page shows pins attached to the lenses of a pair of glasses and pointing at the eyes (Fig. 11). One imagines the composed young man (Spoerri) contorting in pain and darkness when the pins pierce his retina. If we understand the pins as single points, this deceptively simple piece seems to reference the destruction of vision as it is subjected (through the trickery of illusion) to the vanishing point of perspective and (through the physiology of glasses) to the focal point of lenses. The problem with such a strict interpretation is that it explains the work only negatively vis-à-vis the lens of the eye. The work thus becomes merely anti-illusionistic and antiretinal-which it is, but only in part. There is another way of looking at it, a positive one: perhaps the artist sees the points coming and, with deliberation and composure, embraces the broader experience of blindness to follow.
Other spectacles were included in L'Optique Moderne, among them found prescription and reading glasses with bent earpieces that enabled each to be held at any distance from the eyes. These altered the viewing distance within the normally fixed geometry of the lens/focal length and eye ratios, effectively allowing for increased control of multiple visual experiences by the user. Held at distance x, one sees y, and at another distance, z.
As a whole, then, these glasses do not destroy vision. Rather, they enable new visions of the world by replacing normative vision with various alternatives that are controlled by the viewer. In this manner Spoerri and Dufrêne's Optique Moderne provides models for experientially embodied vision similar to those found in Flicker, with its exploitation of muscular and optic nerve fatigue, and Eyeblink, with its reliance on interstitial visual experience.
In contrast to this experiential modeling of vision, Renaissance perspective, with its disembodied gaze, was, according to the philosophical historian Paul Virilio, "the nodule in which the modeling of vision would develop and, with it, all possible standardization of ways of seeing." This viewpoint makes it very difficult to introduce another visual mode in a post-Renaissance context, for it will inevitably be seen in opposition to perspectivally organized vision. Virilio further suggests that stylistic opposition to the controlling gaze of perspective threatens to destroy all visual connection to the object of scrutiny (i.e., the world): there is no body (social or individual) left viewing when the controlling lens is exposed as a limited means for understanding visual experience. By freeing vision of its definitive and militaristic component, the abandonment of perspective renders order untenable. Without the grid/screen, chaos reigns. "In the West, the death of God and the death of art are indissociable; the zero degree of representation merely fulfilled the prophecy voiced a thousand years earlier by Nicephorus, Patriarch of Constantinople, during the quarrel with the iconoclasts: 'If we remove the image, not only Christ but the whole universe disappears.' "
Robert Romanyshyn, in Technology as Symptom and Dream, describes vision in terms phenomenologically similar to Virilio's ("When the world is viewed through a window, the world is well on the way to becoming an object of vision") but adds that "a profound difference remains between this objective body of knowledge created in distance from oneself, and one's living body, between the body which one has and the body which one is." In other words, the screen or "devices for seeing" that for Virilio objectify the world in all veristic art by "dispensing" with the body are only one part of visual experience. There are other logics of cohesion. We must not forget the "body which one is."
Both approaches to vision have implications for understanding L'Optique Moderne, Flicker, and Eyeblink. The Renaissance model expounded by theorists like Virilio finds mere chaos and disintegration beyond the field of scopic unity or spatial illusionism posited by perspectival art and photography. The only alternative to scopic unity is experiential disunity. The embodied vision expounded by Romanyshyn, in contrast, allows for the indomitable "body that is," that lives and takes manifold forms. From Virilio's perspective, the two Fluxfilms and the Spoerri-Dufrêne object would merely resonate negatively with the scopic unity of film and illusionistic images, while from Romanyshyn's perspective the films and the object would affirm the broader physiological basis of vision. By giving the fatigue of the optic nerve or eyelid a physiological framework (Flicker) and by representing the eyelid as it blinks (Eyeblink), the Fluxfilms locate the eye within the human body, with all its motility and sentience. Together, the three Fluxworks offer an alternative to scopic unity, at the same time rejecting the notion of experiential chaos.
To argue for an embodied eye deep in the core of the viewer seems merely to move the vanishing point into the viewer proper, since it means that the visual logic of the work is oriented to the viewer's world. For the iconoclast, in nonperspectival work the vanishing point of perspective in effect turns in on the viewer, such that the viewer disappears. If we understood the body as a mere extension of passive vision, something simply tacked on behind the eye, this argument might be persuasive. However, the embodied model of vision is dynamic. The experience occurs only if the viewer puts something into it: far from vanishing, the viewer asserts his or her existence in front of the vanishing point.
The effort to make this happen can be described as the performative element of all Fluxus work: the audience has to do something to complete the work. Blink hard. Stare hard. Pick up the glasses. Fluxus artists have consistently described their work, particularly the objects they produce, as performative. The artist and performance scholar Kristine Stiles notes that "Fluxus originated in the context of performance and the nature of its being-the ontology of Fluxus-is performative." She continues in terms that bear directly on this discussion: "The body, in addition to its role as subject, is itself presented as an object. Together, subject and object create a changing and interrelated perceptual field for the investigation between actions, language, objects and sounds."
This "changing and interrelated perceptual field" of performativity is succinctly illustrated in another Fluxus work that invokes the blink. The Scissors Brothers' Warehouse Sale graphic, also called Blink, was produced in 1963 by George Brecht, Alison Knowles, and Robert Watts (Fig. 12).
Continues...
Excerpted from FLUXUS EXPERIENCE by HANNAH HIGGINS Copyright © 2002 by Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission.
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