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Fluxus Films from the Collection of Kunsthalle Praha (The Fluxus Collection of Marie and Milan Knížák)

The collection of Kunsthalle Praha, which focuses on significant artistic expressions and trends of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is a vibrant and evolving body of more than two thousand works of art. It also includes the Fluxus Collection of Marie and Milan Knížák, which is a testament to the significant role that artist Milan Knížák played for Fluxus behind the Iron Curtain as director of Fluxus East. Knížák caught the attention of his artistic colleagues abroad primarily through his underground activities as part of the group Aktual.

The Fluxus movement emerged in the early 1960s under the leadership of Lithuanian-American artist George Maciunas (1931–1978). Fluxus built on the legacy of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, broadening the understanding of what art can be and influencing the shape of contemporary art, which employs various forms and approaches. The artists of Fluxus combined visual art with experimental music, theatre, and poetry.

The Knížáks acquired their Fluxus collection thanks to their close contacts with other members of this international movement. Milan Knížák met most of them in person during his visit to the United States (1968–1970) or later during his DAAD residency in Berlin (1979–1980), and he managed to keep in touch with them to some extent even despite the Iron Curtain – thanks to the postal service.

The collection consists of roughly seven hundred items, with works by forty-six different artists. The represented media include primarily multiples, objects, drawings, instructions for actions, photographs documenting various performances, artist’s books, and artistic correspondence. Part of the collection was previously presented at the exhibition Elmgreen & Dragset: READ.

Delivered by Post: Fluxus Films from the Collection of Kunsthalle Praha (The Fluxus Collection of Marie and Milan Knížák) presents a set of works by members of the international Fluxus movement. The films entered the Knížáks’ collection in 1965, when George Maciunas sent them to the couple. During the 1960s, Milan Knížák subsequently screened the films several times in Bohemia and in Bratislava.

All of the films date from the 1960s, and their selection loosely intertwines with the Fluxfilm Anthology compiled by George Maciunas. These short films, which are mostly intended to be projected in a loop, were presented in the scope of events and happenings of the New York avant-garde. Their authors include figures from this scene such as Yoko Ono, Wolf Vostell, George Maciunas, Mieko Shiomi, and Joe Jones.

The characteristic aesthetic of Fluxus demonstrates a strong tendency toward experimentation. In line with Fluxus’s emphasis on processuality and interdisciplinarity, the videos are based on slow motion, absurdity, spontaneity, and improvisation. They reflect the deliberate unconventionality of the collective spirit of Fluxus, whose playful form and emphasis on the fusion of art and life conceal a deeper message.

Marie and Milan Knížák Fluxus Collection

Represented artists:

Eric Andersen, John Cale, John Cavanaugh, Albert Fine, Joe Jones, George Landow, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, James Riddle, Paul Sharits, Mieko (Chieko) Shiomi, Pieter Vanderbeck, Wolf Vostell, Robert Watts

Eric Andersen, Opus 74, Version 2, 1966
colour, silent, 1:35 min
courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York, © Eric Andersen

In this visual sequence Andersen uses the method of single-frame exposures, each of which captures a different motif. The result is a rhythmic whirlwind of images that oscillates between documentation and abstraction. The film is formally simple, yet it functions as a visual poem that develops Andersen’s concept of ‘intermediality’ – the intertwining of artistic media and structures over time.

George Maciunas, ARTYPE, 1966
b/w, silent, 2:40 min
courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York, © George Maciunas Foundation, Inc.

In this film, Fluxus founder George Maciunas experiments with purely graphical structures engraved directly into the film strip. The regular patterns, grids, and textures resemble visual scores intended for cyclical projection. ARTYPE represents a formal and mechanical approach to the image in which aesthetics become a process.

John Cavanaugh, Blink, 1966
b/w, silent, 2:20 min
courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York, © John Cavanaugh Foundation

Blink is a visual rhythm encapsulated in a basic human movement – the blink of an eye. Cavanaugh works with a repetitive structure, wherein the repetition of a small movement takes on monumental intensity. The minimalist film resembles a meditation on corporeality and perception on a micro scale.

Mieko Shiomi, Disappearing Music for Face, 1966
b/w, silent, 11:15 min
courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York, © Mieko Shiomi

Shiomi creates a subtle meditation on time and change through an extreme slow-motion recording of a face. The actress’s slowly fading expression becomes an image of the passage of time and impermanence. The film builds on Shiomi’s musical compositions and conceptualism, with the image replacing notation and the body becoming a medium for the score.

John Cale, Police Car, 1966
colour, silent, 1 min
courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York, © John Cale

In this minimalist film by musician and performer John Cale (known from, among other things, The Velvet Underground), we watch the flashing lights of a police car in a nighttime landscape. The rhythm of the lights functions as a visual composition – the film transforms an object of authority into a hypnotic, rhythmic image. Police Car oscillates between a realistic document and an abstract score of the city.

Albert Fine, Dance, 1966
b/w, silent, 1:25 min
courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York, © Albert Fine

Fine creates a simple, static record of a dance movement, stripped of any theatricality. The camera remains almost motionless, forcing the viewer to focus on the movement itself – its rhythm, mechanics, and physicality. In the spirit of Fluxus, it is not a performance but an act of presence.

James Riddle, 9 Minutes, 1966
b/w, silent, 10 min
courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York, © James Riddle

The film captures time as a compression of events and tiny gestures. At a slow, quiet pace, we watch a series of small actions that take on symbolic meaning precisely because of their everyday nature. Riddle transforms everyday life into a space of perception where even the slightest movement can resonate as a meaningful impulse.

Paul Sharits, Sears Catalogue 1–3, 1965
b/w, silent, 0:28 min
courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York, © Paul Sharits

This extremely short film (28 seconds) is an early example of Sharits’s work with structural film. The series of rapidly alternating images plucked from commercial aesthetics creates a visual whirlwind. It is a critique of both consumerism and radical formalism, with the film strip acting as a carrier of visual violence as well as rhythmic order.

Paul Sharits, Dots 1 & 3, 1965
b/w, silent, 0:35 min
courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York, © Paul Sharits

A short optical composition based on repetitive patterns of dots created directly on the film strip. Sharits does not work with a camera here but with the material of film as a physical medium. The film becomes a visual stroboscope that attacks the viewer’s senses and perception of time.

Paul Sharits, Wrist Trick, 1965
b/w, silent, 0:28 min
courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York, © Paul Sharits

Another of the artist’s minimalist works, in which the film strip is transformed into a visual unit of time. It consists of a rapid sequence of images depicting a human wrist making a simple gesture. The film demonstrates Sharits’s tendency to decode the human body into pure rhythmic and visual abstraction.

Robert Watts, Trace No. 24, 1966
b/w, silent, 4:20 min
courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York, © Robert Watts

Watts creates a linear sequence of movements or objects that leave behind a trace – be it literal or figurative. The film is a silent study of the process in which a gesture leaves a visual memory. In the spirit of Fluxus, it is more of a document of a given moment than a traditional ‘film’ with a plot.

Robert Watts, Trace No. 23, 1966
b/w, silent, 3 min
courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York, © Robert Watts

A companion piece to the film Trace No. 24 in which the author explores the relationship between an object, space, and its recording. The camera becomes a neutral witness to the event and, at the same time, a co-creator of its materialisation. Both Trace films build on the concept of performative minimalism.

Pieter Vanderbeck, 5 O’Clock in the Morning, 1966
b/w, silent, 5:20 min
courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York, © Pieter Vanderbeck

In this work, Vanderbeck explores the physics of movement and visual rhythm through the fall and flight of objects in space. The film is an almost scientific study of physicality; yet at the same time it is a poetic meditation on gravity, time, and weight.

Wolf Vostell, Sun in Your Head, 1963
b/w, silent, 7:10 min
courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York, © Wolf Vostell

The film combines fragments of television broadcasts with textual and graphical interventions, creating what is known as television décollage. Vostell destroys the linear logic of the media and transforms mass culture into a stream of distorted images that oscillate between beauty and chaos.

Here Ono sets in motion an entirely intimate gesture – walking captured through a close-up shot of a human backside. The repetition and rhythm of the individual steps creates a kind of performative score of the body, combining everyday banality with poetic absurdity.

George Landow, The Evil Faerie, 1966
b/w, silent, 0:28 min
courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York, © George Landow

In this short film, Landow (later known as Owen Land) creates a playful, ironic micro-narrative. The fragmented hand gesture on a roof, the appearance of the inscription ‘Kodak Girl’, and the strange combinations of objects give the impression of a Dadaist diary from another reality.

In One the camera captures the flame of a candle in an extreme close-up. The film is shot in slow motion and lasts five minutes, during which time one expects the flame to burn out. Ono works with the themes of waiting, time, and transience – the camera is stationary, but the viewer becomes part of the invisible plot. This radically simple image transforms into an intense meditation.

Jones’s film is an almost abstract study of smoke, recorded with a high-speed camera. The tendrils of smoke, slowly dissipating in space, are perceived here as visual music – movement without a body, presence without words. Jones combines the approach of the Fluxus movement with an elementary performance of transience.

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