Anne Kirker

Senior Curator (Special Projects)
Queensland Art Gallery
Brisbane

Engaging Discontent: Fluxus printed matter
Some see Fluxus as the most radical and experimental art movement of the 1960s. Fluid and open-ended it pioneered what was to become known as 'intermedia', an umbrella term to encompass disparate activities including published multiples: print portfolios, artists' books, boxes with printed event scores. Spearheaded by George Maciunas, Fluxus brought concepts of chance, play and surprise into art and it has had an enduring legacy.

When Dick Higgins started his publishing enterprise Something Else Press in New York in 1964, the associated books and pamphlets became an important disseminator of experimental activity for performance, poetry, music and literature. the Press was the first publishing house in the United States to devote itself to what are now called 'artists' books'.

This paper will address both Fluxus editions and Something Else Press as complementary components. While the former have been regarded as ephemera (fragile components for weighty ideals), the books have deceptively conventional covers and it is only when they are opened that the joke is on us.

Anne Kirker is Senior Curator (Special Projects) at the Queensland Art Gallery, where she held the position of Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs from 1988 until 2001. She has held similar curatorial positions in leading public galleries in Auckland and Wellington, New Zealand. She trained in Fine Arts at the University of Auckland and later gained a Master of Arts (in Art History) at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Aside from an expertise in works on paper, British art of the early twentieth century and contemporary developments in the visual arts are her special fields of interest.  In 1993 she curated the exhibition FLUXUS and after... with Roger Butler and Francesco Conz and the Intermedia Avant-garde in 1997 with Nichols Zurbrugg. Since 1993 she has been actively involved curatorially in the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art series of exhibitions and she is currently working on a major contemporary Californian art exhibition for the new Queensland Gallery of Modern Art.

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