Fluxus, again ! A History of a Radical Experience 1952-1962-2022

New book published by Fondazione Bonotto edited by Gianni Emilio Simonetti

Fondazione Bonotto believes that Fluxus played a central role in the evolution of art in the last century, allowing art to free itself from all categories, genres, and forms .
But Fluxus was not a bolt out of the blue.
 Some previous situations, traces of which are highlighted in these pages, had already laid fundamental theoretical and experiential foundations for its germination.

Sixty years after its debut, we also believe it is important to reveal some elements that continue to exert a not always evident and recognized influence. 
With this small book, we thus hope to inspire new studies and insights into an aesthetic, utopian, and light-hearted experience, which, in one way or another, continues to escape any clear definition.

Fluxus was a cultural, visual, and social adventure that began in 1962. Far from wanting to be a nostalgic celebration, 1962 is not offered here as a starting year, but as the first landing on a journey that began a decade before, in 1952, thanks to John Cage at Black Mountain College. 
During the Sixties, linguistic and formal experiments emerge in a teeming fervor, poised between Europe, the United States and Japan, in an innovative paradigm, extraneous to the aesthetic conventions experienced up to that moment. Thus 1962 becomes the fulcrum of a perpetual development that leads to 2022, in the belief that art can be a mean of political domination over the form of the spectacle or, in other words, one of the original forms of praxis. Proceeding through synthetic narratives and close-ups, the volume returns a remarkably relevant experience of the post-war period, clearing it from myopic criticisms, relying on iconographic and archival materials belonging to Luigi Bonotto, one of the most relevant Fluxus collections in Europe

Gianni Emilio Simonetti (Rome, 1940), was part of the artistic/political experience of Fluxus. His artistic production, influenced by John Cage’s research, has resulted in concerts, performances and works in which the visual aspect of signs, symbols and colors generates a sort of musical score. An experimenter without categories, he has also tried his hand at theater and film directing as well as avant-garde publishing.
He has been a lecturer in Food Design at the Politecnico di Milano and in Cultural Anthropology at the IED. In 2017, a significant portion of his archive, from around 1962 to 2016, was acquired by the Beinecke Library of Yale University.

Texts by: Federica Boragina, Marina Morbiducci, Michela Morelli, Patrizio Peterlini, Gianni Emilio Simonetti

Danilo Montanari Editore
ISBN 978888544992