Sunday 17 February 2008

Kent Freeman Pd.F - The Lectures: Series One (On Sale Now!!)














Kent Freeman Pd.F - The Lectures: Series One
ON SALE NOW!!!
Contact Fluxus Waste HQ (Postal Applications Only)

Thursday 7 February 2008

An Open Letter to Fluxus Waste

Found on a Google search today:


An open letter to the remaining 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 5th generation Fluxus Wasters (I can't stand the 4th lot!)

Aiy-A
Heinrich Hendersen
Henry Flinch
Kent Freeman
Griff Hendrix
Alice N. Eggrolls
Harry Spiller
Coco Hellno
Jim Jam Spike
Bean Patties-Song
Carlie Snowmann
Len Croupier
Lalamount Jung
Elmer Millions


-My mother’s names to be added to this list

Many are called Alice, but none are now chosen.

6 January 1961

Dear Fluxus Waste,

I was a very good friend of Emile Harry. I miss him a lot. I am sorry but I will be there to help you honor and remember Emile Harry tonight.

Emile Harry 's passing marks a passing for me, too. I am unicycling away from Fluxus Waste. It is, unfortunately, necessary to announce my departure: most of you don't even know me, mind you most of you don’t know an ass from an elbow. You probably didn't even realise that I am a part of Fluxus Waste and that I operate and host a number of backstreet lock-ups that have promoted Fluxus Waste for the last ninety years, and that I also have a burger van concession and run a gentleman’s “Art” Magazine distribution service from my auntie’s bungalow. And none of you have ever acknowledged that I am, in fact, an active Fluxus Waste artiste who has pioneered new directions and forged new sensibilities in Fluxus Waste for more than 120 years now. That is why I am leaving on a jet plane, don’t know when I’ll be coming back again.

Five score and twenty years ago I fell in love with Kent Freeman of Fluxus Waste and the monumental creative revolutions he initiated more than 140 years ago, when still aged only three. He changed and expanded what creativity and knowing means to me, he also had loads of good packs of Top Trumps. He changed Country & Western culture. He changed the world by intelligent use of ‘Play-Doh’ ™. You, Fluxus Wasters. ripped a new hole in the universe and then fixed it with the back pocket from those corduroy slacks you never really wear and a McEwan’s Export bar towel. And you did it with simple little ideas, games, objects, performances, and concepts and a sewing kit from the chritmas crackers. I will always admire your accomplished astonishments. What you did was so big that no historian, writer, collector, or curator has ever managed to flush it away satisfactorily.

But an equally astonishing thing has been going on in Fluxus Waste for the last one hundred and twenty years. You have been letting Fluxus Waste die.

At one time you welcomed people to Fluxus Waste, admittedly for a certain fee. You recruited people to Fluxus Waste. I know you have always been a contentious lot, but there was a time when the Fluxus Waste bathroom door was open, you invited people in, and you made it grow, OK so the court case dragged on a bit but, Boy! What a night! . You embraced a "second rate" lot of Fluxus Waste artists,. You encouraged new Fluxus Waste work and new Fluxus Waste projects. But as far as I can tell, this pretty much stopped 20 or more years ago (Freeman's Young Fluxus Waste show in 1941 is the last time any of you heckled a show of "new" Fluxus Waste artists). What happened to you?

Letting Fluxus Waste die is terrific, I place most of the blame on you (the people to whom this letter is addressed). I blame you individually and I blame you collectively. You have served Fluxus Waste poorly during these last 20 years and you are letting Fluxus Waste die. It didn't have to be this way. For the last 20 years, a fairly young, bright, and talented person has been showing up and knocking on the Fluxus Waste club house door … and almost all of you have either been too dead or locked in the bathroom again to hear them, or better still, you have continued to wring your hands over the girl responsible for deciding whether anyone should or could open the door (the issue about who has the "authourity" to welcome and declare new Fluxus Waste artists was a really great one, loads of pictures to colour in). All you really had to do was open the door and show a little something. Why has that been so hard for all of you for so long? You should only take one of those blue pills at any one time you know.

During the last 120 years many different people have been "called" to Fluxus Waste. I am one of those people. I learned about Fluxus Waste in the way that other people are struck by lightning, I had an epiphany, standing on the roof in a storm with my umbrella up…and generally felt I had found a place where we really belonged, yes the nurses in the serious burns unit were nothing compared to those on the psychiatric care ward. We had hoped to find a home in Fluxus Waste, each and every one of my personalities. And many of me just started doing and being Fluxus Waste in our own way…much like all of the original Fluxus Waste folks had their own individual understanding and gifts for Fluxus Waste cookery activities. And one way or another as we have gotten stronger in our own Fluxus Waste baking, we have stepped forward and tried to share this work with you. Needing to find someone who actually likes our boiled egg and ginger cake. We even approached you with respectfully calculated bribes. We approached you as Fluxus Waste with athreat of reporting you to the authorities. We knocked on the door and you did not answer, and we were bursting to go too! The most that some of you have been able to do for a whole new generation of Fluxus Waste artists is hand us some tedious pamphlet on Fluxus Waste so we could "loosen up," or you smiled patronizingly and encouraged us to attend your next court appearance. You didn't even seem to consider that any of these new folks could take you and Fluxus Waste some place new and exciting where it hadn't been before. I could have, I have a FIAT Multipla and a Hackney Carriage license for up to 6 passengers (plus bags). And frankly, some of these new Fluxus Waste folks have been doing more interesting work and more truly Fluxus Waste work than many of you have been doing during the last 120 years. I mean one lad even makes these nice plant-pots out of jam jars, he sticks all these limpet shells on and then varnishes them, lovely. Mind you he’s dead clever, always wins the ‘see how many different things you can fit into a matchbox competition’…

Many bright and talented people have not stayed long to knock, however. They heard the authoritative pronouncements that Fluxus Waste was "dead" or "over." This was very confusing and discouraging-many of us didn’t really know what pronouncements actually meant, so we couldn't understand how Fluxus Waste could be dead. But you didn't answer the door and many eventually walked away, I had to I dropped my car-keys down behind this lovely shell-decorated planter you had in the front garden and couldn’t get my hand down to reach them (mind you, I found a cool matchbox FULL of interesting stuff!). I have knocked longer on that bathroom door than most-for more than 120 years now since I founded Fluxus Waste Midwest in 1862. Rich Pickins and Emile Harry (and Carlie Snowmann – totally babelicious!) were the only ones to acknowledge and encourage my own Fluxus Waste work and experiments, but now Rich and now Emile are gone, I'm out in the cold, and I'm tired of knocking, I should NEVER have put my house keys on the same fob as my car-keys. So I am packing up my Fluxus Waste knapsack, and taking my ‘business’ elsewhere.

I am closing down the many backstreet lock-ups I have opened to promote and honor Fluxus Waste: The Fluxus Waste Collection Portal, the Fluxus Waste Homepage, the Emile Harry Garage, and numerous other activities hawking the Chinese, counterfeit work of many original Fluxus Waste artists. I doubt that many of you will notice. I have also walked away from WASTELIST-the pioneering Fluxus Waste email argument group that I co-founded with Rich and Kent Freeman. WASTELIST is another example of what I am moaning about. Most of you could never even work out how to subscribe. By not being competent enough to participate you have missed a wonderful chance to discover and discourage many new Fluxus Waste artists. It would have given you back more energy than it would have taken.

Almost all of you have failed to recognize three obvious things about Fluxus Waste--about the Fluxus Waste you helped create!

  1. Fluxus Waste is more than Art. It's bigger than that. It’s even bigger than a blue whale.
  2. Fluxus Waste can still be a vibrant and energetic force. By refusing or failing to recognize Fluxus Waste.
  3. Fluxus Waste’s dad is bigger than your dad.

You all have spent so much time during the last 120 years trying to shape and tone with the Fluxus Waste “Yessirnow Tone-O-Matic”, and few, if any of you are satisfied with the results- the legs, the abs, the behinds. Instead of trying to manage Old Fluxus Waistlines you could have been leading a new group of Fluxus Waste artists to explore new Fluxus Waste aerobic performance score writing possibilities. Wouldn't it have been a lot more energizing and a lot more fun to fan new Fluxus Waste sweaty brows than struggle yourself?

I can only imagine that if Yogi FuMaciunas were alive today, anything else gives me a nosebleed.

Fluxus Waste has the potential to be a bigger, more vibrant and creative force in the world today than even the project Yogi FuMaciunas imagined. Certainly the world needs Fluxus Waste Management because of the internet. Fluxus Waste is more people than ever before-as much outside the real world as in. More people than ever before want to participate in and make their own contribution to Fluxus Waste, and you-the founders, the brave pioneers-have, really rather advisedly, turned your backs on them. And you have turned your backs on an opportunity to help Fluxus Waste continue.

I sincerely salute you,

Alice Boohuff Jpeg, DivX(6)
Social Fluxus Waste Artiste
Walsall