Exactly 60 years ago, in 1963, the Lithuanian-American artist George Maciunas published a manifesto describing the aims of his brand new art movement called Fluxus. Avant-garde, it took inspiration from Dada and Buddhism, and focused on the de-commercialization and de-commodification of art. A new exhibit at the Japan Society highlights the work of four prominent Japanese women who were part of the Fluxus movement—Yoko Ono, Shigeko Kubota, Takako Saito, and Mieko Shiomi. Rejecting conventional approaches to art making, they embraced performance art, video sculpture, multisensory installations, and other underexplored forms of expression. For example, the exhibition features Ono’s Cut Piece (1964), a performance in which audience members were invited to cut her clothing off her body while she sat passively on stage. Also on view is Kubota’s Vagina Painting (1965), a video performance in which she affixed the handle of a paintbrush to her underwear and then crouched over paper, marking it with red lines and smears.
—Paulina Prosnitz