Dear Jenny, > Your thoughtful note had me thinking. I may talk with my committee again.
Thank you for your answer, and I hope you will, as Fluxus is still a very large field to explore, and it would be a pity that brilliant students like you have to change their own inclinations because of career or strategic considerations made by outside people. A Ph.D. is a long venture, and you have to be sure to be willing to spend years on a subject before choosing it, moreover your doctorate subject will stick on you as a label, even long after you've finished with it, so you'd better be sure that what you're going to do is what you're willing to do (and even in some extreme cases, what you're willing to be). Sorry to get on my personal experience, but being working for several years now on my own doctorate (on Fluxus, as you might have guessed), and having organised couple of flux-events, here in France, has put on me (in France, I mean) the"Fluxus Specialist" label (which I'm not really ready, nor able, to carry on, of course), and I know that it will take years for me to be able to prove that I can work on something else (if I ever want). History of art (at least here) is a very tiny milieu, where everyone is looking at each other, and where intellectual lazyness is very well shared, so that it's very easy to reduce what one is doing to its caricature. Moreover, among the "colleagues" in history of art, Fluxus is still often considered as a gag, or a sect, or an historical cul-de-sac, so that it's quite uneasy to explain it's a much worthy object... > It may be a mistake of me not to consider going elsewhere, but a good > scholarship and a teaching fellowship at a large American university make it > hard to leave. Besides, this is where my boyfriend studies medicine, and if > he does his residency at the university hospital, we'll be here even after I > finish. Who could resist such arguments? Love, work and good living conditions... > Thought I would add to your comment that Fluxus is related to Zen in some > direct ways. David Doris wrote a very useful article on Fluxus and Zen in > The Fluxus Reader. Of course it is, I just did not want to enter into long explanation about that (zen, koans, Yi King, and all the like), and was trying to make a poor joke... Good luck in your attempts, Bertrand
