Dear Owen, sorry for having been so long to answer your quest, but things are crazy here, as usual...
About Fluxus in school. I guess the whole teaching is to be considered as a Fluxus situation, or at least as "performing art"(Filliou). After ten years of art teaching (and history of art teaching too) I'm now teaching art (and more precisely, how to teach art with children) to future teachers, people that just passed the exam to be teachers mainly in primary schools (we call them IUFM: University Institution for Teachers' Formation). Most of them have originally no concerns with visual arts, and I shall sensibilize them in 18 hours (6 times 3 hours), to get them able to teach art, at least 1 hour a week to children (18 hours, for a forty-two years long career...), anyway, this is not exactly my concern today. What I try to explain them is that their subjects shall allow each pupil to give his own interpretation, and that if everyone is doing the same, then the device they have established is not a creative one. As art teacher, my aim is to build a situation such as everyone can act his own interpretation of the given topic through a common system of different constraints: around few questions and notions (contrast, shape, colours etc.), stimulate not an answer but an interrogation of the proposed device, so that each pupil can take it within his own practice, and give an individual realization fully personnal. This is quite a difference with a very close situation which is the performance/happening situation, where the viewer is turned into an actor of the artistic situation. In fact, in the happening situation, the place of the work of art is still the artist: for example a Kaprow happening is always a kaprow's happening. But as a creative device build through a system of constraints (i.e. the instructions given to the viewer/actor), it is very close to an art teaching situation. The only thing is that in a pedagogical relationship, the acknowledged creativity is the pupils'one (which is why artists can be so bad teachers sometimes, they can't accept to deprise themselves from being the creative pole), even though this creativity arise inside a system built by the teacher. This, to me, is the situation created by Fluxus at its bests moments: they're the only artists that truly tried to displace the creativity center from the artist to the public/ the interpret/ the listener etc. (as wrote someday G. Brecht "what whe need now, is virtuoso listener). In her powerfull article, Ina Blom perfectly described how the event reach its completion in its performing moment, and how this performing moment is enlightened from inside by the written version of each event (cf Ina Blom, in Fluxus Virus, Schuppenhauer 1992) I'm sure I don't give you anything you hadn't thought of long before, but maybe it can still help. Bertrand
