Use of text in Fluxus

Fluxus was ignored and neglected in art historical studies in the 1970s and 1980s, and has a wide influence on contemporary art practices today employing performance, happening, text, and ready-made. Fluxus was an interdisciplinary movement in which text has been used excessively. This thesis presents a chronological examination of the use of text from the Arts and Crafts Movement to the emergence of Fluxus in the 1960s. It seeks to answer how the text has been used before Fluxus and how Fluxus artists used text regarding i) form ii) content iii) language use and display. Five Fluxus artists' text-based works were analyzed with close reading and literary analysis techniques. The findings have shown that Fluxus is a proto-conceptual movement, Fluxus artists use text in various forms and deconstructively, and poetically, use it as instructions for the realisation of performance, and use language as a tool to liberate from the logical and linear structure of language in order to be free from artistic categorizations. Keywords: Text art, Anti-art, Language and art, Fluxus, Fluxus and text use