- Venue
- East Street Arts
- Location
- Yorkshire
Compass invited Graeme Murrell to review Art’s Birthday, the second of six events in the Compass programme, From West to North to East to South and back. Graeme Murrell is an artist based in Huddersfield who performed at the first event in the Compass Programme in November 2010.
Fluxus “presumes that all media and all artistic disciplines are fair game for combination and fusion.”
http://www.artmovements.co.uk/fluxus.htm
In 1973 French artist Robert Filliou declared that art was born 1,000,010 years ago. Its genesis, on the 17th of January, occurred when somebody dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water.
So 38 years later Art is 1,000,048 years old, and like a modern Saint’s day it was of course celebrated on the closest weekend to its passing. Patrick Studios, the base of East Street Arts in Leeds, was just one of many venues worldwide hosting celebratory events.
In fact things got going the previous night with an artists’ dinner at Patrick’s. Artists from as far afield as Dundee, Belfast and Los Angeles converged to consume curry and raise a glass or two.
The next morning, Holus Bolus began. With wild and crazy weather outside, a fluctuating, somehow structured yet wonderfully anarchic overlapping series of events, installations and happenings cascaded through all four floors of the building.
Some impressions on travelling through Holus Bolus: high strangeness at the lounge lizard karaoke; dancing, drum and pan banging; children in tutus and false eyelashes enacting a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party; intense knitting in Woolly Corner; body shape casting in the Hope Cube, superimposed over live broadcast imagery from other worldwide birthday celebrations; a frenzy of podcasting, blogging and fanzine creation in the media hub; dressed crab consumption; a Polish birthday toast; somewhere a short film festival; and interventions not seen but always present. Many other things were happening, coming thick and fast, with a constantly shifting cast of audience participants moving through the spaces, engaging with whatever was on offer as they crossed the threshold into the melee.
Later, a lecture – The Mystery of Absolute Fluxus – given by artist Roddy Hunter, and ending in iconoclastic style with lecture papers tossed into the audience in homage to Fluxus artist Dick Higgins. A singsong too, followed by the traditional invocation of Art’s Birthday by sharing cake and joyous dancing to the Gangband.
I left inspired, excited and uplifted by the energy and diversity of the celebrations I had participated in. Elsewhere, a club night was kicking off, these artists weren’t about to stop. A car outside wore a birthday hat. Filliou’s ghost was blowing in the wind. If anybody suggests that Fluxus is dead, tell them that sponges are still being dropped in buckets, and then some.
Art’s Birthday 2011 was co-organised by East Street Arts and Art, Event and Performance at Leeds Met University. This was the second event as part of Compass Programme: From West to North to East to South and back. Led by East Street Arts and curated in collaboration with Compass Associates, this is a series of six events across the region between November 2010 and June 2011.
About the writer:
Graeme Murrell is an artist based in Huddersfield. His interest is mostly connected to experimental multimedia works involving urban spaces, text, sound and performance.
Since the 1990s he has been involved with several publication projects such as Frontal Lobe, a small press magazine of poetry, scurrilous writing and other rants and Electric Dogs, an unpublished novel. He has also been a member of avant-jazz band Trump and later the freeform music group the F*ks and the duo The Importance Of… He is the editor of the website Monocular Times which curates Situationist and other writing, and hosts the site of pressure group Huddersfield Gem who are dedicated to the preservation of Huddersfield’s Queensgate Market. He is a member of the Sedentary Committee for the Consideration of Gradual Change and continues to curate the Institute for the Preservation of Bad Art, which is dedicated to saving poorly executed artworks from landfill.
