Attention-activism art has a half-century lineage from Fluxus through Ono to Abramović
Evidence
These kinds of “artworks” have a joyful and somewhat madcap-surreal lineage. One can trace a line back through the performative hijinks of the regal Marina Abramović (whose The Artist is Present of 2010 gave museumgoers the opportunity to wait in line for a chance to sit across the table and absorb a deep, eye-locked séance with the artist herself—intersubjective attention at its most melodramatic), back through the gamesome instructional art of Yoko Ono (whose Fly piece of 1963 invited folks to do just that—as best they could—with a stepladder sometimes provided), to the “action poems” and score-based works of the Fluxus group (if you’ve never heard of them, check it out!). And then there were the “happening”-like art pieces of the same era, which encouraged people to register the heightened experience of a collective awareness of sometimes pretty ordinary hangouts. Lots of little “recipes” for mixing up collective experiences of shared attention. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 378
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the chapter program’s claim that collective attention rituals are the organizational form of resistance; these art-historical precedents are its non-political prefigurations. — connects to: Performance and Fluxus artists retroactively read as fighters against commodified attention — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 379; Great art creates attentional situations, not just artifacts — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 383; Contemporary attention art descends from a lineage of score-based performance and happening traditions.
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Performance and Fluxus artists retroactively read as fighters against commodified attention — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 379; Great art creates attentional situations, not just artifacts — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 383; Contemporary attention art descends from a lineage of score-based performance and happening traditions.