International curator explores radical music

Press Release
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
27 November 2000

International curator explores radical music
at City Gallery

The provocative, experimental and sometimes downright odd music of the ‘Fluxus’ art movement will be explored by internationally respected curator René Block this week.

Mr Block is perhaps best known in New Zealand as the curator of Toi Toi Toi - Three Generations of New Zealand Artists (Auckland Art Gallery, 1999). He will present a lecture and video presentation called Fluxus Music – The Everyday Event at the City Cinema, on Friday 1 December, at 6pm. The lecture is presented in association with the Goethe-Institut Wellington.

“We are honoured to welcome René Block to Wellington,” says Paula Savage, director of City Gallery Wellington. “This will be a chance for people to learn more about the experimental music that was part of Fluxus.”

Fluxus emerged in Europe and New York in the 1950s and 60s, and has been described as a “multidimensional web of meetings, presentations, ideas and objects”. Key figures were John Cage, Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys and Nam June Paik. Writer Peter Frank says the often playful Fluxus artists engaged in an aesthetic that encompassed “a reductive gesturality, part Dada, part Bauhaus and part Zen, and presumes that all media and all artistic disciplines are fair game for combination and fusion….[Fluxus artists] remain a network of radical visionaries who have sought to change political and social, as well as aesthetic perception.”

Since 1997, Mr Block has been the director of the Kunsthalle Museum Fridericianum in Kassel. His tour to New Zealand coincides with the Fluxus in Germany 1962 – 1994 exhibition at the Govett Brewster Gallery. The lecture runs approximately 90 minutes. Entry will be on a ‘first come, first admitted’ basis.

ENDS

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