Fluxbooks. From the Sixties to the Future

Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venezia

04 Marzo – 26 Aprile 2015

FluxBooks is an exhibition project dedicated to artist’s books. Divided into two exhibitions, which present artist’s books produced by Fluxus and the works of Bevilacqua La Masa’s young artists.

The numerous aesthetic experiences which alternated one another during the twentieth century found a happy medium for experimentation in the artist’s book. Increasingly easy to produce, thanks also to the spread of relatively cheap and simple-to-use methods of printing, it led to it being chosen, in some areas of poetry as a veritable tòpos, even in the most advanced forms of its negation.
Fluxus is undoubtedly one of the most prolific and irreverent moments of transformation of the book medium. In fact, the experiments by the artists associated with the group organised by George Maciunas, have profoundly marked the way the book object is conceived.The most obvious evolution, in its drastic negation of the book object itself, is without doubt the choosing of the most disparate of objects as books. Items which present themselves as enigmatic and completely unreadable if not as a metaphor that is closely linked to the poetics developed by the author of the book itself. These are the so-called “book object”, a definition that highlights the even more difficult assimilation of such a pointed position compared to an object that has always been the depository of human culture and recollection. The most daring evolution, even if today it is still perhaps the least analysed, is to be seen in graphic composition, which carries on the intentions of the historical avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century, and continues to influence contemporary production.