Moving to a Dada God along Kierkegaard’s Existential Dialectic
“The first question in the earliest and most compendious instruction the child receives is, as everyone knows, this: What will the child have? The answer is: da-da. And with such reflections life begins, and yet men deny original sin.” – Søren Kierkegaard, Either Or, Volume I
The philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard constructs and describes an existential dialectic, which maps humankind’s ontological progression: aesthetic, to ethical, and finally to religious.[1]When this necessary progression is laid over top of the development of art from pre-Dada, to Dada, and finally to Dada’s evolution into historical and contemporary Fluxus, we can see that progress in art, from the decorative or aesthetic to the conceptual, maps to the Kierkegaardian existential progress of ontology from the aesthetic to the ethical. The next stage in Kierkegaardian dialectical evolution is from the ethical to the religious or spiritual, and although we see some examples of this in the Dada-descended Fluxus art “movement,” good potential for a much stronger completion exists, following Remodernist direction “towards a new spirituality in art.”[2]
In the quote at the top of the page, Kierkegaard means that people behave unethically because they don’t know what they want. Furthermore, according to Kierkegaard, this great hole, this nameless thirst, can only be filled and quenched by God. When the infantile human is presented with an aestheticdecision, the nonsense word “da-da” conveys the sentiment “I can’t choose!” Instead of choosing, the baby gives us “da-da” – an ethicaland intellectual alternative to choosing; the choice of deliberately not choosing, and of residing – perhaps comfortably, perhaps uncomfortably – in that ambivalence. But the baby only responds with “da-da” because it has to; it has no other, better options. A better option would be the spiritual– only this gives us an alternative to the “da-da,” which we accept because the aesthetic is so shallow and unsatisfying, amounting only to masturbatory sensual gratification.
Art theory and art history are Western academic disciplines. It follows that examples of scholarly work in the category of “art and spirituality” tend to directly reference Christianity, or are at least reliant on its terminology and concepts. This state-of-affairs is responsible for some resistance to the idea of a serious, contemporary, progressive scholarship of spirituality and art – it is assumed, or at least feared, that any text on that subject will reference Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling in order to demonstrate that the purpose of art is to glorify an Abrahamic God, and then not only maintain a regressive Eurocentric theological/scriptural perspective but work at undoing the Renaissance. But “spirituality” is not a dirty word, in the sense that it falls neither necessarily within the domain of stogy, white-bread old school-ism, nor necessarily within the domain of off-the-meter progressivism and new-age occult flower children.
Kierkegaard was a Christian. In fact, he has stated that the most important feature of his philosophy is how to be a better Christian[3]– he sees this as the highest attainable state of being. It’s best to avoid the term “Good Christian,” since it implies going to church regularly, keeping the Sabbath, staying current on church affairs, etc: acts that Kierkegaard saw as detrimental to a real, honest Christian faith, at least when they were allowed to become all-consuming. Kierkegaard saw “Good Christians” in Denmark in the 1800s, and denounced the hollow, unspiritual motions they went through as features of “cultural Christianity” – i.e., a Christianity that served a hierarchical social function rather than a personal, spiritual one.[4]
Kierkegaard’s writings were an influence on Dada thought[5]: specifically, on Dada’s rejection of the aesthetic, in what amounts to an ethical maneuver. Fluxus, the “art movement” (it has sought, and would seek, to term itself more broadly than this) with roots in the early 1960s, is a relative of Dada thought in the early 20thcentury, and George Maciunas (the author of the “Fluxus Manifesto”) asserts that Fluxus constitutes a direct-line descendant of Dada[6]– in fact, that Fluxus is a sort of contemporary “neo-Dada.” Potential exists in the still-living tradition of Fluxus for Dada (or “da-da,” the expression of the indecisive Kierkegaardian baby, representing all of humanity), to reside in the spiritual; Kierkegaard’s nihilistic proto-human might shape its babbling beyond “da-da” now, with a Fluxus toolkit, and give a coherent response to “What is it you want?” A contemporary Fluxus answer might replace “I don’t know!” with “God! (in a universal, pantheistic, not-necessarily-Christian sense!)”
The Stuckists and Remodernists (Billy Childish et al) assert that postmodern conceptualism – Dada offshoots, exemplified by works like Tracey Emin’s “My Bed,” which is more or less a remake of Duchamp’s “Fountain,” with angst substituted for tongue-in-cheek – is “in crisis,” partly because it lacks this element of spirituality.[7]Postmodern conceptualism is nihilistic: it is without purpose or feeling. It sits there, a pile of debris on the gallery floor, and if it does anything it might laugh at you a little bit, but that’s all. By definition, the most effective antidote to this sort of nihilism is a universal spirituality (this is the position taken by the Remodernists, whose name comes from the rejection of nihilistic Postmodernism, and the notion that early Modernism must be re-embraced), which tautologically amounts to the ultimate sense of purpose and meaning.
In Either Or, Kierkegaard constructed what scholars refer to as his “existential dialectic,” that illustrates the progression of the human state of being. His dialectic moved from the lowest state, one of aesthetics, to ethical, and finally to religious(or spiritual). The movement from aesthetic to ethical is a rejection of a shallow, primitive, decorative ontology, something with which early 20thcentury Dada thinkers and artists like Tristan Tzara and Marcel Duchamp, in their anti-art and conceptualism, were also concerned.
Considering the dialectic’s final move, from ethical to religious, both in a purely Kierkegaardian sense and in terms of the progression of artistic styles, is more complex. Although Dada and Fluxus never fully arrived at a spiritual or religious state, there have been weak examples of their attempts. It is possible to semantically alter the term “spirituality” such that almost any art practice can seem spiritual, but a stronger hypothesis would avoid such generalizations as “all Fluxus is inherently spiritual” (which might be true). Based on some knowledge of theological aesthetics (a broad and rapidly-evolving field that deals with the portrayal or representation of the divine), and knowledge of Fluxus as both a historical and contemporary movement, it should be possible to postulate this final stage of dialectical evolution in terms of Fluxus art.
Visual art, pre-“Dada revolution,” resides in Kierkegaard’s “aesthetic” existential slot. When Duchamp’s “Fountain” was put on display in the Salon des Refusés in 1917, this constituted a move from the aesthetic to the ethical, because the decision to reject aesthetics is concerned with differentiating between undesirable and desirable behavior. Art has one more step to go before it moves to the final place: it needs to shift one slot up to the religious, or spiritual – Kierkegaard’s Christianity constituted a more evolved and liberal spirituality than what many might associate with “mere Christianity,” a term used by C.S. Lewis, especially in his 1952 book of the same title.
Although to a degree artists in the Fluxus fold have done this already, for the most part it has not happened yet, with somewhat good reason: spirituality is a difficult subject to approach, artistically. The first things to come to many people’s minds when “spirituality and art” is mentioned are medieval iconography, the aforementioned Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, or mawkish “Jesus loves you” prints for sale in Bible belt gift shops. This association is unfortunate, and has something to do with the academic and urban art world’s suspicion that “spirituality” might necessarily be associated with dogmatic, regressive, anti-intellectual religion – it’s a reasonable suspicion, considering the rise of Fundamentalism in North America in the late 19thcentury, but it’s not necessarily true. In fact, as Kierkegaard tries to demonstrate, it’s necessarily the opposite: that dogmatic, regressive, anti-intellectual tradition, present in mid 19thcentury Danish Christianity as it is in contemporary North American Christianity, is indicative of the absenceof genuine spiritual content.
Existentialism deals with human existence – the human condition. Kierkegaard is regarded as one of the first existentialist thinkers (or a “proto-existentialist,” along with Nietzsche), and he directly influenced the writings of Sartre and Camus[8]. Existential philosophy tries to answer questions broadly related to ontology: what does it mean to be, to exist as a human being? What are the common problems we face as sentient entities in the universe, that arise from merely being alive, conscious, and making decisions based on free will (or the convincing illusion thereof)? “Dialectic” implies an inevitable progression; probably the most familiar example is Hegel’s historical dialectic, from which Marx drew his political insights. Kierkegaard dealt with a humanistic dialectic that covers inevitable states in the evolution of the human mind, spirit, and state of being – an existential dialectic, applicable to the human entity, but also applicable to the entity of art.
Kierkegaard’s dialectic was concerned with three states of being: aesthetic, ethical, and religious. The aesthetic stage was marked by self-indulgence and self-absorption, and above all, sensory experience. Kierkegaard’s disapproval of this infantile self-pleasuring mode of existence mirrors Dadaist thought in the early 20thcentury, and their move from parlor decoration and prettiness to a purely conceptual and idea-oriented art practice. Kierkegaard’s idea of an “ethical” person was someone who had cast off the trappings of the “aesthetic” life. As such, “ethical” is defined principally in the negative: it is defined in terms of what it is not. Similarly, Dada defined itself as it differentiated itself from existing art theory and praxis.
Dadaists would have disapproved of the definition and institutionalization of Dada that has taken place since its inception. Theorist Boris Groys goes so far as to guild the name of Duchamp and his “Dada Ethic” as the great unmoved mover of the postmodern avant-garde[9], something that would be ironic to patriarchs like Duchamp and Tzara, who intended their movement to be a “non-movement.” More interesting and relevant to inquiry than the history of Dada is an investigation of its lasting power: why are contemporary artists still concerned and infatuated with Dada, nearly 100 years after these ideas were introduced? One could cynically speculate that there simply haven’t been any good ideas since then, or more charitably state that the ideas themselves were so important and so revolutionary, that 100 years is not a long time, considering their scope and depth. Once the idea of “anti-art” is created, it is difficult to backtrack and resume a natural course of evolution; relatively minor developments like digital media, cinema, or interactivity seem trite and unimportant in the face of something as paradigm-shifting as the Dadaists’ ideas. Conceptualism is ongoing – Marina Abramovic, Yves Klein, Gillian Wearing, Yoko Ono, and many others pursue visual artistic careers in this vein. That is to say, their art is concerned with ideas, as opposed to aesthetics. Furthermore, this opposition to aesthetics is the same one that drives Kierkegaard’s existential dialectic from that realm to ethics.
Fluxus is a movement – or rather, “Fluxus is an attitude”[10]– that sprung up in the United States in the early 1960s. Although it paradoxically wishes to define itself as indefinable, like Dada, and probably like many (especially contemporary) art movements, it has classic features of an art movement, per se: patriarchs, archives, and manifestos; in particular, one manifesto, the Fluxus Manifesto, a hand-written, page-long document with paragraphs interspersed with copies of dictionary definitions of “flux.” The Fluxus Manifestowas written by George Maciunas, a Lithuanian who died young at age 46, four years older than Kierkegaard was when he died. By most accounts, Maciunas was a tyrant, whose strict control over Fluxus – over a small group of artists whose practical cohesion drew only from the fact that they “liked each other’s work”[11]– dissolved with his untimely death.
Fluxus is described in terms of four elements[12]: 1) Fluxus is an attitude; it’s not a movement or style. This means Fluxus is dependant only on the people who perform it (or draw it, sculpt it, score it, etc), rather than some unifying decorative or even conceptual standard. 2) Fluxus is “intermedia” (a word coined by Dick Higgins, another important Fluxus patriarch)[13]. This means that a lot of different media come together to form Fluxus projects – often text mixing with images, or those sculptural “combines” in the approximate style of Rauschenberg (although simpler, smaller, sillier, than Rauschenberg) that feature prominently in any visual catalog of Fluxus works. John Cage, the avant-garde composer, was also an important influence, as seen in Fluxus intermedia’s components of music and musical scoring.[14]3) Fluxus is simple. 4) Fluxus is fun. While it’s impossible to attest to the attitude of some of the artists (particularly Maciunas was, according to historical records and first-hand accounts, not the most pleasant, easy-going, or fun-loving person, although perhaps tormenting and sometimes excommunicating[15]members of his clique was fun for him), many of the end results of Fluxus projects are funny (like a performance called “Untitled Marching Piece,” by Maciunas, which entails a march through shin-deep snow by several artists in the original Fluxus fold, while they join hands in their winter coats and hats). Fluxus is further characterized by the use of chance or randomness, a haphazard, avant-garde or even postmodern scribbling and stitching-together, and incorporation of found objects (or “readymades”).
Perhaps the question should not be “What makes Fluxus the same as Dada?”, but rather “What makes Fluxus different from Dada?” A good answer might be that the seriousness of Dada, at least initially, when it was created in 1916, in part as an anti-war movement, contrasts with the deliberate silliness of Fluxus. However, in practice Fluxus turned out to be quite serious; imagine someone with a furrowed brow and humorless countenance, carefully planning the execution of a spontaneous, silly thing. The concept of “Neo-dada” further obscures a clear line between the two non-movements of non-art (Fluxus and Dada), in that Neo-Dada was even less of a definable movement than Fluxus. Maciunas himself used the label “Neo-Dada” until Raoul Hausmann, a member of the original Berlin Dada movement, suggested or demanded that he stop.[16]
The difficulty in academically delving into spirituality comes not so much from its being a vast and complex topic (although this is true), but rather more that a given academic audience might not to be familiar with it and associated issues. Terry Eagleton commented that critical/cultural theory in general – that body of postmodernist and poststructuralist writing that has found its way into almost every humanities discipline, from Art to Sociology to History to English – as mostly refusing to deal, among other things, with the spiritual.[17]In academia, “spirituality” tends to be either relegated to Christian theology, where it’s eaten up by exegesis (ironically, contemporary textual analysis borrows terminology like “exegesis” and “hermeneutics” from higher criticism – analysis of the Bible as text, literature, and history), or it’s shunted off to the domain of new age-ism and not taken seriously. Discussing universals, metaphysics, mysticism, consciousness, and reverence with an academic, humanistic audience is, to some degree, new territory.
Although in Kierkegaard’s dialectic, the final stage was written out, then and there, in Denmark in the 1800s, within the confines of Protestant Lutheranism, as “religious,” and not “spiritual,” after closer examination of Kierkegaard’s writings it becomes desirable and correct to re-term this final stage of dialectical evolution “spiritual,” because of Kierkegaard’s concern with ongoing religious evolution and the impossibility of religious perfection. Contemporary scholars of spirituality might think they have little to gain from a study of 19thcentury Danish mainstream Christianity, and they are probably right – Kierkegaard would have agreed with them. The first barrier to spirituality is often the idea that in order to be spiritual one has to “believe in God.” The word “God” is problematic to begin with: is it being defined as the sum of all reality, as a man in the sky, or somewhere in between? Further exploration requires a reductive approach: dividing the concept into three terms or concepts.
First, consider “mystery.” Spirituality attempts to answer questions that are unanswerable by scientific means. Bringing the discussion back to a flavor of Christianity – like Kierkegaard’s – that is itself liberal enough to apply to universals, one Bible verse stands out: “And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:7). The concept of mystery was important to Kierkegaard’s theology; part of the reason for his theological split from the Danish Lutheran church was that it saw knowledge of God – knowledge of the infinite, and of universals – as being attainablethrough higher criticism and logical scholarship of scripture.[18]Philippians 4:7 illustrates the essential mystery that should constitute the core of any effective spiritual system – those elements common to all religions (and those elements in concordance with progressive academic scholarship). This verse also illustrates that there are some things in the universe that simply cannot be understood or known through logical or scientific means, including textual analysis; human understanding falls short here, and the most we can hope for is to understand that it is not understandable, then pursue knowledge of or closeness to that “peace of God” via revelation, intuition, insight, meditation, and artistic expression.
Along with mystery, consider the term “reverence” – in essence, anti-nihilism. When we revere something, we respect it, and hold it dear; contrast this with the “God is dead” behavior that results when all universals and value systems collapse under the crushing weight of a ton of postmodern bricks. Nietzsche warned that nihilism would amount to the greatest threat that society would ever face, and that it would destroy not only God but the human spirit and its will to live. The antidote for this syndrome is the act of reverence. Without reverence, we cast everything off to the side, because everything is of equal, minimal value; there’s no reason to distinguish one thing from another, and the purpose of breathing in and out is lost.
Finally, in an attempt to if not define, at least make the concept of spirituality clearer, so that it might fit into the dialectic with which Kierkegaard is concerned, the idea of consciousness needs to be approached, if not studied. This is problematic. It’s tempting to simply throw out the philosophical problem of consciousness, rather than attempt to define something that is indefinable through scientific means (harkening to the first element of “mystery”). Presenting the phrases “my mind” and “my body” illustrates the problem of consciousness: who or what is the “me” in the subjects?
Together, these three concepts begin to give a somewhat clearer picture of a universal spirituality. And while these three terms are found in a spiritual, genuine Christianity – one that Kierkegaard would have valued – he was admitted that he, himself, fell short of this authenticity, and doubted the existence of perfect or near-perfect Christians.[19]Kierkegaard tells us that the best path is one where we are eternally striving for this ideal, while simultaneously acknowledging the impossibility of its attainment, along with our own imperfection. This might give a contemporary, progressive reader pause, because it smacks of “original sin,” something that often finds itself made into a scapegoat by liberal thinking, and with usually good reason: original sin can be used to push the notion that humankind is inherently bad or evil, and is in need of ecclesiastical guidance that amounts, simply, to hierarchical coercion – “original sin,” commonly understood, amounts to “what’s wrong with Christianity” in the eyes of enlightened secular humanists. But for Kierkegaard, “original sin,” as is mentioned in the quotation at the beginning of this essay, refers only to imperfection, and to the impossibility of perfection, while simultaneously striving for perfection. It is that striving that gives a Kierkegaardian spirituality its meaning, its mystery, and its reverence.
Because Kierkegaard’s theology was concerned with that “peace of God which passes human understanding,” and because of his criticism of 19thcentury Danish Christians and the fallacy of their spirituality, one can conclude that his idea of God and Christianity transcends any sort of fundamentalism that contemporary progressive academia might be inclined to associate with “Christianity,” and perhaps even transcends a purely, restrictively Christian spirituality altogether. If the central tenet of a theology is mysticism, then referring to scripture and dogma is a meaningless thing. This is the essence of the issue: Kierkegaard was a mystic, because the core of his Christianity is the fundamental impossibility of its completion.
Re-focusing on Kierkegaard’s existential dialectic – specifically, examining precisely how art moved from the aesthetic to the ethical, in that first step constituting the conceptual revolution of Duchamp and the Dadaists, circa 1917, to that state of affairs afterwards, such that art could never be the same again – is the next step. Marcel Duchamp started, in the early 20thcentury, what has come to be called “conceptual art” – art based on ideas, rather than aesthetics. For art to be good, under this paradigm, it has to be “interesting;” interesting has become the new beautiful. The present tense is used because, even though this revolution took place nearly 100 years ago, the art world is still stuck on this idea of ideas.
The most important thing to keep in mind, while processing the concept of art evolution mapping to Kierkegaardian dialectical evolution, is that moving from purely aesthetic art to conceptual art is the same thing as moving, existentially, from aesthetics to ethics. In other words, conceptual art is somehow inherently ethical. It might seem that the first thing to do is to quickly retreat into dictionary definitions, to make sure that everyone is talking about the same thing. In this case, what’s necessary is a retreat into Kierkegaard’s writings, to find out what, exactly, he means by “the ethical.” In fact, he defines it principally in the negative:[20]someone who is ethical, who has moved past the stage of the aesthetic and on the next stage in dialectical evolution, has done so because he has rejected the trappings of the aesthetic.
Before the dialectic is completed – before Dada/Fluxus moves from the ethical to the religious – it might be important to ask “Why do we need to do this?” Many have stated that contemporary art is in a sort of crisis;[21]that conceptualism, as it has been practiced throughout the past century, and especially in conjunction with postmodern impulses, has resulted in not only the destruction of craft, but ironically in the dumbing-down of ideas. The earnestness-born-from-simplicity of Fluxus sets it apart from postmodernism, a quality that gives the art movement much of its potential for an essential spirituality. In fact, some of the thesaurus synonyms for “earnestness” – devotion, fervor, passion, solemnity, zeal – are unmistakably religious or spiritual in their tone and connotation. Postmodernism, on the other hand, is unmistakably nihilistic in its tone and connotation – it embodies anti-spirituality. It is this very nihilism that not only Nietzsche, but contemporary artists like Billy Childish and his Remodernists, criticize and oppose when they see it in contemporary postmodern conceptualism. The solution to this “art in crisis” is that final move along the dialectic, from an ethical state to a religious/spiritual state. Furthermore, instead of utterly rejecting conceptualism, it might be possible, via Fluxus, to modify it by blending in that new spirituality.
There has not been much in the way of overt completion of Kierkegaard’s existential dialectic, but examples do exist; in Dada, there is Johannes Baader. In 1906, Baader (an architect and one of the Berlin Dadaists) designed “World Temple,” envisioned as an monument to religious harmony,[22]and in 1914 he wrote a book entitled 14 Letters of Christ, in which he seemed to identify with the purported author.[23]In 1916, he wrote a letter to Raoul Hausmann – that same Raoul Hausmann who admonished George Maciunas for describing his art as “Neo-dada” – that includes this: “You have eaten of the tree of life if you can hold both sides of God in balance and allow them to play within you according to your will.”[24]Although Baader is singled out, the Dadaists in general (particularly in Berlin) had these mystical tendencies: their way of exploring the world through play while avoiding rigorous description mirrors qualities in Taoism and Zen.[25]However, no one took their interest in spirituality, religion, or mysticism as far as Baader.
There are others. Jean Sellem is a scholar who sees 20thcentury Fluxus practice as entirely rooted in Kabbalah and Tantra.[26]This seems more a historical and cultural gesture, on Sellem’s part, than a spiritual or even religious one. Finally, George Brecht is a more contemporary example of a Fluxus artist who worked with Zen,[27]which is perhaps less a spiritual system than a self-help manual.
In spite of these examples, the contemporary state of “spirituality and Fluxus” remains unfinished; a more potent and important varietal has yet to be grown. The issue with examples like George Brecht’s Zen, Jean Sellem’s Kabbalah, and Johannes Baader’s Christian mysticism is the same one that many would take with Kierkegaard’s Christianity: that it’s necessarily limited in scope. In order for their Dada and Fluxus to be spiritual, these artists and theorists somehow felt that they needed to directly reference other systems of thought (mystical though they were) – they talked about Zen, about Kabala, and about Christian mysticism. There was nothing particularly original in this spiritual exploration; nothing uniquely Fluxus or uniquely Dada, and perhaps nothing universal.
Fluxus has been defined by hierarchical action: particularly and notably the iron hand of George Maciunas, as well as his institutional constructs. In this sense, historical Fluxus was like a religion – the kind of religion Kierkegaard disliked, and that now contributes to the suspicion in academia that any spiritual movement (artistic or not) is going to be a rephrasing of fundamentalism. Fluxus, 1962 – 1998, had all the qualities of an art movement, per se, and operated like an organized propaganda unit: “We had a project center, a traveling exhibition program, a studio in a Volkswagen bus, a publishing house, and a research program.”[28]Now that these enterprises have disintegrated, perhaps Fluxus practice is ready for a genuine, universal spirituality apart from inherently regressive and repressive institutionalization. The machinations of George Maciunas and Fluxus enterprise giving way to a free-form, and resultantly more genuine practice, parallels the continual disintegration of church authority, and the way that has encouraged a more personal, more effective, and more meaningful spirituality in people no longer tethered by and tethered to an institution.
The weak completion of Kierkegaard’s dialectic has been hinted at with historical examples. But what would a strong completion look like, or be like? There are several speculative approaches one could take, along with some things to take into consideration when postulating. Theological aesthetics, as a field, has problems: the prevalence of the Christian perspective, as well as a stultifying reliance on extant fields of study (theology and aesthetics), and a pedantic attempt to squash them together, somehow, with some hand-wavy textual gestures. The portrayal or representation of God is one of the core issues of theological aesthetics, and the Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth recommends against it:
No human art should try to represent – in their unity – the suffering God and triumphant man, the beauty of God which is the beauty of Jesus Christ. If at this point we have one urgent request to all Christian artists, however well-intentioned, gifted, or even possessed of genius, it is that they should give up this unholy undertaking – for the sake of God’s beauty. This picture, the one true picture, both in object and representation, cannot be copied, for the express reason that it speaks for itself, even in its beauty.[29]
Are the same difficulties there when spirituality is moved from a Christian platform – however liberal it might be – to a more universal stance? An obvious issue is that if it’s not possible to define what this “universal spirituality” is, precisely, then depicting it is tautologically impossible. However, perhaps this paradox is well-suited to Fluxus and its own innately paradoxical nature, and perhaps an over-arching spiritual quality of Fluxus is ready to provide the foundation for more overt, specific efforts at a contemporary “theological” aesthetics; one that is not necessarily focused on Western theological practice, but that is rather concerned with the expression of a more evolved spirituality with art.
After describing spirituality, the emergent task is to identify its end results – its existential effects on humanity. Relying on the concept of “anti-nihilism,” a focus on joy, serenity, and meaning follows. This terminology translates spirituality into a humanism that is far-removed from the ethereal, sci-fi qualities of Abrahamic religion, or even a Carl Sagan-esque cosmic spirituality of wonderment and awe. This humanistic form is the sort of spirituality that the Remodernists were concerned with when they gave their manifesto, which denigrates postmodern conceptualism for its bleak nihilism, hollow pastiche, and cobbled-together, commodified craft.[30]
But how does one illustrate joy, serenity and meaning, without being mawkish, overly-sentimental, or tacky? Music composed in a major key and films with happy endings present a similar problem. Because there is an inherent silliness and irreverence in Fluxus, some of those difficulties with mawkishness and sentimentality could disappear – Fluxus might turn out to be the ideal vehicle for artistic spiritual expression (or spiritual artistic expression), since it would paradoxically amount to “reverence through irreverence.”
Consider the four key factors of Fluxus again. Fluxus is small and simple: this harkens to religious values of simplicity and plainness, as expressed in the Shaker religious song “Simple Gifts”:
'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free,
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gain'd,
To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come round right.[31]
The ethic of simplicity fits the Zen that George Brecht expressed in his Fluxus projects, and the “small gestures” ethos evokes a humility, friendliness, and familiarity that could be described as spiritual, or welcoming to deeper spiritual exploration. Fluxus is an attitude, rather than a movement per se: spirituality should be an attitude, and not a movement; like Fluxus, a real, humanistic spirituality loses something when embroiled in an institution, because the institution – and not the human – becomes the goal of the spirituality. Fluxus is intermedia: spirituality is intermedia, in the sense that it should and cannot involve only one vehicle for expression – it must be a fluid, flexible thing. Finally, Fluxus is fun: spiritual expression is joyful.
The purpose of following Kierkegaard’s dialectic, when looking at the progression of art and art movements, is to use spirituality to cancel out the nihilism inherent in the contemporary postmodern avant-garde, and in fact all forms of creative expression. Kierkegaard is relevant because he saw the importance for an entity to move not only past aesthetic considerations to ethical considerations, but from ethical considerations to spiritual considerations, which is a dialectic that has been, in some small ways, brought to completion by Fluxus and Dada ideas. However, the nature of Fluxus is such that in it lies potential for a strong completion of Kierkegaard’s existential dialectic; with simple gestures, joy, reverence, independence from institutional practice, fluidity, and mystery, Fluxus could provide the vehicle for a post-postmodern spiritual solution to “art in crisis,” at the beginning of the 21stcentury.
[1]Søren Kierkegaard, Either Or, Volumes I and II(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944).
[2]Billy Childish, The Remodernist Manifesto(Chatham: The Hangman Bureau of Enquiry, 2000).
[3]Clare Carlisle, Kierkegaard: A Guide for the Perplexed(New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), 29.
[4]Louis K. Dupré, Kierkegaard as Theologian: The Dialectic of Christian Existence(Sheed and Ward, 1963), 164.
[5]Richard Shepperd, Modernism-dada-postmodernism(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000), 75.
[6]Hannah Higgins, The Fluxus Experience, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 167.
[7]Billy Childish, The Remodernist Manifesto(Chatham: The Hangman Bureau of Enquiry, 2000).
[8]Vincent Martin, Existentialism: Søren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus(Bloomington, IN: Thornist Press, 1962), 40.
[9]Mikhail Epstein, Aleksandr Genis, and Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture(Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999), 293.
[10]Sandra Solimano, The Fluxus Constellation(Genova: Neos Edizioni, 2002), 15.
[11]E. Williams, Mr. Fluxus(London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 45.
[12]Allan Revich, Fluxus Vision(Morrisville: Lulu.com, 2007), 2.
[13]Ken Friedman, The Fluxus Reader(Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1998), 203.
[14]Ibid., 114.
[15]Allan Kaprow.Essays On The Burning Life(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 245.
[16]Nicholas Zurbrugg, Art, Performance, Media: 31 Interviews(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 361.
[17]Terry Eagleton, After Theory(London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2003), 101.
[18]Donald D. Palmer, Kierkegaard for Beginners(New York: Writers and Readers Publishing Inc, 1996), 15.
[19]Søren Kierkegaard and Perry D. LeFevre,The Prayers of Kierkegaard(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963),137.
[20]Clare Carlisle, Kierkegaard: A Guide for the Perplexed(New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), 75.
[21]Herve Fischer, Digital Shock: Confronting the New Reality(Quebec City: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 103.
[22]Leah Dickerman, Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris(Washington DC: D.A.P./The National Gallery of Art, 2005), 417.
[23]Richard Shepperd, Modernism-dada-postmodernism(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000), 281.
[24]Ibid., 134.
[25]Ibid., 300.
[26]Ken Friedman, The Fluxus Reader(Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1998), 243.
[27]Ibid., 189.
[28]Ibid., viii.
[29]Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics(New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2000), 666.
[30]Billy Childish, The Remodernist Manifesto(Chatham: The Hangman Bureau of Enquiry, 2000).
[31]Elder Joseph Brackett, “Simple Gifts,” 1848.