Rethinking Aesthetic Education

: Fluxus and the Pedagogical Imperative of Process

Abstract

This thesis philosophically explores the interdisciplinary, experimental practices originating from the art-network known as Fluxus. Through the appraisal of a framework based upon the ontology of process, it ultimately contends how their processes have wider implications with regards to ‘rethinking’ aesthetic education. Whilst there is already the attempt to exemplify how a ‘Fluxus way of thinking’ can augment current institutional educational practice, this research seeks to expand the educational frame of reference to outside of institutional prehensions. Without focusing on the pursuit of instrumental ‘value’, it endeavours to develop the pedagogical qualities residing within the work itself. By foremost problematising not only the entrenched dualism perpetuated by Western metaphysics, but also the static immobility attributed to experiencing art which traditional aesthetic theory maintains, Fluxus works conjointly mobilize thought and experience towards flow and flux. Movement and change. Process in this way, comes to be understood as the spatial-temporal nexus where the work becomes. Consulting both literature, and examples of the work itself (Event Scores, Fluxkit objects), along with the additional analysis of Happenings, which simultaneously arose at the same time as Fluxus this research attempts to uncover the deep and effective pedagogical schema that pertains to a phenomenological experiencing of art that is somewhat close to what Dewey explicated, of art as experience. Being that Fluxus is regarded as a ‘social’ development, rather than an aesthetic one, it is on the whole advanced as offering a coalescence of principles (anti-art, dissolution between art and life, depersonalization, non-objecthood, intermedia, chance) that constitute to a democratic, open-ended aesthetic space. A space that invites participation in embodied ways of thinking, which through the process of the work’s creation, originates a pedagogical moment of either hermeneutic contemplation of one’s orientation in the world, or on the other hand, an interruption of it: one of art’s greatest achievements.

Date of Award	28 Mar 2025
Original language	English
Supervisor	Emile Bojesen (Supervisor) & Inga Bryden (Supervisor)