The FluxUoS Re-enactment Happening
A pilot project was initiated in The FluxUoS Re-enactment Happening: Festival of Research, at the University of Salford in 2019. Talbot and Wilkie and two UoS students re-enacted several Fluxus Art Movement sketches in front of a live audience.
At the Leicester Comedy Festival 2021 panel “Is Comedy Art? Beyond a Joke Discussion” 6th February 2021, eminent comedian Stewart Lee and leading critics and practitioners including Oliver Double and Sophie Quirk surmised that comedians do not like to let people know that stand-up comedy is an art! They deduced that the comedian's serious-art-making is missed by critical/art/social commentary because of the 'shambolic'/non-serious figure and the cultural status of the comedian. This leads us to speculate about the role of the performance artist. Is a cultivated persona a form of artistic expression? How do both forms speak to the encounter between an individual and the audience. Both forms deal with irrationality. Art, like Comedy, is ‘where something happens’.
The staging of these comic skits and provocations, mirrored the original staging of the 1960s art events, in that the enactments took place in a non-theatre (library) space and the audience were neither traditionally, self-selective art nor comedy spectators.
The audience responses mirrored the performance of the original Fluxus event sketches, in that reactions ranged from enjoyment through bewilderment to annoyance.
Most satisfyingly of all, the uncertainty as to whether what had been witnessed was ‘Art’ or ‘Comedy’ led to the rationale to provide further experimental and philosophical bases for the intersections of Comedy and Performance Art and ways in which these areas interrelate.
