Sleepover!

At Anneliese's. As soon as we got the invite on Friday, Nina has been counting the hours until 5 p.m.. Based on the clues sent to my cell phone, the first order of business is the solution of some kind of micromystery.

Fluxus Sours

Tonight, Mari and I went to the Neo-Futurarium to see Greg Allen's latest greatest: Mr. Fluxus, an experimental "interactive exhibit/performance." It was our our first date in months . The reviewer at Time Out: Chicago does a good job of describing what we saw (and I've included a video of one the perfomers who performed a dance not unlike the one we saw him do before the wedding described below):

In Fluxus, life doesn’t imitate art, it is art. And you are the artist. . . . Named by artist George Maciunas in the 1960s, Fluxus (Latin for “flow”) became a loose alliance of artists like Yoko Ono and Joseph Beuys who worked in creative forms from performance to music to sculpture, seeking to strip art of its “professional, parasitic and elite status” and replace it with “art-amusement,” a simple, pretense-free experience not unlike, in spirit and form, the Neos’ long-running, lo-fi juggernaut Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind.

Another Fluxus tenet, the “self-sufficiency of the audience,” drives the flow of Mr. Fluxus, which essentially is a series of installations in the Neo-Futurarium that engages all of its participants’ senses through interaction with the ordinary and the extraordinary. Traveling in a small group, we watched some players literally attack a piano, made music, tasted some acutely sour candy, smelled chocolate-chip cookies, had the chance to picket, and planned a wedding, among other things. Ephemeral and simple, personal and communal, Mr. Fluxus is difficult to evaluate because, well, it only is what it is because you are there.

During the course of the evening, we wrote poems, drew pictures, stuck our fingers in mystery boxes, cut the clothes of two performers, and Maria played the cello at a Fluxus wedding (see the image at right). We both tasted some of the "acutely sour candy" referred to above and brought some of it home with us for Jaime and Maria Rosa to try (see the video below). Jaime's facial expressions were my favorite part of the evening; and now they are recorded for all the world to enjoy.