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Eric Andersen (artist)

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For other people with the same name, see Eric Anderson (disambiguation).

Eric Andersen (born 1940 in Antwerp) is a Danish artist associated with the Fluxus art movement. He lives in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Eric Andersen's artistic activities invite the audience to look at life from new, unexpected perspectives. It can deal with widely different phenomena such as: composing music, the function of museum institutions, the postal system, art or ethnological collecting to natural phenomena such as our circulation around the sun or the functions of or scent. His activity is intermedial, that is to say that he does not use traditional artist's materials and that meant that he and others broke with what kind of issues/subjects art could include.

Life and work

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In 1962 Andersen first took part in one of the early concerts given by Fluxus held during the Festum Fluxorum in the Nikolai Kirke (Nicolas Church) in Copenhagen.[1] He soon took an early interest in intermedial art.[2][3] In his Opus works from the early 1960s, Andersen explored the open interaction between performer and public,[4] developing open self-transforming works, such as arte strumentale.

Eric Andersens most eminent works include: Hidden Paintings, Crying Spaces, Confession Kitchens (Mitologia della lingua, Lawns that turn towards the Sun, Opus 51 - I HAVE CONFIDENCE IN YOU, Mariane - Artificial Stars and PLEASE LEAVE.

Hi's performances depend very much on the public. This is true of not only his Fluxus actions but also his installations, to which the public may be prompted to contribute. From 1962 to 1966 he worked closely with Arthur Kopcke. Andersen turned in the late 1960s to mail art and then in the 1970s was concerned with geographical space.

Already during the 1960s, Andersen began to take an interest in using computers. Unlike the other pioneers in this time, he did not use them to create images, but was fascinated by the algorithms and how he could use them to control the audience. His work opus 1966 is an early form of artificial intelligence, consisting of a poem, which constantly recreates itself. In 2023, he transformed this work into a choral piece in connection with an exhibition on artificial intelligence in Chicago.

Andersen was often a guest in the former East Block countries and was essential as a connector of avant-garde movement between the West and East Pacts on each side of the Iron Curtain. In 1966, he held a three-day event in Prague with the Fluxus artists Tomas Schmit and Milan Knížák. Those were the first Fluxus events in Czechoslovakia. In Poland he exhibited in Galeria Akumulatory 2 in Poznań and in the Galeria Potocka in Kraków.

In 1985 he arranged the Festival of Fantastics in Roskilde, Denmark. In the year in which Copenhagen was Europe’s cultural capital, 1996, Andersen arranged a three-day event Margrethe Fjorden Intermedia festival. Here he performed, among other things, the compositions: parachute-jumping, helicopters, mountaineering, live sheep and 500 singers walking on water.

2017 appeared the book The Glorious Way of Unproductivity by Per Brunskog. In the spirit of Eric Andersen's intermedia tradition, this book is not a biography, but takes the form of a textbook in intermedia, based exclusively on Eric Andersen's work. The book is so far only available in Danish.

Eric Andersen opposes those who describe Fluxus as an: art movement or -ism, as he points out that it was just a global network of artists, but that they had no common form of expression or goal. Or those who designate Fluxus with the term neo-dada, when he mean that Dada was obsessed with the definition of art; while those who participated in the Fluxus events were indifferent whether they were creating art or whether what they were doing was any other form of human activity.

Footnotes

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  1. ^ Owen Smith (1998) Fluxus: The History of an Attitude, San Diego State University Press, p.83
  2. ^ The Fluxus Reader by Ken Friedman ISBN 0-471-97858-2 Page 43, Page 44, Page 125
  3. ^ Hannah B Higgins, "The Computational Word Works of Eric Andersen and Dick Higgins" in H. Higgins, & D. Kahn (Eds.), Mainframe experimentalism: Early digital computing in the experimental arts, p.283
  4. ^ Higgins, Hannah. Fluxus Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. ISBN 0-935640-40-1 p. 150

See also

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References

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  • Owen Smith (1998) Fluxus: The History of an Attitude, San Diego State University Press
  • Block, René, ed. 1962 Wiesbaden Fluxus 1982. Wiesbaden (BRD): Harlekin Art; Wiesbaden: Museum Wiesbaden and Nassauischer Kunstverein; Kassel: Neue Galerie der Staatliche, 1982.
  • Friedman, Ken, ed. The Fluxus Reader. Chicester, West Sussex and New York: Academy Editions, 1998.
  • Gray, John. Action Art. A Bibliography of Artists’ Performance from Futurism to Fluxus and Beyond. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1993.
  • Hendricks, Geoffrey, ed. Critical Mass, Happenings, Fluxus, performance, intermedia and Rutgers University 1958–1972. Mason Gross Art Galleries, Rutgers, and Mead Art Gallery, Amherst, 2003. ISBN 0-8135-3303-1 Page 85
  • Hendricks, Jon. Fluxus Codex. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1989.
  • Jon Hendricks, ed. Fluxus, etc.: The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection. Bloomfield Hills, Michigan: Cranbrook Museum of Art, 1982.
  • Higgins, Hannah. Fluxus Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. ISBN 0-935640-40-1 p. 150
  • Kellein, Thomas. Fluxus. London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995.
  • Milman, Estera, ed. Fluxus: A Conceptual Country, [Visible Language, vol. 26, nos. 1/2] Providence: Rhode Island School of Design, 1992.
  • Moren, Lisa. Intermedia. Baltimore, Maryland: University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 2003.
  • Paull, Silke and Hervé Würz, eds. How we met or a microdemystification. Saarbrücken-Dudweiler (Germany) 1977, Engl.-German, AQ 16, Incl. a bibliography by Hanns Sohm.
  • Phillpot, Clive, and Jon Hendricks, eds. Fluxus: Selections from the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988. ISBN 0-87070-311-0
  • Schmidt-Burkhardt, Astrit. Maciunas’ Learning Machine from Art History to a Chronology of Fluxus. Detroit, Michigan: Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, 2005.
  • In the spirit of Fluxus by Elizabeth Armstrong, Janet Jenkins, Joan Rothfuss, Simon Anderson, Walker Art Center. ISBN 0-520-22867-7 page 37
  • New York Magazine Going with the Flow - 7 Mar 1983 - v. 16, no. 10, Page 104
  • The invisible masterpiece by Hans Belting, Helen Atkins ISBN 0-226-04265-0
  • Happenings and Other Acts (Worlds of Performance) by M. Sandford ISBN 0-415-09936-6 Page 77
  • Fluxus: today and yesterday by Johan Pijnappel ISBN 978-1-85490-194-1 Page 28
  • The readymade boomerang by René Block, Art Gallery of New South Wales ISBN 0-9596619-6-4 Page 138, 147
  • New art examiner by Chicago New Art Association, Pennsylvania New Art Association, Washington, D.C. New Art Association. v. 21 - 1993 page 21
  • Philosophy and love by Linnell Secomb ISBN 978-0-7486-2368-6 page 138
  • Upheavals, manifestos, manifestations By Klaus Schrenk, Städitsche Kunsthalle Düsseldorf ISBN 3-7701-1675-5 page 26, 27
  • Modernism since Postmodernism By Dick Higgins ISBN 1-879691-43-4 page 77,108
  • Action art By John Gray ISBN 0-313-28916-6 page 106
  • The cinema of Scandinavia By Tytti Soila ISBN 1-904764-22-3 page 225
  • Networked Art By Craig J. Saper ISBN 0-8166-3707-5 page 161
  • The Fluxus constellation Sandra Solimano, Eric Andersen, Villa Croce (Museum : Genoa, Italy) ISBN 88-87262-20-9
  • Pop art Marco Livingstone, Dan Cameron, Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal ISBN 2-89192-168-2 Page 234
  • Neo-avant-garde By David Hopkins, Anna Katharina Schaffner ISBN 90-420-2125-X Page 158
  • A flexible history of Fluxus facts and fictions By Emmett Williams, Ann Noël ISBN 0-500-97664-3 Page 40,120
  • Berlinart 1961-1987 By Kynaston McShine, René Block, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art ISBN 0-87070-255-6 Page 69
  • Artistic Bedfellows By Holly Crawford ISBN 0-7618-4064-8 Page 159
  • Not the other avant-garde By James Martin Harding, John Rouse Page 278
  • Commentaries on the new media arts By Robert C. Morgan ISBN 0-9635042-0-7 Page 5
  • Annual Bibliography of Modern Art, 1991 By Museum Of Modern Art Library ISBN 0-8161-0557-X Page 176
  • "The Computational Word Works of Eric Andersen and Dick Higgins" by Hannah Higgins in H. Higgins, & D. Kahn (Eds.), Mainframe experimentalism: Early digital computing in the experimental arts, pp. 279–287
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