Fluxus is an international avant-garde network of artists and composers founded in the 1960s and continuing into the present. The Latin word Fluxus means “flowing”. In English, a “flux” is a flowing out. Fluxus artists hold in common simplicity and anti-commercialism; chance, accident, and humor. Styling themselves as an alternative to academic art and music, Fluxus established a democratic form of creativity intended to be open to anyone. Collaborations were encouraged between artists and across artforms, and also with the audience or spectator. Two factors in the social constitution of Fluxus stand out. One was its tricontinental membership; the other, the strong presence of women. This difference marked more than a difference between Fluxus and other postwar avant-garde collectives. Fluxus women made a radical contribution to the larger stream of feminism in art and public life, something unimaginable in the male-dominated Dada group and unthinkable to a group such as the Surrealists, whose reliance on sexual imagery and male fantasies made their group something of a phallocracy. In this course, we will consider these opportunities, and constraints, through the work of Fluxus artists and composers such as Alison Knowles, Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann, Mieko Shiomi, Takako Saito, Shigeko Kubota, Alice Hutchins, Nye Farrabas, Kate Millett, Carla Liss, Alice Hutchins, Charlotte Moorman and others. This course counts towards the Gender Studies minor.