The Brooklyn Rail

A black attaché case sits open in a vitrine, displaying its maroon lining. The eclectic contents of the briefcase, a Fluxkit assembled around 1969, include a two-inch glass bottle labeled with stylized text and a cartoon—Water Music (1965), by composer Mieko Shiomi—and red napkins sporting color lithographs of disembodied mouths—Flux Napkins (1967), by video artist Shigeko Kubota. These playful, unpretentious curios are just two of the objects in the overflowing Fluxkit, among the hundred-odd works now on view in Japan Society’s four-woman show Out of Bounds.

Curated by art historian Midori Yoshimoto and Japan Society’s Tiffany Lambert and Ayaka Iida, the exhibition surveys the transnational Fluxus network (1962–78) through the lenses of geography and gender, focusing on four members—Shiomi, Kubota, Yoko Ono, and Takako Saito—whose prolific output of performances, scores, and “anti-art” objects is enriched when considered in conjunction with their experiences as Japanese women in New York in the 1960s. Their commonalities shed light on the nuances, tensions, and contradictions that emerged in their effort to embody a set of Dada-inflected ideals—fluidity, ambiguity, ephemerality—in both art and life.

Out of Bounds stretches across two parallel rooms on Japan Society’s second floor. The first pairs Shiomi’s work with Kubota’s, the second, Saito’s with Ono’s. A third, smaller gallery in between is given to the contents of Fluxkit (ca. 1969), flanked by festival flyers and 16mm Fluxfilms looped on a projector. The briefcase at the center of the show functions as an analogy for the social organization of Fluxus itself: a bounded container, it protects fragile contents like paper napkins while excluding undesirable elements. Similarly, Fluxus membership was conferred by the group’s idiosyncratic and influential founder, George Maciunas, who was known for “excommunicating” artists, as well as for his radical inclusivity. “George was color blind, gender blind,” according to art historian Barbara Moore. The bounds of the Fluxus container were permeable in either direction but continually reinscribed.

The “containers” in this exhibition vary in their literalness. There’s Shiomi’s Endless Box (1963–64), a wooden box containing paper boxes; Saito’s interactive musicbox “a” (1992), which makes noise when participants scoop loose seeds into it; Ono and Maciunas’s A Box of Smile (1971), a plastic case containing a mirror (their collaboration began when she debuted at his AG Gallery in 1961); and Kubota’s Fluxus Suitcase (1964), a weathered aluminum trunk that held her art supplies when she arrived in New York, having moved from geographical margin to center, outside to inside.

Other works, such as Saito’s painting Friends (ca. 1966–68), derive meaning from accumulation and boundary-drawing. In this horizontally-displayed, roughly three-foot-square composition, Saito, who is known for her chess boxes and penchant for paper cubes, used oil to render an aerial web of associations. The busy composition features more than twenty identifiable figures, including the artist in a corner, Maciunas in profile, wearing his distinctive wire-frame glasses, and fellow Fluxus members Dick Higgins, Joe Jones, and Alison Knowles. The vibrant colors, intersecting gazes, and overlapping figures can be read as a celebration of Saito’s intricate network.

As Knowles recalled in 2009, Saito was diligent and assisted Maciunas in many of his endeavors. She not only collaborated in the creation of multi-edition Flux objects but is also suspected to have assembled most of them. Notably, the production of Flux objects occurred after dinners that Maciunas organized for several weeks once Saito, Shiomi, and Kubota arrived from Japan. These nightly dinners were billed as communal gatherings but soon devolved into a familiar scene: the women artists shopping for groceries and cooking for their male counterparts. Eventually, when the women stopped cooking, the dinners stopped happening. Inclusion seemed to come with terms and conditions, either involving a double shift or negotiations to avoid it. While Fluxus was, for its time, exceptional in its inclusivity, Maciunas’s egalitarian vision for art did not nullify the race and gender of the artists who surrounded him.

Out of Bounds contains many subtle gestures. For instance, the first and last containers visitors encounter are soft bags rather than stiff briefcases. On one end of the exhibition is Ono’s Bag Piece (1964/2023), three semi-transparent sacks hanging on the wall. Ono said, regarding this work, “By being in a bag, you show the other side of you,” a “soul” without race, gender, or age. On the other end of the exhibition is Kubota’s Video Poem (1970–75), a single-channel video nestled inside a nylon sleeping bag, an artifact reclaimed from a romantic relationship. As the story goes, Kubota had made the sleeping bag for her then-boyfriend, Fluxus composer ​​Takehisa Kosugi, to use in a performance, at a time when she worked three jobs to support his music career. Later, when he wanted to give her one of his works, he gave her the sleeping bag. As suggested by her famous aphorism, “Video is Vengeance of Vagina,” printed on the wall next to Video Poem, the re-appropriation was an act of retribution. Between Bag Piece’s neutrality and Video Poem’s negotiations, the show suggests, lies a lesson for our quasi-egalitarian present.