Intermedial Approach

Fluxus was an international art movement that was active from the late 1950 s to the early 1970 s.The broad Fluxus legacy has been integrated into the typical paradigm of contemporary art and is seen as one of the origins of many new art categories.However,the radically changing ideological context of the 1960 s not only directly contributed to the paradoxes of the Fluxus movement,but also created difficulties in understanding the boundaries of Fluxus,leaving recent Fluxus studies scattered between the one-way codification of art history and the interest in specific artists,the technically eclectic tendencies of media art,and the archaeological interpretations of media studies.The cross-referenced status of the Radicals reflects the increasingly complex relationship between art and media in the post-1960 s period.Against this background,this study is unique as a case study of the artistic thought of the Radicals in the following ways: first,by tracing the historical contexts of the entanglement of the intellectual resources involved in the Radicals;second,by using Dick Higgins(1938-1998),one of the key initiators of the Radicals,as an entry point to the central thesis of the Radicals;third,by using the comparative perspectives of art history,intellectual history,and the history of technology studies.The third is to use the comparative perspective of art history,intellectual history,and technological history studies,and to use the field of art and media as the extended boundary of the theory,in order to overcome the limitations of a single research method and thus to grasp the fluid nature of the radicals’ thought as a whole.The upper thesis of this study enters the site of the radicals’ work through the ideas of Intermedia proposed by Higgins,and reveals the coordinates of the radicals’ thought through an analysis of the inheritance and contradictions between the avant-garde tradition and the radicals’.The following thesis presents three perspectives on the Radical movement and extends to the development of artistic differentiation in the Radicals and beyond,further elucidating the Radicals’ approach to creation-"Reality as media",transforming the medium as technology into a medium as art,in the dialectical squeeze of both aesthetics/politics and randomness/modality,liberating the dialectical horizon of artistic production through the flip of media ontology.Ultimately,this study points out that the Fluxus movement,as a pioneering media experiment,is an example of the evolution of the dialectical system of thought and art practice of the 1960 s in a specific technological environment,and that its media specificity provides an alternative ideological path to the reality of art and media problems gradually becoming mutually exclusive.It is this turn,with the Radicals as an important turning point,that profoundly influenced the subsequent development of the relationship between art and media,marking the unique historical position and intellectual contribution of the Radicals,a turn that this study summarizes as the unfolding of the media dialectic.