An interesting movement, but don’t look too closely

Nearly every modern art movement includes at least one artist whose work goes a long way to define it.

Without Monet, Impressionism wouldn’t be what it was. That’s also true for Cubism and Picasso, Dada and Duchamp, Pop and Warhol. Even Op Art, Photo-Realism and Funk have Bridget Riley, Richard Estes and Robert Hudson, whose paintings and sculptures stand out no matter how they are categorized.

The same cannot be said of Fluxus, a minor movement that emerged in the late 1950s and is still beloved today, despite having produced not a single artist whose work is definitive. Not only are there no Fluxus masterpieces, very few of its works stick in one’s memory. That’s because they’re visually uninteresting -- all for good reason.

Visit “Betwixt and Between: The Life and Work of Fluxus Artist Dick Higgins” to see for yourself. At Otis College of Art and Design’s Ben Maltz Gallery, the informative exhibition is generally true to the spirit of Fluxus: Thinking about its books, banners, prints and paintings is far more amusing than actually looking at them.

Higgins (1938-1998) was a smart, fun-loving jack-of-all-trades who was so inspired by an experimental music class John Cage taught at New York’s New School for Social Research that he co-founded Fluxus with George Maciunas in 1958. The class roster is a who’s who of the post-Beat, pre-hippie avant-garde, including Allan Kaprow, George Brecht and Al Hansen. Its focus on the giddy intersections of music and noise, control and chance, performance and everyday life spilled over into the young artists’ extracurricular activities, eventually becoming the elusive heart and soul of their loose-knit movement, which they named for the idea that the only constant is change.

Books form the show’s backbone. They represent Higgins’ greatest achievement. In 1963, he founded Something Else Press. Over the next 10 years, he published dozens of books bigger publishers wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole. Three vitrines contain examples that demonstrate his wide-ranging intelligence, from Ray Johnson’s “Paper Snake,” Gertrude Stein’s “The Making of Americans,” and Marshall McLuhan’s “Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations” to some of his own works. Those include “A Dialectic of Cultures: Notes Towards a Theory of the New Arts,” “Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature” and more whimsical works such as “Spring Game: An Opera for Shadow Puppets,” and “A Book About Love and War and Death,” meant to be read aloud by two people, one taking over whenever the other breaks out in laughter.

In 1965, Higgins put a term coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge into wider circulation by applying it to the genre-bending, media-mixing art he was interested in. “Intermedia” became the watchword for uncategorizable works that broke down boundaries between media, sight and sound, not to mention art and life. Such freewheeling hybridization went hand in hand with the anti-authoritarian tenor of the times.

Several banners hang from the walls and ceiling. Emblazoned with Higgins’ concrete poetry, some show individual syllables breaking free of the words they spell to collide with one another in cacophonous nonsense. Others resemble overwrought crossword puzzles, their clever repetitions forming the visual equivalent of a house of mirrors.

Musical scores, superimposed with curved arrows or riddled with bullet holes (some of which were used as stencils for spray-painted abstractions), round out Higgins’ works on paper. Each overlays at least two systems to create chance compositions. All attest to an ethos of anarchistic playfulness.

However, Higgins’ conviction that accidental occurrences are freer and truer and more beautiful than those made on purpose just doesn’t hold up. Although such try-anything promiscuity is refreshing when it blows away the establishment’s stodgy conventions, it forms too shaky a foundation for a lifetime of work.

This is particularly evident in Higgins’ 10 paintings -- flat, diagrammatic images he made between 1988 and 1996. These little-known acrylics on canvas include letters, symbols and emblems interspersed among enlarged monochromatic reproductions of engravings and woodcuts from 15th to 19th century books. The best painting, titled “Magicians,” juxtaposes references to Egyptian magicians, Vetruvian physics, European stage shows and a performing pig from America.

Like all of Higgins’ works, his paintings bring together unrelated or loosely linked systems to see if sparks fly when they intermingle.

Unfortunately, many other painters have done similar things with more talent and savvy. A short list includes Jane Hammonds, Carole Caroompas, Lari Pittman and Alfred Jensen.

As a whole, the well-documented exhibition tends to get tedious. Organized by the artist’s daughter, Hannah Higgins (who teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago) and Simon Anderson (who is on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago), it makes mountains of molehills by overstating the historical importance of works so slight, unpretentious and ephemeral that they have more in common with molehills than mountains.

Never one for monumentality or permanence, Higgins has left us with a body of work that is intentionally underwhelming. The impact of his best pieces diminishes when the spotlight shines on them, all the better to inspire viewers to pay attention to everything around us. Everyday pleasures are the modus operandi and raison d’etre of Higgins’ radically democratic art.

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‘Betwixt and Between’

What: ‘Betwixt and Between: The Life and Work of Fluxus Artist Dick Higgins’

Where: Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, 9045 Lincoln Blvd., Los Angeles

When: Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; closed Sundays and Mondays

Ends: April 26

Price: Free

Contact: (310) 665-6905