When Ay-O left Japan for New York in 1958, he was known to be ‘completely against Japanese ideas and culture like Zen’.¹ As a young artist, he had been associated with the Demokurato Artist Association, an alliance of graphic designers, photographers, performers, painters and writers established in 1951. This background was wildly at odds with the dominant creative force in New York painting of the era. By the time of Ay-O’s arrival in the United States, Abstract Expressionism had enjoyed a decade of exposure both in the United States and internationally, with New York usurping Paris as the centre of the modern art world. While briefly falling under its influence, Ay-O produced a series of ‘action paintings’, most of which by 1960 had been ‘cancelled’ with large Xs painted onto them — a gesture, he said, that ‘conveyed my loathing for the New York School’.²

More important for Ay-O was his meeting and associations with Fluxus artists in New York from around 1962, and his embrace of conceptual composer John Cage’s interdisciplinary practice and teaching at the New School for Social Research. The avant-garde Fluxus group in New York included Allan Kaprow, Alison Knowles, Dick Higgins, Al Hansen, Jackson Mac Low, Ben Patterson, George Brecht, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik and its impresario, George Maciunas. While definitions vary wildly, the aims of Fluxus are comparatively consistent — humour, everydayness, ephemerality. To operate outside conventional art world parameters (galleries, museums, dealers), and to enable people to engage with art and life through simple connections and flows of events and occurrences are the regularly stated objectives of Fluxus.

Often described as an international avant-garde network or community of artists, composers, designers and architects — even mathematicians, economists and dancers — Fluxus emerged from meetings, friendship associations and festivals in the early 1960s in Germany, New York, France, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Korea and Japan. Artist and writer, Ken Friedman referred to Fluxus as ‘an international laboratory of ideas’.³

It was Ay-O’s quest for a new direction — to escape from abstract, illusionary art — which led to his alignment with the intentions of Fluxus. Fluxus events and Allan Kaprow’s ‘happenings’ provided Ay-O with the means to explore experience through his objects and constructions. From his Canal Street studio in lower Manhattan, he scoured the streets, skips and junk shops of the Lower East Side for materials to use in works to explore and activate senses other than sight. Like many Fluxus artists, who often involved smell, sound and noise, food and eating, tactility, paradox and humour in their work, Ay-O strived to make everyday life the wellspring of his art. ‘Canal Street was my palette’, he once said.⁴

First produced in 1964, Ay-O’s ‘finger boxes’ — some of the most recognisable objects of Fluxus — evolved from his accumulation of materials. These wooden boxes had a small hole in one face, into which the user could place a finger to feel the hidden contents of the box. The contents comprised a variety of materials, including foam, rubber, beads, hair and nails. Like many Fluxus objects and ‘Fluxkits’ (assemblages and collections of common small objects in plastic boxes), Ay-O’s finger boxes were less ‘art’ than devices to encourage us to regard the ordinary as profound and to liberate human complexity through play. ‘I never want to make boredom my friend’, Ay-O has stated.⁵

His 1994 work 30 no news, a multiple in an edition of 75, subscribes to this simplicity and sense of discovery and participation. The owner of this work is also the maker as they follow the instructions for constructing a sculpture. The work’s potentially infinite number of variations echoes the chance operations of John Cage’s methodology for composing sound, while the packaging, mainly for pharmaceutical products and cosmetics, is transformed into the formal elements of an entirely new and unexpected creation. Ay-O’s 30 no news is a work that embodies the fundamental Fluxus principle of reappraising the ordinary. As the final instruction states, ‘Put finger in & have fun’.

Endnotes

1. CB Liddell, ‘The varied colors of artistic process’, Japan Times, 1 March 2012, , viewed 7 April 2014.
2. Over the Rainbow: AY-O Retrospective 1950–2006 [exhibition catalogue], Bijutsu Shuppan-Sha, Tokyo, 2006, p.160.
3. Ken Friedman, ‘Fluxus: A laboratory of ideas’, in Jacquelynn Baas (ed.), Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life [exhibition catalogue], Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, in association with the University of Chicago Press, Hanover, NH, 2011, p.35.
4. Over the Rainbow, p.160.
5. Over the Rainbow, p.174.