A partial transcript of my episode 14 of THE ART MOVEMENT. Click here to listen to the show.
Mary Bauermeister has been awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit, which is the highest honor that can be bestowed on any German individual by the nation and is awarded in recognition in the political, economic, humanitarian and cultural realms. Bauermeister is a fascinating multidisciplinary artist who addresses esoteric issues of how information is transferable through society. A lot of her work also explores spirituality.
She is also known and celebrated as a figure of the Fluxus movement, which is a very interesting avant-garde art movement that emerged in the late ’50s as a group of artists who had become disenchanted with the elitist attitude they perceived in the art world and looked to such artists as the Futurists or the Dadaists for inspirations, who had also expressed similar feelings of disenchantment through their work, as well as an objective of destroying any boundary between art and life.
The Fulxists (I’m not entirely sure whether that is a term that is used to refer to them but let’s go with it) especially focus on performance aspects of the movements and their events even included audience participation as a way of involving the public in the making of art. In fact, some of them were held in Mary Bauermeister studio, including concerts by such artists as John Cage, among others.
By the way, aside from her work in sculpture, drawing, installation, performance, and music she was the wife of the amazing Karlheinz Stockhausen and they often collaborated on art projects together. She even wrote a book Hanging in a triplet grid – my life with Karlheinz Stockhausen, which she published in 2011 and I would love to get my hands on it.
In Arte Matt 