Fluxus East

Larry Miller

Larry Miller studied under Robert Watts at Rutgers University, and has been active in the Fluxus network since 1969. From 1970 to 1978, he collaborated closely with George Maciunas. The interview that Miller held with Maciunas shortly before the latter’s death is an outstanding documentation, which has made a great contribution to the reconstruction of early Fluxus history in particular. Besides Miller’s own artistic work, he has also organised, reconstructed and performed at numerous Fluxus events and assembled an extensive collection of material on the history of Fluxus.

Miller’s early works already demonstrate his personal understanding of the artist as an investigator of experience and of art as an experiment. Miller sees no existing, fixed boundaries between objects and events, between time and space, and he also rejects the conventional, established thematic canon of fields such as art, science and religion. In his works, therefore, he not only breaks open the formal barriers between the individual art forms, but also investigates the compatibility of scientific theme and artistic form. An example of this approach is the actions on genetic technology and DNA, which he has worked on since the end of the 1980s. In his Genomic License series, he views the genetic code as arbitrarily formable material, which cannot be distinguished from traditional products. In addition, Miller wrote the Genetic Code Copyright, a document that guarantees the multiplication of one’s own genome when undersigned. In 1990 and 1993, Miller travelled to actions and exhibitions in Poland, where, among other things during the festival Constructions in Process IV by the International Artists’ Museum in Łódź, he registered Allen Ginsberg’s DNA, and staged an audiosculpture in honour of Nicolaus Kopernikus. He also produced an advertising programme calling upon the population to copy their DNA.