User:OriginalBK/Larry Miller (artist)

Larry Miller (artist)

Larry Miller is an American artist, closely associated with the Fluxus movement. Miller has produced a diverse body of experimental art works as a key figure in the emergent installation and performance movements in New York in the 1970s, presenting work in spaces such as 112 Greene Street Gallery, Franklin Furnace, PS 1, Exit Art and the Kitchen. He has also exhibited at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim Museum, The New Museum, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. His installations and performances have integrated diverse mediums and materials.

Miller’s early works already demonstrate his personal understanding of the artist as an investigator of experience and of art as an experiment.[1] Miller's work can be divided into two distinct categories: 1) Miller's own video pieces, which were often components of his larger installations and performances and 2) documentary videotapes of Fluxus interviews, performances and events. Since the 1960s, Miller has shot and collected an impressive number of Fluxus related materials, including the 1978 Interview with George Maciunas.[2] 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.[3]

Biography

Larry Miller was born in Marshall, Missouri in 1944. He earned his MFA degree at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1970 when he began exhibiting his work in New York. Larry Miller studied under Robert Watts at Rutgers University, and has been active in the Fluxus network since 1969.

Miller's work has been exhibited and performed in museums, galleries and institutions around the world, including The Whitney, MoMA, The New Museum, Gallery LeLong, Stux Gallery, and Emily Harvey Gallery, New York; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Venice Bienalle, Italy; Akademie Der Kunste, Daadgalerie and Bonner Kunstverein, Germany; Ecole Nationale Des Beaux Arts, Galerie 1900-2000, France; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco and in numerous exhibitions in Canada, Europe, Korea, Japan, and Australia. Miller has received grants and fellowships from the Creative Artists Program, and the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Foundation for the Arts.

Miller's performance residencies have included Portland School of Art, Maine; Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Santa Barbara Museum, California and has taught and lectured at colleges and universities throughout the country. In 1986, Miller was the subject of a retrospective and catalogue, As If the Universe Were An Object at the Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond and Washington Project for the Arts, Washington, D.C. He lives in New York with artist Sara Seagull who is also associated with the Fluxus movement.

Fluxus Involvement

Larry Miller has been associated with the Fluxus group since 1969 when he became a protege of the founder of the group George Maciunas. From 1970 to 1978, he collaborated closely with Maciunas. Miller's numerous original compositions have joined the collective's catalog of works and he has also been active as an interpreter of the "classic" scores and responsible for bringing the group's works to a wider public, blurring the lines between artist, producer and researcher.

Through Miller, Fluxus attracted media coverage such as the worldwide CNN coverage of Off Limits exhibit at Newark Museum, 1999.[4] Other Miller activities as organizer, performer and presenter within the Fluxus milieu include Performance in Fluxus Continue 1963-2003 at Musee d'Art et d'Art Contemporain in Nice; Fluxus a la Carte in Amsterdam; and Centraal Fluxus Festival at Centraal Museum, Utrecht, Netherlands. In 2004, for Geoff Hendricks' Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia and Rutgers University 1958-1972, Miller reprised and updated the track and field events of the Flux Olympics, first presented in 1970.[5] For Do-it Yourself Fluxus at AI - Art Interactive - in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Miller worked as the curatorial consultant for an exhibit of works that allowed viewers hands-on experience including the reconstruction of several sections of the historic Flux Labyrinth, a massive and intricate maze that Miller originally constructed with George Maciunas at Akademie Der Kunst, Berlin in 1976 and which included sections by several of the Fluxus artists. Miller created a new version of the Flux Labyrinth at the In the Spirit of Fluxus exhibit at the Walker Art Center in 1994, where Griel Marcus said, "Miller was... fine tuning the monster."[6]

For the opening of George Brecht - A Heterospective at Museum Ludwig, Cologne in 2005, Miller organized an opening night program to be performed along with Alison Knowles, Ben Vautier and other original Fluxus performers to demonstrate the scope of Brecht's concept of events; the following day he organized a rare performance of Brecht's 1960 Motor Vehicle Sundown (Event) For John Cage, which featured more than 40 vehicles in Cologne's historic Dom Platz adjacent to the famed cathedral. The performers followed Brecht's classic score utilizing a variety of vehicles as instruments of sound, including fire trucks, police and military vehicles and vintage automobiles. A large public audience attended, and the event spectacle was broadcast live on German television.

Miller and three fellow frequent Al Hansen collaborators Alison Knowles, Geoff Hendricks and critic Peter Frank (art critic) did a live performance of Pre-Fluxus Pre-Happenings artist Hansen’s Alice Denham in 48 Seconds at Andrea Rosen Gallery in 2006.[7]

Before Fluxus founder George Maciunas died in 1978 from complications due to pancreatic cancer, he left behind his thoughts on Fluxus in a series of important video conversations with Miller called Interview With George Maciunas, which has been screened internationally and translated into numerous languages.[8] Over the past 30 years, Miller has shot and collected other Fluxus related materials including tapes on Joe Jones, Carolee Schneemann, Ben Vautier, Dick Higgins, and Alison Knowles, in addition to the 1978 Maciunas interview.

One of Miller's significant contributions to the scene was the "Flux-Tour", a performance model whereby artists and performers led alternative gallery and museum tours. Rather than discuss or interpret any artworks on display, the guides turned their attention to the spaces themselves, examining in minute detail such subjects as the lighting, floors, and other structural elements to which their attention was drawn.

In 2011, Miller performed a Flux-Tour at the Grey Gallery at New York University, New York, in conjunction with its exhibitions, Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life and Fluxus at NYU: Before and Beyond. The exhibitions featured documentation from prior Flux-Tours, dating back to 1976.[9]

Genetics, Science and Art

Since the late 1980s, Larry Miller has questioned such boundaries in works exploring issues raised by science.

Whether presented as live performance, specific site installation, or gallery exhibition, Miller considers all of his works -- as well as himself -- to be "performing objects." In this view, there are no fixed boundaries between objects, events, time and space, or between definitions that societies offer for science, art, and religion.

An event realized under hypnosis, Larry Miller's installation "Mom-Me," from 1973, featuring video, family snapshots, photographs by the artist, and video stills was part of The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia at the Guggenheim Museum from January to April 2009.

In addition to Fluxus, Miller is best known for his works with genetics. Basing lines of conceptual inquiry on his 1989 "copyright" claim to his personal genome, he focused on questions of the ownership of DNA, and of the commercial applications of genetic technology. In 1992, Miller launched an international public action, which has since facilitated thousands of individuals in making claims to their genetic rights. Miller created the Genetic Code Copyright Certificate and published it in several language, a document that, when signed, guarantees the multiplication of one’s own genome. 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 &#321;ód&#378;, 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.

Miller's simple fill-in form provides a declaration of copyright of one's own genome. Subsequent works springing from this notion have further speculated on the applications of genetic science. His Genomic License series postulates that DNA is a malleable material which, like clay or digital information, can be shaped into novel products -- bought, sold, and distributed like any other commodity.

Exhibitions related to Larry Miller's genetics work include: Paradise Now: Picturing the Genetic Revolution, Exit Art, NYC, 2000 (touring U.S. through 2004); From Code to Commodity: Genetics and Visual Art, New York Academy of Science, NYC, 2003; Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, 2002 to 2005), Codes and Identity, Clifford Art Gallery, Colgate University, New York, 2003, How Human: Life in the Post Genome Era, International Center of Photography, New York, 2003 and DNA[do not assume], Bowling Green State University, Ohio 2005. Miller has received individual artists fellowships and exhibition grants from the New York State Foundation for the Arts, Creative Artists Program and the National Endowment for the Arts.

External links

Homepage of Larry Miller Retrieved 3.December 2015

References

Fluxus East: Fluxus Networks in Central Eastern Europe. http://www.fluxus-east.eu/?item=exhib&lang=en&sub=miller Electronic Arts Intermix website, http://www.eai.org/artistBio.htm?id=347 Fluxus East: Fluxus Networks in Central Eastern Europe. http://www.fluxus-east.eu/?item=exhib&lang=en&sub=miller Marter, Joan M. and Anderson, Simon. Off Limits: Rutgers University and the Avant-garde, 1957-1963. Newark Museum. Newark, NJ Hendricks, Geoffrey, editor. Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia, and Rutgers. Mead Art Museum, Amherst, Massachusetts Marcus, Griel. Real Life Rock: The Complete Top Ten Columns, 1986-2014. Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticuit pg. 114. Velasco, David. http://artforum.com/diary/id=10844. ArtForum Magazine. April 2006. Interview with Larry Miller, 1978, referenced in Mr Fluxus, E Williams and A Noel, Thames and Hudson, 1997, p114 Lee, Rooni. "Post from The Grey Art Gallery Blog, The Grey Area, Written by DAH Student Rooni Lee." Fields of Vision. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 June 2014. http://nyuarthistory.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/grey-art-gallery-blog-the-grey-area-post-by-dah-student-rooni-lee/