The Art of Aleks Danko: a fluxus pedagogy and realisation
Abstract
The transition from modernism to postmodernism in 1960s introduced Australian artists to myriad new art movements, radical neo-avant-gardes and an era of criticality that responded to the changing global conditions and aspirations for societal change. From the late 1960s Aleks Danko (b. 1950, Adelaide, South Australia) developed a complex engagement with the international fluxus movement, adapting its vanguard philosophies, strategies, and methodologies as a challenge to social and political landscapes in Australia. This research charts Danko's dialogue with the fluxus strategies of intermedia, event scores, chance and art amusement associated with Dick Higgins, John Cage, George Brecht, George Maciunas and others. This research challenges the entrenched interpretation of him as an idiosyncratic, playful, and humorous conceptual artist; a position that Danko has consistently rejected.
The research examines Danko's exhibition practice and his experimentation of the avant-garde in sculpture, installation, performance, film, artists' books, pages and art education. It examines Danko's fluxworks and event scores that play with words, images, and objects, and their arrangements in time and space. It examines Danko's relationship with his audience, the gallery system and being an artist. It reveals Danko's sustained neo-avant-garde strategies, including collaboration, intermedia, time-based and pedagogical practices.
Little is known about Danko's connection to fluxus and its experimental avant-garde philosophy of materiality and life experience. He has been framed as a conceptual artist but this research corrects this misconception and uses Danko's oeuvre to reconsider key terms in Australian art historiography. It proposes a model of experimental practices in Australian contemporary art and in relation to a global postmodern context. Primary sources analyse Danko's early life as a son of migrant parents, establishing foundations for his critical address to the Australian 'way of life'. Examination of his years at art school and early exhibitions reveals the impact of the counterculture and emerging international neo-avant-garde on entrenched modernist aesthetics. Danko's intermedia practices and pedagogy of the 1970s show an engagement with international neo-avant-garde theory and practices that reveals the limits of the dominant model of provincialism in Australian art. Analysis of his installations and performances of the 1990s reveals the emergence of a distinctive allegorical and socially critical Australian postmodernism, embedded in fluxus.