The Fluxus Reader. I've always understood the do it yourself movement known as Fluxus to be characterised by the idea of indeterminacy that tries to dissolve any fixed properties of art or music and so has its roots in Dada. Fluxus art lies between media (intermedia) and outside the established art institution.

The Fluxus idea of indeterminancy is one of the artist relinquishing, to a greater or lesser degree, the power to determine the form of a work, serving instead as a functionary, a facilitator of natural processes within a specific, limiting context (a poem, a drawing, a collage, playing music, a photo)? In this understanding of chance the practice is one of a denial of artistic choice in favour of the potency of apparently arbitrary natural processes.

Thus John Cage regarded music not as a communication from the artist to an audience, but rather as an activity of sounds in which the artist found a way to let sounds be themselves'. Is there a photographic equivalent of this? Or is this where the similarities between free form music and the photography of chance break down?

Fluxus was not intended as an art movement and it sought an alternative to the commercial gallery system, along with its faith in masterpieces created by talented artists appreciated by the suitably qualified spectator. If the efforts were directed at transgressing the boundaries of art, then what lay beyond the boundaries of the art institution? The answer is the traditional avant garde one: art activity must be withdrawn from its special status as rarefied experience and resituated within the larger realm of everyday experience.

Graig Safer in 'Laboratory in the Fluxus' in the Fluxus Reader says that this going beyond the art institution aimed to realize:

a social network built on playing through or interacting among people, activities and objects In this sense, Fluxus functions as more than a way to organise information it is also a way to organise social networks, networks of people learning These networks are based on an interactive model of art rather than on the traditional model of art as a oneway communication from sender to receiver, the notion of the artist offering inspired genius intended to dazzle spectators...participants interact with ideas, playing through possibilities rather than deciding on the meaning of a work once and for all.

Stephen C Foster in Historical Design and Social Purpose: A note on the Relationship of Fluxus to Modernism argues:

that Fluxus was basically a reconfiguration of the modernist or avant-garde paradigms Its use of typically modernist and avant-garde terms might superficially seem to make Fluxus a maverick modernism Or one might speculate that the group kept the modernist model and adjusted, or even ditched, the content Regardless of the truth of the latter, it strikes me that what is more important is the group's reorganisation of
modernism's terms The importance of this resides in the fact that the canon of modernism or the avant-garde rests not in the specifics of the terms but precisely in their organisation