Ay-O
Finger Box flyer + envelope, 1964
Black and orange offset printed flyer designed by George Maciunas with postmarked envelope addressed to Ed Plunket.
4 1/2h x 11 1/4w in / 11.43h x 28.58w cm
AO001
$ 750
Ay-O is a Japanese avant-garde visual and performance artist who has been closely aligned with Fluxus since its international beginnings in the 1960s. Fluxus was an interdisciplinary global community of artists, composers, designers and poets who embraced the banal, heralded the unconventional, challenged authority, and rejected the distinction between high and low art. Fluxus artists combined art with the everyday experience, believing all aspects of life had the potential to be art, and anyone was able to understand, interact with and experience it.. A very early Fluxus object multiple, the Finger Box was first created by Ay-O in 1964. This tactile art piece is comprised of a small hollow cube with a hole in the side. The box is filled with various objects, such as hair, cotton balls, and nails. It is then on the art's observer “risk” to put their finger into the hole to feel the material hidden within the box. Ay-O's intent, by including such potentially dangerous things as nails in the possible contents of the box was to ensure that the user touches the box with an “enquiring, learning gesture.” The Finger Boxes were also intended to be touched by multiple people at a time, promoting a shared, social, experience of perceiving the work. Each cardboard box was adorned with gummed on black and orange printed paper labels (like the flyer) designed by George Maciunus (1931-1978), a key figure and founding member of Fluxus who is responsible for, among many things, assembling Fluxus multiples, and the creation of the Flux Shop where Fluxus multiples, like Ay-O’s Finger Box were sold. Maciunas was trained as a graphic designer and his memorable design for packaging of Fluxus objects, posters and newspapers helped give the movement a sense of unity that the artists themselves often denied.
