"Critical Mass brings long overdue attention to Fluxus adventures and Happening scenes in exotic New Jersey. Innovators like Allen Kaprow, Robert Watts, and Geoffrey Hendricks addressed the art-in-life conundrum at the heart of their own work with a revolutionary approach to pedagogy at Rutgers University, developing events like the controversial Flux-Mass as student projects. This invaluable addition to avant-garde history recollects and reexamines both the teaching of the inexplicable and the lives of the irrepressible."-C. Carr, The Village Voice

"This volume of new texts and historical documents has stopped struggling against the Fluxus ethos. Critical Mass instead presents multiple ways to allow readers of today to access a Fluxus attitude. This attitude had certain nodes, localities, and periods of extreme activity, but this book does not encourage nostalgia for the Fluxus fun we missed; Critical Mass, rather, prompts us to make Fluxus a part of our way of life today."-Bill Arning, MIT List Visual Arts Center

Rutgers University, from 1958 to 1972, was at the center of many new developments in the art world. Artists connected with Happenings and Fluxus created works that had a major impact in New York and abroad. A dozen years after Allan Kaprow's first Happening on Rutgers University's Douglass campus in 1958, George Maciunas (Mr. Fluxus) created his major late composition, Flux-Mass, in the same space, and Hermann Nitsch, the Viennese Actionist, presented his controversial Orgies-Mysteries-Theater. These radical shifts in art paralleled calls to rethink attitudes about race, sex, gender, and war during turbulent times in America's history.

Critical Mass chronicles this ephemeral work on the Rutgers campus and in New York City, and the innovations that grew from Bob Watts, Allan Kaprow, and George Brecht's "Project in Multiple Dimensions." With texts and performance scores by artists-together with numerous photographs of the events and essays by art historians and critics Hannah Higgins, Jill Johnston, Susan Ryan, and Kristine Stiles-Critical Mass presents a vivid picture of this dynamic moment.

This volume is a companion to an exhibit at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and at the Mason Gross Art Galleries at Rutgers University.

Geoffrey Hendricks is a professor emeritus of visual arts at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University.