SIGHTS : Flashing Back to Absurdity With the Art of Fluxus : The ‘60s movement, which thumbed its nose at conventional wisdom, returns in an amusing, confusing show in Santa Barbara.

In the gospel according to the Fluxus art movement, the very idea of a gospel was subject to instant scorn or dismissal. Manifestoes were neatly folded into paper airplanes, and conventional wisdoms were skillfully short-circuited. Most of all, assumptions about the function of art and the art object were systematically thrown out.

In short, Fluxus, the absurdist movement, which flourished primarily in the ‘60s and laid the groundwork for conceptual art, was a grand nose-thumbing gesture in the general direction of the art world. At the same time, the antics under the Fluxus umbrella aspired to serious ends and ephemeral, Eastern mind-sets, despite its often puerile pranks.

As a movement, it seemed absolutely necessary, and categorically self-trivializing. The question that arises, then, with the large-scaled and commanding exhibition “In the Spirit of Fluxus,” a traveling show that has landed at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, might be: Is a fawning Fluxus retrospective in a well-heeled institution a contradiction in terms?

What the show, and the movement it portrays, may lack in any kind of illuminating depth or beauty, it gains in sheer brain-teasing gumption. This is a big, brawling, cerebral circus of an art show, at once confusing and amusing.

For all of its revolutionary intent, Fluxus amounted to a relatively benign wave of madness, realized in many media. With obvious roots in the anarchy-loving, archetype-smashing work of the Dadaists of the post-WWI era, and with Marcel Duchamp as its ad-hoc Svengali, Fluxus swept through--and around the perimeter of--the art world and shook things loose rather than planting land mines.

The movement, fueled by iconoclastic young artists, is now celebrating its 30th anniversary, and this exhibition, organized by Elizabeth Armstrong and Joan Rothfuss and originating at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, can’t help but have an air of wistfulness. One of the central Fluxus tenets was to skewer the preciousness and shelf life of art objects, so many of the works were not made to last.

Paper has yellowed and decayed. Once outrageous ideas have been reduced through time to a quaint whimper. Through the sobriety of hindsight, you get the paradoxical sense of looking back nostalgically on a certain youthful spirit that was all about celebrating the moment.

The Fluxus figure here with the loudest ring of recognition is Yoko Ono, who will perform and discuss her work at the museum Friday and will have a one-person show at the Contemporary Arts Forum from Saturdaythrough Oct. 27.

Ono, a genteel and deadpan provocateur long before John Lennon made her one of the world’s most famous spouses, shows her 1968 piece “Apple.” What the title promises is what we get: the familiar green apple of the Beatles’ record label, minus one bite. Obviously, new materials and maintenance are required daily.

Other well-known artists include Nam June Paik, who became a pioneering video artist. Paik has always worked in crossed-media ideas, such as his “One for Violin Solo,” in which his instrument-bashing performance in the ‘60s produced a lasting art piece--a tangled mass of violin pieces preserved in a pristine box.

The late German artist Joseph Beuys, a conceptualist icon, consumes one wall of gallery with his “Filzanzug (Felt Suit),” a green violin, and “Telephone,” a Duchampesque conundrum with rusty cans.

Other highlights: Ben Vautier’s axiom-covered bedroom installation (“The human sculpture needs sleep. Don’t wake me up before 10.”), and Yoshi Wada’s lovably crazy, Spike Jones-y interactive music piece, “What’s the Matter With Your Ear?”

At the Santa Barbara show, the art has invaded the pores of the building, as well as gallery space. In the bathroom, Allen Hatch has concocted a “Concise History of the Toilet” and provided works on toilet paper. But here, as with much of Fluxart, idea is king, sometimes to the exclusion of aesthetic refinement. Hatch’s imprinted toilet paper art is really more a documentation of the idea of art on toilet paper than it is inherently interesting art unto itself.

Some smaller archival pieces contain intricate and allusive content, while larger, more brash pieces stem from reductionist ideas writ large. Take, for instance, the sprawling and mundane junk sculpture “One Year” (1972-73) by George Maciunas, the self-appointed head of Fluxus.

At first blush, the wall of empty food containers looks like a flagrantly Warholian notion. But the all-important fact behind the artifact is that we’re looking at every package used by Maciunas in the course of a year. It is less an ecological statement about the prevalence of waste than it is a somewhat zany, Zen-like transformation of the commonplace.

If you see other viewers behaving in a peculiar way in the museum, don’t panic; they may well be heeding the directions of one of Willem de Ridder’s numerous “Fluxcards” floating around the building. One, for instance, directs readers to lift their right knee, put the card on it and “offer it to the person who watches you doing this.” Another card asks the holder to throw the card to the ground and stomp on it five times.

This artist enjoys stripping away the traditionally sober, detached role of the art audience. In a mini-concert on the show’s opening weekend, De Ridder’s piece “Walkman Stage Play” was enacted by four volunteers, who were equipped with portable tape players that instructed them to perform specific acts--lifting limbs, manipulating chairs, applauding on command. The result was a madcap choreography of simple gestures.

One of the familiar Santa Barbara-based figures involved in the Fluxus show is Richard Dunlap, a noted multimedia artist and musician whose sensibilities sometimes parallel those of Fluxus. One of Dunlap’s performances on opening weekend involved a trumpet “duet” with Jeff Kaiser of Ventura, in which the tuxedo-outfitted and barefoot musicians produced gusts of air that pushed a toy boat around a shallow pool in the foyer sculpture. Thus, virtual holy water became a foot bath.

By showing what might seem a lack of respect for the presumed sanctity of how fine art works, Fluxus, at its best, showed respect for the very spirit from which art springs. The spirit of Fluxus is the spirit of invention.

Details

* WHAT: “In the Spirit of Fluxus.”

* WHEN: Through Oct. 16.

* WHERE: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St.

* FYI: 963-4364.