PBS just aired a two-part, five-hour, pleasingly conventional documentary about Woody Allen.  It was informative but didn’t go nearly deep enough to get at the sources of his humor, his ambition, and his romantic beliefs.  But the first hours, which documented his rise as a standup comedian, were inspiring.  Unlike a lot of other comedians, Allen didn’t deliver one-liners, he told stories.  And, unlike a lot of other comedians, he wasn’t desperate to be in the spotlight.  He started out as a writer and was perfectly happy writing.  So much of his comedy is about language – about a perfectly turned phrase that floats in the air for half a beat until its meaning (and its sarcasm, and its affront) sinks in.  It was Allen’s business managers, two old-school cigar-chomping vaudeville veterans, who pushed him on stage to act out his jokes and build a name for himself.

That reluctance to perform is evident in the tortured relationship the young comedian has with his microphone.  Watch him on this television show to see how he rests his elbow on the stand, dances around it, plays with the cord, and grips the mic like a weapon that he’d rather not be in possession of.  It’s a fine and elaborate choreography of dread.  To use Allen’s own language, he’s “perspiring audibly."  There’s in this physical anxiety tremendous charm and humility, something that’s lacking in a lot of his movies.  In fact, his own presence is lacking in a lot of his movies.  The standup Woody Allen is a remarkably appealing performer, if only he would want to perform.

Fluxus was not really about art objects so much as it was about provocations.  The artists in the movement, which drew from theater, dada and conceptual art, were overturning centuries-old conventions about artmaking, and conventions about other things too.  And, in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, when they hit their stride, just about everything was being overturned.  So I was curious to see how the NYU’s Gray Art Gallery would mount their exhibit Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life.  As you’d expect, the works aren’t monumental.  There are a lot of texts (pamphlets, posters, stamps, postcards), a lot of found objects (bottles, boxes, timepieces, a white dress shirt), and a lot of small, personal, hand-crafted objects.

Most appealing are the Fluxkits, little boxes that provided all the pieces needed, as well as bare-bone instructions, to perform one proscribed Fluxus action.  They’re a riff on do-it-yourself art kits, and also the facility with which just about everything in our culture – even the most ephemeral ideas – can be packaged, marketed, and sold.  The exhibit includes Fluxkits called A Flux Corsage (a package of seeds), A Box of Smile (a mirror-lined pillbox), Sacramental Fluxkit (vials of holy water), and Zen for Film (an infinity loop of entirely clear 35mm film).  The finest one is A Flux Suicide Kit by Ben Vautier, which contains a razor blade, a rope, a shard of glass, and other potentially dangerous but largely innocuous household objects.  It’s funny, chilling and elegant.