Photo By Matt Borgerding

A man in flux: Mark Patsfall, owner of Clay Street Press in Over-the-Rhine

OK, maybe I appropriated the title of this piece from a print on the wall of the Clay Street Press (1312 Clay St.), Mark Patsfall's gallery in Over-the-Rhine, but you have to admit it's pretty apt. Patsfall is known for creating ingenious, intricate, technology-based work, not to mention having close relationships with many Fluxus artists of the 1960s, '70s and beyond.

Walking into the Clay Street Press, you'll find a little Yoko Ono print, a Nam June Paik portfolio, lots of stuff by Hanna Wilke. Yet somehow among these much-touted artists, Patsfall's own work stands out -- and by leagues.

Patsfall currently has three of his own works mixed into various prints that he "threw up on the walls" for this month's exhibition. The first to catch my eye is Consumer (2001), a mysterious, anthropomorphic intaglio print. Patsfall created an enormous face out of medical stamps; look carefully and you will find babies' profiles, heads inside heads, human figures and the amazing details of the body all mixed together to look like bones and flesh, eyes, nose, skin, wrinkles and pores.

The most amazing part of this print is that it's mounted to the wall at a slight distance to accommodate the small screen set into it and a DVD player behind the wall. This is Patsfall's brilliance, what so clearly ties him to the Fluxus moment. The screen is an oval and takes the place of the mouth. The video is a mouth, Patsfall's own. It opens and closes as objects fly into it: a pen, shoes, a pinecone, a bullet, a toy zebra, a doll, a car, a soccer ball, even an umbilical cord, which he quickly spits out to begin the process of purging.

Some things you should know about Fluxus: The word comes from the idea of flux, the process of flow. The movement began in the 1960s with a group of artists who sought to nix the traditional art of the time. They looked back to an even earlier avant-garde movement, Dada, whose performances and anti-art ideas changed the course of visual art. In this looking back, Fluxus artists began to showcase personality as well as talent. They staged events. They made work with uncommon materials, such as television sets and their own audiences. They fought to disrupt the idea of high culture and high art by mixing in seemingly banal objects. This often took the form of puns, jokes and one-liners.

And so -- a pen, a pinecone, a doll. Mundane objects that we consume, literally, or in the sense of lifestyle (think globalization, gas, water). We eat everything.

It's fascinating to watch the objects that Patsfall has chosen. Standing in front of the face, you can't really help giggling. Especially when the artist -- a quiet but stunningly funny guy with big glasses and a soothing, level voice -- is standing next to you announcing the objects as they go in: "there goes the coin"; "you missed the pizza."

It does seem absurd in a way, a joke between artist and viewer. Despite that, Consumer is undeniably admonishing our behavior, just without all the grumpiness. Its message and M.O. are more than a little heterodox.

Patsfall takes me upstairs to his studio, where he has several older works and a new work in progress -- a commission for the American Broadcast Museum, a two-story pyramid of electronical guts, so to speak, those little green trays and wires, wires, wires.

On the wall, there is another consumer, Traveling Man, which is an exploration of the way we use up time and things when we move. The work is, like Consumer, anthropomorphic and made with paper and small screens. The screens in this work are in the man's eyes, though. He sees Michelangelo's David, whose hand has become the focus as David seems to stalk the streets of Florence.

Traveling Man's eyes blink -- a wave of water rushing over them -- and a new scene appears, a fetus revolving among fish. A blink and another scene. An airplane ride. Rome. Taxis.

The paper Patsfall uses is not ordinary, but bits of maps where the artist has traveled -- Prague, Korea, Germany, Hong Kong. There is a scrap of paper a homeless man gave him on a subway in Seoul, with beautiful Korean letters. Tickets. Receipts. The flotsam of travel.

Patsfall's work nods to the idea of keepsakes but also ridicules it by mixing it all together into a confusing jumble where every place loses its coherence. And in a sense, this calls to mind the issue of travel, cultural overlaps, hegemony. What happens when everything starts to look the same?

Another work at Clay Street Press points even more directly to Fluxus and its predecessor, Dada. Patsfall used the same medical stencils again to create silhouettes of Marcel Duchamp and another man in a performance by the famous Dadaist, Francis Picabia.

The performance, as Patsfall explains, happened like this: The two men "came out onstage dressed like Adam and Eve, naked. Duchamp looked at his watch, and the performance was over." To Patsfall, this performance, only seconds long, tells us so much about time. Once we think about the moment we're in, that moment has passed. Drop the curtain.

Inside the work Patsfall created -- entitled Cinesketch (2002) -- there is another small screen. This one plays a long-running video, which Patsfall recorded out the window on a train from Frankfurt to Düsseldorf. All you can see is a blurred, fast-moving landscape, which, to Patsfall, "ties in the whole Einstein idea."

I ask him which Einstein idea.

"His revelation on the train that time passes differently depending on whether you are the mover or the one standing still," Patsfall says.

Watching the rushing landscape on the screen, you really do get a sense of time's passing. But the fact that you are moving (or in the position of the mover) is a good thing. Especially if you are moving and on a train, which is what I think Einstein and Patsfall are both telling us: Move.