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Cecil Touchon (born 1956, Austin, Texas) is a contemporary American collage artist, painter, published poet and theorist living in Santa Fe, New Mexico . Co-founder of the International Post-Dogmatist Group, Touchon is director of the group's Ontological Museum, Founder of the International Museum of Collage, Assemblage and Construction and founder of the International Society of Assemblage and Collage Artists. Cecil Touchon is best known for his Typographic Abstraction works that 'Free the letters from their burden of being bearers of meaning".
Touchon co-founded the International Post-Dogmatist Group (IPDG) in 1987. Primarily an alternative to a post-modernist view of the world, the group's writings suggest that creativity and artistic pursuits must be based in a recognition of the spiritual underpinnings of all human activities. The IPDG addresses itself to the art world through a presentation of itself as the 'official avant-garde' creating an elaborate bureaucratic structure of outlandish sounding offices through which the various members communicate simulating 'the establishment' as a form of parody.
In 2005 an exhibition was held in Cuernavaca, Mexico entitled "Cecil Touchon - Thirty Years of Fluxing Around" in which art works and scores dating as early as 1975 were exhibited showing the fluxus tendency in Touchon's work over the last thirty years. Touchon has never been formally associated with the Fluxus group until the year 2000 with his participation in the Fluxlist - an email group where the current generation fluxus artists interact and collaborate. In 2002 Touchon, with a number of other artists from the Fluxlist established the Fluxnexus - a group of artists working together on various new Fluxus projects including a new Fluxus performance workbook. In 2006 Touchon established the FluxMuseum in order to assemble and archive samples of works by contemporary 21st Century Fluxus artists. The central focus of the Fluxmuseum has been the creation of Fluxus related publications and curating and mounting international exhibitions of Fluxus art called Fluxhibitions.
Touchon was selected to publish an essay as one of eleven other contemporary "New Fluxus" artists who are seen to 'inhabit the site of Fluxus, developing and interpreting the Fluxus tradition in a new way.' in a special double issue of the journal Visible Language on Fluxus. The double issue was developed by Owen Smith and Ken Friedman and published through the Rhode Island School of Design The other artists included as representing New Fluxus artists: Alan Bowman, Bibiana Padilla Maltos, David-Baptiste Chirot, David Cologiovani, Eryk Salvaggio, Litsa Spathi, mIEKAL aND, MTAA, Ruud Janssen, Sol Nte, and Walter Cianciusi.
Touchon has been involved with Massurrealism with his sound collage works as well as poetry collage are the concepts explored in his various forms of audio and literary techniques involve his theories related to what he calls the Massurreality – an overreaching popular culture mind world maintained by daily exposure to mass media.
