George Maciunas
Encyclopedia
George Maciunas was a Lithuania
n-born American artist. He was a founding member of Fluxus
, an international community of artists, architects, composers, and designers. Other leading members brought together by this movement included Yoko Ono
, Joseph Beuys
, George Brecht
, Nam June Paik
, Charlotte Moorman
, Wolf Vostell
, and Dick Higgins
.
He is most famous for organising and performing early happenings and for assembling a series of highly influential artists' multiples.
His father, Alexander M Maciunas, was a Lithuanian architect and engineer who had trained in Berlin, and his mother, Leokadija, was a Russian-born dancer from Tiflis affiliated with the Lithuanian National Opera and, later, Aleksandr Kerensky's private secretary, helping him complete his memoirs.
After fleeing Lithuania to avoid being arrested by the advancing Russian Army
in 1944, and living briefly in Bad Neuheim, Frankfurt
, Germany, Jurgis Mačiūnas and his family emigrated to the USA in 1948, living in a middle class area of Long Island
, New York
.
After arriving in the USA, George initially studied graphic design at Cooper Union
, moving to architecture at the Carnegie Institute of Technology
in Pittsburgh and finally art history
at New York University
's Institute of Fine Arts. This began a fascination with the history of art for the rest of his life, and whilst there he began his first art-history chart, measuring 6 by 12 foot, a "time/space chart categorizing all past styles, movements, schools, artists etc." between 1955 and 1960. Whilst this project remained unfinished, he would publish three versions of a history of the Avant-Garde. The first appeared in 1966, with Fluxus as the focal point. He also began a correspondence with Raoul Hausmann
, an original member of Berlin Dada, who advised him to stop using the term 'neo-dada' and concentrate instead on 'fluxus' to describe the nascent movement.
's Experimental Music Composition classes at the New School for Social Research
and an emerging interest in eastern philosophy, a number of avant-garde
artists in New York were beginning to run parallel and competing happenings at the beginning of the 1960s.
As well as Maciunas' concerts at the AG Gallery, March 1961 featuring music and events by Maciunas himself, Ichiyanagi, Mac Low and Higgins, the two other most important precursors to fluxus were La Monte Young's influential series of performances in the Chambers Street
loft of Yoko Ono and Ichiyanagi Toshi, in 1961 involving Henry Flynt
, La Monte Young
, Joseph Byrd
& Robert Morris
amongst others; and Robert Watts
and George Brecht
's Yam Festival, spring 1963 at Rutgers University
and New York, which included a series of mail art
event scores and performances by John Cage, Allan Kaprow
, Alison Knowles
, Ay O and Dick Higgins. All of these artists and more eventually became associated with fluxus, 'either through their collaboration on multiples, inclusion in anthologies, or participation in Fluxus concerts'.
Other key influences noted by Maciunas included the happenings that had occurred at the Black Mountain College
involving Robert Rauschenberg
, John Cage, David Tudor
, Merce Cunningham
and others; the Nouveaux Réalistes; the Concept Art of Henry Flynt and Marcel Duchamp
's notion of the readymade.
Though Maciunas conceived of the name "Fluxus" for a publication covering Lithuanian Culture conceived of during a meeting of Lithuanian émigrés, Fluxus soon developed into much more. Fluxus
became an avant-garde
movement characterized by playful subversion of previous art traditions (even including those of previous avant-garde movements), Dick Higgins
’ famously coined term intermedia
, a view that art should not-be something rarefied or commercial, and a firm commitment to blurring the distinctions between art and life. Maciunas’ life-long interest in diagrams made him chart the political, cultural and social history as well as art history and the chronology of Fluxus.
In 1963, Maciunas composed the first Fluxus Manifesto
, (see above), which called upon its readers to:
In 1960, whilst attending composition classes of the electronic composer Richard Maxfield
at the New School for Social Research in New York, Maciunas met many of the future participants of Fluxus, including La Monte Young, Al Hansen
, Allan Kaprow, & Jackson Mac Low
. In 1961 he opened the AG Gallery at 925 Madison Avenue with fellow Lithuanian Almus Salcius, intending to finance the gallery's ambitious programme of events and exhibitions by importing delicatessen foods and rare musical instruments. The gallery, though short-lived (it closed on July 30 due to lack of funds), was devoted to new and groundbreaking art across genres and held exhibits and performances by many of his new acquaintances.
To avoid debt collectors, Maciunas took a job as a civilian graphic designer at a U.S. Air Force base in Wiesbaden, Germany in late 1961. It was there that he organized the first Fluxus Festival in September 1962. This festival featured various "concerts," scripted actions performed by Fluxus artists, as well as interpreting a number of works by other members of the international avant-garde
.
One of the most notorious events performed at Wiesbaden was Maciunas' interpretation of Philip Corner
's Piano Activities, the score of which asked a group of people to 'play', 'scratch or rub' and 'strike soundboard, pins, lid or drag various objects across them.' In Maciunas' interpretation, with the help of Higgins, Williams and others, the piano was completely destroyed. This event was considered scandalous enough to appear on German television four times. The festival then travelled to Cologne, Paris, Düsseldorf, Amsterdam, The Hague and Nice. These concerts and events were to become integral to the legacy of Fluxus.
replete with "a complex amalgam of Fluxus Products from the FluxShop and the Flux Mail-Order Catalogue and Warehouse, Fluxus copyright protection, a collective newspaper, a Flux Housing Cooperative and frequently revised lists of incorporated Fluxus "workers".
The shop, like all his business ventures, was notoriously unsuccessful, however. In an interview with Larry Miller in 1978 shortly before his death, Maciunas estimated spending 'about $50,000' on fluxus projects over the years that would never recoup their investment.
During this time, Maciunas was assembling Fluxus boxes and Flux-Kits, small boxes containing cards and objects designed and assembled by artists such as Christo, Yoko Ono, and George Brecht
. The first one to be planned was Fluxus 1, a wooden box filled with artworks by most of Maciunas' colleagues. Production difficulties meant that the publication date was pushed back to 1964; Brecht's Water Yam
, 1963, became the first Flux box to actually be published. It was quickly followed by similar collected works of other affiliated artists, such as Ben
and Robert Watts; the Fluxkit contained in an attaché case (1965-6) and another compendium Flux Year Box 2 (1966-8). There was an anthology of Fluxfilms (1966), 11 irregularly-spaced editions of the Fluxus newspaper cc V TRE edited with George Brecht (1964–79) and the Fluxus Cabinet (1975-7). He was also closely involved with the production of a number of Flux Chess
sets.
Maciunas, a trained graphic designer, was responsible for the memorable packaging of fluxus objects, posters and newspapers, helping to give the movement a sense of unity that the artists themselves often denied. He also designed a series of name cards incorporating multiple fonts to characterise each of the participating artists. According to Maciunas, Fluxus was epitomized by the work of George Brecht
, particularly his word event, "Exit." The artwork consists solely of a card on which is printed the words: "Word Event" and then the word "Exit" below. Maciunas said of "Exit":
Whilst Maciunas was still alive, no fluxus work was ever signed or numbered, and many weren't even credited to any artist. As such, huge confusion continues to surround many key fluxus works; Maciunas strived to uphold his stated aims of demonstrating the artist's 'non-professional status...his dispensability and inclusiveness' and that 'anything can be art and anyone can do it.' This strategy was maintained throughout his life; key works that have been assigned to him include USA Surpasses all the Genocide Records!, c1966 (see http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y212/paverpol/Argusvlinder2007/Juni/GeorgeMaciunasUSASurpassesAllTheGen.jpg), an American Flag comparing massacres in Nazi Germany, Russia and Vietnam; the Flux Smile Machine c1970 (see http://www.artpool.hu/lehetetlen/real-kiall/nevek/maciunas_smile.html ) in which a spring forces the mouth into a grimace, usually considered a critique on capitalist imperialism; and the film 12! Big Names!, 1973 (for the poster see http://www.mac-lyon.com/static/moca/contenu/images/collection/fluxus/fluxus.jpg) in which the assembled audience, having been enticed into the cinema with the promise of 12 big names including Warhol and Yoko Ono, watched a film made entirely of 12 names-Warhol, Ono etc.- filling the 20 feet (6.1 m) screen, one after the other, for a duration of five minutes each.
, with financial support from J. M. Kaplan Foundation and the National Foundation for the Arts. Maciunas envisioned the buildings as Fluxhouse cooperatives, collective living environments composed of artists working in many different mediums. By converting tumbledown buildings into lofts and living space, Maciunas pioneered Soho as a haven for artists. The renovation and occupancies violated the M-I zoning laws that designated Soho as a non-residential area, however, and when Kaplan left the project to embark on his own artist cooperative buildings in Greenwich Village
, Maciunas was left with little support against the law. Maciunas continued the co-op despite contravening planning laws. Maciunas bought a series of loft buildings and made them into co-operatives, selling the lofts to artists as working and living spaces. He sold lofts for only a few thousand dollars, and hired artists to do the (sometimes shoddy) carpentry, electrical and plumbing work necessary to make them livable. Although it was illegal to sell the units publicly without first filing a full-disclosure prospectus with the New York State Attorney General, Maciunas never bothered with prospectus requirements. And although he made no attempt to enrich himself, his style was rather that of a con man, and he made a lot of his buyers angry with him because of the low-quality conversion work. More than a few artists felt he had duped them into buying their lofts, even though they had literally bought them at cost. Those "duped" artists' lofts came to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars as SoHo developed, and eventually even millions. There began a series of increasingly bizarre run-ins with the Attorney General
of New York. Although the AG's legal efforts were relatively mild, Maciunas acted as if he were public enemy #1, wearing disguises and going out only at night. Strategies included sending postcards from around the world via associates and friends to persuade the authorities that he was abroad, and placing razor-sharp guillotine blades onto his front door to avoid unwanted visitors. The Fluxhouse cooperatives are often cited as playing a major role in regenerating and gentrifying SoHo.
An argument with an electrician over unpaid bills resulted in a severe beating, allegedly by 'Mafia thugs', November 8, 1975, which left him with 4 broken ribs, a deflated lung, 36 stitches in his head and blind in one eye. He left New York shortly after, to attempt to start a Fluxus-oriented arts centre in a dilapidated mansion and stud farm in New Marlborough, Massachusetts
.
of the pancreas
and liver
in 1977. He died on May 9 of the following year in a hospital in Boston
. Three months before his death, he married his friend and companion, the poet Billie Hutching. After a legal wedding in Lee, Massachusetts, the couple performed a "Fluxwedding" in a friend's loft in SoHo, February 25, 1978. The bride and groom traded clothing.
Adrian Searle, art critic for the Guardian
, put it succinctly in a review of a Fluxus exhibition;
The view that his death liberated Fluxus is also widespread;
An oratorio loosely based on Maciunas and titled Machunas premiered in August 2005 in the St. Christopher Summer Festival in Vilnius
, Lithuania
. Machunas was conceived by artist Lucio Pozzi
, with music by Frank J. Oteri. Several of Maciunas' friends and colleagues protested the fact that the libretto was mistaken by many as a biography.
The Maya Stendhal Gallery located in Chelsea has held multiple exhibitions devoted to the legacy and work of George Maciunas. In 2005, the Maya Stendhal Gallery presented "To George With Love: From the Personal Collection of Jonas Mekas
," which displayed original drawings, posters, objects, and other Fluxus items as well as various films from the Fluxfilm Anthology, a collection of 41 films made by Fluxus artists. In 2006, the gallery presented "George Maciunas, 1953-1978: Charts Diagrams, Films, Documents, and Atlases." In 2007, the Maya Stendhal Gallery collaborated with the city of Vilnius, Lithuania, to open the Jonas Mekas
Visual Arts Center. The center's inaugural exhibition examined the lives and work of prominent figures within the history of the avant-garde, including George Maciunas. In 2008, the gallery held an exhibition devoted to Maciunas’ architectural projects, in particular, a utopian housing structure Maciunas drafted in the late fifties and early sixties, entitled "George Maciunas: Prefabricated Building Systems."
Lithuania
Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the biggest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark...
n-born American artist. He was a founding member of Fluxus
Fluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
, an international community of artists, architects, composers, and designers. Other leading members brought together by this movement included Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono
is a Japanese artist, musician, author and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as her marriage to John Lennon...
, Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys was a German performance artist, sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art.His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his "extended definition of art" and the idea of social...
, George Brecht
George Brecht
George Brecht , born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer as well as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Mobil Oil...
, Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the first video artist....
, Charlotte Moorman
Charlotte Moorman
Madeline Charlotte Moorman Garside was an American cellist and performance artist.She was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. She studied cello from age ten and won a scholarship to Centenary College where she took her B.A. in music in 1955. She received her M.A...
, Wolf Vostell
Wolf Vostell
Wolf Vostell was a German painter, sculptor, noise music maker and Happening artist of the second half of the 20th century. Wolf Vostell is considered one of the pioneers of video art, environment-sculptures, Happenings and the Fluxus Movement...
, and Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins was a composer, poet, printer, and early Fluxus artist. Higgins was born in Cambridge, England, but raised in the United States in various parts of New England, including Worcester, Massachusetts, Putney, Vermont, and Concord, New Hampshire.Like other Fluxus artists, Higgins studied...
.
He is most famous for organising and performing early happenings and for assembling a series of highly influential artists' multiples.
Early life
After fleeing Lithuania to avoid being arrested by the advancing Russian Army
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
in 1944, and living briefly in Bad Neuheim, Frankfurt
Frankfurt
Frankfurt am Main , commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2010 population of 688,249. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,300,000 in 2010...
, Germany, Jurgis Mačiūnas and his family emigrated to the USA in 1948, living in a middle class area of Long Island
Long Island
Long Island is an island located in the southeast part of the U.S. state of New York, just east of Manhattan. Stretching northeast into the Atlantic Ocean, Long Island contains four counties, two of which are boroughs of New York City , and two of which are mainly suburban...
, New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
.
After arriving in the USA, George initially studied graphic design at Cooper Union
Cooper Union
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, commonly referred to simply as Cooper Union, is a privately funded college in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, United States, located at Cooper Square and Astor Place...
, moving to architecture at the Carnegie Institute of Technology
Carnegie Institute of Technology
The Carnegie Institute of Technology , is the name for Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering. It was first called the Carnegie Technical Schools, or Carnegie Tech, when it was founded in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie who intended to build a “first class technical school” in Pittsburgh,...
in Pittsburgh and finally art history
Art history
Art history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and style...
at New York University
New York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
's Institute of Fine Arts. This began a fascination with the history of art for the rest of his life, and whilst there he began his first art-history chart, measuring 6 by 12 foot, a "time/space chart categorizing all past styles, movements, schools, artists etc." between 1955 and 1960. Whilst this project remained unfinished, he would publish three versions of a history of the Avant-Garde. The first appeared in 1966, with Fluxus as the focal point. He also began a correspondence with Raoul Hausmann
Raoul Hausmann
Raoul Hausmann was an Austrian artist and writer. One of the key figures in Berlin Dada, his experimental photographic collages, sound poetry and institutional critiques would have a profound influence on the European Avant-Garde in the aftermath of World War I.-Early biography:Raoul Hausmann was...
, an original member of Berlin Dada, who advised him to stop using the term 'neo-dada' and concentrate instead on 'fluxus' to describe the nascent movement.
Fluxus and the New York Avant-Garde
Primarily influenced by John CageJohn Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
's Experimental Music Composition classes at the New School for Social Research
The New School
The New School is a university in New York City, located mostly in Greenwich Village. From its founding in 1919 by progressive New York academics, and for most of its history, the university was known as the New School for Social Research. Between 1997 and 2005 it was known as New School University...
and an emerging interest in eastern philosophy, a number of avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
artists in New York were beginning to run parallel and competing happenings at the beginning of the 1960s.
As well as Maciunas' concerts at the AG Gallery, March 1961 featuring music and events by Maciunas himself, Ichiyanagi, Mac Low and Higgins, the two other most important precursors to fluxus were La Monte Young's influential series of performances in the Chambers Street
Chambers Street (Manhattan)
Chambers Street is a bi-directional street in the New York City borough of Manhattan. It runs from River Terrace, Battery Park City, in the west, past PS 234 and Stuyvesant High School to 1 Centre Street, the Manhattan Municipal Building, to the east. In the early 20th century the street...
loft of Yoko Ono and Ichiyanagi Toshi, in 1961 involving Henry Flynt
Henry Flynt
Henry Flynt is a philosopher, avant-garde musician, anti-art activist and exhibited artist often associated with Conceptual Art, Fluxus and Nihilism.-Background:...
, La Monte Young
La Monte Young
La Monte Thornton Young is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist.Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is...
, Joseph Byrd
Joseph Byrd
Joseph Byrd was the leader of The United States of America, a notable rock band from the 1960s, as well as the psychedelic group Joe Byrd and the Field Hippies, of cult fame through their release The American Metaphysical Circus...
& Robert Morris
Robert Morris (artist)
Robert Morris is an American sculptor, conceptual artist and writer. He is regarded as one of the most prominent theorists of Minimalism along with Donald Judd but he has also made important contributions to the development of performance art, land art, the Process Art movement and installation...
amongst others; and Robert Watts
Robert Watts (artist)
Robert Watts was an American artist best known for his work as a member of the international Avant-garde art movement Fluxus. Born in Burlington, Iowa June 14, 1923, he became Professor of Art at Douglass College, Rutgers University, New Jersey in 1953, a post he kept until 1984...
and George Brecht
George Brecht
George Brecht , born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer as well as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Mobil Oil...
's Yam Festival, spring 1963 at Rutgers University
Rutgers University
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...
and New York, which included a series of mail art
Mail art
Mail art is a worldwide cultural movement that began in the early 1960s and involves sending visual art through the international postal system. Mail Art is also known as Postal Art or Correspondence Art...
event scores and performances by John Cage, Allan Kaprow
Allan Kaprow
Allan Kaprow was an American painter, assemblagist and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. He helped to develop the "Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. His Happenings - some 200 of them - evolved over the years...
, Alison Knowles
Alison Knowles
Alison Knowles in New York City is an American visual artist known for her soundworks, installations, performances, and publications. Knowles was very active in the Fluxus movement, and continues to create work inspired by her Fluxus experience....
, Ay O and Dick Higgins. All of these artists and more eventually became associated with fluxus, 'either through their collaboration on multiples, inclusion in anthologies, or participation in Fluxus concerts'.
Other key influences noted by Maciunas included the happenings that had occurred at the Black Mountain College
Black Mountain College
Black Mountain College, a school founded in 1933 in Black Mountain, North Carolina, was a new kind of college in the United States in which the study of art was seen to be central to a liberal arts education, and in which John Dewey's principles of education played a major role...
involving Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations...
, John Cage, David Tudor
David Tudor
David Eugene Tudor was an American pianist and composer of experimental music.- Biography :Tudor was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He studied piano with Irma Wolpe and composition with Stefan Wolpe and became known as one of the leading performers of avant garde piano music. He gave the...
, Merce Cunningham
Merce Cunningham
Mercier "Merce" Philip Cunningham was an American dancer and choreographer who was at the forefront of the American avant-garde for more than 50 years. Throughout much of his life, Cunningham was considered one of the greatest creative forces in American dance...
and others; the Nouveaux Réalistes; the Concept Art of Henry Flynt and Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
's notion of the readymade.
Though Maciunas conceived of the name "Fluxus" for a publication covering Lithuanian Culture conceived of during a meeting of Lithuanian émigrés, Fluxus soon developed into much more. Fluxus
Fluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
became an avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
movement characterized by playful subversion of previous art traditions (even including those of previous avant-garde movements), Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins was a composer, poet, printer, and early Fluxus artist. Higgins was born in Cambridge, England, but raised in the United States in various parts of New England, including Worcester, Massachusetts, Putney, Vermont, and Concord, New Hampshire.Like other Fluxus artists, Higgins studied...
’ famously coined term intermedia
Intermedia
Intermedia was a concept employed in the mid-sixties by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe the ineffable, often confusing, inter-disciplinary activities that occur between genres that became prevalent in the 1960s. Thus, the areas such as those between drawing and poetry, or between painting...
, a view that art should not-be something rarefied or commercial, and a firm commitment to blurring the distinctions between art and life. Maciunas’ life-long interest in diagrams made him chart the political, cultural and social history as well as art history and the chronology of Fluxus.
In 1963, Maciunas composed the first Fluxus Manifesto
Art manifesto
The art manifesto has been a recurrent feature associated with the avant-garde in Modernism. Art manifestos are mostly extreme in their rhetoric and intended for shock value to achieve a revolutionary effect. They often address wider issues, such as the political system...
, (see above), which called upon its readers to:
"...purge the world of bourgeois sickness, ‘intellectual’, professional & commercialized culture ... PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART, ... promote NON ART REALITY to be grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals ... FUSE the cadres of cultural, social & political revolutionaries into united front & action."
The AG Gallery and the first Fluxus Festivals
Richard Maxfield
Richard Maxfield was a composer of instrumental, electro-acoustic, and electronic music.Born in Seattle, he most likely taught the first University-level course in electronic music in America at the New School for Social Research...
at the New School for Social Research in New York, Maciunas met many of the future participants of Fluxus, including La Monte Young, Al Hansen
Al Hansen
Alfred Earl "Al" Hansen was an American artist considered as one of the most important Fluxus figures. He was a Norwegian American....
, Allan Kaprow, & Jackson Mac Low
Jackson Mac Low
Jackson Mac Low was an American poet, performance artist, composer and playwright, known to most readers of poetry as a practioneer of systematic chance operations and other non-intentional compositional methods in his work, which Mac Low first experienced in the musical work of John Cage, Earle...
. In 1961 he opened the AG Gallery at 925 Madison Avenue with fellow Lithuanian Almus Salcius, intending to finance the gallery's ambitious programme of events and exhibitions by importing delicatessen foods and rare musical instruments. The gallery, though short-lived (it closed on July 30 due to lack of funds), was devoted to new and groundbreaking art across genres and held exhibits and performances by many of his new acquaintances.
To avoid debt collectors, Maciunas took a job as a civilian graphic designer at a U.S. Air Force base in Wiesbaden, Germany in late 1961. It was there that he organized the first Fluxus Festival in September 1962. This festival featured various "concerts," scripted actions performed by Fluxus artists, as well as interpreting a number of works by other members of the international avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
.
One of the most notorious events performed at Wiesbaden was Maciunas' interpretation of Philip Corner
Philip Corner
Philip Corner is an American composer, action musician, trombone/alphornist, sometime vocalist, pianist-improvisor, theorist-educator, graphic score designer, and visual artist, collage&assembleur, calligrapher.-Biography:After The High School of Music & Art in New York City, Philip Corner...
's Piano Activities, the score of which asked a group of people to 'play', 'scratch or rub' and 'strike soundboard, pins, lid or drag various objects across them.' In Maciunas' interpretation, with the help of Higgins, Williams and others, the piano was completely destroyed. This event was considered scandalous enough to appear on German television four times. The festival then travelled to Cologne, Paris, Düsseldorf, Amsterdam, The Hague and Nice. These concerts and events were to become integral to the legacy of Fluxus.
The Return to New York and the Fluxshop
After his contract with the US Airforce was terminated due to chronic illness, Maciunas was forced to return to New York, September 1963. He began to work as a graphic artist at the New York studio of graphic designer Jack Marshad. He established the official Fluxus Headquarters and proceeded to make Fluxus into a sort of multinational corporationCorporation
A corporation is created under the laws of a state as a separate legal entity that has privileges and liabilities that are distinct from those of its members. There are many different forms of corporations, most of which are used to conduct business. Early corporations were established by charter...
replete with "a complex amalgam of Fluxus Products from the FluxShop and the Flux Mail-Order Catalogue and Warehouse, Fluxus copyright protection, a collective newspaper, a Flux Housing Cooperative and frequently revised lists of incorporated Fluxus "workers".
The shop, like all his business ventures, was notoriously unsuccessful, however. In an interview with Larry Miller in 1978 shortly before his death, Maciunas estimated spending 'about $50,000' on fluxus projects over the years that would never recoup their investment.
Larry Miller, "May I ask a stupid question? Why didn't it pay off? Because isn't part of the idea that it's low cost and multiple distribution..."
GM; "No one was buying it, in those days. We opened up a store on Canal Street, what was it, 1964, and we had it open almost all year. We didn't make one sale in that whole year... We did not even sell a 50 cent item, a postage stamp sheet... you could buy V TRE papers for a quarter, you could buy George Brecht's puzzles for one dollar, Fluxus yearboxes for twenty dollars."
Flux Boxes
George Brecht
George Brecht , born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer as well as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Mobil Oil...
. The first one to be planned was Fluxus 1, a wooden box filled with artworks by most of Maciunas' colleagues. Production difficulties meant that the publication date was pushed back to 1964; Brecht's Water Yam
Water Yam (artist's multiple)
Water Yam is an artist's book by the American artist George Brecht. Originally published in Germany, June 1963 in a box designed by George Maciunas and typeset by Tomas Schmit, it has been re-published in various countries several times since...
, 1963, became the first Flux box to actually be published. It was quickly followed by similar collected works of other affiliated artists, such as Ben
Ben Vautier
Ben Vautier , also known simply as Ben, is a French artist.Vautier lives and works in Nice, where he ran a record shop called Magazin between 1958 and 1973...
and Robert Watts; the Fluxkit contained in an attaché case (1965-6) and another compendium Flux Year Box 2 (1966-8). There was an anthology of Fluxfilms (1966), 11 irregularly-spaced editions of the Fluxus newspaper cc V TRE edited with George Brecht (1964–79) and the Fluxus Cabinet (1975-7). He was also closely involved with the production of a number of Flux Chess
Spice Chess
Spice Chess is an artist's multiple by the Japanese artist Takako Saito, whilst she was resident in the United States. Originally manufactured winter 1964-65, and offered for sale March 1965 , the work is one of a famous series of disrupted chess sets referred to as Fluxchess or Flux Chess, made...
sets.
'Perhaps most important of all of Maciunas's publishing activities remain the object multiples, conceived as inexpensive, mass-produced unlimited editions. These were either works made by individual Fluxus artists, sometimes in collaboration with Maciunas, or, most controversially, Maciunas's own interpretations of an artist's concept or score. Their purpose was to erode the cultural status of art and to help to eliminate the artist's ego.'
Maciunas, a trained graphic designer, was responsible for the memorable packaging of fluxus objects, posters and newspapers, helping to give the movement a sense of unity that the artists themselves often denied. He also designed a series of name cards incorporating multiple fonts to characterise each of the participating artists. According to Maciunas, Fluxus was epitomized by the work of George Brecht
George Brecht
George Brecht , born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer as well as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Mobil Oil...
, particularly his word event, "Exit." The artwork consists solely of a card on which is printed the words: "Word Event" and then the word "Exit" below. Maciunas said of "Exit":
"The best Fluxus ‘Composition’ is a most non-personal, ‘readymade’ one like Brecht's ‘Exit’—it does not require and of us to perform it since it happens daily without any ‘special’ performance of it. Thus our festivals will eliminate themselves (and our need to participate) when they become total readymades (like Brecht's exit)" (see http://www.avelas.net/ficheiros/word_event/George%20Brecht_event%20card_def.jpg.jpg)
Some Works
SoHo and the Fluxhouse Co-Operative
In 1966, Maciunas began buying several loft buildings from closing manufacturing companies in SoHoSoHo
SoHo is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York City, notable for being the location of many artists' lofts and art galleries, and also, more recently, for the wide variety of stores and shops ranging from trendy boutiques to outlets of upscale national and international chain stores...
, with financial support from J. M. Kaplan Foundation and the National Foundation for the Arts. Maciunas envisioned the buildings as Fluxhouse cooperatives, collective living environments composed of artists working in many different mediums. By converting tumbledown buildings into lofts and living space, Maciunas pioneered Soho as a haven for artists. The renovation and occupancies violated the M-I zoning laws that designated Soho as a non-residential area, however, and when Kaplan left the project to embark on his own artist cooperative buildings in Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village, , , , .in New York often simply called "the Village", is a largely residential neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City. A large majority of the district is home to upper middle class families...
, Maciunas was left with little support against the law. Maciunas continued the co-op despite contravening planning laws. Maciunas bought a series of loft buildings and made them into co-operatives, selling the lofts to artists as working and living spaces. He sold lofts for only a few thousand dollars, and hired artists to do the (sometimes shoddy) carpentry, electrical and plumbing work necessary to make them livable. Although it was illegal to sell the units publicly without first filing a full-disclosure prospectus with the New York State Attorney General, Maciunas never bothered with prospectus requirements. And although he made no attempt to enrich himself, his style was rather that of a con man, and he made a lot of his buyers angry with him because of the low-quality conversion work. More than a few artists felt he had duped them into buying their lofts, even though they had literally bought them at cost. Those "duped" artists' lofts came to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars as SoHo developed, and eventually even millions. There began a series of increasingly bizarre run-ins with the Attorney General
Attorney General
In most common law jurisdictions, the attorney general, or attorney-general, is the main legal advisor to the government, and in some jurisdictions he or she may also have executive responsibility for law enforcement or responsibility for public prosecutions.The term is used to refer to any person...
of New York. Although the AG's legal efforts were relatively mild, Maciunas acted as if he were public enemy #1, wearing disguises and going out only at night. Strategies included sending postcards from around the world via associates and friends to persuade the authorities that he was abroad, and placing razor-sharp guillotine blades onto his front door to avoid unwanted visitors. The Fluxhouse cooperatives are often cited as playing a major role in regenerating and gentrifying SoHo.
An argument with an electrician over unpaid bills resulted in a severe beating, allegedly by 'Mafia thugs', November 8, 1975, which left him with 4 broken ribs, a deflated lung, 36 stitches in his head and blind in one eye. He left New York shortly after, to attempt to start a Fluxus-oriented arts centre in a dilapidated mansion and stud farm in New Marlborough, Massachusetts
Massachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...
.
The Fluxwedding and an Early Death
Perpetually sick, Maciunas developed cancerCancer
Cancer , known medically as a malignant neoplasm, is a large group of different diseases, all involving unregulated cell growth. In cancer, cells divide and grow uncontrollably, forming malignant tumors, and invade nearby parts of the body. The cancer may also spread to more distant parts of the...
of the pancreas
Pancreas
The pancreas is a gland organ in the digestive and endocrine system of vertebrates. It is both an endocrine gland producing several important hormones, including insulin, glucagon, and somatostatin, as well as a digestive organ, secreting pancreatic juice containing digestive enzymes that assist...
and liver
Liver
The liver is a vital organ present in vertebrates and some other animals. It has a wide range of functions, including detoxification, protein synthesis, and production of biochemicals necessary for digestion...
in 1977. He died on May 9 of the following year in a hospital in Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
. Three months before his death, he married his friend and companion, the poet Billie Hutching. After a legal wedding in Lee, Massachusetts, the couple performed a "Fluxwedding" in a friend's loft in SoHo, February 25, 1978. The bride and groom traded clothing.
"Fluxus is a latin word Maciunas dug up. I never studied Latin. If it hadn't been for Maciunas nobody might have ever called it anything. We would all have gone our own ways, like the man crossing his street with his umbrella, and a woman walking a dog in another direction. We would have gone our own ways and done our own things: the only reference point for any of this bunch of people who liked each other's works, and each other, more or less, was Maciunas. So fluxus, as far as I'm concerned, is Maciunas." George Brecht
Posthumous Reputation
Maciunas remains enigmatic to this day, and his reputation still elicits strong responses both from artists and critics who have come after Fluxus, and by artists who knew him whilst still alive.
"it was a special mission for George to turn up the lights on any such illusionism and he was ever out to demonstrate that the art world has no clothes. He was perhaps the toughest of all on artists, reserving his strictest judgments for those he saw as self-promoting egoists who played into the hands of "High Art" barons."
Larry Miller,
"Dreamer. Child. Utopian, Fascist, Christ, Democrat, Madman. A realist whose realism always needed another kind of reality. (His conceptions of reality never coincided with the accepted reality.) He was beautiful, foolish, dogmatic, charming. Impossible." Milan Knizak
Adrian Searle, art critic for the Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, put it succinctly in a review of a Fluxus exhibition;
"Maciunas was fascinating, talented, and by all accounts a nightmare. Like André BretonAndré BretonAndré Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....
, godfather of the surrealist movement, Maciunas would invite artists, composers and even philosophers to take part in activities. He would charm them, boss them around for years, then perform summary excommunications, banishing those who displeased him..... Maciunas would take against individuals for no good reason - composer Karlheinz StockhausenKarlheinz StockhausenKarlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music"...
was one - and damn by association those who had anything to do with them. All this was wearying."
"Richard LongRichard Long (artist)Richard Long is an English sculptor, photographer and painter, one of the best known British land artists. Long is the only artist to be shortlisted for the Turner Prize four times, and he is reputed to have refused the prize in 1984...
's walks, Gilbert and GeorgeGilbert and GeorgeGilbert & George are two artists who work together as a collaborative duo. Gilbert Proesch and George Passmore have become famous for their distinctive, highly formal appearance and manner and their brightly coloured graphic-style photo-based artworks.-Early life:Gilbert Proesch was...
posing as living sculptures, Sarah LucasSarah LucasSarah Lucas is an English artist. She is part of the generation of Young British Artists who emerged during the 1990s...
's early work and a million other small gestures, actions and ephemeral objects can trace their origins back to fluxus. It was a conduit through which ideas and personalities flowed, and still flow today. Fluxus inevitably failed, and came to be seen as old hat. It was partly a problem of packaging, though Maciunas was a very good graphic designer for whom no detail was too small to be worried over. Fluxus's aim to eliminate music, theatre, poetry, fiction and all the rest of the fine arts combined was doomed. Only the mass entertainment industry might achieve such a thing." Adrian Searle
The view that his death liberated Fluxus is also widespread;
"I do believe that Fluxus not only survived George, but now that it is finally free to be Fluxus, it is becoming that something/nothing with which George should be happy." Ben PattersonBen PattersonBen Patterson is an American musician, an artist and one of the founders of the Fluxus movement.-Biography:Born in Pittsburgh May 29, 1934. From 1956 to 1960, he worked as a double bassist at the Halifax Symphony Orchestra , the US Army 7th Army Symphony Orchestra and the Ottawa Philharmonic...
An oratorio loosely based on Maciunas and titled Machunas premiered in August 2005 in the St. Christopher Summer Festival in Vilnius
Vilnius
Vilnius is the capital of Lithuania, and its largest city, with a population of 560,190 as of 2010. It is the seat of the Vilnius city municipality and of the Vilnius district municipality. It is also the capital of Vilnius County...
, Lithuania
Lithuania
Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the biggest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark...
. Machunas was conceived by artist Lucio Pozzi
Lucio Pozzi
Lucio Pozzi is a Milanese painter and performance artist.His work is in the collections of the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center; the Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Art Gallery of Ontario; the New York Public Library; the Detroit Institute of Arts; Giuseppe Panza;...
, with music by Frank J. Oteri. Several of Maciunas' friends and colleagues protested the fact that the libretto was mistaken by many as a biography.
The Maya Stendhal Gallery located in Chelsea has held multiple exhibitions devoted to the legacy and work of George Maciunas. In 2005, the Maya Stendhal Gallery presented "To George With Love: From the Personal Collection of Jonas Mekas
Jonas Mekas
Jonas Mekas is a Lithuanian-born American filmmaker, writer, and curator who has often been called "the godfather of American avant-garde cinema." His work has been exhibited in museums and festivals across Europe and America.-Biography:...
," which displayed original drawings, posters, objects, and other Fluxus items as well as various films from the Fluxfilm Anthology, a collection of 41 films made by Fluxus artists. In 2006, the gallery presented "George Maciunas, 1953-1978: Charts Diagrams, Films, Documents, and Atlases." In 2007, the Maya Stendhal Gallery collaborated with the city of Vilnius, Lithuania, to open the Jonas Mekas
Jonas Mekas
Jonas Mekas is a Lithuanian-born American filmmaker, writer, and curator who has often been called "the godfather of American avant-garde cinema." His work has been exhibited in museums and festivals across Europe and America.-Biography:...
Visual Arts Center. The center's inaugural exhibition examined the lives and work of prominent figures within the history of the avant-garde, including George Maciunas. In 2008, the gallery held an exhibition devoted to Maciunas’ architectural projects, in particular, a utopian housing structure Maciunas drafted in the late fifties and early sixties, entitled "George Maciunas: Prefabricated Building Systems."
External links
- A whole series of artworks by Maciunas on We Make Money Not Art
- Sonic Youth's interpretation of Maciunas' Piano Piece #13 for Nam June Paik
- Maciunas' 1966 film End After 9
- An excellent interview with Emmett Williams about Fluxus, Maciunas and the European Avant-Garde.
- An extraordinary postcard sent to Nam June Paik, expelling him from Fluxus after performing with Stockhausen, c1965
- The Fluxus edition of Aspen on UbuWeb
- Reminiscences of meeting Maciunas, by Yoko Ono
- Fluxus Performance Workbook
- Jonas Mekas' Warhol and Maciunas, featuring Maciunas' Dumpling Party, 1971
- Collection of links
- Bibliography of Maciunas material.
- George Maciunas Inerview - KRAB Radio Broadcast, Seattle, 1977 (streaming audio clips)
- Maciunas' Timeline and CV
- 37 short Fluxus films, 1962-70
- http://printedmatter.org/catalogue/search.cfm?page=1&search=fluxus%20box&search_type=&sec=1&rows=10&search_recent=m1&search_sort=rz&email=&cookie1=DF2BCF39-1C42-ECEB-78DE499BCC6748B5&list_id=&list_id2=&Partists=&Ptitle=&Pcategory=&Pbook_type=&Psubtitle=&Pvol=&Ppages=&Pbook_cover=&Pbinding=&Pfeatures=&Pprocess=&Pcolor=&Pbook_signed=&Ppub=&Ppubcity=&Ppubloc=&Ppubdate1=&Psynopsis=&Pgenre=&Psubject=&Pretail1=&Pretail2=A nice archive of Flux boxes at Printed Matter]
- Media Art Net archive of early Fluxus works
- A history and critique of early fluxus, especially the fluxus festorum; The Origins of Fluxus, Stuart Home
- FluxRadio an online radio programme on the Fluxus movement at Ràdio Web MACBA