George Maciunas (; ; November 8, 1931 – May 9, 1978) was a Lithuanian American artist, art historian, and art organizer who was the founding member and central coordinator of Fluxus,Colby Chamberlain, Fluxus Administration: George Maciunas and the Art of Paperwork, University of Chicago Press, p. 29 an international community of artists, architects, composers, and designers. He is most famous for organizing and performing in early Fluxus Happenings and Festivals, for his Fluxus graphic art work, and for assembling a series of highly influential Fluxus artists' multiples.
Early life
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 OperaMr. Fluxus, p. 338 and, later, Aleksandr Kerensky's private secretary, helping him complete his memoirs.Mr. Fluxus, p. 18
After fleeing Lithuania to avoid being arrested by the advancing Red Army in 1944, and living briefly in Bad Nauheim, Frankfurt, Germany, initially under Nazi control and then under the occupying forces, Jurgis Mačiūnas and his family emigrated to the US in 1948, living in a middle class area of Long Island, New York.
After arriving in the US, George studied art, graphic design, and architecture at Cooper Union, architecture and musicology at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh and finally art history at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts specializing in the European and Siberian art of migrations. His studies lasted eleven years from 1949 to 1960 and were completed in succession. 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 feet, a time/space chart categorizing all past styles, movements, schools, artists etc.Mr. Fluxus, p. 31 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.Letter from R Hausmann, 1962 quoted in Mr. Fluxus, p. 40
Duke University Professor Kristine Stiles has discussed Fluxus as part of a movement towards global humanism achieved through the breakdown of boundaries in artistic media, cultural norms, and political conventions. The blurring of cultural conventions, which began in the early 20th century with movements such as Dada and Futurism, was continued by Fluxus artists in correspondence with the changes taking place in the sixties. Like the definition of "Flux", which means "to flow", Fluxus artists sought to reorder the temples of production and reveal "the extraordinary that remains latent in the undisclosed ordinary" during the midst of the dramatic modernist epoch.
Career Primarily influenced by John Cage's Experimental Music Composition classes at the New School for Social ResearchColby Chamberlain, Fluxus Administration: George Maciunas and the Art of Paperwork, University of Chicago Press, p. 64 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 in March 1961 featuring music and events by Maciunas himself, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Mac Low and Dick Higgins,Oxford Art Online; Performance Art 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 Toshi Ichiyanagi 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'.According to a letter written by Maciunas to Vostell in November 1964, the 'inner core' of fluxus at that time was Brecht, Ay-O, Willem de Ridder, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Joe Jones, Shigeko Kubota, Takehisa Kosugi, Maciunas, Ben Patterson, Mieko Shiomi, Ben Vautier, Robert Watts, Emmett Williams, La Monte Young, with Kuniharu Akiyama listed as co-chairman for Japan, and Barbara Moore as administrator in New York. (quoted in Mr. Fluxus, p. 42)
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,Colby Chamberlain, Fluxus Administration: George Maciunas and the Art of Paperwork, University of Chicago Press, p. 25 Fluxus soon developed into much more: an avant-garde movement characterized by playful subversion of previous art traditions (even including those of previous avant-garde movements). Fluxus also soon meant 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' lifelong 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: ...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.
Shared by its sibling art movements pop art and minimalism, Fluxus expressed a countercultural sentiment to the value of art and the modes of its experience –distinctly achieved by its commitment to collectivism and to decommodifying and deaestheticizing art. Its aesthetic practitioners, valuing originality over imitating overworked forms, reconceptualized the art object and the nature of performance through musical 'concerts', 'olympic' games, and publications. By undermining the traditional role of art and artist, its humor is reflective of a goal to bring life back into art, which Maciunas states in his agenda, "If man could experience the world, the concrete world surrounding him (from mathematical ideas to physical matter) in the same way he experiences art, there would be no need for art, artists and similar 'nonproductive' elements".
The AG Gallery and the first Fluxus festivals
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, and 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),Colby Chamberlain, Fluxus Administration: George Maciunas and the Art of Paperwork, University of Chicago Press, p. 60 & 63 was devoted to new and groundbreaking art across genres and held exhibits and performance art events 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.Colby Chamberlain, Fluxus Administration: George Maciunas and the Art of Paperwork, University of Chicago Press, pp. 67-68 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 traveled to Cologne, Paris, Düsseldorf, Amsterdam, The Hague, and Nice.The programmes for these concerts included works by John Cage, Terry Riley, Philip Corner, La Monte Young, Henry Flynt, George Brecht, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Yoko Ono, Stockhausen, György Ligeti, Alison Knowles, Emmett Williams, Benjamin Patterson, Joseph Byrd, Raoul Hausmann, Daniel Spoerri, Robert Filliou, Robert Watts, Brion Gysin, Joseph Beuys, Krzysztof Penderecki, Sylvano Bussotti, Tomas Schmit, Takehisa Kosugi, Arthur Köpcke, Wolf Vostell and Cornelius Cardew, amongst others. 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 and former Look art director Jack Marshad. He established the official Fluxus Headquarters at 359 Canal Street in New York City and proceeded to make Fluxus into a sort of multinational corporation, 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 a 1978 interview with Larry Miller 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."Interview with Larry Miller, 1978, quoted in Mr. Fluxus, p. 114
Flux boxes