George Maciunas (Lithuanian: Jurgis Mačiūnas, pronounced ma-chew-nas; born Kaunas, Lithuania, November 8, 1931; died May 9, 1978) was a Lithuanian-born American artist who was a founding member of the Fluxus, an international community of artists, architects, composers, and designers.
His mother was half-Polish and half-Lithuanian and his father was Lithuanian. After living briefly in Germany, Maciunas came to New York in 1948 to study graphic design at Cooper Union. He then studied architecture at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh and finally art history at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.
Maciunas became an organizing force in the New York avant-garde scene of the 1960s. Though he 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 rarified 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 1960, Maciunas opened AG Gallery at 925 Madison Avenue after taking the space over from fellow Lithuanian Almus Salcius. 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 Dick Higgins, Walter De Maria, Henry Flynt, La Monte Young, Ray Johnson, Yoko Ono and many others.
In 1961, Maciunas took a job as a civilian graphic designer at a U.S. Air Force base in Wiesbaden, Germany to avoid debt collectors. It was there that he organized the first Fluxus Festival in 1962 along with Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell, Emmett Williams, Alison Knowles, and Ben Patterson. This festival featured various “concerts,” scripted actions performed by Fluxus artists. These concerts and events, inspired by the likes of Dada and John Cage, were to become integral to the legacy of Fluxus.
When Maciunas returned to New York, he established the official Fluxus Headquarters 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”.
In 1963, Maciunas composed the first Fluxus Manifesto, 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.”
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. 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”:
“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)”
In 1966, Maciunas began buying several loft buildings from closing manufacturing companies in Soho, 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 rennovation 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. Still, he continued to buy new buildings and inventively find ways to continue his operations. Though the operations closed in 1968, the Fluxhouse cooperatives undoubtedly played a major role in making Soho what it is today.
Perpetually sick, Maciunas developed stomach cancer in 1977. He died on May 9 of the following year in a hospital in Boston. Three months before his death, he married one of his tenants, Billie Hutching. Their wedding was a performance piece called "The Fluxwedding." The bride and groom traded clothing.
An oratorio loosely based on Maciunasand 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.” Last year, 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. Currently, the gallery is holding 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.” The exhibition is open until August 23, 2008. For more information on “George Maciunas: Prefabricated Building Systems”, or previous exhibitions at the Maya Stendhal Gallery, visit the gallery’s website at MayaStendhalGallery.com
References
- Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Maciunas' Learning Machines. From Art History to a Chronology of Fluxus (Vice Versa, 2003, ISBN 3-932809-39-4)
- Thomas Kellein, "The Dream of Fluxus" (Edition Hanjorg Mayer, 2007)
- Liz Kotz, "Post-Cagean Aesthetics and the Event Score" (the MIT Press, October, Vol. 95, (Winter, 2001), pp. 54-89)
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