George Maciunas

George. Jeffrey Perkins, Documentary feature-length film/video portrait of George Maciunas, USA, 2018

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 [1])

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". For this reason, Fluxus has been described by Fluxus artist and scholar Ken Friedman as "an active philosophy of experience that sometimes only takes the form of art" in acting as a critical approach to art, life, and the mechanism of its methodologies.

Maciunas' work has been exhibited in many of the major museums around the world with archives held in The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, The Getty Research Institute, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, and Kaunas Picture Gallery, representing the Fluxus room. Recently acquired from the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, The Museum of Modern Art currently holds the largest collection of Maciunas and Fluxus works of 10,000 items. As part of a touring exhibition organized by Dartmouth College, Maciunas' work was featured in "Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life" at New York University's Grey Gallery in fall 2011 and University of Michigan's Museum of Art in spring 2012.

In 2010 problems arose between Harry Stendhal and Jonas Mekas in which some of the practices of the Stendhal Gallery fell into question, causing concern among surviving Fluxus artists. The George Maciunas/Fluxus Foundation, became active in November 2011, presenting exhibitions on the contemporary applications of Maciunas' inventions and theories regarding education and architecture. These exhibitions have explored his ideas as precursors to adaptive design processes and global networks. In September 2012, the foundation held an exhibition on Maciunas' architectural work centered on his prefabricated modular mass-housing system known as Fluxhouse. "Fluxcity: Prefabricated/Modular Solution for Social Housing".

In 2005 an oratorio loosely based on Maciunas premiered in the Summer Festival in Vilnius, Lithuania.

In 1978 Maciunas married his girlfriend, Billie Hutching, in a performance piece called "The Fluxwedding" where the bride and the groom traded clothing.

Three months later, George Maciunas died of pancreatic cancer, on May 9, 1978, in a Boston hospital, surrounded by his Fluxus friends. That same year, Nam June Paik and Joseph Beuys gave a performance "In Memoriam George Maciunas" at the Kunstakademie, Dusseldorf where Beuys and Maciunas first appeared in Fluxus actions. The concert lasted 74 minutes - Maciunas died aged 47. Fluxus artists continue to meet in cities around the world as well as in cyberspace.

When Kaplan left the project to embark on other artist cooperative buildings, Maciunas was left with little support against the law. Maciunas continued the co-op despite contravening planning laws, buying a series of loft buildings to sell to artists as working and living spaces. Although it was illegal to sell the units publicly without first filing a full-disclosure prospectus with the New York State Attorney General, Maciunas ignored the legal requirements, beginning a series of increasingly bizarre run-ins with the Attorney General of New York. Maciunas began 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. Though, like other Fluxus projects, Maciunas managed his duties without personal profit, financial disputes between the cooperatives led to problems. 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.

In the late 1970s and 1980s the Russian underground performing artists Sergei Kuryokhin and Boris Grebenshchikov were experimenting with the Fluxus ideas in their happening shows. Eventually a Fluxus-style community of free artists was founded in a abandoned building at Pushkinskaya 10 in St. Petersburg.

In 1970s George Maciunas was invited by Yoko Ono to paint and decorate the John Lennon apartment in the "Dakota" Building in New York City. His ideas attracted and influenced many artists around the World, such as Yoko Ono, John Lennon, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Nam June Paik, La Monte Young, Eric Andersen, Yasunao Tone, Ben Vautier, Ben Patterson, George Brecht, Alison Knowles, Philip Corner, Wolf Vostell, Geoffrey Hendricks, Joseph Beuys among many others. Maciunas's Fluxus Manifesto declared "opposition to the bourgeois sickness and commercialized culture. " He also initiated mail-art and free networking of mail-artists in 60s, that eventually developed into Internet networking.

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 [2]), an American Flag comparing massacres in Nazi Germany, Russia and Vietnam; the Flux Smile Machine c1970 (see [3] ) 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 [4]) 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-foot-wide (6.1 m) screen, one after the other, for a duration of five minutes each.

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."

In 1963, at the Kunstakademie, Dusseldorf Beuys and Maciunas first appeared in Fluxus actions playing pianos as part of improvised performance.

In 1962 the first Fluxus festival was held in Wiesbaden, Germany, with performances by Maciunas, Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik, Alison Knowles, Emmett Williams and others.

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, 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'.

In 1960 Maciunas started an art gallery at 925 Madison Avenue in New York that became a meeting place for the Fluxus people. They used a wide combination of influences from Dadaists and Marcel Duchamp to John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Nam June Paik, and Futurists. Fluxus focused on the artist's personality and individual actions instead of the traditional "professionalism. " Influenced by the "prepared piano" idea of John Cage, Maciunas invented "prepared sports," multi-bike vehicle, funny food events, and "humorous dances" on sticky floor. Fluxus main ideas were loosely formulated as internationalism, experimentalism, inter-media, play or gags, minimalism and ephemeriality.

Early Fluxus events took place in New York in 1960-62.

More Fluxus festivals (also called "Free expression festivals") were held in the 1960s in Europe, in the 1970s in Seattle, and in the 1980s in various US and European cities.

Since the 1960s, Maciunas pioneered the revival of artistic communities in SoHo by converting several rundown buildings into artist's lofts and studios. At that time Maciunas assembled an highly diverse community of creative people who shared their innovative artistic ideas. Maciunas embraced many unknown artists and helped to advance their careers. Maciunas and the Fluxus movement attracted young Japanese artist Yoko Ono. She and Maciunas became close friends.

As an architect he developed an innovative modular prototype useful in the construction of prefabricated buildings while working at Olin Mathieson's division of Aluminum Product Development and Design. He filed a patent (#2,970,676) for the invention of a structural framework for prefabricated buildings using aluminum beams and columns on January 27, 1958. Maciunas was awarded a patent (#4,545,159) for a modular building system on February 7, 1961. He used this invention towards designing a modular prefabricated mass-housing system known as Fluxhouse. Developed as an improved design to Soviet Block Housing (or Khrushchyovka), Fluxhouse was conceived in consideration to efficiency of materials, transportation, and labor to produce a cost and time effective mass-produced housing system. As an efficient modular system intended for factory production, this eco-friendly and sustainable design can be adapted to construct a single family home, a mid-rise building, or a neighborhood community with the multiplication or subtraction of units. Maciunas conceived this design as a dwelling which combines the low-cost advantages of standardization with the freedom of customization.

After arriving in the USA, 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." 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.

After fleeing Lithuania to avoid being arrested by the advancing Red Army in 1944, and living briefly in Bad Nauheim, Frankfurt, Germany, Jurgis Mačiūnas and his family emigrated to the USA in 1948, living in a middle class area of Long Island, New York.

George Maciunas was a Lithuanian-American artist, known as a founding member of the Fluxus community of artists, architects, writers, musicians, and designers. His main goals were simplicity and fun. He was born Jurgis Maciunas in Kaunas, Lithuania, on Novmber 8, 1931, to a Lithuanian father and Ukrainian mother. He escaped the Soviet occupation by moving to America. There he studied architecture at Carnegie Mellon University. Eventually he developed several loft buildings for artists in SoHo, New York City, and a farm in Massachussetts. However, real estate business was not his calling, and he expressed himself in various artistic initiatives. Maciunas was a master of public-shunning activities, like dressing as dentists with his friends, and using tooth brushes to clean the sidewalk near the Plaza Hotel in New York. Maciunas was co-founder of the experimental art association, that he called Fluxus. He assembled a loose, non-hierarchical gathering of innovative artists, architects, writers, composers, and designers around the World. Their performances blended different artistic disciplines, visual arts, music, and literature.