George Maciunas

Biography

In September 1962, in Wiesbaden, a piano was taken apart on stage. The piece was Philip Corner’s “Piano Activities”, and the performance was led by Maciunas, assisted by Dick Higgins, Emmett Williams and others. The event was shown four times on German television.

Jurgis Mačiūnas was born on 8 November 1931 in Kaunas. His father, Alexander, was an architect and engineer who had trained in Berlin; his mother, Leokadija, was a dancer, Russian by origin, from Tiflis. The boy attended Marija Pečkauskaitė’s primary school and then the Aušra gymnasium. In 1944 the family fled to Germany to escape the advancing Red Army. They spent several years in the American occupation zone, and in 1948 moved to the United States and settled on Long Island.

He studied for a long time, eleven years in succession, from 1949 to 1960: art, graphic design and architecture at Cooper Union in New York, then architecture and musicology at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, then art history at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University, where he worked on the European and Siberian art of the migration period. In those years he began drawing an enormous chart on which he meant to place, by time and place, every style, school and name. He never finished it, but in 1966 he published the first of three versions of a history of the avant-garde, with Fluxus at its centre. He corresponded with Raoul Hausmann, a member of Berlin Dada, who advised him to drop the word “neo-Dada” and speak of “Fluxus”.

Maciunas worked as an architect and graphic designer for several firms, among them Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Knoll Associates. At Olin Mathieson he developed a modular structure for prefabricated buildings made of aluminium beams and columns, and obtained patents for it. Later, on that basis, he conceived a standardised house, the Fluxhouse.

In parallel, in the late 1950s, he studied composition at the New School for Social Research and met La Monte Young, George Brecht, Al Hansen, Allan Kaprow, Jackson Mac Low and Yoko Ono. In 1961, together with Almus Salcius, he opened the AG Gallery at 925 Madison Avenue. The money for a programme of exhibitions and concerts was to come from importing delicatessen foods and rare musical instruments. The gallery closed on 30 July for lack of funds. He had thought up the name “Fluxus” for a magazine about Lithuanian culture, but the movement went far beyond that.

Escaping debt collectors, in late 1961 Maciunas left for Wiesbaden and took a job as a civilian graphic designer at a US Air Force base. There he organised the festival of September 1962: fourteen concerts in Wiesbaden, followed by performances in Copenhagen, Paris and other cities. In 1963 he wrote the “Fluxus Manifesto”, calling on readers to purge the world of the “bourgeois sickness” of professional and commercialised culture. Because of illness his contract with the military was terminated, and in September 1963 he returned to New York, where he worked as a graphic designer in the studio of Jack Marshad.

At 359 Canal Street he set up the Fluxus headquarters and a shop which, by his own account in a 1978 interview, did not sell a single item in a year. Yet there and elsewhere Fluxus boxes were being assembled: George Brecht’s “Water Yam” (1963) came out first, while “Fluxus 1” had been planned earlier but was delayed. Then came the Fluxkit in an attaché case, “Flux Year Box 2”, an anthology of Fluxfilms, the newspaper “cc V TRE” and the Fluxus Cabinet. Maciunas designed the packaging, posters and typefaces for the participants’ name cards himself. During his lifetime Fluxus works were neither signed nor numbered, so the authorship of many is still disputed. It seems to me that the design gave the movement the unity that the participants themselves often denied.

In 1966 he organised the Fluxhouse Cooperative: he bought loft buildings in SoHo from closing factories and sold them to artists as studios with living space. Funding came from the John Jay Kaplan Fund and the National Endowment for the Arts. All this violated the zoning rules for the district, and Maciunas became embroiled in prolonged conflicts with the Attorney General of New York State. On 8 November 1975, after an argument with an electrician over unpaid bills, he was severely beaten and lost the sight of one eye. Soon afterwards he moved to New Marlborough, Massachusetts, to try to set up an arts centre in an old mansion.

Maciunas died on 9 May 1978 in a hospital in Boston.

A few months before his death he married the poet Billie Hutching, and on 25 February 1978 a “Fluxwedding” was held in a loft in SoHo, where the bride and groom exchanged clothes. According to a script he had written himself, his ashes were scattered over the Atlantic.