The Fluxhouse Cooperatives In 1966 George Maciunas, an artist working in the dadaist tradition of anarchistic and irreverent art, became entranced with the idea of artist cooperatives as a vehicle for the emancipation of artists. Beyond residences and studios, Maciunas hoped to establish collective workshops, food-buying cooperatives, and theaters to link the strengths of various […]
From Fluxus to Media Art By Amy Taubin “Warhol and George, Warhol and Fluxus. Somewhere there, very deep, they were both the same, they were both Fluxus…” muses Jonas Mekas during a sequence from his 16mm diary film, Zefiro Torno or Scenes from the Life of George Maciunas. The sequence juxtaposes Warhol’s famed “cow wallpaper” […]
Fluxus: To George With Love Fluxus had its antecedents in those enlightened, earlier twentieth-century artists who wanted to release art from the moribund constraints of formalism. What Dada, Marcel Duchamp, and some aspects of Futurism and Russian Constructivism had initiated in diverse ways between 1909 and 1929 was, by the mid-1950s, reigniting a continuing revolution. […]
FLUXUS: MAGAZINES, MANIFESTOS, MULTUM IN PARVO By Clive Phillpot George Maciunas’ choice of the word Fluxus, in October 1960, as the title of a magazine for a projected Lithuanian Cultural Club in New York, was too good to let go when that circumstance evaporated. In little more than a year, by the end of 1961, […]
GEORGE MACIUNAS: IN MEMORIAM George Maciunas, long-time organizer of Fluxus activities in New York and around the world, died in early May of cancer. Born in November, 1931 in Kaunas, Lithuania, Maciunas has for two decades been an influential presence in the art world. Though his name is not widely known to the general public—to […]
Amy Taubin On the very day in 1949 that Jonas Mekas and his brother Adolfas arrived in New York, they plunged into its burgeoning film scene. The Mekas brothers were already film enthusiasts, but in New York, they discovered avant-garde film. They soon acquired a 16mm camera and Jonas began filming daily life in the […]
“If man could experience the world, the concrete world surrounding him, in the same way he experiences art, there would be no need for art, artists, and similar ‘nonproductive’ elements.” -George Maciunas (1) George Maciunas (1931 – 1978) often asserted that Fluxus was not an art movement but a way of life. He became known […]
Julia E. Robinson George Maciunas: Desigen on Fluxus George Maciunas is best known today as the “impresario” of Fluxus: an international group of artists whose first members came together in 1962 for an inaugural concert series at Wiesbaden, Germany (not far from the epicenter of New Music in Darmstadt). Hardly a regular “concert,” the “Fluxus […]
SHIGEKO KUBOTA By Nicole Demby Conceived of as one video environment, the landscape created by Shigeko Kubota’s magical video sculptures in the show, My Life With Nam June Paik, at once disorients and transfixes. Using a myriad of materials, Kubota creates a world out of inorganic matter that feels like a natural environment, physically expressing […]
Universal Language & the Avant-Garde Stendhal Gallery May 10 – July 28, 2007 Stendhal Gallery proudly presents Universal Language & The Avant-Garde, a show exploring the creative relationship between artists Hans Richter (1888-1976) and Viking Eggeling (1880-1925). Each believed that art had the ability to communicate a universal language, permeating national borders and understood by […]
Divine Benevelence Thomas Bayes Divine Benevolence: Or, An ATTEMPT to prove that the PRINCIPAL END Of the Divine Providence and Government IS THE Happiness of his Creatures. BEING An Answer to a Pamphlet, entitled, Divine Rectitude; or, An Inquiry concerning the Moral Perfections of the Deity. WITH A Refutation of the Notions therein advanced […]
George Maciunas’ Charts The Historical Past of Fluxus’ Future One makes history if one actively intervenes. From the position of stepping back and reflecting, one writes about it. George Maciunas practiced both. As ‘agent-provocateur’ his name became synonymous with the New York Fluxus movement. By acting as the editor of publications both graphically stylized and […]
HANS RICHTER Art and Anti Art Richter’s Memoirs on Dadaism and Its Beginnings Hans Richter’s Dada: Art and Anti-Art begins with the initial formation of the Dadaists in Zurich, Switzerland. Its establishment commenced with Hugo Ball’s entrepreneurial spirit opening the Cabaret Voltaire at No. 1 Spiegelgasse in February 1916, which was formed for exhibitions of […]
Sir Herbert Read on Hans Richter Hans Richter’s name will always be associated with the origins of the modern movement. Avant-garde has become a cliché expression, but in those formative years, between 1908 and 1918, there was an advance-guard of the modern movement, a small group of artists who had to penetrate into unknown country, […]
Hans Richter: Prophet of Modernism By Stephen C. Foster It is common knowledge that artists are submitted to a variety of historiographical fates that are too frequently the result of factors extrinsic to the artist or his/her work, such as the point in time and place from which the history emerges, trends in scholarship, and […]
TIME TRAVEL IN A CABINET By Carolina Carrasco When in 2001 critic Arthur Danto used aesthetician William Kennick’s 1958 metaphor of the world as a warehouse to describe Fluxus’ views on the relationship between art and life, he did not suspect that he was tapping into Maciunas’ most fundamental symbolic nucleus for the movement: storage […]
George Maciunas: Architect By Ken Friedman I. Architect, Designer, Social Planner George Maciunas had several careers in his short, active life. One of these was architecture. George was first of all an architect. The art world has neglected George’s work as an architect, social planner, and designer to emphasize a dramatic but somewhat inaccurate role […]
From Planned Utopias to Jerry-rigged Realities: The Multiple Forms of Maciunas’s Living-Working Systems By: Mari Dumett Reflecting on the life of Lithuanian-born artist and Fluxus founder George Maciunas, fellow artist Geoffrey Hendricks once stated: “To understand George it is helpful to reflect on where and how he lived, for the spaces he created paralleled how […]
For more than three decades, Afghanistan has been persistently, willfully, and viciously raped by its neighbors, the great powers, its own extremists, and warlords. Its people have paid a terrible price. In Kabul, or any of the provincial towns, you can’t walk down the street for five minutes without seeing someone who has lost their […]
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