TRACES: George Maciunas
Today is the occasion to bear in mind George Maciunas (8/11/1931-9/5/1978), an exemplary processor of information as an enigmatic analytic mind, who best is known as the founder and central coordinator of Fluxus Movement from 1962 until his untimely death in 1978. This column is a tribute to artists, living or dead, who have left their mark in Contemporary Art. Through documents or interviews, starting with: moments and memories, we reveal out from the past-unknown sides of big personalities, who left their indelible traces in time and history…
By Dimitris Lempesis
George Maciunas was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, to a Lithuanian father and Ukrainian mother. After fleeing Lithuania to avoid the advancing Russian Army in 1944, and living briefly in Bad Nauheim, Frankfurt, Germany, the family emigrated to the USA in 1948. There he studied architecture and musicology and finally art history at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts specializing in the European and Siberian art of migrations. 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 Fluxus Movement. He assembled a loose, non-himposers, and designers around the World. Their performances blended different artistic disciplines, visual arts, music, and literature. In 1960 Maciunas started an art gallery at 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. 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. In 1963, at the Kunstakademie, Dusseldorf Joseph Beuys and George Maciunas first appeared in Fluxus actions playing pianos as part of improvised performance. Maciunas was a bit of a volatile leader, he would indiscriminately expel individuals from Fluxus according to his whims and had no qualms about dropping artists for the most petty of disagreements. In 1963, Maciunas removed Jackson Mac Low from the Fluxus group, and the following year, expelled Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, and Nam June Paik. 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. Brecht’s “Water Yam” (1963), became the first Flux box to actually be published. More Fluxus festivals or as they called “Free expression festivals” were held in the ‘60s in Europe, in the ‘70s in Seattle, and in the ‘80s in various US and European cities. Since the ‘60s, 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 Yoko Ono. In ‘70s George Maciunas was invited by Yoko Ono to paint and decorate the John Lennon apartment in the “Dakota” Building in New York City. 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. 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. 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.
