56 George Maciunas. Chronology of Russian History

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George Maciunas. Chronology of Russian History: Oct. 3, 1914–1934, ca. 1953–54. Ink and graphite on lined paper, 41.8 x 39.5 x 11.8 cm. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit. Photo: Herman Seidl/Salzburg; in association with Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Maciunas’ “Learning Machines” (Berlin: Vice Versa, 2003).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.33.56 by guest on 29 September 2021 Maciunas as Producer: Performative Design in the Art of the 1960s

JULIA ROBINSON

George Maciunas is best known as the “impresario” of Fluxus. He coined the name for the group of artists, and organized, pro- moted, and documented their activities in the United States and Europe from 1962 until his death in 1978 at age forty-six. The word impresario has been a way for scholars to avoid the difficult territory of how and with what to credit Maciunas. It has also evoked the persona he seemed to need to assume to accomplish his work—idiosyncratic, authoritarian, that of the leftist general—a persona which likewise has proven difficult to explain. By virtue of the unorthodox range of tasks Maciunas took on to organize Fluxus, debate has arisen among Fluxus artists and historians about Maciunas’s proper title and even whether he warrants the description of “founder” or “leader.” For simplicity’s sake, Maciunas is often called an artist, but the role he adopted among artists resists this classification. As a trained graphic designer with broad political ambitions, Maciunas’s Fluxus work—designing posters, flyers, and labels; compiling editions and multiples; drawing up calendars of activities; writing and circulating “news (policy) letters”; and planning and directing concerts—suggests a complex and hybrid “authorial” model that would suspend the term artist or reveal it to be irrelevant. Rather than imposing conventional or anachronistic characterizations onto the figure of Maciunas, as debates about his proper title in Fluxus would do, it would seem more useful to examine the hybrid role he devised for himself, and its fundamental motivations. Maciunas sought to position the art produced under the banner of Fluxus such that it would take on what he saw as an historically urgent role. What, then, would be the significance, in 1962, of intervening in an existing field of artistic production while relinquishing the role of artist? What can be made of the fact that Maciunas saw as his most essential task to remain a graphic designer and to use systematic design principles to organize and frame the means of production of a particular group of artists? Why the zealous performance of propagandist and the exhaustive attempts to shore up an identity for this ephemeral work and its politics? At the height of his powers as Fluxus’s chief organizer, many of the artists vehemently contested the leftist

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.33.56 by guest on 29 September 2021 language that Maciunas was using to speak on their behalf. He called for a “United Front,” announced “revolution” and “purging,” unilaterally produced manifestos (which nobody signed), and chose the LEF group of Soviet productivists as his point of reference at a moment when this project was hardly known in the United States.1 Almost all the formats Maciunas selected for Fluxus had an ancestry in leftist propaganda layouts: the poster, the broadsheet, the flyer, the manifesto, and the dia- grammatic chart. In a well-known letter Maciunas wrote in January 1964 to the German artist Tomas Schmit, his deep political commit- ments were clarified unequivocally in relation to the new “collective” he was creating: Fluxus objectives are social (not aesthetic). They are con- nected to . . . the LEF group of 1929 [sic] in Soviet Union (ideologically) and they [are] concern[ed] with: Gradual elimination of fine arts (music, theater, poetry, fiction, painting, sculpt—etc. etc.). This is motivated by the desire to stop the waste of material and human resources (like yourself) and divert it to socially constructive ends. Such as [sic] applied arts would be (industrial design, journalism, architecture, engineering, graphic-typographic arts, printing, etc.) ➡ these are all most closely related fields to fine arts and offer best alternative profession to fine artists. (All clear until now?) Thus Fluxus is definitely against [the] art-object as non-functional commodity. . . . Fluxus therefore, should tend towards [a] collective spirit, anonymity and ANTI-INDIVIDUALISM.2 Retroactively “interpreting” the Fluxus concerts he and Schmit had been organizing over the previous year-and-a-half with the help of Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys, and others across Europe and, subsequently, in New York, Maciunas stated, “These Fluxus concerts, publications etc—are at best transitional (a few years) & temporary until such time when fine art can be totally eliminated (or at least its institutional forms) and artists find other employment. . . . All LEF revolutionaries . . . were working as journalists or applied artists.”3 This letter has often been cited in the Fluxus literature as an explanation of Maciunas’s motivations and goals. But neither its simple citation nor the detailed extrapolation of its historical sources reveals the importance of the model for Maciunas (and for Fluxus). What the LEF actually was and Maciunas’s use of the LEF reference are two very different historical objects. We know Maciunas was selective in his use of the Soviet example.4 However, the matter of his model’s precise historical referent is less interesting than that of the function of LEF as a signifier

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.33.56 by guest on 29 September 2021 Maciunas put into play. One reason the presence of the Soviet model in Maciunas’s representation of Fluxus has proven difficult to analyze is because it seems so inaccessibly other to the primary contexts for Fluxus activities: New York as well as the major cities of capitalist countries in Europe, at the start of the 1960s. If Maciunas’s reference to a 1920s Soviet avant-garde model of artistic practice is not to be dismissed as mere folly or blind utopianism, it requires complex mediation with acute sensi- tivity both to its radical propositions and the limits of their application. At the heart of this essential critical mediation is the need to recognize and distinguish Maciunas’s work from that of the Fluxus artists themselves, and to see his project as a contribution in its own right. This requires a focus on the contemporary postwar context, full of its own shocks and transformations, rather than on Maciunas’s self-cited historical precedents.

Adapting the Soviet Model: The Author as Producer One of the most important examples of the ideas of the LEF group being transposed to a new context is Walter Benjamin’s 1934 essay “The Author as Producer.”5 Benjamin’s abiding interest was to move the “cultural producer” to be conscious of actual “production” and to create out of that consciousness and those real conditions.6 The author’s responsibility, according to Benjamin, is to acknowledge that from the outset he or she makes a choice whether to side with the proletariat. Benjamin’s focus is the literary author, but the importance for an “artist”- as-producer is easily seen. “The Author as Producer” opens with a penetrating critique of the autonomous work of art. Echoing Plato, Benjamin asks, “What right does the poet have to exist?” and states that he believes that at certain historical moments this profound question should be posed anew. At issue was not merely the question of the poet’s existence but of his or her autonomy and that of the work. The challenge Benjamin put to the author was to envisage the relationship of the work within the conditions of production, rather than relating to them, from a safe (critical) distance. Benjamin lambastes the existing (bourgeois) frame- works of literary production, specifically the newspaper and the book, for commodifying—via structure and convention— even the most politically committed content: the bourgeois apparatus of production and publication can assimilate astonishing quantities of revolutionary themes—indeed, can propagate them without calling its own existence, and the existence of the class that owns it, seriously into question. . . . I deﬁne the “hack writer” as a

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This kind of writing, Benjamin argues, places the author “along- side” the proletariat rather than in its midst. “But what kind of place is this?” he asks. “That of a benefactor, of an ideological patron—an impossible place.”8 The dialectical approach Benjamin proposes as “the heart of the matter” is not to have the work positioned in a place of purist isolation but rather to insert it into “living social contexts.”9 In terms of the historical difficulty of seeing such a distant political project as that of the LEF group transplanted, with credibility, to the 1960s, Benjamin’s conversion of the Soviet productivist model to the realm of subsequent cultural production is a valuable point of departure.10 And though neither the purposes nor the historical moments can be compared, Benjamin’s reasons for adopting this model for his 1934 lecture in Paris—a strategy we might tentatively call “performative”— can inform our understanding of Maciunas’s moves in New York. Speaking of Benjamin, Maria Gough explains, Like many of his Western European counterparts obsessed by the crisis of the intellectual under capital, Benjamin often looks toward (or projects) the Soviet Union as a place where the ancient rift between poet and polis has been healed, a place where the reconciliation of artists and society has been achieved.11 Two of Benjamin’s artistic examples were Dada and Neue Sachlichkeit. “The revolutionary strength of Dadaism consisted in testing art for its authenticity,” noted Benjamin. “The tiniest fragment of daily life can say more than a painting.”12 Neue Sachlichkeit photography proved the opposite point, that “a political tendency, no matter how revolutionary it may seem,” can actually have a “counter-revolutionary function.”13 Benjamin mentioned Albert Renger-Patzsch’s photographic book, The World Is Beautiful, which he felt had “succeeded in transforming even abject poverty—by apprehending it in a fashionably perfected manner—into an object of enjoyment.”14 To consider artistic production in the 1960s, which saw the development of Pop art and Fluxus, we might productively apply the kinds of questions Benjamin asks. First, what is the difference between representing the inﬁltration of commodiﬁ- cation in all aspects of life, taking the commodity as the subject of art, and reconceiving the “production” of art as the production of anti-commodities? Benjamin’s primary example of an “author-as-producer” was a member of the LEF group, Sergei Tretiakov. If Maciunas’s call for artists to apply themselves according to the productivist

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.33.56 by guest on 29 September 2021 model seemed out of date in his time, so Benjamin’s use of this example already seemed “late” when he spoke in 1934. Arguably, however, the asynchronous citation in both cases was strategic.15 Benjamin explains how Tretiakov went into the “Communist Lighthouse” commune as an author, and, while he resided there, “set about the following tasks: calling mass meetings; collecting funds to pay for tractors; persuading inde- pendent peasants to enter the kolkhoz [collective farm]; inspect- ing the reading rooms; creating wall newspapers and editing the kolkhoz newspaper.”16 For Benjamin, Tretiakov exemplified “how comprehensive the horizon is in which we have to rethink our conceptions of literary forms and genres, in view of the technical factors affecting our present situation, if we are to identify the forms of expression that channel the literary ener- gies of the present.”17 The range of tasks, from the intellectual to the mundane, that Maciunas ultimately took on to organize Fluxus bears a striking resemblance to those Benjamin identified. Such tasks included circulating regular newsletters to inform the Fluxus group of events of collective concern; advertising their activities in posters, announcements, and flyers; publishing their work in cc V TRE, the Fluxus newspaper; as well as the more practical tasks of organizing accommodations and, eventually, real housing for artists (including starting the first system of cooperative artists’ lofts in Soho), all the while trying to recruit colleagues to start a commune, or collective farm.18 Benjamin’s account of the “author-as-producer” culminates in the realm of performance with Bertolt Brecht and his concept of Umfunktionierung or “transformation of functions.”19 Benjamin points to an important opposition, clarified in Epic Theater, between the “dramatic artwork” and the “dramatic laboratory.” Despite the great distance in historical context and politics, Benjamin’s argument for the value of a performance practice that runs counter to the mainstream resonates strongly with Fluxus activities: To the total dramatic artwork [Brecht] opposes the dramatic laboratory. He makes use in a new way of the great, ancient opportunity of the theater: to expose what is present. . . . What emerges is this: events are alterable not at their climaxes, not by virtue and resolution, but only in their strictly habitual course, by reason and practice. To construct from the smallest elements of behavior . . . “action” is the purpose of the Epic Theater. Its means are therefore more modest than those of traditional theater; and likewise its aims. It is concerned less with filling the public with feelings . . . than with alienating it in an enduring way, through thinking, from the conditions in

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“Habitual” actions have long been at the heart of Fluxus performance: turning a light on and off (George Brecht), raising and lowering a hat or umbrella (George Maciunas), cleaning one’s teeth (Ay-O), making a salad or reading the newspaper (Alison Knowles).21 With simple props, and simpler actions, Fluxus has both amused and alienated (in the most productive sense). Fluxus was not Brechtian, but it did make great use of the conditions of performance. Departing from their apprecia- tion of the logic of Marcel Duchamp’s “readymade” and John Cage’s practice of experimental composition, Fluxus artists developed their own interventions into the means of production of visual art. The example of Benjamin’s “author-as-producer” draws attention to the mechanisms of production and distribution, inciting thought about the conditions that perme- ated the culture of the early 1960s. The Benjamin example of productive intervention suggests reasons for Maciunas’s con- viction that Fluxus could be positioned politically through the agency of design.

Charting History In the course of his own intellectual development Maciunas discovered strategies that he would later make use of in framing and representing the activities of Fluxus. For a decade, begin- ning in 1949, Maciunas studied graphic design at New York’s Cooper Union, architecture at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, and, ﬁnally, art history at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. During this time, he developed a pas- sionate interest in genealogical charts. The two most important charts Maciunas made in this period were his “Atlas of Russian History,” which tracked the major

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.33.56 by guest on 29 September 2021 changes in the Russian state up to the revolution and whose final dimensions were six by nine feet, and his “History of Art” chart from the Visigoths to modernity, which was slightly larger at six by twelve feet. These great fields of pasted paper projected the information laterally while also extending into three dimensions in accordion-like towers of gridded text. In the left-hand columns he listed the years, and often divided them further into more precise dates, followed by a numbered list of key events, an unusual layout to which Astrit Schmidt- Burkhardt attributes particular significance: “Maciunas bestows on the dates of the years the same kind of ‘physiognomy’ that Walter Benjamin had seen as a general requirement for all his- toriography in his Arcades Project.” 22 The format Maciunas gave the charts allowed him to manage vast amounts of information that normally could never be seen as one field. The manually navigated, foldout structure—which Opposite: George Maciunas. sometimes required the “reader” to turn certain chronologies History of Art Chart, ca. 1955–60. Ink and graphite on lined paper, ninety degrees to read the addenda—broke with the convention 28 sheets, 101 x 163 cm. The of history in the form of a book, one of Benjamin’s apparatuses Gilbert and Lila Silverman requiring alienation, and gave a new meaning to the notion of Fluxus Collection, Detroit. Photo: 23 Herman Seidl/Salzburg; in asso- grasping information. In this sense, the charts emancipated ciation with Astrit Schmidt- the subject by changing his or her reading habits and calling for Burkhardt, Maciunas’ “Learning active participation in the learning process. Machines” (Berlin: Vice Versa, Through the charts Maciunas gained an extraordinary 2003). grounding in Russian history, the history of art, and several Below: George Maciunas. Chronology of Russian History: other fields, which undoubtedly emboldened him to judge the Oct. 3, 1914–1934 (detail), ca. status of art in his own historical moment. As movable, archi- 1953–54. Ink and graphite on tectonic, genealogical models, Maciunas’s charts placed the lined paper, 41.8 x 39.5 x 11.8 cm. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman structuring of knowledge in his own hands and those of the Fluxus Collection, Detroit. reader and forged a design for historical study that was nonlinear, Photo: Herman Seidl/Salzburg; antinarrative, haptic, and interventional. In short, the reader— in association with Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Maciunas’ opening the folds, turning the sheet, and so on—is poised to “Learning Machines” (Berlin: Vice “respond” immediately to the way in which the history is Versa, 2003).

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.33.56 by guest on 29 September 2021 “given,” to appreciate from the outset that history, any history, is a matter of construction. Maciunas called his charts “Learning Machines” and came to consider them among the most important of his life’s work.

Neo-Dada, Administered Actions, and the Mediation of the Score In the spring of 1962, Maciunas moved to Germany to avoid debts incurred by his AG gallery in New York and took a job at the U.S. Army base in Wiesbaden.24 Close to the Darmstadt New Music scene, he encountered numerous artists and composers, including Nam June Paik and Emmett Williams, who would eventually join Fluxus. The following June, Paik and Maciunas met at Wuppertal for an event entitled Kleines Sommerfest: Après John Cage. There Maciunas presented a chart that highlighted the interrelationships between some of the most advanced artistic practices of the moment. The chart acted as the backdrop to a reading of Maciunas’s text “Neo- Dada in Music, Theater, Poetry and Art.”25 As if to distance himself, the better to observe the impact of the “experiment,” Maciunas had an actor stand up and present his text as a lecture-performance. In the absence of the fully developed term Fluxus, the espousal of “neo-dada” was a kind of ruse Maciunas used to draw atten- Below: Arthus C. Caspari 26 reading the German translation tion to the new work being created in his midst. However, the of George Maciunas’s “Neo-Dada author’s sense of the highly provisional status of this term in Music, Theater, Poetry and Art,” comes out in the first lines of the text, and the meaning of at Kleines Sommerfest: Après John Cage, Galerie Parnass, “neo-dada” is progressively dismantled, along with other over- Wuppertal, June 9, 1962. Photo: determined categories, in the course of the performance: Rolf Järling. Opposite, top: George Maciunas. Neo-Dada, its equivalent, or what appears to be Neo-Dada, Poster for Fluxus Festspiele manifests itself in very wide fields of activity. It ranges Neuester Musik, Stätisches from “time” arts to “space” arts; or more speciﬁcally, from Museum Wiesbaden, 1962. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus literary arts (time-art) through graphic literature (time- Collection, Detroit. space-art) to graphics (space art), through graphic music Opposite, bottom: Performance of (space-time-art) to graphless, scoreless music (time art), Phillip Corner’s Piano Activities, through theatrical music (space-time-art) to environ- Wiesbaden, 1962. Photographer ments (space art). There exist no borders in between. . . . unknown (for George Maciunas). Sohm Archive, Staatsgalerie, Many works belong to several categories and also many Stuttgart. artists create separate works in each category.27 Only after the first concert series explicitly called Fluxus in Wiesbaden (September 1–23, 1962) could the scope of Fluxus be glimpsed. With a number of artists present (including Paik, Knowles, Williams, Benjamin Patterson, Dick Higgins, and Maciunas) to differentiate the realizations of scores by a range of composers, the spectrum of activity was sufficiently

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.33.56 by guest on 29 September 2021 broad. In order to draw attention to the concert, Maciunas con- nected it not to neo-dada but to New Music. This was highlighted in the poster that read “Fluxus Festspiele Neuester Musik,” upping the stakes by using the superlative newest. Despite this framing, a dada effect was very much a part of the initial concerts, as the press was quick to observe. With the concept of “Fluxus” as yet undefined, reading the absurdist parts of the realizations as dadaist probably seemed logical. Paik’s Zen for Head, for example, involved dipping his head, hands, and tie into a bucket of paint, and the finale, Phillip Corner’s Piano Activities—which called for performers to “play,” “scratch,” “rub,” “pluck,” “tap,” and “drop objects” on a piano—ended with an excess of enthusiasm and the total destruction of the instrument.28 The experimental quality of many of the pieces, performed at Wiesbaden for the ﬁrst time, might have conjured dada (albeit in a superﬁcial sense). Yet Fluxus had relatively little to do with the historical phase of dada, and as the concerts were repeated ways were found to clarify this important distinction. The “problem” of dada had been identified in Darmstadt a year earlier in Theodor Adorno’s lecture “Vers une musique informelle,” which enu- merated the contemporary reasons for its critical disqualification. According to Adorno, any anti- art sentiment expressed as a direct action “in con- trast to its Dadaist grandparents . . . degenerates at once into culture.” This is dictated by the impossibility today of the politics on which Dadaism still relied. “Action painting,” “action composing” are cryp- tograms of the direct action that has now been ruled out; they have arisen in an age in which every such action is either forestalled by technology or recuperated by an administered world.29 In Fluxus, the crucial agent of mediation was the score, the marker of the enactment as indi- rect action. It was important that the line Paik painted in his animated performance at Wiesbaden was indeed not a direct action, spontaneously devised, but rather an interpretation of La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #10 to Bob Morris, which instructed the interpreter to “draw a straight line

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.33.56 by guest on 29 September 2021 and follow it.” Changes in Maciunas’s own score, In Memoriam to Adriano Olivetti, between the Wiesbaden and Düsseldorf performances, showed that he had learned a great deal from the interaction with his colleagues.30 In the Olivetti score (and its realizations) the inﬂuences of Cage and Duchamp seem to meet the “administered” conditions to which Adorno referred. The performers stand on stage in suits (military uniforms, businessmen’s attire, and so on) and conduct everyday actions based on numerical cues taken from “any used tape from an Olivetti adding machine,” their timing dictated by a metronome. They may be prompted to stand or sit for several seconds, bow, raise their hat, or put an umbrella up and down. If the performance comes off well, it seems less like stereotypically anarchic “direct actions” than like the nine malic molds from Duchamp’s Large Glass thrown into the context of performance, their subjection projected into the living matrix of scored mechanical action.

Enacting the Fluxus Score: Performativity within Performance Maciunas recognized the importance of the indeterminate score—developed from Cage’s model—as an essential element of structure in Fluxus.31 A card with a few lines of text could propose an action, a thought, or perhaps an object. The score George Maciunas. In Memoriam could be realized in any way the performer wished. Rather than To Adriano Olivetti, 1962. dictating a “true” version, the score was only ever a cue, as Performance at Fluxus Festival, Hypockriterion Theater, George Brecht said, “a signal preparing one . . . for an event to Amsterdam, June 23, 1963. happen in one’s own now.”32 Its language-based format forced Maciunas second from right. two qualiﬁcations onto the production of visual art: a concep- Photo: Oscar van Alphen. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman tual element and a degree of contingency. This linguistic model Fluxus Collection, Detroit. of mediation was one of the most salient contributions of Fluxus

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.33.56 by guest on 29 September 2021 to the art of the 1960s and would soon be adopted in various ways by other artists, reemerging in the linguistic strategies of conceptual and postconceptual art.33 Cage had insisted on the crucial split that the score insti- tutes, making the provocative statement that “Composing’s one thing, performing’s another, listening’s a third. What can they have to do with one another?”34 In the very same period, as late as 1957, in his lecture called “The Creative Act,” Duchamp elaborated upon a long-standing implication of his art, driving a wedge between the artist’s work and its reception by placing a new emphasis on the spectator.35 While Fluxus was drawing from both of these sources, for Maciunas, the score had a spe- cific value: it was the very inscription of collectivism. The score was the ideal device for defetishizing artistic practice because it reanimated (and even scripted) the relationship between the work and the audience. Rejecting works of “art” as finalized, static objects, the primary function of the Fluxus score was to compose relationships between subjects. The manner in which the Fluxus score’s textual prompt freed the subject of language through the very devices of language, splitting the text off from each new interpretation/realization, speaks to a condition that would be fully theorized later in the 1960s. In “The Death of the Author,” first published in 1967 in Aspen magazine (along with Duchamp’s “The Creative Act”), Roland Barthes describes the construct of the “author” as a modern phenomenon, “the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology.”36 He distinguishes the author from “[t]he modern scriptor,” who, he writes, “is born simultaneously with the text.” Echoing George Brecht’s statement about the event, Barthes adds, “there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now.”37 Barthes defines an insuperable gap between a text and its realization, the gap between the solipsistic theater of the originating inscription and the inconceivable arenas of interpretation by new subjects in unimaginable contexts. “We know that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning,” writes Barthes, “but a multi-dimensional space in which a vari- ety of writings blend and clash.”38 What had become apparent was that direct expression could no longer even be preserved as a fiction. The authority of the author was neither sustainable nor even desirable. “Did he wish to express himself,” writes Barthes, “he ought at least to know that the inner thing he thinks to ‘translate’ is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable by other words and so on indefinitely.”39 Admitting to this “givenness,” the fact of writing as a gesture of translation or interpretation rather than creation, is the first step toward undermining the institutional authority of language. Barthes cites the sphere of performed language, in particular

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.33.56 by guest on 29 September 2021 Brecht’s distancing effect, as an important starting point for the inevitable removal of the author. He describes such a shift (and mediation) of the basis for creative energy in terms that echo those of Fluxus: The fact is (or, it follows) that writing can no longer des- ignate an operation of . . . representation, “depiction” (as the Classics would say); rather, it designates exactly what linguists . . . call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclu- sively given in the first person and in the present tense) in which the enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered— something like the I declare of kings . . . .40 If writing is always already performative for Barthes—as art is always already the product of a performative act for Duchamp—Fluxus’s move was to further politicize this condition by thrusting the object, the action, the text, and the performance, into the arena of performativity. Performativity has been a key element in Fluxus, but its actual operation has often been obscured in its critical confla- tion with performance. While “performance” is simply a genre of the visual arts, “performativity” denotes something different. In the context of the Fluxus concerts, with the language of the score split from the spectrum of its potential interpretations, a degree of performativity is discovered in the realm of performance. Judith Butler’s definition of performativity—as the act of altering or undoing certain semantic conditions or conven- tions through their own means and terminologies—extends Barthes’s “performative” in a manner that is useful for clarify- ing the distinction between performance and performativity crucial to Fluxus.41 Over the course of a year, Maciunas brought the name Fluxus from the status of an idea (for another anthology of scores or a journal) toward its final meaning, affirming a politics, which he recognized in the work of a particular group of artists. The concerts in Düsseldorf, Copenhagen, and Paris began to establish a Fluxus identity, and Maciunas worked to augment this identity at all levels—logistically, through his exhaustive planning, and graphically, through his designs of the different posters for each city. Immediately following Wiesbaden concerts, Maciunas jettisoned the German title, and the attachment to New Music, adopting a name that would work at all venues: the faux-Latin Festum Fluxorum.

Manifesting Fluxus For Düsseldorf, Maciunas produced the now-famous Fluxus Manifesto (1963). This was prompted by Joseph Beuys, who was based in Düsseldorf and had been enlisted by Maciunas to

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.33.56 by guest on 29 September 2021 help with organization; Beuys felt that the group needed some formal declaration of their project.42 Anticipating Barthes’s idea of a “ready-formed dictionary,” Maciunas mailed Beuys a clipping of the dictionary definition of the word “flux,” rendered negative (as white on black). By the time of the concert, Maciunas had amended the definition by interspersing the dictionary text with his own handwritten statements. This manifesto entered Fluxus performance literally, as hundreds of copies were thrown to the Düsseldorf audience. Although reproduced numerous times, Maciunas’s manifesto has rarely been analyzed beyond its overt content. As a structural intervention into the function of language/representation, it remains one of the earliest and most important documents Maciunas used to initiate and define Fluxus. It did not matter that no one added his or her signature as an endorse- ment of the manifesto’s ideas. The important thing for Maciunas was that being defined and presented as such, he could project manifesto-like energy onto Fluxus. The most striking aspect of the single-page document is the collaged layout of two types of text, establishing a stark con- trast between the “institutional” format of the dictionary (in reverse, white on black), and the graffito-like intervention of Maciunas’s own handwriting (black on white), which pulses George Maciunas. Manifesto, with arbitrary uppercasing and punctuation marks. On a 1 7 1963. Offset on paper, 8 ⁄4 x 5 ⁄8 in. semantic level, words like purge, promote, and fuse, present in The Gilbert and Lila Silverman the dictionary text, are transformed into imperatives in the Fluxus Collection, Detroit. handwritten segments. Echoing the function and stakes of the document’s performance context, the scale, arrangement, and emphasis of the parts mobilize various orders of meaning, oscillating between the “objective” givens and their “subjective” interpretations. The words in the manifesto are activated, graphically and semantically, to refunction the meanings that circulate around them—evoking a tentative, projective (and performative) idea of “Fluxus.” The dictionary excerpts give the primary definitions of “flux” as follows: “To affect, or bring to a certain state, by subjecting to, or treating with, a flux. ‘Fluxed into another world,’” and then the “Med[ical]: To cause a discharge from, as in purging. . . . A flowing or fluid discharge from the bowels or other part: esp., an excessive and morbid discharge.” Below the first collaged strip of dictionary type are Maciunas’s handwritten additions: “Purge the world of bourgeois sickness, ‘intellectual,’ pro- fessional & commercialized culture.” The next

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.33.56 by guest on 29 September 2021 dictionary segment makes the transition to a more poetic meaning, conjuring the term’s sense of dynamism: “Act of flowing: a continuous moving on or passing by, as of a flowing stream.” As if to demonstrate the “readymade” character of words, showing that the very same word can be deployed for opposite functions, Maciunas selects particular words and converts them to his purposes (moving to uppercase): “PROMOTE A REVOLU- TIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART, Promote living art, anti- art, promote NON ART REALITY to be fully grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals.” Finally, to the secondary definition of flux as “fusion,” Maciunas sutures his own alternative definition: “FUSE the cadres of cultural, social & political revolutionaries into united front action.” Beyond the manifesto’s intricate linguistic operations, the strangeness of Maciunas’s language as it must have struck the group—consisting of young artists from capitalist countries, both Americans and Europeans—is important. That Maciunas, in concerts in postwar Germany gathering free, young artists, would purport to summon and speak for them through such extreme and patently anachronistic political terms, which must have seemed like so much jargon, deserves attention. Maciunas had always learned quickly (his radicalization in terms of art had occurred in a matter of months). In the case of the manifesto, it seems that he sensed the (political/ performative) scope of the collision of language and meaning(s) in the arena of performance as it was being demonstrated by the artists George Maciunas. Negative in the concerts: the way the body, the context, and the contin- (definition of Fluxus), 1963. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman gency of events could redefine any given text. Clearly, he was Fluxus Collection, Detroit. convinced that the terminology of the manifesto would have the impact he desired, which would not be lit- eral but could perhaps be performative. Having leaned on the institutional authority of dictionary definitions, Maciunas retooled the key structures out of which meaning is produced and forged his “revolutionary” term Fluxus. The manifesto alluded to the gap between the linguistic and the bodily by moving from the most blatant level of content, albeit of a pointedly extremist kind, to introduce the notion of the “sickness” of bourgeois culture and the need for it to be “purged.” Although the term “purge” evokes revolutionary discourse, in this context it becomes specifically bodily. Just as the bodies of the artists on stage could change the reality of the textual score, so the fully elaborated sense of “Fluxus” had to be defined in bodily terms. Maciunas evoked this in the manifesto by referring to a rupturing of

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.33.56 by guest on 29 September 2021 the discrete boundaries of the body, bringing the inside out in a manner that has remained perplexing for many. He forged a particular critical nexus between language, the body, and the contingency of enactment. Whereas Barthes invokes the performative in the realm of language, Butler demonstrates how the concept of performativity can be more broadly elaborated.43 According to Butler, taboos and boundaries, the very boundaries of the body, are the limits of the social. The aptness of the term Fluxus, defined as a violent bodily reaction against culture, is captured in Butler’s statement, “If the body is synecdochal for the social system per se or a site in which open systems converge, then any kind of unregulated permeability constitutes a site of pollution and endangerment.”44 For Maciunas, such threats to the system were desirable, and the body was clearly implicated as much as language in the effort to construct them. Drawing on Michel Foucault, Butler states, “the body is the inscribed surface of events,” history’s “essential and repressive gesture.”45 She identifies the domain of the social in which the body is situated: “cultural values emerge as the result of an inscription on the body, understood as a medium, indeed, a blank page; in order for this inscription to signify, however, that medium must itself be destroyed—that is, fully transvaluated into a sublimated domain of values.”46 If a kind of nihilistic subjection of the body (reified or blown apart by history) was an important feature of early Dada, then the more administra- tive or institutional subjection of the socially inscribed body, as indicated by Butler, is arguably at the heart of Fluxus.47 This new, institutionalized sphere of subjection is paralleled in the performance space (which is also, potentially, a performative space) that Maciunas organized. This performance/performative space was the “theater” in which Maciunas produced a paper trail of documents, as if to inscribe the “transformation of functions” he saw going on, that it might not be lost in the chaotic and ephemeral field of contingent bodily action. In addressing the imposition of social control, of legislative performances upon the body and, by extension, sexuality and gender, Maciunas raised an issue that had been a subject in art at least since Duchamp. But from the relatively sublimated terrain of Duchampian strategies, a shift occurs in Maciunas’s turn to the visceral attack of a “morbid discharge.” The latter, as a definition of Fluxus, as much as the utopian verbiage of “cadres” and “revolutionaries,” serves to detonate the system of repression evoked by the words “bourgeois culture.” Butler argues that the very notion of a “discrete subject” is con- structed on the basis of exclusion, impenetrability, and the setting of civilized boundaries in opposition to an unwieldy “other”: “The ‘abject’ designates that which has been expelled

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.33.56 by guest on 29 September 2021 from the body, discharged as excrement, literally rendered ‘Other.’ This appears as an expulsion of alien elements, but the alien is effectively established through this expulsion.”48 Examples of this kind of rupture abound in Fluxus performance, from Paik’s “Fluxus Champion” score—requiring all performers/contestants to urinate into a central bucket while singing their respective national anthems, with the longest last- ing being the winner—to Maciunas’s packaged and labeled collections of excrement (from various animals). Butler’s argument about the function of the abject allows us to better understand Maciunas’s deployment of the name “Fluxus,” including the performance of its deﬁnition through the manifesto design: with the variously scaled and otherwise differen- tiated lettering (print and handwritten), as well as the manifest instability of words such as purge contributing to the con- vulsive transformation of language, it shifts from a political sense to a metaphorics of the body. Such a metaphorics (which would include Butler’s bodily boundaries as the limits of the social) also suggests plausible motivations for the utterly arrest- ing—and still hardly understood—postcard Maciunas wrote to Young in July 1962 announcing that he had designed the first Fluxus prospectus “as a tight roll for rectal insertion” to be packaged in an enema box.49 While some have reduced this to Maciunas’s “toilet” humor, when read with Butler the strategy becomes apparent: the purpose of such forceful and incongru- ous language seems an apt method for asserting the agency and sociopolitical disruption he intended through Fluxus.50 This idea announced the next strategy Maciunas would embark upon for Fluxus, which once again deployed design, but also packaging, and the concept of mass production. Working on boxed editions of scores, such as George Brecht’s Water

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.33.56 by guest on 29 September 2021 Yam (1963) and Fluxus I (1964), Maciunas saw that Fluxus should not only evoke a clash between text and performance, or merely the functions of performative text, but that it had to further implicate the object world. In particular, it had to become involved in the actual means of production by which the art object had already, irreversibly, been redeﬁned. During Maciunas’s ﬁnal months in Europe in 1963, he wrote to Robert Watts saying, “Now . . . how about . . . boxes. I mean we could publish a 100 [sic] boxes each containing objects which you would ‘mass produce’ like in a factory.” Later in the letter he reiterates his idea to “start a factory!”51

Fluxus Production Upon his return to the United States, Maciunas moved into a warehouse in the abandoned “trenches” of industrial New York. The space at 359 Canal Street would be the site of Fluxus performances and the location where Maciunas would realize his vision of Fluxus as mass production, disseminated through a venue he named the “Fluxshop.”52 Calling on artists to keep supplying him with ideas to be produced “by Fluxus,” Maciunas assembled collections of games and scores with all manner of inexplicable objects, using readymade items purchased on Canal Street, which he packaged and labeled. Having estab- Opposite: George Maciunas. lished the infrastructure to assemble these products on demand, Design for George Brecht’s collected scores, Water Yam, Maciunas used the Canal Street post office as the auxiliary to 1963. The Gilbert and Lila his mail-order “business.” Silverman Fluxus Collection, The labels he developed turned each artist’s name into a Detroit. kind of “brand.” Generated with scrupulous economy, he var- Below: George Maciunas. iegated letters, changing their scale by photostatic enlargement, Design for Fluxus I, 1964. Collected scores. The Gilbert and printed them in black and white. Reiterating the initial dic- and Lila Silverman Fluxus tates of Maciunas’s letter to Schmit, Barbara Moore has written Collection, Detroit.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.33.56 by guest on 29 September 2021 that by his own admission Maciunas’s visual solutions “should be considered utilitarian rather than poetic.”53 While the label designs satisfied Maciunas’s concern with efficiency, they also served his political ends of making art confront commodification by inge- niously serving only some of the functions of the logo. Like a logo or product label, Maciunas’s packaging created an appeal for the object through design. But a label must also seduce by the simplicity or clarity of its message, by how expeditiously it conveys a sense of the anticipated experience of the product, as if that experience is somehow contained in the design. Maciunas’s logos defeated their purpose. Fluxus labels thrived on being cryptic, on forcing the “consumer” to have to think and work out their meaning. One example is the particularly efficient logo for Yoko Ono, a set of axial lines superimposed to spell out the letters of the artist’s name. In a manner related to the function of a score, which must be read and George Maciunas. Fluxus enacted, even if only in the mind, this cryptic lettering artists’ name labels, 1964–65. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman addressed Maciunas’s concern to generate an active rather than Fluxus Collection, Detroit. a passive subject of design.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.33.56 by guest on 29 September 2021 Performative Design If the difference between a text and its interpretation that was elaborated in the enactment of Fluxus scores evinced the potential for what might be called “performative performance,” the void established between packaging and “product” in Maciunas’s Fluxus production might be understood as performative design: a model of design that subverts its conventional function to political ends. Maciunas’s stated goal was to reduce the “value” of art “by making it unlimited, mass-produced, obtainable by all and eventually produced by all.”54 This he accomplished by confusing the codes of art and the commodity. The work submitted by Fluxus artists consisted largely of ideas, games, events, or actions, eschewing any particular realization within a defined artistic medium. Maciunas understood that by packaging this work and branding it “Fluxus,” he could frame the politics at the heart of such humble objects and ideas, while at the same time contributing his own work to the meaning of Fluxus. He saw that he could serve a larger “mission”: to Top: George Maciunas. Name label for Yoko Ono, evoke the tautology of artistic production—reified, and always ca. 1965. The Gilbert and Lila already a commodity like any other—a status the market was Silverman Fluxus Collection, rapidly cementing.55 Ratcheting up the stakes of what he under- Detroit. stood as the deeply “concrete” statement of the Duchampian Bottom: George Maciunas. readymade—to calibrate the readymade to the order of 1960s Design for Mieko (Chieko) Shiomi’s Water Music, 1964. production—Maciunas made nonfunctional commodities, The Gilbert and Lila Silverman whereby the idea, presumably what people were buying, was Fluxus Collection, Detroit. subjected to the order of the commodity, and art was subjected to the fallacy of actual consumption.56 His 1964 label and packaging design for Mieko Shiomi’s score, Water Music, for instance, adopts the classic consumer strategy of combining the esoteric and the mundane (the score for Water Music and bottled water) while introducing a degree of mystification into the prospect of consumption: Can we imbibe a score? Is the water itself music? The impact of Maciunas’s labeling of Fluxus objects is dra- matically demonstrated in before-and-after views of Ay-O’s Finger Box (1964). Playing upon the subject’s irresistible desire to touch, Ay-O’s box features a finger-size hole with various hidden materials placed inside (the materials, such as a nylon stocking, rubber, or nails, were different in each box) to challenge tactile perception. If the finger box, Ay-O’s invention, was already a brilliant joke on tactility and perhaps even the sexuality of the subject, its transformation by Maciunas’s design underscored the fact that those are the first details of humanity to be erased by spectacle. Maciunas’s reifying design converted the strange pierced box into a flashy product: stacking the letters of the artist’s “name,” with the “O” echoing the hole on top and uniting the animated letters spelling out “Finger Box” and “Tactile Box” with “Fluxshop.” This visual encryption of

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.33.56 by guest on 29 September 2021 Ay-O’s box, and its beckoning hole, parodied the codes of mass production while desublimating the ocular address of the commodity. In its raw state, Ay-O’s Finger Box might ultimately have been dismissed as an eccentric and largely illegible item of Fluxus pranksterism, its unassuming form proposing an action that seems like a futile one-liner. However, with the addition of Maciunas’s label the object becomes something else—both more hermetic and more effective. Labeling was at the heart of Maciunas’s performative design. His “transformation of functions” began with the function of the label. If the label could be so effective in the operations of the commodity, why not have it function in the service of the anticommodity as well? Maciunas’s work on Ay-O’s Finger Box, like all the other Maciunas-designed labeling for the objects, scores, ideas, and games by Fluxus artists, turns the creative act into an aspect of marketing, preserving the pathos of what is being inexorably lost as subjects are replaced by objects.57 Remnants of performance are preserved, as the cue of the score becomes the address of the label, in the new condition of “packaged experience.”

Revolutionary Design A particularly clear and astute testimony to Maciunas’s com- mitment to design as a political practice appeared in the pamphlet, Communists Must Give Revolutionary Leadership in Culture (1966), written by Henry Flynt with some appendices Below: Ay-O prototype for and the design by Maciunas. This document/design object Finger Box and Maciunas design stands as a kind of blueprint providing at once a model for for Ay-O’s Finger Box, 1964. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman “ideal” approaches to design and a gloss on the rationale behind Fluxus Collection, Detroit. Maciunas’s life-long work. Although everything produced Opposite: George Maciunas. by Maciunas exemplified engaged design principles, the Design for Maciunas/Henry Revolutionary Leadership pamphlet attested in explicit terms Flynt, Communists Must Give Revolutionary Leadership in to the breadth and seriousness of his project. The text—which, Culture, 1966. Private collection. though written by Flynt, had parts contributed by Maciunas—

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.33.56 by guest on 29 September 2021 conducted a systematic appraisal of the political and social implications of contemporary design within the apparatus of culture, spanning an extraordinary spectrum of fields from architecture to music to cinema to cars.58 The careful analysis of all these examples asks the reader to consider, and even learn to identify, efficient and egalitarian design and production procedures. The format of the Revolutionary Leadership pamphlet is unique in that it exemplifies the efficiency of design called for in the text. Featuring what had by that time become Maciunas’s signature, the sans-serif typeface produced on his IBM Executive typewriter, the pamphlet was printed on a broadsheet-size page. The sheet was then folded against a piece of polystyrene several inches thick (a sample of the building material that Maciunas proposed to use in his mass-produced housing design as described in the text), and both were encased in translucent plastic to form a packet that could be used for mailing. One section certainly contributed by Maciunas is titled “Note on the Graphics”; it explains the efficiency rationale built into the very object the reader has to contemplate while taking in the information about efficient design, and shows how it can be variously transformed, including by transforming the broadsheet into a poster: A colored stock, which is more rugged and durable than newsprint, but costs as little because it is not bleached, is used. One type is used throughout. Larger sizes are obtained by photo-static enlargement. Costs and arbitrary styl- istic choices are eliminated. The text fills one conveniently sized sheet. It is thus uniform with the appendices, which must be on large sheets. Costs of cutting, binding and blank paper for page margins are eliminated. Text and appendices can also be dis- played as posters. . . . The expanded polystyrene and translucent plastic samples, which have to be included to illustrate Appendix 2, are utilized to form permanent back and front covers and a mailing container. The folding system and size when folded are such that the title section can be shown through the translucent front cover. While we have become familiar with design formats as sophisticated as (and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.33.56 by guest on 29 September 2021 more so than) this one, it is still all but unheard of for the models to be explained much less justiﬁed to their users. The explanation of the format empowers the reader, allowing her or him to hold a design object in hand and know why all its details are thus. The explanation, and the package itself, may also allow readers to appreciate how they, too, could undertake to make efﬁcient, egalitarian objects. The organization through design that was Maciunas’s life- long project for Fluxus and the critical awareness that the Revolutionary Leadership pamphlet exhorts and enacts reveal design strategies in art that can be considered “performative.” Just as the almost tautological notion of “performative performance” deploys the structure and convention imposed upon the “administered” subject of language back upon the institu- tion of language—precisely in order to question social control of the subject—so, too, does such an actively critical design practice constitute a similar model of quasi-mimetic resistance to the regime of design culture. A design performative acknowl- edges design as a code, one that is accepted by the masses and even enjoyed as entertainment, but a code that can nonetheless be scrambled by oppositional codes that are able to act in similar ways. “Performativity” here denotes a new approach to artistic practice in the 1960s that focused on the means of production and came about amidst an escalated consumer culture.

Design Performatives in the Art of the 1960s Benjamin’s model of the “author as producer” is inherently performative. He saw the urgency to “transcend specialization in the process of intellectual production” in order to make the author’s work “politically useful.” He argued that if this were achieved, the author as producer might discover solidarity with certain other producers who might initially have appeared not to concern her or him. In regard to design performatives in the art of the 1960s, Maciunas was not alone in seizing upon such a new “author” role, one that transcended specialization. The appropriateness of such a model was recognized by a contemporary with whom Maciunas has rarely been compared: Andy Warhol. The fact that both Maciunas and Warhol conceived of the sites of their production as “factories” is hardly coincidental; nor is the fact that both trained and worked as graphic designers, bringing this expertise to the context of art. Maciunas’s performative performance of the left-wing zealot, proclaiming Communist values and obsessed with converting art into factory production, can hardly be seen as more eccentric than Warhol’s factory production championed by the statement “I want to be a machine.” Both saw the direction of art and production as it was being transformed in their midst, though

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.33.56 by guest on 29 September 2021 they differed on whether this called for a performance of action or putative passivity. As Warhol explained, Someone said that Brecht wanted everybody to think alike. I want everybody to think alike. But Brecht wanted to do it through Communism, in a way. Russia is doing it under government. It’s happening here all by itself without being under a strict government; so if it’s working without trying, why can’t it work without being Communist? Everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we’re getting more and more that way.59 Although both Maciunas and Warhol adopted enactments of “factory production,” they chose to adopt opposite self-styled images that corresponded to the actual subject of their work. In all his work for Fluxus, Maciunas’s “subject” was “production,” while the long-standing theme of Warhol’s own statements and sound bites, the subject of his production, was consumption. In choosing the uniquely perceptive stance of a radically revised author role and the concomitant subjection of art to the codes of mass production, both Maciunas and Warhol saw that even the most radical qualification and disavowal of the old author/artist model presented choices. If Warhol’s well- known performance can be characterized as that of the author as consumer, Maciunas’s choice, equally as poignant, was the author as producer.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.33.56 by guest on 29 September 2021 Notes A version of this essay was delivered at the conference “Between Object and Event: Beuys and Fluxus in Context,” at Harvard University in April 2007. I would like to thank Branden Joseph for careful and thorough feedback, as well as my other trusted readers, Benjamin Buchloh and Christian Xatrec.

1. The reception of the constructivist phase of the Soviet avant-garde project was fueled by the 1962 publication of Camilla Gray’s The Great Experiment: Russian Art, 1863–1922 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1962). On the different levels of reception, see Hal Foster, “Some Uses and Abuses of Constructivism,” in Art into Life: Russian Constructivism 1914–32 (Seattle: Henry Art Gallery/Rizzoli, 1990), 241–253. 2. George Maciunas to Tomas Schmit, January 1964, in Fluxus etc./ Addenda II, ed. Jon Hendricks (Pasadena: Baxter Art Gallery/California Institute of Technology, 1983), 166. 3. George Maciunas to Tomas Schmit, January 1964, in Fluxus etc./ Addenda II, 166–167. 4. On Maciunas’s reception and knowledge of LEF, see Cuauhtémoc Medina, “Architecture and Efﬁciency: George Maciunas and the Economy of Art,” Res 45 (Spring 2004); Medina, “The ‘Kulturbolschewiken’ I: Fluxus, the Abolition of Art, the Soviet Union, and ‘Pure Amusement,’” Res 48 (Autumn 2005); and Medina, “The ‘Kulturbolschewiken’ II: Fluxus, Khruschev, and the ‘Concretist Society,’” Res 49/50 (Spring/Autumn 2006). I thank Carolina Carrasco for initially drawing my attention to these articles. 5. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 2, 1927–1934, ed. Michael Jennings (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 768–782. 6. “Social conditions are, as we know, determined by the conditions of production” says Benjamin. “And when a work was subjected to a materialist critique, it was customary to ask how the work stood vis-à-vis the social rela- tions of production of its time. This is an important question but also a very difﬁcult one. Its answer is not always unambiguous.” Benjamin, 769. 7. Benjamin, 774. 8. Benjamin, 773. 9. Benjamin, 769. 10. As Maria Gough has pointed out, Benjamin himself reorients the Marxist model in order to apply it to culture. Maria Gough, “Paris, Capital of the Soviet Avant-Garde,” October 101 (Summer 2002): 71. 11. Gough, 71. 12. Benjamin, 774. 13. Benjamin, 772. 14. Benjamin, 775. 15. As Gough notes, “Historically speaking . . . Benjamin’s call for an oper- ativist model of left cultural production in Paris in 1934 comes, as Hal Foster suggestively notes, too late. But what if we were to propose that Benjamin’s invocation of Tretiakov is not just late, but deliberately and polemically so? What if the belatedness of his invocation has, in short, a strategic political function? . . . I am prompted in this direction in part by Benjamin’s well- known investment in the potentially liberatory potential of anachronism. . . . [being] out of harmony with the present.” Gough, 76–77. 16. Benjamin, 770. 17. Benjamin, 771. 18. The idea of a commune is raised often in Maciunas’s correspondence

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.33.56 by guest on 29 September 2021 of the period. See Fluxus etc./Addenda II. 19. In translation, Umfunktionierung is given as “functional transformation.” However, the notion of transforming functions seems more apt, both with regard to Brecht and Benjamin and to Fluxus. I thank Benjamin Buchloh for discussing this point with me. 20. Benjamin, 779. 21. These are all parts of actual scores, reproduced in Ken Friedman, ed., The Fluxus Performance Workbook (Trondheim, Norway: El Djarida, 1990). 22. Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Maciunas’ Learning Machines: From Art History to a Chronology of Fluxus, exh. cat. (Berlin: Vice Versa Verlag, 2003), 11. 23. The physical structure of the charts is described in Schmidt-Burkhardt, 11. 24. Mr. Fluxus: A Collective Portrait of George Maciunas, ed. Emmett Williams and Ann Noël (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1998), 33–35. 25. George Maciunas, “Neo-Dada in Music, Theater, Poetry and Art,” in Gino di Maggio and Achille Bonito Oliva, Ubi Fluxus, Ibi Motus, 1990–1962 (Milan: Fondazione Mudima, 1990), 214–225. 26. The work “in his midst” was all the Cage-influenced practices La Monte Young had gathered for An Anthology, which he had asked Maciunas to design. La Monte Young, ed., An Anthology, 2nd ed. (New York: Heiner Friedrich, 1970). The first edition was published in 1963. 27. Maciunas, “Neo-Dada in Music, Theater, Poetry and Art,” 214. 28. Maciunas justified this creative license in practical terms, explaining that he bought the piano for five dollars and it would have been too expen- sive to pay for it to be removed after the concert. George Maciunas to La Monte Young, ca. October 1962, in What’s Fluxus? What’s Not! Why, ed. Jon Hendricks (Brasilia: Centro Cultural/Banco de Brasil, 2002), 133. 29. Theodor Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” in Quasi una fanta- sia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York: Verso, 1998), 316. 30. Maciunas revised the score for In Memoriam to Adriano Olivetti on November 8, 1962, before the key festivals of Paris (December 1962) and Düsseldorf (February 1963). The revision date appears on the score. See Susan Hapgood, Neo-Dada: Redefining Art 1958–1962 (New York: American Federation of Arts, 1994), 88–89. For dates of the early festivals, see the chronology in Julia Robinson, George Brecht Events: A Heterospective (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2005), 312. 31. George Brecht and La Monte Young were the first to develop the Cagean model of scoring into their own distinct forms—Brecht in Cage’s classes at the New School for Social Research (1958–1959) and Young with the series of 1960 scores. Several founding Fluxus artists, such as Nam June Paik, Dick Higgins, and Alison Knowles, also drew from the Cagean model early on. 32. George Brecht, “Events (Assembled Notes),” unpublished manuscript (1961), George Brecht Notebook VII, March–June 1961, The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit. On the implications of the score/performance function in Fluxus, see my “The Brechtian Event Score: A Structure in Fluxus,” Performance Research 7, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 110–123. 33. The connection of Fluxus to conceptual art remains unresolved. The first entry in Lucy Lippard’s foundational Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (1973; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997) is George Brecht. Lippard states, “Independently, and in association with the Fluxus group, Brecht has been making ‘events’

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.33.56 by guest on 29 September 2021 that anticipate a stricter ‘conceptual art’ since around 1960” (11). For more recent discussions of this topic, see Liz Kotz, “Post-Cagean Aesthetics and the ‘Event’ Score,” October 95 (Winter 2002): 55–89; Liz Kotz, “Language between Performance and Photography,” October 111 (Winter 2005): 3–21; and my doctoral dissertation, “From Abstraction to Model: George Brecht’s Events and the Conceptual Turn in the Art of the 1960s” (Princeton University, 2008). 34. John Cage, “Experimental Music: Doctrine,” in Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 15. 35. Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act” (1957), in Marcel Duchamp, The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo, 1973), 138–140. 36. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York, Hill & Wang, 1977), 143. 37. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 145. Barthes speaks of “the modern text” in a manner that could describe Cage’s indeterminate scores: “the text is henceforth made and read in such a way that at all its levels the author is absent” (145). 38. Barthes, 146. 39. Barthes, 146. 40. Barthes, 145–146. 41. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1999). I discuss the distinction between performance and performativity in Fluxus in “The Sculpture of Indeterminacy: Alison Knowles’ Beans and Variations,” Art Journal 63, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 96–115. 42. I thank Joan Rothfuss for these details and for sharing the associated documentation. See also, Rothfuss, “FluxBeuys,” in What’s Fluxus? ed. Hendricks, 57–65. 43. Butler, Gender Trouble, esp. 163–180. 44. Butler, 168. 45. Butler, 165. 46. Butler, 166. 47. On the body’s subjection in early Dada, see Brigid Doherty, “Berlin,” in Dada, ed. Leah Dickerman (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2005), 88–89. 48. Butler, 169 (my emphasis). 49. Maciunas’s postcard quoted by Henry Flynt in his “Mutations of the Vanguard,” in di Maggio and Oliva, Ubi Fluxus, 112. 50. Flynt states that Maciunas took a “plunge into the dregs,” adding, “So it was that on becoming the impresario of the post-Cage movement, Maciunas configured that movement around a toilet motif (for one thing)” Flynt in di Maggio and Oliva, 112. 51. George Maciunas to Robert Watts, (n.d.) ca. Spring 1963, in Fluxus etc./Addenda II, 149. 52. The Fluxshop should be considered as part of a triumvirate of early 1960s artistic responses to a burgeoning commodity culture, the other two being Claes Oldenburg’s The Store of 1961 and Andy Warhol’s “Factory,” which came into being in 1963, the same year as the Fluxshop. 53. Barbara Moore, “George Maciunas: A Finger in Fluxus,” Artforum, October 1982, 38–45. 54. Fluxus etc./Addenda II. 55. On the notion that art’s status as a commodity constitutes a tautology, see Marcel Broodthaers: “I doubt, in fact, that it is possible to give a serious

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.33.56 by guest on 29 September 2021 definition of art, unless we examine the question in terms of a constant, I mean the transformation of Art into merchandise. This process has sped up nowadays to the point where artistic and commercial values have become superimposed. And if we speak of the phenomenon of reification, then art is a special instance of the phenomenon, a form of tautology.” Marcel Broodthaers, cited in October 42 (Fall 1987): 72. See also my “Sculpture of Indeterminacy.” 56. “Well, the readymade is the most concrete thing. Can’t be more concrete than the readymade.” George Maciunas interview with Larry Miller, videotape (NY: EAI, 1978); transcript reprinted in Ubi Fluxus, 226–233. 57. See Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Cryptic Watts” (New York: Leo Castelli Gallery, 1990); and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Robert Watts: Animate Objects, Inanimate Subjects,” in Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 531–553. 58. Although the pamphlet was initiated and authored by Flynt, Maciunas’s devoted participation signals the common ground of their com- mitments at this time. Flynt recalled that portions of his text were “supplied” by Maciunas. Henry Flynt, interview by author, March 20, 2002, New York. 59. Andy Warhol, interview by Gene Swenson, “From ‘What Is Pop Art? Part I,’” in Pop Art: A Critical History, ed. Stephen Henry Madoff (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 103.

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