DOCSLIB.ORG

56 George Maciunas. Chronology of Russian History

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
56 George Maciunas. Chronology of Russian History 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). 56 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 Grey Room 33, Fall 2008, pp. 56–83. © 2008 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 57 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 “purg- ing,” 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 “col- lective” 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 cita- tion 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 58 Grey Room 33 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 pro- ject 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 ques- tion should be posed anew. At issue was not merely the ques- tion 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 Robinson | Maciunas as Producer: Performative Design in the Art of the 1960s 59 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.33.56 by guest on 29 September 2021 writer who abstains from alienating the productive appa- ratus from the ruling class . .7 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 pro- duction 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.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Major Exhibition Poses Tough Questions and Reasserts Fluxus Attitude
    Contact: Alyson Cluck 212/998-6782 or [email protected] Major Exhibition Poses Tough Questions And Reasserts Fluxus Attitude Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life and Fluxus at NYU: Before and Beyond open at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery on September 9, 2011 New York City (July 21, 2011)—On view from September 9 through December 3, 2011, at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery, Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life features over 100 works dating primarily from the 1960s and ’70s by artists such as George Brecht, Robert Filliou, Ken Friedman, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Mieko Shiomi, Ben Vautier, and La Monte Young. Curated by art historian Jacquelynn Baas and organized by Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art, the exhibition draws heavily on the Hood’s George Maciunas Memorial Collection, and includes art objects, documents, videos, event scores, and Fluxkits. Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life is accompanied by a second installation, Fluxus at NYU: Before and Beyond, in the Grey’s Lower Level Gallery. Fluxus—which began in the 1960s as an international network of artists, composers, and designers―resists categorization as an art movement, collective, or group. It also defies traditional geographical, chronological, and medium-based approaches. Instead, Fluxus participants employ a “do-it-yourself” attitude, relating their activities to everyday life and to viewers’ experiences, often blurring the boundaries between art and life. Offering a fresh look at Fluxus, the show and its installation are George Maciunas, Burglary Fluxkit, 1971. Hood designed to spark multiple interpretations, exploring Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, George Maciunas Memorial Collection: Gift of the Friedman Family; the works’ relationships to key themes of human GM.986.80.164.
    [Show full text]
  • International Indeterminacy George Maciunas and the Mail
    ARTICLE internationaL indeterminaCy george maCiUnas and tHe maiL ColbY Chamberlain Post CHart “The main thing I wanted to talk about is the chart,” says Larry Miller.1 So begins George Maciunas’s last interview, in March 1978, two months before his death from pancreatic cancer. The video recording shows Maciunas supine on a couch, cocooned in a cardigan, noticeably weak. Miller speaks off camera, asking about “the chart,” otherwise known as Maciunas’s Diagram of Historical Development of Fluxus and Other 4 Dimentional, [sic] Aural, Optic, Olfactory, Epithelial and Tactile Art Forms, published in 1973. “Maybe I ought to describe the general construction,” Maciunas says.2 The chart tracks time as it moves downward, he explains. From left to right it registers what Maciunas calls “style,” with happenings at one extreme and Henry Flynt’s concept art at the other. “I chose style rather than location because the style is so unlocalised [sic], and mainly because of the travels of John Cage. So you could call the whole chart like ‘Travels of John Cage’ like you could say ‘Travels of St. Paul,’ you know?”3 According to Maciunas, Cage’s peripatetic concerts and 1 Larry Miller, “Transcript of the Videotaped Interview with George Maciunas, 24 March 1978,” in The Fluxus Reader, ed. Ken Friedman (Chichester, UK: Academy Editions, 1998), 183. 2 Miller, “Interview with George Maciunas,” 183. 3 Miller, “Interview with George Maciunas,” 183. © 2018 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology doi:10.1162/ARTM_a_00218 57 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/artm_a_00218 by guest on 23 September 2021 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/artm_a_00218 by guest on23 September 2021 George Maciunas.
    [Show full text]
  • The Diagram Dematerialized, from Marcel Duchamp to John Cage to George Brecht
    The Diagram Dematerialized, from Marcel Duchamp to John Cage to George Brecht Natilee Harren The event scores of American Fluxus artist George toire of Fluxus events. It appeared in the premiere Fluxus Brecht are minimal and enigmatic, meant to be interpreted concert in Wiesbaden, Germany, in September, 1962, and and enacted by a viewer according only to the limits of the remained on the program as it traveled to Copenhagen, Paris, imagination. Whether imperative or merely propositional, Düsseldorf, and Amsterdam.3 In Copenhagen, Higgins stood Brecht’s scores always position objects and actions in spa- atop a wooden ladder and poured water in a slight arc from tial and temporal relationships, and they are open and a small watering can into an aluminum tub on the ground. generative, embodying the potential for an immense range In Amsterdam, Maciunas held a clear bottle in one hand, of actions to take place in their wake. These qualities of releasing a slight stream into a shallow tin at his feet. Brecht the event score—the arrangement of spatial and temporal performed the piece himself at a concert of happenings in relationships, the call to the beholder’s imagination, and April, 1963, at Rutgers University, where he bent over half- its infinite potentiality—seem to belong to the order of the way to pour water from a curvaceous white pitcher into a diagram, and thus connect Brecht’s work to an entire history white teacup on the floor below (Figure 2). He made several of avant-garde engagements with a diagram model that we sculptures from the score, including a 1966 version in which are only beginning to recognize.
    [Show full text]
  • Fluxus: the Is Gnificant Role of Female Artists Megan Butcher
    Pace University DigitalCommons@Pace Honors College Theses Pforzheimer Honors College Summer 7-2018 Fluxus: The iS gnificant Role of Female Artists Megan Butcher Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/honorscollege_theses Part of the Contemporary Art Commons, and the Other History Commons Recommended Citation Butcher, Megan, "Fluxus: The iS gnificant Role of Female Artists" (2018). Honors College Theses. 178. https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/honorscollege_theses/178 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Pforzheimer Honors College at DigitalCommons@Pace. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors College Theses by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Pace. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Abstract The Fluxus movement of the 1960s and early 1970s laid the groundwork for future female artists and performance art as a medium. However, throughout my research, I have found that while there is evidence that female artists played an important role in this art movement, they were often not written about or credited for their contributions. Literature on the subject is also quite limited. Many books and journals only mention the more prominent female artists of Fluxus, leaving the lesser-known female artists difficult to research. The lack of scholarly discussion has led to the inaccurate documentation of the development of Fluxus art and how it influenced later movements. Additionally, the absence of research suggests that female artists’ work was less important and, consequently, keeps their efforts and achievements unknown. It can be demonstrated that works of art created by little-known female artists later influenced more prominent artists, but the original works have gone unacknowledged.
    [Show full text]
  • Nam June Paik Papers
    Nam June Paik Papers A Preliminary Finding Aid Kathleen Brown, with additions and revisions by Christine Hennessey and Hannah Pacious This collection was processed with support from the Smithsonian Collection Care and Preservation Fund. 2012 Smithsonian American Art Museum, Research and Scholars Center PO Box 37012, MRC970 Washington, D.C. 20013-7012 http://www.americanart.si.edu/research/ Table of Contents Collection Overview ........................................................................................................ 1 Administrative Information .............................................................................................. 1 Scope and Contents........................................................................................................ 2 Arrangement..................................................................................................................... 3 Biographical note............................................................................................................. 2 Names and Subjects ...................................................................................................... 3 Container Listing ............................................................................................................. 5 Series 1: Biographical Material, circa 1957-1999..................................................... 5 Series 2: Correspondence, 1959-2006.................................................................... 6 Series 3: Financial and Legal Records, circa 1966
    [Show full text]
  • From Modernism/Modernity, 11, No. 3 (2004): 282-87. Fluxier-Than-Thou
    From Modernism/Modernity, 11, no. 3 (2004): 282-87. Fluxier-than-Thou: Review Essay Fluxus Experience. Hannah Higgins. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Pp. xv + 259. $29.95 (paper). Teddy Hultberg, Oyvind Fahlström on the Air—Manipulating the World. Stockholm: Sveriges Radios Förlag / Fylkingen, 1999. Bilingual text, Swedish and English. Pp. 337. 2 CDs: Birds in Sweden, The Holy Torsten Nilsson. SEK 400 ($52.00) cloth. Reviewed by Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University “Fluxus,” Dick Higgins has observed, “was not a movement; it has no stated consistent programme or manifesto which the work must match, and it did not propose to move art or our awareness of art from point A to point B. The very name, Fluxus, suggests change, being in a state of flux. The idea was that it would always reflect the most exciting avant-garde tendencies of a given time or moment—the Fluxattitude.”1 Hannah Higgins, the daughter of Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles, both of them foundational Fluxus intermedia artists, agrees. Again and again, in Fluxus Experience, she insists that Fluxus was not, as is usually thought, an inconoclastic avant- garde movement but a way of life, a “fertile field for multiple intelligence interactions” (193) that has strong pedagogical potential. In keeping with her father’s theory of intermedia (see Figure 33), Hannah Higgins uses a Deweyite approach to map possible intersections between Fluxus and other disciplines so as to “allow for a sort of cognitive cross-training through exploratory creativity” (193). Within our existing university structure, a potential Fluxus program “would by definition be unspecialized .
    [Show full text]
  • Architecture and Efficiency: George Maciunas and the Economy Of
    Architecture and efficiency George Maciunas and the economy of art CUAUHTEMOCMEDINA 1. The great frauds of architecture were less resistant to fire and even less beautiful. As for the Guggenheim Museum, LloydWright ought to have In the first prospectus of the contents of Fluxus devised a more intelligent enclosure to ensure that the magazine, of February 1962, George Maciunas paintings of the museum's collections were properly announced that he intended to publish an essay titled illuminated. Instead, propelled by his obsession with "The Grand Fakers of Architecture: M. v. d. Rohe, arranging the museum around a spiral ramp, he had Saarinen, Buschaft, F. L.Wright."1 This was, in fact, one perimeter windows installed all around the building, of the very few original projects for Fluxus magazine which made light fall exactly at the eye level of the that were finally included in the edition of the Fluxus 1 spectators, interfering with their appreciation of the art "yearbook" in 1964.2 In retrospect, this document is one works. In each of these cases, Maciunas denounced a of the best vantage points from which to understand the "preconceived" stylistic goal that hampered the economic rationale behind George Maciunas's anti-art. fulfillment of the building's aims, increasing the costs of In "The Grand Frauds of Architecture," George its construction and day-to-day operation. Maciunas Maciunas intended to critically demolish some of the quoted Mies van der Rohe with utmost irony: masterworks of American postwar architecture: Mies Van he will not make inevitable. der Rohe's Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago "Alone," says, "logic beauty But with a (1949-1951); Eero Saarinen's MIT Auditorium logic, building shines." These innovations are Mies.
    [Show full text]
  • FLUX ACADEMY from Lntermedia to Interactive Education
    The article advocates a Fluxus based experimen­ tal pedagogy which is particularly well suited for scholarship confronted with film and electronic media. Fluxus works have the potential to work the frame of reference, and, by doing so, encour­ age creativity, and what Saper calls "invention­ tourism." The theory explored in Fluxacademy focuses specifically on the use of intermedia for interactive education. FLUX ACADEMY From lntermedia to Interactive Education Craig Saper Craig Saper, pp . 79-96 Visible Language, 26: l/ 2 © Visible Language, 1992 Rhode Island School of Design Providence, Rl 02903 80 Visible Language Vo lume 26 number 1/2 In an archive's file on Fluxus participant Ken Friedman, a loose page of scribbled notes suggests the potential connection between the alterna­ tive arts and pedagogy. 1 The page is entitled The Academy of Fluxus, and it provokes us to consider the connections between Fluxus and the academy in flux. Although people associated with Fluxus are usually thought of as artists, their work also addresses the contemporary crisis in education. In terms of the academy in flux, scholars confronted with the informa­ tion explosion, electronic media , and demands for easier access to knowledge have begun to suggest new strategies (e .g., interaction , non­ sequential ordering, etc.) and a new metaphor (i.e . tourism) for scholar­ ship and education . Fluxus applied these same strategies and the tourism metaphor to artworks which can function as models for educa­ tional applications. While scholars have suggested the usefulness of, for example, describing learning with hypermedia computer programs as a tour of information, they have not worked through applications on a broad-scale.
    [Show full text]
  • George Maciunas: More Than Fluxus
    GEORGE MACIUNAS: MORE THAN FLUXUS Graphic Design, Objects and Ephemera In Association with Barbara Moore/Bound & Unbound May 4 - June 22, 1996 1. U.S.A. Surpasses All The Genocide Records, 1967 Offset poster 21 1/2" x 34 3/4 Maciunas was color blind and, with few exceptions, his graphic style was conceived as black-on- white or black-on-an-incidentally-chosen color. The major exceptions are the three flag posters in this section, in which type and color combine to delineate national symbols. Widely published as a graphic paradigm of anti-war protest, this Vietnam War poster received greater dissemination, albeit anonymously, than any other example of Maciunas's work during his lifetime. 2. America Today, 1966 Offset poster 10 1/2" x 16" Private collection Once Maciunas conceived of a graphic concept, he repeated and refined it over a period of several years. This 1966 design was his first flag poster. 3. Companeras and Companeros, ca 1970 Offset poster 11" x 17" Private collection 4. Seven placards, 1967 Photostats mounted on cardboard (new wood poles), one with 2 petition forms in pocket on back. a. "Support the International War Crimes Tribunal" b. "Nazis Razed Lidice. U.S. Razes Can-Me" c. "Superior U.S. Firepower Slaughters Vietnamese at Higher 'Kill Ratio' than Nazi Pacification Efforts Ever Did in Past" UBU GALLERY 416 EAST 59 STREET NEW YORK NY 10022 TEL: 212 753 4 444 FAX: 212 753 4470 [email protected] WWW.UBUGALLERY.COM George Manciunas: More than Fluxus Graphic Design, Objects & Ephemera May 4 – June 22, 1996 Page 2 of 22 d.
    [Show full text]
  • John Cage Discusses F L U X U S
    The topics addressed in this informal discussion include John Cage's response to George Maciunas' work, the composer's recollections of Marcel Duchamp, the complex relationship between inelegant material and revealing works of art, neo-Dada and neo-Fiuxus, Wittgenstein and the artist's ultimate responsibility to initiate a change in the viewer or receiver. JOHN CAGE DISCUSSES F L U X U S ELLSWORTH SNYDER Ellsworth Snyder, pp. 59-68 Visible Language, 26:1/2 © Visible Language, 1992 Rhode Island School of Design Providence, Rl 02903 60 Visible Language Volume 26 number 1/ 2 ES: John, because so many of the people involved in Fluxus had former­ ly been students of yours at the New School for Social Research in New York, you have been thought of as the spiritual father of Fluxus. JC: You could also say not a spiritual father but kind of a source , like a root; and there were many roots and I was just one. You've seen the tree design that George Maciunas made of Fluxus. Well you recall that the roots are given at the top and my name is connected with one of the roots. So I wasn't the only one who brought it about, but I was one of the ones. And I never had ... oh, a sense of being one of the roots. It was George Maciunas who actually thought of Fluxus, who put me in his design of the tree with roots . It was his idea. But his idea of Fluxus is not necessarily another person's idea of Fluxus .
    [Show full text]
  • George Maciunas and the Flux-Labyrinth (1974/1976): Staging a Soho Way of Life
    George Maciunas and the Flux-Labyrinth (1974/1976): Staging a SoHo Way of Life Anton Pereira Rodriguez and Wouter Davidts Frieze New York 2015 Ever since the first edition of Frieze New York in 2012, the art fair pays tribute each year to “alternative spaces and artist-run initiatives that have defined and transformed the cultural life of contemporary cities.”1 In 2013 Frieze New York celebrated FOOD, the artist-run restaurant initiated in 1971 by Gordon Matta-Clark in the neighborhood of SoHo, the old textile industry district South of Houston Street in Downtown Manhattan, New York. For the 2015 edition, Frieze commemorated the Flux-Labyrinth, a room-filling installation conceived by the artist George Maciunas in 1974. Not unlike Matta-Clark’s FOOD, Maciunas’s Flux- Labyrinth was a project that was firmly rooted in the artists’ colony of SoHo. Whereas the 2015 recreation of the original Flux-Labyrinth included many of the original sections, it also included sections designed by contemporary artists.2 “Hidden among the grid of galleries,” the reconstruction of the labyrinth was promoted as “a space in which to play and discover a new awareness of our bodies.”3 Any additional information about the historical genesis and meaning of the project by Maciunas, however, was not provided, preventing visitors to the fair from discovering the interrelatedness with the Fluxus movement in general, and with the urban realm of SoHo in the late 1960s and early 1970s in particular.4 1/14 By returning to the first built iteration of the labyrinth during
    [Show full text]
  • 1 Maciunas's Models: Thought in Three Dimensions You See, The
    Maciunas’s Models: Thought in Three Dimensions You see, the reason I am so concerned with [functionalism] is that that’s an architect’s training. I mean, that’s the way the architect thinks, he thinks in functionalism otherwise he’s not an architect, he’s a sculptor or a stage designer.1 George Maciunas’s Prefabricated Building System was the most literal expression he ever made of his lifelong devotion to functionalism. His commitment to this ideal, which included an equally unwavering concern for efficiency and economy, was immanent in everything Maciunas made, but the Prefabricated Building System put these principles to the test. The serene, even elegant appearance of the realized model belies the intricate, obsessive and rigorously engaged planning process through which its form was derived. Like most other projects Maciunas touched, the model appears today as a refined design object, whose lucid presence all but transcends the exhaustive calculations guiding its utopian aims. Maciunas’s Prefabricated Building System (1965) was in fact a critique of an existing system – a late-1950s prefabricated housing model made in the Soviet Union – it was conceived as an alternative to that “solution” and other less efficient designs developed contemporaneously for the same purposes. Maciunas’s building project followed directly on the heels of his scathing critique of several examples of modern architecture written the year prior. Both led up to his most significant feat of architectural planning, the system of co-operative artists’ lofts that shaped the area of lower Manhattan called SoHo (then known to the fire department as “Hell’s Hundred Acres”), a project Maciunas initiated in 1966 under the banner of the “Fluxhouse Cooperatives.” 1 George Maciunas, interview with Larry Miller, 1978.
    [Show full text]