George Maciunas, photograph by Peter Moore, 1976.
Fluxus Administration: George Maciunas and the Art of Paperwork
by Colby Chamberlain
University of Chicago Press, 2024
In 2013 a curious exhibition was presented in New York City’s Chelsea gallery district. Included were references to the titles of works by many artists central to the neo-avant-garde, including Yoko Ono’s Four (Fluxfilm no. 16) (1966), and George Brecht’s artist’s book Water Yam (1964). But none of these works—nor any artworks at all—were on view. Plastering the walls of the small storefront were legal documents: specifically, copyright registration forms certified by the US Copyright Office. On the lines reserved for “Copyright Claimant(s) and Address(es),” where one might expect to find the name and residence of the author (e.g., George Brecht, Yoko Ono) of the work being copyrighted, was instead “FLUXUS, solely owned by George Maciunas.” In the case of the copyright filing forms corresponding to Water Yam, on the lines for “Authors” we find, in this order, “George Maciunas, compiler” and “George Brecht, author of original texts.” The only address given throughout the form, even for Brecht, is Maciunas’s Lower Manhattan post office box. As demonstrated throughout Colby Chamberlain’s monograph Fluxus Administration: George Maciunas and the Art of Paperwork, it was via administrative operations like copyright that Fluxus took shape, orchestrated by the historically hazy figure of George Maciunas. Here the puzzle of Maciunas’s elaborate and contentious organization of all things Fluxus reveals itself, as the proceduralism of legal instruments offers up a kind of score not just to be performed, but manipulated, and recast towards artistic ends.
“Maciunas, compiler” is just one of the many faces of George Maciunas (born Jurgis Mačiūnas, Kaunas, Lithuania, 1931; died Boston, 1978), as sketched in Chamberlain’s deftly researched, lively account of the Fluxus founder’s working methods. Yet stopping at the title of “founder” does a disservice to the multitudinous efforts of Maciunas over the course of his all-too-brief life, cut short by pancreatic cancer at age forty-six. It also does not capture the spirit of Chamberlain’s animated narration that carries us through meeting many Maciunases: the émigré, the art history student, the architect, the US Air Force Exchange member, the publisher, the graphic designer, the list maker, the bookkeeper, the archivist, the housing planner, the outlaw, the conduit, the epicenter, the mastermind, the chairman, the dictator, the chronically ill, the queer, and, consummately, as Chamberlain asserts, the artist (though, intriguingly, not “curator”). If Fluxus’s tentacular reach into performance, print, film, and other artistic mediums has left it difficult to define, that is due in no small part to the complex shape-shifting of the singular force at its locus: George Maciunas. Refreshingly, Chamberlain abandons previous art historians’ fixation with defining Fluxus. Rather, Fluxus Administration is concerned with how Maciunas deployed “Fluxus.” Chamberlain’s charting of Maciunas’s activities is not just an engrossing read, but simply put, offers an immense service. Finally, someone has put their finger on the center of Fluxus, pausing its rotation so that we might better understand the gravitational pull around which all artists within it seemed to orbit.
But while Maciunas anchored all output under the banner of Fluxus in some way, he could be hard to find. Fittingly, we first meet Maciunas through a summary of documents listing his birth date, social security number, blood type, and various other data the artist submitted as his biography to accompany his contribution to the eighth issue of Aspen magazine (Fall–Winter 1970–71). Printed alongside other artists’ more routine biographies highlighting notable exhibitions and publications, for Chamberlain, Maciunas’s choice to present this data exemplifies his sensitivity to the ways in which documents “tether a body to the state.” That understanding guides what Chamberlain presents as Maciunas’s ultimate project: tampering with “the structures of bureaucratic modernity to establish new models of collectivity.” Paperwork was the medium that Maciunas tapped into to engage that subterfuge, and it is taken up by Chamberlain as the framework for analyzing the artist’s production. Leaning on German media theorists Friedrich Kittler and Cornelia Vismann, whose work was greatly influenced by Michel Foucault, paperwork and its attendant filing systems, ledgers, and indexes function as “the media of administration, a juncture of materials and techniques that enables and enacts organization.” What Maciunas understood, argues Chamberlain, is that administration is not only the forms, ledgers, agreements, and other documents and processes that make up its familiar aesthetic. It is also a vehicle through which individuals are supervised by the state, authors and collectives are memorialized, and authority performed. For Maciunas, this understanding—or perhaps more aptly, obsession—manifested in paperwork, which for Chamberlain comprises both material forms, plans, and certificates but also the work of administration, ordering, compiling, filing, organization, and editing. The umbrella term “Fluxus” was coined by Maciunas in 1962 (though it was co-conceived) and then stamped on the activities of an extraordinarily broad network of visual artists, writers, filmmakers, kindred spirits, and friends. (The title of Chamberlain’s book is derived from Maciunas’s sign-off on the first of his “news-policy” letters as “George Maciunas, for Fluxus administration.”) Maciunas took up the tools and aesthetics of administration in service of organizing Fluxus into a collective. Or as Chamberlain writes, Maciunas’s “dream of community was expressed in a ‘paper language.’”
Over the five central chapters of Fluxus Administration we are introduced to Maciunas’s activities through modes of paperwork: “Card Files & Charts,” “Newsletters & Postcards,” “Registrations & Catalogs,” “Plans & Budgets,” “Prescriptions & Certificates.” In the first chapter, we follow him through the 1950s during his time as a student, into his brief but formative career in architecture, and through the gallery he co-ran, AG Gallery, which closed in 1961 after less than a year. Chamberlain’s dive into this formative period reveals early glimpses of Maciunas’s working method. As a student enrolled briefly at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, Maciunas adopted the card file as his preferred method of notetaking. The format lent itself to organizing information into standard modules to be arranged. Tellingly, Maciunas never used these cards to write an essay; rather, they served as building blocks for expansive charts mapping the relationships between movements and key figures. That method of organizing and transmitting information would later be echoed in Maciunas’s charts documenting the history and activities of Fluxus—including those artists that Maciunas excluded for defying his unifying vision.
In 1957 Maciunas took a position at Olin Mathieson Chemical Corporation, where he developed prefabricated aluminum-sided wall panels for the firm’s Aluminum Division. Here already the topography of Maciunas’s obsessions with bureaucratic modes comes to the fore, as well as his keen insight into how these obsessions might be leveraged. For example, we learn that Maciunas attempted to retain the patent rights to this construction system for himself, bucking the business norm that the work produced for a company as an employee belongs to that company. Maciunas saw an opportunity for potential financial gain, yet ended up absorbing a lesson in how intellectual property operates as a means for corporations to absorb products.
Chamberlain returns to intellectual property in chapter three, “Registrations & Catalogs.” Having experienced the power afforded by IP to consume, exclude, and most importantly, to unify, in 1963 Maciunas announced to artists wanting to collaborate on a series of solo edition box publications that they needed to assign their copyright to Fluxus. For Maciunas this would guarantee, as Chamberlain writes, a “‘common front’ that could protect Fluxus’s investment in printing costs, centralize its collection of performance royalties, and generate publicity for its ‘propaganda activities.’” What Maciunas wished to propagandize was the “elimination” of authorship and the “artist’s ego,” underpinned by a (skewed) understanding of Soviet productivism and the LEF group’s “push to integrate art into (revolutionary) society through … ‘useful’ applications of a fine artist’s skill set.” Maciunas’s statements concerning the “elimination” of the fine arts for “socially constructive ends” have been widely quoted. But Chamberlain recovers the key role of copyright in Maciunas’s concept of how that could be achieved: by assigning the copyright of all works to Fluxus, authors would become anonymous collaborators, collectivizing their intellectual property. In effect this reversed the typical function of IP, namely to affirm an individual author’s rights. And yet by suppressing “sole authorship through a legal constraint,” issuing “a gag order on individual expression,” Maciunas—who sometimes registered Fluxus copyrights over artists’ works without their knowledge—reasserted himself as Fluxus’s center.
That contradiction, as well as Maciunas’s inflated sense of his own business acumen (and of the profit potential in Fluxus’s output), punctuates the episodes elaborated in Fluxus Administration. Tensions come to a head in Maciunas’s most grandiose plans for Fluxhouses, a network of cooperative live-work buildings in SoHo that ultimately fell far short of their vision due to shaky finances and infighting. Maciunas was crushed by the debt incurred from the purchase and renovation costs. The debts were so bad that a contractor sent two men to physically assault him. But Maciunas did not at first intend to bear the financial burden of the Fluxhouses on his own. Examining the correspondence between Maciunas and his attorney, Chamberlain reveals that Maciunas had applied for a low-interest, long-term loan from the Federal Housing Authority, and was promised seed money from philanthropist Jacob Kaplan and the National Foundation for the Arts (National Endowment for the Arts). But the money never came through. Here, an unfortunate kind of parable emerges: relying on government, bureaucracy, and traditional modes of patronage as sources of support seemed to only prove Maciunas’s skepticism right.
Art history has perhaps been reticent to examine the documental life of art production because it leaves little in the way of reproduction-worthy images, or so the conventional thinking goes. Fluxus Administration refreshingly departs from that norm with copious illustrations of Maciunas’s charts, ledgers, diagrams, and even related correspondence. And it works. Not only because Maciunas brought his dynamic graphic eye to many of these items, but because the design of the book itself meets the exciting challenge set by Chamberlain’s thesis, which regards the paperwork that accompanies artworks as a crucial facet of art history. Chamberlain’s prose is also a pleasure to read. The author’s enthusiasm is palpable, and at times has the effect of bringing us closer to the book’s energetic subject, as if Maciunas’s hyperdrive rubbed off on the author over the course of research. That said, although the book doesn’t attempt to offer a biography of Maciunas, greater detail about his post-WWII years in a displaced persons camp and immigration from Lithuania might have lent more texture to Maciunas’s fixation on administrative records (which include the documents used to confirm belonging to a state, but also statelessness). It might also have added further complexity to his apparent romanticization of government support for the arts in the USSR, which as Chamberlain is careful to point out, Maciunas misunderstood. At times, the author sprinkles in references to Foucault, Kittler, and Vismann that distract from his impressive and captivating research. However, such references may spark the methodological imaginations of emerging art historians to undertake similar projects that test disciplinary limits.
Chamberlain’s conclusion encourages further scholarship by mapping out the archives where Maciunas’s output now lives. It also underscores Fluxus’s ongoing troubling of the boundary separating mediums; apparently when MoMA acquired the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives, the task of determining which items belonged in the museum’s art collections and which in its archives (which visitors can view and often handle) caused significant head-scratching among staff. It is puzzling though that the George Maciunas / Fluxus Foundation Inc. founded by Harry Stendhal in 2009 goes unmentioned. Even if the organization’s efforts were short-lived and controversial, it presents an administrative history worth examining. Alongside producing physical and online exhibitions of materials related to Maciunas’s activities (including the exhibition of copyright certificates mentioned above) and those of Fluxus artists, Stendhal’s stated aim was to promote Maciunas’s modular building system developed in 1965 for new construction projects. According to US Patent and Trademark Office records, he applied to trademark “Fluxhouse” as a brand in 2018.1 The application was abandoned in 2021. If, as Chamberlain incisively contends, Maciunas’s life’s work can be read through his fixation on and tampering with administration, it is curious that the administrative afterlives—and administrative appropriations—of Maciunas’s legacy are left unexplored. One hopes that there lies another set of questions for Chamberlain to address in future scholarship, as there is clearly no one better to interrogate them.
See →.