FLUXUS: MAGAZINES, MANIFESTOS, MULTUM IN PARVO
By Clive Phillpot
source: http://georgemaciunas.com/about/cv/manifesto-i/
George Maciunas’ choice of the word
Fluxus, in October 1960, as the title of a magazine for a projected
Lithuanian Cultural Club in New York, was too good to let go when that
circumstance evaporated. In little more than a year, by the end of
1961, he had mapped out the first six issues of a magazine, with
himself as publisher and editor-in-chief, that was scheduled to appear
in February 1962 and thereafter on a quarterly basis, to be titled Fluxus.
The projected magazine might well have
provided a very interesting overview of a culture in flux. Maciunas
planned to include articles on electronic music, anarchism,
experimental cinema, nihilism, happenings, lettrism, sound poetry, and
even painting, with specific issues of the magazine focusing on the
United States, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and Japan. Although its
proposed contents reflected a contemporary sensibility, its emphasis on
the publication of essays on those topics suggests that the magazine
would have been relatively conventional in presentation. But the seeds
of the actual Fluxus magazine that was eventually published
were nonetheless present, even in the first issue of the projected
magazine, since it was intended to include a brief “anthology” after
the essays.
This proposed anthology would have drawn on the contributors to La Monte Young’s publication An Anthology, the
material for which had been amassed in late 1960 and early 1961, and
which George Maciunas had been designing since the middle of 1961. In
fact Fluxus was “supposed to have been the second Anthology.” But the anthologized works projected for the first Fluxus were radically different from the articles, since they were printed artworks and scores—as were most of the pieces in An Anthology, which was finally published by La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low in 1963.
After interminable delays, Fluxus 1
finally appeared late in 1964. But during this three-year gestation
period it had evolved dramatically and become virtually an anthology of
printed art pieces and flat, or flattened, objects; the essays had
practically vanished. At the same time, the appearance of the
idiosyncratic graphic design that Maciunas was to impose on Fluxus gave
the magazine a distinctive look. The presentation of Fluxus 1
had also become more radical, for not only did it consist of diverse
formats and small objects, often in envelopes, but these components
were also fastened together with three large metal bolts. In addition,
the magazine was mailed in a wooden box branded or stenciled with its
title. The quarterly magazine had also been superseded by the concept of
Fluxus yearboxes. Whether or not Fluxus 1 lived up to George
Maciunas’ intention that it “should be more of an encyclopedia than…a
review, bulletin or even a periodical,” it certainly met the original
definition of the word “magazine”: a storehouse for treasures—or
explosives. This format was also very influential, affecting the
presentation of several “magazine” ventures later in the decade. (The
original meaning of “magazine” was exemplified even more emphatically
by the truly three-dimensional successors of Fluxus 1 , such as the Fluxkit suitcases and the Flux Year Box 2, containing innumerable plastic boxes, film loops, objects, and printed items.)
When George Maciunas consulted his
dictionary he found that the word “flux” not only existed as a noun, a
verb, and an adjective, but also had a total of seventeen different
meanings. At the head of his Fluxus…Tentative Plan for Contents of the First 6 Issues,
issued late in 1961, he rearranged five of these definitions to
explain the use of the term Fluxus, bringing to the fore the idea of
purging (and its association with the bowels). By 1963, these selected
dictionary definitions of “flux” could no longer encompass the
developing intentions of Fluxus, and Maciunas began to promote three
particular senses of the word: purge, tide, and fuse—each not amplified
by his own comments. These amounted to new working definitions of the
three senses, and were refined to the point where they could finally be
incorporated into a collaged, three-part Manifesto, together with photostats of eight of the dictionary definitions.
The aims of Fluxus, as set out in the Manifesto
of 1963, are extraordinary, but connect with the radical ideas
fermenting at the time. The text suggests affinities with the ideas of
Henry Flynt, as well as links with the aims of radical groups earlier
in the century. The first of the three sections of Maciunas’ Manifesto revels
that the intent of Fluxus is to “PURGE the world of dead art…abstract
art, [and] illusionistic art…” What would be left after this purging
would presumably be “concrete art,” which Maciunas equated with the
real, or the ready-made. He explained the origins of concrete art, as he
defined it, with reference to the ready-made objects of Marcel
Duchamp, the ready-made sounds of John Cage, and the ready-made actions
of George Brecht and Ben Vautier.
The first section of the Manifesto
also states that Fluxus intends to purge the world of such other
symptoms of “bourgeois sickness” as intellectual, professional, and
commercialized culture. In one of a series of informative letters to
Tomas Schmit, mostly from 1963 to 1964, Maciunas declares that “Fluxus
is anti-professional”; “Fluxus should become a way of life not a profession”;
“Fluxus people must obtain their ‘art’ experience from everyday
experiences, eating, working, etc.” Maciunas is for diverting human
resources to “socially constructive ends,” such as the applied arts
most closely related to the fine arts, including “industrial design,
journalism, architecture, engineering, graphic-typographic arts,
printing, etc.” As for commercialism, “Fluxus is definitely against
[the] art-object as [a] non-functional commodity—to be sold and to make
[a] livelihood for an artist.” But Maciunas concedes that the
art-object “could temporarily have the pedagogical function of teaching
people the needlessness of art.”
The last sentence of this section of the Manifesto reads:
“PURGE THE WORLD OF ‘EUROPANISM’!” By this Maciunas meant on the one
hand the purging of pervasive ideas emanating from Europe, such as “the
idea of professional artist, art-for-art ideology, expression of
artists’ ego through art, etc.,” and on the other, openness to other
cultures. The composition of the group of Fluxus people was exceptional
in that it included several Asians, such as Ay-O, Mieko Shiomi, Nam
June Paik, and Yoko Ono—as well as the black American Ben Patterson and
a significant number of women—and in that it reached from Denmark to
Italy, from Czechoslovakia through the United States to Japan. Interest
in and knowledge of Asian cultures were generally increasing in the
West at the time, and, in this context, are evidenced by Maciunas’
tentative plans in 1961 for a Japanese issue of Fluxus, which
would have included articles relating to Zen, to Hakuin, to haiku, and
to the Gutai Group, as well as surveys of contemporary experimental
Japanese art. (Joseph Beuys rather missed the point when he altered the
1963 Manifesto in 1970 and read: “Purge the World of Americanism.”)
The second section of the Manifesto,
which initially related to flux as “tide,” is really the obverse of
the first: “PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART. Promote
living art, anti-art, promote NON ART REALITY to be grasped by all
peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals.”
Maciunas’ third section was “fuse,” and
read: “FUSE the cadres of cultural, social & political
revolutionaries into [a] united front & action.” Inevitably most of
Maciunas’ time was spent trying to fuse cadres of cultural
revolutionaries, though not all the Fluxus people saw themselves in
this way. One of his tactics was the employment of the term Fluxus
beyond the title of the magazine as a form of verbal packaging, whereby
Fluxus people would benefit from collective promotion.
Toward this end, Maciunas established Conditions for Performing Fluxus Published Compositions, Films & Tapes, which
ruled that a concert in which more than half of the works were by
Fluxus people should be designated a Fluxconcert, whereas in a concert
where fewer than half of the works were by Fluxus people, each Fluxus
composition should be labeled “By Permission of Fluxus” or “Flux-Piece”
in the program. In this way, “even when a single piece is performed
all other members of the group will be publicized collectively and will
benefit from it,” for Fluxus “is a collective never promoting prima
donnas at the expense of other members.” Maciunas, therefore, was for
the “collective spirit, anonymity and Anti-individualism,” so that
“eventually we would destroy the authorship of pieces and make them totally anonymous—thus eliminating artists’ ‘ego’—[the] author would be ‘Fluxus.’”
Two years after the 1963 Manifesto,
George Maciunas produced another manifesto, significantly different in
tone. But in this new statement Henry Flynt’s ideas once again seem
evident. Maciunas introduces the topic of “Fluxamusement,” which
appears to be an adaptation of Flynt’s “Veramusement,” one of the
“successive formulations of [Flynt’s] art-liquidating position.” While
Maciunas still aspires “to establish artists nonprofessional,
nonparasitic, nonelite status in society” and requires the
dispensability of the artist, the self-sufficiency of the audience, and
the demonstration “that anything can substitute [for] art and anyone
can do it,” he also suggests that “this substitute art-amusement must
be simple, amusing, concerned with insignificances, [and] have no
commodity or institutional value.”
Later in the year, in a reformulation of this 1965 Fluxmanifesto on Fluxamusement,
Maciunas added that “the value of art-amusement must be lowered by
making it unlimited, massproduced, unobtainable by all and eventually
produced by all.” He further states that “Fluxus art-amusement is the
rear-guard without any pretension or urge to participate in the
competition of ‘one-upmanship’ with the avant-garde. It strives for the
monostructural and non-theatrical qualities of [a] simple natural
event, a game or a gag.”
The 1963 Manifesto, with its
talk of purging and revolution, did not include any mention of
amusement or gags, and yet the element of humor was not something
introduced suddenly with the 1965 manifestos; it had been an integral
part of Fluxus from its beginnings. Talking to Larry Miller in 1978,
George Maciunas observed: “I would say I was mostly concerned with
humor, I mean like that’s my main interest, is humor… generally most
Fluxus people tended to have a concern with humor.” (Ay-O summed up the
matter concisely when he said: “Funniest is best that is Fluxus.”)
In this same interview, Maciunas made
another intriguing remark, explaining that Fluxus performances—or
concerts or festivals—came about first because they were “easier than
publishing,” and second “as a promotional trick for selling whatever we
were going to publish or produce.” Even as early as the falloff 1963
he was able to say that festivals “offer [the] best opportunity to sell
books—much better than by mail.”
However, in spite of these beginnings,
one might say that ultimately the purest form of Fluxus, and the most
perfect realization of its goals, lies in performance or, rather, in
events, gestures, and actions, especially since such Fluxus works are
potentially the most integrated into life, the most social—or sometimes,
anti-social, the obverse of the same coin—and the most ephemeral. And
they are not commodities, even though they may exist as printed
prescriptions or “scores.” But when such scores and other paraphernalia
are encountered in an exhibition, rather than activated and
experienced through events, a vital dimension of Fluxus is missing.
There are some Fluxus works that can be experienced simply by looking,
because they work visually, and there are others that can be performed
by an individual as mind games. But many more works require that they
be performed through physical activity by one or more persons, with or
without onlookers. When works or scores such as these are seen or read
in an exhibition, experience of them can only be vicarious.
But Maciunas also said, in 1964, that
“Fluxus concerts, publications, etc.—are at best transitional (a few
years) and temporary until such a time when fine art can be totally
eliminated (or at least its institutional forms) and artists find other
employment.” He also affirmed that Fluxus people should experience
their everyday activities as “art” rather than such phenomena as Fluxus
concerts, for “concerts serve only as educational means to convert the
audiences to such non-art experiences in their daily lives.”
Although Maciunas himself, even by 1973,
was referring to the years 1963-68 as the “Flux Golden Age,” Fluxus
concerts, publications, and so on, however “transitional,” actually
lasted more than “a few years,” for Fluxus did not come to an end until
the death of George Maciunas in 1978. By that time the exact
composition of the Fluxus group had changed many times: some had left
early; some had returned; others had arrived late.
A few Fluxus people and neo-Fluxus
people believe Fluxus is still a flag to follow, while others believe
that “Fluxus hasn’t ever taken place yet!” George Brecht may have put
the matter to rest recently, when he declaredthat “Fluxus has Fluxed.”
But the elusive sensibility that emerged from a world in flux in the
late fifties and early sixties, and which George Maciunas labeled
Fluxus, has weathered the seventies and eighties and is fortunately
still with us. Today it goes by many names and no name, resisting
institutionalization under the name Fluxus even as it did while Fluxus
packaged pieces of it decades ago.
