Fluxus Administration
George Maciunas and The Art of Paperwork
by Colby Chamberlain
University of Chicago Press, 2024
This room on the second floor of 537 Broadway is all too familiar. Tonight it
is the setting for a book talk by Colby Chamberlain for his new book Fluxus
Administration: George Maciunas and The Art of Paperwork. But I have
definitely been here before, both for events sponsored by the Emily Harvey
Foundation and for research on my book, Illegal Living: 80 Wooster Street
and the Evolution of SoHo, co-written with Shael Shapiro.
George Maciunas was married here in February 1978 to Billie Hutching,
with the bride and groom both dressed in white wedding gowns. Sadly, it
was only three months before George died. And, several years earlier,
George Maciunas was beaten severely in this room in 1975 by thugs for
not paying his electrical bills for work on one of his Fluxhouses. The result:
he lost an eye.
George Maciunas bought the building for $325,000 and sold it off to artists
including the second floor. Four decades after its transformation into an
artist coop, there was a Fluxus art show with pipe art by Yoshi Wada and
and an exhibit by Agustin Schang on “Ways of Treating Buildings in Order
to See them;” based on a 1980’s listing of the artists who actually lived
there at the time.
Since its creation as an art space, there have been numerous lectures
held there on the meaning and influence of Fluxus– with everyone holding
a different opinion of its essence and purpose. Was it a true art movement?
Was it a bold anti-art movement? Was it radical? Was it playful? Was it
memorable?
The most recent Fluxus event held there was a book talk and slide show by
author Colby Chamberlain, whose book Fluxus Administration: George
Maciunas and The Art of Paperwork takes a chronological view of
Maciunas’s meticulous, indeed almost compulsive work, each
and every moment of his life recorded on charts and note cards and
catalogs. Precise documents in his perfect architect’s handwriting or on his
electric typewriter.
Chamberlain begins with Maciunas’s Currulum Vitae but goes on to
organize the book into five sections: 1 Card Files & Charts; 2 Newsletter &
Postcards; 3 Registration &Catalogs; 4 Plans & Budgets and 5 Prescriptions & Certificates. There is also a Conclusion and Obituaries.
As I listened to Chamberlain talk, I thought back to our research in Detroit
where the George Maciunas Archives were then stored in Lila and Gilbert
Silverman’s warehouse. Before us, we found precisely organized charts
and documents, all neatly filed. We were researching the real estate papers
for each of Maciunas’s 16 Fluxhouse buildings although our focus was on
80 Wooster Street, Fluxhouse 2, actually finished first, so technically
Fluxhouse 1. We found each tenant, each expense, each renovation.
George, we discovered, basically gave each of the artists who bought in a
rudimentary bathroom with the same grey hexagonal tile. After that, they
were on their own.
The original plan was for the buildings to have art and photography studios
but ultimately, short of cash, artists got their space with minimal renovations and from then on they were basically on their own.
The most interesting part of Chamberlain’s talk (and book) was his
discussion of Maciunas’s passion for collective ownership. There was to be
no individual ownership but rather the owner would be FLUXUS. In fact,
“copy contracts would suppress sole authorship through a legal constraint.
Maciunas was drafting a gag order on individual expression.”
Some critics traced this to Maciunas’s love of the agricultural collective that
he remembered from his childhood in Lithuania; others to Maciunas’s own
personal philosophy. Whatever the source, Maciunas left nothing out.
There were documents on the definition of Fluxhouses with readers
debating whether Maciunas was “suggesting a community consisting of
artists or an community conceived artificially?”
In Chapter 1 Card Files & Charts , Colby Chamberlain, deals with
Maciunas‘s critique of universities for directing students into two narrow
specializations, too early in their academic career. This was evident in his
own career because while he was studying architecture he decided to
enroll part-time at the Institute of Fine Arts. He had a broader vision of the
role of fine arts in education. In some sense, he was ahead of his time here
since students today seem to prefer flexible programs, choosing their
majors in their third year rather than during the first two. Machiunas’s work experience at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and at Olin Mathieson Chemical Corporation, continued his mastery of graphic communication.
Chamberlain examined in detail Maciunas’s work for these companies even
noting that that Maciunas falsified the length of his employment at SOM.
Each and every project that he did at work was documented with detailed
index cards, many of which are reproduced in the book. Later, Maciunas
expanded his recording of information from index cards onto
two-dimensional transformational charts. His work in informational graphics was remarkable and definitely ahead of its time. It was initially handwritten but it clearly was the predecessor of computerized digital recording.
Chapter 2 Newsletters & Postcards
Maciunas saw the Postal service placed ”in the service of the Machinery of
the Republic” Hence Maciunas mailed out memoranda, always with the
logo, Fluxus News.
3. Registrations & Catalogs
What Maciunas wanted most was to eliminate authorship and the artist\s
ego and to “push to integrate art into (revolutionary) society through useful
applications of a fine artists’s skill set.”
In a fourth chapter, Plans & Budgets, |Chamberlain describes how
Maciunas\s meticulously charted the 16 Fluxhouses that were ultimately
established in SoHo. Included in the book is a document which described
the need for such housing. There are charts for the floor plans for three
different coops as well as accounts for their materials which included
ceramic tiles and grout, roofing, plaster and rubbish, sidewalks, and
radiators with unit heaters, etc,
Chamberlain’s approach to Maciunas’s paperwork as the media of
administration is an analysis of Maciunas’s mind and the book reveals |the
underlying dynamics of Maciunas’s practice. “It describes one of the most
radical anti-art positions of the 1960’s.”
