Their esthetic descended from Dada and John Cage (as did mine, later), as they worked in music, visual art, literature, and especially performances. (Only the last I didn’t do.) Though initially attended by a choice few, some of the last have been memorialized in art writing and eventually scholarship.
Respecting Cage’s demand of freedom in choosing esthetic materials, they eschewed heaviness with innovative work that was initially esthetically acceptable to everyone who cared. Two intentions were audacity and comedy, which are ideals I want for my own art.
Their leader and most brilliant exemplar was George Maciunas (1931-1977), a Lithuanian who’d come to America after WWII and initially trained as an architect at first-rank US universities. In addition to organizing and helping his colleagues, he did many things in his own name, some more brilliantly than others, some ephemeral and others permanent. Among the latter I count his publishing, and the first achievement of The Fluxus Newspaper (Primary Information, 2024) is bringing together scarce issues from nearly fifty years ago, mostly only a few pages long, all bound together in a single book outsized at 10.5” x 14”.
The first departure is that Maciunas as an inventive designer used the larger printed page as a field for various elements both visual and verbal and then in different typefaces. The book’s cover exemplifies his departure.
A second departure was t he seemingly unlimited variety of materials on a single page, ranging from abstract designs to pseudo-news clipping to historic photographs to price lists for other items that Maciunas was publishing. Look at the cover. The disparities among the items make many Fluxus pages funny, as indeed was he.
On the front page of February 1964 are these blocks in five vertical columns: a headlined news story about mosquito extermination, “Latest News” above an array of five-digit numerals, more news about the complaints of women wearing girdles at high altitudes, a defaced one-dollar bill, a thumbnail about “knots,” a “curve” street sign, “WOW!,” a short Scottish news article about “yeggs” (burglars) locking themselves in a “Ladies’ Room,” a current price list for Fluxus editions, another vertical thumbnail photo of a 19th century West Coast bean dealer who resembles Maciunas, the reproduction of an ancient patent for a “saluting device” hat, and much, much else, again all within a single page.
Otherwise, another whole page of this book is devoted to George Brecht’s legendary conceptual texts, horizontal thumbnails each less than a few lower-case words long, nearly all of them incorporating the word “page”: “spit on this page,” “eat something on this page,” “turn 14 pages slowly,” “hide this page,” “write as much as you can on this page,” “listen five minutes before turning this page,” “astonish someone quickly with this page,” etc. In the middle is a blank thumbnail, literally an empty page, that implicitly enhances the others.
Another section of this book has first a recto and then a two-page spread with dozens of thumbnails both horizontal and vertical of several Fluxus performances in 1969 and 1970, all accompanied by a numbered sidebar in Maciunas’ signature sans-serif typeface in which individuals and details are identified.
Therefore, within this book’s 80 unenumerated pages are really 10 times as many distinct blocks of printed matter. As pages offer different configurations, merely flipping from a recto to a verso often offers surprise. Therefore as well, anyone reading through this book for the second time or even a third time will discover marvelous blocks that he or she missed on first reading.
The customary promotion for this anthology lists all the contributors, many of whose names are remembered a decade later, reminding us that few reprints from any historic periodical can offer such a distinguished exhaustive list: “Ay-O, Carol Bergé, Joseph Beuys, Elaine Bloedow, George Brecht, Christo, Philip Corner, Walter De Maria, Willem de Ridder, Bern Erismann, Nye Ffarrabas [participating as Bici Forbes], Robert Filliou, Henry Flynt, Ken Friedman, Carolyn Krumm, Heinz Gappmayr, Eugen Gomringer, Raymond Hains, Dick Higgins, Geoffrey Hendricks, Jon Hendricks, Alice Hutchins, Tatsu Izumi, Ray Johnson, Joe Jones, Allan Kaprow, Milan Knížak, Alison Knowles, Arthur Köpcke, Takehisa Kosugi, Ruth Krauss, Philip Krumm, György Ligeti, George Maciunas, Angus MacLise, Jackson Mac Low, Larry Miller, Peter Moore, Hans Nordenström, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, James Riddle, Dieter Roth, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi, Tomas Schmit, Daniel Spoerri, Christer Strömholm, Yasunao Tone, Stan VanDerBeek, Ben Vautier, Jacques Villeglé, Wolf Vostell, Yoshimasa Wada, Robert Watts, Emmett Williams, William S. Wilson, La Monte Young, and Marian Zazeela.” (Yes, I regret not being among them.) I’m not aware of any other periodical, neither in literature nor in art, offering such a comprehensive inventory decades later, simply because nearly all the contributors’ names would have become unfamiliar.
With materials no less deviant than they were several decades ago, this Newspaper book is a treasure, a monument to the continuing life of Fluxus.
P.S. Regarding Maciunas’ achievement as a highly original arts historian, may I recommend this appreciation by a German scholar writing in English:
© Copyright 2026 Richard Kostelanetz, reproduced by permission. Source: KostelOmnibus on Substack
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| Richard Kostelanetz by Leonid Drozner, |
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