Fluxus Information

Flux-Mail: Documents from the Fluxus Network

Before the internet, there was the mailing list. These documents that include score sheets, product catalogs, clinic intake forms, press clippings, contact lists, and broadsheets, they are the connective tissue of one of the twentieth century's most radical art movements. Produced largely by George Maciunas from a P.O. Box in lower Manhattan, they held together a sprawling international network of artists, provocateurs, and enthusiasts spread across New York, Tokyo, Nice, Copenhagen, and beyond.

Fluxus resists easy definition, which was rather the point. Part anti-art movement, part mail-order business, part philosophical proposition, it insisted that anything could be art and anyone could make it. These documents embody that claim literally: a form measuring your resistance to haircuts sits alongside a blueprint for a six-storey snow building; a subscription service offers bottled coughs and canned mystery for a few dollars.

What you are looking at is not documentation of Fluxus. It is Fluxus: bureaucracy as poetry, commerce as critique, the network as artwork.

FLUXFEST

  • FLUXFEST Sale catalog and program. It is a comprehensive repertoire catalog of Fluxus performance pieces available for staging, with pricing and booking information.

  • Authored and designed by George Maciunas, using his signature graphic style which references Aztec/Mayan imegry. Published by Fluxus, P.O. Box 180, New York, N.Y. 10013.

  • Artists listed include several key Fluxus figures: Albert Fine, Milan Knížák, Lee Heflin, George Maciunas, and Paul Sharits.

  • Notable pieces listed include Dog Symphony, Confrontation No. 3, Traffic Light,  Ice Cream Piece, 1966, and Fluxversion I.

  • The typography is an artistic statement in itself. It is bold, playful, mixed orientations, collage-like layout, very typical of Fluxus printed matter, which treated graphic design as art.

  • Features Maciunas's famous "Expanded Arts Diagram", which maps the entire landscape of avant-garde performance movements chronologically and categorically, placing Fluxus within a broader genealogy.

  • Published between the years 1966 and 1967.

  • This piece represents a rare and historically important part of Fluxus hisotry.

‹›

Fluxus Information

  • Fluxus operational archive document.

    Page 1 features the  internal mailing list of the Fluxus network, with home addresses and phone numbers for many major figures including, Ayo, George Brecht, Albert M. Fine, Ken Friedman, Bici Hendricks, Geoff Hendricks, Alice Hutchins, Milan Knizak, Georgia Maciunas, Paul Sharits, Meiko Shiomi, Ben Vautier, Yoshimasa Wada, and Bob Watts.

  • Proposed Fluxshow: a detailed planning document for an entire Fluxus environment including street events, food centers, sports/game centers, vending machines, toilet objects, and film environments, essentially a blueprint for a total Fluxus experience.

  • Flux Films Catalog: a listing of the Fluxfilms package with durations and production methods, including works by Yoko Ono, John Cale, Paul Sharits, and others.

  • Flux Radio and TV Pieces: a document showing Fluxus's ambition to infiltrate broadcast media with pieces designed specifically for radio and television by Brecht, Vautier, Nam June Paik, La Monte Young and others.

  • Paper Concert Supplement November 1967: documentation of a specific performance at the Time & Life Building. A piece involving samurai armor, 12 arrows shot into a paper curtain, each producing different effects, ultimately ending with a space frame pushed over the entire audience.

  • Flux Snowhouse Blueprint: an architectural drawing for a proposed 4-story snow building, an engineering document for what was conceived as a participatory snow sculpture/environment.

  • Press Clippings: two reviews, one from The Guardian, November 30, 1968 and one from The New York Times, June 16, 1968, showing that Fluxus was receiving mainstream press coverage by this period.

  • Flux Products 1961-1969: a comprehensive mail-order catalog of Fluxus objects with prices.

  • Flux Products 1961-1969 continued 

  • Flux Products 1961-1969 continued 

  • Flux Products 1961-1969 continued 

  • A list of Fluxus producers, events and places.

  • Fluxus mailing list.

‹›

(more) Fluxus Information

  • FLUXUSHOPNEWS A promotional broadsheet for the Fluxus mail-order subscription service, operating out of the same P.O. Box 180, New York, N.Y. 10013. It functions simultaneously as an advertisement, a price list, and Fluxus artwork in itself.

  • Fluxclinic Record of Features and Feats: a mock medical intake form designed for the Hi Red Center's "Clinic" event referenced in the Proposed Fluxshow document we saw earlier. It parodies bureaucratic medical forms while measuring entirely absurd or poetic human attributes.

  • Press Clippings: a collection of press clippings about Fluxus, all from the Village Voice and New York Times, spanning 1965-1970. 

  • (another) Fluxus Mailing List: this list extends well beyond the core Fluxus membership to map a broad international avant-garde network.

‹›

Every Man His Own Fluxus

  • A broadsheet/flyer by Ken Friedman titled "Every Man His Own Fluxus",  a mail art solicitation and participatory artwork.

‹›