George Maciunas was a Lithuanian-American artist, a founding member of the Fluxus community, known for his pursuit of simplicity and fun. Born Jurgis Maciunas in Kaunas, Lithuania, on November 8, 1931, to a Lithuanian father and Ukrainian mother, he escaped the Soviet occupation by moving to America, where he studied architecture at Carnegie Mellon University.
After developing several loft buildings for artists in SoHo, New York City, and a farm in Massachusetts, Maciunas turned to artistic initiatives, becoming a master of public-shunning activities, such as dressing as dentists with his friends and using toothbrushes to clean the sidewalk near the Plaza Hotel in New York.
Maciunas co-founded the experimental art association Fluxus, assembling a loose, non-hierarchical gathering of innovative artists, architects, writers, composers, and designers around the world. Their performances blended different artistic disciplines, visual arts, music, and literature, drawing influence from Dadaists, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Nam June Paik, and Futurists.
Fluxus focused on the artist's personality and individual actions, rather than traditional professionalism. Maciunas invented "prepared sports," multi-bike vehicles, funny food events, and "humorous dances" on sticky floors, and the movement's main ideas included internationalism, experimentalism, inter-media, play or gags, minimalism, and ephemerality.
Early Fluxus events took place in New York from 1960 to 1962, and the first Fluxus festival was held in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1962, featuring performances by Maciunas, Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik, Alison Knowles, Emmett Williams, and others. Maciunas also collaborated with Joseph Beuys, playing pianos as part of an improvised performance at the Kunstakademie, Dusseldorf.
Maciunas continued to pioneer artistic communities in SoHo, converting several rundown buildings into artist's lofts and studios, and attracting young artists, including Yoko Ono, who became a close friend. In the 1970s, Maciunas was invited by Yoko Ono to paint and decorate the John Lennon apartment in the "Dakota" Building in New York City.
Maciunas's ideas attracted and influenced many artists around the world, including Yoko Ono, John Lennon, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Nam June Paik, La Monte Young, Eric Andersen, Yasunao Tone, Ben Vautier, Ben Patterson, George Brecht, Alison Knowles, Philip Corner, Wolf Vostell, Geoffrey Hendricks, and Joseph Beuys, among many others.
Maciunas's Fluxus Manifesto declared "opposition to the bourgeois sickness and commercialized culture," and he initiated mail-art and free networking of mail-artists in the 1960s, which eventually developed into Internet networking.
In 1978, Maciunas married his girlfriend, Billie Hutching, in a performance piece called "The Fluxwedding," where the bride and groom traded clothing. Three months later, George Maciunas died of pancreatic cancer on May 9, 1978, in a Boston hospital, surrounded by his Fluxus friends.
